Bloggers who embed YouTube links tend to be male and young. The most active group of YouTube users is between 25 and 35 years old. Bloggers who embed YouTube videos are mostly male (58%), and Break.com is the most male-dominated video site (885), while MTV attracts more female bloggers (68%).

The most active video embed users live in the US, followed by Brazil, Spain, the UK and Canada. In the US, most of these YouTube users live in California, followed by New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida. The size of these states account for a large chunk of these differences. Connecticut, Alabama and South Carolina come in last.

Taking all video-sharing networks into account, the most active bloggers can be found in New York City, followed by Sao Paulo, London, Madrid and Paris.

In Asia, more than 90% of bloggers are younger than 35. In North America, 28% of all bloggers who embed videos are older than 35.

Focus on YouTube

Unsurprisingly, YouTube is the most popular video service in the blogosphere. The site attracts 82% of all embeds and direct links from blogs, followed by Vimeo (8.8%), DailyMotion (4%) and MySpace (1.1%). YouTube's dominance in this market becomes even more apparent when compared to other popular sites like Hulu and MTV. Hulu accounts for only 0.5% of all blog embeds, and MTV is dead last on Sysomos' list with 0.1%.

In Asia, YouTube is even more dominant, accounting for 88.5% of all embeds; and in South America, YouTube leads with an 87.4% market share. Some of these differences can be explained by the fact that some of the services that Sysomos looked at are simply not available in these markets.

More Data

Sysomos' report offers a lot more demographic information than we could highlight in detail, but here are a few more nuggets of interesting information:

• The most popular day for embedding videos is Tuesday.
• The most popular time is between 11:00 am and noon EST.
• YouTube's most active demographic group (20-35) is three times larger than the second-most active group (35-65).
• 20% of bloggers who embed YouTube videos are teenagers; 2.4% are over 60.

The implications of this decision are huge. Whereas before Digg was the place to find and share interesting links from around the web, that role has, as of late, been taken on by microblogging site Twitter.com. To combat Twitter's threat, Digg has tried launching new features like the DiggBar and their own URL-shortening service, but nothing they've done so far could have as big an impact on their future as the new API.

To drive traffic to their service, Digg launched a couple of different initiatives this past year including a browser toolbar and a URL-shortening service. First, there was the controversial "DiggBar" which initially drove traffic to Digg.com via a short URL service that displayed the news story within an iframe wrapper. Later, they changed the way their short URL service operated to redirect anyone clicking the URL directly to Digg.com - even if they weren't currently logged into the Digg website. This quickly became known as Digg's attempt to "bait and switch" its users. Instead of being sent to the news story as expected, users unwittingly wound up on Digg.com. Despite the outcry (and a confused founder Kevin Rose who wasn't aware of the change), the site continues to operate their URL service in this way. And why is that? Because, at the end of the day, Digg.com needs traffic to stay competitive. The soon-to-launch read/write API will simply be another way to get those valuable clicks.

With a read/write API, developers will be able to add "Digg This" functionality to their third-party applications. Adam DuVander on ProgrammableWeb notes this means developers could do a number of things like "automate posting stories and incorporate it into a publishing system,... save a link once and have it go to Digg, your bookmark service and Twitter... allow anyone to create their own interface to Digg, which would also provide Digg itself with additional content." The potential is nearly limitless. Heck, you could even incorporate a "Digg This" button into a Twitter client app like TweetDeck, for example.

To encourage developers to actually build apps or integrate Digg functionality within their existing applications, Digg recently allowed commercial use of their API. That means developers can actually monetize their applications "with full ownership and free of fees," says the Digg API license agreement. That gives the developer community even more incentive to put the API to use.

Digg Needs Traffic to Fight the Real-Time Web

The API change is arguably a brilliant move by the (potentially) fading social news site to combat the threat that comes from the real-time web.

There was a time when Digg.com was the king of link-sharing on the social web. Getting "dugg" sent massive amounts of traffic to your website, often overwhelming servers and bringing the site down - a problem that soon became known as the "Digg effect." While Digg still has that power today, Twitter is quickly becoming the link-sharing site of choice for many users. The reasons for that are many, but one key reason is that Twitter levels the playing field a bit - getting "dugg" is notoriously hard and getting something to the front page seems to be controlled by an elite crowd of diggers... no matter how hard Digg tries to combat that problem. Twitter, on the other hand, is easy. Anyone can share links, and through the power of "re-tweets" large amounts of traffic can be driven to websites, too. Although there's no "Twitter effect" just yet, its time may be coming soon.

