First off, YouTube announced today that it's mobile content offerings are being expanded to cover virtually all its videos.  If like me, you have visited the m.youtube.com site before you know how slim the offerings have been, so this is great news in itself.  Of course, you will still need a 3G or equivalent connection such as WiFi to truly enjoy the benefits but the operators do not see this as a hinderence. A YouTube for Mobile app is in the works and there are no plans for monetizing the site (contextual adds) yet according to daddy Google. Let's see how long that lasts eh? I have used the mobile site before and tell me tell you watching anything over 30 seconds long on my smartphones two inch screen was asking for a headache. Perhaps if the video quality were to improve I might try again.

 
Cellspin caught my eye next. Claiming to allowing updating one's blog from anywhere the service has built in compatability with popular services such as Facebook, Blogger and Flickr among others.  But before we pass this off as yet another " Web 2.0 social app" wannabee I should add that people such as our friends at Hybrid Nation, are really impressed with its interface (not quite one click but close) as well as the ability to post multiple content such as images and video. I did register on the site and will play around with this in the coming weeks and share my experiences. You can also catch Cellspin at Demo 08 here .

 
A quick look over at Comunication Overtones saw this article on social trends for 2008. No surprise to see 2006's predictions of user generated video and content along with discussions on misuse of social media channels and evolution of the press release being replaced with social network fatigue, a continuing slide of email usage as a primary method of communication and the emergence of the phone/handheld as the next playground. Read the bullet points for each trend and see if you can reach the same conclusions the author did.

While this whole thing about the phone being the next battleground was fresh in my mind I wondered over to M:Metrics and sure enough they had some wonderful new statistics on mobile portal and content usage in the United States. Ok ,so it's offical - Yahoo branded services have a nice lead over competitors. And if you ever cared to wonder how often certain portals are accessed compared to say the Weather Channel, well you can find that there too.

Finally a great article on DarlaMack about an upcoming Super Tuesday citizen journalism project where MTV's "Choose or Lose" journalists will be covering the elections with their Nokia N95's and FlixWagons posting software for unprecedented mobile coverage. The journalists will be posting live content all day long with regular coverage on MTV. Flixwagon is the software of choice allowing people to broadcast easily and reach a potential audience of over a 100 million people. Flixwagon has really been stepping up their marketing recently and this is a great achievement for a software still in Alpha. So will you tune in?

That's a wrap for today. Hope you enjoyed the read! Drop me a comment if you'd like to see more of these.

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