That's a hugely big deal on any number of levels -- not least of which is the two men's very different positions on energy policy. We'll have more soon.

Late Update: Here's the reaction from a Republican Hill staffer friend of mine -- very sane good guy, but, you know, still a Republican ...

Dude:

The day Henry got into this race, this result was ordained.

The differences between the 2 are, as you mentioned, HUGE.

But, honestly, the real story here is Nancy Pelosi whacked John Dingell. She put a hit on him, and it was executed.

The rest of the story takes a back seat to that FACT.

For the moment, I'm still going with 'Holy Crap'.

"Shifting costs onto others, while striving to internalize benefits. Detroit chose lobbying, marketing wars, and low-cost hardball - to always and everywhere try to socialize costs and privatize benefits. Never was this truer than Detroit's lobbying against public transport throughout the 20th century. Why does public transport in the States suck? Because Detroit's lobbying machine doesn't."

FreeTrademarksForStartups.com: Free Trademarks For Startups @ErikJHeels

If your company is a bona fide startup, Erik will help you file a trademark application for free. He is up front about the fact that he is doing this to get your future paying business as well, which sounds entirely reasonable to me.

If you have a startup and need help evaluating your preferred trademarks and filing an application, go check Erik out.

Real Girls Media, founded by Kate Everett-Thorp, a WaldenVC venture partner and former president of marketing agency AKQA, raised a $6 million first round of funding two years ago. Among the sites it operates is DivineCaroline, which mixes user-gen and professional content around channels that range from relationships to travel to style. Release

Related

• Meredith Buys Health Marketing Firm Big Communications; Alerts Investors To $16M After-tax Charge
• Real Girls Media Network Gets $6 Million Funding

Check out the best business jobs in digital media. Go here for paidContent.org Job Board.

The depth and potential of the subscription (RSS) Web in which people can bring content to themselves rather than visiting websites has been held back by companies who heretofore have only used RSS to tease people. The hope is that they will click through to the company's portal website, where the eyeballs can be counted for advertising. This has been traditional media's downfall in the use of RSS, because the technology has advanced to the point where it's possible to serve and count ads in feeds.

Tech media and bloggers have been providing full feed RSS for years, having gone through the pro and con arguments long ago. Media companies didn't participate in this, because RSS for media has always been restricted to a marketing tool. I subscribe to 40 RSS feeds, and very few are partial text. I keep those in my reader only because I have to, but I very rarely click through to read the full text. I've long thought it was an insult to provide only partial text, but I've grown to believe it's much more than that. Those companies who provide only partial text feeds are shooting themselves in the foot, because on the Web, authority and relevance go to those who play the game the Media 2.0 way.

Broadcasting and Cable, for example, provides many feeds, but they are useless in terms of communicating information, which is what RSS was created to do. RSS isn't a manipulative marketing tool. It's an end unto itself, and until we start using it as such, we're going to miss the opportunities it offers.

The Guardian has opened the door, although only partially. It's not including images, and has decided that it will only offer full text on stories the paper feels it can legally distribute. The paper has also announced that it will begin running ads in the full text stories, which will be the big differentiator. Sooner or later, the paper will discover that it can also offer ads as items in the feeds, and then the real business model will be established.

The place-based distribution available through RSS is the future, folks. The mobile Web forces the issue, because browsing on a portable device offers virtually no business model, and the only question is who will get there first at the local level. This is another reason why we so strongly advocate a blog-based, continuous news model for local media. Its output is an RSS river of news, that plays well in the place-based distribution model.

Let me repeat: RSS is not a tool for driving traffic to your portal; it's a valuable way of communicating your products and services to an increasingly networked culture. Ignore it at your own peril.

(Originally posted in AR&D's Media 2.0 Intel newsletter)

This post is NOT going to be a list of tricks or quick fixes. I'm not talking about linkbait, or SEO black magic, or anything like that. Hopefully, the things I lay out will seem like common sense. It takes sustained effort over a period of time to build up your reputation and influence - you don't just instantly get famous. So be prepared.

