And you can almost hear the screaming voices of outrage already, can’t you? The programs on Al Jaz Children’s feature cartoons and educational fare similar to PBS, but do have a distinctly Al Jazeera feel, like Saladin, a children’s cartoon about the Crusades, told from the perspective of the legendary Muslim warrior. Fun! But execs believe American Moms and Dads will want this for their kids, and maybe, eventually, that will lead to the network’s news coverage finding a spot alongside Fox News, MSNBC and CNN, as Al Jazeera Children’s general manager Mahmoud Bouneb told Fast Company:

“We have an ambition to create an international feed for JCC that will benefit other markets, [such as] Asia and North America […] We are thinking probably by the end of 2012 because it takes a long time to prepare and to penetrate the market … we have so many requests from Asian countries to bring Al Jazeera [Children's Channel] in Arabic and to be dubbed in English […] It is essential our international feed will cover North America. I don’t think we will face the issues related to the distribution of Al Jazeera (English News).”

Watch a segment of Saladin embedded below:

Murdoch just bought a 5.5% stake in Genie Oil and Gas Inc. He’s sharing that stake with Lord Jacob Rothschild, the billionaire Brit who may or may not moonlight as a Bond villain. Additionally, writes Ungerleider, Murdoch will join Genie’s advisory board, a group that already includes former VP Dick Cheney.

Genie and its investors seem to be aware that Murdoch and Cheney’s involvement could inspire skeptics to hypothesize about what the company might really be up to. So they’ve tried to nip those speculations in the bud:

Public statements by both Genie and their investors have stressed the firm’s American and Israeli (read: non-Arab, non-Iranian, non-Venezuelan) roots. According to a statement by Murdoch, “I believe Genie Energy’s technologies and vast shale oil licenses have real potential to spur a global, geo-political paradigm shift by moving a major portion of new oil production to America, Israel, and other western-oriented democracies.” Murdoch also said that “Covering and distributing news has been my life’s work […] If Genie’s effort to develop shale oil is successful, as I believe it will be, then the news we’ll report in the coming decades will reflect a more prosperous, more democratic, and more secure world.”

Perry was even more explicit, stating that “Both America and Israel have significant shale oil reserves. It’s difficult to overstate their potential to improve our respective economies and national security. […] Genie Energy is developing the technologies America and Israel want to make rapid progress toward energy independence, while IDT Energy is poised for continued growth in the consumer market. I’m very excited to work with their management team to help meet the energy needs of the U.S. and Israel for decades to come.”

Hmm—somehow, we’re still not convinced. Remember, after all, that The Simpsons—a show that coincidentally appears on the Murdoch-owned Fox network—correctly predicted 9/11 four years before the event. That means there must be more to Genie than meets the eye. Maybe that oil stuff is just a smokescreen concealing Cheney and Murdoch’s real intent: to assemble a shadow government and quietly engineer the coming of a new world order. Open your eyes, people!!

As he prepares to join the Boston Celtics, Fast Company looks at just how influential Shaq has become in the area of social media.

SportsGrid has the full breakdown of a recent Fast Company interview, based around Shaq’s involvement in the Influence Project – a way for Shaq, and everyone, to measure their personal influence online. Here’s Shaq’s page.

“All social media feeds each other,” says the All-Star center.

Check out all the details about Shaq’s social media dominance here…

Sid Holt, Chief Executive of American Society of Magazine Editors had this to say about this award:

“The best magazines touch their readers in print, on the Web and increasingly on mobile devices. An award just for print or just for digital can’t do justice to the multiplatform achievements of the most successful magazine brands. The Magazine of the Year honors just that—editorial excellence across multiple platforms.”

Following is a collection of titles and explanations of why they deserve this first time, big kahuna of an award!

The Atlantic

It makes sense that The Atlantic is on this list, as no other “intellectual” magazine has better embraced the blogging sensibility than they. Sure, many of their competitors have dabbled, but none of them have Andrew Sullivan‘s Daily Dish under their umbrella of content (along with a slew of other great writers.) Further, their smartly edited Atlantic Wire perfectly demonstrates how well they understand how an Internet channel can provide a perfect extension to the larger editorial point-of-view and brand. Of course, it almost goes without saying that the actual print magazine is enjoying its best time ever, under the wise leadership of James Bennett, who has completely reinvigorated the title since taking over in 2006.

