The idea for Media Cloud emerged through a series discussions between faculty and friends of the Berkman Center. The conversations would follow a predictable pattern: one person would ask a provocative question about what was happening in the media landscape, someone else would suggest interesting follow-on inquiries, and everyone would realize that a good answer would require heavy number crunching. (more…)

Magnify.net is expected to announce tomorrow a partnership with New York magazine’s nymag.com to build and deploy a Web 2.0 video service. Magnify will build a custom video player and provide encoding, discovery and “curation.”

via New York Magazine to Build Out Video Content – emedia and Technology @ FolioMag.com)

Only the site’s homepages are getting the pink treatment for now, but the rest of the site will follow. And it’s not just aesthetic, it’s all about the brand: the fonts, design stylebook and color palette are all borrowed straight from the newspaper. (more…)

NYTimes.com late last week relaunched its video platform with a high-definition, wide-screen format, redesigned video library and individual playback pages for each video.

via MediaPost Publications – NYTimes Partners With Brightcove For Video – 10/27/2008

TimesTags is just the tip of the iceberg — both with respect to The Times and in the larger metadata ocean. If you’ve done some tagging on sites like Flickr, you know that most tag sets are folksonomies. The NYT tag set is obviously more structured than a crowdsourced set (after all, it’s based on the taxonomy and controlled vocabulary used by Times indexers since 1851). But we’re not trying to present a set of approved terms on stone tablets. We see our tags as a contribution to existing metadata discussions and efforts, such as Freebase, Topic Maps, Fuzzzy and similar projects. If TimesTags can also spark a movement that advocates standardized tags for news sites, so much the better.

via Announcing the TimesTags API – Open – Code – New York Times Blog

Lullabot announced today the formation of a new company: a joint venture between Lullabot, Bond Art + Science, and Ed Sussman, former president of Mansueto Digital. The new company will be launching an easy-to-use platform for groups, individuals and businesses to create powerful dynamic social websites.

via Lullabot Targets New CMS for Publishers