Rojo

Top stories for the week of June 30 - July 3

TV has been a way to sell annoying advertising since the dawn of the broadcast networks, so Google's plan to distribute sponsored cartoons via its far-reaching AdSense network is no shocker. A New York Times story reported that GOOG struck a deal with Seth MacFarlane, creator of Fox's Family Guy, to create "Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy." Apparently 50 two-minute webisodes will be created to run in the AdSpace rail on sites targeted at adults who still like cartoons, starting in September, with advertisers paying more than they do for text-only teasers. Metarand says the move leverages Google's existing AdSense infrastructure beautifully. VentureBeat calls it thinking outside the [TV] box. But WatchMojo points out that Google supposedly was going to try the exact same thing with SpongeBob Squarepants two years ago. Digital Destiny complains there are privacy issues in targeting TV at people like this (umm, DD, have you seen the Google ads on GMail that play off personal messages?). Paid Content says the Times story goes "a bit overboard" in calling it “a bold step into the distribution business."  The Times going overboard about Internet business? Now that's a shocker.

The Week in Blog Censorship:  Some bloggers are up in arms that pioneering proto-blog Boing Boing purged itself of any posts by former contributor Violet Blue, who writes about sex or something. Tomorrow Museum captured the spirit of the minor public outrage by saying "This is sexism. It’s also bad journalism. And it goes against the free interactive spirit of blogging." Gawker says it's just uncool. Boing Boing explains: Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility... we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day." You got a problem with that?

It appears Barack Obama supporters have tricked Google's Blogger service into suspending several anti-Obama sites as "spam" sites. Most were pro-Hillary Clinton blogs, several listed on justsaynodeal.com, an anti-Obama site.  "It looks like Google has officially joined the Barack Obama campaign," says the conservative blog NewsBusters. Bloggasm contacted affected bloggers and "every single one was convinced that it was Obama supporters who had flagged the blogs in some kind of concerted effort to silence them. But when I asked for specific evidence of this, most simply pointed out that only anti-Obama blogs were targeted — a fact that is certainly suspicious but not especially conclusive." BlueLyon, one of the suspended bloggers, posted Google/Blogger's apology letter in a WordPress blog. It read: " …we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the “Just Say No Deal” network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam…” Black & Right asks: "What's next, YouTube?"

Friends (and Twits) with Money: Well, it appears that a movie version of Friends is going to happen. Dlisted says Jennifer Aniston had been the holdout because she's too successful and then scoffs on her movie Derailed.

The National Venture Capital Association says the drought for venture-backed startups is in “crisis.” There were no VC-backed IPOs in the 2nd quarter, and TechCrunch notes that the last time there were no VC-backed IPOs in a quarter was 1978. TechDirt and Infections Greed say Sarbanes Oxley regulations, which make paperwork a hassle, are making companies reluctant to go public. Uhh, maybe potential stock buyers have just looked at the market lately.

A post at Innonate (and later on Silicon Alley Insider) insists Twitter could make itself worth $1.5 billion by turning into a PayPal-like online payment system, specifically fro mobile use. Twitter is everywhere, you see, and people could just type "P somebody $5" and that would do it. "Forget, for a moment, that Twitter has had serious scaling problems" Innonate says. OK. Is the moment over yet? Joe Duck seems to recall that "Nobody trusts Twitter to stay up, let alone handle their money." 

Happy 4th!

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