The voluble entrepreneur and investor, who made his fortune off Web video during the first Internet boom, is dabbling in it again: He has put money into Revision3, the Web video studio/network best known as the home of Diggnation.

The investment was part of a small round of funding Revision3 raised last year, which it hasn’t disclosed until now.

That wouldn’t be that noteworthy, except that Cuban, again and again, has argued that ever-rising expectations for Web video were overblown, and that the technology wouldn’t displace TV. Which happens to be where Cuban is betting heavily, via his HDNet network.

A very brief summary of his argument:  Internet infrastructure can’t support TV-scale viewing; Web advertising can’t support TV-scale programming; people like TV.

And some representative blog posts where he make his case: The Great Internet Video Lie; Why Do Internet People Think Content People Are Stupid?;  The Future of TV Is…TV.

And here’s a representative counter-argument: Cable TV Is Screwd. It was written two years ago, by Cuban’s new partner, Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback.

So what gives? Is Cuban finally backing down? Not at all, the billionaire says. He’s merely investing in a potential source of content for his TV network.

The dollars he’s putting into Revision3 will give him what amounts to a first look on the video site’s programming, and the chance to turn some of it into TV shows.

“I think Jim can make some money from this. I don’t throw money away,” Cuban says via email. “But this investment really confirms my position on web video. While Revision3 will make some money on the web, the real money is [in] TV. And I wanted HDNet to have the option to be that outlet.”

Louderback, for his part, seems fine with a less than total endorsement of his industry–he’s the one highlighting Cuban’s investment. “I like to think that we’re doing some pretty innovative stuff, and [the investment] gives him a broader visibility into that space”, he says.

And since Revision3 won’t say how much money Cuban invested in the company, or the total size of the round–Louderback will only say that it was “relatively immaterial” for his company–it’s impossible to gauge what any of this really means from the outside.

In related can’t-really-judge-what-this-means news: Revision3 says its revenue, which it won’t disclose, grew 80 percent last year, and that the company turned a profit in Q4 of 2010. Louderback defines profitable in this instance as “EBIDTA-profitable,” and says his company should be “solidly in the black” by the middle of this year.

Now Noor is gone too, reports Renesys, the Internet intelligence research firm that has so closely followed the Egypt’s strange disappearance from the digital realm.

That has some Egyptians turning to spotty dial-up connections cobbled together by Internet activists, most of them in Europe. Telecomix, an organization that promotes Internet freedom, published a list of reliable numbers that Egyptians can call with their modems. The French Data Network reactivated a barely used but still perfectly functional bank of modems.

For those with functional fax machines, a German outfit called We Rebuild set up a fax-to-Internet service that allows Egyptians to send fax messages that can then be relayed as email messages or posts they can publish immediately.

Finally, some folks at Google, Twitter and SayNow, the phone service that Google acquired last week, hacked together a Speak-to-Tweet service for Egyptians to use: Call an international number, leave a voice message and it’s published on the Twitter account @speak2tweet. People in Egypt can hear the same messages by dialing the same numbers used to send the messages.

Here’s one message from an Egyptian woman speaking in English:

The company will soon give all users the option to use Facebook entirely over HTTPS, and recommends they do so if they use public Internet access points. It will also show members social captchas for authentication–where they must identify a few of their Facebook friends’ faces–whenever suspicious activity is detected on an account.

Facebook warned in a blog post that using HTTPS will slow down the site and isn’t compatible with all features, including some externally developed Facebook applications. It will roll out HTTPS access “slowly over the next few weeks” via its settings page, the company said.

Facebook still faces other ongoing security problems, such as spam, virus messages and wall posts. CTO Bret Taylor said yesterday the company had cut platform spam by 95 percent in 2010, but I believe he was referring to notifications and posts from applications, especially social games. Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s public fan page was apparently hacked into yesterday and has since been taken down.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

The photo + caption combination seems to work particularly well on Tumblr (and Lolcats) but you can get a pretty good sense of what’s going on via a few samples below. But for my money the best stuff is also the stuff that makes good use of the f-bomb, so you’ll want to see those on the site itself.

What’s great about TRPDSAA, IMHO, is that while a lot of this stuff is inside baseball, you should still be able to appreciate it without knowing what, say, “call to action” is supposed to mean. It’s clearly the product of someone who loves advertising and hates it, too.

