If most of us remember anything at all about T.S. Eliot's great modernist poem "The Waste Land" it is that we were hopelessly lost after the first memorable line - "April is the cruelest month." Eliot filled his masterpiece with so many obscure allusions to literature past and pop culture present that it seemed designed to appeal to scholars, not the rest of us. As a former academic, I will let you in on a trade secret. Even some of us in the field used to debate whether this poem was worthwhile or meaningful to anyone but bickering grad students …

Demand Media continues its ongoing project to create more traditional media destinations and brands, often linked to high profile celebrities. This week, on-screen and print darling Rachael Ray lends her name, face, if not her video presence, to a new eHow Food section. Titled "Rachael Ray and Her buddies" the series of recipes and video walkthroughs are hosted by Ray's "friends" who do most of the video heavy lifting. Ray lends her name to a blog and gives the cast of buddies her highly effective imprimatur of personable, accessible style.

We spent a good deal of time at yesterday's MediaPost event ,Tablet Revolution, focusing on video. Early-in advertisers love embedding clips into their ad units, and the first iAds for iPad are just rich with streaming media. In many respects, the iPad feels like a portable DVR. I myself use it every day to watch Netflix, HBO, and the morning's cup of MSNBC's Morning Joe (usually ready for download by 9:30 each weekday. But the iPad is an interactive device, after all, and advancing the possibilities of the platform beyond time-shifted TV takes more careful thought. Video news aggregator Newsy …

Video gaming can't even seem to buy its way into aesthetic respectability. Three decades after games like Tempest, Galaga and Red Baron first captivated me in the bars and arcades of '70s America, the industry has become one of the economic powerhouses of entertainment...and most critics continue to pay empty lip service to questions about "whether it is an art form?"

Replacement cycles, the on-demand habit and relaxed content distribution restrictions will help make over-the-top digital video available to 488 million households worldwide in five years, says The Diffusion Group. Which is not to say that all those eyeballs will be tuning in to your cross-platform video wares. TDG estimates that barely a majority of those homes (51% or 250 million) will access OTT. About 106 million worldwide viewed digital feeds on their TVs in 2010. But there is a huge gap between those who actually have the connected devices/TVs and broadband service and those who use them. TDG argues that …

For those who really, really don't like pre-rolls and overlays, or just true fanatics of live streams at Ustream, the video hub has instituted a $3.99 a month premium service that bundles ad-free experiences with special member recognition throughout the site. Generally, ad-free access has not been a big selling point for paid content programs. In theory people like to say they crave experiences that block intrusive ads, but in practice they rarely pay for them. In the case of Ustream the service is stripping much of the ad inventory off of premium users. According to product manager Jordan's blog …

How many users does a publisher lose every time the viewer has to endure a delayed start of video content or multiple buffering pauses? And who does that user blame? Hulu or Netflix? CNN? Or Comcast and Cablevision? Surely Akamai and Level3, generally unknown to most onliners, will not take the heat. It is hard to say who pays what sort of price for poor video performance on the Web, but Alcatel-Lucent introduces this morning a video analytics product for top level service providers that is designed to ferret out where and when quality of experience problems exist in the …

If one of your colleagues hasn't forwarded the Grand Rapids LipDub video yet this morning, give it a few minutes. Check your inbox. We'll wait. There, got it? In direct response to being named in an article picked up (but not penned) by Newsweek as one of the nations "dying cities," the makers say "We disagreed strongly, and wanted to create a video that encompasses the passion and energy we all feel is growing exponentially, in this great city."

If you are looking to take a break from digital video viewing and kick back this holiday weekend with a good book, you could do a lot worse than curling up with Gary Shteyngart's superb "Super Sad True Love Story." This dystopian satire is hands down one of the funniest things I have read in recent years -- now out in paperback. What is a literary detour doing in the VidBlog, you may ask. Has old Professor Smith started missing the classroom? Don't worry, my fellow vid-heads. You won't be edified and uplifted, I assure you.

The incredibly expensive, ham-handed, creatively challenged attempt to paint over the dingy Comcast moniker with Xfinity has got to go down as one of the king botches in rebranding history. I know this tech and communications stuff, and I have to admit that there was a time last year when this Comcast customer didn't really understand what Xfinity was. Now that I know it is just Comcast trying not to be Comcast, I resist even more having its silly self-celebratory ads move me to adopt the name.