There’s no escape. The Blackberry service outage is now impacting users on almost every planet, CNN reports. Tatooine and Coruscant appear to not have been affected yet, but users all over Geonosis, Naboo and Yavin were reportedly hit hard. Our thoughts are with their inhabitants.

(Via @dccrowley and @mpoppel, but probably first noted by @brundle_fly)

Oh no! How can ET BBM home?
RT @TechCrunch CNN: Blackberry Outage Impacting Users On Almost Every Planet tcrn.ch/nX3wtP by @robinwauters—
Duncan (@dncnlwrnc) October 13, 2011

Flipboard-esque magazine-style aggregation apps are all the rage right now. Obviously Flipboard has the space nailed, and Pulse is a nice alternative as well. But one aggregation app seems to have caught the attention of a big name news publication — Zite.

The same company that once had a mailbox full of cease-and-desist notices from beastly publications like the Washington Post and AP, may now be headed toward a big payout. According to Canadian news site Techvibes, Zite is in talks with CNN to sell the company for somewhere between $20 million and $25 million.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much else we’ve heard about the deal, and both companies haven’t made a peep. If it goes through, it will certainly be a momentous occasion in the life of Zite. The company has dealt with a couple hiccups over the past few years: most notably the shift from Worio, a new CEO in Mark Johnson, and of course, a massive crackdown from unhappy news sites over Zite’s UI. A $25 million deal with CNN should make those bumps and bruises worth it.

CNN offers a lot of mobile apps on a lot of devices. There is CNN for the iPhone, the iPad, Android, and even Nokia phones. There are even different apps for international news. All in all, CNN’s mobile apps have been downloaded 10 million times, according to the company.

The most popular app is CNN for iPhone, which has been out the longest—since September, 2009. And on Apple devices alone, CNN apps are the No.1 and No. 3 news apps on the iPhone, as well as the No. 1 news app on the iPad. CNN would not provide a breakdown between iOS, Android, and Nokia downloads.

In addition, CNN’s mobile websites drew 201 million combined pageviews in June. CNN is making a big push into mobile, as well it should. It recently launched two new 24-hour live channels on the Web for cable subscribers, and those are also available through its mobile apps.

CNN is now broadcasting live 24 hours a day online and on mobile apps for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. The live streams are available for both CNN proper and Headline News, but good luck finding them. They are definitely not front and center.

If you go to CNN’s main video page, instead of being presented with a live video stream of breaking news, it shows you canned videos from its “Collections.” These seem to be mostly human interest clips like Anderson Cooper answering viewer questions while thoughtfully looking at his iPad or a segment on the best BBQ in Texas.

To watch live video, you can click on the “Live” tab. And this does take you to some live options, including live feeds which CNN has been offering for a while. But to get the new, fully-produced, 24-hour live stream, you have to “unlock to watch.” Click on that and then it asks for your cable company user ID from Verizon, Cox, Comcast, and the like. If you are like me, you will probably have to dig that out. Go ahead, we’ll wait.

You see, CNN’s 24-hour online video is part of TV Everywhere, the cable industry’s answer to Hulu, Netflix, YouTube and the threat of online video in general. The concept is simple. If you are already paying for a channel on your TV, you should get it online for free. Gradually, more and more TV networks are signing onto TV Everywhere and it will become more compelling over time.

My main issue with TV Everywhere from the perspective of a user is the on-boarding process. For every participating site or channel, you have to log in again with your pay TV ID. My problem is I have no idea what my Verizon ID is even though I looked it up once to sign into HBO Go (another TV Everywhere participant). I have plenty of user IDs I use daily and know by heart. Verizon is not one of them. It would be so much easier if the TV Everywhere consortium let you log in with your Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, or AOL IDs—you know, something you use every day. And if you log into CNN, you shouldn’t have to log in again to HBO.

I’m sure it’s a great experience though. But to be honest, I never got past the log-in wall.

