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Google News has just open-sourced its code to create what it calls Living Stories. What this really is, I think, is Google’s attempt to take editors to school on content presentation in our new world.

The article, I’ve argued, is outmoded as the building block of news. The new atomic unit(s) of journalism needs to reflect the transition of news from a product to a process. It needs to gather updates and corrections on a story. It needs to put that story in context and history. It needs to link to other versions of the story from other sources. Going past what Google’s Living Stories format does, it needs to open the door to collaboration. It can do so much more: showing the provenance of the news and linking to original sources, gathering comment and perspective, soliciting questions….

Daylife (where, disclosure, I’m a partner) its own vision of the future of the story, called Smart Stories, that will do more neat things; I’ll let them tell you about it. Daylife also sees that news needn’t exist in isolated, short-lived, repetitive units of presentation invented for the age of print. News should reside in a nest of relevance, which not only improves the presentation, it gives you more options on how you want to delve into the story and follow it and eventually contribute to it. It makes news more personal.

Both companies are doing something important for the benefit of journalists: making them look at what they create in a new way. This is just one possibility, just one step. We also need to think about making news embeddable and distributed. We need to insinuate news into your stream (“if the news is that important, it will find me“) and make it collaborative and enable you to triangulate from different viewpoints and footnote our work and….

The way for Google to serve the interests of news is not to make deals to mollify the mewling Associated Press or cater to pipe dreams of charging. The way that Google and other technology visionaries can help is by reshaping the form of news to show the people who do it how they can do it now. The open-sourcing of Living Stories is a welcome start.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post written by Jeremy Allaire, founder and CEO of Brightcove. Prior to Brightcove, Jeremy founded Allaire Corporation which was subsequently acquired by Macromedia due to the success of their web development tool ColdFusion. At Macromedia, Jeremy helped create the Macromedia MX (Flash) platform. You can see a recent interview of Jeremy here. As one of the guys who helped build the Flash Platform, we asked him to weigh in on the recent HTML5 v. Flash debate.

The recent introduction of the new Apple iPad has stirred the discussion over the future of web content and application runtime formats, and shone light onto the political and business battles emerging between Apple, Adobe and Google. These discussion are often highly polarized and irrational. My hope in this post is to help provide some balance and clarity onto this discussion.

I have a particularly unique perspective, stake and role in this discussion. My first company (Allaire) was born during the advent of the Web, with the idea that a browser and HTML could form the basis for creating content-rich, interactive software applications, ones that didn’t require native code and could be platform and operating system independent. We built ColdFusion as a way to realize this vision. We later became deeply committed to the world of HTML as a developer format, acquiring and building HomeSite, what was the world’s dominant Windows-based HTML authoring application.

In 2000, it became clear to me that web applications and runtimes were not advancing fast enough, and that with the emerging world of broadband internet connectivity that an entirely new realm of rich internet applications would be possible. We (Allaire and Macromedia) merged our companies with the vision that a new class of browser-based applications would emerge, and that we could evolve Macromedia Flash Player from its origins as an animation and motion-graphics engine into a real application platform and rich client runtime that fused media (text, audio, images, video), communications (web services, real-time APIs) and interactivity (rich client-side object model and UI component framework). In March of 2002 we launched the Macromedia MX Platform, anchored around the new Flash runtime, and realized this vision for the transformation of the Web experience and enabling a new class of rich, browser-based applications.

For several years, the Flash Platform was unique in its ability to create highly interactive browser based applications. Around 2003-2004 HTML/JavaScript (Ajax) started to meaningfully emerge as a competing approach to building apps on the Web. Meanwhile, as new Flash Players shipped, it’s ubiquity ensured that the birth of the online video industry would be largely built on Flash. This gave birth to everything from YouTube and Brightcove and Hulu, to hundreds of other online video companies.

Today, my company sits at the center of these new battles over the future of web content and app formats and runtimes. We work with thousands of media publishers who aim to maximize the distribution, reach and user opportunities with their content. This new re-fracturing of web content runtimes is creating challenges (and opportunities) for us and our peers.

A Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Developers (and Audiences!)

I think it’s critical to first frame and understand this discussion with the broader political economy of Internet software platforms. Most of the debate and discussion over HTML5 vs. Flash vs. Native Apps has little to do with what is the right technical approach, or whether something is open or closed, it has to do with the expressions of power and control that drive the businesses of the Internet’s dominant platform companies — Apple, Adobe, Google and Microsoft.

Each of these companies seeks to create unique runtimes and APIs that provide a strategic wedge that can drive other aspects of their business. At one level this is a battle for the hearts and minds of developers and ISVs, but these developers are merely a means to an end. Gaining broad adoption for their runtime platforms translates into their ability to create massive derivative value through downstream products and services. For Apple, this is hardware and paid media (content and apps) sales. For Google, this is about creating massive reach for their advertising platforms and products. For Adobe, this about creating major new applications businesses based on their platform. For Microsoft, it is about driving unit sales of their core OS and business applications.

Web Apps and Content

I’m often asked “Will HTML5 replace Flash?” on the Web. The quick answer is no. However, there is a lot of nuance here and it’s helpful to make the distinction between two broad classes of content applications that are deployed in browsers.

First, there are what I would call Web Productivity Apps. These kinds of applications require responsive, cross-platform, desktop like and highly interactive experiences. They often require seamless integration with existing web content and data. For several years, the Flash Platform was the best platform for creating these types of applications (per above). However, in the past several years, HTML+JavaScript (Ajax) and now HTML5 have created a highly compelling framework to build these applications, and for a large number of web productivity apps, the HTML5 approach will become the preferred model. The best examples are Google Apps, Salesforce.com, and even Microsoft’s forthcoming Office Online. There are also a class of Web Productivity Apps where Flash is the preferred runtime, especially those that involve working with and manipulating media such as images, audio and video. We, like many companies, are pragmatic and use both Flash and HTML as the technology needs require. Other examples of this include rich data visualization applications, where Flash has gained prominence inside of enterprises because of its rich data and visualization features.

