Both sides of the debate sound valid. After all, it made it into German record stores, so in at least one country it's legal. But in America, it's illegal to capture, transmit or possess an image of a prepubescent in a sexual pose (and it could easily be argued that this girl is in a sexual pose). It's still unclear whether knowingly clicking a link to view child porn online counts as possession (after all, the image is now on the viewer's hard drive, at least in their automatically created browser cache).

The Feds are looking into it, according to World Net Daily, as well as plenty of adult pornography, since it all could be viewed by minors (Wikipedia doesn't require registration to view articles or images). So theoretically it's up to them, not the Wikipedia editors.

Jeez, I mean I'm not turned on by this photo, but it's not ludicrous to imagine that someone is supposed to be. And how does that not obviously violate U.S. child porn laws? On the other hand, it's an album cover of some historical note and artistic merit. So is it child porn? And is anyone who argues otherwise a perv?

After the first guy jumped into his jeans, I realized what the whole video would be: a shot-for-shot rehash of a viral ad for Ray-Ban. The two ads are so similar that the creators (unless they're phenomenally short-sighted) clearly wanted to be discovered. First, let's look at the two ads:

Levi's, 5 May 2008: Guys do backflips, swinging jumps, and other stunts and land in their pants.

Ray-Ban, 6 May 2007: A guy catches sunglasses on his face in increasingly impossible maneuvers: Off a house, off a bridge, in a moving car.

Similarities
The stories are the same: A simple trick to establish what we're watching. Then increasingly elaborate iterations, culminating in a stunt so dramatic that it requires a slow-motion replay.

The music is the same: A cool innocuous background beat loosely timed to the action.

The editing is the same: Quick pacing. Slick with dramatic angles, but calculatedly rugged with lingering shots on the guys congratulating each other.

The packaging is the same: Ray-Ban's ad was posted by "neverhidefilms," a YouTube user with no previous videos. The new Levi's ad comes from "unbuttonedfilms," another first-time user. The new ad is one day shy of coming a year after the old ad. The titles are analagous: "Guy catches glasses with face" versus "Guys backflip into jeans." No product is mentioned.

Background
While Ray-Ban's ad was launched anonymously, the creative team behind it soon came forward. Josh Warner, president of The Feed Company, explained how he promoted this viral video to Adweek. The team posted more videos, now more obviously advertising Ray-Ban though still without using a traditional ad format, to the YouTube account that hosted the original viral ad.

Extra evidence
Note the line at 0:36 of the Levi's ad: "At least there's no zipper." That's what clinched it for me: Levi's is the only jeans brand to actively advertise its zipperless buttoned jeans. The user name "unbuttonedfilms" corroborates this.

How well it's worked
Blogs like Laughing Squid and Neatorama posted the video with no guess about the creators (though political blog Hot Air guessed this might be a Levi's ad). Even G4TV's Attack Of The Show discussed the ad, crediting it to an unnamed group of gymnasts and making no mention of Levi's.

And of course even this debunking is giving them publicity. (Not that I mind as long as I'm getting some too.)

My Theory
Obviously the new ad has the same goals as the old: to market a product without actually naming it, by appealing to the public's love of Internet stunt videos. Most likely, The Feed Company made the new Levi's ad. If any other agency was ripping them off, they wouldn't release the ad a year later with the exact same techniques. And in a few days, The Feed Company will come out, because who can really deny themselves another round of publicity?

1. Start the right kind of blog.

Your personal blog isn't good enough. Book deals for personal, story-telling blogs fizzled out a few years ago. There's just too much research for the publisher and no guarantee of mass appeal. The latest book deals look more like movie deals: A conceptual hook will draw people in even if some of the jokes fall flat. There are three kinds of blogs that recently got deals:

A. Whimsical Recognizable Aspects Of Everyday Life
Examples: Stuff White People Like, Postcards From Yo Momma
Likable, easy-to-understand blogs with a regular format. The title explains the whole concept. Make an idea you can explain in one short sentence. It's easy to market, easy to remember, easy to get blogged.
Suggestions: Ideas I Had In The Shower; Things My Kids Said

B. Unique Life Story That's Actually Many Short Stories
Example: The Secret Diary Of Steve Jobs
This is very tough, and I don't personally recommend it. You must either be a famous or extraordinary person or impersonate one. But you have to be a great writer too — there are two sites full of terrible spoof blogs.
Suggestions: Fake Obama; How I Was Actually Raised By Wolves

C. Tiny Works Of Art
Examples: Indexed, Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle, I Can Has Cheezburger
The perfect grist for a coffee-table or "tiny" book. "Indexed" is just little jokes in the form of graphs, "Cheezburger" is of course photos with captions, and "Obama" is simply random slogans about how much the presidential candidate is a cool guy, kind of like "Chuck Norris Facts" (which also got a book deal). Again, stick to one format and fully explore it. If doing the same thing over and over wasn't a path to success, you'd never hear of Jackson Pollock or Dilbert.
Suggestions:

2. Discover yourself.
After a couple of weeks, you should have enough material to start spreading your blog around. Don't just wait to get discovered, but don't overmarket yourself. Put a copy of your blog on Tumblr and LiveJournal for readers that wouldn't otherwise follow you. (Since I started reading Tumblr blogs I find myself checking other blogs less.) Start following other people on those sites, which is less crass than commenting on normal blogs and putting your URL in your signature.
If your blog catches on there, you can start submitting to bigger blogs. But you might want to have a friend do it. I have a few regular tipsters who point me to good blogs by their friends. I'm more likely to follow their leads than someone self-promoting. Still, a well-written e-mail to Gawker's tipline might get you a mention. Same goes for Boing Boing. By that point linkbloggers like Jason Kottke and Rex Sorgatz will notice you if you're worthy.
If you do self-promote and no one picks it up, start over. (If you're reading this article, you're not in it for the love.)
Meanwhile back on your blog, don't stop writing. I stupidly gave up on my blog Bad Idea A Day just when people started to notice it. Now I'm restarting and I have to earn my readership from scratch. Also, have an about page so you're ready for Step 3.

