Top 10 Video Share Websites

The proliferation of video on the Web is due not just to an increase in professionally produced fare, but primarily because it's so cheap and easy for average idiots to shoot footage and spread it around. And much of the impetus for that activity has been Websites that make it cheap and easy to upload and share video for the world to see.

Everyone knows about YouTube, but in fact there are dozens of video sharing sites out there -- most of them free -- that offer features similar to, and in some instances superior to, YouTube's.

TopTen Reviews, which is sort of a Consumer Guide for techies, recently rated video sharing sites, offering comprehensive reviews of each and a useful side-by-side comparison chart. Here are the leaders of the pack:

YouTube, Metacafe, Break, Google, DailyMotion, Yahoo!, Revver, Vimeo, VidiLife, and Stickam.

Here's some of the criteria that their reviewers used:

Audience Features (e.g. search capabilities; screenshot previews; content description; viewer ratings system)

Producer Features (e.g. video creation tools; educational resources; public/private options)

Content (e.g. large library; aesthetic and legal regulations)

Ease of Use (e.g. intuitive organization and navigation; quick loading; minimal buffer delays)

Help/Support (e.g. FAQs; user guides & forums; customer service)

So which site was number one? No surprise here -- YouTube. It wasn't the first video sharing site, and its content is not always the greatest, but it's now synonymous with video itself, having garnered nearly a fifth of the world's Internet traffic. (Here's the TopTen review.)

TopTen reviewers especially liked YouTube's "functionality and community."

The real strength of YouTube is the members that interact, comment, and post videos for specific interests. It’s possible to find a video on YouTube for any interest, occupation, hobby or pastime...

Perhaps the most telling effect of YouTube’s video sharing formula is the fact that YouTube has gone from being the star to creating stars.... Now presidential candidates use YouTube as a way to give their debates and speeches a national audience, because YouTube has such a broad user base....

But is YouTube the best choice for videojournalists, who want their non-fiction stories, often on weighty topics, to stand out from the crowd? What has your experience been with video sharing sites? Which ones do you use... and why?

NPR’s Schiller & AOL’s Armstrong Headline ONA10

The Online News Association today announced NPR's Vivian Schiller and AOL's Tim Armstrong will headline a “keynote conversation” moderated by WSJ.com’s Kara Swisher at its annual conference in Washington, D.C. in October.

Jump-starting the discussion on reinventing media companies will be Vivian Schiller, who joined NPR as President and CEO in 2009, coming from The New York Times Company where she served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of NYTimes.com....

Joining Schiller in conversation will be Tim Armstrong, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of AOL, LLC. Armstrong is responsible for setting strategy and overseeing the businesses and day-to-day operations of the company. He joined AOL in March 2009 from Google, where he served as the President of The Americas Operations...

Moderating the pair will be Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor of the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital. A former reporter for the Washington Post, Swisher the author of “aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web” and the sequel, “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future.”...

You can get more info on the 2010 ONA Conference and Online Journalism Awards Banquet, and register, here.

Google TV: Game-Changer for Videojournalism?

What is Google TV? It's more than just a search engine on your TV set. It's a useful way of integrating your television with your Internet browser, to create a symbiotic TV and Web experience that is more than the sum of its parts.

Let the Big G explain it for you themselves in this short video below. And then ask yourself if this will change the way people view Internet video... and if this will be the catalyst that will take online videojournalism to the next level.



With the increased opportunity for attracting eyeballs -- on bigger screens, in an improved and enriched environment -- will media organizations now invest more resources to produce higher quality nonfiction video feature stories? What do you think?

What Will HTML5 Video Mean for iPad Users?

While we're hoping that the iPad will give a much needed shot in the arm to videojournalism, we're also nervous that, when the much heralded device debuts this week, most online video won't work on it.

That's because Web video has become almost synonymous with Adobe's ubiquitous Flash, which (for technical and political reasons) Apple's Steve Jobs famously refuses to support. He claims that Flash is a bug-ridden Mac crasher that lacks innovative qualities.

Instead the iPad is relying on more Web developers to use the emerging HTML5 coding, which enables non-Flash formats to play in standard Web browsers, without requiring additional software plug-ins.

If video producers want to reach audiences on their mobile platforms, Jobs is essentially bullying them into taking the HTML5 route.

