The news business is totally commoditized. Don’t believe me? Look at TechMeme this morning. It’s all about Google’s Android mobile platform announcements. All the time. Whew.

Instead of trying to compete with the news crews who have written endlessly I just went to Peets, got myself an iced latte, and filed this report from my cell phone.

Oh, don’t expect to see much about this on my link blog, either. There’s too much discussion about it so far.

My two cents?

1. How come there’s no talk about building devices that integrate better into automobiles? I think Microsoft is WAY ahead here.
2. This is a platform, not a hardware device. Andy Rubin, on the call, said that we should expect 1,000 GPhones.
3. There wasn’t much specific about how this platform beats other operating systems like Symbian and Microsoft’s. Big selling point for Android? It’s open source. Will that lead to end user innovations? We’ll see. So far I haven’t heard anything that’ll make me sell my iPhone on eBay.
4. I like Google’s strategy of giving stuff away to developers. It’s the right strategy, but like with last week’s Open Social announcements by Google there are a LOT of unanswered questions. I guess we’ll see how good this OS is when the Android SDK comes out next week.
5. I hope we really see some innovative new devices like a great podcasting phone, or great integration into your car’s environment. But those kinds of fun things are going to be off in the future and Google seems to want to be a platform player, and seems to be avoiding going up the stack for now. We’ll see if that holds out over the next few years (I suspect it won’t).

Anyway, fun Monday morning.

I’m digging through thousands of feed items tonight to find you the best stuff. TechMeme actually is doing a pretty good job, although it’s not fast enough to move stuff like Dan Farber’s post up to the top (he was at the Google CampFire tonight and did the best job so far of explaining the late evening news coming out of Google).

Keep watching the link blog. I’ll be reading feeds for a while.

TechCrunch and others are reporting that Google and MySpace are joining forces on the open social platform that Google has developed.

Let’s just say this is HUGE and totally validates what I said in my social media starfish talk yesterday.

UPDATE: I’m at Google right now in the press conference and this is confirmed.

I’m sitting in a press conference with TechCrunch, BusinessWeek, Forbes, and many other press.

More in a few minutes.

UPDATE: Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, says “This will create the new defacto standard.”

When Shel Israel co-authored Naked Conversations with me we interviewed about 180 companies about how they were using blogs and how that usage was changing their business.

Today I’m watching companies and political candidates and seeing a new trend that I’ve written up as the “Social Media Starfish.” I just did two videos, one that defined the social media starfish and all of its “legs” and another that explains how Google is going to disrupt many pieces of that starfish tomorrow with its Open Social announcement tomorrow.

Some things in text. What are the legs of the social media starfish?

1. Blogs.
2. Photos. Flickr. Smugmug. Zooomr. Photobucket. Facebook. Et al.
3. Videos. YouTube. Kyte. Seesmic. Facebook. Blip. DivX. Etc.
4. Personal social networks. Facebook. BluePulse. MySpace. Hi5. Plaxo. LinkedIn. Bebo. Etc.
5. Events (face to face kind). Upcoming. Eventful. Zvents. Facebook. Meetup. Etc.
6. Email. Integration through Bacn.
7. White label social networks. Ning. Broadband Mechanics. Etc.
8. Wikis. Twiki. Wetpaint. PBWiki. Atlassian. SocialText. Etc.
9. Audio. Podcasting networks. BlogTalkRadio. Utterz. Twittergram. Etc.
10. Microblogs. Twitter. Pownce. Jaiku. Utterz. Tumblr. FriendFeed. Etc.
11. SMS. Services that let organizations build SMS into their social media starfishes. John Edwards is one example.
12. Collaborative tools. Zoho. Zimbra. Google’s docs and spreadsheets. Etc.

It’ll be interesting to see how deeply Google will disrupt the Social Media Starfish tomorrow.

What do you think?

