Mark Glaser at PBS’s Medi­aShift blog offers your guide to pod­casts.

I’m bummed that I won’t be able to attend tonight’s Girls in Tech Launch Party, orga­nized by Adri­ana Gas­coigne, Julia French, LA Lassek at a venue in SF. (Some of my fave peo­ple will be there.) It’s orga­nized around women’s con­tri­bu­tions to tech­nol­ogy in the world today. I’ll be trav­el­ing for the next week (on vaca­tion) and won’t be blog­ging for a few days.

Busi­ness 2.0: Wikipedia founder hunts for gold. Jimmy Wales built Wikipedia into one of the largest and most col­lab­o­ra­tive sites on the Inter­net — but has yet to make his for­tune. Here’s how he plans to fix that.

Craig New­mark appeared on Com­edy Central’s The Daily Show tonight, and I found out at 8:32, two min­utes after the pro­gram ended. Oh, great — the first time I’ve ever wanted to catch a Daily Show episode on YouTube, and it’s not there. (Craig’s so self-effacing that he doesn’t even men­tion it on his blog today.) Any point­ers else­where? Just don’t tell me Joost!

Later: Here’s one place to watch Craig on the Daily Show.

Matt Mar­shall at Ven­ture­Beat: YouTube’s emerg­ing strat­egy, to pay rev­enue on pirated music.

Via Life­hacker and MicroP­er­sua­sion:

xFruits is a suite of RSS ser­vices that teaches your feeds all kinds of new tricks. For exam­ple, you can use xFruits to cre­ate a PDF
from your feed, roll up sev­eral feeds into one, add a mobile feed or
even post to RSS via email. It also rolls all xFruits users into a com­mu­nity.

Above is a Google Map of the last 50 vis­i­tors to Social Media. Interesting.

I’m attend­ing the Tech Pol­icy Sum­mit in San Jose, a first-time con­fer­ence about tech­nol­ogy issues that is draw­ing a crowd of heavy hit­ters — most of the 150 or so peo­ple in the audi­ence could well be on stage.  Some of the speak­ers include Deb­o­rah Platt Majo­ras, chair­man of the Fed­eral Trade Com­mis­sion, Sun pres­i­dent Jonathan Schwartz, Pub­lic Knowl­edge pres­i­dent Gigi Sohn, top execs at AT&T, Sybase, SAP and Cisco. Some inter­est­ing fare so far, though after attend­ing so many uncon­fer­ences (like Blog­ger­con and Vlog­ger­con) and inclu­sive con­fer­ences (like WeMe­dia), the setup here is a bit stuffy for my tastes. There’s no “for­mer audi­ence” here. We’re allowed to ask ques­tions, but it’s still very much us and them.

Rep. Howard Berman, chair­man of the House Sub­com­mit­tee on Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty, was on stage for a half hour, dis­cussing patent issues and immi­gra­tion reform. But I wanted to talk about the loom­ing copy­right cri­sis in this country.

From the floor, I told Rep. Berman that I have this old-fashioned notion that con­gress­men are ser­vants of the peo­ple, that they’ve been elected to do the people’s work. Just today Bit­Tor­rent announced a dis­tri­b­u­tion deal with sev­eral of the big Hol­ly­wood stu­dios. Via­com has announced a plan to dis­trib­ute its con­tent on Joost and con­tin­ues to demand that YouTube take down its copy­righted videos, which is all well and good. But the land­scape is chang­ing rapidly, and I believe we’ll see a back­lash against Capi­tol Hill’s for­mu­la­tion of copy­right in a few weeks if and when Google ban­ishes mil­lions of video­clips that con­tain short snip­pets of copy­righted video or music from YouTube’s servers. (Media cov­er­age has focused on YouTube’s spat with Via­com, while ignor­ing the poten­tially larger and more knotty issue of indi­vid­u­als using copy­righted music in their sound­track or tak­ing news show clips to cre­ate a com­men­tary.) Copy­right law never envi­sioned a cul­ture where mil­lions of us are con­tent cre­ators who want to bor­row, anno­tate and com­ment upon the culture.

I asked Berman whether it was time to reform copy­right laws to take into account the mil­lions of us who want noth­ing more than to express our cre­ativ­ity in a non­com­mer­cial way in this new dig­i­tal era, and whether he was open to lis­ten­ing to both sides of this issue in hear­ings before the House.

