Bob Iger's keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas yesterday was disappointingly long on PR and short on substance. Iger piped on about Disney's willingness to diversify its content distribution, being the first company to sell movie and TV show downloads on iTunes, adding that the company would accommodate new technologies, such as Blu-ray. There was some new stuff, notably a revamped Disney.com home page, which is being positioned as more of a Web portal for all things Disney. Many of the new features are variations on old themes, like mashups and social networking, according to …

The YouTube-Daniela Cicarelli story (and the video) is all over the Web now, so your correspondent here had to take it upon himself to see what all the fuss is about. It is, in fact, exactly what the stories say it is, although the video taken is from a distance and the whole thing is far subtler than you'd imagine. There is no nudity (aside from her remarkably skimpy bathing suit), which is probably why it took YouTube so long to remove the video in the first place. We at MediaPost aren't the only ones who've give the …

eBay Chief Meg Whitman has been widely tipped by industry prognosticators not to make it through the year. One reason, among many, is eBay's inability to integrate voice over IP provider Skype, which the auctioneer purchased in 2005 for $2.6 billion in cash and stock. At the time, Whitman said, "By combining the two leading e-commerce franchises, eBay and PayPal, with [Skype], we will create an extraordinarily powerful environment for business on the Net." Whatever its performance targets, Skype certainly isn't getting much help from eBay, as the two companies still remain more or less mutually exclusive. As …

Some may argue that the news business is a hopelessly saturated place where a dozen or so stories are repeated over and over again each day by thousands of media outlets. That's certainly true, but the Internet public has also shown it has an appetite for user-produced content, in the form of video, blogs or social networking pages. User-generated media gives news stories much-needed additional perspective. On Web sites like YouTube, MySpace or even CNN, citizen journalism is on such a rapid rise that it may one day change the news business forever. The New York Times and …

Part of the reason AT&T took an abrupt about-face last week in the ongoing debate about Net Neutrality is the fact that CEO Ed Whitacre, who confirmed the turnaround last week, spurred the debate to begin with. As recently as late 2005, Whitacre, then CEO of SBC Communications, called Google and Yahoo "nuts" for expecting free use of his company's vast cable network to deliver bandwidth-eating content. Actually, it's not so surprising after all, given that one of the Federal Communications Commission's provisions for the new AT&T, which the government organization finally approved on Dec. 29, was that …

Immigrants have become such a driving force behind Internet startups that at least one in four technology and engineering companies launched in the last 10 years had at least one foreign-born founder, according to a study released last week. The report, from researchers at the University of California-Berkeley and Duke University, found that these founders came mostly from India and China, and have helped start hundreds of companies with a combined estimated sales of $50 billion. Technology-industry lobbyists are now taking that information to Washington in the hope that the U.S. government will increase the annual allotment of …

YouTube has defended its attempts to remove the sex video of Brazilian model Daniela Cicarelli and her boyfriend Tato Malzoni. In an email response to Reuters' Friday report, the company said it had removed the video only for it to be uploaded again. "The video in question was removed from YouTube because it violated our terms of use," YouTube spokesperson Jaime Schopflin said. "It was recently uploaded again, and we became aware of it through media reports and users flagging the content, and we removed these copies immediately." It looks like YouTube's few censors are no match …

David Eun, the former NBC and Time Warner executive, has made the move to Google, as the search giant's new ambassador to the television, movie publishing and local media industries. Eun takes the defensive in his first interview about his post, saying that acquisitions like YouTube don't mean that Google is trying to squash big media. "We never force you to work with us," he quips. Google may not, but what about $1.65 billion YouTube? Are media companies whose content is freely distributed across the Web being held hostage? Google may not be out to create content, but …

Google keyword prices are soaring, returns are diminishing and click fraud is still an uncontained problem. So many small-to-midsize advertisers say they plan to do less business with Google than in years past. Some plan to reduce spending significantly. For example, retailer eBags.com, which depends on search engines and shopping-comparison sites to drive traffic to its site, spent between $5 million and $8 million with Google last year, with more than 75% of that figure going to the search giant. Said CEO Peter Cobb, "The Google percentage has got to go down." Why? Keyword costs for certain …

Microsoft's Zune digital music player failed to crack the top 10 list of models sold at large retail stores during the holiday period from Black Friday through the end of the year, according to market researcher Current Analysis. Can you name nine other digital music players after Apple Computer's iPod? Eight of the top 10 models were different variations of Apple's music player; the other two came from SanDisk, according to research, which tracked sales from Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, Staples and RadioShack. Because of Apple's continued dominance of the hard-drive based audio player market, Microsoft, …