The second broad class of applications are what I would call Rich Media Apps. These kinds of applications include largely consumer-facing, audience and media centric experiences. In particular, this includes online video, rich media advertising and marketing, and online games (casual games). All of these kinds of applications are highly focused on having a great and immersive experience that just works, and the creators of these apps are very focused on audience reach — anything that impedes 100% consumer acceptance is a significant concern. Here, Flash is dominant. The unique runtime characteristics of Flash, combined with its incredible reach, has led these types of apps to become highly dependent on Flash, and massive amounts of the broadband economy are dependent on it. It seems unlikely that HTML5 would be at all positioned to replace Flash for these categories, though it is clearly worth watching how consistent rich media runtimes find their way into the HTML5+ standard. Right now, it is a non starter.

The Handheld Disruption

Much of the above classes of content applications are in reference to the PC/Browser-based Web. The explosive growth in hand-held computing has introduced an entirely new dynamic into the content and app run-time battles which in turn will have a cascading impact on the PC Web. Hand-held computing includes smartphones (iPhone, Android, Nokia, et. al), portable music/entertainment devices and tablet computing devices (iPad and Android devices).

In many respects, the successful launch and growth of these devices has created an entirely new and largely blank canvas for content and applications. First, these devices offer new native services and OS-specific features (location, multi-touch UI, local media, wireless networking APIs, cameras, offline) that are giving birth to a massive new class of non-Web Apps that are built using proprietary native-code APIs and runtimes. Because of always-on broadband connectivity and easy to discovery App Stores, there has been rapid adoption of these new “disposable content apps”.

Hand-held platforms create a new opportunity for platform vendors to disrupt runtime hegemony from platforms that have seen ascendance on the PC/Web, and controlling these new run-times and developer adoption of these runtimes has a direct impact on these platform vendors ability to own audience relationships and monetization opportunities. For example, a web-centric, HTML5-centric handheld world favors Google because it can leverage it’s existing dominance in search and web advertising. A proprietary App-centric universe favors Apple because it can become the primary gatekeeper to reaching the mobile audience and already has a pole position in integrating payments and advertising into content applications.

In the case of hand-held platforms, however, it seems quite apparent that it is not a zero-sum game. Three runtime platforms will gain adoption and often even inter-mingle — HTML5 content and apps, Native Apps (that may contain Flash and HTML content), and HTML5 apps that contain and leverage Flash Player. There is a rich pallet of capabilities emerging, and each developer will need to consider what will be appropriate for their specific audience or application. It is also clear that the adoption of these diverse run-time platforms has the real potential to reconstitute fundamental relationships to audiences and monetization systems.

Video as a Cornerstone Issue

I’m also often asked “Will HTML5 Video replace Flash Video?”. Posited as a winner-take-all, absolute, the answer is clearly no. But like the nuance of HTML5 vs. Flash on the Web, there is also a very nuanced and complex evolving landscape in the video format world.

On the PC/Web, video has gained enormous momentum as a fundamental media type for all content on the Web. This has largely been driven by the adoption of Flash Video, which has approximately 75% market-share for online video. For most web and content app developers, this is fine, it is a great run-time and offers an excellent user experience and Adobe has done a very good job keeping the platform contemporary with the most demanding needs of video delivery and quality.

It is the rapid emergence of hand-held devices, however, that is bringing this issue to the forefront. With massive growth in hand-held web browsing from smartphones, iTouch devices and the pending iPad product, this has raised a deeper issue for media publishers who are eager to have their content be accessible to end-users. In particular, it is the show-down between Apple, Google and Adobe over who can control video formats on these devices that is creating challenges. Again, this is not about “what is the right technical solution”, it is about the political economy of who controls the formats that in turn lead to owning downstream audience and monetization opportunities.

The basic idea behind HTML5 video is that there would be a common video format that could be placed and rendered into any compatible web browser, conceptually replacing the need for the Flash run-time to render video in browsers. But there are enormous challenges with this, some political, some technical and some based on audience behavior.

First, right now, there is a lack of common approach among browser makers on what format to use for the HTML video object. This lack of agreement represents a proxy for broader political battles. Apple promotes MPEG-4/H.264, which it uses for it’s device platforms. Microsoft promotes VC-1, it’s own standard video codec. Google has yet to fully weigh-in on what format to support, which leads me to speculate that they will soon introduce a new format, based on On2 VP8, but under a broad open source license to the format and technology. Firefox, with 24% share of the browser market, proposes to use the open source Ogg Vorbis codec. What few people realize is that while H.264 appears to be an open and free standard, in actuality it is not. It is a standard provided by the MPEG-LA consortsia, and is governed by commercial and IP restrictions, which will in 2014 impose a royalty and license requirement on all users of the technology. How can the open Web adopt a format that has such restrictions? It can’t. Google will make an end-run on this by launching an open format with an open source license for the technology, which according to industry experts delivers almost all of the same technical benefits as H.264. All of this is a long way of saying that there is still significant format tension and that it will take a long time for it to be resolved in next-gen browsers.

Second, but related, is the raw reality of browser adoption and churn cycles, and the fact that online video publishers will only adopt standards that have extremely broad adoption. Until penetration rates consistently reach 80%, it will be hard for publishers to switch and adopt a single, new solution. It is more likely that HTML5 Video adoption will reach that critical mass on hand-held devices before it does on the PC/Web.

Third, and equally important, is the more practical issue of the massive industry-wide ecosystem support for Flash Video. From advertising formats, to business logic for the interaction of video with ads and analytics, hundreds of 3rd party technology companies who have built solutions around online video that are built on Flash, not to mention high quality design and authoring tools that sit at the center of a large labor market for Flash design and development; all of this creates inertia for Flash and a relatively high industry-wide switching cost.

But stepping back and looking at this specifically in the context of hand-held computing, where Apple is politically motivated to block the Flash runtime, it is apparent video publishers will be driven to build and operate solutions that leverage HTML5 Video on mobile and iPad browsing environments.

It’s All About Reach

Whether on the supply side of content and applications, or on the distribution and run-time side of the equation, what is abundantly clear is that reach is still king. For platform makers, these battles will continue as they all seek to drive sufficient reach for their open and proprietary standards such that they can exploit this distribution for their core commercial goals. Likewise, and more important, whatever standards and models deliver the broadest reach will ultimately drive what is adopted by publishers, developers and ISVs.

