All props to Eli, but the stars of the Super Bowl were a set and an ad.

With more precision than the Giants’ final drive to win the game, the “show-technology” company LMG rolled out nearly 800 custom-constructed LED tiles, built an electronic set over one-third of the football field, and rigged 32 projectors 150 feet above the set in less than seven minutes.

The display of imagery, video and 3D effects that followed — living VOGUE magazine covers, reverberating speakers and a heavenly universe — dazzled. Not even production excess, Madonna, M.I.A.’s middle finger, a pageant wish for “world peace” or something called LMFAO could ruin the twelve-minute media spectacle known as the halftime show.

Then came Clint. “Halftime for the Auto Industry” brought a lump to the throat of this former Detroiter with a gritty, reality metaphor about struggle and perseverance. The spot, more compelling than the half of football that preceded it, roiled the gods of football. Google and You Tube pulled the video after the NFL apparently suffered a concussion, filing a copyright claim that the commercial was political. Can’t have emotional honesty in the Super Bowl; it might draw attention from a violent sport, entertainers shooting us the bird, and wardrobe malfunctions. Fortunately, the video is back up today.

A sequel to the pulsating, Eminem “Imported from Detroit” campaign by Wieden+Kennedy, “Halftime” is rich with the unapologetic this-is-who-we-are-and-this-is-what-we-do attitude that made me proud to work in the Motor City. A pretty good metaphor for America, too, if you want to take it there.

Spend a little time at the Googleplex and you begin to believe that business is all fun-and-games and that The Life Google serves a better world.

Paul Allen’s personal spaceship hangs from the ceiling of Building 43. An organic garden supplies produce for healthy cafes across the Mountain View, Ca. campus. There are foosball tables, ping-pong tables and volleyball courts for creative play. There are massage chairs for relaxing; gyms for yoga, dancing and workouts. There are bikes and scooters for people-powered travel between buildings, and a winding path through a whimsical sculpture garden for dog-walking and contemplative jogs. The cubes, yurts and huddle rooms are filled with whiteboards, laptops, lava lamps and large, inflatable balls. Even the men’s rooms are Googlized; messages about groups working on complex problems hang above urinals as if to divert attention from the mundane business below to more Google-worthy issues at eye-level … and the organ between the ears.

I like the environment, but The Atlantic’s James Fallows so loves the the place that he believes Googlers can solve the problem that’s on so many minds these days. He writes that he’s spent a lot of time at the Googleplex over the past year talking with Google strategists and engineers about saving newspapers.

No doubt he passed the garden where
a bronze casting of a T Rex fossil,
a gift from founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, forages among the plants. Fallows has so thoroughly bought
into the cult of Google he reports the company is devising ways to save newspapers from becoming the next dinosaur in the garden.

“Most Internet and tech businesses have been either uninterested in or actively condescending toward the struggles of what they view as the pathetic-loser dinosaurs of the traditional media,” he writes.

Which is entirely wrong.

“Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects.”

Which is incredibly naive.

Fallows loses his balance assuming that Google can actually save newspapers. Or wants to. He bought what Google CEO Eric Schmidt sold to newspaper editors at their convention last month: the survival of high-quality journalism is “essential to the functioning of modern democracy.” Like newspaper editors didn’t already believe that?

Fallows acknowledges Schmidt is a family friend and an Atlantic reader. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way that wind blows. He spends many pages arguing that Google is trying to save newspapers rather than killing them.

Okay, Google is working with some newspapers planning to put their content behind paywalls. Those Google engineers are such good friends of journalism and democracy. And their “permanent beta” culture is so innovative ….

But there are a few other reasons, too.

Google knows newspapers are good for Google because they generate information people want to search for. Google gets all the revenue from all those little ads, formerly known as classifieds, that run next to search returns. You know, those ads that paid for the Googleplex just as publishers were shedding reporters. The paywall is another way to get a piece, one story at a time.

Google would like nothing better than for newspapers to stop printing and start selling online ads for as much money as print ads. That has never happened, nor is it likely to happen. Google wants the money anyway, no matter how much or how little. It covets display ads that count for most of newspapers’ remaining revenue. Google would gets its piece through its its ad-serving platform, DoubleClick, which it acquired three years ago and has now integrated in Google systems.

Fallows is right to suggest that craigslist, more than Google, undermined the classifieds money-machine. Craig Newmark’s crime was to make classifieds free and interactive, a wry play that made obsolete a highly-profitable marketplace in the back pages of the daily paper. Google is responsible for ruining the rest of it. Its algorithms blew up the newspaper bundle, exploding content into atoms. Context was vaporized. Newspapers have been unable to reassemble the pieces in a meaningful way or find a price low enough to charge for them. The Humpty Dumpty problem.

