New Media

Apparently, Britney Spears took a stroll on the streets of New York last night while her newsless, yet somehow touching documentary For the Record aired on MTV.

She updated her Twitter just a few minutes ago:

britneyspears I enjoyed a relaxing walk last night around NYC. Even though it was raining, it was a lot of fun! ~Britney

This might actually be the real Britney too. Her assistant Lauren, usually signs off on posts she writes, and Brit has been updating as herself for awhile now.

Last week, Scott Heiferman, C.E.O. of Meetup, announced when and where candidates could announce their interest in replacing him as organizer of the New York Tech Meetup. So far, several candidates have stepped forward, including Greg Magarshak, founder of social media company Lucky Apps; Joe DiPasquale, founder of CollegeWikis.com and self-described Meetup fanatic; Rich Hecker, an organizer of Bootstrapper.com and co-founder of The Connectors Group, a new angel investment group, and Groupable.com, a site that works a lot like Meetup; Joshua Sherman, an organizer of Personal Democracy Forum and founder of BuycottForChange.org; among others.

What does the tech community think so far? The blogs are abuzz.  read more »

Twitter stepped into the spotlight this week, not only as a charity organizer and possible advertising goldmine during the holidays, but as a legitimate news aggregator.

Lots of tech blogs have been touting Twitter's potential since its inception, but on-the-ground reports from the Mumbai terror attacks put the idea in motion. In some cases, Twitterers were able to be on the scene long before TV and newspaper reporters could get there.

CNN reports that an estimated 80 messages, or "tweets," were being sent to Twitter.com via SMS every five seconds, providing eyewitness accounts and updates.

Many Twitter users also sent pleas for blood donors to make their way to specific hospitals in Mumbai where doctors were faced with low stocks and rising casualties.

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Scott Heiferman, C.E.O. of Meetup, released information today on how people can declare their candidacy to replace him as leader of the New York Tech Meetup. Mr. Heiferman stepped down in November.

According to Mr. Heiferman, a new organizer will be elected on Dec. 11th, after candidates give a five minute presentation at the Dec. 9th Meetup. "Then, with the new Organizer, Dawn [Barber] and I will establish a Board for the NYTM made mostly of other NY tech-related group Organizers," Mr. Heiferman wrote on the New York Tech Meetup's message board. "If the new Organizer wants to make it a full-time paid gig, it's up to her and the Board to figure out how to do so. Self-organized, baby!"

Interested candidates to take over the chair need to state their candidacy here by Dec. 2.

Full memo after the jump:  read more »

Fred Wilson watches television in a modern living room, but it probably isn’t quite like yours. Call it living room 2.0. As managing partner of Union Square Ventures—which invests in budding tech start-ups like Twitter, Tumblr and 10gen—he often brings the latest gadgets and social networking whats-its into his West Village home. He says his big “‘aha’ moment” came last year, when he plugged his Mac Mini, Apple’s tiny desktop computer drive that’s about half the size of a toaster, into his 60-inch television display. Suddenly the Internet, the whole World Wide Web, was in his living room.

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Will you be spending Thanksgiving online? Maybe you prefer some social-networking to spending so-called quality time with your crazy family. Or perhaps you're just too much of an Internet addict to give it up for a few days.

Here are some resources for you to give thanks on the Web this Turkey Day.

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade site - Get all of your info. about the most famous Thanksgiving Day parade. Here you can find a preview of the balloons and floats. You can download a widget and get up-to-the-minute updates on parade happenings and events. You can even get a Facebook application and upload all your videos and photos from the big day.  read more »

Shaquille "Kobe, Tell Me How My Ass Taste" O’Neal wasn't going to let some troll front as his 7-foot-1 basketball behemoth on Twitter. So he started his own account. First tweet: "This is the real SHAQUILLE O’NEAL," came from The_Real_Shaq, early Tuesday morning. It has been a "shaqalicious" romp ever since.

The New York Times' Howard Beck spoke with Mr. O'Neal yesterday to make sure it was him.

“Somebody out there was trying to use my language and trying to speak for me,” he told The Times in a telephone interview. “Rather than have that happen, I thought I’d do it myself.  read more »

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Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke directs us to this great Funny Or Die video that purports to show Variety Writers Sling The Slanguage.

The video is a satire of Variety's semi-impenetrable Slanguage, including new definitions for Geek Meat (n., "a movie that's based on a video game") and Ben Silvermandering (v., "when a studio executive doesn't show up for work because he's too busy partying"). Watch the whole thing to see how they rename the Oxygen Network. (Warning: Language NSFW.)

