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| June 2008 »
 Forbes has a story about YouTube with a few hard, if unsourced, financial numbers — the kind Google and YouTube keep very close to the vest.
The article, by Quentin Hardy and Evan Hessel, says YouTube is going to bring in $200 million this year, and possibly $350 million next year. From one perspective that's small taters (the fourth "Indiana Jones" made $126 million in four days), but it's a heck of a lot more than YouTube was making last year, and if there's one sure thing about YouTube, it's that the site isn't going to stop growing anytime soon. It now gets more than 50% of its traffic from overseas (cagey 'Tube executives won't say how much more, but some of us think it's a lot), and they're making partnership deals like rabbits — CBS, Scripps, Universal Music and now even their competitor Hulu.
A few of the other interesting stats from the article, headlined "GooTube":
- A branded channel (a YouTube page devoted to a product or manufacturer) costs $200,000. Bonus question: Is Scientology's YouTube page a branded channel?
- The big ad on the YouTube homepage costs $175,000 a day, plus a commitment to drop $50,000 more on YouTube or Google ads.
- Web video ad spending is expected to be $1.35 billion this year, up from $775 million in 2007.
- There's not much money in user-generated video: Rates for ads next to such content are down 45% since February, to 18 cents per 1,000 pageviews, according to digital analytics company PubMatic. Of course, that can add up after a few billion views ...
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(image courtesy Dirk HR Spennemann)
The Rocky Mountain News (thanks io9) reported yesterday that there's a guy in Denver who claims to have video of a living extraterrestrial, but he's not showing it because he wants to save it for his movie.
Jeff Peckman is the same guy who is attempting to set up an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission in Denver -- ostensibly to allow us to prepare for the inevitable encounter. If you read the ABC News article linked in the previous sentence, you'll see that Peckman even got a professor from Colorado Film School to "authenticate" the footage. That's right, a certified movie expert thinks this is the real thing.
(Amusingly, the quote ABC news gets from Prof. Jerry Hofmann is somewhat more equivocal: "If this was faked, it's the most elaborate fake I've ever seen," he said. "This is no 29-cent puppet." But, er, isn't every hot new UFO video the most elaborate one we've seen? If you were just showing spinning pie plates, it'd be hard to get much attention.)
As someone who's written about UFO hoaxes before, I find it very difficult to take anything like this seriously. If there were actual indisputable alien footage, it would be simultaneously the most incredible scientific discovery in history and the most explosive news story of all time. Scientists, reporters and governments the world over would be clamoring to analyze it. At that point, it seems unlikely that it would be within one UFO believer's power to keep it secret.
UPDATE: This is apparently a still from the video in question. It just so happens to portray the alien peering into someone's window. What could be more recognizably, uninspiredly E.T. than that?
It's guffaw-worthy that the reason he gives for sitting on this bombshell is that he's embroiled in movie talks: "No one will be allowed to film the segment with the extraterrestrial because there is an agreement in place limiting that kind of exposure during negotiations for the documentary," Peckman told the RMN.
Forget just putting it up online and letting everyone judge for themselves. Eveyone knows you can't make money on YouTube! Even with a real live alien that looks better than a 29-cent puppet.
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Over at KTLA.com (also, of course, owned by LAT owner Tribune Co.), Marcia Brandwynne and Dr. Rick Shuman are running a snappy and engaging Webisodic advice show called, what else, "Sound Advice."
Brandwynne, a former reporter and anchorperson who's now a life coach, and Shuman, a dashing psychotherapist, have a crackling sort of chemistry that allows them to give a fresh spin to age-old agony aunt questions ("What is happiness?" "Should I date her even though she's overweight?" and of course, "My co-worker smells.").
Each 3-4 minute episode (there are about 70) addresses one viewer question, and allows just enough time for Branwynne and Shuman to spar a little bit ("men are pigs" Brandwynne jokes after he reveals he wouldn't date a big woman) before coming to a friendly consensus about how to answer the letter. It's always good to see savvy Web media emerge from unexpected places.
