News in the world of video sites

Firstly YouTube are planning some changes. I guess it had to come at some point if they were going to make any money ever. The changes essentially centre around separating premium and user content in the future and changing the navigation to a tab scheme.

http://www.clickz.com/3633218

Interestingly they will re-design their player to be more like Hulu's. Which leads us to them also touching on the story of where Disney will be doing putting media online. It looks like Hulu is the place. Obviously this only affects the US at the moment, as most Hulu content is not licensed elsewhere.

Read more below:

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090330/disneys-decision-hulu-youtube-or-something-else/

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cotown-hulu28-2009mar28,0,7839088.story

Watch-wall-e-men

Check out this brilliant movie mash-up.

http://www.fuckofffilm.com/movie-and-film-news/2009/3/24/watchmenwall-e-mashup.html

Global ad spend predicted to fall in 2009

Carat have predicted a 5.8% fall in global ad spending in 2009, with China being the only market to have a spending increase. It's not all doom and gloom though, as they predict a rise again in 2010.

http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssTechMediaTelecomNews/idUSLP39506420090325

Jollywise Media Rock the Boat

We recently put together this competition site for the Universal film The Boat That Rocked and Spotify. It's a combination that we think works incredibly well, with playlists for each of the film's main characters on Spotify. Just find out which playlist the mentioned song is on and enter the competition
http://www.thecompetitionthatrocked.com/

Music :) Ally have written about it too:
http://musically.com/blog/2009/03/26/the-boat-that-rocked-gets-spotify-promo-site/

Check out the New Media Age article as well. Although you'll need a login to read the full story.

Searching Twitter

I was reading about how Twitter has started adding text ads:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/mar/24/twitter-startups

Then I read this line:
Given the buzz around real-time search of late, that's very interesting. (There's a Greasemonkey script that will combine real-time Twitter results with Google search results, and it's fascinating...)

Which is exactly what I've was talking about. Fascinating what Twitter comes up with when you search it alongside Google and compare and see how useful Twitter is. Have a look at the links below for some more information.


Twitter Search Results on Google
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/43451

20+ Great Greasemonkey Scripts for Improving Your Twitter Experience
http://mashable.com/2008/12/17/twitter-greasemonkey-scripts/

Local Global News

An interesting approach to local news, getting it globally. It doesn't quite work yet, as not much news is geo-tagged. However - tag everything up properly on the web, a step towards the semantic web, then this could become a really useful site / idea.
And it follows on my theme of giving the web meaning and then mining that data to produce useful information.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/23/netbytes-topix-local-news

Megadrop-downs are good

I agree with Jakob Nielson mega drop-down menus are good. I find they work well in many situations. I would just always suggest that the site indicates that they are dropdowns. Sometimes you can't find the navigation around the site, and only when you happen to put the mouse over the top links do you find it.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mega-dropdown-menus.html