With Twitter. we've seen the dispersal of information sped up. Where it can still take hours - and sometimes even days - to see a hot story make the front page of Digg.com, breaking news on Twitter moves at a much more rapid pace. Within minutes, the news spreads like wildfire, overtaking people's timelines and making its presence known in the Twitter trends. Although today Digg is still going strong, if they can't transform their service into more of a real-time news site where information isn't "old news" by the time it reaches an audience, then they will eventually find themselves outpaced by other services.

By opening up their API, Digg could deliver even more traffic to their site than they've ever done before. And with the additional traffic, stories could move through their system faster. Getting the necessary number of diggs needed to make a story "go popular" could, in theory, take minutes instead of hours if enough diggs came though. With additional traffic speeding up front page turnover, Digg could remain competitive with other real-time services that are attempting to steal their glory. Soon, one of those services may be bit.ly, whose URL shortening service is now the default for the Twitter community. According to recent news, bit.ly plans to mine links it collects to create a real-time news service a lot like Digg's, but based on Twitter instead. There's no doubt that Digg is aware of this potential threat, and that has at least partially influenced their decision to open up.

Still, despite Digg's plans, we have to wonder: will the read/write API be enough for Digg to compete further down the road? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Note: This story was embargoed until 10am Pacific, but as usual, the app still hasn't gone live in the store. This is becoming standard procedure these days and Apple is doing a disservice to both the developers and the press by not giving developers a clearer idea about when a new application will actually appear in the store.

Update (5:30pm): the app is now available in the App Store.

Earlier this year, 12seconds announced tighter integration with Twitter and this app clearly shows this. Once you have uploaded your video, a message will be posted to your Twitter feed.

One nice aspect of the app is that it is extremely easy to use. You just tilt the iPhone sideways and the recorder automatically opens. After recording a video, you can play it, retake it, or delete it.

In a future update, 12seconds also plans to integrate Facebook Connect. This will give users the ability to share video on both Twitter and Facebook. The company also plans to release a few more iPhone 3GS apps in the near future.

A number of other Twitter video services like TwitVid already offer iPhone apps (iTunes link). 12seconds, however, is one of the largest players in this space - especially now that Seesmic has decided to shift its focus away from its video service.

No Growth

It's important to note, though, that Seesmic plans to keep its video service running for the time being, but unless we see a major shift in how users perceive 'video conversations,' we have to wonder if this kind of service has any real future, especially given the asynchronous nature of Seesmic in a time where real-time conversations and video streaming, even from mobile devices, are becoming the norm. In his video, Le Meur also notes that other Twitter-based video services aren't growing right now either, though he hopes that video will be ready to grow again at some point in the future.

Service Still Up, But Completely Deemphasized

We definitely have to give Le Meur credit for keeping the community informed, though. Unlike imeem, which is shutting down parts of its service in the next few days, Seesmic is keeping its service up and running, and the team is communicating with the Seesmic community.

Note: tip of the hat to Allen Stern, who first noticed these changes.

Core Feature: Repost

Meme uses the same one-way follow system as Twitter, and items from users you follow will appear in your stream, mixed in with your own items. Interestingly, users can also comment on links and stories from users they do not follow, but Yahoo Meme puts an interesting twist on the commenting system, though. One of the central features of Meme is the ability to 'repost' (in Twitter parlance, this would be a retweet). The repost button (and not a comment button) appears next to every post, photo, video, or MP3 file. In order to comment on a story, you have to repost the story to your own feed.

At first, this system feels a bit odd - after all, you might not necessarily want to share every item you comment on in your own feed - but it turns out to be a great way to discover new users to follow. Especially, because every repost comes with a link to the person you reposted it from, and a link to the user who originally posted it to Meme as well.

Some Features We Would Like to See

Obviosuly, Meme is only a beta product and it misses a number of features that we would love to see. It would be great, for example, if we could actually upload MP3s instead of having to find a link to a file, or if Meme accepted videos from other video services besides YouTube. We would also love to see a bookmarklet or plugin that would allow us to share items without having to copy and paste links. Unlike most of Yahoo's products, Meme doesn't have an API yet, so third-party developers can't write new desktop and web tools for it yet.

