"Topps," "TMI": When three minutes is not enough/too much

Dodger Andre Ethier appears on Randy and Jason Sklar’s “Back on Topps,” from Michael Eisner’s company. (Photo credit: The Tornante Co.)

Over the last half-decade, enterprising Web auteurs have created — and we’re ballparking, but this feels right — hundreds of original Internet TV series. There are production companies that churn them out, websites that warehouse them, and vast armies of amateurs who own a camera and aren’t afraid to use it. But from that crowded landscape of Web TV shows, who among us can name more than, we don’t know, two? Even the standouts — “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” “Pink,” “You Suck at Photoshop” — fade quick: When an entire season of a Web show adds up to fewer minutes than one episode of “True Blood,” the chance to make a lasting impression is fleeting indeed.

As time drags on and the genre remains chronically hitless, it’s fair to ask if perhaps the bite-size Web show is media’s version of Australopithecus afarensis, the short-lived hominid species that died off 3 million years ago to make way for humans.

So in 30 years, when Google archaeologists are exploring the era when television mated with the Internet, maybe they’ll dig up the digital fossils of these shows and have a quick laugh. Which is not to say there’s nothing good in Web TV — only that the genre itself might have evolved a little awkwardly. Its stumpy three-minute duration may simply be too short for it to survive. Still, some of the webisodes’ best traits will be no doubt be passed along on to future generations of this theoretical Intervision. And other traits won’t.

Double the fun with Sklar twins

Comedians Randy and Jason Sklar, the identical twin brothers who hosted ESPN’s sports comedy show “Cheap Seats,” are on their second Web series. “Back on Topps” is the story of Leyland and Leif Topps, baseball-card heirs whose father sold the ailing company out from under them. Threatened by an evil CEO, the Topps brothers are forced to come up with ever more hare-brained promotional schemes or face termination.

The show is the latest from Michael Eisner’s Tornante Co., which has produced a string of hyped Web series, starting with “Prom Queen” — and “Back on Topps” shows that Eisner is getting better at picking winners.

It so happens that Eisner owns the real Topps and that the branding of this series is part of his strategy to turn the card company into a media company. And Topps, it appears, has plenty to offer in terms of Web entertainment. The company used its sports connections to arrange for an endless parade of famous athletes to stop through “Back on Topps” for cameos.

Dodgers Andre Ethier and Russell Martin show up to be photographed by an artsy photographer as part of the brothers’ Avante Card series. Jordan Farmar submits to an interview on the Topps’ experimental and ill-fated talk show “60 Seconds.” And former UCLA center Kevin Love can be seen around the office changing lightbulbs (without a ladder).

The legitimately funny “Back on Topps” has adopted the manic, every-line’s-a-joke feel of shows like “Arrested Development” and “30 Rock” as a way to keep attention-challenged Web watchers interested. “If you just take the episode to a different place from where it started, and you tell one story well,” said Randy Sklar, “your viewers will be really happy.”

“That and if you can get two or three or four really big laughs in a couple minutes,” added Jason. “We wanted the pacing to be kind of ‘30 Rock’-esque and to have some of the corporate versus human element,” said Randy. “Fast pace, interesting cutaways, funny music — all those things are things we love and wanted to incorporate into the show.”

Shoes, guys, gadgets

As a plugged-in tech world personality — she Twitters, she blogs, she gets photographed at industry functions — Julia Allison has come to symbolize “Internet microcelebrity,” the condition of being extremely well known within a limited group of people (in Allison’s case, her blog gets about 30,000 page views a day, and about 3,000 people have made the more serious commitment to following her moment-to-moment activities via her Twitter feed). When Wired did a cover story in August on Allison and how she’s engineered her singular kind of fame, some expressed outrage that the magazine was even paying attention. (“Julia Allison is a terrible example of self-promotion, a warning of the missteps of public relations ... WIRED ought to be ashamed,” as one blog put it.)

 

Julia Allison, left, Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin are the hosts of “TMI Weekly.” (Photo credit: Pickettphoto.net.)

And so the natural next step is her own Web series, which launches Wenesday and is called “TMI Weekly.” But before you accuse her of being a social media climber, Allison swears she’s not in the market for a TV deal. On the phone Monday, the New York-based Allison insisted that the three-minute, three-times-a-week talk show was not some kind of steppingstone to Hollywood. “I’ve done TV,” Allison said on a conference call with her co-hosts and friends Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin. “I did 400 segments over the last year and a half on every major network. But I get so much more out of this! I can say what I really think.”