3. Ask to meet an agent.
If your idea is wildly successful but no agent has called, find Kate Lee. The agent (who doesn't have an easily googleable home page) was profiled in the New Yorker in 2004 when blog book deals were still novel. Though Gawker didn't think the trend would stick, Lee kept selling blogger books. Last year she sold blogger Rachel Sklar's Jew-ish; this week she sold Postcards From Yo Momma, written by Jessica Grose of Jezebel and Gawker alum Doree Shafrir.
Of course you could talk to other agents; White People was sold by William Morris's Erin Malone.

So did it work? If not, try again. If so, go to hell you lucky bastard. I'll be spitting at you during your reading, next to the guy from White Whine.

The rules make it an offense to blog, use brand ambassadors or seed viral ads while "falsely representing oneself as a consumer." They also apply to bloggers who fail to disclose they have accepted money to write about a product.

This is not of course, happening in the US. But maybe bloggers should rethink their opinions about accepting free shit in return for positive reviews. Word of mouth marketing online is big business here, but most companies and their marketing agencies are smart enough to realize already that disclosure can save them a world of scandal and bad PR.

So far the exact penalties haven't been spelled out, and it will likely take a test case, reported to the Office of Fair Trading and prosecuted, to make clear the size of the penalty and whether jail time is really likely.

Flogging?

Also, here we gratuitously bring up once again Edelman's famous fake Wal-Mart blog. If only it had happened after May 26, and in the UK.

[Ad Age]

1. Publishing economics. The New York Post's new size, 12 inches high, down from 13½ inches, will make it the size of the Wall Street Journal, folded in two. I'm told this will allow both Murdoch-owned papers to be produced on the same presses. If Murdoch's rumored $580m bid for Long Island's Newsday goes through, News Corporation will achieve even greater savings. A person familiar with the deal said the deal, by combining printing and distribution of the New York Post with another title in the same metropolitan market, would wipe out the $50m in annual losses that the Australian media titan still bears on his beloved New York tabloid. This move would be straight out of News Corporation's UK playbook: there, the media conglomerate transformed the profitability of its UK titles in 1986 by breaking the print trade unions and moving production of The Times, The Sun and other London papers to a heavily fortified print works in Wapping.

2. Influence. Rupert Murdoch may be the personification of the press baron, but he's never had anything like the influence in the US that his array of newspapers and television networks brought in the UK. His solitary US newspaper title, the New York Post, has given Murdoch influence over New York City and State politics, but precious little juice in Washington, DC. Murdoch has never had the access to the White House, even under George Bush, that he had to Number 10 Downing Street during Tony Blair's tenure as UK prime minister. Fox News is powerful, of course, but the cable news network is too reflexively conservative to provide any real influence over the liberals who are likely to run national politics, and appoint regulators, over the next political cycle. By creating a national title in the Wall Street Journal, and taking control of about half the New York newspaper market, Murdoch or his successor should be able to withstand any political effort to break up his empire. Look at the UK: the Labour party, which long sought to curtail News Corporation's media power, has entirely given up; about a decade ago, Murdoch passed the critical threshold beyond which he became untouchable. By creating a similarly interlocking network of television and newspaper operations in the US, he can achieve a similar result on a grander scale—if competition authorities allow.

3. Mortality. Last month, the Australian media mogul turned 77 years old. His motives are hard to divine, but one has to presume that the nightmare would be the breakup of an empire he has spent a lifetime in building, the fate which awaits Time Warner and Sumner Redstone's holdings. News Corporation is the one media conglomerate which makes some sense: the profits are made on sports and entertainment broadcasting; tabloids and quality newspapers provide political protection. That's the formula in the UK, at least. In the US, the richest media market, Murdoch bought New York Post in 1976 and has gradually accumulated television stations over the three decades since, launched a fourth entertainment network and a surprisingly successful cable news channel, Fox News. But it is only now, as proprietors such as the Bancroft family and Sam Zell lose hope in the future of newspaper publishing, that Murdoch has been given the scope in the US to achieve the same concentration he has in the UK. And it is no wonder that Murdoch is in such a rush. These newly available newspapers need a dramatic intervention if they are to make the transition to the internet. Potentially hostile Democrats are about to take control of executive and legislative branches of government. And Murdoch, the last great media mogul, is mortal. The aging press magnate can deny the reality by wearing black polo-neck sweaters on the urging of his much younger wife, but he doesn't have much time to conclude his legacy.

(Citizen Kane's desolate mansion, in the Orson Welles movie based loosely on the life of William Randolph Hearst, the pre-eminent press baron of an earlier age.)