Fast Company

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when magazine publishers saw a great editorial opportunity to jump on the new Internet-fueled economy. Sadly, many (if not most) of these titles have fallen by the wayside, ironically because they clearly didn’t understand the new content model that the Internet provided. But not so with Fast Company, who under Editor in Chief Robert Saffian, consistently demonstrates how long-form writing in the print version can still be relevant, entertaining and impactful, and offer a website that offers an original online experience that completely compliments the print-side point of view. The list of smart contributors at Fast Company is legion, though we choose to highlight Adam Penenberg (and his recent book Viral Loop.) Not only a great read, essay and excerpt online, but also a fascinating application on Facebook. So smart.

Glamour

Wait, what? Surely this must be a mistake! A women’s service magazine getting recognized by ASME? Say it ain’t so! We all know that women’s service magazines are only the commercial lifeblood of the magazine publishing industry; the cash cows at publishing houses that make the money that allow for the boutique and intellectually stimulating brands to exist (hello New Yorker!) Only joking (sort of.) For a variety of reasons, we are very fond of the work of Editor-in-Chief Cindi Leive, who’s efforts to bring Glamour into a complete brand experience, from print to online are an exemplar of how it should be done. (And dare we say how good the the magazine looks these days? Yes we dare.) This title definitely belongs here, and congrats are due not just to Glamour, but to the judges of ASME for finally recognizing that a commercially viable brand can also be smart, cool and innovative.

Men’s Health

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to us, Men’s Health Editor-in-chief Dave Zinczenko‘s place in the industry is somehow considered a provocative discussion. Most see him as the “golden boy” of publishing, but there are still some who somehow don’t feel that his recognition is deserved, perhaps because of an overblown cover line hullabaloo. Well, sorry haters – the proof is in the pudding. Not only is Men’s Health helping to drive the Rodale P&L statement, but all of nearly its digital products have proven to be both smart, pioneering and simply cool. From their website to their iPhone application, to their great selling books. In an email to his staff Zinczenko said “it’s an award for excellence across all channels. And we’re the only men’s magazine to score a nomination. Creating excellence across all channels is something only a great team, working together with one vision and purpose, can accomplish.” Well said.

New York

Oh right. Adam Moss. How can a magazine award exist and not include New York? Well there is an easy answer: because it is awesome, great and deserving of all of its accolades. Sure – its a regional title that has comparatively lower circulation than this categories fellow nominees. But you know what? They STILL deserve the love (and are likely considered by many to be the favorite.) Why? Because week after week, no other magazine nails the cultural zeitgeist better than New York. More importantly? Moss has demonstrated how a weekly magazine can effectively use the Internet experience in a way that makes the print version more viable, relevant and actually great fun. Conventional wisdom in the industry states that weekly magazines cannot exist in the digital age. New York demonstrates how wrong that is, and for that alone, Moss and his team deserve to be paraded around the ASME award ceremony on the shoulders of Jon Meacham, Rick Stengel and Jess Cagle. Please make that happen.

Disclosure – the author of this post is married to Geraldine Hessler, Design Director of Glamour.

If you are one of Facebook’s more than 350 million users and have logged in since last night, you were greeted by an open letter from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg outlining a sweeping set of changes to the site. Regional networks are officially dead and gone (though Mashable called their demise a while ago). And privacy settings are getting a major shakeup.

The comments on Zuckerberg’s note tend towards favorable, but one, somewhat unrelated question keeps popping up: where’s the dislike button?

From Zuckerberg’s letter:

Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

No regional networks, different privacy rules: these aren’t the sorts of changes that vastly impact users’ day-to-day experience, at least until their bosses/parents/teachers/bosses’ parents’ teachers find an unprotected photo of them doing a “keg stand.” But these are significant back-end changes.

Fast Company’s Kit Eaton made this neat graphic out of the 16,000+ comments on Zuckerberg’s note (visit Fast Company to see it fully sized) and made this surprising finding. Time and time again, “dislike” and “button” came up next to each other — as in, people were asking for a dislike button to counterbalance the “like” button under items in the Facebook feed. There’s currently an unofficial Firefox plugin that allows you to dislike stuff, but while it might be a great destresser, its usefulness as a social communication tool is limited, since other people have to have the dislike button installed as well for them to see your dislikes.

