Judith Meskill, who runs the most trafficked blog inside of WIN (note: Engadget.com and BlogMaverick get more traffic of course, but are outside the weblogsinc.com domain), is running a contest in which people give the “perfect elevator” pitch on why a corporation should do a blog.

The contest is getting a lot of excitement and links:

http://www.confusedkid.com/primer/archives/002893.php
http://ming.tv/flemming2.php/__show_article/_a000010-001174/
http://mymarkup.net/blog/archives/004088.html#004088
http://otterlearn.typepad.com/blogkathleen/2004/03/weblogs_a
http://pswansen.typepad.com/the_swansen_group/2004/03/thanks
http://radio.weblogs.com/0104704/2004/03/29.html#a1330
http://radio.weblogs.com/0121664/categories/businessOpportun
http://smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/2004/03/
http://weblog.basturea.com/index.php?id=P91
http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000584.html
http://www.confusedkid.com/primer/archives/002893.php
http://www.digitalsqueeze.com/drupal/node/view/1811
http://www.jayday.org/archives/000273.html
http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/2004/03/30.html#a4006
http://www.onlinebusinessnetworks.com/blog/2004/3/31/the-com
http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2004/03/31/perfect_corpor
http://www.splatt.com.au/blog/archives/000318.htmlhttp://www
http://www.zylstra.org/blog/archives/001232.html

As we mention here months ago, Google is launching a free email program called “Gmail.”

Amidst rampant media speculation, Google Inc. today announced it is testing a preview release of Gmail a free search-based webmail service with a storage capacity of up to eight billion bits of information, the equivalent of 500,000 pages of email. Per user.

The inspiration for Gmail came from a Google user complaining about the poor quality of existing email services, recalled Larry Page, Google co-founder and president, Products. “She kvetched about spending all her time filing messages or trying to find them,” Page said. “And when she’s not doing that, she has to delete email like crazy to stay under the obligatory four megabyte limit. So she asked, Can’t you people fix this?’”

The idea that there could be a better way to handle email caught the attention of a Google engineer who thought it might be a good “20 percent time” project. (Google requires engineers to spend a day a week on projects that interest them, unrelated to their day jobs). Millions of M&Ms later, Gmail was born.

I’d be shocked if this happened, then again I was shocked Case did the AOL/TW deal in the first place (and, I said this would end in tears on Charlie Rose a couple of weeks after the merger):

Case is said to have approached Time Warner last year about a play for AOL, but was rebuffed because the media giant wasn’t ready to sell, a source said. But things have changed since then. Federal investigations into Time Warner’s accounting are nearing a conclusion, smoothing the path for an AOL handoff. If Case got AOL back and then turned it around, he’d be sticking it to Time Warner again, analysts noted yesterday. The shrewd exec was by far the big winner when he convinced then Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin to deal the media giant in exchange for America Online’s inflated stock.

Google has totally gone wild adding new features. I guess competition from Microsoft andYahoo,plus an upcoming IPO, is a good thing for the consumer!

Today I noticed that Google News had images when you did a searchnot just on the main http://news.google.com page.

I know, I know this is a really simple thing, but it certainly makes the news search experience even better.

Next up: Google video clips.

Got to spend some time with John Battelle at PC Forum and it was clear that he is gearing up for his next act (after two great runs at WIRED and The Industry Standard). Then I just found this post from Mark Frauenfelder, the founder of bOINGbOING, who is guest blogging at The Industry Standard’s blog:

It feels strange to be writing for the Industry Standard again. In one way, I feel like I’m writing for a pod version of the original, but I guess it would feel even stranger if I were writing for a reanimated Standard with all the former machinery in place.Interestingly, around the same time I heard from Matt McAlister inviting me to be a guest blogger here, I got a call from The Standard’s founder, John Battelle, inviting me to edit a magazine prototype for O’Reilly Books, called Make.John hired me to work at Wired in 1993. At the time, I was publishing bOING bOING magazine in Los Angeles with my wife Carla, and doing graphic design, mainly for Billy Idol. I had interviewed with Wired about a year before. They were considering me as the managing editor. But John got the job. I was happy to take the position of associate editor when they contacted me again.I left Wired to go freelance a little while after John left to start The Standard, and I began writing for the magazine pretty early on. Those years I spent on contract with The Standard were wonderful. The editorial staff was the best I’ve ever worked with. Smart, funny, helpful. And the magazine paid promptly. What a pleasure!It’s good to be working with John again, and it’s good to be writing for The Standard again, too. [Insert nostalgic smiley here.]

Notice the Kottke link in there that takes you to Greg Lindsey’s take on the project in WWD:

Greg Lindsey: Even O’Reilly, the favorite book publisher of geeks everywhere, is thinking of jumping into the DIY pool. It’s exploring the idea of a publication called Make that would be the anti-Cargo the latter tells its readers which DVD player to buy, while the proposed one would tell its own how to rip that DVD player open and hack it. As uncommercial as it sounds, the project has attracted help from some big names in tech publishing circles: former Industry Standard chief executive officer John Battelle and former Boing Boing editor Mark Frauenfelder.

