Aardvark Founders. Pic: Jim Wilson/The New York Times

I have written here often of how technology only shortens the distance between people on the social web. In other words, using social web tools to communicate with friends and family is an extension of our social activities offline. As I write this on July 5th, I recall yesterday seeing tens of thousands gathered on bridges in downtown Portland, alongside the lake in Lake Oswego and milling around in Tigard, Or, to watch the firework displays commemorating Independence Day. Families with kids, couples and teens all very comfortable with each other for a few hours; it is very natural for us to gather with strangers and witness a familiar event.

Opening a browser on a computer or a mobile device today means participation in the social web. Not just because of one’s involvement in social networks but also by letting your friends or family know of your geo-location by allowing a mobile device app to broadcast your whereabouts for instance. Emailing and texting friends, tweeting and updating your Facebook status all let those following you know of your involvement on the social web every day.

This is of course very familiar to us, we surf the web in our own familiar ways using social networking tools, yet companies that wish to harness the power to advertise to this web of millions of people have been stymied for some time, stuck in social media channels wondering how to budge these masses even a quarter of an inch closer to their products. The web and those using it don’t ever stop moving but you can’t simply plant a billboard alongside this viral highway – the billboard’s message will remain right there where it was positioned, as we all go about our daily electronic sojourns.

Rob Glazer of Real. Pic: Kevin P. Casey for the The New York Times

I recently discovered two articles in the Business section of the June 28th 09 edition of the New York Times. The articles cover two companies and their products – one is RealNetworks, a familiar face in technology, the other a new company called Aardvark. Real is featured for launching new technology for hardware devices and Aardvark for creating a social web service that helps you reach hundreds of your online friends and peer group for answers to any of your questions. Real brings us technology based on the premise that the company thinks we need their product and Aardvark brings us technology that embraces the social web by connecting us easily with people we trust to answer our questions. [I used Aardvark yesterday to ask a question of my followers - "who uses online music subscriptions, which one is better and why?" and I received 6 great responses, even one from a friend in Sweden who urged me to use a service called Spotify.] It works.

Aardvark doesn’t bother all of my 1700+ Facebook friends either. As the NYT article points out –

“Those friends-of-friends may turn out to be a great fountain of hitherto untapped information. For example, none of your 200 Facebook “friends” may have recently stayed in Napa and be able to recommend a bed-and-breakfast. But if each of their friends can be tapped, the pool of prospective wine-country authorities jumps from 200 into the tens of thousands.

You wouldn’t want to bother those thousands, however, with your question about Napa B.& B.’s. Aardvark has devised ways to drastically narrow the search, asking only those who are most likely to have an answer, and asking only a few of them at a time, protecting your network of volunteers from being asked too often.”

There’s more – “Having humans, not software, supply the advice is important. Max Ventilla, who formerly was at Google and is now Aardvark’s chief executive, said, “Often the most useful answers don’t answer the original question. Example: ‘You don’t want to go to the Caribbean now — it’s the rainy season — you want to go to Hawaii.’ ”

Aardvark has embraced the idea of the social web and crowdsourcing.

At the other end of the web [not that I'm saying the web exists on a plane with two actual 'ends'] RealNetworks delivered a new version of its Real Player software called Real Player SP. Real was once a pioneer in the online world of video and music delivery but as the NYT says – “.. the company has been largely eclipsed by rivals like Microsoft, Apple and YouTube from Google.”

In his NYT article, Brad Stone argues that Real has stuck to some of its technologies for too long. The new software for instance, allows user to move video onto smartphones like the iPhone and the Blackberry line, but with any mobile device able to stream video directly from the web, why would they want to? When it comes to music I’ve argued that mobile ubiquity and access from the cloud means never having to own music again if you choose to. Real is presuming that people want to ‘own’ or store video on their devices – that seems like an unlikely proposition.

In the same article, “Mike McGuire, an analyst at Gartner, … wonders whether Real is actually meeting new consumer needs, particularly since devices like smartphones are increasingly able to directly display Web video. “Sticking to your guns is one thing, but it’s another to say, let’s add features because we can, and because consumers should want this. Do we really know they do? Is anyone really asking for that?” Mr. McGuire said.”

Meanwhile Rob Glazer, Real’s chief says – “the human nervous system is wired to focus on new things,” like Twitter, and to dismiss the profitable stalwarts that have been around the block. With the new version of RealPlayer, he said, “we have made ourselves relevant again, or even more relevant in a new world.”

I hope that Mr. Glazer doesn’t really believe that notion..

Related Posts:

Authenticity and Authority on the Social Web

On Social Media, Blogs And Advertising

Honda Insight – Let It Shine from Honda on Vimeo.

As Rodger Bridges said today ‘page takeover is the new microsite’ and at least this Honda ad doesn’t break the nav. Click here for the full effect.

Click to watch…

In the current economic climate it goes without saying that most small businesses have been feeling their share of the pain. Of course, depending on which particular sector of an industry your company has the most experience in also determines the number of times the dice will roll in your favor; some industries thrive throughout downturns others suffer as their clients suffer – hard and fast decisions have to be made almost weekly to keep a company on course. Nemo is thriving but we had to make a course correction.

Unfortunately, this week, Nemo had to make a very hard decision to lay off 9 of our employees; 9 very smart, gifted and intelligent workers, who through no fault of their own find themselves suddenly without a job. People are the backbone of every company so it goes without saying that their loss is also Nemo’s loss.

In the end we are all human and of course like every company should we care about our laid off employees welfare. To help them we decided to turn first to the power of the community and social media by using our Twitter account. By noon on the day of the lay offs I sent out a message [or tweet] to the community explaining the cuts, but more importantly letting companies know that if they needed these skilled workers they could get in touch directly with me or Nemo. It worked.

I was blown away at how fast the response to my tweet was. Obviously in such a tight-knit community there was an outpouring of goodwill and good lucks etc but, most importantly, more than five companies and/or individual business owners reached out to us for info about our released staff. The result was that some of the Nemo alumni were in job interviews as soon as the next day. Obviously good news all around and it’s worth pointing out the power of Twitter and reaching out to your supportive community online.

Our message on Twitter.

And a typical response and re-Tweet.

When the Nemo alumni land new jobs, and if they are willing to have me share the details, I will post them up here.

Follow us on Twitter: @NemoHQ

Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

This year’s SXSWi Conference in Austin Texas can only be hailed as a success. I’m unable to distill all the great information that I gleaned into one post so I will spread it out in posts here over the next few days. This year’s speakers included Chris Anderson, Guy Kawasaki and Clay Shirky to name a few. It was Shirky who left me with the most memorable quote of the week – “the internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history…” He was defending internet use against the charge that it was destroying the book publishing and newspaper businesses. The best panels were the ones that included people whose thinking arrived at similar positions – the internet isn’t destroying anything it is merely the great leveler, perhaps the greatest in history.

Austin Kleon, an Austin, TX based illustrator captured the first panel of day one at the conference. This image sums up how I felt at the end of each day of panels…..

Pic by Luc Legay.

So here’s another twist for those of you who still think of Twitter as a waste of time or just simply frivolous. Jay Rosen [on Twitter @jayrosen_nyu,] a journalism professor and new media analyst at New York University has coined the phrase Mindcasting for the way he interacts with the 550 people he follows on Twitter.

In the LA Times today he had this to say – “Mindcasting came about when I was trying to achieve a very high signal-to noise-ratio,” he explained. This meant using his Twitter account to send out tweets pointing to the best media news and analysis he could find, 15 or 20 times a day. “I could work on the concept of a Twitter feed as an editorial product of my own. I’ve hand-built my own tipster network,” he said. “It’s editing the Web for me in real time.”