A dislike button may just be too negative for Facebook to embrace — and some of the same people clamoring for it might be hesitant if dislike trolls harshed on their every joke/name drop/new hairstyle. But this groundswell of support will have to give Zuckerberg & co. at least some pause.

(image via Semantic Web)

Esquire

The Huffington Post has the report:

Hold Esquire’s December issue in front of a webcam, and an on-screen image of the magazine pops to life, letters flying off the cover. Shift and tilt the magazine, and the animation on the screen moves accordingly.

Robert Downey Jr. emerges out of the on-screen page in 3-D, offering half-improvised shtick on Esquire’s latest high-tech experiment for keeping print magazines relevant amid the digital onslaught.

According to paidContent, the issue cost upwards of six figures. Esquire‘s art director David Curcurito compares it to a caveman seeing fire for the first time, but it rightfully conjures memory of Entertainment Weekly‘s much-hyped, but ultimately disappointing video ad from earlier this year.

The Heart Corporation title — like all of publishing — is struggling, and though it’s high budget and forward-thinking, nothing indicates desperation like digital gimmicks and special issues. HuffPo breaks down Esquire‘s recent ad slump by noting, “The number of ad pages Esquire sold in the first half of the year fell to roughly 319, down 26 percent from 431 the year before, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.”

Clearly, the magazine hopes garnering some buzz for stepping into the future is the beginning of answer. It’s ironic to realize that while the internet contributes to the downfall of the traditional magazine market, they’re incorporating surprises like a 3-D issue in hopes to get the blogs buzzing, which will in turn send people to the newsstands. Or so they hope:

But that still leaves Esquire and the rest of the business in a waiting game to see if advertisers return as the recession eases.

With all the dazzle in the December issue shown off, Granger rests back in his chair, the view of midtown Manhattan behind him out of the 21st-story window of Hearst’s glass and steel tower on 8th Avenue.

“I just hope it starts coming back soon,” he says. “It’s got to, right?”

According to Zarrella, there are ways to maximize your exposure. Though the principles sounds simple, and dare we say, even inconsequential, it is crucial to realize the growing importance of spreading one’s ideas online, especially in the face of an uncertain future for journalism.

When layoffs hit a local paper last month, one newly jobless journalist was indignant as he wondered, “How is the fact that I don’t have a Twitter or Facebook account relevant to what I do?” But as circulations continue to fall and online readership rises, simple tactical adjustments must be made to ensure the proliferation of your news and ideas over others.

Based on Zarrilla’s report, Fast Company has a very detailed overview of the report, complete with charts and graphs so be sure to check that out here. But below is a quick breakdown of the steps you can take to increase the chances of being retweeted:

1. Use links, but be careful which URL shortener you use
2. “Please” and “retweet” are the third and fourth “most retweetable” words — so ask nicely!
3. Don’t actually use Twitter to tell people what you’re doing at the moment
4. Abbreviations and emoticons don’t cut it
5. Punctuation is good, but avoid semicolons
6. Be first with ideas and news
7. Utilize proper nouns
8. Negative emotions and complaints are to be avoided
9. The time and day you tweet on do make a difference

For the full list, as well as helpful charts and graphs, here’s the rundown.

Photo via Fast Company and Dan Zarrella

Almost everything seems to be slagging right now (except Joe Wilson‘s Twitter followers!) and book sales are no exception. With advertising budgets down along with all else, many publishers are looking to a book’s author to be its primary salesman, creatively stretching what funds they’re allotted into some sort of viral marketing campaign, including websites, hashtags, and YouTube videos.

The Viral Loop application for Facebook takes a sci-fi aesthetic and proceeds to plot and value your friends on a futuristic web (check out the screenshot below), in a self-described attempt to illustrate how members of social networks participate with and “create value” for the networks they use.

