Granted, one reason I had to read it three times is because I have no idea what the hell he’s talking about. But re-read I did and not skip off to some other pursuit. That bears some relation to Rifkin’s point about Google’s difficulty with social apps, like Buzz. Historically, Google is about delivering information in an efficient manner so you can go do something else with. It makes you efficient the way a panda is efficient: eat-poop-eat-poop… for 16 hours a day. In contrast, social media platforms are all about sucking up your time.Facebook doesn’t help you eat. Or poop. It only helps you use Facebook. Or Farmville.

After researching what pandas do all day, I was struck by how panda-like we are when we use the Internet.

Roaming a massive world wide web of forests, most of our time is spent searching for delicious bamboo and consuming it. 40 times a day we’ll poop something out — an email, a text message, a status update, maybe even a blog post — and then go back to searching-and-consuming.

RSS-inventor Dave Winer put a fine point on the situation Steve “Just Don’t Hold It That Way” Jobs has gotten into himself into with the new iPhone deficiencies. It’s a shitstorm. To be exact, a brewing shitstorm. This torrential downpour of crap is less about technical issues, Winer argues, than it is the loss of trust that will thrust Apple into the grim ranks of other American companies:

It will be ugly because Apple is going to let it get ugly. Because unlike the oil companies they have no experience with PR disasters. When I read their first public response on July 2, the one that said the problem was the meter measuring the strength of AT&T’s signal, I couldn’t believe this was meant to be taken seriously. It’s the kind of story The Onion might have written on a bad day. Or Jon Stewart. That a corporate PR team wrote this says how unseasoned their people are. That they thought this answer was going to satisfy anyone says how out of touch they are with the world they are in.

Newspaper publishers have of late shown some signs of life. Industry analyst Ken Doctor uses the Wall Street term “Dead Cat Bounce” –as in, even a dead cat bounces when you drop it– to describe the phenomenon. In a useful primer, he also offers a guide to decoding the second-quarter earnings. So all you ink-stained necrophiliacs out there should take a look.

Let’s recall that last year’s ad revenue results had all the spring of a dead cat — down some $10 billion and 27 percent. So take a dead cat and pump a little life in it, with things less worse than they were in the disastrous 2009 and you get a bit of a bounce — but not one to crow about. Unless, that is, you don’t have much else to crow about, and that’s that’s the predicament, circa mid-2010, of most newspaper companies. They don’t have a big, positive story to talk about.

You might be surprised to see Marketwatch’s Jon Friedman make this list. For the uninitiated, Friedman’s “Media Web” column, where he publishes gooey profiles of media moguls, is the Chinese massage parlor of media reporting. So it was with interest that I read his takedown of Joel Stein, Time magazine’s resident “funnyman.” Stein recently went to the far-off state of New Jersey, discovered there were many Indians living there, wrote a rather racist column about it and ignited a low-grade media controversy that forced Time to utter some pointless apology.

Friedman, however, wasn’t having it. It’s clear that at the same time Stein was discovering Indians, our media reporter was finding his stones, because this week Friedman, who wrote the column made him feel “stomach-sick,” gave it to Stein — gave it to him good.

Stein is a smart guy but an insufferable journalist, whose top priority seems to focus on calling attention to … Joel Stein. Take his column on circumcision: “I knew having a child would force me to examine my life, but I didn’t expect to have to start with my penis.” Ha ha. Read Stein’s circumcision column.
While it’s debatable whether Stein is the least funny humor writer around, he certainly is now going to be regarded as the most boorish.

ONE FROM THE VAULT: The most execrable bit of media reportage his week went, naturally, to a New York Times features writer who did another daring voyage to Nolita digerati bar Tom & Jerry’s. The last time the Gray Lady showed up, it was to publish an embarrassing story about how a lot of Internet people hang out there.

