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The Parents Television Council is a peculiarly American creature that we Europeans can’t really understand, Europe being home to Italian TV and all.

I’m sure that the Worst TV Clips Of The Week section of their website was intended as a sober warning of all things shocking (at least to easily-offended American eyes), but the net effect is something completely different.

To start with, each programme listed comes with a detailed explanation of why it’s one of the worst – “gratuitious sexual innuendo”, “gratutious teen sex”, “necrophilia” – ok, you get the idea.

Then they’ve handily provided clips of all the “worst” bits, to save you the trouble of downloading a bittorrent and hitting the fast-forward button.

And in case you really didn’t get the message, each clip appears in a pop-up window emblazoned with a warning:

WARNING: Graphic Content!!!
Do NOT push play if you don’t want to see the explicit video!!!

So rather than being the Worst TV Clips Of The Week, the site is actually a handy a guide to all that’s worth watching if you’re in the market for a bit of morally reprehensible low-level titillation.

Seems like the law of unintended consequences in action…

Here’s the clearest (graphical) explanation I’ve yet to find of folksonomies (broad and narrow), power laws and the ‘long tail’ – all in a single post.

Worth a look if you’re interested in any of the above.

The title sort of suggested itself…

(via 37 Signals)

I’ve mentioned GM and their blogs a couple of times in the last week or so – now there’s another first from them. The Director of New Media from GM Communications has been interviewed for a podcast, conducted over Skype. How’s that for innovative?

It’s an interesting insight into how GM have gone about using blogs as part of their communications strategy, but there are a couple of exchanges in particular which are worth seeing / hearing:

Neville: Who are the commenters? customers, employees, dealers? Are you happy and pleased with the spread of commenting?

Michael: I was completely blown away by the level of comments and the thought that goes into those comments. We didn’t know what to expect and in many cases you feel that people have been waiting for years and years to be able to vent their feelings to General Motors, so even the negative ones aren’t sniping, they’re just giving us their sincere feelings and thoughts on what we can do to create better products. We’re appreciating most of them!

There are no shortage of ‘company X sucks’ sites around on the web – and it struck me that providing a comments forum as part of a corporate blog could well be a way of short-circuiting that. If you’ve got a forum on which to vent your spleen – and you can pretty much guarantee that someone in the organisation is going to see what you write – the incentive to create or contribute to an independent ‘anti’ site may be reduced.

Shel: Was there any resistance from your legal staff when the concept was first proposed?

Michael: They had some concerns, but since its Bob Lutz primarily, and at an elevated level in the company, they had confidence that we wouldn’t do anything that would be a problem.

This definitely fits with our experience – you’ve got to have a salesman. If there was a comment that sums up the decision making process in large organisations, this is it. It’ll be interesting to see if GM’s lead is something that other corporates will follow.