Message from Michael - June 29 - Michael Jackson

Message From Michael                                 

                                                                                                                        June 29, 2009                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

      HOW FUNKY STRONG IS YOUR FIGHT

      HOW FUNKY STRONG IS MEDIA’S FIGHT

      INTERNET YOUNGER THAN MICHAEL JACKSON

      FACTOID OF THE WEEK

      SCARY FACTOID OF THE WEEK

      COCKTAIL CHATTER – FAKE NEWS

 

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      HOW FUNKY STRONG IS YOUR FIGHT:  Well, if you’re Michael Jackson, it’s pretty funky strong.  You already know that his album Thriller is the highest selling album in history with more than 50 Million sold.  And that funky strength continues after his death.  On YouTube alone, Thriller has been viewed more than 41 Million times since his death.  In descending order, followed by Beat It, with 27M, Dangerous with 16.5M and Billie Jean with 15M.  On iTunes, the music video version of Thriller was the top seller, but that’s the least of it. Eight out of the top ten selling albums were Jackson’s, 17 out of the top 20 CD’s were Jackson’s.  At Amazon, ten of the top 25 albums downloaded were Jackson’s and the day after his death, Jackson’s songs accounted for 60% of ALL music sales at the site.   At Google, Thriller recorded more than 32 Million searches, but there were 45 Million searches for Michael Jackson T-Shirts.   At CNN.com the hits were five times the normal traffic with 20 Million visitors; the same five-fold increase for CBSNews.com. It was the same story for all news websites; even CNet News doubled its traffic during that time. 

So the next question is how funky strong was the fight by media, and particularly the Internet, to stay up during this onslaught.  Well, all that traffic meant that the Internet stumbled… a lot… but despite a CNN headline “Jackson dies, almost takes Internet with him,” it didn’t quite fall.  AOL’s Instant Messaging service went down for 40 minutes.  At Wikipedia, the overload resulted in what a spokesman called “some fluttering” of access but which others called a slowdown, almost to stop.  Google also had its fluttering moment, with a kind of self-inflicted slow down in use because the service interpreted the massive surge in searches as an attack and started putting out error messages.    Of course, Twitter had similar slowdowns when, at several points, tweets about Jackson comprised almost a third (30%) of all tweets.  Digital media measurement service Keynote says its original assessment that news sites were overwhelmed was in error and that while there were significant slowdowns, there wasn’t the stoppage initially indicated.  However, the impact still can not be underestimated.  Internet backbone provider Akamai reported that Internet traffic WORLDWIDE jumped 11% the day Jackson died.

But all of this still means Michael Jackson continues to set records.  Yahoo says its News property set an all-time record for traffic after Jackson’s death with 16.4 Million unique visitors.  As social media website guide Mashable noted, that’s a million more visits than the Yahoo news site had on election day.  The Wikipedia website scored the highest traffic in the eight year history of the site with a Million visitors in the 7 p.m. hour alone and 1.8 Million that Thursday evening.  Again, for comparison purposes, New York Times media blog site Decoder notes that President Barack Obama got 2.3 Million Wikipedia site visits on election day.  Consumer adviser Regina Lewis at AOL, quoted in the earlier CNN story, says the Jackson story may prove a ‘seminal’ moment in Internet history because of the scope and depth of the onslaught.  AOL adviser Lewis also believes Jackson’s death could prove a “historic milestone” for Mobile Internet traffic in particular because of the sheer amount and when it occurred – while people were at work.

As a side note, I would remind readers that in last week’s MfM, Internet backbone provider Cisco predicted that Internet traffic would increase five times over the next four years and that video would account for 90% of that traffic by then.   Further, proof that one man’s death is another man’s con opportunity, anti-website Sophos reports that spammers took advantage of the Jackson death to find potential email victims… sending out spam emails disguised as news about Jackson’s death looking for people who respond, therefore verifying that they are legitimate email addresses and potential spam victims.  Another side note, news organizations are also dealing with fallout from the Michael Jackson death, aside from the impact on their websites.  That is the fact that celebrity gossip site TMZ was the first to break the news.  Interestingly, TMZ’s site CNN.com did not initially go with the TMZ report even though the two sites are co-owned by Time Warner.  And, finally, I have to say I have no idea what the line means --  “showing how funky strong is your fight” which is from Michael Jackson’s Beat It.                   