This time it was to shadow Internet person Rex Sorgatz, who runs what seems like a web-design and social-media firm. The profile is a brain-numbing, journalistic cipher whose main value was to remind me of a nice piece of writing Sorgatz did for New York magzine a couple years ago. His “Microfame Game,” from 2008, is a wry look at the state of famous-on-the-Internet types, like Julia Allison, and an 8-step program describing the path to join them.

It’s easy to be cynical about this new class of celebrity. The lines between empowerment and self-promotion, between sharing and oversharing, between community and cliques, can be blurry. You can judge for yourself whether the following microcelebs represent naked ambition, talent justly discovered, or genius marketing. The point is that renown is no longer the exclusive province of a select few. Nano-celebrity is there for the taking, if you really want it.

Bollinger, the 19th president of Columbia University

His specious logic rests on the fact that Americans — “ironically,” in a misuse of the word — already consume state-supported news in the form of PBS and NPR here, and the BBC, Al Jazeera and China’s CCTV abroad and that all is well with that arrangement. It’s near impossible to get past the holding up of an official Chinese news source as an example of a flourishing press, but there’s more if you can control your laughter…

Bollinger points to how BP’s ad budget supports newspapers and has done little to influence coverage as if that matter were an a priori fact, and not worth talking about. And he points to public universities and government-funded research as unproblematic examples of public involvement working well in intellectual pursuits and thus evidence that we should be looking at some sort of American version of the BBC.

It’s a flimsy argument anyway you cut it, but what bothered me in particular is his ignoring the question of how such a rough beast would be fielded. Bollinger doesn’t express precisely what kind of government-funded news operation would take shape, but his hints are troubling. It feels like we’d end up with some sort of sprawling redux of the sprawling operations that are now having so many problems precisely because of their sprawl. The assumption seems to be that if tax dollars were to pay for journalism, that what they’d buy is yet another massive, inefficient operation that tries to do everything but does nothing well.

Bollinger points to the fact that there are “only a few dozen full-time correspondents” covering China these days. Ok, let’s assume that’s too few. How many do you need? And how should they be covering China: sitting in a Beijing press club or living in the rural provinces? More importantly, is the problem more one of quality or quantity? Is it a people problem or is it a tech problem? Do we need more generalist types or specialists who may not be “full-time” correspondents but business people or human-right practicioners or urban planners or environmental experts who can write with greater depth and urgency about the most important issues facing the country. Maybe the money spent on Columbia graduates would actually be better spent on a technology platform that would allow those people in rural area that are so hard to cover to speak for themselves.

It’s probably not fair to pick on Bollinger for an example that might have been off the top of his head, but the point is this: The problem in journalism today is not simply or necessarily that there’s not enough journalists running around. There’s also a fundamental confusion about what news is and what its role in our society and culture should be.

These are questions that shouldn’t be sorted out by the government. Instead, it should be up to journalists and news consumers to work it out for themselves. That means listening to your audience, creating cost-effective staffs and innovating until the content and its delivery make sense.

In my mind, the form can’t be separated from the funding source.

How Reddit fits into Conde’s future wasn’t obvious when the deal was done in 2006 and it’s less so now, what with Reddit asking for money from its community. It’s sad to see a site with such a strong community reduced to groveling for more funds to hire enough engineers to basically keep the site up and add some features. There are lessons here for those who still look at big traffic figures — and with 280 million views a month, Reddit pulls a ton — and assume that audience alone will prop up a business.

Here are a few things a ton of traffic won’t fix:

1. No revenue. Ok, This is a bit chicken-and eggy. In most cases, audience is the first step towards making a content outfit some money, but without any scratch a mature site like Reddit isn’t going to be a favorite of corporate overlords. That’s essentially Reddit’s explanation of what’s going on and it seems straightforward. As the Ning saga recently demonstrated, the days of tossing around big numbers of uniqiue visitors or page views as though they themselves indicated the health of a business have come and gone. Less simple is who to blame or where to go from here.

