CNET News.com: AlwaysOn: Traditional Media Need to Shape Up. Traditional media
really aren't in touch with the "IM generation" of tech-savvy teenagers
and college students, admit panelists at the AlwaysOn Media NYC
conference. Matthew Bishop, a writer for The Economist, jokes that his
colleagues "initially were terrified by the Digital Age."

BusinessWeek Online is at the annual DEMO conference. Here's their preview: The New Media Mogul—You. What do Blinkx, Magnify.net, Splashcast, Panjea, Eyejot, Vringo, and BUZ have in common? They aim to give consumers control of their own media.

Advertsing Age: Newspapers begin to embrace social networking sites. They're even beginning to look at MySpace as a model.

At PBS's MediaShift, Mark Glaser takes a look at how Hollywood talent agencies are swarming over the Internet and signing up online video artists. The giant United Talent Agency recently launched an online division and helped the Ask a Ninja videoblog sign a six-figure deal with FM Publishing. But the popular Rocketboom vlog has succeeded without the help of agents. Will agents adapt and thrive in the new digital world?

OhmyNews inspires citizen journalism in Indonesia.

The San Jose Mercury News reports on the spate of user-created commercials for the Super Bowl.

About 35 percent of all Internet users, or 48 million people, have
posted content to the Web, either through blogs, Web pages or sharing
venues where artwork or video can be posted, according to The Pew
Internet & American Life Project research group. BuzzMetrics, a
publication that chronicles the online industry, predicted postings at
consumer-generated content Web sites were expected to reach 1.8 billion
last year.

``I think it will continue to grow,'' said Jesse Drew, acting
director of Technocultural Studies at University of California, Davis,
of amateurs' ads. ``I think it's a good strategy.''

Besides General Motors Corp.'s Chevrolet division, other entities
unveiling Super Bowl commercials conceived by regular people include
the NFL, which held American Idol-esque auditions in which fans
presented their ideas before a small panel; Alka-Seltzer, which asked
musicians to remake the well-known ``plop-plop-fizz-fizz'' jingle for a
performance during the Super Bowl pre-game show; and Frito-Lay, which
asked amateurs to come up with commercials for its Doritos chips.

Chevrolet won't divulge which college team won its competition until
Friday, during an hour-long television special about famous Superbowl
commercials. The participants aren't saying either, even though the
winner was named back in October, after all the finalists completed a
whirlwind ``boot camp'' weekend in Detroit under the direction of
Chevrolet's advertising agency, Campbell-Ewald.

It all started last year, when Chevrolet created the competition for
college students, putting out the word to campuses across the U.S. ...

DVguru has a good Q&A with Mike Hudack, co-founder of Blip.tv, about the video hosting site, grassroots video and the notion of Internet TV shows. I wish more video producers would use creator-friendly sites like Blip or Revver rather than joining the throng at YouTube just because that's where the masses are.

Newassignment.net: Harnessing the Drupal publishing platform for citizen journalism. Excerpt:

Journalist and media consultant Steve Yelvington, who helped set up BlufftonToday’s Drupal site, says he is currently working on deploying Drupal to the Morris company’s other regional newspapers.

Yelvington says more and more newspapers are using the technology
for all their online content management needs, and points out the
recently formed webgroup “Newspapers on Drupal,”
which has more than 60 members around the world. Among the group’s
posters are staffers at McClatchy papers who have been using the
technology to improve their interactivity.

Drupal has a modular design, meaning a wide range of features can be
added, such as photo galleries, e-commerce units, community blogs,
calendars, buddy lists, personal profile pages and more. If you want
specific features, programmers can design new modules, or work within
the open source framework to develop software that better meets
everyone’s needs.

“It’s a rapid development platform as well as an application, so
we’re using it for experiments in aggregation and community filtering
(the Digg model),” says Yelvington.

Drupal has been employed for company intranets, political campaigns
(including Hillary Clinton’s just-announced Presidential bid) and
various nonprofits. It is also used by the popular satire site The Onion and entertainment and gossip powerhouse Ain’t It Cool News.

KernelTrap, a site that covers news on open source projects, uses Drupal, as does Ourmedia, a free archive of non-pornography, non-copyrighted images, text, audio and video clips. In the citizen journalism sector NowPublic relies on Drupal to bring together news from all over the world, while the software is also used to power Placeblogger, which aggregates hyperlocal blogs by location.

“Newspapers should be convening and facilitating community
conversation, working to build a stronger civic process with broader
participation. Drupal naturally presents itself as a tool in this
space,” said Yelvington. ...

From Dan Gillmor at the Center for Citizen Media (via Mac News Network): Apple’s Just Desserts a Big Win for Online Journalism.  Apple is reportedly ordered to pay $700,000 for the legal fees of the small independent Web publishers it went after. Writes Dan:

If this is accurate as reported, it’s indeed a big victory for the rights of all journalists, including the new ones on the Web.

Keep in mind that this was not about bloggers. The Web journalists who were the targets of Apple’s actions didn’t call themselves bloggers, and in fact their sites were as much like online periodicals as anything else.