The Social

NEW YORK--"They've created quite an industry around this whole thing," one woman in a black cocktail dress and diamond earrings commented as the lights dimmed for the start of the 13th annual Webby Awards on Monday night.

The annual awards ceremony for all things in digital media, held once again at the upscale Cipriani Wall Street restaurant, had packed the gilded space--once home to the New York Stock Exchange--with a mixed bag of folks from marketing, advertising, entrepreneurship, social media, online content, and what-have-you. (A common observation at the cocktail hour beforehand: "I don't know many people here.") It was the final event of Internet Week New York, which is co-organized by the Webby's parent, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. And it was, arguably, the most lavish.

Seth Meyers of "Saturday Night Live" hosted this year's Webbys.

(Credit: Courtesy of Webby Awards)

A cheeky take on traditional entertainment awards shows, the Webbys limit acceptance speeches to five words. The opening video montage, projected on several massive video screens throughout the venue, featured goofy Internet memes like "Keyboard Cat." Red carpet interviews featured a handful of "real" celebrities (like "Saturday Night Live" actor and writer Seth Meyers, who hosted the show) along with Internet-minted stars like "Fail Blog" and "I Can Has Cheezburger" blog impresario Ben Huh, who showed up to the ceremony wearing his trademark cheeseburger hat. (Does he ever wash it? "Every once in a while," Huh told me.)

But this year, following complaints that the ceremony was simply too long, as well as to deal with the fact that the smaller Webby Film & Video awards were rolled up into the main Webbys ceremony this year, the organizers pared it down. All speeches were recorded for video to post on YouTube (a Webbys sponsor) and a select number of winners who would give their speeches live at the ceremony were chosen via random selection. More glaringly, the gulf between traditional and digital media grows slimmer with every year--as exemplified by the increasing number of "real" celebrities who are enlisted as Webby presenters and honorees, like this year's surprise guests Martha Stewart and Cameron Diaz. The Internet has come into its own as a part of life rather than a novelty. The question arises: Do we still need the Webbys?

The see-and-be-seen scene
The thing about the Webby Awards ceremony is that it isn't really an awards ceremony: it's a networking event, albeit one with ball gowns, a Seth Meyers standup routine, and Cipriani's trademark bellinis. Winners know well in advance that they've won. There's something a bit self-congratulatory about the whole thing, as the Webby Awards are bankrolled in part by entry fees that companies must submit just to be nominated, and winners have to pay for seats at the awards show. The real point, as with so many tech industry events, is to be seen, and the best way to do that at the Webbys is the five-word acceptance speech.

Get up there and do something ridiculous--as an Animoto executive did when he walked to the podium to accept his award, stripped off his suit to reveal a pair of zebra-print leggings, donned a wig inspired by the styles of '80s hair metal, and shouted, "Wooooo, thank you, New York!"--and you might get noticed by somebody who eventually approaches you at the ceremony's afterparty. Maybe it's a potential client or investor. Or just somebody who's hearing about your company for the first time and will go check it out.

Musician Trent Reznor received the Webby Artist of the Year award.

(Credit: Courtesy of Webby Awards)

But that changed this year, with the organizers' decision to emphasize the more star-studded awards, bestowed upon Web-savvy celebs like comedian Sarah Silverman and industrial music icon Trent Reznor, as well as Web influentials like Twitter co-founder Biz Stone (accepting the award for "Breakout of the Year") and World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who was given a "lifetime achievement" award. Small-time winners were no longer front and center.

While some Webbys-goers welcomed the new format and how it did away with the lengthy parade of accolades that seemed to just grow longer every year, a few were grumbling that they'd reconsider whether to come back next year if they couldn't be guaranteed those five words at the podium. Listening to Seth Meyers wax philosophical about the Web ("Without the Internet, prostitutes would have to find a Craig without a list") and knowing that their taped acceptance speeches would be on YouTube the next day wasn't enough for at least a handful of winners in the crowd.

