ReadWriteWeb

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.

Former Google Product Manger, Steffen Mueller, has launched Topicle, a new search engine community. The service, which went live today, uses a model similar to that of Wikipedia, allowing anyone to contribute to the creation and enhancement of their own vertical search engines.

Recently, the International Olympic Committee announced that they would allow athletes and other accredited persons to blog at the Olympics in August. The committee decided that this would be allowed, since blogs are a form of personal expression, and not a form of journalism. That's great, except for one small problem...with the recent release of the official guidelines, bloggers are finding some very strict rules in place. Specifically, the rules prohibit the posting of still pictures, sound, or moving images.

In post on his blog today, my friend Allen Stern takes issue with Digg winning the "Best User Generated Content Site" award at Friday night's Crunchies Awards. Allen, who provided the web with excellent live blogged coverage of the event based on the video stream describes the scene online after Digg's win: "The chat room went off on the selection simply because Digg is not a user-generated content site."