Now here is a tale of two standards. Last week, thin-skinned politicos were wringing hands and every last drop of TV commentary they could from the New Yorker Obama family cartoon cover. This week, the famous JibJab online satire site releases its camapign Flash video “Time for Some Campaignin’” and I dare say no one will bat an eye. Jay Leno may run it on The Tonight Show and cable may pick it up for a second.  Following on their very successful videos in the last election, JibJab goes for the jugular, giving John McCain a heart attack in the middle of the song. Obama is in ballet tights prancing throuhg the forest and riding a rainbow unicorn. Even a pantsless Bill Clinton makes a cameo and a cigar reference.

Now to be sure, I am one of those who felt The New Yorker cartoon was a misfire, not because it was too biting but because it just wasn’t very good satire. It was so broad and over the top that it failed to make an effective point. JibJab videos are by their very nature broad, shallow and obvious, but somehow funny nevertheless. Sometimes silly works better than smart.

Google has been making the rounds of offline media buyers, from print to radio to TV, hawking analytics tools that promise to bring online measurement tools to offline media. So far, the old guard seems a bit underwhelmed. At a recent Advertising Research Council presentation, Tony Jarvis, VP for global research, Clear Channel loudly challenged Google product manager Keval Desai about getting the Google TV audience measurement tool accredited by the Media Ratings Council. Google balked, by the way. Jarvis is not alone in the offline world. Both sell side and buy side seem less than impressed by Big G’s initial attempts at world domination, according to recent reports. MediaWeek reports that agencies find the new AdPlanner tool novel but shallow.

Google is also taking the direct route, opening a new blog specifically for “Traditional Media” earlier this month here. Here you will find compelling testimonials to the power of AdPlanner as it helps businesses optimize their media mix across TV, radio and print. In video format over YouTube, the materials feel a bit like an infomercial for analytics tools. Still, this is a blog worth watching if only to keep an eye on the Empire.

Morning Routines. They make the world go ’round. And I cling to my morning routine like a fat kid to the last Peanut M&M in the bag.

Part of my morning routine is shared by the masses in New York; I read the paper on the train (two papers actually). I pick up my AMNY and my New York Post in the station and then read them as thoroughly as I can over the course of my 20 minute commute. I have the two papers in my possession for no more than twenty minutes each day. Then I get off the train at Broadway - Nassau and pile them on top of the hundreds of other newspapers spilling out of the trash cans.

This annoys me for two reasons: One, I don’t like feeling the judging eyes on me as I attempt to put the newspapers into the can only to have them slide off the top of the pile and onto the floor where I leave them for fear of stopping and getting trampled by heard of office-bound cranksters. Two, its just stupid. Why are there no recycling containers on the subway platforms?

I’m not a save-the-world freak, but this seems like such a basic concept: there are thousands upon thousands of people tossing paper of the same weight, color, type into the trash everyday. It seems to me that this would be the perfect recycling material that would require minimal sorting effort. Most of the papers aren’t even wrinkled because people have them for such a short period of time.

The final kick in the teeth from the city is the “Can It For a Greener Planet” stickers that coat the outside of the trash cans. Making the effort to toss your coffee cup in the trash is not going to do a thing to help the planet’s greenness or even the overall appearance of the platforms. But recycling massive amounts of newspapers daily might make a dent…

I truly did learn something new at the Streaming Media conference yesterday at the NY Hilton; just how far people will go for a little attention. Everyone has heard at least something about the benefits of streaming live video. This is great for concerts, conferences…anything you’d prefer to view at the exact moment it is taking place. This is called live broadcasting or livecasting. But when streaming media is meant only to display every painstaking detail of someone’s life, it’s LIFEcasting. There are several sites that will help you facilitate your lifecast, though I don’t really want to share the names with you for fear of spreading the disease…ok, fine Stickcam, Mogulus, Kyle.tv and Zannel. Here, you can watch someone wake up in the morning, take a shower (seriously), eat breakfast, drive to work, sit in a cube all day, go to the gym, drive home, make dinner, watch Grey’s and go to bed. Thrilling. Now instead of someone filtering out the “interesting” parts of their day in order to fill a blog, we can actually WATCH someone’s life unfold, no effort required on their end. All they do is plug their camera into their computer and we can watch. Creep City. I want to write this off as yet another “nobody really cares” next big thing, but while watching the 30 minute-long panel at the Hilton, which was being streamed live, 45 people viewed it and 18 left comments. I guess someone cares, it’s just not me.

