What’s not to like?

Here is the (probably NSFW) trailer for the upcoming movie “The Watch,” about a neighborhood-watch patrol.

Please enjoy:

This movie is essentially “Alien” redux. From the same director, Ridley Scott, it’s scarier and has better effects than 1979.

But, in space, everyone can apparently still hear you scream.

Enjoy the trailer:

Prometheus – International Teaser Trailer #1… by addictomovie

This is just plain creepy, and just when you thought it was crazy hillbillies (“Deliverance”) chasing the imbecilic group, it’s some kind of sci-fi, alien-hunting-people plot (“Predator”).

Still, this movie trailer for the upcoming “The Cabin in the Woods” is creepy!

For anyone who loves the idea of a doppelgänger–someone out there who is you except different–this trailer for much-anticipated indie film, “Another Earth,” is for you.

It’s about astrophysics and accidents and aliens and alienation, on the occasion of the “discovery of a duplicate planet in the solar system.”

Deep stuff!

Here’s the moving movie trailer:

Though BoomTown was dubious, this trailer for the upcoming J.J. Abrams movie “Super 8″ is pretty cool beans.

It is in the style of an interactive video game–in fact, Abrams worked with the creators of the recently released “Portal 2″ to embed it right into the video game–and turns out to be mighty scary, since the film concerns an escape of dangerous aliens after a train derailment.

Check it out:

Like many a geek–and after a decade away–I’m headed to South by Southwest later this week.

To get in the mood for the well-known multimedia festival in Austin, here’s one of the films making its debut this coming weekend.

It’s called “Attack the Block,” and is about a teen gang fighting an alien invasion. Plus, it has the best tag line ever: “Inner City Versus Outer Space.”

Which is just about how I am feeling about SXSW!

In any case, despite my lack of hipster cred, I will be there for a party hosted by WordPress with drinks by The Wall Street Journal Digital Network and All Things Digital on Friday, as well as to interview Flipboard Co-founder and CEO Mike McCue on Saturday in an afternoon session with the subtitle: “Game-Changer or Passing Fad?”

NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes and The Digital Solution’s Katherine Boehret will also be at SXSW, so expect plenty of coverage from Texas.

Until then, enjoy this movie trailer, y’all:

This movie looks like a special-effects doozy. In “Battle: Los Angeles,” like all in this genre, the aliens want to kill us. With lots of explosions, natch.

The film opens March 11.

Here’s the noisy preview trailer, in which it is not looking good for the human race:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

There certainly is a lot of noisy swirl of late around the escalating fight between Google and some traditional media companies over content online.

The loudest voice in this fight has clearly been News Corp. (NWS) kingpin Rupert Murdoch, who seemingly has not met a television interviewer of late he did not regale with tales of Google’s nefariousness.

Part of what he is saying is surely justified–it’s definitely a crisis for the news business.

And in Murdoch’s mind, the blame should largely fall on Google (GOOG), which he believes is profiting from expensive content others have created and that the search giant is not paying for to such a warped and massive degree that it makes a mockery of fair use.

In Silicon Valley style, Google defends itself by saying it sends valuable Web traffic to News Corp. and other sites, so perhaps a hand-written thank-you note is really the proper response.

That missive is definitely not in the mail from Murdoch, who instead has sent a series of poison-pen letters to Google.

Most notable is that he has threatened to “de-index” at least some of his content assets–which are not insubstantial–from the now-inevitable crawlers sent out by the search giant.

These are, of course, vintage tactics from the Global Media Mogul Playbook: Causing a public hubbub and spooking perceived enemies by threatening drastic action and implying dire consequences, while simultaneously dealmaking behind the scenes.

Trying mightily to make the stakes more dramatic, News Corp. has pulled Microsoft (MSFT) into the fray as a possible white knight–if you live long enough, you do see it all–for publishers.

Under this scenario, the software giant would fork over some sum of money to get News Corp. and perhaps other key content companies, such as Associated Press, exclusively and prominently featured on its Bing search site.

The reward, presumably, would be increased searching on Bing for the stuff consumers could now not find on Google.

BoomTown reported earlier this week that, in fact, Microsoft was unlikely to hand over any kind of king’s ransom to publishers.

As I wrote:

While a spate of reports has Microsoft execs girding the globe offering gobs of cash to content companies to block Google and favor its Bing search service, sources close to the situation caution that it is extremely unlikely that the software giant would pay giant sums for that pricey privilege, which many inside the company think will not help it gain much search share.

