Obama victory spins a web of tears

Magic Johnson went on Larry King last Wednesday evening. King asked him what he thought of the election.

“Oh man. Last night I cried like a baby, Larry.”

Magic? Crying? Is Mercury in retrograde or something?

Then Will Smith went on Oprah. “Did you cry?” Oprah asked. “Did you cry? Did you cry?” (She had cried in front of millions during President-elect Obama’s  election night speech, so presumably she wanted to know if Smith, an action hero, was in the Crybaby Club.)

He was.

And then there was Jesse Jackson. And Colin Powell. And Michael Salerno.

Who? Oh yeah, Salerno’s an IT manager out of Mahopac, N.Y. Barbecue enthusiast, avid reader, father of triplets. He wasn’t on TV like the other guys, and unlike the others,  he’s white — but you can still see a picture of him getting teary on election night, because he posted it on Flickr.

“I have never been more proud to be an American,” the caption says, and “yes, I’m crying.”

I found Salerno’s pic, along with dozens of other crying photos and videos, on Flickr and YouTube after several friends told me they’d cried on election night. Two of them were guys I’ve known for a decade without seeing them cry a single time.

In one YouTube video, a blue-eyed  guy named Sam with big tattoos and no shirt completely loses it, bawling wordlessly for seven minutes during Obama’s victory speech: a classic.

In another, a pretty 18-year-old girl named Whitney cries in a smiling way that looks almost like laughter. “I’m such a loser,” she says. “I’m so happy.”

“I cried too,” wrote four of the video’s 11 commenters, with one adding, “and I’m not even American.” That was it. The Obama Crying thing was, as far as I was concerned, a full-blown epidemic. One worth further study and explication. I did the only thing I knew how: I went to SurveyMonkey.com.

Survey Monkey lets you create free surveys and send them to people online. It’s easy. So I made a questionnaire: Did you cry on election night? If so, when was the last time you cried before that? And I asked respondents to specify their gender, age range and party affiliation.

Next, I took the hyperlink to my survey and posted it all over Facebook. Seeking parity, I posted it in a number of groups representing many distinct points along the ideological spectrum. I went from the famous group called “One Million Strong for Barack” to “1,000,000 Strong for McCain Palin” to “Reduce the Drinking Age to 18,” and to“weddings 2008.”

Another half-hour of this and Facebook decided I was a spammer and revoked all of my posting privileges, dealing a serious blow to my ability to disseminate the survey. So I turned to Twitter, where I “tweeted” a link to the survey to all 468 of the people who had, through the Web Scout blog, opted to follow my feed.

I popped open a bag of Fritos and let the results trickle in.

Some hours later, my survey had attracted 133 respondents. And are you ready for this? Fully 75% of them said they had cried or “sort of” cried on election night. (I’d included a box for people to say what “sort of” meant, and the consensus was that if you welled up but didn’t actually overflow, that’s “sort of” crying. Fair enough.)

More statistics: 33% of the criers/wellers were male. About half were between 15 and 25, a quarter 26 to 35, and another quarter were 36 to 45; 67% Democrats, 18% Republicans, 11% Independents. An impressive spread across all categories — perhaps this really was a phenomenon!

Among the written explanations were a few gems:

• “As the mother of a biracial child I have always been afraid that she would never be accepted by her peers. She wouldn’t be ‘white enough’ or ‘black enough.’ And seeing that an entire country can accept this biracial man as their leader, and also knowing how much the world as a whole supports him — gives me so much hope for my own daughter’s future.”
• “So proud that Americans elected a smart President! I also cried when I got a thank you text message from Barack Obama on my phone.”
• “I cried because I was so devastated that my country would choose someone who was going to destroy what America was founded on.”

I called Jack Glaser, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley who has written extensively on race, politics, emotion and the Internet. Quite possibly he could help me publish my findings in some obscure academic journal. When I asked him what he thought of my results, there was a pause. He then told me my methodology was completely flawed and my results scientifically meaningless.

I nearly cried.

“Whenever you have a survey where people voluntarily participate, you tend to overrepresent people who feel strongly one way or the other,“ Glaser said.

As a consolation prize, Glaser allowed that “it does look like there’s more expressed emotion after this election than there typically is. There’s a huge release on the partisan level,” he said, “And also a big exhilaration on the civil rights side. And the two sort of intertwine.”

So no science was had here today. Still, I count this as a victory, skewed and warped as it may be, for the social Web. It turns out that a few minutes on YouTube, Flickr and Facebook, plus a bit of survey monkeying, quickly revealed 100 people who had cried on election night. I don’t think you need science to see that there’s something happening there.

Special thanks to David A. Malbin

FunnyOrDie has a pretty good short in which hip-hop artist T-Pain gets in an argument with his Vocoder -- the device that gives that metallic tinge to singers' voices -- reference Tupac's and Dr. Dre's "California Love," Cher's "Believe" and Lil Wayne's "Lollipop." There are also a good number of home-brewed Vocoder videos on YouTube -- this one's fun.

In the video (policy forbids a direct link due to mature language, but just Google it), the Vocoder feels slighted because it doesn't get any credit for T-Pain's success.  Taking matters into its own hands, the Vocoder machine electrocutes a studio technician before forcing T-Pain to sing a song entitled "Thank you Vocoder":

"Thank you Vocoder / You are wonderful. You have helped me out tremendously."

Props to T-Pain both for his quality acting and his willingness to lampoon what has clearly become a sound-effects cliche in both hip-hop and pop music in general. Thanks to this video, I now see that the Vocodor is an evil robotic force that must be stopped.

— David Sarno

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

We are not a bunch of pudgy, bespectacled, suit-wearing doofuses shouts the new Microsoft ad campaign, firing back at the widely admired Get a Mac campaign from Apple. But OK, well, if we are those things, we're proud of it, 'cause those are good things! The spot, which debuted Thursday night, features a John Hodgman lookalike saying "I'm a PC, and I've become a stereotype," followed by quick-cut clips of various multi-cultural successful types declaring "I'm a PC," some claiming the nerdy traits ("I wear a suit!" "I wear glasses!" etc.) made famous by Hodgman's PC character.

So here we are in Phase 2 of the Microsoft campaign, according to the company. The unpopular and confusing Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates ads have been halted, for now, at two installments -- reportedly there's one still left to be aired, but no date is set. Microsoft is strenuously asserting that they planned the campaign just this way all along. But after the firestorm of criticism, the whole thing has the smell of Plan B.

The first new ad, called "Pride" and made by the same agency who did Seinfeld/Gates, Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, is shiny and peppy on the surface. The counterattack on Apple is clear enough: Don't you stereotype us, you snarky slackers! As Michael Arrington points out at TechCrunch, it does succeed in making Apple seem like the mean, name-calling kid, reminding you that lots of worthwhile folks are fine with their PC.

But the rest of the message is still, alas, a vast, undifferentiated wilderness. The tag line this time is "Life without walls," which doesn't mean a lot. So the ad zooms around the world to show us that the whole world is really one, and Microsoft plays a big role in that oneness. It's the "connection" alluded to in the Jerry and Bill ads. But it seems very pre-Internet to put yourself out there as a connector. If anything, in this age of e-mail/Twitter/IM/Facebook/RSS feeds, we could use a little less connection at times. It's way beyond Windows at this point.

Then there's that multicolored cornucopia of achievers from around the world: a black astronaut, a "green" architect, a mysterious-looking white guy with a beard. (Who is that guy anyway?) There's a lawyer, a graffiti artist, a mathematician, a fisherman. There's Tony Parker and Eva Longoria reclining poolside? Pharrell Williams? Deepak Chopra in a book-lined study proclaiming, "I'm a human being, not a human doing"?

Mixing celebrities and normals does not represent democracy -- you'd think this would be clear by now, especially after the Seinfeld debacle. Were the everyday people compensated, I wonder? If you pay a bunch of average people to say "I'm a PC," they'll say it, but it doesn't make it ring true. I'm trying to find that out, and will post if I get a response.

Somehow, the ad manages to make the concept of globalism, which has been reality for quite a while now, seem a little retro. In fact, the whole campaign is feeling a little bit too 20th century, from the ol' hands-across-the-world meme, to Jerry Seinfeld, to, in the end, Microsoft itself.

Update: A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed that the participants were compensated. I'll have a full statement from the company on that in another post soon.

-- Maria Russo

In the new Mac ad on the New York Times home page today, John Hodgman's curmudgeonly PC character drags out an "editorial" entitled "Stop Switching to Mac!" as written by PC. Justin Long's Mac looks on from the clean, empty, expensive ad space on top of the page. It's a continuation of Apple's history of designing Web ads that are literally out of the box -- they don't stay confined to the traditional online ad "cubes."

And like the rest of the campaign, the "stop switching" bit conveys its meaning clearly. PC, Mac suggests, desperately wants people to stick with him, even though all he has to offer is the same old same old. In other words: The Mac is to the Web as the PC is to fusty, old-school newspapers, with their table-pounding editorials. (Ouch.) Well, kudos to the New York Times for having the sense of humor to run it.

It also hits just a week after the kickoff of the Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld campaign for Microsoft, a cryptic TV spot that I wrote about last week, calling it meaningless and borderline offensive. A few commenters thought I went too far in reading subtext into the ad, and while I'm going to stand by the gist of what I wrote, I have to cop to one misfire of my own.

As Mary at the Mocking Words blog pointed out in an e-mail to me, when Jerry Seinfeld asks what he is feeling on Bill Gates' foot, Gates answers "pleather," not "leather." It's hard to make it out, but I listened extra hard several times, and she's right. Among Gates' many talents, actorly enunciation may not be at the top of the list. Bill, practice with this tongue twister:  "Unique New York, you know I need unique New York." Substitute "Redmond" if you'd like.

Anyway: pleather. Perhaps that explains why Jerry says he wears them in the shower, since pleather is waterproof. It does make the exchange seem less potentially sexual, although, maybe not.

-- Maria Russo

The new Microsoft commercial, featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates out discount shoe shopping, was unveiled Thursday night on TV. Today it's near the top of YouTube's most viewed list, and many of those viewers are leaving a trail of rancorous confusion all over the Web. People are asking, nay, demanding to know what the minute-and-a-half-long spot is trying to convey.

Seemingly anticipating the lack of enthusiasm, Microsoft offered an explanation for the commercial on its own site:

After seeing the new ad from Microsoft, which debuted today, some may wonder what Jerry Seinfeld helping Bill Gates pick out a new pair of shoes has to do with software. The answer, in the classic Seinfeld sense of the word, is nothing. Nevertheless, the spot is the first and most visible sign of an ambitious effort by Microsoft's Windows business to reconnect with consumers around the globe.

The post went on to explain that the campaign will show how Windows "has become an indispensable part of the lives of a billion people around the globe," not just on their PCs but also now online and via mobile devices.

But the commercial is not actually tapping into the "nothing" that "Seinfeld" was famously about. "Seinfeld" was about "nothing" because it showed everything that four friends did together. It was the "nothing" of, "What'd you do today?" "Nothing." But the Microsoft spot's little shoe-store vignette relies on unfunny far-fetched details: Seinfeld asking Gates if he ever takes a shower with his clothes on, for example. Thunk. (BoingBoing was in the minority in liking the spot's "absurdist" quality.)

The whole thing is chilly. It begins with Seinfeld walking past a discount shoe store called Shoe Circus. He is eating a churro. He reads out loud the store's name and a sign promising quality shoes at discount prices, then sees Bill Gates through the window trying on shoes and says, "Bill Gates!" and walks in to join the fun.

Let's start with the premise of these two famous rich people out discount shoe shopping. Ha, ha! They don't really have to shop at Payless like the half a million people who lost their jobs this year.

Gates and Seinfeld may both be schlumpy dressers, but their regular-guy qualities stop there. Neither is the Warren Buffett kind of rich, the frugal sort who knows the value of a dollar and doesn't put himself above the working man (or so we believe about Buffett). Instead the ad seems to be somehow making light of bargain-shopping, as if it's just a lark for these guys, or some kind of joke that we're not quite in on. 

A bit into the ad, Seinfeld suddenly takes over from the salesman and is helping fit Gates' shoes, offering him the "Conquistador -- they run very tight." As Seinfeld feels around for Gates' toe he says, "Is that your toe?" Gates says no. Seinfeld asks what it is and Gates says, "leather." The camera lingers on Gates face as he says "leather," and he appears to be attempting to give a meaningful look. Are we supposed to be interpreting something naughty in that exchange? It's not unreasonable to go there, especially after we've witnessed the fondling of Gates' feet by a kneeling Seinfeld.

The most disturbing part of the commercial begins with a cut to a Latino family standing outside the store and looking in the window as they too eat churros. "Es el Conquistador?" the woman says. The man replies in Spanish, "They run tight." There are English subtitles. These dark-skinned people stand close together and have befuddled expressions on their faces. They seem to take Shoe Circus very seriously.

Perhaps they're supposed to represent the consumers "around the globe" that Microsoft is trying to "reconnect" with, but the depiction seems condescending and borderline offensive. These are the kind of people who actually shop at a Shoe Circus, and not by choice. With their grim faces they look as if they have actual problems to deal with besides the tightness of the Conquistador, so the spectacle of them watching the two eternally boyish, care-free retired zillionaires try on shoes leaves a bad aftertaste. Jerry and Bill may well eat churros and buy cheap shoes just like the onlookers do, but Seinfeld goes home at night to his Hamptons estate and his dozen cars while Gates retires to his stadium-sized techno-mansion.

The Latinos are pressed up against the glass, fascinated by the action inside, but they do not appear to know who Gates and Seinfeld are. Are they too poor to own a TV? Do they represent the yearning Latino hordes trying to get in on the American consumerist dream?

Then back inside the clerk asks Gates if he has a Shoe Circus Clown Club card, which Gates produces, and it has the mug shot on it from Gates' juvenile arrest. This is the one comic touch that seems on the money.

As Seinfeld and Gates cross the parking lot after the purchase, the talk (finally) turns to Microsoft. Seinfeld asks Gates if they'll ever make computers "moist and chewy like cake, so we can just eat while we're working." If it's yes, Seinfeld says, "give me a signal. Adjust your shorts."

Then Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, chairman of the Gates Foundation, one of the great technology minds of our time, shakes his booty. It's seems meant to be humanizing -- the playful side of Bill Gates -- but comes off as one more awkward choice. This commercial has a double problem. It pulls none of the emotional strings that might have helped Microsoft "reconnect" with its audience (not that I remember ever being connected to them). And its main idea is a dadaist void. A decade after "Seinfeld," "nothing" has gotten old.

--Maria Russo

Last week, Warner Bros. brought back the defunct WB channel in a new form: an online-only network, the first one with a name inherited from Hollywood. You can watch august old WB shows on TheWB.com, along with raggedy new Web-only video series, and the effect, so far, is something like those professional dog walkers who have a Great Dane, two chihuahuas and a bulldog on the same leash. You know they're all the same species but -- wow, did the Creator really intend for them to be out strolling together?

But that's a little bit like Warner Bros. television. There's the studio itself, which is massive and traditional, defined by shows like "ER" and "The West Wing." Then there was, for a decade, the WB network, which, through independent-minded shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek," created iconic teen worlds in which beautiful people also suffered, and outsiders' obsession with social status could somehow look like social justice.

TheWB.com blends those two corporate identities into what they're calling a "curated experience" -- much in the spirt of an old-school TV network, in fact. With its attempt to be something unified in spirit, it goes a few sprightly steps further than sites like NBC and News Corp.'s more catch-all Hulu.com toward fusing the old TV model with the new one that's emerging on the Web.

Michael Weiss-Malik's "Proposal 2.0" on Google Maps Street View.

We have all heard stories about couples getting hitched through computer games, web comics, technology blogs and lolcats, but Michael Weiss-Malik thinks he may have topped them all. What's better than a kitty "marridj," you ask?

How about a Google Maps panoramic image, accessible by anyone, of the groom-to-be holding a sign reading, "Proposal 2.0: Marry me Leslie!!"

Weiss-Malik, 29, a software engineer for Google Inc., was informed along with many of his coworkers when the Google Street View van — the vehicle used to record panoramic street-level imagery for Google Maps — would be driving by the company's Mountain View headquarters.

Michael Weiss-Malik and Leslie Moreno at a wedding — not their own. (Photo: Michael Weiss-Malik)

He then designed and printed — using the company ink — a sign he would hold as the van snapped pictures, he said. He also registered MarryMeLeslie.com to document the Web 2.0 proposal.

"I wasn't sure if it would get a lot of attention," Weiss-Malik said.

It did. More than 50,000 flocked to the website, and the news got international coverage.

"I figured it would be kind of a fun way to do something big — a very public announcement of asking her to marry me," he said.

The advantage of his public proposal is that Weiss-Malik already secured a "yes" from his bride-to-be in what he calls "Proposal 1.0." The initial proposal was a pretty classic scenario, taking place during a quiet night at home, ring and all.

While Weiss-Malik's fiancee, Leslie Moreno, 26, is waiting to announce her official "yes" until the poll on their website tips toward a majority in support of the decision, here's a spoiler: It's going to happen. And the wedding date is already set tentatively for May 24.

"I got quite a few e-mails in my inbox suggesting that I marry Michael," Moreno said. "Most of the people have been really positive."

Since Google updated its Street View map earlier this month with Weiss-Malik's proposal intact, the heartwarming event has taken on a life of its own. Users spotted it, and submitted links to social media, giving it even more attention. A friend of Weiss-Malik updated Wikipedia's online proposal article to include Proposal 2.0.

"I was pretty sure no one had ever done it before, and only one person could have done it for the first time," Weiss-Malik said. "It's possible no one will ever do it again."

Maybe so, but here's hoping there are many more lolcat "proposalz" to come.

-- Mark Milian

That supposedly "mint condition" Spider-Man comic book you got on EBay that had half a page torn out is a dispute between you and the seller. The California courts are staying out of it, no matter how many lawsuits you file. Consumer protection laws don't apply to sales not specifically targeting California customers, according to an L.A. Times article posted Wednesday.

In the latest judicial message of "buyer beware" in Internet shopping, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said a federal district court in Northern California properly decided it didn't have jurisdiction to require a Wisconsin classic car seller to abide by this state's consumer protection laws.

1964 Ford Galaxie 500. (Photo credit: dave_7 / Flickr user)

The dispute began three years ago when Paul Boschetto of San Francisco offered the winning $34,106 bid for a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 XL auctioned by Wisconsin sellers who described the vehicle in their EBay ad as "in awesome condition, not restored, rust free chrome in excellent condition, recently rebuilt and ready to be driven."

When the car arrived, according to Boschetto's testimony to the federal district court, the engine wouldn't start and the car was rusty and dented.

Boschetto contacted EBay and Hansing in a fruitless effort to rescind the purchase, then filed suit in federal district court alleging violation of the California Consumer Protection Act, breach of contract, misrepresentation and fraud.

The fact that neither the courts nor EBay are stepping in to settle the dispute is disconcerting. And without a working car, it's going to be a pretty long bus ride to Wisconsin to settle this face to face.

-- Mark Milian

Bonnie Fuller, left, will launch a new celebrity news site for women. Tina Brown is behind an upcoming news and culture site.
(Photos: Evan Agostini / Getty Images | Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

It wasn’t so long ago that Tina Brown and Bonnie Fuller were busy transforming entire magazine genres. They lived on opposite ends of the taste spectrum — Brown edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, Fuller revamped Glamour, then re-invented the celebrity gossip concept at Us Weekly and later the Star — but the two had a similar formula: a willingness to throw out the old model, a feel for where the culture was heading and a forward-driving tenacity that became legendary in media circles.

