09.29.06
Posted in Social Media at 2:29 am by
Pete Cashmore brings word that Joe Bereta and Luke Barats, one of the more popular duos on YouTube, have inked a deal with NBC. It’s becoming a familar story: put content online, generate a kagillion hits, and get recruited to the ‘professional’ leagues. (For an example of what I’m talking about check out Cubical War 2006.)
It’s the promise of big bucks doing what they love that most in the social media realm hope for. As James, on the Vivisecting Media Blog, is quick to point out, translating those kagillion eyeballs into real financial success is difficult:
Recently, one of the fastest spreading Internet memes to hit the web was the brilliant OK Go treadmill video. The link to the video spread so fast that within a day everyone I knew had seen it and I was not even passing out the link. People where remixing the video and even did a Lego stop animation video of it. This was a marketers dream and it was huge, huge exposure for OK Go.
So now that everyone knows about the band you would think that a segment of those exposed would buy the music, right? Well, according to the band and the label its not translating so well and it is actually a huge challenge to tap into the Buzz and turn that over to sales.
This isnÂ’t just in the music space either, the movie industry has the same challenge. Look at the huge Internet hype “Snakes On A Plane” had. This had such amazing Internet backing, blog hype and meme-madness. T-Shirts were being sold out, forums were being dedicated to SoaP, hell the script and title were even driven by the Internet. But in the end, it only made $15.3 million on the first weekend.
I fully believe that someone will figure out an effecient way of translating online buzz to bling bling. Until that person with the Midas touch arrives, however, we’ll continue to see stories about creative people having to get ‘day jobs’ with existing big media to make their time pay. Is that a bad thing? No, not necessarily. However, there’s a lot more people with popular online content that slots with NBC.
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09.28.06
Posted in Social Media at 6:44 pm by
Today Ning, a template-code site that allows members to easily create hosted copies of popular applications, launched three new services – a YouTube, Flickr, and Group cloner. (Pete Cashmore has the roundup and a great description of each.) Job boards have seen an similar rash of niche offerings spring up. But who is this good for? Doesn’t this just mean there’s more middle men? Who wins?
Take the bifurcation in job boards. Where once there was only Monster.com or HotJobs there is, seemingly, a new niche job board popping up every week. Cameron Moll, someone we’ve recently had speak at SLCFUG, has just launched Authentic Jobs. This is after recent announcements by 37 Signals, Om Malik, and TechCrunch. The rash launches has generated complaints of ‘Me-Tooism‘ and troubling questions: if everyone can have a job board of their own does the value of a centralized repository get destroyed? In other words, the reason that Monster is convenient for both job seekers and job posters is that it’s one stop shopping.
With these new, niche sites those with job openings are expected to be experts in the backcountry: knowledgable guides in the Internet wilds in order to hunt down the trophy candidates. In a similar manner, job seekers must spread themselves across numerous sites – after all, to say that there isn’t overlap across these tech-centric niches is delusional. People don’t easily fall into nice categories. Why would we expect them to only be interested in a TechCrunch or Om Malik position?
That brings us back to the ability to have your own YouTube. Its almost identical to the online job market: we still have posters/seekers. Like those with positions to fill, a content creators work to find an audience for their talent becomes increasingly hard with the more niche video/photo/group sites that spring up. They end up spending a tremendous amount of time trying to research communities in order to find good targets; barring that, they just spam everyone. The seekers also loose out because they now have to scan a spectrum of sources for great media. I’d bet most don’t bother – they just stick to the watering hole they know.
Personal empowerment is a great thing. However, all I see here is an increase in the number of channels (and thus the amount of noise in them).
Thoughts?
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09.25.06
Posted in Social Media at 3:54 am by
JPG Magazine describes itself as ‘image making with attitude’. It is a traditional pulp rag focusing on beautiful images. What makes them noteworthy now, however, is that they’re becoming a completely reader driven vehicle. Vistors to their website can submit images, vote on what they like, and influence what will be seen in the next issue.
Granted, a magazine with photgraphs is probably very friendly toward this kind of social experimentation – giving a yes/no vote on an image is much easier than having to proof a 1000 word article. And it remains to be seen whether people will still want to purchase a physical paper when they can see all the images (and more) online. However, big props to JPG Magazine for trying to harness the creativity of their reader base.
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09.21.06
Posted in Social Media at 3:24 am by
I’ve briefly mentioned how the Barenaked Ladies, the Candian music group, are enjoying the end of their major label contract. However, they latest news caught even me by surprise: they’ve jumped into social media in a huge way:
The band has a new 13-song CD out, but had too many tracks for it and didn’t want to toss the ones that didn’t make the CD.
The 16 songs that didn’t make it will be sold online. Consumers can download the songs, buy a deluxe CD package or get a USB stick containing all 29 songs.
“People will not often even listen to a record anymore. They might download the songs and just listen to it on shuffle with all your other music or a bunch of other bands they like,” said Robertson.
That’s not the end of the fan interaction. The band is also asking fans to download the song Wind It Up from the MySpace website and to film themselves playing along. Top performances will be mixed together for the actual video.
Those with artistic aspirations can also enter a T-shirt design competition, with the winner receiving more than $1,000 in prizes.