Step 0: Build Your Network

This is step 0 because it needs to be worked on for a while before you get real results. I'm talking about connecting with people, in real life and online. Get to know them, what they like, what they write about, and what they're interested. Help them get to know you, what you're passionate about, and what you know. You can do this by exchanging comments on each other's blogs, following each other on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, or whatever. The medium itself isn't specifically important, but this is why I'm always talking about how important it is to connect with other people on places like Twitter.

Don't be a snob about who you connect with. I have people in my network who are senior editors at large, popular tech publications, and also people who write small, narrowly-focused niche blogs or don't blog at all. I'm friends with them because we have interests in common, and have shared inteactions - NOT just because of where they write! Don't be blinded into thinking you need to connect with the big fish more than other people. First of all, it doesn't matter. Second, you're going to be asking people to link to or say something about your material, and you'll sound like a jerk if it seems like you only care about attention from the popular crowd. Everyone has their own audience and sphere of influence. Be grateful for any and all links and attention that you receive.

Step 1: Create Interesting, Easy To Find Content

This is hopefully a no-brainer, but it bears mention. If you want people to link to something you've created, it should be interesting enough to merit the attention. No matter how good you think you are, not every single thing you write or create is going to get picked up on all the news sites and linked to all over the web. Some of your stuff is going to be higher quality than the rest. Consider exercising some restraint in what you try to promote, so you don't become the boy who cried wolf by trying to get EVERYONE to link to EVERYTHING that you create. Attention and goodwill from other people is a precious commodity. Don't squander it.

Also, make your stuff easy to find. For most sites, the majority of traffic comes from search results, not referring links. Think about what you'd search for if you were looking for the topic you're writing about. Be clear and specific and relevant in your post title. Try putting your post title into Google, and see if Google has any suggestions for making it better (Did You Mean).

Step 2: Link to Other People. A Lot.

Get in the habit of linking to other sites and people in your network. Do it a lot. It makes what you write that much more interesting and useful, and it's a great way to connect with and show respect for the people you link to, and make them a lot more willing to link to you in the future. If you want people to link to you, don't be stingy with the links you give out.

Don't worry AT ALL about trying to keep people on your own site. Think of what's probably the most visited and most useful site on the internet - Google. Is Google popular because they try to keep people on their site, or try to be sticky? No! Google is popular and useful because they send you away as quickly and efficiently as possible. Be like Google.

Step 3. Submit to the News Centers

There are lots of news sites and aggregators out there whose sole purpose is to link to interesting stuff that readers have submitted to them. Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, YCombinator Hacker News, etc. Discover which ones that are most influential for your area of expertise. Learn the process for submitting something, and what the criteria are for it getting published. Become a member of the community - read what gets posted, and post comments on stories.

When you have created something that you think would be a good fit for one of these news sites, submit it! On rare occasions, someone else might pick up your post and submit it, but for the most part, if you don't do it, no one else will. Don't be shy.

Don't get discouraged if what you submit doesn't make it to the front page of the site, especially on really big and popular sites, like Digg and Slashdot. Don't give up, and keep at it.

Step 3.1: Use StumbleUpon

This one deserves its own subsection. StumbleUpon is a collaborative hey, this is cool! service that lots of people use. Basically, there are two sides to StumbleUpon. First, in the course of your web browsing, you stumble pages you think are interesting or cool. Second, you can see what pages other people have stumbled as interesting. That's a super basic explanation.

The reason I put StumbleUpon apart from the other news sites is the quality of the visits that getting on StumbleUpon brings compared to the other sites. Getting linked on the front page of Slashdot or Digg will bring a BIG spike in traffic, but it doesn't tend to last. People who read those sites are voraciously looking for what's hot. Traffic from StumbleUpon is different. Because there's not a front page, once your stuff gets into the database, it generates a pretty steady, constant flow of visits. Which is really nice.

