Media

President Obama asked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to scrutinize Justice Department investigations and said he was “troubled” that such inquiries could hinder reporters.

A new product, Twitter Amplify, will help brands match advertisements with Twitter commentary by viewers.

Content marketing is expected to be a big growth area for the ad industry and Robert J. Murray, global president of iProspect, a leading digital agency, is signing up.

Thursday's Trivia Question : In last night's season finale of Modern Family, what was Phil Dunphy's Mom's name?

Lego has unveiled a life-size Star Wars X-Wing fighter jet made entirely of Legos in Times Square. It promotes an upcoming Cartoon Network show called The Yoda Chronicles. You can also see a life-size Lego Chewy, Vader, R2-D2, C-3PO and Boba Fett in the promo for the show. But the X-Wing has the distinction of being the largest Lego structure built to date. At 11 feet tall, 43 feet long, 44 feet wide and almost 46,000 pounds, it's made of 5,335,200 individual Lego bricks. It took 32 people four months just to put it together. And you can climb into the cockpit for a photo. Which means all you Star Wars and Lego fans must make a pilgrimage to this, the largest and most awesome Lego thing ever made, and get a picture of your child sitting in the cockpit shouting "Pew! Pew!" See lots more photos at Gizmodo.

Mark Ellen won't mind me saying he can be absent-minded. In the early days of The Word he forgot he'd arranged to do a phone interview and went out to get a sandwich.Reception rang looking for him. "There's a Tony Bennett on the line." I couldn't help wondering whether this was the great saloon singer or a decorator ringing Mark with an estimate. It's a common name.I asked them to put him through. Soon as I heard the voice say "Mark?" I knew it was the Tony Bennett. The voice speaking to me was unmistakably the same one that had sung to us all those years. He could no more disguise it than fake his fingerprints.Since then I've decided the singers I really like sing in the way they speak. For instance I prefer Christine McVie to Stevie Nicks. That doesn't mean they sound exactly the same but it does mean their musical sound is identifiably related to their spoken one. The best singer of all, Sinatra, was the classic example. That's how he made songs make sense. He slipped from speech to song without stopping to arrange himself into the posture of a singer.On the other hand, and here I'm obviously an old git, an increasing number of singers don't seem to feel they're performing until they've put on what they clearly think is a singerly voice. And I don't just mean the usual diva tricks - showy melisma, notes sustained beyond reason, the word "my" delivered as "mah". I also find myself being exposed to a lot of guitar-playing stool-roosters who deliver in a mannered "hello sky, hello trees" style from the back of the throat with minimal involvement of the articulators. They wouldn't talk like that. The result is their songs make no sense whatsoever.

Robin Good's insight:Streamified is stream reader / aggregator / publishing platform which allows you to aggregate, filter and read news stories coming from all your selected social channels and RSS feeds. Not only. You can also easily edit and cross-post to any number of social accounts simultaneously or, at a later time.Similar in some ways to Hootsuite, Streamified offersa more elegant and streamlined interface,a much better news reading experience,the ability to create "persitent searches" on any topicacross news sources and social streamsand to apply a large number of advanced filterscross-post directly to G+, FB, TW, LI and many moreKey additional features include:Scheduled posting - organize your editorial calendar by scheduling each post for the day and time you wantBrand alerts - get automatically informed anytime anyone talks about your brand on any site or social media channelTeam collaboration - assign your team members to post and reply on your social networks without needing to give them your credentials for each.Advanced Analytics and Reports - analyze all of your stream and slice the data in multiple useful ways. (Available only in Professional/Enterprise accounts)Free version available.My comment: This is a great tool for content marketers, newsrooms or professionals looking for a tool that brings together the best of Google Reader, Hootsuite and Analytics. Here you have it.If you have to find and post a lot of relevant content, across multiple social media channels, this may be a very compelling solution indeed.More info: https://streamified.me/and here: http://streamified.com/ Pricing info: http://streamified.com/#pricingSee it on Scoop.it, via Content Curation World