Here’s the two videos:

Part I of Naked Conversations 2.0: defining the social media starfish. 22 minutes.
Part II of Naked Conversations 2.0: how Google will disrupt the social media starfish tomorrow. 18 minutes.

Last night I was hanging out with a small group of people when Shel Israel told us “there was just an earthquake.” His wife had called him and he happened to pick up the phone. I instantly looked at my phone and saw Maryam had already called me. Turned out that 80% of the people at the table had the same experience — that a wife or significant other had called them and checked in.

But what was fascinating was what happened next: we all went to Twitter where the earthquake was causing its own “Twitterquake.” Damn, were the posts flowing fast. What a lot of people on Twitter realized was there was MUCH BETTER information flowing through Twitter than on any other media. Quickly we realized no one was hurt, no real damage had been done, so we went back to our dinner.

In San Francisco most of us at the dinner didn’t feel it. I immediately left a TwitterGram, so that everyone would hear our voice and understand that nothing happened where we were.

But the more interesting thing was that I was standing next to Gabe Rivera, the founder of TechMeme/Memeorandum, as this was all going down. He predicted, accurately, that the earthquake wouldn’t make it onto TechMeme. He told us that the only way it’d show up is if it started affecting something in technology. He did keep nervously look at his cell phone to make sure that TechMeme wasn’t displaying anything about it.

We did talk at the table, though, that how we get news has dramatically changed. First of all, the word-of-mouth network was the fastest out there. Loved ones are going to probably tell you news like this before anyone else. Twitter is damn fast, too. Beats the USGS Web site with data. And that’s saying something because the USGS sites report quakes within minutes.

Lots of chatter on Twitter discussed that Google News, CNN, and other mainstream outlets weren’t reporting the news. The local newspaper wrote a story, but this demonstrated how inadequate local journalism is: Twitter had far more information than this story had and had it FAR faster and thanks to things like Twitter, Flickr, Kyte.tv, Seesmic, Twittergram, and Utterz, we can cover the story with micromedia in a way that the San jose Mercury News simply hasn’t gotten a clue about.

Well, that’s the Twitterquake wrap up. Anything from your point of view that we should discuss regarding the changes in how we get our news?

Oh, during the quake we didn’t lose power, didn’t lose cell phones, and didn’t lose access to Twitter. During a really big quake there will be lots of infrastructure down, but SOMEONE will be able to get messages out and that’ll really be interesting to watch how information gets shared if, say, all of San Francisco isn’t able to communicate with the Internet.

UPDATE: Mike Doeff was tracking Twitter for every mention of the Quake. Wow, thanks for doing that!

I’m reading feeds and putting the best stuff on my link blog. So far the best thing I’ve seen on the impact of Google’s Open Social is Marc Andreesen’s post. His company, Ning, is one of those who are involved in the announcement.

See my link blog for other good posts. I’m trying to find stuff that adds value to what’s already on TechMeme, but Marc’s post is so good that it needs your attention anyway.

The artist, Hugh Macleod, who came up with the Blue Monster for Microsoft visited Facebook’s headquarters today and I filmed him. If you haven’t been here for long you might not realize that I love Hugh’s cartoons and have for years.

This is “micromedia.” Very short video.

I loved his thoughts on social objects so today when we went to Facebook I noted that he’s a social object producer and it was interesting that he was visiting the social graph producer.

He ended up saying “Zuckerberg, you just watch out.”

I also have a video of Hugh working his Twitter. Off camera we talked about his thoughts on advertising and its role in decommodifying things.

Heh.

Oh, NBC’s new Hula video distribution scheme is getting lots of notice over on TechMeme. I don’t know why I mention that here. I put a couple of the best articles on my link blog, but there’s a lot better stuff to read about on my link blog than the HulaHype. Look for the travel API article by ProgrammableWeb, for instance.

So, I was reading feeds and just ran across Fred Wilson’s A VC blog (he’s a famous VC who lives in New York City and invests in a bunch of stuff that we use everyday). He posts that his favorite post was a picture done by the founder of Vimeo. Asks what does that say? About blogging?

