But if you’re in a hurry, you might consider this no-nonsense guide from the U.S. Army, which has a couple dozen boards of its own (via the Atlantic).

As I’ve noted before, the first instinct when you see military institutions writing about Pinterest, or Twitter, or offering flowcharts that explain how to comment on blogs might be a giggle. But once you actually look at the stuff they’re writing, it seems much more reasonable.

Unrelated: I have had a weird twinge of nostalgia for the ’80s vintage “Be All That You Can Be” campaign. Maybe some kind of madeleine thing triggered by those Will Ferrell Old Milwaukee ads.

On another level, however, I understand the motivation. When it comes to delivering audio-visual content to a wide audience, the Internet has lowered the barriers to entry so far that anyone with even the dinkiest camera can become a major broadcaster. The television industry may face a crisis of overhead when a large number of scrappy upstarts deliver comparable value with almost no fixed costs. Also, there are some aspects of the television business that the Internet simply does better, specifically when it comes to reaching an audience.

So there is the scent of blood in the water, and out of the resulting frenzy a few lessons have appeared. Here are four of them.

There doesn’t have to be a difference between a “channel” and a “show.”

You probably have a clear understanding about what a television channel is. Comedy Central is a channel. Your local CBS affiliate is a channel. A channel is the thing you tune in to at a specific time to watch a particular show. A channel runs a lot of shows on it. Time Warner Cable offers 900 channels. This seems like too many. Bruce Springsteen wrote “57 channels and nothing on.” That sounds so quaint now.

But if you have a conversation about YouTube channels with this concept of a “channel” in your head you may experience some cognitive dissonance. There are “tens of millions” of channels on YouTube. One company, Machinima, operates 3,380 of them. That’s literally 100 times as many channels as are owned by NBC Universal, and it’s not enough. YouTube just launched 100 more channels with premium content. YouTube must be using the word “channel” differently. Except they’re not.

Both a YouTube channel and a television channel deliver a stream of content from a transmitting device to a receiving one. Viewers tune in to a television channel by selecting its number; they reach a YouTube channel via its URL. The main difference is that the cost of creating a television channel from scratch is incredibly high, while on YouTube it’s pretty close to zero. Unlike television, a YouTube channel can turn a profit with very little programming. The comedian Ray William Johnson, for example, has one of the most lucrative channels on YouTube. It plays one show. That show adds 12 minutes of new programming per week.

If a channel online costs next to nothing, and you can build one around a single show, then why do television shows need television channels at all? Every once in a while there’s a lot of fuss about getting cable channels à la carte. But who cares about that when you can have à la carte programming?

I like to think about this in the context of “The Daily Show.” On cable, you’re limited to 30 minutes of “The Daily Show” per day, and you have to tune in at 11 pm or set your DVR to watch it. There could easily just be a “Daily Show” channel, with all the extra programming that Comedy Central now reserves for the Web site, plus spinoffs for the various “Daily Show” correspondents. More content means more places to sell advertising, which means more profit. One challenge, of course, would be getting the audience to modify its behavior, but new technology seems to be inspiring this already.

Programming can now be delivered to your television set through a remote control.

Let’s define “remote control” as a handheld piece of electronics that tells your television set what to do while you’re sitting on the couch. Smartphones and tablets fit into this category, and before you argue that this definition is too broad, I submit that an iPhone is no less a remote control than it is a camera. It commands your television set far more profoundly than your traditional remote control. At least, if you have an Apple TV. Which you should.

The Apple TV comes with a technology called AirPlay, which allows you to throw videos wirelessly from your phone or tablet to your television set. Got a movie sitting in iTunes on your computer? You can watch it on TV via AirPlay. Find a video you want to watch embedded on a Web site you read? If AirPlay is available, a little button will pop up and you can stream the video to your TV. Need some good recommendations? Try one of the many “discovery” apps out there, like Shelby.tv or ShowYou or VHX. They skim your Twitter and Facebook feeds looking for videos your friends have posted. And you can throw those to your TV.

There are apps for ESPN and Discovery Channel and PBS and other traditional channels that allow you watch their shows, on demand, on your TV, via AirPlay. There are also a growing number of apps for channels that have never been included in a traditional cable provider’s lineup. The Wall Street Journal’s news channel, WSJ Live, is one of them. Time Warner Cable doesn’t carry it, but my iPad does.

