|
+
ARCHIVES
YOU ARE LOOKING AT THE DEMBOT ARCHIVES. TO SEE THE LATEST, CHECK OUT: Add the new RSS feed here:
+
Hollywood Writers on Strike
The major studio writers are on strike starting today. They are interested in obtaining royalties or monetary compensation for their work that airs online. I think the studios are moving slow and can not agree on how money will be made in the future are have been unwilling to commit. Most of these people have contracts with terms well into the future that were defined a long time ago and thus have terms that make no mention of use online. Many major TV shows, including The Daily Show, may need to revert to reruns today because they depend on writers for up-to-the-minute scripts. This is really a major shakeup for the industry. Many people expect this to go unresolved for months. I have not heard any talk within any of my online video circles (that's the old way of saying social networks and email) and yet I would assume that there is a lot of experience and foresight that alot of people have which could be useful to add to the conversation in helping to resolve the conflict. THIS IS THE LAST POST TO THIS BLOG! Be sure and subscribe to my NEW RSS FEED:
+
New Blog
Im Moving this blog over to: www.dembot.com will stay the same, its just that it will start to point over there. BE SURE AND UPDATE YOUR RSS FEED! New Feed: As you can see, instead of posting every month, I'll now be posting more like 10 or 15 times per day. Posted to world by Drew on November 4, 2007 2:19 PM | comments (0)
+
Rocketboom Enters Year 4
What an incredibly interesting time this is. Rocketboom is entering into it's 4th year today. I'm reminded of my favorite spacecraft, the Hubble. Nobody really knows what we will see with it, but we have a direction and we are going strong. The spirit is exploration and the foundation is our own human limits and the freedom to do so. That's the main theme that gets me excited everyday. The best things that came out of our 3rd year: (1) Not "building another network". We've seen alot of the popular content startups turn into networks of shows and I continue to be critical of them for operating like old record labels. There is a better way to grow a brand of content for the long term. I can't believe how much money some of them have burnt through. (2) Got the back-end shop together - payroll/workman's comp, bookkeeping, advertising, legal (Amanda Congdon no longer has any interest in the business - I continue to wish her well and hope that she fares well in the future), accounting - an auditor could walk in right now and ask for everything down to the receipt for the last 3 years and we would smile and hand them everything. And yet we are still cost efficient. (3) Rocketboom has also been working with CAA and we are very happy about the alliance. The greatest asset we have at Rocketboom is our exceptionally creative and dedicated team. All together we continue to create a positive impact (I hope), we have kept costs really low which exhibits the message and the dream of our platform, we have maintained a strong independent nature with an international flair and we have big dreams for the future.
+
Branching Out with Blip
At Rocketboom, earlier this year, we designed a sponsorship model so far culminating in a week-long sponsorship by Real Player and a rev-share deal with YouTube. I personally love our sponsorship model and consider it to be hardly invasive (you can expect to see more of these from us throughout 2008). It's also a great system because we burn the sponsorship message into our master file and thus distribute it across all platforms. Not just one flash file, but all of our files, everywhere (e.g. the sponsorship message travels through our own site, iTunes, Facebook, YouTube, TiVo, etc.). Now blip takes us further with the additional ability to serve interactive, post-roll ads and collapsable overlays in flash AND Quicktime files. After talking with Apple, we believe this is the first time anyone has used Quicktime to serve overlay ads. Our daily publishing method now incorporates this dynamic serving in perfect sync with our hard burning. Blip brokered the sponsorship (many more to come) and has integrated their run-of-site framework into our site for extra coverage between sponsor runs. This gives us the ultimate flexibility to manage multiple sales of various types at the same time. The blip folks are some of the brightest and smartest people in this space so its been a real pleasure to finally come together. Thanks especially to Mike and Dina for maintaining such strong passion and good will. On our side, I want to give a big thanks to the Rocketboom team, especially Mark Mathewson and Jamie Wilkinson whose persistence saw this project through. Check out Mike's post here. To see in action, visit Rocketboom. Want to get involved? Contact us! Posted to online video by Drew on September 24, 2007 7:47 AM | comments (10)
+
Understanding Video Counts
Have you ever wondered how the various video sites determine a view count? TubeMogul conducted a study of the various video hosting sites by uploading videos, monitoring the conditions and recording the counts.
As you can see, YouTube only ads one count per i.p. address, per fully watched video. No partial views get counted. When a video is embedded, it only gets counted once per i.p. no matter how many times the video is viewed. Yahoo Video and Metacafe are even more stringent. Compare this to Revver which gives a count to a full view, a 1/2 view, less than 1/2 a view, refreshes and embeds. Big difference. Why would Revver be so slack on a count? The only reason I can think of is hyperbole.
+
TubeMogul
Each morning we upload our 3ivx 270x480 Quicktime file to Tube Moguel, enter 3 fields of metadata (title, descriptions, tags), select a category and then TubeMogul quickly uploads the video to 9 different sites all within a few minutes: YouTube, Brightcove, Blip, Dailymotion, Revver, Google Video, Metacafe, Myspace and Yahoo. We have never distributed through any of these sites before mostly because we just haven't had the time to go around uploading all day on top of the 9 different files we serve ourselves. TubeMogul has been really fast. They also keep track of stats across all the sites so it's very easy to keep tabs on how things are going. Posted to online video by Drew on 4:14 PM | comments (1)
+
FireAnt Sells to Odeo
Josh Kinberg, founder and creator of FireAnt is one person who has always been on the about page of Rocketboom. We met at school and connected over building the first blog at Parsons School of Design and always discussed online patterns and activity throughout the 2004 elections.
In particular we talked alot about the development of Rocketboom and Ant. During that time, Josh found out about Adam Curry who was working on the same kinds of problems with audio. I remember when Josh first told me about this, we snickered in kinda of a nostalgic way, the same way you would if you just found out that Martha Quinn was building robots and programing micro-controllers. When Josh, Kenyatta and I were building out the backend and strategy for Rocketboom, especially from August through October, 2004, Josh had come up with an elegant proof of concept for an aggregator that focused on pulling video files with an Apple Script. Nothing that Curry and Winer had missed but nonetheless, they along with almost everyone else were tunnel visioned on audio (and pdf files!?). Perhaps one reason for the disconnect occurred because of the difference in application. Podcasters were ultimately enamored with transferring mp3 files to the shiny shiny (i.e. the ipod) automatically. With Rocketboom however, there was no shiny shiny (i.e. the video ipod) at the time but we saw the aggregator as the killer app for bandwidth limits and thick compression settings on the delivery of large video files. Pretty files sent to computers over night while people sleep to be available in full local playback glory, scrollable, jumpable, and without delay when ready for viewing was where it would be at. In October 2004 knowing that video enclosures would catch on very soon, when Rocketboom did launch, I made sure we had them working for the few people who used Josh's player. I also of course noticed that there was no way to offer multiple file types in the enclosure fields and decided the only solution would be to offer multiple feeds (we launched with several). Right around that time, Podcasting was starting to gain momentum and I always noticed how almost no one else was talking about using RSS for video. It was kinda like the Twilight Zone actually in that regard. Even through most of 2005, while podcasting was totally exploding, very few people took interest in the use of RSS with video enclosures. Perhaps it was because the news angle was mostly generated from a radio show fanatic slash tech geek-angle and the disruption they were casing to the radio industry.