11. YouTube

At risk: Daredevils, fictional characters
Case 1: While trying to perform a stunt for YouTube, four teens crashed their Ford Explorer, injuring three and killing one. No details on how awesome the clip would have been, but hopefully it'd be more exciting than "ghost riding," the 2005-07 fad of rolling an idling car down the street while dancing beside it. The result of that fad, besides a few lame videos, was two deaths. Other stupid deadly stunts include subway surfing and fake stunts that end up in banner ads.
Case 2: A man who explained on YouTube how to tie a hangman's noose has been accused of inciting suicide. A few days after the news reported it, someone else posted instructions (though this user has posted plenty of other knot-tying videos, and who could hang themselves with the festive purple and yellow rope he uses?).
Case 3: Of course fictional characters die often and violently: Lonelygirl15, Harry Potter, and the radio star.


10. Myspace

At risk: The lonely
Case 1: Remarkably, no charges were filed in the case of the family who carried on a hoax relationship with 13-year-old depression sufferer Megan Meier over MySpace, then "broke up" with her and thus driving her to suicide. But this is only our first glimpse at two themes of Internet-caused deaths: Tragic romance and preying on the lonely.
Case 2: In this case, MySpace technically saved lives. Cops investigated a 12-year-old boy's MySpace death list, warned everyone who was on it, and searched his home. They didn't find weapons and he said he was just fooling around, so he was just charged with juvenile delinquency. Other death threat cases include a dog and another empty threat against high school students. But just to be safe I make my little sister keep a Google alert on her name, cause she''d be the first to go if some trenchcoated freak started shooting up the cool kids in her school.
Case 3: Of course while stupid people may reveal their murder plans on MySpace, they may be inspired by the site too. Heather Kane saw another girl on her boyfriend's profile and hired a hitman to kill her. Good thing she bumped into an undercover cop instead.


9. Facebook

At risk: Anyone who pisses off a muslim
Case 1: A Saudi Arabian father beat and shot his daughter earlier this year for chatting on Facebook. A preacher in the Islamic country called the site a "door to lust;" many Saudi women use aliases on the site and post drawings instead of photos. But there are still plenty of photos of hookups in the Facebook group "Single and Looking in Saudi Arabia."
Case 2: After a Jewish woman in Melbourne rejected a friend offer from one Ibrahim Dirani, he allegedly wrote to her, "I am Hezbollah and I am going to kill you and all of your family — promise you."
Aw,


8. Pornography

At risk: Viewers of extreme or illegal porn and the people who know them
Case 1: It's hard to feel too sorry for those who kill themselves after they're implicated in child porn rings, like these four suicides in 1998 and these six in 2004.
Case 2: Porn doesn't only kill the depraved. The story of Jane Longhurst, an English woman killed by "a man obsessed with violent sexual pornography," was tragic enough to encourage many UK lawmakers to ban extreme porn.


7. Spam

At risk: The terribly gullible
Case 1: Spammers and scammers can easily take your money if you're dumb enough to give them your passwords and financial info. But some Nigerian scams go far beyond online fraud; many scammers lure their victims to Nigeria to continue paying money in person; fifteen victims were killed after they got suspicious.


6. Blogging

At risk: Those already at risk of dying
Case 1: There's a trick to making listicles like this: Put the weakest item in the middle. Unfortunately the New York Times spent an entire trend piece on the bogus idea of "death by blogging." But Gizmodo editor Brian Lam tells me, "Only bogus to lazy bloggers. I did 75 hours this week and anyone over fifty would die doing that."


5. Ebay

At risk: The already dead
Case 1: Seung-Hui Cho bought empty clips and holsters on Ebay before his Virginia Tech rampage. He got his guns and ammo elsewhere, though Ebay notes that the sale of ammunition on Ebay is legal.
Case 2: Ebay's death profits tend to come from the memorabilia. Celebrity deaths bring predictable results, like sales of Pope tchotchkes and autographed Heath Ledger posters. But Ebay has also hosted auctions for supposed Columbia shuttle pieces, video of insurgents shooting down planes in Iraq, the car used in a murder, and O.J. Simpson's book.


4. Drugs

At risk: Druggies
Case 1: Internet drug sales are ridiculously easy (see "spam" above), so easy that every decent men's magazine did an "I ordered Viagra off the Internet" story by 2005. But that means irresponsible doctors can prescribe dangerous drugs, such as this 2002 case of deadly drugs sold online, or this case of a doctor whose patients sometimes became addicted or were hospitalized, or a 2007 case where a 57-year-old Canadian woman died after taking an illegal sedative she ordered online.


3. Webcams

At risk: Suicides
Case 1: Webcam suicide is one of the darkest modern phenomena, an example of loneliness and despair in a supposed age of connection and hope. Those who have fallen that far and recovered may want to forget it ever happened. Webcammer Stacy Pershall has long insisted that despite reports, she did not try to kill herself on camera in 2001 by overdosing on pills but merely took some Advil "to get a few hours sleep" — on her bathroom floor.
Case 2: While Pershall's viewers worried about her and called the cops to save her, those watching Brandon Vedas in 2003 egged him on. He OD'd on five drugs and died a room away from his unsuspecting mother.
Case 3: A father named Kevin Whitrick hanged himself after the apparent encouragement of people watching his webcam; viewers later said they thought it was a joke, and indeed they'd acted worried after seeing him die. After all, he was in an insult chat room, which brings us to another cause of death:


2. Chat rooms

At risk: Hopeless romantics
Case 1: A man rejected in real life by his chat room lover in 1999 cut his own head off with a chainsaw in her front yard. Enough said.
Case 2: Plenty of innocents have been killed by online predators like the man who killed an altar girl, the Texas A&M killer, and this guy in a rural North Carolina trailer.


