GRD Google Fans

Who would have thought the Red Sox and Cubs would clinch their divisions on the same day? Just enjoy it.

Bob Lobel covers the Red Sox celebration (and by the way, the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004)

And WGN has the Cubs celebration.

And just for old times’ sake… this video still gives me goosebumps.

Jerry Yang is a pretty smart dude, and while he may have a few more days of work before he can return to sitting back and counting his money he has been implementing some under the radar changes that are already beginning to make an impact.

Most importantly, even before Terry Semel’s ouster, Yahoo! has been hiring innovators in digital media and the entertainment industry to turn Yahoo! into the global entertainment property it has so long strived to be.

Some of the key hires we know about so far:

- Blake Jorgensen,…

To promote his forthcoming greatest hits set, Columbia Records has launched a viral video campaign that allows users to insert their own messages into a Subterranean Homesick Blues video.

For most of the online video audience too young to know the video, Dylan stands flipping cue cards with the song’s lyrics on it. Slightly older audiences may remember an INXS video, Mediate, using the same style.

Head on over to dylanmessaging.com and send your favorite Bob Dylan fan a little viral love.

Congrats to OVW friend and fine-mind Brad Berens, on being promoted to the newly created position of chief content officer & editor at large for ad:tech expositions and iMedia Communications.

Brad is one of the finest minds - and more importantly, people - that I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Check out his musings on his blog, Mediavorous.

Now where’s our speaking slot at Ad:Tech????

MSN is reducing the number of pre-roll ads it will show to users as part of its redesign and roll-up of the Soapbox player into the larger video portal.

Rob Bennett, MSN’s general manager, video, entertainment and sports, told Mediaweek, “The feedback on pre-roll is pretty mixed. We’ve definitely heard from our users that they’d prefer longer interval between ads.”

No kidding. Like YouTube, Soapbox’s content is mostly short form video “snacks.” But according to Mediaweek, Bennett says that MSN users will now only see a video ad every three minutes…

Yesterday Broadcasting & Cable reported the FoxNews.com and the soon-to-be launched Fox Business Channel have selected Maven Networks as the backbone for their broadband video platform.

An interesting announcement, it appears that NewsCorp is using Roo to deliver syndicated video content to its newspaper properties, and looking to a more robust system from Maven to handle content management and delivery for its broadcast properties. It will be interesting to see how they leverage both systems simultaneously.

Microsoft has done an incredible job of cross-promoting Halo 3, one of the biggest video game launches in years on the Xbox with Silverlight, one of their biggest technology releases in years.

Across the web, if you have Silverlight installed, you will see Halo 3. Microsoft’s homepage features a Silverlight ad for the game, and the website of agency AKQA which designed the Halo 3 site is similarly skinned to drive visitors to Halo3.com, an amazing example of Silverlight design.

When you consider Microsoft’s vertical integration, now owning hardware, content distribution and promotion across their various…

Google is putting a more direct sell on their filter for video discovery. From the Google blog:

Since new videos are constantly appearing all over the web, it’s difficult to keep tabs on all of them. But now Google Alerts will make it easy for you to add video to your other Alerts: News, Web, Blog and Groups.

The problem is that Google’s video search technology is not as good as some of the more focused video search companies like Truveo and Blinkx. With Google, you’re still mostly limited to the world of GooTube. So…