From a viral Trader Joe’s ad that’s had 340,000 views on YouTube to TateShots from the venerable British museum, people are watching TV in a new way.

It’s true: they watch it on their iPhones and on their PCs. They watch at the airport, at a soccer game and at work. Television has become portable, and people watch it when they have a free minute, wherever they might be.

But new channels of distribution aren’t the whole story. A new class of producers is filling the void as the networks stumble and broadcast audiences erode.

Consumer cameras shoot hi-def. Video editing software costs a couple of hundred bucks and runs on budget laptops. And the technology has been around long enough that some people are learning how to use it pretty darn effectively.

We decided to enter the fray with a new show of our own: StreetStyleTV. It’s a quick hit of fashion, fresh off the street, real people wearing real cloths.

We were inspired by streetstyle photoblogs like The Sartorialist and Garance Dore. This is a similar idea, but on video.

We’ve started a website too: StreetStyleTV.com

It’s a WordPress site with a special theme designed for video. The theme, TV.Elements by Press75, ingeniously breaks a post into media and text elements. Take a look at how we deployed it.

The new television is already changing the way we watch. Soon, it will be changing the way we think and feel and act.

Brilliant piece from McKinsey:

“Six ways to make Web 2.0 work”

http://tinyurl.com/afouxt

Web-2.0-ness is many things - design, concept, functionality, inter-connectedness. Sometimes, just looking at a few links is worth a thousand words.

Therefore, I’ve updated my Web 2.0 links on del.icio.us so you can see it all in one place.

Blogsolid offers expert advice and tips on the full range of blogging culture - basics, growth and power blogging.

Even the design makes this blog worth visiting. It’s original and unusually easy to understand. Have a look at Blogsolid right now.

See a lot of really good work, all in one place, in an easy to browse format (just mouseover the thumbnails and a screengrab pops up in flash) - Best of 07 on BWG.

Most of the recommended sites were familiar territory - Last.fm, Flickr and so forth. But one of the answers was Go2Web2.0, a great site that lists hundreds of great, emerging sites segregated by tags.

Dining? Design? Scrobbling? Twittering? It’s all here. Great looking site, too.

If you’re interested in Web 2.0, Go2Web2.0 is well worth a visit.

It’s called Sxipper. Sxipper is a free plug-in for use with the Firefox browser (please tell me you’re not still using Internet Explorer).

Sxipper is easy to install (takes less than five minutes, no special skills or hacking required). It’s secure, it’s smart and it’s a massive time-saver. Here’s what they have to say about themselves:

• Always available - appears when needed, so you can log in or fill forms with a single click
• Trustworthy - encrypts your personal data and stores it on your computer
• Accurate form fill - learns from its own users how to complete forms with 100% accuracy with our unique training tool
• OpenID provider - provider of private and public identifiers. Sxipper.com is a secure, phishing-resistant OP, with support for PAPE. Identity 2.0 begins here.
• Easy to install - gathers data from your address book and web browser so that you have a running start

Basically, when you navigate to a site where you need a password (gmail, flickr, your blog), a little dialogue box pops up asking you to choose an identity. For most sites, there’s only one choice (the only time I see more than one is for blogging, but that’s because I write 6 or 7 blogs).

Select an ID and Sxipper logs you in. Simple!

Sxipper also features automatic form fills, a very handy feature. Never type your name and address again.

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A brief word about Firefox. Here at OCDC, we’ve tried (and continue to test our web work) on all the major browsers - IE, Safari, Camino, even Navigator (yuck). Most people continue to use IE because they’re stuck with bad old Web 1.0 habits.

Give Firefox a shot - it’s endlessly customizable to your needs, has a small footprint, is constantly (and automatically) updated and is from the not-for-profit Mozilla org. What’s not to like? Say goodbye to IE and it’s endless pop-ups, hangs and crashes.

Download Firefox and give it a try. You’ll thank me.

Full disclosure: SRA is a client. Gotta say, it’s great to have clients who are smart and intellectually curious (goes for all my clients).

