The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has announced a set of Digital Video Ad Format Guidelines and is looking for feedback. The guidelines and best practices address the most widely used current in-stream ad products, including linear video ads, non-linear video ads and companion ads.

They were created to address:

• Simplifying digital video ad buying across multiple sites through minimum common ad specifications for video, overlay and companion ads;
• Achieving more efficient operations through a common set of creative submission guidelines; and
• Increasing consumer understanding of ad interactions and environments through best practice recommendations for creative development and player environments..

“The creation of these formats and guidelines will allow digital video to continue to flourish on two levels– creativity and marketplace efficiency,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB.

Members of the industry including advertising agencies, advertisers, online publishers and technology vendors are encouraged to read the proposed guidelines and submit comments on the IAB site.

The comment period will last for thirty days. Following a review of the feedback, the guidelines will be finalized and publicly released.

Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur, who’s got to be the A-1 top of the food chain numero uno most charismatic French new media entrepreneur ever, announced today that his company had acquired Twhirl, a Twitter client.

Not just any Twitter client, though – le plus grand Twitter client.

Seesmic is a video blogging and conversation platform that makes posting videos so trivial that it becomes practical for informal video conversations. Twitter, similarly, trivializes the process of Web content creation.

Twhirl is a client that may help bring these worlds, along with others, together in interesting ways.

Le Meur offers twenty reasons for integrating Twhirl with Seesmic:

1. Staying in touch with your friends using microblogging is much easier using a client than through your browser
2. Thwirl is the #1 and coolest Twitter client with more than 100,000 downloads and 7% of all tweets posted per day
3. Thousands of new users download Twhirl daily
4. Twhirl works on Mac AND PC, soon on Linux too
5. Twhirl lets you easily use all the advanced messaging options of Twitter (replies, direct messages)
6. Twhirl added very cool features such as search and url shortening in a second
7. Twhirl allows you to have multiple Twitter accounts opened simultaneously
8. Twhirl not only posts on Twitter but also on Pownce and Jaiku, with more services coming soon
9. Seesmic and Twhirl have been created exactly the same way, by listening to their communities and adding new features according to their popularity
10. Twhirl has amazing feedback from its users and press coverage: Thwirl was just on Fox News
11. We got in touch entirely through using Twitter and Twhirl… how cool is that? Okay, we also used Skype a bit to close the deal
12. Most of Seesmic team and investors constantly use Twhirl, made things easy!
13. Marco was already in the process of adding Seesmic support to Twhirl. That is how we got together and thought about him joining in, not the other way round
14. Adding video to Twhirl will be a plus to the Twhirl community. It will remain optional — we won’t break it!
15. Twhirl is free and will remain free
16. Marco has the same international vision, already supporting english, german, spanish and italian (hey where is french!)
17. With Twhirl being based in Germany, Seesmic now has a presence there which will help with the erman version and community
18. Marco will have more means to improve Twhirl as he will join Seesmic full-time and will be able to utilize the Seesmic’s support and infrastructure
19. We are only at the beginning of microblogging, the space is very exciting and new
20. Marco Kaiser is super cool and it is all about people

Seesmic is in a very interesting position.

It’s got a unique service in a sweet spot of a lot of trends in technology. Internet video is exploding, mobile content creation and consumption is up and social networking is getting more and more powerful.

Twhirl should help Seesmic users deal with all of these trends.

Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick offers his take on the deal at RRW.

Queen Rania, the queen consort of King Abdullah II of Jordan, has announced that she’ll be vlogging at YouTube in order to encourage a global dialog to dismantle stereotypes of the Muslims and Arab world.

I was skeptical about the idea, until I watched her video introduction, above. It’s quite remarkable.

She may be a Queen. She may be one of the most powerful women in the world.

But watching her video, she comes across as a complete natural in the world of new media; she’s completely tuned into the feel of social media.

Could there be a more gracious spokesperson for the Arab world than Queen Rania?

