Ajax Girl

The strike by the Writers Guild of America continues to drag on, with the writers this week rejecting a new proposal from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that offered $130m in additional compensation to writers.

The sticking point continues to be compensation for online sales and revenue, with the Writers Guild claiming that the new offer of $250 for a year’s reuse of an hour long program streamed on the Web was not enough when compared to the normal $20,000 payment made per year for re-runs of a program.

Further talks between both parties are set to resume this week, but unless one party backs down from its current position the strike will go on over Christmas and into the new year.

The immediate effect of the strike saw a number of topical daily talk shows go off air, including NBC’s Tonight Show and Late Night, CBS’ Late Show and Late, Late Show and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The networks had stockpiled scripted drama and comedy shows prior to the strike, but as the strike drags on these stocks are running out. Viewers in the United States won’t be presented with static, but they will soon be presented with reruns and cheap to produce reality TV shows and gameshows as the networks scramble to fill the gaps.

Younger audiences are already switching off TV, with various surveys indicating that a growing number of viewers prefer the internet over television. Consider that during the last Writers Strike in 1988 television lost roughly 10% of its audience after the strike, and at a time where there was fewer alternatives for entertainment. Today a viewing audience presented with reruns and reality TV has alternatives, and the internet will be the number one alternative; a switch away from TV today could be as big or even bigger than it was in 1988 and would benefit nearly every part of the long tail of online content providers.

Here’s a quick list of TV shows that will go off air in the coming months. Even if the Writers go back to work tomorrow the networks have already started firing staff so it will take time now to re-hire staff resulting in a delay in restarting production.

House (FOX): three episodes left scheduled for January
Samantha Who? (ABC): six episodes left
Family Guy (FOX): mix of new episodes and repeats through January
CSI x 3, NCIS, Criminal Minds, Without a Trace and Cold Case (CBS): four or less episodes each
Ugly Betty, Pushing Daisies and Grey’s Anatomy (ABC): two episodes left
Desperate Housewives (ABC): last episode to be shown Sunday
The Office (NBC): 0
Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, Two And a Half Men, Rules of Engagement: 0
24 (FOX): postponed indefinitely

See our previous coverage here, here and here.

(image CC via myyearofnewthings on Flickr, list data via AP)

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/193709175/

Google is usually fairly tight lipped about future product releases. But they were surprisingly revealing about upcoming plans for Google Apps at an event in Ann Arbor earlier this week. Blogger Andrew Miller took some great notes from a presentation by Googler Scott Johnston, the VP of Product Development at wiki startup Jot prior to their acquisition by Google a little over a year ago.

First, Google Sites, an evolution of Google Page Creator, will launch in 2008. Google Sites will be based on JotSpot collaboration tools and will allow businesses to create intranets, project management tracking, extranets and other custom sites.

We should also expect Google Docs, Gmail and Calendar to soon work offline via Google Gears. This has been widely predicted, but it’s good to see it coming more formally from Google (note that Zoho, a Google Docs competitor, already has offline functionality via Google Gears).

Some of the other stuff is more speculative, but worth the read (pivot tables on Google Spreadsheets? I doubt it).

* Google Sites: Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration.

* Will users be able to edit docs, spreadsheets and presentation offline? Scott’s answer was yes, and that the Google Gears plugin would handle the offline work. In addition, Google Gears support is in the works for Gmail and Google Calendar.

* What happens when somebody edits a document offline at the same time another user is editing the online version? The same algorithm that reconciles simultaneous editing will apply here when the offline version is merged back into the online version. Changes will be versioned the same way, so basically in chronological order.

* Will Google docs have OCR capabilities for importing .pdfs or other graphical files? Not yet, but perhaps someday. Scott couldn’t comment on the “roadmap” for future enhancements. However, the collaborative Google Sites (based on JotSpot) will allow for upload and storage of any file type.

* Will GrandCentral be integrated into Google Apps? If so, when? Again, Scott didn’t comment on the timing but said they are working on it and it is a “huge priority” for them.

* Will Google Spreadsheets ever have advanced features like pivot tables, macros or offline database integrations? (This was actually my question) Scott said they are constantly trying to find the balance between speed and utility. It will never be a heavy duty analytics program because that would be too heavy and bulky for the average user.

* Will Google Apps support video conferencing in addition to Google Talk and Chat? Scott’s answer, “Not yet”. I got the impression from his body language that it’ll come someday, but nothing more was said.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/193659747/

An interesting article over at the NY Times details the failure of Coca-Cola to follow through on its initial commitment as a Facebook partner in Beacon. Coke had been named as a “Landmark Partner” in Beacon along with Verizon and Blockbuster when Facebook announced Beacon November 6.

Notably Coca-Cola didn’t realize that Beacon wouldn’t be opt-in, and this was key in their withdrawal of support, and continued absence from the program:

“We have adopted a bit of a ‘wait and see’ as far as what we are going to do with Beacon because we are not sure how consumers are going to respond,” said Carol Kruse, Coke’s vice president of global interactive marketing, this morning..“I, like you, certainly understood that it would be opt-in. That’s what I heard before as well as what I heard on the 6th.”

As we know Facebook has now flipped on Beacon, switching to an opt-in model after widespread criticism from users and groups including Moveon.org. The evolving story though is how Facebook got to this point, particularly given key partners were led to believe that the program was opt-in, suggesting that someone, or something caused Facebook to switch to an opt-out model at the 11th hour.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Can’t see the video? Click here

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/193455376/

NASA has relaunched their site tonight as NASA 5.0, in celebration of their 50th anniversary next year. It is the beginning of many web 2.0 features to come for NASA.

Sep Seyedi told us that “of interest to you is the fact that the new interface fully uses the script.aculo.us and prototype Javascript frameworks for its implementation. It was a pretty challenging implementation but got through it.”

The new site features:

• Transitions: Lots of animations in drop downs and trees
• Accordion: Rollover news items
• New topic based navigation
• Calendar component
• Tag cloud (now that IS Web 2.0
• Bookmarking: My NASA and support for Digg, Del.icio.us, and more
• Comments and polls throughout
• Polls
• Image gallery

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/193347843/nasa-relaunches-50-with-prototype-and-scriptaculous