Cute Girl In T-Shirt Will Shill For Dollars

TechCrunch pointed me to GirlInYourShirt, a site that offers up the promotional services on one cute young woman who, for $75, will spend the day in your company t-shirt, posting vlogs, blogs and tweets all about you and your services.

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Is this the next wave of DIY PR?  Perhaps.  I guess the question is whether or not she has that much of an audience to begin with.  If not, it is unlikely to get much interest from promoters around the globe.

TechCrunch SO Wrong on TV Ads

Today on TechCrunch Erick Schonfeld explored what he believes will be the answer to save TV advertising:

“We have a long way to go, but it boils down to two things: 1) replacing 30-second commercials on TV with relevant ad overlays that pop up at exactly the right moment during a show, and 2) automating the buying, creation and placement of TV ads to make it more like buying search ads.”

Maybe because this is coming from TechCrunch or maybe because Erick doesn’t really watch TV but what is being completely overlooked in this piece is the viewer.

Overlay ads suck for the viewer.  Constantly having the flow of your show being interrupted by what amounts to pop-up ads sounds like the thing that would finally get me to turn of my TV for good.  I mean, those little station bugs are bad enough, and when they’re animated it’s downright infuriating.

As for the “clickable” images, why would I want to be clicking on stuff and being directed to other sites while I’m watch TV?  Sure, for the seriously ADD it might solve some problems but for the average viewer this is just another distraction.

I realize that advertisers are going to have to find a way to advertise but I really don’t think constantly covering 1/3 of my screen with associative advertising is going to be the solution.

Bloggers V. News Sites

On Publishing2.0 There is a look at the way TechCrunch, Digg and the NYT each decide to “publish” the news on their websites.

TechCrunch is a tradition blog in that you will always see things with the newest post on top.  Digg is similar but it also allows you to reorganize by number of “diggs.”  Then there is the NYT:

“Here’s the problem — if you visit the New York Times throughout the day, and no important news has broken, the homepage remains largely unchanged, static, like a print newspaper.

Organizing news by importance as the default makes sense when you’re only delivering the news once a day (and the “default” is all you get). But when news publishing is continuous, it’s not the best way to server frequent news consumers.”

It seems so obvious from this side of the monitor…

YouTube Turns 3

Wired points out that YouTube made it’s appearance on the scene only three short years ago.  Amazing to think it has been such a brief period of time:

“The video-sharing site, founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, has, in three short years, become the third-most-visited website worldwide, trailing only Yahoo and YouTube’s parent company, Google.

With its slogan — “Broadcast yourself” — sounding a clarion call to exhibitionists the world over, YouTube was an instant hit, encouraging individuals to submit not only their personal videos but movie and TV clips, and music videos as well.”

Of course, YouTube has become much more than anyone ever imagined.  TechCrunch has a nice look at what’s ahead for the internet titan, including:

“YouTube wants to be everywhere. It will continue to distribute its videos beyond the Web browser to mobile devices and large, flat-screen TVs in the living room.”

Yahoo Tries to Block Pirate Bay

TechCrunch has a look at the attempts of Yahoo to block folks who are searching for the infamous bittorent site, PirateBay.

When I tried to search for it myself I received NO direct links to the site on Yahoo.

However, when I did the same search on Google, the Pirate Bay was the top hit.

Not sure what Yahoo is hoping to accomplish from this effort aside from confirming that they are not really competing with Google in terms of comprehensive search.  It is certainly not illegal to search for the site, nor is it illegal for Yahoo to provide the link.

This is a very scary prelude to what might come as more sites we consider trustworthy turn out to be making a lot of censoring decisions without your input.

Pro Sports, Time to Step Up to the Plate

A number of years ago, around the time of the first dot-boom, there was a site that let regular folks “broadcast” live sporting events over the internet.  Basically, you tuned into the sporting event on TV, killled your volume and turned up your computer to the novice announcer of your choice.

Now, one can argue just how many novices out there are going to be better than the ones the networks are paying, but it was a totally cool idea.  So cool, it was shut down swiftly by either the MLB or NFL (I think) for violating their copyrights.

Now there is a new site, YouCastr (complete with the obligatory web2.0 misspelling) that will allow you to do the very same thing.

The TechCrunch post doesn’t mention anything about deals being struck with the major leaguers so it will be interesting to see if YouCastr makes it out of beta.

This is another (yup, another) example of big corporations potentially missing out of huge opportunities to spread their fan base in a misguided attempt to protect their “ownership” of the game.  Kinda makes you wonder just how much baseball is America’s Sport if the MLB shuts down regular folks attempting to share their love while it happens live.