Move over, vegetable orchestra, YouTube is holding auditions for the world’s first collaborative online orchestra. Announced yesterday, The YouTube Symphony Orchestra is a worldwide project in partnership with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) to bring together international musicians of all ages, instruments and internet connections.

Anyone can download sheet music, rehearse and upload a video of themselves performing “The Internet Symphony,” a piece written especially for the occasion by Tan Dun, composer of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. All the submissions will be considered for a massive global video performance of the piece, which will be compiled from the individual videos and of course posted to YouTube. Get the video rundown of how it all works here.

The event culminates in a live performance of the piece at Carnegie Hall in April 2009 with the YouTube Symphony, which musicians can audition for with a second video (more details here). Sadly, none of the pre-selected Symphony audition songs include “Carry On Wayward Son.”

There are parts available for nearly every instrument, from piccolo to timpani. Online support and pro tips are available in master class videos posted by members of the LSO, as well as a video to rehearse along with the conductor. A judging panel will select semi-finalists from the videos, and YouTube user votes determine who gets to attend a classical music summit in New York (insanely talented pianist Lang Lang will be there!) and rock Carnegie Hall.

Now I kind of wish I’d kept up with my marimba skills. Fortunately, there’s a loophole for those who aren’t violin prodigies — you can sing a instrumental part (if you can imitate the sound of a French horn) or beatbox the percussion part. Get inspired by Tan Dun’s interview on the project below and upload your videos by January 28.

[photo via: inmagine]

[Editor's note: It's no secret that online advertising is starting to slow down in response to the economic slump. Display ads, the meat and potatoes for companies like Yahoo, have been hit especially hard. So for companies looking to squeeze every dollar out of their digital ads, it might be time to abandon traditional content and behavioral targeting strategies in favor of a relatively new concept -- location-based advertising. Below, Placecast founder Anne Bezancon makes her case.]

Most people don’t know that 70 percent of all Web content contains geographic information — the names of places, addresses, maps, zip codes — and that more than 50 percent of all internet searches are local in nature. There’s a lucrative opportunity at the intersection of these two facts, yet targeted advertising strategies have oddly overlooked the significance of location — perhaps the most evolved basis for targeting ads yet.

On an average day, an individual travels through about nine different locations: their home, their office, perhaps the gym, grocery store or restaurant, etc. Increasingly, people in transit between stops are accessing the internet via laptop, cell phone or even GPS system. The goal of location-based advertising is to plunk relevant (and actionable) ads in front of people, tied to wherever they happen to be and no matter what platform they’re using, be it mobile, PC or wi-fi.

For advertisers, each of the locations we all frequent helps them break consumers into categories. From there, they can decide whether to have their ads pop up at a fast-food joint or a gourmet restaurant, in a high-rise office building or an industrial office park, at an airport or at a hotel. It’s the mission of companies like mine, 1020 Placecast, and more recently Google with its Google Maps AdSense program, to connect people and places to serve finely-targeted ads.

As human beings, one of our major limitations is that we can only be in one place at a time. The good news, of course, is that we now have the technology to take full advantage of that constraint. The computers, phones and navigation tools we use to access the internet from anywhere are increasingly equipped with positioning technology, most popularly GPS. Because the devices we use now know where they are, they pretty much always know where we are too.

Taking full advantage of this fact, however, is taking some adjustment. The Internet was initially designed to ignore location, so the ability to tie place and time with specific users hasn’t come easily. The last ten years have seen gradual progress toward better ad targeting, but there’s still a ways to go, and location-based methods are yet to be meaningfully tapped.

There have been three incarnations of ad targeting. The first was to match ads to the content of web sites where they would appear. The second was to serve ads to users based on their past and typical browsing behavior. Of course, this dredged up all kinds of concerns about protection and privacy. The recent demise of startup NebuAd and the current congressional hearings on privacy in behavioral targeting attest to the dangers and limitations of this strategy.

The third wave — ad targeting based on place and time — is only just emerging. No longer are users’ physical locations estimated based on IP address. This method, trapped within the bounds of the internet’s traditionally location-ignorant infrastructure, is inaccurate a third of the time. It’s an understatement to say it lacks the precision required to pull off true location-based targeting. At best, it can place a user in a geographical area the size of a city — pretty rudimentary when your goal is to point a consumer to a particular store within walking distance of where they are standing at that moment.

