Google-owned YouTube suffered its latest attack from the media giants yesterday, when NBC, News Corp., AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo dropped the royal P-bomb…”partnership.”

 

Per today’s Washington Post:

The partnership announced yesterday by NBC, News Corp., AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft creates a first-of-its-kind alternative to some of YouTube’s most popular content: TV and movie clips and music videos that were often posted there without permission. Unlike YouTube, the new competitor—which says it will launch its Web site this summer—has proposed a wide offering of videos, borrowing the iTunes model of offering some files for free and others, in this case movies and TV shows.

The impetus behind the venture is to provide an authorized, copyright-protected and ad-supported alternative to YouTube, which has turned into an enormously popular online destination, with some of its hits coming from user-uploaded shows from television.

So, copyright issues have led to the development of a copycat “legal” site (with some cool enhancements) that charges for media or makes users sit through ads to view it. It’s like 2001 all over again (Napster anyone?).

Much like pre-2001 Napster, one of the things users love about YouTube is that it’s truly free—they don’t have to pay to see stuff or watch ads before clips (standard practice on AOL & Yahoo Video).

Napster users didn’t switch to pay-per-song sites because they thought it was cool; most switched because court decisions forced them to (although illegal file sharing did not come to an end). Since the legalities are unclear here, I wonder how competitive this new partnership’s format can really be—especially since the bulk of this media’s audience comprises marketing- and media-savvy (and big-business-suspicious) Gen Y and X users. Do you think YouTube has anything to worry about?

Can you handle a little heartbreak? Don’t worry, there’s a happy ending.

This Brooklyn mother’s blog tells the tale of her six-year-old daughter Etta saving up to buy a doll named Gracie from Target. Sweet, right?

What happened when Etta had the nerve to bring Gracie to uber-doll HQ American Girl Place for a “doll hairstyling”? She was refused service. Gracie, it turns out, wasn’t “good enough” for the American Girl treatment.

The story has caught fire in the blogosphere and has American Girl blushing big time. Check out the blog comments—one upstart home-based doll company generously offered Etta free shipping on any order.

Real World Company Reputation: 0

Blogging Community Impact: 1

Next Tuesday, March 27, Adobe will ship not one but two versions of its flagship Photoshop application. You can chose between Creative Suite 3, which Adobe claims “includes all the features you love in Photoshop CS2, plus many innovative new ones,” or you upgrade to the extended edition, which is being marketed as an “ideal choice for film, video, and multimedia professionals, as well as graphic and web designers using 3-D and motion.”

This is a big move for Adobe, which has been criticized for releasing versions of Photoshop that do too little while charging too much—customers had little incentive to upgrade.

But this release has some real buzz.

Back in December, Adobe made the beta testing of CS3 available to the public for the first time ever. (If you have a valid serial number for Photoshop, you can download this year’s release and use it without restriction.) This gave potential customers the chance to kick the tires in exchange for working out some of the beta release’s bugs—a bold move.

What’s behind Adobe’s newfound populism? Jim Darlymple at Macworld.com reports that Adobe insists it is not trying to turn Photoshop into a full-fledged 3-D tool; the goal is to complement the tools its customers already use.

I agree that having more 3-D features is great, but I really wish Adobe had more aspirations than just supporting 3-D developers. They’ve crafted Photoshop into such a stellar do-anything image manipulation application that it’s exciting to imagine that ingenuity applied to a 3-D program.

Watch the Adobe Photoshop CS3 webcast.

Let’s talk about RSS. USA.gov has a library of feeds. They do a good job of posting these, explaining what RSS is, and explaining why we, the people, should care. My concern is that they have no control over who creates feeds or what pages they are generated from. USA.gov and GSA—who may be the most tech-savvy outfits in the federal government—have no input it what everyone else is doing. They just get to add them to the list if the other agencies are nice enough to share.

And it shows. There is a smattering of feeds when compared to the size of the entire federal government. Most just don’t exist, but others are not publicized. Also, the feeds that are available show little consistency. USA.gov organizes them as best they can, but how do you respond to the fact that the USDA Hogs and Pigs Survey has a feed (seriously), but there isn’t a thing for federal business opportunities or the IRS? Even agencies that have feeds don’t necessarily know how to use them. Many are not updated regularly (Medical Expense & Performance Reporting System News) and others are of absolutely no interest to enough citizens to warrant a feed (Spallation Neutron Source News). My guess is that in those cases, an agency just happened to have an IT person with time on his or her hands.

At the very least the executive branch of the U.S. government needs to sit down with folks who can explain to them how RSS works and when to use it. Even better would be if, after hanging out with the cool kids for a bit, they came up with a government-wide electronic information policy (not so vague as to be meaningless…sorry, webcontent.gov) that sets and enforces some standards for the quality of information delivered by RSS or any other electronic media. Then I wouldn’t have to spend my entire day looking for the latest news from the Presidential Commission on Tea!

