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(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

I know I’m a little late to the party with this one, but I continue to be fascinated by the response to the by-now legendary video clip featuring Miss Teen USA contestant Caitlin Upton — which I have helpfully embedded here, for those of you who might (like me) have been spelunking in Romania or working on the space station last week, and therefore missed the global furore caused by her comments.

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Just to recap, Caitlin was asked why a quarter of Americans can’t find the U.S. on a map, and gave such a startlingly incomprehensible answer (even for a beauty pageant) that it has to be seen to be believed. Not surprisingly, the clip made it to YouTube in the blink of an eye, and became the latest viral sensation. At last count, the video of a confused Miss South Carolina had been viewed more than 12 million times.

Interestingly enough, however, Caitlin (or her agent and/or parents) didn’t shy away from the publicity. Not only did she show up on The Today Show — where she explained that she was flustered and didn’t hear the answer properly, and then gave a somewhat better answer — but she also took part in several other events that made light of her blooper, including a geographical pop quiz put on by People magazine on its website.

As marketing consultant Bruce Clay notes on his blog, instead of hiding or trying to avoid the consequences of her blunder, Caitlin effectively took advantage of the same forces that made that blunder so notorious, in what he describes as a textbook example of “reputation management,” Internet-style.

CNN’s Jeanne Moos notes in her video on the Miss South Carolina phenomenon that in the new YouTube era, no one is safe from an embarrassing video clip, and mentions the “Star Wars Kid” — Montreal high-school student Ghyslain Raza, who videotaped himself pretending to be a Jedi knight, only to have the clip uploaded to the Internet by fellow students, much to his embarrassment. He later sued and reached a settlement, and hasn’t been heard from since.

Caitlin, meanwhile, has gotten at least as much positive mileage out of her televised confusion as she has negative coverage — much like the “Tron guy,” a sci-fi enthusiast who was much ridiculed for posting photos of a rather unflattering Tron costume he made. The Tron guy (also known as Jay Maynard) turned his humiliation into multiple radio and TV appearances, and was asked to appear at a number of sci-fi conferences and fan events.

Obviously, it’s a lot easier for an adult — or someone with PR management professionals on their side — to handle unwanted Internet attention than it was for 15-year-old Ghyslain Raza. But Jay Maynard and others have shown that there is a flipside to Internet embarrassment. Can anyone remember the name of the Miss Teen USA winner? Unlikely.

Came across an interesting post by Dale Dougherty of MAKE magazine on the O’Reilly blog, in which he writes about how a blog post on the premature burning of the Burning Man was reported by Scott Beale of Laughing Squid on his blog. Dale details how Scott repeatedly updated his post, until it became much like an evolving news story.

More than one person has made the point that hardly anyone cares about whether some wooden structure in the desert built by a bunch of aging hippies was torched a few days early or not, and that is probably true. But Dale’s point is not the nature of the story itself, it’s the process that Scott used — frequent updates, complete with photos.

This isn’t really all that new. Wire services like Reuters and Bloomberg do this sort of thing all day long, filing updates to stories as new information comes in, correcting mistakes, etc. In most cases, newspaper journalists take all of this stuff and blend it into a story that gets published the next morning. But with the Web, there’s no need to pick an arbitrary moment in time and “publish” a supposedly comprehensive story — the story evolves over time.

We can see this kind of thing on some newspaper websites, including the Globe’s, when there is a breaking story — although too often we resort to the traditional story format. Other examples include the entries at Engadget and other blogs when they “live-blog” an event, and the entries at Wikipedia on breaking events, such as the recent highway collapse.

That, to my mind, is effectively real-time journalism, and newspapers should be doing more of it.

A fascinating announcement from Google about an arrangement with four of the world’s major wire services that will see their content featured more prominently on Google News. As far as I can tell, this deal has one major loser: namely, the thousands of newspapers that use content from those services, and are now going to see that traffic disappear.

As I understand it, the arrangement between Google and Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, the British Press Association and Canadian Press will see the content from those wire services appear on Google News with the logo of the wire service prominently displayed, and Google has agreed to give the wires’ version of a story prominence over the thousands of versions of that story that appear on the websites of the various newspapers that are members of AP, AFP, etc.

This is potentially explosive, I think. Whenever I search for a news story in Google News, I get hundreds of identical versions of that story from newspapers that picked it up from Associated Press — and I may even click through to the first newspaper that has a copy. But if I can see the story from the wire service itself, before it was edited or shortened or changed, I would probably prefer that. The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss has more here.

And while a Google spokesman said the changes “will have little impact on news organizations that receive traffic directly from Google News,” a Reuters story on the deal noted that:

“Because of Google’s campaign to simultaneously reduce duplicate articles, the original wire service article is likely to be featured in Google News instead of versions of the same article from newspaper customers, sapping ad revenue to those newspapers.”

In a sense, the deal with Google News puts wire services such as Reuters and AP into competition with the newspapers that are its members and customers — and will only increase the pressure on newspapers (and there are a lot of them) that continue to rely on wire copy to fill both their virtual and their real pages. And this new development is particularly interesting given Google’s recent plan to allow newsmakers to comment on Google News stories.

Further reading:

Dan Gillmor’s thoughts are here. Steven Hodson has some reaction at WinExtra and James Robertson thinks that the newspaper business has to go back to the future. Elsewhere, Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests says this puts the lie to Google’s repeated protests that it doesn’t compete with newspapers, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land puts the announcement into context, and my friend Scott Karp provides some perspective at Publishing 2.0. Steve Boriss also has a post at The Future of News.

