Upworthy’s output is a stream of curated daily picks via email newsletter, Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter. Its first two featured items are both about the Trayvon Martin killing.

Upworthy was co-founded by MoveOn board president Eli Pariser, and former managing editor for The Onion, Peter Koechley. It is backed by Chris Hughes, the Facebook co-founder who recently bought The New Republic.

Pariser, who wrote the book “The Filter Bubble,” explained his justification for Upworthy today: “In the Darwinian environment of the hyper-relevant news feed, content about issues like homelessness or climate change can’t compete with goofy viral videos, celebrity news, and kittens … Hopefully, we can help bring attention and focus to stuff that really matters in a viral format that can reach millions.”

The intersection of virality and more serious content seems particularly timely, given the potency of Kony 2012 and other recent Internet activism, like the SOPA protests.

In an introductory post, Upworthy says it would like to run items about “something like planking or Tebowing but about climate change” and “17 Sexiest Pics About Income Inequality.” I guess it’s better to poke fun at yourself before other people can.

Hughes had previously pitched jobs at the prelaunch start-up for people who “love Facebook, hate Fox News, and are amazingly talented,” but as described today, the site says it’s not partisan.

Pariser said in an email today that the site is “very minimum viable product,” but it already has a privacy policy in the form of an infographic, so I’d say it’s ready for public consumption.

Humor online is a tricky thing, as any misunderstood internet commenter can tell you. Part of what makes comedy work are subtle cues and indicators of “play,” that we’re in on this humor thing together. When the medium for that exchange is something as minimal as Twitter (you’ve got 140 characters, and that’s all), strip those subtle cues out and — well, stuff like this happens.

Boing Boing partner Xeni Jardin, discussing an “oddly presented” and largely misunderstood tweet from @theonion yesterday morning reporting that screams and gunfire had been heard inside the Capitol building

But it didn’t really click for me until just now, when I saw this tweet from Kevin Marks (via Eric Eldon).

Now I get it. Cool!

It’s funnier when they say it:

CIA’s ‘Facebook’ Program Dramatically Cut Agency’s Costs

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Good stuff. And it’s a guarantee that Facebookers are going to share this thing, over and over, on the service itself.

We can’t show you the sketch (starring the awesome Jane Lynch) until Sunday morning, when NBC puts SNL up online. (UPDATE: Here you go.) Until then, here’s the forerunner to the bit: The Onion’s take on the same topic, from 2009:

You just know those big brains at Google’s HQ in Mountain View, Calif., have already been at work on this spoof idea from The Onion: A new mobile phone service that “whispers targeted ads directly into users’ ears.”

Here’s the hysterical video on how such an advertising-blabby Google (GOOG) device might work, including a very funny emergency call. And don’t miss the perfect dig at Yahoo (YHOO) at the end.

Enjoy:

New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users’ Ears

Fortunately The Onion has already talked to the man and woman on the street. Full report here.

Bonus video! The Onion explains why your parents might want to use Facebook and Twitter:

Online talk radio aggregator Stitcher nabbed $6 million from Benchmark Capital and will use the money to give radio blabbermouth Rush Limbaugh, as well as the endlessly talking heads of National Public Radio, even more digital distribution.

The San Francisco-based start-up often describes itself as the the Pandora of online talk radio. And like the digital music site, Stitcher lets its users create and customize their own free personalized talk/information/news radio stations.

The site focuses mostly on its apps for a variety of mobile devices, especially increasingly popular smartphones. It offers programs from about a thousand different sources, such as NPR, E! and The Onion.

Stitcher also recommends new programs to users based on their selections.

The infusion of funding in a Series B round led by Benchmark–whose partner, Bob Kagle, will have a seat Stitcher’s board–will allow it to expand its advertising sales force and improve its offerings, said CEO Noah Shanok in an interview with BoomTown last night.