As long as what she really thinks fits into the show’s three-minute format, that is. The show, produced by Web network NextNewNetworks is being marketed as “‘The View’ meets ‘Digg Nation,’” the influential technology focused talk show on rival Web network Revision3. Inevitably, all involved with “TMI Weekly” also refer to “Sex and the City” to describe the demographic they’re aiming at — but it’s an iPhone/Twitter era, post-television “Sex and the City” crowd. In Allison’s world, there are no moody Carrie Bradshaw-esque stabs at literary depth, no storytelling. She and her friends cut right to the chase: the shoes, the guys, the gadgets.

Or as Tim Shey, NextNewNetworks’ head of entertainment programming, described the audience, “We see it as an underserved community — young women who aren’t really reached by television. They’re watching a lot of YouTube. They care about style, tech, iPhones — how do they balance their career, their life and their relationship?”

Each episode has a topic (to text or not when you’re stood up for a date?; cool new iPhone apps; is this outfit working?) and the hosts each have an area of focus: dating (Allison), gadgets and tech culture (Asha) and fashion and style (Rambin). Viewers can chime in too, of course, as part of the show’s built-in community.

Unlike “The View,” there are no guests from the outside world, and no debating politics or the issues of the day. “We don’t pretend to be a talk show,” Allison said. “We are a new iteration of that.” Their goal is to be more “real” than traditional TV: “With us when the camera is on and off, you get the same conversation,” Allison said.

That conversation feels a bit airless, though. The three hosts don’t agree on everything, but they seem like slight variations on the same personality: flirty, confident, interested in their topics only to the extent that the topics affect them personally; upbeat and “positive” no matter what. “We want to inspire our demographic to really kind of go outside and create their own lives, create their own destiny, they don’t have to get the MRS degree or work at a job they hate, really the sky’s the limit,”  Asha said. That’s a tall order for a three-minute show most likely seen on a computer. There’s a reason inspirational speakers like to play vast arenas.

Over at another NextNewNetworks show, the popular DIY sewing channel “Threadbanger,” a recent episode handily demonstrated how to make the feather hair accessories that were on a “Project Runway” episode. It zipped right along and actually felt useful. That show’s goals are perhaps more realistically tailored to what a three-minute Web show can do for you.

— David Sarno and Maria Russo

MoveOn.org's fuzzy McCain-Palin Facebook ads

Facebook users will have repeatedly seen a series of small advertisements that point to media outlets catching Sarah Palin or John McCain in a lie.  At least, that's what the ads say.

"Jake Tapper: Palin lied," says one ad that points to a column by the ABC correspondent.  "AP: Palin lied again," says a second.  A third continues on the theme:  "NBC: Palin lies lies lies."  One even got YouTube in on the action:  "YouTube says: McCain lied," it read.  "Amazing."

The thumbnail-size advertisements carry no indication of who paid for them. And because the ads so closely resemble the paid web ads news organizations often buy to boost to their own stories (a practice we noted here), it would take an act of sustained curiosity to tell that these were political advertisements at all. 

Two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal got curious, and eventually asked the liberal action group MoveOn.org if it was behind the campaign. It was. 

But unless you happen to have caught the Journal's blog post that day, you'd still have no way to tell the ads come from a partisan advocacy group. The spots continue to circulate today, sans disclaimer. It appears that the possibility of voter confusion is not keeping MoveOn up at night.

Indeed, rather than attempt to eliminate the issue, the group has invoked a strange campaign law loophole that it says makes their ads "totally legal" by exempting the following class of items from the need to include a disclaimer:

(i) Bumper stickers, pins, buttons, pens, and similar small items upon which the disclaimer cannot be conveniently printed;

Let's ignore that this provision is clearly aimed at physical objects upon which only a couple of words can readably fit. The main question, then, is whether or not it's "convenient" for MoveOn to include a disclaimer in this case, given that Facebook ads can only accommodate 140 characters. 