Larry Bud, we hardly knew ye . . .

I knew about massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) like Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (WoW) and similar virtual arenas such as Second Life and Neo Pets. What I didn’t know was that online gaming had grown by such leaps and bounds (since the first graphic MMOG of the late eighties) that the total market is now worth $1 bil! This came as a surprise to me at first.

Upon further reflection, it made sense. Having played World of Warcraft for a few months, I learned how people used it as a way to socialize, vent, and escape. Some really enjoy pretending to be hunters or warriors or even gnomes. They create a social life separate from everything else that surrounds them, planning real-life activities around scheduled raids and quests, and even referring to each other by their on-screen names in real life. Creepy? I think not. Interesting? Definitely!

The human need for company and fraternization remains constant even as technology advances. While we are still able to get together in person and socialize the way our predecessors did, a lot of us choose to participate online and “get our game on” that way. We depend on technology to help us work smarter and better, but using it to play better and harder is a different concept altogether.

What are your thoughts on why these games and virtual worlds are so popular? Is it because people like to “play” in the comfort of their living rooms? Or is it because these avenues are convenient and available on demand? Is there a lesson to learn from the creators of these popular games? After all, they are able to simulate day-to-day life in a virtual world….

For web-hipsters, March 17, 2007, marked more than just the standard St. Paddy’s Day debauchery, it also marked the end of The Show—new media wunderkind Ze Frank’s year-long experiment in vlogging.

The Show’s 3–5 minute “Daily Show-esque” webcasts didn’t necessarily appeal to everyone, but they did give industry folks and average Joes a better understanding of how Web 2.0 tools could (and should) be used to create interactive user experiences to build relationships and create advocates.

Unlike traditional television audiences, Ze’s 10,000-plus-daily viewers didn’t just sit back and get passively entertained. Instead, they became active participants—engaged contributors who submitted video show intros, defined show topics, and used Ze’s wiki site to collaborate on scripts for The Show’s “Fabuloso Friday” episodes. And Ze took part in the dialogue by using their clips, taking their suggestions, and responding to them on his blog and wiki, as well as The Show itself.

The Show’s successful model points to online audience-building lessons that big-time TV networks still need to wrap their heads around. So stay tuned, because while The Show may be over, Ze’s already diving into new projects, and whatever rabbit he pulls from his hat is sure to lead to the next new media trend.

Who likes their info by the handful? Turns out we all do. Instead of sitting down to elaborate meals full of facts, opinions, and perspectives on a single subject, today’s data diet consists of quick factoids, vid clips, and sound bites on any and every interest. Basically, we scarf down news and entertainment like a busload of sumo wrestlers at an Old Country Buffet.

The trend’s called info snacking, and like it says on the potato chip bag, bet you can’t eat just one.

I have to wonder, however, if trying to follow a hundred blogs, casts, and bookmarks so that we stay in the know won’t get overwhelming. As a friend of mine wisely points out when someone is spread too thin: Jack of all trades, master of none.

For now, it’s a lot of fun trying to keep up. Snacking is certainly the right metaphor. Polish off a bag of munchies and the filled-up feeling only lasts a little while before you’re hungry again. Fortunately, there are still plenty of places to get a proverbial porterhouse (think books, newspapers, quarterlies, feature-length documentaries). As much as I love my RSS feeds, I still try to read the Washington Post front to back every morning.

When it comes to information, do you sit down to three squares, or would you rather nibble the day away?

So, an active duty US Marine, Sammy Villareal, just launched
Mymilitaryclassifieds.com—basically Craigslist for the military.

Per TechCruch:

Villarreal hired a programmer and launched MyMilitaryClassifieds.com (catchy name), a free classifieds site organized by military installation. It’s just launching and so there isn’t much content on the site yet (and there are a couple of typos), but if you’re, say, in the Navy and stationed in Iceland, this might be a good place to sell those unwanted DVDs.

This is one of those things that makes me go “SERIOUSLY??? No one has DONE that already?”

Brilliant.

Quite a grounding reality check at a time when so much whiz-bang content is hitting the Net.

Makes me think that if something as obvious as a “Craigslist for the military” has been overlooked for this long, then maybe it’s time for industry hipsters to take a nice deep breath and go back to basics—focus a bit less on being so cutting-edge and entertainment-techie, and focus more on providing online stuff people actually NEED.

So what are you (and the people you’re interested in) doing RIGHT NOW?
Find out on Twitter . . .

Welcome to the world of the micro-blog (a.k.a lifeblog).

You’ll be surprised to see who’s using them…
Like this guy and these guys . . .