While it is easy to take a binary position in the future of content applications and run-times, it is evident that the competing interests of platform vendors, consumers and app and content publishers will ensure that this remains a fragmented and competitive environment for many years to come.

CrunchBase Information Jeremy Allaire Adobe Systems Brightcove Information provided by CrunchBase

La seguridad es un tema de vital importancia para los responsables del desarrollo del proyecto Chromium, el navegador de código abierto que sirve de base para lo que hoy conocemos como Chrome.

Es por esta razón que han iniciado un programa que, por medio de incentivos, busca premiar a quienes reporten un error de seguridad en el código de Chromium y, de forma especial, a las versiones beta o que se encuentran actualmente en desarrollo. Se incluirán dentro de este programa a los plugins que formen parte del proyecto (que no sean de terceros), así como también WebKit y libxml.

Los premios ascenderán a USD$ 500 por cada error de seguridad reportado, mientras que si el error es considerado como de gravedad extrema será de USD$ 1.337.

Link: Encouraging More Chromium Security Research (The Chromium Blog)

British Sky Broadcasting arranca esta semana en Reino Unido con un canal 3D de fútbol en directo de la Premier League que estará disponible en 9 bares (pubs) este fin de semana. El partido transmitido con esta tecnología será el de Arsenal y Manchester United.

Esta es un primera etapa, ya que para abril la empresa espera llevar este canal a cientos de bares y más tarde Sky 3D estará disponible a todos los clientes de Sky+HD .

Recientemente, la firma ha anunciado que lanzará un canal completo en 3D en abril de 2010. Esto brindará eventos deportivos, de entretenimiento y otras programaciones a sus suscriptores. El sistema requiere un televisor especial “3D ready” y claro el Sky+HD DVR box.

Sky 3D comenzó a emitir en Corea del Sur por Korea Digital Satellite Broadcasting el 1 de enero pasado. El lema del canal es “El canal 3D no. 1 en el Mundo“. Este canal utiliza la tecnología Side by Side con una resolución de 1920×1080i y lo contenidos incluyen educación, entretenimiento, deportes, documentales y presentaciones.

En febrero, dos partidos de rugby del campeonato de las Seis Naciones tambien serán transmitidos en 3D en Inglaterra.

Al parecer se le adelantaron a DirecTV, pero es evidente que la adopción de canales en 3D tomarán popularidad gracias al porno a los eventos deportivos, no por nada ESPN se prepara para estrenar en junio su canal 3D de la mano de la Copa Mundial 2010 de Futbol.

Link: Sky launches 3D channel in pubs (BBC)

La red de redes está a día de hoy presente en cada vez más sitios, pero le faltaba un lugar por conquistar y ese no era otro que el espacio, lo que la gente de la agencia espacial estadounidense ha resuelto recientemente.

Concretamente el lugar elegido ha sido la Estación Internacional Espacial, donde hasta ahora los astronautas no podían usar Internet. Esto acaba de cambiar gracias a una actualización de software que permite a los astronautas navegar por la web desde sus propios portátiles, aunque solamente se pueden conectar cuando la ISS envía datos a alta velocidad hasta la Tierra y “los astronautas están sujetos a las mismas directrices de uso que cualquier otro empleado del gobierno en la Tierra” (es decir, que nada de porno, p2p y cosas por el estilo).

Básicamente lo que hacen los astronautas para poder navegar en tiempo real por la red es conectarse a una computadora en la tierra con acceso a Internet, vamos, lo que conocemos como conectarse a un escritorio remoto solo que en este caso uno de los equipos está en el espacio a unos 360 kilómetros de altitud. El primero en usar el nuevo sistema fue el ingeniero T.J. Creamer quien mandó un mensaje a su cuenta de Twitter, o el primer tweet enviado directamente y en tiempo real desde el espacio sin intervención de terceros.

Dejando de lado lo curioso detrás de esta medida, que los astronautas puedan conectarse de forma privada y en tiempo real a Internet, hay razones serias. Al poder navegar por la red y disfrutar sus servicios como por ejemplo las redes sociales los astronautas mejorarán su calidad de vida en la ISS, no hay que olvidar que la ISS no es precisamente un hotel de cinco estrellas y algunos astronautas se pasan muchos meses en ella parcialmente aislados.

Y poco más que añadir, bienvenido sea el espacio y sus habitantes a la red de redes, es un placer.

Coca-Cola no logra hacerse entender en la web (cc) wikimedia

El mayor fabricante de bebidas cola del mundo, ha tomado la decisión de dejar de construir redes sociales propias para concentrar todos sus esfuerzos e inversión económica en generar presencia en las mayores redes sociales en actividad, tales como Facebook, YouTube o MySpace entre otras, es decir, donde está realmente la gente.

La estrategia tiene que ver con el fracaso de sus millonarias campañas basadas en sitios propios donde intentan atraer usuarios, proyecto que hizo agua a causa de la excesiva confianza de sus ejecutivos en Coke, el producto estrella. Esto deja en claro además, que nadie está exceptuado de fracasar en las dinámica actual que propone internet a través de los cada vez más fuertes Social Media.

Tan mala ha sido la planificación de marketing y la experiencia de Coca-Cola en internet que llegó a tener siete nombres de dominio diferentes para diversas campañas. La semana pasada anunció que dejaría estos proyectos para ir hacia donde están los consumidores (y la pasan bien).

Además de jugar un papel cada vez más importante en la publicidad, las redes sociales también está demostrando ser una plataforma común para la distribución de noticias. Tan relevante está siendo este punto que el año pasado la BBC nombró a su primer editor en medios de comunicación social, seguido por la empresa Sky, que hizo lo mismo con su portal Journalism.co.uk y el NYT.

Según Wikipedia, se estima que la publicidad masiva por medios tradicionales genera que cualquier persona en América vea al menos 3 publicidades de cualquier producto de Coca-Cola al día.

A pesar de esta penetración compulsiva en nuestra vida diaria, el gigante de las bebidas edulcoradas no hace buen pie en las más populares redes sociales, donde el consumidor tiene el poder de decidir que le gusta y que no, dejando hecho trizas cualquier intento de las corporaciones por fidelizar a sus clientes.

