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January 31, 2007
Marcel de Ruiter (of ShapingThoughts) has translated the kids’ version of Small Pieces Loosely Joined into Dutch. There are now versions in French, Norwegian, Italian (link is broken….working on it) and Portuguese, which makes me inordinately happy. I know doing a kid’s version is an odd idea, but I’m really glad I did it… [Tags: small_pieces_loosely_joined]
Brad DeLong observes “some of the more interesting categories from Crooked Timber“… [Tags: tagging taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous humor ]
In talking with Lee Rainie of Pew (see previous post), I realized that I don’t have a good answer to an obvious question: What are some good examples of how folksonomies have improved taxonomies? In fact, with my poor powers of recall (and given how imprecise I am, I would make a terrible search engine), I can’t even think of good examples of sites that present a standard-style taxonomy and a tag cloud. I know they’re there. I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged about them. I may even have been married to one during a brief period in the ’70s. But I’m blanking on them… [Tags: folksonomy tagging taxonomy]
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has just released a report by Lee Rainie that finds:
28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.
Since the last figure I saw (and of course I don’t remember where I saw it) was that 0.5% of Net users have used tags, this is a spectacular finding. The wording of the question was “”Please tell me if you ever use the internet to categorize or tag online content like a photo, news story, or a blog post,” so it includes more than people who have set up an account at del.icio.us and are hard-core taggers. Still, it’s a spectacular finding.
Lee generously includes in the report an interview with me about tagging. Thanks, Lee! [Tags: tagging pew lee_rainie everything_is_miscellaneous folksonomy taxonomy]
Andrew McAfee and Karim Lakhani at Harvard Business School has published the first HBS case study of Wikipedia. I haven’t read it yet, but the questions and topics look very interesting… [Tags: wikipedia hbs everything_is_miscellaneous ]
January 30, 2007
Mochila says it’s doing for all content what iTunes has done for music: Enabling people to buy the content they need when they need it. It has a marketplace to let you monetize your “high quality” content. You can set rules for embargoes and usage [=DRM]. From the annoying promotional video he shows, it seems to be aimed at big time publishers, e.g., Redbook, Popular Mechanics and Enterpreneur. “Mochila has solved a huge problem in the media market: Licensing doesn’t scale…We make licensing safe and scalable.”
ThisNext helps you do social shopping. There are 60M SKUs. People want to help each other decide what to buy. At ThisNext users can talk about the products they care about. “McKinsey reports 27% of all personal conversations in USA include discussions of products.” Only 15% of us trust advertisers. “Social shopping is the future of online marketing and brand merchandising.” ThisNext tries to attract the “influencers.” You can see who’s making the recommendation and can connect one-to-one. [Did I ever tell you about the time a couple of friends and I started a company called WordOfMouth.com to enable local communities recommend local services? Someday someone will get online word of mouth right.]
[Tags: onmedia07 alwayson marketing media drm everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Hillary has gone to Yahoo Answers to ask about our experiences with health insurance. As Jeff Jarvis points out, “she could have done this on her own site. But by going elsewhere — by being a distributed candidate — she gets more people, more attention.” Nice move. [Tags: hillary_clinton politics]
ClickForensics has launched a network of advertisers to detect fraudulent clicks on ads, either by a competitor trying to burn up the budget or move up in listings, or by contentent publishers looking to make more money for the clicks. It’s done through bots, spyware, click farms, pay-to-read… They say over 20% of the clicks coming from content sites (?) are fraudulent.
Michelle Wu of Social Television (mediaZone) — omigod, I think it’s a woman! — talks about “social tv,” which is professional TV with social interactivity. She’s shows an over-produced promotional video, with the faux-important voice of Robin Leech. Then she pitches. It lets users talk together—chat—while watching professional packaged, long-form TV. It does p2p peering, saving “over 99% bandwidth costs.” It serves ads to users based on their demographics and behavior. [I’m just not convinced that these various platforms we’ve seen today do much more than starting up a chat room while watching TV; that’s what we do for political events we couldn’t otherwise stand to watch.The P2P delivery is interesting, but I’m guessing someone else will solve this problem in a way that catches on, at which point SocialTV doesn’t seem to be much more than a chatroom with ads. Unless I’m missing the point. Again.]
