Online Media Cultist

Very weird infrastructure problems at the OMC, can only publish one line at a time! Will be back as soon as possible…

Earlier this week, I wrote about highly produced reality television hitting the web in the form of The Next Internet Millionaire. It seems that the web is set for a full on wave of reality shows, two of which are “adventure” shows in the tradition of The Amazing Race and Survivor. Some kids at Ithaca College [...]

Advertisers are getting interested in web video shows, and the media is getting interested in advertisers getting interested in web video shows… it’s getting heated up in the online video space. People are getting jittery that the US economy is heading into or is currently in recession. If that’s true (and of course I hope that [...]

Will Classmates.com open up a new round of tech IPOs? Strange days may be upon us once again.

Social news leader Digg has released a slightly new and improved home page. The biggest change is that video submissions are now integrated with regular articles. I think this change makes sense as videos are such an important part of web content these days, and that the design change makes the appearance of the page [...]

In a piece entitled “Bookstores Begin Slow Descent Into Obsolescence,” Scott Karp eloquently describes the growing sense I’ve also felt over the past few years while browsing record and book stores. It strikes me – at first with amusement but increasingly with a sense of frustration – each time I’m in a particular kind of store [...]

The line between “television” and “TV-quality shows distributed online” continues to blur. A perfect case in point is The Next Internet Millionaire, a reality show that has Internet marketers compete against each other with the goal of winning $25,000 and getting in on “the next big thing” with creator and host Joel Comm. The show looks [...]

A Mark Evans piece that muses about the possibility of a “web 2.0 aggregator” that could bring applications like GMail, Skype, and Basecamp all to one My Yahoo or Netvibes-like personalized homepage got me thinking about an only partially related idea having to do with web start-ups. But sticking with the personalized homepage thing for [...]

Maybe gangsta rap videos and violent movies (man, I saw that slasher flick Hostel a few weeks ago and it literally made me sick to my stomach) do have an effect on kids? It’s not something I would have seriously entertained until recently, but this story of British thugs using YouTube as a way to flaunt [...]

YouTube’s announcement that it is finally going to start running video ads along with some “media partner” videos is causing all kinds of reactions across the blogospheric Milky Way. In my view, the biggest takeaway is that we’re finally seeing how Google – which purchased YouTube for about $1.6 billion – thinks it can make money [...]