Imagine a world where every piece of information delivered via the internet is tailored to where you are now, or where whatever you are looking for is — or even the place you are tagging in a picture of you and your friends. Several savvy companies have developed algorithms that match ad content with information specific to particular locations (event venues, parks, restaurants, etc.). When a user expresses interest in a place by conducting a search or bookmarking something, those ads are called up.

For example, a user browsing event-based social network Eventful’s site for information on the next Coldplay concert might see an ad for the Toyota Scion with the address of and link to the closest relevant dealership. On the other hand, a user looking for outdoor activities in San Francisco might be served a localized ad for Subaru.

Location offers so many different insights into what users might be interested in at various moments in time that brands have the opportunity to get extremely creative with lower risk. So far, experience has shown that location-based methods translate into fewer wasted impressions, better results and more innovative messaging. All of a sudden, collecting tedious and exhaustive user data is not as necessary. Any one place can tell you what you need to know about the audience it attracts.

Place-based advertising will represent a major shift in digital advertising, impacting brands, ad networks and the way average people browse the Internet indefinitely. The propagation of sleek, position-aware devices like the iPhone, and software like Yahoo’s Fire Eagle (an app that lets you share your location data and find cool things nearby), will only add more momentum. It’s about time advertisers sat up and took notice. As with the technology itself, it’s all about where we are — and more importantly, where we’re going.

Anne Bezancon is the founder and president of 1020 Placecast, a San Francisco company that matches advertisers and publishers interested in serving relevant ads based on location. Previously, she served as vice president of directory services for online wi-fi hotspot catalog JiWire, and as chief executive of content management software company BEAP.

Facebook has spent months looking for a partner to take over an in-house classifieds application it launched in May of 2007, called Marketplace. The app hasn’t gained significant traction in the last year and a half. Now, Facebook has found a partner: Classified listing service Oodle.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Oodle claims to aggregate classified listings from more than 80,000 other web sites. It distributes those listings across any partner site that uses its service, including The Washington Post and other mainstream media outlets. It claims to get more than four million users a month.

It’s still not clear how Oodle might integrate classified listings from Marketplace with its service. But one can imagine seeing web-wide listings in an Oodle-owned Marketplace, as well as Facebook listings on Oodle’s other sites. The new Marketplace application will launch in the first quarter of next year.

This is quite an ending for Marketplace, considering that Facebook launched it only days after Oodle built its own service to integrate with Facebook data. At the time, I expected Marketplace to make roadkill of Oodle and other third-party classifieds competitors who were trying to use the early version of Facebook’s platform. (Note: This all happened a couple weeks before Facebook launched the full-blown version of its developer platform.)

In hindsight, both Marketplace and Oodle’s services at the time were more experimental than anything. Marketplace tried to take advantage of your friend connections on Facebook to help you find items for sale, housing and other types of listings. Facebook even gave it special advantages over third parties — it came pre-installed for every user, for example.

Aside: Facebook has previously told me that the third-party classifieds service provider who takes over Marketplace won’t receive any special benefits.

For whatever reason, neither Marketplace nor third-party classified applications have taken off on Facebook’s platform. Apparently, people were already happy using established classified sites like Craigslist, so Facebook decided to unload Marketplace to focus on more central features of the company.

Oodle, meanwhile, has continued trying to build a service that spans sites across the web. It also inked a deal with MySpace, Facebook’s archrival, this summer, to serve its classified listings on that site. It has previously raised $16 million from JAFCO Ventures, Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures.

Perhaps Oodle’s web-wide network can help it succeed on Facebook.

YouTube, the largest video-sharing site in the world, is cracking down on sexually suggestive content. It already removes sexually explicit acts and actual pornography, but now it’s going a step further. Videos that the company defines as sexually suggestive will be more heavily restricted based on users’ ages. Even possibly offensive videos that the company still allows on the site will be demoted within the site’s auto-recommendation features to shield them further from sensitive eyes.