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Podcaster and novelist JC Hutchins, creator of the 7th Son thriller trilogy, needs your help:

THE NATIONWIDE BLACKOUT IS NOW … the violence and chaos are HERE … and YOU are a victim. Call the number in the video below and submit your story of horror and survival! Email your friends this blog post link, encourage them to call and share their “blackout experience!” 7th Son: OBSIDIAN is coming….

Recordings will be played in May, in the OBSIDIAN audio anthology, which chronicles the blackout.

If you’re not familiar with J.C. Hutchins or if you don’t know what any of this is all about, make sure you check out Hutchins’ site. He’s using podcasting, 3D environments and merchandising to create a universe around his fiction. He’s even working on an army of clones!

MySpace is working on a digital music store, striking a deal with three of the big four music companies to start a music Web site.

The New York Times reports that MySpace will spin out its MySpace Music service as an independent joint venture, in partnership with Universal Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music Group. EMI is expected to join the group. The music companies will own minority stakes in the venture and will make their entire music catalogs available

Visitors to the site will be able to listen to free streaming music, paid for with advertising, and share customized playlists with their friends. They will also be able to download tracks to play on their mobile devices, putting the new site in competition with similar services like Apple, Amazon and eMusic.

A subscription-based music component, where users pay a monthly amount for unlimited access to downloadable tracks, is also being considered, Mr. DeWolfe said.

“This is really a mega-music experience that is transformative in a lot of ways,” he said. “It’s the first service that offers a full catalog of music to be streamed for free, with full community features, to be shared with all of your friends.”

Additional products like tickets, T-shirts, ring tones and other music merchandise will also be available. “It’s the full 360-degree revenue stream,” Mr. DeWolfe said.

While more competition in the field of digital music would be good, this sounds more like collusion than competition, with the major record labels willing to do anything to compete with iTunes.

MySpace Music also sounds like it’s competing with the iTunes Music Store of 2003, instead of trying to offer something new and compelling. The way to compete with iTunes is to make the world of free music as easy to use as Apple as done with commercial music.

Apple confirmed the rumor we reported earlier, announcing that the iTunes Store had surpassed Wal-Mart to become the number one music retailer in the US.

“We launched iTunes less than five years ago, and it has now become the number one music retailer in the world,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes. “We are thrilled, and would like to thank all of our customers for helping us reach this incredible milestone.”

At the rate iTunes is growing, you can expect to see music sections disappearing at major retailers and the record labels looking for creative ways to fight Apple’s growing dominance in music sales.

While Microsoft, Amazon and others are trying to figure out how to duplicate Apple’s success in digital music, the real opportunity lies in figuring out how to help people find what they want in the rapidly growing mass of legal free music.

Apple’s announcement is based on data from market research firm the NPD Group’s MusicWatch survey that captures consumer reported past week unit purchases and counts one CD representing 12 tracks, excluding wireless transactions. The iTunes Store became the largest music retailer in the US based on the amount of music sold during January and February 2008.

Image: see more glass

Sony has introduced the HDR-TG1 Handycam, a midget-sized (dwarf, if you’ve seen In Bruges) high-definition video camera, weighing in at just ten ounces

Despite its tiny size, it is a full-featured camcorder that can record 1920 x 1080 HD video and 4-megapixel digital photos directly to Sony Memory Stick PRO Duo or PRO Duo Mark2 media cards. According to Sony, it’s the world’s smallest full HD camcorder

Face Detection

The HDR-TG1 also incorporates face detection technology for both video and still image. It can identify up to eight faces in the camcorder’s 2.7-inch touch panel LCD screen, and automatically adjust focus, exposure, color control for natural-looking skin tones, and when photos are taken, flash control.

The model also allocates more encoding bits to a detected face during the encoding process for the best possible picture when people are the subjects.

Audio is recorded in Dolby Digital 5.1-channel surround sound and features a built-in zoom microphone.

The HDR-TG1 camcorder will ship with supplied accessories in May for about $900.

The HDR-TG1, and similar camcorders, are really pushing down the entry level for HD, putting it into the range of most podcasters.

Can you imagine carrying your HD camera in your pocket?

