The video sharing Web site now owned by Google is teaming up with Warner Music Group to produce the first-ever YouTube New Year's Eve Countdown. The promotion, which is sponsored by Chevrolet, will celebrate New Year's as it happens around the world with new videos featured every hour from New Zealand to Los Angeles.

Special video messages from YouTube celebrities, such as Boh3m3, Smosh, Terra Naomi, Renetto, Chad Vadar, and The WineKone, along with artists from WMG labels Atlantic Records, Warner Bros. Records and Warner Music International will be featured on the home page.

In addition to videos from top YouTube personalities, WMG will provide special video content from New Year's celebrations with its artists as well as music videos and concert footage. "Almost-live" videos from New Year's concerts from New York City, Scotland, Los Angeles, and Houston will be uploaded directly from the venues using mobile phones. Some of the bands playing include, Panic! At the Disco, the Goo Goo Dolls and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Users can upload their videos in a special New Year's YouTube group at www.youtube.com/group/newyears.

Nor did Edwards hope to spread his message by putting himself at the mercy of others. Like all candidates now, Edwards has his own Web site and his own videographer. As he did some volunteer work in the 9th Ward on Wednesday afternoon, he taped a message that his campaign posted later that night on his campaign Web site and on YouTube.com. What he said in that video was nearly identical to what he said to a bank of network and local television station cameras on Thursday.

Smart candidates know the old command-and-control structures of politics don't work anymore. Instead, campaigns are all about building communities and speaking directly to supporters, whether through email or podcasts or what the Edwards team calls "webisodes." As part of his announcement day, he spent a few minutes answering questions on the Daily Kos site, an influential liberal blog.

Candidates are looking for ways to get people more directly involved, by challenging them to give money not just to their campaign but to worthy causes; or by asking them to volunteer their time in New Orleans (as Edwards has done) or in their own communities, or by challenging them to take direct action politically to stop a war or a dam or to enact a piece of legislation.

The 24/7 culture demands dynamic messaging and niche marketing. Edwards offered a window into that future with his announcement day activities. By throwing out the old rules, he hopes his second bid for the White House will be more successful than the first.

Former Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards jumped into the presidential race Wednesday a day earlier than he'd planned, prodded by an Internet glitch to launch a candidacy focused on health care, taxes and other domestic issues.

The North Carolina Democrat's campaign accidentally went live with his election Web site a day before an announcement Thursday that was supposed to use Hurricane-ravaged New Orleans as a backdrop.

The Washington Post described Jessica Cutler as "our blog slut". The National Enquirer opined that she was "beautiful, untalented and morally corrupted". Now the blogger who wrote about her attempts to juggle affairs with six men while keeping a job as an aide to a senator has a new role: as the star defendant in a case that could help define what can and cannot be published in a blog.

Writing under the pseudonym Washingtonienne, Cutler described in detail the sexual intricacies of her life on the Hill. The blog, which Cutler claimed was intended to keep her friends up to date on her social life in Washington DC, achieved notoriety, and its author fame and a book contract, after it was brought to a wider public by another blog, Wonkette.

*****

The case dating from the 2004 blog is expected to go to trial soon. In establishing whether people who keep online journals are obliged to respect the privacy of those they interact with offline, the case could have a profound effect on the content of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. "Anybody who wants to reveal their own private life has a right to do that," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre. "It's a different question when you reveal someone else's private life."

Mr Steinbuch's attorney, Jonathan Rosen, told a judge in a pre-trial hearing that his client, who teaches in Arkansas, wants to restore his good name. "It's not funny and it's damaging," Mr Rosen said. "It's horrible, absolutely horrible." Cutler's attorney, Matthew Billips, had a different view: "I have no idea what he wants," he said. "He's never said, 'This is what I think should be done.'"

The judge, too, seemed bemused by the case. "I don't know why we're here in federal court to begin with," Judge Paul Friedman told attorneys in April. "I don't know why this guy thought it was smart to file a lawsuit and lay out all of his private, intimate details."

1. Web 2.0 -- 206
2. Steve Irvin -- 161
3. Mark Foley Scandal -- 142
4. Blog -- 147
5. Ajax -- 133
6. World War II -- 143
7. Snakes on a Plane -- 126
8. Meme -- 132
9. Wiki -- 129
10. RSS -- 122
11. Podcasting -- 127
12. George Bush -- 129
13. Podcast -- 111
14. Net Neutrality -- 100

PayPerPost, the leading marketplace for advertisers to reach bloggers, videographers, photographers, podcasters and social networks, today announced it has signed a Letter of Intent to acquire select assets of Performancing LLC, operator of Performancing.com, a popular Internet community site for professional bloggers. Through its purchase PayPerPost gains a number of powerful blogger support tools including Performancing Metrics, the leading, free blog analytics service, and Performancing Exchange, an online "classifieds" for bloggers.

