Holy Cow: GodTube Raises $30 Million, Mashable.

What’s interesting about GodTube is not so much the technology – as Pete wrote in his initial review, “put bluntly … it was crap” – but how it’s little more than an existing concept catered to a very specific yet very huge audience. Christian television is enormous in the US, and GodTube has been able to capitalize on people’s desire for religious programming by taking a proven concept (video sharing), a brand name clearly inspired (some would say stolen) by a market leader, and industry best practices to become a big business.

As Pete noted in August, the site actually got its start running on a $300 script. It simply exploded from there, entering the top 1000 web sites in September and never looking back.

Facebook Apps: Why they're focused on fun instead of utility, Andrew Chen.

The only way for a Facebook app to get any sort of distribution is to have a viral coefficient over 1. This is an extremely high barrier for any app in which inviting friends is not an inherent part of using it (or, in your parlance, in which it is not structured for "viral action").

Instead, what most utility-based apps rely on for distribution is word of mouth, in which people tell their friends not because there is something built into the app that naturally causes peer-to-peer transmission but simply because it's worth talking about – or, in your parlance "viral branding." And as you've written it is very difficult to achieve a viral coefficient of over 1 through word of mouth. Ironically, this difficulty is compounded inside Facebook because the proliferation of viral action apps inundates users with invitations and makes them less and less likely to accept anything – including invitations to utility-based applications. So the barrier for going viral increases even further. Given current invitation conversation rates of 5% or less (at least what I'm hearing), for an app to go viral, you have to get people to invite an average of at least 20 friends. How many utility based apps can achieve that? How many inspire so much passion that its users tell 20 friends, on average? Few, even if people find the app incredibly useful.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: Grover Norquist Says Leave Us Alone Already!, Reason.

In this wide-ranging, in-depth discussion, Norquist talks about splits among libertarians and conservatives, the many failures of the Bush administration and the GOP Congress, his trouble with Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the urgent need for reform in Social Security, health care, and education, and much, much more.

Newspapers and Google News: An Analysis, Bivings Report.

Then today I came across a site called Newsknife, which breaks down which newspaper websites have the most articles appear in Google News. I found this fascinating, so I quickly compared the twenty five newspapers that appeared most often in Google News with a list of the twenty five largest newspapers in terms of print circulation. A couple of quick things jumped out at me:

* The Mercury News, Washington Times and Akron Beacon Journal were the papers that performed the best in Google News as compared to their print circulation. For the Mercury News and Washington Times, I’d guess they do well because both papers have a lot of content niche news topics (silicon valley and politics) that are very popular on time. So it makes sense that Google News might have a lot of their stories. I have no idea why the Akron Beacon Journal is in Google News so much.
* The Wall Street Journal and Rocky Mountain News were the largest newspapers that did not appear on the list of top newspapers sites in Google News. I suspect the Journal will start showing up soon given their recent deal with Google. I don’t know what is going on with the Rocky Mountain News.