Why I Oughta...

It's Thanksgiving, and in my world that means 2 things. The Last Waltz and stuffing. I'm already halfway through the first record. I'll watch the film a bit later. Utilizing horns one more time, this was the gig of the Band's life and one of the greatest in rock history. We are privileged that it exists in a form where we can hear it as often as we want. -- Rob Bowman , All-Music Guide

Whitney Matheson wonders if serious films will kill Jack Black Will Jack Black's starring, semi-serious stint in King Kong change the comedian forever? Not to worry: This photo from Nacho Libre, director Jared Hess' follow-up to Napoleon Dynamite, shows Black looking ridiculous again, dressed in lace and covered in doves. (Sounds like a Prince video, doesn't it?) In the movie, he plays a wannabe Mexican wrestler. Black is also set to star in the oft-delayed Tenacious D movie, now set for a spring release. I'd link to the trailer, but this is a family-friendly blog ... Here's the pic she was talking about...

Hitting pretty close to home, eh Mitch ? "Arrested Development" creator Mitch Hurwitz isn't giving up on his show -- but he is using an upcoming episode to poke fun at the skein's latest near-death experience.  Seg, dubbed "S.O.B.s" -- for "Save Our Bluths" -- finds the show's Bluth family fighting to save their fictional construction company. They decide to mount a big event -- "Some kind of 'Save Our Bluths' type thing," as George Bluth Sr. says in the script for the episode.  "It's very self-referential," Hurwitz told Daily Variety, noting that he finished the final draft of the shooting script Wednesday.  In one scene, Jason Bateman's character, Michael, notes, "Our backs are against the wall. ... It's just hard for me to accept that it's really come to begging."  There's also a conversation about whether the Home Builders Organization -- HBO -- might be willing to...

Engadget is reporting that you'll be able to rip Tivo'd programs to your video ipod. Today TiVo is expected to announce an enhanced TiVoToGo service, which would allow subscribers to transfer recorded programs directly to their iPods and PSPs. Of course, many of you are already taking steps to convert TiVo’s MPEG-2 format to MPEG-4 - a process which requires video conversion software and several manual steps to load up your portable. But TiVo is promising background conversion and automatic, overnight transfer directly to your iPod or PSP via your connected PC - a two-hour process for a one-hour show.

So says Business Week . Though the likeliest scenario is that e-mail will remain the prime tool for notification and one-to-one communication, "a huge percentage of collaboration will occur outside of e-mail, with a continued rise in these other tools," says Clay Shirky, associate teacher in the interactive telecommunications program at New York University. "There's an enormous untapped value to be gotten by getting collaboration right." I've told some of my customers the same thing, but they want email blasts and more email blasts...I'm pushing blogs, they want Photo galleries.

Metromix going national ? Yup. There's no "official" announcement, but a blogger who works for the Tribune Co. is putting out the word that the company is turning Metromix, its online entertainment guide in Chicago, into a national site. It's up now in two other Tribune markets: Baltimore and Orlando.  In some ways this development harkens back to the dot-com boom, when major media companies thought the winning strategy was to create new national brands. (At Knight Ridder, where I was new media director for the Miami Herald, we rolled out an entertainment guide called JustGo in all of the company's markets.) This created internal tension at the papers and also some consumer confusion, since those papers already had print entertainment guides with other brand names.  I see at least one important but subtle difference this time around: The Tribune Co. isn't abandoning the newspaper's traditional brand names in local markets. For instance, the si...

Wait no longer. The Craigslist Killer Google Base is here: Google Inc launched a service on Wednesday that gives Web users an online venue to publish anything from a recipe to a research paper.  The service, called "Google Base," invites users to choose labels and attributes for their content that will make it easier for other people to search the site.  The service (http://base.google.com) is free and gives a unique Web address to each user's content, allowing people to easily post information without the need to create and maintain a Web page.  Depending on the relevance of the content, users' information may also appear on other Google properties like Froogle and Google Local, Google said.