And that person works in advertising, of course. Here’s a brief email interview I conducted with 27-year-old E.B. Davis III, a copywriter at Washington, D.C.-based GMMB:

Peter Kafka: Looks like you just started the Tumblr now. Why?

E. B. Davis III: For fun. To take the piss out. Advertising can be a lot of fun, but we get caught up in minutiae and nitpicking and buzzwords. We tend to forget we’re talking to people who don’t really want to talk to us.

Kafka: What provoked it, and what are you trying to do?

Davis: I made some pictures, put them on a blog, and showed two or three people, hoping they would laugh. I expected that to be the end of it. Tumblr only allowed 15 posts on the front page, so I only made 13 pictures, because I didn’t expect people to want to even bother going to a second page. Quick, easy, in and out. Now there are 29 posts (the rest from other people), with 300 submissions I need to find the time to post.

Kafka: Given that you’re satirizing advertising but work in advertising, should we assume you want to be doing something else?

Davis: I am satirizing advertising, and I work in advertising, but I don’t think we should assume I want to be doing something else. Advertising got great potential to be an idea factory. I think we’ve got the potential to make short movies, full-length movies, music videos, and a lot of cool other shit. I work at a social-good marketing agency, and I think advertising has taken a huge step forward over the past couple of years in connecting buying things to doing good. Easy charity. I was already going to buy that Coca-Cola anyway, and now it’s helping to help someone else. Awesome. We get free radio and free television because of advertising. It’s not the worst industry in the world. I have great hope for what advertising can do. It’s just, you know, we mostly end up making a print ad.

At the same time, I’m learning that I don’t need advertising to do what I want. I can make stuff without them. Hence this blog, among other things.

Kafka: How much of the site is you, and how much of it comes from contributors? And do contributors send in art and text, or just text? How much traffic are you getting now?

Davis: [I made] 13 original posts, and now people are making the content (mostly unasked). I’m assuming they’re mostly advertising folk, and I worry that the thing’s too insider-y for anyone else to really care about it. Not that they should care about it. It is a Stupid Thing. My favorite contributors do the work of putting their words on a picture for me, but some just send headlines and I have to put them together.

I have no idea how much traffic I’m getting. I’ve got about 3,000 followers and a lot of tweets and shit.

Kafka: What happens now?

Davis: I have no plans for what’s next. Keep making posts until people run out of interest. I don’t think these types of sites really lead to anything. They’re fun for a minute and then you move on. I don’t want to make any more of it than that. I’m ready to start working on new ideas, but I don’t plan to use the blog to promote it. I don’t want this to become a ‘self-promotion’ thing. I didn’t really have my name attached to it in the beginning, but some people found out it was me, so my name’s out there, but it wasn’t my intention.

It’s just for fun.

Next up is Facebook, which offers aggregated data about trends in the status updates posted by its members, including their activity around major news events and their usage of slang.

The best anecdote from the bit is about a newly popular acronym on Facebook, “HMU.” This comes after Facebook noted in 2009 the growth of the trendy whine “FML. (Explanation: We’ll leave the “F” open to your imagination, but the “ML” stand for “My Life.”) Here’s the whole explanation of HMU by Facebook data scientist Lars Backstrom:

The shorthand for “hit me up” was this year’s biggest surprise. In early 2009, the acronym HMU was virtually unheard of. Only a few posts a day contained HMU, and half of them were probably typos. By May, however, it started to grow slowly and was averaging about 20 posts a day. The volume roughly doubled every month, and by the end of 2009 it had risen to 1,600 posts a day–too modest of a number to be on our radar for last year’s list.

However, HMU continued to grow aggressively throughout 2010, increasing by about 75 percent each month. By the end of summer, HMU reached 80,000 mentions per day.

In early September, an interesting pattern emerged in how people use HMU. Until that point, it was spreading like wildfire, but was being used with roughly equal frequency throughout the week. In September this changed, as usage rates started going through huge swings from day to day. The reason? Before September the demographic most likely to ask their friends to “HMU” was on summer break and looking to hang out most nights. Then many of these folks headed back to school, and HMU became a weekend-oriented request.