Last night, many of us learned about Osama Bin Laden’s death on Twitter. And in fact, the first credible report from Keith Urbahn, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff, was also on Twitter. And while the White House kept pushing off the official announcement for an hour to inform different parties, the news was already being analyzed and spread on Twitter.

So did Twitter supplant mainstream media as the best source of news about Bin Laden’s death? Yes and no. Yes, many people first heard about the news on Twitter, but more often than not the original source of that news could be traced back to mainstream media. Although some unwitting on-the-ground reporting occurred on Twitter as well, Bin Laden’s death was confirmed by mainstream media (CNN, NYT, etc). Even Keith Urbahn notes that his source was not someone in the military or government, but a “connected TV news producer:”

My source was a connected network TV news producer. Stories about "the death of MSM" because of my "first" tweet are greatly exaggerated.—
Keith Urbahn (@keithurbahn) May 02, 2011

Urbahn doesn’t believe his Tweet is evidence of citizen journalism “supplanting traditional media.”

As much as I believe in rise of "citizen journalism," blogs, twitter etc supplanting traditional media, my tweet isn't great evidence of it.—
Keith Urbahn (@keithurbahn) May 02, 2011

And yet, he was able to break the news before the TV producer who told him could air it on traditional media. Twitter is not in and of itself a news source. Whoever is Tweeting is the source. But all it takes is one person to Tweet out news for it to spread faster than through any other medium. The person doesn’t have to be a journalist. Urbahn scooped everyone.

Twitter does not supplant other media, it amplifies it. During the President’s announcement, people were Tweeting at a rate of 4,000 Tweets per second, not an all-time-high, but a close second or third—about the same level of Tweets as during the last Super Bowl.

Twitter also drives people to traditional media. Last night, news that the President was going to make a surprise announcement certainly drove people to TV. For instance, I first heard about the news conference on Twitter, and then I turned on CNN. Much of what people were Tweeting was what they were hearing on TV, thus passing the news instantly to people who may not have been in front of a TV at the time.

But what that means in practice is that if you are following the right people, you don’t have to actually turn on your TV. You can learn most of the salient facts from watching your Twitter stream. It can be such an efficient way to get information that people mistake it for the source of the news itself. For an increasing number of people, it is becoming the first place they turn to find out what is going on. However, it also points to other media (much like a news search does) and people click on those links to find out more. We certainly saw a huge spike from Twitter traffic here on TechCrunch last night, and we are just a technology blog.

Related TC posts:

First Credible Reports Of Bin Laden’s Death Spread Like Wildfire On Twitter

Here’s the guy who unwittingly live-tweeted the raid on Bin Laden

Bin Laden’s Compound Gets A Bum Review On Google Maps

For any of you caught up in the frenzy over the royal wedding between England’s Prince William and Kate Middleton, we’ve collected a comprehensive list of where to watch the festivities online, where to find photos, dedicated mobile apps, Twitter accounts following the Royal Wedding and more.

As opposed to the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, this Royal Wedding is particularly unique because of the web didn’t exist back then. And neither did social media. This will be one of the most publicized and watched weddings in history and the whole world is invited to view and comment both on TV and the web.

Where To Watch

YouTube’s Royal Channel: As we noted a few weeks ago,The YouTube account for the British Monarchy will be streaming the festivities live beginning at 5 AM ET on Friday.

NBC’s The Today Show will be streaming their coverage live on the show’s site. The Today Show’s Royal Wedding Blog Windsor Knot will be posting pictures and coverage.

FOX and ABC will both be streaming their coverage of the Royal Wedding on Hulu. ABC will also be syndicating its stream to Yahoo’s Royal Wedding portal. CBS will be streaming the wedding on Ustream. PBS, PopSugar, and ET will also be using Ustream as a platform for their live coverage.

CNN will be livestreaming the day’s events on CNN.com, including views from inside the Abbey as well as the parade, and via the CNN Apps for iPhone and iPod touch, iPad and Android tablet.

