Social Media Now: Tag You’re It

While the semantic Web remains a twinkle in the eye of Tim Berners-Lee, social media is enabling development of a messier, more human, but perhaps in the end more useful Web ontology. I’m talking about the impact of tagging which is on my mind this morning thanks to two blog posts.

First, David Sifry’s post on “The State of Technorati, April 2007″ highlights a move among Technorati users in recent months away from query-based search towards tagged pages as the entry point for surfers interested in subjects.

Let me begin by saying the people we serve and their behaviors on our site have shifted remarkably in recent months. In brief, we’ve seen phenomenal growth in the use of our tagged media pages. As the use of tags becomes more ubiquitous across all forms of social media and the publishing platforms that support them, they’ve become the lingua franca of the Live Web - the way in which people all over the world indicate what topics or issues are top of mind and guiding self-expression.

About nine months ago, we began to see a marked increase in the use of those tagged media pages, which back then simply included blog posts and Flickr photos using tags. So, throughout the fall and into December, we introduced a number of improvements and new features to our media pages, including the introduction of a huge range of multiple forms of user-generated content. Today, we include blog posts, photos, videos, podcasts, music, people, and events that share a common tag to give our visitors a view into who’s saying what - who’s doing what - across the Live Web, all in real time.

…the majority of our page views now are no longer just in real-time keyword or blog search, as would have been the case just six months ago, but also in our tagged media pages.

That’s a pretty interesting turn of events. Search, more than any other application, led the growth of Web 1.0. But ironically the more information that becomes searchable, the harder it is for self-directed searches to be specifically useful to any individual. As a result we have witnessed the development the search engine optimization industry, which is helpful to publishers. But also we have witnessed the emergence of social search and tagging which represent a kind of user-directed Web information optimization.

Despite its phenomenal growth, tagging hasn’t delivered its full potential in part because there are too many non-interoperable tagging systems and in part because the process of tagging can be so darn inconvenient. That’s why I was interested to see Stephen Baker’s pointer at BusinessWeek to an academic paper exploring a kind of tag optimization technology. In the paper four researchers at Northwestern describe a system of tag optimization that scans existing tags, ranks them according to effectiveness and suggests the best tags for users to choose. The system, called TagAssist, won the best paper award at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media last week.

The semantic Web may still evolve, but it’s more likely to evolve as a technological response to the social behavior of surfers than as an abstract technological solution to a theoretical problem. Building actionable functions on top of an ontology that people have already chosen sounds like the right development path to me.

A related piece today comes from Arnaud Fischer, programming director at AOL Search & Directional, who gives an overview of the advantages of social search over traditional search.

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Social Media Now: Think Locally, Surf Regionally

Maybe it’s because I started my career in the community newspaper business, but for whatever reason I love local news. When I  travel I make a point of seeking out small papers in tiny communities across the world and voraciously devour all the details of local land use battles, trash schedules and school sports. Working in community journalism also was fabulous preparation for Internet journalism. Unlike journalists at major metro institutions like The New York Times (for whom I also worked), community journalists work in a world where sources, advertisers and readers come from the same small universe and where readers regularly walk into the office to shout in your face.

But for some reason the 10 year old effort to drag community journalism onto the Net has largely failed and not for a lack of effort by companies both big and small. (The first effort to harness citizen journalism that I recall was a 1992 print effort by Jedd Gould in Connecticut that lasted a decade before going the of many community newspapers.)

The era of citizen journalism has inspired a new round of local online news efforts–including the recently launched outside.in, founded by my old Silicon Alley colleague Steven Johnson. The latest effort comes from Topix. The company, which is majority owned by three major newspaper companies and which previously organized search results according to local parameters, announced over the weekend the launch of Topix.com–a revamp of its local news business built around community-edited blogs.

Topix CEO Rich Skrenta has a great blog post explaining the process by which Topix came to the decision to revamp. The post should serve as a model for corporate communications and transparency and I recommend it highly to anyone interested in the Internet publishing business. The most interesting part of Skrenta’s discussion revolves around creating an instantly identifiable visual metaphor for the new site, allowing users to enter without effort. Mission accomplished. The Topix.com local pages look great and the blog-style layout is effortless to enter. But there’s little yet in the way of community contributed news (almost all the news on my local site came from a nearby Gannet paper–Gannet is an investor in Topix).

A lot of links to the story this morning–from Techcrunch to paidContent to Mashable–but nothing really in the way of analysis although Frank Gruber has a nice description of the new feature set. Even if it were just a matter of reorganizing its offerings to make them more accessible the Topix revamp would be a good one, but will it be enough to awaken local news online? Is local news the sleeping giant of the Internet in the era of citizen journalism?

Maybe. Certainly local information is as at home on the Net as any other kind of information. Already a generation of people use the Internet to look up movie times, peruse local restaurant menus, check the dates of  recycling pick ups, and buy and sell used stuff. These things once formed the lifeblood of newspapers and their online migration goes a long way towards explaining the continuing economic demise of that business.

And in large cities like New York there are enough people in any given neighborhood for one or two people to emerge who are engaged enough to contribute and participate in local issues online. But as the focus of a local site narrows, finding those individuals becomes increasingly difficult, and of course the audience of interested parties becomes smaller. In addition, the smaller the community the more likely it is that those who care about, say, school board meetings or village trustee meetings are the people who actually attend those meetings in the first place (I wonder how the ratings for public access airings of town board meetings compare with the attendance that those meetings). Certainly major issues can stimulate community involvement online, but you can’t build a predictable business on the hope of a steady stream of major issues effecting small communities.

