A new report from comScore shows that online video views are up compared to the same time last year.  And in fact YouTube, the leader in online video, had views up 50% compared to January 2009.  

In January more than 32.4 billion videos were viewed in the US alone online.  YouTube, owned by Google, had 12.8 billion viewed videos, taking up roughly 39.5% of all viewed online videos.  ComScore reported that the average YouTube visitor watched an average of 94 videos throughout the month of January. That means there were about 136.2 million YouTube viewers in the US (that’s give or take 44% of the entire US population). (more…)

Lip-syncing, crazy weathermen, and dancing babies are just some of the types of things we expect to see on YouTube.  But what about using the site as away to post a Missing or Found ad, like one you might see on a street pole.  Well, two Canadians used the video site to do just that.  Josh Rimer and Craig Weckerle are two Vancouver residents, who were walking around city the night of the Olympics Opening Ceremony.  As they were walking they came upon a red case with a Sony HD camcorder inside, just laying on the sidewalk. 

So, they decided to create and post a video to YouTube, in hopes to find the owners.  And indeed, with more than 10,000 views it worked.  (more…)

A few months ago, YouTube announced they would begin supporting closed captions on videos.  Since that time, we here at iePlexus have been using the feature on all of our social media news briefs, and have even been praised for our use of closed captioning. 

However, now YouTubers now have a feature which should make enabling closed captioning easier.  It’s known as YouTube auto-captioning. YouTube says auto-captions will help YouTube users reach a larger audience in a simple matter.  (more…)

The Shorty Awards, the equivlent to the Academy Awards for Twitter users, were held last night at the New York Times Tower in New York City. CNN anchor, Rick Sanchez who was the first main stream journalist who used Twitter as a connection with viewers through his show, hosted the ceremony handing out awards in a total of 28 categories.  The second annual ceremony is held to share “the diverse ways Twitter can be used to create the best real-time short form content.”

William Shatner made a brief appearance via webcam, not only to congratulate the winners, but also share some of his favorite tweets from his new show, which is based off a Twitter account.  Suzi Orman & Facebook’s Marc Zuckenberg also made a video appearance, which was one of the highlights of the night.  All the winners who gave acceptance speeches were limited to 140 characters, the amount of characters Twitter users are restricted to when they tweet.    (more…)

It was just last week, I was explaining how some of my predictions for the next decade in the social media world were coming true.  This week, thanks to the latest study from Pew Internet, another prediction has become a reality. 

The study analyzed how American’s are now using social media and other variables to consume their news.  Just the other week, we watch the Austin plane crash unfold before our very eyes through the social networks.  In fact, based on a sample of 2,259 adults, 75% of them read news through social networks or e-mail, while about 52% of those continued to forward on the news to others. (more…)

It was discovered today that in just a few weeks, on March 13, 2010, YouTube will no longer be supported by Inernet Explorer 6. Reports say that Ars Technica found the specific date buried in a YouTube Help item pertaining to browser support.

“Support stops on March 13th. Stopped support essentially means that some future features on YouTube will be rolled out that won’t work in older browsers.” (more…)

It’s crazy to think we are already almost two full months into the new year and the new decade.  You may recall one of my first articles from this year, when I gave some predictions into what will social media be like in the future, and already some of those predictions are now realities.  Sort of.

I had talked about students hanging up their sports jersey’s for the video camera and YouTube.  You may recall two rival Seattle area high schools who battled it out on the video site with viral videos.  But could YouTube videos help students get into college?  It can now. (more…)

It’s been nearly two week since Google launched their own social network known as Google Buzz, and users are now weighing in and sharing their opinions.  If you’re not sure what Google Buzz is all about,it simply a cross between Facebook & Twitter.  You are able to integrate a number of social networks to you Buzz feed including Twitter & Flickr.  Facebook has not teamed up with Google at this time.

I’ve been trying to figure out the new social media for the past week and I must say it’s a bit confusing!  And I even consider myself to be pretty internet savy.  I’m usually pretty good at spotting out the social networks that’ll make it.  For example, last year is when Twitter became popular and what it is today, but I have been on the site for close to 3 years now.  But Google Buzz, I can’t just figure out the hype about it.  And apparently I’m not the only one. (more…)

This morning, reports of a single-engin plane crashing into a building just north of Austin, Texas hit the airwaves and the web.  Local stations KXAN & KVUE in Austin had continuing live coverage of the crash with eyewitness reports.  And why eye-witness reports play a major part of how a story unfolds, social media users shared their views before any of the stations started covering the story. And as we have reported in the past, social media is changing the way we get our news.

While the story is still developing, here’s an overview of the story with how social media users have been reporting it. (more…)

We already know that Internet users are spending most of their time on Facebook more than any other site.  Despite the time spent on the site, Google continues to dominate the web as the most visited site on the web. 

However a new report from Compete.com shows that Facebook has now taken out Yahoo as the second most visited site on the web.  At one time Yahoo dominated the web for sure, until about 2 years ago when Google stole the spot from the company.  And since then, most of Yahoo’s traffic has slowly been declining, as Facebook’s rapidly increasing.  (more…)