User Generated

The social web is overwhelmed with content and it keeps on getting worse: hundreds of millions of shares are done daily, tens of hours of video are being uploaded every minute. Current web technology allows nearly everybody to create and distribute content, it’s great at first sight, but it creates a huge noise problem on the web. More after the jump.

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Sports fans: If you’ve captured a great sports moment on video and thought, “This ought to be on SportsCenter,” here’s your chance. YouTube teamed up with ESPN on the second installment of the YouTube + SportsCenter Your Highlight contest, sponsored by AT&T.

Videos must be submitted via the ESPN YouTube channel by May 5, and SportsCenter producers will select the best ones, which will then be voted on by YouTube users. The winner will receive a trip to ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Conn., to tape a special SportsCenter segment.

The winners of the inaugural edition of the CNN iReport Awards were announced Tuesday at the CNN Grill at the 2011 South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, by CNN.com participation director Lila King. They were:

Breaking News Coverage: Michael Roberts, early images of Deepwater Horizon fire;

Original Reporting: Percy von Lipinski, bison as pet;

Compelling Imagery (Photos or Video): Mugur Vărzariu, Abandon Valley;

Commentary: James Amerson, Dear Gulf, I’ll miss you;

Personal Story: Faithe Chu, My escape from Vietnam;

Interview: Tristan Macaraeg, 16-year-old interviews classmate on living in foster care;

Community Choice: Samantha Bolton; and

iReport Spirit Awards: Janie Lambert, Julio Ortiz-Teissonniere, Omékongo Dibinga, Shari Atukorala, and Sherbien Dacalanio.

Location-based mobile app Gowalla added a CNN iReport option to its Highlights, allowing citizen journalists contributing to the cable network’s initiative to use Gowalla Passport Holders to highlight important locations.

When the Gowalla Passport Holders are added, messages will automatically be uploaded to CNN iReport, and highlights can be shared on other platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

CNN producers will be able to choose reports highlighted via Gowalla for use in the network’s reporting, and users whose content is chosen will receive CNN iReport pins on their Gowalla passports.

CNN.com participation director Lila King said:

Opening up iReport to the Gowalla community is an exciting step for participatory journalism. By bringing the power of location services to our iReport community, we are connecting our audience to the precise places where news events are happening.

The one-time “undisputed king of Tumblr” and member of NBC New York’s 20 to Follow Anthony De Rosa, founder of blog SoupSoup, was frustrated by the content on local news sites, so he and friend Richard Blakeley decided to do something about it. De Rosa spoke with Chris O’Shea of sister blog FishbowlNY about his latest initiative, Neighborhoodr.

De Rosa told FishbowlNY:

(Blakeley’s) idea was to crowd-source the content from any neighborhood by making it user-submitted. He designed the look of the site, and I put together the user interface and coding. We originally launched with 40 or so neighborhoods in New York City, which eventually grew to 60 because of demand.

Patch is bleeding money. They think that if you spend enough, you can breathe life into a long-dead top-down newspaper model. Even with the amount of money they’re spending, the people writing for them can’t live off that small a stipend. We spread the work out amongst the entire community, and the updates are frictionless. Anyone can submit content, and there’s a ton of content a click away for us to share. It allows us to get all the way down to the neighborhood level in even the smallest town without having to reinvent the wheel.

For the complete story, please see FishbowlNY.

User-generated news community CNN iReport announced the launch of the CNN iReport Awards, which will recognize the best user-submitted content of 2010, with winners to be announced March 15.

The iReport Awards will be divided into six categories: Breaking News, Original Reporting, Compelling Imagery (photos or video), Commentary, Personal Story, and Interview. A team of journalists and producers from CNN chose five nominees in each category from the total of more than 150,000 iReports received in 2010 from more than 740,000 iReporters around the world.

The panel that will select the final winners — other than the Community Choice winner, which will be voted on by iReport visitors — is made up of: CNN International anchor and correspondent Errol Barnett, ParentDish columnist Rachel Campos Duffy, Star.me CEO Ze Frank, StoryCorps founder Dave Isay, Pictory founder Laura Miner, Vice president and co-founder Shane Smith, and Next New Networks president and co-founder Tim Shey. Voting for the Community Choice winner is open until noon ET March 7.

Nominees will be featured on-air during the week of March 7 from 3 p.m.-5p.m. ET during CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin, and on CNN International’s iReport for CNN, which airs Thursday, Feb. 17, at 11:30 p.m. ET and replays the following weekend.

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NBC News vice president of specials and digital Mark Lukasiewicz spoke with Beet.TV about the explosion in video-news viewing and what his network is doing to solicit and vet user-generated content and create new forms of story telling, specifically mentioning coverage of the turmoil in Egypt.

Most user-generated content on the Web passes through some kind of swear filter. According to WebPurify CEO Jonathan Freger, the process is surprisingly democratic. Since 2007 WebPurify has been working behind the scenes to filter profanity for everyone from WordPress bloggers to Fortune 500 companies, as well as public media enterprise PBS. The company, which has offices in Los Angeles and New York, recently added image moderation and enterprise licensing to its list of services. We caught up with Freger last week to get his thoughts on the future of free speech on the Web.

“What [people who advocate free speech] don’t understand is that what they’re doing when they’re typing into someone else’s website is typing on their property,” Freger pointed out. Site administrators “are are self-moderating,” he said. “It’s not like a government entity that’s doing it.” Freger doesn’t foresee any government-mandated profanity filters on the Web other than the ones services like his provide to individual sites. “It’s too wide open right now,” he explained.

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Image By IISpacebreakII

Cheezburger is in ur investment portfolio, spending ur cash. The publishers of online humor sites I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog, Memebase and The Daily What have raised $30 million in funding. Venture capital firm Foundry Group, which also funded Zynga and Topspin, led the investment with Madrona Venture Group, Avalon Ventures and SoftBank Capital. Foundry Group managing director Brad Feld and Cheezburger CEO Beh Huh gave mbStartups the details.

“Ben and his team have built something that we think is pretty amazing,” Feld told mbStartups. “I think anybody who is part of Internet culture has seen pieces of the site, whether it’s something from FAIL Blog or one of the LOLs,” he said. Founded in 2007, the Seattle-based company owned by Pet Holdings, Inc. has attracted 16.5 million users, with 375 million page views and 110 million video views per month. “With very limited capital, they have [become leaders] in a category that’s emerged around user-generated content.”

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Writing about new media startup companies is like waving a bubble wand in the air and watching the bubbles either land on the ground, latch onto larger bubbles, or burst in mid-air, and it’s hard to tell where they’ll go. Here’s a look at some of our most interesting stories in 2010:

Social Media is Going Mainstream… Sort of

• A slew of browser-based software applications for chatting and sharing data (like enterprise software company HipChat) make the “cloud” metaphor ubiquitous enough for network television ads.
• The phrase “social network” is ubiquitous enough for Hollywood.
• ‘New Twitter’ underwhelms public, finds niche in retail with fashion startup Moxsie.
• Facebook reaches 500 million active users. But don’t get too cocky, social media: Pew Research Center reports that only eight percent of American Internet users are on Twitter.

The Internet is Getting Personal

• Web analytics software can read entire sentences.
• Just when you had LinkedIn and Yelp all figured out, here come new social media sites Bizzy and Hashable to make finding a sandwich more like using Netflix and finding a job more like using Twitter.

Sharecropping is the New Content Farming

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