1. World of Warcraft

At risk: 10 million players, particularly the already crazy ones
Case 1: World of Warcraft addiction may not necessarily be deadly for the player, but it can be hell on their family life. Of course, Kim Trenor was probably crazy long before she moved cross-country with her 2-year-old to see a guy she met on the game, and definitely before she and Royce Zeigler beat "Baby Grace" to death. But if it weren't for that damned game she never would have met the allegedly abusive Zeigler.
Case 2: WoW isn't the first game to drive addicts mad. At least one Everquest player allegedly shot herself after getting hooked on the game.
Case 3: And of course any time you put a beautiful bit of fantasy in the world, some kid will try to imitate it. Happened with Superman, happened with WoW when a Chinese boy jumped off a 24-story building. His parents sued game maker Blizzard saying he was imitating the game, in which some players like to platform-jump, an activity totally unrelated to actually playing. Again, totally not WoW's fault, but something had to convince that boy he could leap off a tower.

I have around four hundred Facebook friends and about four real life friends. Half of my Facebook friends are people I added in a drunken stupor; the other half added me in a drunken stupor. While I might want to look at the "Random Pics" of someone from high school, I certainly do not want to instant message with that person about their "craziest birthday ever." When you sign on to Facebook chat, there's no buddy list. Since all your Facebook friends are theoretically your real friends, everyone comes up. And every time I sign in, the meaninglessness of Facebook friendship becomes more apparent.

The other problem is that to use Facebook chat, you have to admit to using Facebook. And being into Facebook is lame. For as much pleasure Facebook gives me, I know looking at pictures of strangers and creating pithy status updates is not a good use of my time. Plus, having people see you online takes away from the voyeuristic pleasure of Facebook. No onlooker wants to be watched.

But the biggest drawback to Facebook is chat that I don't need it. I can't have three windows dedicated to LOL'ing with friends. Some of us have work to do, even if that work is writing about goofy internet trends.

The vast majority of YouTube partners haven't talked about what they're pulling in. Neither has the company. And there's really no incentive to; revealing the pay would only make users more agitated when they're not at the top of the list. So we're not sure how much Tay Zonday or Chris Crocker are making. But I can tell you this about the Internet stars that South Park killed off:

1. Tay Zonday, "Chocolate Rain": Unknown, but possibly a good amount. Probably made more from his Dr. Pepper commercial.
2. Tron Guy: Probably nothing; he was only part of other people's videos
3. Gary Brolsma, "Numa Numa": Maybe a little from his uncomfortably bad sequel that racked up nine million views, though this was before the partner program officially launched. But the original Numa Numa, which got eleven million views, was just someone else's copy; remember that Gary was the last huge video hit before YouTube, back when everyone had to download Windows Media and Quicktime files.
4. Star Wars Kid: Nothing. Settled a lawsuit against the kids who put his video online (again pre-YouTube though copies are up at the site), and some bloggers raised money for him out of sympathy.
5. Sneezing Panda: Nothing.
6. Dramatic Prairie Dog: Nothing. Apparently taken from CollegeHumor.com, where someone took a clip from a Japanese show and added the dramatic sound. One site claims it was an animated GIF long before it became a video.
7. Chris Crocker, "Leave Britney Alone": Probably nothing; he doesn't have ads on his channel so he must not be a partner. And I haven't heard anything new about the reality show he was supposed to star in.
8. Chinese Back Street Boys: Almost certainly nothing; the clips seem to have been uploaded by someone else, and no ads appear near them.
9. Laughing Baby: Nothing. No ads. A shame too, cause this video got over 45 million views.
10. Afroninja: Nothing. The clip wasn't his.

Slate's ever-griping press critic, Jack Shafer, has already made the point that the Pulitzer judging process is arbitrary. "There's no real science or even fairness behind the picking of winners and losers, with the prizes handed out according to a formula composed of one part log-rolling, two parts merit, three parts 'we owe him one,' and four parts random distribution."

And the former journalist who created HBO's Baltimore drama, The Wire, made one of the last season's villains an editor who boasted of his understanding of Pulitzer judges, because he had once been one. The Wire's semi-fictional Baltimore Sun pretended that its reporting had influenced Maryland's policies with regard to the homeless, because that would prove the impact of its reporting.

But the newspapers' Pulitzer-chasing is most damaging because it distracts newspapers from their real challenge. Rather than impress colleagues with the seriousness of their reporting, US newspapers need to engage a readership that is drifting off to television and the internet. Pulitzer-winning journalism will win Pulitzers; it won't save an industry which is experiencing double-digit annual declines in advertising revenue.

