Social Media Club » Jason Chervokas

Social Media Now: Blogosphere No More!

Jason Chervokas — Wed, 23 May 2007 15:16:12 +0000

Two indications that the heyday of the “blogosphere” is over this week.

First came the rapid rise and seven figure sale of WallStrip. From an industry perspective this is vlogging’s “Dan Rather” moment. I expect a lot of heat around vlogs in the next few months. DIY Internet media always proceeds from easiest to produce/lowest bandwidth text based stuff, up through harder to produce bandwidth hogs. Its time for strong, semi-pro vlogs to climb up into the mainstream the way political blogs did a few years ago.

Second comes today’s Technorati redesign. Technorati founder Dave Sifry writes:

Whereas folks using Technorati a couple of years ago were predominantly coming to us to search the blogosphere to surface the conversations that were most interesting to them, today they are increasingly coming to our site to get the 360 degree context of the Live Web – blogs of course, but also user-generated video, photos, podcasts, music, games and more. They want all the good stuff out there, all in real-time, and we’re using the power of 80 million bloggers to help organize it and make it fun to browse; using the wisdom of crowds as a mirror on ourselves.

Technorati made itself the arbiter of success in the blogosphere by inventing a kind of blog economy where links were the currency. But the company’s own research showed the growth of blogs slowing and new kinds of metainformation (like tags) replacing links in the value chain.

Steve Rubel’s experience summarizes the situation nicely:

…I have to admit that I don’t use Technorati nearly as much as I used to. Link authority was a good metric a year ago, but it’s not nearly as worthwhile today when you consider all of the centers of influence one may wish to search and track. Link authority doesn’t tell me who’s an influencer on Facebook or which video artists are rising on YouTube. It was great in 2005, ok in 2006 and really has faded from relevance in 2007.

At the heart of the new Technorati is the goal of truly live search of the live Web across all its platforms (text, audio, video) and all it’s meta-information sources (keywords, tags, directories), a universal search that goes head to head with Google’s strategy, a losing proposition to Rubel who says “the heyday of dedicated “live web” search engines like Technorati is coming to a close.”

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch reads the redesign similarly:

This is also a clear move by Technorati away from blog search, although many of the media search features have been around for a while. It may be an acknowledgment that they can’t beat Google Blogsearch over the long run, or it may be a strategy to go after a larger potential market for time sensitive content. Or both….

All signs are that Technorati is continuing to look for a replacement to Sifry, the founding CEO, and rumors that the company is looking for a buyer persist despite denials from the company.

But Robert Scobble kicked the tires at the new Technorati and was impressed:

Technorati does “Live” search MUCH MUCH better than Microsoft and even better than Google’s Blog Search.

I predict that, with this update, Technorati will become a quick takeover target. If I were at Microsoft I’d be spending a few corporate hours wining and dining Dave Sifry.

Technorati is so superior to all the other blog search engines now that it isn’t even funny.

Can’t wait to spend some time with it.

Social Media Now: How Much is DIY Talent Worth?

Jason Chervokas — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:13:42 +0000

Is DIY Internet video a new media type? Or just a minor league development system for traditional media?

The announcement that CBS is acquiring Wallstrip, a business group vlog covering stocks, sure looks like the classic minor league or indie rock development path. Wallstrip founder Howard Lindzon tells the rather unremarkable tale of the company’s development on his blog under the headline “You Can Make Money from Blogging!!!” But that headline is a big of misdirection. First, Wallstrip isn’t a blog, it’s a vlog. If it were a blog CBS wouldn’t have been interested. Second, proof that a company will acquire your vlog is hardly proof that the vlog can make money.

I don’t mean to dis WallStrip–in fact I’ve never seen one of its vidcasts and my friend Fred Wilson is involved and I know he has impeccable taste when it comes to Internet companies. I just want to put the deal in perspective for all the new media triumphalists out there who insist that Internet video is killing the TV stars. It looks more like Internet video is creating TV stars. And, as Om Malik points out, “the Wallstrip deal does put a price tag on these ‘talent’ oriented buyouts.” The price for the Wallstrip talent acquisition was $5 million according to reports, but what exactly is CBS buying? Said Duncan Riley at Techcrunch:

From my previous discussions with my source close to the deal, WallStrip has close to no revenue; indeed he claimed that WallStrip has no revenue at all. The cost of CBS or other media outlets establishing a rival video blog to WallStrip would be relatively low and CBS now faces that real threat, the purchase of WallStrip bound to create new startups targeting the investor focused video podcasting market.

I think I understand CBS’s thinking. The company needs to prepare content for the new Internet video distribution channels sprouting like mushrooms (like AOL and Joost). It needs a team that understands how to make content that suits that form and feed the monster, and the Wallstrip team has proven it can produce video if not revenue.

But if getting a pretty girl to read news and commentary online is worth $5 million….well, any pretty girls out there interesting in starting a social media vlog?

Facebook Opens Up: MySpace may be the biggest operation in the social media business, but Facebook is the best.

At every step of the way the company has made the right decisions, at least according to my standing focus group–my 15 year old daughter and her friends. Staying elite before going open kept the creeps out. Keeping the nav and design clean make it quick and easy to use where, according to the girls MySpace was clunky and slow to load. Today my daughter keeps a ghost MySpace page (I wonder how many MySpace members are, in fact, vestigial), but she and her friends live their lives on Facebook.

Now the company is apparently ready to open itself to third party developers who will do everything from widget building to social shopping, as yesterday’s WSJ story noted. If there were social shopping on Facebook my daughter and her friends would never visit Amazon or J.Crew; if there were music recommendation and downloading they’d never go to iTunes.

Yesterday’s WSJ piece was the kind of Monday morning leak that only reporters at the WSJ and the NYT get, and it touched off a lot of speculation as to the true nature of Facebook’s new program, which will supposedly be unveiled on Thursday.

Tony Hung described it as a “reverse API” strategy:

But, what is Facebook doing?

Its letting *other* companies build mashups *for* Facebook *within* Facebook, and then not sharing any revenues (if any are made) with that company.

Wow.

Whatever you call it and however it shakes out, Facebook’s strategy is 180 degrees opposed MySpace’s vertical integration strategy of buying backend service providers.

Link Love:

Sharing the Widget Wealth
Change.org, The Network for Political Change

Social Media Now: Virtual Religion

Jason Chervokas — Fri, 18 May 2007 14:15:12 +0000

James Au, whose pioneering beat for Reuters is Second Life, has a fascinating story this morning about the rise and apparent fall of Avatars of Change, one of the first native religious orders to be formed in SL.

The group was founded as a Neo-Confucian “ecumenical religious and cultural order, united by the Avatarian Way.” It’s membership is interdenominational and it’s practices seem to be centered around consulting an I Ching-based, software oracle.

Au’s story revolves around a controvert sparked when the group’s founder (an offline Christian whose avatar is Taras Balderdash, a gray-bearded Asian man in a silk robe with a blue dragon on his shoulder) asked group members to vote on a proposition that would bar Muslims on the basis of the proposition that Islam is inherently intolerant and therefore not “Avatarian.”:

“There are many jewels of Moslem culture,” he avers. “Music, Sufi mysticism, etc., but the world is now dealing with the youthful energy of its fundamentalism. What I am hoping to hear from our Avatarians is a positive argument against my position; someone who argues, based on the Quran, that I am wrong. So far all I’ve got is constant reminders of other religions being intolerant, particularly Roman Catholic Christianity.” Taras considers this an evasion of the point. “I am interested in the theology. People are people, whatever their faith, and God loves them all. But what hope do we have that a tolerant Moslem theology will win out?”

The vote, which is scheduled to conclude this Sunday, naturally sparked controversy in SL.

(Au interviews a Sufi, Drown Pharaoh, who leads regular prayers in an SL mosque, whose response to AoC paints the group’s vote as an extension of old western Orientalism. If the exchange reads as an argument among theology students that’s because it is. Drown Pharaoh identifies himself in the story as “a religious studies graduate and a committed member of an interfaith community on SL, Koinonia.” The discussion is fascinating, and it mirrors offline debates about the nature of Islam and about who is entitled to speak for Muslims.)

And enough of an AoC membership revolt that the religion appears to be collapsing. From Au’s interview with Taras Balderdash:

My questioning the tolerance of Islam for other faiths has produced such grief and chaos that I have rethought the concept of the the Avatars of Change and left the Order,” he told me late yesterday. “I am just a monk now. The Order is falling apart pretty rapidly, so I’m not sure how much of it will survive without me.”

I’m less interested in the theological debate–which mirrors debates in the offline world about the nature of Islam and who has the right to speak about a given faith–then I am in the nature of religion formation in virtual worlds. In an environment where there is no real death, where nothing is random, and there is no mystery as to the creation of the universe, what role could a native religion play? One sign that social media is truly transformative–not just a new way of doing old things, but a new kind of culture–would be the rise of a native spirituality. But do people’s avatars have spiritual needs that are different in nature from the needs of their humans? Or is there some kind of spiritual practice native to cyberspace that can offer something missing in the real world?

I wish I had the answers. Stay tuned.

Social Media Now: Social Media’s Virtual Economy

Jason Chervokas — Thu, 17 May 2007 21:59:10 +0000

A decade ago an acquaintance at Time Inc. told me the company–renowned through the generations for launching era-defining magazines–would never launch a new title again. Instead, the company would add new publications by acquiring small start-ups that had built audiences they couldn’t fully monetize.

It didn’t quite work out that way for Time, as the very successful launch of Real Simple in 2000 proved. But the logic remains a dominant one in the media business. Let start ups innovate and build audiences, then grab properties that can be made profitable thanks to the economies of scale in backend production and the sales and marketing that big companies can provide.

That seems to be what’s going on in the social networking space. The latest news involves the Walt Disney Company and ClubPenguin, a site for kids variously described as a massively multiplayer game, a social network and a virtual world. According to paidContent ClubPenguin has more than 4.5 million monthly uniques and, although the basic functionality is free, there is premium game functionality available to subscribers who pay $6 a month.

PaidContent confirmed Sony’s interest with sources described as “insiders” and reported that the price on the table is around $450 million:

Some people were intent on floating a $500 million number but our sources peg the price at around $450 million, which would be a 7.5 multiple based on this year’s projected revenue of about $60 million. The self-funded company is already profitable and, according to our information, is operating at about 50 percent margin—ie $30 million in profit this year.

GigaOm joined the race to advance the story writing that NewsCorp had made a $200 million offer for the company, but also getting a non-denial denial quote from Lane Merrifield, co-founder of New Horizon Interactive, the Canadian company behind ClubPenguin.

Om Malik sees the rumored deal as part of a trend, noting that Disney is rumored to be looking at another Canadian tweens site, Webkinz:

Club Penguin isn’t the only company generating interest. Disney, for instance, is rumored to be interested in Woodbridge, Ontario-based Webkinz, another Canadian tween site that has been growing a break neck pace, and is a kid favorite….

One of the reasons these kid-focused communities have taken off versus the more complicated communities like Second Life is that they are dead simple and highly focused.

Most of these online worlds run on Flash, so there’s no complicated client download/installation.

Ok, I get the focus, I get not needing to install a client, but dead simple? Well, maybe ClubPenguin is, though I’d hardly describe Second Life that way.

What I suspect is profoundly interesting to big media players is the new economic models that fire virtual worlds–not only subscriptions for games (something about ClubPenguin that certainly must appeal to Sony), but also the purchase of stuff, both real and virtual. As GigaOm notes Webkinz is owned by Ganz, one of Canada’s largest manufacturers of stuffed toys–and going back to the 1980s cartoon/product boom (remember GI Joe, Transformers, My Little Pony, Care Bears), the connection between products and media properties that feature them has proved to be fertile ground.

The best take on the economic appeal of it all comes from Andrew Chen, entrepreneur in residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures, who correctly notes virtual worlds appeal because of the sales of virtual products

First, let’s start with the numbers:

Habbo Hotel generates $77MM in 2006 (Source)
Club Penguin generates $65MM in 2007 (Source)
Second Life exchanges $1.MM in the last 24 hours (Source)

IMVU, Puzzle Pirates, and Stardoll are all doing very well also
These numbers are pretty exciting because they are NOT advertising dollars, but rather people directly purchasing merchandise on website

Advertising doesn’t work on social networks, Chen explains:

Ads don’t support what people go to social networking sites for….

Because of this, it’s well documented that the CPMs for social networking sites are quite bad. Clickthrough rates are very low – in the case of Facebook, you’re talking about 0.04%, or 4 clicks in 10,000 impressions. Compare that to Google, which is delivering upwards of 300X the CTR.

Seems obvious that clickthroughs would be better on a search site where users come to click, but not as effective in a virtual world where people come to stay. But, Chen notes, where ads are intrusive and tangential to the social networking experience, the sale of virtual goods is endemic, a fundamentally new business model that is native to social media:

Virtual goods in social sites is like dressing up or buying someone a drink at a night club

Because virtual goods go with the flow, in terms of what users want and expect, it makes it easier to monetize groups of people.

…

The really fascinating part about this model is that it support communities, rather than being something that interferes with the user experience. Go with the flow, and money will follow.

