FOX: Merchants of Cool

Where do you turn to find the hottest local bands? How about FOX Interactive Media's O&Os! Thats right folks, no longer satisfied with highschool sports, Local TV lashes out at local music.

From Lost Remote:

"FOX Interactive Media and a few FOX O&O’s have launched a few local music websites in connection with MySpace. The sites are an experiment to see if there is an audience for content that focuses on local bands, concerts and fans.

The first round of sites include mymusictwincities, mymusicboston and mymusichouston, with MySpace pages for each (example). The sites include streaming audio, video of performances, concert calendars and links to the bands’ MySpace pages. It’s kind of a flashback to what was a key to the success of MySpace."

Actually this is not as big of a deal as it might seem. FIM recently rolled out a much discussed content management application for its affiliate stations. This is just some additional content in the existing entertainment section.

Regardless of your views on FIM hosting local TV sites and taking half of the revenue, I can't get past the horsey graphics on the user interface. For whatever reason, the sites that use the scrolling updater completely freeze my browser.

Lonelygirl15 finale: 12 in 12

It seems like such a long time ago but I guess it was last summer.

From Mashable:

"the Season One finale of Lonelygirl15 (yes, there may be another series) will be debuted exclusively on MySpaceTV on Friday, August 3rd.

But wait, there’s more: this “12 In 12″ event means 12 LonelyGirl15 segments run at a rate of one per hour for 12 consecutive hours.

Beginning 8am Friday, you can start watching the segments, with another one coming down the drip-feed each hour of the day.

Each segment is only 1 to 4 minutes in length, meaning you’ll need to find something else to do for the other 56 minutes of each hour - no doubt MySpaceTV hopes you’ll stick around and view other clips."

MySpace TV

In a bid to compete with Youtube, MySpace announces plans for MySpace TV.

From Adweek:

"News Corp.'s MySpace will launch an enhanced beta version of its video site this week designed to compete with Google's YouTube.

"This is the next step in the evolution of video on MySpace," said Jeff Berman, gm of video at MySpace. "This is just the tip of the iceberg."

MySpaceTV will be an upgrade to the social networking giant's current video site, which launched two years ago, and, according to comScore Media Metrix, is currently second to YouTube in the video destination category. The new site will showcase premium content like the Sony Minisodes, which debuted on MySpace last week and features five-minute versions of classic television shows, alongside user-generated content and more polished Internet video offerings like the recently concluded Prom Queen, from Michael Eisner's Vuguru company.

"It's going to be a broad and healthy mix just as users like to watch," said Berman. "It's really going to span the full continuum of the content curve."

Sab Kanaujia, NBCU and Social Networks

TechCrunch dug out a deleted post in google cache from Sab Kanaujia, VP of Digital Innovation at NBC Digital Media.

The post referred to NBC's position and plans for social networks.

TechCrunch:

"On December 26, 2006 he wrote a long post on his blog outlining NBC’s vision for social networking. Sometime After January 9 the post was removed, although a cached version is here (and a copy of the text is below).

The key strategic decision they made, suggests Kanaujia, was to have a distributed social network instead of one large central property. He says they will build “official communities/fan sites around all our TV shows and movies” for example, and “the current valuations…[of large social networks] do not provide an attractive cost/benefit proposition for ownership.”

From the post:

"NBCU is building a core social networking platform that will provide various tools and functionality on all our major properties to enable users to self-express and find, interact and share with other like-minded users. We’re not launching separate stand-alone destination(s), ala MySpace, Facebook, etc. We’ll have the first launch on one of our biggest properties early next year, and then roll-out on all remaining major properties (over 12) in a phased manner before the end of Q3."

From the comments: Robert Young
"Put another way, there is a very big difference between creating a subset social network around "The Office" out of a pre-existing community like MySpace (which itself was built on a very different value proposition), versus that of creating a vertical social network primarily based on the draw of that show."

From the comments: Briana

"The biggest problem I see with creating a standalone network for companies like NBC is that users don't necessarily want to identify themselves as fans of 'NBC' but rather, fans of your programming."

From the comments: Sab responds to Robert's comment

"NBCU is not creating an array of vertical social networks. We'll have single sign-on at the back-end across all our properties to enable seamless user movement w/o requiring them to create multiple profiles. Effectively, it would be one social network with multiple communities with individual look-and-feel spread across various NBCU properties.

