WiredPen

Way back when (2005), Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart gave fans a (pale) green light to share show content after it ran on the traditional tube:

Wired: The Daily Show really exemplifies that sort of new model. It’s on a cable network, not broadcast. It’s among the most popular shows traded online. People download and watch the whole thing, every day. Were you guys aware of that?

Karlin: … If people want to take the show in various forms, I’d say go. But when you’re a part of something successful and meaningful, the rule book says don’t try to analyze it too much or dissect it…

Stewart: … I look at systems like the Internet as a convenience. I look at it as the same as cable or anything else. Everything is geared toward more individualized consumption. Getting it off the Internet is no different than getting it off TV.

Maybe Stewart and Karlin weren’t speaking for Viacom at the time. Or maybe muckety-mucks ignored it because Viacom was focused on how to spin off a large chuck of itself as CBS Corp. But the handlers at Viacom had to have known what they said.

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The federal court for the Southern District of New York has ordered (pdf) Google to release to Viacom all data (4 TB) it has about YouTube viewers: viewer IP address, viewer “name” (assuming a YouTube profile with accurate info), and clips watched (on YouTube.com or as an embed). [Wired, EFF, tip]

Viacom is suing Google, arguing that “infringing material is more popular than user-created videos.” EFF argues that the judge’s ruling is a violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act: Read the rest of this entry »

In class on Monday, I mentioned Adobe’s PDF as a de facto standard. Little did I know that it was about to be declared an ISO standard! (tip)

On Wednesday, Fox & Friends co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade showed doctored photos of two New York Times reporters while discussing an article in the June 28 edition of the New York Times that “pointed out what the newspaper called ‘ominous trends’ in Fox News’ ratings.” From Editor & Publisher.

Doocy characterized the article as a “hit piece” and reporter Jacques Steinberg as an “attack dog.” In their “banter,” Doocy and Kilmeade reference the Westminster dog show and describe one of the NYT reporters as being “dressed as a poodle.” They also reference RadarOnline, an industry gossip web site.

This is TV news? I miss it not.

MediaMatters has screenshots of the Fox News images, side-by-side with undoctored photos, as well as a transcript of the exchange.

Chris Anderson posts a rebuttal, of sorts, to this July-August HBR article entitled Should You Invest In The Long Tail? Both the book, and the seemingly flawed HBR analysis (using percentages, not raw data), are on my summer quarter class reading list. More at the class blog.

My alma mater is buying a local CBS affiliate, WNEG-TV (Toccoa, GA), which will become part of The Center for Advanced Media operated by The Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

The University of Georgia Research Foundation is buying the local station, channel 32, from its current owner, Media General, Inc., pending FCC approval, of course. Reported sales price: $1.44 million. Studio operations for the Northeast Georgia station will be moved from Toccoa to Athens; UGA-oriented programming is planned for fall 2009.

Reportedly, this makes UGA “one of a handful” of universities that hold commercial television licenses. My Google-foo isn’t good today, as I’ve not been able to identify any others yet.

WNEG has been an unappreciated asset for about 20 years. Media General (Hollywood, VA) became the station owner in 2000, when it acquired the assets of South Carolina-based Spartan Communications. In turn, after getting an exemption to the duopoly rule, Spartan acquired WNEG in 1997 and operated it as a satellite of WSPA. Then local owner Stephens County Broadcasting Company had been trying to sell the property since at least 1990, claiming competition from Turner TNT Cable Network had made the station unprofitable. The FCC designates the station as part of the Greenville-Spartanburg-Anderson-Asheville Designated Market Area (”DMA”); it was launched in 1984.

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Political Newsline has spotted a probable copyright violation on the Republican National Committee blog, in a post made by online communications manager James Richardson. (tip)

The photo in question has a watermark (which is how PN was able to track it down) and is clearly marked “All rights reserved” on its Flickr home.

Who’s going to extract royalties for TinyFishy?

Notes for Podcamp Seattle, Saturday 20 June.

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This is a plug for a new podcast, One Bottle At A Time, which is a Washington wine show launched by one of my students after taking my inaugural podcasting class. I realize now (oops) that I did not specifically explain to students how to get listed in iTunes or how to create an RSS feed specifically for the podcast (separate from the blog RSS feed) — although these things are in the books we used in the class. Give him a listen!

The current edition of Vanity Fair contains a map of popular “blogs” showing relative “news v opinion” content and “scurrilous” v “earnest” tone. Many of these “blogs” are media properties that have blogs (such as Salon or Slate) or are simply media properties (Pitchfork Media) or organizations that rest on blogging software (Blogcritics, Huffington Post). And then there’s Drudge, which isn’t a blog — no RSS feed, no archived entries … just a bunch of links (mostly).

The blogs I read regularly are in the upper-right-hand quadrant: “news/earnest”. No big surprise, there! In fact, I knew all but two of the blogs labeled “earnest”: Just Jared (a gossip blog on the “earnest” side of the chart?) and Apartment Therapy. But I was familiar with only one (1!) of the “blogs” in the lower-left-hand quadrant (scurrilous + opinion): Perez Hilton (courtesy of a student). [Yes, I know both Pitchfork Media and Blogcritics, where I sometimes, but not very often, syndicate my content. But neither of these are "blogs" although BC at least has RSS feeds. But it calls itself a magazine.]

It is Vanity Fair, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at how many are gossip/celebrity sites.