“While there is a lot of mutual interest, it’s doubtful Microsoft is going to pay to ‘rent’ a corpus of content that it does not own,” said one source close to the situation. “The economics are not there for anyone.”

In other words, this wrestling match is not about whether Google or Microsoft will serve up links to content online, but about how much–or not at all–they are willing to pay for doing so.

So, what’s really happening here? Here are five possibilities to consider, each of which is true in part:

1. Murdoch really means it.

In this scenario, Murdoch and others, like AP’s Tom Curley, truly believe that Google–like that creepy salt-seeking alien from “Star Trek”–is sucking the life out of the media industry by making bank from its news content, but not giving back nearly enough in return.

Of course, a lot of these companies have willingly done distribution deals with Google over the years.

But now they don’t like it because the increasing money being made by Google, even as their revenue has suffered, has developed into a growing problem.

Which is simply this: There is a lot more money to be made in searching for content than in making content.

This realization has to shake content czars like Murdoch to the core, but it is indeed the situation they find themselves in.

Murdoch makes a fair point in that journalism costs money to make and it used to have a solid economic system under it until Google and others on the Web disaggregated it wholly.

Thus, online aggregators become “tapeworms,” as The Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson quipped.

Thomson also, on a recent panel at the Web 2.0 conference, said to Google’s front page head, Marissa Mayer, that she “unintentionally encourages promiscuity.”

Ouch. That remark, which was was quite striking if you were there to hear Thomson say it, said volumes more.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

2. Murdoch really means to create a lot of confusion, in order to shake down Google.

Well, it would not be the first time Murdoch and many others of his ilk have used public sharp elbows and saber-rattling to get what they want.

Except in this case, the algorithm experts over at Google know precisely–down to the tenth decimal–how much linking to News Corp. makes for them.

And it is not much, especially when looking at the vast sea of data Google serves up.

Its money-making is widely dissipated, from searches for vacation information to mapping to car-buying to health. While news-finding definitely is part of the mix, it is not at the center of the Borg.

Ironically–and oddly left out of this debate–it is Yahoo (YHOO) that has a lot of power in this arena, with massive content sites that shoot traffic all over the Web (including to this site).

But, what Google cannot and never can quantify–although I have seen co-founder Larry Page try once or twice–is the impact of public perception on the company, which has slowly morphed from being a benign, brightly-colored digital, librarian-like helper to a scary, answer-to-no-one, evil-doing monster.

The company’s growing influence over what people see and do not see on the Web is palpably frightening to publishers, advertisers and anyone who wants to be digitally discovered.

Bad luck for Google: Creating and then attacking bogeymen is a Murdoch talent, bar none.

3. Murdoch really means to create a lot of confusion, in order to shake down Microsoft.

Also obvious is the full-scale obsession Microsoft has with Google. While the software giant’s execs try to hide it, their panic over the success of Google has been tough on the once dominant tech company, which has struggled in the Internet arena.

Worse still, Google rakes in the dough, while Microsoft, um, does not.

Finally, this year, Microsoft has created–with no small amount of much needed innovation–Bing, a laudable effort that is starting to show some traction.

While Bing still has a very small market share compared with Google–by a factor of seven to one–it definitely has some momentum.

And, after much turmoil, Microsoft finally did a deft and relatively inexpensive deal to join with Yahoo in a search and advertising partnership to give them both more heft, which will surely help matters.

More important, one of the ways Bing has differentiated itself is via product innovations and intense focus on search niches, such as health.

In this topic area, for example, Bing has struck a not-expensive content licensing arrangement with the Mayo Clinic in order to better feature content.

This is smart business and offers consumers something better and different.

But overpaying big media publishers for the same thing, even if they de-indexed Google at the same time, is not smart, unless it is for really niche things like special financial information.

And even then, there are so many other sources of information out there, it would not take Google long to mount a similar offering, even in the face of some kind of OPEC of News consortium.

Even more–how much do consumers love OPECs of any kind? Not much!

Sources at Microsoft agree:

“If it was everyone, that might become interesting. But even that has issues, since Microsoft is not interested in having exclusive news for a temporary period of time by overpaying for it. It’s essentially a marketing expense, and there are a lot better ways to spend that money to win market share than giving it to publishers.”

Finally, Microsoft has been to the Murdoch party before too, having been part of talks to fold News Corp.-owned social networking site MySpace into Yahoo, had Microsoft prevailed in its attempt to acquire it.

Microsoft missed that pricey bullet and might be more inclined to grow Bing the old-fashioned way–via innovation, marketing and product improvements–rather than just using up too much of its energy trying to mess with Google.

