General Electric (NYSE:GE) subsidiary NBC is planning on taking Saturday Night Live online with a new video site.  The Executive Producer of SNL, Lorne Michaels is planning on launching the site with a library of clips from the past and present.  The video site will also have clips from The Line.  The Line is a show created by producers, writers, and performers from SNL.  The site would have the same look & feel as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

SNL gained a lot of attention from Tina Fey’s portrayal of Sarah Palin.  SNL clips were viewed millions of times on Hulu and on NBC.com.  One of the ideas for the new video site will have individual cast member pages with top 10 clips of them.  The guest host would also decide their favorite SNL moments were. 

Monetizing the SNL site might be tricky because even sites like Will Ferrell’s Funny or Die is struggling.  And skits that include music clips would require royalty fees.  Bringing attention to the website will also be difficult as election time winds down.  It is just too difficult to replicate the hilarity of the clip below.

MyThings is a way to track online consumption.  MyThings has just announced that they have raised $5 million in Series B, led by Dotcorp Asset Management and GP Bullhound Sidecar.  MyThings also informs consumers about product recalls and contains manuals.  MyThings makes it easy to sell items on eBay, donate items, and report stolen items through Trace. 

MyThings also offers several other services such as receipt collecting and valuation services.  When you forward a receipt to MyThings, the service aggregates and creates a repository of all of them.   MyThings employs several valuation experts to determine how valuable your goods are. 

MyThings has made many partnerships to push their services forward.  These partners include Koller, MacDougall’s, ASDA.com, Casio, GoAntiques.com, Jessops.com, TigerDirect.com, CNET.co.uk, Shopping.com, etc.  MyThings’ previous round of funding was $8 million from Accel and Carmel. 

This past week, David Kernell was indicted with a charge for accessing Sarah Palin’s protected computer by means of an interstate communication.  The maximum charge can be a $250,000 fine and 5 years of prison for this charge.  Kernell pleaded not guilty to this charge.  Around the same time that this was taking place, Superior Court Judge Craig Stowers was looking at this case from another perception.

Judge Stowers ordered that Sarah Palin’s must be preserved.  Andree McLeod, a Republican watchdog pushed the case forward.  The e-mails exchanged between Palin, her husband, and others may reveal how the vice-presidential candidate runs the state of Alaska.  The e-mails may also reveal any communication about Walt Monegan. 

Walt Monegan is the former Police Chief of Anchorage, Alaska.  Sarah Palin laid him off on July 11, 2008 for not being “a team player on budgeting issues.”  Palin offered Monegan a position as a director of the Alaska Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, but he turned it down.  Monegan also stated that he resisted pressure from Sarah and Todd Palin to fire Trooper Mike Wooten.  Wooten was in a custody battle with, Sarah Palin’s sister Molly at the time. 

David Kernell brought Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! e-mail account into the public eye.  And the e-mails revealed in the screenshots that Kernell published clearly indicate that the e-mails relate to legislation.  Palin and her husband also created an e-mail account monitored by a computer company in Wasilla, Alaska.  That e-mail account was frozen after Kernell penetrated the Yahoo! account.

“On one hand, I’m pleased that the judge saw fit to order the retrieval and preservation of these e-mails, to the extent of going to the providers to get them,” stated McLeod.  McLeod is a Republican who used to be close to Palin. “But on the other hand, I’m amazed that I even have to go to court to get the governor to comply with Alaska’s public record laws.”

McLeod also is pushing for Palin to release 1,100 e-mails that have been withheld from the public.  This includes 40 that were CC’d to Sarah’s husband.  McLeod was described by Palin as a disgruntled former employee.  However, Palin endorsed McLeod in 2004 as a state House candidate that is “not afraid to stand up for what’s right.”

David Kernell does not deserve jail-time.  I actually think that he did the right thing by bringing this into the limelight.  It helps keep politicians transparent.

When Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) had their 2008 Annual Meeting of Stockholders on August 1, 2008, their stock was trading at about $19.80 per share.  At the conclusion of the meeting of the stockholders, it was decided that all of the board members would remain seated.  Carl Icahn, Frank Biondi, and John Chapple joined the Yahoo! Board out of a proxy settlement.  Capital Research called for a vote recount after the meeting and Eric Jackson pointed out that the vote count was controversial. 

Nothing had changed with Yahoo!’s Board of Directors since then.  However, two major events have ignited in the last week. 

The first event is that Yahoo!’s stock dropped to below $13 this past week.  After seeing this happen, Mithras Capital made a request to have Microsoft make an offer to buy-out Yahoo! at $22 per share.  This is $9 per share less than Microsoft’s original offer.  In response to the stock hitting this low, former major Yahoo! shareholder Eric Jackson sold all his hedge fund’s shares in Yahoo!

“I sold my YHOO stake, which I held through my hedge fund last month when it hit $20,” stated Jackson. “I still own a small amount personally. I had no idea idea it would fall this much but I finally decided to stop pushing a rope by calling for change from the inside [as a shareholder]. I voted with my feet. This board has the blood of its shareholders on its hands, and I hope they wear that scarlet letter stigma for a long time.”

Jackson was very proactive in having Terry Semel fired from the company.  Jackson also interrogated the current Yahoo! board at the 2008 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. 

The second major event that took place this week is that Capital Research upped the amount of ownership that they have in Yahoo!  Capital Research owned 8.6% and now they own 10.1%.  It is slightly peculiar that a company that wanted to have a recount for the renomination of the Yahoo! board increase their investment. 

This seems just as odd as the Carl Icahn twist.  First Carl Icahn accused that Jerry Yang a real-life self-destructive doomsday device for his company, then after joining the board Icahn stated that it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Memeorandum.com is a political news aggregation website that is similar to Techmeme.com.  One of the biggest problems with reading political blogs and news is that it is sometimes unknown whether they have a certain political bias.  For example, if you go to TheHuffingtonPost.com for the first time, then you won’t know that it has a liberal bias until actually reading a few articles.  If you go to Michelle Malkin’s blog, then you won’t realize that it has a conservative bias until after reading a few articles.  Andy Baio, founder of Upcoming.org and Joshua Schachter, founder of Del.icio.us have put their brains together to solve this problem using Greasemonkey and Memeorandum.

Check out the screenshot below of how it works.  The dark blue represents an extremely liberal bias.  The dark red represents an extremely conversative bias.  The lighter colors represents more of a moderate bias.  Josh and Andy used a recommendation algorithm to score all of the blogs tracked by Memeorandum based on the sites that they linked to in the last 3 months.  Then Greasemonkey pulls in the color assignment on anyone’s Firefox browser. 

Andy pointed out that the colors don’t represent each blogger’s personal political view, but gives a score reflected upon their linking activity.  And there is a tendency for bloggers to link to sites that they feel reflects similar views as them.  To install it, click here.

How Did They Do It?
Andy e-mailed Gabe Rivera, the founder of Memeorandum to gather the list of every blog being tracked by the crawler.  Josh and Andy then crawled all of these blogs to find out what other sites they linked to in the last 3 months.  Since Memeorandum archives all of the old posts on the homepage, Josh and Andy took a snapshot of the Memeorandum homepage that represented every 6 hours in the past 3 months.  They basically collected 360 snapshots.  Then using a Python script, Josh was able to scrape the links from the HTML of Memeorandum’s past homepage stories. 

Using all of the backlink information, Josh and Andy created a matrix of all of the data.  Then they created a score of -1 to 1 in a specific column of a Google Spreadsheet.  Based on a website’s score, they were given a color.  I think this is a great way of making publication companies more transparent of their views.

Put the founders of two companies that were acquired by Yahoo! on the same project and there is no telling what genius of an idea can come out of it.  Upcoming.org was acquired by Yahoo! in October 2005.  Del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo! in December 2005.