“The hope for everyone in terrestrial radio is to find new audiences, so as we grow, they will too,” said Shanok, who co-founded Stitcher in 2008. “We want to be a part of everyone’s everyday life.”

Shanok said fast-growing usage and engagement–which he declined to give specifics about–was the reason Benchmark was attracted to the company.

The new funding adds to $3 million Stitcher already raised from New Atlantic Ventures and investors Ed Scott and Ron Conway, who also participated in the new round.

While the mobile app on the Apple (AAPL) iPhone is the most popular, Stitcher also offers software for Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry, Palm (PALM) Pre and Google (GOOG) Android devices.

Stitcher is also pushing into other areas, such as being part of Ford’s (F) initiative to make its SYNC-enabled vehicles into Wi-Fi hotspots, allowing people to connect to the Internet everywhere much more seamlessly in a moving car. They will be available later this year.

Here’s the press release on the funding:

Stitcher Secures $6 Million in Series B Venture Funding

Benchmark Capital Leads New Round to Help Transform the Way We Listen to Talk Radio

SAN FRANCISCO, CA. (April 6, 2010)–Today, Stitcher, a service that allows users to customize talk radio programming on their mobile devices, announced that it has completed its Series B round of financing. Led by Benchmark Capital, with participation from previous investor New Atlantic Ventures and tech veterans including Ed Scott and Ron Conway, the funding will be used to further Stitcher’s product and platform development. Bob Kagle of Benchmark will join Stitcher’s board of directors.

“We know that people prefer listening to news, talk and information programming when they’re on-the-go. The rise of smartphones has finally created an opportunity to give people exactly what they want to hear–on their commute, at the gym, on a road-trip–wherever and whenever they want it and that’s exactly what Stitcher does,” said Noah Shanok, CEO of Stitcher. “Benchmark’s funding, combined with Bob’s guidance, will help us continue to take advantage of the growing market for mobile content distribution.”

Stitcher’s free service allows users to create a personalized audio programming experience. With Stitcher, users can listen to the news and talk radio shows they enjoy whenever and wherever they like, using their mobile devices. Users choose their favorite programs from more than a thousand different sources, and Stitcher then delivers the audio feeds to their phone as a single, regularly updating radio station. Stitcher also helps users discover new content on a variety of topics–including business, sports, politics, entertainment, and current events–by recommending additional programs based on the shows users have in their feeds. A single radio station can include programming as diverse as Fox Headline News, NPR’s Fresh Air, TechCrunch Headlines, Onion Radio News, and E!’s Hollywood Rap Up.

“Stitcher is transforming the way we all consume news, talk radio, pod casts,” said Bob Kagle, general partner at Benchmark Capital. “Noah and his team are building a platform that will deliver the personalized experience consumers currently enjoy for music to the broader world of audio programming. We’re thrilled to join the Stitcher revolution.”

You can’t build a wall around your cubicle using Google News and Craigslist.

That’s tough to do for many reasons, and even when you can do it, it’s pretty hard to scale. But here’s what it’s supposed to look like: Starbucks sponsoring a 25-song video series put on by The Onion.

Simon Dumenco has details on the campaign, but at its core it’s the most basic kind of video advertising, and the kind we saw at the beginning of video advertising. It’s a back-to-the-future version of TV’s early days, when brands like Texaco and Ford (F) sponsored shows called “Texaco Star Theater” and “The Ford Show.”

Back to the present: Look at how much plugging Starbucks (SBUX) has plugged in here! A preroll, plus what amounts to a preroll at the beginning of the video, plus more Starbucks references as the clip goes on. Don’t know what the coffee chain is paying for sponsoring this stuff, but the company seems determined to get its money’s worth.

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists cover the Tears for Fears song, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”:

Some services make this process a little easier. Hulu holds episodes from 1,200 television shows, but is still missing many. Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes Store offers over 50,000 episodes, but unlike network sites or Hulu, it requires viewers to pay to download and watch them (though they are commercial-free). Video search engines like Truveo browse the entire Web, returning an often-overwhelming number of results. And while YouTube is the king of Web video, it can too easily return a search result that isn’t a complete and genuine episode of the show you’re seeking.

