Back in the day, a five-track DIY video mixer was enough to tickle our fancy. But we have gone the way of all users and have grown lazier over the ensuing two years. We now require our personalized videos to be mixed for us. Shark Week to the rescue! This year's promotional coup pulls all kinds of data from a user's Facebook profile to generate creepily personal results.

What ensued could only have been better if Discovery/Shark Week had let us embed the video. All we can tell you is that you've got to try it for yourself. The app mined a few bits of data to create a sort of video obituary/newsreel that was a strange reminder of how much personal information we really do publish inside that particular walled garden.

That being said, it is a crime against humanity that users are not able to download, embed, email, or even pause the videos that are created through this hilarious little app. With a little more sharing, this Shark Week promo could've been hugely popular.

In addition to favorite programming from Shark Week's past, this year's lineup will include a two-hour docudrama of the true story behind Jaws and segments on sharks' diurnal behavior and their favorite spots to hang out and maul people. Shark Week begins August 2. Try to get in the last of your summer beach outings beforehand.

In reality, open-source software provides stable solutions, created by people and for people and used by companies of all sizes. Use Firefox? That's open-source software. Google Chrome? It too is based on an open-source code. Ever look up a term on Wikipedia? The site is completely built on user-generated code and content. "In fact," says Allison Randal, Program Chair of OSCON, "chances are you're using a lot more open-source software than you know: on your computer or powering you favorite websites."

Author: Ravit Lichtenberg is the founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com -- a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit works with CEOs, marketing groups, and social media managers to craft customer-centric engagement strategies that result in higher customer value, stronger customer community, improved monetization, and higher profitability. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com.

What Is Open Source?

"The ideas behind open source are about freedom," continues Randal, "that people should have certain basic rights in the software that they use, the same as every other part of life. It's about people's rights to create things they're passionate about."

Mozilla's founders, who spawned Firefox, walked away from the ashes of Netscape with a desire to change the Web browsing experience. Drupal and Joomla are content management systems that enable unlimited options in website building and publishing. Remember how difficult it used to be to build your own website? Now building one is free, open to all, flexible, and extendable: anyone with a passion or idea can build for it, and numerous companies are taking Drupal and Joomla and building easy-to-use website templates that anyone can use, no programming needed. Don't want to pay for Microsoft Office? You can use OpenOffice for free -- it will serve most of your needs.

In essence, these projects, developers, and organizations address mature, business-critical issues in better, faster ways. This form of crowd-sourcing enables businesses to use solutions that would otherwise have required a lot more time and/or people to develop at a much higher total cost.

Open Source Is Evolving

You may have heard the phrase, "Open Source is free as in speech, not as in beer." This phrase refers to the notion that while everyone can freely start and contribute to any project, the actual use of open source solutions may still come with a price tag -- often for services and additional product layers that a company bundles with the open code. But for corporations that already spend millions of dollars just to keep the lights on, investing in open source increasingly makes better business sense. For the CIOs and CTOs of these companies, it's not about the price tag of each solution but rather about the total cost of ownership over time, especially in a downturn economy.

In a study conducted by Gartner and reported by Matt Asay at CNET, CIOs reported they have increased investment in open-source software and decreased investment in proprietary software. CIOs reported that by investing in open source they were able to do the following:

• Reduce costs by 87% (while meeting or exceeding expectations),
• Improve quality by 92%,
• Ease integration and customization by 86%,
• Quicken pace of innovation by 82%,
• Improve support by 84%,
• Increase standards compliance by 91%,
• Decrease time to market by 82%.

Michael Fauscette, Group Vice-President of Software Business Solutions at IDC, recently highlighted changes in the adoption of open source. IDC found that as recently as 2007, CIOs were reluctant to adopt social media software for fear of IP infringement and poor support: two mission-critical elements of any enterprise. By 2008, says Fauscette, CIOs reported that they preferred open-source software precisely because of the quality of support it comes with. And as for their fear of IP infringement, that was no longer at the top of the list because of standards and self-policing.

Open source doesn't only serve IT companies, though. It is now being explored for government and health care data management and access. Open-source software, in other words, has moved from the basements of Linkin Park fans to the desks of the largest corporations in the US.

Sound familiar? The evolution of open source may sound a bit like the evolution of another web-related phenomenon, what has become known as Web 2.0 social media and social networking. Like open-source software, social media is about the basic human right to communicate, organize, and maintain control of one's own experiences. And both address the needs of companies to do more at higher quality with less money. Both social media and open-source software involve communities and are fed by content: code in the case of open source, and media content in the case of social media.

But unlike open source, social media has thus far primarily been a consumer play and is only now being explored by enterprises. Living on the Web, social media is also hardware and distribution-channel agnostic: it does not require pre-installation and does not compete with pre-bundled proprietary products. Historically, open source, being hardware dependent, has had greater distribution challenges: unless the software came pre-loaded on your hardware, notes Fauscette, you would rarely seek out alternatives to replace what you already have. Without a channel for hardware, distribution was driven primarily by hard-core tech enthusiasts.

