Advertising Age - MediaWorks - MTV’s Niches: From Headbangers to Bible-Thumpers: someone needs to write a peanut-butter manifesto over at Viacom. Why can’t a company try to focus on making a core business amazing rather than chasing transient markets with reckless abandon? Guys: every media company tried that. There is a reason they don’t anymore. Of course, its cyclic and it’ll happen again. Will they never learn?

On the Internet, everybody knows you’re a dog. - By Michael Kinsley - Slate Magazine: uh, hi. JenniCam was from the mid nineties. CUSEEME was hugely active in 2000 or so, with lots of exhibitionism. Web-caming? Try 1998, when residential broadband first hit the scene. NetMeeting communities were HUGE and still are. This is not new, you just have a pretty quippy headline on it.

BitTorrent, everyone’s favorite, misunderstood protocol has inked deals with Paramount, 20th Centruy Fox, Lions Gate, Palm Pictures and Kadokawa Pictures. And a ton of cable companies including G4, Starz and Viacom’s properties.

Why is this important? This holiday season has been huge for HD content. Massive. You couldn’t read a Black Friday ad without stumbling across a HD plasma going for less than $1,000 bucks. Living rooms across America are going to be full of glorious 16×9 screens owned by people who haven’t a clue what to do with them. But that isn’t the point. The point is that these screens now have digital inputs and resolution high enough to be agnostic to the origination of content.

That being so, and also being that every device aimed at that HDMI input now is in a sense a functioning computer, the middle-man of the 5 inch disc likewise needs to be removed. This of course provided that the transition to pure digital doesn’t make people shoot themselves in the foot with the DRM bullets. Anyhow, digital downloads, as we know, depend on bandwidth. Bandwidth is expensive, subject to scaling issues and its single-point origination (as with iTunes, etc) is incongruent with what the web can and should do.

Enter BitTorrent. I’ve been playing with Democracy lately, and its combination of direct download and torrents is absolutely great. Its seamless and transparent to the user and does not require any explanation of what is going on in the back. The nicest thing is, with HD content coming in at near 2 to 3 gigabytes or more, it nicely distributes the bandwidth between clients. The same situation of course looks to be true with the Venice project.

What we’re facing now is not a concern about content, but about the methods to deliver the content. BitTorrent is the logical answer, and as a company, it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with.

Platial Launches TourMapper: More MySpace Maps - Mashable!: Yet Another Tour Mapper. Why is Panic at the Disco always doing these? No selective ability?

Orgoo Releases oTxt - Free SMS Messaging for MySpace - Mashable!: spam factory… party of one!

Peekvid: MOVIES - Watch Videos Online!: this is the most not-legal thing I’ve seen in a quite a long while, and for that I applaud it.

Digg Sends Cease and Desist to DiggDot.us - Mashable!:
“Unfortunately, Digg users might not hear about the name change: the story on Digg has been buried as “lame” (this is often the result of infighting between Digg users, rather than a comment on the quality of the story).” - sooner or later, the best intentions are subject to territorial pissings.