TV Replay will be pulling real-time clips of the ceremony, moments like first kiss etc, that will be live on AOL’s Royal Wedding portal. Splash Live will be streaming from Justin.TV.

How To Follow Using Social Media

The British Monarchy’s Facebook Page will be posting photos, news and more on the social network. And you can follow the Monarchy’s official Twitter account, @clarencehouse, which will be posting news from the event. While I’m sure there will be many hashtags on Twitter marking Tweets about the wedding, you can follow #rw2011 and #royalwedding.

In case you are worried about downtime, we hear that Twitter is preparing for the impending traffic that Tweets about the wedding could cause for the platform.

E! will be livestreaming their coverage of the wedding directly from Facebook.

The British Monarchy’s Flickr page will be updated with photos from the event, and you can access more information on the official site for the wedding. You can also access photos and news from AOL’s Royal Wedding portal and Yahoo’s Royal Wedding news site.

Photo sharing app Color and The Telegraph have joined forces to share real-time eye-witness photos of the royal wedding and the celebrations going on across the UK. A live stream of photos taken using Color in the UK can be accessed here.

Of course, we hear that Royal Wedding guests will be able to Tweet from inside the ceremony so if you follow one of the lucky guests (i.e. Victoria Beckham, and Elton John) you may be able to get an insider’s account of the wedding.

HuffPost Style will be featuring the fashions from the festivities, including the wedding gown, bridesmaid dresses and more. Just Spotted has Royal Wedding channel to keep track of celebs spotted at the wedding.

Mobile Apps

The official Westminster Abbey (where the marriage will take place) app allows you take a 3D tour of the royal church.

Dress The Royals allows you to dress the British Royal Family for the event.

You can also download People Magazine’s The Royals App, The Royal Wedding By Hello Magazine, BBC’s The Royal Wedding Insider, and NBC’s Royal Wedding App.

The news from Japan is both awful and appalling. Awful: 23,000 confirmed dead or missing, and counting. Appalling: pretty much anything to do with the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant. Nuclear meltdown like Chernobyl! Deadly contaminated milk and radioactive tap water! Tokyo a postapocalyptic ghost town! A plume of radiation that threatens America’s West Coast!

Where do they get these morons? Again, twenty thousand people are dead, and the drooling dimwits of the media can’t stop babbling about Fukushima, where exactly one person died – a crane operator who had the misfortune to be up in the cab of his vehicle when the fifth largest earthquake in recorded history hit – and fewer than 30 were injured, only a handful of whom required treatment for radiation exposure.

But all the nattering nabobs can talk about is the hysteria cited above. I used to have time for CNN, but next time I visit America, it’ll be Fox News all the way. At least their idiocy is entertaining. I dare you to try to watch this CNN clip without cringing. It seems Bob Dylan was wrong: you do need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows—

It’s been interesting seeing which Fukushima stories went viral. First, Josef Oehmen’s post, the day after the disaster. (Why? My theory: because on the day it was the only available information written by someone who sounded like he actually knew what he was talking about.) Then Randall Munroe’s brilliant radiation explainer, which would have made Edward Tufte himself weep with delight. Finally, yesterday, this undeniably awesome Badass of the Week.

In short, the truth, context, and most compelling stories of the disaster have been promulgated by a) a weatherman, b) an amateur, c) a cartoonist, and d) Badass of the Week. Meanwhile, what were the so-called “real media” up to?

Western media in race against time; hysterical nuclear bullshit nearing critical meltdown, yet millions are still uncontaminated.—
William Gibson (@GreatDismal) March 18, 2011

Of course I’m far from the first to be furious about this. Talking Points Memo, James Altucher, and Tim Bray, among many others, led the way. Noted environmental activist George Monbiot argues that Fukushima should turn people pro-nuclear power. But the voices of reason are mostly lost in the hurricane of panicked nonsense.