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This is the best mid-90s retro parody commercial I've ever seen. They must've actually gotten out an old VHS camcorder and set up 15-year-old computers and software to increase verisimilitude... impressive.
After digging around, it looks like these are the same guys that did this mid-90s retro soap opera parody, which has about the same aesthetic.
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This film won the Palm d'Purre at Cannes. Eet eez, 'ow you say, sublime...
('at teep Cute Overload)
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 After Giovanny Gutierrez recorded a lithe, undie-clad brunette playing the Wii Fit hula hoop game, the video scored a lightning-quick 500,000 views on YouTube, and racked up a monstrous 9,000 Diggs.
Gutierrez has said that even though he works at an advertising firm, the video wasn't a viral ad for Wii, even if it really should have been.
No, it was just a surreptitious video of his girlfriend. "She loves Wii Fit — and even more," he wrote to me in an e-mail, she "looks hot doing it."
How did she react when she found out that he'd posted the video without telling her, and that hundreds of thousands of Wii fans were now drooling over her?
"She was FURIOUS," wrote Gutierrez, who said she "called me on the phone screaming her head off and then hung up on me."
"But now [she] finds herself actually laughing about it and enjoying her 15 minutes of fame."
Why stop at 15 minutes? Maybe she's got a future doing virtual underwear hula-hooping...
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(Weezer is flanked by the Daft Punk Bodies, Liam "Kelly" Sullivan, Tay Zonday, Charlie the Unicorn and 3D Disney and King Kong. Photo by Jack Green ASC, DGC/Interscope)
Weezer's Pork and Beans, now at more than 4 million views on YouTube, is a seminal homage to viral video, integrating dozens of viral stars, references, nods and winks -- enough to make it a valuable cultural, maybe even literary, document of YouTube's viral roots.
Mathew Cullen of the Motion Theory production studio in Venice, Calif., directed the video. He shared some thoughts with me yesterday -- and a couple of the video's secrets.
What's "Pork and Beans" about?
The song is about the idea of being yourself, of being happy with who you are: "I’m gonna do the things that I wanna do/| I ain't got a thing to prove to you...| I'm fine and dandy with the me inside."
When did you realize that viral video stars fit in with that message?
Almost immediately. I wanted to put a spotlight on what was going on now with people being their own brands and channels. I wanted it to be a celebration of the creativity and individuality that’s being expressed through that. And on the opposite side, I wanted it to be a redemption for those that had been unintentionally embarrassed by it.
Like Mark Hicks, the Afro Ninja (who landed really badly in a botched backflip attempt), and Miss Teen South Carolina, and Chris Crocker who -- regardless of what people think, is putting himself out there to the world and just being himself.
The video is like the next chapter of the Afro Ninja -- you get to see Mark Hicks sort of get his revenge (by beating up some ninjas). Miss Teen South Carolina gets to blend the questions she was asked in the pageant in a BlendTec blender. And Chris Crocker gets a hug from Rivers. (Cullen noted that the hug was also a nod to the mega-viral Free Hugs Campaign.)
There were a lot of stars in the video -- anyone that couldn't make it?
Yeah, we reached out to the Star Wars Kid. But he doesn’t do any appearances or anything. He’s unfortunately -- his life has been negatively impacted by the power of the Internet. But that doesn’t mean... hopefully there’s still some redeeming qualities in the video for him.
There are so many memes and references in here -- must have been quite a project to catalog them all.
There’re only a handful of clips left on YouTube that I haven’t seen [laughs]. It definitely became my main form of entertainment for the past month.
It was very hard to get everything that we wanted to get in there, just because of time. We tried to get in as much of the ones we love and the people we love.
For those people that don’t have a computer or haven’t been on the Internet in a while, this video is like a web Cliff Notes to Internet pop culture. I think of the video as a living thing -- it'll be changed and mashed up over the years. People will do their own versions and mashups of it -– just like we did our own mashup of YouTube.
Are there any obscure references that no one's picked up on yet?