      INTERNET YOUNGER THAN MICHAEL JACKSON:  All right, that’s kind of a funky headline, but it is interesting --  from both perspectives when you think about it.  In 1969 when the military put Arpanet out to bid (thus creating the first computer network and the precursor to the Internet), Michael Jackson was 11 years old, a part of The Jackson Five, and had just signed a contract with Motown Records.  This isn’t some random thought that I came up with out of the blue.  The Open University based in the U.K. has put out a series of podcast interviews with pioneers like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners Lee and others commemorating the fact.

      THE BATTLE OF THE BROWSERS:  First Microsoft released IE8, Internet Explorer version 8, earlier this year.  Then Apple released version 4.0 of its Safari browser.  Now Mozilla is releasing version 3.5 of its Firefox browser.  More critically, underlying those new releases is something called HTML 5, which Safari has some of, but Firefox has more of.  As I’m sure most of you know, HTML stands for Hyper Text Mark-up Language and is the language which allows web pages to talk to each other.  To hear some sites describe it, HTML 5 is the evolutionary equivalent of man walking upright or developing opposable thumbs.  Website BNET Technology says HTML 5 will transform IT “more profoundly than any development since the Internet.”  (Another reason why I recalled the birth of the Internet above.)  It sounds like one of those snake oil ads that claims to do everything, but according to BNET, HTML 5 allows the Web to become a universal operating system, making mobile devices more powerful than low end laptops, improves the quality of cloud-based applications, the efficiency of device storage, and could even be the “ultimate in disintermediation” by allowing every day people to collaborate in the Ethernet without big-time applications like Google or big-time companies like IBM.  I’m not sure whether to say “whew” or “wow.”  And, yes, I admit this may seem a little too techie for most of us, but this is the stuff that you will be hearing about and dealing with in the future.      

      FACTOID OF THE WEEK:  There are more than 150 BILLION web pages stored on the Internet Archive (archive.org) website.  Doing a little simple math, that is 25 websites for every single one of the 6 Billion men, women and children inhabiting this planet.  If you go just on the basis of people with Internet access (which, according to Internet World Statistics, numbers roughly 1.6 Billion), that’s almost 100 websites for every single person online.  And that is not the total number of websites. The archive site ‘only’ lists all websites from 1996 to just a few months ago.

      SCARY FACTOID OF THE WEEK:  At least if you are in television, it is.  TV shows online are commanding higher CPM’s than Broadcast TV shows, according to a report carried by Bloomberg TV and attributed to “global wealth management” firm Sanford C. Bernstein.  Candidly this would have been the headline for this week’s MfM if it hadn’t been for Michael Jackson’s death.  Before you dismiss it, the Bloomberg report quotes a stalwart of traditional media, David Poltrack, who heads research for CBS.  Even he admits that sites like HULU.com and TV.com provide advertisers a captive audience that has fewer commercials and higher viewer recall.  The Bloomberg report says, for example, that a prime time TV ad for The Simpsons would normally run $20 to $40 per thousand viewers.  On HULU, that same ad would for $60 per thousand viewers.  The Bernstein analyst cited in the report, Michael Nathanson, noted that a Simpson’s episode on HULU only has 37 seconds of ad space compared to the nine minutes in the broadcast version.  He also warned the networks not to “cannibalize their core business” in moving to the Web.  (As I say, I am surprised this hasn’t gotten more coverage.  It may be, I should note by way of balance, that the report runs counter to many other articles I’ve read about the abundance of ad space on the Internet.  I guess it depends on what the content is and what the delivery system is.)

      COCKTAIL CHATTER:  We hinted at this in the section above about news organizations questioning the credibility of TMZ, but during the furor over Michael Jackson’s death, several websites and bloggers carried stories that actor Jeff Goldblum and then actor Harrison Ford also had died.  Apparently the rumors grew out of websites which allow you to fabricate reports using real news report by simply inserting a name.  Enough so-called ‘legitimate’ news operations carried the story, forcing Goldblum’s publicist to issue a statement that Goldblum was alive and well and living in Los Angeles.  As long as we’re on the subject of ‘fake news,’ the best example of all had to be the story out of Bolivia where a TV newscast aired images from the television series Lost, believing for some unknown reason that the footage was from the Air France plane crash.  Finally, as a footnote to all this, the Federal Trade Commission (the same people who want to hold public hearings on the future of news), wants rules to regulate bloggers. First off, they want bloggers to disclose when content is sponsored by advertisers.  The agency also wants bloggers and review sites to be held liable for consumer injuries resulting from unsubstantiated claims.  This follows the growing interest in review sites online, and follows in the wake of a number of businesses masquerading their pitches as blog comments.          

