10.31.06
Posted in Social Media at 11:42 pm by
Tinfoil hats on!
mutednoise recently gazed in wonder at the signifigant price paid for the profit-less but eyeball rich YouTube. Even with a supposid bidding war with Yahoo $1.65 billion is a lot of money for a site with lip-synching videos and pirated show clips.
Cuban, earlier this year, stated that no one would buy the video sharing site because of pending legal issues. When rumors of the Google-YouTube deal began to circulate Cuban stated that they would be ‘morons’ to do it.
Now, in what looks like a cheap attempt to save face, Mark Cuban reprints a rumor gleamed from a miscellaneous forum. According to the unrevealed source, YouTube paid the media industry hush money to put off lawsuits for at least six months. During that time it is to be understood that the media players would sue YouTube’s competition to slow their growth, continue to build their marketshare, and dry up venture capital for other upstarts (Bolt and Grouper were both sued this month).
Viacom, the owner of MTV and Comedy Central, didn’t get a slice of the Google money because they didn’t come to an agreement in time. Comedy Central clips started disappearing within the last two weeks. This week comes word that Viacom is suing for copyright infringement.
There are some pretty bold claims there. I don’t even know quite were to start – Cuban spreading rumors to try and save face (CNet even got the bug), the buying off of Big Media, the power play to destroy competiton, etc. There’s a lot here to sift through…. 
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10.30.06
Posted in Social Media at 12:30 pm by
As you may have read Pete Ashdown is the Democratic candidate in Utah. What’s notable is that he is running against an 800-lb. 72-year old Republican gorilla named Orrin Hatch. Despite a compelling message and lots of miles logged Pete has a hard time getting attention; people here Hatch and just assume that the incumbent will rue the day.
What do you do when news conferences and press releases fail to get media play? Why, bring in the baby!
YouTube Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWbHz3fkGhc
That’s Pete’s daughter, Greta, and is probably the most unpolitical ad you’ll probably see this election. That uniqueness is exactly what is working for Pete at this time – it is so different (and, to some, perplexing) that they end up talking and sharing the ad with others. A quick scan of the YouTube tallies for this and other more ‘conventional’ videos on the site show that Greta ahead by several hundred.
It’s a viral message that is spreading – but is it too little too late? After getting over the curiosity of the spot, will people move on or dig further?
As a quick aside, remember that tomorrow is Election Day – make sure to vote!
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10.24.06
Posted in miscellaneous at 12:28 am by
…Not that I am a irrepressible keyboard vamp-ist to begin with, but I’m trying out a new sleep routine this week. Until I get the early morning/early to bed routine down my creative juices may be out of synch with my shut eye. However…
Is anybody else here watching NBC’s new dramedy, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip? I was never a fan of the West Wing, Aaron Sorkin previous television show. But I am really enjoying the wit he’s bringing to this show.
Do you watch? Need to gush?
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10.19.06
Posted in Social Media at 6:28 pm by
Normally I try to shy away from projects that are months (or even years) away from being accessible to the public. There’s just too much that can happen between then and now to get people hopped up on hype. However, the Venice project has too much promise not to gush about. Why the blurb? Because of the founder’s cred – the Venice project has the backers as the guys who created Kazaa and Skype.
Janus Friis, the wonderkid behind both those apps, is blogging about Vience:
It’s simple, really — we are trying to bring together the best of TV with the best of the Internet. We think TV is one of the most powerful, engaging mass medias of all time. People love TV, but they also hate TV. They love the (sometimes…) amazing storytelling, the richness, the quality itself. But they hate the linearness, the lack of choice, the lack of basic things like being able to search. And wholly missing is everything that we are now accustomed to from the Internet: tagging, recommendations, choice, and so on… TV is 507 channels and nothing on and we want to help change that!
Pundits are already guessing this is some kind of distrubuted video play. Given that YouTube, a centralized service, is eating up more than a million per month in bandwidth hosting, a de-centralized service where the burden is shouldered by the audience would be more cost effective.
I just wonder if Venice will be late to the game. With YouTube and Google Video reaching important deals with content providers, and BitTorrent continuing to provide an illegal fix, where will Venice fit?
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10.18.06
Posted in Social Media at 11:15 pm by
Legalized torture got you down? Can’t shake the North Korean pending nuclear winter blues? Gout? Take your mind off your troubles with this excellent batch of video from around the net:
* South Park meets WoW – don’t know how long this site will be up (or how legal it will be but if you missed this episode the first time (or *cough* can’t justify cable) check it out online. Give it some time – it seemed to stream slowly for me but the in game cut-scenes are fantastic.
* I’m enjoying Geek Entertainment TV. The host, Irina Slutsky totters between bubbly and annoying for me but her access to the movers and shakers in my little world is incredibly. On the front page at this moment there are interviews with Mark Cuban, Ask a Ninja (no, it’s not as funny as you think – must be lack of the costume), and Cory Doctorow. There were enough entertaining moments to distract me during the disappointing Tina Fey bomb 30 Rock.
