More and more companies are finding themselves dealing with user-generated criticism – on blogs, forums and on YouTube.

This video is a great example of how to deal with this.

As a response to a fan video for Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 08 that points out an apparent glitch in the game, Tiger Woods and EA Sports demonstrate that the “glitch” is not a glitch at all.

Their response video, in just two days, already has twice the number of views as the original video, which has been up a year.

He’s just that good!

via Steve Rubel

Podcaster and social media guru Chris Penn has posted his take on the future of podcasting:

“There are still hundreds of millions of iPods out there (the low hanging fruit) that have not tuned in, largely because people still don’t know how.

We in podcasting and new media are too quick to give up on anyone who’s not an instant early adopter, and as such are leaving people – and money – behind in our mad, attention-deficit rush for instant gratification, instant results, instant fame.

So to Chris Brogan, Joe Cronin, and just about everyone else wondering what the future of podcasting is, stay tuned. There is far more yet to come, if you are willing to have the vision, commitment, and dedication to achieve long term success. If you’re not willing to make that commitment, that’s okay, but don’t expect the same results as the folks who are.”

Penn makes a great point: a lot of people mistake podcasting for a get-rich quick scheme, rather than a tool.

There are a lot of people making money with their podcasts or as a result of their podcasts now. But it’s not because of their podcasts. It’s because they are smart, talented people with a vision of how podcasting can be used and they are willing to back that vision up with hard work.

United States District Judge Jeremy Fogel has delivered Prince, and Universal Music a fair use smackdown in a case that may end up reducing the number of nuisance takedown notices filed against people that share videos at sites like YouTube.

Universal had sued Stephanie Lenz over the use of Prince’s song Let’s Go Crazy in a video she uploaded to YouTube that featured her baby pushing a toy and dancing.

Or as the legal description puts it:

On February 7, 2007, Plaintiff Stephanie Lenz (‘Lenz’) videotaped her young children dancing in her family’s kitchen. The song Let’s Go Crazy by the artist professionally known as Prince (‘Prince’) played in the background. The video is twenty-nine seconds in length, and Let’s Go Crazy’ can be heard for approximately twenty seconds, albeit with difficulty given the poor sound quality of the video. The audible portion of the song includes the lyrics, ‘C’mon baby let’s get nuts’ and the song’s distinctive guitar solo. Lenz is heard asking her son, ‘what do you think of the music?’

On February 8, 2007, Lenz titled the video ‘Let’s Go Crazy #1’ and uploaded it to YouTube.com (‘YouTube’), a popular Internet video hosting site, for the alleged purpose of sharing her son’s dancing with friends and family. YouTube provides ‘video sharing’ or ‘user generated content.’ The video was available to the public at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KfJHFW1hQ.

While most people would think a snippet of a song in the background of a baby video was fair use, not Prince and Universal.

Ever wonder what the best place is to host a blog or podcast so that your site doesn’t die the first time you get on Digg?

WhoIsHostingThis, a free service that lets you check where sites are hosted, tested the top 100 blogs (based on Technorati rank). They found that two hosts, Media Temple and Datagram, are the most popular with rockstar bloggers:

It’s interesting to see BlogSpot & SixApart on the list, too.

You could probably do worse than have your site located at any of the hosts on this list. If a host can handle the traffic of one of the top 100 blogs, it can probably handle yours.

Last week, we asked Is It Too Early To Declare NBC’s Online Olympic Coverage A Failure?

If your comments are any indication, the answer is a resounding “No!”. A lot of Podcasting News readers are frustrated with the hassles of NBC’s 2008 Olympic coverage.

Here’s a sampling of what readers had to say about NBC’s online Olympic coverage:

• This coverage is terrible. For one, I’m sick of these commentators going on and on about inane nonsense during a routine/race. Let us watch the competition, and kindly stfu already. Secondly, when there is relevent discussion, it seems to praise any and everything that the Chinese do, and comes across rather harsh on our own American athletes. Finally, NBC has done a horrible job of organizing the events. I can’t find anywhere that says when they will cover a certain event. – x
• I have a Powerbook G4 at home and a desktop G5 at work and I don’t have the option of watching the Olympic video on either of my machines. – Dave
• I hate hate hate NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. You are stuck in an era that doesn’t believe in the internet, and you have enforced a totalitarian reign of no-video on the internet. I hate you. – John Fox
• I am glad my hubby and I are not alone. This year’s coverage of the Olympics has been horrific.- Katie
• COME ON NBC…. grow some balls and SHOW THE OLYMPICS LIVE AS THEY HAPPEN!!! – Disgusted

NBC’s strategy has been to use its online Olympic coverage to promote its broadcast coverage. While NBC has been successful with this strategy, it’s angering and losing millions of viewers in the process.

