Youtube

Last week, comScore released its U.S. Online Video Rankings for April 2010. We noted that Vevo in particular saw big growth in its first couple of months on the Web.

But as Clickz this morning wrote, social networking site Facebook has shot up the rankings, too. With 41,335,000 unique U.S. viewers in April alone, the site is no match for Google Sites (which includes YouTube and Google Video), as the leader of the ranking for top online video properties in the United States boasts a combined viewership of more than 136 million users per month.

Facebook is climbing the rankings fast, though: comScore pegged its number of unique U.S. viewers at 13.3 million in April last year, so that means its viewership more than tripled in a year, according to the audience measurement firm.

Thus, Facebook has quietly nestled itself in the number 5 spot, just behind Yahoo Sites, Fox Interactive Media and Vevo. According to comScore, Facebook videos currently draw a bigger audience than known names like Microsoft, CBS, Hulu and Viacom.

Even if surprisingly few videos get viewed by users on average (5.6, compared to 96 on Google Sites and 24.7 on Hulu), the site seems poised for growth in this segment. With more than 400 million active users, the site could soon surpass Yahoo and Fox as one of the leading video destinations on the Web as far as the United States goes, and will likely fight a hard battle with Vevo for the number two spot in the rankings.

And as Clickz points out, a lot of the video content currently available on Facebook comes in the form of embedded YouTube units, but comScore counts views of those to Google Sites, so Facebook’s role in delivering video content to users is larger than the numbers actually suggest.

It would probably also help to stop hiding the ‘video’ page under the ‘Photos’ tab, which makes zero sense to me.

YouTube has been dabbling with its own live streams for almost two years now. It’s live streamed presidential speeches, healthcare debates, cricket matches, and a U2 concert. But so far it’s stayed away from opening up live streaming to the general YouTube populace. The copyright liability would be insane.

Nevertheless, the shadow of YouTube hangs over the budding live video streaming industry, where startups like Livestream, Justin.tv, and Ustream are making their mark. Rumors persist that YouTube is planning to enter live streaming in a bigger way than it has so far. The screenshot above hints at what that might look like. I grabbed it from this YouTube help page for Google Moderator on YouTube. It shows the channel settings for a YouTube content producer (in this case, obviously someone who works for YouTube).  The last button, which I’ve circled above, is for “Live Stream.”

Max Haot, the CEO of Livestream, believes the screenshot provides”strong evidence that Youtube is about to launch a live streaming feature,” despite the fact that it looks like the “Live Stream” button is only enabled right now for YouTube employees. “We are not sure about their choice of name,” he adds.

The simple explanation here is that the screenshot, which was put up to illustrate a different feature (the Moderator module), comes from a YouTube employee with producer access to CitizenTube, the YouTube political channel that often shows live streams. Inside YouTube, that is the button they use when they want to run a live stream.

But the button is there, and if YouTube wanted to it could roll it out as a feature to trusted partners such as brands or politicians. In fact, YouTube is actively courting political candidates and their advertising dollars with all sorts of campaign tools. It would make sense to add live video to the mix. Live virtual town hall meetings could be very popular. Officially, however, YouTube says it has no immediate plans to do so.

According to sources around Twitter, that certainly seems to be the case.

While some Turkish journalists have been protesting against the blocking of YouTube and other sites, it appears the some Google services have come under fire as well.  Presently, we have confirmation of Google Weblogs being blocked, but we have not yet been able to confirm any other services.

The blockages seem to stem from sites that criticize Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey.  Some Turkish citizens, however, have argued that they should be allowed to make their own decisions and not have a lack of information forced upon them.

According to the Turkish Hurriyet Daily News, a Turkish court can ban a complete website merely because of a single piece of content while other sites like YouTube are banned by several court decisions, instead of just one.

We’re still digging around to find some solid information on this, and would appreciate any reports that we could get from inside the borders of Turkey.

Update:

We’re hearing unconfirmed reports that this in a failed attempt to block YouTube, the Turkish government have blocked every Google Service out there.

