Best in blogs: Mashable Sale Rumor, Goldman Sachs Exposed, Homeless Hotspots, and the Most Viral Video of All Time

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AppId is over the quota

So that "Kony 2012" video this week became the most viral video in history, hitting 100 million views in six days, Mashable says. Compared to how long it took other famous Web videos to reach that many views, Kony 2012 makes the "Laughing Baby" just look sad. There's nothing laughable about Joseph Kony, of course, Uganda's longtime horrific warlord whose violent LRA group had kidnapped kids and forced them into child soldiery. Hard to imagine there would be backlash against spreading the word on that, but hang on. Says Slate: "Some critics say that the film glossed over the context of the conflict and unfairly focuses on the LRA, while other groups in the region have used similarly atrocious tactics. Others, meanwhile, have criticized the nonprofit for spending only 30 percent of its proceeds to help Uganda's children." The Nation suggested the viral craze was getting ridiculous: "If you are looking for the precise moment when the viral campaign against Ugandan rebel Joseph Kony turned to farce, it was probably at 6:21 pm on Friday March 9. 'Have you heard of this guy Joseph Kony?,' asked the rapper-turned-reality-star Vanilla Ice, in a tweet from Dallas. 'America needs to send in the hero's that killed Bin Laden and take this killer out.'" Well, if you reach 100 million people, some won't be Winston Churchill.

The Nation says the video "perfectly demonstrates the urgent, uplifting arc of successful web campaigns....[But] the film's largest substantive shortcoming is because of the timing. Kony was already indicted on war crimes in 2005; he already fled Uganda." Wow, the Web works fast.

Another "Internet sensation" this week was the scathing "Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs" letter by now-former Goldman exec Greg Smith, printed prominently in the NY Times. "The Internet has been positively ablaze with chatter, much of it humorous," blogs Bottom Line. The Daily Mash responded with a resignation letter from Darth Vader, mimicking the original: "TODAY is my last day at the Empire. After almost 12 years, first as a summer intern, then in the Death Star and now in London, I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its massive, genocidal space machines." Borowtiz Report did a phony letter from Goldman's CEO reassuring clients: "At Goldman, we pride ourselves on our ability to scour the world's universities and business schools for the finest sociopaths money will buy."

Of course, the South by Southwest fandango, that multi-tentacled squid of a music/tech/film festival, is happening now. A dumb marketing campaign has become the breakout news from Austin. ReadWriteWeb reports: "South By Southwest 2012 can be summarized thusly: An impossibly-named marketing company called Bartle Bogle Hegarty is doing a little human science experiment called Homeless Hotspots. It gives out 4G hotspots to homeless people along with a promotional t-shirt. The shirt doesn't say, 'I have a 4G hotspot.' It says, 'I am a 4G hotspot.'" Epicenter says "This is my worry: the homeless turned not just into walking, talking hotspots, but walking, talking billboards for a program that doesn't care anything at all about them or their future, so long as it can score a point or two about digital disruption of old media paradigms. So long as it can prove that the real problem with homelessness is that it doesn't provide a service." Yes, shocking, a marketing gimmick has turned out to be cynical. The other big news out of SXSW also has nothing to do with the hundreds of musicians, companies, artworks and gadgets on display down there but a rumor that CNN may buy Mashable for $200 million. Retuers columnist Felix Salmon broke the rumor, but there hasn't been confirmation or much solid reporting . "Not so fast," says PaidContent. "There are moments when deals can look very close--and when they might not be as close as they seem."

There was some music news from Austin. Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan talked about the Internet's ongoing destruction of the industry, Social Media Today says. Corgan stated: "Our aim is to turn the 'social' into a new way to experience an album. By taking the medium one step further we will create an experience with Oceania online and off-line that transcends the single and the single mentality in all ways." Get ready for... group earbuds? Also, Apple made a big splash at SXSW, but it was Fiona Apple, resurfacing after years away from the spotlight. Says Idolator: "It may not have been the home-run performance fans might've hoped for from Apple's first performance outside of Los Angeles in roughly five years. But it was enough to prove that Apple remains a fierce and fascinating pop singer."

