Design Mistake Is Embarrassment in Moscow (BBC) The authorities in Moscow have hastily removed posters congratulating Russian war veterans which mistakenly showed the American warship USS Missouri.     The posters were taken down - just hours before Defender of the Motherland Day.      The Russian defense ministry said it did not produce the posters. A Moscow city hall official said the design "should have been shown to specialists who can distinguish one battleship from another". Read More.

Super Bowl Commercials Online. Individuals wanting to study the Super Bowl XL commercials may do so online at Google Super Bowl Commerical site. A lot of money is spent in the production of these adverts viewed by millions. People often watch the game just to see the commercials.

Super Bowl Commercials: Who Really won? (The Edge: The Third Culture) This year, at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, Marco Iacoboni and his group used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain responses in a group of subjects while they were watching the Super Bowl ads. Read Results.

Radio for Peacebuilding. Youth radio is a tool with tremendous power to build peace. Just as youth are deeply involved in conflict, so too they have the possibility to play a role in building peace. Radio has the potential to harness the creativity of young people. A guidebook has been written with such young people in mind. It is designed to help them and those who work with them design and produce entertaining radio programmes which help construct a peaceful future. Download Guidebook

National Archives and Google Launch Pilot Project to Digitize and Offer Historic Films Online The launch of a pilot program to make holdings of the National Archives available for free online has been announced. This will enable researchers and the general public to access a diverse collection of historic movies, documentaries and other films from the National Archives via Google Video as well as the National Archives website. Read More.

Film and Video Online Magazine. Film & Video has just published the February "issue" to the web. It's the first step in making the publication a more native experience. It has illistrated some stories with video the forums have gone live. More news, more frequently is one of the advantages of going all-digital is that we the publication can increase the frequency with which it provides information. Read More.

Filmmakers can post work online. The Independent Film Channel begins airing short movies initially produced for its web site. The new IFC Media Lab is considered an online community for Inde filmmakers who want to distinguish their work from all the other work now posted on the internet. The IFC will make short films of 6 mins. or less available on their web site.

Web Films for Viewing. The Gulf Islands Film & Television School has posted some of its 2005 films online for public viewing. Take a look in the school's Film Library to see a collection of films produced by young filmmakers in British Columbia.

Blinkx A New Search Resource. Blinkx, promotes itself as the "smartest thing on your computer and on the Web", is a recource that provides a different way people think about searching the Internet. Blinkx unifies web, TV, and media content using one search tool. Available to users on the Web at www.blinkx.com and www.blinkx.tv as well as free to download, blinkx automatically and intelligently links to content anywhere and in any format, on the Web, on the desktop and even on TV. blinkx's conceptual toolbar means users are no longer limited to keyword search; instead, blinkx assesses all the information that the user is actively viewing, and automatically recommends and retrieves relevant content, from local, Web and TV searches, based on context. In addition, www.blinkx.tv makes thousands of hours of TV content fully searchable and available on demand for the first time. blinkx is a privately-held company based in San Francisco and London. More information is available at www.blinkx.com.

Last post for the telegram? (BBC News) Last week, Western Union - which for a century and a half brought news of joy, sorrow and success in distinctive, hand-delivered, yellow envelopes - quietly ceased its service. Read More.

Take from the Past, Ad to the Future. (USAirways) Today, a few smart ad agencies are discovering how to sell products through nostalgia. Read More.

Virtual ads pose real threat to traditional media. (Boston.com) Traditional media of all stripes are struggling through their most turbulent period in a generation. Behind the upheaval and soul-searching -- the falling profits, staff cutbacks, content and programming changes, and fear for the future -- lies a stark reality: The rapid growth of online advertising is threatening the historic dominance of print and broadcasting. Read More.

Watch what you post. With the rise in social networking sites such as MySpace.com, experts are warning that students need to exercise more discretion in what they post about themselves online. Besides the obvious danger of posting personally identifying information, they say, the potential exists for embarrassing information to come back to bite students later in life when they apply for college or a job. Read More.

The End of the Internet. (AlterNet) The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online. Read More.

Digital rebirth for comic strips (C|Net) Comic strips are changing with the times. As the newspaper space allotted to comics shrinks along with advertising dollars, cartoonists are looking for new ways to reach their audience. Even "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams, who has had an online presence for 11 years, started publishing a blog in October. Read More.

Sound Editing Goes Online (Film and Video) Eric Lalicata and Ken Skoglund aren’t your conventional sound guys. They’re working on the James Cameron film Aliens of the Deep — shooting sound files back and forth, editing them and logging them for the next stage of the project. There’s nothing unusual about their workflow—except that Lalicata and Skogland are working on two different continents. Read More.

Internet Society Resources. (Scout Report) The Internet is certainly a vast and, at times, quite chaotic place. Fortunately, there are organizations such as the Internet Society which “provides leadership in addressing issues that confront the future of the Internet”. With over 20,000 individual members in over 180 countries, it has a broad range of members located in most corners of the world. Perhaps one of the most important areas of the site is the public policy area. Here, visitors can learn about the governance of the Internet and a host of topics, including access, e-commerce, and spam. Of course, for those emerging cyber law scholars or the generally curious, there is an “All About The Internet” section. Included in this section are links to important guides to Internet law and a number of relevant online research tools.

FAQ: When Google is not your friend.(C|Net) Google's recent legal spat with the U.S. Department of Justice highlights not only what information search engines record about us but also the shortcomings in a federal law that's supposed to protect online privacy. Read More.

Blog Explores Art As Reflection of Society. (Scout Report) Eye level is an art blog written by a collaborative team at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). According to the site, "... the conversation at Eye Level will be dedicated to American art and the ways in which the nation's art reflects its history and culture." The SAAM collection is meant as a foundation for the conversation on Eye Level. A recent post begins by talking about a road trip through the American West to see site-specific artwork, but at least one of the artists mentioned, Andrea Zittel, has a prior affiliation with SAAM. She was the 2005 Smithsonian Lucelia Artist Award winner, and the post links to prior entries on artwork at SAAM, both in and inspired by the American Southwest. These links were to works such as Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (an installation in the Great Salt Lake) and Albert Bierstadt's Among the Sierra Nevada, California, 1868. The February 1 post considers the future of art blogs, and the impact they may have on art criticism, museums, and the art world on the whole.

Stanford University on iTunes. (Scout Report) For those who can’t make it to the balmy climes of Palo Alto, this latest initiative from Stanford will be most welcome. With this program, visitors can download audio recordings of lectures, poetry readings, and even Stanford football games directly to their computer. Of course, this is no substitute to attending this fine institution, but the wide range of audio content available at no charge is very impressive. This version of Stanford on iTunes is compatible with all computers running Windows XP or 2000 or Mac OS X 10.3. Explore Standford.

ASIFA-Hollywood. (Scout Report) Founded in 1957 as the Association Internationale Du Film D’Animation (ASIFA), this organization is “devoted to the encouragement and dissemination of film animation as an art and communication form”. Not surprisingly, the ASIFA branch in Hollywood has a particularly keen interest in preserving film animation of all stripes and their website has hosts of compelling information about their work and related activities. Visitors may wish to start their exploration of the site by looking through the Annie Awards section of the site. This area details the past (and current) winners of these film animation awards since their inception in 1972. There is, of course, copious information about upcoming animation releases along with a number of helpful links to like-minded sites. Finally, all visitors should take a look at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive offered here. Organized as a blog, the site contains image galleries of the work of such animators as Ernesto Garcia Cabral and others. Visit Web Site.

Items from The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2006. http://scout.wisc.edu/