This week, I’ve been testing Clicker, a free Web site that aims to be the TV Guide for all full episodes available to watch on the Web. It searches over 1,200 sources, so it can index some 400,000 episodes from 7,000 shows. Results include television programs as well as “Web originals,” or shows that are native to the Internet and are of broadcast quality. Clicker either plays the video on its site or links you to where this content is shown on another hosting site—like NBC or Hulu. If a show isn’t available online, Clicker tells you so you don’t have to keep hunting all over for it.

I like Clicker and found it to be a quick resource for finding all sorts of shows online. In many cases, it directed me to find the episodes I wanted to watch and saved me the hassle of less efficient searching. It also suggested shows I might like and offered a playlist where I could subscribe to receive episodes as they became available or save available videos to watch later.

Clicker makes descriptive pages about each show

Though it has a search box, Clicker feels more like a directory than purely a robotic search engine that relies mainly on algorithms. In fact, Clicker created a descriptive page for almost every show, and these pages can be edited or created via user submissions, which Clicker will review before posting them to the site. And because it’s focused on TV shows or Web originals, it won’t clutter your results with kids’ birthday parties or cats on skateboards.

The site is still rather new, so it has some kinks to work out—like links to videos that didn’t actually play if, for example, they were pulled by the network. But these were rare, and for the most part, if a video wasn’t available, a clear, brief explanation was displayed at the top of the page. Also, if Clicker sends you back out to a network’s site and that network uses a special player for videos, you’ll still have to download that player.

Filtering Results

Clicker’s program pages contain a description of the show, and a way to filter results by season, airdate or popularity. And the site shows the actual airdate of each video—something that not many other sites do. A column on the right side of each page displays several related shows, like the suggestion of “Modern Family” for fans of “How I Met Your Mother”; and “Roswell” and “Dead Like Me” suggested for people who like “Heroes.” In December, these recommendations will become even more personalized.

Some of Clicker’s sources include NBC, Fox, ABC, PBS, the Food Network and Web original content (i.e. “The Onion”). It also can search movies and music videos; the movies can be watched free in some cases, or paid for via Amazon’s (AMZN) Video on Demand or Netflix (NFLX) Instant Streaming. In January, Clicker plans to incorporate shows and movies from iTunes, using Apple’s pay-and-download method.

Clicker is especially handy when you’re looking for a show that isn’t where you think it should be. “Seinfeld,” for example, is on TBS rather than NBC, where it originally aired, and only nine episodes are available at once before they rotate out and are replaced by nine more. “Friends” is found on theWB.com, rather than on NBC’s site. “Damages” isn’t available on its network site, FX; instead, it can be found at Crackle.com, another video-hosting site. It’s easy to understand why people settle for missing an episode rather than trying to find a show online.

Clicker finds over 400,000 television and Web-original episodes so you can search less and watch more.

Clicker also comes in handy when you’re querying something or someone you need to learn about. By typing in a term like “Thanksgiving travel,” I get news results from NBC’s “Nightly News with Brian Williams,” the “CBS Evening News” and the Associated Press. I also get tips for traveling during this busy time of year from an AOL Travel online video, as well as a 1968 episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies” called “The Thanksgiving Spirit.”

Clicker isn’t the site to use if you want to find the hot video clip that everyone is watching. When I searched for “Whitney Houston” the morning after the American Music Awards, the most recent video I found was the singer performing on “Good Morning America” in September—not the one showing her singing during the awards show the night before.

But the fact that Clicker can find Whitney Houston on “Good Morning America” is useful in itself. A search for Warren Buffett’s most recent appearance on the “Charlie Rose” show can be conducted in a similar manner—either by typing his name into the box at the top of the page or by opening the show’s page and searching within that show for anyone who has appeared as a guest. Performing a search within a show like this anywhere else is nowhere near as easy as on Clicker.