I should note that WSJ Live is also available in the main Apple TV library, so you don’t actually need to use AirPlay to watch it. But the fact that you can illustrates my point. The remote control has become a very personal device, one that you carry around with you all day long, one that you use to store and index your favorite media. A viewer is just as likely to watch a channel she’s added to her home screen as anything available in the cable menu. The programming of her choice routes through her remote control.

Marketing and distribution are often the same thing.

Last month, IFC released the entire first episode of the second season of “Portlandia” online a week before its airdate. They used an embeddable video player, so that any online publication could feature the episode on its Web site. Individual sketches from the show were also made available in the same way. IFC didn’t just tease the show or talk it up, they let people actually see it for themselves. The result was an 81 percent increase in viewership among 18-49 year olds when the show returned to the network.

There are few examples of this sort of thing happening before the Internet. A movie poster hanging in a theater where that movie is playing, perhaps, or a DVD insert in a magazine ad. But this is something the Internet does really well. A single sentence can promote a film and deliver it to your computer at the same time. Allow me to demonstrate: “This video is amazing.”

That, of course, is the lifeblood of online publishing. Here’s something that resonated with me, I’m recommending it to you, my audience. They call it “curating” now. Somehow that word got separated from “blogging” recently, and I’m not entirely sure how or why. I think Tumblr and Pinterest had something to do with it. But curating, which is a thing bloggers do, is a distinct talent. It’s highly respected in other manifestations, such as museum curators or fashion buyers or television programmers. It was curators who spread that “Portlandia” preview around. And when you factor in the marketing power they brought to that show, and you consider how much a network pays to advertise a program in general, there’s only one conclusion to draw. Online curators are the most undervalued talent in the television industry.

A few of those new YouTube channels seem to recognize the power of the curatorial voice. Vice, Pitchfork, SB Nation and the Bleacher Report all received funding to create new YouTube programming. Presumably their editors will create shows that they’d want to watch themselves, and with that level of personal investment, they’d vouch for those shows to their readers.

Television is no longer that different from publishing.

Just last week, the Gawker Media site Kotaku announced a programming schedule similar to that of a television network. This strategy was conceived well over a year ago, and is designed to sell audience size to advertisers, the way television does, rather than pageviews, which have been dropping in value for years.

This is only the latest example of conceptual overlap. Video embedding took off after the launch of YouTube, turning online publications into versions of The Daily Prophet, that newspaper from Harry Potter with the magical moving pictures on the front page. Some Internet video hosting and streaming services are built on content management systems designed for online publishing. When you upload a video to Blip, the last thing you click to make it go live is “publish.” Awl Music, the music video channel launched by The Awl in January, is run entirely on Tumblr. You can watch it on a television set connected to Google TV.

Both traditional and online publishers are producing original video series with increasing frequency. Reuters, Slate and The Wall Street Journal all have news and documentary programming on the new YouTube channel lineup. The New York Times and New York Magazine have been doing their own video programming for years. It’s only a matter of time before some of these compete with the cable news channels.

Eric Spiegelman produces the Web series “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” which is about to launch its fifth season. He helped bring the hit Japanese television show “Retro Game Master” to Kotaku.com, and he helped launch AwlMusic.tv in partnership with TheAwl.com.

The hire, while not final, would fill a position vacated six months ago when the previous CEO, Les Hinton, stepped down amid the phone-hacking scandal at News Corp.’s UK newspaper division. When he resigned, Mr. Hinton, who ran the division before he joined Dow Jones, said that he was “ignorant of what apparently happened” at one of the company’s tabloid newspapers earlier, but characterized his lack of knowledge as “irrelevant” and said it was “proper” for him to step down.

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So congrats to Reuters’ Yinka Adegoke and Sinead Carew, along with The Wall Street Journal’s Sam Schechner, Anton Troianovski and Spencer Ante on their new gigs! If you guys ever want to get together and trade tips (Google Analytics or Chartbeat? etc.) I’m totally down for a Meetup. It would be good to get out of my pajamas …

Meanwhile, this blogger can also report that Verizon has been talking to programmers about a Netflix-style video service. There don’t appear to be any signed deals, and there may not be anything formal on the table yet, so don’t expect to see anything until next spring at the earliest.

