Octavianworld

LMS Usability Review

In all the years that I've been involved in the OpenACS/ .LRN community, it's been my experience that we get high marks for the architectural sophistication and power of the toolkit, but that we get dinged when it comes to usability, especially vs. Moodle, the latest darling of the LMS world.  So, with that as a backdrop, check out this study presented by Emmanuelle Raffenne of Spain's Universidad de la Educacion a la Distancia (UNED) at the recent .LRN global user meetings in Guatemala.   Congratulations to all the members of the community who have been working very hard on this front!

More to follow on the conference...

DylanMessaging: Viral Genius

This viral messaging campaign by Ten4 for SonyBMG's release of a collection of Bob Dylan's music last fall was enormously successful.  I've always loved the original video, and harbored ideas of recording my own version of it at home to kick off various presentations I've given in the past, but hadn't pulled the trigger.  Then I saw this (via Scott Kirsner -- thanks Scott!) and was really impressed.  The mind races to all the other similar possibilities, though doubtless there are intellectual property issues that weren't a problem here.

Reminds me of another viral favorite, Mr. Picassohead

At Harvard KSG With Tim Berners-Lee

Jerry Mechling, who teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School, and runs the "Leadership for a Networked World" (formerly E-Government Executive Education) program there, invited me to a talk by Sir Tim Berners-Lee last Wednesday evening.  The audience included ~50 current and former senior public-sector information technology officials attending one of Jerry's sessions.

Sir Tim's comments included:

• a discussion of how the WWW came to be
• an examination of some of the risks that could have killed it early on, and how those were overcome
• an exploration of some of the possibilities of the Semantic Web
• an exhortation to members of the audience to "set their data free"

An Unevenly Distributed Future: MITX Internet Video Panel

Last night I went to a great MITX panel discussion at MIT on Internet video.  Scott Kirsner moderated a great and diverse group representing the media, CDNs, VC, and agency worlds.  Scott organized the discussion into three buckets:  how are users interactions with web video changing; how is the production side of the business evolving to enable new things; and, the "monetization" of all this.  Here are my notes, and a few ideas:

Expanded Awareness At AOL: MIHOO + eBay? And What About Amazon?

Dave Morgan is a shrewd operator.  In adding buyat to advertising.com, he expands what AOL knows about how surfing ties to buying.  As I wrote here, this expanded awareness of consumer behavior makes it possible to develop better targeting algorithms, raising the CPMs he can charge advertisers or helping him be more competitive at existing rates.

So if a smaller affiliate network like buyat makes sense for AOL, what about two well-known larger networks? 

For example, when does Microsoft add eBay to Yahoo!? Like Yahoo!, eBay's stock is down 30% from last fall.  The premium over the market price that Microsoft is paying for Yahoo! represents only about 5% of Microsoft's market capitalization, arguably leaving plenty of room for another deal of similar scale without stockholders getting nervous about excessive dilution -- and eBay's market cap today is only about a third bigger than Yahoo!'s was pre-MIHOO.  Amazon, with a market cap of $30 billion, is in essentially the same position. (And maybe since it's a neighbor of Microsoft's, it might make more sense?)

This idea isn't that radical.  Yahoo! and eBay already had a partnership.  Google gets the value too, though it hasn't made much progress with its own services, Froogle and Base.

Some will say another deal soon is practically impossible, because integrating Yahoo! will consume Microsoft.  I believe that's a red herring.  The value in the MSFT/ YHOO deal will be created by a better advertising capability: better reach, better data, better targeting.  It won't come from integrating media properties.  If you believe this, it suggests that this is where the integration focus should be.  This  simplifies the integration challenge, and allows Microsoft to turn its attention to the next move.  Also, the current economic circumstances favor further consolidation, especially in a market (digital marketing) with longer-term fundamentals (growth, returns to scale) that remain strong.

Just When I Thought I Was Getting Clever

Since publishing your email address on the web invites spam, I recently used a free external service to add an "email me" form to this blog (see link at left).  The service uses captcha, the system that asks you to prove that you're human when you register for something online by copying a set of squiggly letters and/or numbers into a form.  I was feeling very smug about this until I read my former ArsDigita colleague Carsten Clasohm's post on how some spammers now get around this.

Memo to MIHOO: A Modest Proposal for The Next Step

There are three ways an ad network can compete:  better reach, better data, better analytics.  Know more people, know more about them, know what to do with that information.  Jeffrey Rayport noted yesterday in MarketWatch that recent consolidations in the ad network business have made it a game that "only the mighty can play."  Meanwhile, Danny Sullivan wonders in Ad Age whether the Microsoft-Yahoo combination will be enough to catch Google, even if they can pull the integration off.

So here's an idea, borrowing from a time-honored software business strategy most recently exploited by Facebook when it opened up an API to its "social graph" (also inspired by recent fiddling I've done with the IBM Many Eyes project).  MIHOO should provide a way for "third-party algorithm developers" to query its combined data hoard of users and their clickstreams.  That way, they can "unleash the power of open-source algorithm development" by letting the unwashed mathematicians of the world back-test their ideas for getting consumer X to respond to offer Y in context Z.  Of course, this would come with a price: when you go to run your algorithm on the MIHOO network to "monetize" it, MIHOO takes the gross cut to the network and pays you, the algorithm developer a royalty.

Symbiotic way for MIHOO and the little guy to take on big GOOG.  Lots of problems with this to be sure, starting with privacy (even though it already "is", can data be further anonymized to make it tough to infer my personal clickstream?).  And, as a practical matter, can MIHOO expose a data warehouse that could take mass pounding from the world without slowing to a useless crawl?  Further, would it be worth it?  There is a diminishing return to finer and finer targeting ideas, after all.  As for the competitive risk -- that people will get insights on MIHOO's data set that they can deploy on some other network (Google's or otherwise) perhaps there is a way to abstract the data being queried until a promising algorithm can be "optioned" by MIHOO.

Granted, it's a bit out there... but work with me people, or help me find the fatal flaw.

A Struggle for the Soul of Viral Marketing

I caught up with my former colleague Shiv Singh last week in new York.  Shiv is now leading Razorfish's social media practice initiative. 

We got to talking about Duncan Watts' research on how trends spread through social networks.  Watts argues that they spread randomly, and that it's the predisposition of the network to "catch" the trend that matters most.  This, of course, flies in the face of conventional thinking on the topic, starting with some of the conclusions that flow out of Stanley ("Six Degrees")  Milgram's work, and more recent books like Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and Keller and Berry's The Influentials. These latter two argue that some people matter lots more than others in propagating ideas, and that these people can be pre-identified.

Watts' credibility stems from analysis he's done, both of large email archive data sets and through large-scale simulations in virtual world social networks.  And his conclusion, if you agree, would of course be a bummer for the budding industry of folks trying to help marketers influence social media.

A great article on the topic runs in this month's Fast Company.

My take is that as a practical matter, both sides have a point.  I do believe some people, even if just through more numerous interactions, are likelier to spread ideas (though not necessarily yours), and Watts does not completely discount the role of influencers.  And, as I wrote earlier in this post, simply spreading your message through an influencer will be futile if it doesn't "tune in" and extend in a useful way what's already going on in the "conversations" a particular network is having.

(See also Shiv's article in Boxes and Arrows, and this earlier post I wrote on Marketspace Advisor summarizing some of the research on social networks.)