Which, no, is not very many -- perhaps enough for a few sentences. But adding the 20-character phrase "Paid for by MoveOn," would only reduce the amount of space for the main message by 15%.  Meaning the only inconvenience would be suffered by the intern writing the ad copy -- suddenly she'd have only 120 characters to say what she'd just said in 140. Welcome to the big time, kid.

Adding to MoveOn's somewhat incongruous position are several other ads it has purchased on Facebook. In these others, which generally are selling T-shirts, stickers, and other campaign goodies, the name MoveOn is prominently included, lest a user mistakenly send their T-shirt money to the wrong Obama merchandiser. (Amusingly, the stickers themselves contain MoveOn's name in small print too.)

It would be one thing if MoveOn was using the political ads to point to its own content. Then the identification would be implicit. But in the case of the "lie" ads, they're linking directly to third-party news stories, giving no hint that there's an invisible middleman -- and one with an unsubtle agenda. 

That agenda includes a relatively low standard for labeling something a "lie" -- a word news organizations are careful about throwing around, not least in headlines. Read Jake Tapper's piece and you might wonder if Tapper would say he'd called Palin a liar, or if instead he'd say that he was pointing out some of the candidate's inconsistencies on global warming. Point being, try to put that particular word in any reporter's mouth and you're likely to get a finger bitten off. 

In its excitement to cry liar, MoveOn has been a bit uncareful as well. The ad headlined "YouTube says: McCain lied" linked to this Politico post, where Ben Smith reported that YouTube removed a McCain political ad because it made unauthorized use of footage from CBS.  Smith's post -- which, again, was the page to which the MoveOn ad linked, clearly states that YouTube removed the footage "on the request of CBS," not of its own accord.  (The headline of Smith's post is "CBS takes down McCain webad, suggests it's 'misleading.'") MoveOn removed that ad from Facebook after I asked about it.

Twitterers christen election page with debate drinking game

(via Twitter.com)

Today was the debut of Twitter's new election page, where you can get a live feed of every last election-related tweet singing out across the land. As you might have expected, monitoring it is a frantic experience of democracy in action. Tweets with a candidate's name in them are crowding the page like rush hour commuters on the 405. They run the predictable gamut from the banal ("The first debates are on tonight and i'm at work! Thank god for the dvr. Obama ftw!") to the partisan ("I am here to support John McCain and Sarah Palin for President and Vice Prasident. I believe they are the best choice for America") to attempts at cheeky humor ("I wonder if Obama will respond 'present' to the first question tonight?").

It's not clear who would want to take advantage of grass-roots information that is so blade by blade. Except, of course, as Silicon Alley Insider points out, the political press. This should prove to be a treasure trove of quotable quotes and trend-story-ready memes.

Here's one of those already: a developing debate drinking game.

As one Twitterer explained it:

Can't help myself. R/T: Drinking rules for debate: #obamashot every time Obama says "change", #mccainshot when McCain says "my friends"

(Here's an explanation of how that "#" sound allows Twitterers to create a separate channel for all the tweets on this subject.)

What could be more bipartisan, more patriotic, more deeply in the spirit of American unity than an election-themed drinking game? And so I leave you with the final lines of Walt Whitman's ode to the Twitter-like chorus of voices that makes up our nation, "I Hear America Singing":

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day -- at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

--Maria Russo

Revision3 Beta, the minor league for webisodes

Media is starting to look like some weird fractal zoom pattern where every tiny eyelet contains another, smaller universe of even tinier eyelets.

Evidence Revision3 Beta, the new webisode sandbox that web TV network Revision3 is officially launching Monday, where new amateur-ish shows can ride Revision3's brand power in a race to win bigger audiences. 

Given that online TV is often considered the farm league for offline TV, this means we now have a farm league within a farm league. And since several of the Revision3 beta shows themselves graduated from the YouTube-like Viddler video platform, you could extend the metaphor and say this is a farm league, cubed.

Shows like HackCollege (how to get through college more quickly and "without Adderall"), and "Bottles, Blends and Brews" (lots of drink reviews) are, production-wise, a half-step down from Revision3's already inexpensive web shows, but a half-step up from the legions of YouTube shows that are made for free. See what I'm saying? Until now, who knew that such a half-step even existed?