Of course, most of the satire's bite is mitigated by the fact that Variety is proudly hosting the video on its own site. Allowing one's targets to feel like they're in on the joke out of a spirit of generosity and/or fear? Call that SNLing.

Following Jerry Yang's departure from C.E.O. of Yahoo!, The Wall Street Journal's Jessica E. Vascellaro and Joann S. Lublin are reporting this morning that Yahoo!'s board is searching for the "anti-Jerry" to fill his roll. Sources say Yahoo!'s co-founder just couldn't make the tough decisions.

Per Ms. Vascellaro and Ms. Lublin:

"This company has shown a failure to execute," said a person familiar with the situation. Yahoo's next CEO "can't be just a thinker."

Will Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg meet his fate? The kid has big ideas about mapping our emotions and making the world a better place. Despite recent moves to make profit, his employees seems frustrated with his inability to find (and accept) financial opportunities.  read more »

On Nov. 11, Scott Heiferman looked small standing in front of the glowing, 11-foot-high video walls in the lobby of Barry Diller’s glittering, $100 million InterActiveCorp building on West 18th Street. “There’s a great President-elect Barack Obama line which is: We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for,” he said, microphone in hand, buttoned-down shirt unbuttoned.

Mr. Heiferman, the charasmatic co-founder and chief executive of social networking site Meetup.com, was pacing on a stage in front of 400 Internet entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, developers and miscellaneous geeks. The at-capacity crowd shelled out $10 each to attend the New York Tech Meetup, the monthly must-do event for the city’s technology community, where budding start-ups have five minutes to pitch their new projects.  read more »

Organizers announced today that Internet Week New York will take place from June 1 to June 8 next year. This will be the second year for the event and, in 2009, the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea will serve as the official headquarters. Hey, geeks, rejoice (and feel the hangover)! Internet Week New York is presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences in cooperation with City of New York and The Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting. This year, they are partnering with Time Warner, Tumblr, Google, the New Museum, Columbia Business School, NY Tech Meetup and The Webby Awards for various events.

Maybe this year Mr. Bloomberg will mention more New York-based Internet companies (you know, besides "Facebook" and "Google") in his kickoff speech...

More from the press release:  read more »

Ben Silverman, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and NBC Universal Television Studio and executive producer of NBC's The Office, The Biggest Loser, and ABC's Ugly Betty, appeared on Charlie Rose last night to talk about YouTube vs. Hulu, the iPhone, the awesomeness of The Today Show, and other yawn-inducing topics.

A quote from Mr. Silverman during the interview:

'Digital delivery has altered how entertainment is both produced and delivered forever. And it will continue to alter and evolve.'

Ho-hum. The interview left us nonplussed.

But he certainly agitated Nikki Finke. "Yes, I feel so much better about NBC bettering its primetime prospects now that I've watched Ben Silverman toss around phrases like 'disintermediated from my audience via technology' and 'trigger digital activation' on Charlie Rose last night," she wrote on her blog, Deadline Hollywood Daily. "Silly me for thinking that Ben was hired to program the network instead of parrot advertising-speak."  read more »

GQ names Facebook's 24-year-old Mark Zuckerberg "Boy Genius of the Year" in this month's issue. (Some guy named President-elect Barack Obama is on the cover.) In the article, writer Alex French examines his current dilemma: How will Facebook make money off all that private information we share with him every day?

Most of Mr. Zuckerberg's plans have blown up in his face (remember Beacon and the infamous engagement ring incident?). But since July, he's been simmering a new feature, Facebook Connect, which will allow Facebookers to share their information with other sites. But that would involve Facebook users giving up even more of their privacy and letting other websites make money off their web browsing.  read more »

Amy Poehler debuted her Web show, Smart Girls at the Party on On Networks today.

The first episode features "The Writer - Cameron," a young New Yorker who likes to write about "paranormal kind of stuff," as she told Ms. Poehler in the video. "Wow, mysteries and ghost stories. Scary stuff," Ms. Poehler replied.

The former SNL star plays Charlie Rose (with a dash of James Lipton) during the interview, which takes place at a round table where she asks Cameron about her process and how she deals with writer's block. Cut to clips of Cameron reading stories on a park bench and in her bedroom, surrounded by teddy bears and baby dolls.  read more »

Okay, so now it's a YouTube Presidency, too. In Chicago today, President-elect Barack Obama will video record his weekly Democratic address and post it on YouTube and his transition website, Change.gov, once the original radio address airs this Saturday morning.

"This is just one of many ways that he will communicate directly with the American people and make the White House and the political process more transparent," spokeswoman Jen Psaki told The Washington Post.