It’s worth pointing out that if you are using Twitter solely on the Twitter web page the notion of Mindcasting is difficult compared to if you were to use TweetDeck, an Adobe Air-based app that allows you to group, filter and manage your tweets.

Feel free to follow me @pampelmoose and Nemo @NemoHQ

Er, cough, cough…

Nemo recently completely overhauled the web site for Oregon’s historic Timberline Lodge and Wordpress.org featured the site as a showcase. Go Team Nemo or is that Meat Omen?

Alisa Leonard-Hansen over at her blog, Socialized, rips apart very concisely, the new campaign from JC Penny called “Beware of The DogHouse.” She does it so well. A missed opportunity exposed in all its gory beauty. [In the Doghouse is a viral marketing campaign that allows women to put their significant other in the "Doghouse" for bad gift choices this holiday season.] Ach!!

Excerpt from Alisa’s post – Not only is the premise of the campaign utterly ridiculous and condescending–but at its center is what else…a microsite! A microsite, oh why didn’t we think of that before?! Ah, but wait, it gets better. They implemented Facebook Connect. Now, you’d think I’d be pretty excited about it as I’ve been covering FBC since it was first announced back in May of this year…ah, but marketers never fail me. So did they do something useful with the FBC implementation? No! They created this lame microsite and a game by which chicks can put their dudes in a doghouse and do so via Facebook Connect. So, you chose to use FBC to let girls pick Facebook friends/bf’s into some lame doghouse? Because that is super useful and makes much more sense than say, integrating FBC into the JC Penney online shopping experience and thereby including friend data (purchases, wishlists, etc) into the product merchandising model. No, that just makes too much sense. We’ll just stick with this awesome Doghouse thing…sweet!

Simple user interface, giant database of videos, easy search that works…and all built on the back of free content handed to them by the recording industry. Ha!

MTV Music

This is a beta version of the trailer for Spooky’s Birth of a Nation re-work

I spent last week traveling coast to coast with a stop at the SanFran MusicTech Summit as a panelist, a visit to Venables Bell to make a social media presentation, then on to NYC to speak on a panel at the CMJ Music Conference. Both panels covered social media but the audiences in SF and NYC were wildy disparate – music technologists at one and college students and musicians at the other. I intend to follow up this post with one about the SF visits but first I wanted to write about my fellow panelist at CMJ, the artist Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky.

Paul D. Miller is an artist who embraces the current fractured cultural landscape with abandon. A DJ by nature he is used to mashing, mixing, beat-colliding, deconstructing and rebuilding. He resists the idea of boundaries, everything in his world can be re-booted, shaped and formed anew. He is multi-disciplined and multi-genre. As a musician he regularly tours the world giving away thousands of copies of his CD remixes as he goes. He’s a writer whose latest book, ‘Sound Unbound – Sampling Digital Music and Culture‘, is a collection of essays from the likes of Steve Reich, Bruce Sterling and Simon Reynolds; it is of course accompanied by a free CD of avante-garde music.

DJ Spooky(l) and Dave Allen(r) at CMJ Oct 08

His latest work is “Rebirth of a Nation” – remix of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film “Birth of a Nation.” – literally a movie mashup that Miller has ‘remixed’ and re-purposed into a 21st century take of that classic movie by adding contemporary clips of social unrest and cultural upheaval seen through Miller’s particularly modern lens.

Miller describes in his own words the process of his work:

“Like an acrobat drifting through the topologies of codes, glyphs and signs that make up the fabric of my everyday life, I like to flip things around. With a culture based on stuff like Emergency Broadcast Network hyper edited new briefs, Ninja Tune dance moguls Cold Cut’s “7 Minutes of Madness” remix of Eric B and Rakim’s “Paid in Full” to Grandmaster Flash’s “Adventures on the Wheels of Steel” to later excursions into geographic, cultural, and temporal dispersion like MP3lit.com – contemporary 21st Century aesthetics needs to focus on how to cope with the immersion we experience on a daily level – a density that Sergei Eisenstein back in 1929 spoke of when he was asked about travel and film:“the hieroglyphic language of the cinema is capable of expressing any concept, any idea of class, any political or tactical slogan, without recourse to the help of suspect dramatic or psychological past” Does this mean that we make our own films as we live them? Travelling without moving. It’s something even Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” wouldn’t have thought possible. But hey, like I always say, “who’s counting?””

Miller is a 21st century digital/analog mash up artist. He soaks up culture and remixes and re-purposes it every day. Nothing is sacred, everything is up for grabs. His work belies the efforts of those who embrace online social networking as something “new” brought to us by “new” technological tools. Miller’s work is an antidote to that wrong-headed thinking. In a world that is populated by digital youth there are already hundreds if not thousands of younger versions of Miller creating mashed up works every day. Their numbers grow daily.

Before the end of this decade these young artists will constitute a digital tsunami that will sweep aside current social media and social networking conceits.

Uupdate: Here’s a link to the site for RIP: A Remix Manifesto, where Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.

Almost everyone I know is hooked on the highly addictive Polaroid Image Maker. The software is free to download and replicates the classic Polaroid look, complete with color variations and optional dirt and finger prints!

All you have to do is drag and drop a digital photo onto the Polaroid icon on your desktop. The camera makes that old familiar ‘click’ sound, shoots out a ‘polaroid’ likeness of your photo and even ‘develops’ right before your eyes! As of now, the software is only available to Mac users.

Pic from HuffingtonPost.com

I have been an enthusiastic user of Amazon’s MP3 Store ever since it launched. The store challenges the hegemony of the Apple iTunes Store which is the front runner because of savvy marketing and the superior hardware that is the iPod, but there is no reason that music lovers shouldn’t be able to gather up music from other sources whilst reaping the benefits of DRM-free MP3s; people need to be educated about Digital Rights Management or DRM and obviously it isn’t in Apple’s interest to do that. *See footnotes for explanation about DRM.

Here’s the rub – MP3s purchased from Apple’s iTunes store can only be played on an iPod or a computer authorized by the user to play those MP3s, they can not be transferred to other devices. *See footnotes on how to work around Apple’s DRM. Locking down the music to Apple devices is the technological equivalent of the buggy whip manufacturers back in the day, getting laws passed to ensure that anyone driving a Model T Ford had to have someone walk in front of the car to warn pedestrians of its approach….

Steve Jobs has long maintained that the decision to go with DRM in the first place was because the major record labels demanded that their music files be protected. Critics have long pointed out that it is in Apple’s interest to use DRM to lock the music to the iPod as all of Apple’s profits are in the hardware not the content. And now that Amazon has opened its MP3 download store offering major label music at twice the file size, 256kbs to Apple’s 128kbs, and at prices cheaper than iTunes, Jobs’ argument is beginning to wear thin. *See footnotes for an explanation of MP3 file sizes.

And now comes the G1 Android-based phone, every one of which includes Amazon.com’s DRM-free MP3 store pre-loaded. The G1 users may have never understood the benefits of DRM-free songs and they may never have heard of Amazon’s MP3 store, yet it is not a stretch to imagine that once they use the Amazon service on the phone and realize they can move their music downloads freely and easily across all MP3-playing devices it will make them look askance at the iTunes store.

The Amazon MP3 Store works seamlessly with the iTunes application too so there’s no worry of having to use another application to play MP3s. Upon download of MP3s from Amazon its downloader populates the songs into your iTunes folder, it’s that simple. After that if you own a Zune or an iRiver you can simply sync the device up and the MP3s will appear just as they do on an iPod – you no longer need an iPod to play MP3s unless you have purchased MP3s from iTunes with DRM… Once public awareness spreads of the benefits of DRM-Free files, [no doubt by word of mouth as it is not a media-driven story,] iTunes may have to think again about using DRM.

