On Sunday, a YouTube blog post introduced us to Olivia, YouTube's recently hired News Manager. She's going to be in charge of a new Channel on YouTube called Citizen News. This channel will highlight the best of the citizen journalism that's taking place on YouTube, but its ultimate goal is to become a go-to news destination on the web.

Citizen Journalism Is Going Mainstream

In February, CNN launched user-gen citizen news site i-Report, which was originally just a feature of the CNN web site. They also held two CNN-YouTube presidential debates over the summer. The new site, which looks and feels a lot like YouTube, offers many similar features like the ability to rate and discuss videos and embed them elsewhere.

But CNN is far from being the only large media outfit to launch citizen journalism ventures. For example, Yahoo and Reuters teamed up on You Witness News, BBC has Your News,and MSNBC has a section of their site that features citizen journalism, as well. MSNBC also owns citizen journalism site Newsvine, too.

Apparently, YouTube now wants to bring some of the focus on citizen journalism back to their site, where so many of today's citizen journalists post and share their work.

About Citizen News

On the introductory post, Olivia writes (and posts a video of course - see below):

"Thanks to better, cheaper, and easier access to video equipment, there's an amazing amount of news being reported on YouTube every single day by citizens in all corners of the globe. You're conducting interviews with local community leaders, doing weekly reports on the latest campus news for your school television station, and investigating untold stories you think the world should know about. This stuff is fantastic, but we want to see more from you all and to bring more citizen journalists into the fold." 

Even if you're not a citizen journalist yourself, but you just happen to stumble across some excellent citizen journalism on YouTube, she wants to know. She's also interested in knowing how YouTube can serve citizen journalists even better and she asked for all thoughts, questions, and other feedback to be sent to citizennews@youtube.com.

In the video below, Olivia introduces Citizen News and gives examples of the types of reporting they're looking for, which can include everything from university newscasts to citizen journalism straight out of Sudan:

If you were planning to attend Ubuntu Live 2008 in July, we have some bad news for you: the event has been canceled. Speakers were quietly notified earlier this week and the event's Web site was updated late this morning.

Reuters - Microsoft Corp has proposed to buy Yahoo Inc's search business and take a minority stake in the Web pioneer, stopping short of a full-out merger, a person familiar with the discussions said on Monday.

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Three weeks before it embarked on its blundering attempt to acquire Yahoo, a Google-obsessed Microsoft agreed to pay a juicy $1.23 billion for a Norwegian tech company mired in enough accounting problems, regulatory probes and conflicts of interest that it had become known as the Enron of Norway.

Fast Search and Transfer, which for a while was also known as the Google of Norway, had developed search engine technology that, according to industry experts, surpassed that of Google and could handle truly massive corporate projects. Goldman Sachs estimated last year that the company would grow its revenue 27 percent in 2007. Over the years, Fast appeared to benefit from big contracts with customers such as AT&T, Comcast and Disney.

Enter Microsoft. It has shifted its M&A strategy to an ethos distilled in the words of Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, who reportedly told a defecting executive that he would "f***ing kill Google."

It announced a stunningly expensive $6 billion deal last May for digital advertising company aQuantive, just one month after Google said it would pay $3.1 billion for DoubleClick. And it sought to address a weakness in the crucial enterprise market by acquiring Fast, and ponying up a pricey 8.6 times revenue to do it.

Microsoft's M&A strategy reflects costly hair-trigger reactions to pressure from Google, according to I.T. consultant Stephen Arnold. The Fast deal, and the $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive, are just two examples, he said.

"Microsoft is a world-class knee-jerker in its response to Google. Google has been doing its thing unencumbered since 1998," Arnold said. "Microsoft has a great track record of flopping in online. Google just keeps rubbing it in and edging ever closer to Microsoft's crown jewel — enterprise revenue."

But aside from looking past the accounting woes that led to Fast's delisting from the Oslo exchange, the brain trust in Redmond ignored a host of other problems. The press in Norway said one director, Tomas Fussell, bought an unprofitable company called Hercules Communications and sold it to Fast for a huge profit, creating an apparent conflict of interest. Director Robert Keith reportedly said last year that he should have "shot" fellow director Oystein Spay Spatelan the first time he saw him. The Norwegian conglomerate Orkla ASA, a large Fast shareholder, forced Keith and Fussell from the board late last year.

Fast may have found a savior in Microsoft, which was intent on buying its way into the fast-growing enterprise search market. Its SharePoint product had a beachhead in the middle market but was being threatened by Google, which has quickly racked up $400 million in annual revenue from the business.

Fast, like Google, has its roots in academia. It was launched in 1997 by faculty and students from the computer and information science department at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, led by chief executive John Markus Lervik, an intense former graduate student with a Ph.D. but not prone to small talk or jokes.

"He's never referred to as John, always, always John Markus," says Susan Feldman, a search expert at researcher Interactive Data Corp. who has known Lervik on a professional basis. Arnold, an industry consultant in the U.S., said Lervik, now 38, sometimes seemed bewildered by the ways of big, unfamiliar clients such as the U.S. government.

Still, Lervik's business appeared to grow steadily until the second quarter of 2007. The company reported revenues of $35 million, $20 million below forecasts, and an operating loss of $38 million. Financial regulators in Norway investigated, and the losses widened the following quarter. When trading in Fast was suspended on December 12, the company said it would review accounting for all of 2006 and 2007. The latest unaudited results show revenue growth of 7 percent for last year, which is far below Goldman's forecast. Steve Papa, CEO of rival search firm Endeca, characterized 2007 as "the frothiest year for enterprise search since 2000." Endeca, he said, grew 70 percent last year.

Goldman Sachs criticized Fast's habit of capitalizing an unusually high level of research and development costs and booking sales based on future licensing revenue, calling it "aggressive."

Consultant Arnold theorized that Fast's problems were related to the nature of large enterprise accounts typically worth $500,000 over a period of about three years. It can take a team of engineers three to six months to install the complex search software, but Fast was short of installation experts, in part because so many joined for Google, Arnold said. That led frustrated clients to delay payments that Fast had already booked as revenue, leading to huge revenue shortfalls and earnings restatements.

Rivals are resentful of Fast's accounting troubles. "It was tedious competing with a company whose success, growth and profitability were built on incorrect accounting. We obviously knew on the ground our technology was crushing them, and now it's clear in the numbers," said Andrew Kanter, chief operating officer of Autonomy Corp., a rival search company based in Cambridge, Britain.

A Microsoft representative said, "Through publicly available information, Microsoft was aware of the review of Fast's historical accounting practices and their efforts to implement improved financial controls. With the closing of the acquisition, we will continue to review the company's financial reporting systems and make any additional changes that are necessary to bring the company's systems into line with Microsoft's high standards for financial reporting and controls."

Fast suffered staff problems too. Former president Ali Riaz left in 2006 after six years and has started his own company, Attivio. "I left because after six years of outperformance, I and many other people did not have an equitable stake in the company. It was heavily weighted toward earlier investors, instead of people who actually built the company. I didn't feel it was right," Riaz says. Many of the employees he brought on board and trained left shortly after he did, some having since joined Attivio.

Controversy notwithstanding, Fussell and Keith made a killing on the sale of Fast, closing out their positions in April. Fussell owned 3.2 percent of the company and Keith owned 3.47 percent of the company, according to the 2006 annual report. That means their direct ownership, minus the value of any options of stakes in funds that might have owned Fast shares, was about $40 million each. Lervik, now vice president of enterprise search at Microsoft, had direct ownership of just over 1 percent as of 2006, worth a little more than $12 million.