Beet TV

The how-to video site Howcast has raised $2 million in additional first-round funding from private individuals, bringing its total to $10 million, Camille Ricketts at VentureBeat reports.

Good video journalism can come in different forms, from capturing an instantaneous moment in a war or distilling a difficult concept, according to John Roberts, anchor of CNN’s American Morning. The veteran journalist was formerly with CBS News.

MySpace has launched several major initiatives this election season to get younger voters involved in the political process. It formed MyDebates.org in partnership with the Commission on Presidential Debates, conducted a poll with NBC News and the Wall Street Journal Online geared toward younger voters, and is working with major voter registration groups like Rock […]

Video publishing platform Blip.tv has closed its second round of funding, led by Bain Capital Ventures, the company announced today. Blip focuses on independent niche publishers and has seen rapid expansion, serving over 51 million video views in September–250 percent more than September of 2007, the company said.

The Wall Street Journal publishes 25-30 videos a day, and the majority of them are produced by the paper’s reporters, according to Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray. As part of a strategy to integrate online video with the reporting, The Journal trains reporters on a regular basis in New York and San Francisco to use […]

Eat the Press editor Rachel Sklar will be leaving The Huffington Post after the election to work on her book, according to a report on Gawker today. Andy interviewed Sklar at the TimeWarner Politics 08 summit earlier this week about online video at The Huffington Post and expansions underway at the site.

Yahoo service BuzzTracker's "Most Blogged" feature, which tracks the most linked-to blog posts on the Internet, has been incorporated into the Beta version of the Yahoo News page, Yahoo News General Manager Alan Warms says in this interview. Yahoo acquired BuzzTracker last year, which Warms founded, and is tracking posts from 90,000 blogs with its […]

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer told Andy at the TimeWarner Politics 08 Summit that he keeps his opinions out of The Situation Room. “I’m sort of an old-school, serious, hard news reporter who likes to do the news in a responsible way and not necessarily showcase my opinion, but to try to get some information out […]

TheWashingtonPost.com broke its own traffic record in September, receiving nearly 12 million unique visitors and surpassing USAToday.com to become the second largest newspaper site on the web, according to numbers released by Nielsen today. The New York Times holds the number one spot.

Big media companies need to stop imitating traditional television formats in online video, according to BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis. There’s no reason to do stand-ups and b-roll when the Internet provides the opportunity to reinvent the entire format, he says.

The theme of women in power has played a central role in media coverage this election, according to Rachel Sklar, editor of The Huffington Post’s Eat The Press page. Sklar spoke on a panel at the TimeWarner Politics 08 Summit today called “Playing Politics with Gender – Media, Candidates, and the Majority Vote.”

When a candidate says something that is incorrect, pointing it out to the viewers isn’t partisan, according to Campbell Brown, anchor of CNN’s Campbell Brown: Election Center. “If I don’t [point it out to my viewers], I’m insulting their intelligence, and I’m not comfortable with myself, because I’m ignoring something that is clearly factual and […]

Personal finance web application Mint, last year’s TechCrunch40 winner, leaves beta today with a slew of new features under its belt, including investment tracking and flexible budget sheets, Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch reports. He writes that Mint registrations have gone up 100 percent over the last few weeks due to the financial crisis.

Video streaming solution DigiMeld will broadcast PublicScope Film’s “The Third Jihad” online at 2 p.m. today, at the same time as the film’s theatrical release, the company announced. I interviewed DigiMeld Executive Chairman Alex Mashisky last week about how the company’s recent launch of SuperStream grid streaming technology, which allows online video to reach large […]

Barack Obama and John McCain weren’t the only ones battling it out during Tuesday’s town hall-style debate: CNN Digital Network vied with msnbc.com and other major players for the most unique visitors. CNN came out on top, the company announced today, generating 8.3 million uniques and 67 million total minutes spent on the site. CNN […]

TechCrunch50 runner-up FitBit, a fitness and sleep cycle tracking device that will go on sale next year for $99, has raised $2 million from True Ventures, SoftTech VC and several angel investors, Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch reports today. This appears to be the first round of institutional funding for the company, according to Hendrickson.

Zoho Mail came out of private beta today with some impressive features already lined up: The service has an iPhone app and an offline mode. Gmail still doesn’t have offline support, prompting Read Write Web’s Richard MacManus to write: "Innovative web office start-up Zoho has beaten Google to the punch again."

Create-your-own-social-network platform Ning announced today that over 30 OpenSocial applications will be available for its 500,000 online communities. OpenSocial applications, developed by Google, work across social networks like Friendster, Hi5, and MySpace. 

Competition is growing in the enterprise Twitter market: Austin-based start-up QikCom, which announced its closed beta launch today, adds some fresh ideas to the concept that won competitor Yammer the top prize at TechCrunch50.

User-generated content plays a central role in National Geographic’s dynamic multimedia platform, Senior VP for online content development Rob Covey told me at the Omma Global conference last month. Users can now share their own videos on the user-generated video hub Everyday Explorers, built with online community builder KickApps and recently launched in beta.