For companies, brands, organizations and people that ever doubted the value of social networks and user-generated content (UGC) as a legitimate means of communication, the events of the last week in Iran must be an eye opening experience. Since the Iranian government has expelled almost all foreign correspondents the only news getting out of the country is being sent via social networks, namely Twitter.

What makes this particular situation different is that the content being shared on social networks is not remaining just on the social networks. Images and videos from inside Iran are being broadcast on television channels around the world – from CNN, to the BBC to CBC. (more…)

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) just made a big announcement at the nextMEDIA Conference in Alberta, Canada about its plans for a user-generated content (UGC) program to target young adults.

nextMEDIA Banff, hosted by Achilles Media, is where the world’s leading edge content creators, aggregators, broadcasters, agencies, advertisers and solution-providers meet to develop key business relationships. The conference coincides with The Banff World Television Festival to take advantage of connecting the two media communities. (more…)

Memorial University of Newfoundland is bringing back its Rant like Rick contest, calling on grade 11 and 12 students to submit their own rants for a chance to win free tuition and free books for a year plus $10,000. MUN is offering two second place prizes of free tuition for a year.

The contest has a YouTube presence. Deadline for entries is March 22. (more…)

GoAnimate.com has signed a deal with CBS that allows people to use a Star Trek template for their own animated creations. GoAnimate is a user-generated content  (UGC) website that lets users create animated short films out of pre-existing characters and environments.

The new deal will allow the use of scenes and the characters from the original Star Trek. The new stories can be anything that the user can dream up. The speech is done through writing in speech bubbles and the action of the characters is selected from a number of different pre-animated movements. (more…)

Could it be that the days of free everything on the Web - short as they’ve been - are nearing an end? That’s one prediction from Deloitte’s 2009 Media and Entertainment Predictions.

The report predicts that the rising cost of free online content alone will put serious limits on how much  content the public will be allowed to post on sites such as YouTube and Facebook. For those very large sites, the costs for storing all that content could rise to more than $100 million a year, and they are still having difficulty earning enough from advertising to pay for it all. (more…)

CBC.ca is the number one ranked news website in Canada for buzz generated from its online content, according to a study by Chicago-based Cision.

The study looked at the country’s top 10 media outlets and how effective their online content was at generating buzz, as measured by links and comments that the media outlets received from December 29, 2008 to January 27, 2009.

Cision examined how many times the website was mentioned - including on social media such as Twitter to blogs and forums - and how many times someone responded to that mention. (more…)

For years the music industry has battled to protect its copyrights in the face of countless basement DJs sampling the biggest top 40 hits. Now the controversy over intellectual property is growing in the world of online video. It is the same old debate: if you take someone else’s creation and re-tool it, have you created something new? Often it’s user-generated content that has copyright law-makers scrambling to catch up. (more…)

Radus announced a new media hub platform that provides consistent user experience for reading news feeds, sharing content, blogging or watching videos while also offering access to mainstream and user-generated content like news, sports and entertainment.

“Today, you’re forced to jump between an endless array of news, entertainment, and social sites just to keep up,” said Radus CEO Scott Rankine in an article here. “Radus solves this problem by offering consumers a new approach, one that brings together the best in online media and social networking in a way that’s visually stunning and remarkably easy to use.” (more…)

At first glance Chumby just looks like a futuristic alarm clock, flashing the time and pictures in a slideshow style rotation much like you would see on your computer screen in its screen saving mode. But the compact consumer Internet device (selling at $179.95 a piece) is more advanced than that. It’s an interactive media player that performs as a window into a user’s Internet life outside their desktop, streaming content like weather, news, Facebook, photos, podcasts and music. (more…)

He scores (music), he scores! Elementary school teacher Colin Oberst from Beaumont, Alberta won CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada anthem challenge last night. He took home the $100,000 top prize and will earn half the royalties on the composition.

Oberst ended on top of a heap of 15,000 submissions to the cross-country contest to replace the old theme that CBC lost to rival CTV last summer. The winning composition is called Canadian Gold.