There were two main public brain trusts through 2005 that existed separately on the web where on-the-pulse information about development in the nascent industry made its way in: [1] the podcasting group on Yahoo vs. [2] the Videoblogging group on Yahoo. As for #1, my bafflement with podcasters and music fans who still deal with mp3 crap compression remains. A great beauty of the audio aggregator is that you can deliver very high quality audio files (not a problem to offer the mp3 versions too for the losers), but whatever, people used to take playback quality much more seriously in the good 'ol days of wax and lasers. As for #2, the excitement fueled by foresight into the implications behind a world shift in media, would soon drove user testing, adoption and good will to Ant (later served with a no-no letter on the name, btw), so FireAnt, with "the" surrounding directory of videobloggers was where the first party started. Perhaps we will never know but I feel very strongly that Josh's development of the initial player gave Apple their best look at what I always hoped they would acquire, but instead, built themselves. In a single moment in October of 2005 with the release of the video iPod and video podcasting in iTunes, Apple opened up the concept of video online to the masses (er, you know what I mean) and essentially took a great deal of FireAnt's steam. Coincidentally, the prior release of Apple's audio podcasting client in iTunes stole the same kind of steam from Odeo so it makes since that these two companies would come together for a return match. The space may be ready for more alternatives. Apple's strategy for growth was and continues to remain stealth and secretive, closed and proprietary. They probably get away with it because their products are so good. But Apple's aggregating features have never been as good as FireAnt's which strated off as open sourse and remained open on the frontend. I consider Josh to be a major pioneer in the space for being one of the first, if not the first to create a video specific aggregator, going on to win the support of the videoblogging community, growing a business from an early 2.0-like application, sustaining the onslaught of a changing industry, managing a difficult set of personalities, dealing with alot of legal nonsense and then orchestrating a very delicate acquisition. Way to go Josh. Cant wait to see what's next! Many others have written about this story too. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on September 15, 2007 3:45 AM | comments (0)
+
Retracing Steps
An extremely moving memorial. Also consider the tecnique and use of medium: Retracing my steps I took out my camera today and quickly retraced and recorded my steps on 9/11 six years ago. (A longer version of the story is here, recorded in audio shortly after 9/11.)
+
JoCo Live
For her debut on Monday, Joanne interviewed R&B artist, JoJo and over 5000 people were watching live. I have not heard of another case where this many people were on all at once. Surely there must be some? I was in one room that had a full 500 people in it and the chat was insane. As soon as I typed in the word "Hi everybody" it scrolled off the page before I could even read it. There was an incredible moment where JoJo was singing a chorus "Yea, Yeah, Yeah" and then sang: "Everybody sing with me, Yeah, Yeah, Yea.. . ." Everyone was entering in "yeah yeah yeah" in the chat - it was a hyper crazy collaborative experience that actually worked. Thousand of yeah's scrolling to the live music. Pretty cool. First time? You should give yourself a good 15 or 20 minutes to get the PalTalk player installed and find the room. Not an easy task, but well worth it in this case. Next week she'll be interviewing cast from Entourage.
+
China Online
"Chinese military hackers have prepared a detailed plan to disable America’s aircraft battle carrier fleet with a devastating cyber attack, according to a Pentagon report obtained by The Times." - Link. I like to keep checking back on 'China's effect on the internet' and 'internet's effect on China'. Both of these terms in Google have nothing but posts from me and David Weinberger. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on September 9, 2007 5:54 PM | comments (2)
+
YouTube Jumping
Google has implemented their jumping feature into YouTube videos and it's really nice. As you know, with most flash videos, you can't scroll ahead until the video completely loads out beyond the point you want. With a YouTube video, now you can jump ahead and the video will start to load out from the new point foward, wasting no more time or energy loading any of the prior sections of the video.
Above, you can see I clicked the scoller to the middle of the video. It then began to play from the new point and started to load out ahead (and then behind next). This is a very elegant feature that saves bandwidth and gives the audience way more flexibility for consuming information quickly. Posted to online video by Drew on September 8, 2007 12:48 AM | comments (5)
+
Video News Sites
Tilzy.tv is another new site which seems to be pretty good too (creative, insightful and on the pulse). LostRemote is another one - speaks more to people who have been in the media business for a long time and need some online nudging. Posted to online video by Drew on 12:11 AM | comments (2)
+
Priority Web Traffic OK'd
Net Neutrality takes a serious blow. "The Justice Department on Thursday said Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic." Posted to internet_culture by Drew on September 6, 2007 8:13 PM | comments (0)
+
Barcamp Block
I'm off to San Francisco and then 37° 26' 34 N, 122° 9' 40 W and surrounding blocks for Barcamp Block. Everytime I see the Golden Gate Bridge I wonder how Joseph Strauss convinced everyone that it could be done. It would of been interesting to see how he got everyone to sign off on the idea.
+
Stewart/Cobert Subpoenaed by YouTube
Regarding the suit against YouTube brought on by Viacom (MTV, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, etc.), Larry Neumeister from the Associated Press writes: "YouTube didn't say exactly what it intended to gain from questioning the Comedy Central comedians. Colbert hosts "The Colbert Report," a spin-off of "The Daily Show," which is hosted by Stewart." It seems clear to me that YouTube would like the court to hear Stewart and Colbert's perception of the harm vs. gain argument. It's hard to imagine that the widespread distribution of the Daily Show on YouTube could harm or take away from the show's value compared to the massive PR gain that drives traffic back to their program along with elevating their cultural relevance.