Lots more comments on the original article.

Tim Bourquin, creator of the New Media Expo, is thinking about quitting the tradeshow business.

He cites five reasons – reasons that he feels “threaten the very industry itself”:

• High speed Internet costs. Nearly all convention centers have long-term, exclusive agreements in place with high speed Internet providers and the prices they are charging are ludicrous.
• Drayage. Drayage is the fee to have your booth shipment taken from the convention center dock at the back of the hall to your booth. It almost always cost more to transport a large box 50 yards from the roll-up doors of the exhibit hall to the booth than it does to ship it from New York City to Las Vegas.
• The Pay to Play Mentality. There are plenty of conference organizers out there willing to put a VP of Business Development on some crummy panel in return for money. Unsurprisingly, that speaker then spends his time on the panel discussing how great their company’s product or service is, subjecting the attendee who paid $995 or more to a live commercial.
• Room Blocks & Attrition. In order to use three ballrooms and two smaller meeting rooms, most hotels want at least 2,000 room nights in the contract and a minimum of $50,000 in food & beverage orders AND a rental fee for the space.
• Lack of Control Over The Customer Experience There are too many vendors that exhibitors have to deal with for even a small booth. All of those touchpoints and contacts are out of a show organizer’s control. Because vendor deals are typically exclusive, they have no incentive to treat exhibitors well.

Bourquin offers a lot more detail and some possible solutions at his site.

Do Tech Tradeshows Still Matter?

Beyond the challenges Bourquin cites, though, there’s the challenge of keeping a technology event relevant in an age of Twitter and ubiquitous blogging, and podcasting.

Nielsen has released its VideoCensus rankings of the top online video sites for July, and it looks like long-tail television site Hulu is the company to watch.

In July, Hulu’s traffic grew to 105 million streams per month, and the site leapfrogged several competitors to become eighth most popular vide site. Not bad for a site that’s only been live for five months.

Hulu Close To Overtaking YouTube

What’s really amazing about Hulu, though, is that, at least in one respect, it’s close to overtaking YouTube.

How would you like to be able to copy and paste between applications on your iPhone?

That’s what Geek Brief‘s Cali Lewis demonstrates in the video above.

This isn’t an official solution at this point, though. She’s running unreleased versions of WordPress and other apps that support OpenClip.

OpenClip is a non-profit, open-source, community-effort project, which promotes a framework for the iPhone that allows users to copy / paste between participating applications. OpenClip utilizes a shared space on the iPhone. Applications that use the OpenClip framework can access this common area to write to and read from, allowing copy / paste between participating apps.

While Apple has announced that copy and paste will be coming to the iPhone, this demonstrates a way it can be implemented by developers now. As the video demonstrates, this could be very useful for blogging from your iPhone.

We’ve highlighted several amazing new video software apps in the last few days – but the demo video above, from Image Metrics, is jaw-dropping.

It features a Emily – a computer graphic illustration produced using a new modeling technology that enables the minute details of a facial expression to be captured and recreated. For the first minute and a half of the video, when they revert back to the source (the real actress), Emily’s face is being simulated by the technology.

This is done without traditional motion-capture. The technology instead analyzes video of real actors and models their facial expressions at a minute level.

This obviously has applications in the world of special effects – but it could be an even bigger deal as the technology makes its way down to consumer video. Imagine making video podcasts with photo-realistic animated talking heads – or machinima-type cartoons that look close to real.

Is this scary real, or what? Let me know what you think in the comments.

The Periodic Table of Videos is site that uses YouTube videos to make chemistry interesting and even fun.

The site is organized around the periodic table of elements, and each element has a video that demonstrates its characteristics in visual ways.

It’s a great use of Internet video to deliver educational content in a compelling, on-demand way.