Seeds of Change

Companies that erected insurmountable barriers to protect their source code now realize that the cost of innovation and competition may be just too much compared to that of their competitors that use open-source software. Take Google's Android, an iPhone competitor built on the open-source platform Linux. Android started off as closed-source software but very quickly became an open-source project. Developers can now build applications on top of Android's platform and then use the code for their own Android-like products, just as developers use Firefox code to build their own browsers.

2008 saw another significant milestone: the establishment of the Symbian Foundation to oversee the development of the Symbian operating system as an open-source platform, licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL). The Foundation's members include Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG, and AT&T. With this development, a once highly protected closed-source cell-phone operating system has opened up.

Caleb Sima, Chief Technologist at Hewlett-Packard, calls this "a clear move on Nokia's part to try to catch up to the competition by using open source and the community to help evolve its features to those of smartphones." Companies are now realizing that open-source software is a competitive advantage.

What Open Source Means to Social Media

Open source is the natural platform for fast-evolving social media and social networking. Forget about having to scale the walled gardens of social networks or having to upload, download, and link together multiple applications. With open source, everything is seamless and transparent. Picture a huge festive dinner table, set with dozens of mouth-watering dishes for you and your guests to pick from. You can heap whatever you like on your plate or, better yet, just dab your bread into whatever dish your please, all while seeing what others are putting on their plate and seeing whether they're using a fork or a spoon and hearing the conversation around the table.

But with all of these capabilities and openness, people will face new challenges on the Web. One big challenge will be to make the Web more personal and make it possible to simulate live interaction. One of the most promising companies to address this is Kaltura, maker of the only open-source online video management platform, with a free community platform, now used on over 35,000 websites and soon to be integrated into Wikipedia for user co-creation of rich media content. (Disclaimer: Kaltura is one of my client companies.)

"Extensions like Kaltura make the Web real," says Fauscette. "Video is in fact one of the big things we'll see. This is an opportunity space, and first-mover advantage will be big." For Fauscette, trust is a major sticking point: with the proliferation of networks, friends, followers, and brands online, helping people figure out who and what to trust will be key to making the Web personal.

Whoever tries to control people's relationships will lose. Whoever enables people to create and share experiences that are relevant to them across any website, with anyone, the way they want will win. And open source will create many more winners than losers.

More About Open Source

OSCON is celebrating its 10th year anniversary this coming week in a four-day conference in San Jose, California. In addition to the usual technical tracks, OSCON has added people and business tracks and many free events. You can register for a free pass to the expo hall (yes, free as in beer) and attend the "Birds of a Feather" un-conference, Ignite party, Hackathon, and much more (all free). Check out the list of events.

Great resources online include Open Source Initiative Open Government, Open Data Initiatives, SourceForge (where you can find a list of ongoing projects and downloads), Open Video Alliance, and the excellent short and sweet write-ups by open-source experts such as CNET's Matt Asay.

Oh, and there's always Wikipedia (where smiles are always open).

The Pope celebrated the World Day of Communications on Friday with a statement calling social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace "a gift" that could speak to the "fundamental desire" we all have to connect, so long as people don't isolate themselves online, forget those marginalized by the Digital Divide or violate the "goodness and intimacy of human sexuality." To that we can only say, leave Britney alone!!

In one video already uploaded to YouTube, the Pope calls the internet a new way to talk to God. Perhaps he doesn't see it as a way to talk to nonbelievers on other sites, as embedding of the videos has been turned off. That seems strange given the Church's interest in finding new members, but presumably the Vatican doesn't want the Pope's videos showing up in snarky blog posts like this, or worse. It can get pretty raunchy on YouTube, and though the new Obama adminstration can forgive YouTube its sins with a change in official policy, we hardly expect the Catholic Church to do so.

The Vatican Channel contains 12 videos at launch, most of which are quite short, many under 1 minute long. That's not bad for a religion that is known for holding hour-long rituals, but it truly is a new era of communication. Five seconds is all it takes these days to turn around quickly, open your eyes wide, play some dramatic music and change the world.

Now Put Your Junk in The Box

What will the Vatican be posting on its YouTube channel? So far there's some blessing of lambs and a discussion of the Vatican's relationship with the media. We're hoping to see some gems like when the Pope said last month that homosexuality is as big a threat to humanity as global warming, but we'd be willing to settle for the Numa Numa dance, too.

Who's next? The President of the US, the Pope, who isn't on YouTube these days?

Now, this may seem like a relatively insignificant step for people who live and breathe the Web every day. But for traditional media companies, this sharing of column inches with other publications is not only difficult, it's something they have feared (emphasis is mine):

"The days when content sites were afraid to link to other sites are over," said Marc Frons, chief technology officer for digital operations for The New York Times Company.