The idea is that "The Office" fans on NBC.com should to be able to find and interact with other fans of that show as easily as they can with the fans of, say, "Battlestar Galactica" on Scifi.com."

News Corp's Peter Chernin: No Money in UGC

Peter Chernin sees a big story for online advertising in 2007 but sees little potential to monitize user generated content.

The Hollywood Reporter:

"News Corp. president and chief operating officer Peter Chernin said Tuesday that he expects his company to exceed its goal of $500 million in digital revenue for the current fiscal year and that online video advertising has the potential to be "the single best (business) story" for media companies in 2007.

Speaking at the 17th annual Citigroup Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference in Las Vegas, Chernin said online ad rates have started to become significant at CPMs of $25-$30.

But he warned that industry watchers might overestimate the business opportunity behind user-generated content. "There is very little opportunity to monetize user-generated videos because advertisers are not always comfortable with their content, and "there is no scarcity value," Chernin argued. "If you put an ad on a minutelong clip of someone falling off a skateboard, people can find that (video) everywhere."

Business Week:

"That made me sit up and think. I have heard this from advertisers about YouTube, which explains why they're scurrying to clean up their content. But here's a lot more validation from someone who actually runs one of these sites and has a lot in this game. Chernin said that MySpace has about 2/3rds to 3/4rds as many video downloads as YouTube, the Hollywood Reporter writes.

It sounds like he's making a distinction between user generated content and social networking. But you have to wonder how willing advertisers are to climb into the wild and woolly world of social networking, beyond the places like the home page which Ad Age recently reported sell for $1 million per day. "

Susan Wu on Second Life Open Source

Susan takes a long look at the recent open source announcement for Second Life.

Beneficial developments:

• "Reducing the engineering/QA costs at Linden Lab.
• Mashup style applications, like widgets for MySpace.
• Improved graphics.
• Better support for third-party building tools.
• Accessibility by new audiences.

Challenges:

• Revenge of CopyBot.
• Dying Netscape’s Noble Death?
• Building Babel?"

Bambi's Video is King

Bambi Fransisco thinks video is king. Here some other highlights:

1. Video will drive online advertising.
2. The video business will be bigger than print online.
3. Wikis will be embraced.
4. Poor content will increasingly be consumed.
5. A new MySpace, YouTube or Google will emerge.

Online Video: Cody Willard's "Google Put"

Cody Willard has a powerful article on Financial Times about the future, near future, of online video.

From the article:

"Nothing drives me crazier than when people point to the huge, early successes of MySpace and YouTube, clearly the respective de facto standards in social networking and in user-generated video, and try to explain that they have “won” the game. Nothing could be further from the truth. YouTube is certainly a home run, but it is a home run on the fourth pitch in the first inning of internet video. YouTube is to internet video as the original three TV networks were to television."

Some good snark:

"Unlike the video sites of the “Great Dotcom Bubble”, such as Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com (purchased by Yahoo for a bubblicious $5.7bn back in 1999) which about 12 people anywhere ever used back in the day, people today are actually watching internet video."

The Google Put:

"And as the new video internet sites find their own legs and gain their own momentum and viewership, the monetisation will continue, because the audience is there already. And Google knows how to monetise audience.

That means that any company with a decent brand that generates serious traffic on the internet is going to get bought by Google, or by any of the Google-wannabes who don’t want Google to buy it first. I call this “The Google Put”.

Agency for Virtual Nomenclature and Addressing (corrected)(with feeling!)

Rik Riel points out that ICANN has announced it will seek to control, or will control, virtual address locations.

From the post:

"In a surprise announcement at the ICANN Board Meeting in Sao Paolo, Brazil, Vint Cerf, chair of the ICANN Board, declared that the US-based agency responsible for the web's domain system was now taking charge of assigned names and locations in the virtual world. Mr. Cerf is expected to be holding a virtual press briefing on this at the new Second Life Headquarters of ICANN shortly (direct teleport SLURL.)

From Vint Cerf: (corrected!)

"So, as of today, December 12, 2006, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will be forming an ancillary body entitled the Agency for Virtual Nomenclature and Addressing (AVNA.) AVNA's authority will supercede the naming authority of such private companies as Linden Labs and Blizzard and will be the first contact point for virtual world residents, MMORPG players, and other denizens of the evolving metaverse seeking to procure the use of particular names and virtual locations.