This week, the mighty Brightcove online video platform climbed aboard the HTML5 wagon, delivering another major blow to Flash's dominance. Brightcove's clout extends to more than 1,000 major media customers around the globe -- including 20th Century Fox, Condé Nast, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony Pictures Television, Discovery Communications, ITV, Turner Broadcasting, Hearst Magazines and Fox International.

Two prominent Brightcove clients -- the New York Times (a Brightcove investor) and Time -- are already adopting the "Brightcove Experience for HTML5" for producing their iPad-ready Websites.

To make things interesting, Apple competitor Google (which owns Flash-based YouTube) fired back by integrating Flash into its Chrome browser, thus fortifying it (and its Android operating system) for mobile phones, tablets and notebooks.

Though Chrome accounts for only 5 percent of Internet use, there can be no denying Google's money and clout. Hedging its bets, YouTube is experimenting with its own HTML5 video player, for Chrome, Safari and MS Internet Explorer (with Google Chrome Frame installed).

So what does this all mean for consumers?

First, it helps to understand a little bit about HTML5. Currently, the Web operates on HTML4, a version of the standard common coding language that hasn't changed since 1999. HTML5 is a work in progress, which won't be completed and officially ratified for many years, but elements of it are starting to come into use -- such as the "VIDEO" tag that enables video to play inside a browser without the need for additional plug-in software. It even dictates the videoplayer "controls." HTML5 is supported by Chrome, Opera, Firefox and Safari. Its video relies on the H.264 compression standard (i.e. .MP4 files or Ogg Theora  format .OGV files) -- as opposed to .FLV Flash files.

For those who've ever done any type of basic HTML coding, here's an oversimplified explanation. When you want an image to appear on a Web page, you just need to create an "IMG" tag that points to the image file (e.g. a JPG or GIF) on your server, along with certain attributes (such as dimensions and placement), and voila! There's your image! However, for video to appear on your Web page, you currently have to write code that activates separate plug-in software (usually Flash) to launch a video player and start the video. With HTML5, you can just insert a "VIDEO" tag that works like an "IMG" tag, by pointing to your uploaded video and adding its own instructions on how it should look and behave.

Furthermore, with additional HTML5 interactive attributes, end users (that is, viewers) will be able to do even more -- rotate and spin the videos, slide them around the page, resize them, overlap them with other videos, draw on them, mark them up with their own text and visual elements, and more... all by clicking or just touching the screen. Coders can even dictate the launch times of videos -- so that a video can start at a specific amount of time after the page is loaded (or several videos can start sequentially at pre-established times).

Bottom line: Media Websites that currently produce video need to hop aboard the HTML5 train, as it's leaving the gate. Otherwise their Flash videos will appear as broken icons on iPads and other mobile devices. Essentially, they need to make the minimal investment in recoding their pages so that they are capable of playing both Flash (.FLV) and non-Flash (.MP4) videos -- and in recruiting programming teams to develop or license code that can maximize the interactive potential of the next generation of HTML5 video players.

Brad Neuberg's helpful video tutorial (below) explains HTML5 video (starting at 20:55).

NY Times Launches Daily TimesCast Video

Have you noticed the New York Times' new TimesCast, which launched yesterday with very little fanfare?

It's a daily video, posted mid-day, that strives to offer a lunchtime roundup of the day's top headlines in under seven minutes -- delivered by the New York Times editors and reporters themselves.

The New York Times is so far ahead of the curve in online videojournalism that they produce more high-quality video stories in a day than most newspapers do in a month. And now this:

“It’s not just straight, breaking news, it’s talking about the way The New York Times is looking at the story – our analysis, our particular take on the story,” said Ann Derry, the paper’s editorial director for video and television. “We already produce a lot of video to go along with stories, but we felt the need to have a regular video news overview on the home page.”

The TimesCast shares the articulate intelligence and polished production values of those other videos in its classy stable.

It starts with the newspaper's 10:30 a.m. Page One meeting, with top editors in their neckties assembled around a large conference table, sequentially going over the day's roster of most important developing stories, patching in correspondents or bureau chiefs via speakerphone, as needed. It's intended to evoke a fly-on-the-wall feel, yet one can't help but wonder if the presence of cameras alters the proceedings. Do their editorial powwows really run so smoothly that they practically look scripted, or are these print journalists playing to the camera?