Other than a short riposte in which he equated tak­ing oth­ers’ copy­righted works with piracy (“That’s not peo­ple express­ing their cre­ativ­ity.  It’s peo­ple express­ing some­one else’s cre­ativ­ity.”), Berman had some reas­sur­ing things to say. He said he wouldn’t be a rub­ber stamp or advo­cate for any one side, and that Con­gress shouldn’t be in the posi­tion of prop­ping up out­dated busi­ness mod­els. He said he wants to solicit all view­points when these issues come before his subcommittee.

I fol­lowed him into the hall­way (along with Steve Levy of Newsweek), intro­duced myself and gave him a copy of “Dark­net” to read on his flight back to D.C. (He said he’d read it.) He repeated his posi­tion that he won’t be a “shill” for any­one and that his com­mit­tee will be an hon­est bro­ker with respect to IP issues. I also sug­gested that he take up the “orphaned works” cause cham­pi­oned by Lawrence Lessig and Brew­ster Kahle, among others.

Next, James Cic­coni, Sr. Exec­u­tive VP of exter­nal and leg­isla­tive affairs for AT&T had an inter­est­ing exchange with Wall Street Jour­nal colum­nist Walt Moss­berg. Walt pointed to a num­ber of coun­tries where true high-speed broad­band is deployed much more widely than in the U.S. — Japan, South Korea, Scan­di­navia, “even France, for God’s sake!” In some of these coun­tries, you can down­load video at 50 megabits a sec­ond and upload your own video at 10 megabits per sec­ond. “Why can’t we do that?” Moss­berg asked point blank. In the U.S., he pointed out, the best you can gen­er­ally do is 15mbps down and 2 up — if you’re lucky.

Cic­coni danced around the ques­tion, blam­ing gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion, the dis­persed pop­u­la­tion in the U.S. (“what about Man­hat­tan!?” Moss­berg said), and the tele­com com­pa­nies’ ongo­ing fight with the cable com­pa­nies over access to local fran­chise systems.

Point­ing out that AT&T car­ries 18% of the broad­band traf­fic in the U.S., Cic­coni noted, “The Inter­net wasn’t really built for video. The move to high def­ni­tion will expo­nen­tially increase the amount of traf­fic.” The com­pany is “very con­cerned” about the abil­ity of the net­work to deliver all those bits. “It’s a very frag­ile struc­ture and we need to upgrade it.”

Next, Moss­berg and Sun Microsys­tems pres­i­dent Jonathan Schwartz chat­ted about Schwartz’s blog, one of the best-read busi­ness blogs around.

Moss­berg: “Did your lawyers have a heart attack when you started your blog?”

Schwartz: “No. I had a heart attack when our gen­eral coun­sel started a blog.”

Schwartz says he doesn’t blog at reg­u­lar times. “It fills a lot of the white space dur­ing my day.” No one edits his blog posts in advance. The only time it’s reviewed is imme­di­ately after an earn­ings call, when Schwartz runs his entry past the lawyers.

Schwartz also invited the gov­ern­ment to step in and set some stan­dards for Inter­net broad­band deploy­ment (or some­thing like that; see Schwartz’s blog for details). In gen­eral, Sil­i­con Val­ley wants the gov­ern­ment to stay out of tech­no­log­i­cal affairs. “I’m not inter­ested in hav­ing the gov­ern­ment reg­u­late tech­nol­ogy,” he said. But in this case, “It’s a mean to an ends: enhanc­ing this country’s com­pet­i­tive­ness” with coun­tries ahead of us in the broad­band game.

Some famil­iar faces in the crowd: Dan Far­ber, Shel Israel, Lisa Padilla, Lau­ren Gel­man, Drew Clark and others.

Since Dan Far­ber is here, you can fol­low the conference’s goings on at ZDNet. (I won’t be able to attend tomorrow’s ses­sions.)

I’ll post pho­tos tonight. Here are nine pho­tos from the summit.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to Davis Guggen­heim, direc­tor of An Incon­ve­nient Truth, which won the best doc­u­men­tary Oscar tonight. Davis is not only a cool dude — he’s on the board of Cre­ative Com­mons — but he’s also the nicest, most down-to-earth guy I’ve ever met from Hol­ly­wood. (By con­trast, Al Gore, whom I ran into three times last year, struck me as some­what cold and aloof, per­haps under­stand­ably given his posi­tion.) Davis and I spent a while together last spring dur­ing a Cre­ative Com­mons func­tion in which I also did a brief video inter­view with his wife, actress Elis­a­beth Shue.