Internet and telephone services across Asia were disrupted, hampering financial transactions, after earthquakes near Taiwan damaged undersea cables.

"The repairs could take two to three weeks," said Leng Tai-feng, president of Chunghwa Telecom Co.'s international business. The Taipei-based company, Taiwan's largest phone operator, said two of its undersea cables were cut.

A series of earthquakes, including a magnitude 7.1 tremor, struck Taiwan last night and today, killing at least two people and cutting power supplies. HSBC Holdings Plc said its online banking services were down, while Chunghwa said almost no calls could be made to Southeast Asia, causing disruption to companies including First State Investments in Singapore.

A source tells us that the working name for the project was "WikiSearch" until recently. It's clear that Wikiasari will be focused on quality first, depth second. Search results will include tag based navigation, the top three results will be wikipedia content, and the remaining results are determined by sites wikipedia considers to be "reputable" because they are external reference links from wikipedia pages.

Since all search results will be tied to wikipedia, either directly by linking to wikipedia content or because the sites are linked to from Wikipedia, real people will eventually be determining all search results and rankings within Wikiasari. The search engine will be opensource, and the index will be available under a GFDL. Wikia will operate the master version of the index, but others are free to take it under the terms of the GFDL.

The holy grail is youth-skewing Internet programming, and all the congloms said they were willing to work together to come up with a solution. On Tuesday, Viacom exited the discussions.

Getting several big media companies to work together on any joint venture is an uphill battle. But doing it in the fast-moving and risky Internet space appears to be nearly impossible.

Nonetheless, for the past couple of months, most of the congloms have been trying to put together a plan for a Web site that would let them control the online destiny of their videos, rather than allow the mega-powerful combination of YouTube and its new parent company Google to determine their fate.

That the talks will ever come to fruition became significantly less likely Tuesday, after Viacom exited the discussions along with its valuable collection of youth-skewing cable programs. Disney is already out, Time Warner isn't believed to be taking part, and CBS is said to be iffy on the prospects, leaving only News Corp. and NBC Universal definitely interested in making a deal happen.

But I also had lunch with a smart media exec who shrugged at all this news about an attempt to start TheirTube: "If there is..." he said. In other words, it could just be a negotiating ploy vs. Google and YouTube.

CoComment, the blog comment tracking service that emerged from a Swisscom project, has raised $1.5M from Netage Capital Partners, a Japanese venture fund owned by investment company Netage Group. It acquired a 40 percent stake in the Swiss venture.

Netage has holdings in several RSS projects for the Japanese market, according to its website. It is currently launching CoComment in Japan, said Swisscom in a statement. The Swiss telco also said there had been interest from investors and companies in Europe and the US, but that the Japanese investor brought the "broadest" experience and most "success" in the Internet market to the venture.

The Pandora Community lets you check out other listener's profiles and find shared stations built on multiple users' likes and dislikes. If you're a social network lover, the new community features could be a great way to interact with your fellow music-lovers and discover new favorite songs and artists. And since we're so close to Christmas, don't forget that you can use Pandora to listen to holiday music!

Given the subject matter, it was little surprise that NBC bleeped a recurring word in the chorus 16 times. But soon after the broadcast concluded at 1 a.m. Sunday, viewers who'd seen the bit on TV (and others who had just heard about it) could find the uncensored version online. That's because the network itself had placed it on its own Web site (nbc.com) and YouTube.com, under the headings "Special Treat in a Box" or "Special Christmas Box."

In less than a week the official uncensored version of the video has been viewed by over two million people on YouTube alone. In the process "Saturday Night Live" appears to have become the first scripted comedy on a broadcast network to use the Web to make an end-run around the prying eyes of both its internal censors and those of the Federal Communications Commission, whose jurisdiction over "Saturday Night Live" effectively ends at the Web frontier.

1. bebo
2. myspace
3. world cup
4. metacafe
5. radioblog
6. wikipedia
7. video
8. rebelde
9. mininova
10. wiki

Flip.com will offer girls a forum to create "flip books": multimedia scrapbooks of photographs, home-made music videos and other postings. CondeNet hopes to tap into the same creative flair that girls show when they decorate their school lockers or textbooks. The site is Conde Nast's answer to News Corp.'s MySpace, which -- along with similiar sites such as Facebook -- is drawing millions of young users and has made it difficult for magazine publishers to keep teenagers' attention. Flip is scheduled to debut in February, but 200,000 girls will be invited to a test launch today.

"These girls are so creative, they create shrines within their environment," says Dee Salomon, a vice president at CondeNet. "It must be the hormones -- they customize everything."