The GI Joe parody: Gung Ho has a Charlie the Unicorn tattoo. And the kids in the shot are the band (meaning, Weezer). It’s also a hybrid of the Ray Ban catching-the-glasses on the face viral –- I don’t think many people have picked up that the kids are actually the band.
There’s probably a dozen more like that, easily.
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 Check out Google's Hot Trends today (click thumbnail at right for full screenshot). By my count, fully 19 of the HT 100 are references to Comcast's e-mail Web site. If you count #62 ("what happened") then it's exactly 20%...
A message thread at DSLreports has a chronicle of the problem --which Comcast.net service reps apparently said at first was "routine maintenance." Someone on the forum also posted the following screenshot displaying digital graffiti, which was what users saw when they tried to access the comcast.net home page. This clearly qualifies as a hack.
Comcast has acknowledged the security compromise in a statement, the salient parts of which follow:
“Last night users attempting to access Comcast.net were temporarily redirected to another site by an unauthorized person..."
"We believe that our registration information at the vendor that registers the Comcast.net domain address was altered, which redirected the site and is the root cause of today’s continued issues as well. We have alerted law enforcement authorities and are working in conjunction with them.”
The statements adds that Comcast has "no evidence that any customer account information or data has been lost or compromised."
To translate, this means the locus of the problem was not on Comcast's side per se, but rather with their domain resgistrar -- in this case, Network Solutions. The idea being that someone -- the name of hacker group "kryogenics" was part of the graffiti -- managed to access Comcast's registration account -- the one that controls which server a given address points to, and changed the setting so comcast.net temporarily pointed to the second, renegade site.
At the time of this writing, the site was still having problems -- instead of a graphical page, comcast.net was all text. Personally, I'll be sticking with my Incredimail account for situation-critical communications.
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Cucumber trumpet? Ball bearing beats? Toccata et Fugue in D Minor on a Bottle Organ? Check out this fantabulous YouTube playlist of strange and unusual instruments, courtesy of YouTube's music maven, Michele Flannery. The only thing it doesn't have is Cat Playing Theremin.
Here is the true brilliance of YouTube -- a cornucopia of curios, an index of oddities, a roll call of the really cool. People do the darnedest things... Here for a lot more!
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It's not the heaviest weight dangled from
a swallowed sword. Or the most Ferrero Rocher chocolates eaten in one
minute. But on the tech scene, setting a Guinness World Record for the
largest number of software downloads in a single 24-hour period would
still be a mean feat.
 That's the goal for Mozilla on what has been dubbed Download Day,
a grassroots initiative to get people to pledge to download Firefox 3,
the latest release of the popular open-source Web browser. People are
also being encouraged to host download fests, collect pledges from friends and place Download Day buttons on their websites.
Since 2004, the Firefox community has grown to more than 175 million
users, the company says, and is available in more than 45 languages and
in more than 230 countries.
To take part: Sign up
to get Firefox 3 on Download Day. The actual day has not yet been
scheduled, but the great download will take place sometime in June.
-- Jessica Guynn
Image courtesy of Mozilla
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 The Webby Awards have picked out some big names to honor for their web-wise contributions at this year's ceremony.
David Byrne, Lorne Michaels, Stephen Colbert, Michele Gondry, along with will.i.am, and Tim & Eric, will receive special achievement awards for the different ways they've brought focus and energy to online entertainment.
Michaels gets the honor, in part for "Lazy Sunday," one of the first really viral YouTube videos (recall that NBC had it yanked for copyright reasons, but looks like the Webbys are giving Lorne a pass on that). Gondry has always been Web friendly -- from his weird Rubik's cube video series to his latest movie, "Be Kind Rewind," which uses a low-budge Web video aesthetic. Colbert, the Webby person of the year, is being honored for his creative string of Web-based self-promotions. Says the Webbysite, Colbert has done it all ... ... from Google bombing to make him the top search result for "greatest living American" to challenging the "truthiness" of Wikipedia. In his presidential campaign, the "One Million Strong for Stephen T. Colbert" Facebook group attracted more than 78 members per minute in its first week, while his supporters have raised more than $250,000 for the education charity DonorsChoose.org.
