Ed Keating has left his role as Vice President Content Division for the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) to become the Chief Content Office (CCO) for BLR (Business & Legal Resources), a leading information resource provider.

BLR helps companies comply with federal and state laws related to employment (Department of Labor), safety (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), and the environment (Environmental Protection Agency) through training that keeps those companies out legal trouble and helps them avoid paying fines.

According to the BLR press release, Ed’s new role with the company will allow him to identify new product opportunities, research market needs, evaluate new opportunities, assess competitors, and oversee editorial content operations. BLR serves over 250,000 professionals in human resources, environmental compliance management, employee safety, workers’ compensation management, and workplace training who use BLR products to develop policies and train employees.

During his time at SIIA, Ed’s role focused on business-to-business publishing, content monetization, social media, and more. He also worked with startups in the content industry through the SIIA Previews.

Newstex President Larry Schwartz shared his thoughts on Ed’s move from SIIA to BLR saying, “I have had the good fortune to work with Ed for the past 6 years at SIIA. He will be sorely missed, but we wish him well on his new journey.”

Please join us in thanking Ed for his years of service with SIIA and wishing him the best for his future endeavors with BLR.

The world of online video has come a long way in the last couple of years. Google’s YouTube might still be the page views leader when it comes to online video viewing, but sites like Hulu, iTunes, and Netflix have embraced a different business model that YouTube is finally trying to catch up with.

This week, YouTube acquired Next New Networks, a company that produces original programming and helps people and entities that create video find distribution and make money. Like Hulu and Netflix, the cash cow for YouTube that will come from the Next New Networks acquisition won’t come from YouTube producing its own original content but rather from YouTube partners who create long-form original content for YouTube publishing and distribution. In other words, YouTube will provide the platform but others will provide the content.

As The New York Times reports, YouTube is “creating a new program called YouTube Next that will help the video makers with whom YouTube shares ad revenue to produce more professional content by giving them grants and training.”

There is no doubt that online video consumption is growing and more people are turning to the web to consume long-form video content every day. YouTube reportedly paid less than $50 million for Next New Networks, and key players are being hired to jump start YouTube Next and content acquisition, including a former executive from Paramount.

Bottom-line, it’s great to see YouTube making an effort to differentiate authoritative online video content from less professional user generated content. We’ll have to wait and see how successful YouTube ultimately is with the Next New Networks acquisition.

What do you think? Was acquiring Next New Networks a good investment or a poor investment for YouTube and Google? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: stock.xchng

What’s the real story about the future of the media industry?  That’s a question that many people have been asking for some time now, and it’s one that Henry Blodget (CEO and editor-in-chief of Business Insider) and Jay Yarrow (editor of Business Insider) try to answer in a presentation they delivered at the IGNITION conference in New York City yesterday.

In their presentation, Henry and Jay provide some charts that tell the story of where the media industry stands today.  Once you look at them, it’s hard to argue against the assumption that the media industry will never go back to the way it was again.  Take a look at a few of the most interesting slides below (you can view the entire presentation on Business Insider):

As the two above slides form the presentation show, the market value of new media companies is catching up to or surpassing old media companies.

Even the market values of specific content publisher new media sites are reaching new heights as shown in the above slide.  Note that many of the sites within the larger brands included in this chart are syndicated as part of Newstex Authoritative Content.

If you’re still not clear on where new media stands in relation to old media at the end of 2010, take a look at the above chart.  In terms of market value, the gap has been closed, and with the continued expansion of social and mobile marketing, the balance is poised to shift in favor of new media.

It’s interesting to look at the media industry in this way.  Similar to when televisions started to find a place in every home, new media is finding a place in every home and is becoming the preferred way to consume authoritative content.  There’s no turning back now.

A new book by Ann Handley of MarketingProfs and C.C. Chapman of Managing the Gray, Content Rules, teaches readers how to create blogs, podcasts, videos, ebooks, webinars and more that engage customers and ignite your business.

Content Rules is part of David Meerman Scott’s highly popular New Rules series and teaches you how to write stories that interest people the same way that journalists do.  Content strategy and tactics are provided as are numerous case studies.  It’s a great read for anyone who wants to get started in creating content to build a business or enhance their existing content-related efforts.