But the idea of offering packages of video programming, delivered over the Web, is a fairly straightforward one. Which is why it has also appealed to satellite TV provider Dish Networks, which has also had grown-up conversations about the idea. And to Microsoft, and Google, and Apple, whose discussions about it over the years haven’t progressed very far.

And, of course, to Hulu and Amazon, who are already doing it.

So we’re certain to see more “over the top” video from big brand names down the line. “Shame on those [Netflix] competitors for not being in the market years ago,” says a TV executive — who would be happy to sell any of them some programming when/if they do get into the market.

So if that’s the case, what does that mean for companies like Verizon, which sell traditional pay TV services right now?

Here McAdam, speaking at the UBS media/telco conference this morning, doesn’t just disagree with professional typers. He’s also butting rhetorical heads with Ivan Seidenberg, whose last job was … CEO of Verizon.

A year ago, Seidenberg told investors that “over the top” video — stuff that comes from the Web instead of a cable subscription — was going to be a big problem for pay TV services: “Young people are pretty smart. They’re not going to pay for something they don’t need to … Over the top is going to be a pretty big issue for cable.”

Nah, says the new guy, who takes the conventional line that over the top is a complement to his business, not a threat. Or at least not anytime soon. “We have a tendency to see trends like this in the industry and extrapolate it to become the majority. I think it will be many years before it is,” he said.

Still! McAdam did allow that Verizon was interested in offering stuff that sounds a whole lot like the “over the top” options that Reuters and the Journal reported about yesterday (and I am reporting this morning! From my basement!).

He acknowledged, as we reported earlier this year, that the company had kicked the tires on Hulu this summer. “We kind of  looked at that,” he said. “And we’ll continue to look at alternatives.”

The techniques described in the trove of 200-plus marketing documents include hacking tools that enable governments to break into people’s computers and cellphones, and “massive intercept” gear that can gather all Internet communications in a country.

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But before you envision the rollout of a nationwide Google pay TV service, consider: Building out and maintaining a cable TV (and broadband) service is enormously time-consuming, expensive and messy.

Think, for example, of all those angry/confused service inquiries your local cable guy has to deal with. And recall that last year, when Google tried to sell its own line of smartphones, it was hoping to get by without setting up a customer service operation that gave buyers the ability to talk to a real live human.

Verizon spent some $23 billion on its FiOS rollout, and by the time it stalled out last year, it still wasn’t clear if it was a good idea for the telco to build out a cable/broadband service. So why does Larry Page think it makes sense for him?

He doesn’t, according to Sanford Bernstein analysts Craig Moffett and Carlos Kirjner in a note this morning. Instead, they argue, Page and Google have to be thinking about Kansas City as an R&D experiment meant to accomplish three things:

First, it helps Google (slightly) on the public policy front as it promotes the agenda of faster broadband, and it potentially adds to their status in promoting net neutrality. Faster broadband means more Internet usage, more searches, and more ads. Of course, the real regulatory game is a few orders of magnitude more sophisticated, but every little arrow in the quiver helps.

Second, it is a laboratory for Google to learn about technology and consumer behavior, ranging from the impact of higher speed access on Internet usage to the potential and economics of different ad formats and models, on different platforms, particularly when it comes to advertising associated with video and TV.

Third, it is an opportunity for Google to learn about the economics of deploying and running infrastructure. And learn they will…

Analysts like to pull their punches, but Moffett and Kirjner are crystal clear here: There’s no way they think Google becomes the “world’s biggest cable company” or anything like that.

Just to beat this into the ground, here’s another excerpt from their report (well worth reading the whole thing) where they spell out just how ugly the economics of this kind of venture would be:

From a [return on invested capital]-based perspective, the difference between Google’s current business model and that of a facilities-based wireline service provider like Verizon could not be starker. In 2011, we expect Google to post an ROIC of 56%, or 38% when including goodwill. In 2010, Verizon’s wireline segment (which includes FiOS) sported an ROIC excluding goodwill and “one-time items” of… wait for it… just 1.6%. Including goodwill and similar intangible, and smoothed one-timers, it was -1.0%.

Still. It’s quite obvious that something has changed in Google’s thinking over the years.

