I’ve posted a list at the Innovation in College Media Blog of college media outlets and their online bowl coverage, including the obligatory rant about the Bowl “Championship” Series. Check it out. Also, be sure to check out this excellent article by Dan Wetzel about the BCS and a playoff system. I’m particularly fascinated by the hiring of former White House communications director Ari Fleischer’s PR outfit to create an astroturf campaign promoting the BCS. Fleischer is a political animal, not a sports PR pro. My guess is that hiring Fleischer had more to do with potential political ramifications for the BCS than any attempt to sway college football fans.

And I changed the theme because the other one wasn’t working for me.

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A bit of pop culture this morning. Ross Douthat, the newly appointed token conservative on the New York Times‘ op-ed page, chimes in on the Dan Brown phenomenon (“Da Vinci Code,” “Angels and Demons”). The entire column seems to be a jeremiad against “post-modern” Christianity and religiosity, which is itself quaint and deserving of fuller discussion. But he starts off with an exaggeration (to put it mildly) in his first sentence:

The movie treatment of his novel, “Angels and Demons,” is cleaning up at the box office this week.

See, the problem is, “Angels and Demons” didn’t “clean up” at the box office at all.

A&D made $46,204,168 in its opening weekend as the only major picture opening this weekend. But “Star Trek,” which opened last weekend, made $43,034,547, only $3 million less than A&D. Compared to other summer releases so far, A&D paled in comparison to the opening weekends of “Star Trek” ($75,204,289) and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” ($85,058,003).

A&D also paled in comparison to its predecessor, “The DaVinci Code” which made $77,073,388 in its first weekend of release in 2006. In fact, it couldn’t even beat the opening gross for the second “Chronicles of Narnia” which opened on the same weekend in 2008 with $55,034,805.

What’s more, A&D will likely plummet this weekend as it faces stiff competition from the latest “Terminator” release, and the “Night at the Museum” sequel.

With an estimated budget of $150 million, $48 million on opening weekend is hardly “cleaning up.”

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great job, pete!

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I still have some qualms about the whole idea behind Cathoogle (censoring sites so that sites that that conform to your church’s ideology are preferenced), but that’s my bug, not theirs. Ultimately, I will be curious to see whether the search engine really gets a lot of traffic from Catholics, or whether they will use their own minds to sift through the available information.

And I should mention this is nothing against Catholics in that respect. I’d have similar troubles with Baptist Google or Mormon Google or Liberal Google or Conservative Google.

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Of course, Hulu can also be infuriating, as I found when I went to watch The Big Lebowski again, and found that they’d pulled the movie and now only had a smattering of clips. That sucks.

An Oscar-winning documentary about Harvey Milk, just in time for the new movie Milk.

And, the Marx Brothers infamous Horse Feathers.

I just wish the Marx Brothers were around to make a movie about a modern media company trying to make money in this economic environment. That would be a riot.

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Look, I’m no economist, but it doesn’t take one to figure out that hedge funds and all the other various complicated financial instruments need to be brought under greater oversight by the federal government. You don’t have to argue for bloated bureaucracy to realize that transparency and regulation can be a good thing when multimillionaires are pissing away money with no limitations.

Case in point, witness the oil futures market, where they are blaming the flight of hedge funds for their latest low price woes:

“The new speculators—those who were caught up in a herding mentality and helped to cause the bubble trouble—have exerted added momentum to the swift price declines,” says Bart Chilton, a commissioner with the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission, which regulates oil trading.

So put some requirements on them. Make them declare where they are investing money, and – more importantly – WHOSE money they are investing.

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So here goes.

Numbered blog lists – Are there really only seven habits of highly effective people? Do we really only have 10 web sites for great multimedia? Are there really only 20 WordPress plug-ins that every blog publisher needs? Okay, so maybe this is just me, but I’m seriously tired of numbered lists in blog posts. I understand why people do it – it’s easy to remember, it makes people think there’s a small number of steps that can push them over some sort of imaginary threshhold into greatness. But it’s old. It’s beyond cliche. And besides that, it’s not the way life works. Seriously, if there were just six steps to being a millionaire, don’t you think we’d all already be there?

The BCS – The Bowl Championship Series has *never* worked. Until we – the football viewing public – can get the fat cat presidents of the top football conferences to install an actual playoff system into their sham of a football season, this isn’t really a democratic nation. Seriously, why does Utah, which has an undefeated record, end up kicking Alabama’s butts and then not get any consideration at all for the overall championship? And why does the ACC get 10 teams out of 12 teams in the league in bowl games? Seriously, this mess has to go.