As of now, Meme does not feature any privacy controls - everything you post on Meme is automatically visible for every other member on the service.

Only In Portuguese For Now - What About the Rest of the World?

Given the generic name and address (meme.yahoo.com), we would not be surprised if Yahoo was testing meme in the Portuguese-speaking market before rolling it out to for more languages. If you want to give it a try, however, the features are self-explaining enough so that you don't really need to speak Portuguese to use it.

Back to Basics

After using Meme for a while, it doesn't quite seem right to call it a Twitter clone. Instead, Yahoo Meme is really more of a back-to-basics micro-blogging service that feels a lot more like Posterous or Tumblr than Twitter.

According to Hitwise, 38% of the top 50 searches for 'twitter' in Australia include the name of a celebrity. Lindsay Lohan leads the charge, followed by Ashton Kutcher, Miley Cyrus, and Australia's own Hugh Jackman. While Kutcher's much publicized race to 1 million followers increased Twitter's share of daily visits in Australia by 10.6%, Oprah's first tweet only registered a 2.46% increase

Twitter is also seeing similar growth in other Asia Pacific markets. In New Zealand, the official home of RWW, Twitter's share of daily visits increased 305% in 2009, and it is now the 49th most visited web site there, and its growth rate in Singapore is comparable. Only Hong Kong is lagging far behind these other markets.

Twitter is Sticky

One interesting phenomenon about Twitter is that new users tend to stay on the service. In Australia, according to Hitwise, the single largest spike in visits came one day after the Queensland Election in March, and interestingly, Hitwise did not record a drop in numbers since then. This bodes well for Twitter, which, thanks to the hype around Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher, was able to pick up a lot of new users who typically wouldn't have been too interested in joining Twitter.

Unsurprisingly, the report also concludes that YouTube is a perfect playground for marketers who are looking to engage teenagers and young adults. These users are extremely loyal to YouTube, and, according to this report, the majority of this demographic believes that it is a good thing that brands use YouTube. They also believe that brands who have a presence on YouTube are 'forward thinking and innovative.'

At the same time, though, users don't want to see any additional ads on the service, and over 50% of all the interviewed users said that they preferred the site when it was less commercialized.

However, it is also important to point out that a large number of users reported that they bought a product (both online and offline) after seeing it advertised on YouTube. Within the last year, 91% of all YouTube users interviewed for Entertainment Media Research's report said that they bought a product they saw advertised on YouTube within the last year.

Channels?

Teenagers are the most likely to subscribe to a YouTube Channel (15%), however, 58% of users have absolutely no idea what YouTube channels are about, and only 5% of all YouTube users have subscribed to a branded channel.

This, of course, is a problem for brands that start their own channels with the hope of creating lasting connections to consumers through channel subscriptions.

More Interesting Data:

This report's 300 pages are so packed with data, that we could probably write quite a few more posts about it, but here are a few facts that stood out:

• YouTube users, especially those under 19, are extremely loyal to YouTube; for 69% of all males 15-19 and 66% of all females in this age group, YouTube is the only streaming video site they ever visit
• 56% of all YouTube users have registered an account with the service (48% say they did so to watch 18+ videos)
• 29% of all YouTube users have uploaded videos to the site within the last three months
• 28% of all male users between 20 and 24 go to YouTube to watch commercials, and 43% of all 15 to 19 year old male users watch clips from video games
• the majority of YouTube users classifies itself as 'majority adopters' (44%); 33% consider themselves as first or early adopters, 17% as late adopters, and 6% say they 'never adopt'
• Sex sells: 34% of respondents complained that there are too many sexist videos on YouTube - at the same time, another 34% reported that they were disappointed when a video with a sexy woman or man in the thumbnail didn't actually contain any explicit sex

YouTube At Work

As we reported yesterday, some researchers have argued that using social media in the workplace can increase productivity. According to this report, only 3% of all YouTube users regularly use the site for work purposes (9% do so occasionally, and 13% rarely) with 59% who never use YouTube for work.

Those who do use YouTube for work, do so in order to learn more about a subject that's important for their business (48%), or to learn more about specific products (40%). Only about 16% of these users go to YouTube to find a supplier.

The majority of YouTube users clearly just go to the site to be entertained and watch Jonas Brothers clips, but even though only a relatively small group of users go to the site for educational purposes or to improve their business skills, this is still a very sizable market.