¿Realmente puede Coca-Cola generar presencia y mantener una imagen dentro de la informalidad y vértigo de las redes sociales, sin una cuota de valor agregado que le genere un beneficio al usuario o será otra batalla perdida?

Link: Coca-Cola abandona las redes sociales propias (Bajolalínea)

Editor’s note: Earlier this week, guest writer Ashkan Karbasfrooshan wrote a post about the state of online video. In this post he follows up with some thoughts on what’s holding back this budding industry. Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo, a leading producer of premium, informative and entertaining video content. The company’s catalog of 5,000 videos has generated over 100 million streams since 2006. Photo credit: Flickr/Paraflyer.

After four years in the online video business, one thing is clear: if you produce high quality content and build sufficient distribution across a large enough number of consumer touch points, you can generate more than enough revenue from multiple sources and platforms to build a profitable, stand-alone business.  But no one said it would be quick or easy. Building distribution isn’t obvious and most producers fail to build any meaningful reach, but if you can hatch an editorial direction and business strategy that can attract an audience, over time you will be able to create a real business around it.  But keep in mind the surprises below.

Surprise #1: Lack of Definitions and Standards After All of These Years

Steven Spielberg was trying to transition online with Pop.com in the 1990s and, until his resignation last week, Real Networks’ Rob Glaser has been “at this” for 16 years since 1994 .  Yet to this day, in online video, we still don’t speak a common language.

Heck, we’re not even on the same planet. The first thing you realize about video advertising is that most of the money being generated from video content isn’t derived from in-stream advertising (such as pre-,mid-, or post-roll) but rather by in-banner ads (be they standard display ads or rich media). Yet when you look at the projections being forecast by eMarketer and Forrester, they focus mainly on videos sold inside the video player.

Meanwhile, as online video consumption continues to soar, it is clear that the share of total advertising for video content is going to be much larger than the projections suggest.  YouTube, for example, sells pre-roll ads on an infinitely small percentage of its videos. They generate the lion’s share via display banners. Personally, I think that while display banners aren’t worth much in articles because a reader scrolls down quickly past them, next to video content they are worth a lot more.

But with so much video being consumed on third-party sites, how can producers stay in business, let alone thrive?

One answer, of course, is branded content, which remains unproven at best, and the latest fad at worst.

Surprise #2: The Myth That Branded Content Is a New Thing

Branded content can be many things. It is ultimately the blurring of church and state, or information and advertising. Examples are numerous and include:

• Soap operas, which were funded initially by Procter & Gamble
• That ubiquitous Coca Cola cup on American Idol
• A web series about a couple trying to conceive sponsored by a home pregnancy test
• How-to videos featuring products, such as the use of a particular vodka or gin in a how-to-make-a-martini video.

Whereas publishers have always relied in part on advertiser support, branded content tends to be fully supported by a marketer.  With the so-called death of the 30-second spot and the short-form nature of online video entertainment, the appeal of branded content is growing among video producers desperate to make a buck.

Problem is if a producer waits for the green light from a marketer to produce content that bakes in advertising, they just won’t scale their libraries, which means they won’t grow overall streams.

Also, it begs the question: does branded content fall into video advertising or sponsorship? That detail isn’t clear yet. But with so many competitors vying in the genre, it’s worth questioning how important it will be over the long term and if audiences will accept it.  What looks like the light at the end of the tunnel for many struggling online video producers could turn out to be an oncoming train.

Surprise #3: It Takes A Different Playbook

The biggest difference with regards to monetizing videos as opposed to articles is that it requires a “distribution-over-destination” strategy. When Quincy Smith took over as CEO of CBS Interactive, he said that the Tiffany network’s Innertube project should have been renamed “CBS.com/NoOneComesHere.”

No wonder then that the first video content companies went out of business—because they sought to build “owned-and-operated” properties. This strategy might work with text content but is nearly impossible with videos. Search engines don’t pick up video content well. Hosting videos is expensive. Plus, audiences who read a business article don’t automatically watch business videos (and so on).

Looking at the leading video destinations, you quickly realize that they are all basically aggregators or traditional media companies who still reasonably view online video with suspicion and fear.

Surprise #4: Video Consumption Patterns Are Whack

From our experiences, we see that audiences (readers, listeners, viewers) consume content by type (video vs. articles vs. podcasts) and not categories (auto, business, fashion, etc). And when it comes to videos, some categories are much more popular than others, which lead to unreachable expectations for marketers.

According to TubeMogul, 25% of views come in the first four days after a video is published and, over time, the average YouTube video is seen 500 times. Articles are the opposite: search engines tend to drive people to older articles.  This is alarming. In order to win, it is imperative to grow video views over time and generate exponentially more video views than the average.

Surprise #5: Just Because You Build an Audience, Doesn’t Mean The Advertisers Will Come Knocking

There are three main ways to build an audience: the old way and the new ways.

1. The first is a retail approach where viewers watch your videos on your site and your network channels. This is historically how publishers have built audiences.
2. The second is through wholesale partnerships, which are facilitated by MRSS. (RSS – or Real Simple Syndication – has change the way users consume content and publishers ingest and distribute content  Analogously, MRSS – or simply Media RSS – was designed in 2004 by Yahoo! and the Media RSS community. Unbelievably, it has made distributing videos even easier than syndicating text content).
3. The third is through social media: be it bloggers and/or social media referrers on Facebook, Twitter and the countless other outlets.

YouTube pioneered the embedding and viral distribution of video.  It is certainly true that bloggers are the new “newspaper editors” who can make or break a producer. Similarly, the same way that MySpace helped build YouTube’s success at the macro level, social media referrers will help a video take off on the micro level.

Between MRSS simplifying distribution and video’s embeddable nature, syndication exploded . . . but revenues didn’t. But don’t worry.  Over time, marketers follow the audience, they always will.

Surprise #6: When It Comes to Sales, Sell Your Audience, Not Your Videos

Historically, publishers sell ads by audience. But with online video and the lure of branded content, some have developed a tendency to pitch individual videos or a series of videos to advertisers.  Publishers don’t sell by individual articles, so why should they think that they should sell by individual videos, especially when you consider the widespread nature of videos and where they ultimately end up.

