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Starting today, CNN will allow all users to embed videos from CNN on their blogs or social network profiles. With this, CNN is following a growing trend among news organizations like MSNBC, FoxNews, and CBS. Judging from the wording of the announcement, CNN is clearly hoping to see some of its clips go viral, and with the political season in the U.S. heating up in the run-up to the November election, they might just have chosen the right time to enable this feature.

Our first daily Comments Competition winner is Dan from BlogMinistry, who left this comment on Josh Catone's post CNN to Launch Completely User Generated News Site. Congratulations Dan, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their SmartLink Widgets.

Here is Dan's comment, with some great advice for big media companies using web 2.0 technologies...

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.

Today is so-called "Super Tuesday" in the US. Voters in 24 states are heading to the polls -- including in large population states like New York, California, and Illinois -- to decide who get to face off for the job of US president as the nominees of the Republican and Democratic parties. After the votes have been counted tonight, 52% of the Democratic and 41% of the Republican delegates will have been awarded, and it may be that we have a clearer picture of who those nominees are.

Current Media, the parent company of Current TV and Current.com, has filed for a $100 Million IPO on NASDEQ. Current was famously co-founded by ex Vice President Al Gore. IPOs (Initial Public Offerings) have been thin on the ground in the Web 2.0 era, but in Current's case the money will be used for expansion of their TV network as well as their website offering. We covered Current TV's internet plans in July last year and their new user-generated website Current.com in October.

In the IPO filing, Current describes their media model as "innovative but unproven".