Google is in the content production business. Those of us that sit on our duff and ponder important matters such as these had generally already concluded that, but when I mentioned this as a creeping factor we should all keep on our radars when the Google Knol launched, a lot of the response in the blogosphere used rebuttals like “so what?” and “you’re crazy!”.

The fact is that the reality of Google no longer being in the business of simply monetizing and organizing the world’s information is here now, and we’re going to need to start thinking in terms of what we’re going to do to adapt.

The bit of news that brings this topic to the fore again is something I noticed over at Inquisitr last night, but was also mentioned late last month over at Nalt’s blog, and that is Google’s almost stealth launch of a YouTube show named Poptub. The show stars Maria Sansone, who you may remember as the host of Yahoo’s “The 9.”

She’s now working for Google, though, and the show is going to center around showcasing viral and popular content already within the ecosystem of YouTube. It hasn’t been a runaway hit yet, but each episode boasts at least a few thousand views, and is likely to grow a whole lot more, given the promotional juice that Google’s putting behind it.  

From the Inquisitr: “The new show is being promoted by Google through advertising on YouTube, and across the Google advertising network, including placements in video ad units.”

With the news today that Google continues to excel despite the tough economic times surrounding them means that more content plays like this will continue.  The first major foray in this was obviously the Knol, and developed concurrently was the Calvacade of Comedy, but this show that uses the concept of promotion of user content as it’s cover, crosses the threshold into personality driven content, very similar to the content created by outfits like Revision3 and many top blogs like Boing-Boing and even us here at Mashable.

Will all content producers eventually end up working for Google?  It’s almost a ludicrous question, but with them creeping slowly into every aspect of content production and their sheer size and resources, it’s more than of a little frightening prospect for relative little guys, let alone mainstream media who are barely getting a handle on the media type of the future.

Google Apps, the simple online office package aimed primarily at small businesses, now has support for videos. Users can post and embed videos, tag them, and leave comments - just like having your own mini YouTube. According to CNET, the technology used was actually developed by YouTube for corporate clients, and although it’s quite similar to what you get on YouTube, some features stand out. Scene Browser, for example, lets you browse through the video using thumbnails which refer to certain keyframes.

It might seem like a small upgrade, but it’s actually quite significant; hosting videos costs money and resources, and many companies will be relieved to have a simple solution such as this within Google Apps. Granted, the storage offered within Google Apps Premier Edition (which costs $50 yearly) is 3 GB per user, which is not that much when it comes to video. The videos themselves, however, are without standard YouTube restrictions: up to 300 MB in size and without a time limit.

Google Video is an interesting test for Google. Depending on its success, we can probably expect additional features like more storage, live video streaming and video conferencing, which will make it much more interesting to enterprise customers. Perhaps Google has an idea how to make money out of video sharing after all?

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For as long as there has been reporters or journalists, there have been those anonymous sources who have helped them break more than a few stories. In most cases, these fountains of information have preferred to remain anonymous and out of the spotlight, but it is safe to say that without those sources a journalist’s job would be a lot harder.

This was of course long before social media came along and provided everyone an opportunity to be the journalist instead of just the source. Tied in with that was the total paranoia on the side of the mainstream media newspapers that this Twitter things was just too flaky and bloggers were trying to destroy their business.

As with all things though, given enough time and proof attitudes can change and such is the case as more and more regional newspapers appear to be willing to take a second look at this whole social media thing. Not out of fear that they will find themselves relegated to the ancient past, but rather out of realizing that it can be a great way for them to maximize their already limited resources.

A good example of this meeting on a common ground can be seen in a post today at Poynter Online where Daniel B. Honigman talks about a recent evacuation at the Cook County circuit clerk’s office after a bomb threat and how the
Chicago Tribune included local Twitter users in tracking down the story. Beyond that, the Tribune used the service to further spread the story that the Tribune had posted to their online site.

It turns out that the bomb scare was all over Twitter within minutes of people being evacuated from the building. This Twitter activity on the ongoing events was picked up by the Chicago Tribune’s online persona on Twitter who passed the story onto the newspaper’s City Desk. Within 20 minutes the story about the bomb scare and the evacuation was on the front page of the Tribune’s web site.

