“You don’t paddle against the current, you paddle with it. And if you get good at it, you throw away the oars.”
—Kris Kristofferson

Microsoft is coming after you … like they’ve done before.

This is absurd for a lot of reasons, but here are two of the more obvious:

1. A billion dollars in damages to Viacom? Ridiculous. Clips of their shows on YouTube amount to free advertising. Hasn’t anyone at Viacom paid attention to how YouTube has helped inject some much-needed interest into Saturday Night Live?

2. Viacom says YouTube “has built a lucrative business.” They have? Maybe I missed the memo, but everything I’ve seen and heard indicates that all those video clip views are generating a ton of bandwidth cost, but nary an ounce of profit.

In a purely legal sense, Viacom may be on shaky ground: Title II of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act seems to hold that YouTube is fine as long as they act in a timely manner to remove copyrighted material when Viacom alerts them to the existence of such material on their site.

Meanwhile, some portion of the 100,000 videos Viacom asked YouTube to remove have no relation at all to Viacom-controlled copyrighted material. This clip on YouTube, posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells the story.

Ultimately, traditional media and online media need to work together in a symbiotic relationship that benefits both. It’s starting to happen in the recording industry, it can happen in the broadcast industry.

Traditional media needs to lighten up and be a little less controlling, while online entities need to demonstrate they’re acting responsibly and in an online world that’s not a wild frontier anymore.

Lawyers, tend to your fighters: The bell has rung. Mouthpieces in. Spitbuckets in position. Let’s get ready to rumble!

Jakob Nielsen just posted this new Alertbox article that details “10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities” for your Web site.

I’ve been telling people for years that a newsletter is one of the most powerful online marketing tools there is; I’m glad to see Nielsen call it out as the number-one redesign priority.

Takeaway for marketers: Nielsen tends to be extremely conservative where design is concerned, but there’s a lot of valuable wisdom in here. If you’re considering a site redesign project, this one is required reading.

Top of my emailbox this morning was this subject line: “The Death of the Page View.” Okay, I’ll bite.

The email led to this article over on iMedia Connection about how page views are no longer the metric of choice they once were, for a variety of reasons.

It’s a real problem. Advertisers and publishers both want metrics they can agree on to determine which Web sites claim the largest audiences. Nielsen/NetRatings is the best we have right now, but in an online world where accountability is purported to be the big advantage over other media, it still doesn’t feel like it’s good enough.

And here’s one word the iMedia article doesn’t include: conversion.

Ultimately, it’s the performance of advertising that makes a difference. What information would you rather have: that eHarmony or Match.com is the number-one dating site? Or that advertising on one site typically gets triple the clickthrough of the other?

Every industry seems to have its insider tip sheet. You know the kind: They aggregate and print rumors and leaks and unverifiable information. Everyone in the industry hates them and curses them, but everyone reads them, everyone leaks to them and nine times out of 10 they’re right on the money.

I’d love to see a Web site that aggregates actual online ad campaign performance information. It’s actually sort of amazing that it hasn’t happened up to now (or maybe it has and I haven’t seen it). I want to go to a site and be able to see, for example, that for an independent film, second-tier sites A, B, C and D performed exceptionally well, while well-known sites W, X, Y and Z tanked in performance.

Even if it’s all leaks and rumors and only 80 percent reliable, isn’t a site like that something you would want to have in your online advertising toolbox?