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Bogus Copyright Claim Silences Yet Another Larry Lessig YouTube Presentation
(via - Techdirt )
I read it on 03/02/10 at 08:50 AM
Posted on 03/02/10 at 12:26 PM

Nearly a year ago, we wrote about how a YouTube presentation done by well known law professor (and strong believer in fair use and fixing copyright law) Larry Lessig had been taken down, because his video, in explaining copyright and fair use and other such things, used a snippet of a Warner Music song to demonstrate a point. There could be no clearer example of fair use -- but the video was still taken down. There was some dispute at the time as to whether or not this was an actual DMCA takedown, or merely YouTube's audio/video fingerprinting technology (which the entertainment industry insists can understand fair use and not block it). But, in the end, does it really make a difference? A takedown over copyright is a takedown over copyright.

Amazingly enough, it appears that almost the exact same thing has happened again. A video of one of Lessig's presentations, that he just posted -- a "chat" he had done for the OpenVideoAlliance a week or so ago, about open culture and fair use, has received notice that it has been silenced. It hasn't been taken down entirely -- but the entire audio track from the 42 minute video is completely gone. All of it. In the comments, some say there's a notification somewhere that the audio has been disabled because of "an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG" (Warner Music Group) -- which would be the same company whose copyright caused the issue a year ago -- but I haven't seen or heard that particular message anywhere.

However, Lessig is now required to fill out a counternotice challenging the takedown -- while silencing his video in the meantime:
While you can still see the video on YouTube, without the audio, it's pretty much worthless. Thankfully, the actual video is available elsewhere, where you can both hear and see it. But, really, the fact that Lessig has had two separate videos -- both of which clearly are fair use -- get neutered due to bogus copyright infringement risks suggests a serious problem. I'm guessing that, once again, this video was likely caught by the fingerprinting, rather than a direct claim by Warner Music. In fact, the issue may be the identical one, as I believe the problem last year was the muppets theme, which very very briefly appears in this video (again) as an example of fair use in action. But it was Warner Music and others like it that demanded Google put such a fingerprinting tool in place (and such companies are still talking about requiring such tools under the law). And yet, this seems to show just how problematic such rules are.

Even worse, this highlights just how amazingly problematic things get when you put secondary liability on companies like Google. Under such a regime, Google would of course disable such a video, to avoid its own liability. The idea that Google can easily tell what is infringing and what is not is proven ridiculous when something like this is pulled off-line (or just silenced). When a video about fair use itself is pulled down for a bogus copyright infringement it proves the point. The unintended consequences of asking tool providers to judge what is and what is not copyright infringement leads to tremendous problems with companies shooting first and asking questions later. They are silencing speech, on the threat that it might infringe on copyright.

This is backwards.

We live in a country that is supposed to cherish free speech, not stifle it in case it harms the business model of a company. We live in a country that is supposed to encourage the free expression of ideas -- not lock it up and take it down because one company doesn't know how to adapt its business model. We should never be silencing videos because they might infringe on copyright.

Situations like this demonstrate the dangerous unintended consequences of secondary liability. At least with Lessig, you have someone who knows what happened, and knows how to file a counternotice -- though, who knows how long it will take for this situation to be corrected. But for many, many, many other people, they are simply silenced. Silenced because of industry efforts to turn copyright law into something it was never intended to be: a tool to silence the wider audience in favor of a few large companies.

The system is broken. When even the calls to fix the system are silenced by copyright claims, isn't it time that we fixed the system?

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Tags: copyright  video  fair  such  lessig  
 
 

Connecting With Fans And Giving Them A Reason To Buy Requires A Lot Of Experimenting
(via - Techdirt )
I read it on 02/15/10 at 11:10 PM
Posted on 02/15/10 at 11:09 PM

With my big post explaining the whole CwF+RtB concept in a lot more detail, complete with examples of many artists, small to big, who are using it, we've been hearing about more and more artists. It's really great, and it's often difficult to choose which ones are worth writing up. But sometimes an example comes along that really highlights a point that hasn't necessarily been driven home before, and that helps make the decision easy. ChurchHatesTucker points us to a recent blog post by singer Marian Call in which she talks about her various experiments in connecting with fans and the surprise result of giving them a reason to buy. I can't emphasize enough that the whole post is worth reading, but I'll share a few highlights.

