Twitter broke the sad news of singer Whitney Houston’s death this weekend. Many fans and celebrity friends of the superstar showed their love and reactions via the social network too.

But Twitter isn’t the only place where fans reacted on the web. They also took to fairly new social sharing site, Pinterest.

Many have pinned different pictures of Whitney Houston and have left hundreds of comments.

Check out some pins, re-pins and comments below:

Shadow and Act , a blog turned online film competition with focus on black cinema through the African Diaspora launched its third round of the Shadow and Act Digital Filmmaker showcase this week.

The Shadow and Act Digital Filmmaker Showcase is an online film competition designed to make filmmakers of color that are creating original, artistically inspired, and culturally relevant work  visible. Its goal is also to persuade viewers that digital streaming is a viable way of consuming high?quality cinematic content.

The showcase comes through a partnership with with CEI Media that began March 2011 with its first cycle. This year it will premiere Will Raee’s Faith and Dreams, a look at the brutal recruitment of child soldiers in Uganda.

Also featured will be the short documentary Corrective Rape, directed by Joel Edwards,  which explores a troubling trend in South Africa involving the rape of lesbians by men in an effort to change their sexual orientation.

Viewers can vote for their favorite short films and the winning filmmakers will receive cash prizes.

For more information go to IndieWire.com  

Mobile social video application, Viddy is working with more artists. We first introduced you to the app that enables users to shoot and share 15-second video clips in Sept. 2011 when Snoop Dogg launched a video editing app, and now T-Pain is stepping into the mobile production space too.

Artist T-Pain announced earlier this week he is launching the first premium Viddy production pack, featuring his latest single  “5 O’Clock” featuring Wiz Khalifa & Lily Allen off new album, rEVOLVEr.

The T-Pain production pack allows fans to create 15 second music videos with a video effects layer featuring T-Pain’s signature Steam Punk TV effect.

Viddy provides an interactive way for fans to create & share “5 O’Clock” inspired videos with friends via Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Tumblr. Also, in advance of T-Pain’s North American tour, Viddy is a place for fans to find exclusive behind the scenes footage from T-Pain on the road.

The Viddy T-Pain Production Pack is available at  Apple iTunes Store for iPhone and iPod Touch.

EbonyQA.com, the Q&A social connecting site for African-Americans to post and answer questions unique to their own community will be launching in beta soon.

The site is very similar to Quora.com, but focuses specifically on African-American issues. EbonyQA will connect users with hard to find questions and answers unique to the black community.

Users will be able to earn points for answering questions thus gaining popularity on the site.

Potential members can go to www.ebonyqa.com to sign up for an invite. The company will begin to seek partnerships to make EbonyQA.com the unique online destination for African-Americans to connect while sharing knowledge and ideas.

The site is set to launch early 2012.

Rihanna is setting digital records. Just a few weeks ago  she was named the top-selling digital artist in music history, having over 47.5 million digital downloads and now she is the most-viewed female artist on the biggest video sharing site, YouTube.

According to the Digital Journal, Rihanna currently has 2,068,076,591 YouTube views, surpassing pop star Lady Gaga.

The digital age has been playing in Rihanna’s favor for a while now. Last year she came in No.1 under the music category for most popular page in Facebook’s 2011 Memology report.  In addition, her song “We Found Love” off her latest Talk that Talk album, was the most listened to song on the social networking site.

What digital record will she break next?

More artists are getting into the social network frenzy, including LL Cool J.

LL Cool J demoed his social network, Boomdizzle at CES on Tuesday.  Boomdizzle encourages musicians to collaborate and network on various projects through the web. LL Cool J demoed how those tools would work at CES and played a track he created with Ne-Yo. According to Mashable, he said his goal is for up-and-coming artists to have a place to share their music and then collaborate with recording tools available on the site.

Users can connect with each other via video chat  to create a track together. The site also  allows artists to display the tracks they have created. This is one of many platform that caters to independent artist, this is a space that could grow being that there are so many musicians trying to make a name for themselves. Myspace was were online stars were born, but now it could essentially happen anywhere, including Boomdizzle.

It seems like BET is the only network still holding on to at least one music video show, that is 106 & Park. And even though they are keeping the music video alive on TV, even that has changed a lot from the AJ and Free days.

But thanks to the internet, there is a whole library of music videos to watch whenever we want. So while most people enjoyed having a dozen video shows on BET and MTV, it’s not entirely necessary, especially with new video streaming site, Tubalr.

Tubalr is an online platform that streams videos from YouTube. What’s the difference between this and YouTube? Well, it’s simply a more convenient way to watch the videos you want to see without the hassle of ads, having to continually search for the next video, and just the overall mess that YouTube has in the background.

Tubalr is a clean cut site that has absolutely no ads and will keep playing videos from your artist selection until you want it to stop. Everything from live performances to official videos.

Although it’s not a drastic difference, it’s a simple solution to a simple problem that some people have. It makes the video watching experience more enjoyable and makes you feel more like you are watching a music video show, just without the hosts and commercials.

A few months ago, Google introduced their own social networking platform with the intention of entering the ring to contend for the social media crown against the likes of Facebook and Twitter. This platform, simply dubbed Google + (pronounced Google Plus), showcases quite a few similar features as its leading competition. So as a musician, you may be asking yourself ‘why would I even bother if I’m already on Facebook and Twitter? Do I REALLY need to update yet another social account??’.

Well frankly, the answer is yes, you really do need to get yourself set up on Google + and the reasons as such are quite simple.

Why Musicians Cannot Avoid Google +

1. Google + pages rank very highly (if not #1) in Google searches.

This is incredibly important for any emerging musician trying to establish an online presence, as it will almost instantly increase your visibility. Even if you are still too obscure for your Facebook Fan Page or your personal website to appear towards the top of a Google search, a Google + page will almost instantly rank towards the very top.

2. Google + is the fastest growing social network in history.

Of course it is! Google is already such a dominant force that anything they introduce can grow, and fast. So it is no surprise that Google +, introduced in July of 2011, received 20 million visits in the first 21 days of its existence. As of September 2011, Google + was up to 25 million registered members, which is still infantile compared to Facebook which is somewhere in the range of 750 million registered members. But if Google + can continue to grow at it’s current rate, it may be able to give Facebook a real run for the money.

3. Google + has already shown to be a powerful tool for musicians.

Within the first weeks of the Google + launch, a singer/ songwriter named Daria Musk took advantage of some of the FREE Google + features, namely Google Hangouts, to host a virtual concert to hundreds of fans and new listeners.

Read the rest of this article at Music Think Tank

Google has launched a hub for keeping track of the (increasingly digital) U.S. elections.

As the country prepares for a hot presidential race later this fall, the web is flooded with news, videos and events related to our collective political goings-on.Google.com/Elections organizes information for voters, politicians and journalists all in one centralized dashboard.

“There’s no question that the Internet is set to deliver more political information, opinion and news than any other medium throughout the 2012 U.S. elections,” writes Googler Eric Hysen on the company blog.

Hysen says the new portal is “an election hub where citizens can study, watch, discuss, learn about, participate in and perhaps even make an impact on the digital campaign trail.”

Read the rest of this article at Venture Beat