From Romenesko’s RSS feed today comes two items back-to-back that brought a chuckle.

Item one: Bloggers should consider following ethics and disclosure rules — from the San Jose Mercury News where Scott Kirsner writes the usual stuff that bloggers need to consider “adapting some of the ethics and disclosure practices that guide traditional print and broadcast outlets.”

Item two: “(Maria) Bartiromo partners with the world she’s supposed to cover” — with Edward Wasserman who says CNBC no longer perceives a difference between journalist and show pony. That would be CNBC of the above-mentioned “traditional print and broadcast outlets.”

‘Nuff said.

Mike Penner, Los Angeles Times:

“The best thing that could be said about the amateur ads was that you couldn’t tell them from the professional ones.”

Intended pejoratively, I’m sure, but think about it.

It came and it went, and the temperature outside my Grapevine, Texas apartment is rising. I always sigh with relief when I know that an early Spring is certain. The flowers, the warmth, all of God’s creatures being twitterpated — these are the things that make life worthwhile.

So it was with joy that I discovered nearly unanimous consensus among the country’s groundhogs about an early end to winter. Only in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin did Jimmy the Groundhog see his shadow and run for his burrow, predicting another six weeks of winter. But, hey, that’s Wisconsin, for crying out loud.

Punxsutawney Phil from Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania — the “real” groundhog — says we’re having an early spring. So does Wiarton Willie over in Wiarton, Pennsylvania Ontario. Same with Mona the Groundhog in Southwest Florida, Woodstock Willie and Cloudy from the Chicago area, and General Beauregard Lee in, of course, Georgia.

Woody the Woodchuck in Howell Michigan didn’t see his shadow either, so he’s predicting an early spring for Michigan. Michigan? What does he know? He’s a bloody woodchuck.

I’m going with the majority. Where’s my suntan oil?

Dear Mr. Redstone,

Do you really want to play chicken with Google?

$1.4 billion in 4th quarter net income. Think about it.

Your pal,

Terry

Viacom is (again) all in a tizzy over youTube (now Google) using copyrighted Viacom content. The company is demanding that youTube remove clips from shows like Comedy Central’s Colbert Report and Nickelodeon’s “Sponge Bob.” Ad Age quotes a statement from Viacom:

“Filtering tools promised repeatedly by YouTube and Google have not been put in place, and they continue to host and stream vast amounts of unauthorized video. YouTube and Google retain all of the revenue generated from this practice, without extending fair compensation to the people who have expended all of the effort and cost to create it. The recent addition of YouTube-served content to Google Video Search simply compounds this issue.”

There are a couple of things to note here. One, Viacom and Google have been in negotiations over this, and talks — according to Ad Age — have “broken off.” This is likely a tactic in negotiations.

Two, one of Viacom’s properties is iFilm, a youTube competitor and a place that got at least some of its fame for running the famous clip in which Jon Stewart made a fool of Crossfire’s Tucker Carlson. Crossfire, of course, used to run on CNN, which is owned by Turner. Now perhaps Viacom had a deal with CNN, because Stewart is one of “theirs,” but…

I’m just sayin…

Tim Daly has written a thoughtful piece about how Wikipedia may be interfering with search engine algorithms, which is a concern for people like Tim who work in the search engine marketing industry. Daly argues that Wikipedia pages will show up on the first page of many results on any of the search engines, and he hopes this fact will be startling to search engine marketers.

Across every search engine today, Wikipedia stands tall as the authority on just about every subject matter underneath the sun. Whether you are in need of the definition of a word, a biography of a famous person, or you simply wish to determine the origin of something, Wikipedia stands out on search engines as a credible authority, regardless of the subject.