Playlist of Your Shows

Clicker can be used as a TiVo (TIVO) of sorts if you create a username on the site or simply sign in using Facebook Connect, which I did.

Users can make playlists where they can add just one episode, all episodes, or new episodes to this list—subscribing to receive all new episodes in the playlist as they become available. I added episodes of “The Amazing Race” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” to my playlist. This list can be accessed anytime, and it’s helpful for people who don’t have enough time to watch a show that they found. In December, email and Facebook notifications will be added to tell users that new episodes are in their playlists.

If you spend a lot of time in front of your computer and find yourself searching all over the Web for the TV shows you’d like to watch, Clicker will be a huge help. And even if your show isn’t available, you might find something similar—or better—in Clicker’s recommendations.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg. Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091124/a-clicker-to-watch-tv-online/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090404/weekend-update-40409/ http://allthingsd.com/20090404/weekend-update-40409/#comments Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:36:24 +0000 Oliver J. Chiang http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=16055

Welcome once more to Weekend Update! I’ll be filling in today for your regular host, Beth Callaghan, who’s on vacation.

And what sane person wouldn’t be, after the slew of Silicon Valley silliness inspired by April Fools Day this past week? Digital pranks were the name of the game as Google (GOOG) and others heaped so many tepid hoaxes upon us that we wanted to call April Fold so as to quickly end this round of gags.

But no bag of tricks was needed for one Web site to April Fool itself into crying wolf about an imminent Google (GOOG) acquisition of Twitter, when a real story around the corner was aboutGoogle turning Turbo Tax tweets into ads.

Meanwhile, one of the biggest jokesters of them all, The Onion, won one of the biggest awards in journalism, a Peabody, meaning that the best sense of humor goes to that panel of judges. And to Stephen Colbert, who was willing to entertain (for a while) Twitter spokesmodel Biz Stone’s biz-model-less thoughts in an interview on “The Colbert Report.” Also on BoomTown this week: Facebook’s former CFO Gideon Yu is out, as was a leaked memo from Mark Zuckerberg about Yu’s departure and the company’s situation.

A sense of humor is certainly an invaluable feather to have in your cap these days. Digital Daily wrote about the most recent doom-and-gloom predictions and events to happen in this econalypse, like analysts’ predictions of YouTube losing $470 million in 2009, the barren IPO-less wasteland VCs are bemoaning and a major global slump in semiconductor sales. Other headlines weren’t quite so dreary: Google’s foray into VC land, the folks at BlackBerry HQ celebrating surprisingly good fourth-quarter results and the world’s worst-kept secret, the anticipated merger between IBM (IBM) and Sun (JAVA).

There was a similar mix of dark clouds and silver linings over at MediaMemo. The National Collegiate Athletics Association forced Twitter and partners AT&T (T) and Federated Media to take down one of its first ad campaigns, “March Tweetness,” crying copyright foul. Also running afoul with big companies in legal waters, free music Web site Seeqpod filed for bankruptcy. And video site Veoh laid off a significant amount of staff and kicked out its old CEO, replacing him with founder Dmitry Shapiro and refocusing the company on its “Video Compass” browser plug-in.

Online video is generally a turbulent space these, but the waiting is the hardest part for Hulu when it comes to the rumored Disney deal in which Disney (DIS) seems to be playing the field. Other gems of the week were URL-shrinking Web service bit.ly’s raising of $2 million and media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s Kindle envy.

In a new Mossblog, Walt Mossberg gives us his first impressions of the BlackBerry App World store in which Research in Motion (RIMM) takes a bold step into what was formerly the sole domain of Apple (AAPL). In Personal Technology, Walt reviews a network hard drive from Western Digital (WDC) that makes the technology gloriously simple for everyone. And in Mossberg Solution, Katherine Boehret takes a look at several laptop trays, designed to protect the–ahem–family jewels and family members in general from laptops’ scorching undersides.