Then we cut to senior editor Jane Bornemeier interviewing executive editor Bill Keller, against a news room backdrop, about news highlights -- China censoring Google, Obama signing the health care bill, Clinton meeting Netanyahu. Then there are more newsroom interviews -- not reporters interviewing sources, but New York Times editors interviewing New York Times reporters and even other New York Times editors.

It's well shot and produced, and slickly edited with lower-thirds and appropriate B-roll. But there's a slightly awkward aura to it all.

First, the interviews take place standing up, and not sitting down, which would seem more natural and comfortable. Is this intended to give it a sense of urgency?

Second, one can't ignore the overriding question as to whether journalists talking amongst themselves is content that a news audience seeks or wants. Other major news organizations have experimented with similar behind-the-scenes transparency, inviting us to eavesdrop on editorial meetings, and to hear reporters offer on-camera "backgrounders" of important stories and issues. Rarely are these enticing.

What's remarkable is how the TimesCast, unlike most newspaper-generated video (including its own), clings more to the traditional TV news format of field correspondent conducting on-camera interviews. The big difference here, of course, is that it's the home field and the subjects are the home team. So it can veer dangerously close to seeming like an exercise in narcissism.

There is one critical difference between the TimesCast and similar forays into mid-day news videocasts at other media Websites. What we've previously seen has mostly been an attempt to capitalize on video in the most cynically inexpensive and least labor-intensive way possible -- they just stick a camera in the editorial meeting and let it run, and then stick a camera in their own reporters' faces and let them ramble, and then post the raw unedited mess in a well hidden corner of their Website. When no one watches, they complain that nobody cares about the process of gathering and reporting news.

Or we've seen newspaper video departments team with similarly beleagured local TV newscasts, and in an attempt to avoid a double drowning, produce well intentioned videocasts that are designed to serve double duty, on air and online. But ultimately they resemble scaled-down TV news, with 1:15 segments that contain snappy soundbites, not well developed themes and stories. Not necessarily a step backwards, but hardly a step forwards.

By contrast, the TimesCast seems more like a move in the right direction, targeted for a specific medium and audience. It's smart and articulate, professionally polished and well crafted. And genuinely illuminating.

But wait! Can this be? For the first time, the Times is enabling viewers to embed this video on their own blogs or websites. We've previously taken the Times to task for not making this feature available. Apparently they're making an exception for the TimesCast, or maybe it's a baby-step experiment that will eventually liberate the rest of their video arsenal for wider distribution, o frabjous day!

So ignore our meager descriptions and nitpicks, and partake of the seminal TimesCasts for yourself, below. We're eager to hear what you think about them. Are you likely to watch them daily? If so, in addition to, or in lieu of, reading homepage headlines? In terms of content or style, what would you like to see them do better or differently?

Excerpts: Journalism News You Can Use

Clipped from: http://clp.ly/OXA by clp.ly

A quick roundup of some items that caught our eye lately...

State of the News Media 2010: An Annual Report of American Journalism

This seventh edition of the annual report on the health and status of American journalism, courtesy of Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, will keep you busy all weekend. Trends, attitudes, behaviors, analyses. It's comprehensive, and massive. Think 180,000 words.

Our goals are to take stock of the revolution occurring in how Americans get information and provide a resource for citizens, journalists and researchers to make their own assessments. To do so we gather in one place as much data as possible about all the major sectors of journalism, identify trends across media, mark key findings, delve deep into each sector and note areas for further inquiry.

This year’s report is the most interactive it’s ever been, and contains a number of new features...

Read it here.

*****

Facebook Overtakes Google as Most Popular U.S. Website
(Daily Finance)

Facebook has overtaken Google to become the most popular website in the United States for the first time, according to new data from Hitwise, which measures Internet traffic. For the week ending March 13, the social networking juggernaut registered 7.07% market share, beating the search giant's 7.03% market share.

The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame. Facebook briefly topped Google last Christmas and New Year's, but this is the first time the website's weekly numbers have beaten Google.

The new data is sure to unnerve Google, which has been trying to crack into the social networking market -- with controversial results. For Facebook, the data will add further fuel to its push to go public sometime in the next year or two, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg has suggested. Analysts predict that when Facebook does go public, it could see an immediate valuation of $35 billion -- a figure which could rise to $100 billion by 2015.

Read more here.

