Posted December 7th, 2006 by Scott
August 1, 1981 marked the beginning of an era known as music television (MTV). The first music video to air on MTV was by The Buggles, their 1979 hit song “Video Killed the Radio Star.” This video was the first of its kind and sparked a trend that drew a huge youth audience for the next two decades.
The idea of music videos being played on TV 24 hours a day is a fad that has slowly begun to fade out. Now cable and satellite channels airing 24 hour music television are provided to subscribers at additional costs. Macworld recently published an article stating that the UK record label Ninja Tune will launch a music video channel in the online world of Second Life.
With the introduction of music videos in SL, come new opportunities for advertising. If someone can watch music videos all day everyday for free, what’s to stop businesses from utilizing the channels for advertising? Pontiac recently sponsored a live concert on its own Motorati Island in the virtual world. The event was hosted by Jimmy Kimmel with a performance by Jay-Z. Is this the beginning of the end for music video? Probably not, but according to CIO Insight, it’s definitely video evolution.
Posted December 7th, 2006 by Char Lyn
For the past couple of years, Googling “Martin Luther King” would return the site MartinLutherKing-dot-org* as the top result due in part to a Google bomb by the site’s sponsor—the white supremacist organization Stormfront.org. This example and others like it have pushed educators to teach information literacy to help students refine and validate the search results they get on the Web.
On Nov. 19, an education blogger named Tom Hoffman decided to do something about it. He proposed Google bombing several other Martin Luther King sites to drive MartinLutherKing-dot-org off the first page of results, or at least below the fold of the first page. The next day, a few notable bloggers, including Robert Scoble, picked up on Tom’s blog and added the Google bomb to theirs.
You can view Tom’s The Week in Review to see early results of his campaign. When writing this post, my search for “martin luther king” showed that MartinLutherKing-dot-org has already moved down to 4 on Google, 38 on Yahoo, 1 on MSN, and didn’t appear in the first 10 pages of results on Ask.com. But, it hasn’t even been two weeks, and it takes time to update search engines. I’ll be interested to check back in another week or two and see how the rankings have changed.
Most people recognize the Internet as the ultimate incarnation of the First Amendment’s right to freedom of speech. Perhaps Tom Hoffman’s exercise has shown us that the Internet can also be an expression of democracy. If enough people don’t like what they see, they can vote with the links in their blogs to change that all important popularity meter — the page rank.
* You may notice that I am intentionally not using the actual URL or linking to MartinLutherKing-dot-org in an effort not to promote the site.
** If you are interested in other sites that can help teach information literacy, see Alan November’s list of favorite “sites to validate” for educators.