Comedy Central hit and miss with its revamped website for The Daily Show. The site now features a more extensive archive of earlier shows -- great.

But if you like your bacon to look like ham - sorry, you can't see the shows, as pointed out by the Globe and Mail. The Daily Show won't show the expanded content to viewers outside of the U.S. -- as in Canada.

Using geotargeting (tracking the PC's IP address) is supposed to create revenue opportunities and enhance the user experience by eliminating then need to type in a zip code. It is not to prevent people from accessing content. So one of two things happened -- since Viacom didn't sell advertising that reaches outside the U.S. to support the video, then it decided no revenue, no free watching. Or, perhaps the company's contract with the over the airways carrier up north prohibits streaming of content.

In either case, the company has to come up with a solution to protect its brand image. Or maybe Microsoft should just acquire Canada and make it all part of Washington.

Microsoft "gave" Facebook $240 million for a meager 1.6 percent interest in the company. This is a good deal for both sides for defensive reasons only.

Microsoft gets the security of knowing that Facebook won't be acquired by Google anytime soon. For Microsoft, it was "How little can we spend to make sure Google stays away?" While $240 mil is a huge amount of money in most investment circles, it's the spare change that falls from Bill Gates' pocket when he reaches for the Gold Card. It's like the old days when a butcher would throw some quarters into the curb to get the kids from stop hanging out in front of his doorway. Go away and buy some gum, and don't come back!

And kudos to Facebook for getting more money than the founders probably could have conceived a few years ago when they decided that they could clone existing social network technology better than other folks. It's security to put money in the back for years to come, and they still own nearly all of the company! If someone is insane enough to pay $15 billion for the rest, it's all gravy.

Facebook is the last in the long line of overvalued properties that will likely come crashing back to reality by 2009. A hard rain is gonna rain when all of the dreams of monetizing personal pages and user-to-user communications are proven to be just that -- dreams.

Put the PC headphones away -- music subscription services are taking over the living room, where they are more convenient and can be heard using better equipment. In the past few weeks there's been a slew of deals to put music into home theater boxes. TiVo and RealNetworks got together, and EchoStar bought Sling Media.

Audio hardware company Sonos partnered with anyone with a pulse -- I mean with Sirius Satellite Radio, Napster, Pandora and RealNetworks. Music on demand through cable channels have been out nearly as long as MTV, but accessing your online music accounts is becoming a major trend.

Consulting firm ABI Research says these subscription will help to drive sales of networked home theater devices as more people want to listen to their digital libraries anywhere in the house. "Over the next five years, the networked home audio market is set to grow from what largely is a hobbyist and audiophile market into a broader consumer market," says the company. It only makes sense that download services should follow as well, so carve out some space on your DVR for some tunes.

Just as with video, the wall between online and offline consumption is falling faster than Britney Spears' career prospects. Cable and IP over telecommunications lines (and cell networks) will be alternative methods of accessing content that you first fell in love with online.

Widget platform company Gigya has made its technology for tracking code snippets available to Mochila's content syndication network. Publishers can create widgets using Wildfire technology that can be embedded into all of the popular social networking sites, and Gigya will track the widgets to see where and how they are used.

If your application ain't widgetizable (it should be a word), then getting it broadly adopted will be a Herculean market. Gone are the days of tools licensing -- get the code out there and let the revenue sharing begin!

Mochila, a text, video, and photo content sharing network, will shop the widgets to its buyers and sellers of content so that content and applications can be twisted and turned into entirely new forms.

At the rate we're creating new wdigets, soon personal web pages could have more signatures from widget developers than unique visitors.

Lead generation is a better fit than pay per click as smaller companies that are less web savvy can feel more comfortable in paying for leads. Expect pay per call or pay per lead to slowly take share from PPC as more local advertiser realize that online can drive sales at less cost than print or radio.

Superpages' Robyn Rose (who has a strong self-interest in PPA) is on target when she says:

"national companies should focus on distributing leads to local franchise locations or retail outlets, and small- to medium-sized businesses should focus on the various products they carry or the services they offer."

