Billiam the Snowman and the Republican YouTube Debate
Billiam, a snowman living in Point Hope, Alaska, was one of the Americans asking questiions during the Democratic CNN/YouTube Debate that took place in July. In the first debate Billiam asked a question about global warming. GOP candidates been slow to sign up for the Republican YouTube Debate. One of the GOP holdouts, Republican Candidate Mitt Romney, went beyond simply holding out and leveled a huge insult on Billiam the Snowman. Romney said, “I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman.” Romney, the lone GOP holdout, has posted more videos on his YouTube channel (283 as of Sunday afternoon) than any other presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat. But he has resisted the debate, in which videotaped questions are submitted through YouTube. In an interview with Manchester Union Leader, Romney said, “I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman.” That drew a video response from Billiam, the snowman who questioned the Democrats on global warming last month in their YouTube debate. This time, he riffed on another Romney quote from the campaign: “Lighten up slightly.” Sources at CNN said the debate, co-hosted with the Republican Party of Florida, will be held at the Mahaffey Theatre in St. Petersburg. Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube, said that more than 1,100 videos have been submitted, and the popular video-sharing site will allow YouTube users to upload their videos until Nov. 27. Billiam formulated a clever response to Mitt Romney which can be seen here or below. Billiam and his son Billiam Jr. have received both criticism and support (see here, here, here, here and here). Some people are even trying to save Billiam by with t-shirts. Billiam was created by two St. Olaf college students. There is a silly, absurd quality to the snowman questioner but the question itself is legitimate. Americans want to know the GOP candidates’ positions on the serious issue of global warming. The YouTube debates have already generated a lot of great content and discussion and a GOP debate would put more helpful information out there for voters. GOP candidates John McCain and Rudy Giuliani have already signed on according to CNET. This may have been in response to questions posted by conservative blogs like this post from Pajamas Media that asked, “Are the GOP Candidates Afraid of a Snowman?” Now that McCain and Giuliani will attend hopefully the rest of the GOP candidates will too. The Republican CNN/YouTube Debate has been pushed back to November 28th, 2007 — originally it was set for September 17th. Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee and Tommy Thompson had confirmed for the earlier date. Thompson has since pulled out of the race. Huckabee did well at the Iowa Straw Poll so hopefully he will attend the later date. Ron Paul has been a social media sensation so it seems likely he would attend providing he remains in the race. Fred Thompson has not yet agreed to attend the GOP YouTube Debate but there are lingering questions about whether Fred Thompson plans to run. Mitt Romney was directly challenged by Billiam and surely he would not backdown from such a challenge? Using the power of Billiam CNN and YouTube may be able to get most or all of the GOP candidates to attend. People can submit questions on YouTube up until the November 28th date. Posted in Politics Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com
The LOLz Street Journal
LOLMSM! The Wall Street Journal has a news story about LOLcats and the popular I Can Has Cheezburger? website. The article details Eric Nakagawa’s success with the icanhascheezburger.com website and lists some of the numerous LOLcats spinoffs. So, technically it does qualify as a business article even though they put it in a column called “Time Waster.” Mr. Nakagawa’s simple Web site has become the center of the “LOLcats” phenomenon, a booming online subculture built around digital images and deliberately bad grammar. There’s not much to it: Take a digital photo — often one of household pets, particularly cats — and purposefully place misspelled text on top. Anyone with elementary skills in Adobe’s Photoshop or Microsoft’s Paint software can make their own. Nearly nine months after launching icanhascheezburger.com, Mr. Nakagawa’s site receives around 200,000 unique visitors and a half-million page views each day, according to Mr. Nakagawa. Visitors can browse a sprawling gallery of lolcats, vote for their favorites and post comments. Mr. Nakagawa says he receives up to 500 submissions a day, thanks in no small part to his site’s tool that helps people build their own. He says every entry is screened for merit and originality before earning inclusion. Only 12 or so submissions make the gallery a day. “It’s ridiculous,” Mr. Nakagawa admits, “but we do go through all of them.” He certainly has the time. Revenue from ads on the site is “more than enough to pay my bills.” We blogged about the site’s growing traffic and income in an earlier post. The Wall Street Journal Lolcats story is interesting and it also has some good resources and links. The best thing about it was that they posted it on Caturday. So what’s next for the Wall Street Journal - the major business newspaper turned pop culture and web humor rag? A front page story on Charlie the Unicorn? A detailed analysis of the dramatic chipmunk?. An LOLbiz section? Time will tell. Some other blogs covering the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the lolcats can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. There is also a thread here on Techmeme. Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com