The Google-owned property is still trying to figure out how to make lots of money, even though it racked up an impressive 344 million unique visitors in October, according to comScore. Suggestive content could scare off more advertisers. More on YouTube’s new definition of what “sexually suggestive” means:

Other content like nudity and dramatized or implied sexual conduct may be considered sexually suggestive depending on whether or not it is intended or designed to arouse viewers. Nudity includes exposed or partially covered genitalia, buttocks, or breasts, as well as sheer clothing. Videos featuring individuals in minimal or revealing clothing may also be age-restricted if they’re intended to elicit a sexual response.

YouTube goes on to provide even more specific examples of what is and isn’t acceptable, but I’ll leave you to read the rest of those details yourself.

This all reminds me of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s effort to define obscene porn back in the 1960’s: “I know it when I see it” (much more on the legal issues around porn, here). In other words, like Stewart, YouTube’s definition of what is and isn’t inappropriate is not shared by all. Instead, the company is trying to preserve its family orientation — and likely acceptance among major advertisers.

In related news, Ning, a company that also lets you create your own social-networking site, has until now allowed “adult” sites. Starting next year it will ban them. Company chief executive Gina Bianchini says that: advertisers don’t like the adult sites, legal adult sites prompt more illegal adult sites (NAMBLA?), and adult sites generate far more copyright take-down notices than others, meaning more work for the team.

The good news, for those looking for porn, is that the rest of the web is full of it.

So maybe there was a little something to that Times report about the Microsoft-Yahoo deal after all. Former AOL chief executive Jonathan Miller is apparently attempting to raise money to make a run at buying a piece of — or all of — Yahoo, The Wall Street Journal now reports.

Miller, who is said to be talking with private equity and sovereign wealth funds, would need to raise something in the range of $28 to $30 billion to buy the company at a price of $20 to $22 a share. That’s obviously a lot of money, and the WSJ’s sources are skeptical that Miller will be able to get that much in today’s financial climate.

Over the weekend, a report from the UK’s Times Online said that a deal for Microsoft to buy Yahoo’s search business was close to going through. That of course didn’t happen, but the Times did say that Miller and his Velocity Interactive Group partner Ross Levinsohn were involved and could become the team to take over Yahoo. Interestingly, the report said that while Microsoft would provide the bulk of the money for a deal, outside investment would provide the rest.

Levinsohn flat out denied such a deal to us over the weekend, saying that there was “no truth to it,” and that it was “news to us [presumably Velocity].” While there may have been no truth to that specific report, this new article claims that Miller and Levinsohn have in fact been in behind-the-scenes discussions with both Yahoo and Microsoft for months trying to make a deal between the two sides happen.

Miller and Levinsohn have also apparently met with Yahoo in the last few weeks while the company searches for a new chief executive to replace the departing Jerry Yang, paidContent reports — also noting that it’s possible the WSJ is reading too much into Velocity making presentations around the world to raise a new fund.

We’ve once again reached out to Levinsohn and will update if we hear back.

With this new Miller-led deal, it’s not clear whether Microsoft is playing any role. (Though if such a deal was struck, you can bet their name would pop up again in a hurry.) And other investors and private equity groups are also thinking about making moves at Yahoo without Miller, according to the WSJ. The line of thought seems to be that Yahoo’s stock, valued in the $30 a share range after Microsoft made its big offer earlier this year, is now a steal hovering around $10 a share.

[photo: Adam Hunger/Reuters]

Business software maker Zoho announced today that it’s making it easier to send and retrieve data from its web applications through a new technology called Zoho CloudSQL.

Basically, Zoho CloudSQL allows customers to interact with the data in their Zoho applications using commands in the well-known database language SQL (structured query language). Previously, the only way for third-party applications to interact with Zoho was through the commands allowed in Zoho’s web application programming interfaces (APIs). So if you have a database that uses SQL, Zoho has created a sample application that allows customers to shift data back and forth from the database to Zoho Reports (its business intelligence application) using only SQL commands.

We’re starting to edge toward acronym soup here, and it’s true that this may not be a huge deal to your average Zoho user. But the big idea is that Zoho continues to move away from treating its applications as isolated software. Instead, it’s adding ways for its applications to interact with third-party applications — starting with web APIs and now with Zoho CloudSQL — so that your data isn’t trapped inside Zoho, and customers don’t feel “locked in.”

