News.com.au’s session at DMF

by | Dec 6, 2006 | Uncategorized

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

by | Dec 6, 2006 | Uncategorized

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%

by | Dec 6, 2006 | Melbourne, Podcast, Uncategorized

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. (thanks for the link Jason Van.)

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.

The Long Tail of TPN – 1600 hours and counting…

by | Dec 5, 2006 | Podcast, Uncategorized

As I was looking through TPN’s November stats last night I remembered a question that a VC in SF asked me last month that I couldn’t answer. The question was: how many hours of programming does The Podcast Network have up on its servers today?

Calculating the amount of hours involves some slight guesswork but here’s how I did it.

The first question I asked myself is “How many shows do we have up on our servers currently?”. That’s also a hard question to answer without getting my IT guys to write some sort of script, but an easy way to estimate it is to see how many media files were downloaded from our servers in the month of November. The answer: 3298. That means that in one month, people listened to 3298 TPN shows.

Now, if we assume that each show is, on average, about 30 minutes in duration, that would mean that in November alone we served up 1649 hours of new and archived programming. If you listened to TPN’s archives 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it would take you 69 days to get through it all. And by then, we’d have added hundreds of hours of new programming.

It’s hard for me right now to figure out exactly how many of those shows were brand new in November versus how many are old, archived shows, but some simple math would give a guesstimate. Let’s say we have about 50 podcasts currently producing new content and, on average, each podcast does a new episode once a week. That would mean that in November, about 200 new podcast episodes were produced. So, out of the 3298 files we sent out, about 6% of them were new and the other 94% were archived shows that someone out there still found interesting enough to download. The Long Tail of The Podcast Network.

Okay so why does any of this matter?

It seems to be trendy at the moment to say that content businesses do not scale and that the future is all about aggregation. I wholeheartedly disagree. I think aggregation and platform plays are great, there is no denying YouTube and MySpace’s success. However, what happens when the latest and greatest platform or aggregator comes along? How do you maintain your audience? Stickiness is a real problem if you don’t own the content. Does Metcalfe’s Law apply to platform businesses when something cooler appears on the scene? And if it’s one thing we know about the innernet, it’s that there is *always* something cooler just around the corner.

Here’s a question – what was the #1 blogging platform in 2001? What was the #1 online music site in 2001? Can anyone remember back that far?

I’m going to take some wild guesses. I’d say that LiveJournal was the top blogging platform and that either MP3.com or eMusic were the top music sites.

The second question is this – are those sites still #1 or even highly ranked today in their respective fields? Are they the sites everyone is flocking to? Or were they eclipsed by newer, cooler sites? As they didn’t control the content on their sites, they had few options to stop their audience departing for newer destinations. If you don’t own the content, how do you get people to stick around?

Of course that isn’t to say it can’t be done. Yahoo made it work. MSN made it work. Very expensive plays though.

I think the content business has a lot of upside and will continue to scale. However, the models that we are used to from the 20th century have to change. As audience fragmentation occurs, scale means having lots of shows with a small audience and fewer shows with a large audience. Getting that model right is going to take a whole new way of thinking, something I’ve been working on for the last couple of years.

But to say that content businesses can’t scale any more is just wrong. TPN is owned, operated and financed by one guy at the moment – me. I have a great team of about 50 collaborators who produce content and a couple of part-time IT guys. Between us we served up over 1600 hours of content last month that we created. Who says content doesn’t scale?

DIGG THIS

G’DAY WORLD 172 – Is Podcasting’s 15 Minutes Almost Up?

by | Dec 4, 2006 | Podcast

Today on the show, on a suggestion from Michael Specht, I talk about John Gartner’s recent blog post suggesting that podcasting will never become important.
Here are some other links mentioned in the show:
BusinessWeek’s article “What Podcasting Revolution?”
World Internet Usage Stats
UPDATE: Here is a link to the Pew Report. Note that the survey was conducted in August 2006 and the sample size was 972 people.

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.

The G’Day World podcasts are brought to you by:

wHooiz.com – Who Do You Want To Find Today?
whooiz

and

My Mum Has Breast Cancer
My Mum Has Breast Cancer
The book aims to assist parents in explaining the breast cancer journey to their children in an informative and entertaining way.

Cookin' at the Corner Vol. 1

Download “Cookin’ at the Corner” (mp3)
from “Cookin’ at the Corner Vol. 1”
by The Dynamic Les DeMerle Band
Origin Records

Google Calendar too restrictive?

by | Dec 1, 2006 | Uncategorized

I got this email from Stuart today:

Anyway I just wanted to mention that using Google Calender as the only
way of viewing the recording schedule is very restrictive – everyone who
wants to view the schedule needs a Google account – Some of us (well me
at least) are not interested in feeding the Google world domination
monster – could there be an alternative method of posting the schedule
for Luddites like myself?

I’ve been waiting to be able to do this in Google because I figured it would become the standard and it’s free, so everyone can play. But I’m open to any other ideas. Any suggestions for how I put the schedule up in ways that people who don’t use Google can view?

Get Yourself “Toon’d” at 2nME.com

by | Nov 30, 2006 | Uncategorized

My old buddy from Microsoft Glenn Vassallo finally launched his cartoon production site 2nME yesterday! This is a service that allows you to get a cartoon drawn up of yourself, which you can use on your blog, in your Skype ID, … on your fake ID…. etc. All TOONs are completely hand drawn, by a professional artist, using a Wacom tablet. Check out the photo in the middle of the boxes on the front page. Look familiar? This should be a popular service. It’s only USD$29.