So it comes as little surprise that NYT is dipping its toe in the water rather cautiously. Rather than replacing the default front page, Times Extra will serve as an additional version of the NYT front page that users can activate by clicking a link. However, that version only remains active for 24 hours, at which point the user will have to activate the Times Extra front page, again.

Whatever the case, this is a step in the right direction. A small step, but a good step nonetheless. Hopefully, the next move to be open will involve NYT sharing the metrics about how many users opt to use Times Extra and - given the options - where they choose to go for their news.

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb has an existing syndication arrangement with The New York Times

Forrester predicts that if growth of ratings and reviews continues at its current pace, then "reading peer recommendations will fast become a permanent stage in the purchase decision process."

Likewise we're also seeing a lot of 'imitation is the best form of flattery' among voting and user-generated video sites, with digg and YouTube clones popping up seemingly every day, for every conceivable niche.

Forrester has come up with different categories of social media usage (see image below). It claims that Creators are still growing slowly (it's now 21%), but "Critics" have increased more (to 37%). Critics are defined as people who post online reviews and comments. Collectors are at 19%, Joiners 35% and unsurprisingly "Spectators" are the biggest group with 69% of US online adults 'consuming' social media.

The below graph shows the growth patterns over the past year of each category:

What's particularly noteworthy is that the statistics indicate that social web usage is going mainstream. As report author Josh Bernoff notes in a blog post, the growth in consumption of online content is mostly coming from older people: "social activity is way up among 35-to-44 year-olds, especially when it comes to joining social networks and reading and reacting to content. Even among 45-to-54 year-olds, 68% are now Spectators, 24% are Joiners, and only 28% are Inactives."

Heavy Metal Islam

The blog's focus is clearly illustrated with the most recent post at time of writing: Mark LeVine and Heavy Metal Islam: The Fight Over What Islam Means. The post explains the story of scholar and professional musician Mark LeVine, who traveled across the Middle East "playing with and studying heavy metal bands in the area after the September 11 attacks in 2001." According to Foley's post, Mark LeVine's work uses "the universal language of music to articulate the diversity of Islam in contemporary times."

The post finishes with a selection of links to various media - Flickr, podcasts, the Heavy Metal Islam homepage, LeVine's blog, links to audio. There's also mention of a radio broadcast LeVine will be doing this Thursday, on 'Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders' - which is a radio program by one of the organizations behind the blog, Wisconsin Public Radio.

Incidentally, if you want a 1-line explanation of what Heavy Metal Islam is, this quote at the top of the HMI homepage - attributed to one of the founders of the Moroccan heavy-metal scene, Reda Zine - sums it up: "We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal."

The trailer for a documentary called Heavy Metal in Baghdad, via InsideIslam

How Inside Islam Started

We asked Kaitlin Foley to tell us more about Inside Islam and how it got started. A recent graduate of University of Wisconsin-Madison, Foley has a degree in International Studies and Political Science. She focused on Islamic studies for her degree and so the blog is kind of an extension of that. She explained:

"The project as a whole is a product of University of Wisconsin-Madison, of which me, the blogger, and the pubic radio shows are only part of... in the end, we hope to have a wealth of resources that people around the world can access about Islam and Muslim culture worldwide. This includes digital stories, blogs, YouTube videos, music, and all other types of popular content on the web."

Foley told us that the response to the blog has been "positive from the Muslim community online." She said that it "seems to be an issue people are really concerned about and want to talk about in a new way." The Internet, said Foley, "is a way to talk about political, cultural and global issues in a democratic way." The blog's goal is to "create a dialogue and raise some debates about hot issues in a meaningful way."

The blog is closely linked to the radio show 'Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders', mentioned above. The first radio show to be broadcast is on tomorrow, about Heavy Metal Islam. The second show is October 30 on the topic of Muslims and social media.

The final question we asked Kaitlin Foley was: are you a Muslim yourself? She replied that she's not, although she said a couple of her supervisors are. She explained further that "even though I'm not Muslim, I think Islam is a big concern for anyone with a T.V. or internet access and [it's] an important way people understand the world."

Islam on the Web

Inside Islam is an interesting use case for a blog - it's using a two-way medium, along with new media tools like podcasting and Flickr, to open up discussion on a religion that, in this day and age, can be easily misunderstood.

For context, we must point out that Islam is already a popular topic in the blogosphere. We noted in a post in November that trend charts showed more Web activity about Islam than about Christianity. There is indeed an Alltop category for Muslims, which has a lot of blogs in it. Not to mention there are some web 2.0 blogs that cover the Middle East, including ArabCrunch and IslamCrunch.

Let us know in the comments about other religious organizations or independent sites using the Web in innovative ways.

Top photo: Mark LeVine

See also:
Religion and Web Technology, Part 1: LifeChurch.tv
Religion and Web Technology, Part 2: Shalom Hartman Institute

Abbey told us that he has done "a significant amount of research into the Jewish world's usage of Web 2.0 features". And it is clear from Abbey's presence on the site that he is working hard at putting that Web theory into practice.

