Microsoft today released a video, above, showcasing multi-touch apps developed for future versions of Windows.

According to Microsoft:

Touch is quickly becoming a common way of directly interacting with software and devices. Touch-enabled surfaces are popping up everywhere including laptop touch pads, cell phones, remote controls, GPS devices, and more. What becomes even more compelling is when this experience is delivered to the PC -on a wide variety of Windows notebooks, in all-in-one PC’s, as well as in external monitors. In working with our broad ecosystem of hardware and software manufactures, we’re excited to be showing some of the great work and investments we are working on in Windows 7.

While multi-touch interfaces, like the iPhone interface, are sure to play an important part in future computer interfaces, Microsoft seems to be enamored of the technology, instead of what you an do with it. The video manages to suck the “wow” out of multi-touch technology.

Can multi-touch on Windows make interacting with the Internet better, make content creation more fun or even just be cool for gaming? It looks like Microsoft is waiting for developers – or Apple – to lead the way on this.

Weezer’s Pork and Beans video, which features cameos and references to dozens of viral Internet videos, is a viral hit of its own.

Director Mathew Cullen explains the story behind the video:

“We’d been wanting to work with Weezer since their last album,” said Cullen, “and five weeks ago Weezer sent us this song, and we immediately got the idea. [“Pork and Beans”] is this amazing song about being happy with who you are. That’s exactly where it came from. There’s never been a time like now, thanks to YouTube, where people can put themselves out there. So I embraced that concept.”

“I wanted the video to be a celebration of that creativity. I wanted it to be redemption for those who’d been unintentionally embarrassed by the power — there is a sense of that for those who were shamed by it.” adds Cullen. “For example, take the Afro Ninja. He’s a professional Hollywood stuntman who made one mistake at a casting session that is etched in [millions] of people’s memories. It was leaked without his consent, it was him doing the opposite of what he does best — and it was embarrassing professionally. He was very hard on himself for years because of that, but at a certain point embraced it. In this video, I wanted people to know he can kick some butt. There is an unintentional celebrity that happens on the internet. In the case of the Star Wars Kid, he wasn’t able to get over it. Even though he’s not in [the “Pork and “Beans” video], we wanted to put a nod [to him].”

Expect more Internet meme goodness from the Pork and Beans video take – Cullens says that there’s interviews and more on the way.

via Wired

Rocketboom host Joanne Colan is leaving the show, according to a report in Valleywag:

According to a source at the Creative Artists Agency, host Joanne Colan is leaving Rocketboom, one of the Internet’s first prominent news videoblogs. During her tenure, Colan never managed to transform the show (directed by creator Andrew Baron) from a quirky but inscrutable cult favorite into a mainstream online news source. Nor did she achieve the same web fame as her predecessor Amanda Congdon, who left a job with ABCNews.com last year.

If history is any guide, expect show creator Andrew Baron to search for a new host via Craigslist.

Update: Andrew Baron set us straight in the coments – saying that this is just a Valleywag rumor.

The LA Times, of all places, says that broadcasting is dead:

Broadcasting, simply put, isn’t casting broadly anymore.

As the sweep suggests, the TV networks are losing not just their viewers but also their sense of specialness. They’re becoming just the lowest numbers on the multichannel dial, rather than the last outposts of mass culture. It’s true that this evolution has been happening for years, but this year a tipping point was reached, a Rubicon crossed. Broadcast exceptionalism — its supposed immunity from the market forces afflicting all other media — is finally dead.

And that, fellow viewers, is a huge problem for those acronymic “legacy” networks. One, it undercuts executives’ argument to advertisers that broadcast still delivers the most bang for the buck of any media (negotiations for the sale of bulk ad time next TV season are taking place right now, an inconvenient moment to be sure from the networks’ standpoint). Also, the broadcasters’ economic model, as it currently stands, is simply unsustainable compared with that of their chief competitors, cable networks.

Much of the audience is moving to cable, but many viewers are also abandoning traditional television for Internet TV. Just as some people are abandoning traditional phone lines for cell phones, some viewers are realizing that everything that the like to watch is available via the Internet.

With the audience for Internet video headed towards 1 billion viewers, it’s clear where the growth is, where advertisers are going to move their money and where the future of television is going.

The audience for Internet video will hit one billion viewers by 2013, driven by increasing broadband penetration and the rising connection speeds available to a growing percentage of the world’s population, according to ABI Research.

That’s 1 in 6 people in the world that could be the potential audience for your Internet video!

“The rapid expansion of broadband video creates opportunities,” notes ABI analyst Cesar Bachelet. “A wide variety of actors aim to gain a share of this fast-growing market: not only content owners such as the BBC and NBC Universal, and Internet portals such as AOL and Yahoo!, but also a range of new entrants including user-generated content sites such as YouTube and Dailymotion, broadband video sites such as CinemaNow and Lovefilm, and Internet TV providers such as Apple and Zattoo.”

