Octavianworld

Upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Panel: "What Blogging Brings To Business"

I'm joining Jessica Lipnack, Bill Ives, Patti Anklam, and Doug Cornelius on the "What Blogging Brings To Business" Panel at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston on June 10.

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.

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.

Not Dead Yet

Went to the Web Innovators Group meeting last night in Cambridge.  The ballroom at the Royal Sonesta was full, with a healthy mix of entrepreneurs, engineers, students, VC's, corporate types, etc.   Rumors of Boston's demise as a tech hub are overstated.

Memorable snatches of conversations/presentations:

• "I hear there are assets in Germany available..."
• "We started with a subscription model, and morphed it from there..."

and my favorite:

• "We're a real-time mixer service, halfway between Meetup and Dodgeball.  It's 3 o'clock, you want to meet people, you sign in, and at 4 we've got you in a bar with five people you don't know... but you have something in common with!

I caught up with Paige Arnof-Fenn.  We speculated on Whether It's A Bubble.  "No, there's twenty times the money (advertising anyway) there was in 2001, and maybe 75% of the VC money invested back then," was our consensus.  What about a recession? Money flows to the most measurable media, which these days is online, so maybe this time a recession might kill off the old (golf-and-a-rate-card analog formats) instead of the new.

Branded Readers

Reading news and blogs through an RSS reader has been great for me.  I can get through a lot of stuff in very little time:  I'm guessing I'm 4x as productive going this route.  (I've tried a few different readers -- FeedDemon, Thunderbird, Newsgator, and I'm currently using Google Reader, with mixed results.)  Despite the clear benefits of these tools, few people outside my friends in tech use them.  I've been wondering why, and what opportunities the answers might mean.

Online Video: That Sound You Hear Is The Dam Bursting

By various measures there are some $500 billion spent globally on advertising.  About 40% of this goes to TV, which is why Oxygen is worth a billion dollars to folks like NBC.

Yesterday I saw a press release in which Sony announced more content partnerships, with folks like CondeNet and Sports Illustrated, for the "Internet Video Link" service it packages with its BRAVIA high-def television sets.  Sony gets unique content it can sell ads against.  The online publishers presumably get a rev share on video assets they've already produced, and extra traffic going back to their sites.  If I understand how the service works, this completely bypasses the cable TV infrastructure by using whatever broadband you have available.   Memo to cable company, re: $100/month digital cable subscription:  "Ask not for whom the bell tolls..."

(Ok, you say, but why buy an HDTV if all you can watch is low-res Flash clips?  Not so fast.  See this interesting announcement from Brightcove and BitTorrent yesterday?  How long will it take Sony to add BitTorrent nodes into the   Internet Video Link modules on its sets?)

So, how do we know if Sony's video content bet is ultimately better than NBC's?

NBC paid $12 per Oxygen channel subscriber.  According to news reports, there are about 300k Oxygen viewers in prime time.  Let's assume of course that different people watch different shows each week, and that prime time is as popular as all other times combined.  So I figure that 300k prime time viewers translates into 1.2 million unique viewers per month (cross-check: Oxygen.com has 1.2m uniques).  OK, so $900 million (Oxygen's acquisition price), divided by 1.2m = $750 per unique viewer.  (NBC also has to continue producing programming and pay carriage fees to cable networks to continue to reach those viewers.) Against this up front and ongoing cost, Oxygen gets about $7/unique (per month of course, ~$100M in sales/ 1.2m uniques/12 months). Figure a 15% margin, and NBC's netting $1/unique out of that top line (Oxygen Media LLC didn't disclose income AFAIK).

I don't know the terms of Sony's rev share, or how they are placing those ads with advertisers.  Let's assume the overall split is 1/3 to each party (Sony, content partner, video ad network).   Let's assume a $30 gross CPM for the premium content.  So  Sony's getting $10 CPM.  If  I assume each unique is good for 25 impressions per week, this translates into $1/unique, but that's essentially cost-free (no programming, no carriage fees, no amortization of acquisition costs) if you ignore the cost of the Internet Video Link network infrastructure.  So, Sony's getting the same $/unique.

