ABC World News Webcast interviews Eran Egozy and Alex Rigopulous of Harmonix about the phenomenon that is Guitar Hero (and the company’s new game Rock Band):

The simplest way to explain how you play the game is that there’s music being played in the background and notes are coming out and when they hit the what we call now bar, you strike that note and it sounds like the real music. [...]

We get a lot of people saying "well, you’re just teaching people how to play fake instruments" I think that it’s better that they’re playing fake instruments than say, um, shooting people.

Link [ABC World News Webcast] – Thanks Natalie!

Rick Klein, author of ABC New’s political unit The Note, takes a quick look at the Top 5 Best Campaign Trail Moments so far. His picks are:

- Giuliani taking a call from his wife during a campaign speech to the NRA
- The dynamic campaign trail duo. the Huckster and the Chuckster
- The Great Comeback: when Obama was asked a tough question, Hillary Clinton chimed in and Obama didn’t miss a beat … pwnd!
- John McCain sings the Beach Bay Song "Bomb Iran"
- Hillary Clinton’s showing that she’s human afterall (either that or she’s programmed to tear up)

Link [ABC World News Webcast, video clip shot before Super Tuesday, but I didn't get a chance to post it till now.] – Thanks Natalie!

ABC’s David Kerley went on a little "free sledding" adventure in Vermont, and lives to tell us about it!

Link [ABC World News Webcast] – Thanks Natalie!

Lo and behold, Tistadt’s wife – pissed at being called at home and at the implication that her hardworking husband wasn’t doing his job – called back to leave her own voicemail!

It was a bad move, though – thanks to the long arm of the web, the student got the upper hand: he posted her voicemail on the web!

Here’s the story: Link [ABC World News Webcast] | article at WaPo

So what does this tell viewers at this point about what they are going to see on television from now until possibly next Fall. Are we going to see any of those really good programs that are well written or are we going to be in the wasteland of reality TV?

Dade Hayes: Well, it’s going to be reality heavy. They’ve predicted that since last fall when the strike was really taking shape. Shows like American Gladiator and American Idol are already happening now. The question is how much will they be scraping for reality concept as the Spring wears on. We don’t really know that.

I mean it’s a case where every viewer can cast their vote. If you’re not interested in reality replacing your favorite scripted show, you can simply tune out or go to cable or go to the internet. It’s basically that simple. The question now is whether the ratings on reality will be high enough to keep the engines running at the network.

Link [ABC World News Webcast, Flash video]

Let me ask you this:

Nine individual polls (even Hillary’s own poll) showed that Obama had a significant lead – some even had him with double-digits leads. So how did the pollsters got it so wrong?

There will be a serious, critical look at the final pre-election polls in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire; that is essential. It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong. We need to know why.

But we need to know it through careful, empirically based analysis. There will be a lot of claims about what happened – about respondents who reputedly lied, about alleged difficulties polling in biracial contests. That may be so. It also may be a smokescreen – a convenient foil for pollsters who’d rather fault their respondents than own up to other possibilities – such as their own failings in sampling and likely voter modeling.

Gary Langer, the director of polling at ABC News, explains: Link [ABC World News Webcast, Flash video] | The Numbers, Gary’s blog – Thanks Zach!

Bill Blakemore: Betsy, is 18,000 far off the mark of what is considered healthy?

Betsy Stark: Oh, it’s way off the mark of what’s considered healthy. You need about 100,000 jobs to just absorb all the new people who come into the job market every month looking for work. So this really is a bleak number. And the other thing that happened was there was a 3/10th of a percent jump in the unemployment rate to 5%. So put those two things together and it’s really flashing recession.

Housing slump, credit crunch, pricey oil – I’d be surprised if we’re not going into a recession …

Link | ABC World News Webcast homepage

Do you think we’re heading into a recession? and why?

The ABC World News Webcast has the report from Neatorama on the Top 5 Viral Videos of 2007. These are the videos that you helped select. The final 5 includes Leave Britney Alone! at the request of ABC. The video was never posted at Neatorama, but it was one of the year’s biggest.

Link to the Top Viral Videos feature.

Link to the entire webcast (you can scroll down and select the video segment alone).

Here are his picks: the best (and the worst) campaign ads in the categories of the best use of celebrity, best presidential hair, worst actor, and a really weird one: best use of a rock and a pond!

Link – Thanks Zach and Natalie!

Link [ABC World News Webcast, Flash video] | Blip Festival website – Thanks Zach!

We are going to do an end-of-the-year countdown of the Top 5 Viral Videos in conjunction with the ABC World News Webcast.

Now we have the task of ranking the videos, and we need your help. Below you’ll find a poll of the 18 most popular videos on Neatorama this year. The titles are links to the videos to refresh your memory. For the next few days, you can vote for up to five of your favorites. Thanks in advance!

The road is carved into thousands of grooves. When the car tire hits the grooves, the vibrations turn into a sound source. It makes different tunes depending on the size of the grooves … The rhythm is controlled by the lengh of the groove. For example to get one second of the "do" note, the groove is stretched 28 meters.

