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Google agreed to buy YouTube today for $1.65 billion in stock. In the conference call it was apparent from both Eric and Sergey’s comments (Sergey mentioned MySpace, Facebook, and Orkut by name), that YouTube is ushuring in the next generation of the internet: one that leverages social networks and video.

Google video will remain as a stand alone with even tighter integration with the main google services. I will be watching Google’s page creator as well as their Google personalized home pages. These were not mentioned specifically in the call, but I suspect they are robust entries for GOOG to expand into social networking.

The next generation internet is here is and it is socially networked media. Yahoo!, MSN, and MySpace, look out.

8 months after Rocketboom’s successful ebay auction, word from AdAge today is that 118 advertisers have lined up for a cable TV advertising auction powered by eBay.

Originally dreamed up March 2005 by Wal-Mart SVP-Marketing Communications Julie Roehm at her former post at Chrysler Group, Adage reports the auction is being seeded with $50m in Walmart ads.

Congrats to RB for seeing the trend early and capitalizing on it.

The ad trials are being set up for demonstration next month with an estimated launch in the first quarter of 2007. eBay’s site is located at Admarketpilot.com.

There will be two trading systems to serve both buyer and seller. The Buyer’s format sounds like it will be an RFP format from selected sellers. A marketer can set a start and end date for the trade. Anonymity will be kept during the bid process with the winner and winning bid being revealed at close.

The second system would be one for sellers. Available inventory would be posted and buyers would bid on the package.

YouTube Inc., operator of a hit Web site for videos, has hired Yahoo Inc. Treasurer Gideon Yu to join the startup as its first chief financial officer, according to the Wall Street Journal.

I believe watching what Yu does at YouTube will be one barometer of the health of online video. If he exits quickly, there may not be alot real revenue in their formula. Could it be they are queuing up an IPO? Shopping it for private sale?

It will be interesting to see what Yu and VP of Sales, Tony Nethercutt, can do.

Wow. What an amazing last few months, and what an incredible weekend! Vloggercon was sold out and the Swedish American Hall was crackling with the kinetic energy of vloggers from all over the world!

Our persistence paid off on the connectivity side. We were able to launch the show with 4 bonded T1s and have awesome throughput the entire weekend thanks to Eddie, Alex and the crew at Monkeybrains. We were able to get a nice clear stream out to Nessuno.tv in Italy and they tossed the feed up to Satellite (Hot Bird 3, Freq 12.149, Pol Vert, FEC ¾, Sym 27500) from there.

Rocketboom announced at the show that they will be releasing a video series with BoingBoing soon. Robert Scoble brought us great buzz with his leaked announcement and the subsequent coverage of his departure from Microsoft to PodTech.

Eric Rice, aka Spin Martin, reproduced Vloggercon in Second Life. It included our live feeds embedded in that virtual space.

On the marketing side, Intel’s Viiv brand (the digital living room of the future), won major points from the grassroots media movement when they agreed to listen for two days rather than to speak for 45 minutes. A big shout out to Rohit and OgilvyPR who kept the vision alive, and for Mike Hudack at blip.tv, who jumped in at the 11th hour with a turn key video hosting and tagging solution! Look for some really cool video of videobloggers telling Intel what they think soon.

I announced Jason’s Expedition360 new vlog to everyone on Sunday. The trek now includes a tri-weekly vlog in addition to the 700 hours of archived footage from the first human powered circumnavigation!

I finally had the chance to meet so many people in real life 3 dimensional space that I had only got to know from their video or participation in the Yahoo videoblogging group. It was really, really cool.

…and the parties! Oh man the parties!

We still need to go through the post mortem on the show, but I can tell you that Jay, Schlomo and I have the gears in our heads starting to turn for the next venture already….

Check these tags out for alot more info: Blip.tv, flickr , Tecnorati, Mefeedia, Fireant.

Some type of video coming from me later this week.

My apologies. The site has been down a few weeks. A java code error messed the site up pretty bad for IE users. Should be ok now.

Gee, what’s up? The shoe leather gets a work out this month with the up front in less than two weeks. Online Video is white hot, and there are multiple market strategies that have been evolving over the last 8 months in the shift to digitized media.

Vloggercon is 5 weeks away. June 10-11, San Francisco. Video bloggers podcasting. Tools. Emerging businesses. You really should check it out if you think media can me more than “one-way” communications.

Universus has evolved. Need to update the site. It’s shaping up to be a strong second half.

With the falling cost of production and distribution, it was only a matter of time to see the return of the B-movie, this time via the web. Even though their new weekly video is shot in High Def and premiering inside HD entertainment section, Earthflix makes no pretense with California PI. You can see their connection to the past at the end of this first episode with a tribute to Robert Lippert , by Lippert’s son.

Lippert gave us memorable titles from the 40-60’s with movies like Rocketship X-M, Steel Helmet, and the Tall Texan.

Check out the premier episode of California P.I.

It appears Earthflix will be showing old clips from Candid Camera soon as well. Will a new version be far behind?

South by Southwest is coming up in just a few weeks. I will be out there for most of the Interactive and a day or two of the Music fest. There seems to be the rumblings of a few vlogger activities including the TowerPod launch, and an IOTA kick off party with Magneta Lane, The Mutts, The Slip, Dengue Fever, Heavyweight Dub Champion w/ Dr. Israel and special guest. Will keep you posted as it develop!

The location and dates for Vloggercon 2006 have been set! San Francisco, June 10-11, 2006. Limited attendance. This is gonna be huge.

The last few weeks I’ve been enjoying a new blog in the Bay Area: Valleywag. Backed by Nick Denton’s Gawker, Valleywag has grown on me. At first it was the tabloid approach to the personalities of web two dot oh and old skool tech, but today it actually became a relevant news aggregator with these stories that I found relevant: Google buys Measuremap (which I have been using); Exodus from Technorati. Worth subscribing to.

Well it’s over! After an intense 10 day period and over 100 bids, Rocketboom’s eBay auction shot into the atmosphere with a successful $40,000 bid by the appropriately named Starfinder5. Because of their rapidily growing viewership it is hard to project total subscribers by the time the ads are aired in March, but this puts an approximate value of $53-$61 CPM on the show. Congratulations Andrew and Amanda!

Rocketboom’s advertising auction is now up on eBay.

Update: as of early morning Feb 2nd, auction is up to $12,412.31 with a little more than a week to go. This is an effective CPM of ~ $19.10 with a much better share of voice + the buzz.

One of my clients, Rocketboom will be auctioning off ad time of their show on eBay next week. The winning bidder will allow Rocketboom to create the advertisement, subject to their review.

Rocketboom receives over 130,000 views per episode. Over a few days, many posts receive over 200,000 views.

With time and place shifting, the media landscape is changing. Portability of the brand message will be critical in this new era of Media stepped in social networks and this push toward edge competencies outside of the enterprise.

Update:

Auction is now up on eBay.