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The Olympic Games are supposed to be about international brotherhood and friendly competition, but NBC apparently doesn't want its competition to get too chummy.

NBC, which has the exclusive rights to televise events from the games in Beijing, has made great strides over the years in bringing more content to viewers. For the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, the network set up NBCOlympics.com, but alas it offered little more than photos and schedules intended to drive Web surfers to their TVs.

In 2004, the network discovered high definition, which was nice--unless you weren't too keen on waiting an extra hour for the opening ceremonies to be broadcast, or had no interest in watching the same footage of a diving competition for days on end.

In 2006, NBC seemed to discover the Internet, offering live Internet streaming of the gold medal hockey game at the Turin Winter Olympics.

So it seemed the entertainment giant had finally gotten its act together: in addition to the 1,400 hours of TV coverage, the network plans to enlist the Internet to offer 3,000 hours of on-demand highlights, blogging, analysis, and even fantasy league gaming.

However, the Internet will still be taking a backseat to the TV. NBC will not make televised events available online until after they are seen on TV, Perkins Miller, senior vice president for digital media at NBC Sports, told the Associated Press .

And NBC, which ponied up $3.5 billion to the International Olympics Committee for the rights to televise the games, isn't making friends with other Web sites. NBCOlympics.com is the only site where you will see video coverage of events on the Web. Other Web sites are permitted to show Olympic trials events, but they must link to NBCOlympics.com--and all that video content must be taken down before the games begin in Beijing.

Is NBC being a bit paranoid about Web sites stealing its TV viewership?

"It's not that we aren't nervous," Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics, told the AP. "But we're up to it, and we're going to perform as we always have in the past."

Maybe NBC will surprise us and do better.

Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.

Some people might be embarrassed if their friends found an old copy of Mr. Big's "To be with you" or Paula Abdul's "Cold hearted (snake)" stashed away in their CD collection. But not EMI. They own those songs, and they want the world to know it.

The music giant is suing social-networking site Hi5, video advertising start-up VideoEgg, and 10 unnamed defendants for allegedly infringing on the copyrights of those and hundreds of other pop throwbacks.

The lawsuit alleges that Hi5 users have uploaded and disseminated hundreds of music videos the company owns rights to. VideoEgg is on the hook because it's a former partner of Hi5, and those allegedly infringing videos were uploaded to its servers. (On May 31, VideoEgg stopped hosting videos uploaded by the public and refocused efforts on its ad network, prompting rumors that the company was on its way out.) The lawsuit doesn't say much of anything about who the 10 John Does are.

The companies had attempted to work out some kind of deal for more than a year, a source told TechCrunch, but those efforts eventually failed.

Web site owners might be amazed to learn that one of the biggest sources for duplicate content isn't externally, but rather internally.

Certainly, popular sites and blogs that syndicate a lot of content have to deal with external duplication, but as I already touched on external duplicate content, we know that there are steps to minimize those challenges and to establish your site as the canonical source.

Internal, or on-site, content duplication tends to come in a few key ways, the first of which is within the key page elements. The second is from the content itself; similar to e-commerce sites using stock product copy, you may be using your own copy over and over again on your site. Third, it simply may come from too little differentiated copy.

CNET Networks, News.com's parent company, on Thursday announced a three-year strategic partnership with Yahoo under which CNET will be a third-party content provider of technology news and reviews.

The partnership also allows for Yahoo to sell display ads on CNET properties and for CNET to sell ads alongside the content it provides on Yahoo sites.

"Working together, we have the ability to build more robust content environments and more comprehensive programs for our marketing partners," CNET CEO Neil Ashe said in a press release.

The announcement was made as CNET reported its quarterly earnings, a net loss of $6.1 million, or 4 cents per share, compared with a net loss of $9.1 million, or 6 cents per share, in the year-ago period. Reuters said the per-share loss was in line with Wall Street estimates, but net revenue of $91.4 million fell short of analysts' average expectation for $93.4 million.

CNET has also been in the news of late because the hedge fund Jana Partners is trying to take control of its board.

SAN FRANCISCO--NBC Universal would like to have its TV shows distributed once again through Apple's iTunes service, a top executive said Wednesday, but he called for antipiracy measures to help protect his business' revenue.

George Kliavkoff, chief digital officer at NBC Universal, didn't specifically mention Apple by name in his request, but it was clear he had the iPod maker in mind when it came to combating people's consumption of pirated content.

