Hot on the heels of the Comedy Channel making all "The Daily Show" episodes available online (for free), MTV Networks is now making all "South Park" episodes available online (for free) as well [Reuters, Last100].

Hmmm…Viacom Inc. seems to be actually getting it. Cool.

A few weeks ago I talked about how Netflix is planning to move into the online video space. Well, it launched its first big foray into that this week by signing up with NBC Universal (press release here). Netflix subscribers will now be able to watch NBC’s shows (like "Heroes" and "The Office") on Netflix the day after they’re aired. All this is only for the US, of course.

Meanwhile, this now becomes the third distribution channel that NBC has signed up with (post iTunes) in order to distribute its content. The fourth is still in private beta. Last 100′s Daniel Langendorf is keeping score.

I haven’t really weighed in on the social media sites are bad vs. social media sites are good debate. Nor do I intend to…especially the whole Facebook bashing and Facebook worshiping debate. Everyone else is already doing enough of that for my liking, thank you.

Still, when Hugh MacLeod from gapingvoid posted the following sentiment on his blog, I had to jump in and agree with him:

So what’s stopping Facebook from putting in a small, tickable box that says, "Please do not let my ‘Friends’ send me any more of these REALLY ANNOYING Vampire/Zombie/Super wall/Super Poke/Whatever invites. I really, really don’t want them etc…"?

…

[If] they want to fix the problem, they can easily do so. If they do not, they’re sadly just consigning themselves to the slushpile of history.

I couldn’t agree more. Those incredibly annoying applications are nice for a while — like the noisy, roll-up blowouts that you get at parties — but they get very old, very quickly. I should repeat that. They get very old, very quickly.

Still, "friends" keep inviting other "friends" to sign up for those "applications". A commenter on MacLeod’s post said that some blogger had called these invitations "fram", which is "spam from friends". I like that.

I also really like Hugh’s Third Law:

"If you piss in the soup for long enough, eventually it stops tasting like soup."

Now if only I could have found an internship like this:

Company Name: I Can Has Cheezburger?
City: Seattle
State: Washington

We are looking for upbeat, smart and happy interns to help put moar cheez on the burgers — so to speak. The intern will work on our social marketing, help fulfill t-shirt sales, answer emails from totally random people, bathe Happy Cat (j/k!) and fill in where needed.

Requirements:

* Deep and wide-ranging understanding of popular culture (TV, intertubes, geek, movies, music, games, anime, news…)

* Awsumness. 0.00012 or higher on the Chuck Norris scale.

Please send your resume to:
icanhascheezburger@gmail.com

It’s funny how sometimes you just don’t connect things. I read about Word of Mouth on the Web (WOMOW) some months ago on Rave About It’s Local/Focal blog. It was only today, however, that I discovered that WOMOW was founded and is run by one of my classmates at MBS, Fiona Adler.

WOMOW is "a platform for word-of-mouth information so that recommendations can be stored and accessed to help people find the best local businesses." That is, it’s a place where you can find & rate local businesses and give & receive advice from members about local businesses.

I’ve discovered this service at a particularly good point in my life because my study term is just about finish (one and a half weeks to go!) after which my wife and I will have about three weeks of vacation (she’s also on her summer break). We were going to spend this time exploring Melbourne and its surrounds — have monthly tram card, will travel! — and WOMOW is the perfect resource for doing that effectively.

For example, we haven’t explored Fitzroy as much as we would have liked to. WOMOW will help us plan our explorations better by giving us a list of places that we shouldn’t miss and a list of places that we can do without. And if we visit a place that isn’t already listed there, well then we’ll just create a new listing for it and everyone will be better off.

Ah, I like this whole Web 2.0 stuff (much as I hate the term "Web 2.0" itself).

P.S. How do you pronounce WOMOW, I wonder. Is it Woe-Mao, Woe-Moe, Whommo, or something else entirely? :)  I guess I’ll have to ask.

ITWire reports that Paypal is debuting its mobile payment system, called Paypal Mobile Checkout, in Australia. The system works well for merchants since it’s actually affordable (as compared to other services that charge as high as 50% commission for their service).

To use it, customers make purchases via Paypal from any Internet-enabled mobile phone. They do that either by entering their existing Paypal username and password or, by first registering their phone with Paypal, and then simply typing in a 4-8 digit PIN code at purchase time to authorize the transaction.

