Digital Media

The Winklevoss twins will probably be scary, too. This is a 'Jurassic Park' promo shot of actor Joseph Mazzello, who was recently cast as Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. NB: He's nearly two decades older now.

(Credit: Amblin Entertainment/filmdope.com)

This isn't particularly Earth-shattering news, but it's sort of hilarious.

Dustin Moskovitz, one of Facebook's co-founders and its head of engineering until he left last year, will be played by the little boy from "Jurassic Park" in the tell-all flick "The Social Network."

According to details in the Internet Movie Database, the role of Moskovitz has been filled by Joseph Mazzello, the actor best known for playing Timmy, the skinny 8-year-old who fell out of trees, nearly got electrocuted, and narrowly escaped getting eaten by all kinds of meany dinosaurs in the 1993 blockbuster. In other words, he already has experience as a member of the supporting cast of over-the-top movies about high-tech innovations.

Mazzello is now 26, which should make you feel very old.

Moskovitz was instrumental in Facebook's origins, but in "The Social Network" (helmed by "Fight Club" director David Fincher with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin) he has a relatively minor role. The film is not supported or authorized by Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg, its CEO and co-founder. And the book that the movie is based on--Ben Mezrich's "The Accidental Billionaires"--relies on sourcing, much of it anonymous, from other figures early in Facebook's history. We can confirm that Moskovitz, who has been loyal to the company even after leaving, was not one of them. Putting too much of him in there could lead to legal problems.

The young cast of the movie has proven to be an amusing blend, with "Adventureland" star Jesse Eisenberg starring as Mark Zuckerberg (likely a very good fit), pop star Justin Timberlake playing Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sean Parker (really?), and "Gossip Girl" actor Armie Hammer playing both Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the identical twins who claimed Zuckerberg's founding of Facebook amounted to a theft of their own idea.

Some looks at the new AOL branding.

(Credit: AOL)

It's the media equivalent of moving out of your parents' house, heading to the nearest tattoo and piercing parlor, and yelling FREEEEEEDOM!: AOL has unveiled the "new brand identity" for its post-Time Warner era, slated to begin December 10 when it begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company. And there's nary a blue triangle in sight. Instead, there's a plain new text logo presented with various backdrops, from cartoon scribbles to a rock-star hand symbol to a totally adorable goldfish.

The company is currently offering just a preview, and says in a release that a full unveil will come on the spin-off date. Yay, secrets! I love secrets! But we, of course, have many hints: like the fact that CEO Tim Armstrong, who joined the company in March after a long stint as a high-profile Google sales executive, keeps talking up AOL's future as a powerhouse in digital content and publishing. The company's array of niche blogs, which were hatched when AOL purchased Weblogs way back in 2005, are now its centerpiece.

So the new mood? "It's one consistent logo with countless ways to reveal," the release explained. Ooh, sexy!

The release also included a soundbite from Karl Heiselman, CEO of Wolff Olins, which AOL enlisted to help with the transformation: "AOL is a 21st century media company, with an ambitious vision for the future and new focus on creativity and expression, this required the new brand identity to be open and generous, to invite conversation and collaboration, and to feel credible, but also aspirational."

Of course, it's not all sunny: The company is on the verge of significant layoffs, as well as the possible chucking of non-"content" properties like ICQ and MapQuest, as the spinoff date grows closer.

Whatever. Isn't that goldfish cute?

Maybe Rupert Murdoch was serious about wanting to go without Google.

Murdoch's News Corp. has initiated discussions with Microsoft over a plan to have the media company's Web content essentially delisted from the world's largest search engine, according to a report Sunday in the Financial Times that cited a person familiar with the situation. Microsoft, which owns rival search engine Bing, has also reportedly approached other media giants about having their content removed from Google search results as well.

Microsoft representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The two companies have been linked discussing a Web-search partnership in the past. During Microsoft's failed bid for Yahoo in 2008, the tech giant was reportedly in "serious" talks with News Corp. to make a joint bid for Yahoo.

Murdoch, the chairman of a newspaper, TV, and Internet empire that includes The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, 20th Century Fox, Fox News, and Hulu, warned earlier this month that his sites may soon disappear from the search engine's listings. Murdoch accused search giants of "stealing" his company's content during a recent interview with Sky News Australia. When he was asked why he just doesn't pull his Web sites from Google's search results, he said: "I think we will. But that's when we start charging."

Murdoch and other News Corp. execs have said that they intend to charge readers and viewers for access to the company's content, forsaking the ad revenue model.

For several months, executives at some of the nation's most influential news sources, including The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, have been blaming Google and similar Web services for at least some of their deepening financial troubles.

Google sells ads tied to the news blurbs it "scrapes" from news sites. It links back to the Web sites from which it acquired the content but doesn't share ad revenue with them.

"Publishers put their content on the Web because they want it to be found," Google said in a statement earlier this month. "Very few choose not to include their material in Google News and Web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don't."

Critics of the media companies' bashing Google point out that if media companies were serious about not being indexed by search engines, they could accomplish the feat on their own by adding a robots.txt file to the root of their Web site containing a simple code that would prevent bots from indexing their pages.