Our first order of business will be the levying of regular fees for all virtual land, object and avatar names. For your convenience, these fees will be payable in Linden dollars, There bucks, Everquest gold or any of the other standard virtual currencies. Then we will begin adjudicating intellectual property disputes for companies that feel that their trademarked names and images have been illegally appropriated by virtual world residents. Finally, we will engage in a lengthier and much more complicated process of creating multi-verse name and identity tracking so that whether you are on gmail, Everquest or myspace, you are always known by the same identifier. This, we have been assured by government authorities, is the basis for a secure and stable multi-verse environment."

I am not quite sure I understand this but nice T-shirt Rik!

(Updated) Holy Mackerel! Did I really spell the godfather of the internet's name wrong and he came here and left a really funny comment? Could it really be!?! I loves the internets.

(with feeling) Welcome Second Life Herald readers!

Social Network Numbers

Liz Gannes at GigaOm point to some new numbers from Hitwise:

"Today Hitwise sent out its measure of U.S. social network market shares by divvying up visits to the top 20 sites in the sector (see chart). MySpace has more that 80 percent of this category."

Six Apart's Mena Trott on Vox

I saw Vox profiled on TechCrunch. It looks like a great application with super timing as MySpace and Facebook continue to have issues. Wired interviewed Mena Trott, co-founder of Six Apart.

From the interview:

"Wired News: What is Vox and why did it come into existence?

Mena Trott: It's really a service intended for small group communication. We started working on this about two years ago. It was intended to be the next generation of TypePad, but when we started to think about it, TypePad was really a product for professional bloggers. We realized both TypePad and Vox could stand alone as unique offerings from us.

WN: What are the key features that make Vox tick?

MT: A real attention to privacy and control, which allows you to feel that you have a lot of flexibility in who can see your stuff. And then the ability to play well with other web services. We integrate well with Flickr, YouTube, Amazon, Photobucket and iFilm -- all those services that people are already using online and don't really have one place to gather it all."

World of Warcraft Social Network

Mashable reports the launch of a World of Warcraft social network by Warcraft Social.

From the Warcraft Social site:

"Warcraft Social Network is beta launching! We hope you all will enjoy the site. It has been in the works for a while, and we are so excited to finally see it materialize. Thanks everyone for your support. Please join so we can expand our community and features. We will be making tweaks, adding new features, and making everything more user-friendly as time goes on."

From Mashable:

"Looking beyond the Warcraft theming, it’s a fairly standard MySpace or Friendster clone, with profile pages, messaging and comments. There are a few Warcraft-specific features, however: you can add your character name, race, class, profession, realm and guild, and find members of the same guild or realm.

The bigger question, of course, is whether virtual worlds need social networks - aren’t they social enough already? It’s tempting to say that Warcraft users might not be crazy about MySpace-style sites, but that doesn’t appear to be the case: WoW’s MySpace page has over 100,000 friends and some excellent tools to customize your profile. There are also plenty of popular forums related to MMOGs, so there’s an outside chance a social network could work."

Social Networks Ad Spend: $2B by 2010

An eMarketer study points out the rapid growth of ad spending on social network sites.

From the press release:

"Just four months ago, marketers were sitting on the sidelines of social networks and watching the traffic surge. Now, advertising on social networks has become a top priority. In 2007, ad spending on US social networking sites is expected to spike to $865 million from $350 million in 2006, according to eMarketer's new report, Social Network Marketing: Ad Spending Update. By 2010, eMarketer estimates, spending will hit $2.15 billion.

MySpace will continue to dominate social networks, accounting for 60% of total US online social network ad spending in 2007. eMarketer estimates MySpace will generate $525 million in 2007, up from $180 million in 2006. Competitors such as Facebook, Bebo and Piczo will make up the second-largest chunk of revenue, followed by social networks offered by portals and "niche" networks.

International expansion remains a key area for audience growth and will shift into high gear in 2007. eMarketer estimates that worldwide social network ad spending will reach $1.1 billion in 2007, up from $445 million in 2006. By 2010, spending is expected to rise to $2.8 billion.