Then old-media companies mostly stopped generating the large, ambitious projects Fuller and Brown cut their teeth on, and both editors stepped away from magazines. Now this summer finds both embarked on — what else? — Web start-ups. Fuller has started a Web company aimed at women ages 20 to 40, focusing on — what else? — celebrity news. Brown will run a news and culture site called The Daily Beast (after the fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel "Scoop”), which is funded by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp and will launch in the fall.

Brown and Fuller arrive with hefty resumes in a space where success in other quarters has not always proven transferable. What tends to hit on the Web is the home-grown, the grass-roots, the improvisational. Can either succeed on the Web, where all of their seeming advantages may turn out to be old-media baggage? “Not everyone crosses over so easily,” said Kara Swisher, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and columnist who is now co-executive editor of the tech news and opinion site AllThingsD.com. “But you never know who’s going to do well.”

Others are even less optimistic. Michael Wolff, the acerbic Vanity Fair columnist whose spectacular Internet start-up failure in the 90s was documented in his 1998 book “Burn Rate,” is one who thinks the key to success on the Internet lies entirely in understanding and innovating with technology – an area where neither Fuller nor Brown has yet shown much leadership. “I am very fond of Bonnie,” Wolff said. “There is no one in modern America who knows less about the Internet than Bonnie Fuller. Second to Bonnie Fuller is only Tina Brown.”

And last week, scolding new media tycoon Nick Denton took some potshots at Brown’s new project on his media gossip blog Gawker, calling her "the notoriously profligate Tina Brown" and suggesting that her site will fail because she will not be able to help spending Barry Diller’s money too freely.

But Brown and Fuller are used to being doubted (and derided) in the media, and both have proved by now that they can't be counted out lightly.

If media pedigree did matter, the British-born Brown would have a nice head start. She jazzed up Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and with studio chief Harvey Weinstein started the short-lived, much derided Talk. More recently, Brown hosted an obscure cable TV culture-chat show and wrote a best-selling biography of Princess Diana. She is almost finished writing a book about Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Exactly what kind of creature The Daily Beast will be, beyond falling into the category of “news aggregator” — a site that links to other news sources on the Web — has been the subject of much speculation. Brown was not available for comment, and a spokesperson would say only that the site will target “curious, busy and besieged professionals,” with some undetermined amount of original content and a focus on culture as well as news.

Fuller is still looking for partners, financing and advertiser support for her new company. The plan is to bring to the Web her brand of what she calls “addictive content” – her trademark mix of celebrity news and girlfriend-to-girlfriend advice on fashion, sex and relationships.

Wolff, whose latest venture is a news site of his own called newser.com, is not afraid of throwing water on the passions of other media figures. But he is not alone in cautioning that the Web is so different from print publications as to make the vast majority of crossover dreams seem “preposterous. It’s like, ‘I’m a theater person and I’m going to go into the movie business,” he said. “Only in the rarest of circumstances do those people succeed.”

One who did pull it off is Arianna Huffington, who went from syndicated political columnist to media mogul by starting the Huffington Post with just a handful of employees. Fuller and Brown, Swisher said, “have got to be looking at [Huffington] and saying, I can do that.”

Fuller said she is fully aware of the importance of technology and intends to use it to her advantage: “Digital technology is key to a unique online experience,” she said by email. “The voice I bring to this experience can be extended and ultimately deepened through technology.” Huffington, too, was no technology expert and had not distinguished herself on the Web (pre-Post, she was a medium-wattage columnist, author and media commentator). For allthingsd’s Swisher, it’s mainly about “using the Web well, the way people like.”

So although the celebrity-gossip space Fuller is entering is crowded it also seems able to accommodate variety. Eighteen separate gossip sites attracted over a million unique visitors in June.

“We believe that there is always great room for celebrity coverage,” Fuller wrote in her email. “I found that when we grew Us Weekly and then at Star... there was no shortage of a consumer appetite for celebrity coverage. When you do something well, with its own distinct point of view, you can always find an audience.” Fuller has dipped her toe in the digital river by blogging for the Huffington Post. She has been averaging one or two posts a month – an alarmingly relaxed pace for someone with Web ambitions — on such trustworthy topics as 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy and Anne Hathaway’s boyfriend troubles. Ever canny, Fuller tries to mix a little politics in with the celebrity for the liberal Huffington Post audience, offering this optimistic post in April: “Hillary Clinton and Madonna: Both Unbowed and Uncowed — They’re Virtually the Same, and They Will Rule!”

Brown’s site is entering a more volatile area. Andrew Breitbart, who was a contributor for the Drudge Report and an early developer of the Huffington Post, noted that news aggregators are not as straightforward a business as they may seem. “Aggregators need to figure out something else, a point of view,” he said. The Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, two of the most popular aggregators, depend on their political slants – Drudge to the right, Huffington Post to the left – to define and capture their audience. Brown’s site will not have a particular political orientation. The goal instead will be identifying the kind of story that is interesting to a broad, upscale audience of culture consumers, and adapting to that audience’s patterns and preferences once they are clear.

One certainty is that in the news aggregrator realm, technology plays a central role. Wolff’s newser.com, for example, lets users slide a grid that customizes the page to show a particular number of stories at a time and to choose whether the stories are mainly “hard” – “serious, important, and immediate new,” or “soft,” “cultural, lifestyle, and celebrity news.” (The Drudge Report may be the exception; some say part of its appeal is its low-tech feel, a practically prehistoric-looking design with headlines crowded onto a plain white page with just a few straight-up photos).

But even Drudge faces the encroachment of the automated sites like Yahoo news and the even more popular user-driven aggregrator sites like Digg.com, which rank stories by how many readers “vote” for them as they appear around the Web.

The Digg model has the advantage of being a direct product of the Web’s conversational, free-for-all spirit. Many Web seers predict that Digg’s popularity-contest model will ultimately triumph over hand-edited, sensibility-driven sites like Brown’s. But Huffington expressed a sentiment common to those who have taken the Web plunge: “One of the best things about the new media is that it’s not a zero-sum game. The more sites there are offering smart, compelling content, the more people will get their news, opinion, and entertainment online.”

She had just one piece of advice for the web upstarts, as they leave behind the more human-scaled rhythms of the print world: “Be prepared to move quickly!”

--Maria Russo

T-Pain owned by Vocoder robot machine

FunnyOrDie has a pretty good short in which hip-hop artist T-Pain gets in an argument with his Vocoder -- the device that gives that metallic tinge to singers' voices -- reference Tupac's and Dr. Dre's "California Love," Cher's "Believe" and Lil Wayne's "Lollipop." There are also a good number of home-brewed Vocoder videos on YouTube -- this one's fun.

In the video (policy forbids a direct link due to mature language, but just Google it), the Vocoder feels slighted because it doesn't get any credit for T-Pain's success.  Taking matters into its own hands, the Vocoder machine electrocutes a studio technician before forcing T-Pain to sing a song entitled "Thank you Vocoder":

"Thank you Vocoder / You are wonderful. You have helped me out tremendously."

Props to T-Pain both for his quality acting and his willingness to lampoon what has clearly become a sound-effects cliche in both hip-hop and pop music in general. Thanks to this video, I now see that the Vocodor is an evil robotic force that must be stopped.

— David Sarno

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

We are not a bunch of pudgy, bespectacled, suit-wearing doofuses shouts the new Microsoft ad campaign, firing back at the widely admired Get a Mac campaign from Apple. But OK, well, if we are those things, we're proud of it, 'cause those are good things! The spot, which debuted Thursday night, features a John Hodgman lookalike saying "I'm a PC, and I've become a stereotype," followed by quick-cut clips of various multi-cultural successful types declaring "I'm a PC," some claiming the nerdy traits ("I wear a suit!" "I wear glasses!" etc.) made famous by Hodgman's PC character.

So here we are in Phase 2 of the Microsoft campaign, according to the company. The unpopular and confusing Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates ads have been halted, for now, at two installments -- reportedly there's one still left to be aired, but no date is set. Microsoft is strenuously asserting that they planned the campaign just this way all along. But after the firestorm of criticism, the whole thing has the smell of Plan B.

The first new ad, called "Pride" and made by the same agency who did Seinfeld/Gates, Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, is shiny and peppy on the surface. The counterattack on Apple is clear enough: Don't you stereotype us, you snarky slackers! As Michael Arrington points out at TechCrunch, it does succeed in making Apple seem like the mean, name-calling kid, reminding you that lots of worthwhile folks are fine with their PC.

But the rest of the message is still, alas, a vast, undifferentiated wilderness. The tag line this time is "Life without walls," which doesn't mean a lot. So the ad zooms around the world to show us that the whole world is really one, and Microsoft plays a big role in that oneness. It's the "connection" alluded to in the Jerry and Bill ads. But it seems very pre-Internet to put yourself out there as a connector. If anything, in this age of e-mail/Twitter/IM/Facebook/RSS feeds, we could use a little less connection at times. It's way beyond Windows at this point.

Then there's that multicolored cornucopia of achievers from around the world: a black astronaut, a "green" architect, a mysterious-looking white guy with a beard. (Who is that guy anyway?) There's a lawyer, a graffiti artist, a mathematician, a fisherman. There's Tony Parker and Eva Longoria reclining poolside? Pharrell Williams? Deepak Chopra in a book-lined study proclaiming, "I'm a human being, not a human doing"?

Mixing celebrities and normals does not represent democracy -- you'd think this would be clear by now, especially after the Seinfeld debacle. Were the everyday people compensated, I wonder? If you pay a bunch of average people to say "I'm a PC," they'll say it, but it doesn't make it ring true. I'm trying to find that out, and will post if I get a response.

Somehow, the ad manages to make the concept of globalism, which has been reality for quite a while now, seem a little retro. In fact, the whole campaign is feeling a little bit too 20th century, from the ol' hands-across-the-world meme, to Jerry Seinfeld, to, in the end, Microsoft itself.

Update: A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed that the participants were compensated. I'll have a full statement from the company on that in another post soon.

-- Maria Russo

In the new Mac ad on the New York Times home page today, John Hodgman's curmudgeonly PC character drags out an "editorial" entitled "Stop Switching to Mac!" as written by PC. Justin Long's Mac looks on from the clean, empty, expensive ad space on top of the page. It's a continuation of Apple's history of designing Web ads that are literally out of the box -- they don't stay confined to the traditional online ad "cubes."

And like the rest of the campaign, the "stop switching" bit conveys its meaning clearly. PC, Mac suggests, desperately wants people to stick with him, even though all he has to offer is the same old same old. In other words: The Mac is to the Web as the PC is to fusty, old-school newspapers, with their table-pounding editorials. (Ouch.) Well, kudos to the New York Times for having the sense of humor to run it.

It also hits just a week after the kickoff of the Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld campaign for Microsoft, a cryptic TV spot that I wrote about last week, calling it meaningless and borderline offensive. A few commenters thought I went too far in reading subtext into the ad, and while I'm going to stand by the gist of what I wrote, I have to cop to one misfire of my own.

As Mary at the Mocking Words blog pointed out in an e-mail to me, when Jerry Seinfeld asks what he is feeling on Bill Gates' foot, Gates answers "pleather," not "leather." It's hard to make it out, but I listened extra hard several times, and she's right. Among Gates' many talents, actorly enunciation may not be at the top of the list. Bill, practice with this tongue twister:  "Unique New York, you know I need unique New York." Substitute "Redmond" if you'd like.

Anyway: pleather. Perhaps that explains why Jerry says he wears them in the shower, since pleather is waterproof. It does make the exchange seem less potentially sexual, although, maybe not.

-- Maria Russo

The new Microsoft commercial, featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates out discount shoe shopping, was unveiled Thursday night on TV. Today it's near the top of YouTube's most viewed list, and many of those viewers are leaving a trail of rancorous confusion all over the Web. People are asking, nay, demanding to know what the minute-and-a-half-long spot is trying to convey.

Seemingly anticipating the lack of enthusiasm, Microsoft offered an explanation for the commercial on its own site:

After seeing the new ad from Microsoft, which debuted today, some may wonder what Jerry Seinfeld helping Bill Gates pick out a new pair of shoes has to do with software. The answer, in the classic Seinfeld sense of the word, is nothing. Nevertheless, the spot is the first and most visible sign of an ambitious effort by Microsoft's Windows business to reconnect with consumers around the globe.

The post went on to explain that the campaign will show how Windows "has become an indispensable part of the lives of a billion people around the globe," not just on their PCs but also now online and via mobile devices.

But the commercial is not actually tapping into the "nothing" that "Seinfeld" was famously about. "Seinfeld" was about "nothing" because it showed everything that four friends did together. It was the "nothing" of, "What'd you do today?" "Nothing." But the Microsoft spot's little shoe-store vignette relies on unfunny far-fetched details: Seinfeld asking Gates if he ever takes a shower with his clothes on, for example. Thunk. (BoingBoing was in the minority in liking the spot's "absurdist" quality.)

The whole thing is chilly. It begins with Seinfeld walking past a discount shoe store called Shoe Circus. He is eating a churro. He reads out loud the store's name and a sign promising quality shoes at discount prices, then sees Bill Gates through the window trying on shoes and says, "Bill Gates!" and walks in to join the fun.

Let's start with the premise of these two famous rich people out discount shoe shopping. Ha, ha! They don't really have to shop at Payless like the half a million people who lost their jobs this year.

Gates and Seinfeld may both be schlumpy dressers, but their regular-guy qualities stop there. Neither is the Warren Buffett kind of rich, the frugal sort who knows the value of a dollar and doesn't put himself above the working man (or so we believe about Buffett). Instead the ad seems to be somehow making light of bargain-shopping, as if it's just a lark for these guys, or some kind of joke that we're not quite in on. 

A bit into the ad, Seinfeld suddenly takes over from the salesman and is helping fit Gates' shoes, offering him the "Conquistador -- they run very tight." As Seinfeld feels around for Gates' toe he says, "Is that your toe?" Gates says no. Seinfeld asks what it is and Gates says, "leather." The camera lingers on Gates face as he says "leather," and he appears to be attempting to give a meaningful look. Are we supposed to be interpreting something naughty in that exchange? It's not unreasonable to go there, especially after we've witnessed the fondling of Gates' feet by a kneeling Seinfeld.

The most disturbing part of the commercial begins with a cut to a Latino family standing outside the store and looking in the window as they too eat churros. "Es el Conquistador?" the woman says. The man replies in Spanish, "They run tight." There are English subtitles. These dark-skinned people stand close together and have befuddled expressions on their faces. They seem to take Shoe Circus very seriously.

Perhaps they're supposed to represent the consumers "around the globe" that Microsoft is trying to "reconnect" with, but the depiction seems condescending and borderline offensive. These are the kind of people who actually shop at a Shoe Circus, and not by choice. With their grim faces they look as if they have actual problems to deal with besides the tightness of the Conquistador, so the spectacle of them watching the two eternally boyish, care-free retired zillionaires try on shoes leaves a bad aftertaste. Jerry and Bill may well eat churros and buy cheap shoes just like the onlookers do, but Seinfeld goes home at night to his Hamptons estate and his dozen cars while Gates retires to his stadium-sized techno-mansion.

The Latinos are pressed up against the glass, fascinated by the action inside, but they do not appear to know who Gates and Seinfeld are. Are they too poor to own a TV? Do they represent the yearning Latino hordes trying to get in on the American consumerist dream?

Then back inside the clerk asks Gates if he has a Shoe Circus Clown Club card, which Gates produces, and it has the mug shot on it from Gates' juvenile arrest. This is the one comic touch that seems on the money.

As Seinfeld and Gates cross the parking lot after the purchase, the talk (finally) turns to Microsoft. Seinfeld asks Gates if they'll ever make computers "moist and chewy like cake, so we can just eat while we're working." If it's yes, Seinfeld says, "give me a signal. Adjust your shorts."

Then Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, chairman of the Gates Foundation, one of the great technology minds of our time, shakes his booty. It's seems meant to be humanizing -- the playful side of Bill Gates -- but comes off as one more awkward choice. This commercial has a double problem. It pulls none of the emotional strings that might have helped Microsoft "reconnect" with its audience (not that I remember ever being connected to them). And its main idea is a dadaist void. A decade after "Seinfeld," "nothing" has gotten old.

--Maria Russo

Last week, Warner Bros. brought back the defunct WB channel in a new form: an online-only network, the first one with a name inherited from Hollywood. You can watch august old WB shows on TheWB.com, along with raggedy new Web-only video series, and the effect, so far, is something like those professional dog walkers who have a Great Dane, two chihuahuas and a bulldog on the same leash. You know they're all the same species but -- wow, did the Creator really intend for them to be out strolling together?

But that's a little bit like Warner Bros. television. There's the studio itself, which is massive and traditional, defined by shows like "ER" and "The West Wing." Then there was, for a decade, the WB network, which, through independent-minded shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek," created iconic teen worlds in which beautiful people also suffered, and outsiders' obsession with social status could somehow look like social justice.

TheWB.com blends those two corporate identities into what they're calling a "curated experience" -- much in the spirt of an old-school TV network, in fact. With its attempt to be something unified in spirit, it goes a few sprightly steps further than sites like NBC and News Corp.'s more catch-all Hulu.com toward fusing the old TV model with the new one that's emerging on the Web.

Michael Weiss-Malik's "Proposal 2.0" on Google Maps Street View.

We have all heard stories about couples getting hitched through computer games, web comics, technology blogs and lolcats, but Michael Weiss-Malik thinks he may have topped them all. What's better than a kitty "marridj," you ask?

How about a Google Maps panoramic image, accessible by anyone, of the groom-to-be holding a sign reading, "Proposal 2.0: Marry me Leslie!!"

Weiss-Malik, 29, a software engineer for Google Inc., was informed along with many of his coworkers when the Google Street View van — the vehicle used to record panoramic street-level imagery for Google Maps — would be driving by the company's Mountain View headquarters.

Michael Weiss-Malik and Leslie Moreno at a wedding — not their own. (Photo: Michael Weiss-Malik)

He then designed and printed — using the company ink — a sign he would hold as the van snapped pictures, he said. He also registered MarryMeLeslie.com to document the Web 2.0 proposal.

"I wasn't sure if it would get a lot of attention," Weiss-Malik said.

It did. More than 50,000 flocked to the website, and the news got international coverage.

"I figured it would be kind of a fun way to do something big — a very public announcement of asking her to marry me," he said.

The advantage of his public proposal is that Weiss-Malik already secured a "yes" from his bride-to-be in what he calls "Proposal 1.0." The initial proposal was a pretty classic scenario, taking place during a quiet night at home, ring and all.

While Weiss-Malik's fiancee, Leslie Moreno, 26, is waiting to announce her official "yes" until the poll on their website tips toward a majority in support of the decision, here's a spoiler: It's going to happen. And the wedding date is already set tentatively for May 24.

"I got quite a few e-mails in my inbox suggesting that I marry Michael," Moreno said. "Most of the people have been really positive."

Since Google updated its Street View map earlier this month with Weiss-Malik's proposal intact, the heartwarming event has taken on a life of its own. Users spotted it, and submitted links to social media, giving it even more attention. A friend of Weiss-Malik updated Wikipedia's online proposal article to include Proposal 2.0.

"I was pretty sure no one had ever done it before, and only one person could have done it for the first time," Weiss-Malik said. "It's possible no one will ever do it again."

Maybe so, but here's hoping there are many more lolcat "proposalz" to come.

-- Mark Milian

That supposedly "mint condition" Spider-Man comic book you got on EBay that had half a page torn out is a dispute between you and the seller. The California courts are staying out of it, no matter how many lawsuits you file. Consumer protection laws don't apply to sales not specifically targeting California customers, according to an L.A. Times article posted Wednesday.

In the latest judicial message of "buyer beware" in Internet shopping, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said a federal district court in Northern California properly decided it didn't have jurisdiction to require a Wisconsin classic car seller to abide by this state's consumer protection laws.