More from the Post:

In addition to regularly videotaping the radio address, officials at the transition office say the Obama White House will also conduct online Q&As and video interviews. The goal, officials say, is to put a face on government. In the following weeks, for example, senior members of the transition team, various policy experts and choices for the Cabinet, among others, will record videos for Change.gov.  read more »

Drop.io, which provides un-Googleable, private online storage space, has a new member of the team: Scott Schwanbeck, the former vice president of business development at Fox Interactive Media. According to drop.io's release, Mr. Schwanbeck was responsible for developing strategic partnerships, non-ad-based monetization, content and data licensing, audience development and international expansion for the Fox's IGN Entertainment network of sites, which includes Rotten Tomatoes and AskMen.com. He'll help drop.io lure more partnerships with businesses willing to pay big bucks for online, private sharing "drops."

Sam Lessin, C.E.O. of drop.io, said, “Drop.io is building a new vocabulary for simple private sharing on the web, and Scott’s deep expertise and leadership will be instrumental in the development of key relationships and in distributing our solution within specific verticals.  read more »

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Writing on The Big Money yesterday, Lesley M. M. Blume took a look at Condé Nast's Web layoffs and asked:

What is behind Condé Nast's bellicose approach to the Web? Other traditional media outlets properly regard the Internet as both destroyer and savior and have gone into overdrive to translate themselves into online brands. By axing its online properties, Condé Nast is revealing its apparent online strategy: looking the other way while Jaws devours the back of your boat.

It's a neat metaphor—you can almost hear John Williams' theme from Jaws in your head as you read it—but it doesn't have the staying power of the one proffered by an expert Ms. Blume consulted for the piece: "Right now we're still in the Wild West."

That particular truism is as worn in as an old saddle and hits the mark like a rusty pistol. See examples after the jump:  read more »

From Jon Favreau to Larry Summers to Samantha Power, an interactive guide for the folks on the road to the White House. Friends, fun facts…It’s all there!  read more »

Seems like Mark Zuckerberg is playing cupid on Facebook. AllFacebook.com (link via Silicon Alley Insider) found a screenshot of a personal-ad type ad on the Facebook interface. The ad is called a "Friend Profile Preview," with updates on their recent status updates below their name and picture.

Seems innocent enough but why would they replace prime retail space for a friends' status update? Probably because Facebook is already a kind of dating tool for young'uns and maybe they're banking on becoming a Match.com killer. As AllFacebook.com points out, the New York Times's personal ad rates of $48 per week, $72 for two weeks and $96 for four weeks.  read more »

So President-elect Barack Obama will have a Facebook Administration. How about a Twittering Senate?

GovTrack.us, an independent watch-group for Senate activities, has a Twitter account called SenateFloor, with updates on proposed bills and amendments and their voting results. On Oct. 3, they updated on the Senate's Oct. 1st vote to pass the Economic Stimulus Relief Bill, and included a link to a page outlining who voted yea or nay.

Will President Obama utilize Twitter during his administration? It would be a great tool to incorporate into his "open democracy through the Internet" plan. He already used it during his campaign, with 130,000 followers. But, for some reason, his account has been silent since Nov. 5.

Fast Company recently named Arianna Huffington one of the most influential women in Web 2.0. But might she be hogging the spotlight from other opinionated ladies?

That's what Jessica Wakeman, a former associate blog editor at the Huffington Post, claims in the national media watchgroup FAIR's November/December issue of Extra!. In her article, "Huffington Post Mutes Women's Voices," she noted an Extra! study that found out of the 13 featured blog posts on the Huffington Post home page, only one-fourth of them are usually written by women. Ms. Wakeman hasn't written about "women's political, societal and cultural issues" for the Huffington Post since April. Hmm ...  read more »

Call it the Rumble in the RSS Reader: Ron Rosenbaum, former Edgy Enthusiast for The Observer and current Slate 'Spectator' columnist, took a sharp pin and attempted to pop the increasingly inflated ego of Jeff Jarvis, the former print journalist-turned-New Media guru at Buzzmachine.com.

Here’s a blow-by-blow, so far:

In his Nov. 11 column published last night, Mr. Rosenbaum throws the first crustless PB & J sandwich at Mr. Jarvis by saying he's running for "New Media Pontificator in Chief" and becoming "increasingly heartless about the reporters, writers, and other 'content providers' who have been put out on the street by the changes in the industry," he wrote.  read more »

We were sad to hear that vile MTV couple Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag will be ruining one of our favorite shows by making an appearance on How I Met Your Mother in January. But, while doing some research, we came across a website that cheered us up.