"The longer existing social networks take to develop adequate ROI metrics, the bigger the opening for a next generation of networks that are built from the ground up to accommodate advertising," Ms. Williamson says.

Mashablelabs: Top MySpace Slideshow Tools

Mashablelabs is really on a roll. Out today a review of the top slide show applications on MySpace.

From the post:

"In this round-up we looked for which external slideshow creators users were using. If a user’s page had multiple slideshows then that page was counted for each slideshow creator. Multiple slideshows from the same source were counted only once. Slideshows embedded in comments were eliminated because it’s a common target for spam."

Mashable Labs: The Average Youtube User

Mashable Labs has another look at some numbers. This time they create a profile of the average Youtube user.

From the post:

"From a sample of 41,000 active user profiles we collected some rather unsurprising statistics. Based on the profile info supplied, the age of an average YouTuber is 27, with 20% being 35 or older - a bit more mature, perhaps, than the kids over at MySpace.

We should add the disclaimer that this data is a bit of fun, and really just some preliminary musings before we start looking deeper at the YouTube data we’re collecting."

danah boyd: the high priestess

This is kind of amusing. The Financial Times does a story about danah called "The high priestess of internet friendship."

From the story:

"As Boyd watched these millions jump on to the networks, she began to develop clearer ideas about what deeper purpose the sites served. A large number of members were obviously still using them as a tool to meet new people. But while some were interested in extending their social network, most were not doing that at all. Instead, they were using it to reinforce existing relations with the group of friends they already had from their offline lives. For them, MySpace had become an electronic version of the local mall or park, the place they went to with their friends when they just wanted to hang out.

“When I have to explain it to parents, I say it is the place kids rush to when the bell goes,” said Boyd."

Nice article and great exposure for danah, who I really like.

Checking her blog today:

"Lately, people have been getting angry at me for not being able to look at their project; others yell at me for not being able to find 15 minutes to talk to them for their news articles; still others go straight for the guilt trip. I've started not responding to email. I find that i've gotten snippy in emails and that sucks; i even read blogs about how overly curt i am.

First, Why I am a Bad Correspondent. Second, My ongoing struggle against "continuous partial attention". I'm nowhere near as cool as Neal but, like him, i need 4+ hours of writing time at a time.

At the top of Neal's description is a quote from Umberto Eco: "I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages." What does it mean that i'm not even 30 and that's my goal?"

Fame is a cruel mistress, even for a high priestess.

Brightcove for Independant Producers

Brightcove released information about a new offering to help independent producers make money from their work.

Brightcove press release:

"In the last six months we've seen explosive growth in the online video market, especially in consumer sharing, but this is only the beginning of the Internet TV era," said Jeremy Allaire, chairman and chief executive officer of Brightcove. "Now content producers, from serious amateurs to major studios, are looking for an approach to Internet video that gives them commercial opportunities with their content as well as control over their distribution, and that's exactly what we're delivering with the launch of the Brightcove Network."

TechCrunch:

"By participating in the Brightcove Network, video publishers will be able to manage video posted on their own web sites, showcase their channels for syndication and subscription on the Brightcove website, take 50% of advertising revenue from videos wherever they play and take 70% of revenue from pay-per-download videos, including videos purchased on partner site AOL Video.

Ads will appear in several different formats: pre-roll, post roll, overlays and synced banners appearing next to the video player. Free Brightcove Network accounts will have ad placement decided for them, premium Publisher accounts will be able to select their own ad format."

AdAge:

"Evan Fleischer, director-marketing and promotions at the Rainbow Media-owned IFC, said the model is a practical one for his small cable network. "Syndication is what's going to make or break companies like IFC," he said. "We can't all be YouTube. We can't all be MySpace. ... Brightcove's a mirror of how we work in cable industry. We provide content to [cable operators], they send that content out."

"It's increasingly clear in a market dominated by YouTube and its focus very much on consumer-generated content, there's also a big emerging opportunity with semiprofessional and professional media companies that might not have the scale or expertise to build a self-made online-video initiative," said Joe Laszlo, senior analyst at Jupiter Research.

"There's going to be so much slicing and dicing," said Mitch Oscar, exec VP-Carat Digital. Asks Jupiter's Mr. Laszlo: "How big is the advertising pot going to be and when all these people take their slices out of it is it enough for a content creator to make a real business?"