It’s a smart strategy for a company that wants to gain traction against better-known competitors, because it doesn’t force new customers to switch over to Zoho completely. To use an example of the same principle that revolves around users, not software, Zoho also made it possible for users to log in without a Zoho account if they have a Google or Yahoo account instead.

Zoho CloudSQL is launching for Zoho Reports today, with other applications to follow. It supports all the major SQL dialects.

Pleasanton, Calif.-based Zoho is part of AdventNet.

In the past few years, Bunchball has figured out how to get consumers more engaged in web sites by making them as addictive as video games. Now it has recruited a former Yahoo executive to move on its game plan.

Peter Daboll, former chief of insights at Yahoo, has joined Bunchball as chief executive, becoming part of the official brain drain at the search giant. Rajat Paharia, founder of Bunchball, will stay aboard as chief product officer. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company has created its Nitro platform, which big web site operators can adopt to increase consumer loyalty.

Nitro sets up a system that rewards consumers with points for leaving comments, helping fellow users, inviting friends to join, or submitting their own content like user-generated videos.

Much like in a video game, users can earn points to climb levels, dominate a leaderboard and compete with their friends. They can then redeem the rewards for whatever they choose. The payoff for companies: the rewards that the Nitro-based systems give out — prestige for a user in the form of a digital trophy, for instance — are a lot less expensive than the traditional marketing campaigns that users have begun to ignore.

With this enterprise-focused business, Bunchball is one of the companies that embodies the term Funware, or using video game mechanics to make non-game applications more exciting.

Paharia and Daboll said in a conference call that its strategy is going well. The company has four major announced clients: NBC.com, Hearst Corp., Comcast, and Sports Illustrated’s Takkle site. Considering that the company has been around since February, 2005, that isn’t many customers. But Paharia acknowledged that it took a long time for Bunchball to fashion Nitro the right way.

When Bunchball first started, it created a bunch of games to do just that. But it pulled back from games and focused on its meta-game, or the rewards platform that other companies can adopt. The reward system influences consumer behavior and also documents it for the site’s owners to analyze. Companies pay Bunchball by subscribing to its platform service. In return, the company can increase the amount of time that users spend on a site anywhere from 55 percent to 100 percent.

Big companies are aware that it is more important to get users to come back often than to get them to visit the site just once. So they’re already predisposed to understand Bunchball’s pitch. The hard part, Paharia said, is to convince them that Bunchball can do a better job of making a site more engaging.

“Our real competitors are the people who decide to do this internally,” Paharia said.

There are rivals out there who embrace the idea of using game-like behavior on non-game applications. One example is Lithium Technologies, which enables companies such as Dell to engage consumers more deeply by staging community forums that keep people talking. Other kindred spirits include Shufflebrain, rmbr, Fyreball, Yahoo’s Flickr, the Google Image Labeler, and Seriosity.

Bunchball sets up systems where consumers are rewarded instantly and frequently. It takes about two to five weeks to implement the Nitro platform as a customer; in each case, it is custom-tuned to the content the site owner already has.

Paharia said he decided to step back so that Daboll could aggressively grow the business. More unannounced customers have signed on, including a video game publisher. Paharia said that latter client proves Bunchball’s strategy, since the game publisher clearly had the talent to make its site more game-like yet chose to outsource the work instead.

Paharia said that, while he helped develop the strategy and platform, he decided that he didn’t have the skills to turn Bunchball into a much bigger company. Right now, it has just 10 employees.

The 50-year-old Daboll has become a well-known expert in online consumer behavior at Yahoo. He also served as CEO at market researcher  comScore Media Metrix; president and chief operating officer at MarketTools; chief operating officer at  MediaPlan; and in a number of senior roles at Information Resources Inc.

Paharia said that the company looked at executives in a wide variety of industries, from video games to media. Paharia said he believed that Daboll would bring insights into the kinds of companies that Bunchball wants to target as customers.

Bunchball has raised $6 million in funding from Granite Ventures and Adobe. Daboll said the company did not have an immediate need to raise money.