On last night's episode of How I Met Your Mother, Barney worried that he accidentally made one of his recent hook-ups into a mom. Barney, our favorite bro played with brilliance by Neil Patrick Harris, learns that he won't be a father, leading him to declare to his friend, Marshall, played by Jason Segel, "This is the happiest moment of my life, Marshall! The way I feel about not having kids, I never knew I could love something this much."

Inspired, he creates a new holiday: Not a Father's Day. According to his reasoning, "Why can't there be a day for people who are single and like it that way?" (Hey, Festivus started out as a joke once, too.) Barney then went on to plug notafathersday.com.  read more »

Fast Company has a feature on the The Most Influential Women in Web 2.0 in their November issue. Out of 13 women, two are New Yorkers: Blip.tv's co-founder and C.O.O. Dina Kaplan (who recently co-hosted the Silicon Alley 100 party), and Arianna Huffington, of course. It's common knowledge that tech is a boys' club and most of the women who get on the cover of Wired get there because they are "Internet famous" and have nice boobs. So (finally!) here's a shout-out to real innovators with vision for the Web.

This is what Fast Company says we can learn from Ms. Huffington:

What to learn from her: Don't always take a medium's so-called limitations at face value.  read more »

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YouTube has courted its first studio to offer feature-length films on the site. It's MGM, the 84-year-old film empire with financial troubles. They're looking to pick up hundreds of millions of viewers on YouTube's site, especially the young ones.

More from The New York Times' Brad Stone and Brooks Barnes:

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios will kick off the partnership by posting episodes of its decade-old 'American Gladiators' program to YouTube, along with full-length action films like 'Bulletproof Monk' and 'The Magnificent Seven' and clips from popular movies like 'Legally Blonde.' These will be free to watch, with ads running alongside the video.

The initial lineup may not be all that compelling, but for YouTube, which is owned by Google, the relationship with MGM is a crucial step in an essential reinvention. YouTube had its debut in 2005 and quickly became famous for the democratic sharing of bite-size video clips. Users love the site — 81 million people visited in September alone, according to Nielsen.

The best part of the article is this quote, from James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research: "YouTube is essentially saying to media companies, 'We are sorry for our past copyright stance; we weren't thinking big enough. Let's see how we can make some money together.'"

Yes, yes, newspapers are alive and well for the week (they're cool!), but don't think the internet is lagging behind on this one. This was tucked inside Brian Stelter's story on the election's impact on the Web today:

The New York Times’s Web site, nytimes.com, saw a record 61.6 million page views on Wednesday, compared with 55.1 million on Election Day, according to internal data.

That represents another single-day record.

YouTube is trying to make nice with major studios so they can offer feature films on their site. CNet announced the news yesterday that the Google-owned company is in negotiations to launch an ad-supported, streaming movie service (perhaps expanding their Screening Room section?).

"It's not imminent," one of the executives told CNet. "But it's going to happen. I would say you can expect to see it, if all goes well, sometime within the next 30 to 90 days."

You know what this means? YouTube vs. Hulu fight to the digital death!

Here's more from CNet:  read more »

Not to be a party pooper but those CNN holograms weren't actually holograms, according to the geeks.

You see (adjusts glasses), real holograms are composited from a pattern of light reflection and interference. Laser beams are involved. CNN's technology was simply a matter of shooting political reporter Jessica Yellin with a bunch of different cameras and mashing them all together on a TV screen.

CNN used 35 HD video cameras set up around a circular room. The video cameras were spaced six inches apart, 220 degrees around their subject (including will.i.am) and shooting him/her simultaneously. In CNN's own gleeful story about their "holograms," Chuck Hurley, the Washington bureau's senior producer of video, called it simple chroma-key technology that's been taken "to the Nth degree.  read more »

"Don't Stop Believin'," Journey's power ballad originally released in 1981, has just become the first "catalog" song in history to sell 2 million times, according to SoundScan. Titling it a "catalog" track means it was released before mp3s were invented and available for sale online through venues like the iTunes store.

It was placed in iTunes Store catalog on April 28, 2003, and has been a top-seller ever since, especially in June 2007, when it served as the background for The Soprano family's final goodbye. It's also a pretty sweet driving song and good for gym soundtracks, too.  read more »

Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV was scheduled to give one of his signature, profanity-filled pep talks to New York startups last night at The Volstead bar at 54th Street and Park Avenue. But the owners were peeved that the sponsor's superstar, Mashable's Pete Cashmore, didn't show up for the event* and "therefore wouldn't lower the music so Gary could speak," according to Allen Stern at his CenterNetworks blog. So he moved the party outside and had attendees huddle around him. Mr. Stern posted the video (available above).

