Feedburner is positioning its Headline Animator service as a new type of banner advertising for sites that use news feeds.

Here’s how Feedburner explains it:

By connecting the simple-to-use Headline Animator service to our world-class feed advertising network we can give content publishers the ability to create their very own dynamic, feed-powered ad units and place them in the feed ad network (all by themselves). No sales folks, no ad trafficking to ensure the creative is current. No speed bumps. Just you and your content, going more places. This is the fast-track method for putting dynamic content in front of an audience subscribed to the most popular feeds on the series of tubes. If the world’s top blue-chip advertisers can advertise in feeds, why not you too?

In other words, Headline Animator lets you create banner ads that are dynamically updated with information from your news feed. This means that you can place banner ads that will automatically update to promote your latest news, podcast or video podcast.

While many people have concerns about putting all your eggs in Feedburner’s basket, their approach to dynamic, news-driven banners has merit.

Details are available at the Feedburner site.

Information Week’s Alexander Wolfe today offered his DRM Scorecard, summarizing it Hackers Batting 1000, Industry Zero.

“Every single significant attempt at consumer-music DRM has been cracked,” writes Wolfe. He supports this by noting that CSS (older DVD encryption), Fairplay (Apple’s encryption technology), AACS (new DVD encryption technology) and Windows Media DRM have all been cracked.

The sorry state of media DRM is significant to podcasters and other Internet media publishers because it points out that there is a constant resistance to proprietary media solutions that limit what people can do with Internet content. Limiting what people can do with your media effectively limits the number of people that will do anything with your media.

With the growth of the idea of the “attention economy”, an economic approach that treats people’s attention as a limited commodity, it’s becoming clear that putting up barriers to people’s attention can kill your product. Proprietary media players, like the recently introduced BBC iPlayer, create barriers to people’s attention, which ends up marginalizing the DRM’d content.

A congressional panel voted yesterday, against the Bush administration’s wishes, to shield journalists, including advertising-supported bloggers, vloggers and podcasters, from having to reveal their confidential sources in many situations.

The vote is the latest in an ongoing battle over the status of bloggers and other Internet media pioneers, and whether they should be given the same legal protection as journalists. Some, like the Bush administration and Apple, have fought blogger’s rights, arguing that they weren’t journalists and shouldn’t be afforded the same protection.

By a voice vote, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee approved the Free Flow of Information Act. The proposed version of the act offers protection for a wider set of people than earlier versions.

“Today, we are reclaiming one of the most fundamental principles enshrined by the founding fathers in the First Amendment of the Constitution,” Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) said before the vote.

Does Advertising Make You A Journalist?

The bill excludes casual bloggers from protections, stipulating that the protections apply only to those who derive “financial gain or livelihood” from their journalistic activity. While this part of the bill could prove controversial to anyone that blogs as a hobby, it would include people that get income from things like AdSense.

YouTube has announced a new music video competition, YouTube OntheRise Rap Edition. The video contest hopes to find the best upcoming rap and hip-hop artists in the US.

Interested artists can submit original videos from Friday, August 10 through Friday, August 17. 50 Cent, Common and Polow da Don will help judge the contest and will select 20 finalists to be presented to the YouTube community on Wednesday, August 29. The YouTube community will then vote on a final winner who will be unveiled on Friday, September 7.

“There are top shelf artists on YouTube that haven’t been heard. This contest will give them a chance to rise to the top of the game,” said 50 Cent. “There will be some great stuff coming out of this contest. It’s a shot to claim a spot as an MC.”

Prizes include a trip to New York City to professionally record a single for G-Unit/Interscope Records and a $10,000 gift card from Guitar Center.

WebbAlert, a new video podcast that’s a variation on Rocketboom, has launched and is betting that by brown-nosing bloggers it can generate buzz for the show. The show, hosted by X-Play‚Äôs Morgan Webb, focuses on technology and gaming news.

Here’s what TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington has to say about the show:

Webb also “gets” how new media sites gain quick traction by embracing the community. The show will focus on tech and gaming news and will be featuring blog posts that break and cover the news over traditional news outlets. That will put her in the good graces of the bloggers, who will be more likely to link to the show over time.

In other words, suck up to A-list bloggers and you can get a lot of high-quality incoming links.

While there’s nothing particularly innovative about this approach, it highlights the fact that video search is still in its infancy, and that video podcasters need to be thinking about interacting with the blogosphere in order to attract links and buzz for their shows.

