The Weekly Fizz10, Fizziology’s proprietary chart of the 10 ten movies in social media, will appear every Wednesday on Variety.com. The partnership also includes the use of additional Fizziology social media data.

The Weekly Fizz10 tracks and ranks movies starting four weeks before release through their third week of release.  The rankings are determined by Fizziology’s social media analysts who read and score a sample of social media chatter to grade sentiment, spot trends, and find out what is driving conversation.

"The industry has been using social media to promote, but a lot can be learned from listening. These millions of online conversations are impacting entertainment,” Ben Carlson, President and co-creator of Fizziology.

“We help marketers, content creators and other entertainment decision makers understand what people are talking about – spotting challenges and opportunities."

The site focuses on three main areas.  Connect: Find colleagues, peers and mentors in the entertainment industry. Networking made easy. Careers: Meet professionals directly inside entertainment. Recruit new talent. Search for jobs, promotions or projects.

Community: Exchange ideas. Projects or test your latest big pitch among peers. Industry experts are here to bounce ideas. Your big break starts here.

The site allows users of Facebook or Linkedin to import their existing profile information. Users can upload photos, videos or resumes to their profile. The Biz is powered by Jobster and allows users to search for jobs and for recruiters to post job openings.

"The Biz will give our readers a unique new way to interact and forge relationships with their peers in the community," Variety president and publisher Neil Stiles told the magazine.
 

Yahoo Music Exec Goes Country

When it rains, it pours, goes the saying on the Morton’s Salt box. Yahoo has been raining executives, as yet another decided to switch careers to another company.

This time it’s Country Music Television enticing a highly-placed Yahoo out of Sunnyvale. Frank had served as vice president of music programming and label relations for Yahoo Music.

CMT said Frank will have broad responsibilities at the network. “He will oversee CMT’s music and talent division and all of the network’s on-air and digital music initiatives across multiple platforms, including films, games, touring and other program enterprise businesses,” the network said.

Frank will also serve as a liaison to Music Row and the rest of the country music community, similar to his label relations duties at Yahoo. He had an impressive track record at Yahoo, according to Variety:

At Yahoo, Frank was integral in securing music premieres and performance exclusives for Yahoo Music from such artists as Madonna, Faith Hill, Big & Rich, Toby Keith, Eminem, Nelly, Linkin Park, 50 Cent and Coldplay. Frank oversaw Yahoo’s radio programming and coordinated artist relations. He was instrumental in helping break a number of acts.

The move leaves Yahoo with another tough act to follow. The music industry has a lot of ambitious people working in it, and replacing Frank should not be as challenging as filling other roles at Yahoo, like the CTO position founder and new CEO Jerry Yang holds in addition to his executive duties.

However, FeedFlare is a great addition to any FeedBurner feed as it builds interaction and social media links into each post.

FeedFlare allows publishers to easily build “interactivity” into the content they create, making it simple for subscribers to tag, email or share their content with others. Publishers can include a variety of services including a live display of the number of comments to each post, the ability to email the author directly and show the number of blogs that link to their item.

To enable FeedFlare, login to your FeedBurner account, go to the Optimize tab then choose FeedFlare from the left column. You can then check items that you want to display in your feed.

I suggest adding at least the following:

• Email This – Send the post via email to a friend or a co-worker.
• Comments Count – You may be able to increase click thoughs if people know there are comments on your post.
• Save to del.icio.us – Del.icio.us is one of the biggest social bookmarking sites, lets make it easy for readers to save your posts there.
• Digg This – Ahh Digg. Everyone is obsessed with getting in Digg. This nice part about this button is it also shows you the number of Diggs and if there are any Digg comments.
• Stumble It – StumbleUpon is quickly becoming a great way to find new sites. If a users bookmarks your post in StumbleUpon, you’ll have a better chance of getting additional StumbleUpon traffic.

There are many other FeedFlare choices too. The trick here is to pick the 5 or 6 that will best work for your blog. Don’t go overboard and put as many as you can as it might deter people from reading the feed. Also, don’t just put the Digg button on because everyone else does. If you don’t feel a FeedFlare will work well for your blog, don’t add it.

By adding FeedFalre to your FeedBurner feed, you are making it easier for users to interact with your posts. Visitors don’t always make it to your site to read comments or hit one of the social bookmark buttons. Brining the options to the readers will increase the chances of them sharing one of your posts and getting you additional exposure.

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Other movie industry-focused blogs try to delve deeper into the soft white underbelly of Hollywood, and race to the Internet with what they find. As to how well they do this, Bart and a couple of noteworthy blogs disagree.

“While the blogosphere has its share of heroes, it’s also populated by pseudo-journalists who have never done a fact check or apologized to a public figure whose career may have been damaged by their bizarre rants,” Bart said of bloggers. “They pose a challenge to the gatekeepers and the high priests of publicity who must figure out how to deal with them.”

Alex Billington at FirstShowing.net called Bart’s article “full of lies about publication dates that they break themselves,” and suggested Bart’s rant stems from Variety running out of steam.

