According to The Independent the internet video site YouTube says it plans to start sharing its revenue with users. Chad Hurley, co-founder of the site, said YouTube is working on developing ways for its users, who upload videos on to the site, to be paid for the content they have created.As I mentioned in earlier posts the community industry will be looking out for ways to increase their lifespan and contradict some of the analysts which claim that the business models of user generated content sites are not sustainable without significant thought about the creation of new revenue channels. You Tube is not the first to announce plans of shared revenue opportunities to users.Prosumer video makers can make money from advertising through sites like Revver and AOL has just launched a service that lets people sell their videos
However You Tube CEO Hurly, speaking at the Davos economic summit did not disclose on how such payments would be made and on what terms.

From a business standpoint it still does not make complete sense to me them giving money away, then again from a retention point of view the strategy is seemingly quite obvious. It still does, only temporarily, get them out of a vulnerable market space.

Advertisers and sponsors may see this as an opportunity to move in big time but even if they choose to I still think it is an unsustainable hype in the ad industry. The problem really is that we are already spoilt for good video content, we much prefer professionally made content over the amateur stuff out there. I bet this is no secret to You Tube either. At least 90% of the videos on You Tube are really hardly worth watching and is just extra ballast anyway.
Again, a common standpoint from critics is that what we like about You Tube is that its advertising free and it should stay that way, the question is if this is a sustainable picture. As My Space it does nothing to capatalize on the value of tribal trends in communities in many ways its still just a massive blob of content dumped on a server.

My social conscience has finally caught up with me again. This is the second story I am featuring where web technology is helping people start new lives.
Kiva, San Francisco start-up uses Web technology to give people in developing countries a chance at a decent livelihood that they otherwise wouldn’t have had. I am glad to hear that there are decent IT leaders out there who are devoting their careers to nonprofit organizations that are engaged in this sort of microfinancing activity.

FINCA International is another organisation which focusses on the distribution of microloans. CIO Patel states that the mission is to “assist the underprivileged, the poorest of the poor in the Third World and developing countries to be able to stand on their own two feet”. Microloans usually consist of small almounts of cash from about 25 euros to 200 euros. The funds are usually used to support specific personal needs, be it to start a small business or fund childrens school fees.

“Most of the people we lend to happen to be women, which speaks volumes in terms of the impact that has on a child’s mind when they see their mother, sister or cousin running a micro-enterprise,” Patel said. “[That will] slowly break down social taboos, a very good side benefit.”

Cognitive intelligence is really still something which is far on the horizon but this project certainly gives a good glimpse into the future where media may literally be materialized into a cognitive form.

MIRAGE is an embodied, graphical agent that can communicate with users about real and virtual objects in the user’s environment. A user enters the augmented reality room and puts on the “magic glasses”. Through the glasses the user can still see the room, but superimposed is now the floating graphical image of MIRAGE.

The room that MIRAGE lives in is fitted with trackers that make Mirage appear to be stationary in a particular location in the room, and as the user walks around, Mirage can follow the user with its gaze. Mirage can answer questions about real objects in the room posed by the user, and can perceive pointing gestures by the user, enabling questions such as “what is that [pointing at an arbitrary object]?”, “who is logged in on that machine [pointing at a computer in the room]?”. MIRAGE also has a direct feed to on-line news information that is automatically generated by natural language algorithms every night, allowing users to ask for the latest news.

In the future we hope that technology similar to MIRAGE will be used to teach operators of power plants and take people on guided museum tours, as well as tours of caves and historical sites.

This project was done as part of a graduate computer science course at Columbia University, using the modular A.I. engineering principles of Constructionist A.I.

Kris Thorisson, H.Benko, D.Abramov, A.O.Arnold, S.Maskey, A.Vaseekaran