RocketBoom H264 Ads $11,700. 7 Days to Go

Willo!
Originally uploaded by courtneyp.

Update : $11,700 on ebay : Current Bid. Reserve not met. Very kewl. Interesting they have a clear "floor price" CPM (ie higher than $11 WOW - thats a nice monthly income for 2 people ie 4 X $15k = $60k X 12 months = $720K total annualised / $360K ea minus "production costs" ;), rather than a 100% "let the market decide". I wonder what CPM Jason Calacanis, and his new Sundance friend Perez Hilton, think it will sell for. Like most novelty auctions with media profile there is a premium in there for exposure for the winner in media/blogs etc. But there's also no supply of these types of high reach online/portable video advertising opportunities. So, go Rocketboom. Adam Curry mentioned he was also watching/impressed, and its a pretty damn awesome thing to see emerge. Will the podcasters make the hard line call like Rocketboom has ? (which is easier to do when there is two of you) Interesting...

Heck, next they'll be auctioning houses. A selection for those of you wanting to "quit your day job" and vlog/vodcast - Do we have a name for "amateur" video yet btw ? Where is Wikipedia and the inventors when you need it/them ? I like their line incl use of word memetic, damn I better get that into a sentence tomorrow (email if u are able to tomorrow - maybe when u speak to marketing : "The new brand campaign is so memetic. I kept watching the above the line creative. We all did. Memetic. Like The Ring. Not the Sequel. Or American One." Sorry back to ebay and the 2.5inch screen size sponsorship : "We find that people come back to Rocketboom mostly because they enjoy the interesting stories we cover or exhibit from around the world. When we choose and create our stories, we opt for the most interesting and memetic material to make up each show. By creating the advertisements ourselves with the same intentions, we believe we can create the most effective scenario for both our audience and the advertiser."

Further Selections below, which btw is a well put together piece, although I dont think ebay is the right environment, minus the ubiquitous reach. Maybe this is what Mike Commune Arrington's Edgeio will do : "For the highest bidder, we will create five original, fifteen second (minimum) - one minute (maximum) post-roll commercials that will span five days of programming, Monday-Friday, March 6 through March 10, 2006. Each day that week a different commercial that we create for your company will be played at the conclusion of the Rocketboom episode. Rocketboom reaches a minimum of 130,000 people per day and each day's video, over the course of several days, receives over 200,000 complete views. Thus, the advertisement reach for this auction is currently a minimum of one million views. .. The advertisements will be interactive when played by our online Quicktime audience (approx. half of our web audience). This means that at any time an audience member is watching the ad, they will be able to click anywhere on the ad, at any time during the duration of the ad, to launch a webpage link to your website in a separate browser window. Also, within the Quicktime version, your ad will exist via a chapter marker, making it easy for the audience to navigate to the ad from within the regular Rocketboom program."

Nik "OG" Freestyling on Da Vegas Atherton Tip

Nik
Originally uploaded by Nik Cubrilovic.

Knifing 'nik is busting a rhyme as he schools the Valley on all things file sharing. Such a nice big simple idea, with nice big simple technology that already works. Lock. Load. Wash. Rinse. Soprano is busting a move.

Early Flanking in Battle for 2.0 Aussie Eyeballs

yahoo7
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

Tailrank is breaking all the interesting posts (i think if they made it one column - sortable by time eg 1-24 hours, then usage would go really mainstream - which is always the bane of niche tech web 2.0 services of the non you-tube variety) I like looking at hot posts for last 1-2 hours and 17 minutes ago there is a post about networks launching shows on Itunes before they air on TV. The first results of the Cuban simultaneous dvd-cable-cinema release of (Soderbergh directed) "Bubble" movie are reported on Variety.com btw, with dvd the early winner. ("In Santa Monica, 9 out of 10 people who were willing to chat with a reporter on their way inside, all but two worked in the entertainment industry, and nearly half said they first heard about the film from media coverage of collapsing windows.")

