Social media news and TV – Current.com Blog – Your guide to Current

Got plans for tonight? Of course, you do–you’re tuning into The Thursday Night Block Party on Current, right?

Tonight, Current is kicking off a brand-new season of SuperNews! at 11/10c. This season will include the return of fan favorites including technology obsessed office workers Craig and Darren, the beleaguered Obama administration, the self-obsessed hipsters and continued scathing satires of today’s political, pop-culture, and infamous figures.

But that’s not all. The Thursday Night Block Party kicks off at 10/9c with a brand-new infoMania. This week, Sarah Haskins takes a look at home security in Target Women, so tune in to see her and the rest of the infoMania crew’s take on the week in news and entertainment. Missed an episode? Check out previous infoMania episodes on Current.com.

Then att 10:30/9:30c, tune in for a new episode of The Rotten Tomatoes Show. This week Brett and Ellen take on “Precious,” “The Men Who Stare At Goats” and “A Christmas Carol.” Watch previous episodes or leave a webcam with your review at The Rotten Tomatoes Show on Current.com.

Finally, at 11/10c,  the new season of SuperNews! premieres.  Check out a sneak peek, or get a SuperNews primer on the SuperNews page.

Steph

Monday is here, and while I typically bemoan the end of a weekend, this particular Monday arrives bearing gifts in the form of Current praise from none other than Lo-fi legend Lou Barlow.

Lou is the guest editor for Magnet Magazine this week, and to kick things off they sat down for a Q&A with Barlow. On Sunday they posted a snippet from said Q&A titled, “Lou Barlow’s Good Things: Current T.V.”

Gasp!

This is Lou Barlow, one of the founding members of Dinosaur Jr., we’re talking about here. He’s responsible for Sebadoh, and The Folk Implosion! Amazing. In the post, Lou shares his experience discovering Current along with some very insightful feedback on our programming — ranging from infoMania, Vanguard, and SuperNews! Getting into Current wasn’t exactly a cakewalk for Lou, and I think his recount of the journey to eventually place us on his list of good things is a telling document.

Here’s some of what he had to say:

So, now I’m hooked. I don’t mind the time bar, and the music content is way indie: Animal Collective during the hourly what’s-hot-on-the-web stats, a best-of Take-Away Show (the French web series that captures all our favorite precocious indie stars emoting in public places), a Death Cab For Cutie documentary, etc.

Based on Lou’s interest in our music programming, I wonder if he’s had a chance to check out some of the sneak peeks of Embedded — our six part music special premiering Wednesday October 14th 11/10c. The show covers a wide range of artists, including Mos Def, Silversun Pickups, Ben Harper, Common, Thievery Corporation, and The Decemberists to name a few. To name a few more, you’ll also catch glimpses of K’Naan, Arcade Fire, Lykke Li, Bloc Party, Amanda Palmer, Delta Spirit, Passion Pit, and Bon Iver to boot.

Current Music Presents: Embedded — premiering October 14 11/10c on Current TV

This is just a taste, so please take the time to read his full write-up over on Magnet. If you’re so inclined, do yourself a favor an check out the re-united (and touring) original members of Dinosaur Jr. If you happen to catch them on tour, say hello to Lou for us and deliver this message on our behalf:

Lou, Current is honored to be listed as one of “Lou Barlow’s Good Things.” Thanks for the awesome feedback.

Do you have a “How I discovered Current?” story to share? Post us a comment on this post, over here, or just submit a story to Current (Requires login via Current or Facebook Connect) and tag it “How I Discovered Current.”

It’s been a while since we’ve made a significant update to our TV Schedule on Current.com. Our previous version of the schedule focused on what is airing right now. We collected feedback and are proud to present the latest version of the Current TV Schedule.

The brand new Current TV Schedule page on Current.com

Some highlights:

1. Our featured timeslots let you know what is coming up next from our franchise shows. For example: Tonight at 10/9c Vanguard correspondent Adam Yamaguchi walks you through a sneak peek of the upcoming fall season. It’s all NEW!
2. The list view let’s you see what is on Current, one day at a time. When you land on the new schedule, the grid will automagically jump to what is on Current TV right now. In addition, you can scroll back to see what you missed, or jump ahead through the next six days to find out what is coming up.

There are still a few more things we plan to roll out in our next release (scheduled for Wednesday). Here’s the list:

1. Grid view: This will let you look at an entire week’s worth of Current TV scheduling in one go. For those of you who like to plan out your week, this will be the way to go.
2. List view time zones: We squashed a bug from the previous release that left out time zones on the list view. Those will make their triumphant return.
3. Homepage schedule: Our new schedule page is nice, but sometimes you’ll want to know what’s coming up on Current TV from the comfort of the Current.com homepage. With this new feature, that problem is solved.

What do you think of the new schedule? Do you have feedback or recommendations? Leave us a comment or make some suggestions on our Get Satisfaction page for the new TV Schedule.

Here’s another Current TV host top favorite stories countdown. This time around we pulled together host Dominque Purdy’s top 8 Current TV videos, and gathered them here, for your enjoyment.