+
NYC Videoblogging Meetup Tonight
NYC Videoblogging Meetup tonight at 6pm at the Rocketboom studio. Any and all are invited to come meet with local area videoblogging enthusiasts. For the first hour, everyone will take 2min to introduce themselves and their project(s) and then we will discuss three of these projects in-depth altogether as a group. For the second hour, we can just hang out and chat. Posted to new york city by Drew on August 14, 2007 10:33 AM | comments (1)
+
Rocketboom No Longer Using Pligg
Pligg is for sale. Though I mentioned before that we adopted Pligg on Rocketboom, we actually wound up adapting some of Pligg for Moveable Type, and forked off the rest. Jamie got almost everything we needed so far into just a couple of pages. I actually just started participating in Digg myself. Im slowly ramping up but I feel a major swing coming on. I think YouTube and Digg are my top two favorite websites on the internet right now. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on August 13, 2007 12:53 AM | comments (0)
+
Why do Video Networks Fail? One Reason: The Content
**UPDATE: Scoble not leaving Podtech (I edited to remove the misunderstanding out of the post). I read an article where CEO John Furrier states an additional $2 million had been invested in the company in the middle of July which he expected to last only "a few months". Wow. What are they doing over there? I don't know any of the details as to why the company is not making it except for the one I could always see myself and I believe it's the most important part of a network: quality of content. The network has about 20 shows they list on their website. Have you heard of any of them? Aside from The Scoble Show, quick, name another show. . . Yea, I always have a hard time with that question too. I'd rather see the new networks making it but they are mostly missing that important role of creating compelling content that will resonate with enough people to sustain and grow. Podtech is clearly a tech company. Pod. Tech. From what I can tell, they never had anyone in their company that was a professional and experienced video content producer. And not just someone but someone with good taste who can understand how the content will fit in with everything else that is out there. First adopters are techies and the new networks have the DNA of Silicon Valley all over them. Where is Hollywood in this thinking? Content is business mostly driven by professional content creators, not the technology industry. The problem is biconditional. The traditional studio are not listening to the technologists very well on how to support the flow of their good content. There needs to be more of a collaboration. When we take a moment to step out of the 2.0 bubble and have a look around, its easy to see that the power of the moving image is not going to burst. Online video, personal publishing, content - this type of stuff is not about today's shiny new gadgets and Ajax. When the iPhone becomes an archaic collectors item and Facebook and YouTube are only known by the old and stodgy, people will be still be creating content that will strike a chord in a big way and there will always be a big market for it. I'd rather see the new networks making it but they are mostly missing that really important role of being able to identify compelling content that will strike a chord in enough people to sustain and grow. ** update 8/12: Allen Stern has some good suggestions. I also want to be clear that I believe all the content on Podtech is valuable - the greatest value is not about popularity and monitatiztion. As always, its truely sad how money hampers us. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on August 11, 2007 7:52 AM | comments (18)
+
Album Cover or Wizard of Oz Still?
+
On MSNBC and Apple iTunes
The relatives filled up the 'ol email box today because they saw me on MSNBC Nightly News last night. The story was about email bankruptcy. You can watch it here (doesn't seem to work on Apple browsers). What's my advise on how to deal with email overload? "Eh, not sure yet."
Thanks to Apple for featuring Rocketboom on the front page of iTunes this week!! Ive been a quintessential Apple fan forever but for good reason, they have the best interface, best design and push innovation like nobody's business. Ive yet to review my iphone though to give you some idea, I finally stopped carrying my blackberry last week ('been using gmail and flipping the board sidewise for speedy thumb typing). A+++ I remember well when the idea was but a dream. Posted to rocketboom by Drew on 3:06 PM | comments (1)
+
Twitter Infestation
Today I received the following in my email box:
Yep, Twitter blog spam. These kinds of sucker fish latch on to the RSS feeds of others and then repost the same exact information, but with surrounding contextual banner ads. They set up each website once and then it all happens automatically. Whoever sets the site up can just check their bank account each month to see how many click-thrus they got. The more blogs they can set up, the more they can automatically make. I figured this stuff out because there are some spammers that regurgitate Rocketboom feeds too, though I have always reported them to Technorati and Google Blogs (currently there is just one or two). The Techcrunch article Rocketboom was cited in got regurgitated by over 40 different spam blogs (BTW, thanks to Paul L. for pointing out a comment from Michael Arrington clarifying that "Interesting" just meant "Interesting to him"). You can imagine Techcrunch is happy to have 40 blogs per article link to them just to start with, let alone all of the other blogs that link to them that are actually intentional. Thus the auto-blogs have an easy time existing and perpetuating because they increase the link status of the fish they are feeding on. One of my favorite blogs in the world, Gizmodo, probably has the most spam blogs attached to it that I have ever seen. Here is a headline from yesterday that has 70 links (over 50 spam links) with the same exact headline, "Jet-Man Is So Cool It Hurts". What should be done about this? Anything? **update: Rex Hammock calls these kinds of blogs "splogs" (in a comment on Heather Green's Business Week column). Splog is actually short for "Spam Blog", I'm just leaning. It seems that they are in fact often created by the bloggers themselves for link authority. I guess when applied to Twitter it would be Spit Splogs. It would make an interesting study to see how the ranking of Technorati might change without all the fakes. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on August 6, 2007 8:58 PM | comments (5)
+
Room for More Shows
This week Rocketboom got shot down pretty bad by Michael Arrington while being compared to a new entry in the online videoblogging world, Webb Alert. The headline reads "A lot Like Rocketboom Except it's Interesting". This is the second headline this week announcing a Rocketboom killer. From a new series called Radar: "Webshow pilot takes on RocketBoom (and destroys it)." I see these kinds of headlines almost every week. I always hold my breath when I read them and get all mentally unsettled each time as I gear up to watch. It's flattering to receive the comparisons yet also a bummer - even though its just a personal, subjective opinion, I've been in a funk all weekend on the Techcrunch article just knowing that they think Rocketboom is not interesting. A lot of people have left comments to Rocketboom's defense and many people posted about it to their own weblogs. Michael's post received more comments than most of his other posts I think and the next day he posted again along with a defense for liking the show. The sentiment that we all feel each time a new Rocketboom killer comes along (probably Michael's feelings as well), is damn, it's been almost three years now since Rocketboom came around and despite the explosion in personal media, we still dont have much out there that has struck a major chord. Our options for valuable, entertaining and independent information in a daily is really limited. In the meantime, I dont think we need to pit Rocketboom against other shows like football teams, there is plenty of room for anyone who can put the pieces together. The harshness of the effect can be positive as it certainly helps to keep us trying as hard as we can - complacency is death - though there are positive ways of supporting growth. While important comparisons to other popular shows like Geek Brief and CommandN (classics) can be made, the hope for Webb Alerts, which really does make it a compelling and fresh entry, is the adoption of a regimented, daily, regular schedule. That's smart. Very few independent productions have been able to commit to a full time, regularly scheduled show and by doing so, the show enters into a wide open market with a lot of demand. It will be important for this show to not follow in the path of a prior Rocketboom killer, Yahoo 9, which in my opinion is still weak for feeling fake on the "fake-to-real" feeling scale. With everything else in place, as long as Webb Alerts can develop it's own personality with the writing and a personable presentation, it should become really popular in no time at all. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on August 5, 2007 6:42 PM | comments (8)
+
MSBBC DRM
Yep, in case you didn't know, BBC now stands for WTF? "With today's launch of the iPlayer, the BBC Trust has failed in its most basic of duties and handed over to Microsoft sole control of the on-line distribution of BBC programming. From today, you will need to own a Microsoft operating system to view BBC programming on the web. This is akin to saying you must own a Sony TV set to watch BBC TV. And you must accept the Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) that the iPlayer imposes. You simply cannot be allowed to be in control of your computer according to the BBC." - Link (via) Posted to internet_culture by Drew on July 28, 2007 10:15 AM | comments (2)
