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.

So Viacom has slapped Google (or YouTube) with a $1-billion lawsuit for blatant copyright infringement on a massive scale, according to the entertainment conglomerate’s claim. On a side note, have you ever noticed how people invariably get slapped with lawsuits? Not just hit — slapped. And a big thick lawsuit would hurt, I bet. Especially legal paper.

Since negotiations fell apart between YouTube and Viacom, analysts have been speculating about whether or not the media conglomerate would take legal action against the popular video-sharing site. Specifically in light of the fact that Viacom video clips continue to appear in YouTube’s library on a regular basis.

When Google bought YouTube last year, most throughout the blogosphere saw the move as a natural fit for the search company and lauded the acquisition as an monumental success.

Nearly six months later, however, YouTube’s sparkle is beginning to fade amid the copyright complaints that are plaguing Google’s legal department.

As Google grows and evolves, so does public perception of it. For those of us outside the Googleplex, Google has represented a broad spectrum of things. For a lot of people they’ve made the transition from fun-filled upstart to Evil Empire. We have always known Google for producing fast results, and their speedy evolution is no exception. They’ve run the gamut in less than a decade.

Steve Rubel over at Micropersuasion has a brief interview he did with Megaphone Mark Cuban, billionaire media mogul and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, in which the two talked about things like the “Long Tail” of the Web (and Mark’s own coinage – the “vert ramp” – and how it affects new media. As is his wont, Mark shot from the hip about what the future holds and where advertisers should be putting their money, saying:

Micro Persuasion: A Conversation with Mark Cuban:

Mark Cuban repeated his belief that an eager horde of attorneys will take a beachhead in Mountain View and bombard the Googleplex with subpoenas until they find a copyright breach they can exploit with shareholder lawsuits for millions.

Mark Cuban had more criticisms for prospective buyers of popular video sharing site YouTube, due to the site’s continual use by people for posting copyrighted works without permission.

Billionaire tech entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, is getting his own radio show, according to the WSJ (sub).

Think Partnership will acquire the blog search engine IceRocket from billionaire NBA owner Mark Cuban.

Regulars here know that I am a huge Mark Cuban fan.

There’ll be no puns here for the subject of this article-no “hunger for this” or “dying for that”-puns, a lower form of humor they say, would denigrate the tribulation of a journalist and his newborn raison d’etre-like calling a spoof a sincere flattery. Simply, a Cuban man has embarked on a hunger strike in an effort to win unrestricted access to the World Wide Web.

Kent Newsome has been on a blogging tear lately.

According to a study performed at UMBC eBiquity Research Group at the University of Maryland, nearly three out of every four pings to blog ping servers are from splogs – or what they’re calling spings!

The man behind the IceRocket blog search engine wrote in to clarify how they are dealing with spam blogs, and IceRocket’s stance on Google’s Blogger hosting service.