Now for the sound of the dam bursting:  if I'm an advertiser and I can pay an ad network $3/unique (split three ways between publisher, ad network, and Sony) to reach my audience of women watching TV via, say CondeNet content, vs. paying NBC $7/unique, and get better targeting and measurability (remember, this is *Internet* video), which do I prefer?

Seems to me Sony's got the better growth/ scalability story, though reach is more limited in the short term.

I'm not criticizing the Oxygen deal;  there are sure to be cross-promotional opportunities with iVillage that add to Oxygen's value to NBC (if a small fraction of iVillage's 15M uniques go to Oxygen, that's a huge leg up).  And of course, there are near-term limitations of Sony's Internet Video Link value proposition to advertisers: low reach (the number of people with Internet-ready HDTV sets), and low availability of content from its partners.   Plus, there are a number of apples-and-oranges problems with my analysis (like, are these ways of reaching viewers really the same?  Do they ultimately reach the same viewers?  Are viewers in the same frame of mind?). 

The broader point, though, is about the significant arbitrage that is appearing for advertisers between reaching TV viewers the old-fashioned way and the new-fangled way, and about the dramatic shifts in fortunes that will occur over the next couple of years as dollars flow accordingly.  It's a good time to be long high-quality video content, and to be aggressive about getting online with it.

November 13 Boston Panel: "The Anywhere Transaction Model"

On November 13,  I'm moderating a panel on "The Anywhere Transaction Model" at the Mobile Internet World conference at the Hynes Center in Boston.   See here for details: http://www.mobilenetx.com/seminars/ (click on the "Executive Summit" tab).  Hope to see you!

Postscripts:

Video of Ford Cavallari's session, "Learning To Profit Through Anywhere Advertising":

http://bnettv.com/player.php?id=919

Video of session I moderated on "The Anywhere Transaction Model":

http://bnettv.com/player.php?id=927

Interview Condenet's Carrie Seifer (one of our panelists) did for bnettv:

http://bnettv.com/player.php?id=923

Interview I did on the session for bnettv:

http://bnettv.com/player.php?id=912

One Social Graph To Rule Them All

It seems not a day goes by that I don't get an invitation to connect with someone on one social networking service or another.  It's all very flattering, but it's getting really hard to manage, especially as many of these services don't syndicate well, or at all.

In an ideal world, I could connect and interact with people and groups from a single interface.  Of course, different providers of these services would feel very differently about this.  Smaller ones would love to have this outlet as an alternative to almost-certain obscurity.  Bigger ones say, "I already got one, it's my world, and my users are just living in it, thank you very much."

Via Caroline Meeks and TechCrunch,  I just finished reading  Brad Fitzpatrick's August 17 essay, "Thoughts on the Social Graph".  Brad does a very good job of laying out the problem to be solved and how to go about solving it.  Better yet, he and friends are actually working on it.  With Google behind him, this is pretty serious.

Still, I wonder if it's a bridge too far.  Prediction:  with agents like Jonathan Miller and Ross Levinsohn at Velocity now out there trying to aggregate interesting web properties into networks with the minimal reach necessary to make them interesting to advertisers (i.e., moving them up from the AdSense basement I live in), we'll soon see "federated" APIs based on these individual properties' collective social graph emerge.  Why?  Because doing so will make it more interesting for advertisers to build their own versions of "Facebook applications" on top of these social graphs. 

Let's take an example.  Let's say mythical new age ad network "Travelamigos" goes out there and rolls out a bunch of small travel social networks.  People who use these networks are more likely to find and connect with buddies if they are connected across all relevant networks, not just bilaterally, so they'll find such a capability useful and be more likely to join the underlying services.  Advertisers will have a larger, better-connected user base not just to sell ads to, but also to develop services for.