If I were in the local online business today I would be less concerned with citizen journalism and more concerned with socially enabled regional directories, but that’s just me.

BTW….it’s off topic but kudos to EMI for offering DRM-free music compressed at higher sampling rates. Now if the industry would just embrace flac we’d really be on to something.

Link love:

Ballhype - Social Media Sports Done Right
 

 

 

 

 

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Social Media Now: Photobucket, Scrapblog and the New Hype

There are many ways to measure a bubble economy. As a journalist, I look at media coverage of companies as one indicator. The more gee whiz stories that appear covering little-known companies with little skepticism quoting executives gushing unabashedly about the most obvious facts, the more inflated the bubble.

Yesterday’s orgy of coverage regarding image hosting service Photobucket rang my bubble bells big time. “The Biggest Website You’ve Never Heard Of” gushed Fortune.com in a headline that would have made a publicist blush. “How Much is Photobucket Worth?”  the Techcrunch headline asked, begging the answer: “A lot.”

I expect a lot better from guys like David Kirkpatrick and Michael Arrington. The Kirkpatrick piece read like ad copy: It’s bigger than Facebook! An audience growing by 80,000 a day! Kirkpatrick let ridiculous assertions by CEO Alex Welch go unchallenged: “We’re fad proof,” he proclaimed (yeah, and the Titanic was unsinkable).  And the day’s Ted Stevens Series-of-Tubes award goes to Jerry Murdock, a Photobucket investor who Kirkpatrick quoted as saying: “Linking is the new currency of the Web.”  Um, didn’t Tim Berners-Lee design the Web in the first place so that linking would be the currency?

The Techcrunch story at least placed the sudden publicity for Photobucket in context: Lehman Brothers is beating the bushes for buyers interested in purchasing Photobucket. But Arrington’s tone was just as promotional. “Basically, Photobucket is kicking butt,” he wrote.

Arrington, it appears, was working off the Photobucket roadshow Powerpoint. He published Lehman’s asking price (upwards of $300 million on $6.3 million trailing 12 months revenue). He published the company’s financial projection tables. He even published the blind comment that “our sources indicate that a number of acquirors are very interested in the company at this price.” All he needed to add was a tag line saying: “Act now before it’s too late!”

A dozen years ago, when Tom Watson and I launched @NY (the first media business to cover New York’s new media industry and darn near the first e-mail publishing venture anywhere), our avowed mission to deflate the the hype in press coverage of the initial commercial Internet boom. Thankfully, today, there are blogs galore with the same spirit.

Valleywag, of all things, struck a very considered, skeptical tone suggesting in an analysis that Photobucket doesn’t have anywhere near the consumer loyalty it claims and raising a red flag about the cost of hosting all those photos–a red flag that neither Techcrunch nor Fortune.com paused to consider.

Hipmojo.com called Photobucket out for it’s questionable growth predictions and attendant valuation goals:

Judging by the numbers, the company grew 116% in revenue from 2005 to 2006, but now expects to grow 255% from 2006 to 2007.  Is this normal, reasonable?
 ….

MySpace, the largest social networking site, will double in revenue over the next 12 months.  That means 100% growth.  Usually the outliers experience above average growth.  Can someone explain to me why Photobucket will experience 2.55 times, or 255%, growth in the same period?

Lehman Bros. is good, darn good.  But do they believe this or do they think we lost our calculators?

I can tell you from the time I spent analyzing investments for Primedia Ventures, hyper-inflated growth projections for the year in which a company is looking to sell itself or raise capital is par for the course, and something all investors consider with a grain of salt. That’s a grain more than we got from Kirkpatrick and Arrington.

Meanwhile the latest social media property be shown some love from the meme-makers is Scrapblog, a multi-media scrapbooking web service built around a Flash-based editor application. Earlier this month the company, based in Coral Gables, FL, announced that it had raised an undisclosed amount of first round venture capital from Longworth Venture Partners in Boston. At the heart of Scrapblog’s services is a photo slide show function, putting the start-up in the midst of a crowded space that includes, yes, Photobucket.

Link Love:

NewTube Is Just The Beginning
More details on the in-house thinking at NBCU and News Corp about the nascent view sharing service

T9space Reports 4 Million Pageviews a Month

Matador is Grass Roots for Travel

 

 

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Social Media Now: MOG Music

Good reviews across the blogosphere for the 2.0 revision of social music recommendation site MOG. Kristen Nicole at Mashable has the best recap of the features of the relaunched site   : 

This free service offers a personalized channel of streaming music videos, all based on your tastes. MOG cross references music from your computer and your iPod along with your site activity and the preferences of like-minded users to give you content you’ll want to see. Also taken into consideration are the preferences of your trusted Moggers, which extends beyond your friends to include users whose taste you admire, and even the artists you like.

In addition, MOG has added a “Magic Button.” No matter where you are on their site, clicking the “Magic Button” will give you a comprehensive page of recommendations based on everything MOG knows about you. And MOG’s new features don’t stop there. MOG has added personalized music news, as well as album reviews and concert reviews, found in the “Read” section of their editorial, which is overseen by Michael Goldberg, MOG’s new editor in chief. MOG is also launching an improved Artist page which will feature Wikipedia-powered bios, user-uploaded photos, external links to fan sites, and a compilation of all posts tagged with that artist’s information. Additionally, you’ll see who on MOG is listening most to that artist.