Dominque’s countdown is going to air today, at 6pm E / 3pm P on Current TV, so be sure to tune and join Dominique as he walks you through each story. For now, get a sneak peek at what he’ll be covering in the special. These are some pretty inspiring stories! Feel free to add links to some of your own favorite moments in Current TV in the comments.

Here’s Dominique’s top 8. Enjoy!

1. Bug Wrangler

2. Texting Your Way To Love from SuperNews

3. Chocolate City DJ Garth Trinidad

4. The Beat of Urban Art

5. Wax Poetics Magazine

6. Album Armor

7. Black Violin

8. Beatboxing The Flute

It’s time for us to take another look at one of our host’s top video stories from Current TV. In case you’ve missed it, our hosts have been digging deep into the Current vaults to assemble their top favorites lists, and they’ve been counting their lists down on Current TV. So far, we’ve revisited infoMania White Hot Top 5 master Sergio Cilli’s top 16, and The Rotten Tomatoes Show co-host Ellen Fox’s top 14 on the blog, so give those a look if you missed them.

This time around, we’re pulling faves from Douglas Caballero — many of you recall Douglas from his Current Fix days, but lately he’s been chopping it up in the evenings on a show called Current Exposed. IF you have done so already, check out some of the cool stuff they’ve been up to (below the list), follow Douglas and Current Exposed on Twitter, and most importantly, tune into Current Exposed weeknights at 8 / 7 C.

The best part, you can browse Douglas’ list on the blog, or you could tune into Current TV today at 6pm E / 3pm P and hear all about his list straight from Douglas himself. If you can’t make it today, don’t fret! Douglas’ countdown will re-air on Tuesday 9/22 at 1pm E / 4pm P, so plan a sick day or learn how to program that DVR.

Douglas Caballero brings you The Flaming Lips Santa Claus from Chicago!

So, without further ado, here’s Douglas’ faves for your perusal. Tell us what you think!

1. Flaming Lips Santa Claus
2. Cewebrity Profile: Drunk History — on infoMania
3. Santogold Backstage
4. Evite Master — from SuperNews!
5. Moby Goes Dog Walking
6. Battle Against Bird Flu from Vanguard
7. The Funniest Ways to Die from infoMania
8. Shepard Fairey for Obama
9. Death Train from Vanguard
10. The Blow
11. Lil’ Wayne Misunderstood
    
12. The Cougar — Target Women on infoMania
13. Indiana Jones — Viral Video Film School on infoMania
14. The Kills’ Midnight Boom
15. Behind The Shins

Catch up with Current Exposed:

• Travel Tips from a Navy Seal, with Vanguard’s Kaj Larsen
• Dating Tips on Facebook with Max and Jason from Still Up
• The Dirty Business of Hollywood with Brett Erlich and Ellen Fox from The Rotten Tomatoes Show
• Interview with singer-songwriter Mat Kearney

And we’re back with another favorite stories countdown post! Last Friday we checked out Sergio’s list, but this time around we spent some quality time with Ellen Fox, co-host for The Rotten Tomatoes Show and all around funny person extraordinaire.

Watch Ellen Fox on The Rotten Tomatoes Show on Thursdays at 10:30/9:30c on Current TV

Here’s what Ellen had to say about her top 14:

Ya know who gets their own two-hour TV show about stuff they like? THIS guy! Yeah, tonight Current is re-airing my countdown of favorite videos – and if you like my taste in movies, you may like these segments, too! (Also, if you don’t like my taste in movies, you may finally find something we both like.)

If there’s a common thread running through the line-up, it’s probably “Beautiful Women Doing Interesting Things.” Catching catfish with their bare hands, rioting over chocolate, driving convoys through Iraq.

Enjoy!

So, grab your headphones, tell your boss you have a 2-hour conference call, and check out Ellen Fox’s top 14 Current TV videos for a taste of what is airing on Current TV today at 3pm E / 6pm P. If you can’t make it, we’ll be re-airing it again on Monday 9/28 at 3pm E / 6pm P.

Boobs 101 from Viral Video Film School

Here’s Ellen Fox’s top 14 list:

1. Boobs 101 – Viral Video Film School on infoMania
2. Target Women: Chocolate – Target Women on infoMania
3. I Hate Trendy Bars
4. Nose Jobs in Iran
5. Bonnaroo Silent Disco
6. Ode to Chest Hair: Let it Grow from The Rotten Tomatoes Show
7. ELLIS G. – The Life of a Shadow
8. Jell-O Artiste
9. Shanghai Tattoo
10. Dead Beautiful
11. Lauren Bush
12. Night Convoy: Iraq
13. Passive Aggressive Email Boxing from SuperNews!
14. Girls Gone Grabbling

And, if you just can’t get enough of Ellen, check out this interview she did with Douglas Caballero for Current Exposed titled, The Dirty Business of Hollywood.

Current TV on Hulu.com

Your eyes aren’t deceiving you, Current TV shows are now available on Hulu!