+
Balance of Power
The more that social networks pick up steam, the less influence blogging is receiving. Personal publishing is really exploding right now, indirectly, by people simply revealing their lives as content. Blogging is a much smaller piece of the pie. The web is better able to categorize everyones day-to-day ideas, in all forms of media, and thus these ideas have become more organized and useful for all. Specifically, the dynamics of this influence coming from Facebook, Flickr and Linked-in-like communities is not very apparent. The overall influence or authority is for the most part, hidden. Maybe that's a good thing for now, while it lasts. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on July 23, 2007 7:19 PM | comments (0)
+
Alexa in the News
Cmdr Taco, tears apart Alexa, and leaves the Slashdot community to weigh in. It's not looking good for Alexa [in case you haven't noticed, I have had a few words to say about Alexa myself]. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on 6:57 PM | comments (0)
+
Rocketboom on the iPhone
Today we release our first application significant more so as a sign of whats to come from within our group:
If you have an iPhone, just navigate to this link: Here is a demo of what it should look like(video flip not in demo): Considering we have never even tested it on an iPhone, we still have some work to do this weekend Im sure just to get v0.1 up to par. This application is outstanding for us not because it's designed as yet another standalone Rocketboom player, but due to our primary intent to make it available as a player that anyone can easily customize for their own show. There have been lots of things I've built for Rocketboom over the years, but Ive never had the resources to do anything with them or take them to the next level. I always wanted to for even more ideas come up than I could ever take action on. Enter our superstar programmer Jamie Wilkinson who has been a saving grace the last few months. When we decided to take on this particular project about 3 days ago, Jamie put it together almost overnight. This weekend we'll test and spiffy up the player (still dedicated for Rocketboom) and next week, once we have a grip on the iphone standards, we hope to release the custom functionality so anyone can use it for their own show, or their own favorite shows. I've always been really transparent about everything because I still dont believe in competition for the show, Rocketboom, but this is for a new business (along with RB and other shows in development) so the plan is to keep our other ideas under wraps until they are up. Nevertheless, we plan to work mostly within a GPL when spinning things off. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on June 29, 2007 9:24 PM | comments (1)
+
Paying Bloggers to Write
Shouldn’t Microsoft and Federated Media at least understand why shilling is wrong for a lot of bloggers and stop trying to sell dishonesty? Michael at Techcrunch said he doesn’t care about what he wrote for Microsoft even though he signed his name to it. Yet he signed his name for me - someone who admires and looks up to his opinions. That is why Microsoft had him do it - so I would believe in Microsoft indirectly. This whole chain of events - Microsoft paying bloggers to write for them for this reason, Federated Media promoting the idea to their clients knowing best what the implications would be and the clients agreeing to do it - shows a major sign of laziness or a desperate need for banner ad money. ** I always assumed these ads were quotes bought from prior articles or blog posts written by the blogger, without being payed to write them ** Apparently, people who value journalistic integrity and transparecy of information are willing to write messages they don't believe in just for money, in the very same way they write on their blogs, about the same stuff, to the same people who read them, in the same space and in the same place. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on June 23, 2007 3:47 PM | comments (0)
+
Eyetag IPTV Benchmarking Study
From the German conference I keynoted last week, The Brain Behind on Web-TV and IPTV, a very noteworthy article from Eyetag ( Nikolaus Reinelt and Bertram Gugel):
"Increasingly, a separation between Internet TV as “Over-the-top” distribution and telco IPTV as a new “institutionalized” means of distribution, becomes difficult to make."
+
ROFL Live in NYC
Im pretty excited about this. It's called ROFL. It's kinda like a live, non-screen based version of screen-based internet media. In competition form. At a really cool venue:
Info below from the ROFL website: Friday June 22
+
Rocketboom Sponsorship Launch
Tomorrow on Monday we will be launching a new sponsorship model on Rocketboom! Just over a year ago, we ran out money for Rocketboom. We were not mature enough to consider investments and so I decided Rocketboom had to go forward with an E-bay auction. The plan had materialized months prior but I never wanted to take the risk. I certainly was into the excitement, but what if no one bid? What if the bid was too low? What if our reserve was too high? The immediacy of a check in the bank was an important part of the decision too. I'll never forget the fear of failure that buit up to 5 seconds before the auction ended a loser, followed by a final refresh click with just 2 seconds to go that suddenly showed a $40,000 winner. To this day, I had never publicized that $40,000 was actually our reserve, helping to set the high market value. When people went on to write about the sale, they broke it down to a CPM comparison, though most people didn't take into account that the $40,000 for a week of advertising on Rocketboom included not only airing the commercials, but also creating 5 of them! Also, managing an account like this while working to appease the advertiser is a very difficult feat in and of itself. A few months later, Rocketboom went through a bit of internal turmoil that required me to set all of the business aside for awhile to devote %100 of my energies on just the production. While we would go on to bring in a total of $210k from creative advertising for the year, the amount of energy and conviction we had to put into each piece ultimately put us further behind. To our suprise, during the process, we learned that companies weren't really interested in us having complete conviction in them anyway. Ultimately, they really were big fans of Rocketboom and they wanted us (and our audience) to know that. *They* had the conviction in *us*. So that's why we took that original model and flipped it. Our relationship to the sponsor now starts off with a sign of gratitude for their support. In return, we have a great, critical audience that a sponsor can leverage to provide feedback and insight into their situation. While the system may not be right for many other environments, I think it will be extremely effective on Rocketboom. The entire program was designed to match Rocketboom as it already is.
I'm extremely proud to kick off this Monday with YouTube as our first sponsor. Regarding the broad topic of "video online", in my personal opinion, there is not a single other group in the world that has done more to democratize the moving image. We finally got a Rocketboom YouTube account up and running as well. It's amazing to think we have made it this far without any flash distributions. YouTube will make Rocketboom much easier to share, obviously. For more details, you can visit http://www.rocketboom.com/sponsorship Next, look forward to more content offerings from Rocketboom soon. Extra special thanks to Kenyatta, Joanne and Ellie, the hard-core team that makes RB happen! Posted to rocketboom by Drew on June 3, 2007 7:48 PM | comments (19)
+
The Death of Alexa's Toolbar
What do each of these graphs have in common? It appears that they all show a decline in people who use the Alexa Toolbar. digg: I still have never met an Alexa toolbar user. Do you know of one? Rocketboom was static for awhile and has been on a steady upward incline all year. Why is Alexa showing a sharp downward trend? I just spent about an hour searching the net on Alexa and all I could find were stories of people telling others to instal the toolbar so they could increase their own ranking. I did find that Vista considers Alexa malware and there is no planned support for Firefox or Safari. Technorati is based on actual links:
+
Wallstrip
Congrats to Wallstrip for selling to CBS for a reported $5million. This evaluation is great news for Rocketbooom and others in our field. The gap between established media and new media is turning more and more into media. I've been feeling concerned about our burn rate to late but it looks like Rocketboom spends just a fraction of what Wallstrip spends. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on May 22, 2007 1:18 PM | comments (1)
+
Not Just a Name
Your order confirmation:
+
RB in WSJ
Rocketboom received some nice coverage in the Wall Street Journal today. Since the subject is about startup tips for show running, my top of the list note is to suggest a daily, short-form show. Most shows come out once a week, once a month or sporadically. The value to having a daily update may be the most often missed opportunity yet. Posted to rocketboom by Drew on May 14, 2007 9:05 PM | comments (1)
+
Why do Video Platforms Fail?