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Message from Michael - June 22, 2009

Message From Michael                                 

                                                                                                                        June 22, 2009                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

      SOCIAL MEDIA-TED ELECTION

      MASSIVE MEDIA MOVEMENT

      MEDIA IMMUNITY IN THE RECESSION

      COCKTAIL CHATTER – HAPPINESS AND DRINKING

      ADDENDUM – TOO MUCH 411

 

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      SOCIAL MEDIA-TED ELECTION:  Yes, the U.S. Presidential election was a watershed/ turning point/ big deal in the use of social media in politics, but one factoid about the controversial Iranian election and social media speaks volumes.  The founder of Twitter and its IP provider, NTT America, agreed to hold off a ‘critical’ upgrade of the service because of the role Twitter was playing “as an important communication tool in Iran.”  Reportedly, opposition party leaders in Iran used Twitter and other social media to coordinate and monitor their election efforts and since the loss, it has been used to coordinate the protests.  On the official twitter blogsite, Twitter founder Biz Stone said it was “humbling” to know the service could be playing a “globally meaningful role.” He was careful to emphasize that while the U.S. State Department asked for Twitter to continue, it was a decision by Twitter.  Until it was blocked by Iranian authorities, Facebook was also used to coordinate opposition efforts while protest video has been posted on YouTube. 

Yes, I know I’ve written about Twitter before, but it seems like social media – and Twitter in particular – have dominated media news over the past two weeks.  Also, as a personal side note, I have been asked by a couple of people if they could follow me on Twitter which is odd because I don’t twitter.  This isn’t another paean to twittering but rather a perspective on twittering.  For example, several websites (compete.com and quantcast.com) indicate that the two-year-old service may have peaked with its just under 20 Million users.  In May of this year, Twitter grew by a little more than a percent, dramatically less than other social networking sites.  Web analytics site HubSpot reports in its second annual “state of the twittersphere” that more than half (54.88%) of the Twitter accounts have NEVER tweeted; more than half (55.5%) are NOT following ANYONE; and more than half (52.71%) have NO followers.  Based on having less than ten followers, or ten friends or ten updates, the analysis says one in ten twitter accounts is dormant.  Another study by the Harvard Business Review found that more than half of Twitter users ‘tweet’ less than once every 74 days and that the top 10% of frequent ‘tweeters’ account for more than 90% of all tweets.  The Business Review study also found that, contrary to all other social networking, twitter is a male-driven activity rather than a female driven one.

None of this is meant to discount the impact of Twitter.  Again, I refer to the point above about Iran.  Website editorsblog.org notes that despite some criticisms on Twitter of mainstream media’s coverage of the Iranian election, it cites the CNN headline referring to “teargas and Twitter” in coverage of the Iranian protests.  Website PR 2.0 Blog makes the point that Twitter may be the broadcast medium for the new media generation.  The mediashift blog of PBS.org notes that more and more journalists are turning to Twitter for both personal and professional reasons.  And recently in New York, there was a “140 character conference” which is to be followed by two more – in Los Angeles and in London, which by the way is the twitter capital of the world.  But you know there is a rebellion in the offing when Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor is quitting Twitter because of the Internet “trolls” who blankety-blank-blank-blank everything he does on Twitter.

      MASSIVE MEDIA MOVEMENT:  In less than five years, the Global IP traffic is expected to increase more than five times over, according to the Visual Networking Index created by networking firm Cisco which provides much of the backbone for the Internet.  The company says that by the year 2013, there will be 56 EXABYTES of Internet traffic monthly – compared to the monthly average of nine exabytes of traffic last year.  The major reason – the growth in video which, in all its various forms (TV, VoD, Internet Video and P2P), will account for more than 90% of the total global consumer IP traffic.  Another part of the reason is what the report calls “consumer hyperconnectivity” which will increase what is ill-defined as the “network day” from 36 hours to 48 hours by 2013.  That hyperconnectivity includes active digital multitasking such as listening to music online while web browsing, as well as passive networking such as recording on a DVR while watching other programming.  The other big growth is in mobile broadband which the report says will double every year.  Of that traffic nearly two thirds (64%) will be mobile video.  Most of the Internet traffic occurs in the Asia-Pacific region which is expected to account for 21 exabytes of data a month by 2013, followed by North America (13 exabytes) and Western Europe (12.5 exabytes).  Even though the Middle East and Africa are growing the fastest, by 2013, they will only account for one exabyte of data a month. 