Google News Now Hosting Stories From Wire Services
Google continues to show signs that it is becoming more of a media company. First there was the addition of special comments to stories appearing on Google News. Now Reuters reports that Google has cut a deal with four wire services to host their stories on Google.com. Google is playing host to articles from four news agencies, including The Associated Press, the company said Friday, setting the stage for it to generate advertising revenue from Google News. The news agencies - the Press Association of Britain, Canadian Press, Agence France-Presse and The A.P. - now have their articles featured with the organizations? own brands on Google News. The companies have agreed to license news feeds to Google. The five-year-old Google News service previously searched the Web to uncover links to news articles from thousands of sources, and clustered links on similar subjects together. Josh Cohen, business product manager of Google News, said his company would consider eventually running advertising alongside the agencies’ articles. What will this mean for blogs with numerous AP and Reuters stories now basically being contained as “one story” on Google News? It could be good in a way because it sort of ties all that competition off as a single source. On the other hand most blogs are not featured in Google News results anyway. Mathew Ingram and others here, here, here and here are correct that the real story here is the trouble this causes the daily newspapers which were already struggling. The Reuters story mentions this as well. Because of Google’s campaign to simultaneously reduce duplicate articles, the original wire service article is likely to be featured in Google News instead of versions of the same article from newspaper customers, sapping ad revenue to those newspapers. Any website relying on wire services as a main source of their content could be in trouble as newspapers and wire services start competing more and more with each other. On another note CNN recently ended a 27-year agreement with Reuters. That may just be another sign that things are changing. Advertisement: Keep up with movie and tv news. Click here to add the Watch Watch feed to your favorite news reader. Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com
The Incredible Embeddable Web
Steve Rubel, the blogger at Micropersuasion, has an article in Ad Age today that talks about the trend towards bite-sized nuggets of information and bite-sized applications. He says the web is “increasingly becoming decentralized” and marketers and web publishers need to make use of this trend. If you have been witnessing the explosion of widgets and microblogging tools you are no doubt already aware of this trend. In the article Rubel tells marketers to make everything portable. Make everything portable. The next version of the Macintosh operating system, due out in October, has a small feature called Web Clip that turns any part of a site into a widget that lives on the consumer’s desktop. This is a big sign of things to come. In the very near future portals including iGoogle, My Yahoo and Netvibes as well as social networks will be able to easily inhale the smallest pieces of content from across the web. Don’t wait. Start now to make everything on your website embeddable. Traffic is becoming something that happens elsewhere, not just on your site. Apple’s Web Clip feature sounds fine providing they have the publisher’s permission to snag anything it wants from a publisher’s website. Rubel is right about the current trend. Marketers and publishers that don’t take advantage of widgets and RSS technologies may eventually be ignored by web users actively using tools like NetVibes and iGoogle. It’s the old “get on board or get left behind” thing happening on the Internet once again. This doesn’t mean that content producers necessarily have to come up with their own widgets. A lot of the current applications (and future applications) make great use of RSS feeds so just publishing an RSS feed will make your site’s content available to users. Another example is that publishers creating video content can use YouTube or other video sharing technologies that make it easy for people to embed their videos. There are a lot of great tools out there that publishers can take advantage of. Posted in Widgets Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com
Fast Food Nation
Fast food Nation Inspired by the incendiary New York Times bestseller that exposed the hidden facts behind America’s fast food industry, Fast food Nation combines an all-star ensemble cast lead by Greg Kinnear, Wilmer Valderrama and Avril Lavigne with riveting, interlocked human stories to serve up “a firecracker of a movie that jumps off […]
Britney Spears and Un-Embeddable Video Clips