Comments

Comment threads on YouTube don't exactly have a reputation for encouraging deep, nuanced discourse, but the Entertainment Media Research report also investigated why users decide to comment on a story. Of all respondents, 73% report that they posted a comment because they liked a video, 52% because they wanted to show support for the user who uploaded the video, and 51% because they wanted to respond to another user's comments. Interestingly, only 32% said that they left comments because they really disliked a video.

Surprisingly, no user cited an innate urge to write "ROFL" or "lololololol. this is soooooo stupid" as a reason for leaving a comment.

Note: you can find more information about the methodology used by Media Entertainment Research, as well as information about how to get a free chapter from the report (and how to buy the full report), here.]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/report_users_expect_brands_to_be_on_youtube_no_more_ads.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/report_users_expect_brands_to_be_on_youtube_no_more_ads.php News Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:37:34 -0800 Frederic Lardinois Streamy, which calls itself a "real-time news reading and sharing site," opened its doors today after an 18-month long private beta. Streamy is a mix between an RSS reader, a social media aggregator, and a real-time search engine. You can connect your Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Friendfeed, and Flickr accounts to Streamy, and post status updates from Streamy directly to these services. Streamy will also recommend interesting stories to you, and, thanks to its innovative user interface, sharing stories with your friends on the supported social media services is extremely easy.

Streamy as a Social Media Aggregator

You can use Streamy as a self-contained system to read your feeds, follow other users, share posts with your followers, and even chat with them, but the service really works best once you connect it to other social media services. Starting next week, Streamy will also implement Facebook Connect for signing in to the service, so your Facebook and Streamy friends will be automatically synchronized.

When you open up Streamy, you are greeted with a homepage that can aggregate updates from your friends on various social media services, as well as a list of recommended stories.

Currently, Streamy lets you import your Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, and FriendFeed accounts, and from within Streamy, you can easily update your status on Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook. For Twitter, by the way, Streamy is one of the first services that feature authentication through oAuth.

Customization

Streamy's Twitter, Flickr, and Friendfeed pages are highly customizable. You can, for example, add widgets for specific searches, users, or your direct messages and replies to your Twitter account. The Friendfeed and Flickr pages only feature search widgets. Overall, these features feel a lot like what you can do in Tweetdeck, though the only problem is that the search widgets don't seem to auto-update.

RSS Reader

But Streamy isn't just a social media aggregator; it is also a very capable RSS reader. If you are a Google Reader or Bloglines user, you will be able to import your subscriptions, or you can import an OPML file from any other feed reader.

From within Streamy, you can just drag a link and a circular user interface pops up. To send a link to Friendfeed, for example, you just have to drop the link onto the Friendfeed icon.

Interface

When we looked at Streamy's first beta almost two years ago, the service looked very different, though the core of the service, as well as the innovative drop-zone interface and the highly responsive AJAX interface still remain. Streamy also still features a very interesting chat function (including group chat), which used to be at the core of the original service, but has now been pushed towards the sidelines in favor of a stronger focus on social media aggregation.

One cool feature of Streamy is that you can drag and drop almost everything. This means, for example, that you can drag a shortcut to your favorite blogs to Streamy's title bar at the top of the page.

A Few Things We Would Like to See

Of course, Streamy isn't perfect. It is currently not possible to reply to tweets directly from Streamy, for example, which is definitely a problem, especially considering that you can comment on FriendFeed items directly from Streamy. On the other hand, though, Streamy won't let you 'like' a FriendFeed item. Streamy's co-founder Don Mosites, however, tells us that these features are in the works and should become available soon.

One feature we would also really love to see in Streamy's RSS reader would be the ability to get a river-of-news-style view for folders. Once you subscribe to more than twenty blogs or so, going from one blog to the next to see what's new just becomes tiresome. Again, Don tells us that this is just a matter of flipping a switch, and we hope Streamy will do so soon. For now, you can just drag and drop your folders to the title bar and Streamy will open a river-of-news-style view for you when you click on the icon there.

Verdict

Once Streamy adds those features we mention above, it can easily become a great alternative to Google Reader and Tweetdeck. It's already one of the most fully-featured social media aggregators we have seen. We highly enjoyed testing the service over the last few days and we highly recommend that you give it a try as well.