At the same time the story link was posted to Twitter via the Tribune’s Twitter persona – ColonelTribune – who also took time to thank those on Twitter who had helped with the leads on the story.

While I would have like to have seen that type of attribution in the story as well I fine this kind of willingness to embrace and use new technology like Twitter very encouraging. Rather than the typical bickering that seems to go on about the value of services like this there are organizations that are finding ways to make them work. In the end we all benefit and that is a good thing.

[Twitter screen captures courtesy of Poynter Online]

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GoAnimate is a new site where you can create your own animations. Unlike similar sites that merely allow you to make comic strips with few animation options and custom design capabilities, GoAnimate has a more complete set of features for tailoring any animation to your liking. When beginning, you can start from scratch or use one of GoAnimate’s template designs. Add scenes to your animation just as you would for a video clip.

There’s a pretty wide variety of characters you can use for your animation clip and they’re are all customizable. You can even place a photograph of your face over a character for an added comedic touch (think Elf-Yourself). To make things easy, you can search Flickr or your Facebook account for images. You can also add other media, such as sounds, music and your voice, to make your animation look more professional.

Animations are shareable across a variety of social networking and social bookmarking sites, as well as embeddable, so it’s easy enough to create viral content from your GoAnimate account, though I’m somewhat surprised to see YouTube missing from the distribution “share” list. What I find particularly interesting about GoAnimate’s site and business model is the fact that the team behind GoAnimate has also forged some deals with licensed animated content so that it can be used by animation creators on the site, and shared across the Web. This introduces some marketing potential on the part of many animators, both well-known and independent, not to mention other brands that would like to partake in user-generated animations as well.

Bringing such creation tools to the average Web user is part of a larger trend we’re seeing across a number of Flash-based spaces, including games and multimedia content-sharing from companies like EA Games. As such media becomes further integrated into the social media sites we already frequent, monetization will encourage even more feature development to simplify the creation and sharing process.

I think it’s time that the Web giants of the West clean house and toss away what they don’t absolutely need to accomplish goals set by management. Why? Technological focus of the highly productive sort has given way to competitive hubris, and those two terms should remain exclusive from one another often as possible. Each of the Big Four - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL - has displayed terrible redundancies in their own way, and needlessly so.

One of the most outstanding examples, perhaps, comes by way of Google. Google purchased YouTube some years aback, and its acquisition, while still not especially profitable, has come to dominate the field of Web video much the same way the company’s own search-advertising duopoly has grown. Still, Google Video survives. To be sure, they each serve different purposes. But why is that, exactly? Why work an ancillary angle? Wouldn’t it have been better to do away with Google Video by now and attend solely to YouTube?

Also, Google purchased Jaiku, a one-time strong competitor to Twitter that promoted itself heavily for the mobile crowd to great effect, but lost considerable ground in the last year do to the ways of popularity contest. What was the reasoning behind Google’s purchase? To get on the microblog wagon, of course. Yet, if the intention was good, Jaiku nonetheless gained little for its parent. So wouldn’t it be best to just…move on? Jaiku’s homepage signifies its status well at present. The announcement of Jaiku’s move into the Googleplex is still write large. Still.

Now, how about the smallest of the four, AOL. Seems innocent enough, trying to make things happen for itself. But perhaps it’s trying too many things, no? From the looks of it, AOL has only a few really solid efforts underway: its AIM service, its radio (plus Last.fm) projects, and its blogging network. Those are what make AOL sit unique from other giants, it seems, and which should be developed with vigor. Everything else appears ancillary. AOL Mail is still strong as far as users go, but in utility, it’s no market leader. Search? Three words: “Enhanced by Google.” Sure, its search and home news page are very much bread and butter to the entire operation, but again, AOL can’t survive forever on aid. It needs to find its own way. It should think less horizontal and more vertical. How best to make its most attractive properties better, in other words.

