Something seems to have resonated with Jon Stewart and his “Daily Show” writers, who weighed in yesterday. Note that almost all of the footage they use in this one seems to come from a June 1, 2010, CNN report:

Author Walter Isaacson stopped by “The Daily Show” last night for what was basically a spoiler-free interview with Jon Stewart. Then again, if you’re reading this, you’ve likely hoovered up the book already, either in its entirety or via the excerpts flooding the Web.

Still, an entertaining seven minutes, touching on Jobs’s “Zen Stare,” the role of cosmic coincidence in the Apple co-founder’s story, and a requisite dig at Microsoft.

RELATED POSTS:

• Samsung, Google Cancel Launch Event Out of Respect for Steve Jobs
• Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert Say Goodbye to Steve Jobs
• An Accountant’s Soul Presides Over the P&L at Apple
• New York Times Crossword Honors Steve Jobs With Puzzle Written by Quora Engineer
• For Steve (Comic)
• Walt Mossberg Reflects on Life and Career of Steve Jobs for Fox Business (Video)
• Apple Shares Rise
• Steve Jobs Biography Arrives in October, a Month Early
• Now What? The Post-Jobs Era in Tech.
• Thoughts on the First Day of Apple’s Post-Jobs Era
• How Will Apple Shares Fare Today?
• Tributes to Steve Jobs, in Pictures
• The Three Irreplaceable Qualities of Steve Jobs
• Walt Mossberg: The Steve Jobs I Knew
• Remembering the Life of Steve Jobs
• Steve Jobs in His Own Words
• Barack Obama On Steve Jobs
• Tech and Media Titans Pay Tribute to Steve Jobs
• Steve Jobs’s Appearances at D, the Full Video Sessions
• Bill Gates: “I Will Miss Steve Immensely”
• Steve Jobs Through the Years: Highlights and Clips From the D Conference
• Steve Jobs Has Died

Steve Jobs Full Coverage »

Oh.

Bad news, LinkedIn. You led “The Daily Show” last night.

CEO Philippe Dauman said that a “substantial bump” in licensing revenue generated last quarter by the company’s TV shows came from “new and renewed digital distribution agreements” — i.e., deals with services like Netflix and Hulu.

The size of the bump may not be that big: BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield did some quick math and figured that new digital dollars added up to $70 million this quarter. That’s a tiny fraction of the overall $2.4 billion Viacom’s cable networks generated in the same time period.

But digital dollars are exceptionally profitable — Dauman said the margin on those deals was upward of 75 percent. And Dauman and his lieutenants took great pains to stress that they’d be signing up new digital pacts, both in and outside the U.S.

Unlike CBS CEO Les Moonves, who listed Apple, Microsoft and Google, among others, as potential buyers, Dauman was a little more circumspect when it came to new prospects — the only one he cited by name was LoveFilm, the “Netflix of Europe” that Amazon owns.

But he also suggested that some of the digital deals would come from cable and satellite companies who are already paying him to show stuff like “The Daily Show” and “Jersey Shore” on analog TV, but would want more digital rights. Both the Dish Network and DirecTV are obvious candidates there.

Again, this is the best-case digital scenario for the TV guys — the one where the Internet doesn’t eat into their business, but supplies it with new streams of easy money. It’s hard to believe it will stay that simple — a lot of this depends on customers deciding that it’s easier to pay for content than grabbing it for free off the Web – but right now it’s a pretty good place to be.

Bonus factoid: When this segment aired on the East Coast last night, @ladybigmac — whose profile describes her as a “political junkie that likes to watch golf and NASCAR races” — had 19 followers. As of 7:44 am, she has 1,397. She may not be aware of her newfound celebrity, though: She’s been tweeting to @cnnAM all morning, but has yet to acknowledge her national shout-out.

Except for the part about it not working.

On Aug. 15, Fox will stop distributing its shows on Hulu and Fox.com a day after they air, and will make most Web surfers wait eight days to see them. The only legal way around this, for now, is to pay for a subscription to either the Dish Network or Hulu Plus.

Expect ABC to follow suit, and then NBC. CBS is a reasonable bet, too.

I walked through the networks’ rationale for this last month, when word first got out that Hulu’s broadcast owners — Disney, Comcast and News Corp. — were going to start requiring “authentication” in order to watch shows online the next day. You can read an excerpt at the bottom of the post if you don’t want to click through.