* About DRM

DRM is short for Digital Rights Management. From Wikipedia – Digital rights management (DRM) is a generic term that refers to access control technologies used by hardware manufacturers, publishers and copyright holders to limit usage of digital media or devices. The term is used to describe any technology which makes the unauthorized use of media or devices technically formidable, and generally doesn’t include other forms of copy protection which can be circumvented without modifying the media or device, such as serial numbers or keyfiles. It can also refer to restrictions associated with specific instances of digital works or devices. Digital rights management has been and is being used by content provider companies such as Sony, Apple Inc., Microsoft and the BBC.

* How to remove the DRM from an iTunes purchased MP3:

Simply create a new playlist in your iTunes application. Drag the purchased album or any individual purchased tracks to the playlist. Click ‘Burn CD’ and insert a blank CD-R. After burning the CD click ‘Import CD’ after ensuring that you have set the preferences for importing to ‘MP3.’ The newly imported songs from the CD are now all DRM-Free MP3s. After successfully importing from the CD you can either delete the original MP3s with DRM or keep them for back up.

* An explanation of MP3 file sizes.

In the iTunes applications preferences click on ‘General’ then ‘Import Settings.’ Select ‘MP3 Encoder’ then click on ‘Setting’ below. You now have a choice of file size settings. Apple tags the settings Good Quality – 128kbs, High Quality – 160 kbs and Higher Quality – 192 kbs where the number of kbs refers to the kilobit size of the MP3 file. The higher the number the better quality of the MP3 file for playback. You can also select a custom setting to go higher still. Some people argue that 320kbs is near-CD quality for instance. Apple’s iTunes Store offers downloads at 128kbs while Amazon’s MP3 Store offers files at 256kbs, twice the size in other words.

Click image to play.

Sports, technology, iconic brands and social networking all wrapped up in one package – Nike+ there are only winners here. The Nike+ Sports Kit has allowed athletes to share their data with friends and others who then compete online. This coming together of computer and running shoe technology between Apple, who’s iPod is a way to gather and upload the runner’s data (speed, distance, steps etc) and Nike who’s shoes include the Piezoelectric accelerometer for measuring the data.

And now a campaign to register runners globally to run a 10k and have every mile tracked whether they run, walk or jog and Nike will count those miles towards a charity of its choice. Time to get away from the monitor.

Ma.gnolia announces upgrades to its social bookmarking service.

Why M2?
The decision to re-build Ma.gnolia arises from trying to solve a number of problems faced by the current
design, and the desire to continue evolving Ma.gnolia’s features and technology:

• The current architecture requires considerable effort to maintain the large volumes of activity and data
that customers bring to Ma.gnolia. Keeping up with this growth, exploring interesting new technolo-
gies like OpenID and OAUTH, mitigating the effects of illegitimate use of the service, have come at the
expense of delaying other plans, such as the introduction of pro-level services.

• A single service cannot be all things to all people. Feature requests come in faster than we can make
changes. Moreover, requests are sometimes mutually exclusive, and can be at odds with the values be-
hind Ma.gnolia and its wider community of customers.

• Some of the core technologies used to build Ma.gnolia, such as Ruby on Rails, have matured in both
quality and best practices. While updates and refactoring of the existing codebase could help, those ap-
proaches won’t be as effective as a ground-up re-write.

• Although existing API approaches are well-received, the current architecture is not suited to the emerging direction of modern web services, exemplified by technologies like Google’s OpenSocial and Facebook’s F8.

• A major re-design is required to truly take advantage of lessons learned over 3 years. These issues range across identity, reputation, spam, privacy and contact management, cross-service presence, operational costs and the personal and organizational goals that customers bring to a social bookmarking service.

And the important news for existing users is -

• A free, ad-supported Ma.gnolia will continue to be available for private individuals, as it is now. Existing accounts, with all settings and content will migrate to M2 with no action required by members.
• The ability to download and manage one’s own Ma.gnolia installation, completely public or limited to
select members.
• Business and organizations can subscribe to enhanced features and custom services.

“>

The Communication Arts web site gave the Nemo-branded Nike 6.0 site a thumbs up this week with a ‘Web Site of The Day’ pick – Nike 6.0 blurs the line between the audience and the company by creating clear communication, information and a way to engage with the brand. It’s always nice feelin’ the love.

Click image to Play

Today’s Digital Youth are already well-versed in Trust and Fame, they understand very clearly that their song, their video is only as good as the one that went before it on YouTube unless it is awesome, catchy and fun. Seattle’s Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head worked with the video crew That Go to cut this clip for their song ‘Sophisticated Side Ponytail.’ That Go also made a great clip for Thunderheist recently.

I was reading a report today from ComScore Media Metrix about how American and European mobile users are accessing maps from their mobile devices. No surprise that the iPhone is the leading device in the USA with the Nokia N95 and N70 leading the way in Europe. More interesting was the data on Mode of Transport Intended to be Used when Accessing Maps. As you’ll see in the grid below USA mobile users lead the way in use whilst driving in the car, come last in using their devices whilst traveling on public transport and last again in use whilst working out. Whatever the data means it does point to the fact that we drive more and use public transport less than our European counterparts. Or perhaps it’s a demographic issue?

AdWeek reports that “Federated Media Publishing, the blog-centric ad network helmed by Industry Standard founder John Battelle, has partnered with Microsoft to launch CrowdFire, a music-themed social media platform where fans can share and consume videos, photos and personal accounts from live concerts.”

Reading the story and then digging through the CrowdFire site I can’t help but feel that this is just yet-another-social-network. The site is clean enough and easy to navigate but seems a bit jargon-heavy as in the use of the word crowdsource. And Battelle comes over as oddly quaint when he says that the idea for CrowdFire was sparked when he attended several recent music festivals, and saw how prominent cell phone cameras and other portable video recording devices have become. That sounds so 2000 to me….

HCSC Photo Workshop -Day 3- Tim Zimmerman from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

The HCSC campers woke to Mother Nature playing a game with the weather. The mountain was socked in. While they waited for the clouds to lift, Tim Zimmerman instructed the class all about digital workflow, processing and storage. The clouds lifted on High Cascade and we hit the snow. Molly Aguirre, Hanna Teter, Jeremy Jones all hucked for the workshop shooters.

My good friend Brian Zisk, the man behind the always interesting SanFranMusicTech Conference, has announced the next gathering. It will be back at San Francisco’s Hotel Kabuki on October 20th. There are early bird tickets currently available through August 8th which you can grab here. I will be there as a panelist along with the following folks:

Bob Heyman – Mediasmith, Chief Search Officer
Steve Jang – imeem, CMO & Head of Business Development
Ethan Kaplan – Warner Music Technology, VP
Rachel Masters – Ning, VP of Strategic Relationships
Jack Moffit – Speeqe, CEO / Chesspark, CEO & Lead Developer / IceCast Streaming Media Server, Creator / Xiph Foundation, Co-Founder
Sean O’Connell – Music Allies, Founder & CEO
Dave Ulmer – Motorola, Sr. Director Multimedia Products and Services
Carnet William – Sprout, Co-Founder & CEO
Brian Zisk – SanFran MusicTech Summit, Executive Producer / Future of Music Coalition, Technologies Director

The folks from Tumblr left a post on Social Media Today about an overhaul to the Tumblr platform.

In their own words – We’re getting ready to push some major updates over the next few weeks, and we wanted to give you a heads-up on changes to our custom theme engine. We’ve tried to make Tumblr themes as open and customizable as possible, and the things you’ve created have blown our minds. But there are still things we’ve wanted to do that haven’t been easy enough.

So next Monday we’ll be scrapping our old code for a completely overhauled template engine. We’re seriously excited about this, and we can’t wait to see what you’re able to do with it.

The most noticeable improvements:

* The new engine is scoped, so you’ll be able to nest and repeat blocks and variables.
* The engine uses a new token parser that will support special syntax for API hooks.

