Web X.0

Time to Pay the Viddler?


While there have been many attempts, no one has really seemed to get this whole social video thing down to a science quite yet. There has been no lack of interactive video technologies, although most tend to try to make certain elements clickable, like an image map, without actually encouraging any two-way dialogue.

Enter Viddler. Aside from being a great way to host your video (among dozens of others), Viddler also enables viewers to insert contextual comments that appear during specific times in the video in an almost Pop-Up Video kind of way. The result is an almost conversational stream of comments that appear in a context that seems much more natural than in a chronological listed format below the post.

Of course, this won’t address the main problems with consumer generated commenting, which are spamming, lack of civility and flame wars. Publishers will still need to find that careful balance between moderating and filtering or else everyone will be rushing to the first couple frames of the video to post their “this is teh suck!“

More Tales of Frenemies

Drudge If you have a good eye for bias, I recommend reading Jeff Jarvis’ latest post on Hilary Clinton’s less than visible relationship with the Drudge Report, who just so happens to be running a picture today of Hilary that makes her look like a vampire (is it Monday again already?). While Jeff tends to focus on the hypocrisy of criticizing Hilary for it, citing how normal it would be for someone like McCain to feed stories to the New York Times, I think the bigger message is how some people still think that you shouldn’t engage with detractors.

While working on a closed invite-only community based campaign for a major American auto manufacturer, we encountered the question of who do we invite. It’s easy to engage brand enthusiasts, they’re practically begging for opportunities to get into a dialogue with the companies they love. Then it dawned on us…have you ever really read an engaging discussion thread where everyone basically agreed?

We eventually decided to invite some of the company’s most outspoken critics off the various auto blogs. We only invited the ones that publicly listed their personal blog or email address, since we figured we’d respect the rights of the anonymous thread flamers.

The result was much as we anticipated. At first the detractors joined the community just to pick fights and provide counterpoints to all the gushing. Sure enough, after a while the detractors became personalities within the community that not only made the discussion more lively but provided a better platform for engaging with the brand than long comment threads on blog posts. Over time the detractors became more and more neutral and were posting less negative comments about the brand in public places since they felt like their words had more weight and a greater level of access in the community.

Any chance we could get Giuliani to do an interview with the TPM?

Oink Memorial

Oink 450 So today we learned another lesson about emotional attachments to brands. When the IFPI and BPI initiated the raid on Oink headquarters, which turned out to be a 24-year-old living with his father in a middle class UK neighborhood, the people of the Internet, predictably, sounded out against the record industry and for the “little guy.”

So what is it about downloading music that makes people feel entitled to do it? Is it because many bands benefit from the exposure and the few that are hurt have already profited from their art? Is it because the music industry has evolved to a point where musicians very rarely make a decent living unless they’re licensing their songs?

I think it’s more simple than that. The fact is that people don’t want CDs. The music industry is selling a product that isn’t in high demand. Digital distribution is in a similar state. People who bought DRM crippled music in the early days of iTunes are now finding that their music can’t be transferred to their new computers or new iPods. It’s a broken product.

Oink gave people an opportunity to explore new music at a level of quality that was unavailable to them anywhere else. The site sustained itself through the use of innovative technology (torrents) and the idea that people will voluntarily pay (donate) for a service they can’t get elsewhere. There will be another Oink, probably within the week, simply because there are 180,000 music lovers that want it to exist.

1 … 6 7 8 Scroll to top