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.

Reuters: More U.S. teach­ers are using national and inter­na­tional online news
sites in the class­room, leav­ing behind news­pa­pers that fail to grasp
the Internet’s impor­tance in try­ing to reach stu­dents, a study found. “Stu­dents do not relate to
news­pa­pers at all, any more than they would to vinyl records,” one teacher says.