In what it calls some ‘fun facts,’ the report says the amount of traffic crossing the Internet would be the equivalent of 10 Billion DVD’s; that the surface area of the world’s digital screens in use by 2013 would be the equivalent of 2 Billion large-screen TV’s which translates into 15 times the surface area of Manhattan, or put another way, would circle the globe 48 times.  Okay, a quick lesson, so you don’t have to look it up, an exabyte is a thousand petabytes which is a thousand terabytes which is a thousand gigabytes.  Interestingly, although the report references the “overwhelming pace”, it doesn’t indicate any concerns about keeping up with the growth.

      MEDIA IMMUNITY IN THE RECESSION:  Sorry, don’t get your hopes up about some positive news about media sales.  Instead it’s a report about broadband penetration which echoes the growth noted in the Cisco study.  Broadband adoption in U.S. homes has jumped to nearly two thirds (63%) compared to just over half (55%) a year ago, according to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.  What I had forgotten was that the previous report showed broadband adoption IN THE HOME (an important distinction) had been stagnant.  The report appears to indicate that broadband adoption has grown in the population areas which had been having low usage in the past.  For example, lower income groups such as those making less than $20,000 grew from 25% in 2008 to 35% in 2009; senior citizen usage grew from 19% in 2008 to 30% in 2009; broadband use among those with only a high school degree grew from 40% in 2008 to 52% in 2009; and in rural America, broadband use grew from 38% in 2008 to 46% in 2009.  The only population subgroup that did not grow as much was African Americans where growth was below average.  In comparison usage amongst the high income population as well as the higher education population grew but only slightly.  The point about the recession immunity comes from a part of the survey which showed that twice as many people had cut back or cancelled their cell phone or cable TV plan rather than the Internet service.  That’s even though the cost of broadband has increased, especially – you’ll love this – in areas where there is only one Internet provider as opposed to several Internet providers.      

      COCKTAIL CHATTER:  As the Monty Python skits used to say… and now for something completely different. Despite the economic problems in the country, more than a third (35%) of Americans say they’re “very happy,” according to… you’ll love this… The Happiness Index, a survey of 2,400 adults in the U.S., put together by The Harris Poll.  That’s the same… again despite the economy… as last year.  The pollsters say a close network of friends and positive relationships with family turned out to be more of a deciding factor in the happiness quotient than money or economic stability.  Spiritual beliefs also play a part.  As does education -- the more educated you are, the more happy you are, according to the poll, although the variations are small.  Women are slightly happier than men (36% versus 34%) and more married women are happy compared to single women (38% versus 34%).  Oddly, there was no numbers for married men versus single men.  I asked the pollsters why not and haven’t received a reply.  Unrelated (or at least I think it’s unrelated), just under a third of Americans (29%) drink alcohol at least once a week while a quarter (25%) say they never drink alcohol.  Again, according to our friends at The Harris Poll.  Only six percent say they drink daily and the same percentage say they drink ‘once a year.’  Men are twice as likely to drink as women (40% versus 19%) and women are more likely than men to say they never drink (29% versus 22%).  The favorite drinks – beer (67%), domestic wine (49%), Vodka (41%), Rum (32%) and foreign wines (29%), followed by Tequila (24%), Champagne (18%) and various whiskeys after that.

      ADDENDUM:  Proof that I sometimes cram too much stuff into my messages, several people sent me the link to an online video even though I mentioned it in my previous MfM. (Either that or I’m a lousy writer.)  Anyway it’s the hottest viral video for us media types.  It’s Mad Avenue Blues, which is a song about The Day The Media Died, set to Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie.  Here are two links -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CqRcCHk_Pc . Or http://tinyurl.com/qcz2sm.  As long as I’m repeating stuff, let me repeat the Association of Independent Creative Editors website (http://www.aice.org).  My favorite here is Gnarls Barkley Who’s Gonna Save My Soul which won the music video category.  Warning – it is a little graphic, but it is also poignant and touching.  Watch the two of them and let me know what you think.               

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Message from Michael - June 8, 2009 - Ingenuity and Innovation

Message From Michael                                 

                                                                                                                        June 8, 2009                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

      RAPPING BASSET HOUNDS AND JACKSON POLLOCK

      BACK TO WORK BUT HAVING FUN AND BEING PRODUCTIVE

      FOOTNOTE/ DISCLAIMER – MORE

 

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      INTRODUCTION:  Microsoft has unveiled Bing which it calls “the sound of found” and is clearly aimed as a counter to the Tyrannosaurus Rex of search engines better known as Google.  In the meantime, Google has unveiled Wave which is just as clearly aimed at Mastodon Microsoft’s Office Suite and Cloud Computing.  I thought you would find it instructive to look at the futurists who may be the real challenge to Microsoft and Google.