Phwew….It’s taken nearly two years but today’s MOG sounds like a potential category killer, at least that’s obviously the intention of the impressive management team led by founder David Hyman, former CEO of Gracenote and editor Michael Goldberg, who have reportedly raised $1.4 million in seed money.

Eliot Van Buskirk at Wired News’ Listening Post calls MOG 2.0 everything MTV should have become, particularly hailing the ease of use and integration of the new features.

At Techcrunch Nick Gonzalez notes that although directing users towards new music remains MOG’s raison d’etre, its focus is on user generated blog posts not music recommendation algorithms making it more of a destination site than strictly a service like Pandora or Last.FM.

I am certain that social music recommendation is THE future of music marketing. Traditional channels through which music used to be marketed have completely collapsed. Radio is increasingly driven by talk, not music programming, and what music radio does program doesn’t reach buyers of music very effectively, particularly with respect to new music of any genre. And, of course, MTV barely airs music programming at all anymore.

But enormous challenges abound. For one thing the business sector is already enormously crowded. For another thing the ways in which users listen to music today is so multidimensional and personal that it’s hard to create a single service which can reach users across platforms (from iPods to in-dash CD players, from Sonos to Rhapsody), never mind trying to connect users to one another across platforms. Finally, a service like MOG–built as it is around user generated content more than algorithms and automated tracking–will need to lean heavily on those most musically involved users. That’s good I guess, it’s the uber music dweebs of the High Fidelity variety who are always the ones button holing you to tell you about something you just HAVE to hear. But there is a line somewhere between social networking that’s fun and social networking that is a burden. And for most listeners music remains a purely decorative aspect of their lives.

 Link Love:

 CosmoTV Relaunches with a MySpace Player

Iminlikewithyou: Love in the time of Facebook

German media Firm Burda Buys Stake In Multimedia Sharing Site Sevenload

How Much is Photobucket Worth?

Zaadz Funded by Whole Foods CEO

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Social Media Now: Teaching Citizen Journalists, Social Nets Underrated?

Who Knows What’s Best for Citizen Journalists? ….I was fortunate yesterday to help lead a fascinating discussion about trust, journalism and pro am media at the New York Social Media Club meeting. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen provided the jumping off point by presenting and discussing his mini-empire of experimental, participatory journalism. That empire includes his own NewAssignment.Net and it’s two recently announced joint ventures–AssignmentZero, an experiment in crowdsourced journalism conducted with Wired; and a participatory journalism joint venture with HuffingtonPost designed to organize semi-pro coverage of everyone running for president.

I remain skeptical about the value of attempting to harness citizen journalism by encouraging professional editors to saddle it up and ride it in one particular direction or another. Just as it can replace the traditional reporters’ functions, the community can replace the editors’ functions setting the agenda, calling attention to stories, copyediting and correcting. The fact that the Internet community does this organically, applying tools like blogging, tagging and aggregating, is part of what makes citizen journalism different.

Still it’s interesting to see the pros wrestling with a DIY future, even if much of that wrestling is taking place in the academic realm. Yesterday the Knight Foundation and The Institute for Interactive Journalism (itself a venture of the University of Maryland and the Pew Center for Civic Journalism) took the wraps off The Knight Citizen News Network.

The Network isn’t the ambitious attempt to practice new journalism that AssignmentZero is, instead it is intended as a resource for citizen journalists including a searchable database of US citizen journalism sites, a best-practices feature called “Things We Like,” a multimedia primer in what the Institute sees as “the principles of citizen journalism,” as well as links to the Institute’s case studies and other research.

The site was designed with input from some of the big boys in the formalizing citizen journalism JD Lascia, Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media and I, Reporter.

There’s something presumptuous and out of whack about professionals and academics telling citizen journalists how to do amateur journalism better,  particularly in an era when pro journalism has been so damaged by a credibility crisis (just this week The New York Times owned up to running a false rape allegation from a former US service woman and to one of it’s reporters cutting a $2000 check to a source). But as we watch big media wrestle with the changing DIY media landscape, efforts like KCNN are worth watching.

It’s Twitter’s World, We Just Live in It….Word out yesterday from Steve Poland at Techcrunch that changes to Twitter’s API may help turn the messaging service into a Web services platform, or more accurately a SMS-services platform. We love the idea of Twitter, or any kind of cross platform anywhere messaging service, becoming something other than a party line for the digerati but let’s not get crazy. To Nik Cubrilovic who writes that there will be a business in Twitter IDs akin to the mid 1990s business in domain squatting I suggest a reality check of the sort Fred Wilson writes about here.

Social Networking Under-hyped? …According to Pali Research’s Richard Greenfield (as reported at Barron’s Online by Eric Savitz)

MySpace is now generating “in excess of $30 million” a month in revenue, with about $24 million in domestic revenue and $6 million internationally. He adds that monthly revenues should more than double over the next 12 months, and “at very high incremental revenue margins.” So in 12 months, he’s saying, MySpace should be doing more than $60 million a month in revenue, for an annual run rate in the neighborhood of $750 million a year.

Quoth Valleywag:

…as one News Corporation exec says: “You know, it may turn out that social networks have been, not overhyped, but underhyped.”