The problem with the networks’ logic: Sidereel.com. And Sceper.eu. And Twitter. And Google. Etc.

All those sites will lead you, quite quickly, to anything the networks air, for free, on the Web. And you don’t have to wait eight days to watch them, or even a single day. You can see them within hours, or less, of their original airtime.

Video piracy is nothing new, of course. But if you haven’t tried watching a TV show from a rogue site recently (and I’m not advocating you do so for any reason other than a professional one — I don’t want a “Wolverine” incident) you might be astonished to see just how fast, and easy, it’s become.

As BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield pointed out to Wall Street earlier this year, it’s now a cinch to download pirated copies of any movie you’d like, in very high quality, using free online storage lockers.

But it’s equally easy to grab TV shows, and you don’t have to worry about downloads if you don’t want to clog up your hard drive: Sites like Videobb.com will offer free streams, without commercials, the same night they air on TV.

Here’s a screenshot of last night’s episode of “MasterChef,” available a couple hours after it aired on Fox (which, like this site, is owned by News Corp.).

And here’s a grab of Tuesday night’s “The Daily Show,” which I was able to watch less than 30 minutes after it finished airing on Comedy Central.

Downsides? Sure. The streams aren’t HD quality — if you got it onto your 42-inch LCD, you’d be disappointed. And the sites seem to require Flash, so they won’t work on an iPhone or iPad. And you may still need a bit of trial and error to get a working version.

And they’re illegal, of course.

But again: They are free, totally serviceable, and very easy to find for anyone who’s remotely motivated.

That was the case before the Great Free TV Web Pullback of 2011, too. But back then (as in, now) if you were a middle-of-the-road TV and Web video fan, it was easy enough to head over to Hulu to watch last night’s “MasterChef.” You’d even put up with commercials.

Now Fox, and very likely the rest of the broadcast TV business, are telling non-pirates to go ahead and grab what they like, when they like. I think they’re going to find lots of takers.

—–

So why do the networks think this is a good idea? They probably don’t. But it’s a way to prop the business up in the short term, at the expense of the long run.

From my June 23 piece:

Why would Hulu’s owners push to make the service less attractive? The justification I’ve heard is that most Hulu viewers are paying for TV anyway, so this really wouldn’t be a big deal.

But the real answer is that this is meant to appease cable TV providers who are paying Hulu’s owners — via “retrans” deals — for the rights to provide the shows that Hulu is giving away on the Web. And it’s also meant to protect the value of broadcast TV advertising, since the ad business still doesn’t value a Web eyeball as much as one that watches on a TV.

Again, this is the kind of tension between business models that has been a problem for Hulu almost from the get-go. And it has been the source of many of the disagreements between Hulu CEO Jason Kilar and his owners for some time.

Still, Stewart did spend eight minutes on the story last night. Here he is on Rupert Murdoch’s visit to Parliament. And, of course, Wendi Deng’s pie-deflection.

Which segued to this bit on some News Corp. properties’ … restraint in covering the story.

And for good measure, here’s Colbert’s contribution from last night — a chat with the New York Times’s David Carr, who does most of the heavy lifting.

Includes shout-outs to Tumblr, Vimeo, bit.ly, YouTube, Groupon:

And here’s a TV network taking them up on the offer: Viacom’s Comedy Central, which is counting on Twitter to promote its “Comedy Awards” show tonight.

The network has linked up with the service before. Last month, for instance, it devoted on-screen real estate throughout its Donald Trump roast to hashtag terms it wanted viewers to use as they talked up the show on Twitter. Users who obliged ended up creating free, real-time advertising for the program.

Comedy Central plans to do the same thing with tonight’s show. But it’s taking the integration deeper by buying a “promoted trend” in advance of the broadcast.

Click through and you’ll end up at a page promoting the show, the network’s attempt to create an annual Oscars-style event (which was taped two weeks ago, a fact the network isn’t trying to hide: you can see the winners here). And if you end up on the site while the show is airing tonight, you’ll see a livestream of the telecast, along with a dedicated Twitter widget.

The network is hoping it will be able to get other related terms to trend–for free–as the day goes on; it has recruited about a dozen of the comedians that will appear on the show to actively Twitter about it in advance.

Twitter and Comedy Central were hoping to push the partnership even further by embedding a livestream of tonight’s broadcast on Twitter.com itself, alongside the “#comedyawards” page. But technical issues forced them to scrap the plan Friday morning.

