Preserving our Fondest Memories Digitally - SMC San Francisco Thursday Sep 20

Join us this Thursday September 20, 2007 in San Francisco at Adobe’s offices beginning at 630pm for a fascinating look at how we are preserving our memories and sharing them with our loved ones (please register here). Social Media, emerging technologies and storytelling are changing the way we connect and stay connected with our families and friends - but what about those folks who don’t know Web 2.0, or those that are not digital natives. How can they preserve their memories and share their favorite stories? This is more than just another look at Flickr and YouTube.

We are going to take a look at a great service I first heard about from Social Media Club Phoenix called iMemories, when I met Linda VandeVrede, their PR Director. Joining us for this discussion will be Mark Rukavina, their CEO wo will talk about some of his insights from helping the boomer generation leverage Social Media technologies. He will also address some of the difficulties of dealing with non-digital media and the solutions they have developed for digitizing them and storing them in higher quality.

Additionally, I am very excited to have our long time friend and very early supporter Jen Myronuk joining us to talk about the importance of digital storytelling and her experience interviewing important senior community leaders before the pass away. Jen is the founder of Storyfield and brings a unique perspective to this subject that is very complementary to Mark’s.

We will kick off the evening with a short introduction on the topic and share some personal experiences about how we are each preserving our memories today. Mark and Jen will each then give separate presentations, discussing the social and technical issues involved. We will then dive into a round table discussion of the challenges we each face in preserving our own memories - from conversion, to storage, to sharing and even educating our families about how to use the tools.

Many thanks to Adobe for hosting us and sponsoring this great event with food and drinks. We will have informal networking from 630-7pm, kicking off the discussion and presentations promptly at 7pm and going through 830pm. Please register here so we have an accurate head count for food!

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Quick Update from San Francisco

Been a tough and busy few days, but today is going to rock (though losing the earlier version of this post was not the highlight I hoped for). Tonight in San Francisco Karen O’Brien and I are leading a discussion on connecting with our communities - how to find them, how to determine where to get involved and how much social engineering is required to make the networks of people work. Many thanks to Crimson Consulting for sponsoring this month and next month’s refreshments. There are still a few open spots if you are interested, expecting a few to show up out of the 80+ registered.

In a few moments, I am going to start a little Ustream experiment, with a call in consulting show called Chris’ Insytes - if you have some questions about social media strategy, or you have a specific challenge your are now facing, join me in the chat room (or direct Twitter me, username is chrisheuer) and let’s see if we can come up with something innovative and insightful together.  As I always say, “there is no box”…

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Social Media Now: Deflating the Blogosphere, Sony Share

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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Social Media Now: CBS and Rolling Stone Go Social

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

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Social Media Now: MySpace Kicks the Photobucket

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

 

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SMC London goes videoblogging

March 22, 2007

The London experiment with weekly media-making meetups continued this evening with another member getting his first taste of videoblogging. Guy West has been a regular at our discussion groups and kindly recorded some audio at one of the meetings.

We sat in the brand new foyer of the British Film Institute/National Film Theatre which only opened last week and chatted about our social use of the internet. I was showing off a bit pointing the camera in my general direction which results in the people standing behind me being beautifully in focus, but my face (some will no doubt say this is a blessing) is a bit blurry.

No Palme D’or for this one, but at least we had some footage - and it wasn’t just of me! I showed Guy how to transfer from the camera to PC and then do some simple editing tasks and then we topped and tailed it with some titles and credits. We’d stood around for long enough, occasionally getting odd stares from the patrons of the Lesbian & Gay film festival that’s currently running there so I didn’t make Guy watch while we uploaded it to YouTube - he knew how to do that bit anyway.Next week the clocks will have gone forward, we’ll be into British Summer Time, and hopefully it will be a bit warmer for our first Blogwalk.

Watch Lloyd & Guy chat about teh internets in the BFI foyer

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Chris Pirillo is a Media Whore

February 16, 2007

I say that lovingly of course, as I often reference myself in the same terms, jokingly - though he did rent his chest, which may make it a bit more literal than in my case.  First off, I must preface this by saying that Chris is a colleague, and over the past year plus, has also become a friend.  I relish the opportunities I have to actually interact with him, since he really defines what it means to ‘get it’, and more importantly he is a nice, smart guy who genuinely cares about people.

Why annoint him a media whore today? Because he is integrating one of the most compelling parts of the radio experience with vlogging (aka video blogging, vidcasting, user generated content, whatever).  His latest experiment, which I believe will be a huge hit that ultimately lands him with another TV deal, is to bring his old show from TechTV, “Call for Help” to YouTube.  See his pitch on YouTube and then read his post for more details.

Of course, the problem he will face is that “Human’s Don’t Scale”, so demand will outstrip supply until he can have other experts also answering video calls, ultimately weaving together the best answers and identifying others who really understand their areas of expertise and also communicate well.  So perhaps what he can do is buy up one of the old technologies from a defunct Answers.com or Wondir.com competitor (or maybe partner with one of them) store the questions and answers on YouTube, create a context for the topics like Chris is doing here and voila, you have a really amazing media property and incredible value for all participants - even the one’s who are stuck on their couches and not using mouses…

So anyone out there want to co-produce this and help make it happen?

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