Link Love:

Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection: TiVo Home Movie SharingJamendo Goes Platinum! 1.5 Million Albums Downloaded
Zoolit Launches Social Network Profile Link Aggregator

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Social Media Now: Widgets, TV and Money

Bits and pieces this morning from the world of social media….At Mashable Pete Cashmore tells us about the launch of Spinlets, a service that offers an API to allow users to widgetize social websites. The service is the first product from a company called urSpin. Cashmore cites a number of already launched or soon to launch competitors like Webwag, which offers service it calls widgets on demand.

I am increasingly convinced that the future of social media is a decentralized one. The, dare I say it, Web 3.0 cosmology won’t revolve around fixed hubs like MySpace and Facebook but around user created hubs built on white label private networking platforms like Ning or mutated version of current Ajax homepage platforms like Netvibes.  In that universe widgets will be the new platform for web services and its worth watching all the companies who make widgets, support widget making, track widgets, and collect metadata from widgets that have been distributed

Will Google sue? Yesterday Broadcasting & Cable reported  that the CW network is working on a show with the working title of Viewser that will be built around user content posted to the Web at large. The user-generated or semi-pro content model for TV hardly radical or new. Shows like America’s Funniest Home Videos have long been built around user generated content. From American Idol to the Arthur Godfrey show, amateur hour talent contests have been a mainstay of traditional media programming. And of course MTV’s The Real World predates the Netscape IPO by nearly three years. According to B&C producers are considering ways to make Viewser interactive. But  successes for interactive television remain few and far between (I vote for the NFL’s instant replay rule as interactive TVs only real success, at least other than home shopping TV). TV networks and producers can build entertaining programming around user-generated content. But also long as they are locked into the traditional television platform they can’t turn user TV into true social media in which contribution, participation and tagging are the entertainment, not the content.

From the Duh Department….Steve Rubel commented yesterday on a Market Watch story that said that Rocketboom, the pioneering vlog, is looking at new revenue models—including possible paid programming–because, as it turns out, TV advertisers prefer mega audiences to niche ones. So much for all the buzz last year about Rocketboom’s stratospheric CPMs. We all know niche TV can survive with small audiences, but even low rated cable talk shows like Larry King’s or Nancy Grace’s reach four times as many people as Rocketboom, which reaches 200,000 according to Market Watch. The problem for properties like Rocketboom, as well as for almost all podcasts, is that the compete in areas where traditional media already does a good job. Rocketboom is a general interest, traditional-TV style property that is merely distributed differently. Its producers have to convince advertisers not to spend elsewhere but to spend on Rocketboom instead. In that scenario size matters. If you want to make it with ad-supported media that reaches small audiences you better serve a high value audience (billionaires or people with specialty interests) with critical information that audience members can’t get elsewhere.

What’s disturbing about the Rocketboom story is the lack of innovation in business models it reveals. Its the same old, same old: If you can’t make it selling ads then try to charge for content or you sell services (the Rocketboom team is making corporate videos and doing client work for John Edwards). If you want to sell advertising in niche properties you need to assemble a network of niche properties. User generated and semi pro media continues to dismantle the programming paradigms and distribution networks of traditional media without creating new business models to support the alternative.

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Social Media Now: What Porn Can Teach NewTube

Yesterday’s reaction to the News Corp/NBC NewTube announcement ran the gamut from typical big media hating (Thomas Hawk’s headline: NBC Universal, News Corp YouTube Killer Will Fail) to typical big media cheerleading (Mark Cuban’s headline: Why the NBC/Newscorp Video Venture is a Great Idea).

Sure, there are plenty of reasons for any 50/50 JV between competitors to fail–from competing corporate interests to anti-trust question that may arise (since the consent decree in the 1940s that first tried to separate movie making from movie exhibiting there’s always been a tension that arises when the makers of entertainment content collude to control distribution).

But I don’t see any inherent reason why YouTube and NewTube can’t succeed side-by-side. After all, new media technologies rarely entirely obsolete old ones. Yeah, talkies made silent movies obsolete and color consigned black-and-white movie-making to an arty niche. But books, magazines, movies, radio and television are all still with us 15 years into the commercial Internet era. And the
filmed entertainment business has a pretty successful track record in adapting to changes in signal distribution technology. When VCRs first hit the market in the 1980s the filmed entertainment business resisted, pricing pre-recorded movies at nearly $100 to try to damp consumer demand and protect old business models. Today the so-called secondary markets–television licensing and DVD sales and rentals–are worth twice as much money annually to a company like Time Warner compared with movies in theatrical release.

The dollar volume of the online advertising business today dwarfs the dollar volume of other sectors of the entertainment business (recorded music sales, for example). If NewTube does nothing more than capture a fraction of that for the producers of Heroes, Family Guy or 24, it will be a smashing success. And that success will have no impact on the growth of social media properties like
YouTube.

It seemed yesterday like people were mostly talking past each other with NewTube skeptics wondering out loud about the venture’s functionality, and NewTube believers wondering out loud about YouTube’s ability to compete for ad dollars.

But given what has been announced so far it seems to me that YouTube and NewTube are designed to scratch different itches.
NewTube is all about distribution. YouTube is all about participation. NewTube is Internet media. YouTube is social media. The difference is a question of focus. The entertainment value of TV, however it is distributed, comes from the content itself. People enjoy the leisure activity of watching well-written, slickly produced stuff.  The entertainment value of social media comes from a sense of community involvement. The people enjoy the leisure activity of making, contributing and tagging.