This is obviously good marketing -- not only will the Webbys get attention from the TV, movie and music worlds, but the awards actually make sense. The entertainment landscape still comprises mostly people who haven't figured out "the Web thing" yet, so to spotlight a few who have is an all-around winner.
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 Here's a fun news site from Stephen Dolan at Trinity College Dublin: He's found a way to show the smallest number of Kevin Bacon steps separate any article on Wikipedia from any other. So for instance, if you want to find the shortest path between, say, the Sweetgum tree and ball bearings, just enter them on the page and check out the results (you usually have to submit a couple of times before it works):
Sweetgum --> Glacier --> Friction --> Ball bearing ... 4 steps!
Dolan also used the algorithm to determine that the article from which any other article (on average) is the fewest number of steps away is "2007", with an average click distance of 3.45. It's a little unfair to choose 2007 as the center of Wikipedia, though, because it's just a long list of things that happened that year, so it has a million links in it. Just so, Dolan found that the non-list article that's the closest to most other articles is "United Kingdom."
Let's test it out, shall we? The idea is to pick a topic or person that has the least possible to do with the UK. It's tough. My top-of-the-head attempt is the Planck Epoch. Let's plug it in and watch...
United Kingdom --> December 7 --> Max Planck --> Planck epoch
Let's try one more: Different Strokes.
United Kingdom --> Kosovo War --> Peacekeeper --> Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003 TV series)
--> Different Strokes ... 5 steps! And imagine, I might've had 6 if the "Peacekeepers" weren't a fictional law enforcement group in TMNT.
Not bad, well at least we beat the average. Can anyone find something that's 6 degrees from UK? 7? 8?
(image by
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(image courtesy Joy of Tech)
Checking out today's Hot Trends, one we've figured out, one we haven't.
1. Down at number 93 is "beat Internet filtering," a term whose origin is unclear, but whose meaning we can probably guess. Internet filtering is the practice of using software, hardware, legal means or other obstacles to make certain online information inaccessible. In the U.S., many states have laws mandating that computers in schools or public libraries contain filters. And in an increasing number of countries, China being the best-known case, entire swaths of the Internet are censored for everyone -- in fact, according to this (dry but informative) video from Harvard's OpenNet Initiative, around two dozen countries are now using technical means to filter their population's Internet. Check out this tool from Williamsburger.com that allows you to compare image results from Google China and Google U.S.
To beat filtering, you'd need to "hack" through whatever kind of filtering that's being applied, which is easier said than done. There are many kinds of blocking technologies, and like everything else, they're constantly evolving to stay viable. There are other problems with getting around filters. If you're a Burmese citizen, for instance, you may not know which sites are being blocked in the first place, so how would you know to look for it?
If anyone knows the source for the search term, TV, Radio or otherwise, drop a note...
2. 天安门母亲 -- I didn't know this when I picked this off the list, but this phrase actually translates to Tiananmen Mother. This leads back to the Tiananmen Mothers campaign, a group of family members of victims of the 1989 incident that is challenging the official Chinese version of the student protests there. Yesterday, the group released a series of maps showing the locations of the 175 Tiananmen Square deaths.
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Can anyone prove either that Twittering Popeyes is actually associated with Popeyes fried chicken or that they are not?
All you have to do is call the number at the bottom of this link and ask them. It will be our first crowdsourcing project together.
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If you were hanging around the blogosphere Thursday when the New York Times posted its Sunday magazine's cover story a few days early, you probably witnessed the riot. "Exposed," was the nearly 8,000-word confessional essay by former Gawker.com gossip blogger Emily Gould, in which she describes her compulsion to blog everything, whether it's personal, professional or -- for the really serious Web traffic -- the slippery place where the two intersect.
Hundreds of mostly negative reader comments flooded in immediately, so many that the NYT's comment moderators were overwhelmed and temporarily locked the discussion while they caught up.
