My Digital Media 2.0 presentation
I’ve uploaded a copy of the presentation I’m delivering this afternoon at Digital Media 2.0. You can check it out here. Not sure it’ll make much sense without my witty comments that go along with it though.
ROO’s Tristan Place (VP Sales, Australia) at DMF
Roo have been around 4 years. Have penetrated most of major video publishers around the world. In Australia, they work with News, Sensis and SBS very closely. Their profile in the US is much higher than it is in Australia. Locally they white box their services to other publishers. They enable activation, marketing and distribution of digital media video over multiple platforms. Started in Caulfield in Melbourne 4 years ago with three people. Publicly listed in 2003 on NASDAQ. The core of the vision has always been that the internet is becoming a media distribution platform that needs to be paid for by advertising. Now have a customer base of 100+ Fortune companies. Currently serving 60M+ streams per month. According to comScore Sept stats, ROO ranks as #8 video streaming service by volume in the world. YouTube throw $5 – 6 million a week at bandwidth costs. (Cam’s note: That’s…. $20 – 24M a month! $250M+ a year! Holy cow.)
gdayworld 173 moved to Friday night
folks I’ve change the time of this show to 9.30pm on Friday night to see if more of you can join in.
details here. If you want to be part of a future episode of G’Day World, you can find the schedule on our Google Calendar.
Of course you can also send me a voicemail HERE and we’ll play it and make fun of you for being too lame to actually come on the show.
News.com.au’s session at DMF
Sigrid Kirk, Group Publisher, and Tom Quinn, CTO, from News.com.au are the second session here this morning. It’s more of a moderated discussion with Bill Dawes as moderator.
They started by saying that while News has been at the digital game as long as their competitors, they haven’t really “attacked” it as hard as they could have. That, however, is changing fast.
News Lab is a new site they have where they are experimenting with new services they are trialling. They are prepared to experiment and see what works. They have been very pleased with the success of their blogs.
Their biggest challenge is to take their 3000 hard-bitten old world journalists and move them into the new world but they have been surprised at how keen to get involved in the new space many of their people have been. The challenge then is to skill those people up.
Focusing very much of RSS for the future. Starting to experiment more with AJAX. They also see video as very important and have been pleased with how their relationship with ROO Networks has delivered content for them. They were able to put their toe in the water with video pretty quickly and get access to lots of content.
Tom talked a bit about their approach to capacity planning. Steve Irwin’s death created so much traffic on News’ sites it was 3x their previous peak. Peter Brock’s death was 2x their previous peak.
Adelaide Now is a new site which is an online version of News’ Adelaide masthead which is a weekly newspaper but is now producing news daily for the site. They also have Perth Now. Local content they see as being very important in the future.
They have a small multimedia team but are planning on ramping it up soon. They will produce their own video content and make them available to the entire News network. They want to produce as much of their own video as possible but it’s very expensive so they plan to source it from a wide variety of sources, including UGC.
Rod Tobin from their multimedia team said they are currently streaming using Windows Media but want to move to Flash. One reason is that people are watching the video from work and employers are taking media players off corporate PCs.
They see UGC as fairly resource intensive as they need to have people on staff monitoring the content for defamation, etc. Here’s something I didn’t know – MySpace have rooms of people in Puerto Rico monitoring everything that goes up onto MySpace. 40,000 videos a day are uploaded and they have to check every one?
Tom confirmed that advertising dollars are moving from print and TV to online and readership of newspapers is declining year on year. And while they advertising rates online are lower than in print, the costs of production and distribution are lower as well.
John Allsop’s Session from Media 2.0
okay, here I am at the first Media 2.0 session at Digital Media Festival in Sydney and first up is John Allsop from WestCIV. He’s basically providing an overview of Web2.0 for the audience. From the show of hands, not many people in the room are very familiar with many of these concepts, so he’s giving them a pretty good introduction to AJAX, RSS, tags, mash-ups, etc.
Here’s my cheat sheet on John’s presentation…
He doesn’t like the term Web2.0 and is from the “it’s just the web” camp.
He thinks Microsoft’s Zune strategy is stupid. (Is there anyone who doesn’t?)
He thinks the Daily Show asking YouTube to take down their clips is stupid.
He’s getting stuck into mass media companies for trying to turn their customers into criminals.
“They are all thieves and pirates”…. he’s trying to get the audience to think about how they turn their customer’s activities into an opportunity rather than a threat.
He’s introducing them to Last.fm, the Grey Album, mininova, etc.
Good presentation, really a basic overview of Web2.0 for the audience. It’s the first time I’ve seen John speak and I can see why he’s popular. Great energy, especially seeing as he’s the first bunny of the day.
The 1% of The 1%
5am, Melbourne airport. On my way to Sydney to talk at Digital Media World and to attend STIRR. Half asleep. Went out with some mates last night to see “Little Miss Sunshine“. Pretty good film, not at all the chick flick I thought it was going to be. Interestingly, Steve Carell shot this before he made 40 Year Old Virgin and The Office.
Guy Kawasaki interviews Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell about their new book Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message. 
It’s a great interview and I really like this bit:
Question: What inspires people to create digital content?
Answer: We think there are three reasons: The first is that the people who helped build sites like Wikipedia, TiVo Community, or Mini2 aren’t part of mainstream culture. They’re what we call the “1 Percenters,†the people who live at the edges and are different than from 99 percent of the world. Our research for the book led us to create the 1% Rule, which states that about 1 percent of a site’s total number of visitors will create content for it. The 1 Percenters flout cultural conventions. Americans love rebels, therefore the 1 Percenters often become the influencers of American culture.
I think it was Ben Barren who I first heard talking about the 1% rule as it applies to what percentage of your audience will actually participate in the conversation, which seems to be a good rule of thumb. If a podcast has about 1000 regular listeners, it will get about ten people writing comments. They are the 1% of the audience of the 1% of the population who create the original content. It continually bugs me that such a small percentage of people actually participate but I guess that’s just how it is.
Anyway, Jackie and Ben also talk in the interview about MySpace cooling off and say they think people who have invested time into their sites won’t abandon them in a hurry. I don’t know about that. I invested a hell of a lot of time into my Typepad site over two years but dumped it fairly easily in October. Why? Because using WordPress offers me more advantages. How many sites have you had over the years? I can’t even begin to count the number I’ve had and abandoned. But maybe that’s just something about me. Grist for my next session with my therapist.
BTW, I had the pleasure of meeting Jackie Huba and chatting with her on the show (along with Mena Trott and Steve Rubel) back on podcast #55. Listen here.