Thank you to Oğuz Serdar for the tip.

Should We Use YouTube Moderation? —

Should We Use YouTube Moderation? is a post from Chris Pirillo

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Have you tried YouTube’s Moderation feature yet? If not, why not? If so, will it be worth keeping around for us to use? To me, it seems interesting – but relatively stunted if we can’t get a lion’s share of people to use it to generate good ideas. I’m not going to answer the same questions over and over again.

YouTube moderation in our channel will allow you pose a question or even offer up a topic for a future recording. The community can vote on whether your idea is good or not. Head over to the profile page, scroll down past the favorites to the moderator session. It’s already live on the page – at least for now. We’ll see how things go before I decide if we keep it active permanently or not.

You’ll need to sign in with a Google account, such as from Gmail or Google Docs. If we have a lot of fruitful topics and possibilities arise from your crowd-sourcing ideas, we’ll keep the moderation turned on. Answer the question of what video I should do next. Once you’ve submitted your answer, people can vote it up or down.

We can also turn these questions back to the community. If I don’t have the time to do something specific (such as build a computer), there’s always a chance that we could upload a video submitted by one of you showing off your building skills.

Keep your questions fresh and interesting. Make sure it’s something I haven’t already answered a hundred times, and that it’s something others will want to know. This is your chance to help define the YouTube channel.

• Video Marketing with YouTube: Harnessing The Power Of The Number One Social Media Viral Marketing Site! A+
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Filed under: Audio, Features, Lists

I think the need for music and rhythm is one of the most basic human needs; and as we evolve, so evolve our ways of hunting and gathering this precious commodity.

In this post, I've gathered 10 great places to expand your musical horizons: free, legal ways to discover music online, which work everywhere (not only in the US or in Europe)!

Not all of the sites below actually let you listen to music - they are not all players; but they can all help you find the next big thing, or just a tune to groove to.

Let's get started!

Uvumi

Uvumi is one of my favorite players in this space. You probably won't find much music you already know there; it's a community for budding artists, which lets them put their music online, be discovered and get direct feedback from their listeners.

I've covered Uvumi in detail, but if I had to sum it up in brief, I'd have to say that what impressed me most about the site is how well-managed it is. Marshall (the guy behind the site) seems to be taking both the listeners and the artists really seriously, and there's a true sense of community once you get into it.

YouTube Disco

When was the last time you listened to some music on YouTube? Probably sometime today or yesterday, right? It's something most of us do on a routine basis, and there's a whole cottage industry of mashups which use YouTube as a music repository and dish out recommendations.

And then there's Youtube's own Music Discovery Project. It's pretty much what you would expect, and it's certainly worth knowing about.

To see eight other ways to find and listen to music online (and a bonus mention!), keep on reading after the fold.

Bandcamp

Bandcamp seems to be geared more towards the artists than the listeners, but it's still awesome. It is meant to be used as a "band homepage", and lets artists showcase their work and sell (or give away) their music using a very slick, sophisticated interface.

One recent addition to Bandcamp is the tags page, which lets you browse music by genre or physical location (in case you'd like to see the band live).

The Hype Machine

The blogosphere remains one of the most prodigious sources for music recommendations. After all, people like talking about music. There seems to be an endless amount of music blogs, both large and small, and some also embed single tracks along with their reviews.

The Hype Machine takes a large chunk of this teeming community and aggregates it into its own interface, letting you see who's talking about what, and most importantly you can listen to audio tracks right on the site.

Grooveshark

Grooveshark is my go-to service when I just want to find one song and check it out with minimum fuss. When someone mentions a track which sounds interesting, I just fire up Grooveshark, search for it, and hit Play. Of course, that's just one way to use this incredible service.

Deezer

We've somehow never covered Deezer before, which really should be remedied. Deezer is based in France, but the interface is available in English, Italian, Germain and Spanish as well. It's similar to Grooveshark in that it is a Flash application which lets you quickly find the music you're interested in, and they also have a Radio feature.

