The effort, codenamed "Vevo" according to the Wall Street Journal, would involve a new showcase for music videos on YouTube, with the notion of commanding higher advertising rates. Right now, YouTube makes pennies per view — if it's lucky. Most of YouTube's bandwidth-consuming video funhouse goes unburdened with revenue.

In December, Warner abruptly withdrew its music videos from Google. Most people assumed Warner was throwing another typical record-label fit and being unreasonable. The word from the Googleplex, though, is that the Warner deal was a victim of CFO Patrick Pichette's cost-cutting crusade. In YouTube's early days, the video site had struck a deal, then hailed as groundbreaking, to pay Warner to play copies of its music videos uploaded by users and thereby avoid a massive copyright-infringement suit. But that deal was rather richer for Warner than for YouTube. Google executive Jonathan Rosenberg explained the move on a recent conference call with analysts:

... we'd love to work with Warner. But I think we're going to continue to do what we've been doing; try to continue to make mutually beneficial deals and then try to do some of the things like we talked about on the earlier call with respect to better monetizing YouTube ...

In other words, Google just doesn't make enough off of videos to justify the rates it's been paying Warner and the other labels.

Did Warner walk, or did Google dump it? It's still not clear. What is clear: There's not enough money in online music videos to go around. Google and Universal are negotiating a deal in the hopes that there will be.

But what if there's not? In the '80s, teenagers stared slackjawed at MTV, because there simply wasn't anything else like it on the air. But now, thanks largely to YouTube, there's a surfeit of video everywhere you go. And traditional three-minute music videos, while they satisfied an '80s attention span, are too long for the YouTube generation, which likes its clips a minute or less. (A classic video like Take On Me seems epic now.) Perhaps the record labels should count themselves lucky if they get a link to iTunes, let alone a revenue share — and that anyone still wants their music videos at all.

• Wendi Deng Murdoch, MySpace China
• Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, MySpace
• Max Levchin, Slide
• Robin Li, Baidu
• Markos Moulitsas, DailyKos
• Elon Musk, SpaceX
• Ali and Hadi Partovi, iLike
• Mika Salmi, MTV
• Dmitry Shapiro, Veoh
• Quincy Smith, CBS
• Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times
• Peter Thiel, Clarium Capital
• Evan Williams, Twitter
• Andrew Zolli, PopTech

• Does the fact that you're screening Tropic Thunder for a bunch of local tech reporters rather than the usual film critics suggest that you're not particularly confident in the film's critical reception?
• How will the lost $450 million financing deal for a slate of movies that would have included Tropic Thunder affect your Paramount movie studio?
• Why do you keep making poor Jeremy Zweig tell reporters that your lawyers didn't ask for YouTube users' personal information when you did, in fact, ask for their usernames and IP addresses — information most Internet users would consider personal? And what's he supposed to say now that you've agreed to mask them?
• Isn't Viacom's investment in social network Flux at best an irrelevancy and at worst a mess?
• Why is Viacom's MTV, after 13 years of trying, incapable of running an online music service anyone wants to use?

The cable providers lined Canoe's pockets with $150 million to make it happen. Tough task, says the Wall Street Journal, which reports that TV programmers fear targeted advertising because it might create such value for advertising clients that they end up spending less to reach only exactly those who might buy their products. If it's a fear that sounds arcane and self-damaging, well, welcome to the contrived world of television advertising, Mr. Verklin. Oh, and here's your paddle.

The irony here: Before partnering with RealNetworks, MTV ran a music service, Urge, in partnership with Microsoft — which is now trying to buy Yahoo. Timing is everything. We look forward to the introduction of purple Zunes.

Current has certainly been met with a lot of acclaim, but it's also entirely dependent on users (and journalism students) remaining interested in the project. If something as everyman as music videos couldn't command a younger generation's attention, will Current maintain a steady stream of fresh content — and viewers?

MTV is not gaining access to Bruckheimer's successful film properties or TV series CSI. Those are already licensed to other developers. Other game-development deals with high profile director-producers like Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson have produced nothing but ego massages. A partnership between MTV, with little success and experience in the gaming industry, and Bruckheimer, who has no experience in the game industry, is more likely to be the kind of disaster story Bruckheimer produces so adeptly for the silver screen. (Photo by Frank Connor)

The stunt, as explained by execs at MTV and Paramount, is to prove that digital distribution is a viable business model for long-form entertainment. If so, it only proves this much: Junk distribution channels attract junk content. Instead of going direct to DVD, producers are now saving their worst efforts for the Web. The only difference between Jackass 2.5 and Michael Eisner's Prom Queen is the length of time it takes to bore us.

Of course Tequila's been a hit on MySpace for quite some time now; she says she accepts 10,000 to 20,000 friend requests a day. I'm not sure who Facebook's most popular member is — Scoble? I know you just can't wait for the first episode of A Shot At Love With Robert Scoble.