Finally, our exciting Woz-watch, after many weeks, has come to a sad end: Steve Wozniak was voted off “Dancing with the Stars” this week after one misstep too many. Down, but not out, the Apple co-founder swore that the “geeks shall inherit the earth”… just not the dance floor, any time soon. Please.

More next week.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090404/weekend-update-40409/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090401/no-joke-the-onion-wins-one-of-journalisms-biggest-awards/ http://allthingsd.com/20090401/no-joke-the-onion-wins-one-of-journalisms-biggest-awards/#comments Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:38:55 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=5875 It’s not layoff news, and it’s not an April Fools prank: The Onion has won a Peabody, one of journalism’s most highfalutin awards.

The Peabodys, administered out of the University of Georgia, date back to 1941, and honor “the most outstanding achievements in electronic media, including radio, television and cable.” They tend to go to earnest television documentaries and the like, but they also allow for some very smart, quirky stuff.

Hence the award for the weekly’s “Onion News Network” video site, which debuted two years ago but has really been hitting its stride lately (disclosure: I’m pals with some Onion people). Per the judges: “The satirical tabloid’s online send-up of 24-hour cable-TV news was hilarious, trenchant and not infrequently hard to distinguish from the real thing.”

Other winners include the New York Times’s (NYT) excellent Web site, CBS’s (CBS) “60 Minutes” and… “Lost,” from Disney’s (DIS) ABC. But none of those are as fun to embed as Onion clips.

Here’s the Onion’s most recent effort:

Morning Show Host Starts Charity to Rid World of Flying Debris

And here’s a beauty that, like some other Onion stories, got digested as bonafide news in some places:

Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport

And while this one isn’t technically an Onion clip, I’ve always enjoyed its many meta qualities:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090401/no-joke-the-onion-wins-one-of-journalisms-biggest-awards/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090106/is-there-some-plum-oops-i-mean-apple-event-today-in-san-francisco/ http://allthingsd.com/20090106/is-there-some-plum-oops-i-mean-apple-event-today-in-san-francisco/#comments Tue, 06 Jan 2009 08:00:53 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=8160

Even without Apple CEO Steve Jobs, there will be copious amounts of live coverage of Macworld’s keynote by Apple SVP Phil “No-Black-Turtleneck” Schiller all over the tech sites online in T-minus nine hours and counting.

And, guess what? All Things Digital will be there too, with the intrepid reporting duo of Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski on text and our Webmaster (and not-so-secret Mac fanboy) Adam Tow on photos.

They and many others are hoping the not-prone-yet Jobs will make a surprise appearance, even by iChat, to greet the Apple (AAPL) faithful crowd gathered in San Francisco.

One can hope for His Digital Holiness, but the event might be more about Mac minis and 17-inch Macbook Pros, as most expect.

Until then, enjoy this very funny spoof video from The Onion about a new Apple sensation that almost seems like it could be made and sold: The Macbook Wheel.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090106/is-there-some-plum-oops-i-mean-apple-event-today-in-san-francisco/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20081212/sarah-palin-please-come-back-hulu-traffic-drops-in-november/ http://allthingsd.com/20081212/sarah-palin-please-come-back-hulu-traffic-drops-in-november/#comments Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:43:40 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=2050 File under “interesting, but understandable”: After a flurry of election-related interest in October, traffic to red-hot Hulu fell off in November. Blame Sarah Palin–or the lack of her.

ComScore says that traffic to the joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and GE’s (GE) NBC fell 10.8 percent from October to November, dropping from 5.3 million unique visitors to 4.8 million. (Hulu’s PR team notes that ComScore’s separate “VideoMetrix” panel assigned a much bigger audience to the site last month: 24 million uniques. They haven’t put out November numbers yet but I’ll update when I get them).

