Today may officially mark the end of the second great dot com boom.

Google has had years to diversify out of the paid advertising business, unfortunately for them they have failed to do anything with the opportunity.  Today ComScore revealed that the bottom has dropped out of the pay per click advertising business.  That would happen to be Google's cash cow.

Google's stock proceeded to take a $22 cliff dive.

Consumers are out of money.  The home equity piggy bank has been completely tapped (credit limit, meet falling home equities).  Consumer confidence is the lowest in 16 years.  They are not spending money online, which means that online retailers are slicing and dicing their advertising budgets.

Until the economy recovers, which will most likely be several years, nobody with half a brain is going to fund a digital business based on an advertising revenue model.  This is going to put a big hurt on the current crop of dot coms.  Twitter, Digg, and crew are probably crying in their beers tonight.

There's an interesting little legal battle brewing, over a site you may never have heard.  It's called WikiLeaks, and it's a whistle-blowing site where people can anonymously upload documents to blow the whistle on corruption.  Disgustingly, it was ordered shut down by US District Judge Jeffrey White.

He even went as far as having WikiLeaks wiped off the face of the Internet DNS system, which means you can't use www.wikileaks.org to reach it any longer.  However, the Internet is nothing if not resilient :)  You can still reach it by its public IP at http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks.  There is also an extensive network of alternative DNS names which point to WikiLeaks as well.  I think this is great--not only because WikiLeaks is an important site, but it's also important that government officials of all stripes know that they can't silence the Internet like that.

How, you might be wondering, can WikiLeaks thumb its nose at a court order like that?  Bullet-proof hosting:

Also making a take-down difficult, Wikileaks maintains its own servers at undisclosed locations, keeps no logs and uses military-grade encryption to protect sources and other confidential information, according to an unidentified individual who answered a press inquiry sent to Wikileaks.

I predicted this would happen eventually, I just didn't know it was happening already today.  Off-shore servers are the new off-shore banks:  untouchable, private, secure.  I say, give me some more of that.

Government lately has trended towards less transparency, not more. Credit markets are currently locked up--and have been for a while now--because the whistleblowers (Congress, OCC, OTS, FDIC) are not doing their jobs, instead demonstrating a frustrating reluctance to expose bankrupt companies.  Sarbanes Oxley is a joke in the financial world. If this isn't fixed soon we are headed for a 1930's-style DEPRESSION.

I actually hope people with access and a conscience will leverage WikiLeaks to expose companies which are unlawfully hiding losses off their balance sheets and restore transparency and trust to our economy .  It's not fair that Joe 6-Pack should have to suffer because the official cops are asleep on the watch.  We need MORE sites like WikiLeaks, not less.

If you're concerned about the current lack of honesty in our country and its effects on the people you know and love, it would be well worth your time to sign the petition to restore financial transparency to the USA.

(Except for Cisco of course! :)

Yahoo kindly saved Microsoft from shooting itself in the foot today by rejecting its buyout offer, underlining how dumb both companies are in the process.  Now there appears to be a third stooge, AOL, on stage.  If all three companies merged it would create so much inverse synergy a black hole would form.  Yahoo's stock promptly ramped on speculation that Microsoft will offer more for this turkey.  We will see, corporate debt is getting a lot more expensive these days...

RIMM proceeded to drop service for every single one of its subscribers.  Last time this happened all the messages sent during the outage were sucked into oblivion (I was one of the subscribers back then).

It's not a tech company, but GM announces earnings tomorrow, which promise to be underwhelming.

Might use the opportunity to pick up some in the money Q puts tomorrow morning in anticipation of a really bad day led by RIMM.

These little Heineken kegs are awesome.  $20, tastes great.  A little messy when you first tap it, but after that it's fine.  The garage keeps mine nice and cold right now :P

Just saw the TechCrunch post about uTest, a crowdsourcing approach to software QA.  This is pure genius in my opinion.  QA is always a huge bottleneck in software development projects, and nobody wants to do it.  Kind of like double-checking your math homework.  Unit testing helps with a lot of it, but there are always a lot of tests that simply need a human to do them, and there's no way you can automate the test (especially with rich Web interfaces).

uTest supposedly have over 2000 testers signed up today, which is a pretty formidable workforce (depending on how many projects they're working on).  Not a bad way for somebody to make some extra coin in their spare time, and not a bad way for small business to offload their software QA process.

This strikes me as one of those painfully obvious ideas that companies should already be implementing internally.  Your QA department is overstressed?  Crowdsource your QA to anybody who wants to pitch in for a little extra cash (or some other kind of incentive).  Even if this is only rolled out internally it would give some relief to overworked QA departments, along with exposing the product to people who may have valuable insight.  If uTest has tightly wrapped up the legal end of things I can see them making a serious dent in QA departments, especially for small software shops.

Much has been written about the attempt by Microsoft to take over Yahoo, much of it patently ridiculous.  I've spent the past week trying to figure out why in the world one bad company would buy another bad company, and the only realistic reason I can come up with is they wanted Yahoo's user base.

Most people seem to think that Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo in a last-ditch effort to make a dent in the search and online advertising market, this seems to be confirmed by an email from Steve Ballmer to Microsoft employees:

This year, online advertising is a $40 billion business. It will grow to $80 billion by 2010 and will continue to increase in the years beyond. This market provides a significant growth opportunity for Microsoft—our ability to provide the best search and online experiences for consumers, and the best ad platform for publishers and advertisers, is the key to unlocking this opportunity.

If this is the true motive for this acquisition, Ballmer needs to have his head examined.  Not only is  a Yahoo-Microsoft combination not going to be a viable threat to Google, but online advertising is NOT a place you want to be in a recessionary environment, as most of the companies previously willing to shell out large amounts per click are now either badly hurting or on the verge of bankruptcy (see:  the entire housing and banking industry).  This bubble has popped, as evidenced by Google's lousy earnings last quarter.  It will only get worse.

My guess is that this is really about acquiring Yahoo's user base.  They still have the largest user base of the big search companies, and they've managed to cobble together some semblance of a community around those users.  Based on the fact that Microsoft has also recently invested in Facebook, I see this as a last-ditch effort to achieve critical mass in a user base in order to launch a social network built around the next version of Windows.  Which, by the way, is being rushed out the door next year.  Other comments by Ballmer seem to confirm this:

The Windows user wants to be live. There will be a Windows Live. There will be an Office Live.

I will give Ballmer and Gates credit, they are trying anything they can to breathe new life into this gasping, sputtering behemoth.  However, their track record in this area is not encouraging, and their insistence on clinging to an operating system-oriented user experience is just asinine.  Operating systems are now a utility, not a feature, and they just refuse to face this fact.  If selling online advertising in a recession is hard, selling an unnecessary Windows upgrade is like trying to jump the grand canyon.

I don't like Microsoft's chances in the next five years.  They are the next Yahoo--a has been.  A big flashy merger is not going to put enough lipstick on this pig to make it attractive.  Throwing a ton of money at a failed strategy doesn't appeal to me from a business perspective.  I recently bought some $20 PUT options on MSFT which expire after their next earnings announcement, I fully expect them to be in the money at that point.