1964 Ford Galaxie 500. (Photo credit: dave_7 / Flickr user)

The dispute began three years ago when Paul Boschetto of San Francisco offered the winning $34,106 bid for a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 XL auctioned by Wisconsin sellers who described the vehicle in their EBay ad as "in awesome condition, not restored, rust free chrome in excellent condition, recently rebuilt and ready to be driven."

When the car arrived, according to Boschetto's testimony to the federal district court, the engine wouldn't start and the car was rusty and dented.

Boschetto contacted EBay and Hansing in a fruitless effort to rescind the purchase, then filed suit in federal district court alleging violation of the California Consumer Protection Act, breach of contract, misrepresentation and fraud.

The fact that neither the courts nor EBay are stepping in to settle the dispute is disconcerting. And without a working car, it's going to be a pretty long bus ride to Wisconsin to settle this face to face.

-- Mark Milian

Bonnie Fuller, left, will launch a new celebrity news site for women. Tina Brown is behind an upcoming news and culture site.
(Photos: Evan Agostini / Getty Images | Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

It wasn’t so long ago that Tina Brown and Bonnie Fuller were busy transforming entire magazine genres. They lived on opposite ends of the taste spectrum — Brown edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, Fuller revamped Glamour, then re-invented the celebrity gossip concept at Us Weekly and later the Star — but the two had a similar formula: a willingness to throw out the old model, a feel for where the culture was heading and a forward-driving tenacity that became legendary in media circles.

Then old-media companies mostly stopped generating the large, ambitious projects Fuller and Brown cut their teeth on, and both editors stepped away from magazines. Now this summer finds both embarked on — what else? — Web start-ups. Fuller has started a Web company aimed at women ages 20 to 40, focusing on — what else? — celebrity news. Brown will run a news and culture site called The Daily Beast (after the fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel "Scoop”), which is funded by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp and will launch in the fall.

Brown and Fuller arrive with hefty resumes in a space where success in other quarters has not always proven transferable. What tends to hit on the Web is the home-grown, the grass-roots, the improvisational. Can either succeed on the Web, where all of their seeming advantages may turn out to be old-media baggage? “Not everyone crosses over so easily,” said Kara Swisher, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and columnist who is now co-executive editor of the tech news and opinion site AllThingsD.com. “But you never know who’s going to do well.”

Others are even less optimistic. Michael Wolff, the acerbic Vanity Fair columnist whose spectacular Internet start-up failure in the 90s was documented in his 1998 book “Burn Rate,” is one who thinks the key to success on the Internet lies entirely in understanding and innovating with technology – an area where neither Fuller nor Brown has yet shown much leadership. “I am very fond of Bonnie,” Wolff said. “There is no one in modern America who knows less about the Internet than Bonnie Fuller. Second to Bonnie Fuller is only Tina Brown.”

And last week, scolding new media tycoon Nick Denton took some potshots at Brown’s new project on his media gossip blog Gawker, calling her "the notoriously profligate Tina Brown" and suggesting that her site will fail because she will not be able to help spending Barry Diller’s money too freely.

But Brown and Fuller are used to being doubted (and derided) in the media, and both have proved by now that they can't be counted out lightly.

If media pedigree did matter, the British-born Brown would have a nice head start. She jazzed up Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and with studio chief Harvey Weinstein started the short-lived, much derided Talk. More recently, Brown hosted an obscure cable TV culture-chat show and wrote a best-selling biography of Princess Diana. She is almost finished writing a book about Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Exactly what kind of creature The Daily Beast will be, beyond falling into the category of “news aggregator” — a site that links to other news sources on the Web — has been the subject of much speculation. Brown was not available for comment, and a spokesperson would say only that the site will target “curious, busy and besieged professionals,” with some undetermined amount of original content and a focus on culture as well as news.

Fuller is still looking for partners, financing and advertiser support for her new company. The plan is to bring to the Web her brand of what she calls “addictive content” – her trademark mix of celebrity news and girlfriend-to-girlfriend advice on fashion, sex and relationships.

Wolff, whose latest venture is a news site of his own called newser.com, is not afraid of throwing water on the passions of other media figures. But he is not alone in cautioning that the Web is so different from print publications as to make the vast majority of crossover dreams seem “preposterous. It’s like, ‘I’m a theater person and I’m going to go into the movie business,” he said. “Only in the rarest of circumstances do those people succeed.”

One who did pull it off is Arianna Huffington, who went from syndicated political columnist to media mogul by starting the Huffington Post with just a handful of employees. Fuller and Brown, Swisher said, “have got to be looking at [Huffington] and saying, I can do that.”

Fuller said she is fully aware of the importance of technology and intends to use it to her advantage: “Digital technology is key to a unique online experience,” she said by email. “The voice I bring to this experience can be extended and ultimately deepened through technology.” Huffington, too, was no technology expert and had not distinguished herself on the Web (pre-Post, she was a medium-wattage columnist, author and media commentator). For allthingsd’s Swisher, it’s mainly about “using the Web well, the way people like.”

So although the celebrity-gossip space Fuller is entering is crowded it also seems able to accommodate variety. Eighteen separate gossip sites attracted over a million unique visitors in June.

“We believe that there is always great room for celebrity coverage,” Fuller wrote in her email. “I found that when we grew Us Weekly and then at Star... there was no shortage of a consumer appetite for celebrity coverage. When you do something well, with its own distinct point of view, you can always find an audience.” Fuller has dipped her toe in the digital river by blogging for the Huffington Post. She has been averaging one or two posts a month – an alarmingly relaxed pace for someone with Web ambitions — on such trustworthy topics as 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy and Anne Hathaway’s boyfriend troubles. Ever canny, Fuller tries to mix a little politics in with the celebrity for the liberal Huffington Post audience, offering this optimistic post in April: “Hillary Clinton and Madonna: Both Unbowed and Uncowed — They’re Virtually the Same, and They Will Rule!”

Brown’s site is entering a more volatile area. Andrew Breitbart, who was a contributor for the Drudge Report and an early developer of the Huffington Post, noted that news aggregators are not as straightforward a business as they may seem. “Aggregators need to figure out something else, a point of view,” he said. The Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, two of the most popular aggregators, depend on their political slants – Drudge to the right, Huffington Post to the left – to define and capture their audience. Brown’s site will not have a particular political orientation. The goal instead will be identifying the kind of story that is interesting to a broad, upscale audience of culture consumers, and adapting to that audience’s patterns and preferences once they are clear.

One certainty is that in the news aggregrator realm, technology plays a central role. Wolff’s newser.com, for example, lets users slide a grid that customizes the page to show a particular number of stories at a time and to choose whether the stories are mainly “hard” – “serious, important, and immediate new,” or “soft,” “cultural, lifestyle, and celebrity news.” (The Drudge Report may be the exception; some say part of its appeal is its low-tech feel, a practically prehistoric-looking design with headlines crowded onto a plain white page with just a few straight-up photos).

But even Drudge faces the encroachment of the automated sites like Yahoo news and the even more popular user-driven aggregrator sites like Digg.com, which rank stories by how many readers “vote” for them as they appear around the Web.

The Digg model has the advantage of being a direct product of the Web’s conversational, free-for-all spirit. Many Web seers predict that Digg’s popularity-contest model will ultimately triumph over hand-edited, sensibility-driven sites like Brown’s. But Huffington expressed a sentiment common to those who have taken the Web plunge: “One of the best things about the new media is that it’s not a zero-sum game. The more sites there are offering smart, compelling content, the more people will get their news, opinion, and entertainment online.”

She had just one piece of advice for the web upstarts, as they leave behind the more human-scaled rhythms of the print world: “Be prepared to move quickly!”

--Maria Russo

"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

We are not a bunch of pudgy, bespectacled, suit-wearing doofuses shouts the new Microsoft ad campaign, firing back at the widely admired Get a Mac campaign from Apple. But OK, well, if we are those things, we're proud of it, 'cause those are good things! The spot, which debuted Thursday night, features a John Hodgman lookalike saying "I'm a PC, and I've become a stereotype," followed by quick-cut clips of various multi-cultural successful types declaring "I'm a PC," some claiming the nerdy traits ("I wear a suit!" "I wear glasses!" etc.) made famous by Hodgman's PC character.

So here we are in Phase 2 of the Microsoft campaign, according to the company. The unpopular and confusing Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates ads have been halted, for now, at two installments -- reportedly there's one still left to be aired, but no date is set. Microsoft is strenuously asserting that they planned the campaign just this way all along. But after the firestorm of criticism, the whole thing has the smell of Plan B.

The first new ad, called "Pride" and made by the same agency who did Seinfeld/Gates, Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, is shiny and peppy on the surface. The counterattack on Apple is clear enough: Don't you stereotype us, you snarky slackers! As Michael Arrington points out at TechCrunch, it does succeed in making Apple seem like the mean, name-calling kid, reminding you that lots of worthwhile folks are fine with their PC.

But the rest of the message is still, alas, a vast, undifferentiated wilderness. The tag line this time is "Life without walls," which doesn't mean a lot. So the ad zooms around the world to show us that the whole world is really one, and Microsoft plays a big role in that oneness. It's the "connection" alluded to in the Jerry and Bill ads. But it seems very pre-Internet to put yourself out there as a connector. If anything, in this age of e-mail/Twitter/IM/Facebook/RSS feeds, we could use a little less connection at times. It's way beyond Windows at this point.

Then there's that multicolored cornucopia of achievers from around the world: a black astronaut, a "green" architect, a mysterious-looking white guy with a beard. (Who is that guy anyway?) There's a lawyer, a graffiti artist, a mathematician, a fisherman. There's Tony Parker and Eva Longoria reclining poolside? Pharrell Williams? Deepak Chopra in a book-lined study proclaiming, "I'm a human being, not a human doing"?

Mixing celebrities and normals does not represent democracy -- you'd think this would be clear by now, especially after the Seinfeld debacle. Were the everyday people compensated, I wonder? If you pay a bunch of average people to say "I'm a PC," they'll say it, but it doesn't make it ring true. I'm trying to find that out, and will post if I get a response.

Somehow, the ad manages to make the concept of globalism, which has been reality for quite a while now, seem a little retro. In fact, the whole campaign is feeling a little bit too 20th century, from the ol' hands-across-the-world meme, to Jerry Seinfeld, to, in the end, Microsoft itself.

Update: A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed that the participants were compensated. I'll have a full statement from the company on that in another post soon.

-- Maria Russo

In the new Mac ad on the New York Times home page today, John Hodgman's curmudgeonly PC character drags out an "editorial" entitled "Stop Switching to Mac!" as written by PC. Justin Long's Mac looks on from the clean, empty, expensive ad space on top of the page. It's a continuation of Apple's history of designing Web ads that are literally out of the box -- they don't stay confined to the traditional online ad "cubes."

And like the rest of the campaign, the "stop switching" bit conveys its meaning clearly. PC, Mac suggests, desperately wants people to stick with him, even though all he has to offer is the same old same old. In other words: The Mac is to the Web as the PC is to fusty, old-school newspapers, with their table-pounding editorials. (Ouch.) Well, kudos to the New York Times for having the sense of humor to run it.

It also hits just a week after the kickoff of the Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld campaign for Microsoft, a cryptic TV spot that I wrote about last week, calling it meaningless and borderline offensive. A few commenters thought I went too far in reading subtext into the ad, and while I'm going to stand by the gist of what I wrote, I have to cop to one misfire of my own.

As Mary at the Mocking Words blog pointed out in an e-mail to me, when Jerry Seinfeld asks what he is feeling on Bill Gates' foot, Gates answers "pleather," not "leather." It's hard to make it out, but I listened extra hard several times, and she's right. Among Gates' many talents, actorly enunciation may not be at the top of the list. Bill, practice with this tongue twister:  "Unique New York, you know I need unique New York." Substitute "Redmond" if you'd like.

Anyway: pleather. Perhaps that explains why Jerry says he wears them in the shower, since pleather is waterproof. It does make the exchange seem less potentially sexual, although, maybe not.

-- Maria Russo

The new Microsoft commercial, featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates out discount shoe shopping, was unveiled Thursday night on TV. Today it's near the top of YouTube's most viewed list, and many of those viewers are leaving a trail of rancorous confusion all over the Web. People are asking, nay, demanding to know what the minute-and-a-half-long spot is trying to convey.

Seemingly anticipating the lack of enthusiasm, Microsoft offered an explanation for the commercial on its own site:

After seeing the new ad from Microsoft, which debuted today, some may wonder what Jerry Seinfeld helping Bill Gates pick out a new pair of shoes has to do with software. The answer, in the classic Seinfeld sense of the word, is nothing. Nevertheless, the spot is the first and most visible sign of an ambitious effort by Microsoft's Windows business to reconnect with consumers around the globe.

The post went on to explain that the campaign will show how Windows "has become an indispensable part of the lives of a billion people around the globe," not just on their PCs but also now online and via mobile devices.

But the commercial is not actually tapping into the "nothing" that "Seinfeld" was famously about. "Seinfeld" was about "nothing" because it showed everything that four friends did together. It was the "nothing" of, "What'd you do today?" "Nothing." But the Microsoft spot's little shoe-store vignette relies on unfunny far-fetched details: Seinfeld asking Gates if he ever takes a shower with his clothes on, for example. Thunk. (BoingBoing was in the minority in liking the spot's "absurdist" quality.)

The whole thing is chilly. It begins with Seinfeld walking past a discount shoe store called Shoe Circus. He is eating a churro. He reads out loud the store's name and a sign promising quality shoes at discount prices, then sees Bill Gates through the window trying on shoes and says, "Bill Gates!" and walks in to join the fun.

Let's start with the premise of these two famous rich people out discount shoe shopping. Ha, ha! They don't really have to shop at Payless like the half a million people who lost their jobs this year.

Gates and Seinfeld may both be schlumpy dressers, but their regular-guy qualities stop there. Neither is the Warren Buffett kind of rich, the frugal sort who knows the value of a dollar and doesn't put himself above the working man (or so we believe about Buffett). Instead the ad seems to be somehow making light of bargain-shopping, as if it's just a lark for these guys, or some kind of joke that we're not quite in on. 

A bit into the ad, Seinfeld suddenly takes over from the salesman and is helping fit Gates' shoes, offering him the "Conquistador -- they run very tight." As Seinfeld feels around for Gates' toe he says, "Is that your toe?" Gates says no. Seinfeld asks what it is and Gates says, "leather." The camera lingers on Gates face as he says "leather," and he appears to be attempting to give a meaningful look. Are we supposed to be interpreting something naughty in that exchange? It's not unreasonable to go there, especially after we've witnessed the fondling of Gates' feet by a kneeling Seinfeld.

The most disturbing part of the commercial begins with a cut to a Latino family standing outside the store and looking in the window as they too eat churros. "Es el Conquistador?" the woman says. The man replies in Spanish, "They run tight." There are English subtitles. These dark-skinned people stand close together and have befuddled expressions on their faces. They seem to take Shoe Circus very seriously.

Perhaps they're supposed to represent the consumers "around the globe" that Microsoft is trying to "reconnect" with, but the depiction seems condescending and borderline offensive. These are the kind of people who actually shop at a Shoe Circus, and not by choice. With their grim faces they look as if they have actual problems to deal with besides the tightness of the Conquistador, so the spectacle of them watching the two eternally boyish, care-free retired zillionaires try on shoes leaves a bad aftertaste. Jerry and Bill may well eat churros and buy cheap shoes just like the onlookers do, but Seinfeld goes home at night to his Hamptons estate and his dozen cars while Gates retires to his stadium-sized techno-mansion.

The Latinos are pressed up against the glass, fascinated by the action inside, but they do not appear to know who Gates and Seinfeld are. Are they too poor to own a TV? Do they represent the yearning Latino hordes trying to get in on the American consumerist dream?

Then back inside the clerk asks Gates if he has a Shoe Circus Clown Club card, which Gates produces, and it has the mug shot on it from Gates' juvenile arrest. This is the one comic touch that seems on the money.

As Seinfeld and Gates cross the parking lot after the purchase, the talk (finally) turns to Microsoft. Seinfeld asks Gates if they'll ever make computers "moist and chewy like cake, so we can just eat while we're working." If it's yes, Seinfeld says, "give me a signal. Adjust your shorts."

Then Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, chairman of the Gates Foundation, one of the great technology minds of our time, shakes his booty. It's seems meant to be humanizing -- the playful side of Bill Gates -- but comes off as one more awkward choice. This commercial has a double problem. It pulls none of the emotional strings that might have helped Microsoft "reconnect" with its audience (not that I remember ever being connected to them). And its main idea is a dadaist void. A decade after "Seinfeld," "nothing" has gotten old.

--Maria Russo

Last week, Warner Bros. brought back the defunct WB channel in a new form: an online-only network, the first one with a name inherited from Hollywood. You can watch august old WB shows on TheWB.com, along with raggedy new Web-only video series, and the effect, so far, is something like those professional dog walkers who have a Great Dane, two chihuahuas and a bulldog on the same leash. You know they're all the same species but -- wow, did the Creator really intend for them to be out strolling together?

But that's a little bit like Warner Bros. television. There's the studio itself, which is massive and traditional, defined by shows like "ER" and "The West Wing." Then there was, for a decade, the WB network, which, through independent-minded shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek," created iconic teen worlds in which beautiful people also suffered, and outsiders' obsession with social status could somehow look like social justice.

TheWB.com blends those two corporate identities into what they're calling a "curated experience" -- much in the spirt of an old-school TV network, in fact. With its attempt to be something unified in spirit, it goes a few sprightly steps further than sites like NBC and News Corp.'s more catch-all Hulu.com toward fusing the old TV model with the new one that's emerging on the Web.

Michael Weiss-Malik's "Proposal 2.0" on Google Maps Street View.

We have all heard stories about couples getting hitched through computer games, web comics, technology blogs and lolcats, but Michael Weiss-Malik thinks he may have topped them all. What's better than a kitty "marridj," you ask?

How about a Google Maps panoramic image, accessible by anyone, of the groom-to-be holding a sign reading, "Proposal 2.0: Marry me Leslie!!"

Weiss-Malik, 29, a software engineer for Google Inc., was informed along with many of his coworkers when the Google Street View van — the vehicle used to record panoramic street-level imagery for Google Maps — would be driving by the company's Mountain View headquarters.

Michael Weiss-Malik and Leslie Moreno at a wedding — not their own. (Photo: Michael Weiss-Malik)

He then designed and printed — using the company ink — a sign he would hold as the van snapped pictures, he said. He also registered MarryMeLeslie.com to document the Web 2.0 proposal.

"I wasn't sure if it would get a lot of attention," Weiss-Malik said.

It did. More than 50,000 flocked to the website, and the news got international coverage.

"I figured it would be kind of a fun way to do something big — a very public announcement of asking her to marry me," he said.

The advantage of his public proposal is that Weiss-Malik already secured a "yes" from his bride-to-be in what he calls "Proposal 1.0." The initial proposal was a pretty classic scenario, taking place during a quiet night at home, ring and all.

While Weiss-Malik's fiancee, Leslie Moreno, 26, is waiting to announce her official "yes" until the poll on their website tips toward a majority in support of the decision, here's a spoiler: It's going to happen. And the wedding date is already set tentatively for May 24.

"I got quite a few e-mails in my inbox suggesting that I marry Michael," Moreno said. "Most of the people have been really positive."

Since Google updated its Street View map earlier this month with Weiss-Malik's proposal intact, the heartwarming event has taken on a life of its own. Users spotted it, and submitted links to social media, giving it even more attention. A friend of Weiss-Malik updated Wikipedia's online proposal article to include Proposal 2.0.

