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There’s been a bunch written about BlogTv over the past few days — including at Mashable and Jeff Pulver’s site — in part because the company has been at the Supernova conference in the Valley. BlogTv does streaming video and allows users to create their own “TV shows,” much like Ustream.tv and Stickam.com, and lots of people seem to think that it’s a great thing, etc. etc.

Sounds pretty good so far, right? But if you happen to be north of the 49th parallel, as I am, when you click on BlogTv.com you go to BlogTv.ca instead. Some other sites do this too — it’s a redirect based on where your IP address is coming from. Google does it too, but allows you to click and go to Google.com if you wish. BlogTv.ca doesn’t do that. Why? Because BlogTv.ca — which was created by Alliance Atlantis, a large media and entertainment conglomerate that just got bought by another large media conglomerate — licensed the platform from an Israeli company called Tapuz, and it is only open to Canadians. As a result, BlogTv.com content is blocked from Canadians.

Am I the only one who thinks that this sucks? (apparently not — Robert Sanzalone thinks it does too, and so does Global Nerdy). Call me crazy, but I think video-sharing works best when it’s open to anyone from anywhere, and I said exactly that on my Globe and Mail blog when I reviewed BlogTv.ca after it launched its beta. YouTube doesn’t have a U.S. version that is blocked from Canadians or anyone else for that matter, do they?

Alliance Atlantis tries to make the fact that BlogTv.ca is restricted to Canadians into a feature rather than a bug — it’s a “community” designed just for Canucks, they say. No offence to the bright minds at Alliance Atlantis, but that’s a load of bollocks. It’s geo-gating, and it’s dumb.

I don’t know who to blame for the fact that Manhunt 2 has been indefinitely shelved by Rockstar Games: the Entertainment Software Rating Board, which rated the game Adults Only because of its “excessive violence” (thus ensuring that Sony and Nintendo would never release a version for their consoles); the video-game console makers for being such nervous Nellies, when they already ship violent titles by the truckload — and happily so; or Rockstar itself, for caving in and shelving the game.

Is Manhunt 2 extremely violent? Undoubtedly, considering the first one was, and the second likely ups the ante — considering the player is seeing the game through the eyes of someone who may be a psycopath, recently held in a mental institution. Is that an unreasonable premise for a game? I hardly think so. I played Max Payne and Max Payne 2, and they had a similar theme — including Satanism — and they were great. Moody, frightening, cinematic even. Doom 3 was quite the gore-fest too. And speaking of cinematic, why is it OK for kids to see the Saw movies, but not to play video games? As my friend Clive Thompson asked recently, why is it OK for me to grow up playing violent games, but not my kids?

NewTeeVee has a post about Pando, a large-file sharing application that is branching out into offering video streaming — something that makes perfect sense to me. If you’re already hosting files that people are sending through your servers because they are too big to email (David Pogue just wrote about discovering Pando in the New York Times — I guess he didn’t read my feature from awhile back that looked at different file-sending services), then why not do a little peer-to-peer streaming of video too?

Pando announced the new feature at the Supernova conference in the Valley. According to NewTeeVee, they will be offering ad insertion for publishers, usage tracking and an API for integrating the service into their existing products. One question that occurred to me: why isn’t BitTorrent, the P2P service that Bram Cohen developed, doing this already? They did just announce a deal to build BitTorrent into set-top boxes, but the streaming back-end service seems like a no-brainer to me.

And speaking of back-end services, my new friend Ethan Kaplan — who I met when he came to be on a panel at mesh — has a brief but er… colourful post about video-streaming apps such as Ustream and Blogtv.com and how they “bleed bandwidth out the arse.” Thanks for that image, Ethan.

I seem to be in a video-posting kind of mood today. If you haven’t seen this one, it’s well worth watching — and it’s only five seconds long. For some reason, that’s all it takes to get a laugh out of this particular rodent (which isn’t actually a chipmunk, but rather some kind of gopher or prairie dog).

http://www.collegehumor.com/moogaloop/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1764124

Never one to leave an Internet meme alone, Nick Douglas at Look Shiny (ex of Valleywag) has his own version, and so does iJustine, and Veronica Belmont, and Drew Olanoff of Scriggity. Thanks to Jackson West of NewTeeVee for those links. And for some reason, that surprised gopher reminds me of the guy in the David Blaine parody videos.

http://www.glumbert.com/embed/traincoaster

Today’s laugh out loud moment is brought to you by John Biggs, the former Gizmodo writer who now does CrunchGear, the gadget blog that is part of Mike Arrington’s expanding TechCrunch empire. Biggs writes about the USA Today story featuring Mike and Om Malik, which talks about how they built their blogs into businesses, and his post just about made me fall off my chair:

“Now I don’t know who these people are or what they think they’re doing, but I think it’s bad to show people that you can make “real money” — how much, Om Malley? $5? HA! — doing this.

There are jobs that Americans should be doing — car repair, HVAC installation, dance instruction — that are going empty while these two jokers sit around all day pretending to work. For shame.

“B-logging,” like stamp collecting and religious observance, should be considered a hobby and nothing more. Let’s not encourage these bozos.”

That is gold, John. If I were Mike and Om, I would print your post, laminate it and hang it on my wall.

From Press Gazette comes news the the Beeb is sending reporter and techno guru Ben Hammersely to Turkey to cover the election using a number of social networking tools, including his blog, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook:

“The BBC has dispatched reporter Ben Hammersley to spend two weeks using new social media web tools to cover the run-up to the July general election.

He will visit four cities and report for BBC World, World Service radio, News 24 and BBC News online.

In what is a first for the BBC, Hammersley will file to his personal blog, he will upload photos to Flickr, video to YouTube, post snippets of text to the microblogging site Twitter, bookmark research on the social bookmarking site del.icio.us and network with people through Facebook.”

Should be interesting to follow this experiment in distributed media. If I were a large media outlet, I would paying very close attention. Ben has a bit more on the deal here.

There’s no question that Microsoft’s “surface” user interface is pretty cool, and I have no doubt that we will be using something much like it in the future — but this video with the sarcastic voice-over is still hilarious.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY&w=425&h=350]

Given the sudden departure of Terry “I Did My Best” Semel as CEO of Yahoo, and the installment of Jerry Yang as the new chief executive, there’s a lot of attention being paid to the deal to acquire Rivals.com, the college sports site. It’s a nice deal to come out with after all the uncertainty, if only because the site actually has revenues — about $22-million a year, according to Yahoo — and therefore isn’t a complete Web 2.0 Hail Mary pass.

The New York Times story on the deal says that it is likely to help morale in the media division at Yahoo, whose future has been somewhat up in the air since Lloyd Braun left and the company said it no longer wanted to create its own content. But personally, I don’t find the deal all that interesting. I still think, like many others, that Yahoo needs something dramatic to really shift the focus of the company — something like a Facebook.com acquisition (although it will undoubtedly cost a lot more than the $1-billion Yahoo reportedly offered last year). Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests asks “Where’s the peanut butter?”

Even if it did buy Facebook, however, I’m not convinced Yahoo would even know what to do with it. The company has bought social networks like Flickr and del.icio.us, but apart from doing some work on the back end to integrate them with Yahoo’s server farms, I fail to see what benefit the company has gotten from them. I think the bottom line is that Yahoo is just too safe, too tentative and too boring. It needs to blow itself up somehow.

For a great look at some more practical things Yahoo and Jerry Yang could do, have a read of Marc Andreesen’s tips on turning around a large company. Damn that Andreesen. Like my friend Paul Kedrosky, I find the fact that he continues to write such excellent blog posts irritating in the extreme.