Webware

So either Jon Stewart is really on to something with his mad-as-hell crusade against financial hypocrisy and stupidity, or there are a lot of unemployed people watching Comedy Central clips to pass the time.

Either way, an on-air freakout by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli may have been one of the best things to happen to Comedy Central in months: Fake-news pundits Stewart (of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart") and Stephen Colbert (of "The Colbert Report") have seen traffic to their Web sites and online video clips soar after the two went on mocking vendettas against Santelli, fellow CNBC personality Jim Cramer, and the NBC Universal-owned business network in general.

Traffic to the shows' Web sites has been at its highest of the year so far in the past week, at over 60 percent their weekly average for 2009. ComedyCentral.com, which hosts video clips of both programs, also had its best traffic of the year, and the digital version of a viciously funny clip called "CNBC Gives Financial Advice" logged over 1.3 million views in a week, the sort of numbers usually reserved for grainy videos of cats behaving unnaturally.

Here's the back story: Santelli was supposed to appear on "The Daily Show" after his tirade about the federal government's economic bailout, but backed out abruptly. That's when Stewart and Colbert--but especially Stewart--turned up the heat. Stewart went on the aforementioned anti-CNBC rant on March 5, putting "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer squarely in his crosshairs. Cramer appeared on "The Colbert Report" the following night.

Now, Cramer is scheduled to make a "Daily Show" appearance on Thursday night.

Stewart and Colbert have been two of the most visible figures in cable television's slow crawl onto the Web. Not only are they wildly popular with young and tech-savvy audiences, but the segmented format of their talk shows lends itself well to being split into short clips and swapped via video-sharing sites, which meant that unauthorized clips of the two were some of YouTube's earliest hits. That's what indirectly led to Comedy Central parent company Viacom's massive copyright lawsuit against YouTube owner Google.

Later on, the full archives of both shows were made available on Comedy Central's Web site, and recent episodes are available in full on Hulu (as well as iTunes and Xbox Live).

Colbert, who started out as a commentator on "The Daily Show" before spinning off his blowhard persona into his own talk show, also owes a big chunk of his notoriety to the Web. Video of C-SPAN's coverage of the White House Press Correspondents' dinner three years ago, in which Colbert performed a shockingly blunt comedy routine that skewered then-President George W. Bush, was a huge hit on the Web among those who wouldn't have considered actually watching C-SPAN in the first place.

Last year, Colbert was honored by the annual Webby Awards as "Person of the Year." Take that, nonbelievers!

A new kind of video advertising is coming to MySpace.

The company has partnered with a video advertising company, Auditude, and Viacom's MTV Networks division, to bring Auditude's video ads to MTV content on the News Corp.-owned social network's MySpaceTV video hub.

Here's how Auditude works: it can detect MTV Networks content if either MTVN itself or a MySpace user uploads it, and then it implements both targeted ads and "attribution ads," which provide data about the source of the programming. (For example: an "attribution ad" for Comedy Central talk show The Colbert Report could include information about when the program is broadcast on-air.)

Right now, according to a joint release, Auditude already has four years' worth of 100 television channels indexed in its database, plus 250 million standalone videos.

"As one of the leading providers of online video in the world, we give our fans the power not only to consume our content, but also to share and interact with it across the Web," Mika Salmi, president of global digital media at MTV Networks, said in a release. "With Auditude's solution, we can continue to give users the freedom to take our content wherever they go online, while ensuring that we can monetize it as well."

This is a bit of a surprise coming from Viacom, which sued Google's YouTube over the distribution of pirated content. MySpace has reason to feel jilted by YouTube, too--it's no secret that News Corp. had been interested in acquiring YouTube, which can credit a big part of its rise to embedded videos on MySpace profiles, before Google outbid it.

Auditude says that its technology is compatible with YouTube, as well as Veoh, AOL Video, Dailymotion, and others.

But despite Viacom's beef with YouTube, content from MTV Networks can be viewed on a number of partner sites, like Imeem and Veoh, and episodes of Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report are available on Hulu, the joint video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.