What went wrong? Well, never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to ignorance, so I’m going to optimistically argue that the basic problem is that most journalists simply don’t have a clue when it comes to science and engineering. They don’t understand what they’re writing about; they don’t know which questions to ask; they don’t understand that science, unlike the arts, is ultimately about provability and falsifiability, not interpretation and opinion; they don’t know when government advice is reasonable and when it’s terrified CYA boilerplate; and they don’t know when to call bullshit on whatever source they have dredged up to provide “balance,” which they worship beyond all explanation.

Worse yet, instead of linking to their sources, they expect us to take what they say on faith. Consider Ben Goldacre’s recent excoriation of the (usually respectable) UK newspaper The Telegraph for a ridiculous piece headlined “Wind farms blamed for stranding of whales”, which was about a scientific paper which said nothing of the sort, and which wasn’t linked to in the article. Every serious story about Fukushima should link to that XKCD diagram. I can’t believe I just typed that sentence, but it’s true.

New rule: I don't read "news" stories that don't link to primary sources. http://bit.ly/gQNxu4—
  (@eqe) March 21, 2011

Every story should link to all of its sources. Today the online story is the story of record; paper is disposable, irrelevant, and obsolete before it’s printed. But too many mainstream journalists still think print-first, which is one reason you get this kind of context-free nuclear hysteria, or “wind farms kill whales”, or the risible “cell phones kill bees” story from The Independent—again, a “serious” newspaper—four years ago.

To be fair, part of the problem is that no mainstream journalist could countenance writing about Hideaki Akaiwa in a manner as irreverent and entertaining as that of Badass of the Week; and they do still sometimes hit ‘em out of the park. Take this stunning New York Times piece about the so-called Fukushima 50. That is, if you can penetrate the paywall (at least in Canada, where I live). I know they have their reasons, but it’s sad to see the NYT (which has some excellent journalists who do understand technology) about to take two steps back from the online world just when we need them most.

This is all just going to get worse, because, increasingly, all stories are tech stories. Politics? Obama’s staggering online fundraising. Sports? BALCO and high-tech new equipment. Culture? These days, even fine art is all about the Arduino. Technology has insinuated itself into our lives to such an extent that every story now has a technical aspect — but yesterday’s dinosaur journalists will continue to write about them in the same clumsy-to-moronic way that they wrote about Fukushima.

Disaster there was averted by genuine heroism and desperately hard work. Nuclear power is potentially extremely dangerous and raises many serious issues, and it’s important to debate them in a well-educated way. Instead we got a crowd of fearmongering idiots, each trying to shriek louder than the last. As a result, Fukushima was the first major world story for which the best way to stay well-informed was to tune in to the knowledgeable blogosphere—and tune out the so-called “mainstream media.” We all know they’re dying. Now I’m starting to wonder why we should care.

Image credit: John Morrison, Flickr

BanxCorp this morning announced that it has filed a federal antitrust complaint against nine firms, including Dow Jones & Co, Fox News, The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC.

The company alleges (PDF) that the nine companies engage in “unlawful per se horizontal market division, customer allocation, and price fixing agreements” with its competitors in the market for bank rate websites throughout the United States.

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, and accuses the firms of entering into “a conspiracy in restraint of trade and forming a cartel” with their competitor Bankrate.com together with approximately a hundred competing bank rate website operators including some of the largest media conglomerates in the United States.

The complaint estimates that the damages caused by the “price-fixing cartel” may exceed $500 million, to be trebled under the antitrust statute.

BanxCorp, which operates competing bank rate website BanxQuote.com, indicated that other members of the ‘cartel’ may also be joined.

Currently included: Dow Jones & Company and Fox News Network (both News Corp.-owned), The New York Times Company, CNBC, Cable News Network, MSNBC Interactive New, AOL, LendingTree and Move.

In case you haven’t been on Twitter in the past 20 minutes, the U.S. stock market is collapsing. Well, it was collapsing (the Dow was down over 1,000 points at one point), but now it’s bouncing back. But you’d be forgiven if you have no idea what’s going on just from watching the web, because frankly, it’s struggling to keep up.

