Ben Barren - Confessions of a Mad Man

Tag Archives: google

Trying to Find a Good Tweet on a Friday.

Posted by Ben Barren on July 17, 2009 – 3:17 pm

Filed under Consumer_Internet, Social_Networking

It really is a bit hard to not watch the Prisoner’s Dilemma cant look away Twitter Car Crash whose Feb 12-June 9, 2009 “rough meeting notes” Techcrunch are collaboratively leaking with a gun to the “Nervous (not alert) System’s” 1_Billion_user_target (valued at $1 each) : “that will be the pulse of the planet” SouthParkCo. While it’s nice, in regards to staff, that they want to “Make sure people are happy” it is not 100% that Engineers are at the top of Twitter People Pyramid in the way they are at Google from Founders down. (so said a quote i cant find as it’s not a searchable post!)

Reading thru the longform depositionish Eric Schonfeld post with morning milked espresso + creamed honey toast, I was struck not by the textbook Acquisition targets that have been to fill product gaps (CoTweet for enterprise multiple account login / Twitpic for images / Tweetie for iPhone) - Nor was it the BigCo + Diddy Celebrity partnerships + entertainment advisory positions envisioned or that “How do we communicate to the Board (and investors) to back off” was actually written down. Further, while the acquisition/IPO triggering event meeting points are interesting (they want to keep operational control post event), but what I found most interesting is the centrality and unsolved solution around the classical search problem of Relevance vs Recency which then gives rise to a myriad of product, mission, business model, architecture questions.

It seems Twitter is searching excuse the pun deep into itself.. both at the twitter.com consumer destination + the Commercial API “every tech company is interested in Hosebird” enterprise search + content syndication levels to solve the relevance vs recency issue. Let’s face it most of Twitter search if not all of it is straight boolean search - Pretty much Lucene out of the box - which is becoming more of an issue as the spammers, sextailers, emarketers, get_new_follower_pyramid_bots and all other version of not quite human terminators minus the ability to identify and kill John Connoresque humans are making the product worse (Anyway it seems Twitter is rightly concerned that google with its sizeable search leadership (like apple did by porting OSX to wireless handsets) will do realtime relevance search better than the once Summize small team of PHDs once they have the same 100% of all tweets with no API or latency restrictions- Whether they will give Google a leg up in return for a Google/MySpace or Microsoft/Facebook type 8 or 9 figure revenue deal.. is an interestingtrade-off fo’sure.)

Good vs New : - “Google would kick our ass at finding the good tweet.” : Notion of a “Good” search result - indicating a trade-off between relevance and recency, as well as the authority/insight of the source which is a key objective to offer by year end “Tweet rank.” (possibly similar to the vgood Twinfluence ?) Not without merit, Twitter positioning wise see themselves as “what is happening right now” versus “Google is old news.” Although they recognise “Google has Realtime Content (stocks, weather)”

(GOOG, MSFT, YHOO) Partner vs (Twitter.com) Destination : “Playing with fire here where we know that Google is building the competitive product.” - Does Twitter build out its consumer marketing to get people to Twitter.com - rather than have their content syndicated to the largest websites in the world - Google, Yahoo + Microsoft; “They want to put this on Google.com” Ironically, Twitter is facing a newspapers type dilemma - Receive the traffic and revenue from google, but maybe be neutered by them in the process. But they also dont want to follow MySpace and become irrelevant which being closed is the first step in becoming.