This will let your theme call back for content, like:

{​block:Posts type=”photo” tagged=”spotlight” count=”5″}
” />
{/block:Posts}

We’ve been systematically testing the new engine to make sure it’s backwards compatible. You can test it yourself by adding ?beta=1 to any tumblelog URL [e.g. http://www.davidslog.com/?beta=1]. If it’s working correctly, you shouldn’t see a difference.

Please let us know if you see anything funny.

Incidentally I have tested the clunky old Social Space Station theme and it seems to be identical so that’s good. Still waiting on a banner to take the design to a new universe. The Social Space Station is a tumblelog dedicated to presenting, discussing, and discovering interesting things out there in the social media sphere.

For decades now the dream of media types and ad firms has been to convert the humble remote control from a mere volume and channel changer to a spangly ‘product buying module.’ Tivo and Amazon are announcing a partnership today that introduces a “product purchase” feature via Tivo’s DVR service.

The idea is simple – turn the Tivo remote into a tool for buying the products being advertised and promoted on commercials and talk shows. If a talk show host talks up a book, Blu-Ray disc or CD, Tivo viewers will see onscreen menus with links to buy those products.

The NYT reports that – In the months ahead, TiVo plans to begin offering this feature to advertisers and programmers, so that the chance to buy products and have them delivered will be presented to viewers during commercials and even alongside product placements during live shows.

“Just a few years ago, we were viewed with great paranoia as the disruptor,” said Thomas S. Rogers, chief executive of TiVo. “Our goal now is to work with the media industry to come up with ways to resist the downward pressure of less advertising viewing and create a way for advertising on TV to become more effective, more engaging and closer to the sale.”

Tivo is now positioning itself away from media industry disruptor – offering its customers ways to skip ads, to media industry saviour, but not without Mr Rogers sowing the seeds of paranoia – “As DVRs get more popular, “the majority of commercials in home will be fast-forwarded through,” he said. “It is critical that there be a form of advertising and a transactional solution that underpins the DVR, or the economics of television are going to be substantially undermined.”

The people in the video who see this glass elevator dunk an Oreo cookie into a glass of milk are paying attention. I wonder how many of them grab a bag of Oreo’s on the way home. A cool, alternative way to push advertising.

Well, either Gary Busey has or GotVMail has. Gary appears to be “tired and emotional” as Private Eye would say, so it’s sure to be viral.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal today [subscription req.] a report says that YouTube will will fall short of revenue expectations. The twist to this chatter is that Google has found that 80% to 90% of video watchers hate to watch pre-roll advertising and they leave the video the minute they see any hint of a pre-roll. The story goes that Google intends to ignore its own research and go ahead with pre-roll anyway.

And the reason that most pages on YouTube are ad free? Because Google is fearful of showing that it is profiting from copyright infringement. They already in the middle of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom. That apparently leaves Google with only 4% of the videos being legally a-ok to advertise around as they have been approved by the copyright owners.

Bottom line for Google and the lawsuit they face, is that it is very unlikely they will receive a ruling in their favor to make money from copyright-violating content. It also will be a barrier to entry for anyone trying to launch a social media advertising program around these big content sites. Even Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation doesn’t own the copyright to hundreds of thousands of songs on its MySpace site.

It’s not often I come across a major musical artists’ web site and find that I can say to myself – “these guys got it right.” Today I visited John Mayers site and although I’m not a fan of his music the site is a great example of how to get the message across simply and elegantly while giving his fans the ability to interact on many levels. The tie-in with Blackberry is genius too. The Blackberry micro-site just spreads the Meyer messaging and interactivity far and wide by offering exclusive Meyer content – audio, video, pictures and more.

John says “hi.”

John Meyer has a blog and he seems to use it, at least I hope it’s him because the most egregious offense is having someone else blog for you. I’m going to keep checking back on this one. In fact there are multiple blog links on the home page. This one is written by “Scotty” who may be in the band or may be the T-shirt vendor, it’s hard to tell. The blog focuses on the new T-shirts – “A collaboration with Loomstate – a completely organic, sustainable tee. Very limited… We only made 587 of the shirts, each hangtag is hand-numbered.”

And there’s even a place to send in your encore requests for the shows you’ll attend. Customer happy time I reckon. And client happy too, Blackberry made a wise choice sponsoring this musician.

Credit: Mayer web link found on the Mediapost blogs.

As we celebrate Independence Day we can mull this over. Regardless of the facts of the case and Viacom’s complaint it would seem that, as the NYT reports, “the order raised concerns among users and privacy advocates that the online video viewing habits of hundreds of millions of people could be exposed.”

Via the New York Times:
A federal judge in New York has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom a database linking users of YouTube, the Web’s largest video site by far, with every clip they have watched there.

For every video on YouTube, the judge required Google to turn over to Viacom the login name of every user who watched it, and the address of their computer, known as an I.P., or Internet protocol, address. Both companies have argued that such data cannot be used to unmask the identities of individual users with certainty. But in many cases, technology experts and others have been able to link I.P. addresses to individuals using records of their online activities.

Here’s the back story on the lawsuit from FindLaw:

Viacom and its companies filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube and Google seeking at least $1 billion in damages.

The media company charges that “YouTube has harnessed technology to willfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale,” by taking “the value of creative content on a massive scale for YouTube’s benefit without payment or license. The suit alleges that the copyright infringement is on such a large scale that it “identified more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of their copyrighted programming on YouTube that had been viewed an astounding 1.5 billion times.”

Viacom details the “legitimate licensed channels” that it works with to distribute the company’s copyright-protected content. These partners include Apple’s iTunes Music Store and Joost.

The suit also charges that YouTube selectively deploys filtering technology “[b]y limiting copyright protection to business partners who have agreed to grant it licenses,” even though copyright holders are entitled to protection of their works under federal copyright law without such business agreements.

Vint Cerf, Google’s Internet Evangelist, says that he sees a future where video will be downloaded rather than streamed. If the U.S. had a policy to roll out more broadband capacity users would be able to download an hour of video in 16 seconds. “It’s like the iPod–you can download music faster than you can listen to it,” he told Cnet.

First the email in my inbox.

Introducing Keeping Score with Audrey!

Starting this week, TrueCredit’s Newsletter Editor-in-Chief, Audrey O’Dell, brings you a new blog in the Learning Center. Inspired by readers’ questions, Audrey will offer you the scoop on how to get the most out of credit card reward programs and uncover new and different ways to pay off credit cards (debt snowball, anyone?) and that’s only the beginning! Ever wonder how the credit crunch is going to impact you personally? (Maybe it already has!) Whether your mortgage rates will go up or your credit card rate will come down? Ever transfer a credit card balance to another card offering a lower rate—and then been sorry? Or was it a good idea? Read about these credit issues—and more—in Keeping Score with Audrey. It’s just one of the great features TrueCredit brings you to help you manage your credit. Make the TrueCredit Learning Center a regular pitstop on your road to credit health.

Ok I’m interested – I visit Keeping Score With Audrey.

The first thing I notice is the text on the page is left justified so tightly it almost escapes the page but the instant giveaway that this “blog” is not actually a real blog is the simple fact that no one is home. You cannot comment, all you can do is read what is basically an ad for True Credit’s services. You cannot contact anyone, there is no ‘about’ page – who is ‘Audrey,’ does she even exist?

Wait, there’s more – if you attempt to navigate away from this “blog” you receive the following message:

True Credit’s management have made a poor decision here. They clearly do not understand how important authenticity is in the blog world. If they had really done their homework this area of their site would not exist as it stands today. They have broken all the rules of how to reach their customers online.

I find it interesting that David Pogue, the editor of the New York Times’ Personal Tech column has a problem with the idea of free when it comes to promotion online.

