Monday Morning Miscellany

A mix of things, some late, some not:

From Red Herring (via LostRemote), Yahoo! News will soon launch a "citizen journalism" effort that will solicit uploads of video shot by ordinary people. The site is apparently trying to overcome the technical issues associated with uploading and submitting video directly from a location. But there are sites, such as abazab, that offer the prospect of video uploading from mobile devices. This push is consistent with the social media strategy being advanced by Yahoo! across its site/network.

Answerbag, which looks exactly like Yahoo! Answers, has added "video" to differentiate. Conceptually it's a good idea, but it will be very challenging to find video (less so still images) that are responsive to individual questions. Here's more from MediaPost (reg. req'd).

According to this article that appeared in the WSJ (sub. req'd) over the weekend: Craigslist has 21 employees, is now in 300 cities in the US and abroad and has 10 million uniques a month. Revenues have been estimated to be north of $15 million and perhaps as high as $25 million (I haven't sought to verify or calculate). The Journal article is mystified as to why CL leaves "money on the table." But that's part of the secret sauce.

I'm late on this one . . . Last week, Google introduced "ad scheduling" (dayparting) to AdWords. Lots of people wrote about it some with positive, some with indifferent opinions. I believe it's a valuable addition to AdWords for those who have observed definite time-based trends around clicks and conversions (i.e., at work, after work, weekends).

From PaidContent (last week), "Avatar-based" social networking site targeting young people, Gaia Online, received almost $9 million in VC funding. Watch as social networking, 3-D mapping and gaming start to close in on each other.

One of the questions in mobile is who will be the owner of the brand that resonates with consumers and drives loyalty: the handset maker (e.g., Nokia), the carrier (e.g., Verizon) or a software or content provider (e.g., Google, Yahoo!)? Nokia's Matthew Snyder spoke with me at Where2.0 about the hardware maker's Local Search offerings around the globe (largely in partnership with directory publishers). But in the US that doesn't mean as much because here we're slaves to the carrier's phone choices. (Related: Nokia and Siemens merge their equipment units. Here's the WSJ article)

Also from last week, Photo site Riya is now seeking to become a "visual search engine" (image search, which is hugely popular, and beyond). There's an opportunity here so it's worth watching. More from SiliconBeat and TechCrunch.

Right Media, which began life as an ad network, is trying to epand its "exchange" — essentially an open marketplace for buying and sellling ad inventory. They argue that the Internet needs a more "transparent" platform for buying and selling ad inventory (than what Google and Yahoo! currently offer) and liken their exchange to the emergence of the NYSE. The market wants something like this and, clearly, smaller networks will join. The question is will the larger networks play? The answer probably is: not unless they're compelled. But it may not be necessary if Right Media gets enough smaller networks adding their inventory to the larger pool.

Here's more on Right Media's exchange from CNET. At the other end of the spectrum, there's "anti-network" network Adify.