But what makes Penenberg’s take interesting is that while promoting the book, it is also entirely topical. It would be the equivalent writing a book about eBay and marketing the book through a series of online auctions. It’s not unlike another creative (if circular) book advertising technique used by the creators of This Is Why You’re Fat — a Tumblr of “food porn” that scored a book deal, only to again turn to Tumblr to market the bound version of the site. What a world!

Check out Viral Loop here and if your worth is high enough, please email Mark Zuckerberg requesting, at the very least, a thank you note.

Full Disclosure: Penenberg was a professor of mine at New York University.

Yesterday, MSNBC.com announced its plans to buy EveryBlock, an upstart young website that aggregates newspaper articles, blog posts, Flickr photos, and public records like restaurant inspections and crime reports city block by city block to create so-called “hyper-local coverage” in fifteen cities. Since it was founded two years ago, the site had been running on a grant from the Knight Foundation, which recently expired. EveryBlock’s founder, Adrian Holovaty, told journalism.co.uk that in its current form, the site only does “five percent of what we want to do with it” and that it will “expand profoundly” with MSNBC.com’s backing.

This could spell out yet more bad news for newspapers. Over at Reflections of a Newsosaur, newspaper veteran Alan D. Mutter asks, with some righteous indignation, “How could MSNBC.Com have scooped the newspaper industry by buying Everyblock.Com?”

EveryBlock’s blog and news aggregation are neat, but not quite revolutionary; it’s the wealth of civic information on the site really is unique. I speak from personal experience: discovering EveryBlock’s “Restaurant Inspections” feed a few weeks ago ruined a few of the restaurants in my neighborhood for me, once I discovered that they were rife with mice, spoiled food, and “flying insects.” With MSNBC.com’s deep pockets and newsroom behind it, the site, which in its current incarnation looks decidedly startuppy, could turn into a bigger destination for users and a ready source of in-house news stories.

But forget the editorial side: if the EveryBlock/MSNBC.com alliance really takes off, it could hurt local newspapers where it really hurts — their checkbooks.

According to Fast Company, online ad spending in the U.S. is currently flat, but online local-ad spending is projected to grow 5.4%. EveryBlock isn’t the only way to capture that flow, and it’s still unsteady enough that news outlets still have some time to play hyper-local catchup. But if they continue to stagnate, they’ll suffer the humiliation of being beaten at their own game by a website founded by a software company and a television network.

Related: Rex Sorgatz Interviews EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty [Fimoculous]

Enter the online multimedia magazine Flyp, Gaines’ attempt at synthesizing the dripping cool, the gripping narrative and the masterful design of magazines for the Web. Flyp comes out in “biweekly issues” and is full of content designed to reel you in — a Web version of magazine features’ magnetism.

The latest issue covers everything from the Venice Biennale to food to climate change to the latest effort to digitize books and put them on the Internet — all presented using an array of video, graphics, animation, audio and, of course, handsomely designed text — in a surprisingly easy-to-navigate format.

Yesterday, Gaines’ 62nd birthday, Fast Company ran a piece about his latest project. Gaines said:

We focus on storytelling method and form, but we use all the media that the Internet can carry … I’ve always been interested in storytelling, and that’s why I loved editing Life magazine. When I looked at Flyp for the first time, I thought: this is what Life would be if it existed today.

There are no advertisements on the site for now and a “Free Subscription” tab rests on the top of the site (a sign-up for Flyp‘s email newsletter), but who could deny that what Gaines and his skeleton crew has created is emminently cool and valuable. It can only be a matter of time before magazines begin contracting Flyp to do work for them. Fortune already has.

From Fast Company:

“Flyp is a content model for the future of digital publishing,” Gaines explains, and he and his modest crew are hoping that magazines will turn to their model instead of throwing in the towel. “People are reluctant to fold titles even when they’re gasping for air,” he says, “but they don’t want to make the digital jump either.” He compares the scenario in today’s magazine newsrooms to a rope bridge: too far from the digital side of the ravine, they cower until the bridge collapses. “To me, it’s a no brainer,” he says.

If anything, Flyp is ahead of its time — believe that. Magazines probably aren’t ready to produce the level of multimedia content seen here, although most of them already staff a large portion of the talent required. Even so, magazine readers also need convincing that sitting in front of a screen can some how replace the experience of reading a feature in print. But if it ever can, Flyp is well on the way to discovering how.