In online video, there is big interest in the entry point, the place where people go to discover and watch video and ultimately where payment is made, one way or another, for the watching. For some incredible reason that I can not fathom, an extraordinarily large number of people believe they can create the entry point in which the rest of the world will come to discover video. The competition is fierce and the success rate over the years has been a series of clockwork dead on arrivals. This entry point offline used to be TV-Guide for TV content along with local newspapers for Movie listings, both "dead sources", so to speak. In music, a company called Sound Warehouse once dominated America as the entry point for musical recording sales, physically, and now it's completely gone. Meanwhile, musicians only needed a cheap and clear signal-to-noise ratio to record sound with while the audience only needed dial-up to d/l the music with, to bring on the democratization of the music industry regardless of the pre-established industry's control. The traditional TV/Movie/Film studios have not been as afraid of the internet recently, having had the opportunity to stand by and watch their music industry colleagues break down. Easily anticipating awhile back what has now become cheap and clear imaging to record and edit the world with, a new audience has now materialized only needing to click once to see anything by anyone. Still yet, the pre-established studios have been reliant on 3rd parties (i.e. Silicon Valley) to solve their technological deficiencies, or they continue to not listen at all, and have rolled-out tripping. Does anyone remember a site called Open Media Network? It used to be the biggest thing to hit the internet the day before it released but it took me 20 minutes to remember the name and find it just now. Mark Andreessen (orig. leader of Netscape) was on the board and they signed on PBS. What about Current.tv? They are still here but they decided to go up stream for some reason, as if to provide friction for the rest industry moving online. Many people like myself were jaw dropped to consider the impact the same amount of money and action could have made globally with a strategy that was predominantly based on internet audiences.
What happened to Akimbo's $27Million? What about AT&T Homezone's all-in-one wonder box? Apparently a fresh new $1.6Billion has been alloted to push subscribers. Golly. A current press release states that Brightcove ($59Million injection this year), once THE most promising player in the world (before it was released) "recently added an update to the Brightcove Platform that included several new features and a number of great enhancements to our services". Jeremy Allaire first created Cold Fusion which is a very different kind of venture. Ever hear of Innertube, CBS.com's effort? According to today's Wall Street Journal "CBS's new chief Internet strategist now jokes that the Web address for Innertube should be CBS.com/nobodycomeshere". Now CBS (and thus now Wallstrip) will divert their brand energies to someone else's brand to give it a whirl, Joost: "Joost gets a $45Million extra. Posts that contain Joost per day for the last 30 days. Maybe today's most likely contender will spark, I can't say I will be surprised to see that there is something which makes this one THE one, but at the very least, the risk for Joost, I think, is totally beside itself and it's hard to imagine, just based on history, that this is going to work. Why are these always going wrong or why are they not going better? TOP TEN REASONS WHY VIDEO PLATFORMS FAIL: 1. Insubstantial library of content Most noteworthy, I have always suggested that an individual show may thrive best when allowed to live and breathe in its own home, on it's own website, best suited for it's own special case. A video player is one brand, a network is another and each individual show is itself a brand. If the show is unique and special, it will find its own identity and own distinct audience in it's own authentic location. There is still certainly PLENTY of room for new, quality video content, the kind of entertaining content that Hollywood has traditionally been masters of so the competition is low in the creative studio department, the audiences are growing, business model options are progressing at least - there certainly are plenty of distribution partner options - it seems to be a wonderful time to create video that people respond to online. As for the audiences, they like to get it in different ways at all kinds of different places. No matter where the big party is, or where the authentic home base may be, hopefully the content can make it's way easily into the growing number of scenes on the growing number of screens. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on 12:24 AM | comments (9)
+
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
Issue #1: The hexadecimal sequence, 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0, which unlocks DVDs, has been leaked onto the internet. By the time of this posting, there are 20,700 results found in Google. Whose problem is it? Ultimately the problem belongs to the company that created a copy-protection scheme with this kind of vulnerability. Issue #2: Is it illegal to post this number? Though the number posted to Digg became the most popular post in the site's history, the Digg owners decided to take the post down because they were told it was illegal. I find it really hard to imagine that posting a number like this can be illegal. This is not a personal medical record or information obtained with an NDA, this is a single password, a private industry secret that they let out of the bag. Issue #3: Did Digg take the post down because of tight advertising relationships with the businesses that would suffer from the posting, including their own? Whatever the answers may be, I have a great deal of admiration for the Digg team for managing a closed site in such an open way. I can only imagine they are put in these kinds of quandaries on a daily basis, trying to keep to a democratic mission while maintaining personal control. I would suggest that Digg has a social responsibility to their own mission to end all advertising on the site. They should just get rid of all of it and move to a PBS style model if they are ready to take the next step towards boosting the integrity of their information system. This is not a rejection of advertising in general for the world, just for this kind of site. Of course they should really do whatever they want because it's theirs, an impotant reality check for eveyone that believes in community. It will be interesting to see how they continue to deal with the daily dilemmas. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on May 2, 2007 1:24 AM | comments (1)
+
The Rookie Card
