Tag Archives: user-generated-content

Digital Media Strategy, Featured Articles, Social Networking

5 Observations on the State of Digital Media

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I wrote this as the introduction to a report I presented a year ago, after attending the Forbes MEET conference, and was surprised at how relevant it still was… so I decided to share it with my blog readers.

1. Universal access to media distribution.

The traditional media outlets were used to managing an industry of scarce resources, which they owned. Acting like toll booths, they decided what got published and what didn’t. The Internet put an end to this system, giving everyone an effective distribution channel. The bottlenecks have disappeared. Anyone can post their opinion to a blog, a video on YouTube, and even distribute their band’s songs. MediaSnackers are an example of the way users are adapting to this new way of creating and consuming content.

2. Time-Shifting: The future of media consumption is when you want it, how you want it, where you want it.

Although traditional television will continue being relevant for a while, an ever growing number of users will opt for the freedom of deciding how, when and where to consume media. The need for watching live television will still exist, given people’s need to socialize around shows (the so called water cooler effect), but users will increasingly satisfy this need with their online friends (via Twitter, for instance).

3. A need for more -and better- editors.

In a world of easily accessible, unlimited content, the role of editors is ever more important. We need trustworthy recommendations in order to find quality, relevant content. As the value of our time increases, so does the need for editors or editorial systems we trust. This applies for all kinds of content: news, software, music, games, videos, etc. Services like Digg, even with all their faults and growing pains, are a possible solution.

4. Go Local: news will be closer to home than ever.

When agencies like Reuters can distribute their content to every news show in the world, the value of those news falls (as they’re no longer exclusive to any one show). Newscasts and newspapers need to take advantage of their local presence and knowledge to cover events of real relevance to local consumers. The tendency is towards hyperlocal: the neighborhood, the county, the municipality. The Internet is the ideal medium to distribute this localized content. Likewise, users have begun to engage in Citizen Journalism, using blogs, videos, podcasts and any other distribution technology to give their opinions, make their complaints public and comment on the latest events.

5. The Internet will compete with television on the television.

In the next couple of years the Internet will be connected to the rest of our homes. Already, content that’s available on the Internet competes with television shows, and soon watching an Internet-available show on our television sets will be a simple matter of pushing a button on our remotes. YouTube, CurrentTV, Google Video, to name a few, will have a permanent home in our high-definition televisions. Traditional media networks need to make an effort to distribute their content through the Internet (see Hulu), create Internet content that supports and extends their TV offerings (see Heroes) and, more importantly, begin to compete against themselves in this new arena.

What do you see as the future of digital media?

A Spanish-language version of this article is available at Technosailor.com, where I write a regular column. Disponible en español en Technosailor.com, donde escribo una columna regularmente.

Digital Media Strategy, Rest and Relaxation, Social Networking, Software

33 Fun Things to Do With Your Photos Online

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Now that you’ve got yourself a digital camera, what can you do with all those wonderful photos? Here’s a list to get you started:

Organize and share them:

These services allow you to upload your photos, share them with friends and family, tag them, make slideshows and send them out for printing:

FlickrFlickr – Owned by Yahoo!, Flickr offers both free and premium services. You can tag your photos, add comments to any part of an image, create sets, collections, slideshows, print out photobooks, postcards, snapshots, etc.


ZooomrZoomr – Think Flickr, but map centric. Zooomr offers nice photo storage functions, closely integrated with geotagging (placing your photos on a world map) and e-commerce (selling your photos) functions.


SmugMugSmugMug – SmugMug is a wonderful website for storing your images. It’s fast, well supported, and offers plenty of sharing options, including making photos private and password-protecting them. There’s even a special offer for Yahoo Photos customers who are looking for a place to store their now orphaned images.


PhotobucketPhotobucket – Photobucket also offers tons of features including easy options to share your images online (particularly useful for bloggers and photographers sharing their photos in online discussions)


Shutterfly – Primarily a photo-printing business, Shutterfly also lets you store your photos, create photobooks, postcards, share your photos, etc.

