The Daily Reel has
a short interview with the creators of LonelyGirl15, the online video diary of a fake
teen which became enormously popular on YouTube last year. The topic was what they think
about the monetization of YouTube. If anyone would've benefited from a revenue share with
YouTube in recent times, it's these guys (three of them btw, the New Zealand girl who
played lonelygirl15 was not interviewed). The Daily Reel asked Miles Beckett and Greg
Goodfried, two of the three LG15 creators, if there is real money to be made from online
video. Their response:
"Hopefully! The numbers we get on our videos rival popular cable television shows. With the emerging popularity of DVR's and the difficult time advertisers have reaching teenagers and young adults, it only makes sense for advertisers to shift at least some portion of their advertising budgets to popular Internet video shows."
So how can you too join the impending monetization of YouTube? The AP is running a story entitled The keys to going viral on YouTube. It dryly notes "the consistent popularity of cute, young girls" as one way to achieve success. Parody is popular too -- as well as humor and celebrity gotchas (Michael Richards of Seinfeld fame being the most recent). Another way is very similar to what it takes to become popular in the blogosphere or any social network: actively contribute to and participate in the community. As Aaron Ferstman, a spokesman for YouTube, explained in the AP piece:
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus
Last year at DEMOfall a
company called Vapor Stream generated a lot of
controversial press because it introduced an email system capable of completely erasing
any trace of your communication. This year, one of the contenders that may generate a lot
of controversy is Me.dium - a Colorado based startup
that meshes up attention, web surfing and chatting to deliver extreme, real-time social
networking, right in the browser.
The idea behind me.dium is to let you see and communicate in real-time with your friends and other people online who are "close" to you, based on what sites you are visiting on the Internet. Implemented as a browser add-on, me.dium continuously captures your locations on the Web (i.e. which sites or services you are using), sends this data to the centralized server and computes a map of other sites and users that it determines is relevant, based on your context. Here is a screenshot of it in action:
The map above is displayed using a network-like visualization, where distance between your site and other sites represents the inferred level of relevance.
- Information Super Traffic Jam; "A new assessment from Deloitte & Touche predicts that global traffic will exceed the Internet's capacity as soon as this year. Why? The rapid growth in the number of global Internet users, combined with the rise of online video services and the lack of investment in new infrastructure."; for an excellent take on this very problem, I highly recommend you read Robert Cringely's recent article that prophecies how Google is shaping to provide the excess bandwidth needed.
- Flickr abandons the "old skool"; Yahoo is discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign-in system and from 15 March, all users will be required to have a Yahoo ID to sign-in to Flickr. They're also restricting a user's contacts to 3000. Steve O'Hear writes that "in upsetting those early adopters I can't help thinking that Yahoo just broke one of the golden rules of 2.0." Personally I think it's a storm in a teacup - so you need to change your login process?! Remember that many people these days regularly change their identity. So this Flickr move is not a big deal IMHO, although they should find another way round the 3000 limit.
- Microsoft Zune Phone In the Works; Grunchgear speculates that Microsoft is working on a smartphone to be branded under the Zune moniker, but that it won't run the Windows Mobile OS (why? won't the Apple iPhone use OS X?). Crunchgear says it will be able to sync with the Xbox 360 and stream video from the system to the phone via a wireless data connection. I think this tip is plausible, although Microsoft was proclaiming at CES that it was already number 1 with Windows Mobile (outselling Blackberry). So Microsoft would be competing with its own phone partners on such a device....
- J Allard takes Zune reins; In related news, J Allard - the guy credited as a major force behind Xbox - has now taken charge of the Zune program. This signals Microsoft is very serious about getting the Zune brand up to the high standards of the iPod. They can start by losing the brown color....
Normally when we discuss
mashups, we're talking about browser-based mashups (and usually they involve Google
Maps!). But Proto is a new application for building
"desktop mashups". The desktop/Web hybrid theme is one we've been exploring in recent
months on Read/WriteWeb, so Proto is an interesting twist on this. The site offers a
visual building environment, where you can "combine web services like Yahoo! Maps and
Salesforce.com with desktop apps, like iTunes and Outlook."
Jeb Boniakowski is the co-founder of Proto and he emailed me to tell me more about the service. He calls mashups "situational apps" and his vision for them is "one in which users combine data and services from all over the place (web, desktop, intranet) and publish the results of their work back out to those types of endpoints, for further sharing, reuse, etc."
You don't necessarily need to be a programmer to develop Proto mashups, due to the graphical interface and drag-and-drop functions. A good example of a Proto mashup is this Salesforce.com app - which generates a report "through a series of calls to the Salesforce.com web services and then filtering, aggregating, merging results, and reporting on Proto's side..." Also check out this Post iTunes track to Twitter mashup, and a YouTube mashup.
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus
We covered Widgetbox,
the widget market place, in June last year as
well as during its DEMOfall 2006
launch. Today Widgetbox announced a new product called blidgets, which helps bloggers
create a widget that represents their blog.
Widgetbox is an online marketplace that connects widget developers and widget consumers. It acts as a mediator and solves the problem of adapting widgets to different environments, as well as tracking widget usage. For a step-by-step example of how consumers use widgets today, check out our Christmas post. With the introduction of blidgets, Widgetbox moves into widget creation.