"I was pretty sure no one had ever done it before, and only one person could have done it for the first time," Weiss-Malik said. "It's possible no one will ever do it again."

Maybe so, but here's hoping there are many more lolcat "proposalz" to come.

-- Mark Milian

That supposedly "mint condition" Spider-Man comic book you got on EBay that had half a page torn out is a dispute between you and the seller. The California courts are staying out of it, no matter how many lawsuits you file. Consumer protection laws don't apply to sales not specifically targeting California customers, according to an L.A. Times article posted Wednesday.

In the latest judicial message of "buyer beware" in Internet shopping, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said a federal district court in Northern California properly decided it didn't have jurisdiction to require a Wisconsin classic car seller to abide by this state's consumer protection laws.

1964 Ford Galaxie 500. (Photo credit: dave_7 / Flickr user)

The dispute began three years ago when Paul Boschetto of San Francisco offered the winning $34,106 bid for a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 XL auctioned by Wisconsin sellers who described the vehicle in their EBay ad as "in awesome condition, not restored, rust free chrome in excellent condition, recently rebuilt and ready to be driven."

When the car arrived, according to Boschetto's testimony to the federal district court, the engine wouldn't start and the car was rusty and dented.

Boschetto contacted EBay and Hansing in a fruitless effort to rescind the purchase, then filed suit in federal district court alleging violation of the California Consumer Protection Act, breach of contract, misrepresentation and fraud.

The fact that neither the courts nor EBay are stepping in to settle the dispute is disconcerting. And without a working car, it's going to be a pretty long bus ride to Wisconsin to settle this face to face.

-- Mark Milian

Bonnie Fuller, left, will launch a new celebrity news site for women. Tina Brown is behind an upcoming news and culture site.
(Photos: Evan Agostini / Getty Images | Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

It wasn’t so long ago that Tina Brown and Bonnie Fuller were busy transforming entire magazine genres. They lived on opposite ends of the taste spectrum — Brown edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, Fuller revamped Glamour, then re-invented the celebrity gossip concept at Us Weekly and later the Star — but the two had a similar formula: a willingness to throw out the old model, a feel for where the culture was heading and a forward-driving tenacity that became legendary in media circles.

Then old-media companies mostly stopped generating the large, ambitious projects Fuller and Brown cut their teeth on, and both editors stepped away from magazines. Now this summer finds both embarked on — what else? — Web start-ups. Fuller has started a Web company aimed at women ages 20 to 40, focusing on — what else? — celebrity news. Brown will run a news and culture site called The Daily Beast (after the fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel "Scoop”), which is funded by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp and will launch in the fall.

Brown and Fuller arrive with hefty resumes in a space where success in other quarters has not always proven transferable. What tends to hit on the Web is the home-grown, the grass-roots, the improvisational. Can either succeed on the Web, where all of their seeming advantages may turn out to be old-media baggage? “Not everyone crosses over so easily,” said Kara Swisher, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and columnist who is now co-executive editor of the tech news and opinion site AllThingsD.com. “But you never know who’s going to do well.”

Others are even less optimistic. Michael Wolff, the acerbic Vanity Fair columnist whose spectacular Internet start-up failure in the 90s was documented in his 1998 book “Burn Rate,” is one who thinks the key to success on the Internet lies entirely in understanding and innovating with technology – an area where neither Fuller nor Brown has yet shown much leadership. “I am very fond of Bonnie,” Wolff said. “There is no one in modern America who knows less about the Internet than Bonnie Fuller. Second to Bonnie Fuller is only Tina Brown.”

And last week, scolding new media tycoon Nick Denton took some potshots at Brown’s new project on his media gossip blog Gawker, calling her "the notoriously profligate Tina Brown" and suggesting that her site will fail because she will not be able to help spending Barry Diller’s money too freely.

But Brown and Fuller are used to being doubted (and derided) in the media, and both have proved by now that they can't be counted out lightly.

If media pedigree did matter, the British-born Brown would have a nice head start. She jazzed up Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and with studio chief Harvey Weinstein started the short-lived, much derided Talk. More recently, Brown hosted an obscure cable TV culture-chat show and wrote a best-selling biography of Princess Diana. She is almost finished writing a book about Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Exactly what kind of creature The Daily Beast will be, beyond falling into the category of “news aggregator” — a site that links to other news sources on the Web — has been the subject of much speculation. Brown was not available for comment, and a spokesperson would say only that the site will target “curious, busy and besieged professionals,” with some undetermined amount of original content and a focus on culture as well as news.

Fuller is still looking for partners, financing and advertiser support for her new company. The plan is to bring to the Web her brand of what she calls “addictive content” – her trademark mix of celebrity news and girlfriend-to-girlfriend advice on fashion, sex and relationships.

Wolff, whose latest venture is a news site of his own called newser.com, is not afraid of throwing water on the passions of other media figures. But he is not alone in cautioning that the Web is so different from print publications as to make the vast majority of crossover dreams seem “preposterous. It’s like, ‘I’m a theater person and I’m going to go into the movie business,” he said. “Only in the rarest of circumstances do those people succeed.”

One who did pull it off is Arianna Huffington, who went from syndicated political columnist to media mogul by starting the Huffington Post with just a handful of employees. Fuller and Brown, Swisher said, “have got to be looking at [Huffington] and saying, I can do that.”

Fuller said she is fully aware of the importance of technology and intends to use it to her advantage: “Digital technology is key to a unique online experience,” she said by email. “The voice I bring to this experience can be extended and ultimately deepened through technology.” Huffington, too, was no technology expert and had not distinguished herself on the Web (pre-Post, she was a medium-wattage columnist, author and media commentator). For allthingsd’s Swisher, it’s mainly about “using the Web well, the way people like.”

So although the celebrity-gossip space Fuller is entering is crowded it also seems able to accommodate variety. Eighteen separate gossip sites attracted over a million unique visitors in June.

“We believe that there is always great room for celebrity coverage,” Fuller wrote in her email. “I found that when we grew Us Weekly and then at Star... there was no shortage of a consumer appetite for celebrity coverage. When you do something well, with its own distinct point of view, you can always find an audience.” Fuller has dipped her toe in the digital river by blogging for the Huffington Post. She has been averaging one or two posts a month – an alarmingly relaxed pace for someone with Web ambitions — on such trustworthy topics as 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy and Anne Hathaway’s boyfriend troubles. Ever canny, Fuller tries to mix a little politics in with the celebrity for the liberal Huffington Post audience, offering this optimistic post in April: “Hillary Clinton and Madonna: Both Unbowed and Uncowed — They’re Virtually the Same, and They Will Rule!”

Brown’s site is entering a more volatile area. Andrew Breitbart, who was a contributor for the Drudge Report and an early developer of the Huffington Post, noted that news aggregators are not as straightforward a business as they may seem. “Aggregators need to figure out something else, a point of view,” he said. The Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, two of the most popular aggregators, depend on their political slants – Drudge to the right, Huffington Post to the left – to define and capture their audience. Brown’s site will not have a particular political orientation. The goal instead will be identifying the kind of story that is interesting to a broad, upscale audience of culture consumers, and adapting to that audience’s patterns and preferences once they are clear.

One certainty is that in the news aggregrator realm, technology plays a central role. Wolff’s newser.com, for example, lets users slide a grid that customizes the page to show a particular number of stories at a time and to choose whether the stories are mainly “hard” – “serious, important, and immediate new,” or “soft,” “cultural, lifestyle, and celebrity news.” (The Drudge Report may be the exception; some say part of its appeal is its low-tech feel, a practically prehistoric-looking design with headlines crowded onto a plain white page with just a few straight-up photos).

But even Drudge faces the encroachment of the automated sites like Yahoo news and the even more popular user-driven aggregrator sites like Digg.com, which rank stories by how many readers “vote” for them as they appear around the Web.

The Digg model has the advantage of being a direct product of the Web’s conversational, free-for-all spirit. Many Web seers predict that Digg’s popularity-contest model will ultimately triumph over hand-edited, sensibility-driven sites like Brown’s. But Huffington expressed a sentiment common to those who have taken the Web plunge: “One of the best things about the new media is that it’s not a zero-sum game. The more sites there are offering smart, compelling content, the more people will get their news, opinion, and entertainment online.”

She had just one piece of advice for the web upstarts, as they leave behind the more human-scaled rhythms of the print world: “Be prepared to move quickly!”

--Maria Russo

Microsoft's ad campaign is still fuzzy post-Seinfeld

We are not a bunch of pudgy, bespectacled, suit-wearing doofuses shouts the new Microsoft ad campaign, firing back at the widely admired Get a Mac campaign from Apple. But OK, well, if we are those things, we're proud of it, 'cause those are good things! The spot, which debuted Thursday night, features a John Hodgman lookalike saying "I'm a PC, and I've become a stereotype," followed by quick-cut clips of various multi-cultural successful types declaring "I'm a PC," some claiming the nerdy traits ("I wear a suit!" "I wear glasses!" etc.) made famous by Hodgman's PC character.

So here we are in Phase 2 of the Microsoft campaign, according to the company. The unpopular and confusing Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates ads have been halted, for now, at two installments -- reportedly there's one still left to be aired, but no date is set. Microsoft is strenuously asserting that they planned the campaign just this way all along. But after the firestorm of criticism, the whole thing has the smell of Plan B.

The first new ad, called "Pride" and made by the same agency who did Seinfeld/Gates, Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, is shiny and peppy on the surface. The counterattack on Apple is clear enough: Don't you stereotype us, you snarky slackers! As Michael Arrington points out at TechCrunch, it does succeed in making Apple seem like the mean, name-calling kid, reminding you that lots of worthwhile folks are fine with their PC.

But the rest of the message is still, alas, a vast, undifferentiated wilderness. The tag line this time is "Life without walls," which doesn't mean a lot. So the ad zooms around the world to show us that the whole world is really one, and Microsoft plays a big role in that oneness. It's the "connection" alluded to in the Jerry and Bill ads. But it seems very pre-Internet to put yourself out there as a connector. If anything, in this age of e-mail/Twitter/IM/Facebook/RSS feeds, we could use a little less connection at times. It's way beyond Windows at this point.

Then there's that multicolored cornucopia of achievers from around the world: a black astronaut, a "green" architect, a mysterious-looking white guy with a beard. (Who is that guy anyway?) There's a lawyer, a graffiti artist, a mathematician, a fisherman. There's Tony Parker and Eva Longoria reclining poolside? Pharrell Williams? Deepak Chopra in a book-lined study proclaiming, "I'm a human being, not a human doing"?

Mixing celebrities and normals does not represent democracy -- you'd think this would be clear by now, especially after the Seinfeld debacle. Were the everyday people compensated, I wonder? If you pay a bunch of average people to say "I'm a PC," they'll say it, but it doesn't make it ring true. I'm trying to find that out, and will post if I get a response.

Somehow, the ad manages to make the concept of globalism, which has been reality for quite a while now, seem a little retro. In fact, the whole campaign is feeling a little bit too 20th century, from the ol' hands-across-the-world meme, to Jerry Seinfeld, to, in the end, Microsoft itself.

Update: A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed that the participants were compensated. I'll have a full statement from the company on that in another post soon.

-- Maria Russo

In the new Mac ad on the New York Times home page today, John Hodgman's curmudgeonly PC character drags out an "editorial" entitled "Stop Switching to Mac!" as written by PC. Justin Long's Mac looks on from the clean, empty, expensive ad space on top of the page. It's a continuation of Apple's history of designing Web ads that are literally out of the box -- they don't stay confined to the traditional online ad "cubes."

And like the rest of the campaign, the "stop switching" bit conveys its meaning clearly. PC, Mac suggests, desperately wants people to stick with him, even though all he has to offer is the same old same old. In other words: The Mac is to the Web as the PC is to fusty, old-school newspapers, with their table-pounding editorials. (Ouch.) Well, kudos to the New York Times for having the sense of humor to run it.

It also hits just a week after the kickoff of the Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld campaign for Microsoft, a cryptic TV spot that I wrote about last week, calling it meaningless and borderline offensive. A few commenters thought I went too far in reading subtext into the ad, and while I'm going to stand by the gist of what I wrote, I have to cop to one misfire of my own.

As Mary at the Mocking Words blog pointed out in an e-mail to me, when Jerry Seinfeld asks what he is feeling on Bill Gates' foot, Gates answers "pleather," not "leather." It's hard to make it out, but I listened extra hard several times, and she's right. Among Gates' many talents, actorly enunciation may not be at the top of the list. Bill, practice with this tongue twister:  "Unique New York, you know I need unique New York." Substitute "Redmond" if you'd like.

Anyway: pleather. Perhaps that explains why Jerry says he wears them in the shower, since pleather is waterproof. It does make the exchange seem less potentially sexual, although, maybe not.

-- Maria Russo

The new Microsoft commercial, featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates out discount shoe shopping, was unveiled Thursday night on TV. Today it's near the top of YouTube's most viewed list, and many of those viewers are leaving a trail of rancorous confusion all over the Web. People are asking, nay, demanding to know what the minute-and-a-half-long spot is trying to convey.

Seemingly anticipating the lack of enthusiasm, Microsoft offered an explanation for the commercial on its own site:

After seeing the new ad from Microsoft, which debuted today, some may wonder what Jerry Seinfeld helping Bill Gates pick out a new pair of shoes has to do with software. The answer, in the classic Seinfeld sense of the word, is nothing. Nevertheless, the spot is the first and most visible sign of an ambitious effort by Microsoft's Windows business to reconnect with consumers around the globe.

The post went on to explain that the campaign will show how Windows "has become an indispensable part of the lives of a billion people around the globe," not just on their PCs but also now online and via mobile devices.

But the commercial is not actually tapping into the "nothing" that "Seinfeld" was famously about. "Seinfeld" was about "nothing" because it showed everything that four friends did together. It was the "nothing" of, "What'd you do today?" "Nothing." But the Microsoft spot's little shoe-store vignette relies on unfunny far-fetched details: Seinfeld asking Gates if he ever takes a shower with his clothes on, for example. Thunk. (BoingBoing was in the minority in liking the spot's "absurdist" quality.)

The whole thing is chilly. It begins with Seinfeld walking past a discount shoe store called Shoe Circus. He is eating a churro. He reads out loud the store's name and a sign promising quality shoes at discount prices, then sees Bill Gates through the window trying on shoes and says, "Bill Gates!" and walks in to join the fun.

Let's start with the premise of these two famous rich people out discount shoe shopping. Ha, ha! They don't really have to shop at Payless like the half a million people who lost their jobs this year.

Gates and Seinfeld may both be schlumpy dressers, but their regular-guy qualities stop there. Neither is the Warren Buffett kind of rich, the frugal sort who knows the value of a dollar and doesn't put himself above the working man (or so we believe about Buffett). Instead the ad seems to be somehow making light of bargain-shopping, as if it's just a lark for these guys, or some kind of joke that we're not quite in on. 

A bit into the ad, Seinfeld suddenly takes over from the salesman and is helping fit Gates' shoes, offering him the "Conquistador -- they run very tight." As Seinfeld feels around for Gates' toe he says, "Is that your toe?" Gates says no. Seinfeld asks what it is and Gates says, "leather." The camera lingers on Gates face as he says "leather," and he appears to be attempting to give a meaningful look. Are we supposed to be interpreting something naughty in that exchange? It's not unreasonable to go there, especially after we've witnessed the fondling of Gates' feet by a kneeling Seinfeld.

The most disturbing part of the commercial begins with a cut to a Latino family standing outside the store and looking in the window as they too eat churros. "Es el Conquistador?" the woman says. The man replies in Spanish, "They run tight." There are English subtitles. These dark-skinned people stand close together and have befuddled expressions on their faces. They seem to take Shoe Circus very seriously.

Perhaps they're supposed to represent the consumers "around the globe" that Microsoft is trying to "reconnect" with, but the depiction seems condescending and borderline offensive. These are the kind of people who actually shop at a Shoe Circus, and not by choice. With their grim faces they look as if they have actual problems to deal with besides the tightness of the Conquistador, so the spectacle of them watching the two eternally boyish, care-free retired zillionaires try on shoes leaves a bad aftertaste. Jerry and Bill may well eat churros and buy cheap shoes just like the onlookers do, but Seinfeld goes home at night to his Hamptons estate and his dozen cars while Gates retires to his stadium-sized techno-mansion.

The Latinos are pressed up against the glass, fascinated by the action inside, but they do not appear to know who Gates and Seinfeld are. Are they too poor to own a TV? Do they represent the yearning Latino hordes trying to get in on the American consumerist dream?

Then back inside the clerk asks Gates if he has a Shoe Circus Clown Club card, which Gates produces, and it has the mug shot on it from Gates' juvenile arrest. This is the one comic touch that seems on the money.

As Seinfeld and Gates cross the parking lot after the purchase, the talk (finally) turns to Microsoft. Seinfeld asks Gates if they'll ever make computers "moist and chewy like cake, so we can just eat while we're working." If it's yes, Seinfeld says, "give me a signal. Adjust your shorts."

Then Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, chairman of the Gates Foundation, one of the great technology minds of our time, shakes his booty. It's seems meant to be humanizing -- the playful side of Bill Gates -- but comes off as one more awkward choice. This commercial has a double problem. It pulls none of the emotional strings that might have helped Microsoft "reconnect" with its audience (not that I remember ever being connected to them). And its main idea is a dadaist void. A decade after "Seinfeld," "nothing" has gotten old.

--Maria Russo

Last week, Warner Bros. brought back the defunct WB channel in a new form: an online-only network, the first one with a name inherited from Hollywood. You can watch august old WB shows on TheWB.com, along with raggedy new Web-only video series, and the effect, so far, is something like those professional dog walkers who have a Great Dane, two chihuahuas and a bulldog on the same leash. You know they're all the same species but -- wow, did the Creator really intend for them to be out strolling together?

But that's a little bit like Warner Bros. television. There's the studio itself, which is massive and traditional, defined by shows like "ER" and "The West Wing." Then there was, for a decade, the WB network, which, through independent-minded shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek," created iconic teen worlds in which beautiful people also suffered, and outsiders' obsession with social status could somehow look like social justice.

TheWB.com blends those two corporate identities into what they're calling a "curated experience" -- much in the spirt of an old-school TV network, in fact. With its attempt to be something unified in spirit, it goes a few sprightly steps further than sites like NBC and News Corp.'s more catch-all Hulu.com toward fusing the old TV model with the new one that's emerging on the Web.

Michael Weiss-Malik's "Proposal 2.0" on Google Maps Street View.

We have all heard stories about couples getting hitched through computer games, web comics, technology blogs and lolcats, but Michael Weiss-Malik thinks he may have topped them all. What's better than a kitty "marridj," you ask?

How about a Google Maps panoramic image, accessible by anyone, of the groom-to-be holding a sign reading, "Proposal 2.0: Marry me Leslie!!"

Weiss-Malik, 29, a software engineer for Google Inc., was informed along with many of his coworkers when the Google Street View van — the vehicle used to record panoramic street-level imagery for Google Maps — would be driving by the company's Mountain View headquarters.

Michael Weiss-Malik and Leslie Moreno at a wedding — not their own. (Photo: Michael Weiss-Malik)

He then designed and printed — using the company ink — a sign he would hold as the van snapped pictures, he said. He also registered MarryMeLeslie.com to document the Web 2.0 proposal.

"I wasn't sure if it would get a lot of attention," Weiss-Malik said.

It did. More than 50,000 flocked to the website, and the news got international coverage.

"I figured it would be kind of a fun way to do something big — a very public announcement of asking her to marry me," he said.

The advantage of his public proposal is that Weiss-Malik already secured a "yes" from his bride-to-be in what he calls "Proposal 1.0." The initial proposal was a pretty classic scenario, taking place during a quiet night at home, ring and all.