Fix them:

These services will let you upload your photos and edit them online. Useful if you don’t have an image editor on your computer, or when you need to quickly edit a photo while at a cybercafe.

PicnikPicnik – I was impressed by this one. Picnik will even let you play with their software without creating an account (Scrapblog will too), a clever way to let you try Picnik without forking over your personal information. Slick looking, fast and powerful. Worth trying, even if just for fun.


LookWowLookWow – Java-based online photo editor. Will let you apply effects to an image, undo, compare and save.


SnipshotSnipshot – Another really good looking online photo editor. Not as powerful as Picnik, but worth trying.


PhixrPhixr – Has a nice set of tools, but took forever to load.

Create:

MyPictrMyPictr – Quickly create image thumbnails for online social networks. Upload your photo, crop the area you want to keep (usually your face), choose the network you need your photo for and MyPictr will spit out your image in the proper size and format.


QuickThumbnailQuick Thumbnail – Great when you need to quickly resize an image. A useful feature will resize your image to several sizes at once (i.e., 25%, 50%, 75%)


ePassportPhotoePassportPhoto – The Internet equivalent to a passport photo booth, it will format your picture so that it can be printed and cut into six passport-ready photos. No more paying $8 for 19 cents worth of prints. Make sure your photo is passport-worthy before uploading.


BigHugeLabsBigHugeLabs – Do almost anything with your Flickr images. Calendars, frames, print-out projects… too many to list.

Fun:

ScrapblogScrapblog – Online scrap books. A wonderful service by my Miami friends. You can give Scrapblog a try without creating an account (you can create an account later and recover your trial project). Connects directly to your Flickr account, so using your existing images is very easy. Amazing flash-based interface will leave you wondering what else is possible on the Internet. Let your inner Martha Stewart run wild.


Spell with FlickrSpell with flickr – A fun service that will turn any word into its Flickr image letters.


PhotagiousPhotagious – Online Slideshows, themes, editing, text, unlimited uploads. Should probably be listed under “Organize and share them” but their slideshow functions are in a league of their own.


RiyaRiya – Although it’s been transformed into a “visual search engine,” you can still access their original image storage and sharing service. Riya’s technology will let you search for items containing similar items to a reference image. It will also let you identify a person in an image and find additional images where that person appears.


PikiStripsPikiStrips – Turn any image or images into comic strips, with text balloons and special effects. Look through the earlier examples uploaded into the system for the better quality stuff. It seems the latest ones are mostly people making gang signs.

Map Them:

You don’t need a GPS to map your images online, though one certainly helps. These services will let you identify the geographical place where each image was taken and show them on a map.

PanoramaBuilder Build panoramic images by stitching together your photos. Now you can pan around a place as if you were (almost) there.

3cim Virtual ToursVirtual Panorama Tours on Google Maps – A list of panoramic images overlaid on Google Maps. Mostly used for real estate.


PanoramioPanoramio – Map centric photo storage and sharing. Geotag your photos, correct photos others have wrongly placed. Panoramio photos are regularly uploaded to Google Earth so that other Google Earth viewers can see them by activating the Panoramio layer.

Make real stuff:

Your digital images don’t need to stay trapped inside your computer (or the Internets’ tubes). Make books, posters, postcards… almost anything you want with these links:

MpixMpix – Photobooks, Cards, Magazine covers, greeting cards, calendars, bookwrap, tickets, puzzles and statuettes (these last ones you HAVE to see… worth every cringe-inducing penny!)


QOOPQOOP – Photobooks, postcards, mugs, stickers, canvas prints, mini photobooks, shirts, hoodies, mousepads, calendars, greeting cards, etc., directly from your photo storage account. Works with most popular photo storage sites.


FlattenMeFlatenme – Create customized children’s books with your little rascal’s image in place of the book’s hero or heroine.