In the wake of acquiring smaller digital music services iLike--and now, it looks like, Imeem--MySpace continues to attempt to align itself as the foremost player in the digital music industry. On Wednesday, the News Corp. division rolled out a music charts page to track the most popular music getting listened to on the social site.

It's fairly self-explanatory. There's a prominent "movers" section featuring artists that have seen an uptick in activity recently, and music can be filtered by genre, country, and label category (indie, unsigned, or major). Then there are links to "friend" an artist, buy songs, and watch music videos on MySpace's recently launched music video portal.

(Credit: MySpace)

The design, regrettably, isn't very user-friendly and requires quite a bit of scrolling. And in a world of finely tuned "music discovery" and personalized recommendations, charts can seem a little bit static. A blog post from MySpace Music head Courtney Holt assures that it's "just the beginning of a product and platform evolution that reinforces the key messaging, vision and direction of the new MySpace Music."

MySpace launched its music service last year as a joint venture with major and independent record labels, and has received a mixed response as the industry continues to grapple with the fact that no non-iTunes digital music service has proven to be a huge moneymaker yet.

Perhaps in a sign of how the plague of social media has numbed us all to the value of legitimate human connections, the New Oxford American Dictionary has picked the verb "unfriend," or "to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook," as its 2009 Word of the Year.

At the very least, it's a testament to the ubiquity of Facebook, which now has well over 300 million members around the world.

Facebook itself takes the process of "friending" and "unfriending" very seriously. It once sent warning notes to players of a third-party game called PackRat because it encouraged players to amass huge friends lists (good heavens! they're polluting the social graph!), banned a Burger King ad campaign that let members "sacrifice" their friends to get a free cheeseburger ("Friendship is strong, but the Whopper is stronger"), and still puts a cap of 5,000 on personal profiles' friends lists.

Last year's Oxford word of the year was the decidedly less mainstream "hypermiling."

A correction was made at 9:25 a.m. PT on November 21. It was players of PackRat, not PackRat itself, that were threatened with account suspension.

For Madison Avenue, Facebook just got a little less free.

Last week, the massive social network announced that brands, advertisers, and marketers that want to run contests or sweepstakes on its platform have to go through an approval process first.

Getting that approval could be a new revenue stream for Facebook: according to multiple sources in the marketing industry, they're being told that running a promotion in a Facebook application or "fan page" requires buying ad space too.

It's pricey. The minimum ad buy is $10,000 for 30 days, using Facebook's self-service advertising system, according to documents seen by CNET, or $30,000 for 30 days of Facebook home page ads. Priority in the approval process will be scaled, based on how much advertising space has been purchased. It's a move that one marketing industry professional called, in perhaps a bit of hyperbole, "a little Death Star-ish."

A Facebook representative declined to confirm and said the company did not have any comment beyond official documents released on its Facebook Marketing Solutions page.

Let's step back. Cracking down on contests and promotions might seem draconian, but it's actually important for Facebook: the U.S. state and federal laws that govern sweepstakes are extremely complicated, and by allowing only approved contests, Facebook is making sure that its bases are covered.

"Any promotion that any brand, product, or company would run has to have a terms of service against it," said Gunter Pfau, CEO of the Stuzo Group, an agency that has developed numerous Facebook contests and sweepstakes for clients. "Also, depending on the prize value, they need to be filed with various state regulatory agencies."

What, exactly, is new for contests? If a brand is running a contest on its fan page, it has to be handled through an embedded, separately developed application--not, for example, in the page's "wall." Promotions also can't involve Facebook users manipulating their user photos or status messages specifically for the contest.

Legal experts agree that this is necessary. "The (new Facebook) guidelines really cover only a narrow subset of promotions, specifically sweepstakes, contests, and similar competitions," explained Thomas Williams, a partner at the Chicago law firm Howrey, who specializes in trademark law. "That type of contest or promotion is governed by a myriad of state and federal regulations, so what I think Facebook is attempting to do here is merely shield itself from liability that arises out of its users' potential violations of these laws."

Williams continued: "I think it's a prudent and reasonable step on Facebook's part. There are lawyers who specialize in sweepstakes law, and there really are a lot of twists and turns to it."

One thing it'll also do, Stuzo Group's Gunter Pfau explained, is keep dishonest campaigns and promotions off the Facebook platform. "I think it's great news for consumers," he said. "I think what Facebook is doing is really laying these guidelines in place for companies to protect consumers more."

But what about the new ad spend requirements? Facebook has historically pitched its developer platform and fan pages as a free way for advertisers and marketers to tap into the power of "the social graph"--its 300 million-plus active users and their connections to one another. And while it's clear that the company sees these free pages and applications as a stepping stone for ad dollars--Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, for example, regularly gives Madison Avenue talks about the company's "engagement ads"--it doesn't have a long track record of requiring advertisers to pay for something that used to be free.

