The power of hype -- UTube.com traffic surges

I found this piece over at The Fool pretty funny: visits to Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment -- www.utube.com -- surged 440% higher after the Google-YouTube announcement early last week. People, who apparently had never heard of YouTube but wanted to check out the company that Google was acquiring for $1.65 billion in cash, confused the two. Hey, Google could get into the industrial supply game if it wanted to I guess -- it's got its hands in the pockets of many other industries these days.

This one example of surging Internet traffic at www.utube.com is a perfect example of the premise of hype building and innate curiosity of what the media reports compared to what ordinary citizens crave -- and that's anything being punched up in the media to a fever pitch like, well, anything to do with Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) these days in many ways.

I wonder if some Internet dwellers who had never heard of YouTube now know the Internet video-sharing site just due to the Google acquisition announcement -- and how many of them have started poking around on YouTube looking at videos of dancing cats and kids throwing water balloons. Oh, what a monumental waste of time.

But, the penchant for people wasting time on the Internet is a prime right these days -- it happens at work all day long as the stresses of deadlines and occasional monotony gets pushed aside for a nice relaxing few minutes of funny video watching at YouTube. This fact seems to be lost on many detractors to the Google-YouTube marriage, who can't understand how Google is going to wrangle revenue from these "monumental wastes of time".

That's a right every American has, and many of us use it to the brim each day -- and that attitude won't be going away soon. As long as people continue to "waste time," YouTube may yet be something viable to Google after all.