George Kliavkoff, chief digital officer at NBC Universal

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

"If you look at studies about MP3 players, especially leading MP3 players and what portion of that content is pirated, and think about how that content gets onto that device, it has to go through a gatekeeping piece of software, which would be a convenient place to put some antipiracy measures," Kliavkoff said in an onstage interview at the Ad:Tech conference here. "One of the big issues for NBC is piracy. We are financially harmed every day by piracy. It results in us not being able to invest as much money in the next generation of film and TV products."

Apple's iTunes service has become the largest music retailer in the United States, but relations between Apple and NBC Universal are strained. In 2007, NBC Universal pulled its TV content from iTunes when the two companies disagreed about pricing. Kliavkoff made it clear that he'd like the conduit back, though.

"We'd love to be on iTunes. It has a great customer experience. We'd love to figure out a way to distribute our content on iTunes," he said, but wouldn't comment on any negotiations. "We have film distribution with iTunes so yes, we do talk to Apple," he said.

Price appears still to be a sticking point. NBC Universal sets a wholesale price for content it offers to distributors, and then distributors are free to set the retail price.

"They can mark up the price and make a profit or use it as a loss leader to get people in the door," Kliavkoff said. "It's really difficult for us to work with any distribution partner who says 'Here's the wholesale price and the retail price,' especially when the price doesn't reflect the full value of the product."

"The music industry guys would have something to say about how the pricing has affected their product over the last few years," he added.

The Apple-NBC Universal spat has been a game of brinksmanship over which company needs the other more. Analysts at Forrester Research think Apple needs the content more than NBC needs the distribution.

NBC Universal, through a 50-50 partnership with NBC and News Corp., has its own mechanism to view entertainment TV shows on the Web: Hulu. However, the site doesn't offer downloads and doesn't support mobile devices, at least today.

Hulu is in part an attempt to combat piracy on Google's YouTube, Kliavkoff said.

"It used to be that at the end of Saturday Night Live, YouTube would have clips up faster. You can fight that all you want, but until you provide a place to go at 1:05 a.m. Eastern time that has the digital short, you won't get anywhere." Now, with Hulu, viewers can get the same content through legitimate channels.

YouTube, he added, is a "fantastic promotional vehicle for some of our product," such as trailers. And it's the "market leader for amateur content." But sites like Hulu will change its position for professionally produced video, he predicted.

"I think that balance will shift a little bit. I think at the end of the day people, more often than now, will want to see professionally produced content," Kliavkoff said.

Several weeks ago at SMX West I had the pleasure of meeting and having lunch with Brian White from Google. White works on Matt Cutts' Web spam team, tirelessly working to make Google's search results the best they can be, ensuring the best user experience. Quite a hefty task indeed.

You'd think that someone who spends his days fighting the never-ending battle that is Web spam might be a bit negative or jaded. If that is the case, he does an amazing job hiding it. Instead, he was upbeat and you could feel the excitement in his voice as he spoke. Here's a guy who loves what he's doing and truly wants to not only improve the searchers' experience on Google, but wants to make the Web a better place. You can't help but like a guy who's fighting the good fight.

Crowdsourcing has entered the mainstream big-time. It has become daunting to find a brand these days that does NOT have some crowdsourcing program in place.

My Starbucks Idea is just the latest example: Starbucks asks its consumers for advice, and besides certainly receiving a lot of good ideas, the troubled coffee chain makes consumers feel part of the brand remake.

It's the same template as usual: engage your community, harness its creativity, and let it create the content for you.

It works, sure, but it's getting stale. For some reason, marketing trends take two to three years before they are fully embraced, but if they are, then they become annoyingly ubiquitous (remember the "Tipping Point"?).

The reason is simple: Marketing executives are notoriously risk-averse (Seth Godin once reckoned that only if you're willing to put your job on the line will you do something truly innovative in marketing), and a model like crowdsourcing provides the right balance between safety net ("many others are doing it") and cutting edge ("crowdsourcing?" the CEO shrugged).

Crowdsourcing was a disruptive innovation two years ago, but now it's time to innovate crowdsourcing. It is a viable trend that has implications far beyond the marketing profession, but someone needs to take it to the next level.

So in the spirit of crowdsourcing, let me ask you: in the next stage, what could be a more innovative application of crowdsourcing?

Microsoft Office includes industrial-strength tools for creating forms of all types, but the Access database and InfoPath information manager are overkill for my meager form requirements. If I need to collect basic information from a bunch of people in a hurry, such as for planning a potluck lunch, I stick with the simple form-creation tools in Word.