It says to me that we’re all weird creatures and that we like weird stuff. Including a founder lying in bed pondering the future.

I put it on my link blog. Why? Cause I liked it too.

Translation: there’s something deeper going on on blogs.

1. Blogs have lost their humanity. Their weirdness. Instead we’ve become vehicles to announce new products and initiatives on.
2. We’ve gotten too caught up in the TechMeme games.
3. We’re bored. The interesting stuff is happening off blogs. This afternoon, for instance, I’m meeting Hugh Macleod and we’re just going to hang out in Palo Alto and have fun. Meet at the Apple store at 3 p.m. on University Ave.
4. Creative stuff and ideas and questions are getting spread out all over the place.

Anyway, hope you’re having a good weekend.

I’ve just put a bunch of stuff up on my link blog, including a report of what we were doing at Nokia on Thursday. Hey, there’s that Social Media Starfish again! Look for “NRC Palo Alto” or “Active Words” in the link blog and you’ll see the starfish.

Speaking of which, if you want to see just the headlines of my link blog, they are reposted over on Fast Company Magazine’s site and also on my Twitter feed for @scobleslinkblog.

There’s a lot of great stuff on my link blog. Joi Ito recommends PhotoPhlow. Fake Steve Jobs gives some interviews there. Microsoft’s Listas is discussed. B5 Media has a post about me being on its advisory board. Louis Gray talks about his love of FriendFeed. And on and on.

Why don’t you subscribe to the feed of my link blog?

It’s amazing. A fake blogger, Fake Steve Jobs, reports that PodTech is closing down. This is total, 100% bull####. Not even deserving of a response. I’m not leaving PodTech. When, er if, I am you’ll read it here on my blog.

Interesting that not a single blogger called me this evening. My phone number is on my blog for a reason. 425-205-1921.

Interesting too that OUR COMPETITORS are the ones who are writing this crap. Thanks guys.

Maybe I should start making up 100% bull about them and see what it feels like.

Here, let’s try. Forbes is going out of business and laying off Fake Steve Jobs because he can’t figure out how to make money. I heard it on the Internet somewhere.

And stop making it about me. There are more than 30 people working at PodTech and I only bring in a small percentage of revenues (and my show is highly profitable).

Oh, someone said that I have “long and boring” videos. Here’s my response to that.

I don’t get bloggers sometimes. They get all huffy about their Page Rank going down as if it’s something that they are entitled to.

Now, normally I’d be front and center on all these ego games but here the real truth is that Page Rank has been dead for years. That’s why I never even looked at it anymore.

Here’s why: back when Google started Page Rank was a pretty global thing. If you had a PR of 6 or 7, it’d apply equally to everything. That’s why, back in 2004, if you did a search for “offshoring” you’d find my blog in #3 position because I had a lot of inbound links so Google just assumed I was relevant for offshoring too.

Not true.

In the past few years Page Rank has gone from something that’s global to something that applies to each keyword differently.

So, while I am very highly relevant if you do a search for “tech blogger” you won’t find me any longer on offshoring.

The problem is that Google can’t really show you your real Page Rank anyway. How would it? It would need to ship you a spreadsheet to explain how you rank for each keyword.

Now, since we’re all talking about this, two other issues. First, bloggers were showing up too high in searches anyway. In comparing to my friends we got lots of traffic from Google that we didn’t deserve. The problem is that traffic isn’t good anyway. Put it this way, let’s say I showed up high in a search for Saturn Cars (since I’ve written about them). Most people wouldn’t have found much value in that post and even if they did they wouldn’t have stuck around to be a regular reader.

I’d rather show up for when you’re searching for tech or geek stuff. That’s the audience I want to be in front of.

Oh, and if you sell links to try to game Google you deserve to be knocked down the list a few pegs.