With readers migrating to the Web in droves, all magazines are under tremendous pressure to come up with Internet strategies, or face oblivion. Advance Publication Inc.'s Conde Nast, owner of Vanity Fair, Vogue, Teen Vogue, The New Yorker and GQ, has taken a particularly cautious approach to the Internet until recently. Now, though, the publisher that has been accustomed to being the Alpha Girl of the magazine set is taking steps to avoid becoming just another old-media outcast on the Internet.

The site shouldn't compete with MySpace -- because it can't. Teens (and I say this as a recovering one) are locked into MySpace and a few other megasites for the near future. CondeNet president Sarah Chubb seems to get that. She tells the Journal, "I don't think they'll quit MySpace, but they might tell people on their MySpace page to check out their flip book."

Bound for the news stands in 2007, the new 50-60 page monthly glossy Cool Hunter magazine will come free as a tip-on to the world's most prestigious fashion, design and lifestyle magazines. It will also be distributed throughout the world's top boutique hotels as well as our favorite stores and retailers across the globe. A fascinating read, the magazine will be brimming with feature length articles that showcase the best of cool from around the world.

The Cool Hunter magazine launching March/April 2007- a must for those in the know. Don’t miss it.

Videos Enhancements
Aside from giving Videos their own position in the top navigation, we have added a couple cool features: Top 10 hottest videos, and on-Digg video previews. Simply click any video with a play icon to get lightbox window in which you can preview and Digg the video.

Podcasting
Now you can Digg your favorite podcast series and individual podcast episodes. Not only can you see a list of the most popular podcasts by section, you can also dive into any individual podcasts to see the most Dugg individual episodes. And don't forget - every time you Digg a podcast or podcast episode that is bookmarked in your profile and shared with your friends.

While addition of video digging is understandable - watching online video is one of the fastest growing activities on the Internet - it is hard to fathom Digg's efforts when it comes to podcasting. Despite lot of hype, podcasting hasn't gone mainstream. Listening to a podcasts takes a lot more time than reading a story, or watching a 120-second video.

"Digg is about sharing, and if people want to share podcasts, we want to give the ability to do that," says Adelson, and adds that it was one of the most requested features by Digg users. We don't give it much of a chance, but then we might be wrong. However, the podcast digging could eventually result in Digg expanding to say - music or photos. Now that could be fun!

During an appearance last night on MSNBC, DeLay was asked about the mechanics of writing for his new blog. "Well, I'm not a very good writer," DeLay acknowledged. "I have the ideas, and I have somebody else put the words together." Apparently he still isn't interested in doing research on the Internet.

Glossy online fashion portal Glam Media has gotten $18.5 million in Series C funding to expand the Web site and its sales and editorial staff, the company announced.

Duff Ackerman & Goodrich Ventures led the latest funding round, which was announced Thursday.

Also participating were existing investors blue-chip VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which helped launch eBay, Accel Partners, an investor in Facebook, as well as WaldenVC and Information Capital.

In a separate announcement, Glam said that CNET Chairman Jarl Mohn had invested in the company and would serve as an advisor.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

How would you like to watch 10 people travel across the Country and see 366 professional sporting events in 366 days starting Jan 1st 2008? That is what I, Joe McMackin, am setting out to do. Why 366 days? Because 2008 is a leap year. In regards to the other nine people that go with me, it will be a mix of friends and people who can bring me value. Being a great driver, film editor, writer, website designer/developer, or bringing in a large sponsor are the types of value you can bring to this trip.

Facebook, the social-networking Web site courted by Yahoo! Inc., isn't for sale, board member Peter Thiel said.

"It's going to remain an independent company," Thiel said in an interview last week. "The plan is to actually build it, maybe at some point take it public, but definitely not to sell it."

Facebook, having turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo, is taking a different path than YouTube, which sold itself to Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, and MySpace, now owned by News Corp. Thiel, one of Facebook's three board members, said the company is focused finding the best way to make money from its millions of members.

Started in 2004 by Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook is now one of the fastest growing sites on the Web. Thiel, 39, says the site's college-aged users make it worth $8 billion or more, as much as Viacom Inc.'s MTV music video channel.

And from the blogosphere, Perez Hilton is the most-searched blog site of 2006, generating 91 percent more search interest than the second most popular blog site with web searchers, Huffington Post. While Huffington Post provides news and opinions, three of the top five most-searched blog sites this year cater to celebrity gossip news, including Perez Hilton, a.k.a. Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr., TMZ, a.k.a. "Thirty Mile Zone" around Hollywood, and Pink is the New Blog. The fifth most popular blog site in 2006 is PostSecret, an ongoing community art project where people anonymously email their secrets on postcards.

The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.

The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.

***

Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said the reason for the levelling off in blogging was due to the fact that most people who would ever start a web blog had already done so.

He said those who loved blogging were committed to keeping it up, while others had become bored and moved on.

