After reading a feature in “New York Magazine” showering The CW’s “Gossip Girl” with praise, I felt a need to set the record straight … or at the very least inject my own opinion into the matter.

“Gossip Girl,” while a predictable, typical teen soap drama that plays on the same rich kid stereotypes that “The O.C.” did, is pretty good. Although the artsy film liking, indie music listening, science-fiction loving part of me cringes every time I admit to someone that I am a fan of the show, there’s no denying that I enjoy it. Its delectable teenage drama featuring a dreamy cast set somewhere that is finally not California.

The fact that its good and that it attracts a new generation of text-crazy vapid teenagers is nothing new–yet the “New York Magazine” dubs it as “genius.”

While a good portion of the article is in itself a giant gossip gush about the show’s actors and producers, the real genius in the show and the article is its ability recognize the value of a media experience. The feature describes rabid fans not only watching the mysterious Gossip Girl and her subjects of critique on television, but engaging in their own gossip about the show and its actors.

Predictably, the shows fanbase are largely tech-savvy teens who watch and engage online, rather than on television. Though the show’s ratings are fairly dismal, its online communities are reflecting an army of fans that is usually overlooked. But this time, these fans have triggered the network to campaign tirelessly in support of the show, as well as winning it a 24-episode second season. (Too bad equally the massive fanbase of the critically acclaimed “Veronica Mars” didn’t make quite the same impression–note my bitterness.)

But genius? “Gossip Girl” is hardly the first television show to attempt to bring the world they’ve created onscreen directly to their viewers. In its pilot season, NBC’s “Heroes” created a Web site that allowed viewers to ‘hack’ into the private files of the “The Company,” a sinister organization disguised as a paper company, and collect clues on its objectives. Many of the Web sites used by teen-spy Veronica Mars on UPN’s “Veronica Mars,” were actual Web sites set up by the network. NBC recently created an interactive Web site called “Dunder-Mifflin Infinity,” in which users can virtually work at the fictional paper company featured in “The Office.” You can set up your virtual desk, apply for management positions at your branch, and earn SchruteBucks

Nor is it the first show to draw on a tech-savvy online audience. “The Office” found its comeuppance on iTunes sales, and cancelled programs like “Firefly,” “Dead Like Me,” and “Arrested Development” have found solace in full-length films as a result of dedicated internet fanbases.

What “Gossip Girl” does that those that I have mentioned don’t (and has probably done so unintentionally), is spread the social stereotype they have the opportunity to criticize. While putting high school gossip into a position that has the potential for decent social satire, by engaging its audience in vapid gossip about its cast, “Gossip Girl” does a 180 and forgoes satire in favor of promoting giggling teenage girls to exchange scandalous text messages about their unsuspecting peers.

Shows like “Gossip Girl” and Web sites like Dunder-Mifflin Infinity pose some interesting questions.

How far should the “new media experience” go?

We haven’t officially announced the Nevada Sagebrush Twitter yet, but I thought we’d try it out and see how it goes.  Right now you can see a play-by-play transcript of The Nevada Sagebrush Editor-in-Chief selection meeting by Mike Higdon, Jessica Estepa, Daniel Clark, and myself — including some thoughts that should have probably been kept to ourselves.

As a recent Twitter fanatic, its only appropriate that I discuss the whole Twitter vs. Pownce discussion.  Don’t worry, I can sum it up pretty succinctly. Pownce has much better functionality, but lacks the userbase that makes Twitter so addictive and interesting.  Aaaaand, that’s it.  As Daniel Burka of Silver Orange Pownce’d it, “It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem … ”

On a personal note, I’m extremely happy with things around the Sagebrush lately.  Multimedia is going out on the web on a regular basis and we’re getting some pretty good recognition of late (via the CICM awards and making the finals for the ACP’s Online Pacemaker).

I’d like to raise the bar on the multimedia front for next year.  While the amount of content we’re putting out is pretty good, I think we have a lot of room to improve in the quality department.

I ended up ditching my W3C compliance plans, and instead upgraded the site to the new version of Wordpress MU, which I deemed to be more important. It was a fairly (and long overdue) upgrade. I’d been putting it off because last time I tried to update, something went horribly wrong and it took me a good 2 hours to fix.

The only visible changes I’ve seen in the new version are tags and a few display bug fixes, yet somehow having an updated version just makes everything feel fresh and clean.