As part of the Time Inc. Digital Showcase line-up in Manhattan last week, CNNMoney.com flashed its fat video wallet by showing the room full of press only just what Broadband video has done for their site, both in the past and for the future. According to Jonathan Shar, general manager/SVP for CNNMoney.com, the site, which holds content for Fortune, Money and Fortune Small Business magazines, had over 19 million video streams for 2007, a number that is basically unparalleled in the online business/financial news space. “Video has easily become the main feature of our site,” Shar noted, “and it will only grow in the next two years.”

Most interestingly, Shar informed us that instead of just piling video responsibilities on top of the current editorial staffs’ shoulders, they hired a full video staff of twelve (yes, TWELVE) editors and producers, including Caleb Silver, who is executive producer for the video channel. While the staff is huge and thought to only exist in budget fantasy lands like Time Inc., so is the video undertaking, which includes have an original video on each page so that users can read articles while watching the content-complimentary video at the same time.

So here we are the end of Earth Week and the planet is still polluted and globally warmed. Publishers and advertisers alike have been filling our eyes and ears with their sudden strikes of earthly consciousness in an effort to appeal to those of us who sleep better at night knowing we support green brands. Vanity Fair did the green issue. So did Time. So did Elle. Even Black Enterprise joined the party.

But here’s the thing: I’m ok with lying to myself about my “sofa” commitment to saving our planet. I know that nodding in agreement to Al Gore’s face when I see it plastered on a billboard in Times Square isn’t really “doing anything” but it makes me feel better and frankly, lying to myself is a sharply-honed skill that I just can’t unlearn. I may not have a soul, but I do have a brain and I can tell when I’m being served tap water when I ordered bottled. Basically, I don’t like it when brands lie to me, especially brands that I’ve known and loved all my life.

The actual and physical environmental actions taken by consumer magazines is debatable; they’ll do things like claim they use a certain percentage of recycled paper in their pages and who am I to dispute that? If I had the ability to tell what percentage of a piece of paper was comprised of recycled materials, I wouldn’t be writing for a living. But this I do know: if a magazine is truly committed to this whole green thing, why not go digital for Earth Day? Isn’t that the only truly green option? Suggesting a publication to go digital for a month and sacrificing advertisers who might not be on board is asking a lot, but I don’t think it’s asking more than Vanity Fair is asking of me when it shoves environmental consciousness down my throat on any number of it’s hundreds of pages (recycled or not). If risking losing all those ad dollars for a month is just not feasible, then how about cutting pages in half in the name of the environment? All I’m saying is there are other options.

Personally, I find the brutal honesty in Vogue’s fall and spring fashion issues refreshing at this point. The arrogance of publishing issues that enormous and even listing the number of pages on the cover is simply awesome. Just sell me what I’m really buying and spare me the notion that you care if polar bears are getting uncomfortably warm in the Arctic Circle.

For a list of digital publications and to see how it all works, check out Nxtbook.

Also check out Zinio and Texterity, two other great digital media companies.

Just when it seemed that magazine publishers were beginning to understand how to monetize their online brand extensions (sort of), along came mobile to further confuse the digital matter. Finding audiences online – what they want to see and where and when they want to see it – is one thing, but how do you know what people want to see on their mobile devices, especially when these devices vary so vastly, from screen-size and capabilities to frequency of use?

Well, thanks to thought-pushers like Apple, mobile web awareness has increased enormously, even if people don’t have an iPhone. And with that increased awareness comes increased mobile web usage. According to Nielsen, since December of 2007 mobile web users have increased from 35 million to 40 million. The time for publishers to figure this out has officially come.