Blogging and community contributors will peak in the first half of 2007. Given the trend in the average life span of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, there are already more than 200 million ex-bloggers. Consequently, the peak number of bloggers will be around 100 million at some point in the first half of 2007.

With the launch of StumbleVideo, the company is betting that people will enjoy discovering new videos in the very same way, and spend even more time "channel surfing." "People demand instant access to online video content that's personally gratifying, and they don't want to spend all day looking for it. That's where StumbleUpon fits in," says Feller. "StumbleVideo allows people to discover great videos they would likely never find using traditional keyword searches. The experience is like channel surfing through video content that is laser-targeted to your tastes."

Using the service is easy, in fact, new users don't even need to register or install anything. Simply point your favorite browser to www.stumblevideo.com and use the integrated flash video player to start the surfing experience. You can immediately start rating the videos shown and let StumbleVideo learn from your preferences and find tune what gets shown to you next. Feller tells us, once a user has viewed "75-100" videos, it's a pretty safe bet they'll be interested in joining the community, so at that point StumbleVideo will prompt you to register and save your preferences.

It could certainly turn out to be addictive and rack up pageviews, but somehow I feel it's a bit too solitary: the thing that makes YouTube videos compelling for me is reading the comments, not viewing the clips themselves. That said, I know some Stumblers who are going to love this new release.

What is the "Embed" button and how do I use it?
The Embed button provides code that allows you to post MotherLoad videos on your blog or profile page. There are two versions of the code: one for Myspace users and one for users of other sites.

Why does the "Embed" button give two different formats?
Because Myspace does not allow links to external sites from Flash modules, comedycentral.com has provided a HTML-based version of the player for Myspace users. This allows Myspace users to rate the video they are watching or search the comedycentral.com site for more videos like

What does the "expired" date mean?
Due to licensing agreements we're unable to keep this clip available on the site past the expiration date. We hope you enjoy it while we have it up.

The finding comes from a comScore report on U.S. Internet audience numbers for November that's due out later this week.

"Fox Interactive Media is obviously driven primarily by MySpace," comScore analyst Michael Rubin said Monday. "The bulk of their growth is from MySpace."

Fox Interactive Media's total U.S. page views increased to 39.5 million from 38.7 million during November. By contrast, Yahoo’s page views declined to 38 million from 41.6 million.

"Fox Interactive Media passed Yahoo for top property by page views for the first time," UBS analyst Benjamin Schachter wrote on Monday in a report.

The legislation, drafted by Sen. John McCain and obtained by CNET News.com, would also require Web sites that offer user profiles to delete pages posted by sex offenders.

In a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday, the Arizona Republican and former presidential candidate warned that "technology has contributed to the greater distribution and availability, and, some believe, desire for child pornography." McCain scored 31 of 100 points on a News.com 2006 election guide scoring technology-related votes.

After child pornography or some forms of "obscenity" are found and reported, the Web site must retain any "information relating to the facts or circumstances" of the incident for at least six months. Webmasters would be immune from civil and criminal liability if they followed the specified procedures exactly.

Internet service providers already must follow those reporting requirements. But McCain's proposal is liable to be controversial because it levies the same regulatory scheme -- and even stiffer penalties -- on even individual bloggers who offer discussion areas on their Web sites.

"I am concerned that there is a slippery slope here," said Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "Once you start creating categories of industries that must report suspicious or criminal behavior, when does that stop?"

According to the proposed legislation, these types of individuals or businesses would be required to file reports: any Web site with a message board; any chat room; any social-networking site; any e-mail service; any instant-messaging service; any Internet content hosting service; any domain name registration service; any Internet search service; any electronic communication service; and any image or video-sharing service.

The U.S. Justice Department, for instance, indicted an Alabama man named Jeff Pierson last week on child pornography charges because he took modeling photographs of clothed minors with their parents' consent. The images were overly "provocative," a prosecutor claimed.

The other section of McCain's legislation targets convicted sex offenders. It would create a federal registry of "any e-mail address, instant-message address, or other similar Internet identifier" they use, and punish sex offenders with up to 10 years in prison if they don't supply it.

Then, any social-networking site must take "effective measures" to remove any Web page that's "associated" with a sex offender.

I believe in a theory I'll call "The Stupidity of Crowds". Here's the basic idea: if just one person or a small group of people builds a website, they have to be at least moderately intelligent. Buying servers and writing programs is somewhat hard and takes a little bit of brainpower. This means that the content for their site will be similarly intelligent and thus it won't be of interest to the vast majority of Internet users.

The glorious thing about the Internet, however, is that it allows us to aggregate the combined stupidity of literally millions of people. No longer do you have to try to play towards the lowest common denominator -- now you can actually have the lowest common denominator build your site for you. No single mortal could possibly come up with the content you find on the average MySpace, let alone the hideous color scheme, garish backgrounds, and awful auto-playing background music. No, something like that takes The Stupidity of Crowds.