The company that strove to stay away from anything approaching the content business has now leapt in with both feet. See, for example: Google Music, Google Books, YouTube, and YouTube’s new “channels” project. And recall that Google just made a plus-sized bid for Hulu.

So the notion that Google is now willing to consider even testing out life as a cable TV service is still telling. As is the notion, buried lower in the Journal piece, that Google has floated the idea of turning YouTube into an “over the top” cable service, though that doesn’t seem like it’s on the table right now.

Android boss Andy Rubin even spelled it out at the AsiaD conference in Hong Kong last month: “Google is in the very, very early phases of adding consumer products to our portfolio.” So even if that doesn’t mean it’s ready to become a cable guy, it’s still going to evolve into something much broader than a search company.

The winners include such big names as International Business Machines Corp., Novartis AG, Intel Corp., Abbott Laboratories, Xerox Corp. and runners-up Hewlett-Packard Co. and Yahoo Inc.

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Sorting through more than four million documents, prosecutors found internal emails and documents that, they say, show Mr. Page was aware of the allegedly illicit ad sales. Under this week’s $500 million settlement, those emails won’t be released, avoiding the possibility of disclosure at trial.

“Larry Page knew what was going on,” Peter Neronha, the Rhode Island U.S. Attorney who led the probe, said in an interview. “We know it from the investigation. We simply know it from the documents we reviewed, witnesses that we interviewed, that Larry Page knew what was going on.”

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And when word broke yesterday that RIM was working with the music labels to launch yet another music service, it was time to reach — slowly, because at this point who really cares? — for the bat again.

But it’s possible that RIM may not have a half-bad idea here: A scaled-back feature that gives some of its remaining customers something they’d like, and not much more.

As described by The Wall Street Journal’s Ethan Smith, the new service will give users access to a mere 50 songs at a time, and will let them share the songs with their friends via BlackBerry Messenger.

Is that it? For RIM’s sake, I hope so. Because at a certain price, it sort of makes sense: Yes, everyone says they want access to an unlimited world of music. But lots of people listen to the same small group of songs over and over.

And if RIM is smart — I know — they won’t position it as a competitor to Apple’s dominant iTunes, or the subscription services like Spotify that have yet to take off. They’ll sell it as a cool way to show off your favorite few songs of the moment, and tell your friends about it.

Again, if this works, it will depend on pricing — a couple bucks a month would make sense — and execution. And RIM hasn’t given us much reason to think it will get either element right. But the modest scope of RIM’s ambitions — pulling this off sure isn’t as hard as making a credible iPad competitor — gives them a shot here.

And if BBM Music does work, it wouldn’t be a reason to buy a new BlackBerry, but it might make you happier you own one. And that would be a modest win for a company searching for any kind of victory, anywhere.

And now, just because I can, a Rick Rubin Queen remix from back in the days when mobile phones were shoe-sized:

Short version: A few prominent players have accepted Apple’s terms and will be giving Steve Jobs a big chunk of their subscription revenue.

Many more are sticking around the App Store, but removing any kind of e-commerce link from their apps. This makes their apps less useful, but at least it doesn’t cost them any money.

And a third group is trying an end run by building their own Web apps that will work on Apple devices without requiring the company’s approval.

Some examples from each category:

Play along, eat the tax: Some big print publishers, including the New York Times, Condé Nast and Hearst, are working with the new rules.

That means that they’ll hand over 30 percent of the subscription revenue they generate via iOS apps every month, and that they won’t have access to as much consumer data as they’d get if they sold the subscriptions on their own. But they’ll put up with it in order to reach the 225 million iTunes accounts Apple controls.

(Variation on the theme — play along, pass the tax along to consumers: Music subscription service Rdio is accepting Apple’s tax as well. But to protect its margins it is raising the price for subscriptions sold through iOS devices, from $10 to $15. After Apple gets its 30 percent cut, Rdio will end up with the same $10 it would have had before the new rules.)

Stay in iTunes, but grudgingly: This is the “better than nothing” approach. Services like Netflix, Hulu, Rhapsody, Spotify, and publishers like Time Inc. and The Wall Street Journal (which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp) are keeping their apps in iTunes. But rather than hand over cash and lose access to customer data, they won’t sell any subscriptions through their iTunes apps.