Step 4: Ask Your Network, Nicely

Once you've built your network (see Step 0), get in the habit of letting them know when you've posted something that you think they may find interesting. Send out a link on Twitter, or in your Facebook status, etc. Try to make it hey, I just posted this, let me know what you think and not hey look! I posted something awesome again!. Ask (nicely) for people to link to your post, or to vote for it on Digg and the like. Again, don't become that person who only ever tries to promote their own stuff. But when you've done something that you think deserves some attention, it's OK to let people know about it. Again, if you don't do it, it's unlikely that anyone else will.

Step 5: Listen and Respond

Once you've put the word out, monitor for links and mentions of your stuff. This is where having ego search feeds, or a personalized listening dashboard like the one I created for Intel comes in handy. Set up search feeds (I use Google Blogsearch, Google News, Ask.com blog search, and Twitter search) for your name, and the URL and name of your site. This topic probably deserves a whole post of its own. I'll write something up soon.

When a news site or a blog does link to or mention you, post comments on their site, thanking them, answering questions, and basically being involved in the conversation. The reason for doing this is to show that you're smart, savvy, listening, and engaged in the conversation. Engaging in the conversation, wherever it happens, builds connections between the participants, and makes them that much more likely to want to link to you again in the future. Which feeds right back into Step 0: Build Your Network.

Step 6: Make This a Habit

Like I said at the beginning, this isn't a trick that can be learned. This stuff takes time and effort. That's why you need to think of it as skills to be learned and habits to be formed. Keep practicing. Accept that you might not get stellar results at the beginning. But if you keep it up, you'll find that you've grown your own reputation, influence, and network of people who listen to you. That's what makes all the effort worth it.

Step 7: ???

What have I missed here? If you have ideas, suggestions, or things that you do that you think would be helpful for people trying to get noticed and get linked to, please let me know. Post a comment, or post something on your own blog and link here. Like I said, I'm not proclaiming myself the expert on this subject. I learn lots every day, and I love it. So tell me what YOU do to get people to link to you and talk about you without being a jerk.

According to at least one account, the big star of the NewTeeVee Live conference put on by the gang at GigaOm wasn't the CEO of Hulu, or the head of Netflix, or even alterna-star Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing. It was 15-year-old video artist Lucas Cruikshank, otherwise known simply as Fred. Lucas was a bored teen somewhere in Nebraska when he decided to parody some of the self-obsessed video bloggers on YouTube and came up with the persona of Fred, a hyperactive pre-teen who speaks in an incredibly annoying, squeaky voice. He is a bona fide YouTube superstar.

While musicians and comedians with years of training and talent are desperately trying to get more views for their videos on YouTube, the phenomenon known as Fred records a video of himself leaning into the camera and making faces while sounding like one of the Chipmunks and gets more than a million views. The video I've embedded here has more than 11 million, and that's after less than four months. His latest video has only been up for a day a single day and already has more than 400,000 views, and the one before that (two weeks old) has 2 million. His is the most subscribed channel on YouTube and has more than 125 million views in total. Next up: product placement and celebrity cameos.

Watching Fred's videos is one of those things that separates adults from kids, just like Ren & Stimpy or any one of a dozen annoying and yet hilarious cartoon shows. As Cruikshank says in one of his interviews, viewers almost instantly either love Fred or they hate him and no doubt plenty of older viewers will argue that all Fred's success proves is that any old piece of crap can get millions of views. I disagree. Young Lucas has done one thing that even big networks do fairly infrequently: he has tapped directly into the heart of his target market, which is probably easier for him because he is the target market. But he is also obsessive and passionate, and as Jason Kilar of Hulu says, that is a big part of being a success.