While Weiss-Malik's fiancee, Leslie Moreno, 26, is waiting to announce her official "yes" until the poll on their website tips toward a majority in support of the decision, here's a spoiler: It's going to happen. And the wedding date is already set tentatively for May 24.

"I got quite a few e-mails in my inbox suggesting that I marry Michael," Moreno said. "Most of the people have been really positive."

Since Google updated its Street View map earlier this month with Weiss-Malik's proposal intact, the heartwarming event has taken on a life of its own. Users spotted it, and submitted links to social media, giving it even more attention. A friend of Weiss-Malik updated Wikipedia's online proposal article to include Proposal 2.0.

"I was pretty sure no one had ever done it before, and only one person could have done it for the first time," Weiss-Malik said. "It's possible no one will ever do it again."

Maybe so, but here's hoping there are many more lolcat "proposalz" to come.

-- Mark Milian

That supposedly "mint condition" Spider-Man comic book you got on EBay that had half a page torn out is a dispute between you and the seller. The California courts are staying out of it, no matter how many lawsuits you file. Consumer protection laws don't apply to sales not specifically targeting California customers, according to an L.A. Times article posted Wednesday.

In the latest judicial message of "buyer beware" in Internet shopping, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said a federal district court in Northern California properly decided it didn't have jurisdiction to require a Wisconsin classic car seller to abide by this state's consumer protection laws.

1964 Ford Galaxie 500. (Photo credit: dave_7 / Flickr user)

The dispute began three years ago when Paul Boschetto of San Francisco offered the winning $34,106 bid for a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 XL auctioned by Wisconsin sellers who described the vehicle in their EBay ad as "in awesome condition, not restored, rust free chrome in excellent condition, recently rebuilt and ready to be driven."

When the car arrived, according to Boschetto's testimony to the federal district court, the engine wouldn't start and the car was rusty and dented.

Boschetto contacted EBay and Hansing in a fruitless effort to rescind the purchase, then filed suit in federal district court alleging violation of the California Consumer Protection Act, breach of contract, misrepresentation and fraud.

The fact that neither the courts nor EBay are stepping in to settle the dispute is disconcerting. And without a working car, it's going to be a pretty long bus ride to Wisconsin to settle this face to face.

-- Mark Milian

Bonnie Fuller, left, will launch a new celebrity news site for women. Tina Brown is behind an upcoming news and culture site.
(Photos: Evan Agostini / Getty Images | Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

It wasn’t so long ago that Tina Brown and Bonnie Fuller were busy transforming entire magazine genres. They lived on opposite ends of the taste spectrum — Brown edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, Fuller revamped Glamour, then re-invented the celebrity gossip concept at Us Weekly and later the Star — but the two had a similar formula: a willingness to throw out the old model, a feel for where the culture was heading and a forward-driving tenacity that became legendary in media circles.

Then old-media companies mostly stopped generating the large, ambitious projects Fuller and Brown cut their teeth on, and both editors stepped away from magazines. Now this summer finds both embarked on — what else? — Web start-ups. Fuller has started a Web company aimed at women ages 20 to 40, focusing on — what else? — celebrity news. Brown will run a news and culture site called The Daily Beast (after the fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel "Scoop”), which is funded by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp and will launch in the fall.

Brown and Fuller arrive with hefty resumes in a space where success in other quarters has not always proven transferable. What tends to hit on the Web is the home-grown, the grass-roots, the improvisational. Can either succeed on the Web, where all of their seeming advantages may turn out to be old-media baggage? “Not everyone crosses over so easily,” said Kara Swisher, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and columnist who is now co-executive editor of the tech news and opinion site AllThingsD.com. “But you never know who’s going to do well.”

Others are even less optimistic. Michael Wolff, the acerbic Vanity Fair columnist whose spectacular Internet start-up failure in the 90s was documented in his 1998 book “Burn Rate,” is one who thinks the key to success on the Internet lies entirely in understanding and innovating with technology – an area where neither Fuller nor Brown has yet shown much leadership. “I am very fond of Bonnie,” Wolff said. “There is no one in modern America who knows less about the Internet than Bonnie Fuller. Second to Bonnie Fuller is only Tina Brown.”

And last week, scolding new media tycoon Nick Denton took some potshots at Brown’s new project on his media gossip blog Gawker, calling her "the notoriously profligate Tina Brown" and suggesting that her site will fail because she will not be able to help spending Barry Diller’s money too freely.

But Brown and Fuller are used to being doubted (and derided) in the media, and both have proved by now that they can't be counted out lightly.

If media pedigree did matter, the British-born Brown would have a nice head start. She jazzed up Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and with studio chief Harvey Weinstein started the short-lived, much derided Talk. More recently, Brown hosted an obscure cable TV culture-chat show and wrote a best-selling biography of Princess Diana. She is almost finished writing a book about Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Exactly what kind of creature The Daily Beast will be, beyond falling into the category of “news aggregator” — a site that links to other news sources on the Web — has been the subject of much speculation. Brown was not available for comment, and a spokesperson would say only that the site will target “curious, busy and besieged professionals,” with some undetermined amount of original content and a focus on culture as well as news.

Fuller is still looking for partners, financing and advertiser support for her new company. The plan is to bring to the Web her brand of what she calls “addictive content” – her trademark mix of celebrity news and girlfriend-to-girlfriend advice on fashion, sex and relationships.

Wolff, whose latest venture is a news site of his own called newser.com, is not afraid of throwing water on the passions of other media figures. But he is not alone in cautioning that the Web is so different from print publications as to make the vast majority of crossover dreams seem “preposterous. It’s like, ‘I’m a theater person and I’m going to go into the movie business,” he said. “Only in the rarest of circumstances do those people succeed.”

One who did pull it off is Arianna Huffington, who went from syndicated political columnist to media mogul by starting the Huffington Post with just a handful of employees. Fuller and Brown, Swisher said, “have got to be looking at [Huffington] and saying, I can do that.”

Fuller said she is fully aware of the importance of technology and intends to use it to her advantage: “Digital technology is key to a unique online experience,” she said by email. “The voice I bring to this experience can be extended and ultimately deepened through technology.” Huffington, too, was no technology expert and had not distinguished herself on the Web (pre-Post, she was a medium-wattage columnist, author and media commentator). For allthingsd’s Swisher, it’s mainly about “using the Web well, the way people like.”

So although the celebrity-gossip space Fuller is entering is crowded it also seems able to accommodate variety. Eighteen separate gossip sites attracted over a million unique visitors in June.

“We believe that there is always great room for celebrity coverage,” Fuller wrote in her email. “I found that when we grew Us Weekly and then at Star... there was no shortage of a consumer appetite for celebrity coverage. When you do something well, with its own distinct point of view, you can always find an audience.” Fuller has dipped her toe in the digital river by blogging for the Huffington Post. She has been averaging one or two posts a month – an alarmingly relaxed pace for someone with Web ambitions — on such trustworthy topics as 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy and Anne Hathaway’s boyfriend troubles. Ever canny, Fuller tries to mix a little politics in with the celebrity for the liberal Huffington Post audience, offering this optimistic post in April: “Hillary Clinton and Madonna: Both Unbowed and Uncowed — They’re Virtually the Same, and They Will Rule!”

Brown’s site is entering a more volatile area. Andrew Breitbart, who was a contributor for the Drudge Report and an early developer of the Huffington Post, noted that news aggregators are not as straightforward a business as they may seem. “Aggregators need to figure out something else, a point of view,” he said. The Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, two of the most popular aggregators, depend on their political slants – Drudge to the right, Huffington Post to the left – to define and capture their audience. Brown’s site will not have a particular political orientation. The goal instead will be identifying the kind of story that is interesting to a broad, upscale audience of culture consumers, and adapting to that audience’s patterns and preferences once they are clear.

One certainty is that in the news aggregrator realm, technology plays a central role. Wolff’s newser.com, for example, lets users slide a grid that customizes the page to show a particular number of stories at a time and to choose whether the stories are mainly “hard” – “serious, important, and immediate new,” or “soft,” “cultural, lifestyle, and celebrity news.” (The Drudge Report may be the exception; some say part of its appeal is its low-tech feel, a practically prehistoric-looking design with headlines crowded onto a plain white page with just a few straight-up photos).

But even Drudge faces the encroachment of the automated sites like Yahoo news and the even more popular user-driven aggregrator sites like Digg.com, which rank stories by how many readers “vote” for them as they appear around the Web.

The Digg model has the advantage of being a direct product of the Web’s conversational, free-for-all spirit. Many Web seers predict that Digg’s popularity-contest model will ultimately triumph over hand-edited, sensibility-driven sites like Brown’s. But Huffington expressed a sentiment common to those who have taken the Web plunge: “One of the best things about the new media is that it’s not a zero-sum game. The more sites there are offering smart, compelling content, the more people will get their news, opinion, and entertainment online.”

She had just one piece of advice for the web upstarts, as they leave behind the more human-scaled rhythms of the print world: “Be prepared to move quickly!”

--Maria Russo

Apple ad takes a bite out of the NYT home page

In the new Mac ad on the New York Times home page today, John Hodgman's curmudgeonly PC character drags out an "editorial" entitled "Stop Switching to Mac!" as written by PC. Justin Long's Mac looks on from the clean, empty, expensive ad space on top of the page. It's a continuation of Apple's history of designing Web ads that are literally out of the box -- they don't stay confined to the traditional online ad "cubes."

And like the rest of the campaign, the "stop switching" bit conveys its meaning clearly. PC, Mac suggests, desperately wants people to stick with him, even though all he has to offer is the same old same old. In other words: The Mac is to the Web as the PC is to fusty, old-school newspapers, with their table-pounding editorials. (Ouch.) Well, kudos to the New York Times for having the sense of humor to run it.

It also hits just a week after the kickoff of the Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld campaign for Microsoft, a cryptic TV spot that I wrote about last week, calling it meaningless and borderline offensive. A few commenters thought I went too far in reading subtext into the ad, and while I'm going to stand by the gist of what I wrote, I have to cop to one misfire of my own.

As Mary at the Mocking Words blog pointed out in an e-mail to me, when Jerry Seinfeld asks what he is feeling on Bill Gates' foot, Gates answers "pleather," not "leather." It's hard to make it out, but I listened extra hard several times, and she's right. Among Gates' many talents, actorly enunciation may not be at the top of the list. Bill, practice with this tongue twister:  "Unique New York, you know I need unique New York." Substitute "Redmond" if you'd like.

Anyway: pleather. Perhaps that explains why Jerry says he wears them in the shower, since pleather is waterproof. It does make the exchange seem less potentially sexual, although, maybe not.

-- Maria Russo

The new Microsoft commercial, featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates out discount shoe shopping, was unveiled Thursday night on TV. Today it's near the top of YouTube's most viewed list, and many of those viewers are leaving a trail of rancorous confusion all over the Web. People are asking, nay, demanding to know what the minute-and-a-half-long spot is trying to convey.

Seemingly anticipating the lack of enthusiasm, Microsoft offered an explanation for the commercial on its own site:

After seeing the new ad from Microsoft, which debuted today, some may wonder what Jerry Seinfeld helping Bill Gates pick out a new pair of shoes has to do with software. The answer, in the classic Seinfeld sense of the word, is nothing. Nevertheless, the spot is the first and most visible sign of an ambitious effort by Microsoft's Windows business to reconnect with consumers around the globe.

The post went on to explain that the campaign will show how Windows "has become an indispensable part of the lives of a billion people around the globe," not just on their PCs but also now online and via mobile devices.

But the commercial is not actually tapping into the "nothing" that "Seinfeld" was famously about. "Seinfeld" was about "nothing" because it showed everything that four friends did together. It was the "nothing" of, "What'd you do today?" "Nothing." But the Microsoft spot's little shoe-store vignette relies on unfunny far-fetched details: Seinfeld asking Gates if he ever takes a shower with his clothes on, for example. Thunk. (BoingBoing was in the minority in liking the spot's "absurdist" quality.)

The whole thing is chilly. It begins with Seinfeld walking past a discount shoe store called Shoe Circus. He is eating a churro. He reads out loud the store's name and a sign promising quality shoes at discount prices, then sees Bill Gates through the window trying on shoes and says, "Bill Gates!" and walks in to join the fun.

Let's start with the premise of these two famous rich people out discount shoe shopping. Ha, ha! They don't really have to shop at Payless like the half a million people who lost their jobs this year.

Gates and Seinfeld may both be schlumpy dressers, but their regular-guy qualities stop there. Neither is the Warren Buffett kind of rich, the frugal sort who knows the value of a dollar and doesn't put himself above the working man (or so we believe about Buffett). Instead the ad seems to be somehow making light of bargain-shopping, as if it's just a lark for these guys, or some kind of joke that we're not quite in on. 

A bit into the ad, Seinfeld suddenly takes over from the salesman and is helping fit Gates' shoes, offering him the "Conquistador -- they run very tight." As Seinfeld feels around for Gates' toe he says, "Is that your toe?" Gates says no. Seinfeld asks what it is and Gates says, "leather." The camera lingers on Gates face as he says "leather," and he appears to be attempting to give a meaningful look. Are we supposed to be interpreting something naughty in that exchange? It's not unreasonable to go there, especially after we've witnessed the fondling of Gates' feet by a kneeling Seinfeld.

The most disturbing part of the commercial begins with a cut to a Latino family standing outside the store and looking in the window as they too eat churros. "Es el Conquistador?" the woman says. The man replies in Spanish, "They run tight." There are English subtitles. These dark-skinned people stand close together and have befuddled expressions on their faces. They seem to take Shoe Circus very seriously.

Perhaps they're supposed to represent the consumers "around the globe" that Microsoft is trying to "reconnect" with, but the depiction seems condescending and borderline offensive. These are the kind of people who actually shop at a Shoe Circus, and not by choice. With their grim faces they look as if they have actual problems to deal with besides the tightness of the Conquistador, so the spectacle of them watching the two eternally boyish, care-free retired zillionaires try on shoes leaves a bad aftertaste. Jerry and Bill may well eat churros and buy cheap shoes just like the onlookers do, but Seinfeld goes home at night to his Hamptons estate and his dozen cars while Gates retires to his stadium-sized techno-mansion.

The Latinos are pressed up against the glass, fascinated by the action inside, but they do not appear to know who Gates and Seinfeld are. Are they too poor to own a TV? Do they represent the yearning Latino hordes trying to get in on the American consumerist dream?

Then back inside the clerk asks Gates if he has a Shoe Circus Clown Club card, which Gates produces, and it has the mug shot on it from Gates' juvenile arrest. This is the one comic touch that seems on the money.

As Seinfeld and Gates cross the parking lot after the purchase, the talk (finally) turns to Microsoft. Seinfeld asks Gates if they'll ever make computers "moist and chewy like cake, so we can just eat while we're working." If it's yes, Seinfeld says, "give me a signal. Adjust your shorts."

Then Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, chairman of the Gates Foundation, one of the great technology minds of our time, shakes his booty. It's seems meant to be humanizing -- the playful side of Bill Gates -- but comes off as one more awkward choice. This commercial has a double problem. It pulls none of the emotional strings that might have helped Microsoft "reconnect" with its audience (not that I remember ever being connected to them). And its main idea is a dadaist void. A decade after "Seinfeld," "nothing" has gotten old.

--Maria Russo

Last week, Warner Bros. brought back the defunct WB channel in a new form: an online-only network, the first one with a name inherited from Hollywood. You can watch august old WB shows on TheWB.com, along with raggedy new Web-only video series, and the effect, so far, is something like those professional dog walkers who have a Great Dane, two chihuahuas and a bulldog on the same leash. You know they're all the same species but -- wow, did the Creator really intend for them to be out strolling together?

But that's a little bit like Warner Bros. television. There's the studio itself, which is massive and traditional, defined by shows like "ER" and "The West Wing." Then there was, for a decade, the WB network, which, through independent-minded shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek," created iconic teen worlds in which beautiful people also suffered, and outsiders' obsession with social status could somehow look like social justice.

TheWB.com blends those two corporate identities into what they're calling a "curated experience" -- much in the spirt of an old-school TV network, in fact. With its attempt to be something unified in spirit, it goes a few sprightly steps further than sites like NBC and News Corp.'s more catch-all Hulu.com toward fusing the old TV model with the new one that's emerging on the Web.

Michael Weiss-Malik's "Proposal 2.0" on Google Maps Street View.

We have all heard stories about couples getting hitched through computer games, web comics, technology blogs and lolcats, but Michael Weiss-Malik thinks he may have topped them all. What's better than a kitty "marridj," you ask?

How about a Google Maps panoramic image, accessible by anyone, of the groom-to-be holding a sign reading, "Proposal 2.0: Marry me Leslie!!"

Weiss-Malik, 29, a software engineer for Google Inc., was informed along with many of his coworkers when the Google Street View van — the vehicle used to record panoramic street-level imagery for Google Maps — would be driving by the company's Mountain View headquarters.

Michael Weiss-Malik and Leslie Moreno at a wedding — not their own. (Photo: Michael Weiss-Malik)

He then designed and printed — using the company ink — a sign he would hold as the van snapped pictures, he said. He also registered MarryMeLeslie.com to document the Web 2.0 proposal.

"I wasn't sure if it would get a lot of attention," Weiss-Malik said.

It did. More than 50,000 flocked to the website, and the news got international coverage.

"I figured it would be kind of a fun way to do something big — a very public announcement of asking her to marry me," he said.

The advantage of his public proposal is that Weiss-Malik already secured a "yes" from his bride-to-be in what he calls "Proposal 1.0." The initial proposal was a pretty classic scenario, taking place during a quiet night at home, ring and all.

While Weiss-Malik's fiancee, Leslie Moreno, 26, is waiting to announce her official "yes" until the poll on their website tips toward a majority in support of the decision, here's a spoiler: It's going to happen. And the wedding date is already set tentatively for May 24.

"I got quite a few e-mails in my inbox suggesting that I marry Michael," Moreno said. "Most of the people have been really positive."

Since Google updated its Street View map earlier this month with Weiss-Malik's proposal intact, the heartwarming event has taken on a life of its own. Users spotted it, and submitted links to social media, giving it even more attention. A friend of Weiss-Malik updated Wikipedia's online proposal article to include Proposal 2.0.

"I was pretty sure no one had ever done it before, and only one person could have done it for the first time," Weiss-Malik said. "It's possible no one will ever do it again."

Maybe so, but here's hoping there are many more lolcat "proposalz" to come.

-- Mark Milian

That supposedly "mint condition" Spider-Man comic book you got on EBay that had half a page torn out is a dispute between you and the seller. The California courts are staying out of it, no matter how many lawsuits you file. Consumer protection laws don't apply to sales not specifically targeting California customers, according to an L.A. Times article posted Wednesday.

In the latest judicial message of "buyer beware" in Internet shopping, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said a federal district court in Northern California properly decided it didn't have jurisdiction to require a Wisconsin classic car seller to abide by this state's consumer protection laws.

1964 Ford Galaxie 500. (Photo credit: dave_7 / Flickr user)

The dispute began three years ago when Paul Boschetto of San Francisco offered the winning $34,106 bid for a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 XL auctioned by Wisconsin sellers who described the vehicle in their EBay ad as "in awesome condition, not restored, rust free chrome in excellent condition, recently rebuilt and ready to be driven."

When the car arrived, according to Boschetto's testimony to the federal district court, the engine wouldn't start and the car was rusty and dented.

Boschetto contacted EBay and Hansing in a fruitless effort to rescind the purchase, then filed suit in federal district court alleging violation of the California Consumer Protection Act, breach of contract, misrepresentation and fraud.

The fact that neither the courts nor EBay are stepping in to settle the dispute is disconcerting. And without a working car, it's going to be a pretty long bus ride to Wisconsin to settle this face to face.

