Online advertisers joined the blogger backlash against the Federal Trade Commission’s new guidelines that require bloggers, Twitterers and others to disclose any cash or freebies they’ve received to hawk stuff online.

Noting the new guidelines have created a “firestorm of controversy within the ad-supported interactive-media industry,” Interactive Advertising Bureau President Randall Rothenberg suggested the FTC rescind the new guidelines.

“These revisions are punitive to the online world and unfairly distinguish between the same speech, based on the medium in which it is delivered,” he wrote in an open letter to the FTC on Thursday. The online-advertising trade group suggested the FTC try a do-over, after opening up the issue for discussion with bloggers and online advertisers…

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YouTube, CBS (CBS), NBC, ABC are going to have an awful lot in common in the not too distant future.

Which company uses its traffic to drive eyeballs to programming on which it sells advertising? They all do.

The biggest difference between YouTube and the broadcast networks is that one actually produces content or pays a licensing fee for the content before they sell advertising around it.

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The Internet has been dead and boring for a while now. It has reached a point of stability where flashes of technological creativity are rare, but every now and then some new technology can put a spark back in the ole gal (no sexism intended).

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Rupert, you didn’t ask my opinion on this, but since when has that ever stopped me.

First the good news. You can sell content on the internet. People pay for content on and off the internet every second of every day. It’s easy to do. If you do it right. But before I get to the how to, let me throw out some interim suggestions:

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I have been intrigued by the back and forth between Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, and Mark Cuban on the topic of “Free” as a strategy and business model….Here is where I come down on all of this. First and foremost, Free is a disruptive force. This does not mean that if you deploy a free business model you will be successful.

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You have a video that you want to post on the web. It may be just for you. It could be for friends. It could be for family. It could be for a company or a political campaign. It could a video that you want seen by as many people as possible.

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Each of them being famous in part because of their lack of self-censorship, Courtney Love and Mark Cuban probably surprised no one when they (separately) got themselves in trouble for mouthing off via Twitter. The reported 140-character assassination engaged in by these two famous folks raises a few questions for those of us who aim to be more judicious in our online tweeting, blogging, and other postings.

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A few weeks back, someone pointed me to a Twitter message where one Twitter user was (jokingly) accusing another of copyright infringement for repeating a message. While the situation was amusing, you knew it was only a matter of time until the question became more serious.

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Here is a hard cold fact of the Internet age. Any content creator whose sole business is selling their content à la carte will have a hard time surviving. In a world of unlimited digital choice, the cost of creating and marketing content that generates a profit is expensive and difficult. Which is exactly why the successful sites have been aggregators.

It’s also exactly why newspapers are having a hard time making it. They sell papers one at a time. They sell home subscriptions one at a time. When they charge for monthly subscriptions online, they sell them one at a time. That’s a tough business.

It’s not that the newspaper content is not worth it. The problem is that it requires prospective buyers to first value the content, then decide whether they want to go through the hassle of going to a newsstand, calling the home delivery department of the paper, or putting in their credit card information to buy online. This may be beyond a solvable problem when much of the same content is available online for free.

So what to do?

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It’s easy to write about what the government or other people should do with our/their money. It’s harder to come up with a course of action that I can undertake on my own that possibly, somehow could make a difference. My first inclination is always to try to look “for the next big thing.” But the next big thing is just that–next. It’s not now. It’s Venture Capital. It’s not self-funding, renewal capital.

Rather than trying to be a Venture Capitalist, I was looking for an idea that hopefully could inspire people to create businesses that could quickly become self-funding. Businesses that just needed a jump-start to get the ball rolling and create jobs. I’m a big believer that entrepreneurs will lead us out of this mess. I just needed a way to help.

So here it is. Some people will love it, some will hate it. It is what it is.

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It’s a classic PR play: When you start to look like the bad guy, call out a bigger bad guy.

And it seems to be the strategy that the Securities and Exchange Commission–besieged by accusations of lax enforcement before and during the credit crisis–is using in going after Mark Cuban for insider trading.

It’s too early to say definitively whether Cuban is guilty of insider trading in Mamma.com (now called Copernic), a search also-ran whose management has, in Cuban’s own judgment, “a checkered past.” On his blog, the normally voluble Cuban simply accused the SEC of acting on “win-at-any-cost ambitions” and a process that “was result-oriented, fact be damned.” Still, it’s not looking good for him at all.

The SEC’s complaint against Cuban outlines some pretty compelling evidence: Cuban bought 6.3 percent of Mamma.com in March 2004. Three months later, the company CEO told him it was issuing a controversial, and heavily dilutive, private placement. “Well, now I’m screwed,” Cuban told Mamma’s CEO.

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If you haven’t read, ESPN has said that they will be aggressively bidding for the retransmission rights for the 2016 Olympics. Notice that I didn’t say TV rights. The battle for the Olympics rights will be in spreadsheet projections done by ESPN, NBC and probably DirecTV that will take into account what revenues can be generated by TV advertising (traditional and interactive), cable/satellite subscription revenues, an ever-increasing market size for mobile video and advertising, and of course audio/video and text advertising of all types.

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For years, people have been saying that they will watch things in high-definition TV that they would never ordinarily watch. In the 12 years I have been involved in Internet video in one form or another, I have yet to have anyone tell me they will watch something just because it’s on the Internet. That’s not to say people won’t surf the Net and sample something they otherwise would not watch. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear, while more people are “snacking on Internet video,” the real “meal” continues to be TV.

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The future of any technology can be defined by the economic opportunities it creates. Take just one look around Pittsburgh to see the explosion in the number of businesses built around advances in medical technology and the importance of entrepreneurs focusing on new technology. The impact has been enormous. Which brings us to today. What are the opportunities in front of us to get excited about in the digital media field?

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There is a lot of money being spent trying to turn Internet video into something it’s not. It’s not TV. It’s certainly not going to be HDTV. What is shocking about the entire attempt to turn the Internet into a TV/HDTV distribution medium is how much people lie to themselves about what is actually happening.

First of all, 100 percent of the Internet video that you see offered on the net as HD is not HD. Plain and simple. What is HD video? HD Video is video you can watch on a screen of ANY size and say … “that looks good, almost as good as it can get.” What is currently being passed as HD [on the Internet] is video that looks pretty good because it’s being played on a small PC or laptop screen–and for the big timers, even a 17-inch screen. Well guess what–everything and anything coded at 2MBS and above is going to look good on a small screen.

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