Dave Networks builds “video social communities around brands.” E.g., the Stargate site is a money-making community site.The content developed there can be syndicated. “We’ve created a monetization model for syndication.”
Real Time Content promises a “disruptive approach” that they call Adaptive Media. “Real Time Content, doesn’t just play media, it adapts it to the audience.” Every viewer sees his own TV program. [Well, ad.] It even adapts to the viewer’s mood. In his example, Honda FR-V has four user profiles, although you could have thousands. He creates a thirty second ad in real time for a “young married couple” profile. Then he does one for a socer mom. The first is in Scotland with soothing music and the second features a mom packing kid’s equipment, with spacey music and a voice-over. “We’re empowering the consumer to control the ad.” The ad creator creates the template using a Flash inteface that has metadata for content fragments for mood, demo, etc. [Great. Now we can wait for the blog post titled “My Adaptive Media ads think I’m gay.”]
Jay Hallberg of SpiceWorks does “Ad-supported IT management for SMBs.” If you subscribe, it inventories your network automatically and sets watches on things you want to watch, such as low disk space or low toner. As they do that, they show you ads. [Hmm. Could I be sick of seeing ads? Nah. How could I ever tire of that??] [SpiceWorks may do more than that, but I didn’t hear.] [Tags: onmedia07 alwayson marketing advertising metadata everything_is_miscellaneous ]
I came in at the end of a discussion of marketing to the “IM Generation.” The part I caught was good — you can’t lie, you can’t tell them what’s cool, you have to be transparent. “There’s a lot of top-down marketing that will be roadkill in this environment.” One says that we’re only at the beginning of the development of grassroots videos as an art form.
The panelists are Tom McInerney (Guba ), Steven Starr (Revver), Justin Townsend (IGA Worldwide ) and Jeremy Verba (Piczo). Sorry I missed most of it. [Tags: onmedia07 media ads marketing alwayson ]
[Reminder: I’m live-blogging. Sketchy, imprecise, sometimes inaccurate, incomplete, snap judgments, errors of transcription…you name it.]
ClipSync is a real-time social medium. It will “revolutionize entertainment on the Web.” The founder previously founded Webex, which does simultaneous, synchronized experience. When experiences are simultaneous, you get social inter-reaction. Del.icio.us et al. are serial experiences. Clipsync lets you watch stuff—such as YouTubes—together. [Cool. The idea of enabling people to watch TV together over the Net has been around for a while, including a good version put forward by a friend of mine a few years ago, but I like ClipSync’s doing this for grassroots content. We’ll see if it catches on.]
MotionBox.com says that everything is becoming a video camera. [Well, not video cameras. They already are video cameras. Perhaps I’m quibbling :)] Currently there’s a greater than 10,000:1 ratio of video posters to viewers. Motionbox makes it easy to edit your videos. Cool feature: A slider that lets you pan through the thumbnail of a clip. (Try it here.) The editing interface looks easy to use. It’s Web based, so no software to load. MotionBox also has a player that makes it easy to scan through a video you’ve found. And, a user/viewer can drag select any segment of it and tag it. [Yay tags!] [There are a number of players in this space. Will MotionBox succeed? It looks slick and usable, but I dunno.] [Click here to see why not everything tagged “sex” is really about sex.]
PayPerPost is the “first user-generated advdetising program.” “We connect our advertisers with the largest network of high quality bloggers…The PayPerPost Marketplace lets advertisers connect with bloggers.” In the Market, the advertiser advertises what productsit wants bloggers to blog about for pay. Bloggers look through the available ads and choose the ones they want. He shows an appalling video in which little kids are goaded into smashing a camera because it’s not an HP. but he seems to think we’ll like it. Interesting. I’m live-blogging so I don’t have time to be right, but please permit me a preemptive “Yech.”
Vidavee “enables and organizes the video ecosystem.” Vidavee has built an ad-placement technology “that places ads more intelligently and in a more consumer-friendly way.” It lets your site popup an ad during, say, the most viewed portion of a video based on real-time analytics.
Now the panel of experts gets up. Unfortunately, the first one says “Advertising and content, what’s the difference? Ads and content are all mixed up in the traditional media, so why not on the Web?” [A: Because the Web is ours and we’re trying to build something better.] The other two panelists state some bad feelings about PayPerView. [Tags: onmedia07 advertising marketing video ]
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