Nonetheless, I see way too many producers sell videos over audience, and then when they fail to generate any meaningful distribution, the marketer gets disappointed, blaming the strategy over the tactic.  You have to create audiences for your content. It can be one audience or it can be many.

With a magazine, you can take any one article and project the demographic of that one piece to the whole publication. With videos, due to their embeddable nature, each video can have its own audience profile and as such can embody the demographic of the site that embeds or distributes the video.  So videos have the potential to reach a broader demographic than content locked into one site.  Regardless, until videos generate more revenue from in-stream ads than in-banner ones, videos’ embedding nature remains a double-edged sword.

For a producer to distribute through third party distributors, it means:

1. less recognition of your reach initially. This hurts producers in the short term, but over time, services such as comScore and Nielsen will catch up and offer something while startups like TubeMogul seek to establish the best practices. More importantly, agencies recognize this phenomenon and will let you build your case.
2. less control of the ad inventory, which can be seen as a negative or a positive. Ultimately, as a producer, you have to position this as a plus because you can offer advertisers more reach and share of voice across a larger segment of the online video universe. But, it takes time, especially with a lack of data to support your reach.

Surprise #7: The Myth and Danger of the Viral Video

Too many clients get enamored with the idea of green lighting a viral video. You might as well just flush your money down the toilet instead of approving such a campaign. It is impossible to actually plan for this and if the ad agency you hired is guaranteeing video views, then fire that ad agency yesterday!

But by the same token, who cares if a video generated a million views last month. If an advertiser runs banners next to that video next month and the video fizzles away, it’s moot. This is why it is more important to publish and syndicate videos that over time can generate incremental and sustainable views.  This makes the real estate before and next to the video more valuable.

Surprise #8: With Advertisers Sitting on the Sidelines, Partnerships Need to Make Sense for Producers

Historically, advertisers seek revenue-share deals with publishers to mitigate risks. With video, advertisers have sat out the dance, so the commercial nature boils down to producer/publishers and distributors, who in turn seek revenue share deals with producer/publishers. Problem? Most can’t generate any sales, so producer/publishers don’t get any revenue out of the deals. So my advice is to seek revenue guarantees until advertisers really embrace video advertising.

By and large, most revenue share deals flop because:

• Media companies have great sales teams, but they are only warming up to online video. So while they might be starting to generate revenue from online video, it is immaterial to their operations. Most of these traditional media companies are not producing or publishing enough online, so they are turning to new media producers like us. However, even though they have great sales organizations, they lack volume to make a dent.
• A lot of the video views are coming from video social networks, but most of them are just not set up to sell ads. They are technology companies operating in the media space, not media companies that understand advertising. Often times their VCs bring in experienced sales executives but have very unrealistic expectations. They also have not yet mastered shifting large portions of their audiences from non-sellable user-generated or pirated material to professional content. It has been stated that YouTube, for example, only sells ads next to 15% of their total streams.

However, social media and user generated content has increased pageviews and ad impressions greatly on these sites. Across the web, there is a chance the equilibrium is broken for good. As a result, CPMs are dirt poor and sell-through rates are abysmal. This adds to the challenge and forces a producer to take over the sales process which, while expensive, should ultimately be the end-goal.

Surprise #9: Don’t Chase Hits

Chasing hits is perhaps the most surefire way to kill your business. We adopted the Field of Dreams content strategy: creating content we’re passionate about and/or think audiences will watch, build an audience around it, and only worry about monetizing it afterwards.

It’s not ideal, but the reality is that what works online is very much random. When we look at our most popular videos, we are flabbergasted! This is why online video is such a challenge to TV companies, because they cannot program a show in a time slot and force it down audiences’ throats.

Surprise #10: YouTube is More Open than Challengers

What kind of online video article would be complete without an observation on the leader in the space: YouTube. While far from perfect, YouTube has actually been fairly friendly with producers by allowing them to sell ads around their content.

Surprisingly, this is an “open” strategy. Usually, open strategies are adopted by challengers, not dominant market leaders. You would think that Daily Motion, Veoh and others would allow for this, but they don’t. This hurts their standing and importance in the space. Time will tell if they change their policies and follow the market leader YouTube.

Surprise #11: Everything Won’t Be Ad-Supported

To quote Ty Ahmad-Taylor, it’s true that in theory “if you make television shows, films or music, your business is actually the audience business.  In practice, however, right now there aren’t enough ad dollars to support the “audience” business. So let’s leave the theory for academics. Those in the trenches will tell you it’s about survival, and judging by the past year… it is still about surviving more so than thriving.

After we got disappointed by weak revenues in our earliest syndication deals, we held back distribution and began to pursue licensing deals.  Licensing can generate insanely high eCPMs for a producer, but most producers don’t have the kind of libraries that can command guaranteed and recurring licensing fees. So your best bet to keep the lights on is to command licensing revenues in the short term while you position yourself for syndication revenue over the long term. By doing that, you will in turn build a large enough library to command the richer branded content deals that will push you over the top.

Surprise #12: Search and Video are Still Miles Apart

Ultimately, video is where search was in 1999: a major part of the online ecosystem is still looking for a business model. But history repeats itself and without a doubt video streams will be monetized just as search queries were.

But differences shall remain, with the two leading ones being:

1. Expectations: Google saw over a dozen search companies precede it, most of them had gone out of business, sold or exited search for portaldom. By the time the Nasdaq crashed, Google had an open field with practically no competitors. Video is the exact opposite: even though only YouTube has had a gargantuan exit, VCs have continued to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into so-called YouTube clones (Veoh, Daily Motion, Metacafe) as well as enablers (CDNs and content management systems) and advertising networks (Tremor, Broadband, Yume, Scanscout).  It seems as if everyone is looking for the Google of video, even though for all intents and purposes, Google will be the Google of video thanks to its acquisition of YouTube.
2. Short term vs. long term nature of the payoff. Search is largely a performance kind of medium, whereas video is a branding one. While search captures intent, video captures interest. Both are valuable, but in a very different way.

We’re still early in the development of the online video business, but we are starting to figure it out.