Local companies need to differentiate themselves from the crowd more than is possible with a phone book ad, and websites are the best mechanism to do that. Expect more local directories to attractively price pay per lead and pay per call and increase their education efforts with local advertisers.

Source: Adotas.

On the tube and online, NBC has decided that temporarily espousing green living will green its bottom line.

The network's MSNBC.com and iVillage websites will feature articles about environmentally friendly lifestyles for the week of November 4-10, and the news division will run additional programming about the water conservation and renewable energy, according to Mediapost.

Oh, what hath Al Gore wrought -- inspiring NBC to pay attention as if this idea about green living were new. You can tell that a trend is obvious to everyone when TV and mainstream online news starts covering it.

We'll be seeing green marketing (including some products that are more "greenwashing" than truly sustainable) far and wide as the campaigns once reserved for extremist conservationists is now targeting investors and business leaders. Home Depot has caught on as well, launching a line of "Eco Options" products touted in store and on its home page.

While NBC's move may be temporary, marketing is shifting green forever.

Michael Gray provides some helpful information about optimizing your website and whether or not to include ancillary pages.

He suggests not including privacy policy pages and the like, but address and "about us" type pages can help your search ranking. He also points to the helpful Google Webmaster Tools page as an important double check on your website configuration.

I'm still learning the tools of the trade so that I can get my website covering green business out of SEO oblivion. It's a hard crawl.

If you want to watch important things like models falling through runways or track the California wildfires on your TV and don't want to deal with a wireless network, then SanDisk has a removable hard drive for you.

SanDisk is now selling a $100 device that plugs into a USB port and can transfer playback on a TV through an AV port. Rather than partner with an existing movie download site, SanDisk has started its own called Fanfare.

While SanDisk's solution is likely simpler than setting up a wireless network and you won't have to worry about streaming video playback performance, it's not a long term solution. Much of the best web video is available via stream only, and you may have some problems displaying videos downloaded from sites such as CinemaNow or Movielink that may need to be connected to the Internet and have their own media players.

There's money to be made in transferring web video to the big screen. I'm still waiting for Cisco, Sling Media, TiVo or even Google to stand up and streamline web video viewing on TV, but this at least this a simple solution for the tech averse.

The food chain of video programming is adding another link as media companies see exclusive professionally-produced video as a revenue generator.

Video news and user generated content are the backbone of web video today, but now MySpace, Comedy Central and Yahoo are producing shows aimed at increasing their web traffic. Yahoo and Comedy Central have been playing with web-only video programming for some time without much success, but MySpace is hoping that faux reality show "Roommates" will be a big money maker. The show will use product placement (in this case a car) to augment revenue.

Quality (as judged by the MySpace audience) will determine the success of this show and possible future investments in web-only programming. Cable TV programs and movies as well as direct-to-video movies have found their niche. Now websites have an audience size that is able to compete with TV and opens up a new tier of advertisers.

Source: Forbes.com.

The New York Times outlines the fight between web publishers and ratings services Nielsen/NetRatings and comScore over the "true" amount of traffic to websites.

Advertisers are caught between data from ad and web servers that give a more accurate representation of eyeballs versus the ratings services that approximate the traffic. This is an irrational argument to me, and not just because I'm on the media side.

Why by gosh would you ever believe a "survey panel" of a small percentage of users over audited data that tracks the pieces of content delivered to a computer screen? This is like having a phone survey asking how many people attended a concert instead of looking at ticket sales. While ticket sales maybe be slightly off when compared to filled chairs, it's much more reflective than a survey.

Assuming that robots are filtered out, ad servers and web servers are adroit at counting the who and how many. The advantage of a survey is it can eliminate the small percentage of people who visit a website both at home and work. Useful, yes, but not nearly as important as impressions and unique visitors as tracked by web servers.

Advertisers should put their faith in always-improving web server data and listen to surveys as supporting material to better understand demographics and repeat consumers.