Selection seems to be smaller than Grooveshark, though; in searching for some Ben Folds tracks, all I found was weird karaoke mixes and some MIDI files (!).

Musicovery

Musicovery presents an interesting tradeoff. The interface is really nice, but the sound quality is horrible (at least for the free service). While they claim paid subscribers get to enjoy "Hi-Fi" quality, I was unable to test this. What I could test was an interesting, if somewhat crippled way, to discover music using a canvas of associations, and an intuitive way to specify what you're looking for.

You dial in a genre, and then specify how upbeat or mellow you want your tunes to be, and Musicovery then dishes out surprisngly accurate results. But if you're serious about using this service, you should really go for the Pro option - their free service is kind of bare-bones.

Mufin

Mufin is actually one of the most amazing services on this list; I just discovered it now myself while researching for this feature, and it is simply awesome.

While the web service seems a tad generic (how unique can you be in this space, after all?), their desktop player is amazing. I'm strictly a Foobar2000 guy, for years now, but this player is good enough to make me think of switching.

It takes your music library and neatly catalogs, and lets you easily find similar tracks and email tracks (or actually, links to those tracks on Mufin's site) to your friends. It's an incredible memory hog (271MB on my system, holy cow!) but it's simple, fast and responsive.

They also have a Pro version which seems quite interesting. It has a feature which displays your entire music library as an animated cloud of tracks, which you slice and dice on-the-fly to find just the music you want. There's no trial available for the Pro version, but I have contacted Mufin to see if they'd be interested in a review. If they are, we might just do a giveaway, too.

... this is definitely one to wait for!

Allmusic

It seems like Allmusic has been around forever. This is actually one of the first music discovery services I have ever found online, and it's been going strong for years.

Allmusic features a mind-boggling mass of detailed artist and album reviews, painstakingly cataloged by mood, genre, style, theme, running time, and more. The reviews are long and comprehensive.

While you won't find full tracks on Allmusic, you can listen to short snippets. It's mainly a great way to discover artists somehow related or similar to artists you already know, so you could then go and hunt down their music via other means (or buy of on Amazon via Allmusic).

Muxtape

Remember Muxtape? Back when the service started, it was about free-for-all playlist sharing. Of course, the big labels would have none of that, and gave the service quite a thrashing.

Muxtape then went on hiatus, and came back as a service aimed at indie musicians and smaller bands who wish to share their music with the world. It's kind of like Bandcamp with an added dose of hipster-juice. Muxtape's player remains one of the most innovative and simple online players I've ever seen.

Bonus: ExtensionFM

Now that you've found all of this music online, you may want a nice way to catalog it. ExtensionFM may just be that way. While it won't work with all of the services above, it's a great match for The Hype Machine, and might also work with Bandcamp (tell me in the comments if it does). I recommend you read Lee's detailed review, but in a nutshell I can tell you it's a Chrome add-on which automatically collects and catalogs all of the music you find online, and does it very nicely.

p.s - in case you're wondering why I never mentioned Last.fm, it's because just about everybody knows about it, and because it's just not that good anymore now that it's so restricted (in my opinion).

Got another site or tool you use to discover awesome, new music online? Let's hear about it in the comments!

Ten awesome ways to find new music online originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 30 May 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Youtube - Hype Machine - mufin - Grooveshark - Music

Bill Maher: New Rule: Politicians Must Be Informed of Their Rights: "Everything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You in a Google Search" —

New Rule: Before running for office, politicians must be informed of their rights: that "Everything you say can and will be used against you in a Google search." Now, of course, we all embellish our resumes a little. In college, I described my job of pot dealer as "regional sales associate for a large multi-national firm." But we just had the fifth anniversary of YouTube and the twelfth of Google, and between them, they're killing off a great institution: lying. You just can't lie anymore -- facts are too easy to check, everything is on video, and your wife put a GPS in your glove compartment. Our privacy is gone, our Internet conversations are forever. I even have reason to believe I'm being recorded right now...

