CNN, Facebook partner

Interesting story on journalism.co.uk about CNN’s plans to incorporate social media into its coverage of President Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration on January 20.

So of course I had to log on and become a Facebook fan of CNN to see what it was all about. The event promo says:

What will your Facebook status say when Obama becomes President? CNN.com and Facebook are partnering to enable you to update your status, and follow you friends’ updates, while you watch the inauguration live online, all on http://cnn.com/live …
Whether you’re at the office, at home, at the library, or anywhere else, you can share this moment in history with your Facebook friends live, as it happens.

The story links to NPR (National Public Radio), which is requesting help with its social media coverage, including

• Mobcasting: audio recordings of voicemails left by listeners about their thoughts and feelings on inauguration day
• An inauguration tag of #inaug09 for Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blogs, etc
• Maps of user-generated content

iReport blog gathers news from masses

The maps feature is also prominent iReport, a site run by CNN with the disclaimer: “Only the stories marked ‘On CNN’ have been vetted by CNN for use in CNN’s global news coverage.”

Its world map feature lead me to a report on this fun gadget, a HD Video Recorder Snorkle Mask with Lights, shot at the CES in Las Vegas.

This massive crowd-sourced blog generated 225,003 reports worldwide last month, 1,085 of which ran on the CNN site also. That’s quite a content generator for the amount of resources needed.

So now I am enrolled in the Star Trek webmaster program. Embed!

This wee widget I grabbed from its site packs in a lot of functions, and acts as almost a mini-website for the upcoming Trek movie (T minus 121 days!), featuring a photo gallery, synopsis, downloads, and of course my favourite movie trailer.

What a great way to promote a movie, get buzz going online. And its cool interface transitions (like the website) mimic the way DVDs transition once a button is clicked, slick.

I would advise seeing Trek’s amazing high definition trailer, give you a taste for the Imax version of the movie, coming May 2009.

High definition viewership online is rocketing according to a recent story on TechCrunch: Move Networks Streamed 100 Million Hours Of HD Video On The Web Last Year.

The article says that Move Networks, which powers the Web video streaming for ABC, Fox, the Discovery Channel, and Animal Planet, streamed 180 million hours of video, 100 million of which it claims was in high-definition. And with Hula and YouTube adding HD services, “you can expect that 100 million hours to be dwarfed this year across all the major Web video services.”

Yeay to less pixelated video offerings!