MTV Networks also recently launched MTVMusic.com, a compendium of the longstanding pop-culture brand's music videos.

(Credit: MTV)

Once the global leader in youth culture, MTV's attempts to address the social-networking craze have seemed a little puzzling sometimes (the Twittering Moon Man?) But now we've seen another piece of the entertainment brand's puzzle: Backchannel, a play-while-you watch game that's one part chat room, one part Digg, and one part Mystery Science Theater with a Mean Girls twist.

It's debuting on Monday night with that evening's episode of wildly popular reality-soap The Hills.

Here's how Backchannel works: Watch the show (for now, only The Hills is on Backchannel, but later this fall it will be accompanying the network's new reality show about Paris Hilton picking a new best friend), join a "room" of other viewers while you're watching, and offer snarky or insightful one-liners that appear on the screen in a sort of tag cloud. Click on the ones you like, and they'll accumulate points. You'll receive points from the votes on your own one-liners, as well as submissions you voted on that became especially popular. And, yes, it extends through commercials, too.

In a press conference Wednesday, MTV's digital team referred to Backchannel, developed by New York-based gaming firm Area/Code, as "competitive chat." When you think about it, it's a little bit like competitive Twittering.

Executives said the formation of the game was heavily influenced by MTV's video game Rock Band, which added a new dimension to many bands and artists that were well over 20 years past their heyday.

"Something that arguably has diminishing value over time actually becomes more valuable over time," Area/Code's Kevin Slavin explained. "If Rock Band is doing that for music, what can do that for television?"

But Backchannel has bigger implications for what MTV has in store when it comes to social networking. Profiles for Backchannel are compatible with Flux, the from its acquisition of start-up Tagworld and debuted last year. Popular comments from Backchannel, aggregated on the Web site, will also be displayed on reruns of the show, much like MTV's sister channel VH1's Pop Up Video show from the 1990s.

Additionally, while current incentives for playing are limited to street cred and "badges" on your profile, MTV may be stepping this up a notch. Executives hinted during the press conference that down the road, accumulated gaming points may become a virtual currency that can be exchanged for real prizes--memorabilia, products featured on the show, or whatever.

Something like Backchannel clearly isn't applicable to shows with a "deep" fandom like Lost or Heroes, but I'll admit it--it's perfect for trashing Heidi's plastic surgery, Whitney's weird outfits, and Audrina's perpetually unsound grammar. Brush up on your "OMG" and "fugly," and get ready to unleash your inner Perez Hilton.

MTV might've strayed away from music these days--My Super Sweet Sixteen, anyone?--but the entertainment mainstay's latest project aims to both bring it back to its roots and propel it into the social Web. Ambitious, yes.

'The Hills': Now telling you what you want to listen to.

(Credit: MTV)

It's called "Soundtrack," and it's an "interactive music guide for TV." If you're watching a heated moment of cattiness between Lauren and Audrina on The Hills and are dying to know what song's playing in the background, you can log on and find out exactly what it was. Then you can purchase the MP3, thanks to MTV's partnership with music service Rhapsody, as well as look up more soundtrack information from past programming. You can, of course, network with other members--this is powered by Flux, the social-networking technology that MTV Networks parent company Viacom built when it acquired a start-up called Tagworld.

Radio stations have been doing the "look up a song" gimmick for years, which makes it not particularly jaw-dropping for MTV to institute the same thing. But it does tap into a host of extremely popular and influential cable shows (for better or for worse) and cross-promotion on TV will likely boost traffic. Plus, it should be said that television soundtracks have become a crucial spot for music discovery--remember when The O.C. propelled California indie-pop bands to the heights of coolness a few years ago?

But MTV also hopes that Soundtrack, which will be worked into the main MTV.com site soon, will become an important promotional hub. There's a ranking of the top songs and artists--and it's a lot more obscure than iTunes or MTV's own TRL charts--and indie bands can create profiles to amass fans.

