As Good Morning Silicon Valley observes, Google’s acquisition of YouTube is sucking all the air out of the blogosphere. The GMSV boys are speculating whether the two parties celebrated the deal “with a round of Coke and Mentos”. But here’s the most interesting twist:

The happiest people in the deal aside from Hurley and Chen [co-founders of YouTube] are the folks at Sequoia Capital, the VC outfit that backed them and is looking at better than a 40x return on a year-old investment.

An insightful list. I particularly like the rules excoriating papers which put their archives behind paywalls.

First, stop giving away the news and charging for the olds. Okay, give away the news, if you have to, on your website. There’s advertising money there. But please, open up the archives. Stop putting tomorrow’s fishwrap behind paywalls. Writers hate it. Readers hate it. Worst of all, Google and Yahoo and Technorati and Icerocket and all your other search engines ignore it. Today we see the networked world through search engines. Hiding your archives behind a paywall makes your part of the world completely invisilble. If you open the archives, and make them crawlable by search engine spiders, your authority in your commmunity will increase immeasurably. Plus, you’ll open all that inventory to advertising possibilities. And I’ll betcha you’ll make more money with advertising than you ever made selling stale editorial to readers who hate paying for it. (And please, let’s not talk about Times Select. Your paper’s not the NY Times, and the jury is waaay out on that thing.)

Second, start featuring archived stuff on the paper’s website. Link back to as many of your archives as you can. Get writers in the habit of sourcing and linking to archival editorial. This will provide paths for search engine spiders to follow back in those archives as well. Result: more readers, more authority, more respect, higher PageRank and higher-level results in searches. In fact, it would be a good idea to have one page on the paper’s website that has links (or links to links, in an outline) back to every archived item…

This morning’s Observer column…

So Ed Richards has inherited the earth, and all the media beasts therein. On the face of it, the new chief executive of Ofcom has an imposing remit. He is charged by the 2003 Communications Act (of which, as the Prime Minister’s chief policy wonk on such matters, he was undoubtedly the prime author) ‘to further the interests of citizens in relation to communications matters’, and ‘to further the interests of consumers in relevant markets, where appropriate by promoting competition’. This means he is the regulator of the electromagnetic spectrum, telecoms companies, internet service providers – and TV and radio broadcasters (except the BBC).

…Looks impressive, doesn’t it? My advice to Richards is to enjoy it while it lasts. His Ofcom empire is built on sand, and the tide is coming in…

Later… Bill Thompson wrote a nice pseudo-retrospective essay about OFCOM’s dim future.

The best bit of video coverage to emerge from last week’s Tory Conference wasn’t shot by a TV cameraman or broadcast by a TV station. It was filmed by Dan Chung, probably on a digital still camera — and published by a newspaper: the Guardian! Sacre bleu!

This morning’s Observer column…

Because of its stable and lavish funding, Rainie’s project is achieving its goal: it produces the most objective data on the net’s impact. (Most other data comes from commercial market research, the objectivity of which is questionable.) And although the Pew project’s focus is on the US, many of its findings are relevant to other cultures – or at least to those of other industrialised countries. So when Rainie muses about cyberspace, it’s generally worth paying attention.

Recently he’s been thinking aloud about the impact of the net on the workplace – specifically on the tensions likely to arise as kids brought up in a broadband environment enter the workplace. Today’s 21-year-olds are what he calls ‘digital natives’: their formative years have spanned the period during which the internet and mobile phones became central to daily life. In comparison, their employers are ‘digital immigrants’. That is to say, they have reached uneasy accommodations with what, for most of them, is an alien technological culture…

Well, that’s what it implies.

Socialize with the people you know – and want to know – in a safe, ad free environment where you control who has access to your personal content.

According to The Register, Wallop (where do they get these names from?) “was spun out from Microsoft’s IP ventures program and research department. Microsoft holds an equity stake in the company.” Apparently you have to be invited to become a member. How exclusive is that! Just like a Frat House in an Ivy League college. Wonder if they do online hazing?