Octavianworld

Digging A Hole: Web 2.0 Poster Child Jumps The Shark?

(Click on the graph and add del.icio.us in one of the comparison boxes at bottom.)

My take: These properties were initially both communities and technology demonstration projects.  Now that curious folks are moving on to other properties where these features are deployed in support of other interests, we're winnowing back down to the core folks who came for the community in the first place.  Bigger picture:  the Web 2.0 bubble is passing, and the core ideas are increasingly just "part of the furniture"  in lots of other places.  2007 MBA's take note...

Video Search Part II: ScanScout

A week ago I had lunch with Waikit Lau, president and co-founder of ScanScout (http://scanscout.com).  Waikit, whom I got to know when I was at ArsDigita and he was part of the http://photo.net team a few years ago, describes ScanScout's video analysis technology like this (this is the shareable version): 

Think Viral, Act Tribal Part III: "Dissecting Numa Numa"

Last Thursday morning I attended a MITX Digital Marketing Series presentation titled "Dissecting Numa Numa: A Critical Analysis of Viral Video Content", given by Jeremi Karnell of One to One Interactive, Professor Jeffrey Bardzell of Indiana University's School of Informatics, and Dr. Carl Marci, Chief Science Officer at Innerscope Research.  The questions considered (my version):  why did this amateur work go as "viral" as it did, and how (well) can neuroscience help us predict viral media propagation?

Media as Software: A Conversation With Doug Turner

Kiki Mills at MITX introduced me recently to Doug Turner, whose past includes eight years as a member of the 3D graphics research team at Apple's Advanced Technology Group.  Doug and I met for breakfast and talked shop about digital media.  One of Doug's ideas, which I found particularly interesting, is (his words) the concept of "media as software".  Right now rich media streams are largely analog audio and video once they are "published".  (If you've composed or edited a digital video "project" and then converted it into its final form, you know what I mean.)  Doug describes this  as publishing digital media as platforms on which other people can add/edit their own stuff. 
 

Think Viral, Act Tribal, Part II: What, Why, and How Memes Propagate

A while back I wrote down some ideas about viral marketing prompted by a meeting with an entrepreneur who was having some trouble executing a campaign.  Today, I came across a really interesting research paper, "Memes and affinities:  cultural replication and literacy education", by Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, presented in November 2005 at the National Reading Conference annual meeting.  The paper is here: http://www.geocities.com/c.lankshear/memes2.pdf.

Syndicate This

In the post right before this one, you will see a widget for this blog I created using Goowy Media's yourminis service.  You can help make me famous by embedding it in your blog.  Or, you can install it on your desktop (you need to have Adobe's Apollo player first -- that's their cross-platform desktop equivalent of the Flash player for web browsers) , and wait patiently for it to alert you of my latest big idea.  Or, you can ignore my widget but check out many more useful ones people have built using Flash 8 and the yourminis API.

Update: Gotuit Media and Video Search

Recently I wrote (http://www.octavianworld.org/octavianworld/2007/02/gotuit_video_se.html) about cool stuff going on at video search service Gotuit Media, where my friend and former colleague Patrick Donovan is a senior executive. 

Patrick got in touch the other day to pass on some great news:  Gotuit is now supporting the NFL "Film Room" at Sports Illustrated's si.com (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/nfl/specials/draft/2007/video/) and at the National Hockey League's video site (http://onthefly.nhl.com/index.html). 

For the NHL, Gotuit transforms what used to be a 60 minute linear viewing experience to one that can be sliced and sequenced in a variety of ways, without having to cut, splice, or otherwise edit the underlying video asset. 

Here's a review of Gotuit at latimes.com that does a good job of explaining the potential of this service: http://opinion.latimes.com/bitplayer/2007/04/gotuit_and_web_.html

Good Luck Patrick!

Twittervision: From Cool, To Tool

Following on the recent post I wrote about Twitter, it's occurred to me that location is a major feature of many of the use cases I envisioned.  Today I came across Twittervision, an interesting Google Maps mashup described here. Picture scenarios that filter Twittervision into logical groups (pre-defined groups of people watching a webcast, or people linking and reacting to news, for example).  Now picture further parsing the Twitter posts for the occurrence of keywords signaling reactions, a la We Feel Fine, and then mapping those occurrences to a heat map overlay on the Twittervision Google Map.  What emerges is an "evolving geospatialized map of emotional reaction to events".  Surely this has to be useful to some news organization?

Kaboodle's "Help Me Choose": Another Clever Structured Collaboration Example

The social shopping service Kaboodle recently announced the availability of its "Help Me Choose" Widget.  Essentially, this allows Kaboodle users like me (my wife and I use it to maintain a shopping wish list for home and kids) to publish a poll on external properties like this blog, so friends can offer input into certain purchase decisions.   

DoubleClick Sold: Double the Fun for H&F

A while back I speculated that Hellman & Friedman, the buyout firm that had taken DoubleClick private, would do quite nicely with its investment.  Now it looks like "nicely" = 2.5x.