Features

Alan Abbey listed the following Web initiatives for his organization:

• Weekly postings of original, Op-Ed length essays by the leaders and scholars on topics of interest to the Jewish/Israeli worlds. "We include "talkbacks" (reader comments) on our articles, some of which draw large responses", said Abbey.
• Educational material, including complete course syllabuses.
• Stream and host video lectures from the scholars and leaders, both onsite and offsite. Abbey said that they're using "Blip.tv for full-length videos, YouTube for short ones (we were named 2nd most-viewed Israeli non-profit on YouTube), and Jewish video sites Yideoz.com and JewTube.com for additional distribution (although both sites have their technical issues)."
• Video-enabled distance learning to rabbis, teachers and community leaders in North America. Abbey told us that they are "transitioning this fall to online video via Ustream.tv and/or Mogulus.com." As a matter of interest, LifeChurch.tv also uses Mogulus.
• A blog running on wordpress.com, "to allow us to use some Hebrew, to enhance search, and to give a less formal view of our activities." Abbey said that they're also building sites for some of their leading individuals.
• Hartman is developing an iTunes podcast, both audio and video versions.
• Abbey says that they are "working on enhancing the Wikipedia entries others have created."
• The Institute is developing a Facebook strategy. As of now, Abbey uses his own Facebook page to promote the Institute's content and videos. He's also created a Facebook group for a group of North American rabbis studying with them. "I regularly place our material on related Jewish/Israeli FB groups", said Abbey, "as well as promote through Twitter." He noted that several of their groups use Google or Yahoo groups too, which he wants to formalize some more.

One of the challenges that Abbey notes, is getting their users to participate in social networking on the Web. Abbey puts this down to their audience being "older than the standard online audience", but he thinks they are "slowly making headway."

Analysis

As with LifeChurch.tv, Hartman is making particularly good use of online video. Whereas an apparently well-funded LifeChurch effectively built their own online tv service, Hartman makes use of Blip.tv and YouTube and other third party providers. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, indeed it's often a good move because you can tap into existing communities. Alan Abbey wrote in a recent post that "more than 25,000 people have viewed Hartman Institute videos since we began posting them on the Web, and that's not counting the thousands who have seen them on our website's Digital Lectures channel".

Overall Hartman's web presence makes good use of current trends such as online video, RSS and blogging. They are making progress with other trends, such as social networking and online education. It has to be noted that the web design is relatively no-frills, but that can be gradually worked on over time.

It's pleasing to see the Op-Eds sometimes attracting large comments. This indicates that the move towards individual sites for leaders will pay off in the long run, provided those sites are more like blogs than static websites. Similarly, we encourage Hartman to continue to explore ways to entice their users and students to participate on the site - whether it be in writing, video, photos, or any other creative online activity.

Finally, with Alan Abbey leading Hartman's web efforts, the Institute has a passionate web advocate. You really can't ask for more in any organization! Well done Alan and keep up the great work.

In the comments, we'd love to find out about other religious organizations and the web activities they're doing. Don't be shy about promoting your own sites, or those you know of in your particular faith.

See also:
Religion and Web Technology, Part 1: LifeChurch.tv
Religion and Web Technology, Part 3: Inside Islam

In this post we'll look at a Christian church, LifeChurch, which is using the Web in an extensive way. In upcoming posts we'll cover other religions, such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. Note that we're going to keep a tight focus on the technology - rather than what is being preached with the technology.

LifeChurch.tv is a production of the Life Church, a Christian "megachurch" that formed in 1996 in Edmond, Oklahoma. It appears that the church started its tv operations in 2001, then in April 2006 the LifeChurch.tv "Internet Campus" was launched. This provided weekly live, interactive church broadcasts over the Internet, for anyone in the world to tune into. The website also began offering "online LifeGroups" (small collaborative networks). At the same time a sub-site called LifeChurch.tv Open started, with the aim of offering free content to other churches.

Last but not least, in April 2007, LifeChurch opened a presence in SecondLife. Andrea Useem attended one of the virtual world services, but wasn't overly impressed. "I was looking forward to chatting with people in the cavernous but furnished church lobby", she wrote, "[but] unfortunately, the 15 or so people who attended the service disappeared quickly, and I found myself as I usually am in Second Life -- wandering around by myself." (thanks Marcello for the link)

Praise Be Web 2.0

The LifeChurch websites today are an impressive and well designed collection of content, tools and online video. The main Internet Campus site features a blog which has many 'web 2.0' features: a variety of RSS feeds, embedded video widgets, 'share this' links, live prayer and help options, and connections to Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Vimeo. Also the blog has a number of international translations via the Wordpress plugin Nothing2Hide - e.g. the Korean version.