The indie band promotion may remind you a bit of PureVolume, which thrived for a while as a music promotion and discovery site before MySpace and an army of popular music blogs far surpassed it in influence. And MTV, too, has heretofore been a series of misses in the Web 2.0 space: Viacom lost out to News Corp. in the bidding for MySpace, which had fast become the Web's center for finding new music. The company also failed to jump on the music blog trend, which start-up Buzznet has quickly been amassing. The Twittering Moon Man didn't do much either.

Soundtrack, however, is MTV's most targeted and relevant Web 2.0 effort yet, and will likely be an appreciated attempt to bring at least some of the network's focus back to music. Considering how many people watch The Hills, it could make a difference.

Let's also hope MTV somehow ties Soundtrack into its most shining success of the digital age: video game Rock Band.

News Corp.'s MySpace and Viacom's MTV are partnering again, and this time it's on a weekly TV show. But the program, a countdown show called MySpace Chart, will only air on the U.K. network MTV Two (the equivalent of the U.S. MTV2 channel) and there are no plans yet to bring the show stateside, an MTV Networks representative told CNET News.com.

Members of the social network, which initially gained traction as a way for independent music artists to gain buzz, will vote on select music videos each week that will then be showcased in the hour-long MTV Two show. MySpace Chart premieres on the evening of March 16; a week earlier, pages on MySpace and MTV Two will go live to kick off voting.

MTV parent company Viacom does have its own social-networking project, the "distributed" service called Flux. But partnering with MySpace can give them access to the massive site's audience. "The audience for MTV Two and MySpace are incredibly similar," Philip O'Ferrall, vice president of digital media for MTV Networks' U.K. and Ireland region, said in a statement. "Not only are they both incredibly passionate about their music tastes but they are powerful advocates for the latest upcoming artists, which both MTV and MySpace have a history of showcasing."

Additionally, for MTV, it's a way to bolster the company's new-media credibility; for MySpace, it helps to solidify its role as a pop-culture hub as the market for social networking grows increasingly crowded. In the U.K., MySpace not only competes with Facebook but also with the more youth-oriented Bebo--which syndicates some MTV video content as part of its "Open Media" platform.

MySpace's U.K. arm already had collaborated with MTV in order to find a new anchor for its MTV News show. In the U.S., the two partnered for a series of "presidential dialogue" events leading up to the Super Tuesday primaries.

Flux, the social-networking initiative started by media giant Viacom, will officially support Google's OpenSocial standard. The developer site for Flux now says that OpenSocial implementation is "coming soon."

Flux, still in an early phase, was one of the few high-profile social networks that had not yet opted to partake in Google's developer standard. MySpace.com, Bebo, LinkedIn, and just about every other name in social media (except Facebook, which has opted to stick with its own developer platform, at least for now) had announced support for OpenSocial, and several have already invited developers to start hacking away. A source close to Flux told CNET News.com that Viacom had held off in part because of uncertainty over how secure the brand-new standard was in its earliest releases.

David Glazer, engineering director for OpenSocial at Google, said to CNET News.com on Thursday that version 0.6 of OpenSocial's application programming interface (API) specification contained large improvements over version 0.5, and that version 0.7, which was released to developers on February 6, contained additional incremental security upgrades.

Viacom first announced Flux in September as a platform for adding interoperable social-networking features to both Viacom-owned and external sites. Since then, it's been gradually rolled out to many MTV Networks (a subsidiary of Viacom) sites as the longtime pop culture influencer works to stay relevant in the digital age.

As "Super Tuesday" on February 5 approaches, MTV and MySpace.com have announced the final installment of their ongoing "presidential dialogue" series. Co-presented by the Associated Press, the event will take place at 6 p.m. EST on Saturday, February 2; all candidates from both parties have been invited to participate, and so far, Democratic contender Hillary Clinton and Republican candidate Mike Huckabee have confirmed that they will be part of it.

The remaining presidential candidates--Democrats Barack Obama and John Edwards, and Republicans John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani--have been invited but have not yet confirmed whether they will attend. McCain, Edwards, and Obama have already participated in previous MySpace-MTV dialogues.