Microsoft is at this time a peculiar fellow. It has a reasonable amount of traffic, but its ambition may be too much of a fantasy. Google is very dominant in search, and while Microsoft would do well to remain in the game in order to pull in some coin to fund its Live services, to seek a real challenge with the king of the judge seems somewhat fantastical at the moment. Microsoft was hard after Yahoo, but for $44+ billion dollars, it might be better able to condition its own properties to serve users better. And that suite of full-fledged cloud office applications isn’t going to make itself. My last word about Microsoft for now: The company’s expansion of its original deal with Facebook to supply a search box for users something that I think is worth more to Microsoft’s future than doing anything really massive with Yahoo.

Speaking of Yahoo, it is one player that is so unfortunately confused about its plans for the future that it hasn’t yet managed to make an outright killing with its top properties. From far and wide, cries over the unrealized potential of Flickr have droned on and on and on again. Yahoo Mail, besides being visually refreshed, has remained largely unchanged. Yahoo Buzz, something which many consider to have a clear advantage over Digg, if only for its potential audience, is not displayed with any prominence on the Yahoo homepage. The user must select “More Yahoo Services” in order to gain access. For something which can make Yahoo seem more current and appear more content-rich from the get-go, it’s strangely second-tier. For goodness sake, Yahoo still features a link for GeoCities at its topmost domain. Poor prioritization for sure.

Here’s the thing. The roles of Internet giants are understandably difficult to manage. The carnal objective of enormous financial growth, mandated by the companies as well as the starseekers of Wall Street, is a massively tough nut to crack in and of itself, quarter after quarter. Brilliance is hard to repeat, after all, and sometimes there is only so much you can eek out of a particular business. The risk of having a decision deemed stupid and ineffectual by users and subsequently investors as well, is just added pressure that can only be conducive to cautiousness, and not meaningful progress.

Of course, being a giant also has its outstanding benefits. It means that you carry with your name a sizable amount of money, either in assets or in cold hard cash. Which you can experiment with very liberally, particularly in the startup market. But having the option to do so doesn’t necessarily mean you take it.

For a long time I’ve watched the Big Four mozy about and stretch themselves unnecessarily. I’ve seen things boom, bust, and languish to various degrees of boring. Sites and services launched afresh or have been purchased, and something or other has subsequently stagnated as a result. Yet all too often have those burdens been kept afloat. Why that is is a mystery. There’s no reason for it. They’re dead weight, and the sooner one is done with them the better. You have lower amount of vital statistics to watch over, giving you more opportunity to zero in on what really matters to their brands.

The fact is that excess fat is on everyone’s plate, and the more able one becomes at mimimizing one’s weaknesses, the more pronounced one’s strengths may grow. Really, sometimes it is that simple.

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Conventional wisdom says politics is ugly, politics is blood sport. And conventional wisdom is spot on. But the field of play is no longer reserved only for the Washington Beltway. Nor is it the sole domain of London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow or Beijing. Now the YouTube set have ample ammunition as well. Just how much they have in store is key to determining whether we’ve reached a tipping point in favor of the populist power bequeathed by Google, et al. I’ll posit that we have. The table has most definitely turned.

Not entirely, mind you. The lobbyist class is in no way a vanishing breed. They’re still very much ingrained in legislative organization and debate. And political power unchecked will inevitably corrupt. So on the whole, if any “change” is to occur, it will likely move at snail’s pace. But we are in a very interesting position here today. We now see Google, and other technology companies of similar making, holding substantial weight when it comes to influencing the campaign season. And it is the portfolio billions of dollars large that is the most outstanding indication of Google’s heft. That, for all intents and purposes, makes Google - in particular its increasingly powerful video service - a platform virtually unchallengeable by government and those associated with government.

Published today in The New York Times is a piece by Jim Rutenberg, in which he describes independent video producers as having effectively supplanted some advocacy groups, many known by the now infamous “527” moniker, to take the reigns as the drafters and manipulators of deeply impactful messages tossed about the campaign trail in the US, and beyond.