There are dozens of file-sharing related lawsuits filed every month across the United States so it’s virtually impossible to keep up with them all, but one appeared this week that everyone will want to keep an eye on. Voltage Pictures are the outfit behind the award-winning movie The Hurt Locker. The company has a record of suing large numbers of alleged copyright infringers across the United States and its latest effort will thrust the filmmaker right back into the spotlight. The case was filed Tuesday in Portland, Oregon, against a single named defendant. The basic claims are familiar – defendant is a file-sharer who breached Voltage’s copyrights (in this case for the movie ‘Maximum Conviction’) and who must now be held accountable to the tune of $150,000 in damages. It’s standard fare, until one starts to drill down into the details. The defendant’s name is Jim Choi and he has an eyebrow-raising occupation. “Defendant Jim Choi is an attorney with offices at 16323 SE Stark Street # 3, Portland, Oregon, 97233,” the lawsuit reads. Choi’s website, PDXBankruptcy.com, has been taken down but with help from Google’s cache and Google+ his name and status can be confirmed. Choi describes himself as a bankruptcy lawyer and a member of both the Oregon and Florida State Bars. He has a keen interest in music and also holds black belts in Tae Kwon Do and Judo. Whether they will help him fight off Voltage remains to be seen – the claims against him are scathing. Voltage say that the IP address they traced back to Choi through ISP Century Link was observed sharing the movie ‘Maximum Conviction’ in November 2012, but the accusations don’t stop there. “Choi is a prolific proponent of the BitTorrent distribution system advancing the BitTorrent economy of piracy causing injury to plaintiff,” the complaint reads. The movie company then goes on to list another 66 claimed instances of copyright infringement allegedly carried out by Choi on a wide range of content including Hollywood movies, TV shows and software. Voltage’s claims that Choi infringed other company’s copyrights are of real interest. The unnamed anti-piracy outfit hired by Voltage to monitor for infringement on the studio’s torrents is clearly monitoring and cross matching IP addresses on other people’s content too. Furthermore, in order to accurately prove that Choi had infringed copyright on these other items the monitoring company must actively participate in torrent swarms of content that has nothing to do with Voltage. If the company does not have permission from those rightsholders to do so, it too is breaching copyright. These facts suggest the involvement of a larger than usual operation. Voltage are known to use Canadian monitoring company Canipre, but they are not named in this lawsuit. Moving on, the lawsuit also makes some ‘interesting’ assumptions about the nature of Choi’s BitTorrent activities. “Another growing element of the BitTorrent model is that users are able to attach advertising to the files they upload through various means allowing them to generate revenue through the propagation of the titles they make available to others,” the lawsuit reads. “In this case, plaintiff’s motion picture as copied and distributed by defendant is associated with the ‘TORRENTING.COM’ branding in the title.” The suggestion here is that since Choi allegedly shared a file that that had a website URL in its title (a common occurrence and one generally used to show where a file came from) he was doing so in order to generate revenue. And it doesn’t stop there. “In information and belief, Choi is either directly affiliated with TORRENTDAY.COM and other third party sites as a subscriber and contributor or indirectly promoting the activities of TORRENTDAY.COM and other third party sites in an effort

Building on our piece on the Reuters.com rethink, Source went back to get the nerdier details from Paul Smalera. Of note is that it’s all built on an API called Media Connect (see comment below) that generates the content feeds for all its new platforms and products: The other thing this setup lets us do is show off the depth of Reuters content. We produce, including videos, text, pictures, and other content types, something like 20,000 unique items per day. But our current website really didn’t let us show off the depth of our reporting. So one of the main functions of the CMS is really set up to allow editors to create and curate collections — we call them streams — of stories. This lets us get to the endless-scroll type behavior that Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and the rest have made popular as the new default behavior of the web.

The Pew Research Center launched a new blog earlier this week that’s supposed to provide Pew-quality data and information at a real-time pace. It’s called Fact Tank, and it will be a home for what Pew calls it’s “unique brand of data journalism.” Since Tuesday, they’ve written up data snapshots on topics like Secretary of State John Kerry’s approval rating, American support for drone usage, and media coverage of the Oklahoma tornado. Alan Murray left The Wall Street Journal to head the Pew Research Center in November.