An update to yesterday’s entry… In a 3-2 vote, the college trustees decided to eliminate the journalism programs for both Ventura College and Oxnard College for the upcoming school year. The two campus newspapers, the Ventura College Press and Campus Observer, will be closed. (This will be the first time VC hasn’t had a paper since 1925.) Finally, my mom will be laid off.
My Mom Fights to Save Community College Journalism
My mom, Toni Allen, is the head of the journalism department for Oxnard College. Like me, she’s never afraid of stirring up controversy in the face of stupidity. For me, it’s usually bad copyright laws and misguided corporations; for her, it’s censorship of the student press and ignorant college administrators.
Continue reading “My Mom Fights to Save Community College Journalism”
Yahoo's Contextual Ads in the Wild
So, I think I have a scoop. I’ve discovered that Yahoo is very quietly testing their new contextual advertising program for blogs and other small publishers, a la Google Adsense.
Ken Rudman is a product manager at Yahoo-owned Overture, and his blog features contextual Overture ads throughout. His homepage shows the vertical two-ad format, monthly archives show a three-ad horizontal format, and individual entries show another variation of the horizontal format. The ads have decent relevancy, especially considering its early state.
The Javascript that generates the ad IFrame is hosted on Overture’s server. The domain name refers to “ypn,” which might be an acronym for the ad program… Yahoo Publishing Network, maybe?
I haven’t spoken to Ken yet, but I’m assuming that only Yahoo employees are able to test the ads for now. If you find any other sites testing them, please let me know.
Update: As Phil points out, some of the ads aren’t very relevant.
March 8, 2005: The program will be called the Yahoo! Publisher Network. I was close! Silicon Valley Watcher independently confirms that YPN is Yahoo’s response to Google Adsense. No word on the launch date yet, but the markets have responded positively to the Yahoo rumors.
Here’s another Yahoo employee blog with the same YPN ads (thanks, Rick). Oh, and anyone want to bet that their new “publishing tools” refers to a free hosted blog service that ties into their contextual ads? Brace yourselves, Blogger.
Hitchhiker's Guide Trailer
The new trailer for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is available on Amazon, but it’s low quality and streaming Flash. For me, it’s buffering constantly and basically unwatchable.
I found this much higher-quality Quicktime trailer, that seems to be a copy of the internal workprint with time signatures and “Do Not Duplicate” warning. Oh, well!
hhgttg_high.mov (7.8MB, Quicktime)
My bandwidth was already hammered this month, so you can thank Greg Knauss for hosting the video.
February 18, 2004: Here’s a much better copy of the official trailer, available for download.
Pirating the Oscar 2005 Screeners
Last year, I published some not-too-surprising research that revealed all but one Oscar-nominated film leaked onto the Internet. Let’s see if the industry’s evolving efforts to plug the leaks were any more effective this year.
Below is a list of every Oscar-nominated film, excluding foreign language and documentary categories, with the date of US theatrical release and the first date the industry screener was leaked to the Internet. The results? Out of 30 movies, all but five screener copies were leaked online by pirate groups.
How did those five movies manage to stay offline? For “House of Flying Daggers,” the retail DVD was leaked two months before the US theatrical release, bypassing the need for a screener release. For the others, I suspect that either a screener was never released for the film or that the screener was released after the official retail DVD. (In the case of “Phantom of the Opera,” maybe there was no demand.)
A few notes: Three screeners were originally leaked in VHS format, so I listed those dates first. (Note that all three were later leaked in DVD format, also.) Not surprisingly, almost every screener was leaked during the winter months leading up to award nominations. Also of interest, it looks like the screeners for “Hotel Rwanda” and “The Sea Inside” leaked onto the Internet before the film was even released in the United States.