This odd dichotomy between community and celebrity might sound familiar.

"So, it's like Twitter," Klickable founder Roger Wu quipped at the noisy Webbys afterparty, held further uptown at the Hiro Ballroom nightclub. On the dance floor below, Webbys-goers were dancing up a storm (a rarity in the tech industry) to a performance by ?uestlove, a member of Jimmy Fallon's house band The Roots. It didn't look like a particularly nerdy affair.

Wu had a point. Once a geek craze, Twitter has turned into the latest vehicle for celebrity self-promotion. Ashton Kutcher's hordes of Twitter followers were what catapulted the microblogging service into the mainstream, but some have said that the community-building work accomplished by Twitter's core pack of early adopters was ignored amid the Hollywood glitz.

And the same could be said about the Webbys. A decade ago, actress Cameron Diaz likely would've snubbed the chance to show up at an Internet awards ceremony, and yet on Monday night she was up there bestowing the "Person of the Year" award to Twitter-happy late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon. The Internet isn't a niche corner of entertainment anymore; it is entertainment--but that's overwhelmingly thanks to the innovators and entrepreneurs behind the scenes, not just the actors and TV hosts who've jumped on board the hottest digital trend. Still, it's going to be the likes of Fallon and Diaz who pull in the headlines.

Digital media's triumph is cause for celebration from all sides. And the Webbys team puts on a well-run, enjoyable show every year. But the increasing presence of celebrity is a sign that maybe this is an industry that's outgrown the need for a quirky awards ceremony. Or maybe it isn't. I'm sure there are plenty of people who'd be happy to debate the point on Twitter.

A correction was made to this article: The acceptance speech involving a strip-down was from Animoto, not Ustream.

IAC chair Barry Diller at last week's Founders Club party.

(Credit: Alexander Porter/New York Founders Club)

NEW YORK--From a seventh-floor roof deck at Rockefeller Center, Barry Diller, head of digital-media conglomerate IAC/InterActiveCorp, was addressing the well-dressed crowd at Thursday evening's Founders Club cocktail party.

"There was a time when 'network' was all the buildings on Sixth Avenue," Diller said, gesturing to the west, home to the midtown office buildings that have housed New York's once-unflappable broadcast and print media powerhouses for decades, "and of course now it means something totally different."

The Founders Club, with a watertight guest list, drinks courtesy of Patron tequila, and a decorative pool filled with miniature sailboats bearing the logos of New York's most talked-about start-ups (perhaps a nod to host Diller, an avid yachtsman), was one of the more highbrow events at the second annual Internet Week New York, which culminates Monday night with the Webby Awards gala.

In spite of how rough things have been for the industry over the past year, energy levels were high and there was no shortage of things to do. Internet Week attendees could fill their week up with panels, networking breakfasts, ad industry conferences, start-up expos, and loads of parties. ("It's miraculous that you are all standing up, because all I hear about are these parties!" Diller exclaimed at Founders Club.)

One thing's for sure: New York's tech and digital-media community has been humbled and chastened, and it's ready to get back on its feet. Unfortunately, now there's a whole new problem: what next?

On the bright side, there seemed to be near-universal agreement at Internet Week that changing times present opportunities to explore new territory. A handful of people noted throughout the week that online video-related events had especially high rates of attendance, as traditional media and advertising companies sent marketers and business-development types out to figure out just how they can make a buck or two off it.

There are legitimate reasons for some of this optimism, especially for smaller companies that haven't exactly had the easiest time in New York to begin with. Rents are cheaper now. Prospective employees are willing to work for lower salaries. And once-dominant New York industries have been brought down a few notches, leaving scrappy start-ups in a position that's far from undesirable--especially since big media and finance companies, short on ideas for how to stay afloat, have finally started to listen to them.

"On behalf of the crippled United States economy and the crippled New York City economy, I'd like to thank you for doing what you do," Business Insider founder and former Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget said to an audience of entrepreneurs and venture capital types at the blog's "Startup 2009" pitch competition Wednesday. "When you hear people talking about green shoots in this environment, this is what they're talking about."