ComScore (SCOR) says U.S. traffic at Google’s (GOOG) YouTube also dropped that month, but by a much smaller margin–0.006 percent. And since YouTube is a global property, those numbers are less telling. Hulu, meanwhile, is a U.S.-only site (much to the dismay of blog commenters).

Apologies for not figuring out how to show you this data in graph form–I’ll figure it out eventually. For now, click to enlarge.

This makes plenty of sense: Hulu was one of two places were you could (legally) see the “Saturday Night Live” Sarah Palin clips, which were huge sensations. The other one, NBC.com, dropped a whopping 50 percent–from 14.1 million to 7.2 million, comScore says.

And all sorts of Web sites that enjoyed a bump during the run-up to the election have tailed off a bit since then. ComScore says the Huffington Post, for instance, is down 20 percent– from five million uniques to four million. Presumably Oak Investment Partners was aware of that before it sank $25 million into the site last month.

Meanwhile, Hulu still shows impressive growth. If I could have figured out how to create a graph, you’d see that Hulu has still had a huge run-up since March, when it left beta.

Speaking of beta, video site/blog punching bag Joost has logged its first full month of traffic since its Web video player became open to the public. ComScore pegs traffic at 1.1 million uniques; the company says that its data, which include global traffic, show 2.1 million.

Those aren’t huge numbers–I can think of several text-only blogs, which cost a lot less to build and operate than Joost’s site, that garner more eyeballs than that–but they’re not terrible either. Still, Joost has a lot of ground to catch up if it wants to give Hulu a run for its money.

Last but not least! Here’s an excellent clip from the smart folks at the Onion. It’s a month old, but news to me. Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081212/sarah-palin-please-come-back-hulu-traffic-drops-in-november/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081121/omg-new-gnr-on-myspace-ohnevermind/ http://allthingsd.com/20081121/omg-new-gnr-on-myspace-ohnevermind/#comments Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:08:01 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=1299 Depending on your memories of the late ’80s/early ’90s, the release of “Chinese Democracy”–Guns N’ Roses’ first new album in a gazillion years–could be a very big deal. Until, that is, you actually hear the album. Then it’s not such a big deal at all.

That appears to be the conclusion that visitors to GNR’s MySpace page, where the album is being streamed in its entirety, have reached. Lots of people are showing up at the page, which encourages them to preorder the album, which goes on sale exclusively at Best Buy (BBY) on Tuesday. But few of them are sticking around to actually listen to the whole thing.

Glenn Peoples at Coolfer has actually plotted out the song-by-song streaming results. The numbers in Glenn’s chart, below, are a day or so old at this point, but they’re directionally accurate: Only about 20 percent of the visitors to the page are sticking around to hear the whole album.

What to make of that? Probably an Occam’s Razor answer: People check out the page out of curiosity, hear the first few songs (the title track plays automatically when you load the page), and decide they stink.

More charitable answer: Web music fans in 2008 just don’t listen to entire albums, period. Glenn makes a nod toward this by noting that people who have checked out the MySpace page for the new Paul McCartney album also flit away after a track or two. Perhaps News Corp.’s (NWS) social network just isn’t the place to stream more than a couple songs. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.)

But I’m going with the first explanation: These may be Guns N’ Roses songs, but they’re not good Guns N’ Roses songs.

Remember those? Here’s one, from way, way back in 1991, which as I recall was the tail end of the band’s heyday.

Would you like a professional reviewer’s take on the new album. No problem: Chuck Klosterman takes a crack at it in The Onion. And while we’re addressing all things Axl, a question for MediaMemo readers: Does anyone remember “White Trash Wins Lotto,” the excellent GNR-meets-Gilbert & Sullivan production from about a decade ago? I can still remember the songs, but can’t find them anywhere. Any help, either in comments or via email, much appreciated: peter@allthingsd.com.

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