The gist is this: Subscribers, Social Media and direct Selling to potential clients is far more effective in the long run than trying to make money with Google.

Dr. Haswell made a similar point this morning: since much of their business comes from referring physicians, maybe we should focus on that market more than general awareness. Dr. Kyran Dowling, another SRA physician, also made a similar point to me last week.

In any business, it pays to show up at the doorstep of potential clients, introduce yourself, explain your value proposition and ask for their trade. My old business partner Conrad Fink of This Is TV in New York used to say “good things happen when you leave the house.”

Thanks Brian for a great post. We’re adding you to our blogroll.

And thanks to Jim Haswell, doctor and web maven.

FT joins The New York Times in a switch away from paid content. Yes, you can now read Maureen Dowd for free, just like before the advent of Times Select.

In an increasingly digital world, bloggers boost a news organization’s relevancy by linking to noteworthy content. But under the paid content model, even if I subscribe, my readers can’t see the article if they are not also subscribers.

Case in point:

I had intended to write a post about an article in Ad Age by my former colleague Avi Dan (now at Euro/RSCG). But Ad Age, ever the Digital Dinosaurs, protect their content behind a subscriber wall. The result: their content is not widely circulated in the blogsphere.

In the meantime, we can now enjoy all of The New York Times (and soon FT as well) proving once again that the Web 2.0 world is about connectedness.

LinkedIn is social networking with your past business colleagues. You build your profile (kind of like an online resume) and connect to people you know.

Boomers aren’t all that comfortable with Web 2.0 social networking. They’re not on MySpace or YouTube. But LinkedIn, by nature of it’s focus on past business connections, skews heavily toward the Woodstock generation.

All of a sudden, all my pals from long ago are popping up - people like Norm Sherman and Lyman Casey from D’Arcy, uber-networker Perry Schaeffer and DraftFCB Group CD Pat McGuire. Hi everybody!

Does LinkedIn have real merits as a business tool?

Don’t know yet. But as more people join, the network becomes more and more interesting. Sign up for free and find out for yourself.

As reported in the FlickrBlog, over 7,800 photos were submitted.

Just another example of how Web 2.0 is creating new opportunities for business.

Let’s start with WSJ. They use WordPress to fire up All Things Digital, news, analysis and opinion about the digital revolution featuring heavy hitters like Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

Harvard has created a portal using WordPress-MU for students to create their own blogs. WordPress-MU allows you to run thousands of blogs or websites with just one software installation.

Let’s say your blog-powered website gets really popular. Consider Anousheh Ansari, the first blogger from space. Or CNN. For sites that experience more than 500,000 views a month or spikes in the millions, there’s WordPress-VIP.

Guess what: blogging’s not so niche anymore. It’s not just personal rants and self-promotion. In fact, many of the most popular destinations on the web are powered by WordPress.

Why are big corporations and news portals adopting WordPress and other blog engines for major audience sites?

• Simple to install and customize
• Effortless content creation
• Lots of free and low-cost software, plugins, themes and widgets

Evidence is building that WordPress is poised to become the next software empire to roll across the world’s laptops, changing the way businesses think about websites, commerce and communication.

Thanks again to Dougal for researching this important topic. See his list here.

Want to go to a site that’s tapped into the buzz that will be tomorrow’s boom? Try Mashable.

Mashable reports on what’s new in the world of social networking. There’s a post about Yoomba, a service that let’s you make VoIP calls from your email. And Vizu, the free polling company. They’ve just added Google Maps to their service so you can see where your cause is rising (or tanking).

Some is good, some is bad. But to spot tomorrow’s stars today, bookmark Mashable.

They’ve worked for Calvin Klein, the Musee D’Art Moderne and Bjork. And it’s well-beyond just graphic design, typography and inventing fonts - they’ve done magazine covers (Paris Vogue), stage sets and music videos.

One wonders how and when M/M’s ideas will work their way into the mainstream. Is there some way we can use their thinking in web design? Email campaigns? Inspiring stuff.

To get a better feel for their work, go to the Times article and watch the multimedia presentation.