Mashup with The Newsroom

I think that the hardest thing for any blogger is finding relevant, timely content. I mean sure, I COULD write about Paris Hilton going to jail right now, but that would be SO last week - and that's "not hot". So what to do?

Enter a great new service called The News Room. It allows bloggers - heck, any website owner looking for content - to display licensed videos and articles from AP Newswire, Reuters and TONS more sources. You can then Mash them up (appropriately called "making a mashup") into a nifty embeddable video player like this one:

Sporty, isn't it! And I can add more videos to my feed, make more feeds... and it gets even better. Use these and you get paid when people watch the videos. Obviously TheNewsRoom benefits by showing advertisements in these video streams - but we're all used to that at this point, and the ability to use licensed video at no cost is a really strong incentive for anyone who is looking for more website content. You could, for example, embed an editorial and then type up a rebuttal. Or create a stream about a specific topic - an upcoming movie, a hot celebrity, a favorite hobby or any number of things - and place it on your site. It's really a fantastic tool.

I think what I liked best was how easy it was to search and find news. You can build customized searches called "feeds" (Yeah that term is a bit confusing; I kept thinking about RSS Feeds) and then embed the video of that feed into your website for a constantly updated source of information. How cool is that! And you get paid pretty well too - CPM starts at $1, very respectable indeed.

So why use TheNewsRoom instead of, say, YouTube? Well for one thing, since this is licensed content, it isn't going to be pulled down. Major headache when that video of Britney Spears suddenly disappears. And it's free to use just like YouTube - plus you get paid a portion of the advertising revenue. Finally, the quality of the videos is much better (since they're licensed news content rather than someone's rough TV screen capture) and that's important to me. I for one will be using them pretty frequently. My only advice would be that they come up with a sidebar style as well, for those of us who might prefer to embed one on the side of ever blog page, rather than have a single video smack dab in the middle. Otherwise, job very well done indeed.