I’m still working on organizing the categories properly, so if there are ambiguities with certain posts (namely Sports), don’t worry, I’m working on it.

Expect to see a new layout, possibly in the next month, if all goes according to plan, but don’t count on all going according to plan. In that case, don’t be too expectant. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that at all.

Seeing as not that many people know exactly what I do, in addition to my embarrassingly stark technology posts, I’ve decided to add a little personal Sagebrush touch. I’ll be posting exactly what I’ve been updating, what we’re thinking about for the near future of NevadaSagebrush.com, and perhaps even what we’re thinking about for the far future of NevadaSagebrush.com.

The past few days of updates includes:

• A new and improved user subscription service - We previously used the Subscribe2 plugin for Wordpress. User management’s a little shaky, and, while HTML format notifications are available, they didn’t allow for excerpts and story titles, only a static message every time the site was updated. The new system, provided by the ever-loving Feedburner, lets use send notifications that are both pretty and informational. In actuality, users are subscribing to an RSS feed that then sends out email notifications, but seeing as almost no one really knows how to take advantage of the convenience of RSS feeds, an email subscription is an easier concept to understand.
• Graphic Subscription Images - I got rid of the text links to our subscription services and Facebook groups and replaced them with more noticeable graphics. They’re small and simple, but they’re much more drawing than the previous list with tiny icons. Subscriptions and sharing options are important, they get us straight to people, who may get us to more people and so on and so forth.
• Front page PDF - Our Sports Editor, Scott Oxarart, had talked to me about having our front page available to download as PDF. I liked it, I think it gets across our designer’s (Mike Higdon) design skills to those who might not have access to our print version, and may compel people browsing the site to pick up a print version. Kudos, Scott.
• Author pages - Another request by Scott. When browsing stories and such, if you click on the writer’s name, it will take you to an archive of all the stories they’ve written, along with a list of all the other authors. Writers can put in bios and links to resumes to be displayed on the sidebar (though nobody has yet). Some dilemmas: Stories with multiple authors (double bylines) are made into separate users, therefore they have their own author pages, instead of including the stories on their respective author’s pages; Garrett had two users for some reason, so I had to manually re-edit the author on all his posts. Boo, Garrett (even though it wasn’t your fault at all).
• Reworking thumbnails - I had CSS’d all the photos in excerpts to appear as a maximum of 100px, instead of using the thumbnails Wordpress generated. This means that even though the thumbnails were small, they were still loading full sized photos. Dumb move, no idea why I did it. I’ve been obsessed with cutting down load time, so I went in and edited every post with a photo in the excerpt to use the thumbnail instead. I’d say it cut load time by at least 5-8 seconds. That may sound trivial, but its important.
• Switched media players - I switched from the Anarchy Media Player plugin for Wordpress to another, again, for the sake of load time. I used the Firebug plugin for Firefox to pinpoint the sources of the loading lag. Anarchy was the biggest, sometimes taking as much as 20 extra seconds to load its script.
• Updating categories - There have been some new sections this semester, notably in A&E. It’s really important to me to keep everything organized, which can be really difficult with the volume of stories. I’m still sorting through Sports to get all the stories assigned to the right, specific, sport. I started doing this in November, go figure.
• Switched from a monthly archive system to a weekly archive system - It seemed to make more sense, as we ARE a weekly paper. ‘Nuff said.

We’ve discussed possibly creating a Ning community for the Sagebrush, to promote deeper discussion of stories, which can be limiting in purely comment format. We’d have to organize some sort of moderation, which I’m not sure we have the time or manpower for right now, but we’ll see.

My weekend project is to make the entire site W3C compliant, though I think its a pretty ambitious goal, not in difficulty, but in time management. For those who aren’t familiar with the World Wide Web Consortium, it is an international standards organization for web coding and development. They have certain standards for HTML, XHTML, CSS, and other kinds of code that make up most web pages. While the things required for ‘valid’ code are often trivial, they often make the code cleaner and more compatible with multiple browsers.

For anyone still reading this: what would you like to see on the Sagebrush site? I’ll see what I can do.

PS. Things I most definitely can’t do:

• provide porn,
• provide access to porn,
• ask the Sagebrush to print porn,
• help you install Windows Vista

In the time I should have been I blogging, I consumed no less than three banana cream pies, watched upwards of a dozen movies, indulged in the addictive Beautiful Katamari, and climbed a mountain twice. Such are the obligations of winter break.

