Finally- not only can I get wifi access at Peet’s Coffee now, but it’s actually free - you get a code from the register for 2 hours of free access. Neat stuff. Yet another reason to go to Peet’s (where available of course) instead of Starbucks…

According to comScore MediaMetrix, in October 2005 YouTube had 673,000 US visitors spending in aggregate about 7.809 million minutes for the month on the site (11.6 per user per month). By October 2006 this number was up to 23.48 million users (in the US!) with an average of 59.48 minutes each… for a total of 1.397 billion minutes for the month. That’s almost 1/2 a percent of all online minutes. A staggering figure!

I love playing with Google Trends, so thought running “Youtube” vs. “Internet” would be fun:

At long last, what everyone suspected comes to pass - Lonelygirl15 is a fake and now we know for sure.

Fred Wilson says he doesn’t want to be a “blogebrity“, or to be on some of the mover-shaker blogger lists such as the AlwaysOn Open Media 100. Obviously, BTW, I am happy that LinkedIn in the form of Reid Hoffman is a part of the Always On List but I broadly agree that static lists are quite often, old media crap. BUT, are they going to go away any time soon, no way! Especially here in the US, we love lists. Whether we vote for their constituents or not, lists of important people, sports plays, “celebrity hook-ups” (and other VH1 gems) and best/worst dressed are easy to digest and these lists signal we’re going to cut through most of the BS and just get to the important/cool/gross stuff. Lists are here to stay — it’s all about making sure you (1) stay off the bad lists, (2) avoid the lame lists and (3) don’t get too upset about the other ones. As an example, Discovery’s show “The Greatest American” shows the perils of democracy in listmaking. Just take a look at the top 25 in general. Here are a few interesting ones: (1) Ronald Reagan, (6) George W. Bush (!), (8) Elvis Presley, (9) Oprah Winfrey. Etc. I agree with Fred, let’s cool it with the lists!

There’s just something about Hello Kitty - and Joe Laszlo says this is what he’ll be buying instead of the iPod Shuffle…

The SF Chronicle has a human interest story concerning blogging that I found quite interesting and touching. Many blogs out there are intensely personal discussions, often without an explicit audience. It’s wonderful and scary at the same time.

People often ask me what some of my favorite sites are. One I found a couple of years ago and use religiously is metacritic. They aggregate film, dvd, music and game reviews, assigning a numerical 1-100 score to each that is itself an aggregate of the “scores” given by the critics. The general feel of the review is translated into a score by the editors, and they provide a snippet of the review along with a link to the original. It’s a very powerful summary that also allows the user to drill down to the details and make their own judgements. It’s very seldom led me astray. This weekend - “the Incredibles” gets 88/100 and I will certainly make my way to see this one!

David Card played along with ABC’s interactive Oscars show — what’s most amazing though is that the Jupiter analyst weblogs are up to such a high Google pagerank (wow!).