But then he goes on to argue a position that really needs to be challenged: that these results are not relevant, because they’re based on the value of internal and external links:

Its success at showing up so frequently on all fronts demonstrates the weakness that lies in search engines’ algorithms that has perhaps rendered them obsolete. The shortcoming particularly lies in the overreaching importance given to link popularity. Wikipedia shows up in results so consistently due to the millions of internal and external links that it has generated across the Web. While search engine algorithms take this as a vote that the material on the page has substance, this is truly a “subjective” take, which is given “objective” weight in the algorithm. Obviously, Wikipedia cannot be the authority on everything. It simply shows up because it has tens of millions of links that suggest to computer algorithms that it is an expert, without further evaluation of this claim.

This is a fascinating argument and one that, I believe, flows from traditional assumptions about authority and relevance as applied to what is essentially a cultural change. If, for example, you believe that authority and relevance are best determined using “objective” standards, it’s very likely that those standards were derived through institutional (hierarchical) mechanisms. Linking, in this context, is seen as crude and clumsy, a mechanism that has no place in that which can be weighed and measured.

However, if you view search as a way that people are informing themselves (God forbid!), then weight assigned to links is pretty darned important. This idea of people informing themselves is at the core of the Personal Media Revolution, and it has pretty profound ramifications for anybody in the information business.

Actually, this would be under the heading of “overseen.”

On “Wheel of Fortune” Tuesday night (don’t ask why I happened to see this), the first toss-up was:

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

 _    _ _ _ _

It was solved by two high school girls:

W R I T I N G

 A   B L O G

Hey, if it can make it all the way to “Wheel,” there’s hope after all.

Jeff Jarvis gives props to WKRN-TV this morning in a post about the New York blogosphere.

Following in the footsteps of WKRN in Nashville, WNBC in New York plays host to a meetup with local bloggers and Sree Sreenivasan — who just moved over from WABC to head a new technology push — talked about it at length on the air this morning.

The station covered the event (which they should have) and offered viewers a pretty interesting survey that you can take it yourself.

New York’s first Blogger Summit was held in Studio 6A at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, known to many as the home of the Conan O’Brien Show. There, WNBC and the team of bloggers spent time talking about covering New York, its many niches, and the role “new media” plays in a world previously dominated by networks and newspapers.

The hope is that those bloggers will work with WNBC.com, trading news and information and giving additional exposure to big stories, both on blogs or on TV.

For example, if a blog gets a scoop on a big news story, WNBC would work with that blogger to report that story on television, giving more exposure to that blog. Also, if WNBC has video of a news event that might be interesting to a blogger, the blogger will have our blessing to post that video on their site.

I’m not sure I’d have positioned it exactly that way, but the station obviously felt it was the right path. Organizing the blogosphere isn’t so much about exploitation getting them to work with the station; it’s about the conversation and how supporting the conversation comes with a significant pay-back for the station. This is what WKRN has learned, and along the way, they’ve come to the exact position that WNBC is seeking.

This comes just a few weeks after The Washington Post announced plans for a blog directory and group blog (a “blortal”), Metroblogging DC. This, too, began with another meetup of bloggers. One of the bloggers involved in the group blog is David, who wrote with typical blogger skepticism in his inaugural post:

Generally, this is a good step from a media company the size and clout of the Washington Post, and seemingly, given their interest in feedback from the community of the bloggers, they are looking for a ‘best of breed’ directory when they launch (whenever that may be). It’s ambitious, but, it could be, a solution to a problem that doesn’t necessarily exist at this point, which is, the inability of the public to find relevant information on blogs in the DC Metro Area (regardless of content or focus). Advertising, however localized, is probably the major corporate reason for this push since, it’s been reported widely around the country, that the web (and sites such as Craigslist) are eating into a lot of the traditional revenue such as classifieds and smaller ads that newspapers usually rely upon. This is not to say the presentation of this upcoming site feature was disingenuous, but the reasons for even presenting this to the folks gathered was never fully disclosed.

I think it’s fabulous that local media companies are reaching out to the blogosphere, because the involvement with the local community will only make them better at what they do. We called WKRN’s aggregator “Nashville is Talking,” because the real mission of the station is to listen.

And that’s something we generally don’t do very well.