In case you missed the news yesterday, I decided against moving forward with Jeff Pulver on Abbey Corps. A lot of people have been pressing me to give them some information as to why. I have decided not to get in to it here publicly on my blog, but I do wish Jeff best of luck with his future endeavors. I would like to take a moment to make an important point on something that I have learned this year about business. The other day I was at a conference and someone who is tied in with the venture capital world was ragging on Mark Zuckerberg for not taking the billion dollar offer for Facebook. This person stood up and beat down Mark and the mission of Facebook in a very "disrespectful" way. I saw it more as a fallacious rant of trivial diversion but I say disrespectful because this is the word that many of the speakers and VCs used throughout the rest of the conference when referring back to the incident. This person just couldn't understand why anyone without a strange psychological problem could turn down a billion dollars for a company like Facebook. This was really the low-point of the day for me because it illuminated the concern that I've always had with regards to companies that become bigger and more powerful than the humans behind them. Isn't this why our environment is being destroyed? Is it not because the economic power of companies like Exxon fight for selfish, sustaining interests that ultimately supersede the concern of the many? People need to realize that there are other people who create business and activity on a large scale for other kinds of concerns - like life, for instance; Not everything is for sale or about money. ------ Just before I had the idea for Rocketboom, I was in a state of nearly permeant sadness - a somewhat catatonic state of depression. Combined with existential doom, I had somewhat consciously given up on my artistic dreams. I was facing the reality that there were not enough people interested in my music to ever make a living from it. I had settled for teaching which I enjoyed but something I would of rather done when I was older and wiser. I was fulfilled with the activity I did, but the lack of affirmation from the rest of the word was missing for me. Now, I feel so lucky to have created an activity that I am even more fulfilled by, in part due to the affirmation from so many others. Everyday is a grand new adventure for me now and my dreams and aspirations could easily take me through the rest of my life, ten times over without ever getting old or stale. There are so many places to go from here, my foundation, I just cant ever imagine being without it. Im not here to leverage Rocketboom for my own career, Im not doing this because I want to make money or make money for someone else. Im here doing this because its compelling to me, it makes me feel good, I get self-fulfillment from it, others respond positively to it, and because I have a desire to use the voice for positive change. Not only is my affinity for Rocketboom important to me, its important to the future well being of my life and sense of value and self-worth. Rocketboom lifted me out of the absurd and in a way, however sad this may sound to you, has saved my life. Another way of trying to understand this is through the thinking of an art collector or a football card collector. I sold all my football cards once I got older and needed the money and because I didn't care about them anymore. But there was one card I kept: My Fran Tarkington rookie year card. I had traded for the card with one of my best friends growing up, Wes Berggren, who killed himself by drugs at a very early age. Not only was the card from Wes the prize possession of my collection in street value, it continues to hold the utmost sentimental value, a kind of a value that is very different than money itself. I just could never sell the card for any amount of money for this reason alone. Posted to future by Drew on April 28, 2007 5:28 PM | comments (9)
+
Media 3
Thanks to Shelly Palmer for having me on his podcast. We talk about Rocketboom and distribution platforms. Posted to rocketboom by Drew on 4:36 PM | comments (0)
+
Podcast Hotel
If you are in San Francisco this week for Web 2.0, check out Podcast Hotel. I'll be keynoting on Friday with what I consider to be my best ever, most developed ideas on the future of our medium. I always get a great deal of privileged information from so many different partners and industry peeps, I've been thinking a lot about what people are up to and how it all fits together. Justin from Justin.tv, Josh Wolf and a lot of others will be giving presentations too. 'Looking forward to it! Posted to rocketboom by Drew on April 16, 2007 12:16 PM | comments (1)
+
Webby Awards 2007
I'm quite flattered that Rocketboom received honorable mentions in THREE categories! 1. Best Use of video or Moving Image 2. News/Documentray/Public Service 3. Blog - Cultural/Personal Posted to internet_culture by Drew on April 11, 2007 10:04 AM | comments (0)
+
HD UP
As expected, a pick-up in high quality online content is being desired with the release of the Apple-TV. It used to be that we got calls all the time about new distribution platforms for our files and now they have for the most part turned to HD calls. Aggregators serving HD content are popping up left and right. RB is currently distributed on at least four companies that I know of. Our primary distribution point, Move Digital, has seen a 10-fold increase over the last couple of weeks. We were serving around 400-500 files per day there and its just jumped up to 3000-4000 per day. Related: David Pogue lifts up TiVo in context of it's i-boxing. What's next with all this new hardware? Why set-top box software apps, of course. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on April 7, 2007 5:27 PM | comments (0)
+
podcamp NYC
+
Rocketboom will Remain Free
Even after prior posts, more posts are rolling in. The title of the Market Watch article was apparently misleading. Rocketboom will always remain free and easily available to obtain. That's our #1 foundational principle of being and I don't ever foresee needing to change that. This is not an issue that is determined by money, it's just the way it is and you can take that for granted. Also, we have had plenty of chances to completely smear advertising all over our videos and websites all day long every day so thats not the issue either. I can imagine how post-roll ads could work, we have done this in the past. We're holding out for the best way for the long run. Posted to rocketboom by Drew on March 26, 2007 7:40 AM | comments (3)
+
A Very Common Procedure
I'm so proud of my sister Courtney for a successful run of her off-Broadway play, A Very Common Procedure. Most people don't realize that Broadway shows are mostly musicals and off-Broadway plays are often the end of many playwrights' aspirations. It's such a major accomplishment, I'm trying to think of some way to take credit for this. . .I've got nothin, I'm just an innocent but lucky gene holder.
+
Veered Wind
I have been really disappointed lately with the state of videoblogging. Without delving into the details, I'll try and just state the obvious. I don't have all the answers, I just notice that something is starting to go wrong. 1. One thing that makes the business of videoblogging problematic is the contrasting paradigms of business at play. The notion of "blogging" suggests that the medium may be informed by blogging practices and yet the application of video opens up the medium to traditional TV and Film business methods. I'm only putting forth a hypothesis here formed more from a birds eye view and a feeling, but it seems to me that most bloggers who are leaders in the blogging world would consider their weblogs to be loss leaders where the activity of blogging does not bring in enough revenue to sustain their site's effort but does lead to other related activites that generate revenue. And where in many cases the activity is so close in nature to the weblog, and is so desirable by the blogger anyway, a beneficial and fulfilling lifestyle can be obtained.