And another era comes to a close as the people at Encyclopedia Britannica have announced "we will discontinue the 32-volume printed edition...when our current inventory is gone." It's sad, but just a sign of the times, says The Daily What: "Over the last decade, Encyclopaedia Britannica has seen online rival Wikipedia slowly eat away at its market share, with its high-minded notions of free information for all by all. By comparison, a complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica books will set you back a cool $1,395." Says The Next Web: "I'm not quite sure what has taken the company so long to realize that it was losing money by continuing to print books, but either way, the time has come to say goodbye." Old hardcover encyclopedia sets can be donated directly to Vanilla Ice.

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Best in Blogs: Apple's Gizmo of the Future and the Rush from Rush

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AppId is over the quota

"Here she is - the iPad HD! Er, new iPad," says Engadget. Right! Wait - what? Yes, the new iPad is not being called the iPad 3 but just the new iPad. You know, like they did for the New Testament. "Breaking away from the numerical tracking system used before (and still used in the iPhone range), Apple has decided to highlight the most major change in its newest slate by simply dubbing it 'new.' " Everybody cheer on the count of three: One. Two. Yay. Three. Couldn't hold it in! The denumbering aside, "unsurprisingly, Apple has managed to produce something that's truly beautiful to look at," Engadget adds. Slate Moneybox says Apple is gunning for the PC market with the new iPad, introduced on Wednesday with most of the features experts predicted: a super high-res retina display, quad-core graphics, speedy 4G LTE networking. "The way they presented it, it's not that there's a 'tablet' market dominated by the iPad. Instead, there's a PC market in which...steady incremental improvements to the iPad's capabilities turn it into a potential PC replacement. The more powerful chips mean that more sophisticated apps can reside on the iPad. The rollout of iCloud is supposed to render the iPad's limited storage capacity less relevant..."

The Next Web runs down Apple's full presentation and the product highlights, including a new an iSight camera on the front and a rear camera that runs at 5MP. Plus "a host of Apple apps were updated to work with its Retina display, including iWork, iMove and Garage Band. The new iPad is priced at $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB, $699 for 64GB. And $629, $729, and $829 for 4G. It will be available on March 16th in the US." The Verge has a one of those fancy charts where they compare the new iPad against, like the entire National League Central. Well actually the iPad 2charts, Samsung Galaxy Note, the Asus Transformer something, and the Nook and the Kindle for good measure.

Gizmodo happened to notice another new feature: a new rainbow colored Apple logo at the end of the presentation. "Put your Apple Kremlinology hat on, folks...Is this Apple's new logo? I hope so! I hope so because: I love the rainbow. I LOVE DOUBLE RAINBOWS.... It gets me back to my old Mac years, when all of you didn't know what the hell Apple was." But not everybody is down with the rainbow connection. At VentureBeat Jolie O'Dell lists the new tie-dye logo as part of a new unraveling of the Apple brand, "a certain sloppiness that was absent from former, Steve Jobs-led launches. This wasn't anything major, just a few minor but glaring inconsistencies: Tim Cook going for the 'rumpled executive' look, the ambiguous naming of the 'new iPad,' the use of a truly horrible pun ["Resolutionary"] on a new product's landing page, and the tie-dyed Apple logo at the presentation's conclusion.... all of it pointed to a leadership that either didn't understand or didn't care about consistency in iconography...Today, we saw the first cracks in what will eventually become a wholesale break with the past." Huh?

At Buzzfeed an essayist says she can resist the hype and go without the new iPad: "I wondered whether people like me felt the same way, so I did an informal survey of some of my female friends who are all in their early 30s, have jobs in media, and could afford one if they wanted one. We all have iPhones; several of us have Kindles. We don't hate technology, or America, or Apple. But the general consensus was that we mostly don't need one." The Onion has jumped on the bandwagon, though, saying, with a report saying "This Article Generating Thousands Of Dollars In Ad Revenue Simply By Mentioning New iPad."