Twitter vs All Microblogs eg Facebook + Friendfeed : “Would facebook be included (?)” + “They are thinking about relevance as more than just chronological.” “Fusion of different types of content, relevancy is key.” “There will (be) some weight on recency.” - Fascinating question at a Corporate Strategy Level of whether the Winner, if there can be such a thing in The Real Time Web - will it be a One Trick Pony such as Twitter that does one thing extremely extremely well - Twitter fulfilling it’s Nervous System Discovery + Sharing vision -

Or will it be the Hosebird enabled, Facebook Connect, Disqus, FriendFeed SUP, gnip piped player (namely google on the search/discovery side and a much more open statusy updated wireless beefed up Facebook possibly with a friendfeedish acquisition on the microblogging side) that is able to suck in all the sources of realtime content with no (noticeable to the second) latency or delay, and then provide a standalone recency (twitter only) filter or an integrated relevancy weighted Social Media realtime search result - that pulls status updates from Facebook, Twitter, Blogs (posts and comments) plus whatever viral video, forums, flickrs are flying around - With the punchline being a contextual self service monetisation adsense like system ?

It’s like a Seesmic.com case study at the multi-billion dollar opportunity level : Seesmic was a realtime video P2P consumer destination, but with a strong ability to raise capital it was able to aquire a leading Twitter centric third party app that also increasingly centrally pulled in your content from your multiple distributed social networking identities/profiles. So does Twitter follow a Seesmic multiple content types centralised model… or keep its 140 character group text message focus - The Techcrunch Twitter documentation makes it appear the team believes pulling in the various related feeds its members have (similar to how friendfeed does it I’m assuming they mean) is a commodity offering. However, it’s #1 Fear Factor coming from the 310 documents is when Google (and Facebook secondarily) receive the Hosebird pipe of realtime comprehensive Twitter content : That when this is bolted into + emulated/extended into the Google Real Time Social Media Offering.

Discovery (as opposed to “Distraction” which they mention alot when referred to Diddy, marissa Mayer + Microsoft hehe - what a combination of bus dev stakeholders) There was one interesting set of bulletpoints about business vs engineering decision making and its negative affect on “happiness” for which a committee was suggested at being formed. Nuthin like a happiness committee.

“Discovery and sharing goes hand in hand.”

“Discovery of tweets and Discovery of People are both Important”

“Discovery of Tweets is more intriguing.. Relevance is the first problem.”

“How do you propogate any tweet or message to the Right Person” - The Hunch which comes thru as The Big Capability that Twitter want to build into it’s offering + shift the cards in their favour is Discovery.

Typically this would mean suggested content; suggested followers; suggested hashtags; and suggested ads the Dave Winer hope of ads which arent ads but business solutions to your consumer problems. The nirvana of a relevant search result before u enter the keyword.

“Maybe Machine Learning, saved search.”

Why Google Reader is My Preferred Enterprise Social Media Optimization Eco_System.

Posted by Ben Barren on June 15, 2009 – 4:04 pm

Filed under Consumer_Internet, Entrepreneurship

I don’t disagree it’s scary that the google cloud owns so many parts of our digital assets and identity. If anything it’s lucky google hasn’t been (yet) a winner takes all victor in social media other than in amateur video via YouTube. Now $6B later, if it was able to pickup Twitter and Facebook that may well change. But that’s not what my post is about. I’m interested in one of Google’s less sexy assets, that has a small internal team but market leadership, and a potential business platform in the making; Google Reader.

Businesswise too, I’m spending a majority of my time repurposing Google Reader, and it’s related ecosystems of Google + Third Party created plugins, to enable an always up, always indexing Social Media Eco-System, that enables monitoring, syndication and conversational marketing for clients. Fact is, rather than go down the bespoke pathway, I’d rather focus on the glue, the filtering, and the actual hands-on work involved in the messy distributed, decentralised, global nature of social media. And get Google’s continual updates, as well as the venture funded startups developing around the feed based platform.

While it is very sexy to be a iPhone and to a degree a Facebook developer.. esp as the former has a way for the creator to make money.. and the latter has 200m+ members : Google Reader is the #1 RSS Reader (See Matt Cutts feed reader market share just as an example).. and it’s also part of the long term enterprise cloud that includes Google Docs, Adsense, Feedburner, Wave, and so on. I reckon Google Reader as part of a business platform for social media could be fascinating.

And there are very few businesses other than Feedly.com + Postrank.com taking advantage of it. Not that little competition is a bad thing. But the more developers, the stronger a platform, the better the economics.