Apple’s iTunes has passed Wal-Mart to become the #1 source for music in the US, according to an Apple email obtained by Ars Technica.

If this turns out to be accurate, it is a milestone for the digital distribution of music.

The news was announced in an e-mail sent this afternoon to some Apple employees, a copy of which was seen by Ars Technica. It includes a screenshot of an Excel file showing the top ten music retailers in the US for January 2008, and Apple is at the top of the list. The iTunes Store leads the pack with 19 percent, Wal-Mart (which includes the brick-and-mortar stores as well as its online properties) is second with 15 percent, and Best Buy is third with 13 percent. Amazon is a distant fourth at 6 percent, trailed by the likes of Borders, Circuit City, and Barnes & Noble. Rhapsody is in the tenth slot with 1 percent.

The fact that a digital-only retailer has ascended to the top of the sales charts is not unexpected, but it does demonstrate just how much the music landscape has changed since the beginning of the decade. The NPD Group has been tracking a “sharp increase” in digital downloads over the past several months as physical sales dry up. According to NPD’s research, 48 percent of US teens didn’t buy a single CD in 2007, compared to 38 percent in 2006.

In June of 2007, we reported that Apple had become the third largest music retailer. By February, iTunes was the number two music retailer.

Expect music retailers to continue to cut back on the space that they allocate to CDs.

The Falcon MVIX is a new drive enclosure that loads your media files via Ethernet or WiFi so you can view them on a HDTV.

It combines three main functions:

• It’s a hard drive enclosure, so you can add your own IDE or SATA hard drive and use it to store your media files.
• It connects to your home network either via Ethernet or a 802.11b/g/pre-n WiFi network to share and stream content. It’s compatible with all major computer platforms, including Windows, Mac OSX and Linu
• It’s also a media player itself, which can to your television via composite, component, S-Video, HDMI or DVI with a maximum supported resolution of 1920×1080 Progressive Scan (1080p)

In other words, it looks like Apple TV for tweekers.

Falcon MVIX

The MVIX supports all commonly used media formats, and virtually all of the more specialised ones too. It has no problem with MPEG-1/2/4, VOB, WMV 9, DivX and Xvid video files and will also happily play MP3s, WMAs, AAC, Ogg or WAV and AC3 music files.

The Falcon MVIX Media Centre will be available from Thumbs Up starting April 10, 2008. The suggested retail price is set to £199.99 (about $395 UDD).

BusinessWeek’s Stephen Wildstrom is asking “Can Doug Merrill Save Music?”

Merrill is leaving a cushy CIO job at Google to be the President of Digital Business at EMI, one of the biggest music companies in the world.

BusinessWeek wonders:

Could the surprising departure of Google Chief Information Officer Douglas Merrill be the salvation of the music industry?

Merrill was hardly your typical corporate CIO. He seemed far more interested in the big philosophical issues of technology than the typical CIO concerns of data centers and network security. (Staci D. Kramer has a good interview with Merrill on PaidContent.org.

My hope is that Merrill will bring his quirky thinking to an industry that seems hopelessly mired in the work of escaping from its dead past. EMI has been the smallest and most desperate of the major players in a desperate industry and has been more willing to experiment with ideas like DRM-free downloads ahead of its stodgier competitors. But this is an industry that has to create a new business model almost from scratch. Maybe a very smart outsider with a wide-ranging and unconventional mind is just the person to do it.

But what is worth saving?

• Is it worth saving the confusing morass legal rights that limit what you can do with music?
• Is it worth saving copy protection?
• Is it worth saving copyrights that extend past your lifetime?
• Is it worth protecting an industry that focuses on relentlessly pushing the lowest common denominator in music at the expense of other music?
• Is it worth saving never-ending lawsuits against file sharers?

The Internet offers music fans and musicians more ways to connect than ever in history. The cost of reproducing and distributing music has disappeared.

For many musicians, the old music industry just gets in the way.

The only way the old music industry knows how to make money with music is by limiting what you can do with it.

In this day and age, is that something worth saving?