Tekarma was built by a team that includes a number of former eBay executives and engineers. The idea for the site, as Tekarma's Alex Kazim pointed out to us today, was to provide a comprehensive homepage for every product that would allow users to get tech support, read FAQs, and discuss the product with other users. The content on the site is completely user-generated, though Tekarma also uses Shopping.com's APIs to pull in product specs, which, however, can later be edited by the users.

Features

Every product page features four main sections: FAQs, Reviews, Web Resources, and Surprises. Surprises is actually one of the most interesting sections here, as this is where users can share information that is often left out of standard reviews such as the ground clearance of a car that a buyer would only notice after using it for a longer period of time.

While Tekarma features a price-comparison widget, Kazim told us that shopping is not the focus of the site. Instead, Tekarma, at least in its current iteration, focuses on providing support after a user has already bought the product. In the long run, once the site has more content, Kazim envisions that this may shift a bit, depending on how the users end up utilizing the site.

We liked Tekarma's user-interface, which makes browsing the site extremely easy. As Kazim pointed out to us, the team incorporated a lot of the lessons it learned at eBay into Tekarma's interface. One nice feature, for example, is that the service displays a list of your last search results in the left sidebar. Thanks to this, you don't have to constantly click the back button when searching for a specific product.

Good Start - Now All it Needs is More Users

Overall, while Tekarma is not necessarily revolutionary in its approach, we think that it has enough compelling features to set it apart from similar services like FixYa or product-specific forums. At the same time, though, Tekarma, like most services that rely on user-generated content, will have to attract a sizable number of active users to add content and fill the gaps in its current catalog.

Invites

If you would like to try out Tekarma and maybe add some of your own expertise to the system, you can follow this link. It will be valid for the first 100 readers who sign up for the service.

As we pointed out in our earlier story about these HD videos, the quality is amazing and rivals that of some of YouTube's closest competitors like Vimeo. However, it is also worth noting that you need a relatively fast broadband connection to watch these videos without constant stuttering and buffering.

Just in the last couple of weeks, YouTube has been rolling out a wide variety of new features, including the new wide-screen format (which was clearly in preparation for this release) and the addition of over 25k new songs from music licensing firm Rumblefish to its AudioSwap feature.

Game-Changer

These new HD videos, however, are clearly a game-changer. Web video always had the name of having relatively sub-standard video quality and being generally grainy and hard to watch (and YouTube especially). Now, you could easily put up a screen-cast on YouTube in HD, or film a video with your new Flip MinoHD and have it seen in its full 720p glory.

As Josh Lowensohn notes, the app also can't access the extensive written content from the Howcast Wiki Guides.

If you don't know what you want to watch, the app will show a random video if you shake the phone, though this seems like more of a gimmick than a useful feature.

The iPhone application feels a bit limited when compared to the Howcast web site, but given that most of the tutorials on Howcast are shorter than five minutes and that the production values of the videos is very high, using the service while sitting on a train or bus might just give you a chance to learn how to forage for wild edible plants or how to clean your iPod earbuds.

Myspace's latest feature to let users use their webcams to record videos is something that Facebook and Youtube members have long had the pleasure of doing. Youtube was the first service to introduce this feature back in December of 2006. Facebook followed suit and introduced the feature in May of 2007.

Unfortunately, Myspace hasn't brought anything new to the table. Videos have a recording limit of up to 10 minutes, which is the same as Youtube. On the other hand, Facebook allows its users to extend their recording time up to 20 minutes. All of these services offer privacy settings for your videos. Youtube is the only one that forces you to make your video private after publishing it publicly first. We found the video quality from Myspace to be sub-par at best. We've experienced better recording and play-back quality from video services like Seesmic and 12seconds.tv. We guess something's better than nothing, right?

What To Expect

You can expect to see more videos and hear more noise on Myspace profiles. We just hope that users don't take this too far and record the most outrageous things with their webcams. Musicians can definitely take things to the next level with the new webcam recording feature. Fans of musicians could start seeing recordings of mini-studio sessions from bands or get a sneak peek on a new song from an artist. Musicians could even use the feature to send quick shoutouts to fans or address any questions immediately. All of this can be done without the hassle of recording from a separate software, converting the video, and waiting for it to finish uploading to Myspace. Now Myspace will do all the dirty work for you.