The approach that seems to be working and some of the tools I’ve been combining that works well built on top of Google Reader (and some of the gaps I’d love google and its network of 3rd party developers to plug):

1. Set-Up a New Google Reader for each New Client or (vertical, niche, segment, industry, target market demographic etc) of investigation :

* Benefit : Each client has their own private log-in Social Media System + dashboard

* Required Fix : It would be great if the premium Google Docs/Business solution had a Parent/Child(ren) version of Google Reader. So like active twitter companies that might have 30 twitter accounts running… and use a 3rd party app that allows simultaneous login/dashboard to the 30 twitter accounts… it would be a dream if I had a Master Google Reader account that aggregated and dashboarded the various child accounts. It would have the wiki like Rules around what users could log into which pages/accounts etc with what authority. At moment what happens is I need to login and out of different google reader accounts.. And google only allows your computer to have one google account open at once.. so if u have gmail open, it needs to be same email username for google reader. Doh. If I could run 100 Google Reader accounts into one master account, I would have an awesome/powerful Social Media content syndication tool, as I could partition the different sources of content I’ve subscribed to, and then create various rules as to where it ended up.

2. Plugin Viral Analytics Package (Postrank Google Reader AKA AideRSS plugin) : That ranks every entry to google reader out of 10 for viral buzz, popularity, most dugg, being linkedto, etc

* Benefit : When monitoring for clients what sources, commentators, individuals, URLs matter : And what issues relevant to their brand are popping up.. PostRank is an invaluable tool. Without it, I would have raw filtered content, that is largely boolean matches, and RSS feeds.. but I wouldnt have an idea of what is getting really buzz / high reach in the blogosphere.

* Required Fix : Not that many, Postrank is a great weapon.. I hope they keep upgrading and upgrading it.. they have something none of the typical Social media monitoring systems offer - Viral analytics in near realtime at an entry/post level. However u still have that classic social media issue where it still takes a certain amount of time for an entry to get recognisable links, scores etc. So there is a slight delay.. but I’ve found within a couple hours it hits the spot : more than enough for nearly all clients. It would be better if the sorting worked better. You can currently sort into 4 or so levels of Virality : Average, Good, Great etc. The google reader postrank plugin seems buggy in doing this which is annoying. It would be great if I could have a set of spliced feeds by my google reader categories/tags : So that I could syndicate to intelligence clients or syndicate to CMS a subset of the most viral content by type of content (eg from flickr, youtube, twitter, blogs etc) or by client company, product or brand name : Or a combination eg Most Viral Tweets by Company Brand X… possibly with another level of categorisation such as Location - most popular content (eg tweets) for brand x (eg coca cola) in location x eg victoria.

3. Maximise the presentation of the data and take advantage of different filtering, conversational marketing and analytics tools for Google Reader. Feedly.com is doing some great work around extending Google Reader. While their focus is more consumer, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to apply their solution to Enterprise Social Media Systems. I’m already doing it for starters, hehe.

* Benefit : Feedly represents Google Reader content in a more sexy magazine type format. While this may sound superficial it helps make the tool be used more by clients - both direct and agency. The way Feedly automatically grabs relevant YouTube videos, twitter messages and Flickr photosets in itself is valuable. Feedly is also much more than presentation. Over time it identifies popular/high influence sources, in this case social media commentators that u r tracking for client in Google Reader. As ultimately clients are marketers, understanding who the industry gatekeepers are that are making influential noise about a client, that is very valuable. Feedly also is excellent in so far as it integrates back into google reader (so if u share an item within feedly it still becomes part of your aggregate google reader manicured feed which u can use for syndication +/or a snapshot of important filtered posts for client to read_use) Feedly also plugs direct into twitter and friendfeed so for active conversational marketers, u can jump into conversation asap.