He quotes Kevin Kelly – “David, my guess is that rather than seeing an immediate, or even delayed dip in your books sales, that the pirated PDF either made no difference to your sales, or it actually elevated them. Just as ‘free’ radio drives CD and album sales.” A sensible attitude I say. I reference Kevin Kelly in a recent post here.

Pogue also needs to follow Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog for more on his upcoming book, ‘Free.’

For musicians, 1000 true fans may be the way to lift their sales, and therefore their careers, out of the flat plains of the Long Tail. Looking for information about 1000 fans, I entered ‘1000 friends’ as a search term in Google – it returned 12.2 million results. Here are the Google results.

In this context there isn’t much difference between ‘fans’ – who support musicians and artists, and ‘friends’ – who tend to support causes and the environment. For instance, 1000 Friends of Houston wants 1000 people to donate $100 each to kick start an initiative to improve livability in Houston. Meanwhile the musician Jill Sobule put up a web site asking for donations to make a new album. She needed $75,000. If you visit the site today she happily proclaims that she has achieved her goal and recording is under way. Here’s her original post setting out her goals and the different levels of donor participation.

Kevin Kelly, who describes himself as follows: “Kevin Kelly is a Senior Maverick at Wired magazine and is currently editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website” says in a post at his site, The Technium, “A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.”

Kelly’s article [from which I borrowed that image] provoked a lot of comment and in one case an outright rebuttal from a musician who has been using the 1000 fans technique to sell his music. As this musician wrote, he couldn’t make a living from operating with such low income. [I would argue that the real point of reaching out to your true fans is networking and not about trying to make a living solely from the income derived this way. It should be treated as another arrow in the quiver of tools that musicians already use.] Kelly then wrote another article entitled ‘The Case Against 1000 True Fans.’ The debate continues.

I like the idea of 1000 true fans. It’s rather like a patronage and when it works it must be wonderful to be that artist who feels the affirmation of her fans. Yet what if it doesn’t work? Fundable is a web site that helps artists by putting up the page that solicits the donations. If the artist requests $5000 for her next work to be created but falls short of that goal then no one pays. Fundable helps in two ways 1. It’s an easy way to create a web site for this purpose, and 2. Artists learn how many fans are willing to support their endeavor before starting a new project.

Arguably these groups of donors are more than just ’super fans’ of artists, they are a micro social network. In April, Peter Bowman, a contributor to the web site Internet Evolution wrote a post about the emergence of micro social networking. He argues that companies and businesses that have built micro-sites for their brands are now branching out and creating micro social networks and asks:

“Will this growing micro-social trend dilute the existing power of social network elites like Facebook and MySpace , or will they empower more people to participate in a wider selection of online communities based on their individual needs and wants? Large brands and businesses have been using micro-site spinoffs to vertically promote products and services while targeting a very defined and loyal online market. Micro-sites have worked wonders for companies that want to align something specific to a targeted online audience. Now, there is a growing movement to transform micro-sites into micro-social networks to become more in line with Web 2.0 applications that aim to engage users with more interactivity and peer-to-peer networking options.”

I think he’s right. As people tire of the faceless anonymity of Facebook and MySpace they will either seek out or start their own network to attract like-minded people to their particular cause, movement, musical group or hobby; a group such as the one that donated $83,000 to Jill Sobule. Sobule should start a Ning network to help all those people stay in touch with each other. After all, they share a common goal.

On a much larger level, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails had huge success with his direct sales set up where he sold a deluxe package that was a combination of MP3s, CDs, DVDs and a book that he called an “Ultra-Deluxe Limited Edition” package available in an edition of 2,500 units. Critics scoffed but he sold every one of them raking in around $750,000 gross. That’s a micro social network in action. His next release, ‘The Slip’ comes as digipak CD in a limited edition of 200,000 units.

Dave Allen, Director, Insights & Digital Media, Nemo Design.

Related Post: On Social Media, Blogs and Advertising.

Obama’s viral timepiece.

These days the advertising and marketing world is all abuzz with phrases such as – Social Media, Social Advertising, Facebook Ads, Mass Media Networking Advertising…..etc, etc.. In the last two weeks I have been a panelist at the L I S A seminar in Portland and the Hawaii MusicTech Conference in Honolulu. L.I.S.A., which is an acronym for Lessons In Social Advertising, was aimed at marketers and advertisers who [for some reason] don’t understand social networks or haven’t yet worked out how to advertise effectively to them. It focused on topics such as ‘What is social advertising?’ and ‘How do you get young people to recommend your brand?’ The Hawaii MusicTech panel discussed how musicians could effectively use social networks such as Facebook and MySpace to reach an audience and communicate with them.

Two sides of the table as it were. One group wants to advertise, or push, their messages to a mass audience, while the other wants to create a network of like-minded people who hopefully will pull content such as free MP3s and then “evangelize” on behalf of the musicians by spreading messages by electronic word of mouth. With no hint of schizophrenia I happily migrate between both camps.

To understand and embrace social networking is to place the idea that says “technology makes this possible” to one side and embrace the idea of the basic human need to stay in touch with other like-minded people at all times. As Clay Shirky says “The desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct.” Think about rock concerts for a minute…..

Most people that take a position on social networking and advertising come at it from a technological point of view, as in “technology has created the means for everyone to be connected and to stay in touch.” I disagree with that statement because it removes nature from the game. It is entirely natural for humans to want to interact as often as possible as we are all social animals. Cities are no more artificial (technological) than the hives of bees. Therefore the Internet is as natural as a spider’s web. People who believe that technology is driving our interactions are missing the point – we ourselves are technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as a means of genetic survival. Bottom line – social media is as natural as apple pie as we all want to be as connected as possible – we can’t help it. [A really good book from which I have borrowed some thoughts is 'Straw Dogs' by John Gray, professor of European thought at LSE, published in the UK by Granta.]

Online networks might be seen as antidotes to boredom at work, school or college. These new social networks do more than transmit information about their members, they change behaviour by propagating moods. These days we can all share “news” really fast, even about ourselves – for example, my Facebook or Twitter status might say “I’m heading to the beach in Waikiki…” and the mood that simple statement makes might become very contagious.

The Internet confirms what we have all known for a long time – the world is ruled by the power of suggestion but in the case of social networking it is “influencers” that lead the suggesting. Then suggestions might become “group think.” John Gray writes – “in evolutionary prehistory, consciousness emerged as a side effect of language. Today it is a by product of media.”

So, the question currently being asked by companies and advertisers is “how do we market and advertise to social networks?” Having to ask that question suggests the rocky ground that online advertisers are standing on. For instance, Jack Myers sees nothing but doom and gloom in online marketing: He says “Advertising is simply not a sufficient revenue model to sustain content companies into the long-term future.” And goes on -

“I have preached evangelically for nearly three decades about the bifurcation of the media and advertising marketplace into 1) a transactional commodity business model and 2) a relationship-based brand-focused premium marketplace. Most media companies and agencies are investing appropriately in the technology resources required for their transactional businesses. [But] Brand building, relationship-based business models and premium-priced enterprises require completely new and innovative models, and can take years before they generate returns that justify the investments. Industry realities place enormous pressure on executives to adhere to traditional business models, and companies that foster and advance innovation are often drained of resources before they can deliver the return-on-investment demanded by the stock market, equity rights holders and VC investors. Typically, implementation of new business models must be forcefully imposed by the CEO, need the blessing of investors, and they cannot be managed by executives trained exclusively in the ways of traditional media and advertising.”

Neil Perkin in a slideshow entitled ‘What’s Next in Media’ that can be found here says that today – Social Media is counter-intuitive to communications media. Here’s one of his slides that shows just how counter-intuitive things have become for marketing online:

Meanwhile, the old way of marketing is through push messaging and therein lies the mistake of many of today’s marketing managers. Take a look at this slide to see how things don’t stack up nicely into a marketing message or ‘drop’ that has been long planned waiting its turn on the calendar.

