YouTube Citizen News channel

YouTube has launched a "Citizen News" channel, to highlight some of the best news content on YouTube. Check it out: YouTube Citizen News channel

Once again, my perspective is that the amateurs aren't going to magically self-organize and document the world in a coherent manner like the pros, but I do expect they'll provide useful snippets of information that we can weave together in a pro-am way, similar to what we're doing with our beat blog on the Dallas school district.

Each individual citizen submission may just be a piece of a story, similar to a single statement from a conversation. Synthesized and reported out by a journalist, they're as invaluable as first-person quotes in a 'traditional' story.

Will You Tube announce live streaming Wednesday?

Tech Crunch wonders in this post: What Does YouTube Have Up Its Sleeve? Guess Right, And Win An iPod Shuffle.

Live streaming would be an interesting game changer for TV station Web sites, which currently still own that capability exclusively -- but not for long!  Think what blogging has done to the ability of individuals to compete with newspaper.coms.  This development smacks of the same Alamo for TV.coms.

Later:  OK so they didn't announce live streaming.  It was a set of APIs.  But this is also pretty huge because, as Tech Crunch points out, "YouTube is not just white-labeling its video-hosting infrastructure for other sites, devices, and desktop applications. It is offering video-hosting for free."  So we could use You Tube's technology to let people upload videos from our site, comment, etc. and tap into the You Tube audience.  Downside, we don't get to upload ads etc.