So what's going wrong here is the collision of these two worlds. It happens in blogging, sure, but it's common place right now in videoblogging and I believe this is ultimately where we will start to notice a separation between "videoblogging" and "tv". As of now, we have not seen the influx of major talent from the established media industry adopting the experiences, technologies or practices realised in videoblogging over the last couple of years. This is the area where we have recieved a lot of consulting interest lately. Our intent is to help bring these two worlds together, for as I say, it not really working out so well right now. 2. Journalism is at play as one faction in all media. Sometimes (video)blogging and journalism are closely tied, for the most part, consequently; It just so happens that there is a lot of unintentional cross over. The main glue that keeps the affinity between blogging and journalism, it seems, is a sense of integrity that can be felt and shared by both. There is a desire to find "the trurth" and to be objective while continuing to remind one another that objectivity is futile. Many bloggers aspire to journalistic standards and yet they also feel comfortable with blogging standards and seem to have a good sense of how these two worlds look when put together. A lot of work has already been done in this area. Yet when bloggers say they are not subject to the rules of journalism, something I have said before, it doesn't mean that we don't continue to share many of the same qualities as journalists anyway, such as a sense of integrity and a willingness to value our work and our social contibutions higher than money, for instance. These are human qualities that influence our work. These are the types of qualities that I believe will illuminate a major fork in the road for what type of videoblogger one is, if they choose to identify with videoblogging, or what kind of person they are, regardless of what they call themselves. Now we have major networks doing it, and I think they are doing it wrong, and actually causing a disservice to journalism and blogging in some cases. For instance, a network often has a news division and then has other programing that is non-news (like sitcoms, and other entertaiment content, family, etc). You can imagine that there are different styles, methods and reasons for a network to implement vidoebloggging and right now there seems to be some confusion about how to do that. It reminds me of one of my favorite albums by the Volent Femmes, The Blind Leading the Naked. "Anything goes blogging" is not the right kind of blogging style to suppliment for a trustworthy news division, but just might work for the family type of division within a network. Similarly, there are a lot of new lessons the established news industry and other family divisons can learn from videoblogging when the two work together to inform one another. Posted to rocketboom by Drew on 9:20 PM | comments (6)
+
More Attention Required
Warning the below is not true: "Rocketboom fans may have to pay to see Joanne Colan, now that show co-creator Andrew Baron has told Marketwatch that advertising isn’t working out as he would like. No decision has been made, but Baron said advertisers “are just not happy to do small deals” like Rocketboom has been doing." Its not true at all. Rocketboom will remain freely available. The point I was making is that we are not happy with advertising right now. The advertisers are not being very flexible and down-to-earth and we are just not happy with the idea of mass advertising on Rocketboom. Its not ruled out, it just feels wrong so far. I think pre-roll/mid roll commercials on content like ours is a terrible mistake, product placement will not work for us (LonleyGirl can get away with product placement because the whole show is full of myth and psychological mayhem already), groups like Federated Media while helpful to talk to, haven't addressed video advertising just right yet, and so we have been exploring other ways to do more than just merely sustain, without advertising, or taking hold of people with venerable mental states. Some kind of sponsorship model, more along the lines of NPR or PBS might be best for content that exists for the sake of content itself. The real success story lay in obtaining finantial support from the active and participatory audience - I continue to refer back to a build upon/turbo version of Jason Kottke's mico donation experiement. I think there is a difference between a reader of a link blog and an audience member/fan of a daily show, and it's that loyal audience/fan mentality, one which I seem to express myself for others as well, that could inspire progressive support of the show. A combination of audience support and museum-like sponsorship support could work together to keep centain kinds of content free. Posted to rocketboom by Drew on 12:03 PM | comments (13)
+
Counting Joanne
Out of 24,400,000 Joanne's on Google, Joanne Colan is #3 and the #2 most popular human Joanne. Posted to by Drew on March 4, 2007 10:07 AM | comments (3)
+
Wreck and Salvage Ebay Ad
Today I watched a super creative and interesting video on a new site, Wreck and Salvage, decided to bid on their ebay auction for Rocketboom, and won!
+
mail
Dear world, it's been another long stretch of not being able to respond to 85% of the emails I wanted to, probably missing over 35% that I needed to and potentially losing room for 10% gain by answering emails I didn't want or need to. Today was a wonderful day for Abbey, I wish I could say more, but thanks world. Now I just need a way to manage email. Posted to my_life by Drew on March 2, 2007 5:42 PM | comments (0)
+
LonelyGirl15 Film Debut
Congrats to Jessica Rose (aka Lonelygirl15) for her role in the upcoming film, I Know Who Killed Me with Lindsay Lohan. Posted to film by Drew on February 22, 2007 11:50 AM | comments (0)
+
SXSWi 2007
Panel Name: Production Companies 2.0: Taking Online Video to the Next Level Description: Moderated by Zadi Diaz: Smashface Doug Sarine: Ask A Ninja/ BeatBox Giant Productions This year Rocketboom is teaming up with 30boxes (which our company uses daily) and Satisfaction to host an official SXSW party on Saturday night, just post the Frog Design party. The theme is 8 Bit! Posted to rocketboom by Drew on February 10, 2007 2:45 AM | comments (3)
+
Bill Gates teams up with Steve Jobs on Humanity
This is probably not exactly how they would characterize their relationship but I think its true consequently. Im not sure if there are two other individuals in the world who I admire more for their contributions to human progress and to finally see both of them live, one day right after another, marks for me the end of the concert. Before my little twighlight of the idols, I often spoke about the first rock concert I ever went to and often considered my answer for the best I'd ever seen. When I used to go, we would hold up lighters in the air to show we were there. Now we hold up cameras and phones. Apple and Microsoft have led the personal computing world with the two most pervasive operating systems on the planet and so here we are again, Mac vs. PC. Or rather, for a more healthy perspective, Mac and PC. Perhaps the most profound point about Apple that Jobs unfortunately had to make himself, was their ability to innovate. As he mentioned, a company is usually lucky if it is able to bring one revolutionary product to market in it's life-span. Apple has brought at least two and stands a big chance with it's iPhone and underemphasized Apple TV player. Apple did not invent the mouse but they brought it to market and everyone has followed in their footsteps. Apple did not bring file-sharing or the mp3 player to market but along with iTunes, they lead with listeners and the music industry over the iPod. The record industry may still have a hold on Apple with some respects to their own technological and financial activity, though arguably, Apple is now controlling online market prices. Microsoft, by contrast, is not really known as the company of innovation, but seems to be better at taking the innovation that has been proven in the market to the mass market. Bill Gates laid out a road map that involved a strategy almost entirely devoted to the pervasive spread of their products. To use the Zune example again, you can see how with little to no innovation Microsoft can bring a clone product to the market with features that have already been proven to sell. Even after being panned, it appears to now be a competitive seller (today at #17 on Amazon). I used to pride myself in being ambidextrous with both Mac OS and Windows, but over the last two years, I wound up entirely on Macs due to Rocketboom. Since XP has not changed much, I haven't really missed much, but I became pretty rusty I noticed. Just a couple of weeks ago I received the much talked about Ferrari Laptop from Edelman, it's one of the most amazing gifts ever considering how bad ass the computer is. I decided to give it away on Rocketboom but first, I'm going to take a month or so to become an expert at Vista. I want to stay fresh with what the rest of the world is about to go through. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on 1:07 AM | comments (1)
+
Ins and Outs
There is a new article in the LA-Times this weekend on the tired issue of Amanda leaving Rocketboom. The article was scheduled to run in 2006 and I appreciate Rushfield's attempt to assess the situation. It's still not quite what I was hoping for but . . . I left all of this behind. I said it was over then and the commitment stands. By now, I wish Amanda well and hope she is happy. In other news of my past, I sat down with my accountant last week (I'm trying to get used to the fact that I actually have an accountant!), and for the entire period of 2006, I managed to bring in $247,412 via Rocketboom. $210k of that was in advertising and licensing and the rest was mostly from consulting and merchandising. I realize its unusual to report this kind of information and I may not have the luxury of doing so in the future (and may not even want to myself) but I'm hoping to emphasize the point while I can - a point that I have often tried to make - which is that you can do this. Considering that I had almost no business experience when I started (yet just enough to know I would need to bring on a business partner), most of the incoming potential was never even realized and fell into the pending issue folders due to the lack of having the resources or know-how to accommodate all of it, the production became unstable half way through the year and then went into the dreaded mode of "sustaining" for many months (where over 6 months elapsed just keeping afloat with no innovation which is where I am today - Joanne and I are only now about to roll out what is essentially an RB 3.0) and then finishing off the year with the absolute best possible scenario with regards to Abbey, all-in-all, its carpe diem folks. The ballpark is still wide open. If you have tasteful content that people respond to and half a business mind, you should be fairing at least this well. Posted to rocketboom by Drew on January 20, 2007 10:52 AM | comments (5)
+
From Vegas to San Fran
Im off to San Francisco now for my first ever Mac Expo. On Tuesday, Shelly Palmer and I are giving a conference speech and I have no plans for Tuesday night. I'd love to meet up with any bloggers, just email me if you are in town and would like to hang out. I'm looking for a meetup locale. Note to Steve Jobs: Feel free to call me on my direct line in case you are not too busy these days. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on January 8, 2007 5:44 PM | comments (1)
+
The Digital Decade
Through what looked like a buyers frenzy on the NYSE floor I walked right past the crowd, flashed my VIP ticket, accepted a free Sam Adams from an attendant and now Im waiting for Bill Gates to take the stage here in Las Vegas. It seems like a terrorist would do way more damage hitting the CES expo than any G8 meeting. The international brain power in this room is effecting me without even thinking about it. I was invited by Edelman and Microsoft to attend. They paid for the plane, hotel, ticket, etc. There must be some mistake because they put me in a super-suite at the Venetian Hotel where I could probably fit about about 35 people.