Fascinating stuff. If big companies–media companies or retailers–start gobbling up virtual worlds, it will be interesting to watch them try to strike a balance between maintaining a community vibe and ramming product down the throats of users–a uncomfortable experience even in the virtual world.

�

Social Media Now: Will the Widget Survive?

Jason Chervokas — Wed, 16 May 2007 13:42:32 +0000

On the heels of the still-unconfirmed deal to buy Photobucket, Fox Interactive Media’s MySpace is apparently making another widget move–acquiring slide show widget maker Flecktor for as much as $20 million, according to Techcrunch, although FIM has declined to confirm or deny the deal.

Michael Arrington neatly lays out the logic of the deal:

It’s an odd acquisition…since Photobucket also has a slide creation product that competes with Flektor.

But Flektor has a killer team of founders…. Also, Flektor is custom code built on Flex, whereas Photobucket’s competing offering is built with Adobe’s tools. If Adobe decided to compete directly in this space, MySpace will be in a better position owning their own code.

The acquisition also makes sense from a strategic standpoint. MySpace has massive distribution as the largest site on the Internet. Photobucket brings storage to the table, and the Flektor team looks to be able to create awesome tools for users to create content.

But what might the deal mean for the rest of the world of widget start-ups? At VentureBeat Dan Kaplan looks at the impact on the leading slide show specialists, Slide and RockYou:

While both Slide and RockYou have huge user-bases, they also depend heavily on social networking giant MySpace and other sites. MySpace has made it abundantly clear that it is happy to pull the plug on widgets that lose its favor. If a Slide or RockYou try to push more advertising, and compete head-on with one of MySpace’s new properties (Photobucket, and potentially Flektor), MySpace may try to snuff them. How valuable are these immensely popular widgets when a small competitor can innovate quickly, get scooped up at a much lower price by MySpace and have a giant platform (like MySpace) to gain distribution?

Good question, one David Hornik’s VentureBlog post earlier this week offered a possible answer to. I recommend reading the whole piece, which is a nice wrap up of the state of the widget economy. But most interesting are his observations on the relationship between start-up widget makers and the big boys of social networking:

If a widget is doing nothing to monetize its host’s traffic…, it might be viewed as neutral or perhaps symbiotic for freely increasing the functionality of the host’s site. If a widget is seeking to monetize the host’s viewers (e.g., ads or branding on a voicemail widget), the host may view that widget as parasitic. This relationship, of course, assumes there is a zero sum game of monetizable attention on any given host service, therefore the fact that a widget is monetizing some of that attention means the host has lost that revenue opportunity in return. ….my view is that if a service’s functionality is significantly enhanced as a result of the various widgets that attach to it (e.g., the MySpace experience was massively enhanced early on by the work of both Photobucket and YouTube), one might argue that the widget experience is always symbiotic — enhanced functionality in exchange for traffic, monetized or not.

But it’s interesting to see how quickly the the attitude among the digerati has changed towards widget start ups–from cheerleading for a new world order, to fatalistic resignation about the power of MySpace and Facebook. Om Malik, has a non-interview interview with FIM’s Peter Levinsohn, which is not nearly as bullish on widgets as Hornik’s piece:

The acquisition, if true, is yet another proof that widget (and other start-ups) need to diversify their user bases, because sooner or later MySpace is going to end-up compete with them. This is the way of the large companies, and it is not unusual. What is strange is that start-ups ignore this fact of life – putting their destiny in other people’s hands.

Think this way – if a company trying to do an IPO gets 50% of its revenues from one customers, even the bravest investor runs away from that deal. Why should it be any different for start-ups who are basically hawking traffic and eyeball stats? Funnily enough people have been ignoring what Fox executives have been saying for a while now.

But the Internet media business has always been like squeezing toothpaste, and its hard to imagine that MySpace and Facebook represent the last large audiences to be amassed in the social networking business.

Social Media Now: When Users Attack!

Jason Chervokas — Tue, 15 May 2007 14:06:24 +0000

Digg-hating has become a favorite pastime of the digerati. The sport hasn’t reached the proportions of Microsoft-hating yet, but it’s getting there.

Yesterday’s flap began when Neil Patel at Pronet Advertising wrote a post claiming to prove that Digg editors or algorithms are intentionally burying certain stories posted to the service in a kind of double-secret censorship.

Several bloggers followed up with posts taking issue with Patel’s data–which came from Digg internal data posted through several Digg public applications. Other bloggers followed up supporting Patel with anecdotal “evidence” of stories being censored. Executives at Digg have yet to respond to the story. The latest to-do comes two weeks after the Digg user revolt over Digg’s removal of stories liking to code for cracking HD-DVDs.

I don’t know if it’s true that Digg is burying stories, though I’ve asked the company if it is, and if so what criteria are being used.

But I am fascinated by the anger and resentment that seems to be continuously bubbling up from the Digg user community. Why does Digg suffer the slings and arrows of user anger while other user-informed news sites, like Wikipeida, don’t? And what can companies do to avoid facing the kind of user revolt that Digg has faced this spring?

At the heart of the current brouhaha are questions–perhaps unfair ones–about Digg’s honesty. Just as the Sanjaya flack threatened to undermine the perceived credibility of American Idol, the Patel charge threatens Digg’s credibility–are the top stories really the stories users like the best, or are ulterior motives at work?

That question goes to the core of what Digg has promised users: “everything on Digg is submitted by our community,” the company claims, and “Digg is a digital media democracy.” But Digg also retains rights to remove content for any reason at any time. It’s a reasonable policy given the potential for corporate liability, but it can leave the company in conflict with users–as in the case of the DVD code, the posting of which threatens Digg with legal liability.

MG Siegler–whose story was the buried one at the hear of Patel’s post–suggests that the solution is total transparency:

It is time for Digg Founder Kevin Rose to man-up once again. It is time to make Digg fully transparent. It is time to remove the barrier that hides the bury data from the users. Mr. Rose, tear down this wall.

Siegler is right, the greatest possible transparency is always the best policy for Internet businesses. But users don’t revolt at eBay because tools to track prices and volume of certain kinds of goods aren’t made freely available to sellers AND buyers. eBay users have a different expectation in part because they carry into their eBay experience certain preconceptions of a retail marketplace, but also because eBay doesn’t promise to be a digital democracy.

In some ways Digg’s troubles have resulted from the company being a bad parent–not providing users explicit, firm rules; and capriciously and mercurially changing the enforcement of whatever obscure rules exist (like pulling down the code cracking stories then putting them back up in response to a user tantrum).

But there’s a third reason for Digg’s recent problems, one that’s not often discussed among the cognoscenti–users don’t share Digg’s liability. Would a user revolt over the DVD cracking code have snowballed if every Digg poster shared legal liability? Just as flame wars erupt more easily online than fights do offline because of the abstraction of cyberspace, social media users are more likely to engage in certain behavior online than off because they don’t face any consequences.

Of course, shared liability is a two way street–users also don’t share in the rewards of social media companies–not just ad revenue but also capital appreciation in community equity. But what if they did? A social media property in which not just revenue but also equity is shared with users would be a fascinating thing to watch develop. Would a community of users behave differently if users were equity-holders?
Link Love:

MTV Licenses Social Net Media Player; Offers Grant Money For Student Developed Programs
Meebo Launches Meebo Rooms (oh, and Meebo now has ads)

A Casualty Of War: MySpace

Social Media Now: How Big is Your Widget?

Jason Chervokas — Fri, 11 May 2007 13:34:11 +0000

Several pieces this morning got me thinking about the size and scale of the widget business. First, Matt Marshall at Venture Beat wrote about Slide–maker of a web slide show widget:

Slide, the maker of a Web slide show feature, has emerged as a major player, boasting 150 million daily slide show views and more than 200,000 new slide show “widgets” created daily.

These numbers are astonishing, and are enough to make it the largest “independent” widget company on the web, according to the company. It is a striking example of how quickly you can grow if you have a good, simple idea.

Techcrunch too touted Slide as well as a competitor called Flektor, hyping their value based on traffic numbers and the recently reported $300 million price that MySpace has agreed to pay to acquire Photobucket:

The new kid on the slide show block is Flektor. It just recently came out of beta and has few users so far, but we’re hearing they are getting a lot of attention from potential acquirors.

Does Michael Arrington get a finders fee? I find myself frustrated by Techcrunch when its tone become so unremittingly promotional, for example: “Flektor is brand new and doesn’t have the capitalization complications of the older startups. My bet (and rumors around the valley back this up) is they may be acquired in the next six months by one of the social networks, perhaps one of the up and comers looking for as many tools as possible to compete with MySpace.” Buy now! Tickets going fast!

By contrast Fred Wilson threw a bit of a wet blanket onto widget traffic numbers, writing about Clearspring, which claims to be serving 60 million content widgets a day. Fred, who is one of the most knowledgeable and thoughtful investors I know, doesn’t doubt Clearspring’s numbers, but he does wonder out loud about the way we measure widgets:

But before we start putting Clearspring in McDonald’s territory (billions served), let’s get something straight. Serving widgets generates huge numbers quickly.All you need to do is look at Photobucket, Slide, and RockYou’s numbers for their photo/slideshow widgets to see how powerful the widget model is. I don’t have access to the actual numbers for these three photo widget services and I’d prefer not to print the rumors I’ve heard, but I’d venture a guess that their numbers for widgets served each day will make Clearspring’s 3bn number look tiny.

I do know the numbers for FeedBurner’s widgets and they are well north of what Clearspring is serving. But this post is not about whose you know what is bigger than whose.

It’s about the challenge of understanding what is what in the widget market.

The Internet has long promised to be the most measurable media platform ever, but despite the plethora of metrics that exist–heck, perhaps because of the plethora of metrics that exist– no universally-accepted, bullet-proof, third-party standards exists to allow apples to apples comparisons between one Internet property and another, never mind between one widget company and another.

This babel of measurement is only exacerbated by the distributed nature of widget traffic. From Fred again:

Are those 18mm uniques that are attributed to Photobucket being seen on Photobucket.com? Or are those 18mm uniques the number of people that are being exposed to the Photobucket widget wherever it is being embedded (MySpace, Beebo, etc). I don’t know the answer to that simple question, but it’s an important one.

And what’s the right number to look at? Should Photobucket get credit for having an audience that sees its widget on other services pages? When that page includes five to ten other widgets? Or should it just get credit for those who interact with the widget in some way?

There’s no doubt that the widget business could benefit from a third party measurement that every party could trust. Perhaps the measurement system should be multi-tiered–measuring total traffic, number of widgets distributed, traffic at the point of distribution, and click-through rates (to the extent that a widget is actionable).

Would widget makers welcome such a system? It seems to me that for the moment the dearth of real measurement benefits widget-makers by inflating the value of their products. But a widget to measure widgets–that would have some real value.

Link Love:

Chinese Social Net 51.com Secures $10 Million In Second Round

Last.fm Adds Personalized Music Anywhere Widget

Facebook Marketplace: The Alternatives

Lots of blather on the Net this morning about Facebook’s new free classified ad offering. Here’s a different take that looks at competitors from an end-user’s perspective

Social Media Now: How Much Is Social Media Worth?

Jason Chervokas — Thu, 10 May 2007 14:40:52 +0000

We have a couple of indicators this morning about how much a commercial social network can earn, and how inexpensive it is to build a profitable one.

At the top of the market is MySpace. New Corp, which announced earnings yesterday, doesn’t break out MySpace’s numbers in it’s SEC filings but during a conference call with analysts yesterday, executives confirmed that they expected interactive sales to reach at least $500 million this year, led primarily by MySpace. (FIM also includes Foxsports.com and AmericanIdol.com.)

With nearly 56 million visitors a month, $500 million per year amounts to around 74 cents in revenue per monthly visitor (if all of FIM revenue is attributed to MySpace). We don’t know if MySpace is profitable on an operating basis but perhaps we can infer something from the fact that News Corp doesn’t tell us.

Meanwhile, Techcrunch reports on a company called Tagged. Even at half the scale of MySpace, Tagged’s numbers are substantial–40 million members (half of whom are active) and 1 billion pageviews per month. Furthermore, Tagged CEO Greg Tseng says his company is profitable at $600,000 in monthly revenue. I think that means Tagged is attracting one billion pageviews monthly on an investment of $7 million a year.

Will the commercial social networking business develop on two tracks–with an indie, hits business continually bubbling up from the bottom end?

Look at the current economics of Hollywood comedies, which Jon Gertner brilliantly chronicled in the New York Times Magazine last November:

comedies…tend to have lower physical production costs, since they often don’t require extravagant sets or expensive postproduction work. And if they have low artistic production costs as well (for the cast and directors), they have a kind of jackpot potential that dramas, at least in recent years, have lacked. In other words, even when a comedy doesn’t produce the huge revenues of a blockbuster like ”Harry Potter,” it can help push the returns of a portfolio way up if it is put together in a way similar to ”Little Miss Sunshine” or ”The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” which starred an inexpensive and untested Steve Carell. Such a film will pay off in the theater, on DVD, in television sales — and ultimately contribute to the studio’s catalog. A popular comedy is a valuable piece of intellectual property. If it’s made cheaply, it’s the equivalent of investing early in Google.