Yesterday I raised Fred Wilson’s question about social media authenticity. Slapping social-enabled functionality onto traditional media won’t in itself transform traditional media into authentic social media. But it may help open new, hybrid distribution platforms for traditional media. The presence on the Internet of traditional media with social functionality won’t undermine the appeal of authentic social media which focuses not on content but on people.

In an otherwise excellent analysis on Techcrunch, Michael Arrington wrote:

I think a better approach would have been to focus on the user experience, but this was hardly mentioned (except at one point when Zucker said “we are shocked at the willingness of the consumer to sit through the whole show with ads on NBC.com”). It’s either arrogance or it’s blindness to the reality of this Bittorent and YouTube world. Either way, it suggests they are in over their head.

Arrington would be right if NewTube was all about creating an authentic social media property. But that doesn’t seem to be the intention.

In the discussion of how user-generated content and user-generated distribution will transform traditional media the Net is full of parties with dogs in the fight and the discussion perpetually devolves into absolutes: “We Get It!” shouts one side. “No you don’t,” shouts the other. But for the truly fearless I offer the recent history of the pornography business as proof that professional product, social re-distribution, and user-generated content can live happily side-by-side.

From the days when papyrus was the cutting edge “signal distribution technology,” pornography has been at the forefront of media innovation. In the earliest days of the home video boom, it was the porn business that led the way with semi-pro and amateur content (Ed Powers’ Dirty Debutantes series of videotapes remains a landmark in the development of prosumer media).  In the earliest days of the commercial Internet, it was the porn business that did pioneering work in online payment systems. Today the pornography industry is larger in dollar volume than the so-called legitimate filmed entertainment business despite the fact that its leading corporate commercial producers face a volume of online file sharing that embarrasses the volume confronting the music business (try a Morpheus search for Jenna Jameson). And an entire economy exists to support user-generated content–from the personal
websites of amateurs to properties like Homeclips which aggregate amateur content.

If only News Corp and NBC can come up with content as compelling as MILF Money or Baby Doll Naughty Confessions, NewTube would really be on to something.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Social Media Now: YouTube v. NewTube–Can Big Media Keep it Real?

Last November VC Fred Wilson asked an interesting question of the blogosphere: Can you fake authenticity?

It’s an enormous question of course–the stuff of a thousand dissertation–particularly for Americans. After all, our culture is based on the artificial invention of identities that project authenticity.

But Fred was asking specifically about social media businesses–can the sense of community that inspires the viral growth of companies like del.icio.us, Digg, craigslist, and, yes, YouTube, be intentionally replicated through corporate planning?

Well, it looks like we’re about to get a text-book test case with impending announcement  that NBC Universal and News Corp’s Fox will launch a YouTube competitor this summer.

The effort is hardly a surprise. For months Big Media’s war on YouTube has been shadowed by talk of looming corporate competitors. Staci Kramer at paidContent had the latest chapter nailed on Tuesday — that the JV was coming together, and that Fox and NBC were soliciting Google’s online and tech competitors like Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo with Viacom an on-again, off-again possible collaborator.

PaidContent reports that Fox and NBC video, including material from shows like Heroes and Family Guy, will be distributed on MySpace, Yahoo and MSN.

Also, Terry Semel told an AdAge conference that the new service will be chock-a-block with YouTube-like sharing tools.

Pre-announcement commentary abounds on the Net this morning following the publication an LA Times piece which included this locker room bulletin board fodder:

Google executives’ disdain for the project is evident in their nickname for the consortium: Clown Co.

24/7 Wall Street picks up on the LAT’s comment that big media JVs have a checkered history:

The plan is cumbersome and complex making it unlikely to work. Sites like Yahoo! already have a large store of video content and a huge number of other channels, so making content from major media companies stand out will be very difficult. The same holds true for the other large web portals that the venture will target for distribution.

Mike at Techdirt hedges obliquely:

There are plenty of ways the networks can (and probably will) screw this up, but at least they’re doing something.

Whether or not the JV succeeds will, of course, depend on how cooperative the big media powers can be. It may also depend on legal matters–if the big media companies collaborate on exclusive online distribution, it that illegal, anti-competitive collusion? I also suspect that companies in the traditional distribution channels for TV content–MSOs, TV station owners–will offer some push back.

But most of all the success or failure of the JV will depend on the answer to Fred’s question about authenticity. There’s no doubt that users will show up wherever popular content is posted, especially if it is posted at sites with big traffic like Yahoo and MySpace. But will users confer on this new effort the vibe of Internet authenticity? Will users think NBC and Fox are keeping it real?

That will depend on how much Fox and NBC give to users. Success in social media depends on following the Beatles’ dictum: the love you take is equal to the love you make. Will sharing be limited to the friendly confines of approved destination sites? How intrusive will advertising be? Will users be able to make mash-ups even across ownership (say a Heroes/24 hybrid)? If so there’s a good chance that NewTube will be the feel good hit of the summer.

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Social Media Now: Widget World

Let’s assume that the future of social media is all about widgets and places where people can put them. Let’s assume a universe where all media is distributed by users to other users through widgets that stream audio,
video, text, conversations, personal messages, everything.