MashableLabs: Video Sharing on MySpace

MashableLabs has a great review of all of the video sharing sites that feed MySpace.

From the post:

"Not surprisingly, there’s a glut of web sites offering free video to share on blogs and social web sites. Each wants to grab a piece of the pie and grow big before they drift into obscurity. Only a few will survive the shakeout and likely will be the ones already established, or those with deep enough pockets to play catch-up. Newer sites like Revver didn’t even make the top 10 list and must innovate or go the way of Movie.com into obscurity."

crayon

crayon launched yesterday.

From the press release:

"crayon, the world's first dedicated New Marketing company, is open for business from today in the real world and, simultaneously, in Second Life, the three-dimensional online digital world.

crayon is a different kind of company that integrates the best of the consulting, agency, advisory, thought leadership and education worlds - a mash-up, in new marketing terms.

"The world has changed, but marketing, advertising, and public relations have not," said Joseph Jaffe, author of the bestselling book Life After the 30-Second Spot (Wiley) and crayon's President and Founder. "There is no question that the influence organizations can achieve through traditional marketing, advertising and PR is fading fast."

crayon will help marketers, advertisers and public relations professionals better understand the tremendous changes, challenges and opportunities in today's dynamic and complex world of fragmented attention, increasing consumer control and hardening attitudes towards marketing communication.

"We're not interested in reams of data that says the world has changed. We get it," said Maarten Albarda, Director Media & Communication Innovation, The Coca-Cola Company. "crayon is not only focused on talking about what comes next, but moreover putting the ideas and promises of new marketing into action."

The launch party: CC Chapman

"Have you ever been in a stage production? The rush of energy that fills backstage just before you start. Little things go wrong. Last minute fixes. Mayhem. Crazy times that no one will ever see because they are behind the curtain?

That is what makes any live event special in my eyes. The stuff that is never seen. Sure, we had some of that today at the crayon launch, but I would of had it any other way."

Adrants:

"The riff is just typical early adopters versus late entry capitalists bent on following the eyeballs wherever they may be. It's happening with MySpace right now and people are leaving. It will happen with Second Life too. It's just too easy in this digital world to move somewhere else where marketers aren't. It's your typical game of cat and mouse.

If marketers don't tread carefully, fully understand what they are getting into, converse with and understand clearly the mindset of the people who live in the world they are entering, a disasterous backlash will occur and all parties will lose."

From the comments: Shel Holtz

"We are NOT a Second Life marketing company. We are a marketing company that has its headquarters in Second Life. It makes sense to us, since I'm in San Francisco, Joseph's in Connecticut, C.C. is in Boston, Neville's outside of London, and Chris is in New York. Should we meet via teleconference? Second Life is simply the best solution for us to function virtually yet still be able to meet face-to...er...avatar-to-avatar."

Mish:

"Jaffe said this at last week's conference and reiterated it at the launch, "What’s the next big thing? It is here today, it was here yesterday. Do it now while you can." Oh, how he is sooo right."

Sibley Verbeck Interview

I missed this but there is a great interview of Sibley Verbeck in the Electric Sheep Company.

In the Grid: Part One

"I say that we are building interactive, 3D virtual experiences for real-world companies. Some companies are already used to thinking about the Web 2.0, MySpace, user-generated video on the web, or even videogames, and so it's not so difficult for them to understand that this is a next platform. Other companies are not so active in new types of media, so it's a huge leap."

In the Grid: Part Two

"In Second Life more than any other medium ever invented, creativity has the majority of the value of a product -- so let all creative things exist, and let the most creative be the most popular! [Or] at least to the extent that creativity ties in with what most people desire, which is itself debatable, but you see my point. There is an unlimited amount of land here for communities of different types.

Some corporations don't want to be in SL because they're worried about all the non-PG-13 content, for example. Others come in with ideas [that are] the equivalent of selling Honda Civics in SL. But, A, they can't get rid of anything in SL, so they can just choose to participate or not. And, B, no one wants a Honda Civic as their ultimate fantasy car -- unless it's really souped up in an SL way. So, there you go. Again, yeah, corporations are always worried about what will get associated with their brand, and we're sensitive to that and very honest about it. But there's plenty of room in SL for button-down people and organizations, as well as every other kind."