Some of the most influential pundits on both sides of the political stage are petitioning the Republican and Democratic National Conventions (RNC and DNC) to ensure all Presidential debate video be licensed under Creative Commons, making it legal to share debate video footage online.

Another flash fire seems to have flared up in the blogosphere over interviews with reporters: Jason Calacanis says he won’t do an interview with Wired unless they can do it by email, and says this is ironic (in an Alanis Morrisette kind of way, I’m assuming). Dave Winer says he likes to do interviews via his blog because it’s too easy to be misquoted.

Liz Gannes at GigaOm points to an interesting study done by MySpace about the value of “friending” as a marketing vehicle. It’s obvious that the survey of 3,000 Internet users was done primarily to justify the use of MySpace as an advertising and marketing tool, although the press release takes pains to point out (as they always do) that it was done by an independent firm, etc., etc. 

Sites under the IAC arcology will be the first to display contextual advertising from the Ask Sponsored Listings (ASL) network, with an interesting twist on what gets displayed.