Example video

The Open site also has a blog, written by the church pastors. Its most recent post at time of writing is about a new initiative called LifeShare, which Pastor Bobby Gruenewald describes as a "7-day challenge for the church to move together online with purpose." He describes how they're using the Web to connect with people:

"We're doing this at a few different levels, ranging from simple steps like tweets and internet campus e-invites to more in-depth efforts like sharing online how God is working in your life and embedding video teaching on your blog. We're connecting daily through a live video stream to talk about next steps and pray together. LifeShare is open to anyone, anywhere, so feel free to join us by signing up here."

LifeChurch's Web Apps

What's really great to see is how LifeChurch is using best-in-class web apps to create each different aspect of their online presence - Twitter for real-time communication, Wufoo to create their online forms, Blip.tv for video teaching, Mogulus for live broadcasting, and so on.

But they're also building their own apps, for example the recently announced ChurchMetrics.com, which is a web app that helps churches "track attendance, giving, salvations, and baptisms." As yet the app hasn't been launched publicly, but it sounds like a great example of web analytics applied to the real world (which on this blog means beyond tech!).

The main web app that LifeChurch has released so far is YouVersion.com, a free online Bible which presents Christian Scripture in a variety of media formats, including pictures, video, journal entries, and blog posts. The beta of this app was launched in October 2007. And yes, there is an iPhone app version!

Conclusion

Overall we come away very impressed by how LifeChurch is utilizing the Internet. It is using a variety of web apps to achieve its purpose, and creating its own as well. The church's websites and apps are visually rich and sophisticated in features.

Most importantly, the web activities of LifeChurch are bringing its message to many more people than they would've reached without an online presence. It's a great example of the mainstream web, using many of the tools and trends we've preached here on ReadWriteWeb over the years!

Tell us in the comments about other religious organizations using the Web. We're going to explore a few examples this week, from Christianity as well as other religions.

See also:
Religion and Web Technology, Part 2: Shalom Hartman Institute
Religion and Web Technology, Part 3: Inside Islam

AOL is apparently going to put an RSS reader and a window for participating in multiple 3rd party social networks right onto its front page. This could change the lives of millions of people - snide commenters can take note that with 60 million unique visitors monthly AOL.com still gets 3X as many visitors as Digg. Check out these screen shots below.

Evidence these are real? Beyond the facts that the changes are a good idea and that TechCrunch posts things like this carefully - there's also a very savvy increase in visibility for AOL Radio on these screens. Regular RWW readers will remember our post last month about the how AOL Radio is the most popular streaming music service on the internet and is a huge asset for the company.

Why Would This Happen?

We're going to presume for the sake of discussion that these screen shots really have been leaked from inside AOL. The company has not been doing particularly well for some time. Its efforts to move away from its dial-up subscription business to an ad-based content business don't appear to have impressed anyone to date, including many of its own staff; we wrote about major upheaval in the ranks of bloggers from the acquired Weblogs Inc. network earlier this summer.

If you're going to make a stab at survival - lunging for the future sounds like a good strategy. Aggregation of content from around the web is quite likely a key part of the future for almost all successful websites; the web is too large to pretend you're an island any more, even if your network is sprawling it just can't compete with the options offered by the web at large. While mainstream users used to think that AOL was the internet for years, they are not so naive any more.

Just as Yahoo! appears to be experimenting with integrating off-site blogs with their prized News site (see our coverage from earlier today) so too it makes sense for AOL to try something daring in this department.

Lifestreaming?

Aggregating multiple social networks on one page? Several years ago this would have seemed crazy, but who among targeted young audiences doesn't belong to more than one network today? It's becoming increasingly common. An estimated 62% of Facebook users also have accounts on MySpace, and 15% of MySpace users have Facebook accounts, according to one set of numbers from last year. Another set of numbers, illustrated by the graph below, show the same thing: there's market opportunity in both overlapping users and in pointing users of services like Facebook over to Bebo and AIM as well.

Given the incredible year of growth Facebook has had, it makes sense for both users and vendors to remind AOL visitors that other social networks still exist.

The primary reason most users don't use multiple networks regularly is probably because it's inefficient to do so. Give them one easy place to do so and keeping track of activity among friends on MySpace, Facebook and AOL's AIM and Bebo networks and such a task becomes much less daunting.

Just last month, AOL acquired 2nd tier lifestreaming startup SocialThing. It only makes sense that we'd start to see some of this functionality on the home page of AOL.

But Isn't RSS Super Confusing?

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is the most popular method by which users subscribe to news feeds from websites they are interested in. It's a relatively simple concept but the technology has struggled to find widespread adoption.

It doesn't have to be that way. The rumored AOL interface is pretty straightforward. It provides a list of pre-selected feeds for users to click on, it appears to offer subscription to other feeds and it says "Read the latest news, feeds and blogs from across the web." Put that in front of millions of people and there really is a good chance they'll figure out what to do with it.

It is a risk, but AOL is in a position to take such a risk. It's just a rumor right now, but we think it seems pretty likely to come true. We'd love to see it, in fact.