There are some events that celebrity and music bloggers cannot miss covering and Britney Spears’ awful performance at the 2007 Video music Awards is one of these events. The vast majority of bloggers agree that Britney’s performance was not good. Some say it was a bomb while others argue that it was not a total bomb. You can read some other blogger reviews here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. The song Britney sang at the VMAs was called “Gimme More.” It received mixed reviews — some people didn’t care much for the song before they had even seen Britney’s performance. The analysis of Britney’s performance is sure to continue as more facts come in. People is already talking about how Britney is now embarrassed and Kanye West claims they were both exploited by MTV. That should keep the gossip blogs posting. music bloggers also regularly cover events like the Video music Awards. MTV was smart enough to put the entire show on its website in segments which makes it easy to link to a particular part of the show. They did claim to offer embedding but when the embed code was posted into a blog and played the video wouldn’t run. Instead viewers only see a message that says the video was only available on the MTV website. When are the big media companies going to realize that if they make short video clips available properly for embedding (even with a non-annoying ad) they are going to get much more exposure than they would by only allowing the video to be seen on their website? Here’s what happens if you try to embed the video clip from MTV.com that contains Britney’s sad peformance. As of this writing, it only shows a message that the Britney video can only be found on MTV.com. The player then starts running other performance from the show which are halted by yet another message sending viewers to MTV.com. If MTV is going to go to the trouble to offer embedding, make sure it works properly and isn’t some kind of bait and switch trick to get people to the website. Either it’s embeddable or it isn’t. Don’t make viewers watch an ad, then not provide the video: that’s obnoxious. MTV should have simply noted that embedding was not available for this video. The video clip of the Britney’s clumsy performance also appears frequently on YouTube, but it looks like it is being removed almost as quickly as it can uploaded. You can probably still find it periodically on YouTube by plugging in a Britney VMA search. There are also embeddable clips of the performance elsewhere like here on Brightcove. Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com
Layoffs at Eons
Eons, a social network focused on baby boomers, is cutting 1/3 of its staff according to BizJournals. Mass High Tech reports the Charlestown, Mass.-based startup, which was launched by Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor, recently laid off 24 employees or approximately 35 percent of the staff prior to the restructuring. MHT said the layoffs included some members of the executive team, but the company did not disclose specific names. Eons, which has the slogan “Loving life on the flip side of 50,” will focus on social networking going forward. Eons debuted in August, 2006 when it was kicked off with a launch featuring actress Jane Seymour. The company says it will focus on social networking going forward. Xconomy has more on Eons’ layoffs. Posted in Seniors Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com
YouTuber Chris Crocker Inks TV Deal
Chris Crocker quickly became one of the most well-known YouTubers when his Leave Britney Alone video hit the mainstream. Crocker’s video defense of Britney’s troubled performance at the VMAs has received over 8 million views. It was so popular that it was even parodied by actor Seth Green. Now Variety is reporting that Crocker has signed a deal with 44 Blue Productions that could result in Crocker’s own tv show. CNET’s The Social blog says Crocker was on 44 Blue’s radar before his popular Britney video. But don’t hold your breath. That impassioned young fellow is Chris Crocker, a 19-year-old from Tennessee whose 15 minutes (seconds?) of fame just might not quite be over: Variety is reporting that a television production company, 44 Blue Productions, has inked a deal with him for a potential TV show. It’s not totally serendipitous, as the entertainment site explained that Crocker has actually had a sizeable MySpace following for some time now, and that he’s been on 44 Blue’s radar for almost a year. It isn’t surprising that 44 Blue has been following him. Chris Crocker has been making popular videos on YouTube long before he became famous for the “Leave Britney Alone” video. He has a pretty funny video about MySpace’s top friends lists here. Crocker’s channel has over 51,000 subscribers. If Crocker gets his tv show and it is a success he might even be able to make popular celebrity blogger Perez Hilton a little jealous. Posted in Videos Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com Ad: Watchers Watch is a movie and tv news blog. Feed: Bloglines | Google | Netvibes | Other Readers
SAFCOL Chunk Light Tuna with Oven Dried Tomato and Basil in Spring Water, 3.5-Ounce Pouches (Pack of 12)
SAFCOL Chunk Light Tuna with Oven Dried Tomato and Basil in Spring Water, 3.5-Ounce Pouches (Pack of 12) - recipe for Revenge
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