*****

USC Annenberg Launches Multimedia Series

The USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism has teamed up with the Center for Investigative Reporting to launch a multimedia series titled “Hunger in the Golden State.”

The series, to debut March 19, will run in newspapers, on radio stations and online news outlets statewide over the next three weeks.

Over the course of six months, USC Annenberg journalism graduate students interviewed dozens of state and local-level food bank officials as well as the Californians who struggle with food shortages every day. The reporting unearthed new numbers that show hunger is rising at an unprecedented rate nationwide, affecting millions - including those in affluent areas - but is invisible to many.

The stories explore food waste, nutrition in schools and ways to help Californians fighting to ward off hunger. The project reveals that nearly one in eight people in California has asked for food assistance in the last year. Food banks and social services are overwhelmed, reporters found.

The Los Angeles Times teamed a staff reporter with a student to produce a story explaining how California leaves millions of federal dollars on the table because of problems in the way the state runs its end of the food stamp program.

Read more here.

*****

The Newsonomics of Emerging News Video
(By Ken Doctor / Nieman Lab)

The New York Times. Video. Three years ago, that seemed like an oxymoron, save the Times’ occasional forays into TV experiments. Now, Times TV pops up in front of us on airplane TVs and news video has become an emerging feature of Times sites. As Apple and NYT staffers plot behind closed doors in the Times building, we can expect that Times video will be a key element of the iPad NYT launch.

Behind what we see, though, are some critical developments in processing of digital video, the behind-the-scenes heavy lifting that often determines time-to-market, and business failure or success.

For the Times, it’s not a matter of harvesting decades of archived film; it’s about making the most of its last three years of a video push. The Newsonomics are these:

• Make more licensing income off the video. ...
• Better usage of companies’ own produced video (and partnered video) on their own websites, apps, and tablets. ...
• Put your content into new marketplaces. ....

Lastly, the outsourcing here is essential. News companies are in learning mode — what is it they do best?; what do they leave to others. In this case, the Times and others are applying my Newsonomics Law #9: Apply the 10 Percent Rule, the heavy lifting of journalism can be aided and abetted by smart use of technology.

Video is in the air — C-SPAN’s release of its volumimous archives reenforces that notion — but as usual, it’s the less-glamorous, behind-the-scenes work that will separate the winners from the companies stuck in text mode.

Read more here.

*****

Google and Partners Seek TV Foothold
(New York Times)

Google and Intel have teamed with Sony to develop a platform called Google TV to bring the Web into the living room through a new generation of televisions and set-top boxes.

The move is an effort by Google and Intel to extend their dominance of computing to television, an arena where they have little sway. For Sony, which has struggled to retain a pricing and technological advantage in the competitive TV hardware market, the partnership is an effort to get a leg up on competitors.

The partners envision technology that will make it as easy for TV users to navigate Web applications, like the Twitter social network and the Picasa photo site, as it is to change the channel.

Some existing televisions and set-top boxes offer access to Web content, but the choice of sites is limited. Google intends to open its TV platform, which is based on its Android operating system for smartphones, to software developers. The company hopes the move will spur the same outpouring of creativity that consumers have seen in applications for cellphones.

Google is expected to deliver a toolkit to outside programmers within the next couple of months, and products based on the software could appear as soon as this summer.

Read more here.

*****

... and this one's just for fun... to prove that, despite all those newfangled high-tech tools, sometimes the old ways are the best ways...

Journalist Scoops Press and Police with Simple Google Search
(Journalism.co.uk)

Danish police had been searching for Rumenian murder suspect Marian Clita for a good 24 hours when Norwegian journalist Andreas Lunde Googled him, found his phone number and got him on the line.

In a scoop that almost beggars belief, ABC Nyheter’s Andreas Lunde, tracked down the man wanted for the brutal murder of Norwegian Scandinavian Airline stewardess Vera Vildmyren in Copehnhagen, a man sought by both the police and the press, with a simple Google Search.

“I found a blog post he had commented on, using his name and phone number when doing so, put the Rumenian land code in front of the number and called,” Lunde told Danish TV2 News.

Clita picked up the phone, confirmed he was indeed Marian Clita, professed to be unaware the police was searching for him, but, when asked if he had any knowledge of the murder, said he would get a taxi to the police station in ten minutes – and kept his word.

Read the whole story here.