Comedy Central isn’t relying solely on Twitter to push tonight’s show. It will simulcast the show on five other Viacom-owned channels, including Spike and VH1. And for good measure, it will stream the show to Apple’s iPad and iPhone, and handsets running Google’s Android.

But it’s most excited about Twitter, in large part because comedians themselves have flocked to the service in the last couple years. “It just seems like a natural fit”, says Steve Grimes, who oversees digital for the network.

Twitter is quietly excited, too. Even without the embeded video feature, tonight’s show gives it a chance to promote a cycle that would be particularly virtuous for Twitter: TV networks advertise on the service, get higher ratings, and can charge more for their own advertising. Repeat.

That’s according to people familiar with the new deal, announced last night, between the video site and cable giant Viacom. They tell me Hulu has agreed to a guaranteed payment in the $40 million to $50 million range for Viacom’s programming. The total payout could increase depending on the shows’ performance.

That money covers the new deal’s entire length, which hasn’t been disclosed–Viacom will only allow that the deal goes “into” 2012. But it’s reasonable to assume it’s a two-year pact, just like Hulu’s programming deals with its parents/content owners–News Corp.’s Fox, Disney’s ABC and Comcast’s NBCU. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

Stewart’s and Colbert’s shows will be available for free, the day after they air, on Hulu.com– just as they used to be. In addition, Viacom will also provide shows like “Tosh.0″ and “Jersey Shore,” on a 21-day delay, on Hulu’s paid Hulu Plus service.

The deal is a coup for Hulu, but it’s unclear how many more of them CEO Jason Kilar can pull off without getting more financing. And for that he’ll need the full support of his partners, which makes the blog post he put up last night in the wake of the announcement that much more puzzling. Or maybe he doesn’t want to run Hulu anymore.

For now, just like old times, here’s a Hulu clip from one of Stewart’s recent episodes, where he takes advantage of the big, fat, hanging curveball that Rep. Michele Bachmann and the Tea Party served up last week.

Bonus: You can see a bit of the way the Daily Show’s comedy sausage gets made, via a shot of Oliver’s script/marching orders that Dan Frommer at Business Insider grabbed.

Another (small) bonus: If you have very sharp eyes, and a lot of time on your hands, you’ll be able to spot two brief glimpses of me and Ina Fried at the Verizon presser. Technically, the back of our heads. But still, we get to say we were on the Daily Show, which is pretty cool, right?

Staying at 499 shareholders or fewer is something Facebook has worried about since at least 2007, and sidestepped by creating a special kind of restricted stock unit for new employees and making small talent acquisitions that avoided, when possible, awarding start-ups and their investors with Facebook stock.

Now that that’s over, Facebook’s acquisitions team may get the go-ahead this year to pursue larger and more complicated deals.

As is now widely known, SEC rules mandate that a company with more than 500 shareholders at the end of a fiscal year must report financial information, something Facebook didn’t want to do as a private company. But if you read the fine print, as BoomTown’s Kara Swisher first reported, Facebook has 120 days to disclose from the end of the fiscal year in which it crosses 500 shareholders.

That means the end of April of 2012, by which point Facebook has said in paperwork for its Goldman Sachs funding deal it expects to file to go public.

Basically, Facebook has exorcised a curse hanging over its head by outlasting it. Like a nightclub bouncer, the company had been letting one shareholder out of the room before allowing another in. And now that’s over, as long as Facebook goes public next year.

(Though at this point, many of the company’s financial details are already leaking out as part of the troubling Goldman Sachs deal.)

For now, Facebook is still being cautious about adding shareholders; the Goldman deal (which we’ve heard still hasn’t closed) was structured to combine Goldman’s wealthy clients into a single entity to avoid adding too many shareholders.

Facebook’s corporate development team has said publicly that part of why it likes doing “acqhire” deals of small, early-stage start-ups is because they are relatively uncomplicated, financially speaking. Wherever it can, Facebook tries to cash out an acquired start-up’s shareholders instead of giving them stock. In the past, if a start-up had too many shareholders, it might not have been an attractive acquisition candidate.

Facebook doesn’t always get its way on that preference; sometimes it pays in stock. For instance, Facebook bought two start-ups that had taken investments from RRE Ventures: Hot Potato (in August 2010) and Drop.io (in October). In the first case, Facebook paid RRE in cash, but the second time around, RRE was able to negotiate for stock.