Some notable stats from the Facebook 2010 roundup:

• At key moments in certain games during the World Cup, as many as 50 percent of all new status updates were World Cup-related.
• “Toy Story 3″ was the movie most mentioned in status updates, followed by “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse,” “Inception,” “Alice in Wonderland” and “Iron Man 2.”
• Mentions of the iPad and iPhone 4 accounted for 25 million total Facebook status updates. (I’m not sure what the total number of status updates for the year was.)
• A day after the Haiti earthquake Facebook was receiving 1,800 posts per minute on the topic.
• Yes, Bieber. People talked about the teenage pop star throughout the year, but the single greatest statused-about Bieber moment was the MTV Video Music Awards.
• Facebook could identify 33 separate activity spikes for when each of the Chilean miners was rescued.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Now Flipboard, a social news-reading app based around Twitter and Facebook, is adding publisher feeds.

One thing’s clear: There’s a lot of excitement and energy going into how the iPad can re-create content consumption.

Flipboard is launching a beta test with eight publishers, including, full disclosure, All Things Digital.

The other publishers are ABC News, Bon Appétit, Lonely Planet, SB Nation, SFGate, Uncrate and the Washington Post Magazine.

Participating advertisers, through a partnership with OMD, include Pepsi, Gatorade, Infiniti, the CW Television Network, Showtime, Levi’s, Dockers, Hilton Worldwide, GE, Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, Project (RED), Standup2cancer.org and Charity: Water.

They are contributing full-page ads that are inserted into longer-form articles.

During the beta period, no money will change hands between any of these parties, including our site, according to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue.

Later, McCue said he expects to add many more publishers to the Flipboard app, and perhaps help publishers create their own “iPadified” content experiences to distribute themselves.

Instead of prompting users to go to the iPad’s Safari browser to read full versions of articles, as it has done to date, Flipboard will now import partner publisher content and lay it out automatically. For these stories, Flipboard formats images, divides them into pages and offers different layouts for portrait and landscape modes.

McCue said Flipboard users’ No. 1 most requested feature is the ability to add content through RSS feeds.

But he’s not giving them that with this update. Users can still only subscribe to publishers through Twitter accounts and lists. The reason, according to McCue, is Flipboard is dedicated to the social aspect and beautiful design of content, and RSS contains neither of these things.

McCue speaks of scrolling through Web pages with advertising units and side bars as a relic of the early Web and crappy Internet connections, saying Flipboard represents a return to the pagination and image emphasis of print.

Unlike print, though, Flipboard doesn’t work offline; that’s a future feature, said McCue. He also said his team is still singularly devoted to developing for iPad, and will divert focus to Android tablets only after they have an established user base.

By the way–more full disclosure–seeing ATD content get iPadified in McCue’s demo wasn’t as fun and glossy as you might imagine, especially given our small images.

And in what might be a problem for other content publishers like us, the quick blog posts we often write are not as easily transferable to this layout, given Flipboard does not yet differentiate between short stories and longer articles.

Which means those acts need to create a “profile” for Steve Jobs’s social network. An Apple (AAPL) document making the rounds (Apple has confirmed its authenticity to me) explains how. You can read the whole thing at the bottom of this post.

Most of it concerns technical specs about things you don’t care about, like video formats. Here’s one part you might be interested in–some of Apple’s edicts regarding the content of artists’ profiles:

• Videos, photos, and text posts should not contain pornography, hate speech, racism, nudity, or any references to or depictions of drug use.
• Posts should not include advertisements or links to sites outside of iTunes.
• Posts should not contain links to other content providers.

The first item is sort of obvious, but still worth noting. Because theoretically, if the Beatles ever do make it to iTunes, they’re going to have a hard time promoting some of their songs. Like this one.

But that rule seems like the kind of thing that Apple can change or ignore at will–just like its “no porn except sometimes” ban in the iTunes app store. And anyway, artists have always found ways to put up with, or ignore, these kinds of restraints.

The rules about not posting to links outside of iTunes are more worrisome. Because it’s telling music acts to ignore the digital assets they’ve painstakingly built up on MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and anywhere else on the Web.

Makes sense for Apple, but not for anyone else.

artist_bestpractices_1.0-1

Which means that corner of Deadspin is going to be very, very popular today.

As well as unprofitable, says Gawker Media owner Nick Denton.

“These things are always money-losers,” Denton says via IM, before referring me to Gawker Media marketing director Erin Pettigrew for more.

But while I wait for her to get back to me, I can make some educated guesses to explain why lots of traffic won’t mean lots of money for Denton today.