For large media firms, who currently control and are expanding their own "social media" properties, aggregating and exposing such a "social graph API" would also seem to be a natural progression.

LinkedIn: Facing Reality

Many of us have been wondering for a while when LinkedIn would get around to opening up its API so others could take advantage of its networks of registered users to build applications  that could be spread virally through those networks.  Facebook has stolen a march on LinkedIn, first by allowing anyone to create a group, and most recently by exposing an API to allow others to develop applications that use its registered user base and networks -- or what they call the "social graph". 

Facebook applications have taken off like wildfire, and with this initiative Facebook has raised the "platform ante" beyond where Google, Amazon, and Yahoo had it (i.e., rich APIs and data sets to query through them, but limited networks of users) for anyone aspiring to build a large-scale web presence.  My favorite Facebook app, which I think best (most simply) demonstrates what Facebook has made possible, is the "Friend Wheel".  When I look at mine, I realize how many friends I still have to introduce to each other!  (Maybe what I need is a Facebook app that implements "graphic friendship" ideas...)

Now there's speculation about LinkedIn getting with the program.  Folks fret about whether the LinkedIn UI could handle the weight of a bunch of apps.  That's a red herring, IMHO.  Based on the relative rate of connection requests I've been getting in the last few days (4 or 5 to one in FB's favor), it would seem LinkedIn has no choice. 

But what's even more compelling about what Facebook's done, and why the imperative for LinkedIn is even more urgent,  is the economic opportunity it creates.  Everyone in the network can now make informed choices of apps to place on their profile pages, and a smart platform player will ultimately do a three-way rev share -- some for the member, some for the app developer, and some (ok most) for itself.  It will be interesting to see how soon Facebook gets around to this.

Beyond The Click-Rush Climax: Content As The Once and Future King

Following last week's post, this week's news:

AOL buys Third Screen Media, WPP buys 24/7 Real Media, and now MSFT buys aQuantive for an 85% premium (congrats to my old Razorfish friends).

VLCK's out there if you have, oh, $4B lying around.   However, I'd be surprised if we saw another 2x deal, since it takes a lot of cash and a big market cap to absorb that kind of dilution.  OMC's a possibility given the logic of the WPP-24/7 deal, though it would be a more complicated deal, and like WPP, OMC might be tempted to look "deeper in the draft".

These moves by the big portals clearly raise the stakes for the big online publishers.  Not only do the portals control how traffic gets to them, but now they control even more of how ads are placed on them.

Google: A Contrarian Perspective

Given the preceding post describing the  hype around ad networks,  I thought a closer look at the uber-network might be useful.  What I found surprised me. 

Google reported $10.6 billion in revenue for 2006.  Of this amount, $4.2 billion came from placing ads on non-Google-owned sites.  They paid those sites' publishers $3.1 billion in "traffic acquisition costs", resulting in a gross margin from their AdSense ad network business of $1.1 billion.

In 2006, Google spent $1.2 billion on R&D, a little more than $800 million on sales and marketing, and a little less than $800 million on overhead, for total operating expenses of about $2.8 billion.

A simple allocation of this $2.8 billion to Google-as-media-firm versus Google-as-ad-network based on each's contribution to total revenue puts 40% of these operating expenses, or $1.1 billion, onto the latter.  The resulting math makes Google's ad network business a break-even proposition in 2006.

The Great Click Rush of 2007

Ad networks are hot, and in many cases highly-profitable businesses right now.  On the heels of Google's snapping up DoubleClick for $3 billion, Yahoo! bought (the 80% it didn't already own of) 4 year old  online display ad exchange Right Media last week for $680 million.  So, a logical question to ask is, who buys whom next?

Octavianworld up 1000%, Self-Esteem Soars

In a narcissistic moment of weakness, I trolled through my stats to find that a Blogshares industry moderator had looked at one of my recent posts, and discovered that "Single Girl Theory" has taken a position in Octavianworld and driven my price up significantly:

 

via

http://blogshares.com/blogs.php?blog=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.octavianworld.org%2Foctavianworld%2F

Thanks Single Girl Theory, I'm flattered and I'll try to be worthy of your confidence.