RasterbatorThe Rasterbator – An application which creates rasterized versions of images. The rasterized images can be printed and assembled into enormous (or smaller, if you prefer) posters. See website for details.

Improve your technique:

Microsoft Research Group ShotMicrosoft Research Group Shot – MSR Group Shot helps you create a perfect group photo out of a series of group photos. With Group Shot you can select your favorite parts in each shot of the series and Group Shot will automatically build a composite image. Erase someone in the background, fix faces with eyes closed, etc.


Fascinating! Content Aware Image Resizing – An amazing image resizing algorithm. Watch the video and rest easily knowing that the scientist behind is already working with Adobe on the next Photoshop.

Improve your photos with classical artImprove your photography with classical art – An interesting technique that uses traditional classical paintings to correct the light and color of your photographs.


Automator Actions: Photoshop Automator Actions v3.5 – If you’ve got a Mac and Photoshop, these scripts might make your photo-editing life a bit easier.

Manage your digital images on your computer:

These programs will help you manage your entire photo library on your PC or Mac. Most will allow you to do minor editing, cropping, resizing, color correcting and printing. Easily upload your images to your favorite online photo storage service.

PicasaPicasa – PC/Linux photo management, also includes online photo sharing for anyone with a Gmail account.


iPhotoiPhoto – Mac photo management. If you’ve got a recent Mac, then you have iPhoto installed already.


Apple Aperture – Professional photo management for Mac.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – Professional photo management for Mac and PC.

Updates:

2007/10/01: Make that 34 Fun Things to Do With Your Photos Online. Abhiram Sarat of flauntR sent me an email highlighting their quite promising online photo apps:

flauntRflauntR one-click effects – Online photo editing and effects. Includes uploading from your computer or flickr account and is nice enough to include sample images to play with. You can try out the apps (currently PhotostylR and PhotoeditR, soon PhotoprintR) without registering.

Featured Articles, Ratings Analysis, Social Networking

Content-centric Communities

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Bernard Lunn, at Read/WriteWeb wrote an interesting article about the failure of Eons.

Eons is a social networking website aimed at the over-fifty crowd, headed by the founder of job-site Monster.com. After raising $32M, Eons is now cutting it’s workforce in half – not exactly a measure of success.

In his article, Lunn touches a point I’ve been making for a long time: people gather around content, not around demographic variables (see “The Advertiser’s Dilemma”, “Rethinking Ratings” and “Why Google Should Buy YouTube” for my previous articles on content-centric ratings analysis).

Lunn think the problem lies in Eons’ strategy to connect people around age, a traditional demographic variable, and not around content or common interests. He’s hit the nail squarely on the head:

“…people want to connect around content, not around age. Connecting around content is what Blogs do. You connect on something that interests you. (…) As you get older, you get a more varied set of interests and human relationships across all ages.”

Age/Sex/Location is not a social network

Demographic variables allow advertisers and their clients to easily target their products to artificial segments of the population that probably have very little else in common, other than age/sex/location. In a small-town-world these variables may have been good enough to create desirable advertising targets, but we now live in a connected world where people of all ages and genders interact and share common interests on a scale seldom seen before.

And while you can still use demographic variables to target your product, you’d be missing a much more interesting target, one capable of creating die-hard fans and viral awareness of your product, by ignoring content-centric connections.

As for social networks, look at the successful ones and the “glue” that keeps them together:

Building a social network around content will not magically make it successful, just like putting wings on a box won’t make it fly; but those wings sure help once you put the rest of the airplane together.

The Content-centric Connectivity Chart

The following chart is an example of how people of different ages, genders and cultural backgrounds gather around common interests (caveat: networks are not drawn to scale, connections do not attempt to imply actual traffic for these sites, and age/gender/race were limited by the avatar icons I could find on the net).