It appears that under the weight of just about everyone checking the web to see what’s happening with the market, sites are failing left and right. Google Finance keeps bringing up an error message to “please try again in 30 seconds.” Yahoo Finance, meanwhile is completely down. Trying to look for the news via Twitter, meanwhile, yields mixed results. At one point when the Dow was down about 1,000, plenty of people were still tweeting that it was down 400. Others were saying it was down 600, etc. The problem is that the “realtime” web wasn’t even fast enough for how fast things were crashing.

Then the bounce started happening and people were still tweeting about the Dow being down 1,000. The problem? It was actually down only like 100 at that point. It’s like whiplash out there on the web right now.

So where else do you turn? Well if you loaded up CNN.com while the crash was occurring, you wouldn’t have even known anything was happening. It was only well after the bounce started occurring that they site had a banner up that the Dow was down 900. And again, the bounce was already happening at that point.

Update: CNBC is reporting that the a typo may have caused at least a part of the sell-off.

According to multiple sources, a trader entered a “b” for billion instead of an “m” for million in a trade possibly involving Procter & Gamble.

Whoops.

Update 2: Yahoo has reached out about the Yahoo Finance downtime:

“Yahoo! Finance experienced intermittent issues related to traffic from today’s market activity.  We will continue to monitor and resolve the issue as necessary.”

They also tweeted about it. It’s just now back to normal.

We’ve all had the experience. You visit cnn.com looking to catch up on the day’s news and have a total WTF!? moment when instead you’re greeted by Jessica Alba’s plans to adopt a child. Meanwhile, bombs are exploding around the world, people are dying — but wait, what’s Tiger Woods thinking right now? Also, how do you harness the power of bugs?

A new site, WTF CNN?, compliments of Breadpig, shows you exactly what world news you’re missing by clicking on CNN. The way the site works is simple: CNN.com is displayed at the top of the page, and under it, you get a choice of seeing the frontpage from one of the following global news sites: ABC (Australia), Al-Jazeera (Qatar), BBC (UK), China Daily (China), Deutsche Welle (Germany), EuroNews (Europe), France 24 (France), or Reuters (UK). Both halves are shown live, and switching between sites is as simple a selecting the one you want from a drop down menu.

When you first hit the site, an overlay reads:

We deserve better than this.

If you’ve ever been frustrated by what headlines the CNN.com front page, this is the site for you. Compare their front page at any given time to that of Al-Jazeera English (or a host of others that regularly put CNN to shame).

Dear CNN,

We know you think this is what we want, but it’s not. We don’t care what random Tweeters think about a news story, how many holograms you have in your Situation Room, or even the latest celebrity gossip.

We care about our world. Instead of using your resources to do the journalism that gives us a better understanding of this world — we get the front page of CNN.com.

Why do we have to look enviously at the front page of Al-Jazeera English for a better sampling of important news stories at any given time? If the CNN frontpage is a reflection of consumer demand, are we to believe that their readers demand real journalism?

Consider this a gentle nudge from the anonymous Internet, CNN.

The humorous site was created by a programmer known as Chromakode.

PS. We still love Wolf’s beard.

Exciting news, people who watch TV! CNN will finally go fully HD sometime this spring! This is a great day for news junkies and people who constantly need to be reading a ticker.

The network first launched its HD channel two years ago, but only programming emanating from its New York studios were done in HD; Atlanta- and D.C.-based programming was still in boring ol’ SD. But no more! Starting this spring, it’s HD 24 hours a day~!

Among the shows that will gain several lines of resolution: Rick’s List with Rick “from the barrio” Sanchez. Sanchez, you’ll recall, challenged East Side Dave (again, whom I interviewed), from Ron and Fez, to a fight in light of the Shorty Awards Twitter controversy. Dave accepted his challenge, but Mr. Sanchez has been awfully quiet since then. What’s the matter, dogsie, afraid the Davepound knows how to scrap?!