Defamation Claims. Defamation claims represent a growing threat to employers as a result of the increased popularity of employee maintained blogs. To the same extent that an employer may be liable for defamatory publications of its employees, an employer may also be liable for an employee's defamatory private blog on topics that fall within the scope of the employee's employment or within the employee's actual or apparent authority. Even if an employee's statements are outside the scope of employment, an employer may find itself named as a defendant in a defamation suit if the blogging employee is the supervisor of the defamed individual or the employee's blog references the employer. The chance that an innocent employer may be a defendant in the latter situation is increased because bloggers often blog anonymously, leaving the employer as the only readily identifiable potential source of the defamatory blog.

Harassment Claims. An employer may also be subject to liability for sexual harassment and hostile work environment claims based on an employee's private blogging activities, if a supervisor authors inappropriate comments about an employee or if the employer had knowledge that an employee authored harassing blogs about a co-employee. For example, in Blakey v. Continental Airlines, a pilot filed a hostile work environment claim against Continental Airlines arising out of derogatory comments posted about her on a pilots' electronic bulletin board operated by a third-party service provider. The court held that Continental Airlines has a duty to take effective measures to stop co-employee harassment when it knows or has reason to know that such harassment is part of a pattern of harassment taking place in settings related to the workplace. The Blakey decision confirms that employer liability may extend beyond mere employer-provided blogs.

Economic Damages to Employers. An employer's business itself may be harmed by defamatory comments on employee blogs. Employees may use blogs as a means to anonymously defame employers, supervisors, or other employees which may harm employee morale, result in a loss of good will with patrons, or damage the employer's public image. In the late 1990s, for example, Southern Pacific Funding Corporation filed for bankruptcy after its stock prices fell from a high of $17 to $1 - a spiral triggered by blog postings claiming that company executives were covering up multi-million dollar embezzlement, exaggerating economic forecasts and putting the company up for sale.

Disclosure of Confidential Information. Blogging activities may also result in the unauthorized release of company information and data into the public domain. Whether published by a disgruntled employee or a loyal yet naive worker, a blog that discusses an employer's confidential, business or financial information may have far-reaching and harmful consequences for the employer, such as the dissemination of trade secrets. Similarly, the unwanted release of business or financial information may result in securities law violations, such as unlawful release of inappropriate information in advance of an initial public offering.

Tom DeLay's back, this time on the Internet. Friends tell us that the powerful former House majority leader, dubbed the "Hammer" for his tough persuasion tactics, this week unveils TomDeLay.com, where he'll blog—DeLay's Daily—on newsy issues and build a coalition he's calling Grassroots, Action, and Information Network.

I have created this blog in order to provide Americans with a new meeting place where such opinions and viewpoints might be better shared, discussed, and debated; a place where conservative Americans might really speak truth to power and to one another.

In all honesty, I did not fully realize the impact or potential of the blogosphere until very recently, when Red State gave me the opportunity to post some of my observations in the wake of the recent midterm elections. The response I received was overwhelming, and I would like to again thank the fine people at that site.

This experience brought me to the immediate realization that I needed to become more directly involved in the blogosphere. TomDeLay.com is the product of our latest effort to find new ways to connect, unite and organize conservatives from all over America into a real grassroots political force.

It is not clear how much traction Wikia company has gained. The company says more than two thousand wiki sites have been created on its platform, edited by 30,00 registered users. Wikia wants to users do everything outside of Wikipedia's collaborative encyclopedia process.

It enables "groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions." Wikis are useful, because they let fans - Nascar fans, for example - find information and express themselves. But they are tricky to manage, and Wikia's format isn't exactly elegant. Wikia was founded by Jimmy Wales, the founder Wikipedia, which is one of the rare wiki success stories so far. Part of Wikia's round (amount undisclosed) includes the purchase of the sports community site, ArmchairGM for more than $2 million, underscoring how Wikia is having to reach out to acquire talent and technology. Wikia says it will use the ArmChairGM technology to help it incorporate user-generated news and voting into future Wikia fan sites. With Amazon behind it, Wikia could presumably be used to form wikis around various Amazon product lines. Wikia says it will look for more acquisitions.

Chinese Internet company Baidu launched its blog search service on Thursday to help Internet users navigate their way through the 20 million Chinese bloggers.

It is the first Chinese search service specifically for blogs.

Yu Jun, a senior executive with Baidu, said the service was based on a database of billions of websites, including all the blogs supported by Chinese blog service providers and individual blog websites.

The new service is expected to boost Baidu's users. Baidu started its space channel last July to provide blog services.

