That Eric Alper! - February 9, 2012

Today in 1945, Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie records Groovin’ High with tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon. According to Bebop: The Music and Its Players author Thomas Owens (and probably most of the hosts on Jazz FM), "the first famous bebop recording: http://bit.ly/xmldNq

Today in 1932, Duke Ellington’s band is recorded in stereo by RCA Victor. Engineers used two complete recording set-ups to make simultaneous master discs of the same performances. Why? No one really knows, but the microphone placements resulted in a stereo recording, with one track on each master cutter. All of that took place more than 20 years before technology allowed the commercial reality of stereo.

Today in 1964 - The Beatles made their first live U.S. television appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show." The band perform five songs, including "I Want To Hold Your Hand.," before an estimated television audience of 73 million people (over one-third of the entire U.S. population) – at time time, the largest television audience ever: http://bit.ly/xwUzDO

Walk Off The Earth, have just signed a deal with Columbia Records. The group created a major media and label buzz with their cover of Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know”, which was uploaded on January 5th and has garnered already close to 50 million YouTube views: http://bit.ly/yzK1Ur

Some would have it that TV is no more than a glorified idiot box sent to sanitize and dupe the masses. Those people are either academic cultural theorists or have obviously watched nothing more than Loose Women. Or both. Back in the real world, however, we know different. Television is right up there with music, films and books when it comes to being cool. How could you watch Monty Python, The Simpsons or The Wire and think differently? Exactly. So, herewith are the 50 coolest TV programmes of all time. The shows that changed the way we think, the way we dress and how we watch TV itself: http://bit.ly/xKKwYt

Google started off the new year by announcing that they will be changing their privacy policies so that they can create more detailed profiles of their users. Starting March 1st, 2012, Google will combine information from user’s Gmail, Google Search history, YouTube, and other services. Prior to this change, Google profiled their users, but restricted the profile data use to the service from which the data was collected. If you are concerned about the amount of information that Google knows about you for whatever reason, here are some techniques you can use to guard your privacy online: http://bit.ly/Amxop1

Building Great Relationships With Your Social Media Fan Base. This piece from Erik Flannigan is the fifth in a series of 10 posts about the future of the media industry contained in a report titled: Rebooting Media: The Digital Publishing Revolution for a Fully Social Web: http://bit.ly/zvxpzV