2. No clear path to real revenue. I’m not a regular Reddit user and I may be missing something, but it seems that the main way the site makes money is a little ad unit tucked into the right rail. This morning, it featured a house ad soliciting advertising. That’s unacceptable for an operation with the consumer traction Reddit has — even just from the advertising perspective. As a heavily-trafficked platform whose main laborers are its readers, Reddit should scale. Helping it do so, you would think, should have been job number-one for Conde.

3. Non-strategic owners that don’t get your business. As mentioned, Conde does print and Conde does luxury. It has done digital rather grudgingly. Some of its magazines’ digital hubs have gotten big, but it was hard even back in 2006 to imagine how Reddit would be profitably integrated into the portfolio, given what it does.

4. Non-strategic owners ill-suited for a bad economic times. The recession pounded Conde Nast, leading it to close Portfolio before it had a chance to get off the ground and Gourmet (which it’s now reviving in iPad form). Estimates like Newsweek’s put 2009 ad decline as high as $1 billion. Conde probably just doesn’t have the money to pump into Reddit.

5. Big corporate organizational structure. How a newly-acquired company fits into portfolio like Conde Nast’s isn’t going to be determined by sheer audience size. Revenue and profitability — and the kind of audience — will determine that. Reddit, as important as it may be in certain corners of the online world, is a small fish at a company the size of Conde and every additional resource added will come only with the promise of return.

And here’s a visualization of more than 200 comments left in reaction to Decision on Cleveland.com. It shows relationships between words commonly linked by “and” in the thread. Note particularly the frequent combination of “Wade” and “Queen” and “Bosh.”

So why am I not excited about “The Social Network,” the forthcoming fil-um about the shady-to-the-max early days of the social network?

Probably because the most recent trailer, the second so far, makes it looks like the movie will be an uber-serious, talky-to-a-fault snoozefest investigation into whether Mark Zuckerberg snatched the idea for Facebook from its original founders. I’m envsioning “Zodiac,” another Fincher effort, also uber-serious and talky but not necessarily too long, adapted for a maybe-maybe not-maybe-ok probably theft of intellectual property.

The trailer, while nicely produced, feels off tonally.

This is about some lol-ling Harvard geek engaging in dormroom corporate espionage. When you think about it, an observant R.A. might have been able to keep Facebook’s origins on the straight and narrow. I’m not playing down the severity of IP crimes. Billions were at stake, even if the post-adolescent players didn’t know it at the time. But I’m not sure the subject matter warrants the somberness. The events chronicled in “Zodiac” were slightly more serious. Facebook? Those people had their faces blown off.

I’m not sure what kind of movie I’d make about Facebook, but I think I’d go the black comedy route and add some fantasy elements. Think “Dr. Strangelove” meets “Tron,” the 1980s Disney sci-fi movie in which crag-free Jeff Bridges was sucked into a video game. Why Tron? I think its visual sensibility would help in explaining the social graph.

Another idea: Have you seen “Pirates of Silicon Valley”? I never really thought I’d find myself recommending a Noah Wylie-Anthony Michael Hall vehicle that aired on TNT, but I think it dulls down the edges of the Bill Gates-Steve Jobs rivalry without losing the sense of conflict. It’s a kitschy and fun movie that isn’t over-serious. Which is where I think a movie about Facebook should be.

The trend that leaped out at me is the decline in journalists’ interest in multimedia content. While blogs and Twitter were on the rise, the percent of journos whose organizations produce online video clips dropped rather sharply, from 47% in 2009 to just under 40% in 2010. And that decline didn’t translate into getting more video-based publicity materials. Only 27% wanted links to video content from PRs, compared to 35% the year before. The proportion interested in audio content also shrank.

That’s kind of interesting at a moment when the bar to producing video is lower than ever, ad rates on video content are halfway to decent, and, it’s safe to say, our culture is no less image-driven than before. We haven’t exactly become voracious readers overnight.

Yet Oriella’s numbers confirm a feeling I’ve had for some time now: that the expiration date on all the enthusiasm about historically text-based news organizations becoming multimedia players and making the leap to video has come. While there’s a seemingly boundless appetite for music videos and clips of kittens and Justin Bieber, it’s not easy to aggregate a meaningful audience for online video news.