But now that Facebook seems to basically be giving itself the go-ahead to surge past 500, who gets to be shareholder number 501 or even number 1,001? It’s possible they could be the employees and investors in larger, more complicated M&A deals. Facebook’s name has come up in acquisition discussions for companies like Twitter and Foursquare, but now it may actually start closing more of those deals.

To date, Facebook’s largest acquisition has been FriendFeed for $50 million in cash and stock in 2009. The first time many tech watchers heard of the 10 tiny start-ups Facebook acquired in 2010 was when the deals closed.

But now that big deals are on the table, the question is, who’s next?

Here’s Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” last night ranting about Facebook avoiding making financial disclosures:

Please see my own disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is certainly in the midst of a media bonanza.

Aside from all the heat over its recent investment whatever with Goldman Sachs, the young entrepreneur has been touted on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and been selected Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Oh, yes, and that movie–”The Social Network”–which you just know is going to win some Oscars on February 27.

Now CNBC has just aired a documentary on the huge social networking site, titled–appropriately–“The Facebook Obsession.”

There is no new interview with Zuckerberg, and it’s essentially the same story about the Silicon Valley wunderkind, told yet again. But all the old video clips and photos collected all together on another television show are nice.

Also, I always enjoy the Winklevii spouting off hambone arguments about why they are owed more than $65 million for Zuckerberg’s kneecapping of them back at Harvard University.

And, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-me appearance, I also make a showing, apparently as the grumpy one.

But I did not see it, as CNBC did not deign to post the entire report online, as “60 Minutes” so kindly did.

CNBC did do a preview and provide some clips, which are embedded below, as well the the much funnier Jon Stewart take on it all on “The Daily Show,” titled “The Anti-Social Network”:

Sorry, couldn’t shave down the eight-minute running time, but it’s worth it (boy do I miss the Hulu clip-editing feature). Also, this is NSFW if your workplace isn’t cool with the word “penis.”

If you’re looking for a more sober take on WikiLeaks, check out Andy Greenberg’s excellent Forbes cover story and interview with Julian Assange.

“I can’t control what people think this was. I can only tell you my intentions. This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland or passionate argument or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies.

But unfortunately one of our main tools in delineating the two broke. The country’s 24 hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic.

If we amplify everything we hear nothing. There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats but those are titles that must be earned. You must have the resume. Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate–just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe, not more. The press is our immune system. If it overreacts to everything we actually get sicker–and perhaps eczema.

And yet, with that being said, I feel good–strangely, calmly good. Because the image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false. It is us through a fun house mirror, and not the good kind that makes you look slim in the waist and maybe taller, but the kind where you have a giant forehead and an ass shaped like a month-old pumpkin and one eyeball.

So, why would we work together? Why would you reach across the aisle to a pumpkin assed forehead eyeball monster? If the picture of us were true, of course, our inability to solve problems would actually be quite sane and reasonable. Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our Constitution or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own? We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is–on the brink of catastrophe–torn by polarizing hate and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done, but the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day!

The only place we don’t is here or on cable TV. But Americans don’t live here or on cable TV. Where we live our values and principles form the foundation that sustains us while we get things done, not the barriers that prevent us from getting things done. Most Americans don’t live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, liberals or conservatives. Americans live their lives more as people that are just a little bit late for something they have to do–often something they do not want to do–but they do it–impossible things every day that are only made possible through the little reasonable compromises we all make.

Look on the screen. This is where we are. This is who we are. [points to the Jumbotron screen which shows traffic merging into a tunnel]. These cars–that’s a schoolteacher who probably thinks his taxes are too high. He’s going to work. There’s another car-a woman with two small kids who can’t really think about anything else right now. There’s another car, swinging, I don’t even know if you can see it–the lady’s in the NRA and she loves Oprah. There’s another car–an investment banker, gay, also likes Oprah. Another car’s a Latino carpenter. Another car a fundamentalist vacuum salesman. Atheist obstetrician. Mormon Jay-Z fan. But this is us. Every one of the cars that you see is filled with individuals of strong belief and principles they hold dear–often principles and beliefs in direct opposition to their fellow travelers.

And yet these millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze one by one into a mile long 30 foot wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river. Carved, by the way, by people who I’m sure had their differences. And they do it. Concession by concession. You go. Then I’ll go. You go. Then I’ll go. You go then I’ll go. Oh my God, is that an NRA sticker on your car? Is that an Obama sticker on your car? Well, that’s okay–you go and then I’ll go.

