NBCUniversal announced that it will fold its Dotcomedy.com website into their main NBC.com site. Dotcomedy was supposed to be a destination for folks seeking out the funniest video and videobloggers on the WWW. Sound familiar? Of course it does– there are about a dozen similar sites, backed by huge corporate dollars, slugging it out with roughly the same mission, look, feel and demo. And there are maybe a dozen or more that are in the fight with private venture cap.

Writing for NewTeeVee.com, Chris Albrecht (Is that the Chris Albrecht? How many can there be?) speculates on who will be the next “online comedy initiative” (OCI) to wink out.

We’ve had our issues with DotComedy’s approach and use of pro vlogs. The site always felt muddled, like an afterthought, and it competed with NBC.com (GE) and the newly-launched Hulu. Oh, and it wasn’t funny.

So which comedy site will crash and burn next?

We predicted in our December ’06 posting on the hot comedy stories of 2006 that the rush of the major conglomerates to put up their OCI’s (and their ham-handed approach) would result in a lot of smoldering cyber-wreckage. Albrecht seems to be of the same mind. (And we were quite thrilled to learn that we attract about 35 per cent of the eyeballs of such sites as Funny Or Die and the now defunct DotComedy!)

And, in MediaWeek, Mike Sheilds

The original concept of DotComedy was to create a Web destination that housed a mix of original fare, classic stand-up performances and clips from such NBC standards as Saturday Night Live and Late Night With Conan O’Brien. Even as of May, the site continued to add new material, signing deals with several popular video bloggers to create viral videos for the site. But in recent months, NBC has begun posting more original material on its own site.

Emphasis ours. One can create a video. One can hope that it goes viral. But one cannot “create a viral video” no more than one can say (with certainty) that one will create a hit television show. The arrogance (and clumsiness) with which the TV folks are approaching this Weird Wide Web is truly stunning. Like many present-day politicians, TV execs seem to not fully understand the new media.

Nor do the Writers Guild. Craig Rubens, also in NewTeeVee.com, asks What Does A WGA Strike Mean For New Media?

It’s an especially interesting question as some online video sites are subsidiaries of big studios, like NBCU’s (GE) DotComedy, Fox’s (NWS) MySpaceTV, and AOL Time Warner’s (TWX) Super Deluxe. In the event of a strike, would writers for these sites risk their future guild membership by continuing to write? On the flip side, will independent video networks like Revision3 and Next New Networks move in to scoop up unemployed talent?

So many questions!

Rubens quotes from the WGA contract proposal:

…our philosophy is that the Internet IS television. Our approach is to minimize the differences between how writing for television is covered under the MBA and how writing for the Internet is covered.

That is not a philosophy or an approach. That is more along the lines of a prayer. Or a fervent wish. The Internet is not television.

If the WGA is approaching the strike and the negotiations in this manner to “capture” or claim the internet, not only will they not capture the internet, but they will lose television. Reality television is mushrooming. It will swamp television. And we have been linking to one story after another that quotes actors, producers and directors as saying that their shows are improvised. The implication is that television doesn’t need writers.

Television needs writers. But television doesn’t seem to think so.

The internet is vast. Mind-bogglingly so. So huge and boundless and incorrigible that has changed and will continue to change how we approach communication, art, commerce and entertainment.

Unions, guilds, call them what you will, may or may not grasp the uniqueness of the internet. But, judging from their language and behavior, they seem to not understand how utterly unlike television the internet is. This is going to get more and more interesting.

If a guild were to phone us up and tell us that, since we behave like a newspaper or a magazine and, since we essentially perform some of the functions of a newspaper or a magazine, we are hereby commanded to join a guild and be subject to their bylaws and regulations, we would laugh heartily and hang up the phone. We would continue to do what we do and no one could stop us. We could choose to join, of course, but no one could force us to– It’s the internet. We own the means of production, the “press” is ours, so to speak. We own the means of distribution. Our circulation, our audience, our readership is determined by how hard we work to increase it via promotion and hustle.

The same is true of folks who create videos or websites or other online entities that happen to capture the fancy of the public. They have a historic and unique connection to their audience– it is direct, it is unfettered, it is blessedly free of bureaucratic nonsense and committees and focus grouping. The lure of the cash and the security and consistency will always be there. But it must be weighed against the loss of control, the sacrificing of the artistic purity or vision.

This isn’t just a new media that TV, film and publishing is up against. It’s nothing short of a revolution.