Take a look across the Atlantic. The British Press Awards are so lacking in respectability that, after a particularly rowdy show in 2005, several newspaper editors decided to boycott the awards. A shocked New York Times reporter wrote: "last night's ceremony — a mind-numbing parade of awards in 28 categories — was not a mutually respectful celebration of the British newspaper industry fuelled by camaraderie and bonhomie. It was more like a soccer match attended by a club of misanthropic inebriates."

And yet the British newspaper industry is in much more robust health. To be sure, circulations are in gradual decline. And standards of journalism are as sloppy as ever. But newspapers such as The Guardian have a much greater share of the online audience than their American counterparts. And the papers, while lacking much of the worthy reporting that wins Pulitzers, are way livelier.

The connection? The respect of peers is a luxury that US newspapers have enjoyed because, for much of the second half of the 20th century, they were local monopolies. They could afford to be respectable, because they didn't need to pander to readers. In the UK, by contrast, 12 national dailies are in vicious competition. Editors fear the loss of their jobs, not their honor.

It is not as if the New York Times and Washington Post can magically invigorate themselves by eschewing the Pulitzers. America's vastness, which mitigates against national newspapers and produces smaller local markets which can only support one title, is an unalterable fact. But, while the Washington Post and other winners may celebrate today, they should recognize a harsh truth: the same monopolies which have allowed a public-service mentality to flourish have also left newspapers unprepared for new competition. These Pulitzers are the totem poles of the newspaper industry; beloved relics of former glory.

• And right on cue: Seattle Times announces it is cutting about 200 jobs.

Wired: Apple to New York City: Bite Me

Radar reports Tina Brown, 55-year-old former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, is putting together a news "aggregator" with backing from another old media legend, a former studio boss IAC's Barry Diller. The site is to be run by Edward Felsenthal, who was one of the first people forced out when Marcus Brauchli took over the Wall Street Journal and found temporary refuge with his former patron at Joanne Lipman's Portfolio.

The former queen of buzz is presumably inspired by her friend, Arianna Huffington, who's built a forum for middle-aged liberal celebrities to sound off against George Bush and promote their often tedious causes. The Huffington Post, casting for an acquiror while its pre-election traffic holds, has put out word that it's now worth $200m.

But if the half-baked venture ever gets off the ground, Brown will also compete against one of her most irritating critics, Michael Wolff, chronicler of the media industry in his columns for New York Magazine and now Vanity Fair. Wolff is a partner in yet another news aggregator, Newser. (It's not doing nearly as badly as I'd expected!) In an email response to Gawker, he gave a typically caustic evaluation of Tina Brown's chances, and Barry Diller's credibility as a backer.

"I have great admiration for Tina and Barry, but the last time I looked Tina was still having trouble getting her email, and Barry...well I think he has a few things to resolve before he puts his mind to the online news business." Zing!

The team conducted an experiment in which 341 university students completed what they believed was a visual acuity task, during which either the Apple or IBM logo was flashed so quickly that they were unaware they had been exposed to the brand logo. The participants then completed a task designed to evaluate how creative they were, listing all of the uses for a brick that they could imagine beyond building a wall.

People who were exposed to the Apple logo generated significantly more unusual uses for the brick compared with those who were primed with the IBM logo, the researchers said. In addition, the unusual uses the Apple-primed participants generated were rated as more creative by independent judges.

"This is the first clear evidence that subliminal brand exposures can cause people to act in very specific ways," said Gráinne Fitzsimons. "We've performed tests where we've offered people $100 to tell us what logo was being flashed on screen, and none of them could do it. But even this imperceptible exposure is enough to spark changes in behavior."

[Science Daily via Neatorama]

Short answer? No.

Long answer? In early September, my brother Vlad and I received an email from YouTube inviting our show to their exclusive and romantic-sounding Partner Program with the delicious lure of actual profit.

Break a Leg is a full-length internet sitcom. It's filmed in high-definition, with real actors, full scripts, at least a dozen or so locations and is released weekly. This at a price, of course. Higher quality means a crew, it means a sound designer to fix our sound, it means a production coordinator to get over 10 actors together, it means securing locations as exotic as a sewer, a high school, and an old Wild West ghost town.

So, when YouTube offered money, we couldn't help but salivate just a little. Could this be the thing we need? Could this help us feed ourselves, quit our jobs, pay the crew? Could we make Break a Leg and focus on creating the first self-sufficient high quality, full-length internet sitcom?

In two years of doing Break a Leg, we have made around $2,500.

So, no, probably not.

Here's how it all breaks down: with over 2 million views on YouTube, we've received roughly $1,600 from their Partner Program. We also over half a million views at YouTube competitor Blip.tv, worth a whopping $100. Finally another competitor MetaCafe featured us on their front page and with nearly 100,000 views, we made $500 - which is great, except the only way you'll ever get that many views is if you win a contest (like us) or your show is primarily about how round and pretty the female breast is. Plus a year later, MetaCafe still hasn't paid us.

YouTube is the only game in town right now; they're the only ones who can afford to pay significant sums of money. To be fair they never promised a network-sized budget by any means. The problem is that the most YouTube can do is barely feed a one-man, low-quality show about, say, kittens.

So until the Internet can produce any real amount of money for good creators, there's no way it will ever be the future of TV as everyone in "new media" exclaims. The purpose of entertainment and art isn't to get smaller, quicker and catchier; it's to push the boundaries, to grow, to teach and to create. With no money and an endless stream of throw-away content made for a dime and worth about as much, the shows that can challenge network TV will eventually get grabbed up by those networks or they'll just give up and go on to greener pastures - like carpentry and porn.