And sure, at some point there will be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder and cuts in at the last minute, but that individual is rare and he is scorned and not hired as an analyst.

Because we know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light we have to work together. And the truth is, there will always be darkness. And sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the promised land. Sometimes it’s just New Jersey. But we do it anyway, together.

If you want to know why I’m here and want I want from you, I can only assure you this: you have already given it to me. Your presence was what I wanted.

Sanity will always be and has always been in the eye of the beholder. To see you here today and the kind of people that you are has restored mine. Thank you.”

*Note that this isn’t coming from the most obvious sources: Viacom’s own Daily Show site, which carried a live stream of the event but doesn’t have any record of it anymore, or C-SPAN, which is running a loop of the rally, but doesn’t have a handy way to excerpt the three-hour event. Too bad Hulu can’t help here….

[Image credit: Cliff1066]

As everyone knows, the back-and-forth between Rick Sanchez and “Daily Show” mocker-in-chief Jon Stewart turned serious after some controversial remarks on a radio show from the CNN personality got him fired.

Sanchez was taking aim at Stewart when he shot himself in the foot, which is why it is so compelling to see Stewart handle the situation with admirable restraint in this video from the comedy television program.

Enjoy:

Everyone from college students to famous musicians was logging on to the random-video-chat service to see what it was about. The New York Times asked whether it embodied “a glimpse into a surreal future, a turn in the direction of the Internet.” Social-media researchers analyzed the service, and Jon Stewart lampooned the media’s obsession with it — as well as the prevalence of perverts on the site.

How times change.

Chatroulette debuted a new version of the site Monday — only to be roundly panned by technology watchers. The site seems to have made mostly cosmetic changes, and even those confused users rather than making for a better experience. The user’s image is no longer displayed next to the other person’s image and is instead initially shown as a small inset in the main video screen. Users can now resize those images and move them around. A single gray bar — without any descriptive text — now serves as the “next” button.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

As in Conan O’Brien, the former NBC employee whose brief stint as host of “The Tonight Show” ended badly, and expensively, for the network. It seems to have worked out okay for O’Brien, though–he got a very big severance check, an infusion of online adoration and, eventually, a well-paid gig at Time Warner’s Turner (TWX).

And while it would be a little, um, awkward if O’Brien actually won the Emmy for best “variety, comedy or music series” (he’s up against Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher and “Saturday Night Live”), there is some upside for NBC here. The GE (GE) unit is broadcasting the Emmys in late August, and the potential car-crash nature of the award show might bring in some more eyeballs.

Here is where I’d show you a clip of the award-nominated show, but NBC has scrubbed O’Brien off of its site, Hulu and much of Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. So you’ll have to settle for this bit that O’Brien did specifically for YouTube, where he introduces his favorite viral clips.

As in Conan O’Brien, the former NBC employee whose brief stint as host of “The Tonight Show” ended badly, and expensively, for the network. It seems to have worked out okay for O’Brien, though–he got a very big severance check, an infusion of online adoration and, eventually, a well-paid gig at Time Warner’s Turner (TWX).

And while it would be a little, um, awkward if O’Brien actually won the Emmy for best “variety, comedy or music series” (he’s up against Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher and “Saturday Night Live”), there is some upside for NBC here. The GE (GE) unit is broadcasting the Emmys in late August, and the potential car-crash nature of the award show might bring in some more eyeballs.

Here is where I’d show you a clip of the award-nominated show, but NBC has scrubbed O’Brien off of its site, Hulu and much of Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. So you’ll have to settle for this bit that O’Brien did specifically for YouTube, where he introduces his favorite viral clips.

Not much. At least not in the first few weeks of their absence, according to Comscore (SCOR).

Check out Comscore’s tally of the top video sites in the U.S. for February:

And now for March:

Stewart and Colbert left Hulu, the joint venture site owned by GE’s NBC (GE), Disney’s ABC (DIS) and News Corp.’s Fox (NWS), on March 10. But note that Hulu actually streamed about 10 percent more videos that month than it did in February.

Meanwhile streams at Viacom (VIA) sites, now the only places that can host clips like Stewart’s Apple (AAPL) smackdown, increased as well. Perhaps some of that is because Hulu has been good about the breakup, and is directing Daily Show and Colbert Report seekers directly to Viacom’s sites. Which they’re not required to do.

But for whatever reason, it looks like Viacom’s decision to yank the clips — or Hulu’s decision not pay more for them, depending on your interpretation — made sense for both sides.