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.

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.

A Second (Life) Gold Rush

Things are booming.  Nearly US$5M exchanged in January, up from  US$235k in October 2005.

With the data provided by Linden Labs linked from here:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/02/09/state-of-the-virtual-world
-%E2%80%93-key-metrics-january-2007/

(The comments on this post are interesting, BTW)

I plotted this:

Short version:  Since October 2005, 40x more folks,  each spending 1/6 the hours, but exchanging 3x more  money per hour.

Postscript:  of course averages lie.  There are sure to be massive concentrations in spending, both in terms of who is buying (big businesses experimenting) and what is being bought (land, skins).   And these concentrations could be hints of a speculative bubble that will pop at some point, just like they do in the real world.  After all, what if big businesses buy islands and no one visits them?  They're unlikely to invest further, at least in the short term.  And what if users buy cool outfits, and still can't make friends?  Maybe they cash in those Linden dollars, buy some Ben & Jerry's, and crawl back to real world Saturday nights watching Love Boat reruns.  At least, until a Dale Carnegie for the 21st century emerges to help us with our virtual world social skills.

Perhaps in upcoming releases of such data, LL could include some of these "who's buying what" stats?  Won't be long I'm sure until we see firms cropping up that do all sorts of analysis on the SL economy.  (Related issue:  if economics is "the dismal science" in the real world, is it any cooler in virtual worlds?)

You Heard It Here First: "SGM"

From the Weak-Attempt-at-Punditry-Department, here's an attempt to coin a term for hot new theme to track:  "Subject-Generated-Media", or "SGM" for short.  It's inspired by Red Sox ace pitcher Curt Schilling's blog, 38pitches.com, which is simply brilliant.  I've learned more about pitching reading Curt's posts than I picked up in the past 30 years of being a fan.  Curt is a terrific writer, and he brings out the best in his friends, too.  For example, here's a recent comment on this post, by former Sox Kevin Millar, whom Curt fanned quickly in a recent spring training game:

Well I must say that Curt is right on with the curve ball talk.I have been ragging on his curve ball for a few years and today he called my bluff.

1st ab he shook 3 times and I had a feeling he was shaking to the curve ball but still didnt have the balls to sit 1st pitch curve ball on Schilling. Then, I did call time out, telling Tek “What the hell is Schill doing shaking to the curve ball?”, and bam! sure enough here came this hanging curve ball (Curt: I beg to differ, the first one wasn’t hanging) I watched for strike 1, and couldnt pull the trigger. Then schill came back with another (Curt: which I did hang) whiched I pulled foul (Curt: into the vendor selling lemonade, which for anyone sitting along the 3rd base dugout knows is no surprise, Kevin hooking a pitch foul) and yes he threw the 3rd one in a row which I layed off.

I then had a feeling he was going to throw all curve balls to me, as pedro martinez did to me the 1st time I faced him last year and i struck out on 4 in a row. But Schill caught me guessing and struck me out with a heater in.

So all the trash talking I did to him and all the text messages I ragged him with, he got me and I couldnt look at him after the AB, even though i wanted to laugh

Kevin (Curt: I can hook a fastball better than anyone but Sheffield) Millar

Bazaarvoice Reviews: Another Good "Structured Collaboration" Example

A lot of marketers these days are asking themselves how they can take advantage of "consumer-generated media" ("CGM").  The knee-jerk association for the term is with bboards, and more recently blogs and wikis.  I've suggested in the past that providing such "unstructured" publishing vehicles as a starting point for productive interactions online is often not very helpful.  A more sophisticated approach offers means of contribution where what they're for and how to use them (both to contribute and consume information) are more self-evident.

Friendspammed

After a year of dormancy during which "Tom" has been my only friend on my MySpace page (set up to check out the service), I added a link to Octavianworld.  Stunned by its genius, three of the 163 million reported MySpace members sent me friend requests in the last two days. 