We already live in a universe in which every Internet user is also a producer and often a piecemeal distributor, but now let’s assume a universe where everyone is an MSO, everyone is a Clear Channel, everyone is a Cineplex Odeon; a universe where new channels for distribution spring up quickly, spread fast, and, possibly, disappear just as suddenly.

You can see where this might be scary for big media companies which are heavily invested in distribution channels, companies like News Corp which has big money invested in satellite TV, or Time Warner which operates the nation’s biggest cable TV operator.

In this light it’s easy to understand MySpace’s attempt to cut off widgets it can’t control (which broke into the mainstream press yesterday). Sure, News Corp wants to have its hands around all revenues coming into MySpace. But maybe the company is also concerned about how widgets stand to unwind traditional media distribution channels. After all, the widget they pulled the plug on yesterday was a music player.

News Corp of course is hedging its bets, promoting it’s platform for user created widgets, Spring Widgets. But Fred Wilson followed up all the discussion about widgets yesterday with post about how many Spring
Widgets are incompatible with MySpace. Intentional? Who knows.

One new, potentially disruptive widget launched yesterday in a public beta (public beta is the new official launch). Jaxtr is an IP telephony widget that allows users to connect with other phone callers without revealing
their phone numbers. The company also offers web to phone and phone to web voice mail and text messaging as well as a service which allows widget subscribers to phone in to their widgets loading voice messages.

Sounds pretty complex to me although CEO Konstantin Guericke (co-founder of LinkedIn) showed up yesterday on Techcrunch to try to illuminate.

Jaxtr has raised an undisclosed amount of money from a passel of Silicon Valley heavy hitters led by Mayfield Fund’s Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP/GM of AOL’s Instant Messenger division and David Ladd, former Octel CTO and early pioneer of voicemail.

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Social Media Now: The Global War on Widgets

The global war on widgets launched by MySpace since its acquisition by News Corp made the New York Times today in a piece about MySpace blocking the Hooka music player a few days it was put to use by MySpace’s most visible user, a singer named Tila Nguyen, whose professional name is Tila Tequila.

Ok, so Hooka, a recently launched project of online music consultancy indie911 wasn’t really “blocked.”  A MySpace spokeswoman told the NYT:

A MySpace representative contacted [Nguyen] and told her that she had violated our terms of service in regards to commercial activity. She removed the material herself, after realizing it was not appropriate for MySpace.

The TOS element that Nguyen apparently violated was loading a potentially commercial widget whose maker doesn’t have a revenue sharing deal with MySpace (the MySpace music player is powered by Snocap).

At Mashable Pete Cashmore has been tracking the GWOW for a year noting today that News Corp has also killed Revver, VideoCodeZone, Stickam, Imeem and ProjectPlaylist.

Suggests Cashmore:

…maybe MySpace has realized that the value being created by exponential growth (YouTube, for instance), is far higher than a license fee would cover. Perhaps the more intelligent move would be an “acquire or die” strategy: snap up the best widgets on the way up.

That’s fine, but what happens if the widget war escalates? Say MySpace buys Hooka, and Facebook retaliates blocking Hooka and driving its users into a proprietary music player widget? Will users abandon widgets that aren’t supported by their social nets of choice? Or will they abandon the social nets who limit widgets in favor of open platforms?

After widget makers the people most interested in the answers to those questions are the VCs who invest in widget businesses.

These guys have been having a great conversation about the monetization of the business. David Cohen started it all proclaiming that no matter what widgets will be big business because users love them.

Brad Feld responded with the opinion that widgets which function as application containers for publishers will work, but widget management systems don’t make sense to Brad.

Mike Hirschland issued an open call for thoughts about how to monetize widgets and got a lot of interesting responses.

Chris Fralic offered the opinion that widget management will work as a business offering a variety of functions:

I think we’ll see features like multiple levels of control and customization, automatic updating across the installed base, and tracking of how widgets spread and their “parent/child” relationships

It seems to me that user-chosen widgets freely attachable to all sorts of platforms–from blogs to white label social nets–are the inevitable future and will constitute a new set of networks that will carry ads, messages, and other sorts of media and information. In the long run the social nets most open to innovative add-ons will survive the transition away from social networking hubs towards private -abeled social nets. Why? Because the Internet industry always develops from a more restrictive environment to a less restrictive one.

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Social Media Now: The Consumer Lesson of Twittermania

No doubt Twitter was the story of the week. In fact, given the character limits on Twitter messages, there were probably more words written about Twitter on then Internet this week than there were words written in Twitter messages–from raves about Twittermap, a mash up of Twitter and Google Maps–to a big media wrap up in the Wall Street Journal. Several prominent blogs followed Techmeme’s lead and set up Twitter channels. Others offered personal tales of everything from Twitter addiction to Twitter revulsion (and revulsion, and revulsion).

There’s plenty of Twitter advice out there.

Several bloggers have followed Techmeme’s lead and launched Twitter editions.

And borrowing data from Heather Hopkins at Hitwise, Matthew Hurst compared Twitter usage in the US and UK, looking at Twitter growth over the past week, and wondering what everyone else is wondering: Has Twitter mania has peaked?

 

God, I hope so.

 

It would be foolish for anyone to dismiss disdainfully any application that can create so much excitement so quickly. The history of the Internet is a history of seemingly simple tools of dubious usefulness becoming indispensable parts of everyday life.