Speaking of money, I’m fascinated by Sequoia’s investment in Joost . As Matt Marshall at Venture Beat notes:

Roelof Botha, general partner at Sequoia Capital, led the firm’s investment in Joost. He was also the lead investor in YouTube, a short-length video site — different from Joost, which wants to show full-length video.

Obviously Internet video paid off enormously for Sequoia with YouTube. And by virtue of its founders experience and its corporate support, Joost looks like a great investment. But it sure looks like a hedge, playing both sides against the middle in media wars.

The Problem with Podcasting

Jason Chervokas — Wed, 09 May 2007 18:22:28 +0000

Podcasting as we know it is a disaster.

Howard summed up a few of the problems in his post this morning:

Podcasts are still hard to get, find, and take with you, except if you have an iPod and are using iTunes. Even then, you have to search, subscribe, and regularly sync and remove old content. Microsoft hasn’t build podcast-catching functionality into Windows Media Player or the Zune (not that we should judge by what’s in the Zune.) But I can listen to audio podcasts or watch video podcasts on my Tivo (some are pre-loaded, others must be tediously typed in). Still not a wonderful overall experience, but Rocketboom looks great on TV.

Howard’s first point is the most important one–podcasting, right down to its name, is fatally tied to the iPod. If consuming DIY Internet video had required the used of a portable player–even one you already owned–a near random search for content, the docking of devices and constant file maintanence, YouTube would have never fetched $1.6 billion.

To thrive, DIY Internet audio needs effortless cross-platform access, content that is uniquely suited in form to Internet listening (in other words content must do more than emulate traditional radio), and some useful means of discovery. In short, what podcasting needs is its own YouTube.

There’s legitimate debate about whether or not YouTube could have exploded as a business without the unauthorized redistribution of copyrighted content. But there’s no debate about whether or not YouTube revolutionized Internet video. It did. And it did so for two reasons.

First, it provided a central hub where content could be amassed. Second, it offered a fantastic system for discovery, a system that worked because it was social not only with shared tags and ratings, but also, and most importantly, with social redistribution through an embeddable Flash player.

By giving viewers the opportunity to tag and share video, the YouTube system transformed a media format that was otherwise one-way into something interactive. This spurred viewing and provided feedback to video posters who began creating videos that suited the format that users most appreciated (largely short, often comic).

Podcasting, or DIY Internet audio (I prefer to think of it outside of the ‘Pod’) may well get its YouTube. As Howard mentions podcasting may be among Joost’s offerings–though the degree of user control permitted by Joost remains to be seen. But without a transformation of that sort I think podcasting will remain a geek’s niche.

How big a niche can that be? It’s hard to tell from the Pew numbers. Howard reads Pew’s survey to show a 71% increase between April and August of last year in the number of people who have downloaded a podcast at least once (although the way Pew presents its research makes it hard to make apples to apples comparisons). And Howard and Mary Madden of Pew arrived at the figure of 17 million for the number of people who had downloaded a podcast at least once, a number Howard compares favorably to that of satellite radio subscribers. But its a bad comparison: one-time downloaders vs. a body of subscribers with a 2% churn rate and an ARPU of $11 a month. Call me when podcasting in the aggregate generates $2.2 billion a year.

I know I sound like a wet blanket (it’s what I do best). But that’s not what I’m trying to be. I would love to see a vibrant Internet audio universe but I think there are many rivers to cross between here and there. (And don’t get me started about the cost of podcasting copyrighted music.)

Social Media Now: Widgets, Discovery, and Catching a Buzz

Jason Chervokas — Wed, 09 May 2007 13:29:28 +0000

When is a widget not a widget? That’s the question I find myself asking this morning as I read about Mpire’s official roll out today of 80 new widgets that variously package affiliate shopping and selling data from Amazon and eBay.

Writes Mpire CEO Matt Hulett:

Mpire’s collection of 75 widgets gives free access to packaged, historical Amazon and eBay shopping trend results across 15 popular categories, such as entertainment, sports, fashion, technology, games and youth/teens. Typically, consumers and eBay sellers have had to pay a monthly fee to find out what’s hot or gaining in popularity.

The widgets are for publishers who are Amazon and eBay affiliates, and they are free to publishers. They republish semi-custom content about eBay and Amazon sales (ie, what’s hot in certain categories) with the value proposition to publishers being a tool to drive more retail traffic through the affiliated site. The widgets won’t be revenue generators for Mpire, Hulett told Techcrunch. The program is more about mindshare than about money.

John Cook at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a longer interview with Huellet and Mpire co-founder Dave Cotter who explains the retail widgets as an evolution in web advertising.

Maybe. Sales tracking data, particularly those that track information about market prices on eBay, are certainly valuable. And anything that increases sales is gravy to members of online retail affiliate networks. But is that kind of information broadly valuable to surfers? I’m not sure. Still the notion that actionable widgets represent an evolution in online ad networks is a compelling one.

Now if Mpire would only work some kind of social shopping component into the mix.

Speaking of social shopping, the Wall Street Journal reports this morning that eBay’s acquisition talks with StumbleUpon have heated up, with a potential deal being priced at around $75 million.

Since its very successful purchase and integration of Paypal in in 2002, eBay’s acquisition strategy has been a bit mysterious. I never understood what Skype had to do with running an auction house. But I get the potential core use of StumbleUpon–a social discovery engine: driving buyers to other things they might like but would never think to search for.

Discovery has the potential to solve enormous problems for online retail which today works most successfully when buyers know exactly what they are looking for but least successfully when trying to replicate the bricks and mortar experience of browsing and window shopping leading to impulse purchases.
Link Love:

Mobile Social Networks, Don’t Go it Alone
Katie Fehrenbacher looks at mobile social network start-up InterCasting (whose consumer service is called Rabble). The company has begun selling business to business application through which: “carriers and web-based social network providers….can plug into Intercasting’s gateway via APIs, and the service combines a server software and a handset client”

Buzzlogic Shows Which Bloggers Have Power, and Where
At VentureBeat, Matt Marshall offers an excellent, in-depth look at Buzzlogic’s product–an enterprise-class (and enterprise priced) software for tracking the influence of certain blogs and the impact of blog buzz on products and services. Figuring out how to measure this stuff is crucial to the development of social media as an industry and Buzzlogic seems to be way out in front of the curve

Last.fm + YouTube = Last.fm Video!
Kristen Nicole at Mashable tells us about plans by the UK social music discovery company Last.FM to launch a video service this week.

Social Media Now: Web 2.0 for Adults

Jason Chervokas — Tue, 08 May 2007 13:59:50 +0000

I’m amazed by the wide range of reaction yesterday to the survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Reading the reaction among the meme-makers I found out that the social web is a bust, with “far fewer participants than its architects would have us believe”, that it is a playground for a small minority of geeks, that its upside has a very low ceiling, that active 20-something Web 2.0 participants will abandon their behavior when they become busy in their 30s.

I also found out that “the study is a powerful indication that the social Internet is thriving and getting adopted by a broad spectrum of society rather than an elite group”, that the mainstream media is hostile to the Internet and has mischaracterized the Pew survey, and that the low numbers of adults who have engaged in podcasting represents an opportunity, not a failure.

It seems like everybody with a dog in the fight is anxious to spin the survey. I won’t recap the results. They’ve worked over by the digerati for the past 24 hours. Furthermore you can read the full results for yourself. But I will suggest that readers think about a few things:

First, the data in the Pew survey is a year old. That might not mean much, but than again it may. In a year on the Internet enormous changes can occur.

Second, I’m increasingly skeptical about the value of traditional market research phone surveys that extrapolate out from small samples (around 4,000 respondents in this case). In the old world of mass media, when consumers had few choices, it was easy to conduct a survey of, say, a small number of network TV viewers and extrapolate out national numbers. But in a million channel universe in which consumers have almost infinite choices, the behavior of any given 1000 users may not reflect the behavior of any other 1000.

Finally, I don’t think that Pew’s attempt to segment the market is all that valuable–less valuable even than Forrester’s ladder—there’s too much overlap between categories, and the criteria that divide categories are a mix of measurable behavior and attitude. The segmentation is more confusing than illuminating. Market segments are like jokes–if you have to spend an hour explaining them they’re not working. What is a “productivity enhancer”? How is such people different from “mobile centrics”?

But there’s lot of valuable and interesting, demographic information at the end of the Pew survey. Some of it’s unsurprising–college educated, upper income, men are the most avid Web 2.0 participants. Omnivores, who “have the most information gadgets and services which they use voraciously to participate in cyberspace….,” have the youngest median age (28) among Pew’s strata. And among people with 10 years of online experience there are differing attitudes toward technology, but similar behaviors at least with respect to Internet data usage, although only the so called “omnivores (8%) are avid users of digital media entertainment technology.

The most interesting comments I’ve seen on the report today date come from Curtiss Thompson at 9:01am:

Their findings clearly show that despite adults accessibility and capability to use various forms of technology for communications purposes, very few engage in public forms of communication. They instead use private means of communication, such as cell phone text messaging and online instant messaging. This seems to be indicative of the generational divide, where the older generations value their personal privacy far more than the younger generations, who actively engage in social networking sites that broadcast personal information and communication in a more public manner.

And from Mathew Ingram:

I was pleasantly surprised to find how *many* people engage in “Web 2.0″-type activities. The study says that when asked about things that include blogging, posting comments to a blog, uploading photos or video, creating webpages or mixing and mashing content from other sites, 37 per cent of those surveyed said they had done at least one of those things.

What’s not to like about a number like that? I was expecting the proportion to be much smaller — along the lines of the emerging 1-9-90 rule of thumb for social media, where about one per cent of people create content, 9 or 10 per cent consume it and about 90 per cent couldn’t care less about it. I find the fact that almost 40 per cent of people blog, upload photos, post comments and so on cause for considerable optimism.

Two final notes worth considering. If 37% of American adults have engaged in at least some Web 2.0 behavior, that means 83 million people over 18 have either posted to a blog, tagged a photo, or watched a YouTube video. That’s a big number. Also, the numbers for podcasting in the report are atrocious, even among the most elite users. If podcasting where a stock, I’d short it.

Link Love:

Me.com Launches a Ning Competitor

Photobucket Was a Steal

New Bill to Give Bloggers Same Shield Law Protection as Journalists

Social Media Now: Corporations vs. Communities

Jason Chervokas — Fri, 04 May 2007 13:38:04 +0000

Events conspired this week to throw into high relief the core question for those who would commercialize social media: can a balanced be reached between user control and corporate control or will commercial social media always exist on a cliff’s edge over which either party can push it at any time?

In the Digg/HD-DVD fiasco, it was users who pushed the corporation over the edge–forcing the company to ignore a legal takedown request in order to keep it’s community alive. As Fred Wilson wrote:

I’ve been around web communities since we invested in Geocities in 1996 and one thing I’ve learned is the community thinks they own the community. And if you are the one who actually owns it, you’d better act like the community owns it or you’ll lose it.…

Forget about what’s right and wrong in this case, the important point is Digg showed that they control the community and will police it.

That’s a big deal. They might get away with that on issues like hate, porn, terror, but not on hacking.

When you get in the way of geeks sharing hacks with each other in a geek community, you’ve done something big.
Meanwhile over at MySpace, it was presidential hopeful Barack Obama who was feeling the wrath of the crowd. The Obama campaign had jumped all over a MySpace page started way back in November 2004 when a paralegal named Joe Anthony became a fan of the then-newly elected senator.

Since Obama announced his presidential bid, his campaign had been working with Anthony and the profile had pulled 160,000 friends and garnered Obama a lot of press buzz. But, after an open dispute with Anthony over control of the site, the Obama camp this week had MySpace hand over the “BarackObama” name, refusing to compensate Anthony who reportedly offered to hand over control for a fee of $39,000, a number reflecting the 5 hours a day Anthony claims to have devoted to the site.

Today the “official” Barack Obama MySpace profile has 33,500 friends and the candidate has lost not only a high profile volunteer but also a voter. As Anthony himself explained to Micah Sifry in an open letter:

The campaign got involved in February and although at first it was very exciting, it quickly became clear that they just had no interest in me or my involvement. They only wanted to take control of the profile and get on with it. I bit the bullet for a while and kept working for the good of the campaign, but they quickly went from passive aggressive, to aggressive, and then eventually just rotten and dishonest.

For the past few weeks, the campaign decided it would be better if they just took control of the profile and we decided to try to come to some agreement. By this time, I didn’t have quite as much respect for the campaign guys, and frankly felt like I was just being used. They knew about this profile the entire time, and really just waited until it got enough media coverage and friends request so they could step in and bully me out of it….

This was not about money and I don’t believe that one person who has interacted with me via the Obama profile over the past couple of years would be able to say that my efforts were anything but sincere. This was about holding a campaign to their message, about acknowledging my work, and taking this community seriously.

Apparently the message here is, as an individual, if you have too big of an impact, you’re just a liability.

This is how Obama lost my vote, and one of his strongest supporters.