Content-Centric communities chart

The Content-centric Connectivity chart highlights two key ideas:

  • Successful networks are built around content, not around demographics.
  • There’s a huge opportunity for anyone who learns how to target their products around content-centric communities.

Conclusion

There will always be products that need to be targeted around demographic variables (e.g., feminine products, some toys, acne-medication, denture products), but the opportunities and tools for expanding your product’s appeal have never been this good.

Ratings Analysis, Social Networking

NBC and CBS Neck-and-Neck on YouTube ratings

According to the latest YouTube stats, NBC has caught up with CBS on total daily page views (*) at YouTube. The change took place around Feb. 06, 2007, and is likely attributable to the highly popular D*ck in a Box Uncensored video.

Since then, it’s been pretty much neck-and-neck, with NBC pulling ahead in the last few days, as evidenced by this chart:

NBC vs. CBS YouTube Stats

The latest push by NBC seems to be due to Saturday Night Live’s Chris Rock spot, among others.

Most of these stats come from a new service I’m involved with, TubeMogul, which lets you track your videos across several video websites, compare different publishers and group your videos to compare how they’re doing across different versions or websites. I’ll be posting a more in-depth article about TubeMogul shortly, but in the meantime give it a try… You’ll like it.

(*) As I’ve said before, page views -as reported by internet video websites- are almost useless. We need more detailed stats, such as actual views (playbacks) and how far each viewer got through the video.

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Social Networking

Pecha Kucha

The term Pecha Kucha (pronounced pet-shah coot-shah) is Japanese for “the sound of conversation.” It’s also, I’ve recently learned, a place for designers to meet, network and show their work in public.

The idea is quite simple… each presenter gets 20 slides which are shown for 20 seconds each. This gives each designer a total of 6 minutes 20 seconds to present their ideas and, since the slideshow is controlled by the organizers, presenters can’t overrun their alloted time.

This sounds like a great idea for places like Congress, where participants tend to go on-and-on, sometimes even as a tactic to keep others from speaking.

YouTube, with its 10 minute limit on video uploads, has unknowingly adapted this idea to user-generated-videos. Say what you want… but keep it under ten minutes.

The DEMO conference, with their tightly controlled schedules and presentations, is a nice example of the usefulness of the concept outlined by Pecha-Kucha.org. In true Pecha Kucha tradition, each participant gets 6 minutes (I think) to present their ideas, followed by a couple of days to mingle and smooch with investors (and really explain what they’re about).

Have you seen any other implementations of Pecha Kucha? Any ideas of where it could be implemented?

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Ratings Analysis, Social Networking

Gaming the Cheaters

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The Problem

Users of internet video websites trick the system to inflate the number of views recorded for a particular video. They may do this by setting several browser windows to auto-refresh on their video’s web page, or rigging a number of different computers to do the same thing, over and over again. A group of friends may attack together to confuse any IP tracking measures.

Why It Happens

Fame & Fortune. Bragging Rights. 15 minutes of fame. Why else?

The main reason internet video websites are so popular is because people crave attention. We love to show off. “Hey, look what I made!” – “Look, Ma!!! No hands!” (The other reasons are that people love to be entertained and people are naturally curious).

We can divide the cheaters into two non-mutually exclusive groups: the attention whores and the fortune seekers. Their means are the same, their ends are different. I’ve made the distinction because they affect different websites in very different ways.

Services like YouTube, that thrive on visitor stats and video views, have no real incentive (yet) to do anything about the problem. It actually benefits them. So what if there are users on YouTube who claim to watch 70 videos per hour every single day? It only helps YouTube boost their numbers.

Services like Revver or Metacafe, on the other hand, who pay users for their content, do have a problem. Users who cheat the system into believing more people watched their videos, could steal a lot of money from them. For these services, it’s not the number of views that’s important, but the number of real, attention-paying viewers.

