Internet Programming

Last week in a CBS Studios picket line, one TV writer referred to the current WGA work stoppage as "the first Internet strike." And there may be something to that. Certainly you'd want to clarify that, first of all, even in the last few years of the Internet era, there have been plenty of labor strikes across the country -- to say nothing of the world. Thousands of UAW workers are striking right now against truck-maker Navistar. New York cabbies have called two strikes since September.

CBS Corp., which already sells episodes of its hit television shows "Survivor" and "CSI" on Google Inc.'s online video store, is now offering the downloads on Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store. Apple's online store carries other shows from ABC, NBC and Fox. It previously offered some CBS programming, such as NCAA basketball, but not prime-time hits.

AOL plans today to relaunch its Netscape Internet portal as an experiment in community journalism, trying to recapture the magic of the once-famous online brand. Netscape will rely on its users to submit, rank and comment on news stories, videos and blog postings from across the Web. Stories will be organized into 30 categories, such as movies, travel and money.

Video-sharing site YouTube Inc. deleted nearly 30,000 files after a Japanese entertainment group complained of copyright infringement. The Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers found 29,549 video clips such as television shows, music videos and movies posted on YouTube's site without permission, said Fumiyuki Asakura, an official with the organization. San Mateo, Calif.

Yahoo Inc. has been talking like a major media company. Today it will start acting like one. Ten months after Lloyd Braun, former chairman of the ABC television network, began plotting the company's content strategy, the Internet giant plans to announce today the first of many original programs expected to come from the Yahoo Media Group headquarters in Santa Monica. Yahoo, which for years recycled traditional media companies' work on the Web, has hired its first news gatherer.

Renowned corporate blogger Robert Scoble, credited with helping to break down a siege mentality at his employer, Microsoft Corp., confirmed Sunday that he is leaving to join a recently formed Silicon Valley Internet media company. Scoble, 41, said in a phone interview that he would join PodTech.net of Menlo Park, Calif. This year, the company began "podcasting," or broadcasting over the Web, video interviews recorded with technology industry luminaries.

DR. HORRIBLE is good! And that's exactly his problem. The title character of the landmark new Web musical, "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," played by the lovable and unmenacing Neil Patrick Harris, dreams of gaining admission to the vaunted Evil League of Evil, home of the baddiest baddies in the land. But he's kidding himself. Dr. H is too skittish to harm innocents or wreak much havoc. The ray guns he invents never seem to work that well, and his cackle is so wimpy he's hired a voice coach.

Hoping to plant their flags on the screens of Internet-connected television sets, Intel Corp. and Yahoo Inc. unveiled a new project Wednesday to populate those screens with tiny programs called widgets. Depending on your point of view, the goal is to create a multitasker's dream or an information-overload nightmare: It would let people do things like check their stock prices or peruse their photos, all while watching TV. The notion that the Internet will be the delivery mechanism for TV has been gaining momentum, and the Intel-Yahoo partnership, called the "Widget Channel," reflects the potential.

A decade after the Internet's Big Bang, the online cosmos is expanding as fast as ever. Much more so than a year ago, we can now download or stream many of our favorite movies, most of the TV shows we didn't TiVo, and just about any song you want (Music lovers: I'm exaggerating for effect. Thanks). Larger, higher-resolution online video players are emerging. It won't be long before we think back bemusedly on how many clips we watched on that fuzzy miniature YouTube screen. Remember?

AOL is once again revamping its Netscape.com Web portal, dropping a year-old "social news" component in which visitors submitted news stories and blog entries and voted on them to determine how they're ranked on the site. AOL, the Internet services unit of Time Warner Inc., said it wasn't giving up on social news completely and would instead send interested visitors to a separate, yet-to-be-determined Web address.