Actualmente los vehículos cuentan con sistemas computarizados tan complejos, que ya resulta imposible impresionar a las chicas (o chicos)  con tus conocimientos de mecánica. Afortunadamente, desarrolladores de la Universidad de Columbia y el User Interface Lab han creado un sistema para guiarte (o al menos a los nuevos y sofisticados mecánicos militares) a reparar un vehículo mediante el uso de la realidad aumentada

El sistema se llama ARMAR (Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Repair) o “Realidad Aumentada para mantenimiento y reparación”, se trata de una pantalla montada en la cabeza con visualizaciones de superposiciones gráficas que ayudan a hacer las reparaciones y un teléfono Android que proporciona una interfaz para el control de los gráficos que ves durante el proceso.

Este sistema esta probándose con el Cuerpo de Marines de Estados Unidos en una torreta blindada, de manera que ARMAR puede reducir los tiempos de mantenimiento a la mitad, guiando a los usuarios en la zona dañada y visualizando animaciones 3D para demostrar las herramientas y técnicas adecuadas.

Si tiene éxito en aplicaciones militares, ARMAR podría un día llegar el mercado civil y proporcionar grandes facilidades en la mecánica. Así podrías seguir abriendo el capó (cofre) aunque no tengas ni una idea de dónde va la cuchufleta de la chafaldrana.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Link: Augmented Reality To Help Military Mechanics Fix Vehicles (Video) (Singularityhub)

Cover price rises, a growing online subscriber base and corporate clients will help the Financial Times’s content revenues overtake print advertising revenues for the first time this year.

Stoking the debate over paid news content and the survival of newspapers, the FT Group chief executive, John Ridding, says the landmark moment vindicates the FT’s strategy to charge. He has long advocated that other publishers should follow suit and abandon a “free is good” doctrine.

“In some of the key areas we are at a crucial stage of transformation, so that we reckon next [this] year will be the first year that revenues from content overtake revenues from print advertising,” he says. “The way things are evolving, content revenues should overtake all advertising revenues by 2012.”

When the FT embarked on a strategy of charging online and raising its cover price “people thought we were a bit strange”, recalls Ridding.

“But because of the decisions we took in 2006 in terms of changing the business models and developing content revenues, that has definitely strengthened us and made us in a stronger position than we would have been and than many of others are in,” he said.

FT circulation revenues rose in 2009, despite a drop year on year in print circulation and it says revenues from FT.com digital subscribers rose 30% over the year, as readership rose around the world mirroring a strong appetite for financial news during the economic downturn.

The FT Group, which benefits from an audience willing to pay for its specialist business stories and analysis, concedes that it is in a different position to many of its rivals. But Ridding insists that there is growth to be had by charging, even if just for some stories or columns.

“It’s easier for us, I don’t deny that. But equally, I don’t think anyone can afford to dismiss the idea of developing paid-for content because journalism is valuable,” he said.

Media expert Paul Lee at consultancy Deloitte stresses that a lot of the FT’s subscribers are businesses rather than individuals and so less sensitive to price rises. But the shift in balance between the newspaper’s content and advertising revenues is still significant for the rest of the industry, he says.

“It is significant in that it is reaffirming there is life beyond advertising for online publishing ... it does offer an alternative where an alternative was regarded for a long time as not existing,” he adds.

“In 2010 the FT is likely to be an exception, but it does prove that advertising only for online is not the only model out there.”

As the FT seeks to take account of the changing way people read and pay for newspaper content, it has been working with auditors at Pricewaterhouse Coopers to come up with an average daily global audience, or readership, figure as well as a total daily paid-for circulation figure.

The newspaper group feels the current Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic and print ABCs do not fulfil publisher or advertiser needs.

“In this changing media landscape, traditional ABCs are a little anachronistic when all readers are reading across all platforms,” says Ridding.

The group says the global readership figure is expected to be around the 2 million mark compared with the current 1.3m print readership figure. The number will be available quarterly and will incorporate ABC circulation, ABCe unique users, syndicated readership surveys by third party research companies and the FT’s own audited research based on samples of its user base.

The total daily paid-for circulation figure – the number of readers paying to consume the FT’s content on a daily basis – was up to more than 563,000 in 2009 from 544,180 in 2008.

That number will be made available monthly and will take into account FT.com individual subscribers, corporate business-to-business license users, paid newspaper circulation and E-reader subscribers.

Navigating the journalistic seas this past year has been a particularly challenging/exciting task. As many a publication foundered in the economic benthos, others rode the wave of new technology into previously uncharted waters.

Mashable has been there through it all, stepping in to provide journalists with touchstones and compass directions to help them do everything from tell more compelling tales through alternative storytelling to make the most of their Twitter accounts.

It’s not enough today to have a good rolodex of sources (seriously, who even has a rolodex nowadays?) and a solid recorder, journalists need to be able to make use of every tool in their arsenal in order to stay afloat in today’s almost real-time media landscape.

It’s time to add another factor to the boot leather equation. Here’s how:

Add Social Media Tools to Your Belt

From making use of social media tools to create and store content (ala YouTube and other video blogs) to tracking down sources (via Facebook) to publicizing stories and interacting with readers (by logging into Twitter), social media tools have opened up a whole new realm to today’s journalists. Here are some great resources that can teach you everything from how to use YouTube to conduct man-on-the-street interviews to how to keep up with other journos on Twitter.

The Journalist’s Guide to YouTube

The Journalist’s Guide to Facebook

The Journalist’s Guide to User Generated Video

The Journalist’s Guide to Twitter

The Complete Guide to Video Blogging

Turn Your News Website Into a Community

Reading the news these days is becoming less and less about passive consumption and more about interacting with and commenting on what’s going on in your world. Therefore, websites have to be less like art museums (hands-off) and more like those children’s museums of bygone days (hands-on). Check out these great guides to making your publication’s website more interactive — from tapping into local news to riding the Google Wave.

10 Rules for Increasing Community Engagement

7 Ways to Make News Sites More Social

How Google Wave is Changing the News

How Social Media is Taking the News Local

Become a New New Journalist

If you thought Tom Wolfe was groundbreaking, take a look at what these media mavens are up to. Instead of adhering to the strict demarcations between print and online journalism (which are in the process of being blurred, but still have a ways to go), many in the profession are becoming triple threats (at least!), tackling print, broadcast and online journalism. Here’s some tips on how to join their lofty ranks.

