Elections are now open for the 2010 Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) Content Division Board, a volunteer group of industry executives that works closely with the division’s leadership to direct our activities and initiatives. The members of the SIIA Content Division Board perform a variety of functions, including:

* Helping to decide which industry issues the Content Division focuses on
* Leveraging SIIA to build relationships with industry leaders
* Ensuring that elected members’ companies maximize their SIIA memberships>

SIIA Content Division Board Requirements: Any SIIA member executive who can commit time, energy and passion for a two-year term is encouraged to run. Board members must attend board meetings and are encouraged to serve on working groups and ad hoc committees. In general, the Board holds four meetings per year, although the Chair may call additional meetings as the business of the Board dictates. Board members must participate in at least three of the four meetings, and attend at least two meetings in person.

All nominations must be received by Tuesday, February 23. You can get more details on the SIIA Web site.

The first meeting for new Board members will be held on the morning of Wednesday, May 26, at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, CA, immediately following the SIIA’s next conference, SIIA NetGain.

You can follow the link to view the list of current SIIA Content Division Board members.

Many of the online video publishers who syndicate their video content through Newstex publish their videos on YouTube.  The ability to create your own, branded YouTube channel and the ease-of-use that YouTube offers makes it a popular online video destination for publishers and viewers.

Yesterday, a post was published on the YouTube blog asking users to provide product ideas to help the team behind the site develop strategies to enhance it.  If there is something that has been bothering you about YouTube’s functionality or you have a new idea to make the site even better, now is your chance to speak up!

You can get all of the details on the YouTube blog, and you can provide your feedback on the Google product ideas page.

According to the YouTube blog post, Google plans to take a few weeks reviewing all submitted ideas and will, “respond directly to the ideas you’re most excited about.”  So if you want Google to acknowledge an idea that is posted on the product ideas page, make sure you vote for it.

Right now, I’m seeing a lot of suggestions for YouTube to move to HTML 5.  I’m also seeing some interesting ideas like adding a feature that makes it easy to find the next video in a series for users and the making it possible to upload multiple videos at the same time and then schedule them to publish online at specific times in the future.

One of my favorite suggestions so far is one that would eliminate the one channel per user restriction.  Many publishers have multiple brands that they create content for and having a simple way to manage multiple channels from a single account would save time and hassle.

What’s your suggestion for YouTube?

November 2009 marked a new milestone for online video viewing.  According to a new report from comScore, over 170 million Internet users in the U.S. watched online video in November 2009 for a total of nearly 31 billion videos viewed during the month.  That’s a new record, which demonstrates that comScore’s predictions for the future of online video viewing made in June 2009 appear to be well on track.

Google-owned online video sites (which include YouTube) are far and away leading the pack in terms of the number of viewers and videos viewed, but Hulu is showing impressive momentum — more than doubling its stats from less than a year ago as reported by Nielsen.  Check out the stats below:

Top 10 Sites by Number of Videos Viewed in November 2009

Top 10 Online Video Sites by Number of Unique Viewers in November 2009

Online video represents one of the biggest opportunities for businesses and individuals to grow their online reputations in 2010.  You can follow the link to check out some of the Authoritative Content video publishers who are already making names for themselves online and syndicating their video content through Newstex.

Google has officially launched its new YouTube Direct, which allows organizations to better manage reader video submissions.  The Huffington Post, San Fransisco Chronicle, NPR and Politico have all signed on to use YouTube Direct as a resource.

The process for organizations to use YouTube Direct is simple.  Individuals can upload their own videos related to content found on client Web sites, such as Politico, and flag their uploaded videos for review by that organization’s editors.  Those editors can either approve or reject submissions for inclusion or referencing on their Web sites.  The goal is to connect media and news organizations with individual, citizen journalists.

According to an article in The New York Times, Steve Grove, head of news and politics for YouTube, states that YouTube Direct allows “news organizations to control their experience with users while tapping into the community where that activity is taking place.”

And what’s in it for YouTube?  That’s simple, too.  With YouTube Direct, YouTube.com can position itself as a source for finding useful content rather than amateur videos created solely for entertainment purposes.

This move by Google’s YouTube and its media Web site partners represents one more way that individuals are publishing authoritative content online as well as the continued challenge in finding that useful, meaningful and trustworthy content.  With YouTube Direct, media organizations can cut through some of the clutter to find that authoritative content and incorporate it into their own news offerings.

It’s an exciting time for authoritative content publishers and distributors!

Read more about Newstex Authoritative Content.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is enacting new guidelines that bloggers and Twitter users need to be aware of.  The new rules go into effect on December 1, 2009, and anyone who violates them could face fines up to $11,000 per violation.

The new guidelines affect how bloggers and Twitter users must write and publish review or endorsement posts for which they receive compensation of any kind (e.g., money, products, services, etc.).  The FTC refers to this as a “material connection” between the blogger or Twitter user who publishes the review or endorsement and the company providing the compensation.

In short, bloggers and Twitter users must clearly disclose the “material connection”.  Furthermore, the review or endorsement must be accurate and reflect the average user’s experience with the item being reviewed.  The FTC words the latter requirement as writing a review that reflects the results an average user would “generally expect” to achieve when using the same product or service.

This is the first revision to FTC rules related to endorsements and advertising since 1980, and it comes as no surprise to advertisers who have waited for nearly a year for the FTC to release the new guidelines the agency has made no secret of developing.

You can follow the link to read the complete new FTC guidelines.