While my blogs have been at a standstill, the tech world has been just the opposite. Here’s a recap of some of the major things that went down this past month.

The new year has come and gone, and thus, so have the two biggest [technology oriented] conventions of the year: CES and MacWorld Expo.

The Consumer Electronics Show is an annual trade show held in Las Vegas where major and minor electronics vendors alike show off their shiny new products for the upcoming year, while MacWorld Expo, held in San Francisco, focuses on Apple and made-for-Apple products.
Sadly, I was absent from CES this year, despite being in the area and having to agonize over the dozens of geeks I saw with obvious bags of swag. Luckily for you, the crew over at Engadget has covered the CES floor quite thoroughly. Check out their many reports from CES here (including the oh-so-amusing crapgadget contest, and coverage of Bill Gates’ final CES keynote).

MacWorld also passed without my presence, but if you want to see what went down, the folks at Engadget, once again, prove themselves to be practically a live wire service from these big conventions with their extensive MacWorld coverage. If you’re looking to see the announcements from Mr. Jobs and his infamous keynote, but unwilling to listen to 90 minutes of pretentious banter, check out The Steve Jobs 90 Minute Keynote in 60 seconds.

The most notable Apple announcement is their new ultra-thin, envelope sized notebook, the MacBook Air. With hidden I/O ports, lack of a disk drive, and a [$1000] solid state hard drive option, it looks like Apple is hoping lead the market in a wireless, sans moving parts direction. The new MacBook Air also gives further speculation to rumors of a laptop docking station to be integrated into future iMacs.

… I’m pretty sure I could fit my MacBook Pro into a slightly larger shipping envelope.

MacHeist I, held in December of 2006, was epic. I remember signing up and getting the e-mail with instructions on my first heist. I only had a vague idea of what the prizes were (something about candy, a hooker, or free software), but I was excited none the less. I had been briefed for a heist, and that was enough to make me feel like a badass. Of course, I got frustrated after I couldn’t solve the first one in less than 5 minutes and ended up abandoning my attempt at fulfilling the role of female counterpart to James Bond.

MacHeist II has begun, and once again, there has been no short on hype.

Hosted by the folks at MacHeist.com, the six-week MacHeist event is a mission-based contest in which players are awarded with free Mac shareware and a $2 discount on MacHeist.com’s Mac software bundle for completing each ‘heist’ . While the contents and price of this year’s bundle are yet to be announced, the previous one sold for $49 (not including discounts earned by completing heists). Regardless of participation in the event, the software bundle is available to anyone at its set price.

So if you’re the Ethan Hunt type who’s savvy to free Mac software, check out MacHeist.com, get briefed, and earn your loot.

VideoLan’s main project, VLC media player, received a long-awaited update yesterday, taking a leap from version 0.8.6c to 0.8.6d.

The VideoLan project publishes its content under the GNU license, keeping VLC and all its other products free and open source.

With cross-platform compatibility between Windows, OS X, and Linux operating systems and the ability to play nearly any video or audio format in the universe without having to install any codecs, VLC is the standard in media playback.

The new version of VLC features a security fix for its ActiveX plugin, better compatibility in OS X Leopard, support for recent OGG file formats, and a number of other features and fixes.

If you’re not using VLC to view your media files (at least video), you should be.

Christmas is around the corner and, whether they like to admit it or not, everyone wants to get their hands on the latest gadgets. For those who don’t have a deep enough wallet for the thousand-dollar plasmas, here’s a guide to gadget gifts under $500.

PNY Pen 256 MB Flash Drive - $21

I know that you can’t fit much on 256 MB these days, but … its in a PEN. If this doesn’t make you feel like a James Bond (or in my case, Veronica Mars), I don’t know what will.

Philips DivX DVD Player - $60

DVD players come a dime a dozen these days, but this particular player comes with more features than most DVD players. With HDMI support, 1080i upscaling, DivX support, and USB capabilities, this DVD player is practically a swiss army knife.

120GB Western Digital Passport External Hard Drive - $86

All the hard drive space and portability of an iPod, with none of the music playing capability (or the extra $200). A decent price for a portable external hard drive, great for the gigabyte deprived.

250GB One Touch 4-Lite Maxtor External Hard Drive - $90

Twice the hard drive space of the Passport and half the portability for about the same price. Choose your poison.

