For one, it was recently reported that Comedy Central is celebrating the show’s 15th season by partnering with Walmart to get 1.5 million bags of “Cheesy Poofs” (the preferred snack to the Eric Cartman character in stores. They’re actually being manufactured by Frito Lay. Pretty interesting considering how controversial the show itself is.

At Comic Con, the South Park crew is going all out with a life-size replica of South Park Avenue with interactive stations, a photo booth, a museum, memorabilia, karaoke, costume and trivia contests, movie screenings, a “Big Wheel Fan Prix” race track, a school cafeteria, a confessional booth, and ticket giveaways to “The Book of Mormon,” the Broadway Musical from the show’s creators.

Today there was a parade that went through the streets of downtown San Diego, and tomorrow they are hosting outdoor screenings of the South Park movie and the show’s unaired pilot. The screenings will be followed by a Q&A with the production staff.

The costume contest is on Saturday, where fans will dress up as their favorite characters. That should produce some interesting photos.

There is also a free shuttle bus service being provided by the South Park school bus.

It’s a good time to be in San Diego if you’re a fan of the show, which recently took on Apple in a show about the revolutionary “Human CentiPad”:

Images courtesy of Twitters @colsblog and @GerardWayPhotos respectively.

Without that inspiration, who knows what the results would have been?

What we have is an incredible mock-up of an iPhone case featuring the omnipresent Steve Jobs frozen in carbonite, courtesy of the Society6 website. To put it simply, the case mod is just fantastic:

Well it was fun while it lasted. Yesterday, Society6 was issued a cease and desist from Apple’s lawyers. So I’m sorry to say that the cases and skins are no longer available. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Who knows, maybe Apple was pissed off about the HumanCentiPad?

Or ask Ben Affleck, who was depicted in a love-act with an 8-year-old’s hand-puppet that he thought was current girlfriend Jennifer Lopez.  Or more recently, Britney Spears’ cameo involved her attempting suicide but surviving as a disfigured, headless monster.

So Steve Jobs can’t be too thrilled that he is the focus of the season premiere of South Park, airing tonight on Comedy Central.

In this sneak peak of the upcoming episode we find Jobs’ in his trademark black turtleneck, introducing his newest creation, the HumancentiPad.  He lauds the new invention as “a new product that will once again revolutionize the way we use our phones and tablet devices.”  Video is NSFW due to unsavory references.

This bit is clearly a reference to last year’s underground hit horror film, The Human Centipede.  No need for me to go into details about it.  If you haven’t seen it, Google it.  Be careful, however.

The last time Mr. Jobs appeared on South Park, he was a featured guest at the premiere of Mr. Garrison’s new transportation device, the “IT.”  The IT operated by two strategically placed metal rods…just check out the video below.  If you haven’t guessed, it’s also NSFW.

Job’s company Apple has been in the news recently.  Two data scientists discovered a file in iOS devices that stores users’ location data.  It took Apple over a week to respond, but they finally did this morning in a press release.

Today, Jobs himself responded to the tracking issue in an interview with All Things D’s Mobilized.  He reiterated what Apple’s release said earlier, that they weren’t tracking anyone.

“We haven’t been tracking anyone,” Jobs said in a telephone interview with Mobilized on Wednesday. “The files they found on these phones, as we explained, it turned out were basically files we have built through anonymous, crowdsourced information that we collect from the tens of millions of iPhones out there.”

“As new technology comes into the society there is a period of adjustment and education,” Jobs said. “We haven’t–as an industry–done a very good job educating people, I think, as to some of the more subtle things going on here. As such, (people) jumped to a lot of wrong conclusions in the last week.”

It’s a good thing he responded, as the public’s concern continues to grow about the tracking issue.  The recent privacy concern is most likely too recent to be a part of tonight’s South Park episode, but who knows.  Those guys are crafty.  I can see it now:

Unencrypted geo-logging is bad, mmmmmmkay.

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone along with Comedy Central have launched southparkstudios.com. The site will be ad supported with initial sponsorship from Toyota and Virgin

Along with being able to view full-length episodes of the series users will also be able to create their own South Park Avatar. Users can make themselves into a South Park character with the Official Avatar Generator.

New episodes will be available for viewing soon after they air and will remain available for one week. These episodes will return to the site permanently after 30 days. The site will also feature behind -the-scenes information and allow users to share and comment on episodes with their friends.

When asked about the launch of the new site, Stone and Parker said, "We got really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time so we gave ourselves a legal alternative."
 

In October MTV Networks began offering "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" online, which has helped to increase television viewership. The online catalog features 13,000 "Daily Show" videos dating back to 1999.

Offering TV shows online has been positive for television ratings. "One does not diminish the other by any stretch of the imagination. That is kind of our hat trick," MTV Networks Chairman and Chief Executive Judy McGrath said at the Reuters Media Summit in New York.

More shows from the 20-year archives of MTV Networks could possibly be offered online, but executives did not say which ones. "The Daily Show’ was the first out of the gate and it’s been a big success and it’s a nice little model for us to follow," said Mika Salmi, MTV Networks president of global digital media. "There’s no limit to which shows we can use at this stage."

But South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone said it was about time Viacom let a little crazy into their machine. Through SouthParkStudios.com, Parker and Stone will continue the hit series through a 15th season, and collect half of the advertising money earned via SP material distributed on the Net, mobile, and in video games.

And that is a cue to something else: a sea change in mid swell. Information gatekeepers and media owners always enjoyed a certain amount kingship over the consumer and over the talent.

The Internet, though, has steadily chipped away at that sovereignty, first by allowing the consumer to create his or her own content cheaply and distribute for even cheaper. In effect, the consumer told the provider he wasn’t as necessary as he once was.

Already successful celebrities are starting to exploit this vulnerability as well, for whatever barriers there are to their creativity on TV or radio or at the box office, they are effectively knocked down with sufficient broadband.

Many will no doubt also cite Will Ferrell’s new website FunnyOrDie.com, or even MyDamnChannel.com, which launched recently with video and free-to-burn music.

The white-hairs in suits in the boardroom still object a little, though, saying that though the cardinal sin of revenue sharing has been absolved in some cases, it is an indulgence reserved for talent that has already made them a lot of money.

Well, as a former executive in that NYT piece put it:

“Talent will look at this and say, ‘Why not us?’ ” said Warren Littlefield, a television producer and former president of NBC Entertainment. “Unfortunately, what you’ll probably find is the response is, ‘We’ll tell you why not you: because you haven’t achieved what they’ve achieved.’ This is based upon a decade of proven success; it’s not a deal that’s made on the come, it’s not a deal made with an established creator who’s about to create something new. It’s 10 years in.”   

But rest assured, not every online success in the future will have a decade of Old School under their belt. If you’ve ever heard that old joke – "What will the preachers do when the Devil is saved?" – you might need to update it for executives and talent.