Indeed, the negative connotation of the term “manipulators” (which, just to note is my own, not Rutenberg’s) is important to highlight here, because, as with the Web’s truth seekers, evasions from fact and the viral promotion of fictions also employ YouTube to great effect. YouTube brings the good with the bad, as it were.

But the mere establishment of YouTube (and its competitors) as a channel by which civilians can learn for themselves very quickly and easily the ways of political practice and discover up close the two-sided monster electioneering has become, surely indicates a shifting of the tide. The ingenious craftwork by professional video producers and amateurs alike has proven with ever greater punch that the virtual democratization of media access on the Web, coupled with the very active trend toward ubiquity of Web services, is now a more or less insurmountable and irreversible reality.

The movement toward the tipping point, specifically here in the U.S., began roughly around the time of the 2004 and 2006 elections. And it generally all began with scandalous captures. One recording, taken by a member of Virginia state senator Jim Webb’s 2006 campaign of then incumbent George Allen denigrating loosely the man with the camera, was subsequently pushed to YouTube, where it took on a life of its own.

That is only one of the many videos to get this ball rolling, of course. And while the recipe for the creation of a viral video is not precise and is somewhat amorphous, the fact is that such clips do grow legs and do manage, with an able social networking effort, to surface and flow into the mainstream, where they now have ample opportunity to help direct popular opinion one way or another.

The reason Web video has transformed from a political nuisance to something which requires of candidates and elected officials to dust off the damage control alarm is, as I said earlier, because of the trend toward ubiquitous access of Web services. That is obvious enough. The cat is out of the bag.

But what’s critical to point out here is that the non-lobbyist crowd can now compete for eyes and ears with historically vested interests involved in the political situation in and around D.C. That wasn’t the case pre-2000. Or even pre-2004.

YouTube has risen to become not just a message box complementary to one-way street that is television. It has become something akin to “Fact-Check Central.” Video producers may of course propagate lies and distortions on YouTube just as quickly as the so-called change agents. But one would presume the consumer crowd is not looking for misinformation - unless it is to blacklist the slander. Anyone dealing trash is labeled accordingly. This goes for elements on all sides of the division segmenting Democrats from Republicans from Independents and others.

Internet users instead seem to be latch onto things to which tags of reason and accuracy can sensibly be affixed. And preferably with as little varnish as possible. Call it a simple eagerness to know, if nothing else.

So I’m one to believe that the era of gamesmanship for gamesmanship’s sake is all but finished. Yes our heavily filtered ignorance-is-bliss lifestyle as a society is little more than something left for scavengers to pick over and for historians to document and embellish. And that past had its benefits, even if it was something of a dead-end fantasy. What’s more, there is a bit of a downside to this feverish drive for “gotcha”-style investigations. Mistakes are made. In spades. Reputations can be irrevocably tarnished if maligned messages manage to flourish in the cloud.

But the free-use platform of YouTube and those of similar ilk acts as an open correctant as well. YouTube has no allegiance to one vantage or another. It’s a sparring ground for all sides. Most importantly, it’s a sparring ground with no concern for the financial details of its users. Have a thick purse? A thin one? It’s all the same. One’s content is judged almost entirely by the size of one’s audience. With a pool of viewers many millions strong stretched across the globe, there seems to be little room left for the old-style tactics of silence, secrecy, and deception. Which I happen to welcome wholeheartedly. How about you?

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We already saw YouTube reinvent the way video ads work, but Google does not seem to be satisfied with the amount of money the site is generating. They want more.

According to Fortune, YouTube is now experimenting with full-length videos to see if they can get more advertisers. The popular video sharing site is getting tired of being a home for millions of short, mildly funny clips or pirated TV shows. Instead, they are using the success of the hour-long video titled “Howard Buttelman, Daredevil Stuntman” as inspiration for focusing on lengthier videos.

The idea is that not only is there a large audience who might be willing to watch long, in-depth “films,” but that YouTube would offer more ads per view and thus more advertisers would be motivated to sign on .

Does it make sense?

Sure. “Howard Buttelman’s” star, Francis Stokes, scored a television deal with the Sci-Fi channel and Showtime recently posted an entire episode of their show The Tudors on YouTube. The users are getting views from major television networks. The networks are looking to YouTube for viral promotion. They should collaborate.