Jesus once said that there was nothing hidden that would not some day be revealed, but if he was alive today, and walked on water, it would be instantly on YouTube between a skateboard accident and a turtle biting a baby's ass. And the first comment would be "fag." Twenty-four hours of new video is posted on YouTube every 60 seconds. Mostly of a girl named Kelly, showing off things she bought at Forever 21, but still...

Even when you're just at Wal-Mart in your pajamas buying condoms, someone is taking a picture of it and putting it on a website called "People at Wal-Mart Buying Condoms in Their Pajamas." And Fergie -- whenever you're doing something shady in a hotel room, of course someone is filming it. Also be aware that, without makeup, you don't look anything like you do in the Black Eyed Peas.

Politically, it's even more ridiculous to think you can lie: Richard Blumenthal, running for the Senate in Connecticut, saying he was in Vietnam when he wasn't? This isn't camp, where you can tell a lie and no one will know back home. The army keeps records.

Or John McCain saying, " I never considered myself a maverick." Which of course prompted an avalanche of video, e-mails, letters and probably telegrams of McCain bragging that he was a maverick. There's video of everything, so to think you can get away with making a speech and just pulling shit out of your ass, you'd have to be an egomaniac, a sociopath, or a world-class moron. Which brings me to Sarah Palin.

Last week she said she knows what the Gulf states are going through now because, "I have lived and worked through that Exxon Valdez oil spill." She was a 25-year-old newlywed sportscaster, living in another part of the state that didn't see any oil. She "lived and worked" through Exxon Valdez the same way Christie Brinkley lived and worked through the Iranian hostage crisis. But she got away with it because she lied in the one place where it's still perfectly acceptable to lie -- inside the Fox News, Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh Republican bubble. It's where facts don't matter, because no one ever hears from that other, inconvenient side called reality. 24 days into the oil spill, former journalist Brit Hume said, "Where's the oil? You don't see it on the beach" -- like it's a liberal conspiracy.

Within that bubble, people think they can get away with anything -- hiking the Appalachian trail? Getting your gay hooker from Rentboy.com? But they can't -- no one can. If you don't believe me, text Tiger Woods and ask him. Don't have his number? Google it.

Speaking of hound dogs, our old friend John Edwards is looking for a plea deal this month. Because he said he didn't have sex with that woman, and then they found video of him going down on her when she was six-months pregnant. Senator, there's got to be a simpler way to hide your face from the camera. Don't you have a hat?

In spite of its weak security, poor performance, and woeful standards compliance, a lot of people are still using Internet Explorer 6 as their Web browser of choice. A large part of this user base seems to be made up of corporate users. According to Stuart Strathdee, Chief Security Adviser at Microsoft Australia, one of the reasons for this continued usage is that companies have found a virtue in one of the browser's biggest flaws: it doesn't work properly with social networking sites like Facebook.

Rather than using a secure browser and creating corporate—or firewall—policies to block unwanted time-wasting sites, companies are depending on the browser's increasing obsolescence to render the sites unusable. This allows IT managers to keep users out of YouTube without having to actually confront the users they are supposed to be supporting; it's the sites' fault that Internet Explorer 6 doesn't work, not the IT department's fault for foisting that legacy browser on its users.

With major online Web services like Gmail and Google Docs increasingly choosing to ignore Internet Explorer 6, however, this strategy could start to backfire. And, given Internet Explorer 8's improved performance and security, Microsoft customers are advised to upgrade and find some other way to keep the pleasures of Farmville at bay.

Read the comments on this post

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

With each passing day it becomes less of an insult to say someone's head is in the clouds, as more and more people begin to outright rely on web sites and applications like Facebook, Google Docs, Flickr, Farmville, YouTube and Hulu. Among these popular services are Slacker and Pandora, two internet radio services that have grown tremendously since becoming available as smartphone apps, and which have recently completed the three-screen trifecta by being offered on connected televisions. These services have always had plenty of online competition, including simulcast internet radio stations, streamed Sirius XM, and Rhapsody. But it appears as though the landscape of Internet music services in the US is preparing to accommodate two more game-changing newcomers from profoundly different backgrounds.

