by cameron | 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.
by cameron | 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.
by cameron | 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
by cameron | Nov 29, 2006 | Uncategorized
…by 2012, iPods could launch at similar prices to those on sale now and yet be capable of holding a whole year’s worth of video releases.
That’s a quote from Nikesh Arora, Google’s VP of European operations, speaking at the FT World Communications Conference. (link)
I agree, but it reminds me of something Microsoft VP Jeff Raikes said on a visit to Australia around about 2000. I remember him talking to the MSFT staff over breakfast and predicting that by 2005 most televisions would ship with a terabyte hard drive, enough to store a year’s worth of programming. What happened? Storage costs have continued to come down over the last few years and you can buy a 250gb hard drive now for about $200. So a terabyte should cost about $1000. Still way to much for you to tack onto the cost of a TV. So what happened?
Still, it is undeniable that storage costs are continuing to drop and that we should see that trend continue for some time. And as storage costs and wifi rates drop, the mobile devices will increasingly become portable media players. TPN was built around that vision two years ago. By 2010, I expect the vast majority of the one billion mobile phones in circulation to be mobile entertainment devices. And someone has to build the content that goes on them. These devices by then will have open access to the internet and the “walled garden” models that mobile carriers like to push today will have mostly disappeared. Anyone will be able to download any content and will be charged either a fixed rate by their carrier or might even get free internet access in return for targeted advertising (easier to do on a mobile device than it is on a PC).
It’s going to be interesting to watch the end game between mobile handsets manufacturers (Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, etc), Apple, and the mobile carriers, as they battle over business models, voice traffic versus VOIP, etc.
by cameron | Nov 24, 2006 | Uncategorized
Des Paroz sent me a link to this article in The SMH that talks about how inaccurate the food labels in Australia are.
Julie Robotham reports:
Of the 19 products that claimed to be low in fat or calories, 19 per cent exceeded the fat content published on the panel while two-thirds contained more calories than specified – in one case by nearly three times.
So it’s even worse than I imagined. I knew you couldn’t believe it when a food product is claimed to be “lite” or “low fat”, for reasons I’ve discussed here before. This new data just makes it even harder though to know how many calories you are consuming and what percentage of those calories are coming from fat. In a country where Type 2 Diabetes and obesity are on the rise, we need to do a much better job of
a) educating people how to eat sensibly and
b) making sure that food manufacturers accurately report what their foods contain
This should partly be the responsibility of the government, partly of the media (congratulations to Fairfax and Julie for getting this story out) and partly it lies with us, folks. We need to vote with our dollars. Perhaps someone should start a “website of shame” that highlights companies who aren’t giving us accurate information.