“Don’t scrap the rules entirely, but adapt them to fit into this new world,” said Billington. “Press has changed, and it no longer allows for months of publication time and extensive fact checking. Grant access to everyone, don’t be so restrictive to only

Much speculation centers on the company making a cell phone and even selling its own service plan. But many others expect Google will stake its claim in telecom with a Wi-Fi phone that transmits calls over the Internet rather than over cellular networks. Google didn’t return calls seeking comment.

“A Wi-Fi phone makes more sense to me,” said analyst Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates. “I could see them put out a phone with VoIP (Internet calling) and a good Web browser, then make money through search-based ads like they do now on desktops.” (From Any Google Wireless Handset Might Be Of The Wi-Fi Variety)

A Wi-Fi phone would be interesting, but hardly a mass market product in the near future. It would be a long-term play by Google – cell phone coverage is finally getting fairly pervasive in the U.S., but is far from perfect and not nearly as universal as in Europe. Wi-Fi, by comparision, is almost non-existent. Municipal Wi-Fi networks are coming in a few areas, but coverage is likely to be very limited for years.

I’d be surprised by a Google Wi-Fi only phone. If Google wants to impact the mobile phone/mobile search market quickly, conventional cell technology seems like the only option.

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Unfortunately for Scorsese, he won’t be able to relive the moment on YouTube or any other video sharing site anytime soon.

That’s because YouTube has acquiesced to a Tuesday request from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences that clips from last Sunday’s Academy Awards be immediately removed from the site.

It’s a puzzling move, to be sure, seeing as the Academy offers very little video coverage of the event on the official website for the Oscars, nor does it pursue any ventures in the secondary market by offering home video versions of previous ceremonies. So, I’m really not quite sure what would prompt such a request.

Scott Kirsner, writing for Variety, lends more details to the story:

Several segments of the show, including host Ellen DeGeneres’ opening monologue and musical numbers featuring Will Ferrell and Beyonce, had been among YouTube’s most-viewed content this week.

Ferrell’s musical lament about how comedies never win Oscars, sung with Jack Black and John C. Reilly, had racked up more than 250,000 views on YouTube before it was replaced with the message "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences.”

For YouTube, the takedown notices just keep coming. Traffic to the site, however, doesn’t seem to be suffering in the wake. Several web analysts continue to report that YouTube is experiencing the highest volume of traffic in the history of the site, thanks in no small part to increased exposure by Google in its search results.

The question, however, is will the trend continue in the face of continued copyright issues?

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Anthony’s had a lot of trouble, running into unsigned drivers, video card drivers that have worse performance in Vista than in XP, and a constant Blue Screen of Death before every install.

Now, before you think Anthony is some dumb radio jock, understand this: The PC is question is a top of the line brand new system, installed with an impressive four gigabytes of RAM, and Anthony is an experienced PC gamer, meaning he has spent a lot of time upgrading and tweaking computers, so he knows as much as any expert computer user. There’s no reason even a novice shouldn’t be able to install Vista on a computer that shipped with a “Windows Vista Capable” sticker when it was bought.

So, frustrated as all hell, and not needing a refund (he is a millionaire), Anthony did the only logical thing, and in this video, he shows you how he finally installed Windows Vista:

Hilarious!

The video has been watched 1,260,000 times on a variety of sites and been featured on Gizmodo and Microsoft’s own Channel 9. Maybe somebody from Microsoft could take ten minutes to call him (given that millions of people listen to his radio show) and try to figure out the problem?

If you’d like to listen to the show discussion about Vista, I recommend last Tuesday, where before buying Vista, Anthony explains how it is an essential upgrade, and only an idiot would not get it, as well as Wednesday and Friday, where he discusses Microsoft’s awful Indian call center and the hell he went through trying to install it.

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The usage of online video has increased by a third since the same time last year, according to the video survey performed by the two firms, as 32 percent of respondents said they watch more video today.

Pre-roll advertising beats paying for video when it comes to revenue models, as far as the viewing audience is concerned. 71 percent said they would not mind watching a commercial before seeing a video, while 23 percent said they would rather pay for the privilege.

Here is how video content consumption broke down for the viewing audience that responded to the survey:

– News: 72 percent

– Television or movie clips: 59 percent

– Music videos: 48 percent

– Sports highlights: 44 percent

– Amateur videos: 43 percent

– Concert highlights: 23 percent

– Full-length movies or TV shows: 22 percent

– Live sporting events: 17 percent

– Video podcasts: 17 percent

– Live concerts: 9 percent

Nearly 70 percent of video watchers end up at a video simply by browsing the Internet. But plenty of people get to a video thanks to a friend’s or family member’s suggestion, at 61 percent.

Video sites have built up some loyalty among Internet users. 58 percent in the survey regularly visit a roster of video sites they prefer. Only 37 percent use search engines to find them, a number that may be disappointing to big Internet/search players like Google and Yahoo.

“There’s no question that online video usage is growing faster than most predicted, particularly as more diverse, appealing and high quality branded video content is being made available on the Web,” said Kevin Conroy, Executive Vice President of AOL.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.