winter43 's Profile

MATTHEW FOREMSKI, the 18-year-old son of a Silicon Valley tech reporter, dug up an old version of Rose's MySpace page. She'd deleted it when she became Bree, but Google cached a copy, and Foremski posted the link to his father's blog. Within 48 hours, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and a slew of TV stations ran the story.

He had two other rules: Don't sell merchandise and don't use any copyrighted music without a license.

Her character is also deliberately crafted to target the Web's most active demographics. Nerds geek out on the idea that this beautiful girl lists physicist Richard Feynman and poet e. e. cummings as heroes. Horny guys respond to the tame but tantalizing glimpses of her cleavage. Teenage girls sympathize with her boy troubles and her sometimes-stormy relationship with her strict parents. Early on, viewers started emailing to offer advice and sympathy. Others wanted to talk dirty and discuss mathematical equations.

So if you're searching for the missing link, you need search no further. It turns out to be the ability to fashion rudimentary (digital) tools to feed a not merely national but global conversation, even if that conversation is about a portly lip-syncing New Jerseyite. Why advertise next to some sad sack's weird shenanigans?

Oh, and someone would strike it filthy, stinking rich – and not the piddling few hundred million Hurley and Chen just earned, either. We're talking real money.

Advertisers do have another option: Wait until their commercials make it onto YouTube and hope they go viral. YouTube actually encourages this – so long as the free posts are accompanied by paid versions.

Without being overly simplistic or melodramatic, the state of the Old Commercial Broadcasting Model can be summarized like this: a spiraling vortex of ruin.

The networks say these are measures to promote the broadcast versions of their shows. The overwhelming probability is that the opposite is true, which bodes poorly for those invested in the status quo. One victim is local affiliates, which get a big chunk of their revenue from selling commercial space within network programs. The Internet, needless to say, bypasses them.

Type in "evolution of dance," which has got nearly 35 million views in six months.

A recent Accenture study of 1,600 Americans found that 38 percent of respondents wanted to create or share content online.