Recession may mean a little less spending on entertainment for most of us, but apparently the pockets of tween girls are as deep as the big blue sea with recently released movie Twilight receiving the rank of “forth best November opening of all time” with $70.5 million in box office sales on its opening weekend.

The film benefited from an extensive marketing campaign that made use of social networking sites such as MySpace.

The campaign began in April when over four million people viewed the movie’s trailer on the Twilight MySpace Page which also featured an online forum, character playlist, a quiz to find out which character you are most like, as well as clips from the film, music videos from the soundtrack, and special MySpace profile skins. (more…)

Weather is often a sure fire upload for CNN’s iReport, a user-generated online news channel. Here’s a video report from the big snowstorm that hit the Canadian maritime provinces yesterday. Some parts received more than 80 cm.

CNN will air a special report this Thursday on American Thanksgiving paying tribute to 10 CNN Heroes, selected by users and viewers. More than one million votes were cast for community activists, children’s advocates and other active volunteers who help make the world a better place.

DivineCaroline.com has established an online community where women can come together to share, search, and submit content on every aspect of a woman’s life.

The site is broken up into nine main categories which include everything from relationships and parenting to travel and play. Members can join for free and participate as viewers or take part in the site’s content by submitting stories and reviews or participating in the site’s online forums. (more…)

Greenies of all kinds have been finding a home online lately at TreeHugger.com, a site hoping to inspire and spur environmentally-friendly innovations for business and industry. With user-generated content, blogs, newsletters, video segments and a radio show, Treehugger wants to be “a one-stop shop for green news, solutions and product information.” (more…)

Hey peeping Toms! Put away those binoculars and get to the computer, Swedish home insurance company Atava launched an absolutely brilliant website that will keep you entertained and out of jail at the same time.

The site has taken user-generated content to a whole new level by showing an apartment building with a different scene being broadcast in each window streamed directly from webcams of entrants that have signed up to have their video displayed on the site. (more…)

In Kindergarten, when we duplicated a classmate’s crayon scribble sun, we were pointed at and called a “copy cat” by our tiny peers. In university and college we knew the lecture on the first day of class would be dedicated to all the punishments we would receive if plagiarized material was found in our midterm papers.

After all this, you would think that by the time we reach the stage of professional employment we would be over ‘copying’ the work of others. But according to the gamers’ blog Pushing Play, Sony is not over it and is using entries from their user-generated Design-A-Sackboy Contest for their new LittleBigPlanet game. (more…)

In 2010, motion pictures and Web content as we know them will begin to change as The MIT Media Laboratory’s opens the Center for Future Storytelling, funded by Playmouth Rock Studios.

The Center aims to revolutionize how visual stories are told from major motion pictures to peer-to-peer multimedia sharing. The plan is to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social creating active participants out of audiences by using technology to bridge real and virtual worlds and allow everyone to make their own unique stories with user-generated content on the Web. (more…)

The US military boasts all the latest technology and gadgets on the battlefield. It has also paid attention to the use of social media with various blogs and online communities intended to inform, educate and elicit intellectual discussion and debate on the US army in today’s environment.

Most of the forums available are only accessible to those who meet membership requirements, but there are a few public blogs in which interesting discussion is going on. Perhaps the most impressive of the sites is the public blog, Military.com, which has military communities for every section of the military: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, National Guard and even military spouses. (more…)

Manufacturers looking to win consumer attention will now have access to the technology to easily syndicate user-generated content with Bazzaarvoice’s introduction of BrandVoice.

This technology is a dream come true for marketing and public relations departments as it will allow manufacturers to collect product ratings and reviews and then automatically push them to retail locations and their customers.

“Study after study has shown that consumers are heavily influenced by user-generated product reviews,” said Brett Hurt, founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice in a news release. (more…)

FunMobility has finally caught up with technology seen on CW’s Gossip Girl for the past two seasons with the launch of America’s Best Mobile Flix (aFlix), which will act as in interactive video sharing service and mobile social network.

The community will be made available by Verizon Wireless (meaning that only Verizon subscribers will be able to upload videos and images), however all content can be shared with mobile contacts on various networks.

“Today’s mobile consumer demands creative freedom and giving them the tools to generate their own media is the next step in broadening and deepening their mobile experiences,” said CEO of FunMobility, Adam Lavine in a news release. “aFLIX represents the next evolution of mobile media creation, giving users the ability to point, click and immediately share their personal videos with millions of others.” (more…)