Google today announced Knol - an alternative to Wikipedia that promises to pay authors.
Getting Google’s advertising onto more and more pages is key to the company’s growth. Wikipedia poses an obstacle to Google’s growth, though, because it’s ad-free and quickly becoming becoming the most popular source for information on all sorts of topics.
To fight this, [...]
Video conversation / social networking community Seesmic moved out of beta and opened up to the general public last week. The company launched in the fall of 2007, and raised $6 million in its “A” series of funding late this winter.
Today, Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur announced that the company has raised an additional $6 million [...]
Daft Punk is working on a live concert DVD, created from footage shot by the audience at the Bercy Live Show in Paris.
The Daft Punk Alive 2007 DVD looks like it will be the Cloverfield of concert DVDs. It will feature high-quality sound recorded by Daft Punk synced to audience footage.
A preview is available at [...]
Todd Cochrane is the CEO of Raw Voice, a longtime podcaster at Geek News Central and helps connect podcasters with advertisers via his Blubrry podcast network.
He’s also known for having strong opinions, on topics ranging from the PodShow/Mevio name change to the quality of podcasters’ RSS feeds.
I asked Todd about his perspective on user-generated content [...]
Howcast Media announced the launch of its new site today, a venue for watching and sharing “instructional how-to” videos. Howcast, founded by veterans of Google and YouTube, also announced a directors’ program for “emerging filmmakers” to pad out video offerings on the site.
Howcast paints itself as a hybrid of “user-generated content with the quality of [...]
According to research from Accustream, user generated video (UGV) - things like video podcasts, vlogs and YouTube videos - scored 22 billion views in 2007.
That’s a 70% increase over 2006. People’s attention is moving to online video fast, limited mainly by bandwidth and the availability of content.
Other research highlights:
Long tail videos getting substantial traffic - [...]
Internet media is moving to the mainstream, according to research from Deloitte & Touche:
38% of Americans are watching TV shows online.
36% use their cell phones for entertainment.
54% of Americans use social networking sites, chat rooms or message boards to socialize.
45 percent have a profile on a social networking site.
Online ads are second only to TV [...]