CNBC has published a great interview by Maria Bartiromo with Google CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt. In the interview, Schmidt says that figuring out how to make money off YouTube has become the company’s top priority:

Bartiromo: Let me ask you about YouTube and MySpace. YouTube has these phenomenal growth rates. What do you think is behind that?

Schmidt: Video is powerful. And it’s amazing. You know, we started off with Mentos and the other sort of fun videos, and now people, because they have so many digital cameras, are essentially uploading everything. Furthermore, we’re beginning to see glimpses of significant professional content on YouTube. People are using it–because there’s such a large reach, they’re learning how to reach that audience.

We’re working but have not yet in my view gotten a breakthrough around monetization. So while we have lots and lots of traffic and we have lots and lots of interesting and creative people and all sorts of controversies–we’re blocked in countries, so on and so on–I don’t think we’ve quite figured out the perfect solution of how to make money, and we’re working on that. That’s our highest priority this year.

Bartiromo: Which is a huge priority, clearly. A lot of people feel like this is an amazing opportunity for you. So, as far as monetizing that business on YouTube, do you think that takes a year? Does it take the next five years? What’s your time frame on that?

Schmidt: We believe the best products are coming out this year. And they’re new products. They’re not announced. They’re not just putting in-line ads in the things that people are trying. But we have a number–and, of course, Google is an innovative place. The Yahoo! team are trying various new forms of advertising, ones which are much more participative, much more creative, much more–much more interesting in and of themselves. Google believes that advertising itself has value. The ads literally are valuable to consumers. Not just to the advertisers, but the consumers.

Bartiromo: They want to look at them.

Schmidt: When they’re targeted. When they’re the right ad for what you’re doing or what you care about.

In a nutshell, Google’s top priority is making video advertising as contextual as its text-based advertising options.

Can Google Make Money From YouTube?

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick has a great commentary on the interview. He suggests that Google will struggle to make money off of YouTube, because the Internet is creating a massive shift in how people use their time:

Passive media and advertising does not have a bright future, and many people in those industries who are watching the direction the internet is going know it.

Old media has assumed people just want to consume but that the internet is showing that people want to consume, produce and share. If just a tiny fraction of that consumption continues to shift towards production and sharing – there’s going to be some serious cultural and economic disruption going on.

That’s why YouTube has to come up with something fundamentally more engaging than banner ads run next to music videos.

While Kirkpatrick and others, like author Clay Shirky, make strong cases for the continued growth of user-generated content, they seem to ignore the fact that most people still like passive consumption.

Most people read Wikipedia, but never contribute to it. Most people watch YouTube videos, but never post a video. Most people watch or listen to podcasts, but never make their own.

There may be big opportunities to make money of active Internet media – but history, the current state of the Internet and human nature suggest that there’s an even brighter future for companies, like Google, trying to make money off of people entertaining themselves on the Internet.

Playboy announced today the launch of an online search on YouTube for the best video submissions from potential Playboy models:

To commemorate Playboy’s 55th birthday, Playmate editor Holly Madison is making it easy for you to try out for 55th Anniversary Playmate. Just send her your Playmate audition video through YouTube.

Through our YouTube page, simply upload a two-minute video of yourself, showing off your face, your body and your personality (no nudity, please). Submissions are eligible from U.S. residents, 18 or older, only.

Playboy is calling this the first “Social Media Casting Call”. We call it a shrewd new media marketing scheme. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Contest details are available at the Playboycasting channel on YouTube.

They’ve provided a demo video, below, to demonstrate what they are looking for. It’s NSFW, but clean.

Velocix today announced the availability of its free Velocix Accelerator digital delivery service.

The new service is aimed at the growing and vibrant community of entrepreneurs and new start-up ventures, as well as larger organizations looking to distribute rich media such as video, music, games and software on-line. Velocix’s service is designed to ensure that website visitors have a good experience when downloading content, viewing videos or browsing web pages from anywhere in the world.

“Our Velocix Accelerator service,” said Phill Robinson, CEO at Velocix, “turns the CDN sector on its head.”

The free service includes a 500GB per month delivery allowance for file download, video progressive streaming and website acceleration services.

“Velocix Accelerator is perfect for our needs right now as we build our audience and drive awareness and adoption of our unique business model,” said Adam Urban, CEO at Uploaded.TV. “Our users around the world are already benefiting from Velocix with uninterrupted video playback, and a highly responsive Uploaded.TV website.”

Uploaded.TV is a next generation social network where users can appear on TV and buy airtime as easily as booking an airline ticket.