The authors are seasoned content professionals.  Ann is the chief content officer of MarketingProfs, a widely popular marketing website, and her content appears on sites like Mashable and The Huffington Post.  C.C. is the host of a successful new media podcast, Managing the Gray.  Together, their years of experience in the social web space enable them to put together a usable guide to effective content creation and publishing.

Both the MarketingProfs site and MarketingProfs Twitter stream are syndicated through Newstex Authoritative Content as is C.C.’s Managing the Gray podcast, so Ann and C.C.’s reputations as publishers of respected and trustworthy content are well established.  If you want to build upon your content strategy, check out Content Rules and learn from the experts.

Each year, Technorati conducts a survey of bloggers and uses the data collected to create an annual state of the blogosphere report.  This week, the 2010 State of the Blogosphere has been released (the first three parts are already available online and the fourth should be released anytime now).

7,200 bloggers answered the survey questions this year, and the biggest findings show an increase in the number of people blogging with mobile devices and a steady increase in “mommy bloggers.”

The demographics of respondents put together a picture of bloggers in 2010:

• Two-thirds of bloggers are male.
• 65% are age 18-44.
• Bloggers are more affluent and educated than the general population:
  • 79% have college degrees and 43% have graduate degrees.
  • 33% have a household income of $75,000 or more.
  • 25% have a household income of $100,000 or more.
• 81% have been blogging more than 2 years.
• 64% say they blog as a hobby and for fun while 34% blog part-time for another business or to support their own business.  Just 1% blog full-time for a company.
• 11% say blogging is their primary income source.

A few of the most interesting things I found from the 2010 State of the Blogosphere report demonstrate just why blogs are no longer just personal websites but rather true examples of Authoritative Content:

• 1 out of 3 bloggers has worked as a writer, producer, reporter, or on air personality with traditional media.
• 90% of bloggers blog about their industries.
• 72% of bloggers manage their blogs by themselves.
• 54% define their blogging style as ‘expert’ and 39% define their styles as ‘journalistic.’
• Approximately 4 out of 5 bloggers use Twitter.
• Blogs are catching up to print and online news sources in terms of trustworthiness, as shown in the chart below.

What do you think?  If you hear someone say that blogs are losing popularity, you might want to point them to this post and the 2010 State of the Blogosphere report so they can learn what’s really going on in the world of blogging.

While Twitter started out a few years ago as a social tool where people could communicate in real-time via short snippets, the team behind Twitter believes the site has evolved into something quite different — a news site.

In a presentation at Nokia World 2010 yesterday, ReadWriteWeb reports that Twitter’s vice president of business and corporate development, Kevin Thau, made the case for the site’s evolution into a news delivery tool.  Thau cited examples like the plane crash in New York’s Hudson River that was shared first with the world via an eyewitness’ tweet.  This is just one example of how both news organizations and individuals around the world not only turn to Twitter to share breaking news but also to “consume” news.

News related to the protests after the Iran elections not long ago trickled out from Iranian citizens via Twitter.  News about earthquakes in Haiti was communicated via Twitter.  Even the news of Michael Jackson’s death, first communicated via a blog, was consumed and verified via Twitter.

In other words, Twitter usage patterns have changed significantly in the few years since the tool debuted.  Today, there are 145 million active Twitter users, but according to Alexa, Twitter gets 910 million unique visitors, placing it in the top 10 largest websites.  Considering that 60% of Twitter’s growth today is coming from outside of the United States and the growing number of people with smartphones that make using Twitter on the go easier than ever, there is no doubt Twitter will continue to grow and evolve in the coming years.

Furthermore, yesterday Twitter announced its first redesign since the site’s debut, which is aimed to keep users on the site longer in order to attract more advertisers to make larger investments.  The redesign, paired with the site’s repositioning as a news source, makes a clear statement about where the team behind Twitter wants the site to go in the near future.

What do you think?  Do you use Twitter for news gathering, for socializing, or both?  Will the new design of Twitter affect your usage habits?

Great news for online video publishers today — YouTube announced via the YouTube blog that users can now upload videos up to 15 minutes in duration.  That’s a 50% increase over the previous upload limit of 10 minutes.

