The preview of Live Mesh arrived to much fanfare and enough blogosphere buzz to make anything attached to the Internet vibrate with a low hum. It’s cloud services meets devices, Amit Mital, General Manager of the Live Mesh team, said on the project’s blog.

Though the goal is one of unifying the management of devices, and the files people may want or need to reach when away from a particular machine, Mesh is unashamedly limited in scope. Vista and XP operating systems only may try out the Live Mesh preview.

Mac users need not apply, even though Microsoft like to tout itself as the biggest developer of software for Apple’s OS outside of Apple itself. The Windows-centric strategy leaves out Apple’s iPhone, an odd choice if Microsoft wants to hit the savviest of the tech savvy with Live Mesh.

However, Mary Jo Foley pointed out the architecture of Mesh has support for non-Microsoft technologies, like Cocoa, Flash, and others, available to it. Openness from Microsoft? That’s what could come next.

We’re looking for reasons to be excited here, really. For developers who want to make an application widely available across Windows machines, the Mesh platform provides an API to do so. An app running on Mesh will work the same across devices, Mital wrote.

The real fun should begin the first time an application developer comes up with a way to share rich media files with a Mesh app. Someone with a media center PC who wants to view movies or listen to music stored on that machine on a different computer should be a candidate for that use of Mesh.

We’re thinking there will be an absolute footrace between the MPAA and the RIAA to get to a courthouse and sue the hapless Mesh developer into oblivion. It will not be pretty.

People will want applications to make valuable content available to them per the promise of Mesh, but we need to be convinced it will be any more useful, for developers or everyday users, than creating an app on Facebook’s platform or the Google-backed Open Social.

After all, if someone can email a spreadsheet or other file to themselves at a webmail address, with availability from any browser, where does Mesh improve upon the process?

It’s been a busy week in tech-land, as media and Internet giants have been snapping up Web startups like kids in a candy store. CBS, which only just finished buying the financial video-blogging show known as Wallstrip (created in part by Toronto venture capitalist and hedge fund manager Howard Lindzon) is paying $280-million (U.S.) to acquire Last.fm, one of the most popular online music tools around today. And as has been rumoured here and other places, eBay — which paid $2.4-billion or so for Skype not too long ago — is buying StumbleUpon, a Canadian creation that was based in Calgary before moving to the Valley.

StumbleUpon is what you might call a “serendipity engine,” in the sense that it randomizes the Internet by serving up web-pages from a vast catalogue of user submissions, either sending you to a completely random page or choosing a random one from a category of your choosing. Users — of which there are about 2.3 million now — can then vote on whether they like the site or not. I have to confess that I still don’t see how it’s going to fit into eBay’s traditional auction business, but someone at Seeking Alpha has done their best to put together a convincing argument here.

Last.fm, which is similar to another site called Pandora, allows users to set up a profile with their favourite music (including their iTunes playlists) and then share that with others. The site then recommends new music based on similarities between their selections and those of people with similar tastes. By contrast, Pandora uses advanced algorithms to determine similarities between songs, and then recommend new ones based on those attributes (there’s a good discussion of the differences between the two here).

Scott Karp has some thoughts on the Last.fm deal as a sort of Hail Mary play by CBS because of its radio assets, and there’s a post from one of the Last.fm founders here. In case you are keeping score at home, according to the Times of London (Last.fm was created in London), the three founders will get approximately $38-million each from the deal.

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As usual, the post-mesh social in the atrium and the post-post-mesh social at the Distillery District were some of the highlights of the first day — tons of fantastic conversations happening in the atrium of MaRS and then at the Archeo restaurant and the Boiler House, with people like Mike Masnick of Techdirt and Christine Herron (who is leaving Omidyar), Andrew Coyne and Phil de Vellis, Jon Dube of the CBC and Rachel Sklar of Huffington Post.

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We had Austin Hill and McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves and Cynthia Brumfield and the incomparable Loren Feldman, Rachel Sklar, Ethan Kaplan, Andrew Coyne, Jian Ghomeshi, Christine Herron and the head blogger for Dell, Lionel Menchaca – and others too numerous to name.