So yahoo7 launched in Australia yesterday and they mentioned it was a "6 week" piece of integration etc, which looks about right. Alot of red etc and then a gateway to Yahoo, but it's all good for local competition. Throw in NewsCorp's local attack with truelocal.com.au and you have yourself the setting for a 2.0 Aussie Smackdown : That is once we move past the 1.0 portalonomics. Nic Jones : "What the web has done is to connect communities with the rest of the world but the real value of the web is not global, it is local" ;) At the same time Fairfax, Australia's other top newspaper publisher is preaching online - Top Down : "Fairfax Digital, the company's Internet arm, contributed just A$4.6 million of the publisher's A$425.8 million earnings before interest and tax in the year ended June 30, 2005. Advertising accounts for 80 percent of the company's revenue. "I would like to see substantially less reliance on media publications and more on electronic transmissions and new age information services'' in five years' time, the 66-year-old Walker said. ``Maybe Fairfax needs a younger image because we are preaching to a younger audience... ``All facets of the Internet are attractive to us,'' Walker said. The push online may include entertainment sites or teaming with a financial company to provide services such as mortgage advice, he said... Fairfax may also combine its database with other media companies to tackle Sensis, the advertising and directories unit of Telstra Corp., Australia's biggest telephone company.``Telstra had a monopoly on information transmission in the past but we believe there's a big revenue base out there to be had if we're clever,'' Walker said. ``Sensis' business is high on the agenda because that's a monopoly that's just waiting to be attacked, and we're good at that.'' - Yup, the 2.0 warzone is set.

"Since taking the top job, Chief Executive Kirk has bought holiday booking Web site Stayz Australia for A$12.7 million and a stake (20%) in online advertising company Mooter Media Ltd. for A$4.1 million. His predecessor Fred Hilmer bought online dating agency RSVP.com.au for A$38.9 million."

"Back to Vidpod + TV : What would be really kewl if Apple, Ch7 or 9 (even Fox/News/MySpace) started releasing TV shows for $1.99au before or soon after they were aired. Even Headland and Last Man Standing. Or those series of Sopranos and finale of Six Feet Under would be much appreciated. It's a joke as (Australians) we cant even download Lost etc - which is equivalent to arriving at a website like Yahoo, oops Yahoo7 and being told "Sorry, wrong geo-IP address, you'll have to entertain yourself elsewhere." Variety.com unlike any of the Australian media actually tell us who's on the board : A direct copy of ninemsn : 3 from each side, annual revolving chairman. (as its a JV 50/50) "Board members from Seven are Ryan Stokes, of Pacific Magazines and son of Seven topper Kerry Stokes; Seven commercial director Bruce McWilliam; and head of digital media Rohan Lund. The Yahoo! contingent consists of Hollywood-based Ira Kurgan; emerging markets VP Pam Thompson; and senior VP John Marcom, who will also head up Yahoo7." Ipodbank : "Nickelodeon and Comedy Central are putting shows on iTunes before they broadcast on television. Nickelodeon just put a new episode of Zoey 101 called "Girls Will Be Boys" ahead of its January 29th network debut and Comedy Central will put a new episode of "Drawn Together" three days before its February 1 network debut. While the Zoey 101 episode will cost $1.99, the Drawn Together episode will be available for free."

Blog Ad Networks Doth not Protest Too Much

classic footloose
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

It's interesting that on the Blog Network Ratings List, Federated Media @ #2 is now ahead of WeblogsInc @ #3. With Gawker @ #1. But on a totally different point, thats related, I totally agree with Jason Calacanis on this one, having spent a decade on big brand advertisers and their media buying habits. (regionally anyway ;) The Calacanis quote (which got me thinking about this) was when asked about (if someone was to) set up a new blog ad network, which I'm sure is the last thing on his mind, what should they do : "Reach is what the big boys and girls sell- folks like MSN, Yahoo, and AOL. Niche, startup publisher can't sell reach--they can sell reach within a vertical MAYBE. For example, we can say that we have 10% of the 20M car enthusists out there, or something like that."

I'm particularly interested in the rise of blog/podcast ad networks without ownership and/or exclusivity over content or advertising. For example Federated Media, ala John Battelle, who seem to be the loudest, "premium" for profit blog, funded, 2.0 blog ad network. Federated Media with their retro, hipster post-Denton logo represent "clusters" of sites like Jeff Jarvis' buzzmachine. Buzzmachine today on the far right column, has a federated media skyscraper top position, and a google skypscraper bottom right. Now Jeff may get a higher yield from having 2 ad spots (it doesnt always equate btw esp when u remove the price premium on the higher ad and factor in much lower clickthrus or to quote the Topix.net blog from today " If we can make a UI change (e.g. shrinking ad unit slightly, moving the position, changing the color) which yields a lower ad CTR but keeps the eCPM at the same level, does that mean we increased the user utility of the site?") So rightly this benefits Jeff and it's his blog and his choice. I'm not sure how this benefits the Federated Media pitch though, which is all about "reduced clutter", "fit the environment" and so on. In effect their reach needs a new classification, as do all the blog and podcast networks. In many cases it's non-exclusive.