And at Apple’s insistence, they are stripping out any links that send customers to the companies’ home Web sites. This even applies to services that aren’t selling subscriptions at all, but are offering access to content as part of other subscription services. See, for example, ESPN’s WatchESPN app, which tells users that they have to visit an ESPN Web site to sign up for the service, which is free for certain cable company customers. But the app doesn’t offer a live link to the site, just an address.

End run: The Financial Times was the first big media company to build a Web site that mimics an app but works on Apple’s Safari browser, as a way of working around Apple’s restrictions while reaching Apple’s customers. Now Amazon has followed suit, as has Wal-Mart’s Vudu video service.

Note that both the FT and Amazon continue to keep their old apps in iTunes; they’ve just neutered them. You can still read Kindle titles you bought on Amazon’s iOS app, for instance — you just can’t press a button that will take you directly to Amazon’s Web site to buy a new one.

So what does all of that tell us about the App Store ecosystem and how developers will fare in and out of it?

Not much. It’s pretty early. We might have a better idea in a few months when some publicly traded companies like the Times may end up talking about their Apple relationship during earnings calls. (Admittedly, that’s a stretch of a hope: Apple has a way of getting most of its partners to STFU.)

That said, here’s a not-very-out-on-a-limb prediction: Companies who already have lots of customers and are already in frequent communication with them, like Amazon, should do fine outside of the store.

And companies that have lots of potential customers but little traction, like Vudu, will likely struggle. Particularly since that company sells the same thing — video-on-demand rentals and sales — that Apple already sells through iTunes.

Here’s the old version of the Hulu Plus subscription app for the iPad:

And here’s the new version, built to comply with Apple edicts that kick in at the end of the month:

Easy, right? All Hulu had to do was strip out the link that sent potential subscribers to its Web site, because Apple’s new rule will ban “apps that link to external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions to be used in the app.”

That means that the app can no longer function as an effective advertising tool for the video service, which is a bummer for Hulu (which is owned by Comcast’s NBC, Disney’s ABC and News Corp.’s Fox; News Corp. also owns this Web site). It’d be quite useful to offer a smattering of free content on the app, then encourage users who want more stuff to click through to Hulu.com to pony up $8 a month.

But that’s much better than the previous choice Apple offered app developers that wanted to sell access to content: Use Apple’s in-house purchase system — and give Apple 30 percent of all sales that flow from that — or don’t do it at all.

Lots of developers have no problem using Apple’s system, which gives them access to a customer base of 225 million people. But others won’t want to give up that much revenue.

So now we’ll see how other content companies that currently use external links in their apps decide to play it over the next couple weeks.

My hunch is that digital video and music companies like Netflix and Rhapsody will follow Hulu’s lead and drop their “buy” buttons. The New York Times has already said it would work with Apple’s rules, but that was back when it announced its paywall/subscription plan in March, when it had a different set of options. I asked Times officials about their plans 10 days ago, and they declined to comment.

Also not commenting: The Wall Street Journal — which again, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp. The Journal hasn’t said a peep about its Apple subscription plans, which seems a bit odd, given that News Corp. and Apple rolled out the first iteration of Apple’s subscription offering, via The Daily, back in February.

Rival business daily the Financial Times, meanwhile, has quite clearly signaled what it plans to do: It has built an HTML5 Web app so it can control every part of the subscription process itself.

Then there’s Amazon, which seems to be one of the clear targets of Apple’s revised rules – note that they specifically rule out the use of a “buy” button that goes to a Web site to purchase a digital book. Hard to believe that Amazon will get rid of its Kindle iOS apps altogether, since they’re a key feature of the Kindle ecosystem. But dropping the app’s “buy” button will be a real drag for the bookseller, too.

Now, apps can offer access to content purchased outside of Apple’s walls, as long as the app doesn’t have a “buy” button that connects consumers directly to an external store. That is: Apple won’t make it easy for users to buy in-app content without going through Apple’s store, but it won’t outlaw it, either.

The changes to Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines, published today and first noted by MacRumor’s Jordan Golson, don’t address Apple’s control of credit card information.

Which means that some print publishers, including the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, may still not be willing to adopt Apple’s subscription rules, which kick in at the end of the month. (The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp., as is this Web site). But if those publishers are willing to forgo selling subscriptions through Apple, which just announced it has billing relationships with 225 million customers, it shouldn’t be a problem.