Some of the requisite caveats: This is just the first sample, and it’s not apples to apples, because February is the shortest month, etc. And overall video traffic appears to have increased around the Web month-to-month. Also, Hulu has been hovering around the billion video per month mark for some time now, so perhaps this its natural level.

(A Hulu aside — how are they possibly getting the $200 million-plus run rate they boasted about earlier this year? Last week I sat down and watched an entire episode of “Lost”, which should be their most premium inventory. The show started off promisingly, with a Verizon sponsorship, but by the end of it I was watching ads for 5-Hour Energy and then what appeared to be some non-profit giveaways. That can’t possibly be right, can it?)

And while we’re looking at the numbers: Note that Vevo, the “Hulu for music videos”, is back in the top 10. And, as always, that Google’s YouTube (GOOG) towers above every other site, by a huge margin.

Here’s a video that is sure to go rocketing around the Web today: A smackdown by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” of Apple for its behavior related to the stolen iPhone 4G prototype.

It’s titled: “Appholes.”

That’s gotta hurt.

There’s not much more to be said than Stewart does in a tough attack on the recent door-bashing police raid of a reporter from Gizmodo, which bought the smartphone from the person who allegedly found it in a German beer garden in Silicon Valley.

Stewart began the opening monologue by saying he was a huge fan of Apple (AAPL) and its products, but soon was lacing into the company and blaming it for the messy legal morass.

There are a ton of great lines, although it’s the easiest jibe at iPhone wireless carrier AT&T (T) that is still the funniest: “If you want to break down someone’s door, why don’t you start with AT&T, for God sakes? They make your amazing phone unusable as a phone!”

He ended with a plea to CEO Steve Jobs: “C’mon, Steve, just chill out with all the paranoid corporate genius stuff. Don’t go Howard Hughes on us.”

Then, of course, Stewart asked for Jobs to send him the new 4G: “It looks totally sick.”

Enough said, here’s the video:

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone appeared yesterday on CBS (CBS) anchor Katie Couric’s weekly online “webshow” on CBSNews.com, which was streamed live.

Viewers could submit questions via, of course, Twitter @katiecouric.

On the show, Stone answered questions about a wide range of topics, including the microblogging service’s tipping point (a bar swarm at SXSW), understanding promoted tweets (don’t try), whether it is correct to say “twittered” or “tweeted” (or, as much funnier TV anchor Jon Stewart puts it, “twatted”), using Twitter effectively (apparently, Couric employs a Twitter temper), and why Twitter turned down the $500 million acquisition offer from social networking giant Facebook (we’re a real live company!).

I am not sure what was up with Couric’s smart-teacher glasses and the whole interviewing-remotely-via-a-television thing, but Stone did well.

Here’s the video of the full show, at close to 40 minutes, which is well worth the time:

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Last week, Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart spoofs Fox News’s Glenn Beck in a blackboard parody almost as good as Tina Fey’s spot-on impression of Sarah Palin on “Saturday Night Live.”

The conservative pundits seem to be the online comedy gift that keeps on giving.

Here it is in two videos:

Ternovskiy is visiting the U.S. and flirting with investors, and you can see why they’d want to talk to him. The 17-year-old spent three days in his bedroom building the site, named after a key scene in “The Deer Hunter,” and it attracts more than 30 million visitors a month.

He’s also savvy enough to tell everyone that he’s perfectly happy to go it alone. Though it would be easier for him to do that if Google (GOOG) would send him a check. He says the search giant won’t pay him his AdWords money because he’s too young.

Q: Do you want investors?

A: ?I’m not sure. There are a lot of business people that are interested. I am afraid to take the offers as I don’t have a business plan. If I take the money I’m responsible for delivering on that. Right now I can survive without investors. The site uses peer-to-peer technology and my Web site is not the kind of site that needs a lot of money to run.

Q: So if someone came along to you today and said I’ll give you $5 million for the Web site would you sell it to them?

A: ?I’m not sure to be honest. The thing is, I could take the money, but what if it won’t work well in the future, I would blame myself. I don’t want to disappoint people.

You should read the whole thing, which doubles as a very nice metaphor for the Web 2.0 era.

Which turns out not to have disappeared, after all. You can now launch a Web service that attracts millions of users without having to leave your parents’ house.

But if words aren’t your thing, here’s that excellent Jon Stewart clip about Chatroulette again.