Okay, folks, it’s time to talk about the ESPN NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Challenge. Every year I do this, and every year I get pretty close to the top. So here are my entries:

I have the final four in two of my brackets, including #1, which is always my best guess. In that bracket, Georgetown wins it all. In bracket #3, I also have the final four, but I’ve got Ohio State winning it all in that one.

Sorry, but I think Florida and UCLA will burn each other out in the semi-finals, a rematch of last year’s championship game. I just don’t see either having it in them to win one more after that game.

My best finish was three years ago, when I came in tied for 300th (out of 3 million entries).

WKRN-TV in Nashville experimented with live streaming severe weather coverage a couple of weeks ago via their group weather blog. GM Mike Sechrist wrote about it in his own blog.

Visually it was too small in the player to make out city names and temps and if you enlarged it the picture was pretty fuzzy. We’ll be working on that. We didn’t promote it during our on-air coverage but at the height of the storm we had 11,000 concurrent viewers. That’s more than a full rating point in this market. We’ll be fine tuning this as we head into the volatile spring weather patterns.

I want to point out a couple of important things.

How, you ask, did they manage a whole rating point worth of viewers without promoting it on the air? This is the web’s law of attraction at work, and it’s something most broadcasters completely miss. The online “audience” is not the on-air audience, and people are a whole lot smarter than we think. They know where to go, because that’s what people do on the web. They discover things on their own and through word-of-mouth.

In this case, WKRN’s NashvilleWx.com has been online for over two years, and it has a considerable following. Not everybody shows up every day, but that’s not the point. It has gained that audience through a steady commitment to quality and service, and it’s there when people want it or need it. In other words, it draws users to it instead of blasting how great it is. It’s evolved into a social network of sorts, because people carry on weather conversations in the comments. This is what I call the law of attraction, and it’s a critical factor in the growth of Media 2.0 applications.

As broadcasters, we think we have to “promote” it in order for people to participate. We’re hung up on the mass marketing notions of “driving traffic,” because we think this is the only way things “work” in terms of creating mass. This is not necessarily the case online, where the product and service are vastly more important, and the viral nature of the web kicks into action.

Ask yourself this question. Who am I talking to when I “drive traffic,” and are they the people I really want to serve online? If pushing our own viewers online is our mission and serving THEIR needs is what we’re after, then by all means, let’s push them to our branded web effort.

If, however, our online mission as a multi-media communications company is to expand our reach beyond that which our on-air brand can find, then we need to consider building new brands and playing by the rules of the web. This is how we “find” people who don’t watch TV anymore and aren’t loyal to any over-the-air brand.

One day, Mike will be able to know more about those 11,000 concurrent streams, and I think he’ll find that they aren’t necessarily WKRN on air faithful. Rather, they’re just people in the community looking for information from a place they’ve come to know and trust online, not on-the-air.

(Disclosure: WKRN-TV is a client of mine.)

Now that the hoopla is over, some very interesting observations are popping up about the NBC/Fox “YouTube killer” announced yesterday (see below). The most provocative — and, I think, insightful — comes from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. Michael pulls no punches in calling a spade a spade. Go read his whole take, but here’s the crux of it:

The two key messages Chernin and Zucker were selling were (1) a focus on respecting copyright, and (2) the fact that they were creating what they called “the largest advertising platform on earth.” That may be good messaging to stockholders, but it isn’t what the public cares about.

I think a better approach would have been to focus on the user experience, but this was hardly mentioned (except at one point when Zucker said “we are shocked at the willingness of the consumer to sit through the whole show with ads on NBC.com”). It’s either arrogance or it’s blindness to the reality of this Bittorrent and YouTube world. Either way, it suggests they are in over their head.

There are really big challenges ahead for this company. First, the fact that only two networks joined is a really bad sign. Viacom at least should have been willing to join. Second, this group has little experience in creating web applications, and no experience building the kind of stuff, like YouTube, that users get seriously passionate about. Third, the track record of major media companies working together to deal with this kind of viral attack on their business is not good. As Valleywag pointed out today, EMI, BMG, and Sony Music banded together in 1999 to deal with the Napster situation and created Musicnet, which was a dismal failure and was named by PC World as one of the worst tech products of all time.