And for many other content companies, including Netflix and music services like Rhapsody, the bigger issue has always been the 30 percent revenue cut that Apple was going to extract every month for all in-app subscriptions.

Many of them appeared ready to accept Apple’s rules anyway, and simply try to persuade most customers to sign up outside of Apple’s walls, so they could keep 100 percent of their revenue. Now, as long as they’re willing to give up access to Apple’s marketing might, they don’t have to worry about it.

And as PaidContent notes, Apple also appears to be offering developers another option — raise prices on content they sell through iTunes so that Apple’s 30 percent cut doesn’t eat into their revenue.

Apple previously required developers who sold content within its apps to do so “at the same price or less than it is offered outside the app” — that is, the Apple price couldn’t be higher than anywhere else. Now that language has disappeared from Apple’s rules.

But Apple’s rules still appear to pose a problem for book sellers like Amazon. You can’t purchase books directly from Amazon’s Kindle app, but the software does have a “Kindle Store” button that takes buyers to Amazon’s Web store. But Apple’s new rules look designed to ban exactly that sort of thing.

Here is the language governing subscriptions that Apple introduced back in February:

11.13 Apps can read or play approved content (magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, video) that is sold outside of the app, for which Apple will not receive any portion of the revenues, provided that the same content is also offered in the app using IAP at the same price or less than it is offered outside the app. This applies to both purchased content and subscriptions.

And here are the new rules:

11.13 Apps that link to external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions to be used in the app, such as a “buy” button that goes to a web site to purchase a digital book, will be rejected.
11.14 Apps can read or play approved content (specifically magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video) that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the app, as long as there is no button or external link in the app to purchase the approved content. Apple will not receive any portion of the revenues for approved content that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the app.

It will be interesting to see now if some companies that had said they’d start selling subscriptions via iTunes change course. Conde Nast and Hearst have recently begun selling monthly and yearly subscriptions to some of their magazines via iTunes.

And the New York Times has made a point of saying it would “comply” with Apple’s rules once they kicked in, but so far the publisher has only been selling digital subscriptions from its Web site.

It will also be interesting to see what happens to app companies that don’t adopt Apple’s rules but continue to offer their stuff through iTunes anyway: Will Apple forcibly remove them from the store, and/or disable their apps? Or will the company take less drastic measures, like refusing to approve new updates to their apps? We may see within a few weeks.

They also know that Giggs has gotten the English courts to decree that the media can’t discuss any of this, including his name or the fact that he’s gotten the courts to do this. Or to identify him as the celebrity demanding that Twitter identify people who are using his name on the service.

You can, of course, read all about Giggs on Twitter, Facebook, and Web sites published around the world, though U.K.-based publications have kept Giggs’s name off their own Web sites for the last few days.

So have some publications outside the U.K., including the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp. Parmy Olson, London bureau chief for New York-based Forbes.com, identified Giggs yesterday.

But now that wall seems to have crumbled, courtesy of a British lawmaker who spoke Giggs’s name aloud on the floor of Parliament today: Now everyone from the Financial Times (registration required) to the BBC to the Daily Mail has gone ahead and included the Manchester United star’s name in their headlines.

For the record, the injunction against printing or saying Giggs’s name aloud still stands. Here’s a clip, courtesy of Google’s YouTube, of MP John Hemming doing just that (his argument, disputed by some of his colleagues, is that he’s privileged to speak in Parliament.)

[Image credit: Wikipedia]

The location data appears to be collected using cellphone towers and Wi-Fi access points near a user’s phone and doesn’t appear to be transmitted back to Apple. Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Still, the fact that the iPhone is collecting and storing location data—even when location services are turned off–is likely to renew questions about how well users are informed about the data being gathered by their cellphones. The fact that the iPhone stores months’ worth of location data was disclosed by two researchers last week.

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But it’s also a pretty easy problem to solve. Ask John “I’m a PC” Hodgman, who stopped by “The Daily Show” to explain last night.

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.

And Haile thinks this is a good thing! It’s part of his pitch for Chartbeat, a Web analytics start-up: He says that very soon “content producers” like yours truly are going to be faced with the choice of becoming robots–that is, replaced with algorithms and machines–or sticking around and injecting ourselves with big helpings of technology and data.

