Dave Carroll has a publicist. I'm going to say that again. Son of Maxwell Dave Carroll, the Nova Scotia folksinger who needed only $150 and some creative friends to turn a beef with a US airline into a mortifying (to the airline) viral video that drew nearly 12 million pageviews, now has his own publicist. Eliza Levy is a pleasant sounding young "assistant to the publicity team" at Media Connect, a division of Finn Partners of New York. She's handling PR for Carroll's newly published book, United Breaks Guitars: The Power of One Voice in the Age of Social Media, and his...

[Updated below] Our friends at AllNovaScotia (subscription required) appear to have been punk'd by [restaurateur] singing investor Denis Ryan and Halifax folksinger-comedian Tony Quinn in a YouTube spoof of a profane Irish expat turning the air blue-green with outrage over the Emerald Isle's financial travails. The NSFW clip identifies Quinn as a reporter for "the Financial News," which morphs to "the Financial Times" in the AllNS piece. As alert Contrarian reader DR points out, however, the clip does not turn up on any site calling itself  'Financial News,' and the reporter definitely doesn’t say, 'Financial Times.' Also, the 'reporter' looks and sounds remarkably like...

Until its cave-in to Verizon last month, Google was the most prominent corporate advocate of net neutrality—but only for others, not for itself. Recently, Google has applied self-serving filters to its search results in a manner reminiscent of, say, China. Late in July, Google searches began filtering out any results for the website bestofyoutube.com, an aggregator of videos from the Google-owned video site. I can understand why Google might have a problem with bestofyoutube, which, it could be argued, infringes Google's intellectual property by poaching YouTube content. Mind you, it would be a brazen case for Google to make, given that YouTube itself...

Two weeks ago, Contrarian featured a exceptionally funny and creative YouTube video by two dorky techno musicians from Leeds, comprising two-thirds of the Brett Domino Trio. I didn't say so at the time, but these guys strike me as worthy 2010 inheritors of the 1960s folk revival. They make their own music, using an assortment of real and pseudo instruments. They exemplify the indie knack for using the Internet to bypass industry middlemen en route to fans (and, potentially, a living). Here, thanks to James Fallows, is a similar but even more successful YouTube group, Pomplamoose, covering the sublime Chordettes hit, Mr....

Buried in a Herald story about Dave Carroll's testimony before a passenger rights organization-sponsored hearing in Washington, lies this little nugget: Last week, for the first time since his YouTube hit went Stage 6 pandemic, Carroll inadvertently flew United Airlines—a long booked connecting flight to a gig in Chicago. As the flight prepared for takeoff, a United attendant, apparently oblivious to Carroll's musical history with the airline, chastised him for not placing his (Taylor?) guitar in an overhead bin. A nearby passenger watched in amusement. "Oh, he’s going to write a song about you," she said....