I’m a bit embar­rassed to say that when I fin­ished my 5-minute video inter­view with him about his doc­u­men­tary Teach, he asked, “Want to ask me about the new doc­u­men­tary I just fin­ished?,” refer­ring to what turned out to be his Oscar-winning pic­ture. I replied, “No, that’s OK.”

Tom Forem­ski at Sil­i­con Val­ley Watcher:  Sil­i­con Val­ley has become Media Val­ley — some­one should tell NYC.

Some of Sil­i­con Valley’s largest com­pa­nies are media com­pa­nies:
Google, Yahoo, EBay, for exam­ple are media companies–they pub­lish
pages of con­tent and adver­tis­ing around it.

Some of the most inter­est­ing and most valu­able new Sil­i­con Val­ley com­pa­nies, such as Youtube, Face­book
are based here in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia. So is Craigslist, the sev­enth
largest online media com­pany in the Eng­lish lan­guage world (in terms of
traffic).

Take a look at Busi­ness 2.0’s 25 star­tups to watch
and look at how many of these mostly “social” media and adver­tis­ing
com­pa­nies and are based in the Bay Area:18. Only two are based in New
York. …

New York’s media indus­try doesn’t see the shift that is going on because it feels as if it is mas­ter of its universe. 

Yes, yes! I’ve writ­ten that Google is indeed a media com­pany, Eric Schmidt’s protests to the con­trary. Now the ques­tion is whether they this team of search engine Ph.D.s can sus­tain it.

Donna Bogatin at ZDNet: Web 2.0: Does ‘old media’ get it?

Is it just me, or was there less glam­our than usual at this year’s Acad­emy Awards?

Robert Young at GigaOM:

Read­ing through the LA Times, as I do before The Oscars every year,
I came across a fan­tas­tic Op-Ed writ­ten by a respected Hol­ly­wood author
by the name of Neal Gabler. The opin­ion piece, titled “The Movie Magic is Gone”,
explains how Hol­ly­wood is los­ing its place as the epi­cen­ter of cul­tural
prod­ucts and how movies are los­ing their rel­e­vance as the “barom­e­ters
of the Amer­i­can psyche”.

And what is cul­prit?  You guessed it… the rise of social media!  As Gabler elaborates:

“All of this has been has­tened by the fact that there is
now an instru­ment to take advan­tage of the social strat­i­fi­ca­tions. To
the extent that the Inter­net is a niche machine, divid­ing its users
into tiny, self-defined cat­e­gories, it is pro­vid­ing a chal­lenge to the
movies that not even tele­vi­sion did, because the Inter­net addresses a
change in con­scious­ness while tele­vi­sion sim­ply addressed a change in
deliv­ery of con­tent. Tele­vi­sion never ques­tioned the very nature of
con­ven­tional enter­tain­ment.
The Inter­net, on the other hand, not only cre­ates niche com­mu­ni­ties —
of young peo­ple, beer afi­ciona­dos, news junkies, Brit­ney Spears
fanat­ics — that seem to obvi­ate the need for the larger com­mu­nity, it
plays to another pow­er­ful force in mod­ern Amer­ica and one that also
under­mines the movies: nar­cis­sism.
It is cer­tainly no secret that so much of mod­ern media is ded­i­cated to
empow­er­ing audi­ences that no longer want to be pas­sive. Already, video
games gen­er­ate more income than movies by cen­tral­iz­ing the user and
turn­ing him into the pro­tag­o­nist. Pop­u­lar web­sites such as Face­book,
MySpace and YouTube, in which the user is effec­tively made into a star
and in which con­tent is democ­ra­tized, get far more hits than movies get
audiences. ”

What Gabler calls “nar­cis­sism,” I pre­fer to use the term “dig­i­tal self expression.” …

Whether Hol­ly­wood will remain at the epi­cen­ter of future cul­tural
pro­duc­tion is the big ques­tion. For the first time, Hol­ly­wood should be
con­cerned like never before sim­ply by virtue of the fact that, this
time, the means of pro­duc­tion are now in the hands of the audi­ence
itself.