Information Week reports that blogs and cell phones helped provide some of the earliest coverage of the shooting tragedy at Virginia Tech this morning. A New York Times article calls the horrific incident the “deadliest shooting rampage in American history.” 33 students were killed and at least 15 students were injured. Blog posts to CollegeMedia.com, the website of the publisher of Virginia Tech’s campus newspaper, began at 9:47. With their Web server down, contributors to the campus newspaper the Collegiate Times filed blog entries on their parent company’s Web site beginning at 9:47 a.m. as they attempted to confirm information about two Monday morning university shootings, which left at least 22 people dead and many more injured. ABC reported 29 dead by Monday afternoon. According to the student newspaper’s blog, 20 students died in Norris Hall, a 72,375-square-foot building that houses the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics. The department focuses on materials, material systems, biomechanics, and computational methods, among other subjects. Students and faculty communicated with each other during the crisis through instant messaging and e-mail. A student captured the sound of several gunshots on campus. By the afternoon, the university had posted a podcast of statements from its president, Charles Steger. He said police were investigating the first shooting when they received reports of a second shooting. He said the school was shocked and horrified by a tragedy of “monumental proportions.” He also said he felt a great personal loss. A post on icantread01’s livejournal account called “Madness on Campus” also helped capture the tramatic events. Icantread01 blogged about his friend Kate who helped block the shooter from re-entering a classroom by barricating the door. Kate was also shot in the hand. Several of the comments left on the icantread01 post are requests from the media for interviews. Cybersoc.com has a roundup of blog coverage that included the icantread01 post as well as this post from Jennie Tal whose friend was possibly shot in the leg. Wired’s Threat Level blog has a roundup of blog and cell phone accounts. Boing Boing also has a roundup of first-person coverage that includes the DC Metblogs open thread and Flickr photos of police cars on the scene. The Roanoke Times has a blog-style article (hat tip Citmedia.org) that covers the shootings in reverse chronological order. Cynical-C Blog also has a good roundup of blog and cell phone accounts. Posted in General News Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

YouTube to Split Revenues With Content Creators Someday
Variety is reporting that YouTube could begin sharing ad revenues with content creators as early as next week. Variety cites Wallstrip founder Howard Lindzon as the source of the information. YouTube could take an important step toward integrating advertising with its vast library of videos as soon as next week. Content creators who upload their videos to the site will be offered the option of having short ads shown at the beginning or end, with the resulting revenues split 50-50, according to Howard Lindzon, founder of Wallstrip, a finance-oriented site that distributes videos through YouTube. Key to the new venture will be making sure that those who upload video actually own the rights to it — which has been a vexing issue in the past for YouTube, now part of Google’s Silicon Valley empire. YouTube didn’t respond to several requests for comment. “It’s not surprising at all,” said Josh Bernoff, a digital media analyst at Forrester Research. “A revenue-less YouTube wasn’t going to last.” It will be interesting to see whether YouTube goes with pre-roll ads that might annoy viewers or whether they will choose to display ads at the end of the videos. Before YouTubers get too excited a post on PC World says that Howard Lindzon denies the quote from Variety about YouTube launching ad sharing next week but he did say “that he believes the ads are coming at some point.” PC World also offers this official line from Google/YouTube. Here’s the official line from Google/YouTube: “We are actively exploring a variety of ways to help the community to monetize content, and expect to announce something in the coming months that users will embrace,” a spokesperson said Wednesday afternoon. “We will not comment on further speculation on programs we haven’t yet announced.” OK. So, nothing has really changed. We already knew ads were coming to YouTube eventually because Chad Hurley announced it at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The Variety article also has another nugget of information about a tool YouTube will soon be offering to copyright holders called Claim Your Content. YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, who from the company’s start resisted the idea of integrating anything that felt like a commercial, first mentioned the possibility of inserting ads into videos in January. Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, alluded to advertising as one way that YouTube might cuddle up to previously hostile copyright holders. He called YouTube “a wonderful place for people to take copyrighted information, and, with our support, build ad-supported businesses.” To help copyright holders keep off the site content they don’t want there, Schmidt said a new tool, Claim Your Content, would soon be available. The content claiming tool may not be enough to please some of the entertainment and media companies that want YouTube.com to pre-filter copyrighted videos from getting onto YouTube’s website in the first place. You can read more about Claim Your Content here, here and here. Posted in Videos Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

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