The Solution

So, how do we stop the cheating? Turns out there’s several ways. Most of the internet video services require you to press the PLAY button on the video player to start the video. A simple Page View should not be counted as a Video View. Mindlessly refreshing the web page should do nothing to your video’s view count.

Secondly, videos have length. So measure the amount of time people spend on the web page after they’ve pressed the PLAY button. (You can also write some code to track the video being streamed through the Flash player, but this just seems a lot easier).

This simple method will tell you two things in the long run: how many people actually clicked on your video and how long through it did they watch it.

Granted, some people may just click PLAY and just let the video play while they do something else. This is something we’ll have to live with for the time being. Advertisers don’t know whether you pay any attention to their ads on television, but they still pay for them. You adapt to the limits of the technology. (Advertisers also trust AGB Nielsen to have selected a reliable sample of viewers, but that’s another story).

One problem with the simple method (using time spent on the page) is that you can’t use it to reliably track videos embedded on other websites. This is one point in favor of developing a reliable system to track the actual video streamed through the Flash player. Or you can simply restrict your stats to those from within your website and group the rest as “unreliable off-site video views.”

Yes, you can always write a script to open a web page, click on a button, wait some time and do it again. But it’s about making it harder for the cheaters and reporting more accurate stats.

Thus, three easy steps:

  1. Track video views only AFTER the visitor has pressed PLAY on the flash player.
  2. Use the video’s length and the time spent on the page to measure how far through the video they watched.
  3. Filter IP addresses.

What do you think? Any foolproof techniques to stop the cheaters? Leave your comment below.

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Ratings Analysis

Detailed CBS-YouTube Weekly Stats and Charts

I’ve been compiling data about CBS videos on YouTube for the past week. Here are some charts with the Top 15 videos from the CBS channel on YouTube. I began gathering data on November 21st and have charted the week from Nov. 22nd to Nov.28th (inclusive).

On to the charts!

The CBS|YouTube Top 15 Videos by Net Daily Viewers

Cbs-Youtube Top-15-Net-Daily-Viewers 20061128

  1. Michael Richards (“Kramer”) Apologizes [309,188 views on 11/22]
  2. Michael Richards (“Kramer”) Apologizes [270,853 views on 11/23]
  3. Kirstie Alley’s Bikini Shock [208,408 views on 11/22]
  4. Michael Richards (“Kramer”) Apologizes [169,902 views on 11/24]
  5. Craig is Changing America! [165,804 views on 11/22]
  6. O.J. Simpson’s Rejected Product [151,557 views on 11/24]
  7. Craig is Changing America! [132,860 views on 11/25]
  8. Borat Meets David Letterman [128,636 views on 11/26]
  9. Coast to Coast Goal – Gretzky Style [125,763 views on 11/24]
  10. Rumsfeld Gets Cute At The Podium (extended version) [120,157 views on 11/27]
  11. O.J. Simpson’s Rejected Product [112,174 views on 11/23]
  12. Michael Richards (“Kramer”) Apologizes [110,864 views on 11/27]
  13. Craig is Changing America! [110,079 views on 11/23]
  14. Kirstie Alley’s Bikini Shock [108,399 views on 11/25]
  15. If OJ Won’t Admit, You Must Cancel It. [108,290 views on 11/24]

The CBS|YouTube Top 15 Videos by Average Daily Viewers
(total views for each video divided by the number of days since the video was uploaded)

