Our funny video roundup this week includes a video of Bill Gates’ hidden talent, a music video starring Jabba the Hut, a lazy cat, a rude old man prank and more. So grab a coffee, take a seat and get ready for some serious laughs!
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. 
The social media tool is based on the difficulty of paying for a higher education. It is a key reason many college students fail to graduate. Past studies have shown that upwards of two million college students don’t apply for any of the nearly $70 billion in financial aid the government distributes each year, and that almost two-thirds of students find the process of applying for financial aid difficult.
Bloggers shared the most news links about the deal between President Barack Obama and Republicans in Congress on tax cuts, while the WikiLeaks saga accounted for the most Tweeted news links, and the most-watched news and politics video on YouTube was an interview with Thomas Gottschalk, host of German game show Wetten Dass (Bet It), after 23-year-old contestant Samuel Koch attempted to jump a car using spring-loaded stilts known as “kangaroo shoes” and suffered major injuries, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index for the week of Dec. 6-10.
The tax cut represented 15 percent of news links shared via the blogosphere, and it was followed by: an editorial in The Washington Post criticizing movie Fair Game, at 13 percent; Pope Benedict XVI agreeing to use a solar-powered popemobile, at 12 percent; and at 10 percent apiece, WikiLeaks and a BBC article about conservationists in China successfully mating giant pandas which could allow them to be reintroduced into the wild.
“Cablegate” made up 33 percent of Tweeted news links, and it was followed by: Twitter at 19 percent; Google at 12 percent; Apple at 8 percent; and Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg agreeing to join the “giving pledge” created by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to donate most of his wealth to charity, at 7 percent.
Two top executives from public-relations and communications firm Burson-Marsteller will deliver a keynote presentation on digital communications in politics at BlogWorld & New Media Expo 2010 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, joining the previously announced list of keynotes and speakers.
Burson-Marsteller CEO worldwide and Penn Schoen Berland CEO Mark Penn and worldwide vice chairman Karen Hughes will discuss results from a study of social-media use during the midterm-election races, analyzing how candidates used Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and texting, and how they integrated their messages on other sites and social-media outlets. The keynote is scheduled for Friday, Oct. 15 at noon PT.
Penn has served as a senior adviser to Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Bill Ford, President Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. He is the author of best-selling book Microtrends, a regular guest on cable television, and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.
Hughes served as under secretary of state for public diplomacy from August 2005-December 2007 and as counselor to President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2002, where advising the president on policy and communications.
B&C’s Alex Weprin caught up with Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback to get his reaction to the announcement that Twentieth Television is launching a TV show based on Yahoo! Buzz, the search engine’s social news site.
Revision3 already produces a similar Web show called Diggnation based around the community story selection site Digg.
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” Louderback tells Weprin. “I wish them a lot of success. Hopefully, that will expand the audience for us, with people asking, ‘Who else does this and who does it better?’”
Diggnation is co-hosted by Digg co-founder Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht. Weprin reports that Twentieth Television isn’t commenting yet on the format of Yahoo! Buzz, “though reports have former MTV VJ Ananda Lewis as a possible host.”
Louderback is completely content with his show airing on the Web. “I don’t think you can just take something online and just slap it on television. Television would destroy [Diggnation] in many ways. If we were on a network, there are a lot of f-bombs that would have to be dropped.” And then there’s the beer drinking.
> More: Check out the latest episode of Diggnation as a Mac fanboy meets Bill Gates.
So, in addition to CES, there’s this other conference going on in Las Vegas this week. In fact, CES is sharing some of the same space, the Sands/Venetian Expo Center, with the Adult Entertainment eXpo. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer brought it up last night at the start of his keynote. Ballmer joked that Bill Gates had messaged him to make sure went to CES, “not that other convention.”
Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said on Thursday that he was unlikely to meet with Microsoft reps at this week’s Sun Valley meeting of media and tech executives in Idaho, according to Reuters.
The report said that many folks at Sun Valley are watching Yang, as well as Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and other representatives from both companies, for clues as to the saga’s next twist. (It’s like a soap opera, except that everyone is a geek, and bazillions of dollars and the future of the Internet are at stake.)
Yang “chatted for over a half hour” with Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and was “seen with his head in his hands at their table by a duck pond in the resort,” where many executives gather after lunch, according to the report. “I think he’s a good leader but under stress,” Brin later told reporters at the event. “There’s obviously a lot of frustration, but he’s doing pretty well.”