Except that it points to the continued resource-starvation in newsrooms, I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing simply because the sloughing off of forms that don’t work can lead to better focus on the ones that do.

Anyone who dived into the early days of online video news saw and heard some scary stuff. Droning conversation with little regard for readers’ attention span, a preponderance of, to coin a phrase, faces for text, a lack of appreciation for editing, awful visual effects, bad suits, foundation applied like spackle.

Part of the problem was the lack of imagination that infected most newspapers, however well-funded, when they decided they wanted to do video. Basically, these have amounted to taking the TV news format — serious-looking people sitting behind a desk talking seriously about the news of the day –and transposing it online. While this might be the only way to do the job in a cost-effective way, it’s a format that doesn’t hold up terribly well in the age of “The Daily Show and The Onion, whose mock news network got attention for its forthcoming “News from the Year 2137.” (Here’s the trailer.)

The other problem is that video news is typically user-unfriendly. You can scan a headline, a lede, and maybe even a nutgraf and then move on to your kitten films before the lame spinning global intro comes to a close on your typical news clip. And there are contextual problems for many readers. Most of us read news sites in a workplace where we can’t easily turn up the volume or put on the headphones.

Given the cost restraints of most news organizations, your average text report will serve a reader better than its video equivalent. I’m exempting both large organizations that specialize in video (CNN) and relatively high-quality productions that truly take advantage of the form. Vice’s VBS.TV would be one of these, but I don’t know of too many like it — offerings where the video form is integral to the content.

Because of that relative paucity, the decline of online video news is one of media’s ailments that I find tough to lament.

As a reward for reading to the end, here’s your bonus kitten video.

One of the most popular ways of doing this is in the form of contests that seek to harvest entrepreneurial ideas while rewarding the people behind with support, guidance, and, in some cases, cold hard cash.

Far from exhaustive, here’s a list of three initiatives to foster — and fund — innovation that give big companies new ways to speak to their customers. As to the question of whether these programs are gimmicks designed to garner PR, only time will tell.

MDC’s $1 Million Agency Challenge
Over the years, Toronto-based MDC Partners has positioned itself as one of the more creatively-focused public companies that own ad agencies. That rep is due to its prize possession, the famous Crispin Porter & Bogusky, and an acquisition approach that allowed agency founders to maintain meaningful equity positions in their babies — at least for a time. Last week in Cannes, CEO Miles Nadal and Chief Strategist Chuck Porter announced they’re seeking submissions from folks who have cracking ideas for a startup agency. The winner will get $1 million to make the idea happen. (And the winner will, naturally, lose 51% ownership in the agency to MDC in the process.) The window to enter will be open for three months and then Nadal and company will pick ten applicants to interview before choosing a winner.

Nokia Growth Economy Venture Challenge
At the end of July, Nokia will wrap up its Growth Economy Venture Challenge, a contest designed to bring mobile innovation to the developing world. The mobile phone-maker, whose strongholds are in developing places like India,, is looking for ideas for a mobile product or solution designed to improve the lives of people in those places. The winner, who will receive $1 million in venture funding, will come up with an idea that changes the way people use Nokia devices and does some good. Here’s the call for the entries.

PepsiCo10
Compared to MDC and Nokia, the beverage giant is looking for a concept that’s further along in development. PepsiCo10 is not a contest, really, nor wil it end up with a company getting funded. On the program’s website, Pepsi describes the program as an accelerator. Start-ups operating in four categories with $250,000 in funding and/or that much in annual revenue can apply to be part of the PepsiCo10 program. The categories are social media, digital video and gaming, retail and experiential marketing and mobile marketing. The ten shovel-ready, early-stage technologies that are chosen by Pepsi will receive a pilot execution of the concept and possibly activation across more Pepi brands. Other benefits include access to Pepsi brand teams and agency partners like the PR firm Weber Shandwick, exposure to VCs, the visibility that would come with taking part in a program like this and, coverage from Mashable, one of Pepsi’s partners in the program.