TechPresident has offered excellent extended coverage of the dispute, Anthony’s explanation, Obama’s response, and even an analysis of what Anthony’s profile might really have been worth (as much as $90K according to Sifray). Most interesting is the response from someone in the Dean campaign who had faced similar problems to the ones faced by Obama:

We called people like Joe Anthony “centers of gravity”– people who had built up their own Dean communities. We wanted centers of gravity as close to campaign as possible without imploding.

At first, new centers of gravity were exciting, but very perplexing, and our tiny team debated options. We quickly ran into an odd clarifier–the law. Because of legal concerns about campaign coordination, we were told early on by our lawyers that we had two choices: to have a manager/agent relationship with grassroots supporters, or to not direct grassroots supporters actions at all….

We simply couldn’t have a manager/agent relationship and still have all this flowering of intelligent political energy: we chose to be hands off, talking with people but not telling them what to do.

Finally today we have word that YouTube is finally going to begin to bring its user-creators into the corporate side flow by doing something Obama didn’t want to do for Anthony–offer money.

YouTube announced on it’s corporate blog that it was adding half a dozen or so high profile posters to its partnership program–the same program to which CBS, the NBA, and other big media producers belong.

YouTube didn’t announce specific criteria for choosing the initial members who got a bump in status other than to say that “they have built and sustained large, persistent audiences through the creation of engaging videos, their content has become attractive for advertisers….”

At NewTeeVee Om Malik had an interview with Jamie Byrne, vice president of marketing at YouTube in which Byrne 20 to 40 producers would be included in the initial roll out, with more potentially added in the future.
At Techcrunch Duncan Riley wonders what the revenue split is worth:

…the new Partners Program only goes as far as monetizing the actual YouTube page destination with Adsense units. Whilst not without merit, the new program is limited given the way YouTube content is consumed. The great strength of YouTube from its earliest days has been the use of embedded video on external sites: a large number, if not a majority of viewers will never see the advertising, viewing it only on blogs and forums which if they are running Google Adsense units, do so in a way that does not benefit the content creator.

But nearly everyone expects YouTube to begin inserting pre-roll video advertising at some point in the not to distant future. It will be interesting to watch what happens with the YouTube program–will it spark competition to be chosen for partnership? will it spark resentment that some but not all members are chosen to participate? will it generate enough money for chosen members to matter at all?

Link Love:

BlogCatalog Gets Socially Networked

NBA Taps Into Second Life
If Markets Are Conversations Then Twitter Is Money

Social Media Now: Mainstreaming Social Media

Jason Chervokas — Thu, 03 May 2007 13:44:22 +0000

Last month a Twitter comment from Chris Heuer led to a discussion here at Social Media Club about when social media would cross into the mainstream.

I was surprised by the question. At the latest, social media crossed over in July of 2005 when NewsCorp bought MySpace. In fact, social media is so deeply ingrained in the mainstream that no self-respecting media company would launch a new online property without significant social functionality built in. Witness the beta launch yesterday of the inelegantly named Disney Xtreme DigitalSM–a social networking site for tweens built around ever-popular Disney characters and content.

Disney’s site offers social media “lite” functionality–profiles, customization, chat, message walls and, most importantly for Disney, and most interestingly for the social media biz, parental controls governing chats, discussion participation, and file uploads. Parents have to establish accounts linked to those of their children–which adds a lot of steps to the registration process and may be a drag on member acquisition. Still, one can’t imagine a Disney tween site without airtight protection.

The Disney effort, launching in beta on the heels of the Digg fiasco yesterday, offers an illustration of the two-tiered development of social media as it goes mainstream. Pure play social media properties–which do nothing more than offer tools to members looking to connect with one another and share media–have the kind of credibility that attracts users but have struggled with monetization and executive control. Content-centered social media properties have the advantage of highly attractive entertainment media as a calling card. But in trying to control how the community uses the content, these sites at best present a corny, out of step public profile–like Frank Sinatra singing Nirvana songs–and, at worst, face the kind of user revolt that Digg experienced.

For now the mainstreaming of social media looks a lot like the mainstreaming of MP3 file sharing in the 1990s. Traditional media players at the time tried to shut down the competition with lawsuits while simultaneously launching their own services with strict controls. The result is a universe in the 2000s in which user directed illicit file sharing co-exists with successful, controlled, industry digital music offerings. Social media in the next decade may look very much the same–with a two track ecosystem of corporate controlled media businesses offering social functionality, and white label social networks where anything goes.

Link Love:

Exclusive: The Digg CEO Jay Adelson Interview
Wired News interview with Digg CEO isn’t much of a read, but at least its from the horse’s mouth

HerFabLife is Bookmarking for Trendy Women
Prepare yourself for a flood of niche social media properties like this one, a social bookmarking site for young women interested in fashion and entertainment

Cisco: Social Networks will Define Media Consumption
One of the most interesting goings on in the social media business is Cisco’s attempt to reinvent itself as the builder of The Human Network (as opposed to the router network). Dan Scheinman, senior vice president of Cisco Systems’ Media Solutions Group, delivered a keynote address at the Digital Living Connection Conference in Santa Clara, in which he proclaimed:

“It’s the beginning of new era. Consumers are driving the next set of value creations…Enterprise is last now. We have 1,500 employees on Facebook because we don’t have the internal tools to provide community…. A lot of the enterprise has been behind in adopting all these tools.”

Social Media Now: UGC and its Discontents

Jason Chervokas — Wed, 02 May 2007 13:37:13 +0000

Live by the link, die by the link. Yesterday’s Digg user revolt was an object lesson in the power and peril of user generated media.

I won’t give a blow by blow recap of the events–Techmeme is already overburdened by links to recap stories. You can read a first hand account of how the snowball got rolling here; and Danny Sullivan has an excellent wrap up of events at Search Engine Land. What you need to know is that someone posted to Digg a link to the hexadecimal key to cracking HD-DVD’s DRM. Digg pulled the link down, together with several other stories, after receiving a takedown request. Digg users then began bombing Digg with the code in links and by early this morning Digg founder Kevin Rose had capitulated:

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Social media triumphalists and anti-encryption cyberlibertarians are crowing about a great victory. Duncan Riley’s response was typical:

Will the Digg Revolt of 2007 result in a renaissance in listening to users? maybe, and hopefully it will at Digg, but others should also take note: corporate arrogance towards the user base shouldn’t have a place in Web 2.0, and companies that continue to act in this old fashioned way can now look at a case study of what collectively users can say and do when you won’t listen to them.

Grant Robertson’s was the most ludicrously over the top, comparing the mass postings to Digg with the last great schism in Christianity!

Witness the modern equivalent of the 95 thesis’ Martin Luther nailed to the door of Wittenburg church. We, digital citizens –commonly referred to by the vulgar term of ‘consumers’ — have had enough of content lock-in. We’ve bought and re-bought entertainment media — repackaged and regurgitated digital vomitus — until we’re blue in the face. We’ve been told time and time again that DRM is for our own protection, and we’re finally and inconsolably fed up.

Others looked for nefarious, conspiratorial motives in Digg’s actions :

Episodes of the DiggNation video show were sponsored by the HD DVD Promotion Group. DiggNation is produced by Revision3, a company run by Digg founders, Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose. Rose is also a co-host of the DiggNation show.

Inside the fishbowl its easy to be seduced by the transformative power of collective intelligence, but history has taught us that the mob mentality can also produce the most dangerous and destructive behavior of which human beings are capable. We’re hardly talking about blood in the streets of Paris following the French Revolution here, but what happens to a social media company if its users get it wrong?

That’s the provocative question asked by Andrew Lih whose excellent blog item is the best I’ve read on the subject this morning:

This is quite unprecedented — you basically have a multi-million dollar enterprise intimidated by its mob community into taking a stance that is rather clearly against the law.

Andrew gives us the relevant text from the DCMA:

(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—

(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

If the Digg situation results in legal action, Digg’s only defense will be to challenge the constitutionality of the DCMA provision, dicey proposition at best. And it will be interesting to see if all those armchair revolutionaries who posted links and comments will pony up money for Digg’s legal defense–Pete at Mashable proposes taking up a collection.

The industry fall out will also be interesting to watch. Will the Digg fiasco chill investment in user generated content? What about Wikipedia and other sites to which users posted the offending code? Those sites were able to remove the illegal material without being over run. What processes do they have in place that are lacking at Digg? And is there some difference between the communities of contributors at Digg and at Wikipedia that accounts for the fact that Wikipedia wasn’t surrounded by surfers with virtual torches and pitchforks?

Stay tuned.

Social Media Now: Google Claims Safe Harbor, Clearchannel Goes Social

Jason Chervokas — Tue, 01 May 2007 14:03:14 +0000

There’s not much news to be gleaned from the response to the Viacom lawsuit filed by Google/YouTube in federal district court in New York.

As predicted Google is pinning its defense on the safe harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which was designed to shield ISPs from lawsuits when subscribers used their accounts to trade copied media files.

The response outlines a number of secondary defenses–everything from a claim of fair use to an unexplained claim that Viacom had somehow consented to allow its clips on YouTube because it had other deals with YouTube. The alternative arguments are all weak. But the weakest, and perhaps most revealing, is the “Innocent Intent” defense–in which Google appears to be claiming that YouTube didn’t intend to allow copyright infringement. Donna Bogatin has a short reaction at ZDNet that gets to the heart of the matter, pointing to claims Google made to analysts in its latest earnings call.

If the case goes to trial (an event I doubt will occur) the outcome will be based on case law established in the Napster case. To wit: did YouTube deliberately build it’s business model around contributory infringement and does it have the ability to identify and remove infringing material. Unfortunately for Google, the answers to those questions appear to be “yes.”
ClearChannel Launches Social Nets: Yesterday Billboard’s Brian Garrity reported that radio giant ClearChannel Communications is launching social networks centered on a dozen of its largest radio stations.

Five of the branded Nets have already launched in beta, like Wildspace–the social net for San Francisco station KYLD-FM (94.9 FM). Wildspace is certainly a better Web presence than the station’s extremely busy Web site. The network already has more than 380 members, and of course the radio signal can be streamed.

At Mashable Kristen Nicole notes that social network white label provider Onesite is powering the ClearChannel nets.

I love this strategy. Radio has always been a local business. By virtue of it’s formatted playlist it has been a business that takes advantage of listeners’ sense of shared identity. And talk, not music, is the industry’s driver. Perfect ingredients for social networking success. The radio industry has gone away from it’s core strengths for years–eliminating a sense of personality by jettisoning DJs, centralizing and nationalizing programming. Social networking could help lead the radio business into a new cross platform era in which listeners are deeply tied to stations. Imagine the power of social network tied to an local sports-talks station like WFAN in New York. This is a strategy that is definitely worth watching.

Link Love:

Pure Digital raises $40M, its camcorders share with YouTube
Fascinating new vidcam with a built-in USB plug and software to help enable direct uploading to YouTube

eBay Launches “ToGo” Widgets For Any Listing

Snocap Partners with Warner Music Group to Sell on MySpace

Veodia Streams Live from Your Blog

Runescape Rules

Reunion, Wink Partner Up

Social Media Now: DIY Media Makers Arise!

Jason Chervokas — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 13:56:38 +0000

Thanks to tech journalist Mathew Ingram for flagging a post by Ethan Kaplan that laces into the received wisdom about DIY media, “user generated content” and big media’s attempts to adapt to this new environment.

The essence of Kaplan’s argument is that thinking about media created outside of the corporation as “user generated content” presupposes, and thereby reinforces, the traditional media hierarchy of professional creator/owner/producer at the top and consumer/user at the bottom.

It’s a point well taken and well made:

The whole concept behind “User Generated Content” as a means of describing content created by and for the People is flawed in that it simultaneously is presupposing a hierarchal difference — subjugating the “User” as a different class — as its maintaining this hierarchy by virtue of a disingenuous altruistic elevation of said content to that of Corporate under the guise of Marketing.

Kaplan, who is senior director of technology at Warner Brothers Records, focuses his discussion almost entirely on video, and he has nothing nice to say about things like the Modest Mouse/MTV video contest that invites fans to create animation that will be inserted behind the band in a video (To older readers the contest will be reminiscent of Winky Dink, our formative experience with interactive video, a cartoon in which children were expected at some point to lay a transparency over the TV screen and draw props for the characters to use at key points in the plot development):

Is it really UGC if all the User is doing is generating content as a way of offsetting cost and onsetting “hipness” through the proxy of adoption of an organic concept by what in the end are marketing departments at big companies (and I do understand the intentional irony here, being where I work and all)?

Kaplan’s repose is a call to action:

Take back the media! Do not partake in systems meant to enforce hierarchy, and instead embrace those that seek to diminish and eliminate it.

Remember: nothing stands between the quality or distribution of you and the media companies except the cost of the toys. The quality is not quantifiable different, neither is access.

I think that kind of response is a little facile, neglecting to deal with the diverse motives people have for creating online content, the honest-to-god difficulty of drawing attention to one piece of content in a infinite-channel universe and the ease with which traditional media can co-opt DIY media (as TV news organizations did very effectively in covering the Virgina Tech massacre). But certainly Kaplan’s piece provides food for thought.
Akamai Launches BitTorrent Add-On: The embedding of social functionality into the Web browser continues. Red Swoosh, which Akamai purchased a few weeks ago for $15 million, yesterday released FoxTorrent, a Foxfire BitTorrent add-on that theoretically allows media streaming from torrents.