But will it work?

There is no telling. The long-form video model may be a hit with small independent directors who are looking to make amateur or short films. But they won’t make any money from it without ad revenues. Devin Leonard of Fortune writes:

“…YouTube has a strict policy of not paying for content. Instead, the site offers its partners a share of the ad revenues sold against their content on the site. That’s not very compelling for the big broadcast networks. So, for the most part, they are building their own video sites. ABC is focused on ABC.com. Fox and NBC have launched Hulu.”

What do you think? Will people sit through user-generated feature films? Will advertisers jump on the YouTube train?

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Want to search 100 video sites fast? VideoFetcher is a nifty piece of kit. We received word about the service earlier this weekend, and having given it a brief test run, we can confidently say this thing will come in handy for quite a few rabid video consumers. Particularly those who may wish to search for video from a single engine but view desired results at the source.

It’s simple as can be. Visit the site’s home page and you’re presented with a logo and a search field in a basic white box with blue all around. Enter your query. Then click ‘fetch.’ By default you’re taken to YouTube, with all other available sites listed in a column to the left. If you wish to see what MySpace, Blip.tv, Brightcove, Photobucket, Viddler, or 90+ other sites have to show for your keyword, they’re available with a single click as well. That easy.

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UPDATE: And now it’s back. Thanks to Mash readers lubos, Philip, et al. for spotting the reboot!

Web video fans, we have some news to share, and you may not take it so kindly. YouTube is down. Yes, the copyright-infringing clips and the homages and assaults on the now infamous Miley Cyrus housed within Google’s all-powerful meme machine are evidently inaccessible.

You may panic.

First highlighted by Allen Stern at CenterNetworks, the outage seems to have stretched the globe, with reports from people spanning the US, the UK, Estonia, and places elsewhere. A few simple requests by yours truly for YouTube clips via Google Search this morning return links to unresponsive pages. (The Australian site is down too, by the way.)

Not good, not good. Maintenance gone wrong, is it? Who’s to say? Google’s not talking, neither on the company blog or, more specifically, on the official Youtube Blog. (Which is also down.) And heck, why would they? Only if this crash doesn’t get cleaned up in reasonably short order (what’s the metric for that, anyway?) will Sergey and Larry and Chad and Steve come out with a were-so-sorry and some sort of technological excuse. All we know is that YouTube devotees are likely none too happy with the cold-turkey cutoff.

Right now, it’s likely best to share some alternatives to the pixelated archives of GoogTube. Alright, alright, think, think. There’s Vimeo, Veoh, iTunes Podcasts. Yahoo Video is another. DailyMotion is a good choice. The Onion News Network, too. Those come immediately to mind. Give those a go.

Or you can put this Current TV clip of Mashable bossman Pete Cashmore on repeat. A great choice, actually, regardless of YouTube’s vital stats.

Let us know how your efforts to get into YouTube

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YouTube has tons of videos. More than tons. Gazillions of them. But the site has yet to offer its publishers - particular ones which provide popular and premium content - a decent set of tools to which which to measure viewer data. You know, in order to gauge demand better and all that great stuff.

Well, YouTube has paid recognition to this soft spot, and, according to a keynote speech delivered by Brian Cusack, the company’s sales team manager, at the eRetailer Summit in Miami today, is promising to deliver “more granular metrics” in the second and third quarter of 2008, a report by Juan Carlos Perez of IDG News today has said.

The company, which purportedly receives a great deal of information from around the world - YouTube boasts some 20 country-specific sites - is now said to be “building models to distinguish content that is universally interesting from content that is locally interesting” in order to better deploy its advertising services.

This a very clear indication of YouTube’s drive to more effectively monetize its ever-growing video trove to attract and retain more publishers, more advertising dollars, and more users, a process which the company has shown to be moving slowly along. Despite the sluggish pace of its transition to a more cost-effective framework and strategy, however, the site will undoubtedly accomplish its goal of becoming a cash cow for its parent company, Google, as a result of this new initiative.

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