I think this is absolutely spot on analysis, and the more I think about the deal, the less I think of it. The biggest problem is not that there are only two partners (and that’s huge); it’s the way they seem to have ignored the real trends in video CONSUMPTION that are central to the business disruption attacking the industry.

TiVo allows people to skip ads and why? Because time is the new currency, and those consumers that “shock” Zucker don’t have as much of it as they used to. People skip ads, because they don’t have time for ads, and it’s a foolish assumption to think this would be any different via the web.

I’m also hearing the words of business disruption guru Clayton Christensen in my ears.

(I)f you’re looking to start a new-growth business, very often, the most important customers to understand, are non-customers. Because if you figure out why it is they’re not customers, and then bring an innovation that allows them now to become customers, that’s what growth comes from.

On the upside, one of Christensen’s core recommendations is at play here, because the joint venture announced yesterday is the creation of a new business.

A company can survive a disruptive attack and remain as the leader, but evidence is overwhelming that the only way to do that is if the leader in the industry that’s being disrupted sets up a separate organization. The separate entity then needs the freedom to create a business model that is tuned to that new disruptive business and gives it a charter to kill the parent.

Does this new enterprise have that kind of authority — from the top? In the answer to that question lies the future of the project, and frankly, I’m not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, there’s another aspect to this that bears noting. Some observers are calling this “the new cable TV.” I don’t know if that’s the case, but if it is, it will be similar to satellite in that it’s delivered directly to consumers from points outside their local geography. Why is this important? Because as broadcast affiliate and local cable distribution fall (cable penetration in February was at its lowest level since 1990), the marketplace for local advertising has fewer options. All that money will dramatically move to the internet and those media companies able to do geo, behavioral or contextual targeting.

This is why I tell clients that we must begin to view ourselves as enablers of commerce, not merely purveyors of advertising. This is the real opportunity for local media companies in the years ahead. Databases and database marketing — like Obi Wan Kenobi — are our only hope.

And if you want to know more about that, call me.

The television and internet worlds are abuzz with today’s announcement from Fox and NBC of a joint effort to provide TV shows and films via the internet. Via Lost Remote:

MySpace, Yahoo, MSN and AOL have signed on as distribution partners, and each site will carry embedded video players customized to their look. “This is a game changer for Internet video,” said Peter Chernin, President and COO of News Corporation. “We’ll have access to just about the entire U.S. Internet audience at launch. And for the first time, consumers will get what they want — professionally produced video delivered on the sites where they live.”

Well isn’t that special? And let’s hope Peter has solid research to back up that “want” from consumers.

Chernin says this will be the largest advertising platform on earth and it’s hard to doubt that. There’s apparently not going to be a standalone site per se, but the content will be distributed by partners. Hence, the Chernin statement that people will get this where they live.

While everybody’s whooping and hollering, it cannot go unnoticed that the affiliates take it in the shorts on this deal (again). Oh, they have protections built in (the delay window will be several hours after shows air in Hawaii), but this is certainly a play that by-passes the affiliate system. I suppose the next move would be for broadcast companies to get in on the deal and provide their locally produced content in a similar manner.

This is a move to create the “new spectrum” for broadcast programming, but this time, it’s owned by the private sector. How will that go over with the public? Not as well as you might think.

Here is the latest in the on-going series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World. This one deals with something we all take for granted about the web — links and linking. These, I believe, are the real currency of the web and that one day, like cash, we’ll find a way to buy and sell goods and services using them. Who’ll calculate the value? “The Machine,” of which Kevin Kelly so brilliantly wrote in his 2005 Wired essay, “We Are The Web.”

