Jim Rosenberg | jerotus.

On one of their recent podcasts, high school seniors Heather and Jonelle bantered about guys, music and whether it’s acceptable to wear sweatpants to class. Heather also announced that she broke up with her boyfriend because they were "total opposites."

Right after a segment on the "hottie of the week" (a student named Harry, who plays the saxophone and likes "any girl with a great personality"), Heather paused before announcing: "Here’s a big shout-out to our sponsor: Acuvue brand contact lenses." Heather noted that Acuvue is offering a free trial pair of contact lenses, "while supplies last."

• Once they were your printing presses; now that humble device, the blog, has given the press to us. That’s why blogs have been called little First Amendment machines. They extend freedom of the press to more actors.

• Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency. Now that brilliant invention, podcasting , gives radio to us. And we have found more uses for it than you did.

• Shooting, editing and distributing video once belonged to you, Big Media. Only you could afford to reach a TV audience built in your own image. Now video is coming into the user’s hands, and audience-building by former members of the audience is alive and well on the Web.

• You were once (exclusively) the editors of the news, choosing what ran on the front page. Now we can edit the news, and our choices send items to our own front pages.

• A highly centralized media system had connected people “up” to big social agencies and centers of power but not “across” to each other. Now the horizontal flow, citizen-to-citizen, is as real and consequential as the vertical one.

(via Poynter)

I blogged about this two weeks ago…and now CNBC has picked up the story. You can’t BUY bad press like this. It just takes bad customer relations and idiotic management.

…you.  That’s according to Business 2.0′s "50 People Who Matter Now."  It’s all about "collaborative intelligence," millions of people communicating and sharing across a real-time, "living" web.  Check out who else is on the list.

Obviously, being first in a web search result is a good thing. But here’s an analysis by way of BloggingPro which shows that coming in first instead of second can mean a difference in web traffic of 60%.

The New York Times on Sunday reported on 34 year-old Ze Frank, who lives in Brooklyn and draws some 10,000 visitors a day to his website to see his performances and stunts via video. Now he’s asking visitors to create ideas – essentially creating a collaborative comedy space.  The slogan: "Where you think so I don’t have to."  Nice to see a 34 year-old guy described as a "young adult" by the Old Gray Lady.  Read the story.

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www.jerotus.com

This is too much fun… Entertainment Weekly checks in with viral videos – shortish clips that are so cool, people email them to their friends and family. I confess to having been a huge Star Wars nerd, so of course I would choose this as my own favorite.

ClickZ reports today that Google is adding daypart capability to AdWords (dayparting is a word broadcasters use to slice up air times and advertisers do the same). Pretty amazing:
Google today added dayparting capabilities for advertisers worldwide, thanks to a major infrastructure change on its AdWords platform.
“It was a bit like changing the engines on a jet while you’re flying,” Richard Holden, director of product management at Google, told ClickZ.
The feature, which Google is calling “ad scheduling,” is available today in the AdWords campaign management interface. It enables advertisers to automatically adjust their bids, or pause and resume their campaigns based on the time-of-day or day-of-week.
“It’s a feature that’s consistent with something we’ve been focusing on for the past year: increasing the amount of control we give to advertisers,” Holden said. Read the full story.

I produced this interview for The Bob Edwards Show and it’s been reproduced in transcript form in Monterey, Calif.