It’s a free ticket on a raucous, voyeuristic trip into the lives of video bloggers, a.k.a. vloggers: Mefeedia.com. The online directory of video blogs has nearly a quarter of a million videos and counting. “It’s very easy to find the big-media video [online],” says Peter Van Dijck, information architect and founder of Mefeedia. “Independent stuff is very hard to find.” At Mefeedia, wade through the potentially boring items and you’ll find a burlesque show that posts several times a week. Adam from Hoboken, N.J., produces videos starring a philosophical woodchuck. Watch vlogs by travelers, people …

Like actors who one day hope to direct, agencies frequently talk the talk of wanting someday to own and leverage their own intellectual property. Anomaly, the New York-based online boutique, is walking the walk via a collaborative venture with PayPal Mobile that brings the virtual payment brand to wireless phones. “Text to Buy” and “Text to Give” services enable account holders to pay for physical merchandise or make donations via a short code message to PayPal. Fox, Universal Music, Nike, and Unicef are charter merchants in the program. Anomaly approached PayPal with the idea last …

As terrestrial radio giants continue battling the pesky gnat that is satellite radio, Continental Vista Broadcasting has introduced technology to help AM and FM stations ramp up their Web operations. Taking a page from the Howard Stern playbook, the firm has rolled out iSeeRadio, which equips stations to air Web video culled from radio broadcasts. What sets the technology apart, according to iSeeRadio vice president Kenny Fenton, is both its quality and its interactivity. “People hear ‘Web cam’ and think a new frame every 10 seconds, but we stream at 300 kbs,” Fenton notes. The iSeeRadio player …

As media companies try to fill the seemingly insatiable demand for online content, many have begun exploring the potential of attracting advertising to user-generated content (UGC), including amateur productions from countless aspiring digital filmmakers, musicians, and animators. The growing pool of digital video offerings can be monetized in much the same way that text-based blogs are. Best of all, much of the content is low-cost or absolutely free, and much of it is even high-quality. Indeed, though ugc content is “amateur,” some of the amateurs know what they’re doing. A popular ugc niche is the …

A Connecticut company has created what it hopes will one day be known as the equivalent of Yahoo for TV news video. Search engines have long made it easy to find newspaper or magazine articles on desired topics. But what about video? Called TVEyes.com, the free site functions much like a traditional search engine, sifting through video on TV news Web sites. So far it’s limited to six sites, including FOXnews.com and CNN.com, but more are on the way. The site catalogs the spoken words in the videos —mostly interviews, features, and clips from the Web sites’ …

If a football game runs on a wireless network and nobody sees it, did the football game really run at all? If early wireless content deals are any indication, this isn’t a rhetorical question. Take the National Football League’s relationship with Sprint Nextel. Sprint offers four service tiers on its football package. There’s pay-per-use: Think the Rolling Stones performing live at the Super Bowl and other glitzy events. There’s the NFL application: features such as balloting for the Pro Bowl, live player statistics and clips, and access to the NFL Channel. There’s generic NFL content: ESPN, FoxSports, …

It seemed like a good idea at the time. New Line Cinema wanted to hype “Running Scared,” an R-rated shoot-’em-up thriller aimed at young men. Through previous campaigns, especially high-impact Web efforts that fueled the success of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and last summer’s “Wedding Crashers,” the studio has earned a well-deserved reputation for finessing campaigns tailored to hard-core movie junkies and casual fans alike. This time, though, the studio stumbled. To promote “Running Scared,” it launched a hyper-violent, sexually explicit — and inordinately entertaining — online video game that featured, among other things, a …

As the population of wealthy individuals expands, marketers of luxury goods have a golden opportunity.

The venerable cola brand reaches out to consumers in print, broadcast, and online. But how much is too much of a good thing?

They're in the media vanguard Welcome to OMMA's 2006 Rising Stars! We invited you to nominate the most stellar up-and-comers you know  and you did. We received lots of nominees, individuals who distinguish themselves by taking unconventional approaches to media challenges and turning good plans into brilliant ones. While we scrapped the age requirement, we sought people who continue to grow, evolve, and achieve in their careers. We eliminated nominees with puffy titles like CEO, vice president, or managing director, and we narrowed the search to agency talent. We looked for nominees who are slightly beyond …