Perhaps the most interesting entry of all is Popurls.com, a page that aggregates all the top tagging sites, including Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Flickr. Popurls seems to be taking a Web 1.0 concept toward 2.0 sites, essentially sitting on top of the hottest information feeds and potentially taking away their traffic because you can read summaries of their items by mousing over the headlines without ever clicking through. Think Google News, but with items pushed automatically to you instead of pulled from search engines, all on a single page that is easy to scan.
YouTube introduced Tuesday a new advertising strategy, allowing advertisers to create their own branded channels on the popular online video site, as well as letting consumers participate by commenting and rating the commericals.
Jack Olmsted, 4-H Network News, talks to Rhododendron Festival 2006 Queen Elizabeth Hodgson about her six week trip to Germany at the 69th Jefferson County Fair.
In a move underscoring Silicon Valley's importance in the future of online entertainment, Viacom's MTV Networks on Wednesday announced a $200 million deal to acquire Internet video and gaming company Atom Entertainment in San Francisco.
With the addition of Atom Entertainment, the youth-oriented cable station picks up game sites such as Shockwave.com and AtomFilms.com, a pioneer in user-generated video. AtomFilms seeks to promote and develop new creators of online media, working almost like a talent agency to popularize sites and personalities such as JibJab, Aardman, Jason Reitman and Joe Cartoon. In June, AtomFilms had 1.6 million visitors, according to Nielsen Media Research.
The acquisition is apt to continue to fuel speculation about YouTube, the San Mateo Internet video start-up site that has become a social force in recent months with more than 100 million video views a day. For now, its founders say they are not shopping the company around.
YouTube's unpredictable amateur video may give a corporate suitor pause, at least for now, Bajarin said.
``It is a bit more of a user-created wild, wild west,'' he said. ``It's brand new. That does not mean they won't get snapped up. It's just harder for a traditional media company to see where it fits in with its overall properties.''
A parody of the classic Gilbert & Sullivan song 'Modern Major General', adapted to be about LonelyGirl15
BETWEEN VIDEOS and video games, there's a lot of hand-wringing over how kids today have no need of imagination, no personal petri dish for creativity.
Take lonelygirl15. Oh, wait, you don't know lonelygirl? Well, while you've been sketching Fido in the parlor, lonelygirl — whoever or whatever she is — has turned YouTube into her own private playground and has achieved a level of popularity that B-list actors would crave.
See, lonelygirl seems to be like a lot of younger people who are using YouTube to post their own personal video blogs, and she's been adding her contributions to the Web site for several weeks now. She's supposedly 16, has a friend named Daniel who helps her post her video diaries, is homeschooled and apparently has some strict parents.
She has 13 entries in all. One of the best is a refutation of the Uncertainty Principle, that old quantum physics saw that says no one can truly observe the universe in its present state because it constantly changes. She does so by staring at her friend, Daniel, who's camped out and inert in her bedroom. He never moves, she stares him down and observes him the whole time, and whammo, Uncertainty Principle disproved. Did I mention that, at age 16, I was entering radio contests and winning six-packs of Pepsi and had no idea about any Uncertainty Principle?
See, back in my generation's day, we would have watched something like lonelygirl on TV, absorbed it like sponges, and tuned in the next week. But this generation? They can look at a lonelygirl, and to continue a tortured analogy, wring the sponge out. Maybe it comes from all those years of being plunked in front of DVDs, computers and video cameras themselves: They're comfortable enough to use the same tools and turn around and create something of their own.
So even if lonelygirl's creativity isn't legit, her followers' are. They've figured out ways to not just sit and watch, but to sit and create. Lonelygirl might not exist, but rest assured, creativity does.
Perhaps the most interesting entry of all is Popurls.com, a page that aggregates all the top tagging sites, including Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Flickr. Popurls seems to be taking a Web 1.0 concept toward 2.0 sites, essentially sitting on top of the hottest information feeds and potentially taking away their traffic because you can read summaries of their items by mousing over the headlines without ever clicking through. Think Google News, but with items pushed automatically to you instead of pulled from search engines, all on a single page that is easy to scan.