8 Must-Have Traits of Tomorrow’s Journalist

15 Twitter Users Shaping the Future of Publishing

How Programmer/Journalists Are Changing the News

10 Ways Journalism Schools Are Teaching Social Media

The Journalist’s Guide to Maximizing Personal Social Media ROI

Keep Looking Forward

While good writing and solid sourcing will always be the most vital skills a journalist can have, it’s prudent to keep those fact-finding eyes trained on the horizon. Try to anticipate trends before they catch on, and embrace them. Here’s a few ideas to mull over as we sally forth into 2010. I would invest in a solid pair of boots, friends, the going’s not going to get any easier.

8 News Media Business Trends for 2010

10 News Media Content Trends to Watch in 2010

Is Crowdfunding the Future of Journalism?

12 Things Newspapers Should Do to Survive

[top img credit: Yan Arief]

[notebook img credit: gruntzooki]

[binoculars img credit: gerlos]

Reviews: Facebook, Google Wave, Mashable, Twitter, YouTube

Tags: facebook, journalism, media, social media, trending, twitter, youtube

Así lo afirma un estudio que asegura que el 20% de los consultados ya no tiene servicio fijo. Esto se debe, en gran medida, a que los clientes no actualizaron los contratos con las telefónicas. La tendencia puede extendenser a otros países(author unknown)074450149966528341351825275768177776240617812539194801261590

Ben Rattray is the founder and CEO of Change.org, an online media network for social change.

2009 saw a proliferation of online charity events, competitions, and “friendraisers” that spilled across Twitter and Facebook and filled email inboxes everywhere with more requests for money than any Nigerian prince could ever hope to make. And while it’s hard to argue that this is a bad thing — anytime someone gives money to feed the hungry instead of buying another digital potato seed in Farmville, global karma rises, if even just by a little — this focus on using the web as an ever-more elaborate means of getting people to fork over cash misses the much bigger opportunities just over the horizon.

As we close the books on a decade in which the Internet has been used primarily as a marketing vehicle for fundraising, social change on the web is poised for a shakeup. In 2010, three disruptive trends that ask for your participation rather than your pocketbook will emerge and use the web’s unique potential to empower new forms of social change.

1. Social Activism Will Explode Across the Web

The Obama campaign showed the unparalleled organizing power of the web for large national campaigns, but its long-term impact might be greatest in inspiring an explosion of micro-movements.

In 2010, online organizing tools will start to be used en masse by thousands of small groups of geographically dispersed people who connect around a common interest, share information, and take powerful collective action.

The potential for the web to serve as a tool of democratic empowerment has been long discussed. But until recently, examples of people successfully self-organizing on the web to achieve a social goal were few and far between. The reason is that though the rise in blogs, social networking and social media tools have enabled people to connect and share information like never before, achieving social change requires people to do more than express an opinion – it requires coordinated action.

Cue the rise of free, easily accessible organizing tools to tip this movement.

I’ve seen the power of this shift firsthand on Change.org (a site I founded). Since launching a new social media-enabled petition tool a few months ago, our members have responded to our news stories not just by telling their friends on Facebook about an important issue or tweeting about a gross injustice – but by taking immediate, coordinated action. As a result, our members have won more than a dozen grassroots campaigns – from convincing the US Department of Labor to release a confidential report on slave labor, to helping end the food industry’s deceptive nutrition labeling program, to compelling Live Nation to cancel a series of homophobic concerts.

Each of these victories was achieved with only a few thousand people who came together without any prior connection to work toward a collective goal – showing the power of distributed groups of likeminded people rapidly responding together to a breaking story.

In 2010, the exportability of organizing tools will enable these sorts of dynamically created micro-movements to explode across social media sites, empowering millions more people to translate their shared interest around an issue into collective action.

2. Micro-Volunteerism Will Extend Beyond Wikipedia

Traditional volunteerism was made for the industrial age: volunteers were slated to appear at a specific time and work an agreed-upon set of hours on the weekend doing a task that treated you like an undifferentiated cog in a machine.

Sound like an exciting way to spend a Saturday? Not to me, either. The social web enables a much more flexible, personalized and valuable exchange of volunteer labor. The most successful example of this micro-volunteerism thus far is Wikipedia. 2010 will see the Wikipedia model of micro-volunteerism expanded into a vast new array of opportunities – enabling lots of people to work in loose coordination to contribute to worthy goal using their own personal knowledge and skill.

The most promising organization developing a platform for this type of volunteerism is The Extraordinaries, a Silicon Valley-based social venture. The Extraordinaries allows users to accept a mission that aligns with their interests or skill set – such as to translate an organization’s website into a foreign language or review congressional bills for hidden pork – and complete this task at their leisure, via the iPhone or on the web.

The rise of social gaming further extends the possibilities, and shows how individual elements broken up into a series of small engaging tasks online can become addictive. Millions of hours are spent playing online games each week; imagine the amount of good we could do if the objective of the game weren’t to build a virtual farm but to help a real one?

3. Giving Work Will Become as Important as Giving Money

A couple years ago I asked Dr. Paul Farmer, an internationally acclaimed physician known for his work on infectious diseases in Haiti, what the most important single thing is for the people he serves. His answer? A job.

Although his primary focus is on health, Dr. Farmer’s rationale was that a job provides the means for not only health care, but education, food, shelter, and social status (something particularly important for women in the developing world).

The problem is that getting jobs to rural Haiti, or anywhere in the developing world, isn’t easy. Micro-finance is one powerful enabler, empowering domestic entrepreneurs to create their own micro-enterprises. But not everyone is an entrepreneur, and many people don’t need a loan; they need a job.

In 2010 we will see the rise of digital work as a means of economic empowerment and development in the poorest countries on earth. Digital work can be completed on computers, whether in rural Illinois or rural Rwanda. One organization pioneering the movement toward digital work for development is Samasource, a Silicon Valley social business that gives poor women, youth and refugees work ranging from data entry to image tagging to Facebook application testing (yes, I’m serious).