-- Mark Milian

Bonnie Fuller, left, will launch a new celebrity news site for women. Tina Brown is behind an upcoming news and culture site.
(Photos: Evan Agostini / Getty Images | Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

It wasn’t so long ago that Tina Brown and Bonnie Fuller were busy transforming entire magazine genres. They lived on opposite ends of the taste spectrum — Brown edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, Fuller revamped Glamour, then re-invented the celebrity gossip concept at Us Weekly and later the Star — but the two had a similar formula: a willingness to throw out the old model, a feel for where the culture was heading and a forward-driving tenacity that became legendary in media circles.

Then old-media companies mostly stopped generating the large, ambitious projects Fuller and Brown cut their teeth on, and both editors stepped away from magazines. Now this summer finds both embarked on — what else? — Web start-ups. Fuller has started a Web company aimed at women ages 20 to 40, focusing on — what else? — celebrity news. Brown will run a news and culture site called The Daily Beast (after the fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel "Scoop”), which is funded by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp and will launch in the fall.

Brown and Fuller arrive with hefty resumes in a space where success in other quarters has not always proven transferable. What tends to hit on the Web is the home-grown, the grass-roots, the improvisational. Can either succeed on the Web, where all of their seeming advantages may turn out to be old-media baggage? “Not everyone crosses over so easily,” said Kara Swisher, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and columnist who is now co-executive editor of the tech news and opinion site AllThingsD.com. “But you never know who’s going to do well.”

Others are even less optimistic. Michael Wolff, the acerbic Vanity Fair columnist whose spectacular Internet start-up failure in the 90s was documented in his 1998 book “Burn Rate,” is one who thinks the key to success on the Internet lies entirely in understanding and innovating with technology – an area where neither Fuller nor Brown has yet shown much leadership. “I am very fond of Bonnie,” Wolff said. “There is no one in modern America who knows less about the Internet than Bonnie Fuller. Second to Bonnie Fuller is only Tina Brown.”

And last week, scolding new media tycoon Nick Denton took some potshots at Brown’s new project on his media gossip blog Gawker, calling her "the notoriously profligate Tina Brown" and suggesting that her site will fail because she will not be able to help spending Barry Diller’s money too freely.

But Brown and Fuller are used to being doubted (and derided) in the media, and both have proved by now that they can't be counted out lightly.

If media pedigree did matter, the British-born Brown would have a nice head start. She jazzed up Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and with studio chief Harvey Weinstein started the short-lived, much derided Talk. More recently, Brown hosted an obscure cable TV culture-chat show and wrote a best-selling biography of Princess Diana. She is almost finished writing a book about Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Exactly what kind of creature The Daily Beast will be, beyond falling into the category of “news aggregator” — a site that links to other news sources on the Web — has been the subject of much speculation. Brown was not available for comment, and a spokesperson would say only that the site will target “curious, busy and besieged professionals,” with some undetermined amount of original content and a focus on culture as well as news.

Fuller is still looking for partners, financing and advertiser support for her new company. The plan is to bring to the Web her brand of what she calls “addictive content” – her trademark mix of celebrity news and girlfriend-to-girlfriend advice on fashion, sex and relationships.

Wolff, whose latest venture is a news site of his own called newser.com, is not afraid of throwing water on the passions of other media figures. But he is not alone in cautioning that the Web is so different from print publications as to make the vast majority of crossover dreams seem “preposterous. It’s like, ‘I’m a theater person and I’m going to go into the movie business,” he said. “Only in the rarest of circumstances do those people succeed.”

One who did pull it off is Arianna Huffington, who went from syndicated political columnist to media mogul by starting the Huffington Post with just a handful of employees. Fuller and Brown, Swisher said, “have got to be looking at [Huffington] and saying, I can do that.”

Fuller said she is fully aware of the importance of technology and intends to use it to her advantage: “Digital technology is key to a unique online experience,” she said by email. “The voice I bring to this experience can be extended and ultimately deepened through technology.” Huffington, too, was no technology expert and had not distinguished herself on the Web (pre-Post, she was a medium-wattage columnist, author and media commentator). For allthingsd’s Swisher, it’s mainly about “using the Web well, the way people like.”

So although the celebrity-gossip space Fuller is entering is crowded it also seems able to accommodate variety. Eighteen separate gossip sites attracted over a million unique visitors in June.

“We believe that there is always great room for celebrity coverage,” Fuller wrote in her email. “I found that when we grew Us Weekly and then at Star... there was no shortage of a consumer appetite for celebrity coverage. When you do something well, with its own distinct point of view, you can always find an audience.” Fuller has dipped her toe in the digital river by blogging for the Huffington Post. She has been averaging one or two posts a month – an alarmingly relaxed pace for someone with Web ambitions — on such trustworthy topics as 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy and Anne Hathaway’s boyfriend troubles. Ever canny, Fuller tries to mix a little politics in with the celebrity for the liberal Huffington Post audience, offering this optimistic post in April: “Hillary Clinton and Madonna: Both Unbowed and Uncowed — They’re Virtually the Same, and They Will Rule!”

Brown’s site is entering a more volatile area. Andrew Breitbart, who was a contributor for the Drudge Report and an early developer of the Huffington Post, noted that news aggregators are not as straightforward a business as they may seem. “Aggregators need to figure out something else, a point of view,” he said. The Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, two of the most popular aggregators, depend on their political slants – Drudge to the right, Huffington Post to the left – to define and capture their audience. Brown’s site will not have a particular political orientation. The goal instead will be identifying the kind of story that is interesting to a broad, upscale audience of culture consumers, and adapting to that audience’s patterns and preferences once they are clear.

One certainty is that in the news aggregrator realm, technology plays a central role. Wolff’s newser.com, for example, lets users slide a grid that customizes the page to show a particular number of stories at a time and to choose whether the stories are mainly “hard” – “serious, important, and immediate new,” or “soft,” “cultural, lifestyle, and celebrity news.” (The Drudge Report may be the exception; some say part of its appeal is its low-tech feel, a practically prehistoric-looking design with headlines crowded onto a plain white page with just a few straight-up photos).

But even Drudge faces the encroachment of the automated sites like Yahoo news and the even more popular user-driven aggregrator sites like Digg.com, which rank stories by how many readers “vote” for them as they appear around the Web.

The Digg model has the advantage of being a direct product of the Web’s conversational, free-for-all spirit. Many Web seers predict that Digg’s popularity-contest model will ultimately triumph over hand-edited, sensibility-driven sites like Brown’s. But Huffington expressed a sentiment common to those who have taken the Web plunge: “One of the best things about the new media is that it’s not a zero-sum game. The more sites there are offering smart, compelling content, the more people will get their news, opinion, and entertainment online.”

She had just one piece of advice for the web upstarts, as they leave behind the more human-scaled rhythms of the print world: “Be prepared to move quickly!”

--Maria Russo

Seinfeld and Gates' Microsoft misfire

The new Microsoft commercial, featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates out discount shoe shopping, was unveiled Thursday night on TV. Today it's near the top of YouTube's most viewed list, and many of those viewers are leaving a trail of rancorous confusion all over the Web. People are asking, nay, demanding to know what the minute-and-a-half-long spot is trying to convey.

Seemingly anticipating the lack of enthusiasm, Microsoft offered an explanation for the commercial on its own site:

After seeing the new ad from Microsoft, which debuted today, some may wonder what Jerry Seinfeld helping Bill Gates pick out a new pair of shoes has to do with software. The answer, in the classic Seinfeld sense of the word, is nothing. Nevertheless, the spot is the first and most visible sign of an ambitious effort by Microsoft's Windows business to reconnect with consumers around the globe.

The post went on to explain that the campaign will show how Windows "has become an indispensable part of the lives of a billion people around the globe," not just on their PCs but also now online and via mobile devices.

But the commercial is not actually tapping into the "nothing" that "Seinfeld" was famously about. "Seinfeld" was about "nothing" because it showed everything that four friends did together. It was the "nothing" of, "What'd you do today?" "Nothing." But the Microsoft spot's little shoe-store vignette relies on unfunny far-fetched details: Seinfeld asking Gates if he ever takes a shower with his clothes on, for example. Thunk. (BoingBoing was in the minority in liking the spot's "absurdist" quality.)

The whole thing is chilly. It begins with Seinfeld walking past a discount shoe store called Shoe Circus. He is eating a churro. He reads out loud the store's name and a sign promising quality shoes at discount prices, then sees Bill Gates through the window trying on shoes and says, "Bill Gates!" and walks in to join the fun.

Let's start with the premise of these two famous rich people out discount shoe shopping. Ha, ha! They don't really have to shop at Payless like the half a million people who lost their jobs this year.

Gates and Seinfeld may both be schlumpy dressers, but their regular-guy qualities stop there. Neither is the Warren Buffett kind of rich, the frugal sort who knows the value of a dollar and doesn't put himself above the working man (or so we believe about Buffett). Instead the ad seems to be somehow making light of bargain-shopping, as if it's just a lark for these guys, or some kind of joke that we're not quite in on. 

A bit into the ad, Seinfeld suddenly takes over from the salesman and is helping fit Gates' shoes, offering him the "Conquistador -- they run very tight." As Seinfeld feels around for Gates' toe he says, "Is that your toe?" Gates says no. Seinfeld asks what it is and Gates says, "leather." The camera lingers on Gates face as he says "leather," and he appears to be attempting to give a meaningful look. Are we supposed to be interpreting something naughty in that exchange? It's not unreasonable to go there, especially after we've witnessed the fondling of Gates' feet by a kneeling Seinfeld.

The most disturbing part of the commercial begins with a cut to a Latino family standing outside the store and looking in the window as they too eat churros. "Es el Conquistador?" the woman says. The man replies in Spanish, "They run tight." There are English subtitles. These dark-skinned people stand close together and have befuddled expressions on their faces. They seem to take Shoe Circus very seriously.

Perhaps they're supposed to represent the consumers "around the globe" that Microsoft is trying to "reconnect" with, but the depiction seems condescending and borderline offensive. These are the kind of people who actually shop at a Shoe Circus, and not by choice. With their grim faces they look as if they have actual problems to deal with besides the tightness of the Conquistador, so the spectacle of them watching the two eternally boyish, care-free retired zillionaires try on shoes leaves a bad aftertaste. Jerry and Bill may well eat churros and buy cheap shoes just like the onlookers do, but Seinfeld goes home at night to his Hamptons estate and his dozen cars while Gates retires to his stadium-sized techno-mansion.

The Latinos are pressed up against the glass, fascinated by the action inside, but they do not appear to know who Gates and Seinfeld are. Are they too poor to own a TV? Do they represent the yearning Latino hordes trying to get in on the American consumerist dream?

Then back inside the clerk asks Gates if he has a Shoe Circus Clown Club card, which Gates produces, and it has the mug shot on it from Gates' juvenile arrest. This is the one comic touch that seems on the money.

As Seinfeld and Gates cross the parking lot after the purchase, the talk (finally) turns to Microsoft. Seinfeld asks Gates if they'll ever make computers "moist and chewy like cake, so we can just eat while we're working." If it's yes, Seinfeld says, "give me a signal. Adjust your shorts."

Then Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, chairman of the Gates Foundation, one of the great technology minds of our time, shakes his booty. It's seems meant to be humanizing -- the playful side of Bill Gates -- but comes off as one more awkward choice. This commercial has a double problem. It pulls none of the emotional strings that might have helped Microsoft "reconnect" with its audience (not that I remember ever being connected to them). And its main idea is a dadaist void. A decade after "Seinfeld," "nothing" has gotten old.

--Maria Russo

Last week, Warner Bros. brought back the defunct WB channel in a new form: an online-only network, the first one with a name inherited from Hollywood. You can watch august old WB shows on TheWB.com, along with raggedy new Web-only video series, and the effect, so far, is something like those professional dog walkers who have a Great Dane, two chihuahuas and a bulldog on the same leash. You know they're all the same species but -- wow, did the Creator really intend for them to be out strolling together?

But that's a little bit like Warner Bros. television. There's the studio itself, which is massive and traditional, defined by shows like "ER" and "The West Wing." Then there was, for a decade, the WB network, which, through independent-minded shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek," created iconic teen worlds in which beautiful people also suffered, and outsiders' obsession with social status could somehow look like social justice.

TheWB.com blends those two corporate identities into what they're calling a "curated experience" -- much in the spirt of an old-school TV network, in fact. With its attempt to be something unified in spirit, it goes a few sprightly steps further than sites like NBC and News Corp.'s more catch-all Hulu.com toward fusing the old TV model with the new one that's emerging on the Web.

Michael Weiss-Malik's "Proposal 2.0" on Google Maps Street View.

We have all heard stories about couples getting hitched through computer games, web comics, technology blogs and lolcats, but Michael Weiss-Malik thinks he may have topped them all. What's better than a kitty "marridj," you ask?

How about a Google Maps panoramic image, accessible by anyone, of the groom-to-be holding a sign reading, "Proposal 2.0: Marry me Leslie!!"

Weiss-Malik, 29, a software engineer for Google Inc., was informed along with many of his coworkers when the Google Street View van — the vehicle used to record panoramic street-level imagery for Google Maps — would be driving by the company's Mountain View headquarters.

Michael Weiss-Malik and Leslie Moreno at a wedding — not their own. (Photo: Michael Weiss-Malik)

He then designed and printed — using the company ink — a sign he would hold as the van snapped pictures, he said. He also registered MarryMeLeslie.com to document the Web 2.0 proposal.

"I wasn't sure if it would get a lot of attention," Weiss-Malik said.

It did. More than 50,000 flocked to the website, and the news got international coverage.

"I figured it would be kind of a fun way to do something big — a very public announcement of asking her to marry me," he said.

The advantage of his public proposal is that Weiss-Malik already secured a "yes" from his bride-to-be in what he calls "Proposal 1.0." The initial proposal was a pretty classic scenario, taking place during a quiet night at home, ring and all.

While Weiss-Malik's fiancee, Leslie Moreno, 26, is waiting to announce her official "yes" until the poll on their website tips toward a majority in support of the decision, here's a spoiler: It's going to happen. And the wedding date is already set tentatively for May 24.

"I got quite a few e-mails in my inbox suggesting that I marry Michael," Moreno said. "Most of the people have been really positive."

Since Google updated its Street View map earlier this month with Weiss-Malik's proposal intact, the heartwarming event has taken on a life of its own. Users spotted it, and submitted links to social media, giving it even more attention. A friend of Weiss-Malik updated Wikipedia's online proposal article to include Proposal 2.0.

"I was pretty sure no one had ever done it before, and only one person could have done it for the first time," Weiss-Malik said. "It's possible no one will ever do it again."

Maybe so, but here's hoping there are many more lolcat "proposalz" to come.

-- Mark Milian

That supposedly "mint condition" Spider-Man comic book you got on EBay that had half a page torn out is a dispute between you and the seller. The California courts are staying out of it, no matter how many lawsuits you file. Consumer protection laws don't apply to sales not specifically targeting California customers, according to an L.A. Times article posted Wednesday.

In the latest judicial message of "buyer beware" in Internet shopping, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said a federal district court in Northern California properly decided it didn't have jurisdiction to require a Wisconsin classic car seller to abide by this state's consumer protection laws.

1964 Ford Galaxie 500. (Photo credit: dave_7 / Flickr user)

The dispute began three years ago when Paul Boschetto of San Francisco offered the winning $34,106 bid for a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 XL auctioned by Wisconsin sellers who described the vehicle in their EBay ad as "in awesome condition, not restored, rust free chrome in excellent condition, recently rebuilt and ready to be driven."

When the car arrived, according to Boschetto's testimony to the federal district court, the engine wouldn't start and the car was rusty and dented.

Boschetto contacted EBay and Hansing in a fruitless effort to rescind the purchase, then filed suit in federal district court alleging violation of the California Consumer Protection Act, breach of contract, misrepresentation and fraud.

The fact that neither the courts nor EBay are stepping in to settle the dispute is disconcerting. And without a working car, it's going to be a pretty long bus ride to Wisconsin to settle this face to face.

-- Mark Milian

Bonnie Fuller, left, will launch a new celebrity news site for women. Tina Brown is behind an upcoming news and culture site.
(Photos: Evan Agostini / Getty Images | Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

It wasn’t so long ago that Tina Brown and Bonnie Fuller were busy transforming entire magazine genres. They lived on opposite ends of the taste spectrum — Brown edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, Fuller revamped Glamour, then re-invented the celebrity gossip concept at Us Weekly and later the Star — but the two had a similar formula: a willingness to throw out the old model, a feel for where the culture was heading and a forward-driving tenacity that became legendary in media circles.

Then old-media companies mostly stopped generating the large, ambitious projects Fuller and Brown cut their teeth on, and both editors stepped away from magazines. Now this summer finds both embarked on — what else? — Web start-ups. Fuller has started a Web company aimed at women ages 20 to 40, focusing on — what else? — celebrity news. Brown will run a news and culture site called The Daily Beast (after the fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel "Scoop”), which is funded by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp and will launch in the fall.

Brown and Fuller arrive with hefty resumes in a space where success in other quarters has not always proven transferable. What tends to hit on the Web is the home-grown, the grass-roots, the improvisational. Can either succeed on the Web, where all of their seeming advantages may turn out to be old-media baggage? “Not everyone crosses over so easily,” said Kara Swisher, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and columnist who is now co-executive editor of the tech news and opinion site AllThingsD.com. “But you never know who’s going to do well.”

Others are even less optimistic. Michael Wolff, the acerbic Vanity Fair columnist whose spectacular Internet start-up failure in the 90s was documented in his 1998 book “Burn Rate,” is one who thinks the key to success on the Internet lies entirely in understanding and innovating with technology – an area where neither Fuller nor Brown has yet shown much leadership. “I am very fond of Bonnie,” Wolff said. “There is no one in modern America who knows less about the Internet than Bonnie Fuller. Second to Bonnie Fuller is only Tina Brown.”

And last week, scolding new media tycoon Nick Denton took some potshots at Brown’s new project on his media gossip blog Gawker, calling her "the notoriously profligate Tina Brown" and suggesting that her site will fail because she will not be able to help spending Barry Diller’s money too freely.

But Brown and Fuller are used to being doubted (and derided) in the media, and both have proved by now that they can't be counted out lightly.

If media pedigree did matter, the British-born Brown would have a nice head start. She jazzed up Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and with studio chief Harvey Weinstein started the short-lived, much derided Talk. More recently, Brown hosted an obscure cable TV culture-chat show and wrote a best-selling biography of Princess Diana. She is almost finished writing a book about Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Exactly what kind of creature The Daily Beast will be, beyond falling into the category of “news aggregator” — a site that links to other news sources on the Web — has been the subject of much speculation. Brown was not available for comment, and a spokesperson would say only that the site will target “curious, busy and besieged professionals,” with some undetermined amount of original content and a focus on culture as well as news.

Fuller is still looking for partners, financing and advertiser support for her new company. The plan is to bring to the Web her brand of what she calls “addictive content” – her trademark mix of celebrity news and girlfriend-to-girlfriend advice on fashion, sex and relationships.

Wolff, whose latest venture is a news site of his own called newser.com, is not afraid of throwing water on the passions of other media figures. But he is not alone in cautioning that the Web is so different from print publications as to make the vast majority of crossover dreams seem “preposterous. It’s like, ‘I’m a theater person and I’m going to go into the movie business,” he said. “Only in the rarest of circumstances do those people succeed.”

One who did pull it off is Arianna Huffington, who went from syndicated political columnist to media mogul by starting the Huffington Post with just a handful of employees. Fuller and Brown, Swisher said, “have got to be looking at [Huffington] and saying, I can do that.”