"How can it be that such vapid foolishness be accorded the importance of a cover piece in the Times Magazine," wrote a commenter who identified himself as Leo Dymkoski from Toronto. "Extraordinary."
"Please stop embarrassing our generation with mindless prattle," wrote L.M. from New York. "The world already thinks we are a bunch of spoiled brats, and we need intelligent and talented people (which you obviously are) to put their abilities to good use."
The ire of average readers unaccustomed to seeing such personal musings in the paper of record's magazine was one thing. But even more explosive was the eruption of shrieking blog reactions from commentators around the Web. What she'd exposed in her essay, it appeared, was more than just the vagaries of Internet microcelebrity. Gould had tapped into a vein of media-world animus that no one quite realized was there.
The media's disapprobation was evident on the usually even-keeled NPR. During an interview on "Day to Day," host Madeleine Brand focused on what the piece revealed about Gould as a person, pointedly asking Gould if she worried that she came across as "very narcissistic." Brand added that the magazine's photos of Gould splayed across her bed, laptop at her side, "make the point that it is all about you."
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A few weeks ago we saw that Hulu, the web video site from NBC Universal and Fox, had opened a promotional front on competitor YouTube. Hulu simply said that they were using YouTube to showcase some of the material available on their home site, so what's the big deal? Everyone else does it.
But this week, Hulu's YouTube channel was one of the most viewed channels on the site, and last night, Hulu clips accounted for eight of YouTube's top 16 most viewed clips, including the top two. Some have theorized that Hulu's 'Tube incursion is a result of disappointing post-launch traffic at Hulu itself, but if you believe Alexa, the site has in fact been riding a gentle traffic increase for several weeks now. The truth is surely much simpler: more people want to watch "Family Guy" clips online than have heard of Hulu -- a lot more. From that perspective, using the short YouTube "Family Guy" videos as breadcrumbs that lead back to Hulu, where viewers can watch full episodes, might be a winning strategy.
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Top of the Ticket has the astonishing video, now on YouTube's most viewed list.
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The New York Times website launched the TimesMachine feature today, a nifty tool that lets you flip back through virtual reprints of its first 70 years of issues, from 1851 to 1922. When you hover your mouse over an old article, the text of it pops up for easy reading. "Bullet Tears Brain, Man Lives for Hours," blares a headline from 1908. (Therein is recounted the tale of a man who shot himself in the head and didn't immediately die. "I thought I'd be dead," read the man's money quote, which he gave shortly before dying.)
Sadly, the new feature isn't free -- you've got to be a print subscriber to have access. The NYT seems to be continuing its inconsistent policy of making some features for-pay, and others free. You would think that the Internet demographic most likely to make use of the TimesMachine feature would be the group least likely to subscribe to the print version -- and that the NYT may therefore be missing an opportunity to use the flashy tool to lure readers to its site. If I'm wrong, though, and making the service exclusive to print subscribers somehow boosts circulation -- I'll be happy to eat my fedora.
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Paul Bradshaw isn't a psychologist. He just plays one on the Internet.
Calling himself an "amateur psychotherapist to the blogerati," the U.K. blogger has identified common psychological complaints of bloggers and social media addicts as they adapt to "the demands of new technologies."
Among them:
-- Comment guilt: Feelings of worthlessness and frustration that they don't comment more frequently on other people's blogs.
-- Twitter rage: Extreme psychopathic episodes directed at microblogging service outages (the most acute case currently being studied: TechCrunch's Mike Arrington)
-- Twitterhoeia: The uncontrollable urge to share mundane
experiences with Twitter followers (Arrington currently taking part in
a case study)
-- Six degrees of separation syndrome (also known as Robert Scoble
multiple personality disorder): The delusion that he or she is just one
friend removed from anyone else in the world and compulsively adds
friends on social networks
-- RSS reader Sisyphus complex: No matter how much time is spent checking RSS reader, there are still 8,978 posts unread.
And we thought it was just us.
We would like to add a few.