So, are we rich yet? Hardly. But we're waiting for your call, Mr. Guffman.

Below, the trailer for Break a Leg.

Apple itself is a gigantic technology manufacturing company. Which means they're killing the planet! Computers, computer chips, computer batteries, cell phones—all are made of poison. And all end up in landfills. Apple will recycle your old computer, btw, if you promise to buy a new one, from them. (Our boss doesn't care for this line of criticism against the technology industry, pointing out that they've reduced paper usage, but paper is made from wood pulp, not mercury.) But Al Gore's on the board! And they had some sort of corporate initiative with the word "green" in its name. Just like G.E.!

(Not to mention the DRM-laden iTunes store, the company's habit of suing bloggers to reveal their sources, and all the other Boing Boing-bait shit they engage in.)

Apple products have always been "hip" in the bourgiest sense of that word, but now they're simply straight-up lifestyle accessories —you paid an extra two grand for a laptop without a DVD drive because it said Apple on it. Your mouse has one button, because Apple thinks its users are morons who will become confused by a second mouse button. You're paying extra for the brand, and nothing more. While that's always been true of certain varieties of 'hipness', sometimes there's a corresponding raise in quality. (The $200 Levi's jeans are sturdier and better constructed than the $60 equivalents. We're told!) With Apple products, that extra money goes into making your USB port-less laptop look like a clean bathroom tile.

Look, we'll be fair: the primary benefit of most Apple software, the Mac OS especially, is a pleasant intuitiveness and out-of-the-box usability. They look pretty and usually they work. This is why Apple products are perfect for your grandmother! She'll have a much easier time figuring out a Mac than trying to install Firefox on XP. This is also why old white dudes like Karl Rove or Rush Limbaugh or Charlie Rose enjoy their fine Apple computers. Not that you'd know this from Apple marketing, which plays exclusively to the cosmopolitan grup demographic. Designers! People who like the indie rock! Kids who wear sneakers! These products were designed for you, because Apple thinks you're imbeciles!

No, they clearly, seriously do. The damn "I'm a Mac" ads have been proving that for two years now. You're a Mac! You're an unpleasant and unlikable little pseudo-hipster creep! The PC is a lovable wit and a fantastic writer! But he wears a tie, you see, so he's a nerd. And they've been insulting your intelligence since day one! The 1984 Super Bowl ad? How childish do you have to be to think that buying one overpriced personal computer over a competing one is in any way a blow against any sort of authority?

At least they finally dropped "Think Different." Because that slogan made us want to find a way to somehow pry the entire West Coast off the continent and send it to drift into the ocean.

We don't hate Macs, we think iPhones are probably a better trend for assholes than BlackBerrys, we own an iPod, and we'll freely admit that buying a computer pre-loaded with Vista was one of the stupidest things we've ever done. (Works fine after the downgrade to XP tho!) Ok? We're just sick of people thinking that because some marketing firm lackey introduced his boss to Feist, or because Apple hired a designer who's heard of Bauhaus, that that makes them a more creative, liberal, or hip company than, say, Dell. At least Dell doesn't condescend to us.

When I'm out, I want to know what people are saying to me. Used to be I needed to go to my big box and look up my messages. Now I can go out and still check for messages in a little box in my pocket. Next I want a device to speak messages into my head without me having to use my hands. That's not actually ridiculous!

Science fiction has used this idea for years; the fantasy used to be written up as mystical telepathy, but eventually writers figured we'll actually engineer this ability some day, so now sci-fi telepathy uses implants and nanotechnology. So will real communications, soon enough. As with cell phones, the technology will look clunky at first. For example, this neckband microphone could let people Google by silently forming words in their throats.

Imagine having a conversation and being able to invisibly call up instant research. For all practical purposes, you'd be as smart as the Internet (or as dumb as the Internet, but still). Eventually such devices will get slick and unnoticeable, until a hands-free Internet tool is as essential as a cell phone. We've seen how much an Internet-in-boxes did for the world; imagine what Internet-in-our-brains will do.

Meanwhile, look at the problems of excessive Internet use. They're just the old problems of desk work: sedentary lifestyle and frustration at broken machines. There's nothing inherently bad about being more connected to the world. (There's something inherently annoying, but you can turn off your Facebook feeds easier than you can ignore your family.)

My condition gives me "anger, tension and/or depression." It causes "arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation and fatigue." It makes me stupid and forgetful. Twelve hours a day online is unhealthy; that's why I need twenty-four.

Try it yourself: here's an interactive map.
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So, are readers finally tiring of the torrent of shallow news about no-name celebrities, as Salon believes? The reasons for the abrupt decision are more prosaic, and depressing. Pagesix.com experienced its first day with more than 1m pageviews, last week, when the site published a gallery of photographs of Eliot Spitzer's hooker, Ashley Alexandra Dupré. But it was not making sufficiently rapid inroads into a market dominated by Time Warner's TMZ, and gossip blogs such as Perez Hilton. But the decision to shutter the spinoff gossip site likely owes even more to the Australian media mogul's pessimism about the US economy, and advertising spending.