Now Google says it is willing to help. What it is unwilling to do is admit that it is culpable. Rather, its execs maintain that Google actually serves newspapers by driving traffic to their web sites from searches. Google has maintained that newspapers ought to charge a lot for the advertising on those pages, but a viable market has yet to materialize for most. So it goes like this:

First, Google unbundles content from the newspaper package and sells it off a piece at a time.

Next, it hastens the dismantling of physical operations — paper, ink, delivery trucks, production and the jobs that support them — as unnecessary, recurring costs of distribution. You get to find your news on Google without getting your hands dirty.

Then, it grabs display ads by serving them through DoubleClick and forcing online newspapers to create more expensive ads since newspapers would have to share ad revenue with Google.

Take that, Apple. Just like the iPad or iTunes, Google could try to impose controls on content-distribution platforms that yield revenue. Let’s take the big slice from those desperate publishers. Who’s your boy: Eric or Steve?

The survival of high-quality journalism? The functioning of modern democracy?
Let’s not leave those questions to the likes of Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs or James Fallows. They confuse important questions with current cliches.

We don’t need lava lamps or inflatable balls to cool-out a business that no longer works.
Journalism and democracy will survive and flourish in new forms and formats that are emerging. That’s an idea worth the investment.

I was wrong. There are at least nine people outside of Apple who have the iPad. One is Stephen Colbert, who has the best review yet.

Late last year William Dean Singleton, the CEO of MediaNews, announced he had identified the problem behind years of steep decline in the news industry. “It’s a good old fashioned economic recession,” Singleton said. In the absence of motion, sooner or later the problem will be recession.

Download the report (PDF)

By MARK WALSH

Have you noticed how much time, money and intelligence is allocated to identify the demographic, psychographic, emotional and purchasing-intent characteristics of today’s Internet users (or consumers?)? Isn’t it amazing how great companies like Tacoda, Revenue Science, Ad.com and all the ad-networks are touting their ability to find the needle in the haystack? And then, you see those same companies, and a host more, claim that they can tell you all sorts of things about that needle? Like why they abandoned their shopping cart with you, why they might use Facebook to talk about you, why they are paranoid about downloading entertainment from you, why they like/don’t like getting updates or deals from you?

Download the Report (PDF)

If Ashton Kutcher’s 4.5 million Twitter followers make you feel inadequate, I’ve got good news: scientists investigating social networks have punked the “influentials” theory that drives celebrities to the top of the charts.

Aplusk, who boasts that he’s bigger than CNN, is apparently overrated. A new study finds that the importance of most influential spreaders in a social network does not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people. Which means well connected celebrities and organizations may have less influence over the spread of valuable information than we give them credit.

Exploring the impact of network science on the spread of information as well as the spread of viruses, Maksim Kitsak at Boston University and a cross-disciplinary team of scientists dismiss e-fluentials, viral marketers run amok, and tipping points. Marketers have spent billions promoting these concepts, including Influentials Theory, which spins the notion that influential people matter more than others. It is also the premise behind Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller, The Tipping Point.

Compare the illustrations below. We used to think that networks worked like the one on the left. The new research suggests they look more like the one on the right: more random, more distributed.

Duncan Watts, one of the pioneers of network science and now the principal research scientist at Yahoo!’s Human Social Dynamics Group, has long been skeptical of the marketers and the pop sociologists. Watts, the author of Six Degrees: The Science of the Connceted Age, has developed a new technique for propagating ads virally, which can double or even quadruple the reach of an ordinary online campaign by harnessing the pass-around power of everyday people and ignoring influentials altogether.

Less-connected people who are less strategically placed can have a significant effect of the dissemination of information, Kitsak’s research team now finds. They discovered that the location of an individual within at a hub of a network can make them more central to the flow of information. The finding seems to support both the random nature of communications networks as well as the value of geography or local knowledge in disseminating information.

Incumbents with historic ties to geographic communities might see an advantage in this ecosystem. More likely it could further disintermediate the flow of information from traditional hubs. Look at the connections from Luis Perez, who posted his Facebook connections on Flickr. Now consider there are more than 70 million Facebook users like Luis.

My day is now a little less sucky thanks to an invitation from Blogads founder Henry Copeland (aka @HC): SUXORZ: the worst social media campaigns of ’09.

Henry and friends will select the worst of the worst at an event Feb. 3 in New York:

Braving hate-mail after naming ’08′s “winners,” the Suxorz panel returns to dissect the twelve worst social media and web 2.0 ad campaigns of ’09. Together, we’ll shame the marketers who abuse people-powered media.

The Suxorz occurs in three rounds: each panelists talks for a couple of minutes about an ’09 social media campaign they hate, maybe showing a slide or Youtube clip, then the drunken mob audience votes on the worst campaign of that round. Finally, we revisit each rounds’ winner and vote on the grand champion Suxorz campaign.

Nominees include Pepsi, @insidethebcs, Charmin, Habitat and Pampers.

Join the Facebook group or register here.