The Social

The congressional vote regarding royalty fees for Internet radio has been moved at the last minute to 11 a.m. EDT Saturday, according to Pandora, one of the start-ups that has been pushing for this vote in the wake of pressure from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB).

"It has to happen tomorrow," Pandora chief technology officer Tom Conrad said in an interview with CNET News on Friday night. The start-up has put up a blog post encouraging fans and users to call their congressional representatives through the night to support the cause. "The timing issue that's critical here is that many of the Internet radio providers, Pandora included, for financial reasons really need to have this issue resolved before 2009." Additionally, members of Congress will soon be on the campaign trail for their own re-elections and are already occupied by the Wall Street crisis.

To put it more bluntly, the Internet radio services could run out of money before a resolution is reached.

Earlier on Friday, it was revealed that the NAB had been lobbying members of Congress to halt legislation that would keep up talks between the Internet radio services and SoundExchange, which represents record labels and performers.

Conrad said that "it's not clear" as to what the NAB's motivations are, but speculated that it might be because the trade group feels threatened by the rise of Internet radio. "They operate the broadcast towers all over the country," he said. NAB insisted earlier on Friday that speeding up the negotiations would be rushed and unbalanced.

Pandora CEO Tim Westergren said in an August interview with The Washington Post that last year's Web radio royalty hike would consume 70 percent of Pandora's revenue and that the start-up could be close to shutting down as a result. Some allegations of "Chicken Little" melodrama ensued, but Conrad assured CNET News on Friday that the company did not regret those remarks.

"I think our message all along for the 18 months we've been negotiating this has been dramatic perhaps, but certainly not hyperbole," Conrad said. "Pandora's a venture-backed company. Without some kind of change, there's just no way for our investors to feel like it's a good investment."

Last.fm, the social music site that CBS Interactive purchased last year, will be seeing closer integration into one of the media conglomerate's other properties very soon. According to a joint announcement Tuesday, Last.fm and CBS Radio will be sharing audio content on the Web to provide online editions of CBS' radio stations to Last.fm users and free streaming music to CBS Radio listeners.

A collaboration with CBS Radio has been rumored since the Last.fm acquisition was first announced last May.

In what Last.fm co-founder and CEO Felix Miller said was "the first of what we hope to be many collaborations (with) CBS Radio," streaming versions of all the company's radio stations--including New York's WCBS, Los Angeles' KROQ, and Chicago's WXRT--will be available on Last.fm. In return, listeners using CBS Radio's player on the Web will be able to listen to full songs on Last.fm. The partnership is a simple one: basically, it's designed to create crossover and brand awareness between the two CBS divisions.

CBS Radio's 140-plus radio stations are now in the process of being introduced to Last.fm in a "staggered rollout." In addition to music, news, talk, and sports stations will also be available on the social network.

NEW YORK--Just how much will Mountain View invade Madison Avenue?

Several hundred New Yorkers involved in advertising and marketing packed a room in Google's Chelsea offices here Monday night to find out. A panel of Google advertising employees, moderated by sponsor Mimeo Vice President Jeff Grill individually addressed the crowd at the January installment of the New York Advertising Club's bimonthly meetup to talk about what they do and how they do it: New York ad sales director Tim Castelli; East Coast team manager for audio sales, Joe Anastasi; head of television sales Long Ellis; print ads account executive Tiffany Shen Miller; and consumer packaged goods team manager Sarah Carberry.

The general message was that Google's making big moves to bring its advertising strategy that's proven so successful on the Web--up-to-the-minute, uber-targeted advertisments that give advertisers access to detailed analytics, and the ability to cater to both major brands and tiny businesses--to more traditional platforms like print, television, and radio, and that ad agencies should pay attention. The audience likely left the offices either fired up or terrified.

Somewhat ironically, despite the large number of ad industry professionals in attendance, Google's proposed acquisition of online ad firm DoubleClick never came up.