First, she talks about how much value there is in really connecting with your fans over social networks, and that doesn't mean just putting out blast messages about what you're doing, but also reading about what they're doing -- and, at times, going beyond that, including visiting "their websites, blogs, photo albums once in a while." Obviously, you can't do this all the time or with every fan, but it certainly does help connect with many fans in a very genuine way. It's not marketing, it's about making a connection and building a real relationship.

But the bigger point that she makes is that all of this -- both sides of the CwF + RtB equation -- require an awful lot of experimenting:
About twice a week I think, "Why don't I try this crazy idea and see if it works?" about some element of my career. With no label, no manager, and no inner voice of reason slow me down, I get to experiment all I want. 90% of my crazy ideas have to do with social networking -- which I spend half a lifetime doing, despite the crap I take from my family and Real Life friends. (Hey, some of us actually do bond over web comics, starship replicas, the fail whale, and photos of stuff on cats.) Mostly my nutty ideas work just a little bit. Some are epic failures. But my experimental flopping and floundering inches me closer to the day when I'll be totally financially independent as a full-time musician. Plus it's more fun than having a real job.

But every now and then a crazy idea works really really really good. Bam!
The really good idea in this case? She was performing a live gig at Whole Wheat Radio that was to be streamed online, and in a quick & dirty way, decided to offer up a special limited edition "bootleg" CD of live tracks. She said that her Twitter and Facebook friends had been complaining that she hadn't released any new music in a while, and she's still working on her next "studio" album -- but in just two hours she was able to assemble everything she needed for the Marian Call Bootleg Album, which she decided to make available for one night only. How did it work out?
I planned to sell 20-40 of my little bootleg CD's. Silly me. I sold well over 200. My little stack of jewel cases looked so pathetic.

WholeWheatRadio.org broke every record for online listenership, CD sales, tips -- everything. The more listeners tuned in, the more tuned in, and the more money they gave, the more money they gave. The crowd online was thrilled to be breaking WWR records. I drove away from Talkeetna having earned about $4,000 in one night, with a new CD to produce in just a couple of days and an avalanche of e-mail and publicity requests to deal with. Seldom have I been so happy and so panicked.
Again, this isn't the solution for everyone. But it shows how really connecting with fans, and trying different stuff out continuously, helps. Eventually, one or more of those ideas takes off with great results. While she may not be a full-time musician yet, it certainly seems like Marian has all the right pieces in place (and, yes, that includes great music).

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Tags: fans  connecting  cd  doing  idea  


 
 

3 New Ways to Measure the Social Web
(via - Mixpanel - Analytics for startups )
I read it on 02/23/10 at 04:34 PM
Posted on 02/11/10 at 12:05 PM

Post by Tim Trefren (Co-founder of Mixpanel, Inc.) guest posted at http://mashable.com/2010/02/02/social-analytics/

When most people think of web analytics, they think about pageview tracking; basically, measuring which pages on a website are being viewed. Pageview tracking is a well-established technology, but it's no longer meeting the needs of many of the most well-known companies in social media. Companies like FacebookFacebook, Zynga, Slide, and RockYou are spending tons of resources building their own internal analytics tools.

There's a reason for this: Social media is highly competitive, and the biggest advantage you can have is data. To improve and grow, these companies need to gather as much information as they can, and they need more than simple pageview tracking.

In the following sections I will cover three of the most important things to measure for social applications.


1. Funnel Analysis: Measuring Conversion Rates

One critical kind of analysis that social apps require is called Funnel Analysis. This is a way of measuring conversion rates, which is the lifeblood of all applications. The term conversion rate refers to the total number of visitors who came to a site, compared to the number of visitors who did a desired action (such as creating an account or purchasing an item).

What Funnel Analysis gives you is a more granular way of analyzing conversion rates. Instead of simply looking at signups divided by total visitors, you figure out the steps that have to be taken to get a user to sign up and measure the individual conversion rates between steps. As you can see from the image above, there's often a pretty steep dropoff between each step, giving you the namesake funnel shape. (Note: the image uses made up stats and is for illustration purposes only.)

This more granular look at conversion rates can have surprising results. Let's take a look at Twitter'sTwittersignup funnel:

1. Hit homepage
2. Go to signup page, fill out registration form
3. Browse suggested topics
4. Addadd e-mail friends
5. Search for someone

As you can see, the signup process is pretty complicated, and will benefit from detailed analysis. We might find, for example, that there's a huge dropoff rate (a dropoff occurs when many of the people who made it to one step don't make it to the next) at the Add e-mail friends step. Once we've discovered a dropoff rate like this, we have to figure out the root cause. The dropoff rate at the Add e-mail friends step could mean that users are unsure how to continue, causing them to leave, or they might not want to add their e-mail information. We would have to test to make sure.

