Well, this unusual video by Demand Media is certainly a unique effort to get freelancers to consider doing work for its Demand Studios.

In it, staffers at the Santa Monica, Calif.-based network of social networking sites and apps maker went full Van Halen–with a celebrity assist by a leather-clad Brooke Burke, who co-runs the Modern Mom site on Demand.

Said Demand in its explanation for its MTV moment:

“Brooke Burke and Demand Studios want you to ‘Join The Band’ today! At Demand Studios we enable talented freelancers to create valuable content, reach an audience of millions and earn money. We have produced more than 500,000 articles and videos and are one of the largest producers of Internet-ready video on the Web today.

Meet the team behind one of the biggest content studios in the world, Demand Studios. Not only do we produce tens of thousands of high-quality articles and videos every month, we know how to rock ‘n’ roll.”

Indeed, as you will see in a very funny and innovative video below:

At least, according to this excerpt from a 10-questions interview former Wonkette blogger Ana Marie Cox, who now contributes to Time magazine’s Swampland blog, did with Stop Smiling magazine recently.

Cox (pictured here) was on a blogger panel at our third D: All Things Digital conference in 2005, where she talked about the changes in the media industry due to the rise of blogs.

At the time, there was a lot of controversy about the rise of bloggers.

But now, in questions No. 7 and 8 here, Cox discusses the huge differences in the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns, in terms of blogs, and how the image of bloggers has shifted dramatically with mainstream media.

From Cox’s lips to traditional journalists’ ears.

Here are the excerpts:

Q7: You’ve been around long enough to see the differences between the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns. Do you have any strong feelings about how this year differs from the Kerry-Bush election, in terms of the role that blogs play?

AMC: In 2004, MTV hired me to cover the Democratic convention, and I swear I did two or three interviews just on the fact that I was a blogger covering the convention. I doubt that would happen today. In 2004, people would be highly suspicious of me, because at any moment I could break out my computer and blog about them. I went to YearlyKos in 2006, as one of my first assignments for Time, and I was hanging out with the real reporters, and there was this running joke: As soon as someone said something off-color or impolitic, you’d say, “Hey, I’m gonna blog that.” Like a taunt. In 2008, I was at a Republican debate during the primaries, and I looked around the filing center and everyone was blogging. Everyone has that force propelling them to publish whatever they can. Anything that happens to them is now fodder for a Washington Post blog.

Q8: Do you think more traditional reporters still frown on blogging as if it were not a serious form of journalism?

AMC: The whole “are bloggers journalists?” question, which was always stupid, is finally fading, especially thanks to people like Josh Marshall [of Talking Points Memo], who have shown you don’t have to have a big organization behind you to be a journalist. The defining characteristic of a journalist is what you produce. I think it’s changed the question from “are bloggers journalists?” to “what is journalism?” And that is a perfectly acceptable debate to have. There’s never going to be an answer, but it starts us at a better place than simply talking about delivery systems.”

Ana

They say that only the grass gets trampled when elephants fight. And that grass might actually turn out to be Yahoo in the epic battle between Microsoft and Google.

While the New York Times spilled a lot of ink earlier this week in a very long piece about that massive mano-a-mano, the true fallout in the online ad space, at least, could be more painful for the No. 2 player–Yahoo–which sits smack in between No. 1 Google and No. 3 Microsoft.

Yesterday, that was clearly in evidence in a kind of round-tripping ad deal Microsoft struck with Viacom, a five-year strategic partnership that was valued at $500 million by the two parties.

It’s pretty simple, really. Microsoft dips into its massive cash coffers and buys ads on Viacom’s many online and offline media outlets and it also licenses Viacom content–from places like MTV and Comedy Central–for its online MSN and Xbox 360 services.

Viacom scores!

For that, Viacom has agreed to use Microsoft’s digital ad-serving technology and also will let it sell some of its display ads on its–who knew?–300 Web sites. (Of course, Microsoft handed Viacom yet another one of those economically unsound guaranteed ad deals that both it and Google are so fond of doing these days.)

Viacom scores again!

Naturally, Google was not in the competitive mix, given Viacom is suing its YouTube unit for $1 billion over copyright-infringement issues.

And Viacom also got to smack Google again, since it dumped DoubleClick–the online ad network that Google is in the midst of acquiring–and replace it with Microsoft’s Atlas service (which the software giant picked up in its recent purchase of aQuantive).

Yep. Viacom. Scores. Yet Again. (Except the Microsoft-Viacom deal probably has now provided Google with some air cover about complaints–leveled by Microsoft to government regulators–that it had a dangerous monopoly over online advertising with its DoubleClick purchase, which means it is more likely to be approved now.)

While this is all very clash-of-the-titans, with most of the benefit accruing to Viacom, one has to wonder where this leaves Yahoo–considered the longest-standing and doubtlessly most experienced seller of display ads–in this war.

Viacom did pick Yahoo to manage its search-ad business earlier this year, and this deal with Microsoft will not impact that.

But Yahoo’s game in the future is not in the monetization of search, which Google dominates, but in turbocharging its graphical and video ad business, an area in which it has the best shot at differentiating itself. It should have been in this fight, but it was not mentioned once.

And watching Viacom work the Microsoft-Google Cold War, it feels a lot like what Facebook did recently when it expertly played the bickering pair against each other over its financing and the right to sells its international ads.

Given Yahoo keeps losing in this kind of warmongering (to be fair, it can’t even contemplate competing in what will surely turn insane), you almost want Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to get while the getting is good and auction off his company’s crown jewel–its search monetization business–to the highest bidder.

If that was the case, if Yang was bold enough to do it and willing to swallow a little pride, I would think we haven’t nearly begun to see just how high both Google and Microsoft can bid.

While Masnick’s company consults with companies on a range of tech-related issues, which it discloses, it manages to use its site to do hard-hitting and pungent analysis of many top issues–often taking aim at the practices of its own clients. In fact, Techdirt is often more honest and insightful than some sites that have no such affiliations.

Here is his tough take on the recent MTV abandonment of its Urge music service and deal with RealNetworks, for example, which cuts right to the chase:

MTV has had an awful lot of trouble over the years trying to become the MTV of the Internet. It seems that the company rested on its TV laurels for way too long, and then totally misunderstood what the online world wanted, originally insisting that its archive of video would make it a player in the space. More recently, it tried to get into the music download business, but offered a me-too package that wasn’t even remotely compelling. Almost no one used it. So, it should come as no surprise that MTV is now killing off its Urge music offering, that was launched together with Microsoft, and instead focusing on a new joint venture with RealNetworks’ Rhapsody music service. Of course, once again, it’s going to face the same questions as before about what differentiates this from anything else out there, and once again, it seems likely that MTV won’t have a very good answer.”

And, in this video, Masnick talks about the recalcitrance of old-media companies to come around fast enough, even after all this time, to the realities of the digital age: