The Library of Congress has teamed with Flickr to make its vast catalog of images available on the Web, starting with 3,000 photographs with no known copyright holders. The goal of the project is to provide exposure to these rarely seen images and to harness the Flickr community to compile missing data — like the photographer, subject, and copyright holder — for free. As far as partnerships go, Flickr seems to be the winner. They gain access to thousands of beautiful and historic photographs. Having the Library of Congress on board may even encourage other public institutions to follow suit and join their tagging project, "The Commons." The Library of Congress will likely get what they paid for: inane comments and simplistic tags rather than the useful metadata they seek.

Blogger Rogers Cadenhead doesn't get to declare the official winner of the bet between the Dave Winer and the New York Times. Google — the company, not the search engine — will call a winner, and the Long Now Foundation, which holds the cash in the pot, will decide the issue. I know because I set this all up in 2001, by talking to Google PR chief David Krane before approaching Winer and the Times to arrange a wager on whether blogs or the paper of record would cover the big stories of this year better. The bet ran in Wired's Long Bets issue.

The New York Times is launching a partnership with startup PurpleStates.tv. Videos filmed by PurpleStates' "citizen journalists" will run on the Op-Ed page of NYTimes.com. [Beet.tv]

The policy just confirms what we always suspected was Google's attitude: Users are losers, and we know best. The Google-owned video site claims that channel partners who regularly produce videos with more than a million pageviews can earn "several thousand dollars per month," but those are few and far between. The real winner is Google, which continues to dominate the Internet video market, and now eliminates the small advantage held by rival upstarts Revver, VuMe, and Metacafe which have been touting their own loser-generated-content reward programs for some time.

Online encyclopedia Wikipedia will begin paying for "key illustrations" on the site, overturning the site's all-volunteer tradition. The funding for these illustrations comes from a donation by a man who feels that while Wikipedia is more up to date, Britannica, the traditional encyclopedic benchmark, has better illustrations. A list of 50 articles in need of better illustrations will be issued and contributors will be paid $40 if their illustration is chosen. With expenses weighing on Wikipedia's bottom line, could Jimmy Wales be cooking up schemes to fill out the top line?

Brightcove, the online video company that managed to raise nearly $60 million in January, is shuttering its failed YouTube clone, Brightcove.tv, next month. Instead of trying to make money on loser-generated content, Brightcove is transforming its .tv domain into a hub to showcase its professional producers (like HBO, The New York Times, and National Geographic).

Irina Slutsky of Geek Entertainment TV has found a way to carry on her idea of celebrating the best in video podcasting. Under PodTech, where Slutsky brought the awards last year, the event was badly mismanaged. Slutsky left Podtech, but the "Vloggies" name remained with PodTech. Former CEO John Furrier "openly" trademarked "Vloggies" shortly after firing the event's organizer. At the Winnies, in a dig to PodTech, which failed to have a sufficient number of Vloggies awards made last year, attendees will bring their own, old trophies to swap "instead of wasting money on 'made in Hong Kong' trophies." Oh, and it gets better.

The website for Hulu, NBC and News Corp.'s online-video joint venture, looks pretty. But the reality of getting ready for next week's launch? Very messy. A tipster tells us that a dozen members of the Hulu launch team are stuck on an agonizing "all-night" conference call. Also on the call: Executives from distribution partners including AOL and Yahoo. The topic of discussion? No doubt the fact that the site, days away from launch, isn't quite ready. Poor, unlucky souls. No wonder their old-media colleagues have nicknamed them "Hulusers." And I suppose that makes the videos on the YouTube-notgonnabe website Huluser-generated content.

Tastebook, Conde Nast's latest attempt at harnessing loser-generated content involves ink and paper. No, it's not handing over the editing of its magazines to its readers, like startup 80/20 Publishing. But it has invested in Tastebook, a startup which binds 100 recipes (culled from its cooking site Epicurious.com or your personal collection) into a personalized hardcover cookbook. It'd be far more exciting if it were scratch-and-sniff, though. [Silicon Alley Insider]

The Wikimedia Foundation, parent company of the volunteer-written encyclopedia Wikipedia, announced that it is moving its headquarters from retiree haven St. Petersburg, Fla., to San Francisco. Why San Francisco? Because, as the press release states, "its proximity to Asia in particular is expected to enable the Foundation to form closer ties with volunteers and potential partners in that part of the world." And, we're suspecting, to help founder Jimmy Wales keep his kimono collection updated.