While Apple is out on the front lines creating the media devices of the future, it's good to know some folks are still creating good old fashioned content. Take Rush Limbaugh - he just has to open his mouth and there's a week of reaction for us to read, watch and listen to. Says the L.A. Times' Company Town blog: "The flight of advertisers from The Rush Limbaugh Show continued Wednesday, with a total of 45 national and local companies pulling their spots, according to the liberal activist groups angered by the talk radio host for calling Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a 'slut' and a 'prostitute.' Yep. They're not calling him the new Rush. "The current tally is up to 46 - and 48 if you count the bands who don't want their music played on the show," updates Atlantic Wire. The lib-leaning Media Matters site is tracking who is still advertising on the Limbaugh program. Muses Boing Boing: "I wonder if many Republican politicians are secretly rooting for Limbaugh to receive a Joe McCarthy-style dethroning, because they are scared to death of him?" In a column for Bloomberg, Michael Kinsley starts a backlash-backlash against Limbaugh's opportunistic critics: "The self-righteous parade out the door by Limbaugh's advertisers is hard to stomach. Had they never listened to Rush before, in all the years they had been paying for commercials on his show? His sliming of a barely known law student may be a new low - even after what he's said about Nancy Pelosi and Michelle Obama - but it's not a huge gap." But at Esquire's The Politics Blog, Charlie Pierce backlashes it one step further: "This is Kinsley being deliberately stupid...We can't do the right thing now because we didn't do the right thing then?"

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Best in Blogs: Village People Music Victory, Classic PC Game Respawns, and Facebook IPO Hoodiegate

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AppId is over the quota

In a victory for the rights of Village People everywhere, Victor Willis, who was the "cop" character, lead singer and co-writer for the flashy 1970s disco group, has won an important copyright case, reclaiming ownership in the songs YMCA, In the Navy, and 31 other Village People classics. It's a court ruling "with significant implications for the music industry," explains ArtsBeat: "Early last year, Mr. Willis invoked a provision of copyright law called 'termination rights,' which gives recording artists and songwriters the ability to reacquire and administer their work themselves after 35 years have elapsed. " This first such case is good news for all kinds of artists. "Over time it's expected to affect the rights to songs by Dylan, Springsteen, Tom Petty, Billy Joel and others," HuffPo notes. "Good for him and probably good for all of us," says Threedonia. "This move by large entities to corral and monopolize artistic content is troublesome." "This is precisely the result that many record labels have feared: that a musician could recover the copyright interest in his songs," adds Jonathan Pink. "Yikes. Not because of what this means to the labels, but what it means to me! Now these songs will be in my head all day! Ugggg. I blame U.S. District Judge Barry T. Moskowitz."

Some old-school entertainment is just 2 good 2 B 4-Gotten. Bethesda Softworks is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the pioneering PC game Wolfenstein 3D by making it playable for free on the Web. Says Mashable: "Wolfenstein 3D, which can be played here, is considered one of the earliest first-person shooters, and the game that made the genre popular on PC...Expect work productivity to drop today." "This is the game that started it all," says AppNewser, "and it is widely credited as being the ancestor or godfather to RPG games as diverse as HalfLife, Portal, and World of Warcraft." Geek.com calls it "one of the most important and memorable PC games of all time ...  it changed the way many of us thought about video games, video game violence, and totally insane boss fights ... It's bloody, not at all safe for work, and quite difficult, but it's a foundational video game experience. Pro tip: Z is strafe."

Back in the modern world, the Hoodie as a statement beyond fashion has again reared its hooded head. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wore a hoodie instead of a suit while pitching his company's zillion-dollar IPO to investment bankers. Analyst Michael Pachter told Bloomberg: "He's actually showing investors he doesn't care that much ... I think that's a mark of immaturity. I think that he has to realize he's bringing investors in as a new constituency right now, and I think he's got to show them the respect that they deserve because he's asking them for their money." Backlash, anyone? Business Insider says the tech world immediately began "turning Pachter into a punching bag ... It was the tech world versus the banking world." Kara Swisher of All Things D tweeted that the analyst is a "doofus." "This is what happens when you take people from outside of tech and collide them with topics that they don't understand, in this case, Mark Zuckerberg's wardrobe," says The Next Web. Pachter defended his fashion advice for Zuck and said he's not anti-hoodie, noting that there's a photo of himself wearing a hoodie at the gaming blog Kotaku. Om Malik blogs that the real problem isn't that the hoodie makes a statement, it's simply "a fashion abomination...The hoodie madness has spread so wide and so far that even respectable designers such as Ted Baker are selling their own spin on the hoodie. Question: Will a Yahoo patent on Hoodies mysteriously emerge and stop Zuck from being a hoodie-maven?"