The VimeoLand toy gives a look at recent happenings on Vimeo. VimeoLand displays an interactive landscape of characters that represent the latest actions from Vimeo users. Hovering your mouse over a character will display a pop-up containing one of the following recent actions:

• A comment
• A like
• Recent signup
• Recent upload

Each action includes a link to the profile of the user who completed the action and a link to the video that the action took place on. What's a little random and unique about VimeoLand is an airplane that flies back and forth above the landscape. Clicking the plane will cause a random video to be dropped from the plane's cargo. It's pretty nifty. Vimeo fans will find this particular toy to be very useful and entertaining.

Currently there's only one other toy available. If you're looking for something less flashy than VimeoLand, we recommend Pulse.

Making Your Own Vimeo Toy

We're interested in seeing what other unique visuals developers will create with Vimeo Toys. To help developers get started, Vimeo has listed a sample XML file with over 50 activity items to choose from. Vimeo's team of workers will decide whether or not your toy is worth being featured on Vimeo. While this isn't a problem for us, we'd rather see the community take a vote on what stays and what goes.

What we think would be really interesting to see is for Vimeo and developers to take things to the next level. By this we mean seeing a visual graph of what our friends, or a select group of users, are up as a Vimeo Toy. The current offerings are still a little too random for our tastes. Nevertheless, we're happy with what we see so far and look forward to see what else is next.

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 list includes 40 different sources of video, but here's a look at the top 15. How many of these have you heard of?

1. Next New Networks
A venture funded mini-empire of online video shows on a wide variety of topics, from sports to politics to a rip-off of the lolcat phenomenon as a video show. Run by former edge-TV execs. Some good stuff, and hey - they're winning!
2. Chris Pirillo
A one man empire run by uber-(media)-geek Chris Pirillo. Pirillo notes in a blog post about the TubeMogul 40 that these numbers don't include his successful live tech-help show, either.
3. Howcast
How-to videos, similar to the many other offerings in this space but with a little more allusion to sex. And more viewers.
4. For Your Imagination

Professional video producers, making content for brands to ride along with.

5. Tornante

Michael Eisner's company, the holders of Vuguru.

6. WatchMojo.com

More professional video producers, making content for brands to ride along with or otherwise make use of. Apparently it's working, given the presence of these kinds of companies.

7. iJustine

Justine Ezarik, the woman who stole Justin.tv's lunch in terms of publicity. She's now interviewing top tech executives, covering movie launches for General Motors' I Got Shotgun social media campaign and generally having fun.

8. Nalts

According to his bio: "Kevin Nalts is one of the most-viewed YouTube comedians with more than 650 short online videos seen more than 25 million times. By day he's a Marketing Director at a Fortune 100 company, and he speaks, writes and consults in the area of online marketing and viral video."

9. MyDamnChannel

Hollywood veterans doing comedy, including the You Suck at Photoshop series. It's working for them.

10. Ford Models

Ad sponsored eye candy, content about beauty products, nothing new here - just supermodels blathering on the internet.

11. CBS Interactive

The rolled up web properties of CBS.

12. HBO
13. Rocketboom

This daily short form, comedic documentary show just keeps on drawing crowds. It's getting more social media play than PBS (#20).

14. FUNimation Productions

Anime! Why am I not surprised? I had no idea though.

15. National Lampoon

Next generation, low-brow humor that's not as funny or smart as The Onion but is from a very established brand.

Notes

That's just the top 15 of TubeMogul's Top 40 and it's notable that these numbers don't count viewership through services like Blip.tv and Castfire, both big services. TubeMogul is a very successful service so far though and their claim of 30,000 users is remarkable.

Our take away from this list is that old media is still generally dominant but that video producers born and bred on the media fringe are holding their own very respectfully. And that Chris Pirillo is a maniac.

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.

Basically, these are all countries that could, as the Google Maps team puts it, "benefit tremendously from local knowledge and expertise that you and other map makers posses, and we're excited to see how you put that to use."

Those maps that are currently available for editing vary greatly in the detail already available for them. Barbados already has a relatively complete set of roads, while Vietnam is almost completely devoid of any details outside of the major cities and St. Vincent and the Grenadines are nothing but gray blobs on the map so far.

The editing functions of Map Maker are extremely easy to use and it is probably only a question of time before more users start using their local knowledge to add to these often bare maps. For most of us, however, the real question is when Google will open up the rest of its maps for editing at this low level - or if this is even desirable.