Do I have to mention that I wrote two articles for CNN.com, one about the iPad and one about Ubisoft’s DRM? Well I just did, so there.

Well, Rupert Murdoch is going to love this. More people around the world get their news online from Google News than from CNN or the news properties of the New York Times. In November, 2009, according to comScore, Google News attracted 100 million unique visitors worldwide, making it a larger news site than CNN (66 million) or the combined properties of the New York Times (92 million). But do you know who is even larger? Yahoo News, with 138 million unique visitors worldwide. Funny how you never hear Murdoch complaining about Yahoo News.

Still, the top two sources of news online are Yahoo News and Google News, followed by the New York Times sites and CNN (China’s QQ.com News would come in fifth with 53 million visitors a month, followed by the BBC and MSN News with about 48 million each—the Wall Street Journal Online is way down the list with only 6.8 million).  Google News is the orange line in the chart above.

These numbers do not include general search for Yahoo or Google, where even more people find their news. For instance, WSJ.com gets about a quarter of its traffic from Google, all told, and former BusinessWeek.com editor John Byrne pegs Google’s traffic contribution to BW.com at 45 percent, “up from less than 20% in 2006.”

Do these numbers mean that traditional news sites should lay down and die or whine about how unfair life is when reader loyalty can no longer be taken for granted? No. As Byrne himself points out:

Instead of complaining about this and threatening to block Google from crawling a site, media companies would do well to step back and more fully understand what they really need to do: rebuild the relationships they have with their readers,

He suggests that people trust Google more for unbiased information than news brands. The value of news brands are diminishing and being replaced by more straightforward search. Brands are about relationships, whereas search is about transactions. A deeper look at the data bears this out. While Google News has more visitors on a global basis than CNN.com, people spend a lot less time there. In November, visitors spent nearly 2 billion minutes at CNN.com versus 840 million minutes on Google News. CNN generated 1.8 billion pageviews, while Google News produced 656 million.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Google News and Yahoo News both have many more individual country sites than CNN or the New York Times. So they have an advantage when comparing global visitors. In the U.S., Google News is still smaller than both, with about 24 million monthly unique visitors compared to 50 million for both CNN and the New York Times sites. (See chart below). Yahoo News has 44 million, so there is still hope left for traditional news sites. As I’ve argued in the past, Google doesn’t control the news, it exposes it.

What news sites decide to do with that exposure and use it to build longer-lasting relationships is up to them.

Update: comScore is in the midst of switching to a hybrid data model which includes both panel and server data, but not all sites are measured that way yet. For instance, CNN is, but Yahoo News isn’t. So if you compare apples to apples, and use only the older panel-based data, CNN would be at 38 million uniques compared to Yahoo News’ 44 million.

Jim walton, President of CNN Worldwide, kicked off the presentation by talking about how the last time he had taken the stage, it was during CNN’s annual all-hands meeting in January, when he kept receiving questions about layoffs. He recounted that he had said “if we have significant layoffs, I will sit on this stage, and allow all of you to throw tomatoes at me.” going on to say that today, “nobody is going to be throwing tomatoes. He said that CNN had increased its profits year over year, and that it would be ending the year with more journalists than it started with.

The presentation then launched into a slideshow of past CNN designs, beginning with the site’s original launch in 1995. Then Kenneth “KC” Estenson, Senior Vice President and General Manager of CNN.com took the stage to talk about the site’s traffic: CNN.com has 38 million unique visitors every month, 1.7 billion page views, and 100 million video views. 121 Billion total page views all time.

Estenson says there are two reasons to change CNN.com: the site wants to constantly move forward, and it wants to help expose the wealth of content that exists beyond what sits on the homepage. The site wants to emphasize breaking news, and more video, as well as perspective and analysis, and keep it easy to use.

The new site will go live on Monday.

There will be a new Entertainment portal, which will include a new partnership from Entertainment Weekly and People Magazine.