I remain skeptical about BitTorrent’s potential as a mainstream consumer media distribution technology. In it’s wild west, user controlled form it’s clunky and unreliable. In the controlled centralized form (a la BitTorrent Inc.’s store) it offers users few advantages over other P2P technologies. And the need for a client limits the number of consumers who will be willing to try it. But if BitTorrent has a future, a browser plug-in that enables streaming is an important step forward (even if the streaming functionality remains limited because of the way BitTorrent distributes data). Can’t wait to try it out.

Social Media Now: Deflating the Blogosphere, Sony Share

Jason Chervokas — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 14:31:44 +0000

Maybe it’s time for Blogspotting to change it’s name. In the Newsweek online column of that title, Heather Green takes a closer look at numbers provided by Dave Sifry at Technorati. The numbers, first reported early this month in Sifry’s State of the Live Web, suggest that the practice of blogging has plateaued.

Picking up threads from Matthew Hurst and Steve Rubel, Green emphasizes active posting, not the sheer number of blogs, as the best measure of the blogosphere’s health. Technorati’s threshold for counting a blog as active isn’t a high one–at least one post within 90 days. According to numbers provided to Green, the number of active blogs tracked by Technorati is around 15.5 million. The total number of blogs is 70 million. So only 22% of blogs are active ones.

We already calculated back at the beginning of the month that the rate of daily blog posting per blog has declined slightly– from 2.3% in October to 2.1% at the end of March 2007. Green finds that the percentage of blogs that are active has also been declining from 36.7% in May 2006 to 20.9% in March 2007.

And, interestingly, the English language blogosphere in particular is shrinking. In October 2006 39% of blog posts were in English. In March 2007 only 33% were.

In other words, in October 2006, 39% of blog posts were in English. In March 2007, only 33% were in in English.
Sony Shares: The videosharing battle between GooTube and big media is getting a new competitor. Tomorrow Sony will launch a video sharing site. The unnamed site will be Japanese only, but Sony has said that it will decided about an overseas launch schedule based the Japanese experience. Last August Sony spent $65 million to acquire video-sharing site Grouper. It’s unclear if Grouper technology will power Sony’s new effort.

More social media acquisitions: TheStreet.com has purchased the remaining 50.1% of socially-enabled, and vowelly-challenged financial advice site Stockpickr; and NBC has purchased Rmail, a service provider that integrates RSS feeds into email. Terms of neither deal were announced.

Social Media Now: Monetizing Widgets, MySpace: Link Nazi, Social News

Jason Chervokas — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 12:48:34 +0000

Bits and pieces this morning from around the world of social media.

First, in the wake of the mysterious end to the MySpace/Photobucket war, comes an interesting quick piece by one of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Chen, entrepreneur in residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures, on the subject of monetizing widgets. Widgets=ad networks, Andrew argues. And that means widget makers are faced not only with the challenges of making great widgets but also with the challenges of building sales staffs and paying publishers:

This means that companies like Slide, Photobucket, and others will start having to pay a Traffic Acquisition Cost (TAC). For ad networks, this TAC looks like 60-80% to the publisher, but they are given a standard unit with little to no value to the end user. Let’s say that the widgets will get a better position, like 40-50%.

But even once this is solved, they will have to figure out how to monetize the space. They will also have to build out ad sales teams in order to monetize the real estate, and it’ll probably be brand advertising and not direct response. The former is much harder than the latter.

Andrew offers four things widget makers need to do to improve their earning potential including building sales teams and destinations sites of their own. And Chen is down on widget aggregators:

I think one major loser for this perspective on the market is widget aggregators. In those cases, every $100 needs to be split amongst the blog infrastructure, the widget market, the widget aggregator, and potentially the user. Yuck. That’s a bad business to be in.

Second, regular readers know I’m a believer in the creeping decentralization of social networking–moving away from hubs like MySpace and Facebook and towards white label social networks and Net applications (like the browser) with embedded social functionality (with some kind of cross-platform portable ID). It’s a future against which MySpace continues to erect barriers. Several blogs, and several forums for MySpace layout providers, have noticed that MySpace has begun to filter outgoing links posted in comments through a service called Msplinks.com–a property owned by fraud protection service Mark Monitor.

On one hand the move–which replaces direct links to outside sites with links through Msplink–will benefit users by targeted comment spam. On the other hand it gives MySpace the ability to defeat not only businesses it considers parasitic, but even defeat collateral brand building that come by placing links. Writes Hooman Radfar at Widgify:

For example, I posted a link to Widgify to my friend’s MySpace page. I set the link target to:

http://www.widgify.com

When the link was published to his MySpace comment section, the link target was replaced with:

http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3LndpZGdpZnkuY29t

This means that MySpace can now not only track link-out activity, but can also block outbound links. This only seems to be the case with new comments. Old comments still point to their original link targets. MySpace has already turned off links for Flash widgets, so there is definitely a pattern emerging. This activity is extremely interesting in light of the upcoming changes coming soon from MySpace competitor, Facebook. Facebook seems to be moving in the opposite direction – opening up to developers. I wonder if MySpace take a hint from web history, or continue to move along their current trajectory. I guess time will tell if Tom still wants to be everyone’s friend.

Finally, in the world of social news, Seattle-based Newsvine launched a redesigned version of its service yesterday. CEO Mike Davidson gives a full wrap up of the new design on his blog. The central premise of the redesign is the ability of users to recreate not only “MY” style news pages but a customized front page for the service as a whole:

We have our own ideas for what the front page of a news site should look like and you have yours. Most major news sites attempt to solve this problem by maintaining their editorially imposed front page and then offering a “My” page which users can play around with and customize. The result of this strategy is almost always two-fold: 1) Barely anyone customizes. 2) Even among those who customize, there is hesitancy among users to give up their daily reading of the front page in favor of the “My” page. This is evident from sites like ESPN and Yahoo News, both of which have feature-rich “My” pages but do a ton more traffic on their front pages.

The move will be an interesting test of an important question in the world of customized news–do end users fail to customize because it’s not easy for them to do so, or do end users fail to customize because they’re more interested in having some third party provide a top level news filter in a world over information overload?

I think social news should function a lot more like Last.FM–I’m must more interested in knowing which news stories are being read by friends who share my interests than I am interested in knowing what news stories are being rated highly by an enormous general audience. A top level news filter based on social profiles and friends, plus distribution via widgets, would do a lot more for the social news business than individual customization or over all ratings at web hubs.

Social Media Now: Climbing the Social Ladder

Jason Chervokas — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 13:30:06 +0000

The blogosphere is full of cynics. And there’s plenty of cynical response on the Net to Forrester’s report on adult social media behavior. The report, which is geared to helping marketers integrate social media into business strategies, proposes a “participation ladder” as a metaphor, with six rungs stepping up from “inactives” at the bottom to “creators” at the top.

Pramit Singh criticizes the report, and all off the meme-making blogosphere punditry, for over hyping recycled information:

If you look at the above graphic, do you see anything new? To me, this looks like they have taken Jason Calacanis’ observation about social networking/web 2.0, namely ‘80% consume, 19% comment, 1% contribute”, added up known observations taken by the Pew Research and voila!, a new report is born.

But there IS new and interesting information in the Forrester report. Most importantly Li and her colleagues have tried to slice online social behavior into narrower segments that the traditional ones of contributor, participant, and tagger. In doing so they challenge the conventional thinking about social segmentation most recently reiterated at Web 2.0 Expo last week by Bill Tacer, general manager of Hitwise, who said:

It’s not the 80-20 rule anymore. It’s 1-9-90.” Spread across the Web, generally 1 percent of visitors are creators and producers, 9 percent are “highly involved participators”,… and 90 percent are consumers or viewers.

Li splits the universe of social media participants into the following categories:

Creators, who publish blogs, web pages, etc, comprise 13% of users
Critics, who comment and review, comprise 19%
Collectors, who tag and bookmark, comprise 15%
Joiners, who uses social networking sites, comprise 19%
Spectators, who passively engage with social media content, comprise 33%
Inactives, who use the Net but not social media, comprise 52%

Obviously the user classes overlap since the percentages add up to well over 100%.
I’m not crazy about Forrester’s metaphor. The ladder is bad because it implies that users climb from the bottom to the top–that “spectating” is a gateway drug on the way to creating. This isn’t true. Also the ladder fails to convey the truth these strata are not discrete–creators are also joiners, for example.

And I would quibble with Forrester’s nomenclature. Collector is the wrong word for someone who shares tags and bookmarks since collectors typically acquire rare stuff and hold it close.

The study also comes up short when it examines the reasons for which people become engaged in social media, slicing those into only three categories–entertainment, career, and family–so broad as to be utterly useless.

But I applaud Forrester for trying to look at the universe of social media through a finer sieve than is typical and I’m particularly interested in a table that Li et al have complied about different behaviors in each of these categories according to age. The table reveals that 18-21 year olds are way more deeply involved in joining social networks than people a little older and those a little younger. Could social the MySpace/Facebook business have peaked with this demographic?

At Skype Journal Phil Wolff proposes an additional ladder, a Ladder of Disclosure–a way of thinking about social media behavior based on how much personal information participants are willing to reveal from live webcam living Twitter addicts at the top to folks off the grid at the bottom. It’s a very interesting way of thinking about the social media universe although Wolff has no survey data to work with. Wolff also notes that Forrester’s ladder misses the mobile Net and live communications systems like IM or Skype.

In other survey news, Liz Gannes at GigaOM reports on a survey that MySpace commissioned of its users, which found, perhaps self-servingly, that there is an exponential increase in brand awareness that comes from social networking campaigns.
Widget Peace: Terms of the armistice have not been announced but MySpace has lifted its ban on video links from photo and video hosting widget maker Photobucket.
Funding News: Mountainview-based Podbridge, a podcasting analytics firm, has raised $8.5 million in second round financing led by new investor Sutter Hill Ventures and joined by first round investors Mayfield Fund and Worldview Technology Partners.

Social Media Now: MySpace News Not Ready for Prime Time, Twitter Ready for Its Close Up

Jason Chervokas — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 14:16:53 +0000

The digerati’s first impressions of MySpace’s social news venture, which launched in beta yesterday, was anything but positive. Well undercooked was the general consensus, even for a beta launch.

No one was more harsh, or more scatological, than Rex Dixon who called MySpace News nothing more than a clipping service linking the kind of of generic user rating system that is a generic part of many content management systems

At Wired News, Michael Calore concisely identifies problems more specifically :

MySpace users can’t add stories, only vote on them….

The site has no search, you have to browse items by category. Story ranking is counter-intuitive — are we looking at stories ranked by number of votes or average vote? The top story on the site has only 16 votes. Also, when you click through to a story, a MySpace News navigation bar remains at the top of the page (see my second screenshot below). A second click is required to load the linked article. This strikes me as a usability no-no, but maybe it’s just a matter of preference.

But Josh Lowenstein at Webware most specifically hit the nail on the head:

There are quite a few things missing from MySpace News. The first is integration with MySpace proper. There’s currently no way to show which stories you’ve been rating (or reading) on your MySpace profile. Likewise, you can’t see what your friends have been up to, something that is critical for a social network.

I’m not ready to pile on MySpace after one day, but it does seem to me that if social news is going to work it will have to rely on the kind of word of mouth discovery that comes from see what your friends are reading. I’m surprised that wasn’t the first step for the development team.

Twittermania, Chapter 387: The start-up story of the year so far in social media is the astounding rise of Twitter. Evan Williams’ Obvious announced on Monday that the company would spin off Twitter, with co-founder Jack Dorsey serving as CEO

Meanwhile developers and entrepreneurs continue to experiment with Twitter as platform. This morning at Mashable Kristen Nicole describes how Menuism, a restaurant ratings business, is using a Twitter feed its developed called Gutcheck through which members can share what their eating. And Fred Wilson offers a very interesting thought piece about his vision of Twitter’s future as “the status broadcasting system of the Internet”:

I don’t consume local services very often on my phone because it’s a hassle to log in and tell them where I am. But if I could just send a text message to Twitter with my location and information starts coming to me on my phone, I’ll do that.

If all these things happen because of one text message I sent to Twitter, that’s fantastic….

Twitter is a simple but flexible status broadcasting system. The web doesn’t have one yet and so Twitter is going to be it.

Social Media Now: Stumbling Upon Social Shopping, Teen Identity Management

Jason Chervokas — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 13:19:08 +0000

StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp spent yesterday afternoon denying rumors that StumbleUpon had agreed to an acquisition by eBay.

If that purchase, or one by any of StumbleUpon’s other rumored suitors, goes through its implications for social search will have been predigested. It’s funny and fascinating, seeing out pundits reacted to the reported price of $40 to $45 million.

Valleywag sees the price as evidence that the social news sector’s financial value does not live up to the hype:

The rumored purchase price, of some $40m, will provide the Stumble Upon’s founders and angel investors with an excellent return, because there was no venture capital round; but the deal values the Digg audience only in the $100m-$150m range, and the entire sector below $500m. A revolution in news, maybe, but with more losers than winners.

