YouTube’s newly-minted News Manager Olivia M. has announced the launch of a citizen journalism channel on the site, called Citizen News. Explains Olivia, the proliferation of inexpensive and easy-to-use media tools (blog engines, video cameras, multi-function mobile phones, etc.) has sparked a boom in user-generated news coverage. “[T]here’s an amazing amount of news being reported […]

Podcast network blubrry has introduced a new service for podcasters, Premium Podcast Statistics: Many of you using our Podcast Statistic service have asked for a wide variety of additional reports. While our basic stats package will remain free, we want to bring you a much richer data set in the plus package which will be […]

Videographer is a free WordPress theme for creating video sites. “It’s a great way to build content-rich niche sites, and use the power of YouTube at the same time,” says creator Shane Navratil. To use it, you’ll need to know WordPress, some HTML and possibly some php. No support is provided for the theme.

There’s been some discussion in the last few days about so-called “blogging 2.0”.

Call me blogtarded, but this “blogging 2.0” idea seems to be missing the most basic thing that has made the growth of blogging and Internet media interesting: the Internet is unrelentingly lowering the barriers to content publishing, to the point that it is becoming trivial to publish content.

blubrry‘s Todd Cochrane announced today that his company was removing more than a hundred podcasts from its service and banning sites because of problems with “podspam”: This morning I instructed our CIO to have all shows that were using a RSS Feed generation service hosted by trafficgeyser.net and mypodfeeds.com to be terminated here at Blubrry.com […]

Mobile broadcast network FlyTunes has added video and audio podcasts to its offerings, in addition to a new user interface and a customizable channel guide. The new video and audio channels cover a wide range of topics, including news, entertainment, politics, kids & family, health, comedy, business and technology. FlyTunes now offers users over 350 […]

EQAL, the studio behind faux-vlog shows LonelyGirl15 & KateModern, has signed a deal with CBS to create online content. The two companies will work on producing multi-platform content, including online and mobile, around CBS programming. EQAL will work on a non-exclusive basis with CBS at consulting, producing and scripting. “This partnering signals CBS’s attention to […]

Magnify has introduced a new service that promises to make it easy for Movable Type and WordPress publishers to incorporate media from a variety of sites. Magnify Publisher is a native blog application that lets you search for video, text, and images, using key words and tags, and embed the content directly into a post, […]

Advertisers are spending more at niche, or “long tail” web sites, and less at large sites, according to figures from PubMatic, a advertising service for publishers. The PubMatic AdPrice index shows that, while average ad rates are falling, rates at niche sites are actually on the rise. eCPMs (effective cost per 1000 ad impressions) for […]

The Guardian reports that BT PodShow, an online TV portal, is getting its full consumer launch: The service is a joint venture with US-based Podshow (now Mevio), in which the backers of Google and YouTube have invested, and which has been running for several months. It has over 1m hours of content. The two companies […]