My Twitterstream was dominated by snarky play-by-play, and the rest of the Web was doing the same thing. Even the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal put Grammy liveblogs on their homepages.

So now it might be nice to head online and actually see–and hear–what I missed. No dice.

The official Grammy site, run by the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, has plenty of clips, but none from the CBS broadcast itself–it’s all backstage, or red carpet or other footage I don’t care about. CBS.com doesn’t have anything, and neither does TV.com, CBS’s mini-Hulu.

Meanwhile, Google’s YouTube, the place where I really expect to see clips, is doing a very good/frustrating job of keeping the site scrubbed free of amateur uploads. You can find some stuff, but it takes work, and the quality is poor, and I’m pretty sure it’s getting removed quickly after it goes up.

So while I really want to see Arcade Fire’s performance–my Twitter pals were ecstatic about it–right now the only thing I can find is grainy footage of  Lady Gaga doing yet another Madonna…homage. This may or may not be available by the time you read this:

[UPDATE: Ask, and you shall receive! For now. Thanks to @colinparksfried, @tdotjdot and @nolaschott]

A CBS rep notes that Grammy performances “aren’t typically available online due to rights clearance issues,” and I’m sure that’s true. Any given song can have lots of different owners, and getting all of them to agree to put it on the Web can be a huge hassle. On the other hand, it’s not an insurmountable challenge–that’s why we have Vevo.com, a Web site dedicated to nothing but music videos.

Left unsaid here is that big live events like the Grammys are now TV’s most valuable commodity, and the people who produce big live events continue to struggle with the Web. But more and more of them are getting it–even the very uptight NFL is putting highlight videos up on its site while the games are in progress.

The Grammys are already being augmented very nicely by the Web, which provided it with endless free promotion last night. But now that the live event isn’t anymore, you’d think the music industry, which can use all the promotion it could get, would be pushing very, very hard to let people see what they missed last night.

Who knows. It might even prompt someone to, you know, buy some music.

The idea is that instead of parsing through disjointed material, searchers can lean back and have a story told to them about what they’re looking for. The Qwiki results page experience feels like watching a low-budget TV documentary with panned-across stock footage and a robotic voice. (Side note: You probably don’t want to learn how to pronounce things by hearing them on Qwiki.) Eventually these presentations will be created for many more topics, and be playable on a variety of devices.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Qwiki, which just raised $8 million in Series A funding led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, is hedging on the public release by calling it an “alpha.” But the company, which won the TechCrunch Disrupt start-up competition in 2010, says it has “hundreds of thousands” of potential users signed up, of which about 60 percent have been given access so far.

Qwiki CEO Doug Imbruce said in a phone interview that Qwiki has received acquisition offers already, and took funding from individual investors rather than venture capitalists so its founders could retain control of the company and focus on product rather than monetization.

Imbruce emphasized that Qwiki is not a search engine and does not seek to be comprehensive. He said Qwiki plans soon to build its index by letting third-parties input material for new topics, including profiles of individuals.

An example Qwiki for Mount Everest is embedded below:

It’s short, and it’s good stuff. Ev Williams and Biz Stone come off as funny, likable and confident. Like the kind of guys that could run a cool company or something.

A spokesman for the studio, a unit of Time Warner Inc., declined to say whether it had yet figured out the source of the leak, but said an investigation was underway. The spokesman said the early release wasn’t a promotional gambit.

The watermarked footage was made available for download on BitTorrent file-sharing sites such as IsoHunt.com and thePirateBay.org. Copies were still available Wednesday, though Warner Bros. said it was working to remove the illegal copies.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Alas, you’ve got no choice but to remember that last part. It has disappeared from the Web, apparently at the behest of Major League Baseball.

Stewart dissected the media hubhub about Obama’s pitch–and in particular Fox News’s analysis of it–on his July 15 show. But if you watch the archived version of that show at Viacom’s (VIA) “Daily Show” Web site, you’ll find that the bit has been cut out of his opening monologue. It once ran for two minutes and 43 seconds, but now the archive stops short at the 55-second mark.

And if you try to watch that episode on Hulu, the Web site owned by News Corp. (NWS), GE’s (GE) NBC and Disney (DIS), you’ll find that it’s gone altogether, replaced by a message blaming “rights issues” (click image to enlarge):

What happened? The story, via Viacom officials, is that pro baseball officials contacted them this week and told them to take down the Obama footage, which it owns.

The argument, I’m told, is that the MLB was fine with Stewart (and every other TV show in the country) using the clip under “fair use” terms–the footage itself was a news story, and Stewart was adding value via his commentary, etc. But it balked at the notion of the footage remaining in Viacom’s archives, and circulating on the Web, forever.

