The City of Campbell River, in partnership with the Campbell River First Nations community, INFilm, Strathcona Community Futures, Rivercorp and North Island College, has launched the Campbell River Creative Industries Initiative. This initiative is designed to create a new economic sector in Campbell River that will tap the creative talent and resources of our little City by the Sea. Exploring everything from Urban Transformation to Community Partnerships, it is hoped that this initiative will lead Campbell River into a new era of prosperity. It’s a great time to be a geek in Campbell River!

Quick Pitch: Consumer Reports meets Yelp () for the purpose of creating buying alliances on behalf of the consumer.

Genius Idea: Groubal is an advocacy platform that enables U.S. consumers to create online petitions and recruit others to their causes.

Find your bank’s late payment fees unfair, or upset that you weren’t compensated by an airline for a three-hour flight delay? Create a post on groubal and leverage your networks on Facebook (), Twitter () and elsewhere to build support and demand action.

Each month, groubal picks the highest-ranked petitions and brings them to the attention of corporations and industry leaders in the hopes of creating effective group buying alliances. It’s the site’s willingness to champion its users’ causes that sets it apart from other online petition sites. It’s not just a tool for formalizing complaints; instead, it helps users carry those complaints to achieve reform and develops a site community in the process.

Hey there, ma and pop: Are you hip to Twitter (), Facebook () and the myriad of other social media tools that are currently at your disposal — you know, the ones the teens and 20somethings have basically dovetailed into their everyday lives? Social media may seem like a vapid way for tweens to gossip about Twilight () and the like, but it can be an effective (and fun) way to reach new customers and create stronger bonds with loyal fans.

Some of you may already be riding the Internet () wave (let’s face it, most of you probably are if you’re reading Mashable ()). The University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business recently did a study that shows the relationship between social media and small businesses and found that the technology adoption rates in the U.S. have doubled in the past year from 12% to 24%.

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When news breaks these days, YouTube is quickly becoming a tried-and-true source for fascinating and poignant video footage from on-the-ground citizen journalists.

Because of its perceived growing importance in the Fourth Estate, YouTube () is testing a News Feed. This feature will highlight newsworthy videos uploaded by amateur videographers as well as professional news outlets.

This feature is the result of a partnership with the Graduate School of Journalist at the University of California at Berkeley. The video service and the J-school will be working together to track breaking news on YouTube and aggregate it as a stream. The focus will be on freshness (with regard to date and time uploaded), impactful visuals, and citizen or non-traditional sources — the latter, we suspect, may help prevent any big media kerfuffles over their content being used in an unbranded stream.

You’ll find the feed live at CitizenTube, where YouTube has for some time been intermittently tracking news stories, such as the Iranian elections and subsequent sociopolitical unrest.

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After months of rumors and hinting, Twitter has unveiled its major new foray into the world of geolocation, Twitter Places.

This feature will highlight tweets at a given location. Starting now, Twitter.com desktop and mobile users can tag their tweets with existing Twitter Places and add new Twitter Places, too.

Twitter Places can be explored and will reveal a list of recent, public tweets from that location. Twitter will also show you nearby locations and points of interest, including restaurants and shops.

Twitter Places will be integrated with Foursquare and Gowalla, as well. “Location is a key component of these tweets, so we worked closely with both companies to associate a Twitter Place with Tweets generated by these services,” wrote Twitter geo head Othman Laraki today on the company’s blog. Location data will also work with more browsers, including Safari and Internet Explorer.

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“Old people” on Facebook: They couldn’t beat it, so they joined it.

But why? And how did they hear about social media in the first place? They can’t all be simply stalking their younger relatives, can they?

A new study from the AARP — that’s the American Association of Retired Persons — shows that baby boomers in the 50-years-old-or-better age bracket are cool with the Internet (), down with Facebook, hip to the iPad and not just using the web to spy on their kids and grandkids.

The AARP spent some time last month interviewing 1,360 adults over the phone. They found that more than a quarter (27%) of Americans age 50 and older use social networks. Facebook is the most popular — in fact, 23% of all survey respondents said they preferred it to sites such as MySpace (), LinkedIn () and Twitter. Another study earlier this year from eMarketer showed that boomers and seniors were flocking to Facebook, again showing a strong preference for this site over Twitter and MySpace — all this in spite of the fact that another survey showed older Americans reported hearing an awful lot of bad news and media coverage about Facebook.

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The new trend in cable and network television is to turn to social media sites to recruit talent for reality series. Case in point, The Food Network has put out a challenge asking YouTubers to submit video entries to be considered for The Next Food Network Star.

Entries will be accepted through July 16, and though the prize for the winning entry isn’t a guaranteed spot on the show, it’s still pretty decent: a one-on-one audition in New York City with Food Network executives.

If you’re unfamiliar with the reality series, this show challenges contestants to live in a house together and compete in food-creating challenges in the hopes of securing their own series on the Food Network. Episodes are usually filled with drama, tears and celebrity chef guests.

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Kim Yeo-hee has been blowing up the tubes lately — the YouTubes, that is — with her iPhone-playing, singing, viral music videos, which have garnered millions of views over the past two months.

Her efforts have paid off in spades; the Wall Street Journal reports that this young lady just signed a record deal.

The 22-year old song stylist uses iPhone music apps running on several different iPhones simultaneously as her accompaniment. She is signed to Dreamhigh-Ent, based in Seoul, and will be releasing an album of her own music later this month.

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Starbucks’ Vice President of Brand, Content and Online, Chris Bruzzo, is on stage at the Mashable Media Summit today and he just revealed that last year’s Free Pastry Day was a whopping success, driving more than one million people to stores.

As we noticed, activity on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook () became electric on the day of the event as the free pastry news spread in digital form. Bruzzo’s credits fans with the idea to use social media to drive new business, and his remarks confirm that the swell of social media activity drove customers to visit Starbucks stores in droves.

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Today at WWDC, Steve Jobs officially announced the brand new fourth-generation iPhone, to be called the iPhone 4.

Thanks to that whole lost prototype incident, we’ve known what the phone was going to look like for several months. But now we have confirmation of the final design as well several of the 100 new features and specifications.

The new phone is powered by an A4 CPU (just like the iPad), sports a 3.5-inch screen with 960×640 resolution, dual mics, and an upgraded camera system that will include HD video recording and editing capabilities.

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