Even the big companies seem to think the little guys are doing something right, or at least, in difficult times, they can make it seem a little sunnier by putting an entrepreneurial spin on things. New AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, for example, referred to AOL as "the world's largest start-up-slash-turnaround." He's not entirely off base. In New York, anything digital has historically been a bootstrapping industry in and of itself.

"I think the financial meltdown might be the best thing that ever happened to the New York start-up scene," Chris Dixon, co-founder of the fledgling Hunch, told CNET News at the Founders Club event. Dixon, who sold his previous company, SiteAdvisor, to McAfee in 2006, believes that in the Web 2.0 boom, New York's tech scene was even more upstaged by the San Francisco Bay Area's than it had been in the first dot-com gold rush. "(There were) hedge funds sucking up all the talent like they didn't in the '90s," he said.

But the excitement about the potential for innovation is tinged with plenty of confusion that can descend into downright cluelessness, brilliantly parodied in a YouTube-hosted music video called "Mad Avenue Blues" that was making the rounds last week and was the subject of many an Internet Week cocktail party conversation. Set to the tune of Don McLean's "American Pie," the video details the panic that one of New York's biggest industries went through in "the year the media died," and its lyrics full of marketing jargon are uncomfortably spot-on.

All joking aside, Internet Week made it clear that across the industry, nobody seems to be really sure what direction to take, and this can lead to major friction. In his opening address at Digitas' Digital Content NewFronts event on Wednesday, the ad agency's chief creative officer Mark Beeching gave an impassioned speech that included, among other things, the insistence that media companies give up on the fight against digital piracy because it's just not worth it.

"I can name a half dozen media executives who will have something to say about that," somebody remarked to me about Beeching's talk the following day, where even more digital-advertising types had gathered for cocktails and a presentation from ad agency Crispin Porter and Bogusky, which has gained serious geek street cred for edgy campaigns like the Burger King "Whopper Sacrifice" stunt.

At least they can agree on Twitter
Then there was the back-and-forth banter in the highly anticipated I Want Media panel on Wednesday, where it seemed like the only thing the panelists--who came from both print and digital media--could agree on was that the industry's more or less enamored with Twitter. Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal, a firm advocate of media outlets charging for online content, sparred onstage with Nick Denton, founder of entertainment and gossip blog network Gawker Media, who stands staunchly in favor of advertising.

"There's not enough advertising out there to support us," Murray insisted. "The model, digitally, in part because it's so easy to move from place to place, just doesn't work."

Denton retorted, "That is so not true," claiming that "most newspapers, apart from The Wall Street Journal and maybe the Financial Times, they have nothing that people are going to pay for."

But over the past year, as the crisis in the media industry grew worse, Denton didn't sound quite as unflappable. Over the winter, he had been predicting a near total collapse for advertising-based content, and the company spent months trimming away the fat, casting aside unnecessary cargo. Gawker Media consolidated two blogs, sold several others, and laid off a number of writers and editors. It's probably turned into a far more efficient operation.

But things turned out better than he expected, and on Thursday night Gawker partnered with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) for a party on the roof of the blog network's downtown headquarters--the latest in a parade of Gawker roof parties that started popping up as soon as the weather began to warm. There was, of course, an open bar. Waiters brought around trays of appetizers that were certainly several notches up from the fare at Gawker parties of yore, where the catering typically involved ordering pork dumplings en masse from somewhere in nearby Chinatown.

Guests weren't quite sure what was being offered to them. One of the appetizers, they learned upon asking, was pheasant. Another consisted of shot glasses of spicy tomato juice with oysters at the bottom. It was more "Mad Men" than media meltdown.

But ideally, that pheasant was eaten with the knowledge that the industry is still in a grave situation, and it's still not clear how or when it will end.