Google's Storytelling Ad: Here Are 6 More

Lots of theories circulating about why Google's Super Bowl ad ("Parisian Love") was such a smash hit.

We think its charm and popularity can be summed up in one word.

Storytelling.

Look how cleverly it hooks and rivets you with its suspenseful, fast-paced narrative. A character, a quest, an obstacle, a climax, a satisfying resolution.

All in less than a minute.



Lesson for videojournalists: look for the natural dramatic arc as you shoot and edit your non-fiction narratives. It's what will make them memorable.

Now here's a treat: six more similarly structured short storytelling videos, courtesy of Google's "Search Stories" channel on YouTube. Enjoy!

Out of Office



Mad to Live



High School



Potholes



Cheermobile



Newbie

We Watched 33.2 Billion Online Videos in Dec.

American online video viewing continues to surge in popularity. December 2009 data from the comScore Video Metrix service shows that nearly 178 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month. A record 33.2 billion videos were viewed during the month.

The top outlet by far is YouTube/Google, with 13.2 billion video views.

Hulu ranked second with more than 1 billion videos viewed, an all-time high for the property, and representing 3.0 percent market share. Microsoft Sites ranked third with 561 million (1.7 percent), followed by Fox Interactive Media with 551 million (1.7 percent) and Yahoo! Sites with 539 million (1.6 percent).

Nearly 178 million viewers watched an average of 187 videos per viewer during the month of December. Google Sites (YouTube) attracted 135.8 million unique viewers during the month (97.5 videos per viewer), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 59.8 million viewers (9.0 videos per viewer) and Fox Interactive Media with 56.8 million viewers (9.7 videos per viewer). The average Hulu viewer watched 22.9 videos during the month, representing another all-time high for the property.

This certainly bodes well for purveyors of videojournalism who were once worried that people wouldn't sit still long enough to enjoy videos on their computer screens.

Read more here.

A New News Platform: Google's Living Stories

Those Google geniuses are at it again. Take a look at Living Stories, "a new, experimental way to consume news, developed by a partnership between Google, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. You can read the same reporting and analysis that you expect from the Times and the Post, delivered on a highly interactive platform."

One video is worth 10,000 words:



Happily, these Living Stories include visual elements, including slideshows and video.

Read the behind-the-scenes story on the creation of Living Stories, and let us know what you think. Once it's fleshed out to incorporate more topics, is this something you plan to use? Why or why not?

What Hath Satan Wrought?

It was 40 years ago this week that a computer at UCLA "talked" to a computer at Stanford, thus paving the way for what would become the Internet and, in the '90s, the Web.

If you click on the image at the top right, you'll see a record of the first message sent over the ARPANET, as it was then called, as annotated and preserved by Leonard Kleinrock, who is still a UCLA computer professor.

This record is an excerpt from the "IMP Log" that we kept at UCLA. I was supervising the student/programmer Charley Kline (CSK) and we set up a message transmission to go from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the SRI SDS 940 Host computer. The transmission itself was simply to "login" to SRI from UCLA. We succeeded in transmitting the "l" and the "o" and then the system crashed! Hence, the first message on the Internet was "Lo!".

And behold!

In their 40th-anniversary salutes this week, an astonishing number of media outlets got their chronology all wrong, and placed the oft-designated "fathers of the Internet," Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, at the scene on Oct. 29, 1969.

In fact, it wasn't until the early 70s that Kahn and Cerf invented the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the technologies used to transmit information on the Internet.

Cerf is now Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, and in this 2008 Beet.TV video interview, he provides some interesting perspective on the future of the Web, especially as it relates to video consumption.



You'll find good articles about the birth and development of the Internet in Forbes, and in the Guardian of London. Forbes also has an excellent Internet Anniversary quiz.

A day after the anniversary, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced that it would accept Web addresses (URLs) in non-Latin letters, meaning that next year you'll start seeing Websites in Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi, Cyrillic (Russian), and, most prominently, Chinese.

"This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and an historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet," ICANN's President and CEO Rod Beckstrom said.

From our perspective, nothing has evolved as much as video. When we built our first Website in the early '90s, there were less than 1,000 Websites in existence, and most of them were known as "personal pages," manually catalogued by Yahoo (in that pre-database, pre-Google era). Everything was "flush left" and with a 14K modem, it took forever for a small still image to load. You'd pray it didn't crash your computer, forcing you to reboot. Video? Fuhgetaboutit! If you wanted to view a 5-second clip, you'd start downloading it at bedtime to view when you awoke in the morning.