New York ad sales director Castelli told the audience that Google's prime advantage is that it can connect a marketer to a consumer "at that moment of relevance." Not only is targeting niche audiences more necessary than ever, but so is streamlining a process that (according to Google) has been largely unchanged in traditional media for decades.

With television ads, for example, Ellis explained that Google aims to "take the benefits of online and move them to the television world...(which) means measurement and accountability and optimization." Google already has a partnership with EchoStar to sell advertisements on the Dish satellite network, and will soon be launching a partnership with metrics giant Nielsen to gather more specific demographic details. In about three weeks, Ellis said, Google television ads will allow for program targeting.

Likewise, in radio, Google also believes it can revitalize an industry that some critics have declared moribund in the face of new media. "Google is just re-engineering the offline space," audio sales manager Anastasi said. "After your ads start running, you can go online and you can see when your spots are running," he explained as he talked about how Google could revolutionize the efficiency levels of the radio ad market. "You can get that air check literally seconds after it runs. You can change that copy in less than 24 hours."

On the print ads side, it's more about restructuring a musty business. Google hopes to drive targeting and efficiency by providing "a single Web interface where you can go and research available inventory across multiple publications, and make that buy online, and track and plan and do everything within our system," Shen Miller said.

Web video advertising, which Carberry discussed, was the only truly "online" market niche that was talked about Monday evening. Carberry spoke less about how Google would revolutionize the industry--after all, Web video ads are quite new to begin with--and more about how its YouTube property would be ideal territory for advertisers looking to reach a truly media-savvy audience. "(Being) able to dive into that community where people are so responsive to seeing their video messages," she said, will be a gold mine.

What's next? First off, there's mobile advertising, something that none of the Googlers present really talked much about. Mostly it's because the Android mobile operating system is still hush-hush. But it's also because the industry's not yet mature overall, Derek Kuhl said, and a lot of things have to be decided. "None of us know" what the monetization models could be, he admitted.

Then there's social media. An audience member asked Castelli what he thought the "next big thing" in advertising would be, and the Google sales director responded that he thought it would be the likes of Facebook and MySpace, which have heretofore struggled with monetization. The most high-profile entry in the field, Facebook's Social Ads, has been considered as controversial as it is innovative. "The social community aspect of the Web is something that's not going anywhere," Castelli said, and suggested that Google may delve into social advertising somewhere down the road.

Google does have access to a whole lot of eyes and ears with the impending OpenSocial program, after all.

But overall, despite its successes, Google was still largely pitching to the agency professionals in the audience and helping to sharpen its image among the Madison Avenue crowd--not scare them off. "The future (for Google advertising) is bright only because it's a partnership with ad agencies, and it's a platform to make them smarter," Ellis said.

"Every meeting I'm in with an agency, I learn more than I could ever give," Kuhl said. "The planners and the agencies are just fascinating people. I learn from them every time."

CHICAGO--One of the predictions in the lead-up to this weekend's Second Life Community Convention here has focused on the potential for lots of talk about organization.

There are plenty of critics who claim, however erroneously, that Second Life is a mess both structurally and technologically. And Linden Lab's decentralized and laissez-faire approach to the largely user-created virtual world, it could be argued, has allowed its identity to be shaped by its most prominent and press-worthy residents--who are, on occasion, blowing up buildings, stealing identities, and barraging lectures with oversized flying man-parts.

We won't really know until tonight at the earliest (more likely tomorrow) if there is indeed focused discussion about an evolution toward more order for Second Life. But one announcement timed in conjunction with the convention has hinted toward a "yes": the launch of the Virtual World Radio Network, which aims to be a hub for Second Life news and financial information as well as cultural programming. A live stream is available both in-world--the VWRN is giving free virtual radios to interested residents--as well as over the Web.

"The need for a truly professional, state-of-the-art media operation in Second Life has become apparent by the sheer number of unconnected blogs, podcasts, and other random bits of information in SL," a VWRN press release said.

Sounds like they have order on the brain.

The VWRN is not an official Linden Lab creation, but it's a positive sign to see that residents of Second Life are also catching onto some of the tactics that could help the virtual world move into maturity.