Many people have asked about the meaning of our name. "Baidu" was inspired by a poem written more than 800 years ago during the Song Dynasty. The poem compares the search for a retreating beauty amid chaotic glamour with the search for one's dream while confronted by life's many obstacles. ".hundreds and thousands of times, for her I searched in chaos, suddenly, I turned by chance, to where the lights were waning, and there she stood." Baidu, whose literal meaning is hundreds of times, represents persistent search for the ideal.

The Quick Capture tool uses an Adobe Flash Player API to connect to the user's webcam. The user must first grant the Flash Player permission to use the camera and microphone-and must do so every time-before using the service. Once the user grants permission, he or she must then select the type of connection being used for the video and microphone: DV, FireWire, or USB.

After entering in the title, description, tags, and categories in the text boxes to the left, the user is all set to click the "Record" button. Videos are saved directly to the site, no encoding necessary. In fact, a user who wants to post videos to YouTube using the Quick Capture method doesn't need to have any software at all, aside from a working web browser. One thing that Quick Capture currently lacks is the ability to edit your videos once they're recorded, though, so editing-savvy users may still prefer to record videos on their own.

Netanyahu started a Hebrew blog this week in order to reach his constituents while bypassing the media and to allow him to write longer articles that the media would not publish.

Netanyahu's spokesman said that the opposition leader wanted to post his articles in English but was looking for a staff of volunteers to help.

Readers of the website can already send messages to Netanyahu on his site, www.netanyahu.org.il, in many languages.

I've been scooped before, but not like this. I call Robert Scoble to interview him for a column I'm writing on blogging and I end up being the story - a story that's posted before I'm even back from lunch.

Seriously, Scoble who rose to fame as a Microsoft blogger and now works on video podcasting at PodTech.net, is a nice guy who was gentle in his criticism and constructive in his advice. And he asked if could write about me on his Scobleizer blog.

(Hey, I call to him to say I'm attention starved and he asks if he can write about me. Of course, I said yes.)

Metacafe's headquarters are in Tel Aviv and Palo Alto, California. The company employs 40 people.

Metacafe is one of the largest video-sharing sites on the Web. Every month about 17 million users enter the site and watch more the 450 million video clips uploaded by the users themselves. The Tel Aviv-based company is considered a direct competitor of YouTube, which was sold to Google for USD 1.65 billion.

So, there are hundreds of utterly worthless blog-related pages on Wikipedia. Some are genuinely notable, but others are just self-promoting vanity / spam.

Here's some quick guidelines for a non-notable blog:

1. Is it an article about a blog?
2. Is the article title the blog title?
3. Is the blog's first hit on google when searching for the said blog title?
4. Can most of the "about" info be gathered from clicking "about" link on the blog?
5. Is the rest of the shit inane garbage blatantly promoting the said blog?

If so, the blog is a perfect candidate for getting deleted from Wikipedia. Make sure to check alexa and google, and search for "exact" blog name. Skip through a few 'next' pages on google, to get total number of 'unique' hits, the rest being uselessly duplicated content. Then nominate it for deletion

Pierce defends himself by listing his accomplishments, including appearances on G4TV, mentions in the New York Times and Washington Post, having a word he coined ("blook") a nominee for Oxford's word of the year, and is the number three result when you Google the name "Tony". This doesn't mention the hundreds of additional bloggers who credit Pierce with inspiring them to write, or influencing their style. Rank wise, of the millions of blogs online, Technorati has listed his Busblog in the top 500, and Blogebrity ranked Pierce an "A List" blogger when it launched almost two years ago.

It would seem that within the field of blogging, Tony Pierce is doubtlessly notable - so is the notability of the field of blogs a legitimate issue, or coud this be a coordinated attack on blogs by Wikipedia users who don't like the medium and some of its players?

I decided to educate Microsoft about the use of images licensed under Creative Commons and hosted by third-party sites by using the same tactics employed in its own fight against piracy, but with a little twist. I edited the Goatse image to remove depictions of anything that might be considered offensive, and placed the Creative Commons circle logo covering up the focus of the image. The modified image was meant to send a message to readers of the Internet Explorer team's blog that the new picture was out of place, and ensure quick corrective action from Microsoft. I was unsure how many employees in the software division would get the subtle reference to Microsoft's own anti-piracy efforts.

He wasn't pleased that Microsoft used his photo on a commercial site, without attribution. In addition, he said, the use of the photo violated the Flickr terms of service by not linking back to the site.

"Basically they stole one of my photos and put it on their blog," Kennedy said. "I decided to make them very aware of that fact."

Presumably, they are. The updated RSS Team post now concludes with an apology to Kennedy for the improper use, in addition to an apology to readers who saw the second image. What's your opinion of what Kennedy did? Was he justified? Should be interesting to see what people think of this one.

I'm sure that gets everyone 16 and under to laugh, but is that really the best way that Niall could have gotten the image taken down?

I don't think so. Unprofessional, especially for someone who used to work at Microsoft.