Companies take pride in the amount of money they give to charity, in many cases aiming to give 1% of total revenue. In 2010, I expect at least one Silicon Valley company to blaze a path toward the more ambitious and potentially transformative goal of offering 1% of their work in a digitally enabled way to people without employment prospects – thereby moving beyond traditional aid in favor of economic empowerment.

Conclusion

These three trends – providing new ways of giving voice, giving time and giving work – represent the future of social change on the web.

I don’t mean to imply that giving money will stop being important. On the contrary, the web will continue to be an essential tool for fundraising in 2010, and for good reason – donations are the lifeblood of non-profits and the Internet is a highly efficient means of raising money. There are also an increasing number of effective fundraising platforms that leverage the unique power of the web to enable new types of giving – including well-known innovators such as Kiva and DonorsChoose, and new entrants such as Vittana.

But fundraising isn’t where the innovation will be in 2010. Instead, we’ll see the rise of new forms of participation that move beyond fundraising and make 2010 the most interesting year yet for social change on the web.

More social good resources from Mashable:

- 4 Social Good Trends of 2009
- Why Social Media Is Vital to Corporate Social Responsibility
- 5 Essential Tips for Promoting Your Charity Using Social Media
- 20 Ways to Change the World in Only 15 Minutes a Day

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Maica, Kronick

Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, iStockphoto

Tags: 2010, List, Lists, predictions, social change, social good, social media

Pepsi will reportedly be skipping its annual Super Bowl commercials, and will instead invest the money it would generally spend on those, in social media marketing. This would make the first time in 23 years that Pepsi will not have Super Bowl ads.

Larry D. Woodard, President and CEO of Manhattan ad agency Vigilante writes in an ABC News piece:

Pepsi represents one of the stalwarts, not just of the Super Bowl advertiser lineup, but of broadcast TV in general. In 2006, spending on brand, Pepsi was at about $150 million. Although brand spending has been decreasing in recent years, Pepsi has continued to spend tens of millions on TV. And the Super Bowl annually has the largest audience of any TV show.

As television viewership has gone down, Internet usage, particularly social media interaction, has increased. The 2009 Super Bowl attracted an impressive 95.4 million viewers (approximately 42.1 percent of U.S. TV homes) and many of those watch the commercials as attentively as the football game. By contrast, in the important 18-34 demographic, a whopping 85 percent use social media (texting, blogging or social networking), and the phenomenal growth of social media has the attention of every major company. This holiday season, Toys "R" Us developed a Facebook page that grew at the astounding rate of between 40,000 and 95,000 fans per day after its late November launch.

As the numbers Woodard mentions would indicate, the Super Bowl is always an advertiser's dream. It costs big bucks, but there are so many eyeballs on those ads, and some people even watch the event just to see the commercials. Pepsi's move really says something about how far social media has come in the advertising world in such a short time. The fact that the company is breaking such a long-standing tradition in favor of it says a lot.

Of course social media will play its role in the further viewing of the Super Bowl ads themselves. They will no doubt appear on various video sites, and will be shared by countless people on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.
 

Related Articles:

> Socializing Advertising

> Pepsi's Social Media Challenge

> Amazon.com, Pepsi Bank On Free MP3 Music

Chris Crum

Pepsi will reportedly be skipping its annual Super Bowl commercials, and will instead invest the money it would generally spend on those, in social media marketing. This would make the first time in 23 years that Pepsi will not have Super Bowl ads.

Larry D. Woodard, President and CEO of Manhattan ad agency Vigilante writes in an ABC News piece:

Pepsi represents one of the stalwarts, not just of the Super Bowl advertiser lineup, but of broadcast TV in general. In 2006, spending on brand, Pepsi was at about $150 million. Although brand spending has been decreasing in recent years, Pepsi has continued to spend tens of millions on TV. And the Super Bowl annually has the largest audience of any TV show.

As television viewership has gone down, Internet usage, particularly social media interaction, has increased. The 2009 Super Bowl attracted an impressive 95.4 million viewers (approximately 42.1 percent of U.S. TV homes) and many of those watch the commercials as attentively as the football game. By contrast, in the important 18-34 demographic, a whopping 85 percent use social media (texting, blogging or social networking), and the phenomenal growth of social media has the attention of every major company. This holiday season, Toys "R" Us developed a Facebook page that grew at the astounding rate of between 40,000 and 95,000 fans per day after its late November launch.

As the numbers Woodard mentions would indicate, the Super Bowl is always an advertiser's dream. It costs big bucks, but there are so many eyeballs on those ads, and some people even watch the event just to see the commercials. Pepsi's move really says something about how far social media has come in the advertising world in such a short time. The fact that the company is breaking such a long-standing tradition in favor of it says a lot.

Of course social media will play its role in the further viewing of the Super Bowl ads themselves. They will no doubt appear on various video sites, and will be shared by countless people on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.
 

Related Articles:

> Socializing Advertising

> Pepsi's Social Media Challenge

> Amazon.com, Pepsi Bank On Free MP3 Music

Chris Crum

Hoy fué un dia casi normal en Ecuador. Ustedes saben, compras navideñas, apagones, sin BlackBerry y claro, el cierre de una de las estaciones más grandes de Ecuador, Teleamazonas.

El cierre del canal fue por falsos supuestos de una controversia sobre la explotación de gas en una isla de Guayaquil. Esto hizo que el gobierno clausure por 72 horas a Teleamazonas, acalorando el debate sobre la libertad de expresión. Esta noticia causó que se movilicen cientos de entusiastas del periodismo ciudadano. Blogs locales y Twitter tambíen se unieron en la tarea de informar todos los hechos.

Teleamazonas está transmitiendo su señal a ratos en su pagina web y actualiza su Twitter constantemente. Al final del día, un grupo de crackers ecuatorianos hicieron un deface a la web del ente regulador Conelec y hasta estas horas aún no la han corregido.

Las dos partes tienen su punto, Teleamazonas es castigado por no realizar un periodismo veraz y el gobierno es criticado duramente por suprimir el derecho a la libertad de expresión que tan de moda está por esta parte del mundo.

El debate está abierto y dificílmente termine pronto, ¿Ustedes que opinan?