(I think Valleywag is making a mistake to classify StumbleUpon as social news, but that just highlights the slippery quality of definitions in the world of social media.)

Dylan Tweney at Wired News had the opposite reaction:

$40 million seems like a lot to pay for a company that has just 2.2 million users — users who have done nothing more than download and install a browser toolbar. $20 per user? It just doesn’t make sense.

Andrew Parker had a more in depth analysis of the reported valuation and its implications for the social media industry comparing StumbleUpon’s price of $21 per user to the acquisition prices of Flickr, MySpace and Skype. According to Parker’s analysis StumbleUpon’s per-user price per user is in range with MySpace’s in 2005.

The Net was also abuzz with speculation over what eBay plans to do with StumbleUpon–a toolbar utility that allows users to rate websites and videos, then enables a sort of query-free social search, directing users to sites according how closely other users rating match a surfer’s own. Om Malik sees the acquisition as more of a technology purchase, giving eBay a new technology to attach to Skype in an effort to create a backdoor desktop.

I think Muhammad Saleem gets closer to the likely reasoning: social shopping. Saleem quotes a fall 2006 report from American Marketers Association:

…47% of consumers said that they would be open to using social networks (such as MySpace, Orkut, Facebook) to find and discuss holiday gift ideas. Furthermore, 51% of them said that they would look for discounts [on] social networking sites, 51% said that they would download coupons form theses sites, and another 18% said that they would participate on such sites by (reading or) writing product reviews. Most interestingly though, 29% said that they would actually make purchases through these sites.

Social shopping is the slumbering giant of the social media industry. Going shopping together, buying because of word of mouth recommendations, trying on a pair of pants and asking a friend: “do these make me look fat?” are endemic offline shopping behaviors that should translate into online behavior with almost no effort.

So far this hasn’t been the case. Online store fronts have been slow to add social functioning beyond Web 1.0, discussion board-style user ratings. Social networks have been slow to add commerce (although there is some indication that users are more likely to purchase from sites that are specifically devoted to commerce than from general social sites, social networks could certainly launch stores). And social shopping start ups like Kaboodle, ThisNext and ShopWiki have yet to reach notable consumer scale.

While rumors of the eBay acquisition of StumbleUpon made the rounds, Google–a reported StumbleUpon suitor–launched something that looks a little bit like a competitor–a toolbar refinement of Google’s “feeling lucky” feature that will direct users to new sites based on that user’s prior searches. That sounds ok. It has the benefit of requiring less data entry than StumbleUpon, but it also has the disadvantage of being search based. People use search so broadly and so frequently that I can’t imagine search based serendipity being possesses anything close to the signal-to-noise ratio of ratings based serendipity.

Teen Privacy and Social Networking: A fascinating study out this morning from the Pew Internet & American Life Project looks at attitudes toward privacy and identity management among teens who use online social networking. Pew is selling as the top line of it’s story the notion teens don’t share personal information indiscriminately, but apply various screens–allowing only friends to view certain information for example to keep things from their parents and others.

It’s a duh kind of finding that fails to plumb more important depths because even the narrower circle of friend who are able to see the personal information can be quite large and the information shared can be quite personal (imagine sharing private information not with six friends but with your entire high school).

I found more surprising the finding that 45% of online teens DON’T have profiles on social networks. And of the teens who do have online profiles one-third don’t restrict access to their profiles in any way.

The most interesting parts of the survey delve into the way teens manipulate their online identities and why. Older teens share more personal information than younger teens. Boys lie about their identities online more than do girls. And predictably girls are more wary than boys about identifying their physical location.

At its core the survey shows that teens are very sophisticated about identity management:

For most teens, decisions about privacy and disclosure depend on the nature of the encounter and their own personal circumstances. Teen decisions about whether to disclose or not involve questions like these: Do you live in a small town or big city? How did you create your network of online ‘friends’? How old are you? Are you male or female? Do you parents have lots of rules about Internet use? Do your parents view your profile?

The Net savvy and privacy sophistication of kids doesn’t surprise me. Back in the mid 1990s I covered for The New York Times the social trend of teen girls using the Internet to form online clubs in an era long before social networking tools make it easy. Even then the 13 and 14 year olds I contacted were incredibly careful, smart and probing about contact from strangers and displayed a more advanced understanding of online identity safety than did their parents.

Social Media Now: Confusion over DIY Media at NAB, Facebook Widget Friendly?

Jason Chervokas — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 14:10:47 +0000

Reports coming in from the National Association of Broadcasters offer an interesting look at the evolving relationship between traditional media and DIY media. On the one hand you had David K. Rehr, CEO and President of the NAB, kicking off the conference by suggesting that broadcasters are being challenged by the Internet not because anything substantive has changed but because broadcasters are using the wrong words to describe why they old ways are better than the new ones:

Internet radio sounds like the future. Wireless sounds like the future. Digital television sounds like the future. High def sounds like the future. YouTube, Google, iBiquity sound like the future.

What does “free over-the-air broadcasting” sound like? I think you know.

We were wireless before it was hot, but we are captives of the language of decades gone by. The language of our past is confusing and perhaps obsolete. We need to update and clarify. We need to reframe and rebrand.

….

The NAB right now has a team working on finding the best words to define us and take us into the future. This will be a long and continuing effort. But, we need your help. We need your ideas. We need your self-discipline, so that we all speak the same language.

Pitiful. Sounds like when athletes and politicians blame the media for their failings.

Meanwhile, NAB members seem to be adapting by co-opting, aggregating and framing user generated content. At Lost Remote Cory Bergman tells the tale of television station WKRN in Nashville which created a blog, NashvilleisTalking, to aggregate information from local blogs already being produced in and around Nashville. In addition the station has launched other blogs under its own domains:

Our traffic has grown phenomenally. 60 percent of our traffic is WKRN and 40 percent is the blogs,” he said. NashvilleisTalking — which aggregates content from 435 local blogs — averages 5,000 unique visitors a day (yesterday the number hit 9,000 due to the Virginia shooting). And what about revenue? “We’re making more money this year than we’ve ever made,” Sechrist said. “And it’s from the pre-rolls on the videos.” He said WKRN is averaging 600,000 videos played a month, and much of that success is due to video’s exposure on the blogs (although he admits a reluctance to push too many ads to the blogs themselves.) But beyond money, Sechrist says “a lot of (our users) are never going to watch us on TV, but they’ll come to us on the web when something big happens. We have a relationship now.”

Meanwhile, programmers continue to try to graft social functionality on to traditional media. The Los Angeles Times has a story today about MTV’s plan to attach online components to all it’s programming:

The key for MTV will be developing shows that will drive viewers to spend time on series-related online games, in Web communities or on cellphones coughing up jokes of the day.

“We can either stay in the mass business,” Graden said, “or we can be in the hyper-specialty business where the shows may not have broad appeal but in the Digital Age would better engage our viewers.”

He said that the current series “Scarred” and “Human Giant” are examples of the new strategy. “User-generated content has to become reflected in our programming,” Graden said. “Something like ‘Scarred,’ which tells the stories behind the Web’s most gruesome clips of crashes, wipeouts and accidents, “is based on footage that may already be infamous, but it’s our own narrative accompanying it.”

It just may be that the tradition media players who thrive will be those who most effectively absorb socially created media, not those sitting around with PR agencies trying to figure out different words to use to describe TV and radio

Facebook to go Widget-Friendly, Direct Challenge to MySpace: Eliot Van Buskurk reported yesterday in Wired News that Facebook plans to open it’s network to third party widgets, taking a precisely opposite approach from its chief competitor MySpace, which has declared war on third-party widgets. If it happens the effort will allow us to gauge the value of openness and widgets to social networking hubs. At Mashable, Pete Cashmore thinks open widgets are the best strategy for wresting the social networking crown from MySpace. I don’t know if widgets will be the difference maker, but I and anyone invested in the widget business will certainly be watching to find out.

Social Media Now: MSM Co-opts CitJ

Jason Chervokas — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:07:49 +0000

Coverage of yesterday’s horrific massacre at Virginia Tech was hardly a showpiece for semi-pro and citizen journalist.

Contrary to the reports of boosters, like Amy Gahran at Poynter Online who called it “Another Sad but Seminal Day for CitJ,” those who would denigrate the whole idea of citizen journalism got plenty of ammo from bloggers who raced to mistakenly identify the shooter.

Another blog, by a self-identified assistant physics professor in Massachusetts got closer with outlines of the story vaguely correct, but again with the wrong person named.

The semi-pros did a better job particularly given how prepared Blacksburg is. (Tom Watson and I first covered Blacksburg’s groundbreaking municipal Internet initiative, the Blacksburg Electronic Village, for The New York Times in 1996.) The Virginia Tech student newspaper, Collegiate Times, posted minute by minute updates throughout the day, even though the paper’s own servers were down. But for a news operation on the scene, staffed by peers of the victims AND the shooter, the CT coverage was remarkably thin–few photos, little comment from students, and NO investigation. Hard to believe that at the very least the paper’s editors didn’t start tugging at the thread of the earlier murders, looking for witnesses and others, given that they were sitting on top of the biggest news story ever to hit Blacksburg.

Planet Blacksburg–a pioneering, student run Web-based newspaper–was slower and more considered in its updates, but failed to advance the story beyond what was being reported by the much maligned “MSM” and didn’t deliver any deeper, inside sense of the events or mood on campus.

The most successful social coverage of the event was Wikipedia’s which was updated and edited in real time much in the way traditional news coverage is called in by stringers, edited and published. But this was entirely collaborative. If this is the future of citizen journalism, then the future is bright indeed!

Blog attempts to record and respond to events–first and second person accounts were interesting but not more informative than what was available on CNN or MSNBC, in part because those broadcast outlets were busy soliciting Internet contributions from amateurs with almost distasteful aggressiveness. CNN was calling for submissions the way traffic reporters ask for drivers to call in from cell phones. But they had plenty of accidental material on air, including cellphone video whose audio track captured the massacre.

It seems to me that citizen journalism, at least of breaking news events, works by sheer dumb luck–someone is in the right place at the right time with a camera like Virginia Tech engineering grad student Jamal Albarghouti whose cell phone video which capture the sound of gunshots became the cornerstone of CNN’s coverage. MSM is well on the way to fully co-opting citizen coverage of breaking events.

Facebook was flooded by members creating greif groups–the cyber equivalent of leaving flowers at the scene of a tragedy–and the social network served to connect friends across campuses where once telephone calls did the trick.

I don’t want to lose perspective. The important thing to remember is that 33 people lost their lives to the senseless mayhem of a psychotic killer. But despite all the blather, citizen journalism didn’t get much of a boost yesterday.

UPDATE: Citizen journalism, and blogging in particular, is proving to be better at investigative journalism than it is at breaking news. Students in the shooter’s playwriting class offered memories of creepy, violent plays to the Collegiate Times, and a former classmate Ian Macfarlane, now an AOL employee, acutally posted two of the plays, as well as this chilling memory:

When we read Cho’s plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn’t have even thought of. Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. I was even thinking of scenarios of what I would do in case he did come in with a gun, I was that freaked out about him. When the students gave reviews of his play in class, we were very careful with our words in case he decided to snap. Even the professor didn’t pressure him to give closing comments.

Social Media Now: CBS and Rolling Stone Go Social

Jason Chervokas — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 13:27:25 +0000

CBS’s Online Video Network Targets Advertisers, Not Audience: One of the big differences between new media circa Web 1.0 and new media circa Web 2.0 is that this time the big boys get it, or at least the big boys get that they need to do something different quickly.

Consider the CBS Interactive Audience Network–a cross-platform programming network announced yesterday. The gist of the plan is for CBS to distribute video content it owns on the Internet wherever and audience may be looking for it—that means AOL, MSN, CNet, Comcast, Joost, Netvibes, just about everywhere EXCEPT YouTube (after all, Viacom, CBS’ sister company, is still suing YouTube).

Henry Blodget credits CBS Interactive president Quincy Smith with smart deal making. Smith, who helped sell YouTube to Google as an investment banker at Allen & Co., really gets it, says Blodget, laying it on thick. You can decide for yourself about Smith thanks to Staci Kramer’s interview with the man at PaidContent.

After reading the interview I was left wondering just what’s going to be so interactive about the CBS Interactive Audience Network. It won’t offer wide open VOD. Instead, according to the company “a rotating list within a specified viewing time frame of programming from entertainment, news and sports will be offered.”–sounds like a semi-traditional TV schedule to me. There MAY be sharing and embedding but that will depend on how well those features serve advertisers, Smith tells Kramer. And classic CBS programming will be made available to the extent that its content that CBS owns free and clear (which means, basically CBS News programming).

Maybe the company is just doing a poor job describing the idea, but the CBS Interactive Audience Network sounds to me like it’s being driven more by the sales department than anything else. From the Kramer interview:

“Advertisers deserve mass out of CBS, the largest television network on the planet and we should second that with on line mass.” He offered as a scenario taking a Monday night comedy, then creating an audience for it that’s bigger than the Super Bowl by Friday. Smith: “This is a real chance to make numbers matter and at CBS that is what moves needles.”