Look at Rocketboom's Studio ! Now an Ad-Auction

rocketboom boom
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

It's the exception that proves the rule, and parents dont get myspace, so how rockn that the Rocketboom H-264 ready news-vid is auctioning its ads on Ebay : You dont have to pay no middleman no stoopid non transparent fee, and by running your own 1-7 day auction you ensure liquidity in the bidding. The more the merrier. Keep independence, amp up marketing, play coy in "discussions" and smell the napalm ! Awesome. Englishmen in New York says the "winning bidder will have to relinquish control of the advertising to Baron and Congdon who are going to make the adverts themselves. If a company insists on making its own advert, then Congdon and Baron will vet it (and exercise a veto) before it runs. And this policy will apply to all future adverts on Rocketboom."

Podnetwork chiefs like Adam Curry and blog bureau OG's as per John Battelle will be watching : Very high reach shows (like Rocketboom is for portable video) and Daily Source Code are lucky in that they can control the small amounts of advertising they offer. And the talent in these cases is also the co-owner/founder. It gets harder once you drill down to the "long tail" of podcasts and vlogs, where it isnt economic to control/produce the creative. (most likely result then is customised audio/video integration sponsorships for high reach shows and standard agency produced creative or "read-ons" for low reach show). And dont forget that 1950's TV trend at moment, where podcast/vlogs are funded by advertisers. Ala Mary + Karla on Podshow, sponsored by Acuvue. Word.

Aussie Cricket Blog has got it Dead Right

black + red suede
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

Enuf already, and Im sick of Gilchrist talking as if he's the messiah. Earth to Gilly - You aint Bradman, in fact at moment you are closer to Kim Hughes. The Cricket Blog : "Australia has gone roster crazy as Phil Jaques has been rested from club cricket this weekend. Now Ricky Ponting and Adam Gilchrist, I can understand. They're busy guys, they contribute their heart and souls to Australian cricket. But Jaques isn't even in the Australian team! I know taking sickies and preserving public holidays are great Aussie traditions but this is taking things too far. They also mention the stresses of preparing for his upcoming wedding. Get with the program, Jaques! Skiving off wedding preparation so the girl does all the work is another great Aussie tradition!" I agree, lets get Jacques opening for Australia again.

Ex-Junglees Go After the "ACL" Market (Top Secret)

cowgirls at night
Originally uploaded by lustybagus.

While on the topic of crawling, it seems some ex-Junglee employees who missed the chance to buy Google early on, are focusing on an algorithm around identifying the category or topic of a page. Silicon Beat from Battelle link : "Kosmix, like Google and Yahoo, is crawling and indexing the entire Web. It has come up with its own technology to rank pages by category, instead of by keyword." Sounds Clusty to me : "So type in ACL into Kosmix's health engine, and you'll get relevant pages straight off, but also a helpful categorization of results along the left-hand column, for example: "definition," "causes," "treatments," and "blogs" and "message boards." Harinarayan doesn't mind boasting: "What you can get with five minutes at this site, is a hundred times what you can get at Google." It even provides a category for alternative medicine. Harinarayan remarks: "You wouldn't even know to ask about that at Google." These Stanford guys are pretty "confident" arent they. Not "pretty". "Confident". Although this parts interesting - "To organize its results, Kosmix doesn't use pagerank -- or popularity, based on the number links to a page. Kosmix decided pagerank is inefficient when it comes to categories. "There is no affinity to topic, when you are ranking by raw popularity," says Harinarayan. Instead, Kosmix looks at what pages that link to other pages are saying -- to take a bigger stab at judging the meaning or subject of the page. If the linking page is saying something similar to the page it links to, you can begin getting at its meaning, or at least muster up enough information to categorize it by topic. Harinarayan calls it "category rank." Kosmix is essentially tagging pages with categories. "Auto-tagging the Web," as Harinarayan puts it."

Brazil Pumped about MSN Spaces Changes

brazil.jpg
Originally uploaded by lustybagus.