Ultimately, Funnel Analysis is about finding and improving trouble spots in a website. With continual analysis, changes can be measured and ideas can be tested over time.


2. Engagement Tracking: Measuring What People Do

signup imageAs I mentioned earlier, pageview tracking is becoming less and less relevant for many web companies. Instead of the basic unit of measurement being the pageview, they are starting to track more directly relevant things, like the actions people are taking. Twitter, for example, may want to know how many tweets the average person sends and what they are searching for, not how many pages they viewed. Pageviews are just a way of approximating the information we really want, and as the web grows more interactive, they become less and less relevant.

Think about this: Sites exist today on which you never actually change the page. These are highly interactive sites, but they are impossible to track with pageviews, so traditional analytics tools are useless.

This will only become more common as time goes on and more companies develop highly interactive applications and adopt AJAX loading techniques.


3. Visitor Retention: How Many People Come Back?

This next technique measures a fairly complex but extremely valuable metric for successful web applications.

You can think of Visitor Retention as a measure of how sticky your site is. What we're really measuring is the percentage of people who come back again and again. The most common way of approaching this is to look at a group of users from a single time period (a week, for example) and track their behavior over time.

Here's an example of a retention table that should help clarify things:

Each row shows the weekly retention rates for a single group of users (sometimes known as a cohort). The first row, for example, is the cohort seen between December 7 and December 13, 2009. We can see that 15.15% of the users in that group came back after 1 week, 13.4% after 2 weeks, and so on.

This is crucial information, particularly for social applications, because most of the value lies in the size of the community. An application with low retention is like an empty shell many installs but few active users and you don't want to build an empty shell. You want a thriving, vibrant community.

Retention is a huge factor in building a strong community for a few reasons: You don't have much of a community if everyone is a newcomer (so more old users is a good thing), and the nature of retention is such that you get disproportionate returns on any increases you make. Without going into too much detail, an example would be that increasing retention by 33% might give you 50% more users in the long run.

Twitter is again a good example for us, as the network has been plagued by low retention rates. Twitter may seem successful now, but their low retention rate is troubling. In the past, companies that seemed to be extremely successful (think early Facebook apps) ultimately lost their edge because they couldn't retain their users.

It's entirely possible that Twitter itself could be a fad. With such low retention, I wouldn't necessarily be surprised but it is still too early to tell.


Conclusion

There's a lot to learn about analytics from the frontrunners in social media. The intense competition has resulted in many new and innovative ways to track and analyze visitor data.

We covered three such concepts in detail today: Funnel analysis, which lets you track conversion rates across whole parts of your site, engagement tracking, which is becoming more relevant than pageviews, and visitor retention analysis, which helps you understand and optimize the number of repeat visitors you get.

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Tags: retention  analysis  rates  users  social  
 
 

The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul
(via - ReadWriteWeb )
I read it on 02/09/10 at 11:26 AM
Posted on 02/09/10 at 05:15 AM

Youth social networking researcher danah boyd has observed that many people presume the way they use social networks is the way everyone uses them. "I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men," she says. "I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it's often hard to see beyond that."

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

Sponsor

This Wednesday, Warden will make Friend, Fan page and name data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It's a move that Facebook has to have seen coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years, and an event that's been complicated by Facebook's recent privacy policy changes, which have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data available for outside analysis.

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

Nerds in Space: Social Graph Analysis For Solving Large-Group Problems

Warden studied Computer Vision in college in the U.K., then got into game development. After moving to L.A., he spent six years building graphics drivers for the original Playstation and the XBox. Then he started his own independent business, where, thankfully, he open-sourced much of his work (something he's still doing today).

When he found out that starting his own business wasn't going to work with his immigration status, he was very fortunate to have also caught Apple's eye with the software he had been releasing to the public. Apple bought his company in order to bring him on board. The proceeds of that small sale are now sustaining his next project after going independent again.