Fuller said she is fully aware of the importance of technology and intends to use it to her advantage: “Digital technology is key to a unique online experience,” she said by email. “The voice I bring to this experience can be extended and ultimately deepened through technology.” Huffington, too, was no technology expert and had not distinguished herself on the Web (pre-Post, she was a medium-wattage columnist, author and media commentator). For allthingsd’s Swisher, it’s mainly about “using the Web well, the way people like.”

So although the celebrity-gossip space Fuller is entering is crowded it also seems able to accommodate variety. Eighteen separate gossip sites attracted over a million unique visitors in June.

“We believe that there is always great room for celebrity coverage,” Fuller wrote in her email. “I found that when we grew Us Weekly and then at Star... there was no shortage of a consumer appetite for celebrity coverage. When you do something well, with its own distinct point of view, you can always find an audience.” Fuller has dipped her toe in the digital river by blogging for the Huffington Post. She has been averaging one or two posts a month – an alarmingly relaxed pace for someone with Web ambitions — on such trustworthy topics as 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy and Anne Hathaway’s boyfriend troubles. Ever canny, Fuller tries to mix a little politics in with the celebrity for the liberal Huffington Post audience, offering this optimistic post in April: “Hillary Clinton and Madonna: Both Unbowed and Uncowed — They’re Virtually the Same, and They Will Rule!”

Brown’s site is entering a more volatile area. Andrew Breitbart, who was a contributor for the Drudge Report and an early developer of the Huffington Post, noted that news aggregators are not as straightforward a business as they may seem. “Aggregators need to figure out something else, a point of view,” he said. The Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, two of the most popular aggregators, depend on their political slants – Drudge to the right, Huffington Post to the left – to define and capture their audience. Brown’s site will not have a particular political orientation. The goal instead will be identifying the kind of story that is interesting to a broad, upscale audience of culture consumers, and adapting to that audience’s patterns and preferences once they are clear.

One certainty is that in the news aggregrator realm, technology plays a central role. Wolff’s newser.com, for example, lets users slide a grid that customizes the page to show a particular number of stories at a time and to choose whether the stories are mainly “hard” – “serious, important, and immediate new,” or “soft,” “cultural, lifestyle, and celebrity news.” (The Drudge Report may be the exception; some say part of its appeal is its low-tech feel, a practically prehistoric-looking design with headlines crowded onto a plain white page with just a few straight-up photos).

But even Drudge faces the encroachment of the automated sites like Yahoo news and the even more popular user-driven aggregrator sites like Digg.com, which rank stories by how many readers “vote” for them as they appear around the Web.

The Digg model has the advantage of being a direct product of the Web’s conversational, free-for-all spirit. Many Web seers predict that Digg’s popularity-contest model will ultimately triumph over hand-edited, sensibility-driven sites like Brown’s. But Huffington expressed a sentiment common to those who have taken the Web plunge: “One of the best things about the new media is that it’s not a zero-sum game. The more sites there are offering smart, compelling content, the more people will get their news, opinion, and entertainment online.”

She had just one piece of advice for the web upstarts, as they leave behind the more human-scaled rhythms of the print world: “Be prepared to move quickly!”

--Maria Russo

The old WB and the online future

Last week, Warner Bros. brought back the defunct WB channel in a new form: an online-only network, the first one with a name inherited from Hollywood. You can watch august old WB shows on TheWB.com, along with raggedy new Web-only video series, and the effect, so far, is something like those professional dog walkers who have a Great Dane, two chihuahuas and a bulldog on the same leash. You know they're all the same species but -- wow, did the Creator really intend for them to be out strolling together?

But that's a little bit like Warner Bros. television. There's the studio itself, which is massive and traditional, defined by shows like "ER" and "The West Wing." Then there was, for a decade, the WB network, which, through independent-minded shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek," created iconic teen worlds in which beautiful people also suffered, and outsiders' obsession with social status could somehow look like social justice.

TheWB.com blends those two corporate identities into what they're calling a "curated experience" -- much in the spirt of an old-school TV network, in fact. With its attempt to be something unified in spirit, it goes a few sprightly steps further than sites like NBC and News Corp.'s more catch-all Hulu.com toward fusing the old TV model with the new one that's emerging on the Web.

Michael Weiss-Malik's "Proposal 2.0" on Google Maps Street View.

We have all heard stories about couples getting hitched through computer games, web comics, technology blogs and lolcats, but Michael Weiss-Malik thinks he may have topped them all. What's better than a kitty "marridj," you ask?

How about a Google Maps panoramic image, accessible by anyone, of the groom-to-be holding a sign reading, "Proposal 2.0: Marry me Leslie!!"

Weiss-Malik, 29, a software engineer for Google Inc., was informed along with many of his coworkers when the Google Street View van — the vehicle used to record panoramic street-level imagery for Google Maps — would be driving by the company's Mountain View headquarters.

Michael Weiss-Malik and Leslie Moreno at a wedding — not their own. (Photo: Michael Weiss-Malik)

He then designed and printed — using the company ink — a sign he would hold as the van snapped pictures, he said. He also registered MarryMeLeslie.com to document the Web 2.0 proposal.

"I wasn't sure if it would get a lot of attention," Weiss-Malik said.

It did. More than 50,000 flocked to the website, and the news got international coverage.

"I figured it would be kind of a fun way to do something big — a very public announcement of asking her to marry me," he said.

The advantage of his public proposal is that Weiss-Malik already secured a "yes" from his bride-to-be in what he calls "Proposal 1.0." The initial proposal was a pretty classic scenario, taking place during a quiet night at home, ring and all.

While Weiss-Malik's fiancee, Leslie Moreno, 26, is waiting to announce her official "yes" until the poll on their website tips toward a majority in support of the decision, here's a spoiler: It's going to happen. And the wedding date is already set tentatively for May 24.

"I got quite a few e-mails in my inbox suggesting that I marry Michael," Moreno said. "Most of the people have been really positive."

Since Google updated its Street View map earlier this month with Weiss-Malik's proposal intact, the heartwarming event has taken on a life of its own. Users spotted it, and submitted links to social media, giving it even more attention. A friend of Weiss-Malik updated Wikipedia's online proposal article to include Proposal 2.0.

"I was pretty sure no one had ever done it before, and only one person could have done it for the first time," Weiss-Malik said. "It's possible no one will ever do it again."

Maybe so, but here's hoping there are many more lolcat "proposalz" to come.

-- Mark Milian

That supposedly "mint condition" Spider-Man comic book you got on EBay that had half a page torn out is a dispute between you and the seller. The California courts are staying out of it, no matter how many lawsuits you file. Consumer protection laws don't apply to sales not specifically targeting California customers, according to an L.A. Times article posted Wednesday.

In the latest judicial message of "buyer beware" in Internet shopping, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said a federal district court in Northern California properly decided it didn't have jurisdiction to require a Wisconsin classic car seller to abide by this state's consumer protection laws.

1964 Ford Galaxie 500. (Photo credit: dave_7 / Flickr user)

The dispute began three years ago when Paul Boschetto of San Francisco offered the winning $34,106 bid for a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 XL auctioned by Wisconsin sellers who described the vehicle in their EBay ad as "in awesome condition, not restored, rust free chrome in excellent condition, recently rebuilt and ready to be driven."

When the car arrived, according to Boschetto's testimony to the federal district court, the engine wouldn't start and the car was rusty and dented.

Boschetto contacted EBay and Hansing in a fruitless effort to rescind the purchase, then filed suit in federal district court alleging violation of the California Consumer Protection Act, breach of contract, misrepresentation and fraud.

The fact that neither the courts nor EBay are stepping in to settle the dispute is disconcerting. And without a working car, it's going to be a pretty long bus ride to Wisconsin to settle this face to face.

-- Mark Milian

Bonnie Fuller, left, will launch a new celebrity news site for women. Tina Brown is behind an upcoming news and culture site.
(Photos: Evan Agostini / Getty Images | Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

It wasn’t so long ago that Tina Brown and Bonnie Fuller were busy transforming entire magazine genres. They lived on opposite ends of the taste spectrum — Brown edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, Fuller revamped Glamour, then re-invented the celebrity gossip concept at Us Weekly and later the Star — but the two had a similar formula: a willingness to throw out the old model, a feel for where the culture was heading and a forward-driving tenacity that became legendary in media circles.

Then old-media companies mostly stopped generating the large, ambitious projects Fuller and Brown cut their teeth on, and both editors stepped away from magazines. Now this summer finds both embarked on — what else? — Web start-ups. Fuller has started a Web company aimed at women ages 20 to 40, focusing on — what else? — celebrity news. Brown will run a news and culture site called The Daily Beast (after the fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel "Scoop”), which is funded by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp and will launch in the fall.

Brown and Fuller arrive with hefty resumes in a space where success in other quarters has not always proven transferable. What tends to hit on the Web is the home-grown, the grass-roots, the improvisational. Can either succeed on the Web, where all of their seeming advantages may turn out to be old-media baggage? “Not everyone crosses over so easily,” said Kara Swisher, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and columnist who is now co-executive editor of the tech news and opinion site AllThingsD.com. “But you never know who’s going to do well.”

Others are even less optimistic. Michael Wolff, the acerbic Vanity Fair columnist whose spectacular Internet start-up failure in the 90s was documented in his 1998 book “Burn Rate,” is one who thinks the key to success on the Internet lies entirely in understanding and innovating with technology – an area where neither Fuller nor Brown has yet shown much leadership. “I am very fond of Bonnie,” Wolff said. “There is no one in modern America who knows less about the Internet than Bonnie Fuller. Second to Bonnie Fuller is only Tina Brown.”

And last week, scolding new media tycoon Nick Denton took some potshots at Brown’s new project on his media gossip blog Gawker, calling her "the notoriously profligate Tina Brown" and suggesting that her site will fail because she will not be able to help spending Barry Diller’s money too freely.

But Brown and Fuller are used to being doubted (and derided) in the media, and both have proved by now that they can't be counted out lightly.

If media pedigree did matter, the British-born Brown would have a nice head start. She jazzed up Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and with studio chief Harvey Weinstein started the short-lived, much derided Talk. More recently, Brown hosted an obscure cable TV culture-chat show and wrote a best-selling biography of Princess Diana. She is almost finished writing a book about Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Exactly what kind of creature The Daily Beast will be, beyond falling into the category of “news aggregator” — a site that links to other news sources on the Web — has been the subject of much speculation. Brown was not available for comment, and a spokesperson would say only that the site will target “curious, busy and besieged professionals,” with some undetermined amount of original content and a focus on culture as well as news.

Fuller is still looking for partners, financing and advertiser support for her new company. The plan is to bring to the Web her brand of what she calls “addictive content” – her trademark mix of celebrity news and girlfriend-to-girlfriend advice on fashion, sex and relationships.

Wolff, whose latest venture is a news site of his own called newser.com, is not afraid of throwing water on the passions of other media figures. But he is not alone in cautioning that the Web is so different from print publications as to make the vast majority of crossover dreams seem “preposterous. It’s like, ‘I’m a theater person and I’m going to go into the movie business,” he said. “Only in the rarest of circumstances do those people succeed.”

One who did pull it off is Arianna Huffington, who went from syndicated political columnist to media mogul by starting the Huffington Post with just a handful of employees. Fuller and Brown, Swisher said, “have got to be looking at [Huffington] and saying, I can do that.”

Fuller said she is fully aware of the importance of technology and intends to use it to her advantage: “Digital technology is key to a unique online experience,” she said by email. “The voice I bring to this experience can be extended and ultimately deepened through technology.” Huffington, too, was no technology expert and had not distinguished herself on the Web (pre-Post, she was a medium-wattage columnist, author and media commentator). For allthingsd’s Swisher, it’s mainly about “using the Web well, the way people like.”

So although the celebrity-gossip space Fuller is entering is crowded it also seems able to accommodate variety. Eighteen separate gossip sites attracted over a million unique visitors in June.

“We believe that there is always great room for celebrity coverage,” Fuller wrote in her email. “I found that when we grew Us Weekly and then at Star... there was no shortage of a consumer appetite for celebrity coverage. When you do something well, with its own distinct point of view, you can always find an audience.” Fuller has dipped her toe in the digital river by blogging for the Huffington Post. She has been averaging one or two posts a month – an alarmingly relaxed pace for someone with Web ambitions — on such trustworthy topics as 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy and Anne Hathaway’s boyfriend troubles. Ever canny, Fuller tries to mix a little politics in with the celebrity for the liberal Huffington Post audience, offering this optimistic post in April: “Hillary Clinton and Madonna: Both Unbowed and Uncowed — They’re Virtually the Same, and They Will Rule!”

Brown’s site is entering a more volatile area. Andrew Breitbart, who was a contributor for the Drudge Report and an early developer of the Huffington Post, noted that news aggregators are not as straightforward a business as they may seem. “Aggregators need to figure out something else, a point of view,” he said. The Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, two of the most popular aggregators, depend on their political slants – Drudge to the right, Huffington Post to the left – to define and capture their audience. Brown’s site will not have a particular political orientation. The goal instead will be identifying the kind of story that is interesting to a broad, upscale audience of culture consumers, and adapting to that audience’s patterns and preferences once they are clear.

One certainty is that in the news aggregrator realm, technology plays a central role. Wolff’s newser.com, for example, lets users slide a grid that customizes the page to show a particular number of stories at a time and to choose whether the stories are mainly “hard” – “serious, important, and immediate new,” or “soft,” “cultural, lifestyle, and celebrity news.” (The Drudge Report may be the exception; some say part of its appeal is its low-tech feel, a practically prehistoric-looking design with headlines crowded onto a plain white page with just a few straight-up photos).

But even Drudge faces the encroachment of the automated sites like Yahoo news and the even more popular user-driven aggregrator sites like Digg.com, which rank stories by how many readers “vote” for them as they appear around the Web.

The Digg model has the advantage of being a direct product of the Web’s conversational, free-for-all spirit. Many Web seers predict that Digg’s popularity-contest model will ultimately triumph over hand-edited, sensibility-driven sites like Brown’s. But Huffington expressed a sentiment common to those who have taken the Web plunge: “One of the best things about the new media is that it’s not a zero-sum game. The more sites there are offering smart, compelling content, the more people will get their news, opinion, and entertainment online.”

She had just one piece of advice for the web upstarts, as they leave behind the more human-scaled rhythms of the print world: “Be prepared to move quickly!”

--Maria Russo

Marry me, Leslie: a Google wedding proposal (sort of)

Michael Weiss-Malik's "Proposal 2.0" on Google Maps Street View.

We have all heard stories about couples getting hitched through computer games, web comics, technology blogs and lolcats, but Michael Weiss-Malik thinks he may have topped them all. What's better than a kitty "marridj," you ask?

How about a Google Maps panoramic image, accessible by anyone, of the groom-to-be holding a sign reading, "Proposal 2.0: Marry me Leslie!!"

Weiss-Malik, 29, a software engineer for Google Inc., was informed along with many of his coworkers when the Google Street View van — the vehicle used to record panoramic street-level imagery for Google Maps — would be driving by the company's Mountain View headquarters.

Michael Weiss-Malik and Leslie Moreno at a wedding — not their own. (Photo: Michael Weiss-Malik)

He then designed and printed — using the company ink — a sign he would hold as the van snapped pictures, he said. He also registered MarryMeLeslie.com to document the Web 2.0 proposal.

"I wasn't sure if it would get a lot of attention," Weiss-Malik said.

It did. More than 50,000 flocked to the website, and the news got international coverage.

"I figured it would be kind of a fun way to do something big — a very public announcement of asking her to marry me," he said.

The advantage of his public proposal is that Weiss-Malik already secured a "yes" from his bride-to-be in what he calls "Proposal 1.0." The initial proposal was a pretty classic scenario, taking place during a quiet night at home, ring and all.

While Weiss-Malik's fiancee, Leslie Moreno, 26, is waiting to announce her official "yes" until the poll on their website tips toward a majority in support of the decision, here's a spoiler: It's going to happen. And the wedding date is already set tentatively for May 24.

"I got quite a few e-mails in my inbox suggesting that I marry Michael," Moreno said. "Most of the people have been really positive."

Since Google updated its Street View map earlier this month with Weiss-Malik's proposal intact, the heartwarming event has taken on a life of its own. Users spotted it, and submitted links to social media, giving it even more attention. A friend of Weiss-Malik updated Wikipedia's online proposal article to include Proposal 2.0.

"I was pretty sure no one had ever done it before, and only one person could have done it for the first time," Weiss-Malik said. "It's possible no one will ever do it again."

Maybe so, but here's hoping there are many more lolcat "proposalz" to come.

-- Mark Milian

That supposedly "mint condition" Spider-Man comic book you got on EBay that had half a page torn out is a dispute between you and the seller. The California courts are staying out of it, no matter how many lawsuits you file. Consumer protection laws don't apply to sales not specifically targeting California customers, according to an L.A. Times article posted Wednesday.

In the latest judicial message of "buyer beware" in Internet shopping, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said a federal district court in Northern California properly decided it didn't have jurisdiction to require a Wisconsin classic car seller to abide by this state's consumer protection laws.

1964 Ford Galaxie 500. (Photo credit: dave_7 / Flickr user)

The dispute began three years ago when Paul Boschetto of San Francisco offered the winning $34,106 bid for a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 XL auctioned by Wisconsin sellers who described the vehicle in their EBay ad as "in awesome condition, not restored, rust free chrome in excellent condition, recently rebuilt and ready to be driven."

When the car arrived, according to Boschetto's testimony to the federal district court, the engine wouldn't start and the car was rusty and dented.

Boschetto contacted EBay and Hansing in a fruitless effort to rescind the purchase, then filed suit in federal district court alleging violation of the California Consumer Protection Act, breach of contract, misrepresentation and fraud.

The fact that neither the courts nor EBay are stepping in to settle the dispute is disconcerting. And without a working car, it's going to be a pretty long bus ride to Wisconsin to settle this face to face.

-- Mark Milian

Bonnie Fuller, left, will launch a new celebrity news site for women. Tina Brown is behind an upcoming news and culture site.
(Photos: Evan Agostini / Getty Images | Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

It wasn’t so long ago that Tina Brown and Bonnie Fuller were busy transforming entire magazine genres. They lived on opposite ends of the taste spectrum — Brown edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, Fuller revamped Glamour, then re-invented the celebrity gossip concept at Us Weekly and later the Star — but the two had a similar formula: a willingness to throw out the old model, a feel for where the culture was heading and a forward-driving tenacity that became legendary in media circles.

Then old-media companies mostly stopped generating the large, ambitious projects Fuller and Brown cut their teeth on, and both editors stepped away from magazines. Now this summer finds both embarked on — what else? — Web start-ups. Fuller has started a Web company aimed at women ages 20 to 40, focusing on — what else? — celebrity news. Brown will run a news and culture site called The Daily Beast (after the fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel "Scoop”), which is funded by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp and will launch in the fall.

Brown and Fuller arrive with hefty resumes in a space where success in other quarters has not always proven transferable. What tends to hit on the Web is the home-grown, the grass-roots, the improvisational. Can either succeed on the Web, where all of their seeming advantages may turn out to be old-media baggage? “Not everyone crosses over so easily,” said Kara Swisher, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and columnist who is now co-executive editor of the tech news and opinion site AllThingsD.com. “But you never know who’s going to do well.”

Others are even less optimistic. Michael Wolff, the acerbic Vanity Fair columnist whose spectacular Internet start-up failure in the 90s was documented in his 1998 book “Burn Rate,” is one who thinks the key to success on the Internet lies entirely in understanding and innovating with technology – an area where neither Fuller nor Brown has yet shown much leadership. “I am very fond of Bonnie,” Wolff said. “There is no one in modern America who knows less about the Internet than Bonnie Fuller. Second to Bonnie Fuller is only Tina Brown.”