FitBit is a company that created a device and website to determine how much fitness and sleep you are getting.  The device retails for about $99 and debuted at the TechCrunch50 conference.  The device is wireless and comes with a recharging dock.  The FitBit Tracker devices automatically uploads activities, calories burned, distance, and sleep quality to the website.  This information is then presented to the device holder in an entertaining way. 

True Ventures and SoftTech VC have decided to plug in about $2 million in funding into these companies.  Through the round of funding, Jon Callaghan of True Ventures has joined the FitBit board.  FitBit plans on using the funding to further the development and distribution of the device.  The funding will also help develop additional products and services.  Signing up for FitBit.com is free. 

FitBit was started by Eric Friedman and James Park.  Friedman has previously worked for Webshots and co-founded Windup Labs.  Park was also a co-founded in Windup Labs. 

CBS Corporation (NYSE:CBS) has made an agreement to put full TV shows on Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) subsidiary, YouTube.  Google has been selling many TV shows on Google Video for a price in the last few years.  When that model didn’t work out, they bought out YouTube.  Now that TV shows are streaming for free on Hulu already, YouTube decided to match that service.  Problem is that YouTube’s video quality is terrible compared to Hulu.  YouTube even copied the Lights On/Off and Theater View feature from Hulu [screenshot below].

Some of the shows that will be played on YouTube will include full episodes of Star Trek, Young and the Restless, Beverly Hills 90210, and MacGuyver.  As you can tell by the yellow lines in the play video bar above, YouTube will be advertising like crazy throughout each episode.  All full length TV episodes will have this icon next to them:

Hopefully YouTube will start rolling out the archives of some of the newer hit show on CBS such as CSI, Survivor, How I Met Your Mother, The Unit, and Big Brother.  If YouTube and CBS are worried whether this idea will affect DVD sales, they could always use the music approach: link to the DVD purchase link through Amazon.com.

I have not switched away from Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows quite yet.  I actually think Windows Vista is an amazing operating system with the exception of the User Account Control.  The UAC is one of the reasons why Windows Vista received so much negative press.  The operating system constantly questions whether you want to do a certain action.

Want to install a program?  Are you sure?  Want to uninstall a program?  Are you sure?  I don’t know what was worse, the paper clip Office assistant or the User Account Control.  Ben Fathi, VP for core OS development at Microsoft has officially announced that for the next operating system, Microsoft has decided to scale back on the User Account Control feature. 

“We’ve heard loud and clear that you are frustrated,” stated Fathi on the Engineering Windows 7 blog. “You find the prompts too frequent, annoying, and confusing. We still want to provide you control over what changes can happen to your system, but we want to provide you a better overall experience.”

You know what Windows should do?  Eliminate the User Account Control and improve upon their Restore Point feature.  And also make Restore Point a lot more noticeable.  Most Joe Sixpacks don’t even know what the Restore Point is and how it can fix security problems.

The EMI Group is a music company that is owned by Terra Firma Capital Partners.  Terra purchased EMI for £3.2 billion around August 2007.  EMI recently signed with MySpace Music to have their music distributed through the social network.  EMI used to represent Paul McCartney, Radiohead, and The Rolling Stones, but all of those artists have left since. 

As EMI’s market share is declining and they had to cut almost 50% of their work force, they are trying a new experiment on the Internet.  EMI also wants to launch an online music distribution service of their own.  Why?  Because they want to gather data on their customers.  At the end of the day, everyone wants to become a microcosm of Amazon.com.  They’ve been using the streaming/download digital music download model for years before even iTunes existed.

The leader behind EMI’s efforts for digital music downloads through their own service is Douglas Merrill.  Merill came to EMI as the President as the former CIO of Google.

EMI currently represents artists such as Lily Allen, The Beach Boys, Beastie Boys, The Beatles, Coldplay, The Chemical Brothers, Duran Duran, Daft Punk, Dem Franchize Boyz, Norah Jones, Lenny Kravitz, The Kooks, Moby, Liz Phair, Spice Girls, Switchfoot, Keith Urban, Robbie Williams, and Yellowcard.