A number of vendors, including Warner Music and Hoyts, have already signed up for the service and more interesting applications — such as SMS payments and proximity payments — should also be on their way (depending, of course, on the rate of consumer take-up).

PayPal has done quite a bit of innovating in online payments over the last few months.

First, in a partnership with VeriSign, it launched the PayPal Security Key. This is a highly secure add-on to their transaction system that "[generates] a unique six-digit security code about every 30 seconds. You enter that code when you log in to your PayPal or eBay account with your regular user name and password. Then the code expires – no-one else can use it."

Now, Reuters reports that, in a partnership with MasterCard, it’s about to launch the PayPal Secure Card. This software utility "generates a unique MasterCard number each time a PayPal user arrives on an e-commerce sales checkout page that does not otherwise accept its payments." To the merchant whose page you’re on, your payment looks just like any other MasterCard transaction. While to you, it looks just like any other PayPal transaction.

In a word: awesome!

The 2007 Frost & Sullivan Australia Best Practice Awards were awarded to "the best and brightest in the Australian Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry" in Sydney last Friday. This years awards focused on digital media advertising, unified communications, and enterprise outsourcing. The awards site hasn’t been updated with the results yet but Computerworld has published an article on the awards and the winners.

Much as I would love to get the Sony Reader (I can’t, I don’t have enough spare cash lying around) because I think it would be incredibly useful to me, it hasn’t done all that well in the market. In fact, the whole e-book concept hasn’t gone down well with consumers. At least not as well as, say, Sony would have hoped. (Or as I would have hoped, because that might have considerably reduced the retail price of the Reader, thereby making it affordable to me!)

All that might change, though, with the introduction of Amazon’s long-awaited, much rumoured-about, Kindle e-book reader. At least I hope things change. Kindle hasn’t yet been launched by the way — it’s supposed to be launched later today in the US — but it’s already being talked about. Notably, in Newsweek’s interview with Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, though both CNET and Engadget have talked about it as well.

We learn in strategy that, in many ways, the holy grail of strategic competition is to change the industry (presumably in your favour!). Amazon’s already done that a number of times and, through to the Kindle, they’re hoping to do that yet again. Being a fan of both e-books and tablet PCs, I hope they succeed.

Expect more coverage (on this blog) of this device and of this strategic move as more details emerge.

With the Australian federal election a few days away, all eyes seem to be on (among other things) daily opinion polls.

To generate data for those polls, people are asked "Who would you be most likely to vote for if an election were held this Saturday?". Chris Lloyd, one of our professors at MBS, argues that there is a lost opportunity in asking this question because "binary data gives much less information than continuous data – roughly 5-10 times less information." As a result, he argues, these opinion polls don’t capture the swing vote, even though that’s where all the action is. I agree with him completely and wish they would get all that extra data for us. However, I have three theories as to why they don’t do a more comprehensive survey.

The first is the obvious one (though a guess on my part): the economics aren’t worth it. That is, the comprehensive poll will cost too much because it’ll both take longer and will be more complicated to execute.

The second is the less obvious one: it’ll add too much uncertainty into our lives (or, put another way, it’ll give us too much information). Because these votes are swing votes, they’d change much too often for the general public’s liking. If the numbers jumped up or down by, say, 5% every other day, the polls would be perceived as being overly sensitive and voters as being overly fickle. Eventually, because the polls would seem almost erratic, the public would lose interest in them (they would seem less relevant as accurate gauges of solid public opinion), the media would stop buying them from polling agencies, and everyone would lose money. Yes, this reason comes down to money as well.

The third is the least obvious one: people would prefer not to know (or, put another way, too little uncertainty isn’t fun, either). Because, if they did know (with a reasonable amount of accuracy) who was going to win beforehand, it would make the actual voting on the election day much less exciting. And, in the same way that no one wants a boring, predictable sports tournament final, no one seems to want a boring election day either.

At the end of the day, though, people have to vote with their feet and not with their survey responses. And that little bit of uncertainty — that "anything can still happen" feeling — keeps people interested and much, much more motivated. Both of which, ultimately, lead to a better election process and a better execution of a democracy because everyone will have been interested in it and everyone will have participated in it.