-- Post-traumatic inbox disorder: Feelings of helplessness...
...
and loss of control triggered by overwhelming influx of e-mails,
resulting in an inability to sleep, work or enjoy life. It is related
to post-traumatic update disorder: the failure to update your status on
Facebook and other services, which leads to generalized anxiety.
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 Check this out. In what can only be the largest ever assemblage of viral video stars, Weezer has managed to round up an incredible guest cast for its new "Pork and Beans" video, a teaser for the band's upcoming red album -- titled "Weezer" again, which comes out June 3.
With a chorus that goes, "I'm gonna do the things that I wanna do/I ain't got a thing to prove to you," the song is a meditation on what's cool and why it's probably not worth doing it to get ahead. Certainly the viral stars in the video didn't win their seven minutes of fame by being cool.
Here's a partial roll call -- there are a few I'm missing so feel free to fill them in: You've got Tay Zonday of Chocolate Rain, Chris Crocker of "Leave Britney Alone," the Numa Numa guy, Judson Laipply from the Evolution of Dance (YouTube's #1 video of all time), Miss South Carolina Teen USA, Daft Punk Hands, Mentos and Diet Coke guys, Liam Sullivan from "Shoes," Afro Ninja, the Dramatic Look squirrel, All Your Base Belong to Us, and, I think the beginning is an homage to funtwo's Canon in D.
In most of the riffs, Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo inserts himself into a re-enactment of each YouTube hit -- wearing a lab coat to conduct the Mentos experiment, hugging a crying Crocker, or singing along with Zonday. (Apropos of nothing, Kevin Federline also makes an appearance -- a possible nod to his own quarter-hour of fame?) At the end, a bunch of the stars appear together on a music video set for a chaotic, mega-viral effect.
YouTube's beside itself with excitement about this one -- it's sort of like one big tribute to its early days, and it's certainly fun to watch.
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 Will Thomas at HuffPo homed in on the McCain campaign's website to find the latest twist in social media: grassroots talking points. If you want to help the campaign, simply read the talking points McCain wants you to parrot (e.g. "John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship"), choose a political website on which to post them, and go nuts. Thomas calls this "comment troll" recruiting -- in essence, getting people to spam message threads with a candidate's political propaganda.
I wonder, though, if this is any different than handing lists of campaign discussion points to door-to-door outreach volunteers. In both cases, the messengers are serving as a vehicle for a prefab message, and many of them probably add a personal twist. Gotta have that twist, though. Without any evidence that the volunteers are actually processing the message they deliver, it is just flat-out copypasta. The beauty is that if the talking points end up plastered verbatim all over the Internet, one quick Google search should show it. Doesn't look like it's gotten that bad yet.
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Free Culture crusaders at MIT have started YouTomb, which scans YouTube's most popular videos and keeps track of the ones that are taken down, either by copyright holders, YouTube, or the user. More interesting than specific videos that have been taken down is the list YouTomb has generated of who's taking down the most videos, and why. Among the most active media companies are TV TOKYO, Viacom Inc., Warner Bros., World Wrestling Entertainment Inc., Freemantle Media (makers of "American Idol") and NetResult (a sports copyright enforcer).
Assuming YouTomb isn't missing too many takedowns, it's striking how infrequently videos are removed -- at this point, only a couple per hour. As YouTube rolls out tools for copyright owners to guard their content, that number is certain to go up -- possibly a whole lot.
According to their statistics, users as a group take down more of their own videos than any media company, with almost 6,000 submitters having pulled the plug on a video after it has become popular. These users could be a mix of 'regular' folk and corporations, so it's hard to get a read on why people generally take down their own stuff, but it's certainly a good question.
(via NewTeeVee)
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 Last week we dug to the bottom of an online mystery: How did the first line of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" become one of Google's fastest-rising search terms? As it turned out this was no literary renaissance but rather legions of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Viewers" who wanted to know the answer to the show's $25,000 question -- and weren't going to wait for host Meredith Vieira to tell them.