The first is a startup from Europe called Spotify, which has been winning fans across the continent in the five countries in which it is offered. Spotify's Open service represents something of a holy grail for on-demand music from the cloud: you can play any song in its catalog as often as you like for up to 20 hours per month for free, and share songs with your friends. The service gets high marks for its responsiveness. Becoming a premium Spotify member essentially turns the service into something more akin to Rhapsody, with no ads, better audio quality, and offline listening. Spotify has begun offering a private preview of its U.S. service to a lucky few, and is expected to be rolling out more broadly this year.

Continue reading Switched On: Thunder in the cloud

Switched On: Thunder in the cloud originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 29 May 2010 17:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s a freebie: if I were an author looking to get the most out of the social web (and I am), I’d do something along the lines of what I’m about to share. Your mileage may vary, but here’s a decent approximation of the things I’d do. Please feel free to share liberally. Just link back to An Author’s Plan for Social Media Efforts, please.

An Author’s Plan for Social Media

1. Set up a URL for the book, and/or maybe one for your name. Need help finding a URL? I use Ajaxwhois.com for simple effort in searching.
2. Set up a blog. If you want it free and super fast, WordPress or Tumblr. I’d recommend getting hosting like Bloghost.me.
3. On the blog, write about interesting things that pertain to the book, but don’t just promote the book over and over again. In fact, blow people away by promoting their blogs and their books, if they’re related a bit.
4. Start an email newsletter. It’s amazing how much MORE responsive email lists are than any other online medium.
5. Have a blog post that’s a list of all the places one might buy your book. I did this for both Trust Agents and building blocks.)
6. Consider recording a video trailer for your book. Here’s one from Scott Sigler (YouTube), for his horror thriller, Contagious.
7. Build a Facebook fan page for the book or for bonus points, build one around the topic the book covers, and only lightly promote the book via the page.
8. Join Twitter under your name, not your book’s name, and use Twitter Search to find people who talk about the subjects your book covers.
9. When people talk about your book, good or bad, thank them with a reply. Connect to people frequently. It’s amazing how many authors I rave about on Twitter and how few actually respond. Mind you, the BIGGEST authors always respond (paradox?)
10. Use Google Blogsearch and Alltop to find the people who’d likely write about the subject matter your book covers. Get commenting on their blog posts but NOT mentioning your book. Get to know them. Leave USEFUL comments, with no blatant URL back to your book.
11. Work with your publisher for a blogger outreach project. See if you can do a giveaway project with a few bloggers (here’s a book giveaway project I did for Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years book).
12. Offer to write guest posts on blogs that make sense as places where potential buyers might be. Do everything you can to make the post match the content of the person’s site and not your goals. But do link to your book.
13. Ask around for radio or TV contacts via the social web and LinkedIn. You never know.
14. Come up with interesting reasons to get people to buy bulk orders. If you’re a speaker, waive your fee (or part of it) in exchange for sales of hundreds of books. (And spread those purchases around to more than one bookselling company.) In those giveaways, do something to promote links back to your site and/or your post. Giveaways are one time: Google Juice is much longer lasting.
15. Whenever someone writes a review on their blog, thank them with a comment, and maybe 1 tweet, but don’t drown them in tweets pointing people to the review. It just never comes off as useful.
16. Ask gently for Amazon and other distribution site reviews. They certainly do help the buying process. And don’t ask often.
17. Do everything you can to be gracious and thankful to your readers. Your audience is so much more important than you in this equation, as there are more of them than there are of you.
18. Start showing up at face to face events, where it makes sense, including tweetups. If there’s not a local tweetup, start one.
19. And with all things, treat people like you’d want them to treat your parents (provided you had a great relationship with at least one of them).