Link [ABC World News Webcast by Joo Hee Choo]

Amazon is trying to do for books what Apple’s iPod did for music: Amazon Kindle is not the world’s first the electronic book reader, but perhaps it has the right combination of features to make it work (Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, said that the goal of Kindle is to revolutionize "the last bastion of analog" with a device so good you forget that you’re even using a gadget).

Here’s a video clip from ABC World News:

Similar to the iPod, the Kindle is designed so even the most technologically challenged user can create a literary library that is accessible in seconds. … The device costs $400 and holds up to 200 books. Each book costs $10 and so far there are 90,000 titles to choose from Amazon.com’s electronic bookstore.

Link [ABC World News Webcast] | PC Magazine Article by Michael J. Miller | Caveat from Boing Boing: Amazon Kindle: the Web Makes Amazon go bad crazy

Bill Blakemore of ABC World News Webcast has the concise (and neat) history of the most famous video game character of all history: Mario!

In 1982, our unpreposessing little rescuer Jumpman was given a cheerful name rarely seen in the annals of heroes: Mario – in a sequel game called donkey Kong Jr. In 1983, little Mario was given a shot at his own game, Mario Bros. …

Link [ABC World News Webcast] – Thanks Zach and Natalie!

See also: 10 Mario Fun Facts!

Jonathan Karl did something that very few civilians ever get to do: ride along on the U2 spy plane:

The U2 goes to such a high altitute you you basically have to wear a spacesuit. I’m doing what they call the ‘pre-breathe’ which is basically getting in the suit and breathing pure oxygen before you go up to the flight. The reason why you do that is they want to get all the nitrogen out of your blood because if nitrogen is in your blood when you reach the altitude of 65-70,000 feet, it will actually try to get out and your blood will literally boil.

ABC World News Webcast has the story: Link [Flash video]

Want to be a Jedi? Don’t just flail your lightsaber like the (in)famous Star Wars kid … As Yoda would’ve said: "To Star Wars Jedi Academy you must go". As Taryn Fireside, a student at the academy, said:

My favorite thing about New York Jedi is not nerds trying to best each other. It’s about nerds trying to better each other. And make life better through the dorkiness that make them great!

Link [Flash video] | NY Jedi’s website - Thanks Zach!

This is crazy: an eight-year-old boy called 911 on his drunk-driving mom, while in the speeding car with his little sister! Thankfully, no one was hurt and police was able catch her based on the road information the boy gave the dispatcher and call tracking technology.

Here’s the recorded 911 call: Link

ABC World News Webcast has the this guy named "Chicken Charlie", a culinary genius who deep fries everything!

Chicken Charlie has sold close to 100,000 fried Twinkies, 200,000 fried Orio cookies in the last five or six years, 10,000 Krispy Kreme chicken sandwiches in the last two years. New for this year selection is Fried S’mores and the deep fried peanut butter, banana, and honey sandwich. He sells about 300 to 400 of those every day!

And boy do Americans looove fried food: Charlie’s little trailer sells about 3,000 to 5,000 orders every day and grosses about $1.5 million a year.

Link

Here’s an ABC World News Webcast interview with Pete and Brian, the guys behind Funny or Die, a comedy website that features short comedy videos. The site started with a bang with the incredibly popular short comedy sketch The Landlord by Will Ferrell (viewed nearly 45 million times since it was put on!).

Funny or Die just came out with a new clip: FCU with Bill Murray, about a CSI-like Fact Checker Unit. Their mission: to find out if Bill Murray likes to drink warm milk before going to bed.

Link [ABC World News Webcast] | FCU with Bill Murray: Hit play or go to Link [Funnyordie] | Pete And Brian’s Website – Thanks Natalie!

The King of Kong and a Fistfull of Quarters is a documentary about a middle school science teacher Steve Wieby battling a hot sauce mogul Billy Mitchell for the world record on the classic arcade game Donkey Kong.

Donkey Kong without question is the hardest game. The average Donkey Kong game doesn’t last a minute. It’s absolute brutality….

Link [ABC World News Webcast] – Thanks Natalie!

Pouring beer (all the samples you want!), captaining a jet boat, operating a roller coaster … sick of spending your summer trapped behind a desk? Here’s a list of the best summer jobs by ABC World News Webcast: Link

From ABC World News webcast, here’s a story of San Francisco Chronicle reporter David Rubien who uses marijuana for medicinal purposes (no, he’s not deathly ill – he has repetitive strain injury): Link

Poor Merry Miller … She’s a one-time ABC News Now interviewer who became an Internet sensation when her first (and only!) interview with Holly Hunter turned out to be a disaster!

Haven’t seen it? Here’s the YouTube clip:

Now, Merry Miller tells us what it feels like to be notorious on the Net: Link [ABC World News webcast]

I’m excited to start a new collaboration with ABC World News Webcast. from time to time, we’ll feature a fun-filled, bite-sized video clip from the website. Like this one:

Ever F#@$*! wonder why we curse in the first place? Do curse words actually harm people? Is cursing more common than ever before? How old are the F- and S-words anyhow?

In this ABC World News webcast, Timothy Jay, the author of Cursing in America, lets you in on the answers: The Psychology of Swearing