One of those things that doesn’t get much attention is the hard business of customer service, something that changed this year that changed with the handing of the Titanium Lion Grand Prix to Best Buy and agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky for their work on Twelpforce. The program takes the business of customer service, so often confined to call centers located in the land of God knows where and the return counters in stores, and opens it up for all to see. Employing Twitter — hence the “Tw” — and open to hundreds of Best Buy employees who can tweet from a single account, it’s the mobilization of the retailer’s army of experts to deal with customer complaints or question as they’re expressed in real time.

After the award was handed down on Saturday, I spent some time with Twelpforce. What impresses isn’t that it does the yeoman’s job of answering reasonable questions about electronics and their components. In this day and age, that’s nothing special. What’s striking is how it’s equipped to handle even the shrillest consumer, the kind who, for better or worse, makes Twitter the giant bitch box that it is. These aren’t people who are particularly wired or famous, even in an internet kind of way. They have one qualification: They have been, or feel they hacve been, dicked around by Best Buy and they’ve decided to let loose in short form.

For instance, a Twitter user knowsn @heathrmichelle let loose this one:

@twelpforce Thanks again Best Buy & Geek Squad for the worst customer service. In store and on the phone. Again. When will we learn?

This, to be sure, is not the stuff of big viral, antibrand campaigns. Heather has just 45 followers and her problem is too non-specific to merit a retweet. But that didn’t stop a Twelpforce agent from getting into a several Tweet exchange that resulted in the consumer sending a presumably detailed email to a complaint address. All this doesn’t make for a magic fix to the original in-store problem. Instead, it’s a way of at least funneling the often raw emotion that comes from being dicked-over in a commercial setting into something potentially positive.

Not too long ago, it would have been difficult to imagine a major multinational brand like Best Buy worrying too much about these people. Even at the relatively late date of 2007, Bob Garfield, my former colleague at Advertising Age, was able to make hay — massive bales of it — by instigating a war against Comcast when it short-shrifted him on his home cable service and failed to respond. It was called “Comcast Must Die.” And despite that headline, the cable operator was stunningly non-responsive and it took some real doing to engage them.

Perhaps having learned from Comcast’s mistakes, Best Buy seems incredibly attuned to even the smallest, most ephemeral beefs. It’s hard to prove, but I think this personal attention matters. I recall maybe two years ago idly complaining about my own cable provider’s crappy website in a Tweet. Within a few minutes, I got a reply from an digital marketer there. At once he asked me what my problem was AND rightfully chided me a bit for being so lazy with my digital whinging. That reminder that a brand is really an assemblage of the work of real live people — who, you know, have bosses and feelings and all that –made me promise to myself to make my criticisms sharper and more meaningful.

By incorporating a large group of tech types, Twelpforce is a stab at scaling that sort of micromanaging of the customer relationship. I can’t sat whether it is or will regarded a success and some, especially those who these sorts of accounts should be handled by a small group of people, already regard it as a failure. If nothing else, Twelpforce is a move in the right direction, as an example of brands listening to their customers and thats’s where advertising needs to go. The Titanium recognition from Cannes, which is designed to award strong business ideas as opposed to ad conceits, should help people in the ad business further bring customer service into their purview.

Naturally, the concept has its critics, as this recent Tweet attests:

Naturally, there was a reply:

For most players, there is no real reason to submit to an in-depth profile such as the one that Gen. Stanley McChrystal did for Rolling Stone, a profile that has cost him his command in Afghanistan. Was there any upside to agreeing to the profile? Had it contained none of the disparaging comments about the president, the vice president, their aides, and U.S. allies, McChrystal still wouldn’t have gained from the article’s publication. Magazine profiles don’t turn public opinion or influence Congress. They just don’t. So why bother?

