When the nominations for the 65th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards are announced at 5:35 a.m. on Thursday July 18, a big change will be the number of categories honoring interactive TV. From Variety awards editor Jon Weisman‘s Monday item:

Chief among the changes is the establishment of a competitive award for outstanding interactive program, saluting either a standalone experience or one that serves as a companion to a TV program. In the Emmy context, “interactive” denotes anything that encourages proactive engagement from the audience — not to be confused with video content delivered via broadband, such as Netflix’s House of Cards.

This category can have zero or multiple awards as determined by the Academy’s 12-year-old interactive media peer group, which currently counts 627 members. The other new interactive TV awards categories cover multi-platform storytelling and visual experience/visual design, to go along with the existing brackets of original interactive program (not tied to an existing TV show) and social TV experience.

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Fun interview from the SXSW Samsung bloggers’ lounge in Austin by What’s Trending host Shira Lazar. Thanks to her opening compliments and willingness to drink from the same plastic cup, guest Marc Maron wasn’t sure if this was an interview or a date.

Around the eight-and-a-half-minute mark, Maron tells Lazar about his upcoming IFC show Maron, an offshoot of his podcast success debuting in May. “If you haven’t had your fill of me, there’s more me coming in a different format,” the comedian joked. “It’s all I have.”

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Remember that crazy “Electrified” stunt David Blaine put himself through last fall above New York City’s Pier 54? Attending CES for the first time to publicize a related documentary made in partnership with Intel and VICE, Blaine sat down with What’s Trending‘s Shira Lazar to itemize some of the biggest challenges of what he has said is his final endurance stunt.

It turns out there was a special connection between Lazar and Blaine with regards to the stunt. It was her idea to send down to the location the aptly named musician Reggie Watts.

“We were in LA doing a Google Plus hangout with him while he was doing the stunt in New York,” Lazar tells FishbowlLA. “We knew Intel wanted to get musicians to join in and we knew we needed to get someone who was fun, Web centric and had their own performance art style. We reached out to Reggie and he was available, so he showed up on site in New York City that day. It ended up being a perfect alignment.”

As Blaine tells Lazar in the clip above: “Reggie was so incredible. As soon as he started playing, it was like all of the pain went away and the rest of the stunt got easier.”

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Talk about an awards show that really should have a mastery of the whole Internet stream business. Last night, things got off to a rocky start at CES for LA’s International Academy of Web Television (IAWTV) when the website stream for their 2013 awards show could not be properly viewed. Luckily, the organization had a back-up:

Another thing that’s kind of strange is that at this hour, there is still no list of the winners posted on the IAWTV website; still partying in Vegas, perhaps. Anyway, via Twitter, the organization let followers know who and what was landing ultimate kudos in 33 categories as the evening wore on.

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When the owner is YouTube, the focus viral Web content and the reception area the size of a small airplane hangar, press coverage of a new Playa Vista 41,000-square-feet hybrid production facility is not a problem.

Reports about this week’s official opening of YouTube Space Los Angeles include John Jurgensen for the Wall Street Journal, Darren Franich in Entertainment Weekly and Shira Lazar of What’s Trending. She in fact did a live broadcast from the location during Wednesday night’s cocktail soiree (excerpt above). From Jurgensen’s report:

YouTube will assess proposals submitted online, along with each applicant’s track record of acquiring subscribers and working with other YouTube creators. If approved, they’ll have their run of the facility for a period of three months. On site, a 20-person staff will keep people on track with a minimum of hand-holding. About 25 channels will be represented in the first term, starting in January.

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A media blitz these days touches many more bases than the major networks and leading daily newspapers. Witness our former Governor, who wrapped up his first week of Total Recall autobiography chest-thumping with a 2:30 p.m PT Google hangout chat hosted by What’s Trending maven Shira Lazar.

The global audience made possible by this technology was plainly obvious. Commenters awaiting the event’s start were chiming in from Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Macedonia and points beyond.

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Yesterday, 83-year-old Downey resident Stanley Hoffman (a.k.a. Kwayzar) was a topic of conversation on Current TV’s The Young Turks. All thanks to his unlikely Reddit-relaunched rap song “I Can Still Do It.”

Today, he dropped by the Hollywood studios of Shira Lazar’s daily Web show to talk about what is just the beginning of a huge viral surge:

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Hollywood Reporter website editor Chris Krewson goes the extra mile this morning to populate his Internet station, reporting about today’s revamping of Web talk show What’s Trending from a weekly one-hour Wednesday operation to a Monday-to-Friday noon PT 20-minute endeavor.

Host Shira Lazar and business partner Damon Berger have been busy since launching in May 2011. As far as the big question – how does the show make money? – here is Krewson’s answer:

What’s Trending garners about 150,000 views per week on all its platforms, including YouTube. Revenue is drawn from advertising – What’s Trending has worked with AT&T, Samsung, Virgin America and Vizio – as well as syndication.

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Here’s a wonderful bit of video from Shira Lazar’s weekly Web talk show What’s Trending.

She had writer-director Bryan Singer on as a guest and cued up some of the parodies of his feature film work populating YouTube. Then, she threw up his live reactions to what he was seeing, picture-in-picture:

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A crazy end to a crazy story.

Yesterday evening, not long after doing a brief Skype interview with LA-based What’s Trending host Shira Lazar about his recent suspension without pay from the Colorado Springs Gazette, reporter Barrett Tryon tweeted that his job had been reinstated. And… that he was no longer interested in resuming employment with the paper, after being suspended for linking on Facebook to an LA Times article about a change in his outlet’s ownership.

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