Vanguard’s Laura Ling investigates the post-economic fallout of Las Vegas, the once booming Sin City in Lost Vegas

We’ve been making Current content available in many different ways (including dedicated channels on YouTube and iTunes), and we’re happy to announce that fans of Hulu can now cozy up to the latest episodes of SuperNews!, The Rotten Tomatoes Show, Vanguard, and infoMania, presented in that awesome Hulu viewing experience. If you’ve never checked out some of our shows or watched TV content on Hulu before, head on over, give it a spin, and then let us know what you think.

SuperNews on Hulu.com

The Rotten Tomatoes Show on Hulu.com

Vanguard on Hulu.com

infoMania on Hulu.com

Last night, the team over at Boxee announced some new enhancements to their app at a developer event they threw in San Francisco. If you’re unfamiliar with Boxee, here’s a quick rundown. Boxee let’s you manage and consume your video library from you’re PC or TV using a remote.

They pipe in content from all over the web, so you can kick back and watch your favorite shows all in one place.

The big announcement last night included support for Windows and an exclusive partnership with MLB.tv. In addition, the fine folks at Boxee have also teamed up with us to feed some of our Current shows into the app. This means you now have another viewing option for catching the latest episodes of The Rotten Tomatoes Show, infoMania, Vanguard, and SuperNews!

So, now you can officially add Boxee to the long list of places you can find Current for your viewing pleasure. If you’re on Twitter, show Boxee some love with a tweet about Current on Boxee.

Seriously, what are you waiting for? Go check it out!

Hello Current.com’ers!

We occasionally receive questions asking us how stories get picked for featuring on the homepage, or how one story made it to the homepage over another. So in an effort to clear things up, I thought I’d run through some of the sections of Current.com and layout some details regarding our featuring processes.

First, it’s important to note that staff is a part of the Current.com community — always has, and always will be. Contributions from our community help shape the content we program and feature, and there are sections of Current.com dedicated to showing the top community stories as submitted, voted on, and commented on by our community. But in addition to these community curated sections, there are also areas that are reserved specifically for staff to use to program featured content — both community submitted and editorialized by our online producer team.

Current Stories

This section is on the homepage, and it is refreshed occasionally with topical content submitted by the Current community.

We focus primarily on community contributions, and we try to make sure that the stories featured here are timely, contextually relevant, and that they are not duplicate posts. People who submit trending stories before anyone else on Current tend to wind up featured, and this has nothing to do with preferential treatment. When you notice that your post was not featured, check to see if it is too similar to a previously submitted story by doing a search on keywords and sorting by “newest.”

Homepage Channels

Each channel on the homepage has two sections:

Featured: this is noted by the “star” image and the stories in this section are picked by the online producer for the channel. They can be either community posts or a staff submission (usually a callout for webcams, comments, or a blog post pointing people to a new feature, tool, or other notable piece of original content).  Each one of our online channels on the homepage has a corresponding online producer who acts as a host and moderator for that channel. They pick the story featured in this spot, and it corresponds with the first story featured on the channel homepage. The story picked for this spot can be a relatively new submission, or a popular trend.

Community picks: this is noted by the “#1” and “#2” symbols, and the stories placed in these sections are the top two most popular stories as determined by the Current.com community on that channel. These are determined strictly based on popularity alone — a result of votes, views, comments, and shares on the submitted story.

Channel Homepages

The channel homepages have a featured section (we call it the playlist) and a popular ranking section.

Stories for the featured section are picked by the online producer, and the first story is the same story that is featured on the homepage in the channel featured section (see above).

The popular ranking section is all determined by community activity, and the top 2 stories are the ones “picked” to feature in the “community picks” section of the homepage channel module. Our online producers also write blog posts that get featured and highlighted on our site in various places.

To clear up one fundamental misunderstanding: we have some staff members whose sole job is to produce video content for airing on Current TV. These pieces range from shows like infoMania and SuperNews! to Current News recaps like the following video recap of the Neda story from Iran [WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES].

The way we represent these pieces of content on Current.com is via their staff profile, which we clearly mark with a green staff badge. This isn’t showing preference, it’s simply calling out when and where we contribute to the site.

I hope this helps clarify things. Please understand, we realize that some of this can be confusing (and in turn frustrating), so we have been discussing some design changes that could help call these distinguishing sections out better in the future. In addition, I’ll be working on a series of “meet the online producer” and “meet the online community team” posts to help get you guys better acquainted with some of the names and faces you see around the site.

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please post a comment below or feel free to submit them to our Current.com feedback threads on Get Satisfaction.

the team over at SuperNews! are returning to the airwaves this friday with a brand new episode. so, to whet the appetite of the Internets, they passed us a clip from the show in advance.

‘using pets to get laid’ from SuperNews! on Current

yup, continuing on our legacy of animated Star Wars references, a certain wookie shows off his sexual prowess in ‘using pets to get laid.’ you can catch the full episode this friday at 10pm p/e.

– mario

related:

• SuperNews! realizes that cell phones complicate relationships. find out how love can get even more complex when you text your ex.
• Meghan McCain feels the wrath of ‘Jabba the Rush’ in SuperNews!’ politically-charged homage to Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.
• Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster are re-imagined as bachelors on the prowl in the SuperNews! take on a social media sitcom. watch out for Mr. Furley!