The company explains that the time limit is extending for uploaded videos because the YouTube Content ID system has evolved to a point where it’s easier and more reliable in identifying videos that have been uploaded but violate copyright laws  (for example, uploaded movies or television shows).

Newstex syndicates video content from many authoritative online publishers who use YouTube to share their video content, and it will be great to see what they do with that extra time!

If you publish video content through YouTube, then you might be interested in the contest YouTube is holding to promote the new time upgrade.  Here are the steps to enter the contest via the YouTube blog:

“We encourage you to take full advantage of this new time limit by making a video of your “15 minutes of fame.” Imagine that this video is all the world will ever know about you: what would you want to communicate? What will be the enduring stamp you’ve left on us all? Tag your video with “yt15minutes,” upload it by Wednesday, August 4, and we’ll select a handful of people to truly gain their 15 minutes of fame by featuring them on the YouTube homepage in a future spotlight.”

What do you think of the upgraded time limit for YouTube videos?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

comScore has released its monthly report about online video viewing in the United States, and the results show that online video continues to be extremely popular and growing.

According to comScore, May 2010 online video viewing delivered the following statistics:

• U.S. Internet users viewed nearly 34 billion online videos in May 2010.
• Google sites (including YouTube.com) received by far the most online video views with 14.6 billion videos viewed.  That’s a 43.1% market share!  The next closest site was Hulu.com with 1.2 billion videos viewed or a 3.5% market share.  That’s a huge gap between the market leader and everyone else!
• Nearly 183 million people viewed online videos.
• The average number of videos viewed per person was 186.
• For YouTube alone, 144.1 million viewers watched 14.6 billion videos for an average of 101.2 videos per person.
• The average online video viewed was 4.3 minutes.
• 84.8% of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in May 2010.

Check out the chart below to see the top online video sites in May 2010 according to the comScore report.

Are you using online video to establish your reputation as an authoritative source?  Check out some of the online video publishers who are already syndicating their authoritative content through Newstex, and contact us to learn how you can syndicate your content to boost your exposure and earn some money, too.

Want to be part of the historical record officially?  You will be if you’ve published a public tweet on Twitter since March 2006, because your tweets are going into the Library of Congress archives.

You might not be able to edit those old tweets, but it’s as good a time as any to make sure your future tweets are good.  They’ll be available through the Library of Congress, after all.

The announcement began to travel quickly across Twitter and the social Web this morning when the Library of Congress published the tweet shown below.

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world and adding the complete public Twitter archive to its digital assets will undoubtedly spawn a lot of research in a wide variety of areas of study.

Newstex already syndicates tweets from thousands of authoritative bloggers and makes that content available to top distributors who provide it, primarily via closed systems such as corporate and educational libraries, to professionals who need access to trustworthy content to do their jobs.  Professionals in the fields of business, government, journalism, academics, and more access syndicated Twitter content for a variety of purposes, including research.  Contact Newstex to learn more about syndicating your Twitter content.

In marketing, there are consumers who are considered ‘early adopters’ or products and brands, and there are consumers who fall into the ‘laggards’ category.  The latter consumer group is slow to try new products and prefers to wait for others to test drive them first.  Laggards need to fully understand the benefits that products can deliver to them before they pull out their hard-earned money and buy them.

In 2009, the smartphone market took a big jump when laggards (including members of the baby boomer generation) embraced the benefits of having access to the Internet and mobile apps.  2009 marked the year that devices like the Apple iPhone and Google Droid moved from being cool new toys to truly useful and helpful products.

The chart below from eMarketer (via a comScore study) shows the break down of mobile device ownership by age range as of November 2009.

Smartphone sales are expected to grow in record numbers in 2010, eventually eclipsing personal computer sales.  It’s interesting to imagine how different the above chart will look at the end of 2010.  Just 20 years ago, almost no one had a mobile phone.  Today, 55% of baby boomers consider their mobile phones to be a necessity.  As people from all age ranges and demographics begin to rely more and more on mobile apps, that percentage will surely grow.

Could you live without your mobile device?  Would you want to?  What app can’t you live without?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.