Apple launched a new “iTunes 2008” section of the iTunes store tonight, showcasing its top content for the year. The best-selling movies category is particularly interesting because at the top of the list is a movie that isn’t available yet: The Dark Knight.

Set to be released next Tuesday, The Dark Knight apparently managed to outsell every other movie that iTunes has offered this year in pre-sales alone. That includes hits like Iron Man, Superbad and Wall-E. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised. After all, The Dark Knight is the number two movie of all time at the box office with over $530 million made domestically alone.

Or maybe, The Dark Knight will be the movie that pushes the iTunes movie store into mainstream usage like its music store sibling. After all, between new Macs, Apple TVs, iPhones and iPod touches, you can bet that there are going to be a lot of new devices capable of playing iTunes movies this holiday season (and of course, Windows-based PCs can play this content as well through iTunes).

As The Joker might say, “it’s all part of the plan.“

So maybe you just got an iPhone or iPod touch, or maybe you’re going to get one very soon for the holidays. With something like 10,000 applications out there in Apple’s App Store, it’s basically impossible to know which ones to get. Sure, the most popular ones right now are clearly displayed in the store, but those leave out a lot of great ones that have been popular in the past. Luckily, Apple has just rolled out a Top Apps category in iTunes as part of its iTunes 2008 year-end section.

This section features dozens of apps broken into two groups: Free and Paid. Within these two categories, you’ll find the Top Overall apps, Top Games, Top Entertainment, Top Utilities, Top Social Networking and Top Music. It’s a very comprehensive list, and I’d guess that even old iPhone veterans like myself will find an app or two that we’ve missed along the way.

This section would be a lot more interesting if Apple gave download statistics for each app. We know that Koi Pond was the top selling paid app this year, but just how many times was it downloaded? And how does that compare to the top free app, Pandora Radio?

Also, considering that games are such a large percentage of the App Store, it might make sense to make the Top Games section a little larger than the others. I already have just about all of the top 10 free and paid games, but if it showed the top 15 or 20, I may not have some of those.

Expect all the apps shown on this page to see massive jumps in downloads. That, in turn, may make quite a few other iPhone app developers rush their 2009 apps out the door to have the best chance of making this list next year.

Apple clearly has high hopes for the location-based social network Loopt. It has shown off Loopt’s iPhone application at conferences, featured it on its displays and even made it central in one of the new iPhone commercials. But Loopt hasn’t yet reached its potential on the device. Everyone is still trying to figure out the best way to do location-based networking. It’s a work-in-progress, and updates to Loopt’s app show that.

Tonight, the company rolled out version 1.2 of its iPhone app. While the update contains the usual bug fixes and performance tweaks, the real meat of the update is in Loopt’s potentially powerful Mix feature. The look and feel of this area has been completely revamped.

Because it is so potentially powerful, Loopt Mix is also more than a bit intimidating. You see, it lets you view and be viewed by random strangers who happen to be around you (assuming they too are not only using Loopt but have opted in to Loopt Mix as well). Previously, it was hard to tell exactly who was around you. When I’ve shown it off before, more than a few times people would question, “Is that a guy or a girl?” because of the small picture icons. Not only are those now bigger, but there is now a male or female symbol next to Mix profiles to show you exactly who you’re looking at.

Or maybe, more appropriately, who or what you’re looking for. New filters on Mix’s main screen make it easy to find people who are specifically looking for “Networking,” “Friendship” or “Dating.” While the first two are areas that anyone on Mix can see, the dating area is only viewable to those users who also say they are interested in dating.

If you are in fact interested in dating, you also now have to specify which gender you are looking for. Again, this makes things a bit more clear. Quite a few users have reported getting unsolicited messages from other Loopt users of the same sex when they weren’t interested.

Of course, no matter what tweaks and improvements Loopt makes to its service, nothing will really matter for location-based networks on the iPhone until Apple finally releases its Push Notification system and/or allows applications to run in the background. Loopt packs a lot of potential punch, but right now, it basically requires that everyone have it running at all times. On the iPhone, that is unreasonable. And it will never truly take off like that.

Find Loopt in the App Store here. It is a free app.