Newsvine, the Seattle-based headline aggregator — think Digg, but without the heartthrob cofounder — has sold to MSNBC.com for an undisclosed amount. The company had raised a small amount of venture capital, $1.5 million, which has led some industry insiders to peg the price at more than $15 million, less than $35 million. Newsvine, like Digg and the rest, encourages users to discuss news headlines, but it adds a twist: So-called "citizen journalism," where users also write their own articles. To a cynic, allowing that just spells more loser-generated content. But for MSNBC, which has, since its birth over a decade ago, been struggling to embrace the Web, the prospect of viewers contributing reporting has double appeal. First, it potentially cuts costs, and secondly, it adds a much-needed appearance of hipness, as upstarts like Current.tv threaten to garner a more youthful audience.

While NBC and Apple bicker about whether iTunes will carry shows from the network's upcoming television season, CBS is plotting its own online-video coup. Convinced that YouTube's success is based on Internet users' short attention spans, it has decided to create faux user-generated content by remixing its own shows into short clips and releasing blooper reels with the help of a dedicated production unit, EyeLab. To ensure "authenticity," CBS has hired six twentysomethings who will work offsite. That's awesome. Because the only thing possibly worse than loser-generated content is poseur-generated content.

Apparently Martha Stewart thinks wikis are a good thing. Which strikes me as odd, since the no-longer-jailed domestic doyenne built her multimedia empire pretty much by sitting you down and telling you how things are done, her way or the highway. She's a tastemaker, not some kind of San Francisco-Web-startup "community manager." Asking for readers to email in scrapbooking tips is one thing. But user-generated recipes? Communally edited herb-planting instructions? Heresy. The plans for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia to embrace wikis and other community features on a new website, announced by company president Susan Lyne, suggest to me more an attempt to embrace the bubbly valuations assigned to Web properties like MySpace and YouTube, rather than the egalitarian ideals of Web 2.0 proponents.

Brilliant. Someone — apparently a rejected applicant for the TechCrunch40 conference going on now in San Francisco — has hijacked the shindig's name for a Twitter account and is skewering the presenters' every misstep live. Already, the organizers' lack of selectivity — if you'll recall, it was originally supposed to be 20, not 40, startups — is becoming clear. "Thus far, 50% of presenters have a better way to search for Britney Spears... GENIUS! (psych)" reads one Twitter.

We love Cal Tech graduate student Virgil Griffith's Wikipedia Scanner — a tool that has revealed to the public what we've always known: That people working at corporations, government agencies, and mass media outlets are duplicitous bastards. For instance, a State Farm employee buried commentary on its Katrina policy, a Fox News reporter erased aggregated battery charge, and someone at the Israeli Embassy sorted out the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to his satisfaction. It's certainly good gossip to learn who's blotted out petty grievances, but you have to know what you're looking for. And therein lies the problem with Wikipedia Scanner.

Are you a self-righteous, humorless hippie with no sense of what is socially acceptable? Have design skills? PETA wants you to create its new blog advertising campaign. [BlogAds]

Mitt Romney's campaign is airing a user-generated advertisement, solicited from users of Yahoo's YouTube-like Jumpcut service, for the Republican presidential candidate. This is, of course, a refreshing change from politicians passing lobbyist-generated bills. [Advertising Age]

If you've been aching for an adults-only social network, San Francisco-based Zivity may offer some release. Billed as a mature site for connoisseurs of provocative photography, Zivity will host shots from a selection of scantily-clad models. Like HotorNot, users can then vote on the appeal of particular photographs. Subscribers can even leave messages for the vixens on display — a feature that will surely show off the maturity of the community. Zivity paints itself as a classy boutique where its members can enjoy fine photography. Unfortunately for the models, users aren't actually screened for taste; like most porn sites, all one needs for membership is a credit card. Zivity has raised $1 million for what — loser-generated content about soft porn? The models get a cut of the action, but if they have to put up with Internet commenters, we think they should hold out for stock options.