An eclectic mix, and some great conversation. If that was a taste of what mesh is going to be like Wednesday and Thursday then we are in for a great ride. And now I have to get some sleep.

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Tickets are going fast, but there are still a few left if you hurry

One thing we’re doing again this year is the “15 Minutes of Fame” segment on each of the two conference days, in which three deserving entrepreneurs and/or their startups get five minutes each (hence the 15 minutes) to talk to the attendees about their idea and why they are the best thing to happen to the Web since YouTube. Last year’s winners included the gang at TakingITGlobal, as well as AreYouFrank.com, Favorville.com and Pixpo. Stowe Boyd wrote about the 15 Minutes here, and Tara Hunt wrote about it here.

Same idea this year: head over to the sign-up form at the mesh site, and give us a pitch — in 250 words or less — about you and your company or idea, and tell us why we should give you five minutes in front of the mesh crowd to wow them with your brilliance. If you get selected, you get a free one-day pass to the conference as well as those five minutes of glory.

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Be that as it may, it is still interesting to see how fast Technorati.com has been growing: over 9 million unique visitors in March, up 141 per cent in a single quarter, and double-digit growth every month in page views as well. Not bad. It’s no MySpace, but still pretty good for a blog-search engine. But Dave doesn’t just want to be a blog-search engine — he wants to be a media company. Don’t we all, Dave. But I’m not sure a lot of traffic to Technorati’s tagged media pages really counts as being a media company, unless we are really stretching the definition of the term.

It’s obvious that part of Dave’s post is also designed to cement the impression that Technorati is the leader in blog search, a campaign he has also carried into the comments section of Robert Scoble’s blog, on a post the Scobelizer did about whose search is better. I think Dave should win some kind of award for the number of comments he left on Scobey’s blog, most of which (not surprisingly) are aimed at showing the deficiencies of Google’s search — although to give him full credit, he responds to criticisms from bloggers as well.

So is Technorati the leader? The charts on Dave’s post look pretty good, although neither Hitwise nor Quantcast are infallible when it comes to measuring such things. But as Zoli Erdos points out, Technorati’s lead over Google may not be as large as it seems, and there is clearly still room for improvement — for example, Google’s blog search indexes comments as well as posts. And as I have written about previously, Sphere and Icerocket have their strengths (and weaknesses) as well.

In other words, blog search is still very much a horse race.

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Google, according to Light Reading’s Ray Le Maistre, “comes into play . . . in the network planning.”  For optimal efficiency, Javeri and his team “used the Google mapping service to work out where the radios should be positioned so that the whole city can be covered with a signal . . . .”  Yet Javeri didn’t exactly sit at his computer and type in random addresses to achieve this even spread.

“LifeStyle’s team has input the GPS . . . coordinates of the network’s nodes into the individual radios, which in turn feed data into the Google application to create an online network map for the company to use,” reported Maistre.  The point of this?  “Javeri says he can see which nodes are live, how those nodes are connected, and even whether a single radio in a network node is operational or not.”

Considering that this “optimized” network will still cost between $46 and $58 million, it’s scary to think how much money might have been wasted (and what sort of spotty coverage might have nonetheless resulted) had Javeri gone with a more traditional setup.

Once other companies get wind of this idea, they’re sure to embrace it; in fact, as GigaOM’s Katie Fehrenbacher notes, the strategy is already spreading.

Online video and the revolution it is helping to power is a big part of what we’re going to be discussing at the mesh conference in Toronto on May 30 and 31, and so we wanted to reach out to the community and hopefully find our own version of that fantastic “The machine is us/ing us” video that has been making the rounds of late.

My fellow mesh organizer Rob Hyndman has written a great post on the mesh blog with more details about the contest we’ve set up. Check it out and then get out that video camera!

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The first one at the Irish Embassy was so much fun that we decided to have another one.

It’s taking place on March 28 at the Charlotte Room, which is just east of King and Spadina in Toronto, and we’ve got most of the bar booked — and all of the pool tables (check the Upcoming page here for more details or to see who else is coming). Come on down to have a few drinks and connect, share and inspire.

Let’s mesh!

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