The NBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement is up after the 2010-2011 season.  The players, who make unlimited amounts of money and have guaranteed contracts that last forever, are negotiating to expand or at least keep those rights with the owners who have been given billions of dollars of tax subsidies from municipalities across the country.

Meanwhile, no matter how you cook the numbers, anecdotal evidence from sportswriters across the league says attendance is down, corporate sponsorship is down, and ad spending on television is down.  So somehow the NBA will have to make an argument to its TV networks that the league is more popular than ever (in order to get a huge TV contract) but also show the Players’ Union that it needs to change its contract structure (so they don’t bankrupt the league.)

Both sides will have to get public opinion on their side.  So, they’ll try to fool folks into thinking they care about the community.  But remember things like this when you see a “Made for TV” charity event in the future (from ESPN.com):

The sides met Friday, with negotiators for the players fortified by the presence of All-Stars such as LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and Kevin Garnett, who came to the meeting instead of attending the community service events they were scheduled for.

Well, I’m glad they have their priorities in line.

Let’s pretend for a moment that the Olympics were about pure athleticism, the thrill of amateur athletes pursuing their dreams, and the overwhelming sentiment that we CAN all come together as one world, free of politics or finance.

Well, if that were indeed the case, instead of the reality that the IOC is a profit making money machine intent on protecting it’s global monopoly; well then the image below would actually be an embedded video player, and you’d be able to watch Olympics video from any one of the millions of blogs that would be syndicating it.  Instead, this is merely a screen shot and when you click on it you’ll go to their site, so you can see a Panasonic ad banner along with your videos.  <sigh>

It doesn’t get much more meta than this. As part of a UW student’s project, in which he interviewed folks about Social Media, I got a side question about Social Media for personal brands.

So here I am, on the web site I keep to somewhat maintain my own personal brand, repurposing content from this site,which Derek uses to maintain his own personal brand, talking about why it’s important to have a personal brand.

(And a side note, apparently my personal brand is to have a huge head, tilt it at a 45 degree angle, and make funny faces at the end of videos.)

Thanks to Forbes.com for putting this handy Super Bowl Ad Viewer together.

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To celebrate Who Dat Nation’s Independence Day, let’s have the great Satchmo tell us the story…

This is interesting.  When did the Seattle Times sell their “background” as part of an ad?  I wasn’t aware they were doing that.

(Disclosure: I have worked on marketing projects for Microsoft.)

Online readers of the Miami Herald have a new option – donate to the paper.  Are newspapers the new PBS?