We knew the music of the Beatles was coming to the MTV video game Rock Band, but now we have a release date: September 9, 2009. That's when you'll be able to get The Beatles: Rock Band, a new edition of the game for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii consoles. You can start working on your bad "lonely hearts club band" puns now.

The game itself will retail for $59.99 in the U.S.; there will also be a $99.99 version that comes with Beatles-inspired guitar controllers, and a $249.99 "special edition" bundle. I'm guessing that one comes with a walrus.

The date is awfully cute, considering the Beatles' formally self-titled "White Album" contains that song called "Revolution 9," which consists largely of a repetition of the phrase "number nine, number nine, number nine." Conspiracy theorists say that if you play it backward it sounds like "turn me on, dead man" and is hence one of the clues that adds up to reveal that Paul McCartney died and was replaced by a lookalike early in the band's career.

But here's something else for conspiracy theorists of a different variety. September 9, 2009, happens to be a Wednesday in early September, and Apple has historically held iPod-related announcements on Tuesdays in early September. If you want to be mega-speculative, consider that there could be an announcement that week that in addition to Rock Band, the Beatles would finally be coming to iTunes. The band's catalog is currently not legally available for digital download.

There have been legal issues and general animosity for years between Apple Inc. and Apple Corps, the publisher of the Beatles' music. When record label EMI, which owns the rights to the Beatles catalog, inked a deal with Apple to make its catalog available on iTunes without DRM, buzz circulated that the Beatles could be added to the digital-media emporium soon. It's been almost two years, and no Fab Four yet. Late last year, ex-Beatle Paul McCartney said that talks had stalled. There's no real gauge on where things stand now.

But I guess you could just try playing a Steve Jobs keynote backward and see what hidden messages surface.

Project Playlist has struck a deal with Sony BMG to bring the label's catalog to its streaming-music service. It's the first major-label deal for Project Playlist, which recently brought former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta on as CEO but has been dealing with legal problems that have seen its widgets banned from social network MySpace.

Currently, Project Playlist has been sued by Warner Music, EMI, and Universal Music Group, as well as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), because of the amount of unauthorized content that members have uploaded to the service. Industry rumors have persisted that Project Playlist was interested in a merger with Imeem, a similar service that has deals with all the major labels.

Reports had surfaced in April that unlike the other labels, Sony BMG was negotiating with Project Playlist rather than seeking legal action against it. Now, months later, that deal has come to fruition.

"Collaborating with Sony BMG is a significant milestone in our effort to improve the access and quality of content on Project Playlist, and enhance the overall user experience," founder Jeremy Riney said in a release. "We hope that we soon will be able to provide our users with ready access to even more of the music they want in the way that they want it."

There are a ton of social music sites out there, but Project Playlist is growing fast: Traffic firm ComScore pegs its user base at 40 million.

(Credit: Criterion.com)

Highbrow film company The Criterion Collection has launched Criterion.com, an "online cinematheque" for people who want to watch movies, delve into some editorial content, and socialize with other fans.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of the new site is the fact that you can rent many Criterion films (a melange of old and newish, domestic and foreign) for $5 per stream, and that $5 will be deducted if you then choose to purchase the flick on DVD. Kind of a cool model that nobody seems to be using yet.

Criterion has also teamed up with a new film-centric social site, The Auteurs, to host a monthly "film festival" that makes a handful of Criterion films available for temporary free streaming and discussion. November's picks, sponsored by IFC, follow a "cruel stories of youth" theme and feature the World War II drama Au revoir les enfants as well as the quintessential nasty-kids story, Lord of the Flies, among others. No, there's no Mean Girls.

I know, I know, it's all a bit pretentious. Now go put on a scarf and down a few macchiatos and think about something deep.

Among the digerati, there's already a clear winner in the presidential election: little Web "widgets" that can be dropped onto sites to carry everything from election results to user-chosen news headlines to slideshows of VP candidate Sarah Palin's fashion choices.