Alan Meckler posts today about the wave of new dotcom acquisitions. Meckler has made a business of buying up small sites to make something big. At WIN (The Weblogs, Inc. Network) we’re making small sites every day to make something bigtwo paths to the same place: niche b2b advertising dollars (not to mention brand extensions like conferences).

Alan and I are good friends and have breakfast every six months or so. A lot of people have “Meckler” stories, but I’ve always liked his brash “this is who I am and this is my view of the world” style. At least you know where you stand with Alan.

Last Friday brought news of two Internet deals. First, Yahoo purchased Kelkoo, a French company that runs online shopping comparison sites in nine countries, for approximately $575 million in cash (about 16x Kelkoo’s yearly revenues). And Infospace announced its acquisition of Switchboard (an American localized search company) for $160 million in cash and stock (paying 15x yearly revenues).These acquisitions hammer home the trend that Internet shopping and search information are two hot commerce areas. We are also seeing a rapid consolidation of properties in these sectors.

The large multiples being paid (in excess of 15x revenues) further indicate that the whole Internet sector is getting white hot. Some pundits are saying that the excesses of the 1990s bubble are erupting again. But 2004 is different than a few years ago because companies being acquired today are solvent, profitable and grabbing market share.

Judith is hatching an Elevator Pitch Competition over at The Social Software Weblog. The goal is to explain the benifits of blogging to non-bloggers genius!

Judith: We came up with the idea of holding an Elevator Pitch Competition’ [extremely concise presentation delivered to potential clients not lasting more than a minute, or a short elevator ride] to describe the potential benefits of corporate weblogging. I have included related links to two current articles on creating an effective Elevator Pitch’ below.

Judith is hatching an Elevator Pitch Competition over at The Social Software Weblog. The goal is to explain the benifits of blogging to non-bloggers genius!

Judith: We came up with the idea of holding an Elevator Pitch Competition’ [extremely concise presentation delivered to potential clients not lasting more than a minute, or a short elevator ride] to describe the potential benefits of corporate weblogging. I have included related links to two current articles on creating an effective Elevator Pitch’ below.

According to this post to a discussion group I’m on China is starting to block blogs:

Dear all, Since last night domain names with a typepad’ domain name are blocked on the internet in China; for blogspot’ domains that is already the case since the beginning of last year. According to my assessment (I posted the suggestion on my weblog) the RSS reader would be a good system to avoid this kind of direct blocks of url’s. That in itself seems a good argument in explaining users in China the advantages of an RSS reader. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Of course, RSS aggregators have not been effectedas mentioned in this followup post:

Thanks all, I’m currently using bloglines and that is a rather easy way to go around the block. Using RSS-feeds are not often used in Asia in general, so this current block against type domain is at least a way to promote the usage of RSS. Mostly China blocks url’s directly, and that system is rather easy to circumvent. They have a much more sophisticated system, installed in 2002 and checking incoming traffic for key word. When that system gets up (and it did go up earlier in the month) it changes the whole internet into a mess and turns in that way against itself. A very good way to proof that technical methods for censoring do not seem to work very effectively.

Seems like a couple of folks have posted notes about my panel at SXSW. I’m going to post them here.

A really (really)long transcript by Kathryn.

Simon Willson: I attended a whole bunch of panels, and tried to sample a good range of topics. Surprisingly one of the most thought-provoking was Monetizing the Blogosphere, which I went along to purely to see if any fights would break out. It turned out to be a marketing pitch for Weblogs Inc, but their business plan and author package was impressive. Authors get the first $1,000 earned by their blog every month with the rest of the revenue split 50/50. The value proposition is that Weblogs Inc will actively seek advertisers and sponsorship deals – the kind of miserable task that most bloggers would run a mile from. Jason Calacanis added an element of fun to the proceedings by introducing a purple furry monkey as a “proxy” for rival blog promoter Nick Denton, who was unable (or unwilling) to attend the panel.

Figby.com/Michael Moncur: Since Peter Rojas left Gawker Media’s Gizmodo to start the EnGadget weblog for Weblogs Inc, there has been some bad blood between the two. The other day I attended CEO Jason Calacanis’s presentation, Monetizing the Blogosphere, at SXSW, and he made several nods to this.

The most entertaining bit was when he said (paraphrasing) “I invited [Gawker's] Nick Denton to sit on this panel with me, but he declined, so this bunny will be playing the part of Nick.” He then conducted a rather comical dialog with the bunny. (See my photo at sxswblog)

The non-bunny parts of the presentation were very entertaining and informative, and all in all it left me with a very good impression about Weblogs Inc. I met Calacanis later, and he was surprisingly down-to-earth. I’m not as optimistic as he is about making money with weblogs, but I make enough money on Web advertising to find Nick Denton’s pessimism hard to believe.