On its official website, the campaign organizers - three Chinese bloggers by the names of Flypig, Webleon and Babechloe - also released a #080808 buddy icon template (download), to encourage Twitter users to make their own #080808 buddy icon. See the images below for inspiration.

#080808 Twitter Buddy Icons collected by YUKI.N

A note that Twitter is not popular in China, but the Beijing Olympics could be a booster for the product there.

McDonald's has come out with an "alternate reality game" called The Lost Ring. The aim of the game is to discover a hidden history to the Olympics, which involves adventures in ancient Greece, mysterious packages, heroines, and so on. The Lost Ring apparently has the backing of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). There's an accompanying wiki and a YouTube site that has some very cinematic trailers, the first of which is embedded below:

It's an ambitious social media marketing ploy by McDonald's. While the McDonald's logo and brand aren't immediately apparent, the terms and conditions page indicates that it's a subtle push to associate their brand with the Olympics "spirit". Here's what the T&C state: "McDonald's is proud to sponsor The Lost Ring and bring the spirit of the Olympic Games to people around the world."

Now For the Not-So-Subtle: Lenovo's Athlete Blogs

Another example of social media and the Olympics is from computer manufacturer Lenovo, which has created blogs for about 100 Olympics athletes. Entitled Voices of the Olympic Games, in this case there is an explicit connection between the site and the brand. All the participating athletes were provided with "new Ideapad laptops and video cameras to capture their experiences." Many of these blogs are hosted on Google's Blogger.

Here's an example, from Rachel Dawson of the USA Field Hockey Team, from her latest post Out and About in the Village. . .:

"...the village is thriving as new batches of athletes arrive daily. The chaos in the dining hall is a key indicator of the increase in athlete volume. In order to understand the capacity of the dining hall let me draw you a mental picture . . . combine 6 football fields (3 deep and 2 wide), then line the space with thousands upon thousands of tables, put in buffet style food stands and add one McDonalds café, and there you have the village dining hall. Needless to say, the dining hall is the prime location for socializing, culturizing, and simply people watching. Today, there was extra excitement at meal time as some big time athletes arrived - ehhh, maybe you have heard of Michael Phelps, or perhaps Roger Federer or how about Spanish tennis phenom, Rafael Nadal. Yes indeed, we saw all of them."

Did you spot the McDonald's mention? They are doing a great job already infiltrating the Olympics!

Other Social Media Marketing at the Olympics

Via livemint.com, who got the following information from marketing consultancy R3 Asia Pacific, here are further examples:

• Panasonic's photo contest, where consumers can upload photos within the subject of Olympics and vote for others' photos on the website.
• Samsung Electronics Co. started a video contest based on the torch relay theme.
• China Mobile and video share portal Youku formed a platform called M-Zone, designed for "cheering for Olympics".
• FAW-Volkswagen Automobile Co. Ltd launched the Honk for China campaign. According to livemint, "Netizens who write about the torch relay passing through their town can link their posts with the FAW-VW's official torch map website. They then receive a "honking badge" that allows them to compose a tune which visitors can play (honk). Bloggers who attract the most "honks" win prizes."
• Qingdao Haier Co. Ltd, in association with Baidu.com Inc., sponsored an Olympics online "love torch" relay.
• Nike Inc. had a "creative community" for sharing creative works.
• PepsiCo Inc.'s website celebrates "Everyone can be on the can for China" online activity around the Olympics. Consumers can upload pictures or articles about their love for China on websites such as 5a.com, Xiaonei.com, Taoao.com, Pocn.cn, Ipartment and 163.com.

Conclusion

Any major sporting event these days will attract big sponsors, and the Olympics has always been an event where global giants like Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Kodak, et al can flaunt their wares. With social media, you could say that brands are just using the Internet to find ever more ingenious ways to promote their brand - and that the Olympics is just a prop for that. McDonald's clever alternate reality game is proof of that. Lenovo's 'blog for schwag' promotion for athletes is a more overt example.

Still, we think it's good usage of social media tools and it shows just how far the Web has come that big brands are pumping money into it as part of their Olympics marketing. What do you think of these social media marketing efforts? What others have you come across?

One of the most obvious ways the Web will be utilized with the Beijing Olympics is with online video coverage. In the US, NBC has teamed up with Microsoft Silverlight for 2,200 hours of live coverage. Meanwhile in China, Adobe has teamed up with a Chinese network.

Despite the geographical limitations, NBC is promising lots of 'new media' features in its Web coverage. These include:

• Users have the ability to watch whatever sport they want, unlike on TV where you get what the broadcaster dishes up.
• There will be 3,000 hours of "on-demand encores of full events and highlights".
• Users can switch between up to 4 live streams.
• Users will see the standard world feed that is sent to all broadcasters, so there will be no network TV commentators. Instead, the NBC expects to see bloggers "serve as play-by-play voices and analysts" (free talent!).
• Users will have access to statistics, biographies and other information.