Andrew Keen – Okay, seriously, Andrew Keen had a good schtick a couple of years ago with his neo-aristocratic mewling about the lower standards brought about by the Internet – which he wrote about in the intellectually tepid Cult of the Amateur. But his train has left the station. He’s actually taken to writing about the economic impact of the Internet and asserting that it could bring back the Great Depression. He seems equally fascinated with evoking Godwin’s Law in his own blog posts. Read this fisking from Sadly, No! for a more complete takedown of a shock jock of the 21st century.

Internet media stars – Can we just lock up Jason Calicanis, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis and all the other Internet pundits in a room and let them read each other’s RSS feeds for the next year? Hmmm? Seriously, do we really need Jarvis to write a book (so old media) about “What would Google Do?” as if Google was Jesus? WTF? And why is Clay Shirky pimping himself as the new media guru with a book? How do we not ask if irony is not alive and well with that kind of stuff? Hmmm?

What Newspapers Need to Do blog posts – I know the industry is “dying.” I know newspaper leaders can’t seem to figure out their business model. So go ahead and invent something already. Enough navel-gazing. Enough blogging about “what is wrong with journalism.” Just do it. Innovate. Be real. Be transparent. Be a rock ‘n’ roll example of what you want to see in the future and STFU about “woe is me.”

• Mitch McConnell – I don’t delve into politics too often, but Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, is a ridiculous example of a politician who wants to play chicken with our economy rather than actually deal with the economic meltdown that is going on. As far as I’m concerned, the entire Republican Party in Congress needs to spend the next two years playing “Let’s see who can STFU longest” instead of standing in the way of cleaning up the mess that has been the last eight years of G.O.P. rule.

Generational Stereotypes – Do we really need the uptick in articles and blog posts about the differences between the Baby Boomers, Gen X and “Digital Natives“? Can’t we all just agree that we’re in this together? My mom is a baby boomer, my kids are “digital natives,” and yet I find the whole stereotyping thing to be utter Bullshit. Aren’t we all Americans? Isn’t there a common thread? I think that’s what drew me to the Obama campaign in the first place – he wasn’t looking at one group as opposed to another.

Seriously, I don’t care if you want to stereotype people, but leave the blogosphere out of it. Let us live and survive together.

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Tom Henegan has contacted the owner of CatholicGoogle, the search engine that gives higher authority to Catholic web sites and filters out pr0n. He picks up on the question I asked about CG in an earlier post:

Some bloggers have asked if this site violates the Google trademark. “I’m in the process of speaking with them,” Mulhern said, adding he was dealing with Google in the United States. “I’ve asked whether they object to the name.” Just in case they do, he has been thinking about alternatives. “We’re thinking of changing the name of the website to something more catchy,” he said. “We might put out a poll.”

My question was not so much a real question, but more rhetorical in that I knew the answer ahead of time. Yes, CatholicGoogle violates Google’s trademark. Given Google’s frequently stated aim to provide the best search results, CatholicGoogle dilutes their brand in a big way. An Internet beginner wouldn’t be as quick as a netizen to be able to distinguish between Google and a knockoff.

I’m glad Mulhern is looking into changing the name of his site. Maybe he could call it “CatholicSearch” or something.

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I’m interested in seeing how long it takes this web site to change its name. According to the site’s disclaimer:

Catholic search engine powered by Google striving to provide an easy to use resource to anyone wanting to learn more about Catholicism and provide a safer way for good Catholics to surf the web.

CatholicGoogle is powered by Google using “safe search” technology, it produces results from all over the internet with more weighting to given to Catholic websites and eliminates the vast majority of unsavoury content, such as pornography. The site is not associated or affiliated with Google.com, we work closely with Google to help ensure that the adverts are not objectionable in nature, however, some of the results and adverts that are displayed may not be in line with Catholic doctrine and we do not endorse of any of the results or adverts displayed on Catholic Google.

Look, if you’re interested in walling off the Internet from a certain set of religiously minded patrons, that’s fine. But you can’t use the name of a company to brand your particular form of Internet censorship. Not only does CatholicGoogle use Google’s name, but they co-opt their distinctive color scheme as well.

About the only semi-original work on the entire logo is the halos, and I bet that took all of two minutes to draw upon that cliche’d visual imagery. Even if Google doesn’t come after CatholicGoogle with a platoon of lawyers – which they might not, given the inevitable PR headaches that would spur – CG should do the right thing and stop mooching on Google’s business brand.

And I’m sort of curious about this part of the CatholicGoogle search filter: “more weighting to given to Catholic websites…” Is there something inherent in “Catholic” web sites that make them more credible than “non-Catholic” web sites? Here’s the whois information for CatholicGoogle, which appears to originate from France.

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