Incoming Bay Area News Project editor-in-chief Jonathan Weber has been writing a periodic column on small business for The Big Money (the WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive Co site covering economics and business). Today he writes about his decision to say goodbye to New West, the new media company he founded in Montana five years ago.

New West has not been easy, he says. "We've been trying to do something inherently difficult—develop a new business model for quality journalism." And, he adds, "for the last two years we've been doing it in a terrible economy."

On the journalism side, Weber says he thinks he's done "a pretty good job with the product vision, the editorial, and the conferences, and I'm very proud of the team we have put together." That bodes well for BANP.

On the business side, though, Weber says he struggled with his "own weaknesses as a CEO": "I've learned that I am not a very good sales manager, and the marketing side doesn't always come easily either."

At BANP, those duties will fall to incoming CEO Lisa Frazier, which Weber told BayNewser when we interviewed him a couple of weeks ago was one of the attractions of the new gig.

As for New West, San Francisco-based Internet media executive Lynn Ingham (Interactive One, Community Connect, SustainLane, Ad Age Group) is pulling a reverse Weber and heading back to her native Montana to become the company's new publisher.

The Commonwealth Club is hosting a noon-time panel next week on the topic "California Media in Crisis: Who will hold California Institutions Accountable?" Speakers include:

Score one for the new media kids. Digg Dialogg, the periodic Internet video forum that interviews big machers using questions submitted by and voted on by Digg users, got a live interview with Toyota CEO Jim Lentz today.

The interview aired this afternoon at 5pm ET (2pm PT) on Digg and on San Francisco-based Internet TV network Revision3. Digg users submitted over 1,300 questions after Digg announced the interview Friday morning. Lentz answered the top ten.

Traditional media scratched their heads at the top two questions, which were completely unrelated to the crisis at hand: "What [kind of car] do you drive?" and "How far along is Toyota on moving into some truly gas free cars in the future?"

"Democratic journalism doesn't always get to the point immediately," the Christian Science Monitor wrote. But then it tipped its hat to the new way of doing things: "There were hard-hitting questions that were more authentic than anything from an investigative journalist." Specifically: "I was a General Manager of one of your largest dealerships in the US. I was aware that this problem dates back to 2004. In fact, there was a death involved in a sudden acceleration incident at an Atlantic City Hotel in a Camry that our dealership sold. At this point is Toyota's position going to change as to the dates involved?"

It turns out that Google isn't the only one to use its keyword search functionality as the basis for an ad.

Of course, Slate V didn't air theirs during the Super Bowl. And it’s not so much an ad as a parody. Still, highly worthwhile.

(Via Valleywag.)

Just prior to the Super Bowl, the Los Angeles Times offered an interesting look at a passionate subset of football followers. Their interest in the game, however, had little to do with team allegiances or even football in general.

It's a group that, as the game unfolded, bid on keywords for the right to appear atop the list of sponsored links on a given search engine, whenever that keyword was searched.

Some terms, like "football" and "Miami" are obvious. Others -- like "Tracy Porter," the relatively unknown defensive back whose interception return for a touchdown sparked New Orleans' victory over the Colts -- wouldn't make sense until something specific happened during the game.

Hit it right, and the buy can end up being a bargain, with fees determined by the number of clicks on a given ad. Depending on bidding, prices can range from pennies to dozens of dollars per click.

Denny's Corp., which purchased airtime for three broadcast commercials during the game, got in on the action, purchasing the keywords for, among others, "Dennys" and "free breakfast" on Google.

Search-engine spending was up 8 percent last year reported the Times, despite flat overall online ad spending and a depressed general ad market. Super Bowl-related searches are up 40 percent, year over year.

Update: Google has released its list of the most popular search terms surrounding the Super Bowl:

If you think Facebook's just a great new way to stay in touch with friends, or, from a professional point of view, a way to spread links to the content you're creating, you're missing at least half of the value it's creating: The aggregate information. Collectively, Facebook users are essentially creating a massive database about who they're connected to and what they care about.