The Sound And The Fury: 2006 US Ad Spending, By The Numbers

Just came across this summary of 2006 US ad spending from TNS Media.  It's striking that despite all the talk about online advertising's growth, Spot TV still outgrew it on an absolute basis, and TV as a whole is still outgrowing overall ad spending as a whole by 25% (5% vs. 4%, led by Spot and by the growth of Spanish language advertising). 

Advertising on the web is great, but having seen services like Spot Runner and Visible World, and related vertical efforts, TV may not be dead for a while.  Of course, as content from each begins to flow to each, and with mobile to spice things up further, perhaps the category definitions are becoming less useful anyway. 

This is a rear-view perspective.  While 2006 may have been the year of online video on the conference circuit, the ad models for this medium haven't yet been really worked out (though there are some interesting ideas out there), and both advertisers and media players are still "organizing for digital"  buying and selling.  So I'd expect the shifts everybody's been hyping to accelerate somewhat this year.

Of course, this is one summary, among many that might report the numbers differently, and it would be interesting to compare them to each other, and with what the leading prognosticators have been saying...

SMS: Simplicity Makes Sense

Last week I attended a MITX panel discussion, "What's Now in Mobile: The Capability of Today's Wireless World".

It's the best of times and worst of times in mobile marketing.  We're at the front end of an "amazing" new age of capabilities, with video, location-based services, and so much more.  At the same time, the ecosystem's development is hindered, as Nellymoser founder John Puterbaugh put it (referring specifically to mobile video), by "dozens of content formats, hundreds of [differently-configured] networks, and thousands of phone types."

Before the presentations I had a chance to talk with Toshi Uchida, a director at Fidelity's e-business Wireless Group.  Toshi's comments before and during the talk, emphasizing simplicity as crucial to application development in this medium, provided a useful counterpoint to the  hype about mobile.  Among the insights: 

• "aftermarket" application installations on pc's are hard enough for most people; on mobile devices they're well-nigh impossible today, even on a relatively powerful device like my BlackBerry 8700.  (I've added Google Maps and the Gmail client, but browsing web pages is so slow and visually painful that I don't readily experiment as much in this medium as I'd like to.)
• unless they are highly-motivated power users, like traders, most people just will not deal with complexity in mobile application interfaces. The mobile context is just too crowded with other stimuli, time-constrained, size-constrained, and "semi-conscious" to accomodate anything higher than a brain-stem -level assumption about user focus.

This has left me wondering a lot lately about SMS and how to take better advantage of it, since everyone has the capability these days on their phones, unlimited-use plans are now cheap and getting cheaper, and it's really easy to use.  Although Pew reported last year that more than a third of US cell phone users use SMS, very few people I know seem to take advantage of SMS as a service interface, such as Google's (46645), or this impressive array offered by Bankinter in Spain. 

Looking at Bankinter's services, it occurred to me -- when was the last time I saw an SMS cheat sheet posted by a vendor in a public place?  Maybe the answer is to introduce user guides into print advertising, or billboards?  Where's the laminated, business-card-sized, double-sided helper for my wallet?  And, for vendors with whom I have an account, perhaps a refund or partial subsidy (in the spirit of pre-paid postage on business-reply envelopes) of any SMS charges I do incur in using those services?

Related:  this excellent article by Sim Simeonov on the mobile tech stack.

"In Their Tribes", Or, "How Do You Handle 10,000 Tech Maniacs' Votes?"

Dell  got a lot of press recently for launching its new Digg-knockoff "ideastorm" site (http://dellideastorm.com) for receiving and prioritizing customer feedback on its products and plans.  Right around the same time, The Wall Street Journal pointed out that on Digg itself, there's an extreme power-law distribution among contributors:  one guy, "Stoner", accounts for 13% of posts that got voted onto the Digg home page recently, and only 30 of the 900,000 registered users account for a third of Digg home page posts.  The bias that such extreme concentration can create is immediately apparent on the ideastorm site:  Linux (or more-generally, open-source)-oriented suggestions account for 18 of the 30 highest-rated suggestions on the first two pages of the site's list.

