The organizing committee for the London 2012 Olympic Games is working with the games’ biggest sponsors to mount a massive social networking campaign in the lead-up to the Summer 2012 Games. The campaign revolves around promoting interest in the games by promoting involvement in sports for everyone.

Adidas, which has a £100m sponsorship deal for the next Summer Olympics, will be the first to launch a social media project this spring, an “online sports activation project” to encourage kids and young adults (through high school age) to participate more in athletic pursuits.

Focusing attention on the sites and using the media that young people are thought to use most often, the initiative will employ social networks and social media, to encourage experienced athletes and coaches to work with novices to develop interest and involvement in different sports.

new media age reports that the social media project includes “an online destination,” accessible from the London Olympics website, and will be “active across all the major social networks.” Participation of schools in the project is expected as well.

Alex Balfour, head of new media at LOCOG, told new media age, “The main driver for [the program] will be … focused less on the people who are already active in sport or aspire to be lead sports people and more on those who have some interest but don’t see the social rewards in it.”

The organizing committee plans to develop a presence on all major social networks by the end of this year.

Other major Olympic sponsors for the 2012 Games include British Airways(BA), British Telecom (BT), McDonald’s and Visa.

Adult use of social networking sites has more than quadrupled in the past four years – from 8% in 2005 to 35% now – according to a report by Pew Internet.

Highlights of the research report:

• While media coverage and policy attention focus heavily on how children and young adults use social network sites, adults still make up the bulk of the users of these websites.
• Younger online adults are much more likely than their older counterparts to use social networks, with 75% of adults 18-24 using these networks, compared to just 7% of adults 65 and older. 
• Overall, personal use of social networks seems to be more prevalent than professional use of networks, both in the orientation of the networks that adults choose to use as well as the reasons they give for using the applications.
• Most adults, like teens, are using online social networks to connect with people they already know.

The rise of social networking is likely to act as a driver to increase the consumption of Internet media at the expense of traditional media:

• Social networking sites compete with offline media for your time and attention;
• Social networking sites help you get news and information from a trusted group of people; and
• Social networking sites are redefining “the media” as “us”, instead of “them”. 

Micro Persuasion’s Steve Rubel says, even in the day of new media, text is still king on the Internet. 

He offers five reasons why:

• It’s scannable – according to Jakob Nielsen users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average site visit and 20% is more likely
• Three letters: SEO – For all that Google Universal Search has done to elevate video, search results are still largely made up of text and everyone wants better SEO
• The workplace – It’s much easier for cube-based workers to read text on the screen and get away with it vs. watching long videos. Watching videos (even work related vids) screams “slacker”  
• Mobile Devices – Yes, of course you can put a video on an iPhone. But it’s work and requires planning. Text is easier to pull up in a nanosecond  
• Distribution – Nothing flies like text. It’s so easy to cut and paste it and send it somewhere or to clip and re-syndicate it via email, RSS or social networks

Rubel is right. This is why combining new media with blog posts as podcasts makes so much sense. 

Wrapping a blog post around your audio video files addresses the issues that Rubel raises – making your media files findable and scannable, subscribable and viewable in a variety of situations. By putting your media in a podcast with scannable text, your content more useful everywhere.

Do you think putting your audio and video files in blog posts, as podcasts, helps get your message heard?

Image: sean dreilinger

YouTube is bringing back silent movies – by censoring at least some videos that make use of unauthorized copyrighted music.

Here’s an example:

More examples here and here. 

YouTube displays this message under the videos:

These videos cry out for remixing with some alternate music, don’t they?

via Mashable

The Linux Foundation (LF) is now accepting 60-second video entries for its I’m Linux contest, which spoofs recent Apple and Microsoft commercials.

Prizes include a trip to Tokyo to participate in the Linux Foundation Japan Linux Symposium. 

Here’s the scoop:

If you’ve been alive and aware of mass media over the last twelve months, you’ve probably seen television commercials from Apple and Microsoft touting their operating system. From Apple’s ubiquitous “I’m a Mac” to Jerry Seinfeld to Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” retort, operating system commercials have been flooding the airways. Except one OS has been notably absent – Linux.

While the Linux Foundation would love to spend millions promoting Linux on TV, it’s simply not our style (or in our budget). Even more importantly, Linux isn’t a top-down, commercially controlled operating system. It’s a grassroots product of mass collaboration. That’s why we’re sponsoring a community contest to create a Linux video that showcases just what Linux means to those who use it, and hopefully inspires many to try it.

The winner will receive a free trip to Tokyo, Japan to participate in the Linux Foundation Japan Linux Symposium in October 2009. The winning video will also be unveiled at the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit in San Francisco on April 8, 2009.

Details at the Linux Foundation site.

Kaltura has updated its All in One Video Pack plugin for WordPress. 