Word 2007 groups the options found on the Forms toolbar in Word 2003 into the Legacy Tools button in the Controls section under the Developer tab. These form fields are a subset of Office 2007's Content Controls, which allow you to populate forms automatically from external sources, extract form data as XML for use in other applications, and perform other operations. I may have use for these advanced features someday, but for creating a basic form, they're too much.

Start with a template and a table
Whether you're using Word 2007 or Word 2003, create a template to serve as the master copy of your form document. The simplest way to format the form is by using a two-column table: The left column lists the field names, and the right one holds the data you're collecting. In my example form for planning a company potluck lunch, I created fields for the respondent's name, department, and preferred event date, as well as for the food and beverage each person plans to bring.

Text boxes work for the name, department, and food fields, and I use a drop-down menu for the beverage choice. I also use a drop-down menu for the date preference in Word 2003, but Word 2007 adds a control that lets people select a date from a monthly calendar.

To select a form control in Word 2007, place the cursor in the table cell where you want the control, click the Developer tab, and choose the appropriate icon in the Controls section, or click the arrow in the bottom-right corner of the Legacy Tools icon and select the control from the drop-down list.

Click the down arrow on the Legacy Tools icon to insert a form control.

(Credit: Microsoft)

In Word 2003, place the cursor in the table cell you want the form field to appear in, right-click an empty area of the toolbar, select Forms to open the floating Forms toolbar, and choose one of the controls on the toolbar.

Select a control from the floating Forms toolbar to insert it in a document in Microsoft Word 2003.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Once your form control is in place, right-click it and choose Properties to customize it. Another way to access the control options is by selecting the Properties button in the Controls section of the Developer ribbon in Word 2007, or by clicking the Form Field Options icon on the Forms toolbar in Word 2003. For text fields, you can change the default text that appears (by adding "Click here to enter text," for example). You can also specify that a number, date, or other type of text be entered; set a maximum length; specify a text format; and even set a macro to run when data is entered, or when the field is exited. This is also how you enter items for drop-down lists, and set the size and default values of checkboxes.

Add items to the drop-down form control by entering them in the Field Options dialog box and clicking Add.

(Credit: Microsoft)

There's a more elegant way to ask people to select their preferred date in Word 2007: choose the Date Picker control, which adds a month-by-month calendar to the form that appears when you select it and choose the down arrow to the right of the current entry. The Content Properties dialog lets you specify the resulting date format.

Set the date format used in your form's calendar control via its Properties dialog box in Word 2007.

(Credit: Microsoft)

When your form controls are in place, save the file using the .dotx format in Word 2007, or .dot in Word 2003. When you're ready to distribute your form, open a new Word document, and choose the template from the list that appears. Save the resulting file with the .docx format in Word 2007, or .doc in Word 2003. Now the form is ready for distribution, but first make sure your recipients can add text and otherwise access its fields. In Word 2007, place the cursor in the field, click the Properties button in the Contents section of the Developer ribbon (or right-click and choose Properties), and make sure "Contents cannot be edited" is unchecked. In Word 2003, ensure that the lock icon at the far right of the Forms toolbar is selected.

When the forms are returned, you can collect the data as comma-separated values in a text file (.txt) in Word 2003 by selecting File > Save As > Tools > Save Options, checking Save data only for forms, and clicking OK > Save > OK. In Word 2007 you should be able to do the same by clicking the Office button, choosing Save As > Word Document > Tools > Save Options, selecting the Advanced tab in the left pane, scrolling to the "Preserve fidelity when sharing this document" section in the right window, checking "Save form data as delimited text file," choosing Plain text (.txt) in the Save as type drop-down menu, and clicking Save > OK. Unfortunately, I couldn't get this function to save the form content when I tested it. I'll keep experimenting, though, and I'll let you know if I find the solution.

Tomorrow: Customize the Details view in Windows Explorer.

(Credit: Acquia)

What do you do with 2,000,000 downloads and a 100% growth rate? With 240,000 members of your community and 900-plus developers (a number that doubled in 2007)?

You'd start Acquia, that's what you'd do. Or, at least, that's what North Bridge Venture Partners did, and the company looks to have a huge opportunity before it. I spent some time with Jeff Whatcott, vice president of Marketing at Acquia, to get more detail on the company and its launch of its products.

First off, however, I just had to know:

Does Acquia compete with Microsoft Sharepoint?

This is bigger than Sharepoint. Sharepoint is primarily behind-the-firewall collaboration. Drupal can be used for this, but Drupal's real sweet spot today is outside-the-firewall social publishing, or collaboration.

... Read more