Set up this way, where so many "precincts" vote in the same general pool, voting sites like ideastorm can quickly alienate folks that don't have time (or money) to organize support for their ideas. Erick Schonfeld's post, here on Rojo, suggests what sites like these need is a "trustworthy reputation system" where people can disclose more fully who they are and who, if anyone is paying them to place stories there.

I come to a different conclusion.  I believe voting sites, like other forms of "structured collaboration", are best managed in subgroups, defined by shared interests, and coordinated through active moderation by volunteer "editors" -- much as Wikipedia has evolved.  From direct experience in managing a social bookmarking application, I can foresee (in fact we've specified) several specific administrator-defined (subgroups, categories, recognition and networking opportunities for volunteers) and user-defined (e.g., tags, profiles) mechanisms to make this work. 

On ideastorm, which takes the trouble to tell you how many people have endorsed a particular person's (in this example, Gautam's) idea, it would be especially useful to publish a page that ranks submitters by the number of endorsements from unique others.  These listings might include links to these submitters' profiles (including addresses for blogs if they have them, or perhaps at least bios).  Dell could then draw its volunteer moderators via further screening of this pool, maybe offering a piece of equipment or some public recognition as a thank you for assiduous moderation. (Reddit provides a stats page that's sort of like this, though its "karma"-based rating -- explained here -- isn't particularly intuitive, to me at least.)

More generally, I think there's lots of room for "shades of gray" models between "fully-edited" and "fully-user-generated" content that would provide more transparency about how members of a group promote submissions.   Think in terms of "concentric circles of delegated moderation", where trusted insiders recruit trusted outsiders from a pool of folks who have demonstrated passionate, constructive participation.

Beyond Peanut Butter

I recently posted a contrary perspective on Brad Garlinghouse's recent "Peanut Butter Memo",  which presaged and maybe influenced the recent reorganization at Yahoo.  My post suggested that placing lots of early-stage bets ("peanut butter") isn't a bad idea at all, as the Yahoo memo suggested.  Rather, it's a question of how you manage them -- "drowning kittens", as some graphically call it.

Scanning my prolific friend Bill Ives' blog recently, I came across this post on "Collective Intelligence Networks", and especially John Maloney's excellent comment on GE's internal "Imagination Markets".  This, on the same day that the NYT gave Intrade a huge plug (my colleagues and I have been tracking prediction markets for a while, as yet another really interesting form of "Structured Collaboration").

It occurred to me that running a prediction market internally, on the likelihood of success of early stage ventures in companies like Yahoo and Google among others, might be a really interesting complement to formal management reviews.  In such services, like in other media properties, the apps are frequently visible to highly-informed end users who can be excellent proxies for early-adopter, power-user consumers -- but verbal feedback from such users can often be unreliable.

The tools for doing this appear to be available, though we haven't installed and tried one yet.

Perhaps another idea illustrating a principle that if you want to  "organize for digital", you've got  to (with apologies to Nicholas Negroponte) "be digital".

Gotuit: Video Search, and its Implications

A couple of weeks ago I had breakfast with Patrick Donovan, and old colleague from when we worked together in the early 90's at a Lexington, MA consulting and software development firm called Symmetrix.  These days Patrick is VP of Product Development at Gotuit Media.  Gotuit provides technology that allows users to "deep-tag" a slice of a video they look at on sites like YouTube and Metacafe. 

Here's a slice I made of a four-minute video on YouTube about the BT around the world sailing race.  I wanted to highlight what I thought was one of the more "that's gotta hurt!" moments in a video otherwise full of them:

 

Here's the url for this slice on Gotuit: http://www.gotuit.com/player/index.html?c=SM_Entertainment&t=8503&s=59028

Gotuit doesn't actually rip and store video itself; rather, it's an interface through which you create a data layer (on Gotuit) that identifies and describes (with title, tags, and a free-form text field) slices of videos hosted elsewhere.  Gotuit provides a browser toolbar with buttons that make it easy to quickly deep-tag a slice of a video and then share it via embedding or a hyperlink in a blog or other web page, or by simply emailing it to one or more friends.