• It’s hard to serve ads into traffic spikes. Or at least that’s what Denton always says about his most popular posts, like the iPhone 4 prototype that Gizmodo showed off to Apple’s dismay, or a sorta-sex tape featuring “McSteamy” from “Grey’s Anatomy,” etc.
• In this case, Gawker is very likely to serve up the Favre post without any advertising, anyway. When I interviewed Denton onstage at an Advertising Week event last week, I asked him specifically about how advertisers feel about “athlete dong” photos, which his readers love. His answer, in short, was that advertisers are understandably squeamish about this stuff, and can opt out of posts that contain it in advance. Have to assume this is one of those cases.

Requisite to-be-sure: Denton runs a for-profit business, and he won’t run athlete dong photos or anything else unless he can make money doing it.

So while those individual pageviews that the post generates won’t make him money, those visitors may well end up visiting other, dong-free posts on Gawker sites today, which will have ads.

And of course, the post will give Gawker and Deadspin that much more publicity, as mainstream media outlets that would never stoop to running athlete dong photos find time to talk about the site that did. (Cough.)

UPDATE: Sure enough, both the Favre post and the rest of Deadspin are currently ad-free. Via e-mail, Erin Pettigrew explains why that’s so:

In the case of major ad/edit adjacency issues such as this, we have a cadre of tech tools to handle the display conflict. Usually the decision is made to prevent ads from showing next to NSFW or similarly questionable content and then the tech solution is put into place to effect that immediately after. The tech tools range from removing ads on a per-post basis to scanning post content for particular topics against which we can negatively target ads.

If the adjacency affects takeovers and sponsorships where ad inventory cannot be otherwise rerouted, we communicate the scenario upfront to the client and involve them in the decision-making. The same tech solutions then apply.

It’s the classic airplane ad next to an airliner crash scenario for which publishers need to develop contingencies. For this particular scoop, the decision was indeed to clean the Favre post pages of ads.

I saw your note about spikes — you are correct that we aren’t able to instantly match ad demand to the surge of inventory supply caused by traffic spikes. This is because our inventory is 100% directly sold versus hawked by real time auction marketplaces. More pageviews does not directly equal more dollars! Also, note that our ad bookings close weeks to months before creative hits the websites. So, unless a spike is ‘scheduled,’ it can’t really be sold.

Articles with positive headlines get a boost in sharing of more than 30 percent compared with the average, while ones with negative headlines fall below the average by about 10 percent, according to Dan Zarrella, a social-media consultant at Boston marketing firm HubSpot. By far the biggest jump in sharing comes from content with sexual overtones, which is nearly 90 percent more likely to be shared than average in Mr. Zarrella’s preliminary analysis.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Google’s (GOOG) video site says this is one of the “biggest redesigns in YouTube history,” but my hunch is that most YouTube users won’t notice any difference at all since they’re paying attention to the video clips and not the window dressing around it.

YouTube is briefing the press a little later today, and a PR rep promises that the email is merely a “condensed sliver” of what the company will be talking about. If true, I’ll update with anything relevant.

UPDATE: Apologies, wasn’t able to listen to the call, after all. If you want to play reporter, you can take a gander at the press materials Google provided (before and after screenshots, metrics to support the change, etc) here.

Dear Partner,

We want to provide you with an update on YouTube’s new video page, which we’ve been hard at work on for the last several months. You can read more about it here:

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/01/video-page-gets-makeover.html

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/02/latest-changes-to-video-page-new.html

On Wednesday, March 31st we’re happy to let you know that we’ll be transitioning all YouTube videos to this new video page.

As a result, we’d like to highlight a couple items that will be of interest to you:

* The channel banner placement will change: Branding on the video page moves to a more prominently placed (albeit smaller) banner on top of the video, substituting for the text channel name and link. Please upload a graphic with the following dimensions: 25px (height) by max 170px (width is flexible up to this amount). Instructions on how to edit or change the
banner are here:

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?&answer=172994

This banner will continue to link to your channel. Please update your banner if you have an arrow pointing to the subscribe button or another area on the page.

* The “Subscribe” button will move to a more prominent location at the top of the page: As you can see in this blog post:

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/02/latest-changes-to-video-page-new.html

The “Subscribe” button will now be at the top of the page, to the right of your channel banner…so it will stand out even more :)

* We’re introducing a new “see more videos” pane: This new “more videos” area on top of the video allows for seamless exploration of content from your channel; click on the arrow next to the number of uploads to access a grid displaying all of your channel’s videos. This makes it easier for users to browse your whole library while watching one of your videos.

This new video page makeover is one of the biggest redesigns in YouTube history–and we’re excited to make YouTube a better place for you and your content!