Image: Flickr

At a time when traditional media sources are struggling to remain profitable, smaller, niche players are emerging as the go-to places for authoritative content.  Many of those authoritative content providers syndicate their content through Newstex, including GlobalPost, which focuses on foreign news coverage with approximately 70 foreign correspondents in 50 countries.

According to the New York Times, CBS has taken notice of the depth of authoritative coverage that GlobalPost brings to the world of journalism and plans to partner with GlobalPost to report foreign news.

The partnership makes sense for both parties.  For CBS, the company gets access to talented reporters living in the countries from where they report and delivering current news from the inside.  For GlobalPost, the increased exposure can only be a good thing.  As long as GlobalPost is allowed to continue reporting foreign news in the authoritative way it has done since its inception earlier this year, the alliance should bring GlobalPost the revenue and recognition it needs to grow and produce more news from around the world in a way that only GlobalPost can.  It’s a business model that seems poised to grow to new heights.

To syndicate your own online content through Newstex, click here.  If you’re a distributor and would like to offer Newstex Authoritative Content, including GlobalPost content, to your customers, click here.

A new report from the Nielsen Company sheds some light on the ever-growing popularity of online video.  Everyone knows online video is hot, but did you know just how hot it really is?  The statistics in this report tell a very clear story.

According to Nielsen’s research, people spent 42.2% more time watching online videos in July 2009 than they did in July 2008.  The average viewer watched 3.5 hours of online video in July.  The number of unique viewers increased by 14.2% to a massive 136 million unique viewers.  The total number of video streams jumped by 31.4% to more than 11.2 billion which equates to an average of 82.4 streams per viewer (a 15.1% increase) in July 2009.

Of course, leading the pack is YouTube with more than 7 billion videos streamed in July 2009 and 104 million unique viewers.  You can check out the website stats in the chart from eMarketer below.

These results are in line with statistics released by comScore in June, which you can read about here.

So what do you think?  Are you leveraging the online video opportunity yet?  And if you are already a video publisher, are you syndicating that content through Newstex to boost your own exposure and traffic and make some money?  Follow the link to get the details about video syndication through Newstex Video On Demand.

Last month, I wrote a post on the Newstex blog called New Twitter Statistics Tell an Interesting Story where I talked about research conducted by Sysomos on 11.5 million Twitter accounts.  In that post, I discussed the trends related to how people use Twitter (e.g., frequency of posts, numbers of followers, etc.).  Today, I’d like to take a look at the statistics provided by the Sysomos research from the authoritative content perspective.  Specifically, the fact that nearly 1 in 4 tweets is created by a bot.

What do I mean by authoritative content?  I am referring to the useful and meaningful tweets posted by experts, professionals, and people who have built some kind of credibility on the topics they tweet about.  These are the online publishers (organizations and groups) whose content Newstex syndicates through its news, blogs, video and Twitter syndication agreements.  It’s the authoritative content that professionals, business people, journalists, academics, lawyers, and more count on to do their jobs everyday.

So how does one find authoritative Twitter updates if 1 in 4 tweets is created by bots, according to the Sysomos research?  That’s certainly the trick, and unfortunately, there isn’t an easy way to sift through the clutter on Twitter to find the authoritative tweets.  I wrote a post on the Newstex blog about that exact problem just a week or so ago, which you can read here.

In short, Newstex provides a solution to finding great content hidden behind the clutter through its NewsTwits product.  Twitter content can be meaningful, powerful and authoritative.  Through NewsTwits, that authoritative content can get in front of key influencers who want it and need it but don’t have the time to haphazardly search through the tweet clutter (including the 24% that’s created by bots) to find it.

Image: Flickr

A new research report from Sysomos, a social media analytics company, was released in June and provides interesting insight into the world of Twitter.  The research was conducted on a large sample — 11.5 million Twitter accounts. 

First, check out the graph from Sysomos below which shows the growth of Twitter users between March 2007 and May 2009.  Incredibly, almost 75% of Twitter users created their profiles in 2009.  60% of all Twitter users are from the United States.

A few more interesting statistics from the Sysomos report:

• 85.3% of Twitter users publish fewer than 1 update per day.
• 21% of Twitter users have never published a tweet at all.
• 50.4% of Twitter users haven’t published a tweet in at least 7 days.
• 93.6% of Twitter users have fewer than 100 followers, and 92.4% follower fewer than 100 people.

Perhaps the most interesting statistic is this one: 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity.  According to an article in The Guardian, there are 30 million Twitter accounts, which translates to 1.5 million active Twitter users.  It’s not surprising that companies like Google and NewsCorp are rumored to be considering an offer to buy Twitter.

Read more from the Sysomos report.

In a new study conducted by iVillage, BlogHer, and Compass Partners, eMarketer reports that  53% of U.S. women age 18-77 who use the Internet participated in some form of online social media in March 2009.  Of those women who use social media, 3 out of 4 (75%) use social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.  More than 1 in two (55%) use blogs.   Check out the stats below:

12 million U.S. women (29% of the women who actively used blogs in March 2009) posted to blogs, and 8 million (8%) actually published blogs, while the remaining 22.7 million (54%) read blogs.  Those are some big numbers, and they’re showing no signs of slowing down.  In fact, blog usage is taking more and more traffic away from traditional media everyday.  Check out the stats below to see the 1-year change in media usage habits:

So what do all these numbers tell us?  Social media has reshaped the way people share and receive information.  There’s no going back now.  It’s an exciting time to be a member of the blogosphere and online community!

Images: eMarketer