Although it’s a somewhat soft launch today (shhh - don’t tell anybody), the Turner Broadcasting new venture I mentioned a few months ago when the splash page was posted has gone live today in all it’s UGC and comedic goodness. Get in there, check out the funny stuff (quite a bit NSFW), register and make some friends (I’m JoeBobATL). There are bits of coverage by members of the team (What do I know?), on Fark.com (one of the providers of content, and a great destination on it’s own) and by another one of the content providers, Olde English. Do check out this goofy woman-on-the-street vid (Making Friends by Chelsea Peretti) and the hilarious Sodom and Gomorrah by Brad Neely, pictured above in this screenshot from the launch. My team was involved in the advertising technology for this - and we’re pretty proud of how this came out. Share and Enjoy!
Yesterday, Turner Broadcasting (you know, those guys who sign my paycheck) took the wraps off a project that’s been in the works for a while - a new broadband site called Super Deluxe (splash site up and running - find the easter eggs!). Dubbed by a story in MediaPost and the Hollywood Reporter as a blend of features of TV networks like Comedy Central with the social networking features of a MySpace, the coverage reports that the site will feature material from both established and emerging comedians and allow for a fair amount of ‘UGC’ (that’s user generated content to those uninitiated among you) from users to also appear on the service. The Hollywood Reporter had this to day:
Dubbed Super Deluxe, the free, advertiser-supported venture will target men 18-34 with a mix of live-action and animated material that won’t skimp on profanity and toilet humor. “It’s like cable TV without the rules,” Turner Entertainment Group president Mark Lazarus said.
TBS has recently announced another effort in a similar vein, though of smaller scale, where users can submit videos to for consideration as being ‘Funny or Not’ as well as the already launched VeryFunnyAds.com, a place to - you guessed it - watch funny commercials. MediaPost reports that the Super Deluxe site will launch in January. My team is involved with - you guessed it again - the ad technology to support the service. We have a busy Fall ahead of us…
From a story on Sunday on C|Net, pointing out new move towards adding an outlet for ‘citizen journalism’ to the flagship CNN.com site, called CNN Exchange.
On Monday, CNN is expected to announce the launch of CNN Exchange, a page on the company’s Web site that will feature user-submitted video, audio and articles.
In other CNN news, they have also launched a new 3-minute free preview of live streams from the premium Pipeline product. Nice way to sample this cool service.
So my old buddies in the new media department of The Savannah Morning News are going all Web 2.0 and relaunching their web presence from a very 1999-era treatment to a clearly forward-looking model incorporating user generated content (blogs, flickr-like photo products etc), a clean (if gradient-heavy) design, and other helpful features like RSS. The beta of the site is available here; the old site is here. Like most newspaper sites today, there is a level of content that requires registration - but taking a page from MySpace and AIMPages, has the added benefit of giving the user a personalized home page where you can post entries, photos, link to other sites, etc. Kudos to the editorial and technical teams for putting this well conceived next-gen newspaper site together. Now if only there were a nice gallery of all my photos I shot during my time there at the then News-Press from 1989-1994, I’d be really happy!
A few weeks ago Amy found an old recorder for Sam to play with. He immediately took to blowing through it, and in this video plays along with mom’s French horn. When he first began to get sounds out of it, he’d crack up every time he heard a noise come out. He’s a natural, I tell ya!
About a month ago, Sam began to show us the hand motions to the itsy-bitsy spider song. Here, he’s accompanied by our resident musician. Click on ‘play’ triangle to start video on the page.
I’ve spent some time this weekend working on digitizing and editing videos we’ve taken of Sam over the last six months. The big result of that project was a DVD with all the clips, but I’m slowly working on short outtakes for the blog. I’m using YouTube.com, one of many Web 2.0 sites allowing user-generated content like this to have a (free!) home on the web. This should make it easier for everyone to see these clips. Up first - Sam’s very first visit to the beach when we were in Sarasota in March, visiting Amy’s mom and dad. Click on the ‘play’ triangle in the image above to start video playback in this window - total run time is 2:47.
Okay all you geeks out there - now for something really useful coming out of the Web 2.0 biddness - a fresh-for-2006 site to let you research, catalog and of course - TAG - your wine drinking - WineLog.net. The site includes a nice bit of integration with mobile, allowing a user to send wine details to a portable device. Along with trying to remember to send moblog photos of any wines we drink to the Flickr Wine Memory Jogger group. It’s free to register on WineLog, so give it a try - I know I will.
C|Net.com reports on a new feature user-generated content play YouTube rolled out yesterday - the ability to recieve and post content sent directly from mobile devices. As evidenced by the role Flickr has played in events like the London 7/7 bombings, still images have flown around the web like wildfire in our mobile-happy world. Video has been more challenging, although major news outlets have carried some of these grainy clips on-air and on-line. But this new feature at YouTube suggests the next major news story may include plenty of citizen journalism video coverage if this feature gets even modest adoption.
It’s amazing what’s available on the web today. Who needs user-generated content when you can post network TV? Guba.com appears to be like most of these services - another storehouse for UGC material. Some enterprising soul has searched that site for nuggets - not gold, mind you, but network and cable television full episodes. They’ve organized all that content into another site - peekvid.com - that offers up a nice handy list of episodes from shows like 24, Family Guy, Monty Python and The Sopranos. Not that these can’t be found on BitTorrent, but I can see the cease-and-desists flying through the air now… (via Thomas Hawk by way of Digg).
Web 2.0 biddness - a fresh-for-2006 site to let you research, catalog and of course - TAG - your wine drinking - 