By and large, content creators have not yet embraced the idea of producing global television for Internet distribution. As this happens, the scale of viral video hits is likely to dwarf anything that we’ve yet seen.

Amazon has quietly dropped the price of its Kindle book reader, the device it recently said was selling better than it expected.

The Kindle electronic book reader had been $399; now it lists for $359.

We’ve been skeptical about the Kindle’s prospects since it was introduced. While it’s a big name book reader, it has clunky hardware design and a high price.

Even more important, the Kindle doesn’t embrace the Internet. It doesn’t make it easy for you to get Internet content; it isn’t a new platform that you can easily publish content for; and it doesn’t play well with the Web.

via engadget

The long tail of cinema is coming soon to Internet television, according to New York Times article.

It looks at Cinetic Media, a company that is working on distributing indie films via the Internet:

John Sloss is one of the top sales agents for independent films. Mr. Sloss, 52, has handled the sale of such diamonds in the rough as Little Miss Sunshine, the perky 2006 film about a family traveling to a children’s beauty pageant. He sold the $8 million project to Fox Searchlight for $10.5 million, setting a festival price record that still holds.

Now Mr. Sloss and his New York company, Cinetic Media, are rolling out a new business called Cinetic Rights Management. The executive and his team — he just hired Matt Dentler, the highly regarded director of the South by Southwest film festival — will act as sales agents for filmmakers who have been left on the sidelines. And here is the twist: The goal is not exhibition in theaters but rather distribution via the Internet and other growing delivery routes like cable on-demand services.

The idea is to create value for that other 90 percent of independent movies, or at least for a good chunk of them.

“We’re going to make it our business to go to every portal, every mobile provider, every video-on-demand service and make the most aggressive deals we can,” Mr. Sloss said last week in a telephone interview from France, where he was working the Cannes International Film Festival.

The company will charge a commission that will vary depending on the type of film. (Mr. Sloss would not reveal his planned cut, but Cinetec takes between 7.5 percent and 15 percent on traditional deals.) While no single title is likely to deliver a windfall — unless it breaks through as an unexpected hit — the company is betting that the “long tail” of niche content on the Internet will, in aggregate, produce meaningful income.

This could prove to be an important tactic for indie films. There’s a lot of movies that never make it to the theater because they don’t have mass-market potential. The Internet, though, can reach niche audiences more effectively than theaters can, which should lead to an explosion of options for Internet movies.

Remember Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against Google over copyright infringement?

Viacom sued Google, arguing that “YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization….based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content.”

Google is fighting back, claiming that the Viacom lawsuit threatens the future of the Internet as we know it:

In papers submitted to a judge late Friday, Google said YouTube “goes far beyond its legal obligations in assisting content owners to protect their works.”

It said that by seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet communications, Viacom “threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression.”

Viacom, on the other hand, responded that YouTube consistently allows unauthorized copies of popular television programming and movies to be uploaded and viewed tens of thousands of times.

Viacom says that it has identified more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of copyrighted programming — such as South Park & MTV videos — that have been viewed more than 1.5 billions times

“The availability on the YouTube site of a vast library of the copyrighted works of plaintiffs and others is the cornerstone of defendants’ business plan,” said Viacom.

Freedom VS Responsibility

The outcome of Viacom’s lawsuit is likely to be very significant.

While an argument can be made that there is promotional value to getting content on YouTube, an equally valid argument can be made that YouTube destroys the value of short video clips, like skits from Saturday Night Live or music videos. If the videos are available for free viewing and downloading from YouTube, copyright holders can’t expect to control their distribution or sales.

If Viacom were to win the lawsuit, YouTube might have to completely change the way it works, screening videos for copyright infringement before publishing. This could be unworkable and could rewrite the rules for new media companies.

The Phoenix Mars Lander has a Twitter feed, and as Evil Mad Scientist notes, the Mars Lander is Twittering in the first person:

I’m sitting on very flat surface here. Tiny rocks around my foot pads. The horizon is flat and looks perfect for digging!!!

It’s unclear if this is an official feed or not; I couldn’t find a mention of it on NASA’s site. Either way, though, it’s an interesting way to bring space exploration into new media.

The latest video by Weezer, for their song Pork and Beans, is insanely viral, racking up a couple million views in the last two days alone. 

It’s not hard to see why. The video pays tribute to many of the stars and one-hit-wonders of Internet video, with new media cultural references that are almost too many to list. 

Watch for the numa-numa guy, afro ninja, the Diet Coke & Mentos guys, Chris Crocker, Miss Teen USA, the Star Wars kid, Tay Zonday, the Evolution of Dance guy, references to Daft Punk & Will It Blend? and, my favorite, the dramatic gopher.