Newsweek does a Q&A with Michael Hastings, the freelance writer for Rolling Stone who brought down a general this week:

One of the most vivid scenes in the stories comes when you are out with the general, his wife, and his team for a night on the town in Paris. His team is entirely forthright with you, did that surprise you?
Well, they were getting hammered, I don’t know at that moment if they were being the most forthright. Of course it was surprising. A lot of the reporting that is getting most of the attention happened right away in the first few days in Paris. So I was surprised—because they didn’t know me.

So fond is the media of Jon Stewart’s ability to take sacred cows to the abattoir, he’s become a bit of one himself. It’s rare for him to get a rough going-over of the sort that Jezebel gave him this week for the boy’s club he runs at The Daily Show.

This mentality arguably goes straight the top: The host and executive producer’s onscreen persona is lovable mensch, but one former executive on the show tells us “there’s a huge discrepancy between the Jon Stewart who goes on TV every night and the Jon Stewart who runs The Daily Show with joyless rage.”

Nicholas Carr is always trying to make us feel like big dummies whose stupidity results from an overreliance on the Internet. This week he did it for the San Francisco Chronicle:

Reading from a screen is very different from reading from a book. A book provides a shield against distraction, allowing us to focus our entire attention on an author’s narrative or argument. When text is put onto a screen, it enters what the science fiction writer Cory Doctorow terms an “ecosystem of interruption technologies.” The words have to compete for our attention with links, e-mails, texts, tweets, Facebook updates, videos, ads and all the other visual stimuli that pour through our computers.

Don’t expect Breaking Media to open a Tokyo office any time soon. As The New York Times reported, Japan isn’t precisely welcoming in digital media.

No online journalism of any kind has yet posed a significant challenge to Japan’s monolithic but sclerotic news media.
“Japan just wasn’t ready yet,” said JanJan’s president and founder, Ken Takeuchi, a former reformist mayor and newspaper journalist who started the site in 2003. “This is a hard place to create an alternative source of news.”

Even if it didn’t surprise, the ruling is still still sort of a symbolic moment that, if Viacom and other big content companies interpret it correctly, could lead them out of a Luddite frame of mind that has no room for a realistic understanding of how content is consumed and distributed today.

Here’s what needs to come next:

1. Media companies need to see consumers as their friends. The substance of Viacom’s lawsuit might have been about copyright and about changing YouTube’s behavior with regard to copyright, but it was by extension also an attack on the very people who are the end user of professional content. The Viacoms of the world can interpret the will to upload good clips of Jon Stewart or South Park or its other shows as something that results in smaller audience and costs them revenue. But it’s just that — an interpretation. These companies can also choose to see it as a readymade distribution network on a massive scale. They’re the people helping to make shows buzzworthy and drive audience and attention. Yes, YouTube makes money off Viacom’s work, but now without doing some marketing work in the process.

2. On a more tactical level, Viacom needs to get a licensing deal of some sort done with YouTube, as so many other media companies have done. This of course will never happen At this point, an appeal looks inevitable — and pointless in the absence of any evidence that the appellate courts will come out in Viacom’s favor. There’s a middle ground between resistance to the digital reality and the need to protect copyright. At this point, Viacom has taken severe damage to its once-strong brand as the forward-thinking content player that created MTV and Comedy Central. A cease fire would go far in making Viacom seem like it understands the world around it and isn’t kicking and screaming as its dragged into a new era.

3. While this is a major victory for Google and YouTube, there are others to be fought. Most urgently, YouTube needs to find a clear path to monetization. With preroll, annoying overlays and all kinds of sponsored content deals all over the site, the user experience on YouTube has declined, even if traffic hasn’t. With all those ads slapped all over the site, you’d think there’d be more headway in making it pay, that doesn’t seem to be the case as analysts generally regard the site as a loss-maker. (Google isn’t transparent about YouTube’s performance, but one YouTube executive has predicted profitability this year.) Google, of course, is loaded down with cash so YouTube’s monetization lag matters only so much. And the site is still young. But at some point it’ll become vital to turn all of those eyeballs and uploads into moolah.