After spending five years at Apple struggling to navigate the maze of people and connections and types of expertise in order to get the information he needed, Warden decided to go independent and build a company that solved exactly that kind of problem. "I can't think of a better big company to work for, but it was still a big company," he says. "It was hard to find the right people to talk to, whether for particular expertise or for contacts at external companies." And so Warden left Apple to build a company that would use social graph analysis to solve problems like that. He called the company Mailana.

We've written here a number of times about Mailana's tool that analyzes the social graph of any Twitter user. Enter the username of someone on Twitter and Mailana will show you which 20 other people the user has exchanged the largest number of reciprocal public @ replies with. Find someone interesting or important? Mailana's Twitter analyzer will tell you who they most regularly interact with. See, for example, The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Rockstars on Twitter.

Pulling Down the Facebook Social Graph

Now Warden is about to unveil a much larger project along the same vein. For the past six months he's been crawling public profile pages on Facebook. He now has more than 215 million of them indexed and updated about once a month. When he began he was using the Web crawling service 80legs, but over time he had to build his own crawling infrastructure.

When I talked to him this afternoon, he had already begun uploading 100 GB of user data onto his server to make it available for academic research starting on Wednesday. Warden says he's removed identifying profile URLs but kept names, locations, Fan page lists and partial Friends lists. All those fields of data are just waiting to be analyzed and cross referenced. That's one very rich resource.

Yesterday Warden posted some of his own initial observations from the data on his personal blog. Those included:

  • In almost every state in the Southern U.S., God is number one most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the L.A., San Francisco and Nevada regions? "God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren't that popular either," Warden writes. "Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot." In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is number one.
  • In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.
  • The bulk of Warden's posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the western U.S. tend to have Facebook friends all over the country; people in the southern U.S. tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area.

Taking a Deeper Look

These observations are interesting, but they are only the beginning of what's possible. Name, location, friends and interests are great data points to analyze. Warden has written a program that will estimate gender as well, based on names. All these data points can be cross-referenced with outside data, too. Members of Facebook's own staff did this kind of analysis when they compared user last names to U.S. Census data, which allowed them to estimate changes in Facebook's racial composition over time based on the likelihood of people with particular last names to report a particular racial backgrounds.

"I'm mostly thinking 'What do I try first?'," Warden says. "There's so many interesting ways to slice the data - especially as I'm starting to get changes over time. I'm also trying to map out political networks in aggregate; how polarized the fans of particular politicians are - so how likely a Sarah Palin fan is to have any friends who are fans of Obama, and how that varies with location too. One of my favorite results is that Texans are more likely to be fans of the Dallas Cowboys than God."

Warden says he hasn't talked to anyone from Facebook since he started crawling the site, but he did get an email from someone on the security team asking him to take down instructions he'd posted that exposed a security hole that made harvesting peoples' email addresses easy. So the company is paying attention. "I'd love to see them put me out of business by putting decent data out there," Warden says. He says his Amazon Web Services bill was over $5,000 last month.

Why is he indexing all this content and why is he going to hand it over to the academic world later this week? "I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we're just littering the Internet with," Warden says.

"Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm a starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."

For a great example of the kind of social impact that data analysis can make, Warden points to some of the fascinating ways that GIS data is illuminating the intersection of race and public services. Data has shed light on social injustices for decades, and measurable information about the interactions of hundreds of millions of people every day on Facebook offers opportunities to discover both good and bad news about the contemporary human condition.

Warden says he's not yet been able to interest any investors in his ideas for businesses based on this data, so his girlfriend Liz Baumann, a former insurance actuary, stepped in to help and is now running much of the crawling. He says he's now focused on "working on ways of presenting all this information in a form that answers questions for people willing to pay." His first experiment along those lines is the very interesting FanPageAnalytics.com.

What does Pete Warden hope for from this week's public release of all this Facebook data? "Hopefully I'll get to see a bunch of interesting [academic research] papers come out of it, worst case. And I'd like to be the guy people turn to when they need stuff like this."

Already well-respected among a fringe group of bleeding-edge geeks, we hope that Warden's work on social graph analysis will end up impacting a far larger number of people than may ever know his name.

Discuss




Tags: warden  data  facebook  social  company  
 
 

Good Ideas Salon With Seth Godin Recap
(via - PSFK )
I read it on 02/08/10 at 05:52 PM
Posted on 02/08/10 at 10:51 PM

Good Ideas Salon With Seth Godin Recap PSFK's Good Ideas Salon with Seth Godin, held last Thursday at the Soho House in New York City, provided to be an inspirational and thought provoking morning where Seth shared ideas from his new book Linchpin. He talked about what it takes to to a be a successful Linchpin; one fundamental ...