"It makes sense for Facebook, but (it's) a little discouraging to advertisers," commented Alisa Leonard-Hansen, who holds the title of social-media evangelist at digital-marketing firm iCrossing. "Facebook is continually trying to discover new ways to monetize, and they picked up on the trend that advertisers were using their pages to run contests and other promotions. I think Facebook was looking to be able to benefit from this marketing trend."

The ad spend requirements, too, could be considered partial compensation for the new human resources required in Facebook's approval process. Each company running contests on Facebook now has a designated advertising sales representative, and fan pages will continue to have to be policed for potential violations of both advertiser regulations and sweepstakes law.

There might not be a lot of friction as the new regulations go into effect. Companies that don't run contests on their Facebook fan pages or applications won't be affected. Even some that do, especially small-scale fan pages that could easily go unnoticed by Facebook, won't have to change much. "Of course, there are going to be savvy marketers who skirt this and run (contests) under the radar," Alisa Leonard-Hansen said.

It really goes without saying the obvious: this is Facebook's service, and it can do what it wants with it. That doesn't mean marketers will stop grumbling. As one put it in a phone call to CNET, "This is another example of Facebook saying, 'Sorry, eat it, you've got no choice.'"

NEW YORK--Manhattan is the center of book publishing, all four music labels have headquarters here, and it's home to the country's largest general newspaper.

(Credit: New York magazine)

But even in the Big Apple, many people appear unwilling to pay for media.

New York magazine conducted an apparently unscientific poll of 100 pedestrians in Manhattan's SoHo district and it revealed some startling and humorous results.

Few of those polled are willing to pay for The New York Times. Asked whether they subscribe to the paper, 79 said no. Asked how much they would be willing to pay to read the paper online, 63 said "nothing." To the question of how charging a fee to read the paper online would affect The Times, 65 answered that it would make it less successful.

The good news for the music industry was that 34 of the respondents say they pay for all their music. The bad news is that 61 acknowledged obtaining at least some of their music illegally.

As for downloading TV shows illegally via BitTorrent files, seven of those polled said "all the time." Five said never." 38 said only if they miss a show on TV. 12 asked "What the hell is a torrent?"

When it came to books, the respondents were much more willing to pay and don't appear to be Kindle fans. Check it out.

Maybe it hasn't worked so well to mesh the short-video-clip culture of the Web with traditional cable news: Current Media, the edgy cable company co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, announced Wednesday it has laid off 80 employees in conjunction with a programming shakeup.

According to a release from the company, this shift involves canceling a number of programs, including "Current Tonight," "Current Takeover" and "Current Exposed." Most of the layoffs are in conjunction with those programs.

Additionally, per Wednesday's release: "Current will be shifting away from short-form programming and daily in-house production and towards proven 30-60 minute formats from a multitude of sources, including acquisitions, co-productions, outside studios, as well as Current developed and produced content." So it sounds like there will be a significant amount of new focus on outsourced material rather than more expensive in-house production--and perhaps less of an attempt to compete with well-established, live cable news networks.

Exactly one year ago, Current--headquartered in San Francisco but with many of its production operations in Los Angeles--laid off about 60 people but said that it was also creating about 30 new positions, which left its head count around 410 employees. Current chief operating officer Joanna Drake Earl told CNET News that this year's cuts leave its employee numbers at around 300.

The release said that the cuts were "not the result of a need to cut costs" and that the company would be hiring in areas like talent management, licensing, marketing, and ad sales. It'll also be consolidating its two L.A. facilities into a single new one.

"We've been an extremely innovative company doing lots and lots of different things," Earl said, "but (we've had to ask) what are we doing for our audience, and what shouldn't we be doing."

The company had filed for a $100 million IPO about two years ago but then retracted it amid concerns about the economy. It's repeatedly had to deflect rumors about its viability, like a report early this year that it would be closing its San Francisco headquarters to focus on L.A.

This post was updated at 2:10 p.m. PT with comment from Current's COO.

(Credit: The Beatles)

No, the digitally remastered Beatles catalog hasn't come to Apple's iTunes. But it has come to an apple-shaped USB device.

Retailing for $279.99, the collection will be released December 8 in North America, three months after the September 9 release of the remastered set of the band's albums (as well as The Beatles: Rock Band video game). The apple shape is in reference to Apple Corps, the Beatles music publisher--which in the past, you may recall, sued tech giant Apple in a trademark dispute.

(Credit: The Official Beatles Shop)

When the release of the remastered Beatles catalog and Rock Band game were announced for September 9, 2009 (the band has a song called "Revolution 9"), speculation arose that a concurrently scheduled Apple Inc. announcement might bring the catalog, still unavailable for digital download on the Web, to iTunes. That didn't happen. But with the release of the USB collection, the albums are available in non-CD digital form for the first time.

In addition to MP3 and FLAC versions of 14 stereo titles, according to a release, the 16GB device contains "all of the remastered CDs' visual elements, including 13 mini-documentary films about the studio albums, replicated original UK album art, rare photos and expanded liner notes."

Correction 10:45 a.m. PST: This story initially misstated the release date. It is December 8 in North America. Also, the type of lawsuit Apple Corps filed against Apple Inc. has been corrected. It was a trademark dispute.