As the NYT notes, NBC's coverage of the Olympics online is the culmination of NBC's "multiple-network strategy, which began in 2000 with the addition of CNBC and MSNBC to the mix." The upshot is that coverage of the Olympics becomes an on-demand, 24/7 experience -- although unfortunately not worldwide in NBC's case. This is possible because the "cyber-pipelines" infrastructure is largely in place now, in the US, to support such extensive online video coverage.

NBC's coverage online will be powered by Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Media player. CNET reports that Limelight Networks is being used to route the video streams to Internet service providers. NBC was originally planning to use Adobe's Flash, but CNET noted that NBC "was convinced by Microsoft earlier this year that Silverlight would allow it to stream more high-quality video than would have been possible using Flash."

It seems China's TV networks didn't buy that line, as Adobe has partnered with CCTV.com to bring Olympics online video to mainland China.

CCTV.com and Adobe Partner for Internet Coverage in China

Today, Adobe announced a partnership with CCTV International Networks Co, Ltd. to deliver Web coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games to fans throughout mainland China and Macau. CCTV.com owns the online video rights to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games for mainland China and Macau. CCTVOlympics.com plans to provide 5,000 hours of "on-demand protected streamed video content including full event replays, highlights, features, interviews and encore packages." This is made up of 3,800 hours of worldwide broadcast Olympic Games video and 1,200 hours of CCTV's own video.

Choosing Adobe as a partner, as with NBC and Silverlight, is a hint that Chinese Internet viewers can expect a rich interactive experience. The press release trumpets "an unprecedented Web experience created with Adobe Flex and delivered via Adobe Flash technology".

Unlike NBC though, CCTV is not eschewing commentators and replacing them with bloggers. CCTV promises "expert analysis from CCTV's Olympic media team". However it also will be diving into the social web via "social networking features that will enable fans to share aspects of their Olympic experience with friends."

Conclusion

The 2008 Olympics is set to be the first to have a mammoth online video presence. Up to 5,000 hours of coverage would be enough to satisfy even the most rabid of Olympics fan. What's possibly even more interesting to watch will be the performance of interactive Web technologies such as Silverlight and Flash in this coverage. Which one will end up better? Although I guess if you're in the US, you'll never know about Flash - and vice versa for the Chinese regarding Silverlight.

Further coverage from the RWW Network:

RWW: The Olympics Go Mobile

last100: Roundup: The most digital of all Olympic games is well underway

last100: NBC Olympics on the Go will allow (some) fans to download events to watch on their computers

I discovered OleOle at a taping session for a reality tv show about startups that I'm participating in. I'm one of the judges and one of the 20 startups competing for the grand prize is OleOle. OleOle is based in both New Zealand and the US, with its software development and technology HQed in NZ and marketing and sales in Los Angeles. It has 28 employees in total. The website has been in development for 2 years and the full launch was April.

OleOle has a full complement of social media features - personalized start page, blogging, photo sharing, videos, profiles, groups, news, voting, podcasts, forums, etc. It also features more traditional soccer website fare, such as fantasy leagues, live scores, tables, stats, and more. OleOle is going after a potentially huge vertical social network market - football fans. Football (soccer) is by far the world's most popular sport, and one of the few truly global football codes. There are an estimated 1 billion fans worldwide, according to OleOle.

OleOle has big plans. It wants to be "the future of football online" and already claims to be the leading social media site for football. I had some questions about that in the tv show taping, as sites like EPSN Soccernet and Yahoo Sports are also enormously popular online soccer sites. However OleOle does differentiate itself by being a purely social media site - they pointed out for example that the content is 100% fan generated (FGC instead of UGC?). Although not all of that is amateur content, as we shall see below.

OleOle has acquired some of the leading football blogs, such as the Chelsea Blog and the aptly named ArseBlog - a fan blog for English football club Arsenal. I say aptly named, because I'm a Manchester United fan - arch rivals of Arsenal :-) The one-man ArseBlog was acquired by OleOle a month ago. I have to admit, it has an awesome byline (see image). And you can see the potential payoff for OleOle owning ArseBlog in this post, about a player Arsenal may or may not be buying, which garnered over 1,500 comments (or "arses" in the site's lingo).

OleOle's revenue model is advertising, but it also plans to get into sponsorships, merchandising and ticketing. This is one of the advantages of using social web technologies for a mainstream audience - there is a potentially big and lucrative market, and soccer brings some added revenue options (match tickets, team jerseys, etc).

Right now the company isn't cashflow positive though. It's taken NZ$6 million in series A funding so far (mostly from its founders), and is currently shopping around for a Series B. OleOle aims to hit profitability by 2010, which not coincidentally is when the next football World Cup is on. Ultimately, OleOle could become an acquisition target itself, for a mainstream media company that covers soccer such as ESPN or any of the US television networks.