      RAPPING BASSET HOUNDS AND JACKSON POLLOCK:  How’s that for a headline?  They’re part of the varied selection of Webby Awards honoring the best websites.  The winners were announced earlier but will be available on a special YouTube/ Webby site starting Tuesday.  And just for good measure, add Timothy Leary to the headline.  Why?  Because if these websites had been available when he was alive, he wouldn’t have needed LSD.  They are that amazing.    So, get ready to turn on your computer, tune in to the various websites and drop out of circulation for a while, as we give you this special salute to the ingenuity of the website designers and the innovative thinking of the webware designers.

As you can tell from the headline, one of my favorites was the rapping basset hound.  The basset belongs to one of the founders of Comviq Sweden, which supplies prepaid cards for mobile phones, and the dog has become the company symbol.  The dog does the typical scratching, screeching of an LP on a turntable, but it also has an interactive feature so you can add in barks, woofs, snorts and sniffs and then record it.  You can even download the basset ringtone.  Want to try it yourself… go to the website -- http://demo.fb.se/e/tele2/beatbox/site/. It’s this interactive feature that makes these sites so fascinating… and for traditional media… frightening.  The site jacksonpollock.org, for example, allows you to use your cursor like a paintbrush, slashing lines across the ‘canvas’, throwing blobs of paint, changing colors, then cleaning the slate and starting over.  And, yes, video is the rage, but when you couple it with the three dimensional look on some of the sites, the ‘wow’ factor grows exponentially.  The designer website barcinski-jeanjean.com even asks if you have 3-D glasses before taking you on a 360 degree tour of Amsterdam with floating sheets of paper that you can click on for information.  The less flamboyant but no less fascinating “Thank You with a T” site (thankyou.thisisgrow.com/t37j) shows the T-Shirt designers drawing on your computer screen from the other side.  Also on the environmental side is Protect77.com where a massive display of nudes in the Antarctic is just part of many art projects displayed in 3-D-like visuals.

As for Timothy Leary, he could go to website behance.net which bills itself as a free platform for the world’s leading creative professionals with designs and portfolios ranging from the weird to the wonderful.  But if he really wanted to trip out, he might go to Queensland University lecturer and self described ‘digital and hypermedia poet’ Jason Nelson’s site, secrettechnology.com, which contains what it understatedly calls ‘oddities.’  Or something a little less ‘disturbing’ is web designer Joshua Budich’s My Star Wars Collection (joshuabuddich.com/SWCollection) which won both the Webby Award and the People’s Voice award in the Personal category with its compilation of hundreds of Star War toy figures.

The BBC walked away with both the Webby and the People’s Voice award (along with many others) in the news category which included Salon.com, MSNBC’s spectra visual reader and The Daily Beast.  But if you want to see the next generation of news, go to the student category where graduate students at UC Berkeley won a webby for their website (missionlocal.org) which looks at the Mission District of San Francisco, or the website of the graduate students at Columbia University who look at the Correction Corporation of America (businessofdetention.com).  That next generation can probably best be seen at People’s Voice winner, the waylandstudentpress.com website, the home site of Wayland High School in Massachusetts and the handy work of, incredibly, a freshman student, Robin Kim.

The point of all this is, yes, you will find some of the more well known websites amongst the Webby winners, but dig amongst the nominees and you will find even more fascinating places… like birdpost.com which combines birding with satellite maps… 1000awesomethings which is a ‘time-ticking countdown’ of things marvelous and meaningfully mundane… Timespentalone.com which is a multi-dimensional display of ‘thoughts and explorations conceived in isolation’… Sandrific, which displays sand collections from around the world… or Failblog.org which captures real-life pictures of people’s ‘failure to communicate.’                    