Links play a key role in the web’s determination of the new metric “influence,” and this will grow in terms of validity and value as the years go by. Those of us in traditional media embrace the concept of inbound links, because we can easily see how they help “drive traffic” or distribute our content. We’re reluctant to play with outbound links, however, and this is to our detriment.

Links, the Currency of The Machine

Jay Rosen is a friend and colleague and a brilliant man. The launch yesterday of Assignment Zero, the first project of his creative effort to combine professional and amateur journalists, is both timely and historic. NewAssignment.net is a blending of some of the most amazing new and old media minds, but it is Jay’s vision that is pushing the journalism envelope with the project.

The most refreshing thing about the whole deal is the almost playful spirit associated with those involved. It’s not that this isn’t terribly serious, for it is, but every person admits that this is being made up as it goes along. And let’s face it; we first learned how to do that in kindergarten, so why shouldn’t there be a little joy? The goals are great journalism and insight into how professionals and amateurs might work together. The path? Well, that’s open to discovery.

In the end, one hopes that the birthing process will deliver something — perhaps not all, but at least part — of what free people might be able to accomplish by working together with a common purpose. The first assignment is crowdsourcing, and the resultant story will be published in Wired. I, for one, can’t wait.

And as I always must do, I want to remind everybody that the possibilities for such cooperation are even more significant at the local level than at the national or global level. This is yet another reason why entry into the Media 2.0 space is a necessity for all local media companies.

New numbers from Hitwise show that both YouTube and Viacom have picked up growth in web traffic since things got messy between the two.

But this whole thing isn’t about web traffic, copyright, or monetizing this thing or that. What’s really happening here is a whole lot bigger than it appears. Google can afford to simply bide their time, because the real business disruption moves forward with or without an agreement with Viacom.

The problem for Viacom, Umair Haque writes, is that one of its key properties, MTV, has been hypercommoditized by YouTube. Music videos (legal) are a big part of YouTube, as are reality shows (legal user-generated creations). So what’s left for MTV? Had Viacom been a part of the solution instead of the problem, MTV could easily have been YouTube today. This leads Haque to conclude — correctly, I think — that for Viacom “this is really kind of a fight to the death.”

Meanwhile, a new user-generated animation site has launched. MyToons.com, and it will pose further problems for the copyright industry, not because people will upload copyrighted material, but because technology is making animation easier for a lot more people.

And the first real project in Jay Rosen’s experiment in open-source journalism — Assignment Zero — launched today. Funded by NewAssignment.net, Wired Magazine and others, it’s a serious attempt to do investigative journalism from a new direction, and it’s yet another example of the people formerly known as the audience getting involved in this thing we call media.

This is the heart of Media 2.0, and it’s why we all need to think carefully about how we approach this world. Everything is counterintuitive here, and we really need to adjust our view to see what’s really taking place.

It really isn’t about copyright at all.

In the words of the immortal Gomer Pyle, “Surprise, surprise!”

Viacom moved its Queen today in the high stakes game of chicken chess with Google/YouTube over those copyrighted videos that we’ve written about so much. Viacom filed the suit in U.S. District Court in New York and is seeking $1 billion in damages.

In a statement, Viacom lawyers said, “YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site. Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws.”

This had to happen, and it will be interesting to watch. In essence, the entire Hollywood entertainment hegemony is in the hands of the judicial system now, and I think that even if it wins, it loses. This will simply accelerate chaos and the ultimate creation of a new “Hollywood” spawned by the people formerly known as its customers.

You see, as J.D. Lasica noted in the subtitle of his powerful book, Darknet, Hollywood is at war with the digital generation, not YouTube or Google. It’s their customers they have the problem with, and they can’t sue every one of them (they would if they could). It’s their customers who are uploading the videos to share with their friends, and let me tell you this, the potential for backlash here is pretty significant. And what does it say about the long-term value of an industry that resorts to suing its own customers anyway?

And don’t be fooled by the dollar amount here. It’s a drop-in-the-bucket compared to what’s at stake.

