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Posts Tagged ‘Ireport’

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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Amateurs vs. Agencies: Microsoft’s Razorfish Acquired

Publicis Groupe SA announced acquisition of Microsoft’s Razorfish advertising agency for $530 million dollars. In a joint press release, the group announced that the deal will increase Publicis’ ability to deliver digital campaigns and further elevate’s Razorfish’s status as a leader in online marketing. According to Bloomberg, in exchange for Razorfish, Publicis will give Microsoft 6.5 million in shares – a deal that makes Microsoft a 3% owner of the advertising company.

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As a standalone agency, Razorfish has had a number of high-profile partners including Google, ABC.com, Omniture and Adobe. Microsoft first acquired Razorfish’s parent company aQuantive for nearly $6 billion dollars shortly after Google announced plans to purchase DoubleClick and its display ad serving products. At the time, aQuantive was comprised of Avenue A | Razorfish, DrivePM and Atlas. While the acquisition served Microsoft well by giving the company a good ad management dashboard in Atlas and an ad ranking solution in DrivePM, the Redmond giant kept Razorfish at arms length. Despite the fact that the company won at least 7 Webby’s and a number of other advertising awards, between October 2008 and February 2009, Razorfish cut 120 of its US employees to reduce costs during a particularly bad year for advertisers. With this new deal, the company remains Microsoft’s ad agency of record and gains new Publicis resources to ramp up digital production. Nevertheless, is Razorfish able to deliver on its promise to help “media companies succeed in an era where the audience is also their editor?”

The company has shown a number of user-generated successes including CNN.com’s iReport, Netflix’s Instant Viewing Player and community and TED’s Encyclopedia of Life and Pangea Day film festival.

However, just as agencies are shifting from print and broadcast campaigns to digital advertising, is it possible that amateur dynamos are preparing to hijack the industry? Last week ReadWriteWeb covered Digg’s new ad program – a program where advertisements can be voted up or voted down by the community. As advertising shifts to this new mixed-content model, where are companies more likely to see success, with content from world-class advertisers or trusted community members? As always, especially with the current market, agencies will have to work tirelessly to justify their retainers.

Discuss

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Shitstorm Averted? AT&T Restores Access To 4chan (Which Is Now Under DDoS Attack)

AT&T has made even more people than usual angry when it started blocking/filtering parts of 4chan late last night. The popular message board, famous for being able to brew online (and offline) shitstorms like no other web property could, saw portions of its publication – including /r9k/ and the infamous /b/ – blocked for AT&T customers across the United States. Quickly enough, there was a lot of rallying going on, with 4chan members and fans virtually gathering to plot digital riots and all-round mayhem.

An update on the situation as of 8 AM Eastern Time: access to 4chan has apparently been restored, with AT&T reportedly confirming the hours-long block of portions of the site, “following the practices of their policy department.”

AT&T went on to say that they contacted (or at least attempted to contact) the owners of 4chan, which Moot vehemently denies. AT&T told CentralGadget that they have specific reasons why they blocked these parts of the site, but they would not disclose them, further stating that they have requested specific things and changes from 4chan’s owners to which they have failed to comply.

Meanwhile, 4chan is apparently under DDoS attack, supposedly because of the attention the site has been getting for the past 12 hours. The site is sometimes down, sometimes up but very slow, according to various reports. Note that this is not AT&T’s responsibility and quite possibly even the reason for the company to have made the dangerous decision of restricting access to the message board in the first place.

Updates coming, including some of the actions taken by 4chan members and friends to retaliate.

Update 1: this thread on Digg (760 votes and counting) pointed to a now-removed fake article at CNN’s iReport about the death of AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson.

Update 2: there’s pledge up at ThePoint to boycott AT&T and cancel the Internet service with them.

Update 3: YouTube alert

Update 4: an announcement on the Project AT&T forum reads: “All rioting/’war’/protests have been suspended for the time being.”

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