Nikon Coolpix L11 - $98

With 3x optical zoom, a sturdy design, and 6 full megapixels, this little camera is great for a casual user just looking for a quality portable and easy-to-use camera–and all for just under a hundred bucks.

Audio-Technica QuietPoint Noise Canceling Headphones - $115

For those of you who like getting completely lost in your iPod, noise-canceling headphones are a must. How else will you save your ears from those damn carolers?

The iPod Family - $79 to $399

By now, iPods need no sales pitch or introduction, as they’ve become practically a staple for holiday shoppers. Here’s a price breakdown (from lowest to highest) of the current generation, previous generation, and refurbished iPod products all available from the official Apple Store, ranging from $79 to $399.

• 1GB iPod Shuffle - $79
• 2GB Refurbished Previous Generation iPod Nano - $79
• 4GB Refurbished Previous Generation iPod Nano - $99
• 4GB Current Generation iPod Nano - $149
• 8GB Refurbished Previous Generation iPod Nano - $149
• 4GB Previous Generation iPod Nano - $149
• 30GB Refurbished Previous Generation iPod - $159
• 8GB Current Generation iPod Nano - $199
• 8GB Previous Generation iPod Nano Product RED™ Special Edition - $199
• 30GB Previous Generation iPod U2 Special Edition - $199
• 80GB Previous Generation iPod - $219
• 80GB Current Generation iPod Classic - $249
• 8GB iPod Touch - $299
• 160GB Current Generation iPod Classic - $349
• 16GB iPod Touch - $399

Canon SD1000 - $176.00

If you’re willing to spend a bit more cash for sleeker point-and-shoot than the sub-$100 Nikon L11, go for the Canon SD1000. A 3x optical zoom, a plethora of shooting modes, and ISO sensitivity up to 1600, this tiny camera packs a lot in its 4.5 ounces.

Zune 8GB/4GB - 185$ and 139$

I’ll give the Zune its credit. The new design looks much sleeker than the previous one, AND they got the sense to dump most of the DRM crippling its wireless capabilities … as well as the feces colored Zune. If I didn’t already have a bunch of iPod accesories, I might go for the upcoming new generation 80GB Zune 2.

Toshiba HD DVD Player - $232

When looking at high-definition player options, its clear that HD DVD is in the lead as far as affordibility goes. When I find a sub-$300 stand Blu-ray player, I’ll add it to the recommended list. This particular Toshiba player supports HD DVD, standard DVD, and CD playback, and up conversion for standard definition DVDs.

Amazon Kindle - $399

For the bookworm who wants a library in their pocket. You can e-mail or transfer via USB your own eBooks and Word documents, download books from the Kindle Store, browse an up-to-date Wikipedia, get digitally delivered newspapers, read blogs, and more, all from your Kindle on-the-go.

Canon TX1 - $435

When was the last time you could fit a 7.1 megapixel camera AND an HD camcorder in your pocket? Uh … now.

Canon Rebel XT with Lens Kit - $465

While its been overshadowed by the new Rebel XTi, the XT is still a solid entry-level SLR, and, unlike the XTi, can be found on Amazon with a lens kit for under $500. (Oh yeah, and its 8 megapixels for those who are megapixel-centric).

Nikon D40 with Lens Kit - $480

Also a previous generation SLR (predecessor to the Nikon D40x), the 6 megapixel Nikon D40 comes with a lens kit for under $500.

Support the WGA by picking up swanky-looking pro-writer swag.

Don’t know about swag? Educate yourself.

The free media player for the Mac, Miro, has just gone version 1.0, just after publicly announcing its self-proclaimed superiority to its competitor, Joost.

Miro, whose player is based on the open-source VideoLan project, not only plays nearly every video format (and like VLC, without having to install any codecs), but allows you to download and subscribe to video podcasts and online television programs (including several channels of HD content, all DRM-free), and search for and view content on YouTube, Revver, BlipTV, etc.

In addition to the plethora of content available through the Miro Guide, Miro also comes bundled with a BitTorrent client.

Both Miro and Joost, despite their DRM and open-source differences, are working towards the same thing, a thing the WGA is currently striking to get a cut of: bringing the television to the internet on a large scale.

So, is Miro the future? Personally, I think most people would rather sit on a couch in front of a television than watch all their content slouching over a computer, but that’s where products like SlingBox and the AppleTV come in.

Also, if you’re going to be the future, Miro, where are our Windows and Linux builds?