The Linear model above reminds me of traditional TV and Print advertising. Some people in advertising and marketing today still view the Internet as a “channel” rather like TV.

Let’s consider another buzz phrase – viral marketing online. The success of YouTube in extending an advertising campaigns length and reach is now common currency. We’ve all seen the videos, perhaps even this one – My girlfriend and the Wii Fit. 2.2 million views and going strong.

The viral aspect of YouTube pleases advertisers and marketers because they can take pride in the statistics – 2.2 million viewers, that’s great! Not so quick though. The wise online marketer knows that it’s not all about page impressions. Broad use of metrics is far more important – users, time-spent, interactions and pass-alongs. The Wii certainly got a lot of exposure in that video but how can the results be tracked? Where’s the ROI?

Those YouTube stats don’t show the whole picture. It is clear that the video is very popular and it fits the rules of users, time-spent, interactions and pass-alongs, but there is no clear ROI except in its “value.” By value I mean that the brand is being talked about, the brand via the video is being shared, people are “spending time” with the brand. The ROI though is difficult to judge. Even if Wii sales were to jump by 5% in one week can we really say it was due to this “viral” campaign. Probably not. The video’s value will continue throughout its lifetime on YouTube. Talk of value over ROI makes marketing managers queazy.

Viral campaigns are not just online. From Adrants: Jack Goldenberg tells the story of how he and Kevin Glennon turned a custom-made Obama for President watch into what could become a fairly sizable viral campaign for the candidate.

“Most people think of viral marketing as something they’ve seen on YouTube or a similar site. But in reality, a viral is any communication that causes one person to be so affected by “experiencing” the viral that they communicate it to another.” He also argues that “Happy Meal toys were an in-home reminder of the need to visit McDonald’s. Kids would see two or three of them on their desk in their room and say, “Mom, Dad, we HAVE to go back to McDonald’s. I need 3 more Star Treks Happy Meals to complete my collection…..the Happy Meal was viral – kid to parent-multiplied by the millions of kids who frequented McDonald’s.”

That’s an example of an early viral campaign. We can perceive its “value” but we can’t perceive its ROI. And that’s why Jack Myers, as I quoted above, says “(completely new, innovative models) can take years before they generate returns that justify the investments.” If as marketers we don’t understand social media and merely pay lip service to viral marketing then we are basically flying by the seat of our pants.

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and blogger at The Long Tail, has pitched in to the social media advertising conversation with a post entitled You may be on Facebook But the Money’s in the Long Tail. He also posits that “social networks should be a feature, not a destination.”

As Chris says, and I agree, “I’ve been thinking a lot about how to integrate social networking into websites better. Right now the world is focused on stand-alone social networking sites, especially Facebook and MySpace, and the fad of the moment is to take brands and services there, as companies build Facebook apps and MySpace pages in a bid to follow the audience wherever they happen to be. But at the same time there’s a growing sense that elements of social networking is something all good sites should have, not just dedicated social networks. And that suggests a very different strategy – social networking as a feature, not a destination.”

He has a proviso too – “social networking to me means the tracking of individual preferences and behavior and giving users the ability to draw upon implicit or explicit connections between them and other users to do something useful.” This brings me to Ning, a social network platform that both Chris and I like. As he says “Ning, suppresses its own brand for the sake of those of the microsites it hosts.” Go here to see how the hip hop/rap label, Rawkus, uses Ning as its entire web presence.

Chris goes on to say – “As I think about the current Facebook craze and the notion of it as an all-encompassing platform, sucking in functionality from other sites across the board, I find myself skeptical. With my Long Tail hat on, I think that one-size-fits-all will fail in social networking, just as it has everywhere else.”

Meanwhile MySpace admits that it is not making as much money through ads as it would like. See Selling Ads For MySpace is Hard Work. MySpace COO Peter Chernin said:

“We remain incredibly optimistic about social media. But there are specific challenges 1) Tons of inventory. Lack of scarcity creates a liquidity challenge. Working on bringing big brands aboard. 2) People who are visiting social networks are there for different reasons, different uses. Figuring out how to target. 3) What’s the value of a “friend”? Trying to figure out new metrics to communicate with marketers.”

Bottomline: It’s the wild, wild west out there.

Anderson points out that ad rates on MySpace go for an astonishingly low $0.13 cents per CPM (one thousand impressions.) So that’s $0.13 on a general-purpose social network like MySpace and on his Ning-hosted network DIYDrones he’s getting $7.00. Even with a more generous scenario–$0.50 on MySpace and $5.00 on a focused Ning site–the difference is still a factor of ten. He believes that as big networks like Facebook and MySpace struggle to target ads based on the faint signals of consumer behavior in a generic social network, the smart money is going to the niche sites, where laser-focused content and community makes targeting easy. I couldn’t agree more. Also see: Facebook Ads Don’t Rock an experiment by Bob Gilbreath, an advertising executive who ran an ad on Facebook. It’s a real eye-opener. And another – Ad CPMs Are Higher In The Tail. And of course companies are springing up that think they have the answer to your problems in dealing with big social networks. Here’s one.

What this all points to is that companies should be advertising directly to those niche groups and networks that include people who would like to hear from their brand. The brands need to wait until they are invited in. A mass, scatter-shot approach to the large social networks will only fail.

Companies also need to consider Radical Transparency. For those unaware of this concept there’s a great article here on Wired Magazine’s site. I also wrote about it myself when Wired’s web site crashed. The basis of this theory is that you open the company’s doors [only as much as you like] by creating communication between your company and its fans and detractors. It’s a big step and for some, especially executives, it will cause a great deal of unease.

Wal-Mart used this approach to great effect. Here’s the original story from the New York Times and here’s just one bloggers’ reaction. And here is the Wal-Mart blog.

As the NYT article says “Known for its strict, by-the-books culture — accepting a cup of coffee from a supplier can be a firing offense — Wal-Mart is now encouraging its merchants to speak frankly, even critically, about the products the chain carries. This unusual new Web site, which was quietly created during the holiday shopping season, has become a forum for unvarnished rants about gadgets, raves about new video games and advice on selecting environmentally sustainable food.

Corporate blogs are nothing new — General Motors, Dell and Boeing have them — but Wal-Mart’s site, called Check Out, turns the traditional model on its head. Instead of relying on polished high-level executives, it is written by little-known buyers, largely without editing.”

And the key point there is “without editing.” Once a company opens the doors it can not close them. If a company starts a blog [and it should] it can not moderate the comments. And the CEO and other executives should not be contributing to the blog if they do not have the right “authority” or “voice”. By that I mean authenticity. It’s an overused word at times but in the right context it is completely accurate. If a CEO were to jump on the blog to blow her own trumpet non-critically about a company’s service or product the readers would see through it immediately. Being authentic means the blog author is a “trusted source” and this trust can never be abused.

A blog is a micro social network. My blog garners around 100,000 unique visits a month and its adherents are seeking out what I have to say about music, technology and the web. I am well versed in those things. I have an opinion about them. I also provide free music downloads from artists that I have “filtered.” I only post music from artists that I like and I believe that my audience will like them too. In short I have become a trusted source [people like my opinions,] a filter [people share my musical tastes,] and I am an influencer [I push certain artists and online companies that I support,] as well as an authority [people believe that I know what I am talking about.] A company’s blogger or bloggers need to have all these bases covered if they are going to safely cover the company’s communications through the blog.

Meanwhile the executives have to sit back and allow the comments, both good and bad, begin to flow. They can never interfere if they want the blog to be taken seriously. They will feel insecure and perhaps a little nauseous but if they wait it out it will work fine. It works for Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer.