Lastly, we want to remind you that YouTube sends occasional product-related email communications that are relevant to our Partners. To ensure that you’re eligible to receive our updates, check your Email Options settings within your Account and opt in. You can see the instructions on how to do this by following this link:

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=176643

Still reading? Okay, here’s your Easter egg, a classic Spencer Davis Group YouTube recommended to me this morning:

[Image credit: Kevin Dooley]

For Chinese people, Google is not god, and even if it puts on a full-on show about politics and values, it is still not god. Actually, Google is not a virgin when it comes to values. Its cooperation and collusion with the US intelligence and security agencies is well-known, which aroused spats with Europe. If some information is “unfavorable”, Google must delete it under the order of relevant US agencies. The data of its search results is also “stored for inspection.”

After Google launched an attack on China’s censoring, American officials and media responded vigorously. Is it still a corporate incident or commercial action? All this makes one wonder. Thinking about the US’ big efforts in recent years to engage in Internet war, perhaps this could be an exploratory pre-dawn battle.

A blistering attack, though Google (GOOG) clearly invited it by directing Chinese searches to an uncensored search engine based in Hong Kong, essentially using Beijing’s “one country, two systems” policy against it.

There will undoubtedly be more like it in the future, especially if Google continues to tweak the Chinese government as it did today by indexing Twitter posts on its Chinese search site in open defiance of the country’s ban on the microblogging site.

[Image credit: China Daily]

In a TPS report filed today (TPS here referring to “tweets per second” and not “Test Program Set” from the movie “Office Space.” Ha ha, what a funny coincidence.) Kevin Weil of the Twitter analytics team points out that tweets grew 1,400 percent last year. He also notes that the 50-million-tweets-per-day figure does not include posts generated by accounts that have been identified as sources of spam.

Further evidence that the microblogging service has pushed through the growth ceiling it hit last fall. As I noted last week, the latest metrics from comScore (SCOR), show Twitter.com with 73.5 million unique visitors in January, up eight percent from the 65.2 million who visited in December 2009.

Hi Peter,

My name is [Redacted] and I’m working with the ad:tech team on the social media outreach and promotion for ad:tech New York. ad:tech recognizes that you are a key influencer in the digital marketing community, and as such, I’d like to see if you are interested in a promotion exchange.

ad:tech will provide:

• Twitter announcement of your involvement with ad:tech New York to our 6,800+ followers.
• Your choice of: a free pass to the exhibit hall (valued at $35) or 35% off a full conference pass.

*If you are already registered or can’t make it to the event, you can offer it as a prize to your network, give it to a friend or client….It is completely transferrable.

We ask you provide:

• No less than 3 posts about ad:tech New York on Twitter, Facebook or your blog. Suggested postings: a session you’re interested in, why you like ad:tech, the exhibitors that you want to see or technologies that you are interested in learning about. What you share is up to you–it just needs to be posted by November 1.

Interested in writing a blog post and would like additional information on ad:tech? Quotes, photos, interviews, ideas, etc. will happily be offered with request.

To redeem the offer:
Share 3 posts about ad:tech, then email me, [X]@ad-tech.com, with links/screenshots by November 1.

• Tell me how you’d like ad:tech to promote your involvement with the event at the show.
• Let me know if you’d like the free expo pass or the 35% discount on the conference.

Please let me know if this is something that you are interested in or if you have any questions?

Thank you for your continued support of ad:tech. I hope to meet you in New York!

[Redacted]
Social Media Outreach
ad:tech

Well. Flattery is always a nice approach, so I’m pleased to hear about my influencer status. Also, it’s nice that the ad:tech team is willing to provide “ideas” for me upon request.

Alas, even if I wanted to take ad:tech up on its offer, the Dow Jones Code of Conduct would prevent me from doing so.

But this letter does generate two questions for me:

• Is my work nearly worthless? Or pretty valuable? Three posts is a little less than a day’s work for me. Ad:tech says that’s worth either $35 (a free expo pass) or up to $558 (35 percent of the highest price for an ad:tech conference pass). That’s a big swing!
• I know there are a lot of “social media experts” out there, because there are a lot of them following me on Twitter. But I don’t really know what they do. Is this it? That can’t be right. Can it?

Anyway, this kind of thing always makes we want to pull up a “Glengarry Glen Ross” clip. There isn’t a direct connection, mind you. Just a vibe.