Nieman Journalism Lab's New Free App

Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab released a new app this week (for iPhone/iPod/iPad) that it touts as "the best way to keep up with what's happening with the future of journalism. It brings you all the latest news from the Lab along with the best from around the web: new startups, innovation at established news organizations, and new ways to do great journalism online."

Here's what it features:

— In the Lab: The full text of all our stories here at the Lab, in mobile-friendly form. Scroll through what we’ve been writing, click through on our links — and when you’ve read a piece worth sharing, it’s easy to post it on Twitter, email it to a friend, or open it in Safari.

— On Twitter: Our Twitter feed, updated throughout the day, is an essential guide to the most interesting links on the traditional journalism world, new startups, advertising, marketing, and social media.

— Hot Links: We’re excited about this one. We’ve curated a list of the most influential corners of the future-of-news Twitterverse and, using the web service Hourly Press, scan through them for the links they’re talking about most. This list of 10 links, updated hourly, is the purest jolt of future-of-news talk online.

— Friends of the Lab: Here you’ll find the latest from our sister projects — Nieman Storyboard, Nieman Watchdog, and Nieman Reports — plus some of our other friends from Harvard. Plus, we give you quick and easy access to the public RSS feeds of some of the best sources of journalism news: The New York Times’ media coverage, paidContent, Poynter, MediaShift, Romenesko, Columbia Journalism Review, and Mashable. As always, tap on the headline to get the full story.

— Search: Curious what we’ve written about The Guardian, aggregation, Bill Keller, or MinnPost? We’ve got full-text search of the Lab’s archives, so you’re just a few taps away from finding out.

Download the free app here. And here's a video demo:

Nieman Journalism Lab iPhone app from Nieman Journalism Lab.

ComScore: Online Video Viewing is Booming

Mashable: The Social Media Guide reports that Hulu and Facebook are shattering online video records, according to the Web analytics firm ComScore.

While YouTube draws 125 million viewers per month (one billion views per day!), Hulu and Facebook are closing in with double-digit percentage gains that shatter their previous video-viewing records.

There were 27.94 billion videos viewed in October, up 7% from September. Out of that, Google/YouTube is still on top with 10.52 billion videos viewed.

The big mover in October though was Hulu. In September, the News Corp/Disney/NBC joint venture delivered 583 million views. In October, that number shot up by 31.8% to a total of 855 million video views. This is by far a record for the TV video website....

The biggest winner seems to be Facebook. In September, it had 31.18 million unique viewers. In October, that number skyrocketed by nearly 25% to 41.15 million uniques. Once again, this is a record for the world’s largest social network, and one that speaks to how powerful Facebook is becoming in the video space...

We urge newspapers that are still not convinced about the future of video, and pulling back on resources instead of investing in its future, to look at these eye-popping statistics:

* 84.4% of U.S. Internet users watched at least one online video in October.

* The average person watched 10.8 hours of online video in October.

As Mashable notes: "Online video continues to grow and the end is nowhere in sight."

Tell us, how much video do you watch every day? How much for business? For pleasure? How much at work? At home?

We still hear folks whining about having to wade through a lot of video swampland to get to the good stuff. It's faster to scan a page of headlines, and a few sentences of text, to decide what to read -- but committing to watching a video is a bigger investment of time and attention. We realize that, and that's why we created KobreGuide -- to help you find that golden needle in the haystack every day!