Culturite

Cable network AMC has angered online fans of its critically acclaimed drama “Mad Men” by asking social networking site Twitter to shut down feeds inspired by the show.

What could have been cleverly co-opted and adapted into a subtle viral marketing campaign has now been yanked from the interwaves (most likely by reactionary lawyers, our ad dept suspects), deeply upsetting committed yet attention-deficit Twitterers. This is reminiscent of NBC’s rabid squashing of any content on YouTube that relates to its shows. I can understand entire episodes being pulled, but little clips here and there seem to increase buzz and to potentially earn the shows (specifically SNL) some new fans. While on a smaller scale than NBC’s watchdoggery, folks at AMC cited the Digital Millennium Copyright Act when they silenced the tweets—essentially calling the one or two sentences-long Twitter messages (Twitter messages!!! I hardly know what those are!) unauthorized fanfiction, and therefore verboten. As Alejandra Ramos points out, it’s pretty ironic that the show about advertising fails to recognize a good opportunity to… advertise.

After spending the last year or so working with guitarist John 5, the former Marilyn Manson band member who now plays with Rob Zombie, Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd is close to finishing its next studio album.

Disappointed Neil Diamond fans will get a refund after attending a concert at Ohio State University in which the 67-year-old singer’s voice sounded raspy.

Some fans left the Monday concert early and others said Diamond completed the concert without mentioning anything to the audience about his voice.

A statement from Diamond, the singer of such hits as “Sweet Caroline” and “Song Sung Blue,” on Tuesday says a doctor has diagnosed acute laryngitis.

Diamond spokeswoman Eve Samuels says the singer is offering a refund to those who place a request before Sept. 5. “I haven’t let you down before and I won’t let you down now,” the singer said in an apology on his Web site.

Another message says Wednesday’s concert in Green Bay, Wis., will be rescheduled for Sept. 12, and Friday’s concert in St. Louis, Mo., will instead take place Sept. 10.

Nicollette Sheridan and Michael Bolton have ended their engagement.

The split was amicable, said Nicole Perna, a publicist for the pair.

The 44-year-old actress and 55-year-old singer have been engaged since March 2006. They first started dating in 1992 and spent five years together, Perna said, then rekindled their romance in 2005.

Sheridan plays Edie Britt on ABC’s “Desperate Housewives.” Bolton won Grammy awards in 1989 and 1991 for male pop vocal performance.

Songwriter Kara DioGuardi, the newest American Idol judge—and, if passive-aggressive morning radio comments are anything to go on, reputed bane of Paula Abdul’s existence—got a taste of the media blitz to come in New York Tuesday morning, when she joined up with her critiquing colleagues for the first time.

And while the 37-year-old new recruit made the most of her first photo op in advance of the show’s Big Apple tryouts, her fellow colleagues got in their first sound bites of season eight.

“It’s like, you know, having dinner with three people for seven years, and getting quite bored of each other,” the ever-diplomatic Simon Cowell told reporters. “So it’s having a fourth person, new opinion, I think it’s gonna be interesting…And she’s cute.”

“I know Kara, and she speaks her mind—so she will be speaking her mind,” Abdul added.

“That’s a nice way of saying she’s bitchy,” Cowell said, before doing his best to dispel the circulating rumors of judge-on-judge tension.

“We had a picnic last night in the bedroom,” he said. “I wore pajamas, the girls wore negligees and we kind of broke the ice.”