Making money from and sense of new media on the Web – video, photos and social interactions – may be the job of the next generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

Up to now, few startups have figured out how to turn the public’s spiraling interest online social connections, video clips and sharing information into successful business models.

Don’t expect any quick change to this imbalance of audience and money. Still, several young companies took their cut at this intractable problem Wednesday at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco.

One of them is VideoSurf, the developers of a promising video search site. Combing through video with the intention of providing information on demand has been a “fundamentally hard problem” that in the past has required lots of manual labor, said Sheryl Sandberg (pictured), COO of the social networking site Facebook.

VideoSurf believes it has taken a big step toward resolving the difficulties. The site went into beta testing on Wednesday, and the company hopes to make money with advertising as it adds features.

Fotonauts also wants to bring greater access to online media – in this instance photos. “We’re trying to create a searchable body of images anyone can use,” said Keith Teare, president.

Fotonauts lets visitors create and share photo albums of the pictures they have stored on Flickr and Picasa (support for other sites is to follow). Multiple people can contribute to the same album, as well as access and use photos from other albums left open to the public.

The company will kick off an expanded beta test within three weeks and plans to make money with ads and corporate sponsored photo albums featuring products and services.

Alex Eberts, co-founder of Akoha, hopes to capitalize on people’s interest in online (and offline) social interactions. Akoha’s online game, which went into testing on Wednesday, fits into a category of products referred to as social games: in this case, do an act of kindness such as inviting someone to coffee, and follow the chain of events online as that person treats someone else to java, who treats someone else to java.

“We’re seeing a lot of interest in social games,” said Eberts. “Many people play Facebook like a game.”

When asked how he will make money, Ebert is not sure. “We want to keep this authentic,” which makes him cautious about placing advertising.

“It is a hard thing to do,” said Bradley Horowitz, who oversees Google’s communications products and social applications. But “it could be a fun, addictive thing.”

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.