      OKAY, BACK TO WORK:   But have fun doing it by looking at the top 100 ‘Webware” winners, as named by CNET and tech editor Rafe Needleman.  Plus you will find some possible solutions to make work easier.  For example, all those markets that are going to a news sharing arrangement should look at the Infrastructure and Storage category where Carbonite, Dropbox, DropIO, Mozy, Windows Live Skydrive and YouSendIt provide online storage and file sharing capabilities.  For all of us individuals, these sites are mainly there to provide backup to your hard drive… free, in most cases.  It may not be all about ‘cloud computing’ this year, but pretty close.  As Needleman and the CNET editors say in their pick of the Amazon Web Service as an editor’s choice, it used to be that venture capitalists looked ‘askance’ at entrepreneurs if you couldn’t run your own servers, now they look askance if you do run your own services.  “The cloud is where the new Web apps live,” they say.  If you do that much online work, the thing that drives you crazy – remembering your ID and password, right?  Well, now there are two apps to do that for you.  Website OpenID, which also made the top 100 Webware list last year, creates one master identity online so you can access multiple sites without creating another specific ID and PW.  This year the editor’s choice is OAuth which allows permissions to be set up between services so you don’t have to give out an ID and PW.

As long as I’m on this productivity kick, the webware 100 offers a variety of avenues to explore.  I just recently discovered Google Calendar, but it is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ways to making work more streamlined.  Now you may have heard of Zoho (because I have mentioned it in previous MfM’s), but how about Remember The Milk, which allows you to create a to-do list or checklist and which the CNet editors call “the most portable goal setting service” in its class.  Webware Evernnote allows you to take notes on your computer and they appear almost immediately on any other machine you’re using.  Webware RingCentral let’s you use a single phone line in multiple locations.  And instead of GoToMyPC, you can try LogMeIn which is also a remote desktop application.      

You know something is really hot when it makes both the Webby Awards and the Webware top 100.  In this case it is dimdim.com which is an open source web conferencing and screen sharing application, allowing you to share presentations and collaborate on projects.  The folks at dimdim say it is a virtual classroom allowing you to synchronize with multiple users.  Two others that, I believe, have made both lists are animoto.com which promises (and delivers) the ability to produce videos from your still pictures in just minutes; and graphics processor nividia whose website speakvisualcom is an interactive, multi-dimensional testimony to the capabilities of the processor.

One of the growing trends in web sites and web software is the proliferation of recommendations and guides for consumers and businesses.  From CNET’s Webware list comes Good Guide which provides a recommendation system that is “safe, healthy and green.”  From the Webby list, you probably know about About.com but how about veryshortlist.com which provides a guide to “new and sometimes vintage entertainment and media that haven’t been hyped to within an inch of their lives.” A similar goal to ours here at MfM.  Which is why we are re-visiting the Webby and Webware lists, because although they have been covered, they haven’t been covered to the extent they deserve.

Again, the point is you’ve heard about some of the standard web and software applications, but there is so much more out there.  For example, instead of Internet Explorer, you may use Safari or Firefox.  But have you heard of Maxthon?  No?  It has been downloaded more than 200 Million times and is the second most popular browsing software in China, created by folks “fed up with the lack of customization in Microsoft’s IE.”  And you’ve heard of Digg, but have you heard of Diigo?  It also is a content sharing and bookmarking tool, but in addition it allows you to save entire web pages and actually make notes on top of the content.  And instead of Google, Yahoo or MSN, try Scour which combines the search capabilities of all three.   

      FOOTNOTE AND DISCLAIMER:  Separate from the Webby’s is the Web Marketing Association which has its own WebAward program which is still taking entries.  And as long as I’m on an awards kick, give yourself a treat and go to the Association of Independent Creative Editors website (http://www.aice.org).  My favorite here is Gnarls Barkley Who’s Gonna Save My Soul which won the music video category.  Warning – it is a little graphic, but it is also poignant and touching.  Watch it and let me know what you think.  And while I’m at it, let me add another.  If you haven’t seen Mad Avenue Blues, which is a song about The Day The Media Died, set to Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie, this is one you really, really need to watch. Here are the two links -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CqRcCHk_Pc . Or http://tinyurl.com/qcz2sm.  And, definitely, let me know what you think.  Thanks to WNEG-TV Account Executive Lisa Ferrell for the lead on this one.  Oh, yes, the disclaimer.  This week’s MfM is a week late.  Looking at all the creative websites and ‘webware’ was so fascinating that I did indeed turn on, tune in and drop out.

Finally, you can find the links to both of these through search, but just in case, here they are.  You can click on them or cut and paste them.

For the Webby Awards -- http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?season=13.

For the Webware Top 100 ---  http://news.cnet.com/8301-13546_109-10244820-29.html?tag=mncol           

      SUBSCRIPTIONS:  If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com.  You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.