4. A deal will be made.

My not-too-surprising prediction is that in the end, News Corp. and others will probably strike some kind of lesser deal with Microsoft–although it will tout the heck out of it–while taking some of its content behind a pay wall and thereby de-indexing it from Google.

More damaging would be if AP, which actually provides the most used news content online, removes its links completely from Google, because–unlike the premium content from other publishers–this is the bread and butter of consumer usage of content.

As to promotional material or links to television shows and movies from publishers like News Corp.? Well, it would seem the most self-destructive form of pique to remove those links from any of the top search engines.

That said, even if it really pissed me off for publishers to do so, I would probably switch to another search engine to find information on “Glee” if forced to. That’s how much I love those singing kids and Jane Lynch!

Finally, Murdoch has also threatened to challenge the fair use doctrine–which allows others to use copyrighted content within limits, as Google and many others do (such as this site).

While some think that is a bridge too far, it might be Murdoch’s best argument of all. Why should Google make a fortune on the content of others, even if only listing it? Doesn’t the sheer volume of what the search giant vacuums up make its reliance on fair use as a defense pretty ridiculous?

You can be sure Murdoch has his many lawyers and lobbyists all over this one, as does Google.

5. The truth is out there.

In perhaps his most strident television interview, with his Sky News Australia service (which you can see below–oh, the irony–on Google’s YouTube), Murdoch said about those who use Google to find News Corp. content:

“They don’t suddenly become loyal readers of our content. We’d rather have fewer people coming to our Web site but paying.”

That really is the honest truth in all this hubbub: Murdoch and other publishers have to find a way to get a some pool of dedicated online readers to pay enough to be able to then provide them with content that will keep them coming back for more.

That’s a business that Google truly cannot help or hinder, really.

And more to the point, it is also a business that Rupert Murdoch does seem to know a thing or two about.

ABC certainly is taking its sweet time in releasing the first episode of “V,” a sci-fi television series that debuted earlier this week on the Web in any substantial way.

The network is showing about nine minutes of the redo of the 1980s miniseries about a lizardy alien invasion disguised as a peace mission by outerspace hotties online on its site.

But pretty much the only way you could watch “V” in its entirety this week, if you missed its broadcast Tuesday, is by buying it on Amazon.

It initially streamed there free, to build momentum, as well as on Apple (AAPL) iTunes, but now the only place you can get it–if you fork over $2–is Amazon (AMZN).

That all changes tomorrow, when the show–whose debut racked up surprisingly high numbers at 13.9 million viewers–shows up for free on ABC’s site and on the Disney (DIS) network’s joint venture video partner, Hulu.

If you cannot wait, here is the extended promo video for “V,” with a glimpse of scaly badness, as well as a preview of the show next week:

For the last month or so, the Google homepage has played with the famous colored-letter logo by morphing it into a sci-fi in-joke and later adding another “l” to indicate the company’s 11th birthday.

The former–which included logos with alien spaceships and crop circles–was to honor writer H.G. Wells, author of “War of the Worlds” and other science fiction.

Now, a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi–the Indian leader whose 140th birthday anniversary is today–has become the “G” in the logo. (If you click on the image, it links to a search for his last name.)

While the impulse to do so seems hard to resist, I am not quite sure I much like Google (GOOG)–even with good intentions to educate and honor–using the image of one of the world’s great political leaders and peace advocates as a letter on a search service homepage, even if it will be seen worldwide.

(The poor Gosselin kids as a “G”? Oprah as an “O”? Liza Minelli as an “L”? I am totally down with that!)

Then again, I might be a tad grumpy on this issue since I also didn’t like Gandhi’s photo being used in that “Think Different” Apple (AAPL) marketing campaign more than a decade ago, which made him seem like some sort of advertising pitchman.

In any case, here’s the real thing to truly appreciate his impact on this world–Gandhi’s actual voice in his famous “One World” speech in 1931:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Under cover of darkness last night, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on the social-networking site’s blog that it would “return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.”

Oh, this is just too good to resist. Therefore, BoomTown shall not tarry in our ongoing job of busting the chops of the young Facebook leader, whose minions have actually–and I am not joking here–given him the nickname: The Wizard.

Well, the Wizard obviously had to pull back the curtain last night and show some serious mea culpa to the people, before they got out the pitchforks.

That’s due to the controversy Facebook has been embroiled in this week about changes it recently made to its Terms of Service that gave the company unusually sweeping rights over customers’ content and privacy.