It’s hard to imagine what’s in this for the distribution partners. According to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

CBS has been asking to keep 90% of ad revenue generated by its videos; the other 10% would go to distribution partners, according to people familiar with the matter. That payment structure is identical to the one secured by NBC Universal and News Corp. A CBS spokesman declined to comment. A spokesman for the NBC-News Corp. venture wasn’t immediately available to comment.

Maybe those companies have secured that kind of revenue split, maybe not. But at ZDnet Larry Dignan points out that the biggest winner in all this may just be Akamai–which will benefit from serving all this new Internet video the way UPS benefited from e-commerce.

Rex Hammock is skeptical about the whole Internet video thing:

I think when given an option, people will view programming on those nice, new expensive big-screen HD TVs. (Granted, the programs will be recorded and the commercials zapped, but still, we’ll still need those friendly local affiliates.)

Rex may be correct in the near term but as an investor I wouldn’t be long on the TV station owners. With something like 90% of Americans getting TV through cable and satellite distribution, local broadcast affiliates have become living anachronisms. And with the ability of programming networks to go direct to consumer over the Net, it looks to me like TV station owners are on the verge of being disintermediated. And who says you can’t watch IP video on a big screen TV?

If you want a gauge of the trend watch political ad spending. Presidential election years are to TV station owners what the Christmas buying season is to retailers, and, with the Feb 5 super primary coming up next year should be a banner one for people selling broadcast ads. But my guess is that it will be the last of these such national election cycles. A comparison of the online political ad spend vs. TV in 2008 and 2012 will tell the tale.

Poking Jann Wenner: Talk about a soft launch, apparently Keith Blanchard, Wenner Media’s executive director for online media told a group of journalism students at NYU that Rolling Stone plans to launch a social network for pop music fans build largely around user created best of lists.

It’s hardly a unique idea. MOG already offers a mix of social networking, social discovery, and traditional editorial together with lots of streamed music. Rolling Stone has a marketing advantage over start ups like MOG, but not much else.

Blanchard plans to launch a separate site that will be a social network for music fans, complete with profiles and the ability to have a say in their “Best of” lists. Blanchard called it the “American Idol version of lists.”

The digerati were quick to pile on the idea well in advance of it being more than a twinkle in Blanchard’s eye. At Mashable Pete Cashmore announces “Rolling Stone Social Network Bound to be Lame”. Cashmore and others like Michael Arrington at Techcrunch repeat the old saw that Rolling Stone can’t compete in social networking because it’s neither young nor hip like social net audiences are. But Pramit Singh at Mediavedia points out some interesting numbers:

Comscore analysis shows that,
- More than half of Myspace visitors are now 35 and older.
- 71% of the Friendster’s 1 million user base is 35 and above.
- 50% of Facebook users are 25-plus, despite that it has now almost become mandatory for new college and high school students to register there.

Aiming an aging demographic is a smart idea. They have the buyer and stating power, vis-à-vis the fickle younger crowd.

Adult-oriented social networking sites are already up and running, Multiply for example.

Next up: A social network fro Esquire and New Yorker magazines, perhaps?

Gosh I hope so, there are few better reads than the personals in The New York Review of Books!
Link Love:

Twitter trouble
The technology challenge of catastrophic success

Wikia Adds Four More Open Source Magazines

VisiblePath Is A Lot Like LinkedIn, Except It’s Useful

Social Media Now: The Global War on Widgets Continues

Jason Chervokas — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 13:36:39 +0000

Yesterday’s MySpace/Photobucket flap was the latest skirmish in the ongoing war on widgets led by Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp division responsible for running MySpace.

It’s funny watching the digerati contort itself in an effort to explain why MySpace is wrong both morally and financially. Jon Fortt at Business 2.0’s The Utility Belt, probably went the furthest, actually quoting scripture to suggest that MySpaces is on a hubris-paved path to destruction. And Photobucket’s own desperate attempts to foment unrest among MySpace users reminds me of nothing so much as the scene from Woodstock–mud caked hippies sitting in a field chanting “No rain”!

My old friend Ed Sim offered what I thought was the most simple, sober observation:

Well guess what-distribution via widgets on MySpace was relatively frictionless, but now that Photobucket is a serious player, the Gorilla is fighting back and that is just the way the world works. I am not saying that you should not leverage free distribution, but that you should prepare yourself for the day that it may disappear.

There’s plenty of other postmortem examination today, the best comes from Om Malik, who gives us 5 lessons of Photobucket Fiasco, and Nicholas Carr, whose comparison between the economics of social networks and the economics of sharecropping is truely inspired:

It’s worth remembering that the business model of Web 2.0 social networks is the sharecropping model. After the Civil War, when the original sharecropping system took hold in the American south, the plantation owners made money in two ways. They leased land to the sharecroppers, and they also leased them their tools. It’s no different this time. The payments for land (Web pages) and tools (video widgets et al.) don’t come directly, through exchanges of cash, but rather indirectly, through the sale of advertisements. But the idea is the same. If there’s a widget that can accommodate advertising, that tool will be supplied by the plantation owner, not by some interloping varmint. Whine all you want, but that’s the way it’s going to be.

Now, if the interloper would like to pay for the privilege of being a tool supplier on the plantation owner’s land, well, that’s a different story entirely.

There’s one crucial difference, however, between social networks and cotton plantations. God wasn’t making any more plantation acreage, but Internet real estate is infinitely expanding, and users don’t need to rely on government largess for their 40 acres and a mule.

Having spent a fortune for MySpace, executives at FIM are obviously feeling their oats and certainly MySpace (as well as Facebook) remains a powerhouse by virtue of the traffic it generates and the barrier to user exit created by the network effect. But industry leading social sites have come and gone before, going back to the Web 1.0 days of personal web page building through the social media era. Does anybody remember TheGlobe? Geocities? Friendster?

(Wired News has an interview today with Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams about his new, vowel-challenged business, Socalizr, which combines event planning with social networking.)

Embedding social functionality in the browser in inevitable. Social networks that aren’t web based—like AIM–can snap on Web-based functionality (although the AIM Pages beta is lame so far). Businesses like Socializr reflect the trend of adding social functions to all Web content and services. The era of private label social networking is just beginning. Transportable identification will allow users to easily cross social networks. Clearly the future of social media is open, not closed.

As long as social networks like MySpace are free, easy to use, quick to add functionality and perceived to be cool, there’s no reason for consumers to switch. But there’s also no reason for consumers to join only one social network. The mindshare and pageviews crucial to MySpace as an ad supported business in the end may rely more on new and added functionality than FIM executives believe.

FIM may be on to something with its SpringWidgets platform–a plantation on which it invites sharecroppers to grow new widgets that Fox can own and control. But its an open source world. New and better functionality is sure to be developed more quickly via open access to widgets. That said, I understand how vexing it must be to see other companies selling advertising on your real estate.

Meanwhile, at Techcrunch Michael Arrington–who leaked information from Photobucket’s roadshow book–asks the question of the day: Can Photobucket Survive without MySpace? To the extent that Photobucket survived before the blockade by selling advertising on its site, seen by users uploading photos, then, yes, Photobucket can survive. (According to Techcrunch two thirds of Photobucket’s revenue came from advertising on its own site over the past two years. Last year’s total revenue was less than $10 million.) To the extent that Photobucket was counting on video posted to MySpace to meet its 2007 revenue target of $32 million, then no, it can’t survive. But it was hard for me to believe the 3X revenue growth in the Photobucket projections to begin with.

Link Love:

Two New Ways to Mine for Twitter Gold

The 12-Minute Definitive Guide to Twitter

To the average Joe, blogs aren’t cutting it

Social Media Now: MySpace Kicks the Photobucket

Jason Chervokas — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 13:32:48 +0000

This isn’t going to help Photobucket with its efforts to sell the company. Late last night MySpace moved to block its members from posting links to videos hosted on Photobucket.

Photobucket had been trying to expand it’s business from photo hosting to video hosting by offering users a suite of editing and production tools to spur the loading of video. The still photos it hosts remain unblocked.

Scoble offers a little tough love for users of Photobucket’s video service:

If you want to avoid these issues there’s really one choice: pay for your site’s own hosting and build your own traffic. One reason to join services like MySpace and Wordpress.com is that there’s a built-in level of traffic…. If you go off and build your own site you don’t have those advantages, but you’ve got to live with [it] when they pull down parasitic services, which is what Photobucket is.

Calling Photobucket a “parasitic service” is a little harsh. It’s a backend business that provides photo hosting and video editing tools for free to users. That its value relies on user created linkbacks from sites it doesn’t own doesn’t make it any more parasitic than your average search engine. Still, its fair to say that Photobucket, like dozens of backend service providers and widget makers, rely for their success on the kindness of strangers.

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch offers a short term history lesson:

This is turning into a habit for MySpace, which usually claims bugs, security issues or terms of service violations were the cause of a shut down. In January MySpace mysteriously shut down all Flash widgets on the site for 2.5 hours. An Imeem blockade came next. Vidilife, Stickam and Revver have been permanently banned.

Clearly News Corp’s war on widgets and add-ons continues.

Duncan Riley looks at the business implications for Photobucket, calling the MySpace move an “act of corporate sabotage” and wondering outloud if the move is designed to drive down Photobucket’s asking price:

….when your product targets social networks and you’ve had access partially blocked to the biggest marketplace of them all…with the possibility of course that the ban could end up involving all content, your value drops, and drops dramatically…and because of this there’s little doubt that News Corp has simply just screwed Photobucket over. I wonder if News Corp ends up buying Photobucket? What better way to squeeze a better price!

At Deep Jive Interests Tony Hung nails the lesson of the MySpace move for the development of the widget business:

If MySpace has an alternate video storage and management product cooking — which only has to be *just* has good — it will have no problem locking in its users. ….

And if MySpace *does* have an alternate to Photobucket, the next logical question is “what else do they have cooking?” There’s been a spate of news around widgets which cross blogs and social networks. But if MySpace (and other networks) starts developing their own in-house widgets, it might signal a larger trend towards creating truly closed-in system…not only preventing people from leaving MySpace…but also increasing the height of those metaphorical walls which separate its users from marketers who are salivating at the chance to get at this demographic. Higher walls (to flog the metaphor) can only mean steeper tolls to get access to MySpace’s users.

Scoble adds the observation that this will chill the climate for investment in businesses like widget businesses that rely on social networks to drive traffic.

That’s certainly true. It’s hard to invest in a business whose fate is in the hands of others (unless that business has a patent protectable technological advantage or some such defensible advantage). But I still believe that a secular trend is just beginning which will drive social networking away from walled-garden hubs towards more user directed networks. But a long term secular change is not going to help Photobucket build a consumer facing video business today. It looks as if, to do that, the company will have to launch a site of its own. Does anyone own the Videobucket.com domain?

Building its own social network seems to be the approach of one of Photobucket’s start up competitors. Kristen Nicole at Mashable writes today that DivShare, a photo and video hosting service, has soft launched DivShare Groups–which allows users to establish their own hubs for sharing media. On its blog DivShare lays out the features–comments, RSS feeds, access rules and the rest of the social networking kit and caboodle.

In the traditional media business, power once accrued to copyright holders who often had no direct relationship with consumers–film and TV studios not movie theater and TV station owners. But the irony of the Internet media business is that even though it’s offers a wide open distribution platform, hell, BECAUSE it offers a wide open distribution platform, power accrues to the company that can draw a crowd and develop a direct relationship with consumers. And the more that company relies on the network effect to draw and hold users, the stickier it is (think eBay). For now, News Corp and Facebook, remain the girls with the most cake.

Link Love:

Exclusive Screenshots: Spock’s New People Engine
Techcrunch offers an exclusive inside look at Spock, a people-centered search engine

Social Media Now: Do Community and Commerce Mix

Jason Chervokas — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 14:04:19 +0000

It’s tempting to dismiss the social commerce survey published today by iProspect as just the latest missive from the Duh! Department.

The survey, conducted by JupiterResearch, found that 33% of Internet users had relied on sites with user-generated recommendations to make buying decisions.

Frankly that number is surprisingly low, particularly considering that Amazon–by virtue of it’s user recommendations–fits the survey’s profile and considering what we know about the impact of social recommendation in the offline world. Writes Pete Cashmore at Mashable:

It’s hardly a surprise that users make decisions about what to buy based on Amazon reviews, and in fact Amazon was by far the most influential of the sites listed, with 28% of Internet users questioned saying they’d made a purchase based on info from Amazon.

The runner-up might be a little worrying: Yahoo Answers, which seems to be populated by teens who provide misleading answers about as often as they provide correct ones, influences 4% of users when they come to make a purchase.

I’d be more worried about the small numbers for big social network players. MySpace, which 2% of users cited as influencing a decision, lapped Facebook which was only cited by 1%; and iVillage, which offers great product-based discussion groups for buyers considering home appliance purchases, was cited by less than 0.5% of respondents. Those numbers suggest one of three things: either there is enormous, untapped potential for growth in commerce touched off by social networking hub; or users like their commerce and community to remain separate; or the survey is plain wrong.

