Today marks the anniversary of the very first television commercial which was aired on July 1, 1941. Television broadcasts were changed forever. According to Wikipedia:

The first television advertisement was broadcast in the United States at 14:29 on July 1, 1941, when the Bulova Watch Company paid $9 to New York City NBC affiliate WNBT (now WNBC) for a 20-second spot aired before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies. It simply displayed a Bulova watch over a map of the U.S., with a voiceover of the company’s slogan “America runs on Bulova time!”

Thank goodness for TiVo.

It looks like one of the next trends in web tools will be applications that bring the web to you rather than making you go out and search for sites that match your needs or interests. One tool that I started playing with recently was StumbleUpon, which links users to sites that have been stumbled by surfers with similar interests. SU reminds me of the Next button on WordPress with some degree of logic involved in determining your next destination.

I ran across another site today that promises to serve up all the latest news on your pop culture interests from music to TV to movies. PopBandit.com creates pop pages for each band or actor or TV show that you might be interested in. The pop page includes photos along with a feed of the latest news, product releases and videos. PopBandit also features a social networking aspect that allows you to see other visitors who are fans along with other popular pages.

I decided to see if PopBandit had a pop page for the Arctic Monkeys, since I was listening to them on the MP3 player today. Even though they might not be a mainstream band, sure enough there was a pop page for them with links to the latest news and videos about the band.

There is a new song playing on the radio with Tom Petty on vocals, but it is not his usual band backing him up. Petty is currently playing with members of his early 70’s band, Mudcrutch, which never made it past there first single, but led to Petty’s eventual success.

PopBandit also has pages for new movies like Get Smart, and the site will even send you an alert when the Weeds Season 3 DVD comes out. Check out PopBandit and find what you’re in to.

I wasn’t home to watch the 18 hole playoff in the U.S. Open golf championship today, so I set up our TIVO (one of the world’s greatest inventions) to record the action. The first two hours were on ESPN. Recorded with no problem. The second portion was televised on NBC, so I set up a recording on channel 4. Part of the broadcast time for this unscheduled event ran during the time that Ellen would normally be on channel 4, and since WBOC has made the ridiculous request to Comcast that syndicated programming on competing networks be blocked locally, I had a full hour of that stupid blue screen in the middle of my U.S. Open playoff. Luckily the playoff ran late, so I did get to see the 18th hole and the extended sudden death, but I missed about five holes where some of the best action took place.

I would just like to let WBOC know that due to their blue screen ignorance, I have always and will continue to watch a show on channel 13 or channel 95 or any other possible competing channel due to this inconvenience. WMDT tried to impose this restriction on local TV viewers in the past, and look where they are now. WBOC might be worried about losing their Ellen viewers, but at the same time, they are also losing viewers like me who refuse to put up with their attempt to restrict our viewing options. I say out with the blue screen and boycott WBOC and FOX21.