* Required Fix : I hope Feedly go more enterprise and really delve into analytics (they dont yet integrate Postrank from what I understand) - As well as identifying virality at the post level, if they could track over time the most influential social media commentators for the client/account : That would be very valuable. They could establish an Influence Index, that tracked the Social Media Noise made by each of the Google Reader feeds/sources. Relatedly they could graph over time the influence of each of the sources, and allow a drilling into which posts/tweets/videos/links are driving the influence trend. Again, Google Reader has a basic trends tab - which identifies useful daily data such as average number of entries for Top 40 sources - but u cant yet export this data with one click or present it in a sexy Google Finance/Trends type way. Maybe Feedly can do this… or someone… or a combination of hackers, developers, clients, agencies.. and product geeks such as myself.

4. Google itself is starting to provide more output options and widgets for Google Reader, which can be applied as Desktop Social Media Monitoring and Action Tools. But there needs to be more serious choices around the opening up of Google Reader accounts via feeds.

* Benefit : So at moment, Google reader allows the registered user to click “share” or “share + annotate” any of the entries. These shares in aggregate become a public atom feed. This is very useful as previously mentioned, it becomes a manicured aggregate set of entries which can be published to a webpage, pulled into a CMS, or delivered to client as a tailored monitoring list. (esp with accompanying PostRank score out of 10 for each entry) Further these items have a schema based on the categories which you establish in the Google Reader account. With some additional work, a developer can then slice n dice the feed according to client requirements eg Twitter entries only (assuming Twitter is a category) Or YouTube Only.. or Brand X eg Coca Cola only entries etc

* Required Fix : Unfortunately, Google Reader like Google.com search doesnt have a Twitter Search or FriendFeed advanced search and feed creation capability - where the user can specify a set of Boolean criteria from an advanced search criteria and create a feed as a result. This is so annoying. You can search a google reader account. But you cannot create a feed based on this search thus making it pretty much useless. You cannot specify recency, relevance, keywords, content types, categories, or handpick entries to create feeds from these combination of entries.

Let’s say client wants to take any matched entries from the last month of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and publish those on a specific page on their website. Then on another page they want to publish under fair use of course, all the entries about another Cannes Festival Film : Coppola’s Tetro. Or Alan Ball’s True Blood Season 2 HBO vampires show which starts today.. lets say I need to generate a feed from my google reader just of the True Blood content…

I cant do this with Google Reader out of the box : And unfortunately there is too much hacking to achieve it. With some basic advanced search and feed creation features - same as Friendfeed Advanced Search (setup by ex-googlers no less) - then suddenly Google Reader really becomes a powerful CMS syndication tool… as well as a monitoring one.. I can setup a range of different rules/criteria and destinations for the matched results.. to a whole range of users across an organisation.. but at moment, I cant do this.. so either Google Reader team dose it, or one of its developers like Feedly.. or a Friendfeed starts thinking like this and extends its scope.. Dave Winer mentioned awhile back that Friendfeed could differentiate itself from Twitter and Facebook by being a more CMS like product.. I totally agree with that : Kind of like what Zemanta are doing for blogging and Navify are for Wikipedia value added content.

5. My final bolded benefit and required fix for building on top of Google Reader Social Media Eco-Systems is the absolute brilliance and non deadness of the Really Simple Syndication format. What Dave Winer created here is so awesome, but people who say RSS is dead are just plain stoopid, as it’s like saying water is dead because they prefer the taste of Coca-Cola. With each Google Reader able to take up to about 4k feeds (based on my personal RSS reader maxing out at 4k feeds and asking me to delete some to be able to add new ones) - 4k sources is more than enough per client.

And even compared to 18 months ago, there is now (even for an Australian based client in one industry segment) an absolute wealth of valuable social media content; I can grab blog feeds + search feeds, Flickr has geographic tagged + vanilla photos by feeds, YouTube has a near infinite level of feeds that can be drilled down to keyword and Client product/brands; Twitter has heavy advanced search filters that create feeds, including geographic parameters which helps for brands outside the US that may have the same names; Facebook is finally starting to open up public feeds; Friendfeed has useful influentials; And increasingly feeds can be added which analyse the analytics - What is being linked to; What is being retweeter’d; And so on. All of this thx2 Dave Winer and the handy RSS format. This is a fundamentally different approach than the Nielsen’s and large social media monitoring systems.