Cbs-Youtube Top-15-Avg-Daily-Viewers 20061128

  1. Michael Richards (“Kramer”) Apologizes [127,754 average daily viewers since 11/21]
  2. Kirstie Alley’s Bikini Shock [89,259 average daily viewers since 11/20]
  3. Craig is Changing America! [61,678 average daily viewers since 11/21]
  4. O.J. Simpson’s Rejected Product [61,596 average daily viewers since 11/22]
  5. The K-Fed/Britney Sex Tape [59,315 average daily viewers since 11/9]
  6. Rumsfeld Gets Cute At The Podium (extended version) [58,552 average daily viewers since 11/13]
  7. Borat Meets David Letterman [55,905 average daily viewers since 10/30]
  8. Rumsfeld Gets Cute At The Podium [43,083 average daily viewers since 11/9]
  9. Playstation 3: It’s Just so Old and Outdated [42,576 average daily viewers since 11/17]
  10. If OJ Won’t Admit, You Must Cancel It. [42,540 average daily viewers since 11/22]
  11. Coast to Coast Goal – Gretzky Style [42,143 average daily viewers since 11/22]
  12. Most Memorable College Plays [40,238 average daily viewers since 11/20]
  13. Curious George W. Goes To Vietnam [38,892 average daily viewers since 11/21]
  14. Borat wrestles Harry Smith [38,762 average daily viewers since 11/1]
  15. NCIS Cat Fight [38,138 average daily viewers since 10/17]

The CBS|YouTube Weekly Top 15
(most viewers during the week)

Cbs-Youtube Weekly-Top-15 20061128

  1. Michael Richards (“Kramer”) Apologizes [968,127 viewers during the week]
  2. Craig is Changing America! [478,404 viewers during the week]
  3. O.J. Simpson’s Rejected Product [425,746 viewers during the week]
  4. Kirstie Alley’s Bikini Shock [414,882 viewers during the week]
  5. Curious George W. Goes To Vietnam [295,015 viewers during the week]
  6. Most Memorable College Plays [289,991 viewers during the week]
  7. Coast to Coast Goal – Gretzky Style [289,481 viewers during the week]
  8. If OJ Won’t Admit, You Must Cancel It [285,106 viewers during the week]
  9. Rumsfeld Gets Cute At The Podium (extended version) [268,507 viewers during the week]
  10. Borat Meets David Letterman [256,363 viewers during the week]
  11. Make A Celebrity Turkey [138,201 viewers during the week]
  12. The Newest Bond Villain [132,611 viewers during the week]
  13. A Field of Dreams for Judy Coffman [127,846 viewers during the week]
  14. Track Star Faces Biggest Hurdle in Iraq [116,377 viewers during the week]
  15. David Letterman’s Angry Audience Guy [111,669 viewers during the week]

The CBS|YouTube Video of the Week Award

By now, it should be obvious that Kramer’s apology was the most popular video on the CBS|YouTube channel this past week.

Here’s a graph showing the evolution of total viewers and the daily viewers during the past week. I’ve included Nov. 21st on the chart since that was the day the video was uploaded. That way you can see the complete evolution of an Internet hit.

Cbs Topweeklyvideo 20061128

One Final Note Regarding Last Week’s Article

On last week’s article, I noted a difference between CBS’s Top-15 list for Nov.17 and my own list for Nov.21 (please refer to the article for details) and wondered whether CBS had somehow doctored their list to make it more marketable. Having looked at one week’s worth of data I feel there is no evidence of foul play. Kramer’s video hit 800,000 views just three days after being posted, and the average daily views indicate the growth predicted in the article would have been not only possible but quite normal.

If you have any requests for particular channels to track or a specific chart you want to see, please leave me a comment and I’ll do my best to accommodate your request.

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Ratings Analysis, Social Networking

Article Roundup and CBS-YouTube Data

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A number of interesting articles across the net, CBS|YouTube numbers for the past week, and some upcoming surprises.

First off, the articles:

The Fuzzy Math of Big Media’s Digital Revenue – at AdAge.

It seems like every major player expects to make US$500 Million from digital ad revenues, even though everyone defines digital differently. Good read to get an idea of who’s playing where.

Is Mining Virtual Gold Exploitative? – at MTV Overdrive

This is one of those mind-blowing news segments straight out of some Sci-Fi book. Imagine hordes of Chinese adolescents working twelve-hour shifts mining gold… virtual gold, that is. The gold in question exists only inside the virtual worlds of World of Warcraft (WoW) and is sold through international brokers to wealthier players who lack the time (or skill) to obtain it on their own. On a similar vein (pun fully intended) a recent press release announced Anshe Chung had become Second Life’s first virtual millionaire. Don’t you just love this?