Murdoch, disclosing a slowdown in ad revenue at his Fox television stations and newspapers, has predicted a "temporary downturn for a year or so." Other media companies, such as the New York Times, are also suffering from the advertising downturn, and have cut costs by making piecemeal layoffs.

The News Corporation boss, who has funded a decade of losses at his tabloid, the New York Post, is typically a patient investor. But he can also be decisive. He will be wary of overstretching the company, particularly after stretching to acquire the Wall Street Journal. During the last big advertising downturn, Murdoch nearly lost control of his company.

Anyway, before competitors gloat at News Corporation's reverse, they should remember this: if advertising spending has indeed turned down, the downturn will not spare web sites. The web's boosters hope that newly cost-conscious marketers will simply redirect their budgets from print and television to the web; that was the hope during the last recession, and it was wishful thinking, then and now. Murdoch will be embarrassed for a day; other media groups will be subsidizing loss-making websites for months before they come to the same conclusion.

• March 2006: Cover story "Putting the WE in WEB" praises Flickr, YouTube and others for letting ordinary people create things online — years after these sites became popular.
• December 2006: Trend piece declares 2007 the "year of the widget." It wasn't.
• 2007: Profile of hot new user-generated-content startups.
• February 2007: Interview with Jimmy Wales, who explains why his site Wikipedia is the future.
• January 2008: Story about Flickr users organizing photos for the Library of Congress. Newsweek calls them "the unwashed masses," and I wish there was a way to punch a magazine.

Gawker Media
Our publisher Nick Denton loves to point out that no major media company could buy Gawker and keep up the site's outsider angle. Of course he wants you to believe Gawker does something special and to think of it as a competitor to decades-old media empires. But he's not lying.

When this network tried licensing stories to Yahoo News two years ago, the editors bitched about it (this was before he replaced them with inexperienced, unsure toadies like me), and the stories never did well. Gawker and Yahoo let the contract expire, and while Denton pretended it was because I kept maligning Yahoo execs on our Silicon Valley site Valleywag, it was really because no one was reading Gawker on Yahoo. Their audience just wasn't interested.

Imagine you were running this show. Why sell it and either work under some executive who probably hates you for some five-year-old blog post, or struggle to start another business that becomes this influential? It's easy to say Denton is in this for the money, but only if you've never seen the man revel in his own role. He doesn't want to be rich, he wants to be Rupert Murdoch.

TechCrunch
Before he started Silicon Valley's most influential blog, Michael Arrington (pictured demonstrating caution and humility in Business 2.0) was a successful lawyer, but this didn't make him much of an analyst. Despite frequently getting his story utterly wrong, he built influence by covering every startup that would talk to him. Tech writer Paul Boutin figured it out: TechCrunch wasn't a news source, it was a phone directory, and that's what the Valley wanted. Arrington used his local influence to earn a few scoops, and now he's an unignorable player in tech reporting.

But it's all him. Most press about TechCrunch is actually about Arrington. None of his writers are breakaway talents. And while the blog probably makes over a million a year in ad revenue, TechCrunch also makes plenty from its conferences (and "parties" where startups pay to demo products for liquored up biz-dev guys). As with Gawker, the publisher makes the brand. If Arrington sold but stayed in charge, he might have to stop writing dramatic posts like "When will we have our first Valleywag suicide?" If he left the blog, what's left? A staff of amateurish writers who can't get the scoops Arrington gets?

Boing Boing
Boing Boing is owned by its four idiosyncratic writers, who act like the blog is still the small-time zine it started out as in the 90s. For example, Cory Doctorow always pushes his anti-copyright agenda, and Mark Frauenfelder owns the ukulele news beat. That's why the blog remains popular even when sites like Digg theoretically replaced the its role as a clearinghouse for Internet memes. The blog was getting nearly a million views per day before the team stopped publicly reporting traffic, but at its heart it's a personal blog, and selling it would be like selling a favorite pet: theoretically possible but against the whole point. Besides, they all have other work that they can promote to their Boing Boing fans, and that's more valuable than ad revenue.

Weblogs, Inc.
The network of over thirty blogs made sense for AOL because it was already a non-personality-based news farm that paid under $10 per post (even lower than Gawker Media at that point), churning out consumer-friendly content. Since then, most of its blogs fell behind competitors, except for the still wildly successful Engadget tech blog. Founder Jason Calacanis was indeed in it for the money, and he left the network soon after the sale to try relaunching Netscape as a social news site (the project failed and is now just a section on the Netscape web site). Calacanis's new project, a web directory, is even less personality-based. Maybe a blog network could replicate Weblogs's success, but it would have to focus on a niche, as no one will manage to dominate as many topics as Weblogs did.

Everyone Else
Well all the others are too small, aren't they? If you want to hire a writer, you could buy his blog and immediately dissolve it, but there's no point adding an existing blog to an existing media outlet.

Most magazines, TV networks and newspapers have already launched blogs with current and new staff. It's cheaper and avoids creative conflicts. Plus blogs always have a lower revenue-per-pageview rate than the media sites that could buy them, so any acquired blog would have to be integrated into the buyer's ad inventory.

For the record, Gawker Media doesn't buy blogs, but Denton's hired at least three people who started blogs about Gawker.