+
John Edwards YouTube Video #1 Most Viewed Channel
+
John Edwards to Run for President (Announcement on YouTube)
Today Joanne, Chuck and I are out in New Orleans for a Rocketboom exclusive. We just filmed John Edwards' first announcement that he is running for president. It's actually an announcement of an announcement, so to speak. I then uploaded the video to YouTube and there ya have it folks, the rest is history. http://youtube.com/watch?v=1etlZaf6zUw We also got an interview with him which I will post early in the morning on Rocketboom, well before the rest of the press will meet him for his formal press announcement: (BTW, it may look like a photo op, but Edwards has been working out here all day and has been providing major support since last year when Katrina hit). Joanne and I are heading back to NYC and Chuck will follow Edwards around the US till Friday to shoot footage which we'll edit for the official John Edwards website. Posted to world by Drew on December 27, 2006 9:29 PM | comments (8)
+
Abbey - The Studio
Ive spent quite some time investigating Podshow and Podtech. I've watched both of them form and grow. I've met the people behind the businesses and I've asked a lot of questions. In my investigations, I have spent the most time getting to know content creators. I've met and pal'd around with a lot of them over the last few years and most of my best friends "have a show". I've shared in discussions about their visions and dreams for their shows and I have heard and shared in a lot of frustration, concern and uncertainty. The typical scenario is much like a band who "signs" onto a label for all their business and production support. So whats wrong with these new networks? Nothing is wrong with them! They seem to be working. I'm very thankful they exist because my friends have jobs doing what they love to do and the audiences are happy. It's just that these networks appear to be more focused on ad sales than generating content. This is not very exciting to me. I don't want an ad sales business. Why try to enter into a market with another one of the same thing? Think Zune - there was nothing that the Zune had to offer consumers that they couldn't already get. If I did want an ad network, I would prefer one like Federated Media. FM stands to make a percentage of the ad sales but only needs to spend on generating ad sales. The typical new network stands to make a percentage of ad sales but must spend on a whole lot more to provide adequate support, such as bandwidth, design, production, talent management (drama), IT, PR, legal, to name but a few. All of this added expense requires a lot more share in the ad sales and show equity for the network to make it. It then becomes natural for the network to provide weak support in areas beyond the ad sales. This leaves many content creators stuck in a box and disgruntled. Abbey Corps is about enabling content creators by building community. When the emphasis is shifted towards supporting great quality content and the options for monetizing that content remain open to outside partnerships and community support (as well as our own in-house options), the health of the organization and thus the quality of the content can continue to grow in the most natural direction. As with Rocketboom, there is no need for Abbey to compete against anyone. When there are so many good support services like YouTube, Revver, GoogleVideo, Blip.tv, Podtech, Dotsub, TiVo, iTunes, Akimbo, Federated Media, Datagram, MoveDigital - it's silly to isolate yourself. One show may work great on YouTube and another one may not work there at all. One show might enjoy a wikia wiki and another might have it's own. There is no one answer and there is no umbrella that has it all. Thus Abbey is not intended to be a brand network for shows, it's a creative studio for people. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on December 25, 2006 4:36 AM | comments (15)
+
Delivering News
Joe Lewis at WebProNews picks Joanne as a top Web 2.0 personality. "When it comes to researching topics and reporting breaking news in the Web 2.0 world, one has to be careful to avoid falling into the trap of monotony. Sometimes, the news isn't all that exciting, but it's often the people associated with the story that makes all the difference." "[Joanne] is sharp as a tack, charming, and has a delivery style that you simply can't teach; it's just a gift. " - More. Posted to rocketboom by Drew on December 23, 2006 9:54 PM | comments (0)
+
Abbey Corps
One thing that I kind of like about Rocketboom is that I have never Well all of that is about to change. I'm going to post some news on my blog! :) I'll post it in pieces over the next several days. I'm calling it And so, since Rocketboom began, the biggest most important step of my Clue #1 And so begins Abbey Corps. My next clue will reveal which other shows are a part of the studio Onward and Upward. Posted to internet_culture by Drew on December 22, 2006 6:33 AM | comments (15)
+
Windows Vista: A Present
At first I thought it was one the 200 daily spam mails, the subject of this one read "Windows Vista: A Present". After glancing the body, I noticed the word Rocketboom and looking a little closer, the email said "I wanted to give you a heads up that Microsoft has sent you a laptop with Windows Vista for your use, no strings attached.. . .The laptop was sent to Rocketboom’s mailing address." When I noticed the "no strings attached" part, I knew something was up. The email was sent from Edelman, and then a followup email confirmed that the laptop had already been sent. That is, in fact it is true, they really did just send us a laptop. When I mentioned this to Joanne she said "Shall we start dissing other companies too and see if they respond with freebees?" Quite the olive branch, thanks guys. I'll post again when the computer arrives. Posted to outer space by Drew on 3:03 AM | comments (1)
+
Favorite Music Video of 2006
Bigger than Eat It, White and Nerdy has been played over 20 million times online and is Weird Al Yankovic's #1 top selling single of his career. As one of the most downloaded videos on the internet, with a peak in popularity over the last couple of months, it might be worth it to take a deep look into the character of this video. There you can see the core root of internet culture today. The white and nerdy guy embodies the quintessential iden |
It's getting close to my favorite conference in my favorite place to be during my favorite time of the year, 