Tags: ideas  seth  linchpin  godin  salon  
 
 

Next Week: Mashable NextUp NYC, The Future Journalist [Social Media Week]
(via - Mashable | The Social Media Guide )
I read it on 01/29/10 at 01:06 PM
Posted on 01/29/10 at 02:38 PM

Mashable NextUp NYCLess than 100 tickets remain for Mashable's Social Media Week event, NextUp NYC The Future Journalist on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 92YTribeca.

Join us for networking and a conversation and Q&A with Sree Sreenivasan (Professor and Columbia Journalism School Dean of Student Affairs and contributing editor of DNAinfo.com) and Vadim Lavrusik (new media journalist and digital media graduate student at Columbia University Journalism School).


Details


Location: 92Y Tribeca, 200 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10013

Socialize: Facebook Event Page

Pricing: $20 in advance, $25 at door. Tickets on Sale Now.

Food and drink: Full cash bar and food menu available


Schedule


  • 6:00 7:15 = Open Networking
  • 7:15 8:45 = Conversation and Q&A with Sree Sreenivasan and Vadim Lavrusik
  • 8:45 Bar Close = Open Networking

A Conversation and Q&A with:


Sree Sreenivasan Prof. Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia Journalism School Dean of Student Affairs and contributing editor, DNAinfo.com.

Sree Sreenivasan is a tech evangelist and skeptic specializing in explaining technology to non-techies. He is a professor and dean of students affairs at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches in the digital media program. Sreenivasan is contributing editor at DNAinfo.com, a Manhattan-news startup he helped launch in 2009 with Joe Ricketts, the founder of Ameritrade and whose family just bought the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field. He also has been a fixture on NYC-area television. For more than eight years, he served as technology reporter for WABC-TV and WNBC-TV and now occasionally appears on various TV shows (on CNN, NBC's Today Show, CNBC and elsewhere) to talk tech. He has written articles for The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Rolling Stone, National Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes and Popular Science. You can find him on Twitter at twitter.com/sreenet and on the Web at sree.net.

Vadim Lavrusik Online journalist and M.S. candidate in Digital Media at Columbia Journalism School

Vadim Lavrusik is a new media journalist and social media consultant studying digital media at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where he is launching NYC 3.0, a tech start-up news site as part of his Master's project. He's reported for publications like the Star Tribune, The Minnesota Daily, the Mpls./St. Paul Business Journal and most recently was a guest feature writer for Mashable.com, where he covered trends in news media, and contributed to Poynter Online's E-Media Tidbits. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/lavrusik and the Web lavrusik.com.


Thanks to our Sponsors


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Thanks to our Partner


smac logoSMAC the Social Media Advertising Consortium fosters collaboration throughout the entire social media ecosystem, diving deep into critical issues and staying ahead of this constantly evolving industry. By bringing together buy side, sell side, and research professionals to develop relevant standards, comprehensive research and definitive measurement tools, our goal is to grow revenues and increase engagement. SMAC members are groundbreakers. Entrepreneurs. Thought leaders. Together, we form a community that feeds off each other's creativity, creating an environment for learning and discovery.

Tags: Events, nextup-nyc, social media week




Tags: media  social  sree  ideas  sreenivasan  
 
 

The iPad and publishers: A survey of early reaction
(via - O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies. )
I read it on 01/27/10 at 08:30 PM
Posted on 01/27/10 at 09:42 PM

What really jumped out to me as I looked over the iPad's feature set is that the device is clearly built for media consumption. Movies, music, books, news -- the bread and butter content that keeps iTunes humming. That's good for Apple, obviously, but it also creates an interesting opportunity for publishers. They've got a new distribution mechanism and a new canvas.

iPad.png

With that in mind, I decided to filter the barrage of iPad coverage through a publishing lens. What follows are intriguing ideas culled from all sorts of sources. Most revolve around content applications the iPad may provide.

There's no way I'll catch all the good stuff -- there's just too much out there -- so please use the comments area to post links and commentary that grab your attention, publishing-related and otherwise.

Ebook pricing could get interesting

The iPad's release portends a price-point battle between Apple and Amazon. That's ebook pricing, not hardware.

