Much interest in the social media scene today around young Lucas Cruikshank, whose alter ego Fred, the squeaky-voiced 6-year old with anger management issues, is hot stuff among teen and tween YouTube viewers. Reporting from the New TeeVee Live conference, LA Times reporter Jessica Guynn says ‘Fred’ is the star of the show. A commenter on her story prognosticates: “Hollywood should wake up and see that FRED is the next big thing…I firmly believe that he’ll be one of the first real internet sensations to sucessfully crossover to mainstream media.”

An earlier LA Times story asks the million dollar question: “So here we are at a moment when for all its cash and talent, the best of Hollywood’s online efforts slide off the wall like penne al dente, while a Nebraska kid with a $100 camera can attract a giant, hugely valuable audience by jumping in a baby pool with his clothes on. What does he know that we don’t?”

Jeremiah Owyang can’t watch more than 2 videos of Fred before his head explodes, but gives props to Fred’s 11 million views of one video, 250k subscribers and 68,000 comments. Perhaps “getting Fred” can replace the sonic teen repellant as a benchmark of one’s relative youth?

The future of journalism is in the crowd
Joshua Benton at Nieman Labs has corralled a fascinating account of the future of journalism evolving beneath our noses. Reporting on The Daily Kos’ decision to open a story about AIG to questions from the crowd, and picking up on AIG’s willingness to engage the audience via The Daily Kos, Benton writes: “Within a few hours, Daily Kos readers had left more than 300 comments.”

The analysis is very much worth reading in full, but here are Benton’s views on the three lessons to learn from this episode: “Smart businesses are willing to engage with their audience in new ways; where there’s an audience gathered, people in positions of power will talk to them; and the crowd can, under the right circumstances, do good journalism.”

He adds: “The tools for collective questioning aren’t perfect yet, and they probably never will be. But in at least some cases, the questions from the crowd can be at least as good as the questions from the newsroom.”

Google adds voice search for iPhone
The New York Times reports that Google is to add voice search to the next version of its iPhone app, released to vague disinterest in back in August, if comments on the app at the iTunes store are anything to go on. The app may or may not be released today. Googler Matt Cutts tweeted about his experiences of using the enhanced app, saying: “I’ve been using it tons and consider it amazing. I think it will be pretty big.”

VentureBeat‘s MG Siegler writes: “Eventually the free voice search service will roll out to other phones beyond the iPhone, but users of Apple’s hot device will get the first crack at testing it out. Again, another sign of the good relationship between the two, despite earlier rumors that Apple is working on its own search engine (which probably isn’t what it seems).”

It’s unclear at this stage whether or not the feature will be available to iPhone users outside the US.