But Lucas is also a smart video producer, whether he does it intentionally or not. His clips are short, they aren't exactly complicated, he builds loyalty by using the same routines or catch-phrases, and he times the release of new videos for when his fan base gets out of school. That's smart. Annoying he may be, but he is clearly far from dumb. Whether he can translate any of his popularity into a real business without irritating his fans remains to be seen, but if I worked at Nickelodeon or Teletoon or some place like that, I would get him in to teach my staff about how to play this game.

Newsmastering: A General Overview

• What Is Newsmastering And What Are Newsradars? RSS News Aggregation And Re-Publishing For Beginners

  Newsmastering is a new and emerging skill that involves gathering, filtering and selecting from the chaos of information that saturates the Internet, and delivering the resulting news feed to niche-targeted audiences.




• Web Content Formats - Links Posts: How To Convert Your Link Posts Activity Into Effective Niche News Publishing

From Steve Rubel to Sepp Hasslberger, many beginning bloggers as well as a good number of experienced ones like to publish (especially on weekends) posts that are nothing else but a collection of recommended links they are offering to their readers. These digests of links have gotten over time different names: link posts, linkstream, best links of the day, news grabs and so on, with a thousand different variations.



• News Aggregation Is Online Independent Publishers Natural Next Step

  If you have mastered the blogging paradigm, have made your blog an authority and a reliable source of information, commentary or news in your selected field(/s) of interest, it is about time to "scale yourself up" - Work Less and Look More At The Bigger Picture (= See the Future).




• The Human News Aggregator: An Interview About NewsMastering With Robin Good

  Marshall Kirkpatrick, the official online interviewer at NetSquared.org, took the time to cal me up and find out more about this emerging new practice and about the tools and processes required to make it all work.




• What Is RSS: A Guide To Really Simple Syndication Benefits, Best Uses And Applications

  This is a guide explaining what RSS is and how to best use it. It is targeted at the non-technical user who has not had yet the opportunity to fully understand what RSS is all about and how to best put it to use.




• The Network Second Layer: RSS Newsmastering

  Read slowly and with maximum attention what Stephen Downes says right here:

  "What should happen, what is already happening, is that a large network of sites like Edu_RSS should emerge, forming in essence a second layer in the network. The result of this second layer is that the internet will self-organize, that information generated in a thousand or a million places will cluster, become composite, interpreted, specialized, and produce highly targeted, highly specific resource feeds at the output end."





• What Public Relations Professionals Could Do With RSS: Newsmastering, Newsradars And Personal Media Aggregators

  If you have been wondering how RSS could be of use and benefit to PR work, this good audio conversation (38' minutes) with Sally Falkow, renowned PR and branding expert, should shed some new light on these interesting issues.




• Content Aggregation And The New Curators: Podcasting Newsmasters

  Unless we start to leverage the filtering ability of talented content curators, editors and newsmasters with the efficiency and speed of new tools which allow them to find, monitor and spot key relevant content bits, we are doomed to be either drowned in this chaotic cloud of content available to us or to miss a great deal of the very best of it.




• RSS Newsfeeds Aggregation: My Business Experience

  RSS newsmastering, or the ability to aggregate, filter and compile topic-specific news digests, has opened up several interesting opportunities to create quality new services while extracting good revenue from them. The same goes for feed sponsorship and ads integration. While I am not particularly in favour of this last one, there are specific instances and formats of RSS ad integration that will yield certainly good results.




• How To Create NewsRadars: Rok Gets The Good' Steps

  With inexhaustible energy Robin has been promoting the benefits of public and private News Radars to researchers, information professionals, corporate knowledge workers and independent publishers. See the Related Articles section at the bottom of this post for references to these articles. Before Robin adopted and refined the term, the concept of News Radars was mentioned by others, notably Rok Hrastnik and the people at MyST Technology. The latter company is currently using the term BlogSite Briefings.

Newsmastering Tools and Services

1. The First RSS Newsmastering Engine For Search Professionals: MySyndicaat

   Targeted at "professionals" researchers, information librarians, competitive intelligence analysts, information scouts and specialized news editors, the new technology makes it finally rather straightforward to create topic-specific newsradars (news feeds) on just about any selected theme.