Mashable posted some of the highlights of the speech:

1. “Hustle” - improvise, be resourceful, do whatever it takes to care for your community.  read more »

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IAC /InterActive Corporation Chairman Barry Diller took a gamble this summer by spinning off the HSN shopping channel, the Ticketmaster, LendingTree.com and time-share business Interval Leisure Group. In a conference call yesterday, he announced the consequences: $14.8 million in loss, or 11 cents per share, compared with a profit of $70.5 million or 47 cents per share this time last year, according to Bloomberg (via The New York Post). Yikes.

Mr. Diller spun it this way: "the last quarter when the costs of our spin-offs will distort the operating performance," he said during the call. IAC/InterActive Corporation posted a 10 percent increase in revenue for their third quarter, to $369.  read more »

Twitter Vote Report, a site that is aggregating voter experiences and problems at polling stations across the country, has been collecting voter tweets on Twitter, call-ins and text messages this morning and afternoon. And, surprise! New York is ranking some of the top wait times in the country.

Results are changing in real time (and the site is having high-volume traffic issues) but some tweets from New York are logging in wait times up to 180 minutes in the Downtown Brooklyn area.

Check out these dispatches:

Billy: The space was extremely confining. I went at 6am when the polls first opened and machines were broken and people had trouble moving around the room to find there district.

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In 2006, MTV requested that Weird Al Yankovic censor the names of the sites Morpheus, Grokster, Limewire and Kazaa from the video of "Don't Download This Song." Al was pissed about it, but he complied. All was (probably) forgotten until Techdirt noticed the video on MTV's new music video site and were perplexed by the bleeps. So The New York Times decided to do some digging.

In an e-mail message on Sunday, Mr. Yankovic wrote that he had bleeped out the names to the file-sharing sites in his song two years ago, after MTV “told me that they would refuse to air my video” otherwise. “Instead of subtly removing or obscuring the words in the track,” he wrote, “I made the creative decision to bleep them out as obnoxiously as possible, so that there would be no mistake I was being censored.”

MTV is often known for censoring advertising and brand names in their videos (like blurring Coca-Cola ads). So maybe that was the reason why they had Weird Al insert the bleeps. But we're guessing it might've also been because those online file-sharing sites were slowly choking the music industry to death at the time.  read more »

The Web is revving its engine for tomorrow's big night. Here's where you can tune in on your computer and your iPhone:

ABC News is offering live streams of its own TV broadcast and they'll have Web cams at the McCain and Obama campaign headquarters. CBS News will be offering county-by-county, up-to-the-minute results with live blogging, and a simulcast of its TV coverage, starting at 6:30 p.m. Around 2 a.m, Katie Couric will live chat with viewers on CBSNews.com and CNET.com. MSNBC has a neat results widget, which posts real-time results to your blog or Facebook profile. CNN YourRaces allows you to customize your own tracking tool (with local races too), and then watch the results in real time through CNN's site or on your  read more »

Silicon Alley Insider announced their list of the top 100 most influential New Yorkers in the digital business community.

Last year, Mayor Bloomberg was at the top. This year, it's Fred Wilson, co-founder of venture capital firm Union Square Ventures. Why?

But investments alone aren't what makes Fred so influential in the New York digital business community: It's the unique way in which USV makes them. Fred's blog on VC financing and technology has become a Silicon Alley Bible of sorts, a candid take on gadgets and technology trends that generates between 20 and 200 comments per post. A third of USV's investments grow from these comments.

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David Lynch is developing a Web series based on his most recent book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity (published in December 2006 by Tarcher) for On Networks. Reel Pop has the news and they say that On Networks chief content office Jen Gregono let the goods "slip" during a panel discussion at the OMMA Video conference in Los Angeles, but she didn't give too many details. It's not all that surprising that one of the weirdest directors in movies is starting to experiment with wacky ideas online.

On Networks may be the rigth place for him. The Austin-based company bills itself as a "digital media innovator leading the change in how digital TV programs are created, distributed, consumed and sponsored.  read more »

The tech blogs have been buzzing about MTV's launch earlier this week of its own Hulu-like video site at MTVMusic.com. The network will never be a "music channel" again (they switched to 24-hour coverage of vapid people making out in a hot tub long ago). But they redeemed their dignity online by uploading 16,000 videos, with MTV concert footage and Unplugged performances, too. There is a vintage videos section with a trove of gems (Bowie's "Space Oddity"! Gang of Four's "Is It Love"! Dinosaur Jr!), but we're kind of bummed that we can't find some our '90s favorites in the search engine (no Psychedelic Furs, no Swervedriver, no Green Day videos from the Dookie album).  read more »