None of that makes any sense, of course: There’s no reason that Stewart’s use of the clip should be okay, but only for a limited time. And if Viacom wanted to spend time fighting MLB on this, it certainly could have.

But presumably, the company figures it wants to use its legal resources elsewhere–like fighting the never-ending copyright lawsuit it filed against Google (GOOG) and YouTube. Remember that one?

In any case, I’ve reached out to MLB to make sure I’m not missing anything here. And of course, you can still find all sorts of footage of the pitch, along with other anchors making fun of it, all over the Web. Like this one:

Here’s an edited version of the beginning of the July 15 episode of the “Daily Show.” Before you click on it, note the title of the clip, and it’s original running time.

I’m told that an edited version of the show will show up on Hulu again later tonight or on Thursday.

So says video views tracker TubeMogul, which illustrates its argument via a nifty interactive chart at the bottom of this post.

If you don’t like charts, here are some words: Unauthorized clips of Jackson’s July 7 funeral/memorial generated 16.6 million views on Google’s (GOOG) YouTube within 48 hours. But copies of newly unearthed footage from 1984, which shows Jackson’s hair going up in flames as he filmed a Pepsi commercial, are barely making a ripple, comparatively. Tubemogul says the clip generated fewer than 800,000 views in a 24-hour stretch.

Important distinction here: Tubemogul is tracking video views only. Anecdotally, there’s plenty of evidence that people are still interested in reading about Jackson online, especially as more and more lurid stories get out. But the YouTube audience, it seems, has moved on.

I feel a little funny about linking to or embedding the hair-fire clip. It has a sort of snuff-film quality to it, especially with the ghoulish music and commentary layered on by US Weekly, which says it has “exclusive” access to the video. But it’s easy enough to find if you want to gawk.

Here’s a more pleasant one:

For those of you who don’t watch CNN or visit CNN.com with any frequency, iReport is the news service’s attempt to create its own user-generated news hub. It’s supposed be to be able attract eyeballs on its own and in some cases, feed the Web site and the cable channel with free content donated by viewers.

To date, iReport is best known as the place where someone posted a bogus item about Apple (AAPL) CEO  Steve Jobs. But CNN says it has been using the site heavily to augment its Iran coverage. From a press release it sent out earlier this week: “Since last week, we’ve received 4555 iReport submissions related to Iran–including more than 1600 this past Saturday and Sunday alone, and an additional 689 just yesterday. To date, 150 of the Iran-related iReports have been vetted and verified by CNN producers for use on CNN air or online–something the likes of YouTube or Flickr just aren’t equipped to do given their lack of newsgathering infrastructure.” (Yesterday CNN told me it added another 399 Iran-related iReports, and that seven had made it onto air. Presumably those numbers are still increasing.)

The breast-beating seems a bit much given that CNN, like every other cable network, has been happy to play up any bit of social media it uses in its Iran reporting. But the point about the vetting and verification is interesting.

I checked with CNN rep Jennifer Martin, who spelled out what that means: That CNN producers have contacted the people who sent in all of the Iran-related iReports it has featured on the network and at least verified that they are who they say they are. That in itself seems worthwhile, and maybe even worth bragging about.

Andy Plesser at Beet.TV has more, including an interview with CNN.com producer Lila King.

Here’s an example of some the “verified” footage the network has used so far. For some reason the play/pause/etc. controls don’t show up on these embedded videos, but I’ve been able to get them to start and stop by clicking on the image:

Iranians shouting “Allah O Akbar” at night:

A pro-Mousavi rally:

To keep the prices of its Flip camcorders affordable, Pure Digital always made some sacrifices in quality and style. And though the company improved on style in June by releasing the sleek $180 Flip Mino, it stuck with standard definition while other companies boasted high-definition capturing capabilities.

The $230 Flip MinoHD is the first camcorder from Pure Digital Technologies to use high definition.

Today, Pure Digital adds a high-def member to its family: the $230 Flip MinoHD. This handheld camcorder looks like the original Mino (more digital camera than video camera), but the MinoHD is capable of capturing high-definition footage in 1280×720 pixel resolution, or 720p. (The regular Mino records at 640×480 pixels.)

Both cameras can be personalized with colorful designs that people can either make themselves or select from TheFlip.com. It’s also possible to upload personal photos to decorate the camcorder. This personalization process is free on new Minos, but people who want to personalize Minos they already own are out of luck.

I brought my MinoHD along on a weekend trip to a lake in North Carolina and used it to capture beautiful images of leaves at their color-changing peak and games of charades among friends. Overall, I really liked the quality of the footage, which had rich hues and sharp details such as glistening ripples of waves on the lake’s surface. And the MinoHD’s improved sound even clearly picked up the voices of two guys paddling away from our dock in a canoe.