They were getting sick of Orkut. And their green and gold is pretty damn close to Australia. So very interesting that the secret powerhouse in blogging - that tween alternative to the kewl kids myspace : MSN Spaces, now has ads (partnered with amazon and kanoodle) that bloggers can make dough on, and they are getting into crawling and enhanced searching through profiling (open text field on location doh :( and content. One of my favourite current topics ! Link via Blogherald/Torres and finally The Spaces Blog (cant be long till there is a link attribution blogging firefox extension startup eh ?) Frank Arrigo - this is what I'm interested in understanding more about, I was using it yesterday on ninemsn spaces and it seemed to not be functional in terms of search results : "In order to make your content on MSN Spaces “searchable,” our search crawler needs to go out and crawl your content. Hmmm, this sounds kind of circular, you may be thinking. Well, maybe that sentence was, but the way this works isn’t J: on Jan 25th we added a whole bunch of new code to spaces.msn.com. Some of it you can see (like some new features and new design) and some of it you can’t. The stuff you can’t see is code we added to your MSN Spaces pages that will make them searchable. And like we said above, it takes some time for our crawler to go out and crawl your MSN Spaces pages with this new search code on them."

A Flickring Broadcast.com Search on delicious Geocities

green sneakers
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

The Gemaya/VC/Entrepreneur Triumvirate and the mindset of the "tired/hungry" entrepreneur is almost revealed in this light Guardian piece on del.icio.us : On one hand, you have the entrepreneur that has slaved obsessively with no resources (till later stages) for years. Reports the Guardian on Joshua : "Small wonder that when I got in touch, the guy who invented one of the hottest new ideas online - and just sold it for a personal fortune - couldn't have sounded more miserable. Online, the gossip was about how much he sold for, and the reach of "user tagging", the idea that Delicious introduced. But Schachter, the site's creator, mainly sounded relieved to have the $57bn corporation taking over."

On the other hand, the resources which large companies offer allow for dreaming to occur. Calacanis got a Powerbook (non-Intel ?) and a trip to Sundance ! Joshua concludes with : "I want to build something that grows from large to huge. I don't know if I have another innovation in me, but it would be nice to try."

I file this under the flickr/youtube conundrum. Youtube was jokingly called the flickr of video. However, if flickr hadnt be bought by Yahoo it could have been the youtube of video. Even the new myspace. Instead, it has to take a dumbed down approach having its technology assimilated, integrated into the organisation. (always near impossible, often leading to being run as standalone) ExFounders - now employees - have to attend corporate meetings, train staff, and run problem projects ("we will be the #1 in social search + tagging, and x's skill in this area is unparalleled etc") In between planning the next new new thing they will do that is. Throw in home improvements, new philanthropic interests and a break after a crazy few years - all deserved too. All you have to do is look at Evan Williams/Blogger as an example, that its hard, technically, and organisationally to do so. Let alone get on the front foot and recreate that near autobiographical first book. Plus 2nd Album Blues. Go back even further and look at the "acquisition integration non success" of multi-billion dollar deals like Geocities and Broadcast.com. I wont even touch that period of astrology and ecard eyeball acquisitions. I hope that doesnt happen here. No-one said succession planning and acquisition integration was easy in any industry ! As marketers say, every new problem begats the need for a fresh solution. Schumpeter and so on.

2 Aussie Bloggers for Every 1 Booney Doll

cture
more boonies
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

As you know I've been running a competition on who would be the perfect spokesperson for gnoos, our aussie blog search engine to be, about whether we should use David Boon, the selector, or his doppelganging Booney Doll which promotes VB beer, or Trevor Chappell, the underarm younger brother of Australian cricketing royalty. The Booney Doll is miles ahead. The Booney Doll of which there are 200,000 The Age says today (already being auctioned on Ebay Australia) are being chattered about on Aussie Blogs. Foster's (who sell VB) Marketing Manager Cameron MacFarlane is quoted as saying "Interviews with Booney are off the Richter scale, the blogs are firing and Booney dolls are going off for $48 on eBay."

Now with 450,000 Aussie Blogs, if Foster's had been able to do a one stop blog.ad buy to coordinate a Booney Blog presence : Where each blogger put some basic code on their blogs, so (when the crickets on) he could utter classic lines such "Got a beer, yet ?", "He's seeing them like watermelons" through unique image text, (even) audio and rich media placements (the bloggers could choose which creative they wanted), that would THEN be one of the best integrated campaigns I've ever seen. Bloggers, their audience and passions are much closer in fit to VB's target market than the niche audience gathered by the latest portal or auto site that doesnt even provide any value or fun for consumers or advertisers. 450,000 blogs to me sounds like the best word of mouth + virtual sales force (next to the bottle shops) you could ask for. (watch out for the Booney Doll Meme)

Congrats Fosters, Y+R (lets talk blogs) and VEIL (the company that developed the technology, as well as Paul Harvey the cartoonist, David McCausland of Studio 57 F1 that did the modelling out of clay, as well as the hired voice-over as it wasn't boonie) The funniest Booney Doll story I've heard so far, is a Nova 100 Radio listener, who was at a funeral and had a Booney Doll in her bag, because the wake afterwards was at the cricket. During the funeral the Booney Doll went off to coincide with the first cricket match of the season, and she wasn't aware, as were any of the general public, that the Doll was going to talk and it said "Got a beer, yet ?"