But mania is as mania does and the headlong rush to twitter about Twitter smacks of nothing so much as “irrational exuberance.”

 

Still, whether or not Twitter itself is the solution of doom, the Twitter eruption of 2007 has exposed the enormous latent demand for low-cost, everywhere messaging that effortlessly crosses platforms and unites messaging channels.

 

Today cross-platform, everywhere messaging is ubiquitous in the enterprise. (The Blackberry is to enterprise messaging what the iPod is to consumer music.) But for consumers in the US that kind of ubiquity has remained out of reach. The cost of data service plans offered by wireless carriers (circa $70 a month) is prohibitively expensive, limiting smart phone penetration. And the inability to integrate SMS, e-mail, IM and the Web without custom software means cross-platform, everywhere messaging is today a dweeb-only affair.

 

Twitter is hardly a perfect application. Most of all the signal to noise ratio is low. And how Twitter plans to monetize the service is anyone’s guess. But one can imagine a Twitter-like service with greater user control–customizable message rules for user defined friend groups, for example, or methods for streaming music or swapping pictures, or means for schools to notify parents about snow days–becoming indispensable not only for geeks at SXSW but also for soccer moms at Starbucks.

 

Now that would be something to twitter about.

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Social Media Now: Journalism Goes Pro-Am

A decade ago Tom Watson and I gave a lecture to graduate students in journalism at Columbia University. In those days Blogger wasn’t even a twinkle in Evan Williams’ eye but the Internet had already changed journalism. In the new era, we told students, everybody will be a reporter of his or her own life (so reporting will be the least important part of what paid journalists do); the line between journalists, editors, sources and readers will be erased; and any journalist can start a publication so do it!

I have no problem saying “I told you so.” In fact I’m proud of how right we were. But even we didn’t anticipate the speed with which citizen journalism would swamp professional journalism, nor how the avalanche of citizen analysis would overwhelm citizen reporting (there is simply too much undifferentiated analysis on the Net today as a daily perusal of Techmeme will make immediately apparent).

 

Which brings me to journalist and educator Jay Rosen and AssignmentZero , Rosen’s new experiement in pro-am journalism, a joint venture between his NewAssignment.Net and Wired News.

 

AssignmentZero, which launched yesterday, is designed as a 3-month attempt to connect citizen journalists with professional editors who will shape stories in advance by guiding assignments and shape stories that are published by editing packages. The assignment is a little self referential for my taste–the growth and spread of crowdsourcing.

 

(As Jeff Jarvis points out a big story, open ended, qualitative story of this type might be less well suited to crowdsourced journalism than NewAssignment.Net’s earlier efforts, for example tracking drug prices across the country.) Rosen and Wired seem to have different goals for the project. For Rosen it appears to be an experiment in proof of concept.

 

In an intro piece he asks:

Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, report on something happening in their world right now, and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely, while hitting high standards in truth, accuracy and free expression?

 

For Wired News it seems to be a software play, as Evan Hansen, editor in chief of Wired News told lost remote :

Essentially, we’re building a software platform for journalism 2.0 — open source and extensible – which we believe will bring new dimensions of creativity to news gathering

Most of the response on the Net was positive, but Duncan Riley at 901am has a blistering response basically calling the idea a hippie pipe dream.

 

Will it work? Hard to say. Riley is correct in noting that collaborative, wiki-based news efforts have largely failed. And one might wonder if central editorial control of crowdsourced information is really necessary. Doesn’t citizen journalism work because the community of users functions as an editorial board? Isn’t the most radical change wrought by citizen journalism the impact of citizen consensus on perceptions of truth, accuracy and free expression?

 

But if you’re interested you can ask these questions and more of Rosen himself. Rosen will be the featured guest at the next meeting of the Social Media Club New York chapter, Tuesday, March 27, at 6 pm at the offices of Edelman Public Relations, 1500 Broadway at 43rd Street. RSVP here.

 

 

 

 

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Social Media Now: Can Vid Sharing Start-ups Survive the Clampdown?

From the bad timing department:  today MyToons  , a cartoon-specific video sharing site, takes the wraps off its service which has been in private beta. The site is being pitched as a place where animation pros and fans can share “their creations” not the creations of others, and naturally the company has a DMCA-compliant take down policy. Maybe there are enough pro and semi-pro animators looking interested in an online hub for MyToons to build a sizable community. But there’s no doubt that South Park clips would have been like Miracle-Gro for the start-up.

Meanwhile NBC, which has sent YouTube mixed signals–exploiting the viral impact of Dick in a Box while at the same time sending YouTube a take-down letter–has cut a deal with VMIX, a big-media friendly vid-sharing startup led by Greg Kostello, former exec VP of tech at MP3.com and president of Vivendi-Universal Net Technologies. The NBC channel offers mostly teaser clips for NBC shows as well as original shorts like Zeros, a parody of NBC’s series Heroes. There are YouTube-like tools for sharing, including embedded player code for bloggers.

At VMIX NBC appears to be pursuing the Mark Cuban/BBC model–viewing VMIX as an aggregator that can redirect traffic to NBC’s own sites. Cuban was crowing yesterday about the Viacom suit. But even he noted that the problems with current copyright law is that it exists strictly to advance the financial interests of big corporations at the expense of innovation:

The DMCA Safe Harbors as they are written will not exist for very long. You can bet the same companies that spend tens of millions of dollars to extend copyrights to ridiculous extremes, or that want to push for truly ridiculous things like a Broadcast Flag, or the new Webcast Royalties, will spend whatever it takes to get the law changed to their liking. Just as they have done multiple times before. One thing is certain, our lawmakers and lobbyists are relatively cheap compared to the
dollars at stake here.

