Upon clicking into the article “Best Places to Spot Stars in Las Vegas” on USA TODAY ‘s new co-branded vertical, we noticed something a little different. Next to each menu-page picture of the suggested A-list ambush locales, there is a button that reads: ‘ADD TO MY EXPERIENCE.’

Very clever. As readers make their way through a site that feels a lot like those of urbandaddy.com and other similar city-centric email blast services, they can build their own travel destination repertoire. This is a good example of how a newspaper can extend itself into the Web, well beyond the paywall-or-no-paywall realm.

And any Vegas Buzz section toplined by articles about topless pools and additional Caesar’s dates for Jerry Seinfeld immediately has both our outdoor and indoor attention. Put it this way: the new Sin City compendium is much more colorful than the blue-dot logo USA TODAY recently plunged into. (It’s prominently displayed on the new Vegas site.)

Read more

How do you stay limber ahead of stand-up performances in Redding (tomorrow) and Santa Barbara (Friday)? If you’re Jerry Seinfeld, that’s easy; you valet park the vintage wheels at Budd Friedman‘s Improv and walk on stage for an unannounced 20 minutes.

Jay Mohr was on the marquee for the early show at The Improv last night and tweeted out, with the hashtag #studygreatness, news of the Great Observational One’s drop-by. That in turn inspired this tweet from a certain Chelsea Lately regular:

Read more

This may be a new record. Sunday afternoon, the Twitter account @SeinfeldToday was playfully launched to showcase the strands of nothingness that might preoccupy Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer if their Thursday night NBC show was still on the air.

This morning, members of the Jerry-loving media were rushing to get the scoop and this afternoon (ET time), Atlantic Wire blogger Esther Zuckerman was chronicling the whole thing. A mere 20 hours in:

The man behind the account, BuzzFeed’s sports editor Jack Moore, started tweeting out scenarios with his friend, comedian Josh Gondelman, and then decided that the joke merited its own account. Moore is a Seinfeld fanatic himself: “I’m pretty much constantly watching episodes in the background while I’m doing anything,” he told us in an email. “I have a thumb drive with the whole series on it that I keep in my bag pretty much all the time.”

Read more

Chalk up another TOLDJA! for Nikki Finke, from a beat she still pretty much owns (who, what, when, where and how each year’s Oscar broadcast is taking shape).

In this case, on the red carpet heels of an August 2 LA Times report that Jimmy Fallon and Lorne Michaels were in talks to handle 2013 broadcast chores, Finke quickly harpooned that notion, explaining that these efforts had begun and ended with exiting AMPAS president Tom Sherak. This past Wednesday, Fallon confirmed his non-participation during a Today Show interview from London and last night, Kim Masters added a Hollywood Reporter item that seemingly reconfirms Michaels will not be involved with any iteration of Sunday Night Live.

In the wake of all this, the question remains not so much who the Oscars should approach for the producing and hosting gigs, but rather who might actually say yes. Word is the list of those who regularly turn down AMPAS is long and illustrious. In her updated Sherak item, Finke for example noted that perfect A-list candidate Tom Hanks continues to pass.

Read more

LA Weekly writer Ali Trachta recently attended the 100th episode taping in Encino of underground talk program The John Kerwin Show. While the on-air elements are late night rote, the production schedule and pay stubs are not:

New episodes tape just once every five weeks and air on the tiny Jewish Life TV network (JLTV). The show’s staff is unpaid.

Thirty-nine-year-old host Kerwin has helping him, sometimes remotely, some pretty well-established buddies like writer Marvin Silbermintz and associate producer Don Sweeney, both previously with The Tonight Show. His guests for the 100th episode above were Jonathan Winters (at home in Santa Barbara) and Brandi Glanville.

Read more

Seven years after profiling Phyllis Diller in Goodnight, We Love You, Gregg Barson is set to unveil his documentary look at another comedy legend. It was in fact while making that previous project that Barson first met Jerry Lewis.

Probably the biggest difference when it came to making Method to the Madness of Jerry Lewis, which premieres tomorrow night on Encore, was how involved his latest subject was in the filmmalking aspects of the assignment. Barson tells THR reporter Lesley Goldberg that the king of comedy was extremely “hands on:”

“There were points where I’d be shooting him and he’d say to get a shot from a different location,” Barson recalls. “”I thought, ‘Jerry Lewis is helping me direct and giving me pointers.” During the process, Lewis screened cuts of Method and offered notes on the craft, cutting, timing and pacing.

Read more

Jeff Bercovici columnist at Daily Finance lays out a case for nixing the pajama dig:

Jokes about bloggers in pajamas were already a cliche by 2005, when a group of blogs banded together to form Pajamas Media. They were even more hackneyed by 2008, when Sarah Palin swatted at “some blogger probably sittin’ there in their parents’ basement in their pajamas.” Now it’s 2010. Paul Krugman blogs. So does Hendrik Hertzberg. So does James Fallows. So does…well, everyone.

Read more

The super adorable Ellen DeGeneres has started a record label and signed the super adorable YouTube phenom Greyson Chance.

What other comics are stepping out of their comfort zone? Will Jerry Seinfeld start his own cereal company? Carrot Top an organic market chain? Meh.

Our person on the inside gave us a sneak peak at the new Microsoft campaign. As we’ve been reporting there are more celebrities beyond Jerry Seinfeld that are going to appear in them. Plus real people…

Today the New York Times reports:

Mr. Gates makes a cameo appearance in the new Microsoft spots, along with celebrities like the actress Eva Longoria, the author Deepak Chopra and the singer Pharrell Williams. (Mr. Seinfeld is gone, at least for now.)

But the stars are everyday PC users, from scientists and fashion designers to shark hunters and teachers, all of whom affirm, in fast-paced, upbeat vignettes, their pride in using the computers that run on Microsoft operating systems and software.

Ok, in all fairness, none of the names and scenarios we reported are the same as the ones mentioned in the NYT although the general idea is the same.

But when it comes to this stuff you just can’t blink.

See, we live right next to the studio. We’re are the closest in the United States geographically to where they film them. So we therefore have television commercial experience. We know what’s at stake.

We just got word from our person on the inside that the new Microsoft commercial featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates was most likely directed by Bryan Buckly. The same commercial director that did the American Express Ellen Degeneres spots. The one with the animals that won an Emmy and the other one with Beyonce and the Village People.

For people with TiVo, we sure watch a lot of commercials…