Anyone can submit their episodic show to Beta -- which says it is not putting a limit on the number of programs it will host. If your show is accepted, Revision3 gives you a production deal. (For an idea of how much/little money this involves, refer to the previous paragraph's half-step conceit). Still, the exposure Revision3 can offer to a show -- for one thing, a reprieve from the anonymity of infinity that is YouTube -- is itself a considerable boon to web producers. 

The site's initial slate, which offers mostly commentary and how-to type shows on music, food, finance, tech, and sexy things, feature hosts that are, again, better than YouTube little leaguers but perhaps not ready for the pros. In terms of who might eventually be drafted to the majors, I'm a fan of Walt, the guy who teaches you the basics of music theory faster than you can say sousaphone.

— David Sarno

Cheap import for CBS: Illeana Douglas' Ikea show

Illeana Douglas and Greg Proops in "Easy to Assemble"
(Photo: Brandon Ruckdashel)

It was a good week for the paradoxical new world of indie-branded entertainment. Illeana Douglas' Ikea-sponsored Web show, "Easy to Assemble," hit YouTube late last week and has nearly 250,000 views. This week CBS "picked up" the show for its website TV.com. The site will have exclusive rights to broadcast each episode on Web and mobile for a week, making it TV.com's first scripted original show.

You can look at it as a commercial with a show inside, or a show wrapped around a commercial, but the main thing is -- you can look at it. In this show about her attempt to leave her semi-unsuccessful Hollywood life for a job at the Burbank Ikea, Douglas is trying to forge something original. (I already reviewed it here.)

There are, of course, those who fret about the unstoppable rise of product placement in our entertainment -- and this show's relationship to Ikea may be the mother of all product placement, given that the show is entirely set within a store and the characters are employees. But in "Easy to Assemble," the commercialism is not only part of the joke, it's a nod to some deeper meta-stuff. Douglas is trying to spin a little comedy out of the depressing fact that to get through the day now, we've got to wade through the giant tide pool of hypercommercialized everything. On the other hand, when it comes to the idea that she's working at Ikea because Hollywood isn't hiring, she might not be quite as kidding.

-- Maria Russo
 

 

Meme of the moment: McCain's suspension

Suspension Nation (via YouTube.com)

Since John McCain suspended his presidential campaign it's been suspension-mania on the Web.

Late night TV was a suspension party last night, and this morning clips of the best suspension-related stuff are going strong. David Letterman's extended rant on McCain's suspension is currently the top video on YouTube, with almost 800,000 views, and over at colbertnation.com Stephen Colbert's announcement that he was suspending his show leads the site.

Twitterers have gone to town on the concept, announcing that they are suspending work, breakfast, lunch, dinner, their naps, their diets, their faith in humanity, disbelief and, of course, twittering until the crisis has passed. Oh, and one John Dickerson was the first twitterer to suspend all suspension jokes.

Several blogs have called for the New York Mets to suspend their pennant race. A cooking blog has suspended cooking.  A Nashville blogger is suspending his mortgage payments. And far too many blogs have announced that they are suspending themselves.

Finally, Rocketboom's video of David Blaine's suspension over Central Park is climbing the YouTube charts. But Debateporridge gets extra points for putting together a video called Blaine on McCain, featuring a suspended Blaine being told of the candidate's suspension.

-- Maria Russo

Behind the Gwyneth Paltrow backlash

Gwyneth Paltrow's new lifestyle/advice website, Goop.com, went up yesterday in preview form, but the backlash is already well underway. The site will be a collection of recommendations and musings from Gwyneth herself about things that make her life special.... but the road ahead looks bumpy for this little operation! It's not just that apparently no one wants to take life direction from the girl who has it all -- though that's a powerful thread in the criticism of the site. There are also some more basic technical problems, starting with the layout of the two-page site. It's not clear why she bothered to put it up with so little content on it. It feels like something that won an award for Web design in 1998.

We're given little but mottoes and flourishes. "Nourish the inner aspect," we're entreated. Er, but  "aspect" means "appearance to the eye or mind." Meaning, I think we're being told to nourish our inner superficiality.

The home page of Goop is bare and white, listing just a few categories in which Paltrow will offer said nourishment: Make, Go, Get, Do, Be, and See. Each has a little pastel-colored icon (a bike, a butterfly, etc.). Lots of people appreciate a clean-looking home page. But there's pared-down, and there's undernourished, and Gwyneth's page is just undernourished.

(Photo credit: AP/Peter Kramer.)