Remember Niall, maybe someday this Web 2.0 bubble will end and you might need to go back to a company and look for a job. I know that doesn't seem probable right now, but I've been there.

A Japanese entertainment group has asked the popular video-sharing site YouTube Inc. to implement a system to prevent users from uploading videos that would infringe copyrights, a group spokesman said Tuesday.

The Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers sent a letter making the request addressed to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen by express mail and e-mail on behalf of 23 Japanese TV stations and entertainment companies, according to Takashi Fujii, a spokesman for the Jasrac group.

The letter requested that YouTube introduce a preliminary screening system to prevent copyrighted clips from being posted. It also asked for a series of provisional measures, including posting a notice in Japanese about illegal uploads, requiring uploaders to register and terminating users who violate copyright.

The frenzy of activity around video is one of the main reasons we are starting this new blog. The torrent of news, is such that it is almost impossible to keep up with everything, and write about companies and technologies on our flagship property.

The $1.65 billion deal that sent me an diet5; phone companies changing their stripes6 and old media companies like CBS deciding that YouTube is good for ratings - these are signs that something profound is happening.

It is a time of confusion, creation and disruption. Which means it is perfect time for a new blog devoted to what Jeff Jarvis describes as "exploding TV." A new blog that aspires to make sense of it all, and at the same time has fun doing it. Technologies, companies, people… everything will be part of the NewTeeVee's focus.

Starting tomorrow, the photos and videos submitted will be placed throughout Reuters.com and Yahoo News, the most popular news Web site in the United States, according to comScore MediaMetrix. Reuters said that it would also start to distribute some of the submissions next year to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media outlets that subscribe to its news service. Reuters said it hoped to develop a service devoted entirely to user-submitted photographs and video.

"There is an ongoing demand for interesting and iconic images," said Chris Ahearn, the president of the Reuters media group. He said the agency had always bought newsworthy pictures from individuals and part-time contributors known as stringers.

"This is looking out and saying, 'What if everybody in the world were my stringers?'" Mr. Ahearn said.

The project is among the most ambitious efforts in what has become known as citizen journalism, attempts by bloggers, start-up local news sites and by global news organizations like CNN and the BBC to see if readers can also become reporters.

Users will not be paid for images displayed on the Yahoo and Reuters sites. But people whose photos or videos are selected for distribution to Reuters clients will receive a payment. Mr. Ahearn said the company had not yet figured out how to structure those payments. The basic payment may be relatively small, but he said Reuters was likely to pay more to people offering exclusive rights to images of major events. For now, no money is changing hands between Yahoo and Reuters, but if Reuters is able to create a separate news service with the user-created material, it will split the revenue with Yahoo.

Some marketers offer "content generation services," where they sell stories to Web sites for the sole purpose of getting them submitted to Digg and other sites. This combination of spam and blogs is called "splogs." The stories often feature topics and keywords in headlines that are likely to appeal to the Digg crowd, such as "geeks" and "Apple."

Lazier but still tricky marketers merely scrape content off legitimate sites to put up on their own sites in a technique called "link jacking." In essence, they are hijacking the links that should go back to the original site, experts say.

In a posting last week titled "The Spam Farms of the Social Web," blogger Niall Kennedy detailed how a suspicious item recently made it among the top five stories on Digg before the community "buried" it. The Digg user submission links to a story entitled "Geek's Guide to Getting in Shape: 13 Surefire Tips" written by "Dental Geek" for the i-Dental Resources blog. The blog site has links to other pages with ads that offer content creation marketing services and which collect money for dental plans sold, Kennedy said.

Digg isn't alone in these problems. News aggregator Reddit and Delicious, where users swap Internet bookmarks, are also susceptible, Kennedy said.

For $.99 cents a month FakeYourSpace lets you buy "hotties" both male and female to add to your MySpace profile as friends and what's more they even post 2 comments a week. Oh and fear not, those comments will be germaine because you'll be the on writing them.

FakeYourSpace claims to make it "easy for any regular person to make it seem like they have a Model for a friend." Which is really all we want right - the illusion of friends?

FakeYourSpace is an exciting new service that enables normal everyday people like me and you to have Hot friends on popular social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Not only will you be able to see these Gorgeous friends on your friends list, but FakeYourSpace enables you to create customized messages and comments for our Models to leave you on your comment wall. FakeYourSpace makes it easy for any regular person to make it seem like they have a Model for a friend. It doesn't stop there however. Maybe you want to appear as if you have a Model for a lover. FakeYourSpace can make this happen! The possibilities are endless. You can have our Models leave you any type of customized message you may wish. Want to make an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend jealous? No problem.

Wannabe Petes or Nikkis will be able to upload a video clip to the channel's revived website E4.com, giving reasons as to why they should star in the eighth season of 'Big Brother'. The auditions, which will be rated by other users and studied by producers Endemol and Channel 4 commissioning editors, with at least one online applicant guaranteed a place in the 'Big Brother' house.