Take this analysis by Los Angeles-based programmer Pete Warden, for example. By cranking the data on 210 million public Facebook profiles, Warden has come up with insights into how closely connected people in different parts of the country are to the people who are geographically near them. Not surprisingly, the data shows that geographic ties are closer in smaller centers in the middle of the country than in larger urban areas on the coasts. For example, people in Cincinnati are most closely connected with people in Columbus, Dayton, Lexington.

Whereas people in San Francisco tend to have friendships that extend more rapidly to points further afield, like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago.

What else he's discovered, after the jump.

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The cast list at what is likely to be the hottest ticket in New York on February 18 has been set. Judge Denny Chin has released the lineup of speakers who will appear at the Google Books settlement fairness hearing in US District Court on that day. The fairness hearing, if it isn't pre-empted by some procedural motion that takes this case in a new direction, will be the last milestone before Judge Chin decides whether to approve the settlement.

Speaking in Opposition

Online media circles are abuzz this morning over Google's decision to run a 60-second ad during last night's Super Bowl. After all, as Google chronicler John Batelle points out (via Wired's Epicenter), in 2006, Google CEO Eric Schmidt called brand advertising of the likes of the "Parisian Love" spot "the last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America."

And in a year when some major brands decided the Super Bowl was no longer the best place to plunk down their brand advertising dollars, you do have to wonder what Google executives figured the return was going to be on a 60-second TV spot likely costing somewhere around $6 million.

It sort of makes you wonder if once again those clever Google people weren't just as clever as ever. The ad's real target might not have been the Super Bowl's almost 100 million viewers. (Were a bunch of guys passing nachos really going to get all mushy over a story about a student going to Paris to study abroad and ending up looking for instructions on how to assemble a crib?) It's possible the intended target was the post-game buzz. After all, Google seems to have been trying to keep the ad hush-hush before the big event (Batelle said Google refused to discuss it when he pinged them last week, and he couldn't find the company listed on the CBS lineup of advertisers), which would be consistent with a campaign designed to produce massive post-event chatter.

And indeed, just about every major news outlet is talking about the ad this morning. And given that it's just so gosh-darn cute, there's a lot of ooh'ing and aah'ing going on as well. (Not to mention re-embedding of the ad on online sites. Like, um, ours.)

In an phase when the news around Google is more likely to skew negative than positive (ongoing resentment about the Google Books settlement, rehashing about why a don't-be-evil Google went into China in the first place, Bing encroaching on Google Search's market share), perhaps $6 million was a fairly inexpensive way to buy a little goodwill.

In the meantime, enjoy the ad. Because really, it is so gosh-darn cute. (And Google: Don't forget to give the person who came up with it a nice tidy bonus.)

A religious scholar in Egypt has reportedly condemned Facebook, saying it "could result in the proliferation of illicit affairs."

"Surfing such websites makes it easier to develop forbidden relations with others," GulfNews.com reported the scholar as saying. "While one spouse is away, the other turns to chatting online, thus wasting time and falls into the trap of illicit affairs."

Meanwhile, after Twitter-based chatter protesting Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez's decision to clamp down on press freedoms sent the hashtag #freevenezuela to the top of Twitter's trending topics, Chavez reportedly called on the country's National Assembly to pass laws against potential terroristic uses of the Interwebs.

Not good news for the Google Books settlement: The U.S. Department of Justice has submitted its opinion (officially, a "statement of interest") on the revised version of the deal that that would create a framework for Google to use the millions of books it scanned from university libraries. Says the DoJ: they still can't get behind it.

"Despite the substantial progress reflected in the proposed amended settlement agreement in The Authors Guild Inc. et al. v. Google Inc.," says a DoJ press release, "class certification, copyright and antitrust issues remain."

Specifically, according to the statement of interest:

Although the United States believes the parties have approached this effort in good faith and the amended settlement agreement is more circumscribed in its sweep than the original proposed settlement, the amended settlement agreement suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: it is an attempt to use the class action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the court in this litigation.

This is the same criticism of the deal that others have made: That the agreement Google made with the authors and publishers groups that sued it is, in the end, more of a new business deal than a resolution of the alleged copyright infractions, and, therefore, not an appropriate outcome of a class action suit.

The next step in this ongoing saga: a February 18 hearing before the New York court that is overseeing the case.