The Wall Street Journal says Apple is pushing book publishers to set two ebook price points, $12.99 and $14.99, with Apple taking its customary 30 percent cut from any sales. They key word in all this is "set." The big kahuna of ebooks, Amazon, controls its pricing. Most bestsellers are parked at $9.99, which is below what Amazon pays a publisher for a title. Amazon is subsidizing its low price point.

But that's the present. The future is a different matter. The thought is that Amazon is taking a short-term loss on ebooks so it can solidify its position as the dominant channel. Once it owns the ebook market, Amazon can ditch the subsidy and force publishers to renegotiate pricing.

That's the fear, and Apple appears to be playing to it by giving publishers an option: get a measure of pricing control through Apple, or make more with Amazon but pray they don't rewrite the rules later. (Apple could always rewrite rules, too ...)

What's really interesting about this -- and kind of bizarre -- is that the binary Apple-or-Amazon thinking obscures an important point: mobile devices already offer publishers plenty of pricing options.

What about e-reader applications?

Steve Jobs famously quipped a couple of years ago that "people don't read anymore." Well, I guess Apple changed its stance on that one. The new iBooks app -- and accompanying store -- is a big ol' cannonball in the ebook pool.

Early discussion on a back-channel publishing list I follow has focused on how Apple will treat its new ebook competitors. Will established applications, like Stanza and the Kindle app, be removed? Kirk Biglione, co-founder of Medialoper, thinks competitors will remain in Apple's universe. Just don't count on sharing titles across apps:

Look for books to be added as a new media type in the device media library. The other reading apps may be able to co-exist as long as they don't access books stored in that library. So, for example, you probably won't be able to use Stanza to read iBooks. [Note: Kirk gave me permission to post his comments.]

One thing to consider here: Past inquiries from the Federal Communications Commission may soften Apple's competitive instincts. At least for a while.

Of course, FCC heat doesn't preclude Apple from a little friendly rivalry. Digital Trends picked up on the backhanded compliment Jobs gave Amazon during the iPad presentation:

... [Jobs] basically told the online retailer that we'll take it from here.

The reading/viewing experience

Apple has already shown what it's capable of on the music and video front, so I'm curious to see how it handles the book experience. Early word is positive from folks who've had a chance to demo the iPad. Here's Gizmodo's take:

It's an optical illusion, but just seeing the depth of pages makes the iBook app feel more like a book than a Kindle ever did for me. The text is sharp, and while the screen is bright, it doesn't seem to strains the eyesbut time will tell on that.

The iPad is backwards compatible with existing iPhone applications. That seems useful on first blush, but Joshua Topolsky of Engadget called out a big issue with "old" apps:

It's kind of silly looking. A lone app in the center of a black screen.

More to come

I'll be adding to this post in the coming days as more analysis bubbles up. Again, please use the comments to point out interesting or informative links you come across as well.




Tags: apple  amazon  ipad  pricing  ebook  

 
 

Social Media: Connecting Thoughts Not People
(via - TechStartups.com )
I read it on 12/13/09 at 06:42 PM
Posted on 12/10/09 at 09:34 PM

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

Listening in to 'Wordpress for Social Media'
Image by croncast via Flickr

Are you the sum of your thoughts? It's a hard question to answer, right? I'm trying to sort this out and would like your help.

The dissonance between the physical and ethereal nature of disembodied communication like the internet is a minefield for human interaction. Primarily because we rely heavily on physical cues and environmental variables to base our levels of connection with a person. We rely on their actions, not just words.

My assertion is that social networks exacerbate this inability to fully understand the people we are linked with in these networks due to experiencing their random thoughts.

Sure it is interesting to read what someone is doing throughout their day, but the only value is what the reader places on that thought to make it a reality in their own mind. Maybe that is the nature of connection?

What I am really trying to understand is that if a person can create real bonds simply through sharing their thoughts in social media?

I've personally been at what turned into social media for over 7 years. I've become many things to many people based on the types of content that I was producing. Much of that content was dependent on what I was interested in or experiencing at that time. Like this piece.

The sum of interactions in social media are related to those fleeting thoughts. When shared repeatedly with networks of people a notion of who that individual is are created. This give us the ability to create baselines for who we think a person is. A baseline for example being, they're nice or they are a jerk.