Hearst is the leading the way, with nine current mobile platforms. Director of mobile for Hearst magazines and digital media, Sophia Stuart, explained at the Min Day Summit last week in New York that mobile is not something that can be ignored by publishers, but that it will not work for every publication. “The content must make sense for the user. This is not the web, it’s the user’s personal device so it has to be relevant, helpful information.” Hearst currently incorporates five revenue streams and packages their mobile platform along with the print as a line item and not simply an add-on. Stuart noted that there are four reasons to develop a web application:

1. Entertainment
2. Time sensitive information, like breaking news
3. Personalized information that is specific to each user
4. Lifestyle information, like restaurant tips, music store locations, etc.

But if the web is now available on so many phones, why develop a mobile platforms for your readers? “The number one reason is for targeted advertising,” says John Paris, director of mobile products for Time, Inc., “and people don’t want to search for things on their phones, they want the content to come to them.”

While the web is the place to experiment, mobile devices are not. Paris affirms, “I will not be the guinea pig for any mobile company. I will only listen to pitches that have proven, powerful results from three major brands.”

Nothing can make a head spin quite like trying to wrap it around the concept of virtual worlds as anything more than something a creepy neighbor used to sit in his mom’s basement and experiment with. But they are coming out of the basement, slowly but surely. They sure seemed to be a viable, real life medium at the Digital Worlds Conference held two weeks ago in New York. And newly created worlds such as the vLES (virtual Lower East Side created by vMTV and Vice magazine) and the CosmoGIRL! virtual prom (a CosmoGIRL! and There.com creation) got so much coverage by the mainstream media, it seems as if everyone is hip to these virtual worlds but you.

Not true. The reality is that while virtual worlds are more developed and have more visitors than ever, everyone is not “doing it”…yet. Over 70% of the users are children (with influential, malleable minds) and the others are using the medium for video games or Second Life, both of which are largely based on fantasy and not what the “new” virtual world creators claim their worlds are really all about. The applications now being developed for virtual worlds for purposes like real world business development are still on the fringe.

At the min Day Summit today, keynote speaker Geoff Ramsey stated that virtual worlds are good for two things: to learn about community activity and to test new marketing concepts, the key words there being LEARN and TEST. Ramsey also suggested that hardcore users of Second Life should “get a real one,” a notion echoed throughout the digital community.

So while advertisers scramble to figure out how they can make their brand presence known and how to turn virtual interest into real ad dollars, most of the rest of the world is still googling “avatar”.

User tolerance for searching search results is shrinking. Any search engine optimizer should be aware that only 8% of users will drill deeper than three pages of results, which is a decrease from 10% two years ago, according to iProspect. About 68% of users say they tend to go with first page results, up from 62% in 2006 and 60% in 2002. Also important is brand credibility, with 37% of respondents saying that being at the top of search results indicates a brand’s leadership in that category. The emergence of blended search results (images, video, blogs and text) have crowded the field even further, making less room on a page for traditional text-based hits. Companies should be optimizing and hyper-distributing multimedia into the search eco-system as well.

As we have reported in both MIN and DMR, Yahoo’s new social media network, Buzz, is using its beta release to drive traffic from the Yahoo front page to a limited range of branded media sites. Yahoo itself has been touting partner success stories, namely sites that get massive spikes when one of the highly rated articles in this new recommendation engine floats to the Yahoo.com page. But now metrics provider Hitwise is suggesting that Buzz is rivaling Digg in the places that matter most to major media partners. Heather Hopkins, vp research, Hitwise, UK says she was “amazed” at new charts showing Digg.com driving only 10% more traffic to news and media destinations in the last week. To be sure, Digg.com still is the gorilla in the room when it comes to driving traffic to blogs, games and video. Hopkins concludes that Buzz’s quick rise proves “there is likely room for a new entrant in social news media.” Well, there is room if you have hundreds of million of eyeballs already coursing through your pages. What Yahoo is proving is that it still has scale no one else enjoys, and it can throw that weight around to its partners’ benefit when needed.