Media Daily News’ Joe Mandese writes about a new online measurment service being worked on by Nielsen…

The new service, dubbed “Video Census,” not surprisingly initially focuses on video content being streamed and downloaded over online services, but if the marketplace embraces it, Manish Bhatia, president of global services and U.S. sales for Nielsen Online, said it ultimately would be rolled out to measure other forms of online content.

The system works by combining traditional panel based measurement to glean information that cannot be derived directly from the Internet, including profiles of individual users and data for publishers and video producers who do not actively “tag” their content.

“For sites that don’t tag, we will still attempt to report data, but we will get it from the panel,” Bhatia said, adding that if the system catches on he believes it would be in the best interest of content distributes to actively tag their programming to ensure it gets the best measurement.

“Our point of view is that both [panels and census] provide you with useful information and we came up with a solution that combines them,” he said, noting that the service is currently being tested by clients including Time Warner, MSNBC, Viacom, ESPN, CNET, Veoh and Heavy.com.