And last week, scolding new media tycoon Nick Denton took some potshots at Brown’s new project on his media gossip blog Gawker, calling her "the notoriously profligate Tina Brown" and suggesting that her site will fail because she will not be able to help spending Barry Diller’s money too freely.

But Brown and Fuller are used to being doubted (and derided) in the media, and both have proved by now that they can't be counted out lightly.

If media pedigree did matter, the British-born Brown would have a nice head start. She jazzed up Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and with studio chief Harvey Weinstein started the short-lived, much derided Talk. More recently, Brown hosted an obscure cable TV culture-chat show and wrote a best-selling biography of Princess Diana. She is almost finished writing a book about Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Exactly what kind of creature The Daily Beast will be, beyond falling into the category of “news aggregator” — a site that links to other news sources on the Web — has been the subject of much speculation. Brown was not available for comment, and a spokesperson would say only that the site will target “curious, busy and besieged professionals,” with some undetermined amount of original content and a focus on culture as well as news.

Fuller is still looking for partners, financing and advertiser support for her new company. The plan is to bring to the Web her brand of what she calls “addictive content” – her trademark mix of celebrity news and girlfriend-to-girlfriend advice on fashion, sex and relationships.

Wolff, whose latest venture is a news site of his own called newser.com, is not afraid of throwing water on the passions of other media figures. But he is not alone in cautioning that the Web is so different from print publications as to make the vast majority of crossover dreams seem “preposterous. It’s like, ‘I’m a theater person and I’m going to go into the movie business,” he said. “Only in the rarest of circumstances do those people succeed.”

One who did pull it off is Arianna Huffington, who went from syndicated political columnist to media mogul by starting the Huffington Post with just a handful of employees. Fuller and Brown, Swisher said, “have got to be looking at [Huffington] and saying, I can do that.”

Fuller said she is fully aware of the importance of technology and intends to use it to her advantage: “Digital technology is key to a unique online experience,” she said by email. “The voice I bring to this experience can be extended and ultimately deepened through technology.” Huffington, too, was no technology expert and had not distinguished herself on the Web (pre-Post, she was a medium-wattage columnist, author and media commentator). For allthingsd’s Swisher, it’s mainly about “using the Web well, the way people like.”

So although the celebrity-gossip space Fuller is entering is crowded it also seems able to accommodate variety. Eighteen separate gossip sites attracted over a million unique visitors in June.

“We believe that there is always great room for celebrity coverage,” Fuller wrote in her email. “I found that when we grew Us Weekly and then at Star... there was no shortage of a consumer appetite for celebrity coverage. When you do something well, with its own distinct point of view, you can always find an audience.” Fuller has dipped her toe in the digital river by blogging for the Huffington Post. She has been averaging one or two posts a month – an alarmingly relaxed pace for someone with Web ambitions — on such trustworthy topics as 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy and Anne Hathaway’s boyfriend troubles. Ever canny, Fuller tries to mix a little politics in with the celebrity for the liberal Huffington Post audience, offering this optimistic post in April: “Hillary Clinton and Madonna: Both Unbowed and Uncowed — They’re Virtually the Same, and They Will Rule!”

Brown’s site is entering a more volatile area. Andrew Breitbart, who was a contributor for the Drudge Report and an early developer of the Huffington Post, noted that news aggregators are not as straightforward a business as they may seem. “Aggregators need to figure out something else, a point of view,” he said. The Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, two of the most popular aggregators, depend on their political slants – Drudge to the right, Huffington Post to the left – to define and capture their audience. Brown’s site will not have a particular political orientation. The goal instead will be identifying the kind of story that is interesting to a broad, upscale audience of culture consumers, and adapting to that audience’s patterns and preferences once they are clear.

One certainty is that in the news aggregrator realm, technology plays a central role. Wolff’s newser.com, for example, lets users slide a grid that customizes the page to show a particular number of stories at a time and to choose whether the stories are mainly “hard” – “serious, important, and immediate new,” or “soft,” “cultural, lifestyle, and celebrity news.” (The Drudge Report may be the exception; some say part of its appeal is its low-tech feel, a practically prehistoric-looking design with headlines crowded onto a plain white page with just a few straight-up photos).

But even Drudge faces the encroachment of the automated sites like Yahoo news and the even more popular user-driven aggregrator sites like Digg.com, which rank stories by how many readers “vote” for them as they appear around the Web.

The Digg model has the advantage of being a direct product of the Web’s conversational, free-for-all spirit. Many Web seers predict that Digg’s popularity-contest model will ultimately triumph over hand-edited, sensibility-driven sites like Brown’s. But Huffington expressed a sentiment common to those who have taken the Web plunge: “One of the best things about the new media is that it’s not a zero-sum game. The more sites there are offering smart, compelling content, the more people will get their news, opinion, and entertainment online.”

She had just one piece of advice for the web upstarts, as they leave behind the more human-scaled rhythms of the print world: “Be prepared to move quickly!”

--Maria Russo

California consumer protection laws don't apply to EBay fraud

That supposedly "mint condition" Spider-Man comic book you got on EBay that had half a page torn out is a dispute between you and the seller. The California courts are staying out of it, no matter how many lawsuits you file. Consumer protection laws don't apply to sales not specifically targeting California customers, according to an L.A. Times article posted Wednesday.

In the latest judicial message of "buyer beware" in Internet shopping, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said a federal district court in Northern California properly decided it didn't have jurisdiction to require a Wisconsin classic car seller to abide by this state's consumer protection laws.

1964 Ford Galaxie 500. (Photo credit: dave_7 / Flickr user)

The dispute began three years ago when Paul Boschetto of San Francisco offered the winning $34,106 bid for a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 XL auctioned by Wisconsin sellers who described the vehicle in their EBay ad as "in awesome condition, not restored, rust free chrome in excellent condition, recently rebuilt and ready to be driven."

When the car arrived, according to Boschetto's testimony to the federal district court, the engine wouldn't start and the car was rusty and dented.

Boschetto contacted EBay and Hansing in a fruitless effort to rescind the purchase, then filed suit in federal district court alleging violation of the California Consumer Protection Act, breach of contract, misrepresentation and fraud.

The fact that neither the courts nor EBay are stepping in to settle the dispute is disconcerting. And without a working car, it's going to be a pretty long bus ride to Wisconsin to settle this face to face.

-- Mark Milian

Bonnie Fuller, left, will launch a new celebrity news site for women. Tina Brown is behind an upcoming news and culture site.
(Photos: Evan Agostini / Getty Images | Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

It wasn’t so long ago that Tina Brown and Bonnie Fuller were busy transforming entire magazine genres. They lived on opposite ends of the taste spectrum — Brown edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, Fuller revamped Glamour, then re-invented the celebrity gossip concept at Us Weekly and later the Star — but the two had a similar formula: a willingness to throw out the old model, a feel for where the culture was heading and a forward-driving tenacity that became legendary in media circles.

Then old-media companies mostly stopped generating the large, ambitious projects Fuller and Brown cut their teeth on, and both editors stepped away from magazines. Now this summer finds both embarked on — what else? — Web start-ups. Fuller has started a Web company aimed at women ages 20 to 40, focusing on — what else? — celebrity news. Brown will run a news and culture site called The Daily Beast (after the fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel "Scoop”), which is funded by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp and will launch in the fall.

Brown and Fuller arrive with hefty resumes in a space where success in other quarters has not always proven transferable. What tends to hit on the Web is the home-grown, the grass-roots, the improvisational. Can either succeed on the Web, where all of their seeming advantages may turn out to be old-media baggage? “Not everyone crosses over so easily,” said Kara Swisher, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and columnist who is now co-executive editor of the tech news and opinion site AllThingsD.com. “But you never know who’s going to do well.”

Others are even less optimistic. Michael Wolff, the acerbic Vanity Fair columnist whose spectacular Internet start-up failure in the 90s was documented in his 1998 book “Burn Rate,” is one who thinks the key to success on the Internet lies entirely in understanding and innovating with technology – an area where neither Fuller nor Brown has yet shown much leadership. “I am very fond of Bonnie,” Wolff said. “There is no one in modern America who knows less about the Internet than Bonnie Fuller. Second to Bonnie Fuller is only Tina Brown.”

And last week, scolding new media tycoon Nick Denton took some potshots at Brown’s new project on his media gossip blog Gawker, calling her "the notoriously profligate Tina Brown" and suggesting that her site will fail because she will not be able to help spending Barry Diller’s money too freely.

But Brown and Fuller are used to being doubted (and derided) in the media, and both have proved by now that they can't be counted out lightly.

If media pedigree did matter, the British-born Brown would have a nice head start. She jazzed up Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and with studio chief Harvey Weinstein started the short-lived, much derided Talk. More recently, Brown hosted an obscure cable TV culture-chat show and wrote a best-selling biography of Princess Diana. She is almost finished writing a book about Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Exactly what kind of creature The Daily Beast will be, beyond falling into the category of “news aggregator” — a site that links to other news sources on the Web — has been the subject of much speculation. Brown was not available for comment, and a spokesperson would say only that the site will target “curious, busy and besieged professionals,” with some undetermined amount of original content and a focus on culture as well as news.

Fuller is still looking for partners, financing and advertiser support for her new company. The plan is to bring to the Web her brand of what she calls “addictive content” – her trademark mix of celebrity news and girlfriend-to-girlfriend advice on fashion, sex and relationships.

Wolff, whose latest venture is a news site of his own called newser.com, is not afraid of throwing water on the passions of other media figures. But he is not alone in cautioning that the Web is so different from print publications as to make the vast majority of crossover dreams seem “preposterous. It’s like, ‘I’m a theater person and I’m going to go into the movie business,” he said. “Only in the rarest of circumstances do those people succeed.”

One who did pull it off is Arianna Huffington, who went from syndicated political columnist to media mogul by starting the Huffington Post with just a handful of employees. Fuller and Brown, Swisher said, “have got to be looking at [Huffington] and saying, I can do that.”

Fuller said she is fully aware of the importance of technology and intends to use it to her advantage: “Digital technology is key to a unique online experience,” she said by email. “The voice I bring to this experience can be extended and ultimately deepened through technology.” Huffington, too, was no technology expert and had not distinguished herself on the Web (pre-Post, she was a medium-wattage columnist, author and media commentator). For allthingsd’s Swisher, it’s mainly about “using the Web well, the way people like.”

So although the celebrity-gossip space Fuller is entering is crowded it also seems able to accommodate variety. Eighteen separate gossip sites attracted over a million unique visitors in June.

“We believe that there is always great room for celebrity coverage,” Fuller wrote in her email. “I found that when we grew Us Weekly and then at Star... there was no shortage of a consumer appetite for celebrity coverage. When you do something well, with its own distinct point of view, you can always find an audience.” Fuller has dipped her toe in the digital river by blogging for the Huffington Post. She has been averaging one or two posts a month – an alarmingly relaxed pace for someone with Web ambitions — on such trustworthy topics as 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy and Anne Hathaway’s boyfriend troubles. Ever canny, Fuller tries to mix a little politics in with the celebrity for the liberal Huffington Post audience, offering this optimistic post in April: “Hillary Clinton and Madonna: Both Unbowed and Uncowed — They’re Virtually the Same, and They Will Rule!”

Brown’s site is entering a more volatile area. Andrew Breitbart, who was a contributor for the Drudge Report and an early developer of the Huffington Post, noted that news aggregators are not as straightforward a business as they may seem. “Aggregators need to figure out something else, a point of view,” he said. The Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, two of the most popular aggregators, depend on their political slants – Drudge to the right, Huffington Post to the left – to define and capture their audience. Brown’s site will not have a particular political orientation. The goal instead will be identifying the kind of story that is interesting to a broad, upscale audience of culture consumers, and adapting to that audience’s patterns and preferences once they are clear.

One certainty is that in the news aggregrator realm, technology plays a central role. Wolff’s newser.com, for example, lets users slide a grid that customizes the page to show a particular number of stories at a time and to choose whether the stories are mainly “hard” – “serious, important, and immediate new,” or “soft,” “cultural, lifestyle, and celebrity news.” (The Drudge Report may be the exception; some say part of its appeal is its low-tech feel, a practically prehistoric-looking design with headlines crowded onto a plain white page with just a few straight-up photos).

But even Drudge faces the encroachment of the automated sites like Yahoo news and the even more popular user-driven aggregrator sites like Digg.com, which rank stories by how many readers “vote” for them as they appear around the Web.

The Digg model has the advantage of being a direct product of the Web’s conversational, free-for-all spirit. Many Web seers predict that Digg’s popularity-contest model will ultimately triumph over hand-edited, sensibility-driven sites like Brown’s. But Huffington expressed a sentiment common to those who have taken the Web plunge: “One of the best things about the new media is that it’s not a zero-sum game. The more sites there are offering smart, compelling content, the more people will get their news, opinion, and entertainment online.”

She had just one piece of advice for the web upstarts, as they leave behind the more human-scaled rhythms of the print world: “Be prepared to move quickly!”

--Maria Russo

Are Tina Brown and Bonnie Fuller wired for their shift online?

Bonnie Fuller, left, will launch a new celebrity news site for women. Tina Brown is behind an upcoming news and culture site.
(Photos: Evan Agostini / Getty Images | Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

It wasn’t so long ago that Tina Brown and Bonnie Fuller were busy transforming entire magazine genres. They lived on opposite ends of the taste spectrum — Brown edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, Fuller revamped Glamour, then re-invented the celebrity gossip concept at Us Weekly and later the Star — but the two had a similar formula: a willingness to throw out the old model, a feel for where the culture was heading and a forward-driving tenacity that became legendary in media circles.

Then old-media companies mostly stopped generating the large, ambitious projects Fuller and Brown cut their teeth on, and both editors stepped away from magazines. Now this summer finds both embarked on — what else? — Web start-ups. Fuller has started a Web company aimed at women ages 20 to 40, focusing on — what else? — celebrity news. Brown will run a news and culture site called The Daily Beast (after the fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel "Scoop”), which is funded by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp and will launch in the fall.

Brown and Fuller arrive with hefty resumes in a space where success in other quarters has not always proven transferable. What tends to hit on the Web is the home-grown, the grass-roots, the improvisational. Can either succeed on the Web, where all of their seeming advantages may turn out to be old-media baggage? “Not everyone crosses over so easily,” said Kara Swisher, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and columnist who is now co-executive editor of the tech news and opinion site AllThingsD.com. “But you never know who’s going to do well.”

Others are even less optimistic. Michael Wolff, the acerbic Vanity Fair columnist whose spectacular Internet start-up failure in the 90s was documented in his 1998 book “Burn Rate,” is one who thinks the key to success on the Internet lies entirely in understanding and innovating with technology – an area where neither Fuller nor Brown has yet shown much leadership. “I am very fond of Bonnie,” Wolff said. “There is no one in modern America who knows less about the Internet than Bonnie Fuller. Second to Bonnie Fuller is only Tina Brown.”

And last week, scolding new media tycoon Nick Denton took some potshots at Brown’s new project on his media gossip blog Gawker, calling her "the notoriously profligate Tina Brown" and suggesting that her site will fail because she will not be able to help spending Barry Diller’s money too freely.

But Brown and Fuller are used to being doubted (and derided) in the media, and both have proved by now that they can't be counted out lightly.

If media pedigree did matter, the British-born Brown would have a nice head start. She jazzed up Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and with studio chief Harvey Weinstein started the short-lived, much derided Talk. More recently, Brown hosted an obscure cable TV culture-chat show and wrote a best-selling biography of Princess Diana. She is almost finished writing a book about Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Exactly what kind of creature The Daily Beast will be, beyond falling into the category of “news aggregator” — a site that links to other news sources on the Web — has been the subject of much speculation. Brown was not available for comment, and a spokesperson would say only that the site will target “curious, busy and besieged professionals,” with some undetermined amount of original content and a focus on culture as well as news.

Fuller is still looking for partners, financing and advertiser support for her new company. The plan is to bring to the Web her brand of what she calls “addictive content” – her trademark mix of celebrity news and girlfriend-to-girlfriend advice on fashion, sex and relationships.

Wolff, whose latest venture is a news site of his own called newser.com, is not afraid of throwing water on the passions of other media figures. But he is not alone in cautioning that the Web is so different from print publications as to make the vast majority of crossover dreams seem “preposterous. It’s like, ‘I’m a theater person and I’m going to go into the movie business,” he said. “Only in the rarest of circumstances do those people succeed.”

One who did pull it off is Arianna Huffington, who went from syndicated political columnist to media mogul by starting the Huffington Post with just a handful of employees. Fuller and Brown, Swisher said, “have got to be looking at [Huffington] and saying, I can do that.”

Fuller said she is fully aware of the importance of technology and intends to use it to her advantage: “Digital technology is key to a unique online experience,” she said by email. “The voice I bring to this experience can be extended and ultimately deepened through technology.” Huffington, too, was no technology expert and had not distinguished herself on the Web (pre-Post, she was a medium-wattage columnist, author and media commentator). For allthingsd’s Swisher, it’s mainly about “using the Web well, the way people like.”

So although the celebrity-gossip space Fuller is entering is crowded it also seems able to accommodate variety. Eighteen separate gossip sites attracted over a million unique visitors in June.

“We believe that there is always great room for celebrity coverage,” Fuller wrote in her email. “I found that when we grew Us Weekly and then at Star... there was no shortage of a consumer appetite for celebrity coverage. When you do something well, with its own distinct point of view, you can always find an audience.” Fuller has dipped her toe in the digital river by blogging for the Huffington Post. She has been averaging one or two posts a month – an alarmingly relaxed pace for someone with Web ambitions — on such trustworthy topics as 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy and Anne Hathaway’s boyfriend troubles. Ever canny, Fuller tries to mix a little politics in with the celebrity for the liberal Huffington Post audience, offering this optimistic post in April: “Hillary Clinton and Madonna: Both Unbowed and Uncowed — They’re Virtually the Same, and They Will Rule!”

Brown’s site is entering a more volatile area. Andrew Breitbart, who was a contributor for the Drudge Report and an early developer of the Huffington Post, noted that news aggregators are not as straightforward a business as they may seem. “Aggregators need to figure out something else, a point of view,” he said. The Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, two of the most popular aggregators, depend on their political slants – Drudge to the right, Huffington Post to the left – to define and capture their audience. Brown’s site will not have a particular political orientation. The goal instead will be identifying the kind of story that is interesting to a broad, upscale audience of culture consumers, and adapting to that audience’s patterns and preferences once they are clear.

One certainty is that in the news aggregrator realm, technology plays a central role. Wolff’s newser.com, for example, lets users slide a grid that customizes the page to show a particular number of stories at a time and to choose whether the stories are mainly “hard” – “serious, important, and immediate new,” or “soft,” “cultural, lifestyle, and celebrity news.” (The Drudge Report may be the exception; some say part of its appeal is its low-tech feel, a practically prehistoric-looking design with headlines crowded onto a plain white page with just a few straight-up photos).

But even Drudge faces the encroachment of the automated sites like Yahoo news and the even more popular user-driven aggregrator sites like Digg.com, which rank stories by how many readers “vote” for them as they appear around the Web.

The Digg model has the advantage of being a direct product of the Web’s conversational, free-for-all spirit. Many Web seers predict that Digg’s popularity-contest model will ultimately triumph over hand-edited, sensibility-driven sites like Brown’s. But Huffington expressed a sentiment common to those who have taken the Web plunge: “One of the best things about the new media is that it’s not a zero-sum game. The more sites there are offering smart, compelling content, the more people will get their news, opinion, and entertainment online.”

She had just one piece of advice for the web upstarts, as they leave behind the more human-scaled rhythms of the print world: “Be prepared to move quickly!”

--Maria Russo