TubeTheVote: Unbiased Social Media Political Magazine?

Via Mashable

September 12, 2008 – 9:27 pm PDT – by Doriano “Paisano” Carta 3 Comments

TubeTheVote is an interactive online political magazine that strives to be as unbiased as possible. How does it try to accomplish this difficult and rare feat? By trying to present as equal an amount of information for both political parties which isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Political Points of View
TubeTheVote truly is a social media political magazine because it provides the most popular types of content found online today such as YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Twitter messages and Blog posts. These resources are scoured routinely every day by journalism students from Michigan State University, Florida A&M, UC Berkeley, and the University of Texas which have all partnered with TubeTheVote. Their primary mission: Cover both sides of the story and both parties as fairly as possible.

An Interface as Slick as a Politician
It’s a pleasant and refreshing experience thumbing thru the digital pages of this new age magazine. The look and feel is extremely appealing and easy to navigate. It’s a slick interface and everything seems to snap into place rather quickly due to good performance. All of the content also loads in a brisk manner which adds to the enjoyment factor.

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Overlay.TV Helps You Customize, Monetize Streaming Video

Via Tech Crunch -by Jason Kincaid on September 4, 2008

Overlay.TV, a startup that lets users augment streaming videos with customized text, audio, images, and links, has launched to the public. The service overlays videos from a number of video sharing sites with a new layer containing this customized content, which can be used for entertainment purposes or as an easy (and potentially effective) means of monetizing video.

To use Overlay.TV, you first give the site the source URL of the video you’d like to modify. Overlay then streams this video from the original host (the site doesn’t host any video content, so it shouldn’t have to worry about the copyright violations that plague sites like YouTube). After loading the video, users are free to add their own content as part of a new layer with options that include text, links, custom images, and clip art. The site includes some basic timeline functionality, so you can set specific times for each item to fade in or out, but it can be hard to finetune the position and timing of each element.

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Google Launches Video For Businesses

Via Tech Crunch

This certainly won’t be the most interesting product launch of the day for Google, but it’s worth noting anyway. This morning Google is launching Google Video for business, a customized video platform aimed at businesses for internal use. Think training vides, HR videos, etc. (anything that isn’t outside facing). The product is included in Google Apps Premier Edition for free, with 3 GB of storage per user account.

This is a “Zero billion dollar market today” Director of Product Management Matthew Glotzbach said in a briefing about the product. The reason there’s no market, though, is that it’s a huge pain to build a video infrastructure for internal use. Google Video for business aims to make that trivially easy.

Videos basically have the same features and limitations as YouTube, including upload size and file type limits. Videos have access control, even if they are embedded outside of the intranet or Google Apps, and can be tagged and commented on just like YouTube.

NBC’s $1 billion Olympic “research lab” good, not great

By Jacqui Cheng | Published: August 25, 2008 – 01:06PM CT Via ARS Technica

The 2008 Olympic Games came to a close over the weekend, leaving many of us spectators feeling warm and fuzzy inside as we finished cheering on our favorite athletes. Despite the numerous concerns over China’s handling of the Olympics, the event managed to pull people in and get those from all walks of life excited about sports. Broadcasters were feeling pretty warm and fuzzy, too, after raking in mounds of advertising dollars associated with the Games. And this year, thanks to the Internet, those mounds were bigger than ever, although there’s still room for improvement…

…market research firm eMarketer Inc. said that it estimates NBCOlympics.com will only pull in $5.75 million in video ad revenue—”surely a passable performance for a bit more than two weeks,” says eMarketer, “but it represents only 1.1 percent of this year’s online video ad spending projection of $505 million in the US.” Even NBC now knows that its fears of cannibalizing the TV audience were over-exaggerated.

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