Although it’s fun to attend conferences like SES you can learn an enormous amount reading the many folks who are live blogging the sessions here in San Jose. If you read this and I haven’t added your blog please do so in the comment section.
Search Engine Watch (official blog for SES)
Tech Macro News
OK, so I’ve got Gymnastics on the TV and Table Tennis early rounds on the computer. HUGE kudos to NBC and Microsoft for providing such a superb streaming and downloadable video environment – this is definitely NOT your father’s technological Oldsmobile Olympics.
Effective with Beijing we are seeing how powerfully technology can cover major events. In this case the coverage was very expensive, but as these technologies mature and bloggers become more adept at webcasting we can expect a lot of visibility where there was little before.
Cool.
Erick at TechCrunch has a problem with the coverage and is calling NBC lame, but he’s very wrong about compatibility and lameness. Bob Kostas’ deadpan nonsense notwithstanding, NBC rules.
Wow, once again for interesting stories about sex, lies, and videotape you need look no further than your computer screen. Here’s the interesting scoop that is leading to some nastiness in the chattering nonsense of my favorite technology blogOsphere:
After noting on Twitter a nasty debate about “self made” vs “sugar daddied” between online content guys Jason Calacanis and Andrew Baron this popped up:
ValleyWag reports:
The Rocketboom episode neatly explains why the world of online video so resembles film school, a parent-funded enterprise of self-indulgent auteurs with macroambitions viewed by microaudiences (including yours truly). Sony’s deal doesn’t affirm the potential of online video as a means of creative expression; it simply tells us that the rich, despite themselves, can’t help getting richer.
Rocketboom was the early tech news show hosted by Amanda Congdon. Not clear to me how much this hurt the show, but the buzz died way down until Rocketboom was bought by a big player recently.
But it gets more fun/sad/tragic/interesting. Baron’s father, a prominent Texas attorney, is a friend and supporter of John Edwards and some rumors suggest he may have played a role in what appear to be possible hush money payments or at least hush up activities surrounding John Edwards affair with a …. campaign video producer.
So, do all roads lead to low monetizing but highly subsidized online video? Stay tuned for the next video episode – at least as long as we can find some politicians or parents to pay for it.
First I want to say how I really appreciate the fact NBC is going to place all of the Olympic sports content online – a real boon for those of us who follow sports like Table Tennis and Badminton. Those sports don’t make prime time NBC TV – in fact historically they are simply left out of the TV coverage.
But reading in NYT about how they spent much of the past few days keeping the opening ceremony offline makes me wonder how well they thought this out. I really love watching the opening ceremonies – even the boring parts – and for the audience that would have watched this online live I think they could have targeted some great advertising – for example I would have been happy to sign up for “Olympic Specials” and give more demographic info than I normally would do in exchange for the privilege of a real time or short delayed webcast. As an advertisers how would you like it if NBC offered you the ability to slice and dice your audience according to a survey you helped produce?
As it happens my daughter’s play conflicted with the first few hours of the ceremony, so I’ve taped them on media center and will watch them tonight or later. But you can bet your bottom NBC dollar I probably will FF through most if not all of the ads – in fact through the boring parts and ads which I would have *had* to watch if they’d let me see this live on China’s 8/8/8
I can’t help but think NBC’s approach was shortsighted. Why squelch all the videos they could find rather than work to provide us with coverage of one of the the greatest events humanity has to offer at the time we want to watch it? In this case wouldn’t choice have been more profitable?
Here’s a thoughful observations from YieldBuild after attending the the OMMA conference. The issue is whether you can do too much targeting of your advertising and scare folks away by being “creepy”.
Although we’ve only begun to scratch this surface I suspect that it’ll be dependent a lot more on the individual than on the targeting mechanism. For example I don’t really mind Google “reading my titles” and offering relevant ads to me as I read my email, though for some this is clearly a major invasion of privacy. (What? You didn’t realize Google is reading all your titles and possible your content, though I’d guess they dont’t do that for liability reasons alone)
Two of very interesting posts about VC fund economics are over at Fred Wilson’s joint:
First “Venture Fund Economics” | Second
A challenge is that my understanding is that Union Square fund has done *much better than average* and therefore you would not want to make generalization about the VC industry from their experiences. I also need to get some feedback from Fred regarding the time frames he is discussing in the specific example he gives of a fund’s projected performance.
As I noted about some of his Venture Capital observations some time ago it’s very important to make sure you are factoring time into these equations, especially when the time frames are in decades or many years.
Fred points this out in the first post as well, noting that doubling your money is not really that impressive if it happens over a ten year time horizon. It is critical to always recognize how the current value of money is greater than the future value – the gist of the notion of how “discounting” affects investment and other economic decisions.
I just stumbled on this provocative statement at a website:
We invoke the spirit of free and radical inquiry with the least amount of censorship, whilst preserving high standards in quality control.
