YouTube Moves Bring Glimmer of Hope

Simon Cowell joked that the moment Susan Boyle walked on the stage of Britain’s Got Talent, he knew the performance would be extraordinary. In the same vein, I would like to note that even as we talked about Google losing up to $1.65 million a day on YouTube, I knew that YouTube was about to take drastic action!

The first big change, and by “big” I mean 960×250 pixels big, was launched on April 15th, as YouTube Inc. turned over its prime real estate — the entire top of the home page — to advertising. Volvo took this spot on Day 1 with an innovative spot that was both commercial and enjoyable to watch — a very cool combination of unique content with some revenue-producing advertising.

Continue reading this article at Internet Evolution.

Research Identifies Your Chance of YouTube Fame and Fortune

Who are the people who create all this social media content; specifically, the ones who spend their time creating all these YouTube Inc. videos. The standard assumption is that these people want fame and fortune, or at least fame. They want to top the charts with the most-watched video on YouTube. They want their videos to go viral and be emailed from person to person. They want to be like JerryC, who played Canon Rock to more than five-and-a-half million viewers!

But how easy is that to do? If you get inspired to create your own YouTube video, what are your real chances of success?

Check out this entire article at Internet Evolution.

Google Losing up to $1.65M a Day on YouTube

Google is spending more than $2 million a day on YouTube — and it is nowhere near seeing a return on that investment. Indeed, it may be losing up to $1.65 million daily on the video site.

According to financial firm Credit Suisse and Internet measurement provider comScore Inc. , YouTube Inc. is on track to serve 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors in 2009.

That’s the good news. The bad? To support those visitors, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) will spend more than $2 million dollars daily..

Check out this full article on Internet Evolution

Check out the discussion on this article at Slashdot

I fought the law and Facebook won???

As the Facebook debate rages on over whether the creators of social media data or the companies hosting it are the real owners of this data, it’s interesting to see that innovative members of the legal system are bypassing the whole discussion and saying, “The data is public and we are going to use it.”

Consider this example from New Zealand. A young mother was convicted after using the Internet to declare a relationship she was concealing from welfare authorities. She had reported that she was a single mom and was thus eligible for $480 a week. But Web 2.0-savvy investigators checked out her Bebo and Facebook pages to find the truth: She was living with the father of her 2-year-old son, entitling her to only $140 a week. The convicted mom commented, “It came as a big surprise when I was caught. I didn’t ever think they would look me up like that.”

Read the whole article here on Internet Evolution

Computers Can Spot Your Face in the Crowd

It looks like 2009 could be the year when facial recognition technology will start to take off. The idea is quite simple – use the computer to match the faces in a photo against a database of known faces to find specific photos. Like many innovations, there are multiple the potential applications for this technology ranging from consumer uses to police/military uses. While this technology could be used to help catch you – hopefully the police are not looking for our readers and we’ll focus on the fun applications coming your way.

Read the full article here.