Reaction is pouring in, and I’m only going to provide one link here. It’s to Umair Haque, the brilliant economic guru who never met an archaic business model he couldn’t deconstruct:

Nice one guys - it’s like putting off going to the gym…by ducking into Krispy Kreme.

Gamesmanship doesn’t buy you time or space - it’s just (a desperate) excuse to not meet the fundamental challenge of deep, sweeping strategic reinvention.

It’s the mark of a truly great firm to embrace this challenge head-on. Conversely, not having the imagination, vision, or appetite to embrace this challenge is usually the mark of a once-great firm slowly dragging itself past strategy decay and into strategic irrelevance.

I love Umair.

People who know me well know that I have this pocketful of little sayings (My “isms”) that I use to help define life’s seeming complexities. The title of this post is one of them, and events of the past week have brought it to mind once again.

Yesterday, the folks at Pew released their latest “State of the News Media” report, and it’s filled with ominous prose (even moreso than the same report last year, etc.) that describes a collapsing infrastructure and an industry in search of answers. “The hope that Internet advertising will someday match what print and television now bring in appears to be vanishing,” the report notes, and this is the most discouraging nugget of all. Robert MacMillan of Reuters picked up on this theme.

News outlets, particularly U.S. newspapers, were able to rely on advertising and subscriptions for years, and have staked high hopes on their online sales eventually eclipsing weaker print revenue.

That may not work out, however, said Tom Rosenstiel, the study’s supervisor and the group’s director. The amount of online advertising dollars is still rising, “but now there are growing doubts about how much of that will accrue to news,” the study said.

“The people on the countinghouse side have got to come up with a new plan,” said Rosenstiel, who used to cover the news business for the Los Angeles Times. “The audience is migrating but the advertising probably never will in sufficient amounts.”

The report questions whether the industry has the vision or the capacity to lift itself out of the quagmire and notes that public ownership likely works against it at this time in history.

And this leads me to a session I attended last week by the people at the American Press Institute’s Newspaper Next program. This elaborate and intense body of work came from some of the best business minds in America, and it’s designed to provide newspapers with the tools they need to innovate.

The data was interesting, and I was right there with the guy, until he pulled out the various forms and formulas to manage change. It was a step-by-step, “one potato, two potato, three potato, four” (illustrated) guide to building new enterprises, with appropriate attention to the bottom line, of course.

You can’t left brain your way into right brain thinking.

The problems facing the news media today are enormous and require original thinking, and you just won’t get that from the Harvard Business School.

In his keynote address to the public broadcasters of the Integrated Media Association two weeks ago, the inimitable Michael Rosenblum opened with, “I gotta tell ya, you’re all fucked!” He then went on to spin his historical tales of disruptive innovations and how failure to react correctly cost governments, armies and businesses everything.

The news media doesn’t need another report or another study. It needs a vision, and that, I’m afraid, isn’t going to come — perhaps even cannot come — from within.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s 2007 “State of the News Media” report is out. Here’s the link. I’ll write when I’ve had the chance to absorb it. Let the naval observations begin!

MySpace is getting into the news business with launch due in early 2nd quarter, according to inside sources and the company’s own sales materials.

• MySpace News takes News to a whole new level by dynamically aggregating real-time news and blogs from top sites around the Web
• Creates focused, topical news pages that users can interact and engage with throughout their day
• MySpace is making the news social, allowing users to:
  Rate and comment on every news item that comes through the system
  Submit stories they think are cool and even author pieces from their MySpace blog
• MySpace users previously had to leave the site to find comprehensive news, gossip, sporting news, etc. With MySpace News, we bring the news to them!

Now it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this is not good news for those of us in the news business, unless we view it as another way to get our content onto yet another platform. MySpace is currently cutting deals with content providers to do just that, and I think it’s likely the process will show us what types of “news” will be of interest to young people, circa 2007. And that is something we might be able to use downstream.

That said, this is another example of an internet pureplay company taking on the role of media company and using their core audience as the distribution vehicle.