Now, of course, you can watch entire movies and TV episodes via the Web, and we're at the point where the Web is becoming the primary media outlet for video production and consumption. And though more than 1.6 billion people around the world are connected to the network, that still represents only a fifth of the planet's population -- so adventures aplenty lie ahead.

We planned to write this ode on Thursday, the actual anniversary date, but we've been laid low with a nasty cold. So, yes, you might well ask, why is it that we can befriend thousands of strangers from places we've never been, and communicate with them in real time, for free, halfway around the planet ... and we still can't find a cure for the common cold?

Attention Newspapers: Video Improves Your Google Ranking

If you don't have video on your Website, you jeopardize your chances of getting a top Google search ranking.

That's a lesson that newspapers should take to heart, judging from the advice of Bruce Clay, a veteran of the search engine optimization (SEO) industry.

In an interview with ReelSEO, Clay discusses what is known as "Engagement Objects" -- multimedia components such as MP3 audio files or videos that Web page visitors can interact with.

Whereas Google once used 120 variables to rank Websites, thanks to "engagement objects" its algorithms now incorporate 200.

In the case of video, we believe that as one of the more important engagement objects, Google has actually started to build it into the algorithm. That means if your Website has video on it, it is going to be received by the algorithm better and your site will actually have an opportunity to rank better.

A year from now, we are going to be sitting here saying, "If you don’t have video, if you don’t have engagement objects on your website, you are just not going to rank. It will make you last among equals if you don’t have it.”

This corroborates the findings of Nate Elliot at Forrester Research earlier this year, in his study, “The Easiest Way to a First-Page Ranking on Google.” He concludes:

“Not only are video results increasingly common in Google’s search results, but your videos stand a 50 times greater chance than your text pages of being shown on the first results page.”

Forrester's tips for optimizing video for best search results:

* Insert keywords into your video filenames.

* Host your videos on YouTube, and embed those YouTube videos into your own site. Google says its algorithms consider how many times a video is viewed, and any views embedded videos receive on your own site get added to the 'views' tally on YouTube. (And yes, nearly every video we saw Google blend into its results came from YouTube.)

* Optimize your YouTube videos by writing keywords into your videos' titles, descriptions, and tags.

* Embed videos into relevant text pages on your site. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about.

* Also create a video library on your site, so Google knows where to find your video content. (Google Video Sitemaps can help with this too.) Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.

Many newspaper Websites bury their video, poorly annotate it, and make it impossible to navigate (from text story to video and back, or from one video to another). They would do well to heed the advice from marketing pros, and start affording their potentially most valuable asset better care and treatment!

Watch the video interview with Bruce Clay here.

Hey, Google Labs, How About a 'Fast Peek'?

Google Labs just launched Fast Flip, which is an ingenious way of quickly browsing entire pages of online publications that enables the publications themselves to better share in ad revenues. Everyone benefits!

You can currently access about three dozen titles, using a variety of criteria, but even Google's own description doesn't do it justice: "Blindingly fast overviews of headline pages of top newspapers." So just go play with it for yourself.

Since Google owns YouTube, we'd like to propose a video version of this. How about a 'Fast Peek' of the top news videos? Or for the less hurried, a 'Slow Look' at some quality videojournalism. Just sayin'!

Meanwhile, if you want to see the other two dozen cool apps Google has been cooking up for you, check out Google Labs.

3D YouTube Videos? Put on Those Funny Glasses!

A Google employee's work on an online "stereoscopic player" (as a side project) came to light on YouTube's help forum, since the obvious implication is that we'll soon be watching (and able to create) 3D videos -- yup, just like those blockbusters at your local gigaplex.

The 3D project caught the attention of some astute bloggers:

* Search Engine Roundtable: "YouTube Testing 3D Videos"

* NewTeeVee: "Now Playing on YouTube: Experimental 3D Videos"

Users are able to choose from one of ten 3D viewing styles (e.g. “Red/Cyan Glasses: Full Color"). Uploaders can enable the view mode by using the tag “yt3d:enable=true.”

