Thanks to Metroknow for this link to a study about online activity including kids. Symantec, maker of Norton Security, did the study and here are some highlights from the study of kids activity:
Online Activity Study
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Category Archives: Social Networks
Current TV filing for $100,000,000 IPO. Initial PE ratio = infinity!
Today Current TV, with Al Gore a prominent investor, is filing for a big IPO. But there is a problem. They lost a lot of money “making” their 64 million in revenues last year. Will they ever be profitable? Global warming or not, I’m guessing they will be profitable about the same time that hell freezes over.
I still just don’t get it. I understand why video clips are fun and a significant development online, but I don’t get those who express *economic* enthusiasm for online videos produced by … you and me. As I’ve noted before about online video, I don’t understand why people think video sites can make money. Youtube cost Google 1.6 billion but doesn’t make money. Podtech had a brilliant, well executed, forward vision of the online video landscape. They even had the ultimate forward looking blogger spokesmodel Robert Scoble (who has just moved to FastCompany.com and is right now hanging in Davos with the uber-economic-elite). Despite this Podtech failed to deliver on the promise of monetizing quality content to the larger user base. I had a chance to talk about this with John Furrier at CES. John told me he’s still very bullish on video, but Podtech is going to focus more on a model where they’ll be producing company videos for corporate clients, helping them to leverage social media advantages. We also talked about how hungry many big companies are for those who understand social media and want to leverage that power to their corporate advantage. This, in my opinion, is where you’ll see most video and podcasast production efforts moving over the next few years. The money is in leading corporate clients into the uncharted social media waters rather than trying to build website visitation and monetize clips. The latter is a very dead end in my view.
So, should you invest in Current TV’s IPO? Sure you should, right after hell freezes over.
Virgin Galactic’s Open Source Spaceship
What a great concept! Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is launching a spaceship project where they’ll apply to space flight the principles from Open Source software development – ie shared development by community without the encumbrances of profitable ownership. Profit works best for some things, but in a space as innovative as space this is probably the best approach to get the job done faster. Space Kudos to Branson!
Pownce vs Twitter
I’m experimenting with Pownce, on which I’ve had an account for some time but which is now taking off as a social application after public release a few days ago. So far it seems a lot like a “prettier” twitter with a few more features. I’ve been very impressed with the way you can import friends and contacts from Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and many more applications. I still don’t like the fact that no productive person has enough time to really engage with any of these networks – thus the idea application would be one that would carry me around as I’m online rather than force me to log in and off and participate on the applications terms rather than mine. MyBlogLog still – for me – offers the best functionality of all of them and now with their new API I think it might be the best platform for our US History and Travel website where we are hoping to build something of a travel community from the many users who just drop in for a bit of info.
Another shot in the Blog Revolution? Few links if by land and none if by sea.
Louis Gray is rightfully pissed off at the way Mashable, a major tech blog, did not properly handle some stories written by Gray. Basically they under-attributed Gray’s reporting of Robert Scoble’s PodTech departure. I’m not familiar enough with Mashable to know if Gray is reasonable to suggest that they’ve built the whole site on this type of secondary reporting, but I certainly agree that blogs are now doing what mainstream media has done for decades – sacrificing good quality reporting in the interest of monetization. Also I think the great and thoughful voices of several big blogs have been largely replaced by marginal writers and writing as those sites struggle to become “media companies”.
Another defect of the new web is that linking practices and linking strategy have become very critical to success – A list sites simply don’t link out appropriately because they (correctly) view their links as valuable and (incorrectly) choose not to give that value away.
Matt’s got a good post on this story, noting how attribution is a cornerstone of good journalism and Mashable and others should do a better job of attribution, though I’m not clear if Matt would agree that insufficient linking is part of opportunistic linking strategies more than journalistic oversight:
I wrote over there:
…. but monetization is trumping journalism all over the place and I think the blog community should think about this a lot more than we do.
I don’t know about Mashable’s practices, but often it is marginally paid and marginally talented writers who feed the big blogs that originally had really thoughtful voices.
Also, natural linking has effectively become a “web currency” and many “A list” sites are very reluctant to link to sites outside of their frames of reference – I believe they see it as too big of a favor where even 5 years back it would have been done without a second thought.
I see this as a growing problem with many large, heavily monetized tech blogs. They are (slowly) trading profit concerns for journalism and web concerns. An inevitable thing, but a bad one
The video revolution will NOT be televised, because it’s boring.
OK, I officially don’t get it. Don’t get all this talk about how online video is the next big thing. Perhaps more accurately I do get it, but don’t understand why so many bright and well connected folks don’t seem to understand that there is a very important challenge with video that makes it far less significant of an online force than most of the early adopters seem to understand. Online video has a role to play in the information landscape, but it’s not nearly as significant as many seem to think.
Here’s a BBC story about the very clever Loic Lemeur and his clever SEESMIC project. We’ll see more of these stories over the next few years as mainstream press slowly figures out that the early adopter online community is very enthusiastic about videos, video blogging, and pretty much any moving pictures that you can pump online. Seesmic is a combination of video and community and thus offers the killer combo if you buy into the idea that the online world is going to revolve primarily around two key components: social networking and video.
