HBO wants you to try “Hooking Up” on the web.  It’s announced a new web video show, Hooking UP, that will feature microcelebrities Jessica Rose (lonelygirl15) and video bloggers sxePhil (Philip DeFranco) and KevJumba (Kevin Wu). HBO hopes that, by using faces familiar to Internet viewers, they’ll be hooking up with the Internet video audience.  “I think [...]

Beet.tv‘s Andy Plesser reports that the co-producers of lonelygirl15, Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, have raised $5 million in venture funding for their new company, EQAL. They’re building a digital media studio and working on product placement and licensing deals. “We’re going to teach Hollywood how to do it right,” said Beckett.

EQAL, the faux reality show startup of LonelyGirl15 creators Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, has raised $5 million in capital to help it produce new shows and international versions of its show: Per Becket & Goodfried: We’ve spent the last year and a half working hard at producing lonelygirl15, launching KateModern, and figuring out a [...]

Author William Gibson, whose novels have predicted the social implications of Internet technology and the rise of faux-documentary video sensations like LonelyGirl15, offers his vision of how the Internet has wrapped itself around all media, whether its online or offline: The thing that has affected me most directly during Pattern Recognition, and subsequently, is the [...]

The winners of the Webby Film and Video Awards were announced today, with winnders ranging from Hollywood heavy hitters like NBC‚Äôs The Office Webisodes to Eepybird.com‚Äôs The Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiments. The Webby Award Winner for podcasting was NPR Podcasts, which also was the People’s Voice Winner. Organizers also announced the recipients of [...]

YouTube today confirmed that it was announcing the first-ever YouTube Video Awards, a significant award established to recognize popular YouTube videos. The 2007 YouTube Video Awards commemorate the site’s most popular user-created videos of 2006. The company is only offering winners a trophy, despite the fact that the popular user-generated content the award highlights has [...]

Forbes has posted their take on the Web Celeb 25, a list of who they consider to be the biggest, brightest and most influential people on the Internet. Their pick for the No. 1 Web Celeb? Faux jailbait vlogger Lonelygirl15. Vloggers and video podcasters are well-represented on the list. Other Internet videographers to make the [...]

Lonelygirl15 and the Numa-Numa kid may soon be on your cell phone. YouTube is working with Verizon Wireless to bring a slice of YouTube to mobile phones.YouTube’s phone-based version will require a $15-a-month subscription to a Verizon Wireless service called VCast. VCast users will be able to view a selected number of videos approved by [...]

The United Nations has hooked up with fake jailbait vlogger lonelygirl15 (actress Jessica Lee Rose) and the producers of the discredited YouTube flog for an ad campaign promoting a UN antipoverty event planned for Sunday. Rose, the actress who plays “Bree” in the Lonelygirl15 videos posted on video-sharing Web site YouTube, will reprise the role [...]

Rumors of a Google acquisition of YouTube, which started at the TechCrunch technology blog, have run wild over the last few days. The Wall Street Journal followed the TechCrunch post by reporting that Google is in talks to buy the popular video-sharing site, citing the TechCrunch blog and a person familiar with the matter. Since [...]