* Benefit : Google Reader is a feed based system. So the system becomes more valuable as more content is in an RSS format. For nearly all social media, their content is RSS Ready : Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Blogs. Where the next level of revolution will come is when Facebook becomes open and it’s content is made available via RSS when the member opts-in to have it exported out. Given Facebook looks more like Twitter meets Friendfeed and sucks social media in - It’s inevitable that users are allowed to syndicate their content out. This will make a Google Reader Social Media EcoSystem approach even more valuable.

* Required Fix : Hopefully the Zuckerberg monster will open up sooner rather than later to feeds. And that there will be analytics feeds which become available which traverse, index and filter the Facebook cloud into a Postrank like Mean Girls popularity test. Given Facebook is about real people, and real people live and act within a one hour drive of home… there will also be alot of local marketing opportunities that this creates in social media. Especially when tied into other local social media like parts of twitter and flickr, which already index very well in Google Reader.

Having 5 or 6 times setup the above Google Reader Eco-System(s), I’m becoming fairly fast and efficient at optimising these solutions for clients. I’m constantly looking for and testing new plugins + solutions. In the last fortnight Google released it’s Google Reader Gadget as part of the Google Desktop solution. There are some very interesting tie-ins here that I’ve been testing.. I’m also interested in building some of the above glue to connecting tissue with developers who have an interest in this; The Google Reader centric Social Media EcoSystem may not be as sexy as developing for IPhone or Facebook, but the competition is far less, and the combination of Google enterprise products means long term there seems to be a substantial opportunity in the intelligence, monitoring, syndication and conversational marketing of such a platform.

Personally I find the possible products that could be built around this Platform for Social Media Optimization could be fascinating and quite differentiated from the Nielsen’s + Buzz’Metrics_Numbers_etc_Solutions : Many of which do a kickass job. What I need though is a hands on tool that actually helps me extract info I can action. Too many tools in the space display a graph, and a fake brand value impression… but dont say : Here are the 5 most influential social media commentators for your client, and here are their contact details.

Not to mention with social media splintering… the way to deal with YouTube, Twitter, Blogs, Flickr etc is different (in terms of analytics monitored, the way each content type is presented etc… but the beauty of RSS is it’s a solidifying element.. and with Google Reader alot of the heavy boring work - that you dont want to build or maintain Google does.. then when u plugin tools like Feedly and Postrank.. as well as Google’s Desktop and Reader Gadget.. u can concentrate on ensuring The Universe of what is being monitored is comprehensive/up2date.. and then focus on the filtering algorithms, the slicing and dicing… the scoring and identification of social media commentators.. as well as the hands on of contacting these people, writing a tailored email.. calling them up… meeting them.. with the money saved on the back end and bespoke solutions.. or the exhorbitant monthly licensing fees for nonactionable graphs.. u can spend money on sexy client unique algorithms +/or real life relationship building…

Cant Wait to get My Supra TK Society Patent Grey, photos via PrimitiveShoes.com - Click to visit and drool.

That said.. if u dont want to do anything but u want the above done.. well that’s my sales pitch.I’m keen to spend the majority of my time working on the above projects so I can get some economies of scale and become a specialist in Social Media Optimization. Rather than work for 5 clients on 5 different projects. I’d rather work on 5 clients doing projects across the same value chain, even if some are social media intelligence, others interested in syndicating parts of the blogosphere under fair use, and others in acquiring customers, and getting traffic via social networks. The type of commitment setting up such a system entails that I personally work on is :

* Typically setting up a Full Blown Social Media EcoSystem via Google Reader and plugins is (up to) 5 days work.

* Then ongoing for keeping feed sources and plugins up to date, with additions and deletions, plus normal customer queries is half a day a week.

* If there u also want the monitoring for client names, products, brands, competitors, trends etc : that usually adds another half day per week. To get hands on, where monitoring is only the starting point and there is a new website, product/brand launch.. and the aim is to convert clicks, traffic and sales etc - add another half day a week : If you get the drift.

Still add that up at a very cost effective much lower than agency/consultant hourly/daily rate (with volume/longer term time discounts) it’s far more cost effective, and much more value creation than the standard Social Media Buzz Monitoring by the TV ratings or Bespoke software systems. Namely because by using open source, free, and freemium software (most of which is free, none of which costs more than $100 per month) - there is a whole technology/software/licensing cost line item that doesnt exist.

If u get my drift. redbarren at gmail dot com if u want to ping me… Always happy to prepare a tailored real demo for real prospects.. so u can compare the apples and oranges….

Rick Klau + Google/Blogger I hate to ask this, but are you Evil ?

Posted by Ben Barren on January 21, 2009 – 5:19 pm

Filed under BB_or_not_BB

Update : Rick, the Tony Soprano of the Mountain View blogspot world, got my old blog turned back on. 4 months I tried, took him a few hours when i was asleep. So he’s lost me from blogger to wordpress, but I’m using feedburner… the wheels of the world they turned. But is there anyway to divert my old blogspot atom feed subscribers to my new feedburner one ? No idea what has happened to imnotantisocial.blogspot.com - Unless she or hackers just deleted it ? Very strange….

Dear Rick,

The Inauguration today was amazing, not just to Americans, finally u have that simpelton out of the Oval Office, and some brainstrust can start the repair, innovate and grow mantra/execution.

You may be able to help me while we’re on a good vibe : So on September 13th 2008, I got an autogenerated email from google saying that my multi-thousand post top 100 aussie blog that I never ran an ad on incl adsense, 4 year adventure, benbarren.blogspot.com - had been classified as a spam blog, ‘many apologies‘ said the google autogenerated robot with no person with an email reply; “Within 2 days, we’ll resume your blog to normal.. or delete it in 20 days.” - Well Rick Klau, we had a conference call or two in 2005 (u may or not remember, was a gr8 call) when u were at Feedburner about bringing service out to Australia.

Unfortunately, google seem to be successfully stuffing up feedburner but im still using it for my new blog! Now I can empathise/aspire to a 7 figure earn out but maybe u can help myself and others in this googbot_autoclassification_as_splog (there are many) We’d love to get our blogs back from autoclassified googlesplogbot (tip1 - clean out all the old false autosplog classification queries like this on blogger forum that have not yet been resolved, will take an admin less than one day) Many of us try the blogger help forums but no1’s home

I cant update my benbarren.blogspot.com blog for 4 months now - I’ve had to tell people verbally which when u think about it is crazy given 75% of my audience WAS global ! (I cant update my blogspot in anyway which is so annoying u dont believe) I’ve come to my new self hosted benbarren.com address on wordpress. But that doesnt help with the thousands of visitors and rss subscribers I’ve lost, not to mention income. Heck if google thinks im a spammer, some people dont want to disagree with the borg.

I won’t even talk about commercial contracts I couldnt comply with for above domain, or clients that asked “Why arent you blogging?” - 6 months later. The fact I cant get control of my blogspot back and leave a message back ere, really pisses me off. And given I spent 4 years building an RSS readership, u’d understand that I want to port them to my new feedburner feed yeh ?

I only write this, because I’m very zen about my life.. so be it.. but I went to an upncoming Melbourne fashion blogger today ImNotAntiSocial.blogspot.com - heck she may have without notice shifted to wordpress, facebook, typepad etc - but i sense a bigger problem.. anyway Rick can u help - and confirm to the google blogspot spam bot robot I aint a splog’bot, and if indeed the same bot has imnotantisocial.blogspot.com in her sights, well release her to, she’s 23 endorsed human.