I’m very skeptical. Not about the internet, which continues to rule. Not about social media, which clearly has become and will remain a key driver of online life. The internet has always been about people far more than technology, and the best definition of “Web 2.0” is an internet driven primarily by people and their needs rather than technology and its constraints. But I’m very skeptical about online video, and I think the early commercial challenges of companies like RocketBoom, PodTech, and YouTube are an indication that it is very difficult to build a business or a community around video, let alone create a highly profitable environment that will drive future innovation in this space.
The biggest single challenge to video is obvious but overlooked by most of the sharp folks I see working that angle: Most video clips are very boring. Unlike a wordy blog entry you can quickly scan for the quick info buzz, and unlike pictures which you can review at the speed of an eye blink, with a video blog entry of video clip you’ll need to pay a lot of attention, and take up much of your attention span to glean the nugget or two of interesting content you’ll be lucky to find.
Video online enthusiasts often agree with this, but then suggest the answer will be better video indexing services – applications that chop up the video into dialog chunks or “ideas” that are then indexed and easy to search and easier to surf. Sure, that is an improvement, but if I want the goods I’d rather have a transcript and/or a few still pictures than a video any day, because unless you are a very slow reader a transcript is going to be easier to deal with efficiently than a video.
So, is there any room for video online? Of course, it’ll continue as a major force for cheap little entertainment bits and perhaps even could become a minor social force as tech enthusiasts use tools like SEESMIC to communicate in a more robust and intimate fashion than you can do with writing. However the lack of monetization potential combined with the fact that 99.99% of all video clips will bore to tears means that ultimately video will NOT create the kind of sea change in internet focus many have been waiting for.
In fact, the video revolution is so boring it’s not even online yet, and it may never be.
Social Networking = Facebook? Myspace is more likely to be an average person’s social space.
Marshall’s at Read Write Web is right to question some of the prevailing social networking wisdom.
He notes that the ongoing Facebook frenzy is driven in part by folks who are infatuated with Facebook while they keep foolishly thinking Myspace is of little long term significance. The numbers show how Myspace remains *the* key social media player, and trends suggest this will be the case for some time.
Firefox IPO? Blodget says to bet on it.
Market watcher Henry Blodget’s bullish on the prospects of Firefox and for good reason. Firefox has 15% of the potentially *extremely* lucrative browser market with most of the rest resting in the hands of Microsoft.
Blodget goes so far as to suggest a merger with Netscape, leading to a mega browser company that would then partner with many and build a more aggressive marketing plan.
It’s a very good idea and something to watch carefully.
Why not Flock?
I’ve wondered why Flock has flailed away in the browser market, so far without much success. It’s a great product with very sharp folks behind it, and it rests on a great idea – socializing the browser. But I think Flock was ahead of it’s time. In the meantime websites used mashups and widgets and such to socialize themselves, leaving Flock less valuable than it would be in a world where you could not easily get cross-website activity within your existing browser.
Even early adopters (well, maybe not Scoble, who seems to try a new application every 15 minutes) are pretty stubborn about changing applications. Google’s been the biggest beneficiary of this tendency which many wrongly attribute to superior search results. Results matter, but not as much as “momentum” which kept us all using MS Office products well past their prime.
But this factor probably won’t inhibit Firefox adoption any more than it already has – Firefox is a popular application and has enormous positive buzz, and as Blodget notes they’ve done little to hype or promote it yet.
Dodgeball vs Twitter
In a recent analysis for TechDirt Insight Community I was looking at mobile social networking. Although Alexa comparisons leave something to be desired this Twitter vs Dodgeball reach comparison is pretty darn striking, and shows how the more “robust” Dodgeball has been crushed by Twitter. My take on what happened with Twitter is simple: Twitter rocked the SXSW conference last year as the key networking application for a large number of “alpha” onliners. This popularity has carried over as mobile networking moved into the techno mainstream.
It’s not clear to me if Twitter – or any similar application – will hit regular folks in the same way only Myspace really has done so far with Facebook as a distant second in total social networking. Myspace’s popularity stands in stark contrast to the way it is largely disparaged in much of the hardcore tech community where people will use Twitter and LinkedIn and to some extent Facebook, but would probably laugh out loud at somebody who asked them to check out their Myspace page.
2008 will see a tidal wave of social online activity and applications
My prediction about the evolution of the internet in 2008 is that we will see a lot more excellent applications like Flickr and Picasa to store, organize and share stuff as well as a lot more Twitterfeeds and Tumblrs which allow you to more easily share and assemble content you have stored or created elsewhere.
I don’t think there will be more huge breakthroughs in search or social applications, rather we’ll see people increasing and refining their use of social applications (and to a lesser extent search aps) and we’ll seee a huge number of new programs arise to accommodate the tidal wave of online social activity.
We’ll see blogging go much more mainstream and probably show signs of levelling off in the affluent world as those of us who are compelled to write all get blogs. People in tech who like to write already have blogs, and people out of tech who like to write are mostly in the process of “getting blogs”, and I mean that in both senses of the word “get”. In the developing world, with the advent of One Laptop Per Child and other great technology enabling projects, blogging will begin to take off in extraordinary fashion as everybody with something to share will soon have the means to … share it with everybody.
These are exciting times for those of us fortunate to be on earth and online. Let’s not screw it up, OK?
Joe Duck 