Here’s a snippet from an Idaho farmer’s market from a YouTuber who’s been fiddling with the feature. (NOTE: Double-click on each of the embedded videos below to see their original 3D versions, with scrolldown options: Red/Cyan glasses, Amber/Blue glasses, Green/Magenta glasses, etc..)



For the full-fledged techie treatment, try this:

Depth-Dependent Halos: Illustrative Rendering of Dense Line Data



For something prettier, try the 3D experiments of this Japanese YouTube creator, especially "3D Waltz of the Flowers":



Now all you videojournalists need to put on your thinking caps and determine how this technology is going to best help you tell your stories.

What New Media Has in Common with Jell-o

Did you have any idea how fascinating Jell-o is? Not just the product, but its colorful history. It's the subject of an engaging chapter in the new bestseller, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price," by Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.

Jell-o, a 19th century invention, was arguably the first product to exploit the concept of "free" as a successful marketing technique -- not by giving out free samples, but rather by printing tens of thousands of pamphlets with Jell-O recipes for its salesmen to distribute to homemakers for free.

Gelatin comes from flesh and bones. It's the translucent, glutinous substance that skims to the top when you boil meat. But if you collect enough of it and purify it, adding color and flavor, it becomes something else: Jell-O. A clean powder in a packet, far removed from its abattoir origins of marrow and connective tissue.

After its inventor had failed to make a go of marketing it, he sold the company to an enterprising businessman named Orator Frank Woodward, who devised the free pamphlet scheme.

Thus was born one of the most powerful marketing tools of the twentieth century: giving away one thing to create demand for another. What Woodward understood was that "free" is a word with an extraordinary ability to reset consumer psychology, create new markets, break old ones, and make almost any product more attractive. He also figured out that "free" didn't mean profitless. It just meant that the route from product to revenue was indirect, something that would become enshrined in the retail playbook as the concept of a "loss leader."

Anderson, who is also the author of "The Long Tail," was recently a guest on NPR's "Fresh Air" with host extraordinaire Terry Gross. He discussed "Free" in the context of media institutions struggling with how to survive in a world where their product has been seemingly devalued to zero.

Among the topics Anderson addresses:

• Why the traditional advertising model hasn't worked on the Web;
  
• Why media outlets haven't yet figured out how to customize video ads and match them to appropriate videos that showcase them in appropriate environments;
  
• How the Wall Street Journal is successfully employing the "free-mium" model, which invites everyone through the front door at no charge, and gives away an appreciable amount of content, and then charges for niche or premium content;
  
• How each medium copies the previous one -- radio was TV with pictures; the Web was print with hyperlinks -- and then builds to the next plateau;
  
• Where all the money really went when Craigslist decimated the newspaper classified ad business (Hint: it didn't go to Craigslist);
  
• The impact of "free" on the quality of journalism, with so many fewer professionals on the beat, domestically and internationally;
  
• Given that newspapers are dying but, despite e-books, print books are thriving, what is the role of the print magazine in this age?
  
• Will financial desperation destroy that formerly sacred impermeable wall between editorial and advertising, given that Google has successfully married church and state? (Or was our long-held assumption -- that editorial/ad adjacency connotes the possibility of corruption -- erroneous in the first place?)

For journalists and videojournalists struggling with the question of how to make a living in a world where their products are being given away for no money, this half-hour interview is well worth a listen.

Guess How Much Online Video We Watch?

How many online videos do you watch every month? How much time do you spend watching them?

The average U.S. Internet user watched 111 videos, for a total of 6.4 hours, during the month of April, according to data released yesterday by ComScore Video Metrix service.

Nearly 152 million U.S. Web users collectively watched 16.8 billion online videos, an increase of 16 percent from the previous month.

What's especially remarkable is that Google's YouTube accounted for 6.8 billion of those viewed videos (or 40.7 percent of the online video market), with 107.8 million viewers -- a 15 percent increase over March.

Fox Interactive Media (MySpace) ranked a distant second with 513 million videos and 58.8 million viewers (3.1 percent), followed by Hulu with 397 million videos and 40.1 million viewers (2.4 percent) and Yahoo! with 355 million videos and 45.4 million viewers (2.1 percent). Also in the top ten: Viacom, Microsoft, Turner Network, CBS, Disney, AOL.

Other notable findings for April 2009:

• 78.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
  
• The duration of the average online video was 3.5 minutes.