In a debate over fashion between tech guys, there really are no winners. But the Facebook IPO is sure to make it all good for those lucky investors who can see beyond the hoodie. One stock analyst has predicted via CNET that that "although Facebook is expected to go public in the next few weeks between $28 and $35 a share, the stock could hit $46 within the next 12 months....Arvind Bhatia bases his bullish opinion of Facebook's shares on a host of factors, including his contention that the company's monthly active users will grow from about 900 million right now to more than 1.5 billion in 2016." Adweek delivers the top 10 things to know about the Facebook IPO, including "Facebook and Google will end up in some kind of death match" (#9) and "Zuckerberg will continue to wear hoodies to all major press events and executive board meetings" (#5). VentureBeat says the company still faces the challenge of "turning hype into trust." At Deal Journal, MarketWatch's Dave Callaway suggests "global economic instability could pose a substantive challenge to Facebook's IPO." Want way more info about the Facebook IPO than you are prepared to care about? Former disgraced tech stock analyst Henry Blodget has a long story at his Business Insider about "How Goldman Sachs blew the Facebook IPO." It ends with a detailed disclaimer citing an immense list of his conflicts of interest in covering Facebook (and likely many other tech topics) and ends with the line "So, basically, I'm conflicted out the wazoo." Now you tell us, Henry! The Ape Con Myth seems to have obtained the Facebook IPO roadshow presentation, and like Wolfenstein 3D, you can play it on the Web for free. Ape Con says: "If you can watch all 30 minutes and 59 seconds and still want a share of Facebook ... go for it."

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Best of Design Blogs: Groundbreaking New Designers and More

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AppId is over the quota

Whether it is a unique architectural tool, an individual's street style, or a memorable moment in a child's life, a lifestyle blogger likes to share what excites and moves them. Similar to how reporters and editors of online news sources use the web to deliver immediate and current information, those who blog in fashion, art and design use it to showcase a certain aesthetic, thus breeding inspiration in various forms. Driven by the annual Milan Furniture Fair, the desire to share design was certainly abundant on the web in April.VosgesParis described the luxury designs and vibrant life on the Italian streets. Justin McGuirk told a different story about this year's fair. In The Guardian, he wrote about the new iconoclastic designers who stole the show with their alternative means of production and design: "These were the geeks and hackers challenging the very notions of luxury craftsmanship and mass-produced furniture."

While McGuirk glimpsed into design's future, others noted what's hot in the present--and past. Emmas Design Blogg, known for consistently posting fresh interiors from a "Scandinavian prospective," paid homage to Est and Llamas Valley, two digital design magazines that are now a year old. Actor, director and tastemaker Diane Keaton devoted words to the rooms that contain them, as she blogged on Remodelista about the life found in a home library: "Sometimes it's startling; sometimes it seems to be subdued by shadow and light; sometimes it's filled with a sublime beauty." Keaton's words can almost be used to describe the unexpected and unique journey that Spitalfields Life has taken its readers over the years. Now a popular book launched this spring, the British blog began with a promise made by its anonymous "Gentle Author" in 2009: "Over the coming days, weeks, months and years, I am going to write every single day and tell you about life here in Spitalfields at the heart of London." The author kept his word and has continued to share stories that move him.

Guest post from the editors at Remodelista, the sourcebook for the considered home.

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Best in Blogs: Mega Millions Inspires American Dreams, Obama Campaign is Pinterest-ing

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AppId is over the quota

The Mega Millions lottery drawing this Friday night will reach an all-time record jackpot of $500 million, give or take a few megabucks, giving millions of Americans reason to stop resenting the wealthy one percent and instead believe that they may join the much more elite .00000000569 percent (the odds of winning the jackpot are 175,711,536 to one). With so much at stake, mathematicians and economists have relished the opportunity to have people actually read their blogs. After a gigantic load of calculations on his blog, David Torbert concludes that "for your 'investment' of a $1 lottery ticket, your expected return is 88.2 cents for this Friday's drawing." Which on its face doesn't sound so bad, though it essentially means the more you buy, the more you lose. But opinions are mixed. "At some point it becomes what a friend calls a 'utility bet,'" says The Spectacle Blog. "In other words, the possibility, almost no matter how small, of winning such an enormous prize makes it worth taking a flier with some modest amount of money." Cunctabundus has noted that the .00000000569 percent chance of winning with one ticket "rounds to zero" - and so do the odds of winning if you buy two tickets. "And 20 tickets? Your chance of hitting the jackpot is a just over a hundred-thousandth of a percent. Say it with me, round to zero."

