If 2006 is/has been the unbundled awakening, 2007 is looking more and more like a desperation year for local broadcasters, a year when new media ventures begun this year need to begin producing fruit. We won’t have the Olympics, although they didn’t perform up to snuff this year, and we won’t have elections, so political ad money will vanish. Wherever I go and with whomever I speak, there is this growing sense that new media MUST be more aggressively pursued…or else.

While this shouldn’t come as a bulletin to anybody who has been following my writing, the urgency I now sense is intense and palpable. Two items of interest today add to my concern.

One, the folks at WeatherBug have launched their own video sharing community, where anybody can upload their own forecasts, reports or storm video. The key word here is “community,” and while the site sucks so far, that’s not the point. It’s another play for the local weather niche by an outside internet company. Weather is THE local franchise for broadcasters, and they ought to be viewing this — and the effort by the Weather Channel to provide local weather applications — as very serious competition.

Two, take a look at BuffaloAtHome.com, a local information portal built by VertaSource, LLC. This company has a deal with CBS/Viacom and has already launched “at home” sites in Chicago, Philly, Baltimore, Detroit, Rochester, and Erie and has plans to launch 30 more — including Denver tomorrow — by year’s end. These are not stamped with the CBS brand, although it’s pretty easy to see the partnership.

Bob Gerow, General Manager of VertaSource told me that it’s been quite a challenge to get the local CBS affiliates to sign off on providing content, because they assume they already have a portal. In the end, though, revenue drives the deals, and while he won’t give me his “secret sauce,” Gerow is quick to point out that their model isn’t banners and page views. Keyword exclusivity and business search optimization are two areas where they make money, and isn’t that just like pure internet players? So while the broadcasters are still out there trying to make a buck off of reach/frequency methodologies, this company is growing revenue the internet way. How terribly smart!

Related to local media, “CBS asked themselves this question,” he said. “Do we want to be one of 25 sites in a market or one of two or three portals?” Who will these other portals be? Googles, Yahoos, YouTubes, or other internet pure plays?

So once again, we have very smart people coming into town and creating applications that could and should be done by the local stations (media companies) themselves. This is serious business, folks, and not to move TODAY to develop new businesses on the web is playing with the lives of your employees. 2007 is just a few months away.

A report from the London School of Economics — and reported in today’s London Telegraph — finds that beautiful people are 36% more likely to produce daughters than sons. It also notes that the world’s females are becoming better-looking than men as a result (Oh THAT’s why, eh?).

So while the children of aggressive, scientific parents tend to be boys, who can outwit their competitors when it comes to finding a mate, the children of beautiful, empathic parents tend to be girls, who can take their pick from the gene pool and then hang on to their man.