Article pages have been redesigned:

The site also has a more prominent opinion portal, including pieces by David Frum who is a new contributor:

CNN.com is also partnering with TED, and will now feature TED’s talks, which include presentations from some of the world’s most notable scientists, artists, and more.

iReport will now be more deeply integrated into CNN’s homepage.

New product called NewsPulse “very early, launching in Beta”. “An iTunes for news” — a listing of all the articles inside of CNN, and you can go in and sort them by popularity, sort my content and categories. Watch video inline.

Launching new quiz called CNN Challenge. Flash-based interactive quiz show every week to test your knowledge of recent news/events.

Earlier this year the site did a collaboration with Facebook to do live feed with Facebook stream. Did it again for the Michael Jackson memorial. During inauguration, had 27 million video views (largest live video event ever). Next month they’re doing it again — on Nov. 9th, CNN and Facebook are adding Oprah. At 9 PM that night Oprah will be hosting a book club on CNN.com, with Facebook chat to bring these three brands together. Oprah will be announcing this tomorrow at 9AM on her show.

CNN’s last major redesign was back in 2007, when the site integrated a much broader selection of multimedia content (streamed through a more friendly Flash media player) as well as more ‘Web 2.0′ social features. For more of CNN’s past designs, check out its archive at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Check out this article about the most dangerous celebrities to search for on the web. The opening line: “Be cautious if you plan to Bing Jessica Biel or Google Brad Pitt. A new report says you might get a virus.” Um, “Bing Jessica Biel”? Aside from it sounding oddly sexual (insert badda-bing joke here), it’s a little odd to see that on CNN.com before it has really entered the tech lexicon. Sure, Microsoft wants everyone to use it as a verb to be like Google, but there’s obviously a big difference between a company wanting something to happen for branding, and it actually happening.

CNN.com’s search is marked as very clearly powered by Google, so it would seem there is no real ulterior motive for CNN to hype Bing, maybe they’re just trying to get ahead of the curve. The problem is that when you’re a mainstream media publication, you have to stay in touch with your audience — which is a nice way of saying that sometimes you have to “dumb it down” a bit, or fall back to things people will understand. For example, if my mom is reading that article right now, I guarantee you she has no idea what Bing is and is quite confused about what CNN is implying there.

If you Bing Jessica Biel, you’ll get a virus? Now just imagine you had no idea what Bing is and tell me how you read that.

[photo: FHM]

[thanks Andrew]

In case you haven’t gotten enough of the non-stop coverage of Michael Jackson since his death last week, grab some lunch and watch his funeral, which is already under way, but the public memorial at the Staples Center in Los Angeles is scheduled to start at around 10:30 AM PT/ 1:30 PM ET. You can watch it on TV, or on pretty much any video or gossip site on the Web.

CNN.com is covering it live with the same Facebook chat integration it used for Obama’s Inauguration. You can see everyone’s comments on the side, or just your friends. I wonder which one will generate more Facebook status updates (the Obama CNN-Facebook Inauguration generated 1.5 million).

Right now five of the top ten top trending topics on Twitter search have to do with MJ (“MJ’s,” “MJ Memorial,” “Staples Center,” “RIP MJ,” and “#michaeljackson”).

Where are you watching MJ’s funeral today? (Come on, admit it, you have nothing better to do). I’m following 1938Media’s Twitter stream, he’s at the funeral (or at least is pretending to be) and even dressed up for the occasion.

UPDATE: Facebook reports that as of 10:30 a.m. PDT 300,000 users are logged in to the Facebook/CNN platform. There have been more than 500,000 status updates, with 6,000 status updates posted per minute. And the Michael Jackson Facebook page now has 7 million fans, more than any other fan page, including Barack Obama’s. And the MJ virtual glove has been given away 800,000 times, making it the most popular virtual gift ever on Facebook.

Look at the CNN Breaking News Twitter account right now. 8 of its last 10 tweets contain a broken link. This is a Twitter account with nearly 2 million followers, that CNN is promoting like no other on its shows, and it’s 404-ing millions of people.

Why this matters is of course because so many people are using this account as their main means of getting news about Iran. When CNN tweets out things like “Daughter of former president Rafsanjani arrested #iranelection,” and then has a link that doesn’t work, a lot of people are obviously very upset.

If you’re going to insist on basing most of your coverage around Twitter CNN, please figure out how to use it.

Update: It looks like CNN has figured it out after an hour with broken links. Whoever runs their account started using TweetDeck instead of the web, and so now all of the links are using the Bit.ly URL shortening service. But that’s interesting too. Why does CNN, which has a natural URL that is already very short, not just make its own short URLs? That way it could also guarantee they will work if a service like Bit.ly goes down.

FOX News and MySpace are partnering to launch Fox’s citizen journalism social media platform on MySpace, called uReport. MySpace members can share citizen produced content with the MySpace community, as well as have the chance to be featured on FOX News. FOX News and MySpace are both owned by News Corp.

FOX News uReport, which is nearly identical to CNN’s citizen journalism initiative iReport, is a platform through which users can upload photos and videos to FOX News from a computer or mobile device. Members of the MySpace-uReport community can become “uReporters” by uploading video and photos tagged by specific news categories, including entertainment and politics. FOX says that this content could be featured in programming on FOX News Channel and foxnews.com, with FOX News maintaining editorial control of the MySpace page.

CNN’s iReport has a Facebook page where iReporters can upload footage, photos and content to the platform but it’s unclear if this footage is used on CNN.com or on the CNN news channel. CNN’s iReport famously caused Apple’s stock to drop after someone posted a false rumor about Steve Jobs having a heart attack. Fox may have missed its chance, since the most activity on CNN’s iReport was leading up to the presidential election and inauguration. CNN partnered with Facebook to cover the inauguration events in January.

uReport on MySpace
http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/media/embed.aspx/m=56119193,t=1,mt=video

So what does Nippon do? Answer 1: The country produces lots of robots to keep up productivity. Answer 2: The economy, in this case Canon, lets employees go home early (at 5.30 pm) to make more babies for the sake of the nation.

At least this is what CNN.com is reporting and what has been picked up by many other news sources and blogs around the globe. Canon is apparently telling all employees to go home earlier twice a week for said reason.

But I don’t really think that is true. I looked around on the Japanese web and on Canon’s Japanese homepage and couldn’t find any confirmation for this news. My guess is that Canon just announced a special childcare program and nothing more.

Let us know in the comments if you know more.

Yesterday was supposed to be the day that live Web video streaming took on TV broadcasting.  CNN.com alone served a record 21.3 million streams, with a peak of 1.3 million simultaneous streams. And Akamai reported a peak of 5.4 million simultaneous visitors per minute to the various news sites for which it hosts video, and more than 7 million simultaneous streams.

With millions tuning in from their PCs to watch President Obama’s Inauguration speech, it was one of the biggest tests yet for live video streaming.  But live streaming failed. CNN.com kept bumping viewers into virtual waiting rooms. This happened to me in the middle of Obama’s speech. I had to keep hitting refresh, but missed half the speech. The stream on Hulu was even worse, with the video frozen and the audio coming in and out. And forget about Ustream. I couldn’t even get any audio. This seemed to be the general experience out there, based on other reports.

When it comes to big live events with millions of people watching at the same time, traditional TV broadcasters have nothing to worry about. Right now, the Internet breaks at about one million simultaneous streams. That is nothing when it comes to the audience size for historic events, or even a big football game. The Internet simply does not shine when it is used as a broadcast medium. And yesterday proved it.

Will it get better? Yes. Akamai and others can always put up more proxy streaming servers at the edge of the network to meet demand. But that is an expensive proposition for infrequent events. Perhaps a better solution for live streaming is a peer-to-peer model where streaming quality improves as more people watch. (Check out RayV, which does this). That would require everyone to download extra add-on software for their browsers. I’d do it in a second if that would solve the live stream stuttering problem.