And we’re about to see a bunch of “real” media companies attempt to grow their own social networks. First up is USAToday.

USAToday.com has relaunched with new interactive features, in an effort to create a “social network” of news users. USAToday has led the way in RSS and customizeable pages, but this takes all that a step further. Users can not only interact with the paper; they can also interact with each other.

While I don’t doubt that this is cool and will help their overall mission (to drive traffic to their site and keep it there), the truth is this is a Media 1.0 play in Media 2.0 clothing. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, because there’s an awful lot of money to be made in the 1.0 world.

The demand is unknown, but everybody in the news business knows there’s a group of news “groupies” in every market, and these, I think, will likely be the users of such an application. This, of course, begs the question why there isn’t already a social networking site called “news groupies,” but that would mean the ability to tap multiple media sources, and this is something media companies abhor. We want everybody to come to OUR portal or OUR site or OUR social network.

This, I think, misses the bigger point of Media 2.0, and because of that, I think media companies who explore this space as a way of bringing more people into their tents may be wasting time and resources they could be spending on developing business strategies within the Media 2.0 disruption.

All traditional media companies speak to their own audiences, regardless of format, but those audiences are shrinking and just because we have elaborate sites online does not necessarily mean we’re attracting a different crowd. People who left “the media” did so for a reason, and no matter how much we try and reformat, remix or repurpose what we do, it still is what it is.

We should strive to do as much of that as possible, of course, but it simply cannot be our only strategy, for the disruption impacting all media isn’t something that brand extension tactics can overcome.

I’m on-the-road on biz these days and doing all sorts of stuff that actually puts food on the table (and the squirrels’ table), so I haven’t been able to write much here. Lots to say, though, so I’ll try to get to some of it on the plane and post it tonight.

Be good while I’m gone.

Whatever.

Well, well. ABC has done a deal with the Geico cavemen to do a sitcom. The show will be set in Atlanta, where three prehistoric men battle prejudice as they go about their lives. Steve Hall over at Adrants points out the obvious:

Joe Lawson, the Martin Agency copywriter behind the Geico campaign is on-board as a writer at least for the pilot which will even feature a Gieco spokesman. Now that’s some serious brand integration.

Product placement is for losers. Getting your ad campaign turned into a TV show is the new new thing. Just think. Now, we can expect TV shows about a fast food worker who dreams he’s a rapper married to a bald pop star.

Steve’s only partially being facetious, and we don’t know yet if Geico is on board as a sponsor. But there are two things to point out. One, this was inevitable. The characters are lovable (and probably already have high Q-scores), and the concept is creative and filled with humorous possibilities. Two, long form advertising is already bubbling up from the bottom on the web (see FlushTV), so why shouldn’t it make it’s way to broadcasting? Maybe this will inspire the ad industry to new levels.

These are indeed fascinating times.

Alex Rowland doesn’t blog as much as he used to (or should — take that, Alex), but when he does, it’s usually a worthwhile read. This morning he writes about the vanity of sharing your life online, or is it more than that?

Many do these things for fame and self-aggrandizement, but I think the reason for most share their lives is that the simple act of sharing information for most humans is a very pleasant activity.

I think this is an evolutional trait of human beings. We are genetically programmed to enjoy the process of passing along experience and information to others. The web has just enabled this to become a much larger part of many people’s lives. It’s magnified the pleasure of sharing because you can share with so many people at the same time. It’s more subtle and less sinister than fame, but actually more powerful.

It gives me great hope for the future of our emerging civilization.

Me too, Alex. Me too.

Let’s begin with an assumption. Quarterly reports to stockholders always include “forward-looking” statements. This is business-speak for what we used to call “evangelistically-speaking” in the counting of those attending a church rally or function. If 501 people showed up, evangelistically-speaking, that would mean “almost a thousand.”

You get my drift.

So Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman told shareholders yesterday that the company’s online properties collectively registered more than 40 million unique visitors in Dec. 2006, and ranked as the number one online entertainment destination and the 10th most popular destination on the web (according to PaidContent.org). The latter assertion is based on the former, and we don’t really know that those “unique visitors” are truly unique. Dauman is referring to collective properties, and determining uniques over multiple properties can be dicey. I’m not suggesting he’s lying, but 40 million is a hell of a big number.

Dauman also used year-over-year growth figures from January to make a case that pulling clips from YouTube was a smart strategy, even though that didn’t occur until February. We’ve seen nothing in the way of evidence to suggest that people have bolted from YouTube to Viacom properties, and Dauman’s own numbers would suggest that having the clips on YouTube didn’t interfere whatsoever with their growth and may have, in fact, actually contributed to the growth! I think using those January numbers to make a case was poppycock, and Viacom investors ought to be furious.

“As far as Google and YouTube, obviously we required them to take down over 100,000 of our clips that were appearing on the site. Our content was a substantial part of the traffic on those sites. We are very pleased to have more traffic on our sites since we took down our video from YouTube because we are able to monetize that as opposed to someone else doing so,” Dauman said.

This time, Dauman is, in fact, lying. No “forward-looking statement.” Just a simple fabrication.

He goes on: “At the same time, we are interested in deals that provide an additional distribution platform for our content as long as it respects our copyright. We think we can generate incremental revenues that way. That’s why we did the deal with Joost. It’s a great opportunity for consumer experience and meets all our criteria for content, controlled advertising relationships, as well as linking back to our sites. We are looking at this very strategically, as we have in the history of many decades of this company, of looking at every window in the development of content. We love being a pure content company. That is a great place to be, no matter what distribution platform there is.”

Here Dauman looks back at company history and essentially says, “Our strategy worked for us then and it’ll work for us now.” This is a very dangerous assumption, because reveling in the history of the content business is problematic in a world where it’s just damned hard to scale content.

Meanwhile, a Financial Times story gets it ALL WRONG, using the year-over-year January numbers as January to February in a piece that pumps Viacom’s YouTube strategy as a wise move. Now, I realize the Financial Times is in league with big business, but this story is so slanted that it’s vertical.

“Video streaming traffic on our sites has increased dramatically, an important validation of our strategy,” said Philippe Dauman, president and chief executive of Viacom, owned by media mogul Sumner Redstone.

Traffic to Comedy Central’s Website was up more than 90 per cent, MTV.com had increased by more than 50 per cent and Nickelodeon had seen more than 30 per cent more traffic in the past month, Viacom said.

Honestly, folks, you’ve really got to pay attention in following this story, because such disinformation can lead to bad strategic mistakes in the Media 2.0 paradigm.

If it looks and smells like BS, it’s probably BS. And that’s NOT evangelistically-speaking.

UPDATE: Sorry, folks, but I can’t leave this alone. Motherload, the Comedy Central streaming application, launched in October of 2005. One would certainly hope that streaming traffic would’ve been up between January 2006 and January 2007. *sigh*

At WKRN-TV in Nashville, just about everybody blogs, including morning anchor Heather Orne and her husband, Prime Time anchor Neil Orne. Neil was one of the first bloggers at the station, and Heather joined him just a few months later.

Heather is nine months pregnant, and they’ve been using their blogs to let viewers in on the progress of her pregnancy. Page views, as you can imagine, have skyrocketed.

On Wednesday, Heather was involved in a little fender bender, and it scared the crap out of everybody, including the driver of the other car. You see, he’s a fan and has been following Heather’s condition.

Neil posted a picture of the two cars stuck together. Here is Heather’s blog.

Do yourself a favor and read the comments. Then ask yourself why your anchors aren’t blogging.

I’ve been around the broadcasting business now for 37 years, and in that time I’ve lived through a lot of what’s known as history.

I remember when cable first was birthed, and the engineers at the station laughed because it wasn’t up to “broadcast standards.”

I remember brainstorming a music video channel with co-workers in Milwaukee and coming to the conclusion that it wouldn’t work, because the music industry wouldn’t license the music for it.