Oh and rick congrats’n'all that on google/feedburner, even if GOOG is iteratively post acquisition, wrecking feedburner services : Understand platform shifts in large companies arent exactly smooth sailing. Congrats on taking over product side of Blogger, damn u must be in charge of largest user generated blog community in world ?

Just watch that autoclassify splog robot. Some of us are humans, who creatively + commercially depend on our blogs. So, arbitrarily classifying blogs as spam, with no feedback, ruling, contact points.. um it kinda sux. And u r Tony Soprano now

Also, not sure what has happened to imnotantisocial.blogspot.com - but um I hope its not what happened to me. I wasn’t going to say anything, but when it starts happening to those around… um given u only took your great new job in January of this great new Inauguration 09 year.. I thought u might want to help…

Thx for anyhelp however u can, in getting benbarren.blogspot, imnotantisocial.blogspot.com (if it is indeed also spam classified - i may be totally wrong) but i’d hope more importantly u could learn more about the bot crawling technology that just shuts down real blogs without ability to even post to your audience that u have been locked out, or port your feed subscribers to feedburner, now owned by google.

Best and congrats again, BB

Video Warz : Sergey/Brin 1st : Rupe 2nd.

Posted by Ben Barren on January 6, 2009 – 12:47 pm

Filed under Consumer_Internet, Gadget_Lust, Web 1.0

Some quick news from Lindz MySpace : “little piece of TRUE information: we did NOT break up! access hollywood, extra, et, every tabloid, page six… AND every GOSSIP website. Get your stories straight please. It’s really annoying to have all of your friends emailing you saying, i saw, i read, etc… NOT TRUE”

My Fave Welder, by Uboat Designer for $770 Click.

In a LiLo/Sam paparazzi video soundbite driven world, the sheer reach of YouTube means it will always be a vsmart buy by GOOGmeister. And Rupe’s MySpace Video plus Hulu private equity funded $1bn startup valuation is equally shrewd. I’m just wondering when the Hulu video golds of river will drop for Australia’s TV networks who can get together and get Private Equity, heck why not Ch7 backer Kravis Kohlberg the original Barbarian at the Gate, and place Australian TV programming online, ad supported ala Hulu. And given Hulu raised $100m @ $1b valuation first round (watch the Arrington/DeWolfe Paris Hilton dating interview vid) the private equity guys can claw back some of those losses by increasing the average multiple of their media assets by adding a Hulu Downunder like asset. That’s a play I’d like to be involved in.

Nice Royal Blue Supra Ellingtons

But reason why Rupert Murdoch doesnt care about Aussie TV businesses, like Channel 10, is that he has Newscorp’s founding stake in Hulu, plus MySpace Video - with post Palin/Fey election momentum. He’s miles behind Sergey and Brin due to their fortitude in be willing to fight and pay music studios for compensation for music video plays, but #2 by consumer reach only isn’t a bad place to be, lets face it there is no #3, when u can sell traditional TV brands for alot higher CPM. Either way, Google and Newscorp pretty much own video online. Even if CBS want TV.com to become a major lean back destination . It’s just a bonus that video usage is up 40% / 08′ usage.

Some Reebok HighTops

So ancillary questions like who will Facebook partner with in Music (or will record labels go to hulu).. and by extension Film and Television, suddenly become interesting. What if Facebook diversify their terabytes of photos from the flickr playbook and increasingly encourage video uploads plus some studio deals. Anyway, video is game on, where the party’s at. Anyways I could go on here, but in 2009 a Hulu.com play will hit downunder, and that is one seat at a table (depending on which table becomes The Table of course) I definitely want to be commissioned for.

Comscore Video Usage Nov 08

Comscore research via Broadstuff.com : “The amount of time U.S. Internet users spend watching video is up an impressive 40 percent year over year. Watchers tuned in for 273.1 minutes of online video in the month of November 2008, up from 195 minutes in November 2007, according to comScore.”

Catch some Supernatural Sanctuary, S01 Online; Click.

BTW, Picasa is finally available on OSX, well at least at a Google Labs level.