A company with a good blog policy will be listening to its customers and then shaping its communications around that data. It will also create content that is both relevant and hopefully surprising. Influencers will pass along the good stuff creating the viral moment that marketers pray for. Then people in the outer circle of the influencers will also start to talk about the brand, and as they do the company has to make it very easy for its core fans to spread the word. Do not fear negativity, it is just more communication – let it roll. There should never be a barrier to communication or interactivity. Remember, it’s not about technology, it’s about people. Bloggers have to be about having an opinion and sharing it but never about reporting….it’s a two-way conversation.

Sometimes people look at it backwards. Points 1 and 2 in this slide are wrong. As I said at the beginning of this post, we are technological beings and we are naturally immersed in technology; it can’t be any other way. And you can’t enforce social cultures online as there is no central “being.” Facebook’s “soul” is merely the millions of disparate people who are members. When Facebook goes away, as it will, those millions will migrate to the next application that allows them to socialize freely and easily.

For marketers this is a huge dilemma. In social media we create a selfless or virtual “self” – for instance, in the Facebook friends network one might see a coherent global pattern but that pattern only emerges from the activity of all its members (friends). The group or network seems to be centrally located but in fact it is nowhere to be found. No one has the slightest idea what these people do or want; they actually don’t exist. The good news is that within each of any of these social network groups resides at least a couple of influencers; again, companies and brands must wait to be invited in. These are parties that can’t be crashed.

Dave Allen, Director, Insights & Digital Media, Nemo Design.

The following URLs link to people, companies, articles or stories that are referred to in this post:

Grammy’s Hawaii MusicTech Conference
LISA 08
Content Marketing = Brand New Marketing
What’s Next In Media
My Facebook profile
My Twitter
My music and technology blog, Pampelmoose
Clay Shirkey’s blog
Jack Myers’ Web Site
Neil Perkin’s Blog
Wii Fit YouTube video
Adrants Obama watch story
Obama watches web store
Wired Magazine
You may be on Facebook but the money’s in the Long Tail
Social networks should be a feature not a destination
Rawkus, a social network on Ning
Selling ads on MySpace is hard work
Bob Gilbreath’s Facebook ad experiment
Ad CPMs are higher in the tail
Lotame.com
Blog reaction to Wal-Mart blogs
NYT story on Wal-Mart blog
WalMart blog

Every waking moment we are inundated with brands from all over the globe. We have our brand loyalties but when something new comes along that can offer the same plus more, we tend to find a reason to jump ship. The brands we tout determine the general perception of who we are by the overall population. But that’s what we want, right? After all, when we adopt the mission of each brand, don’t we suddenly become their soldiers in a war for users reiterating the bullet points and three line tags that they have strategically written and milled over in little conference rooms just for the pure objective of speaking directly to us and our demographic? Planning all the right words, the right slang, and just the right length to appeal to the short but detrimental period of time we will absorb this information. Probably the easiest and most obvious for all of us computer dwellers is the MAC, PC rivalry. You are either one or the other. And when the argument arises, both speak with such conviction that one would think it was Gates and Jobs being summoned for that short period of time. Of course we all know MACs are better.

So, the point of all this is really to steer you in the direction of something I found called “Brand Tags: A collective experiment in brand perception.”( www.brandtags.net ) Its an addictive little site that allows you to give a single word or a phrase for a random brand logo that it shows you. You also have the pleasure of seeing what other users have written. A guy by the name of Noah Brier ( www.noahbrier.com ) put this together as a little experiment. I must say I can’t stop. So go ahead and give it a whirl. You just might surprise yourself on what you come up with. 

Slowly but surely Apple’s iTunes and its accompanying device, Apple TV, are narrowing the gap for me when it comes to TV viewing choices. My cable package with Comcast frustrates me – it’s like the mobile phone provider packages too, you get all locked up with stuff you don’t need, to get access to the stuff you do need. It’s just like walled gardens with the social networks and music services online, it’s a model that has to be broken. And Comcast and other ISP’s need to understand that the end user, their customers, treat Internet access as a utility like electricity so it’s about time that the “one price fits all” model is dismantled too.

With iTunes and Apple TV I can pick and choose the shows I want to watch and I can time-shift, i.e., watch them when I want. If I want to watch all the Deadwood episodes in one weekend marathon I can. And I will own them too and have the ability to watch them anywhere – iPhone, MacBook, iPod.

Grand Theft Auto IV sold 6 million copies in its first week at $60 a pop in the USA. Globally it brought in $500 million. That outstrips all of the first weeks music CD sales from top artists since 1991. Here’s the top 5 list of those week one sales in units not dollars:

1. ‘N Sync – No Strings Attached – 2.4 million
2. ‘N Sync – Celebrity – 1.9 million
3. Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP – 1.8 million
4. Backstreet Boys – Black and Blue – 1.6 million
5. Britney Spears – Oops….I Did It Again – 1.3 million

On April 29th one day sales for Grand Theft Auto IV were 3.6 million copies. Now, let’s hear it from all those folks who say that internet file sharing is killing music sales….

From Jakob Lodwick

While Guy Ritchie was busy shooting Nike’s The Next Level Madonna was doing the vacuuming….

This is what Dane will do for Nemo and our clients:

Flex / Flash Development with ActionScript 2 / 3. Standards Compliant Web Development – XHTML + CSS + AJAX. Server-side Web Development – C# / VB.NET, PHP, JSP, Ruby, Python. Relational Database Design and Implementation. Project specification, prototyping, and information architecture. Application Development C++ / C#

He will also do the following:

Write technical specifications & functional documentation. Recommend hosting, encryption packages, payment gateways and any other technical platforms that a project or client may need. Manage the technical side of a project to ensure accuracy to the project plan, the right use of our code library, and ensuring that the code…..oh never mind.

So, good luck with all that Dane….

Dane joins Nemo from Struck Creative where he helped get the Portland office off the ground and was a Lead Interactive Developer. Prior to that he spent 2 years at the Overland Agency as a Software Engineer and Lead Flash Developer. Before joining Overland he was a freelance Interactive Designer and Developer.

From 1999 – 2003 Dane skipped college to travel in Zimbabwe as a motorcycle repair dude. A photoshopped picture of Dane sporting fake dreadlocks will appear here soon. Dane lives in the Pearl with his better half the famous and lovely Kiala Kazebee.

In an article that is related to the previous YouTube post the NYT reports that speakers at the leadership conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies urged the industry to stop wallowing in self-pity and get on with the challenges ahead.

Here are some of the comments:
“We should just stop talking about what was,” Tom Carroll, president and chief executive at TBWA Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group. “It’s like driving in the fog, you’re not sure what’s ahead of you, but you have to keep driving.” Mr. Carroll acknowledged that it would be hard work to “change the way we do our business,” but called it a necessary response to the profound shifts in media, consumer behavior and technology that are remaking the advertising landscape. He illustrated his point with a rhetorical question, “How’d you like to be in the CD business?” [Ouch!]

Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative at TBWA, who in wearing onstage his trademark garb of a T-shirt, jeans and sandals was perhaps the most casually dressed speaker in the 90-year history of the conference. “Stop whining,” The new realities “shouldn’t be scary,” he said, because they offer “a huge opportunity for us” to become far more useful to marketer clients as they seek more effective ways to sell products.

I thought this was a good one – - -“If you want to participate, you’ve got to start hiring young people,” Mr. Clow said, “and don’t tell them what to do — ask them what to do.”

“Strap on your seat belts,” advised Irwin Gotlieb, chief executive at the GroupM unit of the WPP Group, which is composed of large media planning and buying agencies like MediaCom and MindShare. “In order to achieve any kind of success, we — meaning media agencies and creative agencies — are going to have to cooperate and collaborate in a very different way than we have in the past,” Mr. Gotlieb said.

“All these challenges will no doubt put a strain on all our organizations,” he added. “Every one of us will be re-engineering and re-inventing, but the end result will be a positive one.”