Strangely, each of the categories links to the same note from Gwyneth herself.

"GOOP, a collection of experiences," that note reads across the top, again striking a shallow note. Experiences don't seem meant to be collected, like bottles of perfume or vintage posters.

Then comes Gwyneth's own voice:

"My life is good because I am not passive about it. I want to nourish what is real, and I want to do it without wasting time. I love to travel, to cook, to take care of my body and mind, to work hard..."

One wants to give Paltrow the benefit of the doubt as she works out the kinks, but this website will involve a lot of writing, and in this little note she has not found a winning tone. She hits us with too many "I's," and she sounds preachy and rigid. It's great that she wants to "nourish what's real" -- but why follow that with "without wasting time?" Just figuring out what's real takes some people a lifetime. 

She ends with a rather demanding list of things we should do to get started making our own lives better:

"Invest in what's real. Cook a meal for someone you love. Pause before reacting. Clean out your space. Read something beautiful. Treat yourself to something.Go to a city you've never been to. Learn something new. Don't be lazy. Workout [sic] and stick with it. Goop. Make it great."

Maybe that "pause before reacting" was a nod to her critics, to give her site time to develop. Sadly for Paltrow, this is the web. Gawker rushed right in to make fun of the unlovely name "Goop," and Popeater whipped up a photo gallery of names Paltrow must have passed on (yes, including the obvious  scatological rhyme.) E! Online let it fly from sentence one: "Good news everyone, Gwyneth Paltrow is launching a lifestyle website -- because when life is as amazing as hers obviously is, it's selfish to keep all those fabulous secrets to yourself." Granted, says the blog fadedyouth, "being a rich actress with an equally rich rock star husband makes it a lot easier to spend your days reading novels, shopping at fancy stores, and traveling to exotic places."

That brings us back to the life-advice-from-a-star issue. Women are unlikely to line up to hear Paltrow explain how she has perfected the art of living. It's a tricky line you have to walk, if you want to advise the fair sex. You really ought to have suffered some sort of great hardship and loss. It also helps if you struggle ceaselessly with your weight, and it's a bonus if  your domestic arrangements are on the freakish side. As evidence, I offer this list of successful, beloved female advice purveyors: Oprah. Martha. Suze. Rosie. Tyra.

Not a rock star husband among them. Come to think of it, not a husband among them.

-- Maria Russo

Digg gets $28.7M boost, plans to double size, go global

Tapping into a $28.7-million round of fresh venture capital, Digg.com will embark on a major expansion over the next year, with plans to double its staff from 75 to 150 as well as relocate to a San Francisco headquarters roughly three times the size of its current offices. Among the site's development plans will be the addition of international and multilingual interfaces to the existing site and a renewed shift in personalizing content for individual users.

"This is reactive to some of our growth success," said Digg CEO Jay Adelson.  "We saw some significant acceleration in revenue growth."  Adelson said that Digg now attracts 30 million unique visitors every month (UPDATE: ComScore shows Digg with only 16M worldwide uniques in August), and the company says advertising sales have helped nearly triple Digg's revenue since this time last year.

According to Adelson, the majority of the staff bulk-up will be aimed at engineering and R&D. "We've only completed about 10% to 15% of our ideas of our vision for Digg, and we've still got a lot of ideas in the hopper. Having the engineers here to execute on all that code work — that's a huge part of all this." The new office, which won't be ready until the end of 2009, is a quarter-mile away from Digg's current location in the Portrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco.

Adelson was not specific about Digg's next round of features, but in this video from the Web 2.0 Expo (h/t TechCrunch), Adelson spoke at length about what he called "Hyper-personalization," a model that, instead of showing users the most popular stories, would make guesses about what they'd like based on information mined from the giant demographic veins of social networks. This approach would essentially turn every user into a big Venn diagram of interests, and send them stories to match.

Adelson said Digg had not yet deployed local views of the content, but that it was in the planning stages. "We do believe the implicit groupings of users and interests that we use in the recommendation engine will certainly play a role in the future of Digg and how we can address localities and topics."

The new initiative will seek to boost Digg's connections with other media outlets — the site partnered with CBS News' Katie Couric for the conventions last month — as well as offering media websites a new set of analytical tools to evaluate how their content performs among Digg users.