This sounds like a lot of steps. It is. But this is how people are finding success. Should this be the publicist’s job? Not even a little bit. The publicist has his or her own methodology. The author will always be the best advocate for his or her own work. Never put your marketing success in the hands of someone else. Always bring your best efforts into the mix and you’ll find your best reward on your time and effort.

You might have found other ways to be successful with various online and social media tools. By all means, please share with us here. What’s your experience been with promoting your work using the social web?

Chris Brogan is the New York Times bestselling author of the NEW book, Social Media 101. He is president of New Marketing Labs, LLC, and blogs at [chrisbrogan.com].

Digg Wants to Be the Twitter of News —

Digg founder Kevin Rose is close to his first major launch since taking over as CEO and instituting layoffs. He published a video today on his personal YouTube account laying out the site’s upcoming version 4 release, due “very soon” (found via TechCrunch).

The new Digg — which has been in the works for at least a year now — will extend the site’s current social features (which are pretty minimal) to allow for both friending and following other users and publishers. So if you friend a user, you see what they Digg and comment on; if you follow a publisher, you see everything they publish. The result is a personalized news page that seems like a combination of Google Reader, the Facebook news feed and Twitter. These features aren’t surprising; they’d been discussed publicly by previous CEO Jay Adelson and others at the company.

Here’s the key quote from the video, from Rose describing Digg’s new value proposition:

“Because we’re only links and news we cut out all the miscellaneous status updates like you see on other sites.”

This sounds like a good approach. The problem, though, will be standing out from those other sites that people already use to get their news and updates together, since much of that information will end up being duplicated and redundant for people who use more than one of the services.

---

YouTube has always been known for its, shall we say, vocal community. But until now, the only way users had to respond to each other was through the site’s infamous comments, or via video responses — there hasn’t been a particularly good way for YouTube video uploaders to ask their subscribers for opinions. Today, YouTube is launching a new feature that allows channel owners to poll their audience in a more structured manner: it has embedded a customized version of Google moderator, a tool that launched back in fall 2008. The tool allows your subscribers to vote responses up and down, and has been tweaked to allow for both text and video responses (it is also embeddable).

Moderator has previously been integrated for a handful of YouTube events on CitizenTube, including interviews with President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper; now it’s open to anyone. The feature is pretty straightforward: you enter your question/topic, decide whether you want to allow both text and video responses, and decide how long the poll will run.

This is a perfect feature for YouTube. Many of the site’s millions of users do actually have something interesting to say, but their voices can be lost among the myriad spammy (or just plain stupid) comments left by other users. This gives channel owners an easy way to engage with their audience, without having to sift through the cruft to find the good responses.

Here’s a video showing off how the feature could be used:

Google announced this morning that it is enabling real-time discussions on YouTube channels by adding support for Google Moderator. Moderator allows sites to request questions or ideas from its audience that can then be voted up or down by the site's community of visitors. The service had previously only made appearances on YouTube for exclusive interviews with President Obama and the Prime Minister of Canada, but today, every channel has the ability to add this feature.

Sponsor

The widget sits front and center at the very top of the page, and by placing the most recent questions at the top it creates a real-time stream of suggestions from the audience. Google has already invited 12 popular YouTube channels to participate, including the New York Times, Stanford University and Howcast.

On Stanford's channel, Dr. Euan Ashley, a cardiologist and professor, is taking heart related questions from the audience. Over on Howcast, which creates short videos explaining how to do various tasks, they are soliciting ideas from their audience for their next video creation. And on the New York Times' channel, they have created an open forum for people to ask the Times any question of any sort.

Moderator comes with the ability to flag inappropriate content, as well as sort by highest voted or most recent posts. It's great to see some real-time web functionality coming to YouTube - a platform that already seemed fairly real-time with the ability to nearly instantly create video content online. For channel admins, adding Moderator may be a great way to focus the submission process for ideas within YouTube itself, but if YouTube isn't your thing, you can also embed Moderator on any website.

Discuss