* Ben takes a picture everyday and posts it to YouTube. No, I haven’t gone soft and posted one of those lame windows into someone’s lack of life. This is a spoof on those lame windows and its good. Tip: watch for the books and read the titles.
* WallStrip with Lindsay Campbell. Let’s get one thing straight – the stock market is a massive collaborative hallucination specializing in mob mentality and fueled by greed. But WallStrip is such a promising recap of that hallucination’s effect on popular culture that I’m willing to forgive. It just started Monday. If they can keep up the quality up (a big if considering its a week-day daily) they’ve got a winner on their hands. And don’t even start the comparisons to Rocketboom. That show was never funny and has been coasting on its first mover advantage for way too long now.
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10.17.06
Posted in Social Media at 1:42 pm by
At mutednoise we love YouTube (maybe not $1.65 billion worth of love but close). ReviewTube is a site that takes the already social media rich YouTube and adds a whole heaping additional layer of social creation on top of THAT.
It works like this – go to ReviewTube and load up any YouTube video by popping its URL in the provided form. The Adobe Flex based application then loads up the video. As the video is playing you can provide commentary, providing even richer meta data about the video as its playing.
For example, take the newly launched stock-humor vlog, WallStrip. Just pop the URL in the ReviewTube Player:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLhKw2uKUE8
and start commenting away (one has to be registered and logged in to leave comments).
Super slick. I predict YouTube to have this (either from buying out ReviewTube or rolling their own features) within the next 2 months. It is the logical progression in their social video toolset.
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Posted in Social Media at 1:26 pm by
I recently became involved with the Gwabs project as a copywriter. Gwabs is an upcoming ‘desktop to desktop’ networked fighting game; imagine if you had to raise Pokemon on your desktop who then had to fight off other encroaching Pokemon from other players.
Right now the project is knee deep in development so there isn’t too much for the copywriters to do. However, the downtime does give me a chance to become familar with the web based tools we’ll be using for collaboration.
Rather than having to exchange IM handles or arguing over just which platform (AOL, Yahoo, MSN) to use all conversations use Campfire. Campfire is a completely browser based chat system from Chicago’s 37 Signals. Verdict is still out – it looks uncomplicated but I have yet to catch anyone on the team online to see how the chat works.
We’re also using Google Docs for document collaboration (formerly Writely). This morning I was able to jump into the first created document that was being circulated for comments and easily make my changes. I used to work for a company who’s bread and butter was document collaboration and change logging. It was this cumbersome process built mostly off the back of Microsoft Office documents. I had long argued that we needed to adopt an approach to collaboration that was web-centric. Having just started on this project I can see I am vindicated.
I’m not the only one who is enthusiastically embracing these tools. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang writes:
It’s also much easier to make changes directly onscreen, in a way that everyone can see, than to put edits on a printed page, which have to then be carried later (if you can remember exactly what they meant).
He also goes on to point out that its not just distributed teams (like the Gwabs team) that can benefit from a browser based set of collaboration tools:
the system may facilitate collaboration at a distance, but it supercharges collaboration in person. More broadly, I suspect that this is where the really big gains in collaborative and social software will be made in the future: not in teams whose members are on opposite sides of a continent, but teams whose members are on opposite sides of a coffee table.
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10.16.06
Posted in Social Media at 4:02 pm by
ZDNet is hosting a solid piece by Donna Bogatin that asks whether ‘Users are really in control’. One of the reoccuring themes that has run throughout the Web 2.0 hype (and indeed, on this website) is that technology has empowered creatives to take back entertainment; that popular cultures has been fragmented into a bazillion ‘me cultures’ for which we’re all better off.
Donna starts her piece with this compelling comparison:
“Users are in control” packs the same mythical punch as “every vote counts.”
She then deftly goes on to demonstrate that rather than be usurped by this new media movement, the content kinds have instead subverted the creativity of the massive to building and extending their own brands.
What did she [Beth Comstock, President, Digital Media and Market Development, NBC Universal]present as “evidence” that “users are in control” at NBC? A slick, professionally produced NBC promo video promoting NBC’s YouTube contest designed to get “ordinary people” to create promo videos for NBC’s “The Office” show!
Far from being in control, YouTubers were required to create content about NBC, for NBC and promoting NBC.
…
The NBC – YouTube so-called “user-generated content” contest is, in reality, a NBC controlled and NBC dictated vehicle to get YouTubers to generate NBC content to NBCÂ’s liking.
For an even more upset voice on this matter we turn to a post by Citizen Agency’s Chris Messina that he wrote just this weekened. He compares these sort of relationships between big-guy, little-guy equivalent to sweatshop labor:
… ‘crowdsourcing’ as a business concept is a dangerous and caustic idea that attempts to rechristen the most seemingly “lucrative” aspects of the open source gift economy and architecture of collaboration as something that can be evaluated as an economic equation and leveraged against the hapless “public”.