Kaltura’s plugin is designed to offer all the functions you might need for video and rich-media, including the ability to upload/record/import videos directly to your post, edit and remix content with an online video editor, enable video responses, manage and track your video content, create playlists and more…

Highlights:

• Upload, record from webcam and import all rich-media directly to your blog post;
• Edit and remix videos using Kaltura’s online full-featured video editor;
• Easily import all rich media (video, audio, pictures…) from other sites and social networks, such as YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, CCMixter, Jamendo, New York Public Library, any URL on the web etc.;
• Allow readers and subscribers to add video and audio comments, and to participate in collaborative videos;
• Manage and track interactive videos through the management console;
• Sidebar widget displaying thumbnails of recent videos and video comments
• Complete administrative capabilities. You decide who can add and edit each video;
• Supports more than 150 video, audio and image file formats and codecs
• Three different video player styles to choose from
• Custom sizing of the video player
• Advanced sharing options for videos
• Easy installation that takes just 4 steps and a few minutes.

This new Version 2.1 includes several fixes and tweaks as well as a cool new widget for the blog sidebar showing all recent videos posted and video comments.

Additional capabilities coming soon:

• The ability to create, manage and display video playlists
• Podcast recorder and player
• The ability to create video galleries
• Advanced playing features such as: subtitles, download button, credits, content discovery, etc.

If you still have any doubt about whether podcasting is a mainstream phenomenon, Oprah and Apple have announced that her series of podcasts is available through iTunes (iTunes link):

With such video and audio podcasts as Oprah.com’s Health and Wellness Channel, Oprah.com’s Spirt Channel, and Oprah.com’s Money Channel, you can now enjoy some of your favorite Oprah programming whenever you’d like. Download and watch individual podcasts. Or subscribe to a channel and have iTunes automatically download each new episode for you. Enjoy.

Oprah is offering both audio and video podcasts. 

Do you think Oprah’s podcasts are a sign of mainstream adoption of podcasting?

YouTube announced today a new project, in collaboration with the US Congress, to bring government videos to the video sharing site:

Two new channels were announced:

• The Senate Hub
• The House Hub

Video director and new media pundit Tim Street was at MacWorld this week, where he interviewed New Media Expo founder Tim Bourquin about his recent decision to sell the NME (formerly the Podcast and Portable Media Expo) to the organizers of the Blog World Expo. The combined show will be called the Blog World and New Media Expo.

We speculated about the impact of this merger with Blubrry CEO Todd Cochrane during his 24-hour Podcast Marathon last month. Hearing Bourquin explain the thinking behind the sale helps better understand the situation.

Bourquin was a pioneer in several facets of podcasting; he organized the first commercial podcasting convention, back in 2005, and he was among the first to develop and sell a popular podcast series (Endurance Radio, an endurance-sport podcast) at a profit.

In Street’s interview, Bourquin talks about the changes he has seen as, the podcast industry becomes one more piece of the media creator’s toolkit. “You’re not just a blogger; you’re not just a video podcaster. You’re a media creator,” Bourquin says. “Everyone is broadening their horizons when it comes to creating content.”

As for Bourquin, it looks as though he is not just passing the reins of the New Media Expo to the Blog World Expo folks, he’s leaving podcasting behind. Acceding to listeners’ pleas, he and his brother Emil are going to do one more “wrap-up” episode of their popular Podcast Brothers podcast. He has no other podcasting plans on the horizon.

Does this mark the end of an era?

What do you think the impact of Bourquin’s departure from the podcasting scene will be? For those who’ve attended both the NME and the Blog World Expo, what will the combined expo look like?

Would you like to know a simple way to make your Internet videos rank higher than 80% of all the videos published?

Research firm Forrester has taken a look at the state of search engine optimization of Internet videos, and have found that less than 20% of marketers insert keywords into the filenames of the videos on their site, and even fewer use more advanced tactics like writing keyword-rich captions and annotations, or creating online video libraries.

“If you’re not optimizing your videos, you should start,” says Forrester’s Nate Elliot. “Optimizing video content to take advantage of blended search is by far the easiest way to get a first-page organic ranking on Google.”

Here are the steps that Forrester recommends:

• Insert keywords into your video filenames.
• Host your videos on YouTube, and embed those YouTube videos into your own site. Google says its algorithms consider how many times a video is viewed, and any views embedded videos receive on your own site get added to the ‘views’ tally on YouTube. (And yes, nearly every video we saw Google blend into its results came from YouTube.)
• Optimize your YouTube videos by writing keywords into your videos’ titles, descriptions, and tags.
• Embed videos into relevant text pages on your site. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about.
• Also create a video library on your site, so Google knows where to find your video content. (Google Video Sitemaps can help with this too.) Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.

In addition to the suggestions Forrester offers, you should consider using keywords related to your video within the video itself. Some search engines are beginning to index the audio of your videos – so including your keywords in your script may help you optimize your videos for future search engine technology. 

Got other ideas for search engine optimization of Internet media? Leave a comment!

Image: Steve Garfield