I talked to Matt Mullenweg last night by AIM, from a wi-fi connection in Italy. He was just starting to catch up on the story, swamped under a ton of e-mail and interview requests. He wrote something brief on his weblog, and is in the process of composing an official response for the WordPress homepage. Update: Here it is. Please read it! It addresses many questions.

Update: Matt just posted a comment in this thread, addressing some of the conspiracy theories and saying that his response is coming very soon:

Andy did let me know he was working on the article, I was open and answered all his questions however I’d prefer if our AIM conversation wasn’t quoted more just because I don’t have access to it myself and I’m not terribly articulate on IM. It didn’t occur to me that the article would be finished while I was gone and there would be so much feedback. I’m back online and going to be posting a response shortly.

Otherwise, things are settling down from a very busy day yesterday. eWeek, MSNBC, The Register, Slashdot, Ars Technica, and Metafilter all posted articles about it. After deleting the offending articles, Google added WordPress.org back into their search results and reinstated the 8/10 pagerank.

Chad Jones, the creator of Hot Nacho, contacted me and asked me to post this statement. Several parts of his story were contradicted by Matt himself, and I don’t believe it myself, but I’m happy to reproduce it in full below.

Disclaimer. I’m hesitant to even write about this, knowing the web’s fondness for angry mob justice, but I feel like it’s an important issue that needs to be addressed. My one request: please be calm and rational. WordPress is a great project, and Matt is a good guy. Think before piling on the hatemail and flames. (Important Update: Followup to this entry, with an official response from WordPress and Hot Nacho.)

The Problem. WordPress is a very popular open-source blogging software package, with a great official website maintained by Matt Mullenweg, its founding developer. I discovered last week that since early February, he’s been quietly hosting at least 120,000 168,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages. (Update: Google is actively removing every article from their results, but here’s a saved copy of the first page of results. You can still view about 25,000 results on Yahoo. Here’s an example of some results in MSN.)

It’s been almost two years since the Star Wars Kid video, but the tributes keep coming.

Tonight, “Arrested Development” featured an obvious SWK homage. In a flashback, the family stumbles on a tape-recording of George Michael, the teenage son of Jason Bateman’s character, doing his lightsaber moves. (Thank to Matt for the video.)

Video: swk_arrested_development.mpg (10MB, MPEG2)

While I’m at it, here’s a video clip I’ve been sitting on since late last year from the Cartoon Network’s “Venture Brothers.” From Episode 106, a winged henchman tries to fight Brock with a junk lightsaber. Before he does, he performs some very familiar fighting moves…

Video: swk_venture_brothers.mov (5MB, Quicktime)

And, for the completists out there, episodes of two other shows were entirely based on the Star Wars Kid ordeal. In Episode 76 of “Ed,” aired December 2003, an overweight high school student recorded himself doing a dance. After the video is stolen, leaked online, and remixed into a catwalk-style fashion video, he asks Ed to help seek damages in civil court. In the end, he decides to drop the charges and embraces his geekiness by repeating the dance moves in the high school halls. The fifth episode of “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends,” aired September 2004, was full of geek in-jokes and SWK parallels. The TV Tome description rounds it up nicely.

Finally, because I get asked occasionally, I have no new Star Wars Kid news. He’s never tried to contact me, and I haven’t tried to follow up in any way. I don’t know the outcome of the lawsuits or what Ghyslain is up to. If anyone out there knows, I’d love to know how he’s doing.

June 26, 2006: Here’s a clip from the September 25, 2005 episode of “American Dad.”

Next week, I’ll be at the Emerging Technology conference in San Diego. I don’t usually go to conferences (too expensive, and I’m too cheap), but I was offered a free guest pass by Cory Doctorow. Humbled and honored in a very big way.

Many people I know opted to attend SXSW Interactive this year, but the SXSW panels seem to cover well-trod territory (e.g. blogging as journalism, commercial blogging, CSS hacks, online community, moblogging, podcasts, etc). Despite the great people in Austin, I think the better presentations will be in San Diego.

Looking at the list of sessions, I’m absolutely giddy. The creators and founders of amazing web applications like Flickr, 43 Things, Del.icio.us, Wikipedia, Typepad, Bloglines and Basecamp will all be talking about their experiences, as well as inspiring folks like Cory, Larry Lessig, Chris Anderson, Ev Williams, Merlin Mann, Danny O’Brien, and James Surowiecki.

Anyway, I can’t wait. If you’re attending ETech, be sure to find me and say hello.