Some Picasa Images Finally 4 OSX only at GOOG_Labs Level!

Look at that Google Employee Desktop with Chrome!

2008 internet industry stats r wak.

Posted by Ben Barren on January 3, 2009 – 10:03 pm

Filed under Web 1.0

The top level stats are pretty scary for the internet sector for 2008 via the always good Burnham’s Beat : “Internet stocks outperformed the market in 2008, albeit in the wrong direction. Overall, the internet sector declined -52.2% during 2008 vs. the NASDAQ’s -40.5% decline and the S&P 500’s -38.5% decline. Out of 128 year-end stocks in the sector, the average stock declined by -52.3% and the median stock declined by -56.2% indicating that declines were pretty well balanced across small and large cap Internet stocks. It’s interesting to note that Google, which accounts for a whopping 41% of the sector’s capitalization was down 56%, slightly more than average, which means that Google actually underperformed the Internet sector as a whole. Believe it or not, but only 4 Internet stocks or just 3% of the total managed to post a gain in 2008. That means that 60% of the Top 10 performing Internet stocks of 2008 actually lost money.”

androids live amongst us bostonians

Posted by Ben Barren on January 3, 2009 – 1:28 pm

Filed under Web_O/S

VentureBeat’s posts around Google’s Android Operating System run Netbooks are fascinating. Their latest Q+A : “How far away is Android from mass adoption as an OS for laptops and PCs? Will we see a Google OS in the short time? We don’t know. To our best knowledge we all can only speculate as eWeek recently did when they reported that a third of traffic streaming out of Google’s Mountain View headquarters is stripped of the usual identifying information that accompanies such traffic. Android needs substantial additional effort to be ready for mass adoption as an OS for PCs and laptops — but who knows what Google is planning. Chrome and Android itself were in development for many years before they were revealed to the public. Our experience with Android is that news leaks to the public do not occur. Google has separated most of the Android team. Its core is in Boston and does Android employees do not have much contact with non-Android Google employees.”

If You Like Androids + Chuck then Check out The Middle Man. Click4 Torrents

“Well Miss Tarrant, dont you think you’d be better on the platform ?” - Henry James, The Bostonians, Google Books, pg 342.

GOOG v AAPL O/S warz comin.

Posted by Ben Barren on January 2, 2009 – 2:27 pm

Filed under Consumer_Buzz

9 Sneakers Being Looked Forward to in 09

So poverty delirium is kickin in, but sure is fascinating what Venture Beat have to say about Google’s Android operating system running on a Netbook : “Google is planning to use Android for any device — not just the mobile phones.. Now think of Chrome, Google’s web browser, and the richness it allows developers to build into the browser’s relationship with the desktop — all of this could usher in a new wave of more sophisticated web applications, cheaper and more dynamic to use.. Android is designed to run on any device in a category widely referred to as “embedded devices.” The fact that various OHA partners have already developed Android enough to easily work on our netbook may be considered evidence enough that Google is getting increasing buy-in from industry players to realize this vision.” - Gonna be some noice Aapl/Goog battles in the future.

Some Nice APC Boat Shoes if it Gets Warmer

billionaire boys club does that live software thang

Posted by Ben Barren on December 28, 2008 – 12:48 am

Filed under Consumer_Internet, Web_O/S

I like Tim O’Reilly’s “Live Software” capabilities of Web 2.0. UGC only goes so far : “Again, consider MyBarackObama.com. It definitely harnessed explicit contribution, providing a platform for volunteers to organize and host local calling parties, to blog, or perform other campaign activities. But ultimately, Obama’s ground game–old fashioned precinct-level organizing, amped up to a new level by an army of distributed volunteers armed with mobile phones and coordinated via a web application–was the key to his victory. The “explicit” social media elements of MyBarackObama.com paled in impact compared to the development of a next generation electronic nervous system, in which volunteers were trained, deployed, and managed by a web application who used them, in John McMullen’s memorable phrase, as “souls in the great machine.”"