In the technology industry, the New Year has become synonymous with the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. But this year, the event will be conducted in a decidedly lower-key than years past. Lighter on celebrities, heavier on substance, the slimmed-down CES opens Jan. 8 with a line-up that heavily skews toward traditional media companies and Internet service providers delivering media content. If last year was all about the convergence of Internet and technology companies with the consumer electronics market, 2007 is all about old media fighting back. But all that glitters at CES is not …

John Battelle, one of the Web industry's better prognosticators, gives his 2007 predictions. Among them: Yahoo, AOL or IAC will be scooped up by Microsoft this year, as the software giant realizes it can't build its way into a better online media position. If it doesn't buy AOL, Yahoo will, he says. Failing that, AOL will go public, but the IPO will receive a lukewarm review. Perhaps, but the official stance from the Time Warner camp is that AOL is still several years away from being let go, especially since its massive executive shakeup has only just …

YouTube, MySpace and all the other Web 2.0 sites being bought up by major media corporations may be clamping down on the sex and violence depicted on their sites, but that doesn't mean minors can't easily find it elsewhere. Web sites like Stickam.com are able to build businesses by going precisely where others fear to tread: unfiltered live broadcasts from Web cameras. Stickam combines MySpace-like elements with features that allow Web camera conversations to be broadcast to large groups of people. Dailymotion, a French startup, is more like a young, uncensored YouTube, though the company's executives maintain they take …

For Web publishers, posting user feedback has become a requisite part of their business. Will wikis be the next step in the content they offer their audiences? Since wikis enable people to edit and contribute to published content, it raises the risk that the information provided could be inappropriate, irrelevant or just plain wrong. As the folks at Wikipedia will tell you, wikis need constant monitoring. This would certainly cost, but would the payoff in ad revenue make it worth the expense for media companies? Absolutely, because wiki content costs nothing to produce. The problem media …

As the predictions for 2007 pour in, Billboard says this should be the year the music industry figures out how to profit from user-generated content. In 2006, record labels like Universal Music Group struck deals with YouTube and Google Video, enabling video users to freely use their copyrighted material in exchange for a cut of the publishers' ad revenue. As opposed to suing all and sundry--a policy that will ultimately prove both fruitless and futile--these progressive deals represent an important part of the recording industry's future. The music industry has to figure out how to roll …

Company got a bad rep? Take a page from the book of Monsanto Co., a producer of engineered crops. The company sent camera crews to the Philippines, Australia and other countries where their genetically modified goods are produced to film testimonial from local farmers. These videos were then placed on the company's Web site. Companies like Monsanto are often the target of protests by environmentalists, but the use of video helped show how genetically modified crops have actually made the lives of the local farmer better. The PR effort illustrates one of the many uses of …

Video blogging is a particularly dangerous business in Baghdad. Isam Rasheed, the publisher of the weekly vlog "Alive in Baghdad" believes that vlogging is the only way to tell the true story of what's currently going on in Iraq. Whereas CNN, MSNBC and Fox News can afford protection for their journalists, vloggers play a dangerous game. In one case, two of Rasheed's writers were captured and held for 72 hours. In Iraq, anyone filming without an entourage can easily be regarded as a spy, but Rasheed maintains the risk is worth taking. It's this kind …

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales believes his next wiki project could become powerful enough to take on Google. Wales' vision of a totally transparent social search engine could prove to be the ultimate extension of Google's original vision: Organize the world's content, and make it searchable. Google ranks its results based on how many links a given page receives--a system that's prone to trickery and hacking. Wales hopes the participation of the Web community will eliminate those problems, although wikis, as we know, are even more open to such tinkering. In reality, wiki-based sites like Wikipedia rely on …