What the survey seems to suggest is that Internet purchases are most commonly made buy people who begin with the intent to purchase. And those people head to sites like Amazon.com that are identifiable as stores. Forty-six percent of respondents said they the reason they searched Amazon was to buy something, and 28% said the site influenced their decision to buy. Meanwhile 49% of respondents said they searched Facebook to connect to friends, and, unsurprisingly only 2% said the site influenced a buying decision.

What remains untested is the impact of social network functionality on online buying. Cashmore is “willing to bet that the addition of a ‘consumer reviews’ section on YouTube could increase it’s influence. Likewise, MySpace doesn’t currently provide any way to convene around products.”

I agree with Pete. But the proposition remains untested. According to published reports MySpace is speaking with potential commerce partners about a MySpace store. Such an effort would offer one test of social commerce. Another test would be to look at the effectiveness to date of social shopping start ups like NextThis and ShopWiki.com to see if social shopping works as a widget or whether the social aspect of shopping is enough to allow a start up store to compete with a powerhouse like Amazon. Finally a survey with a control group would be nice: do stores like Amazon or Musicians Friend which are packed with user reviews have higher or lower conversion rates than stores, like LandsEnd.com, which don’t? Do products with higher user ratings outsell those with lower ratings on Amazon?

Link Love:

Gigya To Ease Widget Publishing On Social Networks
How to win in the Twitter vs. Jaiku battle

Social Media Now: Blogger Code of Conduct is DOA

Jason Chervokas — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 14:00:00 +0000

There are few things worse than media self-examination. It’s freighted with the kind of navel-gazing self importance that turns off all but the most egotistic insiders.

The mishugas surrounding Tim O’Reilly’s attempt to get a bloggers to adopt a code of conduct (his is modeled on the guidelines adopted by the BlogHer group) smacks a little bit of this kind of self-involvement.

I get civility. I practice it. Always will. But the kind of code O’Reilly’s is proposing is the kind of feel-good measure that will have no effect on the “problem,” to the extent that there is a problem at all.

As Duncan Riley wrote on the 901am blog:

….those who think that a blogging code of conduct is the antidote to death threats and misogyny have about as much hope of success as I’ve got of space walking on Jupiter next year….

Reaction among the digerati has largely been strongly negative. People seem to feel there’s a mob mentality developing. Michael Arrington writes:

…whenever someone, no matter how much I respect them, tries to tell me what I can and cannot do by defining “civility” around their own ideals, I tense up. It feels like a big angry mob is arming itself to the teeth and looking for targets, and I need to choose whether I’m with them or against them.

…The code of conduct and the mass of bloggers lining up behind it scares me a lot more than the hate comments and death threats
I’ve received in the past.

Robert Scoble had a similar reaction:

I do find disquieting the social pressure to get on board with this program. Tim O’Reilly is a guy who really can affect one’s career online (and off, too). I do have to admit that I feel some pressure just to get on board here and that makes me feel very uneasy.

Well, with this much opposition it hardly seems like the villagers are at the door with torches and pitchforks. In fact, it looks to me that the code is dead on arrival.

O’Reilly’s code would require bloggers to police themselves and the conversations that take place on their blogs for threatening language, libelous language, copyright infringement, and violations of privacy. But, except for the last matter, bloggers are already under a legal obligation to do these things or face potential civil or even criminal action. Contrary to popular belief, blog publishing is subject to the same legal standards of print publishing. There’s really no need for an extra code on this score.

Interestingly the only measure in O’Reilly’s code that would likely have an effect on blog incivility is the one that has met with the most opposition from the uber bloggers–banning anonymous comments.

I despise anonymous comments. Too often they function as a shield for precisely the kind of vitriol that creates problems, driving the level of discourse down to something that resembles a graffiti chain on a junior high school bathroom stall. Furthermore if the ethos of the social Internet is centered on personal responsibility, then taking responsibility for what you post–either on a blog or in comments–requires an openly declared identity. As a journalist, I was trained by both educators and editors, to allow source anonymity judiciously. It is an essential tool for reporting policy from the inside, for example, but it functions poorly in sport reporting when anonymous locker room sources pile on a coach or manager. Arrington and Scoble both refuse to ban anonymous comments. Fine. And certainly O’Reilly’s requirement that bloggers confirm the e-mail addresses of people posting comments is impractical. But anyone who accepts anonymous comments should be conscious of the potential for abuse.

Social Media Now: Spanning the Blogosphere, Selling In Second Life, Valuing Facebook

Jason Chervokas — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 14:15:38 +0000

Spanning the Blogosphere: I’m not too fond of the phrase “Live Web.” First, I’m not convinced that the so-called static web era was all that static—links were live, after all, and pages were updated regularly, and message boards and other sorts of multiway communication platforms existed. Second, even as multifaceted as it has become—with widgets and clients offering all sorts of live interaction—Web-based information is just one source of information flowing into the message stream in which we all swim, a message stream that includes e-mail, IM, voicemail, text messaging and more, an environment not tied to http or the browser.

But for Dave Sifry, whose business, Technorati, is Web based, “Live Web” is the phrase of choice although he is still titling his quarterly report “The State of the Blogosphere.” There are some fascinating nuggets: There’s the enormous growth of blogging in the Middle East, particularly in Iran, as illustrated by the fact that Farsi has now become the 10th most common blogging language. There’s the growth of tagging as bloggers’ ontological system of choice (although still only 35% of blog posts tracked by Technorati include tags). And blog spam is seasonal, peaking during the Christmas buying season.

Two other things worth noting. There is at least one sign that blogging may have peaked. Technorati tracked an average of 1.3 million daily posts in October and 1.5 million this month. That’s slower growth in per day posting than the survey has found in the past, but not a slide in the number of posts per day as Steve Rubel suggests. It IS a slide, however, in the percentage of blogs that account for daily postings. Using Sifry’s numbers (which sometimes seem to be moving targets) it seems like the rate of daily posts per blog was 2.3% in October and 2.1% in April.

Also, Sifry continues to highlight a distinction between blogs and so-called “mainstream media” that I think is no longer useful. Blogs ARE mainstream media, at least users experience them alongside traditional media and draw less and less of a distinction (as Sifry notes). No consumer surfing for information about Zune players would consider Engaget and ZDNet to be in different information categories. The blogging world has to get the chip off its shoulder about “mainstream media.” Bloggers try so hard to say they’re different it sounds like they have an inferiority complex.

Selling in Second Life: GigaOm has an absolutely fascinating piece, written by Wagner James Au, about the failures of traditional marketers to make hay in Second Life. The piece jumps off from a small scale survey (200 repondants) by Komjuniti, a SL brand consultancy. There’s not much news in the survey (when asked people feel marketing is intrusive and uninteresting, I mean, duh!), But James Au’s suggestions to marketers using SL are fascinating. To wit: Because teleportation is the primary mode of transport, forget billboards, no one sees ‘em; just like in RL, events, giveaways, and the like are necessary to draw people to your location; and finally, join the fantasy:

To play in Second Life, corporations must first come to a humbling realization: in the context of the fantastic, their brands as they exist in the real world are boring, banal, and unimaginative. Car companies are trying to compete with college kids who turn a virtual automotive showroom into a 24/7 hiphop dance party, and create lovingly designed muscle cars that fly, and auction off for $2000 in real dollars at charity auctions.

….as the Komjuniti study suggests, they can keep building sterile shopping malls, and continue wondering why Residents prefer nude dance parties, giant frogs singing alt-folk rock, and samurai death matches– and often, all three at the same time.

Valuing Facebook: There’s a suspicious meme making the rounds started yesterday by Mark May, an investment analyst at Needham & Co (is Facebook beating the bushes for buyers?). In a report May argued that Yahoo made a terrible error in December abandoning attempts to acquire Facebook to the tune of $1.5 billion, because now Facebook is worth many times that number. At Barron’s Online Eric Savitz picked up the ball and ran with it, quoting May: Facebook is no doubt one of the most important Internet companies to have been created in the last five years.

No doubt. But is it worth more than $1.5 billion? Not according to Douglas McIntyre at 24/7 Wall St:

Comscore says that Facebook as 16.7 million unique visitors a month. Even better, the site has 24 visits per unique visitor, putting it just behind Yahoo! among all web properties.

…The New York Times digital properties have a unique monthly audience of almost 40 million. The market cap of the entire New York Times Company (NYT) is only $3.4 billion. It even includes those worthless big newspapers.

Maybe Facebook is worth $1 billion, maybe less. But more? No way.

But McIntyre is still basing the entirety of his valuation on pageviews. Meanwhile at ZDNet, Larry Dignan got his dander up about arm chair CEOs piling on Yahoo:

Now time for a reality check.

If News Corp. still can’t figure out how to monetize MySpace (it’s getting there) how can Facebook be profitable enough to justify a big valuation? My hindsight indicates that Facebook should have taken Yahoo’s dough and ran. It’s one thing to build an audience it’s quite another to make money from it.

Facebook is the “in” thing for now. Let’s follow May’s logic and assume Yahoo did pull the trigger on a Facebook purchase (of course we’d all pick that apart too.) Guess what would happen when Yahoo bought Facebook? It would be an “out” thing. Consumers are a fickle bunch and will leave in a second. Suddenly that valuation doesn’t look so hot.

Is social media really all that? I know it’s heresy to think that social media may not be the second coming of the Web boom, but there are a few areas of concern. Perhaps Mozilla’s social media meets browser effort hurts traffic at MySpace and Facebook. Perhaps someone cooks up a technology that allows you to take your profile–and all of your friends–somewhere else easily. Bottom line: We don’t know how much money social media can make.

I’m with Larry on all but his last point. Social Media really IS all that.

Link Love:
MySpace Music Players: MySpace Speaks

Google MyMaps Smashes Mash-ups

Reko Launches – More Social Networking in Firefox

Social Media Now: The Social Edge, Debating Viacom’s Value to YouTube

Jason Chervokas — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 14:42:22 +0000

It hardly signals the end of the line for social networking hubs like Facebook and MySpace, but it may be the beginning of the end. I’m talking about the potential impact of a Mozilla skunk works project to embed social networking functionality directly in the Web browser.

There’s a lot of buzz among the meme-makers. At Techcrunch Michael Arrington calls it bad news for start ups like Flock with ambitions to build social browsers. That would certainly appear to be the case, particularly since Flock is built on top of Mozilla, although for the moment the window is wide open for socially enabled browsers. Speaking of windows, Microsoft must also be developing similar functionality for Internet Explorer.

At ZDNet Larry Dignan raises an interesting question about the potential impact of social browsers on the economics of social networking hubs:

Another interesting thread will be how this works for big social networking sites that depend on page view growth like MySpace. If I can track all my social contacts in my browser will I visit MySpace?

Technology, functionality and ease of use will ultimately tell the tale of which implementation wins the day. For now the Mozilla effort, called The Coop, is an experiment, existing publicly only as a prototype which I intend to begin playing with today. But as a general matter the more social enabling included in a piece of software, the more valuable and sticky that software becomes to users.

Embedding social networking directly into Web browsers reflects the typical evolutionary path of Internet functionality away from hubs and central servers towards the edge where individuals have greater control over their user experiences. And it’s hardly the only sign of the decentralization of social networking. Kristen Nicole has a piece at Mashable about OtherEgo.Com–a revamp of the social network formerly known as Rantiq. Kristen identifies the killer app hidden within the new service–the ability for users to make all their social network profiles available in one place–but criticized the company for making the feature hard to find and inconvenient to use:

Surprisingly enough, the ability to add other profiles, OtherEgo’s major differentiator, is not prominent on their site at all. The link to add a profile is rather low key, and any added profiles actually show at the very bottom of the page. Another concern I have is the ability to add anyone’s public profile to your own OtherEgo space by simply inserting the URL. Those things aside, it’s an interesting (but not totally convenient) way to keep your social networks in one place.

On his blog, Internet Outsider, former Wall Street wunderkind Henry Blogett called attention to a report from Vidmeter suggesting that YouTube’s success is not predicated on copyright infringement. Blodgett draws the following conclusions from the report:

Traditional media videos make up only a small percentage of YouTube views.

NBCFoxTube, the hypothetical consortium, even if successful, won’t dent YouTube’s growth.

Online video viewers usually watch short clips, not full shows.

But Pete Cashmore at Mashable offered a more detailed reading of the report, one that pokes holes in Blogett’s over hyped reading:

Well, bear in mind that since it’s unfeasible to crawl all of YouTube, they stuck with a sample size of 6,725 clips. This was not a random sample – it was taken from the most viewed list. Of those, 9.23% had been removed due to copyright violations, and the removed videos only accounted for 5.93% of video views in the sample. Viacom removed the most clips: about 40% of the videos removed were from Viacom. What’s more, Viacom clips accounted for 2.37% of all videos views counted.

There are lots of ways to interpret this, and we actually think it’s risky to draw conclusions. The thing is, Vidmeter only counted removed clips, since they’re unable to count the total number of copyrighted clips that haven’t been taken down. They also used the most viewed list as a sample, meaning that it’s not necessarily representative of what’s going on elsewhere on the site. And Viacom’s 72 videos in the sample still accounted for about 38 million views.

Couldn’t have said it better myself, Pete. The complete report is available here.