And a commenter on Lost Remote’s post sums it up thus:

“Damn. I pay a ton of money for AP rights every year, and while it’s primary for the audience hitting our home page, I see a huge number of hits to that content from google news users. Guess I can kiss those eyeballs goodbye.”

Indeed. Although William Hartnett of the Palm Beach Post notes that those eyeballs aren’t really worth much anyway.

Some of my more careful readers may have noticed that I haven’t exactly been posting up a storm lately, and that’s because I have been having waaaay too much fun offline — touring around PEI with the family, relaxing by the shores of Bay Fortune, which looks like this:

… and have also been doing a fair bit of this:

Regular blogging will return soon.

As plenty of others are reporting elsewhere, the New York Times has launched the public version of its MyTimes customizable home page, which has been in beta for almost a year now. I tried it out when it first launched and I confess my reaction was very similar to some of the other responses out there — in other words, the new offering has some not bad features, but nothing that’s going to alter the fabric of the Web or cause the earth to stop rotating.

I think one of the most interesting features is the ability to check out — and add the RSS feeds for — some of the sites that New York Times reporters and columnists like to go to. I confess I haven’t really spent much time on the site since I checked it out initially, but the last time I looked they hadn’t done much apart from letting you add feeds from NYT writers and add tabs specific to each of your favourite authors.

My friend Mike Masnick at Techdirt isn’t very impressed with the site, and I share his lack of enthusiasm. While it’s not a bad offering, I wonder why the Times bothered with MyTimes when there are others offering much the same features. I assume they’re hoping faithful readers will gravitate to the site because of their love for the brand, but I’m not sure that’s true. If I were them, I would have spent a bit more time trying to make it unique.

As Mike Arrington points out at TechCrunch, Zoho has launched offline support for its Zoho Writer application (although it’s read-only for now) using Google Gears — which is more than a little ironic, considering Google still hasn’t offered the same functionality for Google Docs.

But while that irony makes for a funny post, does it really amount to anything from a competitive point of view? I’m not so sure it does. Implementing Gears support for Google Docs would probably take about half an hour of programming time — and in all likelihood requires little more than a piece of script to be turned on.

There’s no question that having offline support is a key feature, and Zoho should be congratulated for offering it. But Is being first enough to give it any kind of compelling advantage over Google Docs? Unlikely.

An editorial about Google in the Los Angeles Times has caused quite a kerfuffle (or perhaps a brouhaha) in the blogosphere — in part because the editorial said that for some newspapers, the search engine and its Google News aggregator are as bad as Osama bin Laden.

Robert Niles of the Online Journalism Review says the paper “lit its credibility on fire” with that statement, and insulted its readers with a misunderstanding of how Google News operates and what the benefits are for online journalism. Jeff Jarvis says — and I would agree — that the editorial seems to be mocking newspapers that see Google as Osama.

In any case, there does seem to be a tone of righteous indignation to the editorial, at the idea that someone like Google could be so bold as to claim that a feature of theirs — in this case, the ability to add comments to a Google News story — might help to improve journalism. And that is where I think the LA Times misses the boat.

As my friend Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 points out, journalism is no longer (if it ever was) a thing that is crafted and polished and then delivered to newspaper readers for their enlightenment every morning. It is something that develops over time — a continuous process, and media outlets are only part of that process now.

I think smart newspapers know that, and are trying to make their readers, their community, and those affected by news events a part of that process. The not-so-smart ones are making fun of Google and hoping it goes away.

It has looked for awhile as though Technorati was having difficulties — and not just technical difficulties but in the executive suite as well, with founder and CEO Dave Sifry writing on his blog earlier this year that the blog-search company was looking for someone to replace him — but now the wheels really appear to have come off. Sifry is leaving the company completely, without a CEO to fill his shoes, and eight people are being laid off.

In his farewall post, Sifry says the company will be run in the interim by a committee of the board (trust me when I say this is rarely a good sign), and that the search for a CEO continues. The Technorati founder says he will continue to be “engaged strategically from the point of view of a director on the board.” According to his post, he will be chairman. As for the layoffs, Sifry says:

“Because we’ll be focusing our efforts more precisely moving forward, it became clear we needed to adjust our expense structure to be more appropriately aligned with our priorities moving forward. So, we had to make the difficult decision to part ways with eight of our staff members.”

I’ll say this much for Dave — he certainly seems to have gotten the hang of the cold-blooded CEO dismissal message. Om notes that one of Technorati’s biggest issues (apart from uptime problems) is that Google is eating the company’s lunch. Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher has some added perspective on the difficulties of the startup game here.

Doc Searls has an excellent post up with some advice for newspapers trying to make their websites better. One quibble: he’s still trying to push the “charge for the new, give away the old” idea, which I gave him some grief for last time be brought it up (and he gracefully admitted that he might not be right about the “charge for the new” part).

In any case, the rest of his advice — including the “give away the old” part of the above statement — makes perfect sense and should be laminated and posted in every newsroom from sea to shining sea. Bon mots include the following:

Start following, and linking to, local bloggers and even competing papers (such as the local arts weeklies). You’re not the only game in town anymore, and haven’t been for some time.

The whole “bloggers vs. journalism” thing is a red herring, and a rotten one at that. There’s a symbiosis that needs to happen, and it’s barely beginning. Get in front of it, and everybody will benefit.

Stop calling everything “content”. It’s a bullshit word that the dot-commers started using back in the ’90s as a wrapper for everything that could be digitized and put online… Your job is journalism, not container cargo.

There’s plenty more where those came from. Go read the whole thing — I’ll wait.