The Library of Congress has teamed with Flickr to make its vast catalog of images available on the Web, starting with 3,000 photographs with no known copyright holders. The goal of the project is to provide exposure to these rarely seen images and to harness the Flickr community to compile missing data — like the…
Blogger Rogers Cadenhead doesn't get to declare the official winner of the bet between the Dave Winer and the New York Times. Google — the company, not the search engine — will call a winner, and the Long Now Foundation, which holds the cash in the pot, will decide the issue. I know because I set this all up in…
The New York Times is launching a partnership with startup PurpleStates.tv. Videos filmed by PurpleStates' "citizen journalists" will run on the Op-Ed page of NYTimes.com. [Beet.tv]
The policy just confirms what we always suspected was Google's attitude: Users are losers, and we know best. The Google-owned video site claims that channel partners who regularly produce videos with more than a million pageviews can earn "several thousand dollars per month," but those are few and far between. The…
Online encyclopedia Wikipedia will begin paying for "key illustrations" on the site, overturning the site's all-volunteer tradition. The funding for these illustrations comes from a donation by a man who feels that while Wikipedia is more up to date, Britannica, the traditional encyclopedic benchmark, has better…
Brightcove, the online video company that managed to raise nearly $60 million in January, is shuttering its failed YouTube clone, Brightcove.tv, next month. Instead of trying to make money on loser-generated content, Brightcove is transforming its .tv domain into a hub to showcase its professional producers (like…
Irina Slutsky of Geek Entertainment TV has found a way to carry on her idea of celebrating the best in video podcasting. Under PodTech, where Slutsky brought the awards last year, the event was badly mismanaged. Slutsky left Podtech, but the "Vloggies" name remained with PodTech. Former CEO John Furrier "openly"…
The website for Hulu, NBC and News Corp.'s online-video joint venture, looks pretty. But the reality of getting ready for next week's launch? Very messy. A tipster tells us that a dozen members of the Hulu launch team are stuck on an agonizing "all-night" conference call. Also on the call: Executives from…
Tastebook, Conde Nast's latest attempt at harnessing loser-generated content involves ink and paper. No, it's not handing over the editing of its magazines to its readers, like startup 80/20 Publishing. But it has invested in Tastebook, a startup which binds 100 recipes (culled from its cooking site Epicurious.com or…
The Wikimedia Foundation, parent company of the volunteer-written encyclopedia Wikipedia, announced that it is moving its headquarters from retiree haven St. Petersburg, Fla., to San Francisco. Why San Francisco? Because, as the press release states, "its proximity to Asia in particular is expected to enable the…
Newsvine, the Seattle-based headline aggregator — think Digg, but without the heartthrob cofounder — has sold to MSNBC.com for an undisclosed amount. The company had raised a small amount of venture capital, $1.5 million, which has led some industry insiders to peg the price at more than $15 million, less than $35…
While NBC and Apple bicker about whether iTunes will carry shows from the network's upcoming television season, CBS is plotting its own online-video coup. Convinced that YouTube's success is based on Internet users' short attention spans, it has decided to create faux user-generated content by remixing its own shows…
Apparently Martha Stewart thinks wikis are a good thing. Which strikes me as odd, since the no-longer-jailed domestic doyenne built her multimedia empire pretty much by sitting you down and telling you how things are done, her way or the highway. She's a tastemaker, not some kind of San Francisco-Web-startup…
Brilliant. Someone — apparently a rejected applicant for the TechCrunch40 conference going on now in San Francisco — has hijacked the shindig's name for a Twitter account and is skewering the presenters' every misstep live. Already, the organizers' lack of selectivity — if you'll recall, it was originally supposed…
We love Cal Tech graduate student Virgil Griffith's Wikipedia Scanner — a tool that has revealed to the public what we've always known: That people working at corporations, government agencies, and mass media outlets are duplicitous bastards. For instance, a State Farm employee buried commentary on its Katrina policy
Are you a self-righteous, humorless hippie with no sense of what is socially acceptable? Have design skills? PETA wants you to create its new blog advertising campaign. [BlogAds]
Mitt Romney's campaign is airing a user-generated advertisement, solicited from users of Yahoo's YouTube-like Jumpcut service, for the Republican presidential candidate. This is, of course, a refreshing change from politicians passing lobbyist-generated bills. [Advertising Age]
If you've been aching for an adults-only social network, San Francisco-based Zivity may offer some release. Billed as a mature site for connoisseurs of provocative photography, Zivity will host shots from a selection of scantily-clad models. Like HotorNot, users can then vote on the appeal of particular photographs.…