So what?  Search is already a killer app on the web.  Video is exploding on the web.  Ergo, search for video will be huge.  Since video (and audio) is consumed linearly, meaning you can't browse it the way you can browse text, simply tagging and otherwise describing a source file on YouTube or somewhere else is only partially helpful to getting you to what you're looking for and helping you consume it efficiently.  Being able to deep-tag slices becomes really useful particularly for form factors and contexts -- like mobile -- where efficient use of limited resources (time, bandwidth, and memory) are more important. 

It doesn't stop there.  Of course, if you can tag inside a video, and you can sell ads against tags, you can advertise inside a video, in a highly targeted way.  And if you can tag inside a video, you can also string together slices to create what we used to call "highlight reels", but now would call "tag-dimensional mashups" I guess, allowing "omni-directional re-purposing" of content.  Videos of NFL games could be sliced and mashed up to create "best touchdowns", "hardest hits", "ugliest players" series.  Again, particularly interesting for mobile applications and contexts.

While I'm not sure that Gotuit in its current business model incarnation (today's separate service vs. a licensed, embedded capability in major video sites) or UI expression has reached its final stage, this is a really interesting company, and Patrick is a very smart guy.  Check them out.

Recursive E-Commerce

Just fooling around, with one-click ordering Javascript popup.

 

Missed Connections

Last night I checked out TripConnect.com   In theory, a useful service: travel recommendations are a popular thing to share, as other folks like Tripadvisor have demonstrated.  Presumably, they would be even more popular to share within groups of folks you know and whose opinions you trust, which is TripConnect's premise.

Problem is, as far as I can tell, you have to manually enter / invite the network of folks you'd like to share trip reviews with.  No thanks.  Within the circle of folks whose names I'd have the patience to  put into the system manually, I'm better off calling or emailing them.

TripConnect's UI looked eerily like LinkedIn's (the usual Web-two-oh pastels and rounded buttons).  So I thought, "TripConnect is a useful focus for collaboration in search of pre-existing networks of folks to use it.  LinkedIn is a network of folks looking for useful things people could share.  Why don't they partner?"  I'm sure someone has thought of this of course. 

I'm more interested in the general case -- what other networks and other service ideas, existing or envisioned, should get together like this?  Where's the LinkedIn API so folks like TripConnect could build mutually beneficial services onto it?

Referrals to stuff like this appreciated!

I Like Peanut Butter

Recently many of us read with interest Yahoo! exec Brad Garlinghouse's leaked "Peanut Butter" memo on what the venerable portal needed to do to revitalize itself.  In sum, Garlinghouse argues that Yahoo! needs to narrow the set of businesses and initiatives it's pursuing, and clarify/simplify/shrink the organization around the surviving priorities.  "I hate peanut butter.  We all should," says Garlinghouse.

Go Daddy

This post was originally published on my first blog, hosted by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center.

I've been travelling between Boston and Washington a lot lately, and have been dipping into the bin of free magazines by the airline gate to keep stimulated until "electronic devices are permitted" in flight.  Recently I picked up the Valentine's Day edition of Ad Age and came upon some interesting data.

The Business of Blogging

This post originally appeared on my first blog, hosted by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center. Jeff Jarvis later kindly mentioned it here.

We're in the middle of a blogging bubble, or at least it feels that way if you spend any time at all in the Blogosphere.  So, many people are asking, "Is there a business here?"  This note suggests some ways of thinking about this.

Beating Into An Offshore Breeze

This post originally appeared on my first blog, hosted by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center.

Attending an AMR Research conference in Boston today.  Bruce Richardson's (SVP Research) talk -- always good -- included comments on trends and implications of offshore outsourcing.