$XB Apple + $3.5B Pixar + 55c per Video = Stevie Boy

New Google interface
Originally uploaded by mamster.

WebProNews really do some solid coverage of this space - Some of these extracts of the Ipod Video economics are fascinating. Talking about TV episodes ala Lost that retail on "Apple's iTunes for $1.99, generate 55 cents for Apple and pass the remaining $1.44 to the network. Apple earns less than double for a video download of those two top-rated shows than it does from a song sold on iTunes, Hollywood Reporter said in an article. Where Apple's music take is about 29 or 30 cents per song from a major label, it gets 55 cents from videos... even at a "worst-case scenario" - where 20 percent of the viewing audience buys downloads instead of watching episodes on TV - generates an extra $15 million in revenue for the network... A JPMorgan Chase analyst, Spencer Wang, commented in the report how that $1.44 exceeds the "estimated 57 cents in advertising revenue per user generated under the current model." Given Google have no end user subscriptions; Admitting it made mistakes launching its video offerings; Plus no hardware/devices vertically integrated - it will need to pull something out of its tricks from the edge bag; More tricks than search filters on the left nav or announcement they will do what eyeblaster did what feels like decades ago. And when Steve brings out his wireless sequel to the Newton (im thinking competition to Nokia's 770 Web Tablet but done in a apple way), then expect even more hardware sold and videos to be downloaded. I just read today MTV is putting all the South Park and Trey Parker etc content onto Itunes. This Ipod thing will continue to be a hockey stick avalanche. I should disclose though that I helped my brother get some money off a new car, and he's giving me the $500au voucher the car dealer thru in : which given my ipod shuffle died 3 days ago, will go towards a Black Ipod Video 30gig. If anyone is using one to podcast - info appreciated about this whole .wav recording and mic in tricks etc.

10 Random Aussie Day Blog Posts

Its the day after Australia Day, some of you sad corporates are back in the cubicle and spending your time cruising the Internet. I've booted up the gnoos aussie blog index, entered the new IP address and password, and here's what its spewed back to me.

1. In the latest blog awards, this is Australia's best blog. And I'm loving the View from Elsewhere in Northern Territory. As well as the long toothed hinterland dweller.

2. Wild Young Under Whimsy has had it with Jim Courier's tennis commentary. And Mrs Hardly's into The Hardy Boys (how good were they) and Dungarees.

3. What Australia Day means to Lucy Tartan @ Sorrows st Sills Bend, other than fn hot weather. Australia Day means nothing to Greg Winterflood, except the Merops Ornatus bird is back. Melbourne Sex Blog wants some tolerance.

4. Some beautiful looking food at Spice Blog.

5. Jules just made me realise I missed the Hot 100 Songs from Triple J. While from AmpersandDuck I didnt need to know as much about Libra's branding subtext for its tampon line ;;)

6. Zoe's kicking it Canberaa snark style and got a CrazyBrave picture of John Howard. So does Daily Flute :)

7. Ausculture kicked it hard and is still hurting : The Boudist is involved and has a great pic of Sydney by Air.

8. JungleJamie has me fascinated with the etiquette around raw food guests. Jobe's not thinking it's so funny in some aussie blog bitchiness. meowwww !

9. It's getting political in Western Sydney.

10. Melbourne Human Female's Camping Trip is hilarious (her words "awesome"), esp having to watch Veronica Mars before leaving, as are the pics of the tent and journey.

