At the outset, let me cop to the fact that I am too old for this. I have directly experienced only one of the three topics involved in today's blog entry, because, again, I am too old. The new and inventive "Saved By the Bell Interactive Game" by the Fine Brothers that launched on YouTube last week banks on multiple levels of pop cult nostalgia, to which I was oblivious when they occurred in real time. When the "choose your own adventure" game books craze in youth lit was ascendant in the 80s I was already in grad school trying …

As the recent uprisings in the Middle East attest, the cell phone has become a powerful new player in media creation and in politics. Anyone with a smartphone anywhere in the world can bear witness to atrocities occurring right before them and have that evidence on the Web in seconds. The power of this is not to be underestimated. According to many historians, U.S. involvement in Vietnam during the 1960s sparked such public division in part because the war was being televised to a degree and at a level of explicitness never seen before. What happens to our politics, our …

The age of the app is upon us, and it is creeping to the TV set. Even as we wait for Google TV and Apple TV finally to activate Android and iOS app on their respective devices, connected TV sets are picking up momentum and may be capturing viewers' hearts with their built-in apps. According to a new ethnographic study by Strategy Analytics of a dozen owners of connected TVs in the U.S. and UK, app love actually does creep up on you in the living room. None of the people studied in this intensive, in-home research had purchased their …

Truth be told, you don't associate the magazine world with breakout digital creativity. From the incredibly misguided Pathfinder online newsstand only for Time Inc. magazines back in the mid-90s to hundreds of magazine brand URLs that laid essentially fallow for a decade, this is not an industry that embraced the Web with both arms. So it is heartening to see the online viral video campaign touting Hearst's first iPad-only magazine effort, Cosmo for Guys. Now making its way into the viral circulatory system of the Web, a video promotion called "iPad Head Girl" is verging on a quarter of a …

Where were you in May 2005? As with every other medium that has flourished in the last century and a half, YouTube was the catalyst for an online video energy that had been building for a while. Some say the month YouTube went live, May 2005, may be seen as a turning point that falls into the pantheon of the 1947 World Series, which marked the beginning of that medium's fast rush to household ubiquity.

Paul Malmont is having altogether too much boyish fun. He not only writes pulp-like adventure tales, he writes pulp-like adventure tales about the greats who used to write pulp adventure. And in life, he has a dual identity that is something like the pulp heroes of old. And now, Malmont is promoting his new novel with a literary trailer sending up his own marketing profession. By day, Malmont works in the ad trade, as an Associate Creative director at R/GA, according to his latest LinkedIn listing. By night he dons the garb of bestselling novelist, the author several years …

You have to wonder whether the TV skunk works at Google have been totally routed by the apparent dismissal of the Google TV project in the general digisphere. When the platform flopped originally late last year, we were promised a robust 2.0 update. Now we may be waiting until fall to see the platform refreshed to accommodate Android apps in a retooled Honeycomb interface. Meanwhile, to add humiliation to the insult and injury of Google TV, Logitech reported yesterday that sales of its Google TV-powered Revue device were actually worse than zero.

That happened pretty fast. Just a couple of years ago I recall speaking with online video providers who were starting to distribute via emerging set-top boxes and laptop-to-TV interfaces like Boxee. Although they found the Web-to-TV path for online video promising, generally less than 2% of their clips were being viewed on TVs. Nielsen's latest study of how people are viewing Hulu and Netflix is remarkable in demonstrating how quickly a popular service can drive adoption of new distribution paths.

Now here is a study in contrast between what seems to have the most impact on TV and what works online. Nielsen released its list of most-liked TV ads from the second quarter of 2011. Sentiment is the dominant theme among those spots, with the highest "likability index" scores (those ads noted by the consumer panel as being liked "a lot.") Topping the list is an Oreo spot in which a boy wakes up dad for a midnight Oreo snack in order to say "Happy Father's Day."

And here's another good reason for TV networks to dislike the Internet: they just don't get a fraction of the attention here that they do on their native platform. In a roundup of traffic metrics to the major nets this past year, Compete shows that the average unique user spend about half an hour at a network site each month. Compare that to the 34 hours per person per week Nielsen says Americans watched traditional TV in 2010.