This week we have another, more lurid mystery. There's no tidy TV ending this time, but our investigation allowed us a glimpse behind the curtain, where vice and commerce meet in that obscure and lawless way particular to the Internet.
NPR editor Tricia McKinney, who last week played Holmes to my Watson, had been noticing a strange pattern on Google's Hot Trends list: a few days a week, very early in the morning, it appeared that a whole bunch of people in Texas were searching for the same very specific lewd phrases.
Texans searching for porn in the wee hours. If it doesn't sound surprising, remember that in order for "The Waste Land" to make this hot list, it took as many simultaneous Google searches as a popular daytime game show can generate -- certainly hundreds, probably thousands -- at the same time.
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 I'm a couple days late reporting that the indefatigable Tricia Walsh-Smith, a self-described divorce "warrior," is back with a third installment of her real-real-reality chronicles (for background see here, here and if you want to, here). Episode 3 is a huge improvement over #2, which I mercilessly panned for its lack of camera movement, flat tone and general failure to move the "plot" forward. This time, though, Trish is all about color, music, and motion.
Now safely ensconced in her barely lived-in London flat, Trish can continue/reprise the rambling story of how her husband Philip wronged her by "upholding the prenup." She then wields the following sentence fragment in unblinking earnest: "birth certificates, computers, files, scripts, my life, my Limoge collection." That, ladies and gentlemen, is dialogue.
Another stroke of genius in plot development was Trish's appeal to fans [aside: Who are these fans? I thought I was the only fan. If there's a real fan base there should be websites and "Bonkers" T-shirts] to send her money through PayPal to cover her legal fees. Every woman and "every man who's not an MCP" should send money, and with the excess money (if there is any) Trish will start "Women Warriors of the World United" so she can help other women "in [her] position."
"Women of the world: If I win, you win."
Seriously, who wants this woman as a running mate?
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 Jerry Yang hasn't enjoyed having to fend off Microsoft's takeover advances. But unless the Yahoo chief executive speaks Hungarian, we doubt Yang was the guy throwing eggs at his Microsoft counterpart yesterday.
There's a priceless video circulating on the Interweb of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer ducking for cover during a lecture in Budapest, Hungary.
Ballmer had just started his talk at Budapesti Corvinus Egyetem, a university, by asking the students how many still had exams to take, when someone in the audience stood up and shouted "Hey, you!" The guy pointed his finger at Ballmer, said something about Microsoft causing damage to the Hungarian people, then demanded that Ballmer "Give that money back right now."
The Microsoft honcho, who has remained quick on his feet during the Yahoo takeover saga, took shelter behind a lectern as the protester tossed his chicken grenades. All three missed, making delicious splatting sounds.
When the last egg was tossed, Ballmer emerged from the lectern to glare. The guy, muttering as he was escorted out, drew a laugh when the crowd caught sight of the writing on the back of his shirt: "Microsoft = Corruption".
But the biggest laugh was reserved for Ballmer, who scratched his famously bald head and quipped,"It was a friendly disruption." Hmm. Maybe if you were Hungarian, that would be hi-laaarious.
"That broke my train of thought," Ballmer said, before continuing his talk.
And, for your enjoyment, our brief history of face pieing.
-- Chris Gaither
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 A new video from Brave New Films called "McCain's YouTube Problem Just Became a Nightmare" has been No. 1 on YouTube's most-viewed list all day today. The video is an assemblage of clips that appear to show McCain contradicting himself and making exaggerated statements about his own experiences (think Hillary in Bosnia) or about matters of policy --taxes, Katrina and the war in Iraq.
With the big, sweaty Democratic wrestling match commanding most of the popular attention so far, McCain has been able to hang out in the Internet's political rafters (with a couple of exceptions). But now the next stage of the election is starting, and McCain will have to contend with the same self-amplifying feedback cycle that has hounded Obama and Clinton -- the one that goes CNN-YouTube-Fox-YouTube-CNN.
The senator from Arizona seems adept at supplying the kind of gotcha sound bite the News/Tube loop is built to digest and pass along. It's just that, until now, no one's had much of an appetite.
