From the LATimes, Cameron Crowe on music and moviemaking: calendarlive.com: Moviemaking, from the soundtrack up [pdf]

The right song at the right time is a powerful concoction that can make a sequence, or even an entire movie. It scratches at your soul. [...]

[...] Music, and particularly songs, can be a finicky partner to motion pictures. After all, both are often attempting to tell a complete story, their way, without the help of the other. But just between you and me, right up through my own sixth film as a director, “Elizabethtown,” it’s been the prospect of those long afternoons and evenings in the editing room, coaxing that marriage between the right song and the right scene, that’s kept me going through the grueling parts of making a movie.

You authors are saps to resist Googling [pdf]

If the paranoid myopia that drives such thinking penetrates too deeply into the law, search engines will eventually shut down. What’s the difference, after all, between a copyrighted Web page and a copyrighted book? What if Internet entrepreneurs could sue Google for indexing their websites? What if the law required search engines to get clearance for every Web page? Even a company as large and well-funded as Google couldn’t pull that off because what’s on the Internet, and who owns that content, changes constantly.

As one author told me, “fear of obscurity, not digital indexing, is what keeps most authors awake at night.”

Technology that makes it easier to find, buy and read books is good for everyone — even the authors suing Google.

It’s Not TV, It’s Yahoo

Mr. Semel describes a strategy built on four pillars: First, is search, of course, to fend off Google, which has become the fastest-growing Internet company. Next comes community, as he calls the vast growth of content contributed by everyday users and semiprofessionals like bloggers. Third, is the professionally created content that Mr. Braun oversees, made both by Yahoo and other traditional media providers. And last, is personalization technology to help users sort through vast choices to find what interests them.

[...] Increasingly, Mr. Semel and others are finding that the long-promised convergence of television and computers is happening not by way of elaborate systems created by cable companies, but from the bottom up as video clips on the Internet become easier to use and more interesting. Already, video search engines, run by Yahoo and others, have indexed more than one million clips, and only now are the big media outlets like Viacom and Time Warner moving to put some of their quality video online.

[...] One of Yahoo’s secret weapons, Mr. Braun says, is that it can personalize information for the interests of each user, such as its My Yahoo page and the song recommendations provided to users of its music service. Mr. Braun is weaving this technology into a video player Yahoo will introduce near the end of the year.

“It will almost be like a television set,” Mr. Braun said, except as people watch one program, on the center of the player, other areas will offer additional programming choices, based on their past viewing habits. It will let them use Yahoo’s video search to find programs from amateur videographers and video bloggers. And it will, of course, promote the glitzy shows Mr. Braun is creating.

“People want the freedom to do exactly what they want to do,” he said. “But they also like to be programmed to and reminded of the different things that exist. Yahoo is in a position to do both of those.”