An update to yesterday’s entry… In a 3-2 vote, the college trustees decided to eliminate the journalism programs for both Ventura College and Oxnard College for the upcoming school year. The two campus newspapers, the Ventura College Press and Campus Observer, will be closed. (This will be the first time VC hasn’t had a paper since 1925.) Finally, my mom will be laid off.

My mom, Toni Allen, is the head of the journalism department for Oxnard College. Like me, she’s never afraid of stirring up controversy in the face of stupidity. For me, it’s usually bad copyright laws and misguided corporations; for her, it’s censorship of the student press and ignorant college administrators.

So, I think I have a scoop. I’ve discovered that Yahoo is very quietly testing their new contextual advertising program for blogs and other small publishers, a la Google Adsense.

Ken Rudman is a product manager at Yahoo-owned Overture, and his blog features contextual Overture ads throughout. His homepage shows the vertical two-ad format, monthly archives show a three-ad horizontal format, and individual entries show another variation of the horizontal format. The ads have decent relevancy, especially considering its early state.

The Javascript that generates the ad IFrame is hosted on Overture’s server. The domain name refers to “ypn,” which might be an acronym for the ad program… Yahoo Publishing Network, maybe?

I haven’t spoken to Ken yet, but I’m assuming that only Yahoo employees are able to test the ads for now. If you find any other sites testing them, please let me know.

Update: As Phil points out, some of the ads aren’t very relevant.

March 8, 2005: The program will be called the Yahoo! Publisher Network. I was close! Silicon Valley Watcher independently confirms that YPN is Yahoo’s response to Google Adsense. No word on the launch date yet, but the markets have responded positively to the Yahoo rumors.

Here’s another Yahoo employee blog with the same YPN ads (thanks, Rick). Oh, and anyone want to bet that their new “publishing tools” refers to a free hosted blog service that ties into their contextual ads? Brace yourselves, Blogger.

The new trailer for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is available on Amazon, but it’s low quality and streaming Flash. For me, it’s buffering constantly and basically unwatchable.

I found this much higher-quality Quicktime trailer, that seems to be a copy of the internal workprint with time signatures and “Do Not Duplicate” warning. Oh, well!

hhgttg_high.mov (7.8MB, Quicktime)

My bandwidth was already hammered this month, so you can thank Greg Knauss for hosting the video.

February 18, 2004: Here’s a much better copy of the official trailer, available for download.

Last year, I published some not-too-surprising research that revealed all but one Oscar-nominated film leaked onto the Internet. Let’s see if the industry’s evolving efforts to plug the leaks were any more effective this year.

Below is a list of every Oscar-nominated film, excluding foreign language and documentary categories, with the date of US theatrical release and the first date the industry screener was leaked to the Internet. The results? Out of 30 movies, all but five screener copies were leaked online by pirate groups.

How did those five movies manage to stay offline? For “House of Flying Daggers,” the retail DVD was leaked two months before the US theatrical release, bypassing the need for a screener release. For the others, I suspect that either a screener was never released for the film or that the screener was released after the official retail DVD. (In the case of “Phantom of the Opera,” maybe there was no demand.)

A few notes: Three screeners were originally leaked in VHS format, so I listed those dates first. (Note that all three were later leaked in DVD format, also.) Not surprisingly, almost every screener was leaked during the winter months leading up to award nominations. Also of interest, it looks like the screeners for “Hotel Rwanda” and “The Sea Inside” leaked onto the Internet before the film was even released in the United States.

If you’ve been following my Links page lately, you’ll know that I’ve been somewhat obsessed with the new Block View search for A9 and Amazon Yellow Pages. Amazon photographed virtually every street-level business in Los Angeles, among other cities, and it’s a very fun toy to play around with.

More recently, A9.com was mentioned in a small bit of awkward dialogue on Thursday night’s episode of The O.C. Waxy reader Eric Vaughan went to the trouble of finding and editing the clip. Watch it below, and judge for yourself:

theoc_a9com.avi (3.7MB, Windows Media)

Even though this appeared to be a clear example of paid product placement, A9.com’s CEO denies that it was paid for or that they knew anything about it.

This seems very unlikely, especially considering A9’s somewhat-obscure status in the non-geek world, the timing of the episode with recent publicity, and The O.C.’s use of the full domain name instead of simply “A9.” (Has anybody ever used/heard the term “A9.com’d” before?) I don’t even particularly care about the product placement, but I don’t like attempts at covering it up.

One way to settle the issue would be to contact Allan Heinberg, the writer of that episode, or any of the producers. I’ll try to do some research on Monday, but please e-mail me if you know anyone that might be able to help.

February 21, 2005: I have two reliable sources that confirm that A9 was not even aware of the O.C reference before its broadcast.