According to BusinessWeek, SkyBlog is doing big things in France.

It started as a lark four years ago. French rap radio station Skyrock, operated by Paris-based media group Orbus, launched a free blogging service to give listeners a way to talk back and get to know each other. The response was beyond management’s wildest expectations: Skyblog now attracts a remarkable 2.85 billion page views a month, putting it fourth among all Web sites in France and No. 1 in the coveted 15- to 24-year-old age range, according to researcher comScore.

What’s interesting to me is people need to take an approach that puts local social networking at focus instead of looking in the mirror at the behemoth all the time.

Originally posted on December 3, 2006 @ 4:53 pm

By the time this hits your feedreaders you should start seeing some 9rules updates on their site. It will be interesting to see how they grow and if they launch the top secret “9rules live” shortly after the update.

Thank you very much for being patient with us while we sorted through the list. With so many submissions we had to find a way to go through them all. We tried several different approaches and we agreed on one that we think will work the best.

So without further ado, starting tomorrow you will see regular updates for acceptances in 9rules. We normally do one big list and it’s over and done. Instead, we will be making regular announcements over the next two weeks listing the sites that have been accepted. We aren’t trying to drag this out but we had to find a way to thoroughly go through the sites. People forget that after the acceptances, I have to email them, they have to accept the membership agreement, get set up in the forums, put the lead on their site, they have to be added to communities, and Scrivs has lots of fun taking screenshots of all the sites. There is work beyond the list itself and that had to be thought of as well.

Source: 9rules

Originally posted on December 5, 2006 @ 5:37 pm

Reuters continues its push into New Media aggressively by partnering with Yahoo to allow users to create and upload video and images to share. While its unknown whether these news organizations will be paying those who upload videos and photos. This partnership shows a consistent pattern of development for Reuters, who is also a partner in BlogBurst, an agency that syndicates popular blogs.

According to The New York Times, Reuters said that it will distribute some of the submissions next year to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media outlets that subscribe to its news service. Reuters said it hoped to develop a service devoted entirely to user-submitted photographs and video.

Originally posted on December 5, 2006 @ 7:34 am

BitTorrent parent company Azureus recently received 15 Million Dollars in Venture Capital funding. So what are they putting the money into developing?

Zudeo, a high speed, high definition video sharing site that has a simple interface, a downloadable client, and the power of bittorrent. What’s not to love?

According to ArsTechnica:

The site, still in beta, allows the usual mix of tagging, uploading, and free viewing, though content is quite limited and features are still sparse. Users first need to download the Azureus application to get content, though, adding a layer of complexity to the normal process.

In return for using a BitTorrent client, Zudeo offers full HD-quality videos and gigabytes of storage space. It’s free to content producers, who need to use the Azureus Director Edition to upload their creations.

Azureus isn’t the only company using BitTorrent to distribute massive video clips; there’s also, err, BitTorrent. BitTorrent (the company) has its own plans to become a content distributor, and it just signed deals with 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate, MTV Networks, Paramount, and Starz that will allow it to offer their content for download in the new year (in addition to deals it signed earlier in the year). The company has also closed another $20 million funding round, a sign that investors still have confidence in peer-to-peer distribution models (or that they desperately want to create a YouTube-style success story).

Originally posted on December 5, 2006 @ 5:53 am