Somehow it struck me as oxymoronic. Not that “high standards of quality control” would *necessarily* mean that they’d edit according to some sort of ideological or thought standards, but it just seemed like they were leaving open that possibility. Most online censorship takes the form of anti spam measures – which we almost universally approve of. Other much more questionable forms are “you are off topic”. I try to avoid making that type of decision. However when blogging the Kim tragedy I practiced some harsh censorship by completely banning comments from a guy who initially was thoughtful but became abusive with his comments. I don’t regret that decision, but clearly I was practicing censorship of his point of view. I don’t like notion that censorship has a clear line of distinction from other editorial forms. Rather I think it’s clear that everybody practices censorship of various forms, and what we need editors to do is explain which forms they apply rather than try to explain why their brand of censorship is not censorship but is some form of quality control.
Related was a legitimate but annoying form of censorship/spam control hit me yesterday and I was clueless until the webmaster explained what happened.
I tried to write something in response to a silly comment over at RealClimate.org which included the word “Socialistic”. The spam filter was NOT being political however – can you find the drug in the word?
so cialis tic
OK, even though I really love the power of tagging things and think *auto tagging* will quickly becoming a cornerstone of how the world will effectively managing the maelstrom of web content effectively, I’m not really feeling the new launch of Delicious – the site and application that in an important way is the grandfather – which in web years that means you have at least passed out of drooling infancy – of content tagging.
What? I have not even reviewed the new site or APIs? Yes, I’m blogging before enough thinking again (sorry, Sarah Lacy!)
Delicious’ basic tagging idea is very good – users tag stuff and share tags with people and the main site then has a body of information that can be used to determine the sites most appropriate for various tags. The challenge of course is that noboby much wants to spend that extra 10 seconds or so tagging stuff, unless of course you are a search engine optimizing person in which case you are going to be *far too willing* to tag stuff. This disparity in tagging enthusiasm can easily distort the results, especially for popular commercial terms. This is why I would argue that the best tagging is automatic or based on simple behavior observations rather than direct user feedback. Google, MSN, Yahoo alll have this type of massive behavioral data stream and I want to see them process it to improve the search experience. For example if, after millions of searches, 4 out of five people who do a lot of dental searches click to the site “dentistry.com” and stay there for several minutes after a query for “dental information”, you can be fairly confident that the site is a good one for that query. This is a simple equation but data can be processed in far more complex fashion to reveal a lot more about how others are searching and finding things. Generally this will give us a lot of insights.
So, I’m hoping a lot of folks use Delicious and tag like crazy, but I’m not holding my breath…
When Google bought Youtube for 1.6 billion last year they effectively allocated $400 million of the purchase price towards lawsuits they felt were coming down the pike. Although both the purchase price and that extraordinary “copyright payoff” of 400 million seemed extraordinary at the time, Eric Schmidt and the Google boys may be wishing they’d allocated a few more bucks to stave off the copyright violation bandwagon, which today solidly topped YouTube’s 1.6 billion price by about 179 million dollars.
Viacom is suing Google for a billion already, and today Mediaset joined the fun with a 500 million Euro ($779 million US) lawsuit. Interestingly, Mediaset is controlled by a company owned by Italian Prime Minister Sylvio Burlusconi, so the case will likely become fairly high profile in Europe.
So, assuming YouTube is worth the $1.6 billion Google ponied up for the big show, they’ve got to be more than a little concerned that the legal onslaught has only just begun but already is approaching 2 billion. Obviously neither Viacom or Mediaset expects a full payout but you can be sure many, many others will follow for two important reasons:
1) Google’s got the money. Deep pockets are a *very* attractive stylin’ feature these days and despite some stock price setbacks Google is still sitting pretty pretty in terms of cash and revenue prospects.
2) Videos don’t got the money. Monetizing video remains one of the most problematic features of the online world, and it’s becoming clear that no “magic bullet” is out there. I’ve written for some time that video will not monetize well and I think the jury (that would be millions of us out there in online land) is almost in with the verdict that video simpy will not pay distributors nearly as well or serve advertisers nearly as well as pay per click which remains the most lucrative and effective form of online advertising – probably of any paid advertising for that matter.
WordPress is one of those amazing Web 2.0 companies that always impresses you with innovation and quality.
Here, they have created a way to better index WordPress blog content using Google sitemaps. WordPres was was already the best CMS system in terms of facilitatating proper search rankings through categories, tagging, and general structure. Ironically WordPress is better than Google’s own Blogger.com – ie I think it’s fair to say that an identical blog written to the two CMS would rank better in the WordPress version because it is far more robust in terms of crosslinking, creating categories, and with the sitemap feature even pushing out content descriptions to Google. To Google’s credit they do not appear to elevate blogger content above others – in fact I think the algorithm accurately notes that bloggers blogs have far more spam than WordPress.
Of course one of the best aspects of WordPress is that Matt and his merry band of WordPressers don’t charge a dime for all their great WP work. They make enough off of spam blocking “Akismet” which is sold to big companies for enterprise network use, and pick up a few bucks from various add-on features such as domain names and CMS styling at WordPress. This is a perfect example of how innovative entrepreneurship, global scale technology, profit and non-profit can all mix comfortably in systems that work well for every participant.
WordPress dudes, keep up the amazing work!
Joe Duck 