Very cool – a harbinger for things to come?
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09.19.06
Posted in Social Media at 4:23 pm by
LonelyGirl15 lit up social commentary last week. Most thought she was an innocent teenager posting video clips. Many feared how she would fare at the hands of her overtly religious parents. Instead, the real drama has surrounded the revelation that the videos were fake; nothing more than an experiment in episodic content by Hollywood 20-somethings.
The story has gone mainstream, garnering fame and publicity for the creators and the ‘LonelyGirl’, actress Jessica Rose (who has since made a Tonight Show appearance because of the hoopla). Many of the original fans felt betrayed– fans that had gone so far as to record their own videos of encouragement or advice to the troubled ‘LonelyGirl’.
Frankly, IÂ’m shocked at their shock.
People bemoaned some kind of lost innocence, as if the ‘purity’ of user generated content had been violated by a fame seeking interloper. The girl that they were emotionally invested in was swapped out for just another marketing trick. I can sympathize. However, expecting anything online to be the genuine article is completely naïve. The very act of releasing something as social media compromises any ‘honesty’ that it may have had. Speech becomes a bit more titillating. Stories are embellished. The drama is trumped up because there is a camera on the other end of the gesticulations.
YouTube and Google Video (rumored to be the corner stone of an upcoming iTunes announcement) are only another medium for storytelling. Further, this will continue to happen anywhere these stories can exist outside of personal knowledge of the teller. In a blog or forum we adopt personalities to interact with the audience – the antagonistic troll, the first responder, the sympathetic listener, the voice of reason, the comedian, etc. And while the gist of what someone is saying may be heartfelt the message is most certainly channeled through a persona of other intent.
The revelation that LonelyGirl was only an actress is not the sullying of social media’s integrity. Instead, it is simply a reminder what a performance ‘being natural’ on a public stage really is.
From Geek and Poke:
http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/images/page_1_79.jpg
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09.18.06
Posted in Social Media at 1:21 pm by
MySpace has launched yet another initiative to harness its kagillion users – the MySpace BlackCarpet. By adding the BlackCarpet as a friend to one’s MySpace profile users can get opted in to previews at local movie theaters. The aim is to use permission-based marketing (ala ‘Is it ok to give or do something for you’) to build buzz.
Considering that all MySpace profiles come with built in blogs this is a pretty clever idea; select people who have already said they’d enjoy seeing new movies, throw a few free tickets at them, and hope they have a positive blog post by morning. Of course, if the product is bad this strategy will backfire; however, since when has releasing a bad movie been a good idea?
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Posted in Social Media at 1:14 pm by
In a potentially huge announcement YouTube and Warner Music have announced an ad revenue sharing deal. YouTubers have long loved their music videos; whether its seeing the original artists on treadmills or watching others lip synch along, music is a big part of YouTube. The agreement makes that kind of use ok. That’s right, if you’re just goofing around and trying to create the next viral wonder with Warner Music on YouTube, it a go.
It almost seems too good to be true – I’ll see if I can’t dig up some more details.
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09.16.06
Posted in Social Media at 3:08 pm by
The muvee folks make a neat product. Till now it was just a desktop application that you could throw your pictures, audio, and videos at and it would spit out a finished ‘music video’. While the videos may not win any academy awards they were a godsend for content creators everywhere: no more time spent wading through tedious edits and transition choosing.
Muvee has since taken its product online. As Pete Cashmore on the Mashable blog states:
muveeMix, which launches today, is a new service for mixing videos on the web and posting them straight to your social networking profile or blog – Friendster, MySpace, Blogger, Multiply, Xanga, LiveJournal and TypePad are among the suggested platforms.
He goes on to point out many of the hassles the new service needs to overcome – they’ve got some usability kinks to iron out. However, think about what a move this represents: it removes much of the hassle from producing something with semi-professional quality: simply point, shoot, upload, and link too. The easier these processes become the more social sites – MySpace, YouTube, etc. will blossom.
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09.13.06
Posted in Social Media at 12:58 pm by
By harnessing the already brilliant work game creators have done, game owners are able to create new media easily, quickly (relatively), and with amazing polish. It’s like having a big, motion capable box of legos. The artform is called machinima and we’ve discussed it several times before on mutednoise (in particular, check out mutednoise’s interview with an up and coming Second Life machinima master).
Today I came across the 1K project trailer. It is 1000 cars run at once set to a Moby track.
Incredible, soothing, mesmerizing.
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09.12.06
Posted in miscellaneous at 3:12 am by
I haven’t paid much heed to the forum registration. After all, since I’m getting between 1-2 bogus spam-bots registering for the site each day I figured the form to apply must be working just fine. After poking around a bit this evening, however, I discovered that after accepting the user agreement a potential member would always be taken to a screen saying:
Sorry, that user name is already taken.
That is pretty incredible considering the newbie hasn’t even had a chance to enter a user name.
Apparently its a fairly common occurance; so much so there is a PHPBB knowledge base article about it. I ran the scripts and I’m back in business. Sorry to any who might have tried signing up for however long the form has been locked away.
It makes me wonder, however, how were the spam bots getting through? 
And now that the form is in working order can I expect a torrent of bogus accounts? 
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