Yesterday was the inaugural edition of Star P.M., a downloadable version of The Toronto Star which is available daily after 3:30 p.m (4:15 for the final edition with market updates). You can register to receive the ‘paper’ via email as soon as it becomes available and it comes as PDF which prints out nicely on letter sized paper.

In an age where the end of print media as we know it is predicted, The Star continues to do an admirable job of staying ahead. Its website is user friendly and updated frequently, for a good start. It also boasts RSS feeds and the option of tagging articles to your Del.icio.us favourites. On top of that, many of its reporters are also bloggers and podcasters. The refreshing thing about their blogs is that they are not regurgitation of the article pubished by that author. The blog posts either expand on their written thoughts or talk about something entirely different within their area of expertise.

I think Star P.M. will only build on their momentum. I remember when the daily paper was delivered in the afternoon and it has many benefits. Reading the paper in the morning really only catches you up on the day before. You really aren’t on top of the world news unless you check online regularly or keep CP24 or CFRB-AM (or any other news oriented station) running in the background. Star P.M. allows you to catch up everything that happened while you were at work. All in a nice little package and at very little cost to Torstar.

It’s brilliant and I wouldn’t be surprised to see other dailies around the world follow suit.

Text100 has opened a PR agency in Second Life.

I don’t really know what to say about that. When I read about Second Life I get an image of a big game of Sims gone awry, and I find it lends credence to the stereotype (or is it?) of online geeky folks living their lives via a mouse and desktop in the basement. Measuring out their lives with pixels instead of coffee spoons, I suppose.

Apparently the legion of “virtual” people is growing - BusinessWeek reported that 170,000 such devotees were online back in May, so I imagine there must be gazillions now. (Update: There are 595,000 “residents” now.) All spending real money (real money!) to buy fake money to buy fake things, like fake land. Or fake PR services, I guess. (As an aside, that’s one of the sadder things about SL - it’s a brand new world, no physical limits and endless resources. And what do people do? Shop.)

I can see why marketers have glommed on - obviously you have a large group of uh… motivated people with disposable income all in one place (kind of). It lets the digital marketing department have some fun, ‘cuz there’s a ceiling on the fun to be had buying real estate for web ads and subverting MySpace. And, well, it will garner you some ink in meatspace - see MTV, BBC Radio 1, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers Records, American Apparel and Major League Baseball.

I can see SL as having the potential to add new dimensions to distance learning, at least in parts of the world where broadband is becoming a utility. (For the rest of the world - I guess you could call them the un-online - they are probably poor people in a poor place so we can’t sell them anything anyway. Pity. Oh well…)

I can even, maybe, see why regular people might choose to spend their valuable, limited time pretending to be animated. We live in a taxing era - lots of people have limited, stressful or difficult lives (maybe even all of the above) so the fantasy that they can recreate themselves and live a totally different, unlimited life (albeit one which requires them to sit in a chair and stare at a monitor, natch) could have appeal. Some people, god love ‘em, are simply cashing in. In the real world, I mean - trading those Linden Dollars for currency. (Now that I can understand.) Linden Lab, of course, has created something that defies any easy label - let’s just call it clever - and I imagine they will monetize it in even more elaborate and creative ways. Understood.

But what will Text100 do there? They’ve explained they will make their best trainers available there for internal usage and offer up their “space” for client press conferences. Press conferences? I bear in mind that Text100 is a tech PR outfit so their target journos are likely to be much more tech savvy than your average daily beat reporter, but I’m interested to hear how (and if) that works. Anyone know?

Was reading this story in the Globe by Grant Roberts about the myriad deals TV nets are striking with websites, particularly NBC and YouTube. Check here for a recap, but basically NBC did an about-face and went from attempting to take YouTube to court for posting NBC clips without consent, to striking a partnership which sees it formally supply content to YouTube. (Broadcasting & Cable is reporting today on a promotional deal between ABC’s Good Morning America and YouTube, so I guess there’s no exclusivity joy for NBC.)

I love the comments on Grant’s story, all three of them. My favorite is from some guy (and I know it’s a guy, I just know it) who calls himself Fine By Me. According to him, “TV is dead.”

TV is dead. Newspapers are dead. The :30 spot is dead. Mainstream media is dead. Oh, come now. Time to get some sentient doctors to examine those death certificates because traditional media, though in flux, makes big profits, reaches billions. I’ve been staying at a friend’s place recently and TV is the star attraction over there - Big Brother, Rock Star: Supernova, anything with Gordon Ramsay in it. Yep, they’re watching it on PVR but they are watching it, rabidly. Three urban women, prime demographic, lots of spending power - there’s a big TV and a fat stack of glossy magazines. On the subway this morning, I was jammed in nose-to-armpit with thousands of commuters wrestling with a newspaper (though usually a free one).

Not dead, see? Business models changing? Yep. New competition? Yep. Still making money? Yep.