Overall OleOle is an impressive site and a great example of how the Social Web can be utilized in the real world. I'll be watching OleOle with interest, not only for the tv show but as an example of what can be done with web technologies for a mainstream audience. Another thing to watch is whether they use the platform they've built for other sports.

InfiniteHoops was founded by Tosh Meston from Seattle (and yes he's ex-Microsoft). Meston told us by email why he created InfiniteHoops:

"To find a pick-up game in the pre-web days, one had to do a lot of footwork, go down to the local park or gym hope to find a group of players. Finding a recurring 5 on 5 basketball game could be challenging, especially if you are new to an area. These days people turn to the web to find games just like they turn to it to find anything else."

Granted it's a relatively tiny network and I would guess it's attracted a fairly middle class user base so far. But you have to admire the efficiency of using the Web to find a local pick-up game - there is plenty of potential for this to take off.

How it works is that players get notified by email when a group they're part of has enough players for a game. Game and group pages integrate Google maps to display court locations. Game pages also have rosters, so that you know the number of players showing up.

Facebook app? Oh yes it has one of those - designed "to push game events into the news feeds of people in your social graph in the hope of attracting additional players to your game."

Other features include a javascript Pick-Up Game Search widget for basketball bloggers, user profile pages, a news feed of events generated by people and your groups, RSS feeds of group messages, iCal feeds of game times, and many more goodies.

A potential killer feature, not yet present, would be a mobile version of InfiniteHoops and/or some integration with some of the popular and growing mobile social networks.

Meston has a nice network building up too, with InfiniteSoccer, InfiniteSoftball, InfiniteFootball and InfiniteHockey also on his roster of sites.

We're starting with a sports website that has probably peaked in popularity just this week, the NBA basketball website.

So, I'm a basketball fan and I've been tracking the NBA finals with much interest this year. I'm a long-time Lakers supporter (although my name suggests I should be a Boston fan!). This year's final was a dream match-up for the NBA marketers, as it revived the most famous rivalry in NBA history: Lakers vs Celtics. So I wondered how has this story been covered on NBA's official website?

As of today, here is the NBA.com homepage:

Click here for full page version

As expected, it's dominated by news and pictures of the winning Boston Celtics team. The homepage is extremely busy, with loads of links and information including results, stats, fantasy leagues and videos.

What's Web 2.0 on NBA.com?

The NBA site makes great use of video, with a whole section devoted to video highlights of basketball. The latest videos are in WMV format, which meant I had to download a plugin called Flip4Mac (I'm on a Mac) - a collection of QuickTime components that enables you to play, import and export Windows Media files. A 10.7 MB download later, I was able to watch the NBA videos.

A great feature was the NBA Highlight Mixer, which enables you to mix your own videos:

I especially enjoyed the NBA Dunks section! Similar to YouTube and other popular video sharing sites, NBA Highlight Mixer allows you to view videos by popularity and by ratings. Here's one showcasing Lebron James (note: requires Flash):

Regarding the Lakers-Celtics history, I'm pleased to say there were plenty of classic videos of the 80's Lakers vs Celtics clashes.

Back to the NBA homepage, there seemed to be a decent selection of RSS feeds:

There was a veritable feast of other clickable options on the NBA site - everything from opinion polls, to fantasy leagues, to mobile alerts, to dinky fun things like the NBA Nickname Generator (mine is Richard "Rocksplitter" MacManus).

NBA Blogs

And of course, what could be more web 2.0 than blogs! NBA.com has those too (and no we're not talking about Mark Cuban's, who as Dallas Mavericks owner is probably the NBA's most famous unofficial blogger). One of the more popular NBA blogs is from Gilbert Arenas, who is a current player - a guard for the Washington Wizards. In his latest post, he starts off by debunking a Washington Post blog rumor that he's giving up blogging - "I'll give you all a hesitant no, this is not my last blog", Arenas (kind of) assures fans. He goes on to say about his blogging:

"You'll hear all the negative stuff about me blogging like, "Oh, you said you want to play Cleveland, you called out Cleveland, you're crazy ..." It could be one little quote in a long blog post from me, but that's the only thing people talk about when I could have five other stories in that blog post. But, it's just like everything, people pick and choose what they want to read. You just got to do your job to be entertaining.

You give your readers and insight of your life and what's going on. It's a risk. But if they hate you, they're going to hate you for telling the truth and I can live with that. The bad part about it is that you can kill yourself with your own sword."

More than a few tech bloggers can relate to that! Overall Arenas' blog is excellent and I'm keen to read more of it next season.

Conclusion

There's an overwhelming amount of stuff on NBA.com, enough to keep click-happy fans happy for a long time. NBA.com is using the latest web technologies to good effect too, especially on the video side.

What do you think of NBA.com? Also, what are some unofficial NBA websites out there that are making great use of the Social Web, which perhaps the official site could learn more from?

Update: The Widgets Lab blog has a post about NBA.com widgets, noting that they are "web friendly and socially acceptable (works on Myspace & Facebook)".