Alex Reid

Since Jay Leno announced he is stepping away from NBC’s flagship show the Tonight Show in May 2009 and Conan O’Brien was declared his successor, SNL star Jimmy Fallon is up the ladder taking over the Late Night spot from O’Brien.

NBC however, is actually utilizing the web by placing daily “webisodes” online of Fallon doing his stuff, thus attracting a lead-in presence of Fallon and allowing constructive feedback before the Nielsens see Fallon on TV.

From the New York Times:

One reason for trying out the show online, (Saturday Night Live creator Lorne) Michaels said, is that the Internet will allow Mr. Fallon more freedom in terms of what he can say and do, “more opportunity for experimentation,” Michaels said.

Michaels added in the New York Times piece that the Internet experience will give Fallon more experience than O’Brien had a chance coming in tune with prime time TV.

I applaud and fully support the decision of the Canadian Teachers Federation (CTF) to lobby the government to make cyberbullying a separate criminal offense. I see cyberbullying as one of the core Internet issues because simply put, it’s abuse – no matter the medium.

It is the anonymity that differentiates cyberbullying from physical harassment.

The word “cyberbullying” implies it’s simple playground teasing, but the definition goes as deep as threats against one’s life and severe social manipulation such as the case with the woman in Missouri who played a hoax that ended with a young teenager committing suicide as a result. In fact the CTF is coming from the viewpoint that it’s not only students who fall victims to social manipulation, but teachers are regularly threatened. Despite the word “Cyberbullying”, it exists beyond the playground.

Of course, the legal recognition of this new offense must also allocate an increase to police resources to investigate and help prosecute offenders.

I love how Nine Inch Nails continues to give its fans a surreal experience before they even see the show.

I was impressed by last year’s marketing of the album release of Year Zero. It started with tour t-shirts highlighting certain letters to spell a website URL, and if you were geek enough, you’d find several related web sites within the same IP block. And if you were in select concert venues during their European tour, you may have found a flash drive with a high quality MP3 of some of their yet-to-be-released songs.

Of the flash drive method, NIN head Trent Reznor said:

The USB drive was simply a mechanism of leaking the music and data we wanted out there. The medium of the CD is outdated and irrelevant. It’s really painfully obvious what people want – DRM-free music they can do what they want with. If the greedy record industry would embrace that concept I truly think people would pay for music and consume more of it.

I’ve never liked CDs. However, CDs were printed and even that was a medium. The CDs were coated with a thermo-chrome heat sensitive face which is black when first opened and with the warmth of a CD player, the colour changes to white with black binary code printed on it which further leads you to another web site.

This year’s The Slip certainly gives the industry just that. It’s free. All of it. Free and ready for download on the NIN web site. It’s being released under a Creative Commons license, which allows listeners to remix the songs as they want, provided they do so for noncommercial purposes and credit NIN as the source.

For the Luddites however, a limited special print of 200,000 CDs (accompanied with DVDs) will be available on July 22, 2008.

Two Canadians who refused to complete the 2006 Canadian census in protest against a software contract awarded to an arms manufacturer (Lockheed Martin) say they are willing to go to jail over the issue.

It’s interesting to note how Census branch director-general Peter Morrison is happy to announce the census was a “resounding success” when it’s the law.

U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton for the Southern District of New York ruled on Thursday that Google, parent company of YouTube, must turn over 12 Terabytes of user data logs. It’s part of the discovery process that Viacom is doing in its $1 Billion lawsuit to prove that YouTube is hosting pirated videos from its collection.

Viacom is also getting all the videos YouTube ever removed for whatever reason. While this might help Viacom show that pirated videos were at one time hosted, it may show that YouTube was making efforts to combat it if there are any timestamps included with the inclusion and subsequent deletion of said pirated videos.

However, Viacom wanted more which it didn’t get. Viacom wanted YouTube’s proprietary search function source code as well as YouTube’s new “Video ID” program. In both cases, the argument from Viacom was that YouTube skewed their search results to show pirated videos and at the very least, perhaps Viacom can offer suggestions on how to help filter out said pirated videos. The judge denied Viacom on these two fronts, protecting Google’s Intellectual Property.

Finally, Viacom wanted a copy of every video ever put up in a private account. The judge, again, ruled against that citing the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.