Pity the poor regulator who, someday soon, will be faced with evaluating some proposed combination of all or parts of Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and/or News Corp. (is there anyone else left?). What yardstick would you even apply? Someday, they're all going to be in the same combination of the content creation/distribution business, online advertising, applications development and platforms and social networking anyway. It's really only a question of how they get there and when, not whether or even should they. Trying to come to grips with that through the keyhole of any one deal or company is probably not a formula for a coherent regulatory framework for the future of the digital media industry.

Some guy named Bob probably hates me. I don't know him and he doesn't know me ... but he's the unfortunate registrant of Bob.com and has used his first name for his email address. Yup, you guessed it - that makes his email address bob@bob.com. That also happens to be the email address that I have used for the past ten years to fill out forms that require an email address that I don't want to give. For more than a decade, Bob has been getting my junk email and to tell you a truth, I feel bad about it.

Last week, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were able to listen to a play back of what is believed to be the earliest mechanical sound recording. Made in 1860 by the French typesetter Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, the "phonautogram" features the voice of a woman, believed to be Scott's daughter, singing a line from the French folk song, "Au Clair de la Lune." It was made with a device invented by Scott that used a stylus to etch patterns onto paper coated with smoke from an oil lamp.

There is an art to sucking up. Done too blatantly it will backfire. Done too weakly, you won't get what you want. The perfect suck up contains the following elements:

• Credibility. No matter how good your suck up, if you don't meet the requirements for placement, a job, an interview, whatever, it won't matter, so you need to show why you deserve what you're asking for.

From Future of Television Forum West - What will be the evolutionary path of the digital living room? Will devices drive functionality, or will it happen the other way around, where functionality dictates the design of devices? Speakers at the Future of Television conference disagreed.

From Future of Television Forum West – Joel Hyatt, co-founder of Current TV (with former Vice President Al Gore), said that their viewers by far prefer user generated so called "VCAM" ads over professional ads in his morning keynote.
“We have seen that 9 out of 10 of our viewers prefer user-generated ads over the Madison Avenue generated ads,” said Hyatt.

I love Sk*rt. You can think of it as "Digg for chicks" (in the words of QueenofSpain), and it features the user-selected stories in topic such as Arts & Entertainment, Design & Crafts, Family & Parenting, and Food & Home.

As someone passionate about travel and the travel industry, I pay a lot of attention to sites that are out there. Travel has long been an active industry online, whether you talk about people's behaviour with increasingly booking travel online, or the slate of review and opinion sites that let people share their opinions about travel destinations. From Yelp to Driftr to Dopplr there are new travel sites that let you do just about anything you want and they are all great ... yet none have quite found the right formula to harness the one thing that travel enthusiasts like me all have in common: a passion for talking about travel and sharing my experiences.

First, let me offer a great big thank you to Youtube from me and everyone on the internet, including many small businesses. Im just guessing here, but based on reports coming from Compete and others, I don't think its a stretch to say that Youtube subsidizes the cost of more than half the user generated internet bandwidth consumed in the United States.

Los Angeles, CA — Digital Media Wire, Inc., a leading publisher and events company in the digital media industry, and media distribution developer PassAlong Networks™ have published the second edition of the “Project Millennials” sourcebook, a guidebook that provides practical information, case studies and strategic advice for consumer marketers focused on the Millennial generation.

Los Angeles, CA - Digital Media Wire is pleased to announce agenda and speakers for the upcoming Future of Television (www.televisionconference.com/west) to be held at the Hollywood Roosevelt in Los Angeles, CA on Monday, March 24 and Tuesday, March 25, 2008.

The 2008 Millennials Canada Conference, co-produced by Digital Media Wire and Canadian Music Week, is taking place today as an integral part of the Canadian Music Week. The youth focused one-day event brings together leading international entertainment, media and technology executives and consumer marketers to focus on how to connect with the much sought after Millennial Generation (those born between 1982 and 2000), which will outnumber both Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers by 2010 to become the most significant consumer sector for the media and entertainment industries. Here are some early take-aways from the conference:

Day -1095: Waiting for a Macintosh that comes close to a Vaio in size, weight, and, most importantly, battery life. Day -60: Rumors start circulating about a super-cool, super-thin MacBook. Day -30: Go into Apple store and tell them to put one of these rumored super-cool, super-thin MacBooks aside for me if the rumors are true. Day 0: Steve announces MacBook Air at Macworld Expo in San Francisco.