The Viacom-owned MTV and the News Corp.-owned MySpace aim to make this the "most publicly accessible and interactive presidential candidate event in history," according to a release from the two companies. The event will be broadcast live on MTV, MTV2, and the Latino-geared MTV Tres, as well as shown in part on the college network MTVU, streamed live on MTV Mobile, MySpace's election site, MTV's Choose or Lose politics site, and the Associated Press Online Video Network. It will be translated into Spanish for La Vibra, and broadcast on XM Satellite Radio, AP Radio, and MTV Radio. In addition, the event will be broadcast on MTV's giant high-definition TV screen in New York's Times Square.

As with past installments of the presidential dialogue series, questions for the candidates will be gathered not only from the live audience (this time it will be in MTV's Times Square studio), the Choose or Lose Web site, and MySpace's MySpaceIM instant messaging client. Real-time polling will be conducted through Flektor, the social-media start-up that MySpace parent company Fox Interactive Media purchased last year.

Both MTV and MySpace have been particularly visible in youth voting initiatives for the 2008 campaign season. MTV has launched a citizen journalism campaign, and MySpace has been polling young voters as a way to gather data and spread awareness.

The shaky relationship between NBC Universal and YouTube has collapsed once again, as an NBC representative confirmed on Monday that the network has decided to stop posting promotional clips on the video-sharing site.

According to the representative, NBC Universal pulled out of the deal on Friday to support the upcoming launch of Hulu.com, the Internet video service founded by NBC and News Corp. that could compete for eyeballs with Google's YouTube. A test version of Hulu, which will stream full-length TV shows, is expected to make its debut within the next two weeks.

The breakup is important because it shows that some of YouTube's best-known former partners are satisfied to distribute their shows online themselves.

"NBC informed us on Friday that they were taking down their branded channel and clips," Ricardo Reyes, a YouTube spokesman, said in an e-mail. "Our relationship with NBC was a YouTube success story, so we hope NBC decides to post more original content and stay engaged with our users."

NBC Universal's first dealing with YouTube occurred in 2005 in what turned out to be a watershed moment for YouTube and Web video. Unauthorized clips from the show Saturday Night Live began appearing on the video-sharing site and helped generate publicity and big traffic.

At first, NBC Universal demanded that YouTube remove the clips, citing copyright laws. Then, the entertainment powerhouse reversed its decision. NBC cut a deal whereby it agreed to post promotional clips of some of its shows on YouTube. As many have pointed out, it was really NBC and those SNL clips that helped YouTube build a name for itself with the mainstream. At the same time, YouTube helped introduce SNL to a new generation of fans.

Back then, nearly everyone said NBC Universal was smart to cut a deal. Analysts were predicting that YouTube could one day be the gateway for all Internet video. The site would be a hub where millions looked for user-generated clips, full-length TV shows and perhaps one day feature films.

But the number of pirated clips on YouTube--users recording a favorite TV show or movie and posting the copy to the site--angered many media executives. To many in Hollywood, Google dragged its feet when it came to preventing piracy. The issue came to a head earlier this year when Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google for copyright violations.

At the same time, Viacom and NBC started asking whether they really needed YouTube. The companies ratcheted up efforts to distribute video through their own sites and other Web portals.

Anyone wishing to watch an episode of Heroes can go to iTunes, NBC.com and soon Hulu.com. Fans of the Viacom-owned comedy series The Daily Show can just log on to that show's site.

So did Google blow it by playing hardball with the content creators? Did it push too hard when it should have paid the fees the big media guys wanted? This way it could have made those companies dependent on the traffic generated by YouTube and also hooked people on finding their favorite TV shows on the site. It might have been tougher to leave YouTube then.

But Google probably didn't have much of a choice. Such a scenario would have meant that Google would have emerged as a powerful gatekeeper. Google would have become to video what iTunes has become to music, and the TV and film industries are resolved not to follow the same path as the record labels. It was probably only a matter of time before NBC and others struck out on their own.