Digg was started on a shoestring budget by founder Kevin Rose in 2004 and has received two rounds of funding since then, a $2.8-million "A" round in 2005 followed by an $8.5-million "B" in late 2006. The "C" round is being led by Highland Capital Partners but includes previous investors Greylock Partners, Omidyar Network and SVB Capital.

— David Sarno

Kid in Palin hack fuss gets a digital hit-and-run

Was David Kernell the hacker in the Palin case? (Photo credit: Emily Spence / Associated Press.)

The still-hazy story of the hacker who broke into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account is an excellent case study in the powers and perils of digital communities and why it can be hard to tell them apart. I for one got caught up in the whirl of hype and slippery half-truths that surrounded this story, so I’m counting it as a teachable moment.

Much of what we know — or think we know — about this story comes to us from its only primary source: a semi-anonymous written confession the hacker may have posted on an underground Web bulletin board. I say “may” because the note is long gone. 4chan.org, the hormonal birthplace of Web pranks designed to get a rise out normal Web folks, conveniently drops all discussion threads older than a few minutes.

But in the case of the Palin-hacking confession, someone appears to have rescued it before it was pushed off the plank. An anonymous source forwarded the message to conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, who posted it for all the blogosphere to see. Among the most intriguing parts of the message was the writer’s explanation of how he unlocked the Alaska governor’s account by using the “password recover” feature — which allows users who have lost their password to create a new one if they can answer a few “security questions”:

“It took seriously 45 mins on wikipedia and google to find the info,” read the statement. “Birthday? 15 seconds on wikipedia, zip code? well she had always been from wasilla, and it only has 2 zip codes.

“The second was somewhat harder, the question was ‘where did you meet your spouse?’” wrote the culprit. “I found out later though [sic] more research that they met at high school, so I did variations of that, high, high school, eventually hit on “Wasilla high” I promptly changed the password to popcorn and took a cold shower ... ”

And just like that, the world discovers that a vice presidential nominee’s standards for data security are no more canny than hiding a key under a doormat. (Moreover, anyone who’s created much of a biographical footprint online ought to realize that they’re not much safer.)

But it appears that Palin’s lack of security awareness was equaled  by that of the supposed hacker, who left an e-mail address on his mea culpa that crafty bloggers quickly connected to various social networking profiles of a University of Tennessee student named David Kernell — who also happened to be the son of a Tennessee Democratic legislator. Web sleuths built a profile of Kernell based on online clues — a 20-year-old avid chess player, and self-described “Obamacrat.”

Well, with a name, a political affiliation, and a connection to a Democratic politican, conservative bloggers had enough fuel to light their torches and begin a trial by firelight. It wasn’t long before the conviction was handed down in headlines: “FATHER OF HACKER Is Tennessee Dem State Rep!!!!!” screamed a blog post at Gateway Pundit. “Student claims responsibility for Palin e-mail hack,” declared a British technology magazine called PC Pro, which seemed to think the Kernell had himself admitted guilt. Even the New York Post got in on the action when it concluded, “Dem Pol’s son was ‘hacker.’”

“Your name is Mudd,” wrote the Ace of Spades HQ blog. “And every derogatory tip I get about your background, I will publish.” He finished with a request for anyone who’d been in a relationship with Kernell to contact him.

Google allows the embedding of books

Google has released a set of tools that allows bloggers and Web designers to embed entire books in their blog posts. Though Google's Book Search has let Web cruisers flip through digitized volumes for a few years now, this embeddable technology might do for public domain books what YouTube's embeddable player did for online video. How about the utopian world where every other website you go to, someone has embedded an interesting book and turned it to just the right page so you can begin flipping through it?

This doesn't work for all books, of course. Plenty of copyrighted books come without any sort of preview (You can't read a single page of John Grisham's "The Firm," for instance), and others do strange things like omit random pages to make reading the whole thing impossible (see Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow").  But for many academic works, classics whose copyright has expired and books that were never copyrighted in the first place, the Google preview works just fine.  Try it yourself.

And after you do, read the first three chapters of "The Heart of the Internet," (after the jump) and write a 200-word summary to share with the class.

NOTE: I moved the embedded book to after the jump.  Our blogging platform (Typepad) appears to have trouble rendering the book in Internet Explorer.  It works fine in Firefox.

— David Sarno