We're watching the media landscape change in real time and one of the most interesting ways that's happening right now is through new online video producers breaking the monopoly of the old TV giants. Who's taking the lead in the new video landscape? Though old media is making a strong play - it's not winning so far. New, independent online video producers are the top publishers today.
A company called TubeMogul is keeping track of the viewership on 15 different websites from YouTube to Crackle. Today they've launched the TubeMogul Top 40, a monthly leaderboard for viewership across a wide variety of video services around the web. Below is a look at who those leaders are.
The Google Maps team just announced the addition of a new feature to Google Maps: the ability to contribute to and edit maps through Google Map Maker. Users can now edit and moderate various map features, including roads, lakes, power lines, and bike trails among others.
While Google already allows users to create and share new map layers through 'My Maps', this is the first time it is actively looking for help in creating maps (almost) from the ground up.
We weren't kidding when we said Wikis are now serious business. For music, WikiAudio is providing a new way to educated music fanatics. While music fans visit sites like Last.fm, Imeem, and Myspace for their music fix, musicians and producers can head over to one of the largest and most comprehensive audio wiki's ever.
On Sunday, a YouTube blog post introduced us to Olivia, YouTube's recently hired News Manager. She's going to be in charge of a new Channel on YouTube called Citizen News. This channel will highlight the best of the citizen journalism that's taking place on YouTube, but its ultimate goal is to become a go-to news destination on the web.
When I was a kid, I made dumb videos that a total of 5 people actually watched -- me and the 4 other kids I made them with. But today, a kid with a funny video can be seen by millions of people, whether he is swinging a golf ball retriever or lip syncing to a German pop song. There is an Internet shooting star falling to earth every day. Someone creates a video that goes viral and generates millions of views, and for some this flashes and fades, but others are parlaying these flashes into commercial success.
"Ten Thousand Cents" is a crowdsourced art project that led 10,000 artists, each paid one penny for their contribution, to recreate a US $100 bill one tiny section at a time. The brainchild of San Francisco artists Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima, "Ten Thousand Cents" utilized Amazon's Mechanical Turk service and a bit of custom Flash software to lead 10,000 web workers in a coordinated, crowdsourced art project. The result is a rather impressive rendering of a US one hundred dollar bill drawn by an army of contributors.
We've been writing a lot about the trend of media companies paying more attention to citizen journalism and amateur reporting tools. Perhaps no mainstream media outlet has done more to push citizen journalism into the spotlight over the past year than CNN. In August 2006, they launched the user generated content-focused i-Report feature on their web site, which has since attracted over 100,000 submissions from users, and last summer they held the first of two CNN-YouTube presidential debates, in which questions were submitted via YouTube. CNN is about to take their participation in amateur news reporting a big step forward with the planned launch of iReport.com, an entire portal dedicated to completely user generated news content.
MTV announced that on February 1 it would end the user generated content television channel Flux, which it started in the UK in September 2006. Flux will be replaced by "MTV One Plus 1," which is a one hour timeshift of the programming on its flagship station. Though MTV is abandoning the idea of a completely UGC-oriented television channel, it is not giving up on using user generated content in its programming and will actually continue to build out the Flux brand online.