Stephen Bronars at Bronars Economics seems to be worried that after you win you may have to split the jackpot with others - logic that seems to be leaping ahead a little - but he concludes that "even after taking the likelihood of multiple winners into account, the expected value of a one dollar Mega Millions ticket is more than a dollar." So get in line! Everyone's an expert now, apparently. Says the Pinch That Penny blog: "As math is a fuzzy subject for me, I deferred to my buddy the math whiz (he wrote a post for me on the NBA lockout a few months ago)." Well, maybe not everyone.

It does as if like an undue amount energy is being expended wondering what everyone will do after they all win. Business Insider is on top of the topic with strategies for taking your winnings ("make sure to decide between lump sum and annuity.") and seven things you could do with the winnings ("Buy 952,000 new iPads. Donate $475,999,999 to Planned Parenthood and $1 to Susan G. Komen.")The consumer finance blog Life Inc. warns unemployed job seekers not to admit in job interviews that they'd quit after winning the jackpot: "When you answer the lottery question - or any interview question - you want to leave out any inkling you're not excited about working hard, no matter what the circumstances." The Economix blog has noted the correlation between high unemployment rates and high lottery sales: "Can't Find a Job? Play the Lottery."

Anyway - the sound you are hearing now is the alarm clock going off on Saturday morning. You didn't win Mega Millions. The next bandwagon leaving the stations appears to be...Pinterest. Yes. Says Naked D.C.: "Pinterest is the new social media revolution - an electronic scrapbook that allows you to 'pin' pictures, ideas, quotes and the like from various websites around the Internets. In short, it is the greatest invention to ever befall young, unmarried women who are looking to creep the sh*t out of their imaginary boyfriends by completely planning their wedding before they ever meet anyone." Ok, there's that, maybe. The newest Pinterest adopter appears to be Mr. President, Barack Obama, who has the worst Pinterest page ever, Naked D.C. says. Jezebel, in a comprehensive analysis of the PObama Pinterest presence, adds: "while I bet Barack Obama's got some totally cute DIY wedding flower ideas, this move makes sense in light of what appears to be the President's reelection strategy: personally befriend every woman in America."

"President Obama Joins Pinterest, Wants All Your Themed Cake Recipes," laffs WebProNews. "Obama has always had a huge presence on both Twitter and Facebook, but in the last six months, Obama has checked-in to Foursquare, started blogging away on Tumblr, went a little hipster by joining Instagram, joined Google+ and almost immediately hosted a Hangout, made his campaign playlist available on Spotify, and switched his Facebook profile over to the new Timeline." The Dallas News Trailblazers blog notes that Obama "isn't the first to use Pinterest for political purposes. Groups like liberal-leaning Think Progress have employed it to poke at GOP candidates. Ann Romney, wife of GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney, has a page of her own to collect recipes and post campaign photos." VentureBeat gets to the real point, figuring Obama's pinning will "likely be a bigger boon for the social networking site than for the campaign. Consider this yet another defining moment for the still-small, 30-person, Palo Alto-based company." Pinterest certainly is attracting a crowd. The Daily Dot broke news that a Pinterest spammer may be making $1,000 a day: "Spammers are turning innocent users' clicks into cash by running thousands of automated Pinterest profiles, and they're getting away with it for longer than any of them expected." That's $30,000 a month for doing hardly anything, says Mashable. Hey, who needs the lottery?

