We wonder why Dan Lyons, author of the "Secret Diary of Steve Jobs," the clever, stinging first person send up of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, has restarted is blog. Particularly now that his identity is known and he is a staffer at Newsweek... When I spoke with Dan last fall in Boston, shortly after he ended the blog and started his [...]

RealNetworks has just released RealPlayer SP, a downloadable application which allows users to save Web video, including YouTube clips, to several mobile devices.  RealPlayer SP also provides users the opportunity to share videos on social networks.  It can save and transcode various file formats including Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media, and RealVideo.Jeff Chasen, VP of product development, came by the Beet.TV [...]

With western news organizations banished from covering street demonstrations in Iran, the role of "citizen journalists" has become essential. CNN's iReport has been getting many uploads about the Iran crisis, about 4,600 over the past week, including 1,600 last weekend alone. While these user-generated videos go up on the site without filtering, CNN producers vet these videos for use on the [...]

Andrew Heyward, former president of CBS News, has expanded his consulting to include an engagement with NBC News, the New York Observer reports. Felix Gillette at the Observer writes:  "According to an NBC News spokesperson, Mr. Heyward will be working with NBC News President Steve Capus and NBC News Senior Vice President Alexandra Wallace." I spoke with Heyward by phone a few [...]

YouTube has been striking deals with programmers like ABC, ESPN, Sony, Lionsgate, and MGM this year, and now it’s also letting many of those programmers use their own video players and sell their own ads on the site. ESPN will be the next programmer to use its own video player starting in July.  This development was reported in May. Here is my overview on the [...]

Qik, the mobile video platform, is being integrated into Brightcove, the big video services company.   Initially, mobile users will be able upload files, but soon after they will be able to stream live to Brightcove-powered sites. This could be an important development in, so called, "citizen journalism," allowing users to upload directly from mobile devices to newspaper sites, including The New [...]

Paul Slavin, who heads digital operations for for ABC News, explains the difficulty of news gathering in Iran.  We spoke last Tuesday (June 16) about news gathering in Iran; this was before the government imposed strict restrictions on foreign journalists. Slavin also talks about how the demands of a highly diversified audience for news has created new ways to create and [...]

In an effort to learn more about online video ad formats, Starcom is expanding its research project called “The Pool” to include new publishers and advertisers focused on short-form content for the Web, said Tracey Scheppach, SVP and video innovation director at Starcom USA. In my interview at the OMMA Video conference in New York on June 16, Tracey said new [...]

The horrifying of the death of a young woman shot during protests in Tehran was uploaded to YouTube, sent to CNN and the BBC, and posted to Facebook by a young Iranian asylum seeker living in Holland.  The gripping story of how he got the video from a friend in Tehran, verified and distributed it, has been reported the [...]

Today in New York, the Huffington Post launches its New York local site.  This is part of big roll out of local and "hyper local" sites planned, says Arianna Huffington in this video interview with Kara Swisher. She tells Kara that the $25 million venture investment from Oak has been untouched and will be used for expansion and local will be [...]

Six Apart, the San Francisco-based blog hosting and software company, has linked up with VideoEgg, the video ad network, to offer bloggers the opportunity to integrate interactive video ads. This represents a big development for Six Apart in becoming an ad services firm for its bloggers and advertisers.  The company,  whose brands include TypePad,  VOX and Movable Type, has been offering [...]

Well, now, this is not really complete coverage, but we covered a bit of the waterfront and produced 14 segments from the conference and put all the clips together here on one directory page. For extensive video of the sessions and other clips, check out this video page on the D: All Things Digital site. Congratulations to Walt and Kara and the whole [...]

HP, the world's leading personal computer maker, is developing applications for its TouchSmart line of computers, including one for publishers which allows content to be browsed by touch. The application, created with Adobe AIR, was first introduced with the Time magazine, for the Time 100 issue.  HP is in discussions with several other publishers to implement this, we are told. Last [...]

Word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful types of marketing, but also one of the toughest to execute and measure. But with eight years under its belt, word-of-mouth agency BzzAgent can now measure reach, return and change in sales to determine the value of a word-of-mouth for brands, the company’s CEO Dave Balter told Beet.TV at the Digitas New Front in [...]

Tweets from within Iran are gettting retweeted as much as 300 times, according to an analysis done today by Simon Owens.  It is quite interesting to see how the retweets have emerged as sort of distributed news source.  Many of them, it appears, have been retweeted by users outside of Iran.  It almost seems to be a peer-to-peer news service.  [...]

Those clever folks at JibJab have debuted an animated "superhero" clip of President Barack Obama.  It went live yesterday.It was shown to President Obama at the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association dinner Friday night The video is getting a lot of buzz, having been shown broadly, in its entirety,  on broadcast television networks, including CBS this morning.  While JibJab has some [...]

The long-anticipated integration of collaborative video editing software into Wikipedia will happen later this summer, according to a report by David Talbot in Technology Review. The video platform is from Kaltura, the New York-based start-up.  I have reposted my interview with CEO Ron Yekutiel. Ron speak about the coming "wisdom of crowds" in community-created and edited video.In his story, Talbot quotes [...]

Ten years has been been a period of extraordinary growth for Blogger,  Erick Schonfeld reports on TechCrunch.  The Google property is by far the most popular, he finds. OK, but who actually was the first to blog?  Scott Rosenberg, who has has book about the 15-year history of blogging coming out next month, titled Say Everything,has a little video about how [...]

Borrell Associates told me at the OMMA Video conference June 16 in New York. “Health is the largest category and we also see automotive and travel picking up as well,” Gordon Borrell said. He predicts local TV broadcasters will generate $1.31 billion in online revenue this year, but video will only account for $52 million, or 4%, of that figure. About 70% [...]

Newser, a new news content aggregation site, has raised $2.5 million investment funds, its first, Rafat Ali at paidContent reports tonight.  Rafat says the investment round involves several individual investors.  Rafat gets the the story with co-founder Patrick Spain.  Spain tells Rafat that the site has 2 million visitors per month and Compete puts the number of monthly uniques at 650,000. [...]