Research firm Forrester has released a new report looking at the state of the “mobile web” – custom web sites developed for cell phones – and says the iPhone will put the slimmed-down mobile sites out of their misery.

According to Forrester’s Vidya Lakshmipathy:

On June 29, 2007, Apple released the highly anticipated iPhone to the public. Forrester evaluated the iPhone’s capabilities, and we believe that the iPhone signals the beginning of the end for the mobile Web as we know it today: Stripped-down sites crammed onto the small screens of devices meant for phoning, not browsing, will become a thing of the past. Companies looking to stay on top of this trend should get iPhones and experience their capabilities for themselves. Going forward, firms should continue to experiment with the mobile Web sites they own today in order to learn how to create content that is timely, location-aware, and actionable for users on the go.

Just as important, the iPhone demonstrates vividly that cell-phones can effectively handle podcasts, video-podcasts, YouTube content and other Internet media.

Rock group AC/DC, one of the last remaining big-name holdouts to digital distribution, has announced an exclusive¬†deal with Verizon Wireless’ V CAST Music’s digital music service to deliver their entire music catalog digitally.AC/DC must have negotiated a sweet deal with Verizon, because their deal looks like it could be a highway to digital music hell:

27-time Grammy winner and entertainment icon Quincy Jones has introduced a video podcast series, the Quincy Jones Show. The podcast offers a behind-the-scenes look at Jones’ world, including footage of him at work in the studio with some legendary performers.

“I live to touch and share my love and wisdom with people around the world,” said Quincy. “My podcasts are a powerful new way to reach out to millions and bring the best I have to offer to an extended new audience online.”

In his six decades in the music business, Jones has worked with Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Elle Fitzgerald, Michael Jackson and others.

You can preview Jones’ video podcast below, or subscribe by adding this URL to your podcast client:
http://podcast.quincyjones.com/rss

A new Hollywood video destination site, My Damn Channel, is the latest attempt by mainstream media companies to break into the exploding Internet video market. While the site is getting hyped by the Associated Press & Variety, it appears to be a variation on all the other mainstream media video destination sites that have failed to make much of an impression with Internet surfers.

My Damn Channel brings together Hollywood veterans, including comedian Harry Shearer, filmmaker David Wain and music producer Don Was, with the idea that Internet audiences are starved for professionally produced content. The site hopes to be a destination site, and plans to syndicate its content to other Internet video sites and collect a share of the revenue.

The concept appeals to content creators because the Internet can provide creative options not available through traditional channels.

“If you walk into any of those places today, you will sooner or later be smothered by network creative input,” Shearer said. “And unless you have made the studios about a billion dollars, your project will be creative inputted to death.”

While demand for Internet video, both amateur and professional, is exploding, there’s also a long history of Internet video destination sites announced by traditional media that get spikes of hype and then quickly disappear. My Damn Channel’s site, which is much harder to navigate and much slower than established video destinations, looks like it could follow the path of HBO’s recently demised This Just In. HBO’s site, like My Damn Channel, promised to make a splash in the world of Internet video by offering professional mainstream content, but failed to make an impression and was put out of its misery in less than a year.

Here’s an example of the type of content that My Damn Channel is staking its fortunes upon:

Despite the tremendous popularity of legal music downloads, and the widespread availability of free legal music downloads, music piracy is at an all-time high, according to a report out today that urges the record industry to make legal buying easier and cheaper.

Why? A growing band of consumers are unconcerned about being prosecuted for illegal downloads, according to Entertainment Media Research.

Its fourth annual Digital Music Survey, suggests that piracy is widespread:

• 43% say that they are illegally downloading tracks, rising from 36% last year and 40% in 2005.
• Only 33% cited the risk of being prosecuted as a deterrent against unauthorised downloading, compared with 42% in 2006.
• Nearly one in five respondents – 18% – claimed an intention to download more unauthorised tracks, up from 8% in 2006.
• Price is the key factor for the slowdown in legal downloading after sharp increases in 2005 and 2006. As the cost of CDs in shops has fallen the perceived cost advantage of digital downloads has been eroded.

The report suggests one way to tackle that may be for music companies to consider introducing differential pricing, something that Apple has fought against, suggesting that the record companies were getting greedy. 84% of consumers, though, agreed that older digital downloads should be cheaper and 48% claimed they would be prepared to pay more for newly released tracks.

John Enser, head of music at law firm Olswang, said: “As illegal downloading hits an all-time high and consumers’ fear of prosecution falls, the music industry must look for more ways to encourage the public to download music legally.”