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Scripps, the owner of HGTV, and the Food Network, DIY Network and the Fine Living Network, has partnered with YouTube to create an online channel for each of their on-air channels. While none of the first 200 or so Scripps clips was actually produced specifically for the web, segments from these kinds of lifestyle shows do tend to be inherently bite-sized--and Scripps has even sped up the slower ones for the YouTube attention span.
Cooking show fans will be happy that they can now make "chocolate gooey butter cookies" with Paula Deen or, for you calorie-averse treat-o-phobes, "fresh fruit stack sticks" with Rachel Ray.
How-to and instructional videos are becoming an important commodity online, so these clips could well be stumbled upon by someone searching for "custom home" or "Chorizo burger w/pimento mayonnaise." Scripps has already begun selling advertising against their YouTube content--commercials for a brand of baked beans pop up a few seconds into every clip. And while the revenue from that may not amount to much more than a hill of beans now, with a large enough library and a stable of sponsors, this approach could make sense for TV companies looking to give their short-form content a second life.
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 We've known for a while that when it comes to counting video views, it's mostly voodoo. Everyone who writes about online video, including me, is guilty of quoting view numbers (e.g. wow, the latest sexual health video from illumistream has 110,000 views in 2 days!) without adding any kind of caveat about their statistical wobbliness.
 On Wednesday, online video analytics company TubeMogul will be releasing its study of what counts as a view across a dozen video sites. The basic finding is that with only a few exceptions, all a view means is that a video begins to play. Notice how I didn't say it means "someone began watching" -- watching has nothing to do with it. On YouTube, AOL Video, MySpace Video, Yahoo Video, Veoh and Revver, a view is counted as soon a video begins, meaning tick marks are handed out even if viewers didn't watch a single second. It doesn't matter if your video is two minutes or two hours -- if it started playing, it was viewed.
YouTube just launched its Insight tool, which allows video makers to see certain geographic and demographic information about who's been watching their clips. But conspicuously absent is any information about how much of each video viewers are sitting through. If I were a YouTube regular, I'd want to know if people were watching all, half, or just a few seconds of my stuff, even though they all counted as an equal view. Remember, Nielsen television ratings are based on making people click a remote control button every few minutes to show that they haven't left the room. That way, advertisers know the viewership numbers aren't inflated.
With online videos, though, using the loosest possible definition of a view means viewership numbers are goosed by definition.
Who do you think benefits from inflated view numbers? Viewers? Makers? Advertisers? The video companies? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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 LisaNova has picked up the gauntlet, declaring war against the smut peddlers and corporate hegemons that have taken over YouTube (see today's Playboy post and last week's post about iPower).
In her current chart topper," LisaNova will Collab Your Face Off!" (CLBW*), Lisa asks viewers in her best infomercial imitation, "Are you sick of all the sexy thumbnails and mainstream media videos that now dominate all the lists on this web site, keeping your videos from getting the exposure they deserve?"
No doubt the answer for many YouTubers is a resounding "yes!" Then all you have to do, instructs Lisa, is insert her brand-new LisaNova collab clips into your videos.
 Lisa has produced a series of 10-second videos designed to be popped into other videos like hats onto a paper doll. Her characters, she says, can fit into any story. There's Emo LisaNova, Salacious Librarian LisaNova, Naughty Nurse LisaNova, Kim Kardashian LisaNova, and others in the pipeline. Enterprising YouTubers are simply to pop the appropriate Lisa into their clips, and bam! YouTube will be won back for the masses (or at least, Lisa's name, face and chest area will get a lot of exposure).
At this point, this idea exists at the gimmick level -- you can't very well use Lisa's clips to make anything but a jokey video blog of your own ("What The Buck" has already done so (CLBW*)). Still, this is a catchy idea. What could be more viral than getting tons of people to replicate your video by inserting it into the middle of their video? If the crowd can figure out how to run with this, maybe there will be a user-generated resurgence.
*Can't link, bad words
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