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Posts Tagged ‘Citizen Journalism’

Twitter Hires Pixar Financial Chief, Preps for More Profitability

Two months after announcing that the startup managed to turn a profit in 2009, Twitter has announced that it will be hiring Pixar finance head Ali Rowghani as its chief financial officer.

Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams told Reuters today that the new hire represents the company’s direction toward “creating value for our users and capturing the financial opportunities that result from it.” Rowghani will join Twitter officially in March.

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Last year, Twitter’s search deals with Google and Microsoft made the company around $25 million – about $15 million from Google and $10 million from Microsoft. These two deals were enough to make the company profitable last year. For a fairly young company that offers a simple, free web application for end users, this is quite a feat.

Other revenue channels include creating a revenue-sharing scheme that would let Twitter share the profits generated by third-party applications. The details of this plan are still under wraps, but Twitter’s platform director Ryan Sarver announced at LeWeb that the company would announce details about this plan early in 2010.

Other possible sources of revenue are multi-user accounts, which Twitter has been testing internally.

Twitter has also recently made another high-profile hire, calling on Current TV’s Robin Sloan to work on media partnerships, covering “everything at the intersection of Twitter and media, from live events on TV to citizen journalism on the web.”

We’re excited to see how the startup that’s managed to become a cultural zeitgeist within a few short years will continue to grow and profit. Particularly in its early days, many who lived through the dotcom crash were skeptical about the monetization potential of a free web service. Without incorporating advertising – something that no users wanted to see – Twitter has managed to create a sustainable business.

We can’t wait to see what ideas Rowghani will bring to the table.

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YouTube Direct Gives News Orgs A Way To Accept User-Submitted Videos

Love it or hate it, there’s no doubt that “citizen journalism” — the trend where ‘regular people’ record video, snap photos, and tweet live from breaking news events —  is quickly gaining steam. One of the biggest catalysts for the trend has been YouTube, which gives people an easy way to upload and share the video footage they shoot from the heat of the action. And while we’ve seen some media sites, like CNN’s iReport, attempt to take advantage of this user submitted content, many news sites haven’t found a good way to integrate it. Today, YouTube is launching a new application that looks to make this easy for all media organizations. Dubbed YouTube Direct, the new open source application will allow news orgs to integrate a video upload tool directly into their sites, where they can accept and review user uploaded footage.

The new tool will allow news organizations to screen video uploads as they come in, and use the best clips for their broadcasts and on their websites. Of course, news organizations will still be responsible for actually curating the content to ensure that it’s accurate, which is a task that will require additional manpower for the more popular news sites. All video content uploaded through these tools will be available on YouTube proper as well.

My biggest concern with this kind of reporting is always credibility — oftentimes you’ll come across videos on YouTube that seem like they’re relevant to breaking news, but are unable to determine who uploaded the clip. Fortunately, as an open source tool YouTube Direct allows organizations to customize their submission process. Hopefully the more credible ones will require (or at least encourage) uploaders to leave their contact information, so that fact checkers can follow up on their video reports to ensure their validity.

News organizations aren’t the only sites looking to accept user generated videos, either — YouTube Direct will work that any site that wants to upload video content, so we should probably expect to see some more creative uses in the future.

The feature is not live quite yet, but should be up by tomorrow morning.

Image by quinn.anya

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Mollom Blocks 100 Millionth Spam Message

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Mollom, the spam-filtering startup that eliminates comment and post spam on popular content management systems, just reached two important milestones: it processed 100,000,000 messages and is now actively protecting over 10,000 websites.

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It was only about three months ago when the startup, began by Dries Buytaert and Benjamin Schrauwen, celebrated its 50 million message milestone, and only two months before that when the company reached 25 million. Mollom is still a young company, but these milestones are coming fast because so many websites are getting on the bandwagon with the aim of increasing the quality of their website interaction by blocking spam.

Even more impressive is that these statistics are for Mollom’s public servers only and don’t include message processing on private servers operated for large-volume clients, such as Netlog, an online social portal for European youth.

Mollom set up dedicated servers in Netlog’s data center to provide automated around-the-clock monitoring and custom-trained content classifiers. Mollom’s servers analyze more than 50 messages per second for Netlog, adding up to an additional 4 million messages per day that are not counted in the latest milestone.

Large sites such as Netlog are turning increasingly to Mollom for its ability to filter spam in near real-time. Another site, popular citizen journalism hub NowPublic, had been receiving almost 25,000 spam posts per day before implementing Mollom’s service. After NowPublic installed Mollom, the number of legitimate comments by users jumped 180%, while spam comments fell to nearly zero.

Taking into account the traffic from the 10,000 websites that Mollom protects, Mollom currently processes up to 150 million messages a month, making it one of the largest website spam filtering services available today.

But Mollom is not content to rest on its past achievements. The company is currently changing the architecture of its back-end, which will make the software learn faster and make its actions easier to debug, analyze, and oversee.

Mollom offers its services in tiers, with products targeted at small blogs, mid-sized sites, and large enterprise-level Web properties. Mollom Free, designed for small blogs and sites with small posting volumes, is provided free of charge to the Web community, while Mollom Plus and Mollom Premium are commercial services designed for sites with higher volumes and reliability requirements. More information about its service plans is available on Mollom’s website.

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