Will Paying for User Video Pay Off? – at GigaOM

A nice round-up of Internet video companies that pay their users for uploaded content.

YouTube vs TV – at Mashable
Apparently, internet video websites are stealing users away from regular television (according to a BBC report – not that I trust the BBC a whole lot, anyway). But this seems reasonable – after all, time spent watching internet video is time spent away from the TV.

Why the Verizon/YouTube deal doesn’t matter – at CinemaTech
A simple explanation of why this YouTube/Verizon deal is not important… mainly, it’s too restrictive (which is exactly the opposite of why YouTube was such a success in the first place).

And now the good stuff:

All the coding/learning time paid off and I now have one week’s worth of CBS|YouTube data which I’ll be reporting on this week.

Total Views for CBS videos on YouTube between midnight November 21 and midnight November 28 were: 6,849,294.

Most Total Daily Views were on Wednesday, November 22nd (1,333,848) and Least Total Daily Views were today, Tuesday, November 28th (410,094).

Most Daily Views for any particular show were on Wednesday, November 23rd: 309,188 viewers watched Michael Richards (“Kramer”) Apologize.

Please note that since I do not have direct control over YouTube’s servers, these numbers may be off by a couple of late-night viewers. Nothing serious, in any case.

Stay tuned for graphics and additional data.

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General Announcements, Ratings Analysis, Social Networking

A Recap of Recent Articles

Yesterday’s article – Analyzing the CBS YouTube Stats – proved to be very popular, more than doubling the number of visitors and sending page views through the roof.

So, to welcome all the new blog readers, a short recap of our latest posts is in order.

Remember that you can subscribe by email to the blog if you want to receive new articles on your inbox. Simply click here to subscribe. No spam, just the latest article.

On to the recap…

Analyzing the YouTube Stats attempts to shed some light on the recent press release from CBS regarding their first month on YouTube. Using their Top-15 videos and comparing to a more recent Top-15, we can analyze the viewership volume of newer videos and determine their viral growth.

Google Does Video Graphs critiques Google Video’s latest feature, view stats for your videos, and shows where there’s room for improvement.

Blast From the Past – Multidimensional Data Analysis presents a graph I came up with years ago, while doing rating’s analysis for a TV network. If you’re a fan of Edward Tufte, this one’s for you.

The Advertiser’s Dilemma is about optimizing ad purchases in the Internet video age. When videos go viral overnight, and go cold almost as fast, how to you place your ads to maximize exposure while minimizing cost?

An Informal Chat with Second Life Creator Philip Rosedale – random musings from the recent Forbes MEET Forum (held at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles).

Rethinking Ratings analyzes current television rating methods and why they’re inappropriate for the Internet video industry. Suggestions for improvement.

Where are the Editors is where I ramble about the need for trustworthy editors in an era of endless information. This was a recurrent theme at the Forbes MEET Forum (even though this article was posted before the conference).

Hacking at Apple Stores is a short piece about the copious amounts of personal information people leave behind on the computers on display at Apple Stores.

Why Google Should Buy YouTube – posted before the actual purchase, this articles presents a number of reasons why buying YouTube would add enormous value to Google… and why the US$1.65 Billion they eventually paid for it might actually be a bargain.

Case Study: NBC’s Heroes details the good and the bad about how NBC is taking advantage of Digital Media Integration with their new hit series.

The Paris Hilton School of Blogging is a humorous look at name-dropping in blogs and its advertising value.

Google Media – an in-depth analysis of the way Google will change the way you experience music, television and media in general. Includes interface mock-ups.

Well, there you go… Now you have something to read over Thanksgiving.

Have fun and come back soon!

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