The 'Big Brother' feature follows a similar path to YouTube and MySpace by offering users the chance to become instant celebrities with their homemade videos, which they can post on E4.com.

Andy Duncan, chief executive of Channel 4, said: "E4 already has a powerful connection with younger audiences and looms large in their media consumption habits.

"These viewers are the first generation to grow up with the internet and they are driving the phenomenal growth of social networking online and of user generated content as a mainstream entertainment medium. We think it's a perfect platform to launch this initiative and propel Channel 4 into one of digital media's fastest growing market places."

Asia's blogosphere is surging forward with nearly half, 46 per cent, of those online actively blogging, according to research released by Microsoft's MSN and Windows Live Online Services Business. The research showed that blogging is a social phenomenon with Asians primarily blogging as a means to maintain and build their social connections and to express themselves. The research findings are reportedly based on an online survey of more than 25,000 MSN portal visitors across seven markets.

Microsoft noted that blogging as a corporate or business tool still appears to be nascent in most markets, with little interest from consumers in blogs from business or political leaders. The exceptions are South Korea where blogging is reported to have permeated all aspects of life and India where a culture of self improvement is seeing business related blogs become popular.

The report suggested that netizens in Asia are most interested in those blogs written by friends and family (74 per cent) while blogs by work colleagues were the second most popular blog but were a distant second with only a quarter of respondents showing interest. In South Korea and India, however, respondents are most interested in blogs covering a specific topic of interest, the report said.

"Current is exploring better opportunities to distribute our content," Current TV spokesman Alex Dolan said on Friday. He declined to elaborate. A Yahoo spokesperson said the company does not comment on rumor or speculation.

Current TV, co-founded by Al Gore, is a San Francisco-based national cable and satellite channel that features video created by viewers.

"We are no longer accepting uploads to the Yahoo! Current Network, but would encourage you to upload your videos to another pod family. If you landed here with the intention of uploading to Yahoo! Current Driver, your piece should find a home in Current Speed. Yahoo! Current Traveler submissions will fit in nicely with Current Travel, and Yahoo! Current Action pods should go to Current Edge."

I haven't seen the service but Fanning explained it to me this way: Using an add on or a software download, Rupture taps into the game to automatically pull together character names, profiles, and resources, and publish them on a personalized site. Rupture will also pull together stats to create individual and guild rankings and provide a place for guilds to organize their playing. As Rupture tracks each member's playing over time, these personalized profiles evolve. And players will be able to chat in groups or with other individuals and download other addons and game demos.

Mediocrity is the only possible result of a wide sampling of opinion or input. The only idea that can survive such a mechanism is one consistent with the lowest common denominator. The mob works to ensure that all other results are weeded out. Now, we might think that it is the highest common denominator that is promoted in this environment, but it's just not so. The "highest" anything is largely held by the masses as being discriminatory and elitist. So only the lowest common denominator wins out. The point is that in this sort of environment excellence does not survive.

Excellence is not the sum of opinions. Excellence is not born of consensus. Excellence is by its very nature something far outside the average. In fact, not even good is found in the average. Average is comfortable. Average requires no great effort. Average requires nothing exceptional. Average anything is..., well, just mediocre.

I'm not anti-amateur, I'm just anti-mediocrity. Yes, low barriers to entry allow us to find the diamonds in the rough - the excellent writers and thinkers who otherwise would not have a publishing platform. Unfortunately, it also means we have to put up with a million yahoos who think they know way more than they do. Years ago I heard a minister say "if anyone tells you they have all the answers, run the other way." That's why I steer clear of Web2.0 pundits.

Mediocrity and decadence: these are now our birthright and we work feverishly to ensure that they're the primary features of our social endeavors. This sort of thing has happened before. History is filled with stories of how societies, great and small, have followed this path. We can read about their beginnings and their inevitable endings, in books - and now in the so–very–accurate and august Wikipedia (monument to the wisdom of crowds - /sarcasm).

The waxing relevant engines of our culture are teaching us to follow a pat, clichéd script that has played out over and over again for millennia. Western culture is on the downhill slope and gathering speed toward the brick wall at the bottom. I’m talking about the hill where, at the bottom, lie the heaps of rubble that history refers to: great cultures all. Welcome to culture 2.0.

So, in a nutshell, Andy believes that crowds are grunting masses of baboons, and that anything that surveys a group of people will inevitably result in mediocrity. The great are pulled down amongst the rabble. Pretty depressing, right? At one point, Andy says that "Western culture is on the downhill slope and gathering speed toward the brick wall at the bottom." It made me want to crawl into bed with a copy of Wuthering Heights and a nice bottle of Dom Perignon and wait for the mob with pitchforks to attack my castle.