For the record, here at KobreGuide, we watch many hours of videojournalism every month to find the best story every weekday for you! If our average video is about 5 minutes, that would add up to nearly two hours of high-quality viewing we provide you every month. And, if you're an "average" consumer (as measured by ComScore), that would still leave you more than four hours a month for goofing around on YouTube!

So our advice: Enjoy your candy, but don't forget your veggies. They're good for you, and taste good, too!

Get Rich on YouTube?

"YouTube Videos Pull In Real Money," according to last month's New York Times headline:

Making videos for YouTube — for three years a pastime for millions of Web surfers — is now a way to make a living. One year after YouTube, the online video powerhouse, invited members to become “partners” and added advertising to their videos, the most successful users are earning six-figure incomes from the Web site.

It ain't necessarily so, says the Los Angeles Times:

YouTube video creators make money, but not a fortune. In the year since Google's preeminent video service launched its ad-revenue-sharing program with partner users, some have turned amateur video production into a full-time job. But not everyone is having the five-figure-per-month success of Michael Buckley, host of the WhatTheBuckShow, who was profiled by the New York Times.

Why the discrepancy? Apparently YouTubers sign agreements with Google preventing them from publically disclosing advertising income. Google cleared certain partners to disclose financial earnings for the New York Times story -- obviously, the most successful ones.

The big question, we're almost afraid to ask, is how does the quality of video content correlate to number of viewers and, hence, ad revenues?

LIFE Comes to Google

Need to find more Web activities to fill your day? You can now search millions of images from the LIFE magazine photo archive, stretching from 1750s etchings to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint efforts of LIFE and Google:

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We're digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.

Have fun!

(Pictured: Iconic LIFE photo of sailor kissing nurse in Times Square during impromptu VJ Day celebration, following announcement of the Japanese surrender and the end of WWII. Shot August 14, 1945 by Alfred Eisenstaedt.)

Waltzing with Animation

Ari Folman, writer and director of the celebrated new animated documentary "Waltz With Bashir," discusses his filmmaking process, from interviewing subjects to creating the unique animation for the film, with the New York Times.

Appropriately the Times created an instructive video animation of the interview (2:42). It shows what Folman tells: "You can't Google 'animated documentary' and find a manual of how to do it at home, so we had to invent everything from scratch."

It's an inventive demonstration, and as we previously wondered in our blog entry on Animated Documentaries, how soon will videojournalists start adding animation techniques to their toolkits?

Neatness Counts!

One of the things we pride ourselves on at KobreGuide is how we've nicely organized our video listings -- by channel and topic -- so that it's easy to find something great to watch. Unlike some video sites we know, wherever you are on KobreGuide, you're just a click away from more great stories. Our confidence in the importance of our well organized and easy-to-navigate grids system was underscored by this New York Times blog item: YouTube Pales Next to Hulu’s Spiffy Multiplex

Even though YouTube is a huge success with its audience, the site itself is a mess. It is visually distracting, and I never can find what I want when I want it. On Hulu, it is a lot easier to understand what is going on and find the episodes you may want to watch.

Let’s say you wanted to relax and watch a movie on your computer. What does Hulu have? One click at the top of any page gets a list of some movies and ways to find more. How do you find all the movies on YouTube? I spent five minutes wandering around the site and I still don’t know.

So maybe before Google sends more people to Hollywood seeking films, it might want to build a better online theater in which to watch them.

PBS Frontline's "News War" -- The Future of Journalism?

See part three of PBS Frontline's "News War," entitled "What's Happening to the News," segments 16-25. The series examines the mounting pressure for profits faced by America's network news divisions and daily newspapers, as well as growing challenges from cable television and the Internet.

Network executives, newspaper editors and publishers, bloggers, Wall Street analysts and key players at Google and Yahoo! discuss the battle for market dominance in a rapidly changing world.

The primary challenge to both newspapers and broadcast networks is the growing power of the Internet as a news distribution platform, pulling consumers and advertisers away from more traditional media.

But Internet news providers like Yahoo! and Google say that they are not in the business of creating content, relying instead on traditional news-gathering organizations.

If not newspapers, who will create content for the Internet news aggregators? Bloggers? Self-appointed pundits? Anyone with Internet access and an opinion, informed or otherwise?

This is clearly no longer traditional "reporting." But is this journalism?

Read about it here. View it online here. And start praying for the soul of the Fourth Estate.