2. From RSS Reader To Direct Online Publisher: Newsmastering Away With Blogbridge

   Making use of a good RSS feed reader is essential to the daily routine of most bloggers. Feeds give you a way to quickly seek out the latest hot news for your niche audience from across the web. Wouldn't it be nice, though, to be able to read your feeds and publish your blog posts from a single application?




3. Beyond NewsMastering: Yahoo! Pipes Is The Internet RSS Remixer - Overview And Reports

   Yahoo! Pipes, is essentially a very powerful RSS feed remixer, which goes well and beyond the original newsmastering concept I described a few years ago. Potentially, Yahoo! Pipes is a highly disruptive visual programming environment that puts in the hands of many people the ability to create web mashups and web-based applications that combine data from different sources with much greater ease and effectiveness.

Robin Good Shares His Top100 News Sources For Free

Sponsor

The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program

The program launched over the weekend through via this lighthearted post over on TypePad.com which reminds you that "Tumblr...will not pay your bills." According to the company, they've already seen hundreds of journalists signing up to participate.

As detailed in the TypePad blog post, the bailout program includes the following, a dollar value of at least $150 per year (the price of the TypePad service alone), if not more :

A free TypePad Pro blog account, the same service that powers many big-name media blogs. It includes professional support so Six Apart will answer any questions you have.

The blog is enrolled in the Six Apart Media advertising program. These are display ads that pay a more than Google text ads, and bloggers get to keep the revenue.

Six Apart will promote the new site on Blogs.com, a directory of the best in blogs. Blogs.com will be a way for all of the bloggers peers in the Journalist Bailout Program to cross-promote and share traffic for their independent sites.

Lots more. Six Apart can also introduce you to their VIP program to help drive traffic to the site, help connect blogs to LinkedIn profiles, make it easy to manage your comments from an iPhone, and even show you how to automatically promote posts to your Facebook friends

There are no rules on how the blog must be used. Journalists can use the blog showcase their best work, launch something new, or hang onto the site, you know, "just in case."

The Times, They Are A-Changin'

We're in the midst of a great upheaval. The internet is impacting the business models of so many established ventures. Newspapers and magazines aren't the only industries affected by any means. The internet has left nothing untouched, whether music, video, news, sports, communication, marketing, advertsing and more, those wishing to stave off its force of change are simply trying to outswim a tidal wave.

What's better for those being impacted is to be prepared and thinking ahead for the future - what is Plan B? As we mentioned earlier this week, not everyone sees the death of the journalism ahead - media mogul Rupert Murdoch, for example, sees opportunity.

And if you think successful journalism can only come on the platform of old media, you're wrong. Look around. So many journalists are now getting into blogging, but one of our newest favs that proves the potential success of the model is TechFlash, home to John Cook and Todd Bishop, both of whom left their respected papers and struck out on their own to deliver quality tech news in readable format without all the bias, backstabbing, and petty quarrels the tech "blogosphere" seems to get itself involved in from time to time.

Journalists may also want to keep in mind Arianna Huffington's recent, but vague, promise to begin funding investigative journalism through her incredibly successful The Huffington Post site, one of the most recognizable and read blogs out there.

So journalists, get your platforms ready...there's no better time than now and no better price than free.

Note: Six Apart's Movable Type weblogging platform is what powers our blog here at ReadWriteWeb.

The Big Bang Theory Season 2, Episode 8

Sheldon

I'm sorry, but I'm not going to watch the Clone Wars TV series until I've seen the Clone Wars Movie. I prefer to let George Lucas disappoint me in the order he intend.

Nice, and the Star Trek bit is refering to a couple of jabs at Star Trek Movies. But after the show, instead of showing the usual credits, the image above appeared for about 1 1/2 seconds. Just enough time for me to notice something was different and rewind the TiVo for a screen grab. It made me smile.