“The system worked well for 40, 50 years,” Mr. Silverman said, referring to the model of paid pitches that interrupt programming. “Now we have to think differently and do each other’s jobs.”

“Our studio has to think a little more like an advertising agency,” he added, “and the advertising agency has to think a little more like a studio.”

Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, told the audience that digital media will “create new opportunities for advertisers and new opportunities for information.” He added, “The scale of this is underappreciated.”

The opportunities will come in the form of “developing new forms of storytelling,” Mr. Schmidt said.
“We’re not creative,” Mr. Schmidt said of Google, seeking to reassure the attendees that the company did not seek to usurp agency functions. “We’re sort of boring.”

Google held an event last month to pull together executives from companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Pepsi and General Mills and try and persuade them to run advertising on YouTube. Google’s challenge is to teach these executives that YouTube is more than just a site for users to upload goofy video clips, it’s actually more of a social network activity site. As Google executives pointed out using YouTube is more engaging than watching television as there is much more interactivity. And one of Google’s execs, Dave Eun said that “he thought advertisers were far too focused on well-known television brands, and that some of the best video comes from smaller outlets like the Sundance Channel and the Professional Bull Riders Association.” Google is also trying to get the industry to set standards for online videos, on the assumption that standards will help advertisers spend more on video ads.

“Profits may not have arrived for online video, but venture capitalists are still happy to pick up the bill. More and more U.S.-based, venture-backed online video companies are attracting more and more financing each year, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Some $460.5 million was invested in such startups in 2007, up from $266.9 million in 2006. And already, in the first quarter of 2008, another $217.3 million rained down on the category.” Story here.

Ever wonder where A Tribe Called Quest got their cool samples or you could swear “hey, I know that song” when you here someone else’s song? Well now you can find out with The History of Sampling.

“Each square represents an album, with sampled artists on the lower half and sampling artists on the upper half. Albums are placed horizontally according to release date, while vertical placement reflects the number of samples on that album. The middle resprents the area of most sampling, so commonly sampled albums are closer to the side with the sampling albums, and vice versa. The rectangles that appear to the right of a selected album represent the individual songs. Songs with taller rectangles have a higher sample count.”

4 Hero and J Dilla – Over The Breaks

Nate, friend of Nemo, went out to play with Microsoft’s new Surface interface. There’s more info here at the Surface blog.

What would a music video look like if it were purely directed by the music? Not driven by a concept, nor by a desire to build an image, but purely as an expression of a great song? Designer Jakob Trollback shares the results of his experiment in the form. The song is “Moonlight in Glory,” from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s classic album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, remastered in 2006. Jakob Trollback is a designer and creative thinker and he’s also a DJ. His company is Trollback + Company. From the TED Conference 2008

As Facebook continues to become more and more ubiquitous as the social networking tool of the chattering classes it has become obvious to heavy users of FB [me included] that the site needs to give us all not some of the tools to make the experience a one-stop-shop for communicating with both friends, co-workers and business clients. Today Six Apart launched a Facebook application that brings us one step closer to that goal.

Blog It by Typepad for Facebook – Blog It is a free Facebook application which focuses on making it easier for you to create content no matter the blogging platform you use. Blog It brings some of the best social aspects of Facebook to blogging, making it easy for you to let your friends and colleagues around the web know what you’re up to and what you’re writing.

Thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web for the news.

I signed up for Dopplr recently. Here’s the blurb from their ‘About’ page.

Dopplr lets you share your future travel plans privately with friends and colleagues. The service then highlights coincidence, for example, telling you that three people you know will be in Paris when you will be there too. You can use Dopplr on your personal computer and mobile phone. It links with online calendars and social networks.

The service has attracted a following among business travellers around the globe. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia recently named Dopplr his “favorite non-wiki website” in The New York Times Sunday Magazine: “You put in your travel schedule and link to your friends. It allows you to see where everyone is. I love it.”

Their blog will keep you updated with their updates. An iCal/Google calendar feature looks quite handy.

Quit being a Bitchr… says iJustine [Justine Esarik]

For anyone who has been aware of Marshall McLuhan’s life and work and who have read his many books and essays, he is perhaps best remembered for the slogan The Medium is the Message upon which he elaborated in his 1964 book, ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.’

For those who know the slogan but not the man or meaning behind it a timely book published by Mark Batty Publisher came out late last year entitled Everyman’s McLuhan written by W. Terrence Gordon, Eri Hamaji and Jacob Albert. It’s basically a primer for those interested in McLuhan and who are ready to plunge into his work.

This is a pocket-sized book that’s handy to have around; you can pick up this book and start at any page, you can jump around too without losing the thread and it’s also worth having just for the graphic design. The writers also provide the back story to some of McLuhan’s writings including the slogans. For instance they flesh out his thinking behind “The Medium Is The Message.” They ask “How can the medium be the message? How can the television circuits, screen etc. be the ad coaxing us to buy?” They let us know that McLuhan never intended his phrase to have such a literal meaning. He often rephrased the slogan to fit different audiences and those paraphrases are not that well know. Here’s one – “The medium is the message, but the user of the medium is the content of the medium, in the sense that any medium is an extension of the human body.” By that he could mean that a mobile phone is an extension of our ears. The idea then extends itself to this – “The medium is an environment that produces effects.” I recommend picking up this fascinating book, it’s a mere $12.71 at Amazon right now.

This morning the day began with me catching up on last Sunday’s NY Times Business Page and a story entitled Thinking Outside the Company’s Box. The article discusses one of the oldest barriers to innovation amongst large technology companies – Not Invented Here, wherein even the most creative people have a persistent bias toward their own creations versus the ideas of people from other companies. As I was pondering the way companies get round this dilemma (which had me also contemplating “The Curse of Knowledge,”) I came across a blog post from Adrian Ho at Zeus Jones who’s post outlines how large companies, e.g. Apple, “don’t really use advertising agencies and instead rely upon innovative business ideas to communicate their benefits and values to their customers.” Ho mentioned in a comment elsewhere that he wasn’t touching upon an ad agency version of “Not Invented Here” known as “Not Created Here,” (in fact he’s tip-toeing around it,) but rather was making comparisons to Alex Bogusky’s “Anything and everything is an ad” quote and what Ho sees as the “dangers of ad people presenting ideas about how to run a client’s business under the banner of everything is an ad” and how he’s “seen presentations go horribly wrong” because they were built upon that premise.

Which brings us to this thought – If “everything is an ad” should businesses communicate with their customers by simply continuing to run their business and therefore do they need an ad agency at all?

What are their options? Here’s a list for starters: Radical Transparency, a Facebook Page or Group, delivering groundbreaking stylish and functional products that brand the company and change how its customers approach communication, or an unfiltered company blog written by employees. And then there’s authenticity.

Back to the beginning; Not Invented Here and Not Created Here are both roadblocks to innovation and creativity. In the first case, large companies such as Google buy up other companies that bring them an edge in new technology or an opening into a new market. In the second case, Ho argues that “Rather than creating “communications objects” that help to grow a client’s business, agencies who champion the idea that “everything is an ad” should instead be helping to magnify and extend the communication and marketing effects of the client’s own business objects.” Which really means that a cultural shift within agencies needs to take place – agency creatives have to listen to the clients ideas rather than presenting something from scratch; one size does not fit all, companies need to embrace innovative business ideas to communicate their benefits and values to their customers. This morning another article in the NY Times caught my eye – How to turn a herd….

The blogosphere is all a-twitter about the new Bjork video from Encyclopedia Pictura. It is a truly breathtaking piece, gorgeous to look at. Watch it here.

DROPCLOCK is an aesthetically intriguing motion clock screensaver. Every minute of real time is numerically expressed with heavy helvetica dropping into water in super slow-motion.