I remember when CNN was born, and all of us big-J journalist types looked down our noses at it with disdain and an assurance that it would never work.

I remember when networks actually paid affiliates to be a part of their distribution chain.

I remember when “must-carry” came along and affiliates were in the driver’s seat with the cable companies.

I remember when video tape replaced film in newsrooms and how all the photographers at first laughed and then cried when they went from a lightweight CP-16a film camera to an RCATK76 AND a portable tape recorder. It would never work, they said.

I’ve been through 45s, albums, 8-tracks, cassettes and CDs.

I was there when Betamax duked it out with VHS and lost.

I remember when I got my first computer and when our newsroom underwent the transition from those floating rundown devices to computerized versions.

I remember my first experience with a station Website, and how we all viewed it as a pain-in-the-ass.

And for the last ten years, I’ve been working in this world called the internet, and I just shake my head when I hear familiar refrains about quality and how this thing or that “won’t work.” I look out at YouTube, Boston.tv, blip.tv, gotuit.com and thousands of vlogs and other forms of what Jeff Jarvis calls “small TV.” How can we be so stupid, I ask myself, not to see what’s really happening in the world of video and video news?

Former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt said recently, “…we specifically formed the view in 1994 that the Internet ought to replace broadcast television…”

That’s ancient history in terms of the Web, but it clearly states what now is obvious.

When I grew up, high school was a very trying social experience. Individual identity was always tied to group identity.

“Oh, he’s that guy from the choir.”

“She’s a cheerleader.”

“He’s such a loser.”

“She’s just so popular.”

And so forth.

Getting in with the “right” crowd was the most basic quest of every student back in the early 60s, and this mission has been the basis for countless movies about growing up.

Kids were always labeled by other kids, and I don’t imagine it’s much different today. But there is something very different about today, and it’s found in the social connectivity of MySpace and similar places.

In this space, you’re permitted to define yourself, and I think that has significant ramifications for the future of everybody. That’s because it’s actually possible to drag your online identity with you into the “real” world (IRL), and in that sense, they’ve taken power away from the mob culture. Kids actually have some control over how they’re are seen by others, and that, my friends, is huge!

I would hope this means that young people just might be able to see past the surface and be more tolerant of others. Because if that can happen, tomorrow’s world will be a whole lot better than today’s.

The real pressure on any business is found in its spreadsheet, and that’s certainly the case with broadcasters. We can talk theory until we’re blue in the face, but until something impacts the bottom line, most companies — to their detriment — don’t give a ripple chip. This is why the movement of money from the broadcast world to the web is so significant, and something we watch closely.

We’ve heard from several research companies this week about the growth of online revenue, and there’s really no consensus on the matter, except that the flow of money to the Web will continue. There are so many variables and so many unknowns that’s impossible for anybody to be certain about how much and when, and this is what causes sleepless nights for media executives.

On Monday, the folks at eMarketer released a report stating the online ad revenue growth was “slowing.” One of the projections in the study was that ad spending online in the U.S. would reach $36.5 billion by 2011, which would be 11.3% of all ad spending.

Today, investment bank Jefferies & Co. projected global online ad spending would be a $60 billion market by 2010 and essentially agreed with eMarketer about spending in the U.S. Jefferies projects that online will represent nearly 10% of total ad spending in the U.S. by 2010 and added that “the online channel is quickly becoming a mainstream marketing channel with proven return on investment.”

These are big numbers and the only thing the various research companies agree on is that search will continue to drive revenue growth, and this is why it’s so important for broadcasters to pay attention. Video search is the next frontier, and where is your company in that space? Are you blowing away online videos after a week? A month? Why are you doing that?

eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman wrote in his report, “As we move into the next decade, marketers will put more of their online budgets into video and other rich media categories than they do into display ads, banners and other static placements.” He added that even if the economy slows, the continued growth of the online audience and attendant advertising will drive an ongoing shift away from other media, especially radio and newspapers.