In 2004, the buzz about digital media and the election was all about a nascent form of news publishing--blogs. In 2006 it was online video, particularly YouTube, after the video-sharing site hosted a widely circulated amateur video of George Allen, then a Virginia senator up for re-election, using an obscure racial slur at a campaign rally.

In 2008, it's been all about the widgets. A Silicon Valley fad for two years running, they've officially hit a mainstream fever pitch with the campaign cycle. And if there wasn't enough already about this election to make your head spin, these might put you over the top.

The companies and Web developers who make applications for clients like media companies and political campaigns, from widgets to mobile-device downloads, are currently riding high. So are a ton of Web start-ups that let you vote, mash up, aggregate, or what-have-you with news stories and headlines. Media outlets have been decorating their Web sites with the digital equivalent of Christmas tree ornaments: countdown clocks, video players, tickers with headlines sourced from around the Web, and the trendiest of all, the clickable red-and-blue Electoral College projection map.

It's a far cry from 2004, when we were all marveling over "citizen news" at sites such as RedState and DailyKos, and campaigns' use of Meetup to bring supporters together.

With the electoral cycle drawing to a close, we'll soon see whether the endless parade of "election apps" is a lasting digital trend or whether the hype will fade. Widgets and gadgets and mash-ups are largely reliant on technology created by small Silicon Valley companies that could fall from favor as innovation speeds on, go belly-up in the face of a recession, or see their contracts trimmed from the budgets of cash-strapped media companies that have commissioned them.

Right now, though? They're everywhere. You can see election apps in action on TV, with cable network Current aggregating election-related messages from micro-blogging service Twitter along with headlines from social news site Digg. They're on newspapers' Web sites, like sharing start-up SocialMedian's partnership with outlets like the Washington Post and the U.K.'s The Guardian. They're on the iPhone, with downloads ranging from Electoral College maps to poll results to an official Barack Obama campaign app. And they're on social networks; both Facebook and MySpace have partnered with youth-voting organization Rock the Vote to entice more of their young members to register to vote.

The campaigns are in on it, too. Obama's campaign created an internal social network, an application to run on an Apple iPhone; used a text-messaging campaign to announce his choice of Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden as his running mate; and used the platform of a development company, Clearspring, to make a "Tax Cut Calculator" application. (Clearspring says it's had 1.3 million views in fewer than three weeks, half of which have been on MySpace.) Republican rival John McCain has been less proactive on the social-networking and Web app front, but Clearspring said that a third-party "McCain-Palin '08" application has been embedded across the Web 13,000 times.

For the news-hungry masses, in an era when headlines can emerge anywhere at any hour, widgets and mash-ups and Web apps--often described by their manufacturers with adjectives like "real-time" and "dynamic"--are like 24-hour access to popcorn. "People are gravitating, not just individuals, but actually the campaigns--they're seeing widgets as a way to get their message out and get their campaign message in front of people, particularly in the social-media space," said Bill Rubacky, Clearspring's director of marketing.

2008's election-app craze is as much about managing this frenetic news cycle as it is about galvanizing voters. Just check out MySpace's "Decision '08" page, which features nothing less than an NBC political news feed, a Google Gadget for locating polling stations, an MSNBC video player, a link to an interactive Electoral College map, and a poll from Flektor, a widget-maker that MySpace parent company News Corp. acquired last year--in addition to the usual MySpace networking features.

Some Web users might find it to be an efficient one-stop source for interactive political news. Others might scream "media overload." And if you look at fashion, an era of heavy accessorizing (read: the '80s) is often followed by a reactionary period of austerity. Will digital politics' equivalents of gold bangles and neon leg warmers end similarly? That's dependent on one huge factor: results. Should Obama lose the election on Tuesday, his social-apps-heavy campaign tactics may be seen as less effective than most pundits anticipated.

There's also a question of what happens after Tuesday, when the election hype ends and the reality of a likely recession sets in. One not-so-good sign: Silicon Valley venture capitalists are already expressing concern about the app industry's ability to make money.