Wired got it wrong when it established the term, putting business interests ahead of the community’sÂ… suggesting it’d discovered a gold mine of cheap labor that could become the next wave after international outsourcing. What Wired should have said of course, casting it in such a light, was that itÂ’d discovered the next source of legalized sweatshop labor where you never even need to meet face-to-face, let alone account for, the people doing the work.
Ouch. Then there is an dire warning for those seeing dollar signs by getting work for nothing:
So lessons learned? ‘Crowdsourcing’ is off limits for you corporate types. Call it ‘internet sweatshop labor’ if you need a new phrase. But keep your capitalist dog-eat-dog ethos out of open source. We’ve been there, we know what it looks like and it makes monsters out of people. Corporations are meant to serve individuals, not the other way around.
I, less sensationalistically, do believe that their can be a healthy relationship between the two – much like how whale lice benefit (and are benefitted by) the whales they reside on.
Take the office promotion, for example. Yes, for free, NBC was getting some very funning promotional spots. But in return individuals were getting a channel for their creativity. Would some of those ‘amateurs’ have made their commentaries on cubicals anyway? Perhaps. But the constraints provided by an centralized effort helped gel the process – that’s a role that can’t be underestimated.
It also is important to remember that if this contest had been for, say, syndicated episodes of the dreadful ‘Yes Dear’ the response would have been next to nill. People have a natural desire to be a part of something greater themselves – to revel in what they can identify with. If you consider the joy that millions feel by being a ‘fan’ of their local team you know what I’m talking about. People were more than willing to contribute to the Office contest because it resonated with their own lives. People do know when they’re being exploited. I’m too optomistic to assume anything otherwise.
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10.12.06
Posted in Social Media at 11:59 am by
If you haven’t yet heard, social video site YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion. News is now emerging that this was after initial negotiations between Yahoo, who was itself offering $1.3 billion. The fact that Google continues to swoop in and bust up Yahoo deals (AOL, MySpace) is a conversation for another time.
But what in the world is it about YouTube that makes it worth that amount? Careful thought still leaves me scratching my head.
It’s not the technology. It’s true that YouTube was one of the first to use the now ubiquitous flash player. It’s true that YouTbue was one of the first to allow others to easily embed movies on their web pages. But these things are commodities – meaning that they are easily copied. If you look at Google Videos they already sport both these features. Google did not buy a specific technology here.
It’s not about the eyeballs. YouTube is the leading video site on the web. It’s commonly said that they’re spending a $1 million every month just on badwidth fees. But the afore mentioned Google Video site already existed. Surely the $1.65 could have been used to increase their own visibility? Build in the kind of community support that YouTube already employs? And if they were after the social networks on YouTube couldn’t they have just partnered as they have in so many other cases (Intuit, MySpace)?
This being mutednoise let’s throw in a left-field idea. Google bought YouTube need to understand the traffic. They want to know how to scale. They want to understand how to make these massive sized files work with their distributed network systems. They don’t want to wait for someone else to come along and have better grips with how to serve, search, and store massive amounts of data. They can see the writing on the wall that our age of data abundance will only grow along an exponential curve – YouTube represents the first in a line of bandwidth heavy hogs. They bought YouTube because its a sandbox of the landscape to come.
Does that make sense?
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10.10.06
Posted in Social Media at 9:31 am by
It hasn’t been a good week for the residents of Second Life. The virtual world has been besieged by attack after attack. Tony Walsh on Clickable Culture has a great recap:
Since the beginning of October, the virtual world was knocked offline temporarily through malicious, self-replicating objects (the easiest and most common form of attack) on October 2, October 3, and October 6, October 8. On October 4, a scheduled global software upgrade that required downtime failed, At the time of this writing, Second Life has been down for over 4 hours due to the discovery of an exploitable software bug. Last month marked a spike in operational problems (which seems to have been outdone this month) and a breach of user data resulting in all user passwords being reset as a security measure.
But here’s the crux – why has this all started happening now? Again, Tony Walsh:
Second Life’s population growth has outstripped Linden Lab’s ability to effectively manage it, and I feel this is evidenced by the decline in the stability of the platform (also see Steven Davis’ views on the security situation) and the decline in the quality of service–when there’s no time to be proactive because you’re spending all your time reacting… well, that’s not a good place to be in. I don’t think Second Life is truly scalable, except in a very limted technical sense.
He goes on to predict that the next six months will either make or break the platform. While I am not one of them, virtual storekeepers who rely on Second Life to make a living must be extremely frustrated. In real life shop keepers don’t have to worry about being spontaneously locked out of their stores. Second Life needs that kind of stability that doesn’t need to be thought about before it can truly be an ecommerace environment.
Related links:
* Wagner James Au explains why reporting on these events only gives power to the griefers. Personally, I think this is a long time advocate conveniently ignoring the platform’s problems.
* October 3rd’s attack recapped. Replicating objects bear the message “Terror will rain down upon the unfit gods and the flock that they govern, from now until the End of Days.”
* October 6th’s Attack recapped
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