While Zuckerberg had said in his first post about the issue that Facebook was not in the content-stealing business, the strong language in the ToS sent the usual suspects into a major meltdown over the possibility that the young geek had gone into full-scale evil mogul mode.

As if!

In fact, Zuckerberg has been ensconced in his Silicon Valley lair for years now, counting down until he knows precisely everything about everyone’s drunken college days!

Until D-Day then, here is my translation of his latest backtracking post:

What the Wizard wrote: Update on Terms

Today at 10:17 pm

Translation: OK, I have reached my limit of being yelled at by Sheryl and Elliot, have had my usual breakfast of Red Bull and Frosted Flakes–they’re grrreat!–and am ready to eat some major digital crow this morning.

I mean, night, which is my morning, because I actually slept through all this noise today about this whole Terms of Service “controversy.”

What the Wizard wrote: A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users. Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.

Translation: Did you know crow is delicious if you eat it with a little Bosco on top?

More to the point, I would just like to assure you that we have taken our lawyers–who idiotically rewrote our ToS to give us ownership rights to the Bible, “American Idol” and everything Bill O’Reilly utters–and sent them over to our friends at MySpace, because their owner, News Corp. (NWS), already owns two of those three [and also this site!].

What the Wizard wrote: Many of us at Facebook spent most of today discussing how best to move forward. One approach would have been to quickly amend the new terms with new language to clarify our positions further. Another approach was simply to revert to our old terms while we begin working on our next version. As we thought through this, we reached out to respected organizations to get their input.

Translation: As in: More yelling by Sheryl and Elliott and more Fedexing of lawyers to MySpace HQ in Beverly Hills.

But after we calmed down, we all decided the best course of action was to shoot ourselves in the right foot to stop the bleeding from when we shot our left foot before.

We are, of course, completely out of feet now, so if these hijinks continue, sooner or later, someone is going to lose an eye. By someone, I mean, um, me.

What the Wizard wrote: Going forward, we’ve decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don’t plan to leave it there for long.

Translation: Facebook, of course, never had any intention of stealing content and copyright! Perish the thought! After all, that’s the job of Google (GOOG)!

By contrast, ours is to collect incredibly embarrassing photos of everyone in the United States until one of them runs for president, and then our nefarious scheme to control the world begins.

We were planning on blackmailing the world for one billllliiiion dollars then, but Microsoft kind of forked over 15 times that without any pressure.

Still, we would like to own Palo Alto, Calif., and get free parking 24/7, so there will be demands!

Until then, enjoy the sheep-throwing. Mwaahahahahahahaha! (Quick visual: I am petting my white cat right now with Ernst Stavro Blofeld-like evil glee, and am, of course, cackling.)

What the Wizard wrote: More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world. Our terms aren’t just a document that protect our rights; it’s the governing document for how the service is used by everyone across the world. Given its importance, we need to make sure the terms reflect the principles and values of the people using the service.

Translation: Not to be completely and utterly arrogant or anything, but we just passed Pakistan, and those Brazilians better get ready to samba.

By the way, once we get to No. 1–look out, China!–we plan on decreeing that everyone in the world speak Pig Latin and that forthwith it will be flip-flop Fridays.

Also: Esyay, Iway amway anway alienway omfray anotherway anetplay.

What the Wizard wrote: Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we’ll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms.

Translation: Ybay ethay ayway, “Otay Ervesay Anmay”? It’sway away ookbookcay.

In other words, I am sure you will make delicious contributions, after which Facebook will “invite” you to our world-wide HQ to share in a lovely meal.

Especially those Winklevii. I look forward to the twins coming by soon!

What the Wizard wrote: You have my commitment that we’ll do all of these things, but in order to do them right it will take a little bit of time. We expect to complete this in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we’ve changed the terms back to what existed before the February 4th change, which was what most people asked us for and was the recommendation of the outside experts we consulted.

Translation: To my credit, I did give in much quicker than with the Beacon ad snafu. And you thought I learned nothing during that debacle!

And, by outside experts, I mean Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, who yells much, much louder than Sheryl or Elliot combined.

What the Wizard wrote: If you’d like to get involved in crafting our new terms, you can start posting your questions, comments and requests in the group we’ve created–Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. I’m looking forward to reading your input.

Translation: Here’s my first pass, based on the U.S. Bill of Rights, Amendment I:

Facebook shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition Faebook for a redress of grievances.*

*Exceptway, ithway ymay ompletecay iscretionday, enwhay Iway
ecideday otherwiseway.