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Facebook-Instagram Explained, Billion-Dollar Bubbles, and the CEO Who Really Was a Mensch

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AppId is over the quota

It's official. One billion dollars will buy Instagram, or a pile of patents from AOL. That's how much Facebook reportedly paid to acquire Instagram, maker of the eponymous snap-and-share photo app for smartphones, and what Microsoft spent on a mess of patents that AOL had. Now everyone is contemplating the value of a billion. HuffPo for some reason calculated what a billion dollars might purchase in college expenses (probably the more low-paid interns you hire, the more of your reports will relate to college). It determined that a billion bucks could pay 12,113 professors for a year, which doesn't seem like a bargain, or cover room and board for 250,000 students (we'd still apply for financial aid). Ewan Spence writes at his Forbes blog that these billion-buck deals "do little more than set down the big bind in the high stakes VC poker of Silicon Valley. You want to play? Find a billion. You've built a mobile phone application and it has some users? It's nothing till you can sell it for a billion."

ReadWriteWeb isolates eight factors behind the amazing ascent of Instagram: "In just 551 days, the photo-sharing mobile app zoomed from zero to 30 million-odd users, and 10 million U.S. visits by March 2012, up 1000% since December 2011. Its valuation outstrips that of the 116-year-old New York Times." Among the things Instagram did right in order to "win the startup lottery": it "didn't get creepy" about sharing private information, and its interface "stayed junk-free." TechCrunch says a new floodgate has opened for tech startups. "Two and a half years ago, Mint.com was acquired for $170 million, and everyone thought that was an amazing deal following the great recession. Now, a fledgling company with a small team gets acquired for $1 billion. My best guess is that it is about to get crazy." Where the Circles Meet wonders whether Facebook or Microsoft got a better deal for its gigabucks and concludes "the bigger winner in today's spending spree appears to be Microsoft. It gets a whole bundle of patents that are bound to come in handy at some point in the future both offensively and defensively. While Facebook's purchase of Instagram comes with great engineers to help retool the Facebook photo experience, leaving Instagram as a standalone app poses the problem of cannibalization of Facebook's photo options." But the big winners are the folks who received the billion, Instagram and AOL. "Instagram was an app that had no way to generate revenue," so it makes out like a bandit here.

Patentology looks at these two deals and other recent acquisitions and analyzes: "All of these deals have in common the fact that the entire valuation is based on intangible assets. How do you put a price on a bundle of patents? On a team of great employees? On a loved brand? Or on the future potential of a technology? Are the recent valuations justified, or are we heading for another industry meltdown similar to the 'dot-com' bust of March 2000? After all, the Zuckerbergs, Systroms and Kriegers of the world could be excused for failing to learn the lessons of history - they were little more than kids at the time!" Epicenter says we can turn off the bubble alarm and safely return to our desks. Facebook's paying $28 for each of Instagram's 35 million users was a sensible buy and a much better deal that far stupider tech acquisitions of the past. Concurs Rick Webb at Betabeat: "I am having a hard time moulding the Instagram purchase toward a bubble narrative. Facebook's IPO is estimated to value the company at a hundred billion dollars or so. It's really not that much money to them." Meanwhile, some devoted users of Instragram are a little glum. "Are the golden days of Instagram over?" writes Jenna Wortham at Bits: "The sale of Instagram brings a harsh reality into focus, the realization that the secret rooms or private spaces online where we can share, chit-chat and hang out with our friends are fading. The few safe havens that do exist are quickly being encroached upon or are next on the shopping list for a company like Google, Apple or Facebook." Paul Ford nicely sums up some of the user regret at Daily Intel: "For many Instagram users it's discomfiting to see a giant company they distrust purchase a tiny company they adore -- like if Coldplay acquired Dirty Projectors, or a Gang of Four reunion was sponsored by Foxconn."

But cheer up. Sometimes there are happy endings in the valley of dreams. The dramatic and touching story of a smaller tech acquisition has become a sort of Schindler's List of stock options. Business Insider reports on the fairytale story behind the recent $210 million buyout of mobile app developer OMGPOP, whose Draw Something had become a craze. Apparently, the startup was on its last legs just months ago and had to make layoffs to survive. When the new app began to take off and the buyout looked imminent, CEO Dan Porter scrambled to re-hired the laid off workers so they could cash in. "He was literally negotiating the deal and jamming the re-hires back into payroll....Their options kept vesting and they benefitted from the sale. Porter didn't have to do it. It was just the mensch thing to do."

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