Total Recut is a site that provides online resources and social networking opportunities for fans and creators of video recuts, remixes and mash-ups. They’ve announced a contest to promote fair use rights and to celebrate Remix Culture:

Create a short video remix that explains what Remix Culture means to you.

Using video footage from any source, including Public Domain and Creative Commons licensed work, we want you to produce a creative, educational and entertaining video remix that communicates a clear message to a wide audience. The video is to be no shorter than 30 seconds and no longer then 3 minutes in duration.

This contest is being run to promote awareness of remix culture in an educational capacity by encouraging the fair use of a wide variety of content and also to create a new pool of work that explains what remix culture is to the general public.

For more information on fair use, check out these guidelines from the Center for Social Media.

The submission period starts May 1 & ends June 2. Prizes include a laptop, camcorder and portable media player.

via JDLasica

The Sydney Morning Herald took a look at the Cult of Podcast Celebrity and profiled pioneering podcaster Cameron Reilly:

One Australian who is using podcasting to give himself – and his fellow podcasters – a voice is Cameron Reilly, who founded the Podcast Network – a stable of podcasts ranging from religion to martial arts.

“I made a decision that I was going to try and use the internet as a platform to try and make the world a better place,” Reilly says. “The very basis of human culture is communication and that’s all the internet is about – sharing information.”

His flagship podcast, Gday World, began in November 2004 and now has about 50,000 listeners.

“It started off as a technology news show but that got boring and these days I usually talk about religion, politics and social justice. Honestly, when I started I thought I’d get about half-a-dozen listeners who would hear me give the same rant as I do over a bottle of wine with dinner.”

The article profiles several other podcasters, too, including Leo Laporte & Beti Nic.

Scott at Bitnotic sent us word about their new generative ambient music application, chill.

The concept of generative music – popularized by Brian Eno – is that complex music can be created by setting relatively simple processes into motion.

You can think of chill as a royalty-free music generator. It uses generative music processes to create new music in an ambient/chill-out style.

Songs created by chill can be saved in AIFF, Wave, and MIDI formats. Songs are royalty-free and can be used in podcasts, video productions, and record albums without further licensing. You can also use chill MIDI files as the basis for compositions in digital audio workstations such as Apple’s Logic.

While each song is unique and random, you have several options for shaping the results. The “Mood” controls include Mellow and Swell. You also control the mix of the instrument parts and effects

Bitnotic is actively seeking feedback on the public beta. The company is holding a contest where the three best comments/suggestions/bug reports will win free licenses to the final product. Details are available on the Bitnotic web site.

You can preview an example of chill’s output below. Then download it and give it a try.

chill 1.0 will retail electronically for US $19.95.

Podcast pioneer and former MTV VJ Adam Curry shared this image of his podcasting setup on Flickr.

This is his rig for recording Daily Source Code. It shows how you can get a professional podcast from a relatively modest setup. (It helps to have Curry’s 20+ years of media experience, obviously!)

I spy what looks to be a Faderfox LC2, a Mac laptop running Ableton Live and a pair of Harmon Kardon Soundstick speakers. No sign of a mic.

See anything else?

Author Clay Shirky gave a speech at the Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008, that touched on his idea of the social surplus – the vast quantity of people’s time that is being freed up to do user-generated media, Wikipedia and other useful things as they move their attention from television to the Internet

Along the way, Shirky explained why user-generated media is better than Gilligan’s Island:

If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list.

Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

The answer is obviously Mary Ann.

Now that we have that cleared up, check out Shirky’s full speech at his Here Comes Everybody site. It’s an interesting read and it articulates why podcasting and other indie content is going to continue to grow at an incredible rate.

Apple today updated iMac line with the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors and the most powerful graphics ever available in an iMac.

The iMac now includes faster processors with 6MB L2 cache and a faster 1066 MHz front-side bus across the entire line, and 2GB of memory standard in most models. The 24-inch iMac now offers a 3.06 GHz Intel processor and the high-performance NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS graphics as options, extending iMac’s lead as the ultimate all-in-one desktop computer for both consumers and professionals.

Here are the details:

Digital music sales will represent 40% of all music purchased worldwide by 2012, according to the research firm In-Stat. Digital music downloads represented 10% of the total worldwide music market in 2007, up from 6% in 2006.

Factors contributing to this growth include the global expansion of broadband, continued demand for single-track downloads, and expanding music catalogs. Another key driver is the potential for market growth in full-track downloads to mobile handsets in markets other than Japan, which currently is the primary market for this type of digital music format.

Factors limiting the growth of digital music sales, according to In-Stat, include piracy, incompatible services, DRM and weak consumer demand for subscription services.