The trailer:

"Rogues Do It From Behind:"

The series is apparently doing well even in this scary new world of amateur porn, falling budgets, and a customer base that refuses to pay money when they can watch everything for free on Megarotic.com. It's expensively produced, and looks surprisingly catchy. I mean it's still not exactly network-ready cinematography, and there's no real swordplay (which would have taken the series from "weirdly good" to "weirdly epic"), but it plays off the Warcraft world so well that, unlike every other porn spoof ever, it actually could appeal to fans of the original. Even if these fans are the sort who jerk off over their headset mics to a dancing orc after a cave raid.

• It's for starfuckers. "TED seems like a free pass for the Valley to shed [meritocratic] values, to be seduced by celebrity, to gawk at Hollywood types and politicians that its denizens would otherwise never encounter." That's according to BusinessWeek writer Sarah Lacy, who's never been invited to TED as she admits in her story "Why I'm Fed Up With TED." Lacy, who wrote cover stories on dot-com "Valley Boys" treating them like celebrities, also got a six-figure advance to write a book about such dot-commers. But if anything that makes her TED condemnation an expert opinion.
• Even the webtards are over it. Such as TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington, who's given up on begging for an invite. Demonstrating the writing skills that will help him replace all tech media with his blog network, he explained on Twitter, "TED is such a lame conference."
• It's for Olds. How else did former TIME editor Walter Isaacson (his name is made of old) get away with calling his upcoming book "one of the first books for the electronic age"? (Like several books before it, an editable version will appear online.) Hello Walter, welcome to computers! Have you heard of the "For Dummies" series? You don't even have a home page.

• Who is Jimmy Wales? Everyone knows he founded the collaborative encyclopedia edited by a mob of prickly nerds. But it's also important to know that Wales is very much like Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist: His fans treat him like a holy man. He's not like Steve Jobs, who wants to come across as hip and spiritual but is really just an old corporate dude in a turtleneck. Jobs gives nothing to charity; Wales runs a non-profit. Wales is Jesus.
• What's Wikipedia? Again, you know this. But you also should remember Wikipedia is a symbol of the Internet's promise. It's a bit less accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica, but that doesn't matter, because it was built in seven years and it covers everything. Most importantly, Wikipedia proves that a crowd of strangers can accomplish something just to make the world better.
• Really? Not really! Because lately Jimmy Wales has been acting less like Jesus and more like Pat Robertson. He wants to overthrow Google with his search company, Wikia. And:
• What's his sex life like? I know, you didn't actually ask! But remember that to a growing crowd of nerds, this is like asking if Jesus porked Mary Magdalene. And he did! He shagged conservative Canadian commentator Rachel Marsden — or at least just talked about shagging with her, in these lurid IM chats that feel exactly like every lame flirty IM conversation I've had since I was 13. [UPDATE: Marsden confirms she shagged him "seven times," and I'm updating this post in hopes that I've at least earned some heavy petting.]
• Who's Rachel Marsden? She was fired from Fox News comedy-news show Red Eye; she says it was nothing, but the New York Post says it was for "erratic behavior." (You can read more on her Wikipedia page.) She's not just a right-winger and thus an odd match for the supposedly liberal, technoutopian Wales; she's also crazy.
• So. Why does this really matter? Because Jimbo violated the rules of his own holy church. He met Marsden when she asked him to fix her Wikipedia entry. That's not how things are done at Wikipedia! And that's why Wales reportedly sent a memo to Wikipedia staff saying he'd stay out of her profile. It sounds like a confession that he'd been meddling.
• So he's a mere man now. Jimbo denied any wrongdoing in a personal note yesterday. "A few gossip websites," he said, had spread rumors that he was in a relationship, but in fact he has "one meeting with Rachel Marsden on February 9th, 2008." The Clintonesque precision helps Jimbo avoid admitting that his non-relationship with Marsden included all the dirty IMs about having sex in hotel rooms. So Jimmy gets to break site policy to intervene in some hot woman's profile, talk dirty to her, brag to her about his plans to beat Google, bang her, then wash his hands clean of his own affair and pretend he's still untainted. Why doesn't he just run with it and get all the notable women of the world to spend a night with him so he'll tweak their profiles? That seems more fun.

This is a conscious move by Microsoft, which bypassed more traditional super-agencies to give the account to CPB, which prides itself on making ads that are too smart by half. Maybe that's what Microsoft needs to kickstart its image, but it's a big gamble, considering the size of the market at stake. Or maybe CPB will pull back a bit on the wackiness. But in all likelihood, that's what they were selling, and that's what the company wants.

No word yet on what the campaign is gonna look like, but you can use your imagination, based on this small and selective sample of some of CPB's past work:

BK's Kick'n Chicken

Miller Lite Man Law

Volkswagen Unpimps The Auto

Since no one read the boring list, Nalts made a new sarcastic one. At least I hope it's sarcastic, but I despair that it's true. His tips boil down to:

1. Spend an assload of money. Only don't make it look highly produced. 2. Screw your critics. 3. Throw boobs in. 4. Target 10 million views. 5. Find a washed-up television personality. 6. Make it a rap. The kids love raps. 7. Do something really safe. 8. Steal an idea that works. 9. If you've ever shot a video, you know viral video. 10. Fake some positive comments.

It wasn't til the last items that I had any idea he was being sarcastic. I mean, this viral ad for Ray-Bans got three million views using most of the techniques ab