Chartbeat is supposed to help people like me with the cyborg route, by providing real-time information about the way the stuff I make performs on the Web: How many people are looking at a given story, where they’re coming from, how long they’re staying, etc.

Until now, most of Chartbeat’s 3,000 customers have handed that information over to managers and editors. But now Haile is rolling out Newsbeat, a tweaked version of the service that’s supposed to be delivered directly to rank-and-file stuff-makers like me. He’s been working with Web publishers like Gawker Media, Fast Company and Time Warner’s Time Inc. to get the rollout ready.

I’m not entirely opposed to my coming transformation, by the way: Unlike some of my peers–and these tend to be older peers–I like the idea of knowing more about the way people consume the stuff I make.

And it’s inevitable, anyway. On the Web, it’s impossible not to be exposed to performance data. The only question is what kind of data, and how much.

But still. I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do with all of this data. The version of Chartbeat that All Things D already uses gives me plenty of personalized information about my stories, and it’s narcotizing to sit around and watch my numbers flick up and down all day.

And if I were running a very big Web site, like, say, the Wall Street Journal, which also uses Chartbeat (and, like this site, is owned by News Corp.), I could put some of that data to work. I could figure out which stories I might want to highlight on the homepage, and try to analyze why others aren’t performing as well as they could, etc.

But from my worm’s-eye view, I don’t know what I’m really supposed to make of my Chartbeat report. Chartbeat tells me that my scooplet this morning on Rock Band is doing well, which is gratifying. But I could also get that information, with a longer delay, via services like Adobe’s Omniture or Google Analytics.

And in any case, then what? That information can’t help me make more scoops, or more interesting stories. And in the end, I’m pretty sure that’s the only way I can I do a better job.

Haile disagrees, of course. So let’s let him make his own case in this interview, which we conducted in the semi-busy hallway outside his office yesterday.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110104/chartbeat-says-the-rise-of-the-machines-wont-be-so-bad-if-youre-a-cyborg/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101224/does-the-fcc-want-to-kill-hulu/ http://allthingsd.com/20101224/does-the-fcc-want-to-kill-hulu/#comments Fri, 24 Dec 2010 11:31:18 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27434 One of Washington’s proposed conditions on the Comcast-NBC U deal will force the merged company to offer NBC’s shows to any Web competitor.

So what does that mean for Hulu, which has already locked up exclusive rights to NBC’s Web video?

A couple of possible answers: Perhaps Federal Communications Commission head Julius Genachowski is trying to put a fork in Hulu. Or maybe the conditions he wants to place on the merger are so toothless that they don’t really count as conditions at all.

Background: Each of Hulu’s three partners/owners–GE’s NBC, News Corp.’s Fox and Disney’s ABC–has agreed to mutual exclusivity pacts. If you want to watch one of their shows for free online, you can see them on the networks’ own sites, or via Hulu–either on the main site itself, or via other sites that are taking Hulu’s feed. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

But one of the primary conditions Genachowski wants to place on FCC approval for the Comcast-NBC deal is that Web competitors will get access to NBC’s shows, according to the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Here’s the WSJ:

Comcast would be required to offer NBC Universal programming to any online video provider that has reached a similar deal for content with some of NBC’s competitors, such as Walt Disney Co. or Fox Television, a division of News Corp.

That’s a bit vague, so we won’t really know what Genachowski intends until he goes public with his proposed rules. But there are basically two ways to interpret what the Journal is reporting here. Either:

• The FCC wants to make sure that NBC doesn’t prevent Hulu from syndicating its content out to third-party sites, as it’s already doing with Yahoo, AOL and…Comcast. If that’s all Genachowski wants, that’s no big deal, and not really  a restriction at all. Because Hulu’s business plan is predicated on wide distribution. Or….
• The FCC is telling NBC that it has to offer its shows directly to other Web sites. That’s potentially devastating news for Hulu. If, say, Yahoo can license “The Office” directly from NBC, it may not want to bother cutting a deal with the joint venture site. And to be clear: The overwhelming majority of Hulu’s traffic comes from people watching shows from its big three partners.

So which is it? The FCC held a farcical press conference yesterday where it wouldn’t answer any specific questions about the deal. But it would be nice if it could clear this one up soon.

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