Again, we are only dealing with thoughts to create these notions. They are assumptions as to the true nature of a person that most have yet to meet. I would posit that what happens in social media and across social networks is the connecting of thoughts. If you like someone, you like their thoughts. If you dislike someone, you dislike their thoughts. Any judgments are based on these and most likely very little on physical actions. So, if you met them in the real world you would need to attempt to ascertain all over again who that individual in front of you is.

Maybe we're connecting thoughts first and then people with social media?

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WordPress 3.0 Wish List
(via - TechStartups.com )
I read it on 11/27/09 at 11:08 AM
Posted on 11/25/09 at 07:06 PM

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

wordpessWith the imminent release of WordPress version 2.9 on the horizon and my subsequent lack of excitement, it only seems fitting to put together a wish list for the next version. It is even more fitting since Raanan (@raanan) asked, What's on your wishlist for 3.0 ?

I partially answered that question in the comments with the following:

  1. Semantic integration with Zemanta or OpenCalais
    1. This would be like having a librarian with a fancy masters degree in categorizing everything on the planet riding shotgun with you while you write.
  2. WordPress recommended vocabulary for categories
    1. This could mirror NYT Open Linked Data RDF or other semantic tools
  3. Image upload and modal window to open in advanced mode for properties control
    1. This could be a combo of both tabs but something more powerful from the first time the window opens so that users don't need to perform multiple actions to add padding or custom links to images
  4. Feed only choice for publishing posts
    1. This doesn't have to be authenticated and would work by same rules with tags, categories, etc. to syndicate for apps or widgets
    2. Imagine being able to use WP as a CMS to manage the data that is delivered to mobile apps on the iPhone, Android, Blackberry or Palm as one standard

In addition to these four I have some more wishes for this list

  1. The return of horizontal navigation to the administration panel or the option to choose vertical left side or horizontal suckerfish style
  2. Integrated gallery function for display in themes
    1. Yes, there are plenty of plugins to do this but some of that code like the integration of the fabulous WPTouch mobile theme into central codebase would be huge
  3. WordPress.org installs that allow for gravatar uploads through profiles
    1. Hook this into the .com API and welcome these users into the fold
    2. This could turn out to be a great way to make them familiar with the .com platform
    3. But mainly so users can swap them on the fly with their own installs
  4. Content libraries from media companies
    1. Stock photos, video, quotes
      1. A new API component to allow multiple third parties to supply this content

I'm sure that over the next few weeks I will think about this some more and come up with a couple other ideas. But for now, what's on your wishlist for 3.0 ?

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Top 5 Ways to Gain Traffic Beyond SEO
(via - TechStartups.com )
I read it on 11/27/09 at 11:08 AM
Posted on 11/24/09 at 07:09 PM

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

grindermanThis short list is a way to gain site traffic beyond SEO. I should also say beyond PPC, affiliate marketing or hiring a social media expert.

It hurt me to type those last three words.

As Nick Cave said in his Grinderman role, Get it on.

In no particular order . . .

1. Be the first in a niche

Take the thought about that next great business and simply flesh it out on paper. Then implement. Even in the simplest form if you are first in a niche you will get the rank and community support to grow. It will start out small but over time if it is the right idea and execution traffic will grow.

2. Insightful content

Being first is awesome but if you aren't first, ahem, which you most likely aren't, you'll need to deliver insightful content. Regardless of whether it is video, audio, text or non-digital products the content around the item needs to add value.

3. Controversy

If you're doing it right it will find you. On accident you will step on some toes of competitors or even your own users. Remember this isn't always about always being right, it is about the battle that you can win. And if you lose, be gracious and admit the defeat. If you despise confrontation maybe this one isn't for you but it sure can help in promoting your wares.

4. Offer more

Much more than your competitors. Give visitors a reason to come back. If you nearest competitor offers a message board then offer a message board and live chat . . . and standard 3rd party social tools like Twitter or Facebook. Take the time to review your road map and go off the reservation with brainstorming. Get crazy with ideas and you'll find a solution that you didn't know was there to differentiate you from the competitor. In other words, innovate.

5. Celebrity love

This isn't the layup that it seems. The site doesn't have to be flashy and filled with paid celebrity users. One engaged celebrity user would do. Hell, that engaged celebrity could come from the site community and simply need the spotlight to shine themselves. Offer your users the chance to become the rock star of their dreams.

Conclusion

Be a grinder and get it on. Stop languishing as competitors in your space pass you by. Maybe you are already in the lead and feel that you are not meeting your goals grind it out.

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