What this means for the near future is that YouTube, with far less professionally crafted content on the site, is going to compete for eyeballs with the likes of NBC and Viacom as well as a legion of other video plays cropping up seemingly every day.

In the coming months, as YouTube purges its site of more and more copyright content, we'll learn the real value of true user-generated content.

Updated 12:30 p.m. PT

A coalition of major media and technology companies that notably does not include Google appears to be getting serious about copyright on the Internet.

A who's who of media companies--CBS, News Corp.'s Fox Entertainment Group, NBC Universal, Viacom, and Disney--as well as Microsoft and the News Corp.-owned MySpace, along with video-sharing sites Dailymotion and Veoh Networks released a set of guidelines Thursday designed to halt online piracy.

Notably absent from the list is Google, which unveiled filtering technology for its YouTube video-sharing site on Monday. Sources familiar with the coalition plan say Google was involved in the talks at one point, but backed out shortly before making its own announcement. Disney and Microsoft initiated the effort, multiple sources said.

"Initially Disney reached out directly to us," Veoh Networks CEO Steve Mitgang said in an interview with CNET News.com.

In response to questions, Google released a statement from YouTube Engineering Director Jeremy Doig: "We appreciate ideas from the various media companies on effective content identification technologies. We're glad that they recognize the need to cooperate on these issues, and we'll keep working with them to refine our industry-leading tools."

A YouTube spokesman who asked not to be named says Google had talked to Disney about the guidelines but Google and YouTube executives decided not to join the alliance because they were worried that creating "industry-wide mandates" would stifle innovation.

A source close to the deal hinted that the longstanding billion-dollar lawsuit between Viacom and Google over copyrighted content on YouTube may have played a role in Google's decision to back out, citing the possibility that it could have affected how the litigation would unfold. And another source familiar with the alliance finds fault with the fact that Google's new filtering system doesn't actually block infringing content from being posted, but supposedly removes it from the site within minutes. The media group's guidelines call for "blocking infringing uploads before they are made available to the public.

"It's unprecedented that these disparate companies have come together," the source says. "It's a real loss that Google isn't a part of this."

The companies expect to implement the guidelines before the end of the year, another source at one of the companies says. It hasn't been made clear whether this will mean we'll be seeing more announcements and partnerships--or more specifically, whether the two video-sharing platforms involved in the alliance, Veoh and DailyMotion, will become more attractive business partners for the major media and technology companies involved.

"Our goal is to be a vital partner for premium independent and individual producers. We're already a partner to CBS," Veoh's Mitgang said, referring to the company's new online video-sharing network. "We are actively working with everybody on the list regarding this."

Representatives from multiple companies involved in the initiative emphasized that it's not a closed partnership and that other corporations may be introduced into it as well--provided they are willing to adhere to and support the guidelines.

"The principles acknowledge a collective respect for protecting copyrights and recognize that filtering technologies must be effective and are only a part of what is necessary to achieve this goal," a joint news release said.

The guidelines also call for companies to: balance the legitimate "fair use" rights for using copyrighted material, promptly address claims that content was blocked in error, and upgrade technology "when commercially reasonable."

Protecting fair use--which allows people to post excerpts of copyright content and use content for educational purposes and for parody--is important, says Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, which monitors copyright issues online.

Boehm criticized Google for not joining the effort. "Google is continuing to play hard ball," he says. "They are going to use their market share and economic power to just hold off any kind of reform or compromise."

Several sources say plans have been made for representatives from some members of the new alliance--though it's not yet clear which companies--to head to Washington, D.C. soon to meet with members of Congress on the matter. Rather than move to encourage more legislation, it's to educate lawmakers on the issues and show them that occasionally-sparring media and technology companies can handle this on their own.

A full list of the principles involved in this new set of guidelines, which emphasize high-tech filtering, quick removal of pirated content, and promotion of infringement-free digital content, are publicly available at the new site UGCPrinciples.com.

The news was originally reported by the Wall Street Journal earlier on Thursday.

With contributions from CNET News.com's Elinor Mills.