"(Political news) is certainly something many people are passionate about, and when the election's over its unclear who they will turn to," said Amanda Michel, head of the "Off the Bus" political coverage hub for the Huffington Post, a political news outlet that has seen its traffic soar with the impending election.

In other words, many of the companies that have been responsible for the share-this, embed-that culture of the 2008 election's digital coverage might not be around to do the same thing for the 2010 midterms or the 2012 general election.

"I wouldn't be surprised if the Internet as a whole took a breather," said Mark Ghuneium, founder and CEO of analytics agency Wiredset. "You know what they say about a rising tide raising all boats? It might be true that (the election) is keeping things sustained."

A correction was made at 1:46 p.m. PT: Clearspring was the platform for the Obama campaign's tax calculator widget, but it was not officially commissioned to make it.

It seems like the only complaint that the cranky digital-media press can come up with for MTVMusic.com, the legendary pop-culture brand's new music video hub, is, "Why wasn't this here years ago?"

Yeah, yeah, we know. There are licensing issues, especially for all those campy '80s videos that haven't seen the light of day in years. And launching a product prematurely could have led to bad press, as opposed to the "wow, we like this" response that MTV Music seems to have gotten thus far.

The issue, of course, is that most music videos are already available on YouTube, and it's not clear yet whether people will change their browsing habits and actually go over to MTV Music for videos now.

Viacom-owned MTV Networks has built in community features through its Flux technology, so that members can comment on videos, rate them (not surprisingly, Rick Astley's 1988 song "Never Gonna Give You Up," which has experienced a wild surge of Internet-meme popularity in the past year, is near the top of the chart), and share them on Facebook, MySpace, and blogs.

There are a couple of ads for Rhapsody, MTV's music retail partner, but I haven't seen any actual "Buy This Song" links accompanying videos. That'd be a good move for MTV.

So I leave you with Weezer's "Buddy Holly," one of my favorite videos of the '90s, back when we all thought they'd turn out to be a dweeby, one-hit-wonder novelty act:

Apologies for the poor camera-phone quality.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy)

NEW YORK--Spotted, Gossip Girl-style: Teen pop sensations the Jonas Brothers, heralding the launch of MySpace Music atop a billboard in Times Square. The launch of the News Corp.-owned social network's music service is coming any day now.

The Jonas Brothers display can be seen on the billboard on the corner of West 43rd Street, with the slogan "Songs We Can Agree On" and a short list of songs in the manner of a mixtape (which include selections from Elvis Costello, Prince, and Albert Hammond Jr.) That's a hint at the playlist-creation focus of the new music service. A URL for the Jonas Brothers' MySpace page accompanies the ad, indicating that high-profile artists will likely be pimping the service when it debuts.

Playlists and "digital mixtapes" are hot: we've seen this recently in the iLike developer API and the popular-but-shuttered start-up Muxtape.

MySpace Music will be launching with either three or all four of the major music labels onboard, depending on which sources are asked. It'll offer paid downloads as well as free streaming and concert tickets. And, presumably, it has the approval of the doe-eyed Jonas Brothers, or at least their publicist.

(Credit: HBO)

It's official: as reported yesterday, Apple has inked a deal with HBO to sell episodes of the premium-cable network's original programming in its iTunes Store. You can now use Apple's digital-retail hub to purchase episodes of The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Deadwood, The Wire, Rome, and Flight of the Conchords.

Right now, all six seasons of Sex and the City are available for purchase, as a promotion for the spin-off movie opening at the end of May. But iTunes currently offers only the first seasons of the other shows, as well as The Sopranos' final season. (Flight of the Conchords has only had one season so far.)

A number of popular HBO shows, like the entertainment industry comedy Entourage, are not available for sale.

This is the first time that Apple has agreed to variable pricing in the iTunes Store. Sex and the City, Flight of the Conchords, and The Wire are priced at the standard iTunes $1.99, but The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Rome sell for $2.99.