Like I wrote yesterday, maybe it’s time to rethink copyright law along the lines of its original intent (to promote the useful arts and sciences) and using limiters other than time to protect the limited interests of creators.

A bigger problem with VMIX is that it force-feeds content into the hands of users giving them the potential to share but not load or alter. Successful social media properties allow users not only to tag or comment on media but also to contribute it. The process of contributing and collaborating is part of what makes social media entertaining to users. A site or service that limits contribution and collaboration is doomed to stepchild status.

Among the flood of predictions surrounding yesterday’s big story, my faves were delivered by Jon Fine at BusinessWeek who offered a numbered list of reasons why Viacom and Google will settle. Here are the first three:

1. No network—or networks—will be able to build a YouTube on their own

2. The ancillary traffic to Viacom clips will always be much greater at YouTube than it would be at any Viacom or Viacom-plus-whoever-site; control as the networks once understood it is over, etc.

3. Thus, it would make sense for Viacom to partner with YouTube, and especially to partner with a company that’s proven adept out of putting a system to target ads around truly massive traffic . . . .hmmmm . . . now who would that be?

 

 

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Social Media Now: Dere Oughta Be a Law!

This isn’t a defense of YouTube. Not a legal defense anyway.

The Viacom/Google suit will revolve around how much control YouTube has over the content posted to it, whether YouTube’s business was deliberately built on copyright infringement, and the nature of the prior negotiations between it & Viacom. If the case reaches the Supreme Court Google will lose.

Maybe Viacom really wants to shut down YouTube. Or maybe we’re witnessing is a public price negotiation, one in which Sumner Redstone just put the hammer down.

Unfortunately the whole matter leaves the most important issue off the table–what to do about the broken state of copyright law in the US.

The Constitutional intent of copyright is , ” . . . to promote the progress of science and useful arts…” by extending copyright protection for a limited time. The idea was to give creators incentive to share original work, then allow other people the ability to built on the work. The time-limited nature of the protection would balance the competing interests of creator and society in a way that would best advance the interests of each.

The first US copyright laws followed the English model. An individual creator could be granted a 14 year copyright, and if he or she lived long enough there could be a 14 year extension. In the mid 1700s the average life expectancy of an adult was 64 years. Creators could protect works for 44% of their lives.

Today copyright extends for the lives of the creators plus 75 years essentially providing a sinecure to corporations who amass copyrights, effectively limiting instead of promoting progress in the useful arts.

Meanwhile people keep doing what they always have done–making stuff and sharing stuff.

Let’s not forget that Google is a big corporate interest in all this. But I wonder if Viacom can actually prove damages. Were ratings down because Daily Show clips were on YouTube? Did ad rates drop? Did the company sell fewer Chapelle Show DVDs?

In other words could it be possible that Viacom’s commercial interest was protected AND something innovative was promoted?

We need copyright laws for the 21st century that protect the rights of creators in ways that continue to spur innovation and time may not be the difference maker anymore.

The thread on Techmeme is predictably enormous. My favorite quickie analysis come from Carlos at Techdirt:

The suit illustrates Viacom’s misunderstanding of the web and YouTube: its claim for $1 billion essentially says that’s the amount of money it thinks it’s missed out on because of YouTube (just to put it in perspective, Viacom’s 2006 revenues were $11.5 billion). That’s pretty ridiculous, and should Viacom’s own video site ever become popular enough to deliver similar viewer stats, the revenues it generates will underline that.

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Social Media Now: Crowdsourcing a Better Mousetrap?

There are two classic ways of thinking about start-up opportunities. The first imagines solving a specific problem, the second imagines building a better mousetrap.

The mousetrap model has largely fallen out of favor, particularly among media technologists. After all, the history of new media technology is a tale of worse mousetraps (VHS, redbook CD, lo-rez MP3) triumphing over better ones.

But search remains a business sector for mousetrap makers–better algorithms=better search, or so the thinking goes.

If there’s any problem-solving thought going on in the world of search it is a matter of search engine optimization–third party businesses solving the problems of indexed sites looking for boosts in traffic. But what about the problems of searchers who want to ask plain language queries and get better, more contextually appropriate returns from the entire universe of online content not just from the most linked and trafficked sites?

Social search holds out the promise of bringing a little bit of end-user problem-solving into the search business by putting users, not algorithms, at the center of search.

Today there are two piece of news in the world of social search. First comes the beta launch of WikiSeek: Community Edition.  As Michael Arrington explains in Techcrunch, WikiSeek is something of a Wikipedia symbiote–searches only return Wikipedia entries and sites to which Wikipedia links. And at present only 10 links are returned per search (presumably this is a beta restriction). But results can be edited by anyone and that editing includes not only adding and deleting returned links but also altering the order in which links are returned. Can wiki-based search scale? Dunno. We’ll find out.

Meanwhile another company focusing on social search–Eurekster–announced yesterday that it had raised $5.5 million in second round financing (its first venture round) from Technology Venture Partners of Australia and Transcosmos Investments of Japan  Eurekster offers to blog publishers contextual, user-driven search widgets called Swickis.

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