Daisy Simpson feeds Dave Winer + Gets 3 KickAss Ideas

pizza hut job
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

I love Dave Winer's 3 trends (1. Open Yahoo Search API 2.Bittorrent 3. P2P webcasting) that Yahoo should leverage to upseat the dominant GOOG paradigm : "P2P webcasting. I wrote about this vaguely the other day, and no one apparently understood what I meant by Skype for webcasting. Come on guys, it’s pretty simple. Suppose we’re having a conversation, and I decide “Wow, this would be great for Scripting News, let’s do a webcast of this right now.” So I whip out my laptop, get onto the net (there’s wifi everywhere of course, heh) and launch my Yahoo Webcaster desktop app for the Mac. I choose New Webcast from the File menu. A window opens. There’s a button that says “Copy URL to clipboard.” I click it. Go over to my outliner, paste it into a post on Scripting News. “Tune into this webcast I’m about to do with Bull Mancuso about intellectual property and organized crime.” I highlight the word webcast and click on Add Link. Save. Then I go back to the Yahoo app and click Start. We talk for ten minutes, all the while people tune into the stream, which is managed via a realtime BitTorrent-like P2P connection. And of course when it’s all done it’s automatically archived to an MP3 and included in my RSS 2.0 feed for people who subscribe. If you’ve ever done a webcast, you know how much better this would be. And it’s ready to go, we know how to do all the bits."

Angie Yahoo Diggs The U.N doesnt Yahoo

Shine photobooth
Originally uploaded by caterina.

Digg's founder Kevin Rose commented re the Jolie rumours they were "focused on features, not selling the company" which to me sounded like someone who while happy in their business, is influenced by the GEMAYA-VC-Entrepreneur triangle ("First 20 Million is the Hardest" - btw if anyone has had the responsibility for writing a multi-million dollar cheque to a business owner, you wouldnt be surprised at people who sell for their share of $25m-$35m eg Take out 50% for the VC if there was one, 10% maybe for staff options, split the remainder with another founder, give some to the tax man, and you can buy a nice house, car, give presents to family, take a sabbatical and throw in some servers and a 2.0 'evangelist' employment contract with the new owner : why not ?) My guess is the digg founders will drive the business for a couple more quarters. Even Kevin said they were executing on "features" as opposed to "building" a company, with the liar's freudian paradox of "not selling the company". So maybe file digg under 'Looking for more than $50m' once they execute further, in areas like advertising and expanding the product from technology centric mobbings, to a range of content verticals. Sport. Entertainment. Finance. Even some international (just dont worry coming to australia, we've got that area covered fine guys ;) As Kevin said : "So, just to set things straight - we are not in talks with Yahoo. We are focused on creating new features and expanding digg into new areas beyond tech. The recent reports about digg and Yahoo! are just rumors, nothing more." So, Angie Jolie-Rose, will not become Angie Jolie-Rose-Yahoo Inc. Maybe the new BillyBob will be Tagworld.com, which is a great all in one service. J.Botter Weblog : "The cool thing about TagWorld is that they actually have the software to back it up. Instead of focusing on releasing horrible compilation CD’s which serve as nothing more than a marketing ploy, the fellas at TagWorld are taking the initiative to build a much better social networking experience. It’s a strategy that is brilliant in both the short AND long term, because instead of just trying to get millions of users, they’re building an interactive environment for when the day finally comes that they can boast a huge userbase."

Trupedia its Damn Hot and Power Blackout

its hot here too
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

It's been well over 100F/38C degrees here today, spent with some real engineers, followed by a power blackout for hours (I lost this post duh) and its still damn hot ! Hence why Gisele isnt clad in much. Dave Winer, whose River of News - awesome - I clicked around today (and wanted to import my own opml into !!), also linked to a Village Voice Article on Wikipedia, or was that Trupedia. Like Flickr and Blogger, it was interesting because while some people say it was luck, in effect a secondary feature became the Main Show. Now for the ads they will introduce - or maybe a trade sale to someone first : "In 2000, Jimmy Wales, a futures and options trader with a fondness for Ayn Rand, decided to start an open-content encyclopedia called Nupedia. "I saw it as a kind of social event," he says, "the equivalent of a sports league—but for geeks." He hired an acquaintance, Larry Sanger, a philosophy grad student at Ohio State University, to begin recruiting scholars and experts. Unlike what became Wikipedia, Nupedia would have a relatively traditional format, with each entry undergoing a seven-step editorial process. The first article, published in the summer of 2000, took more than four months to complete. The subject was atonality. By the end of the year, there were only 24 articles. As a side project, Wales used the wiki, a type of software that allows for constant collaboration, to create a second encyclopedia where people could mess around with the entries before they were formally reviewed. Sanger came up with the term Wikipedia ("a silly name for what was at first a very silly project"), and the site was launched on January 15, 2001, now referred to by some users as Wikipedia Day. Within a month, the encyclopedia had 1,000 articles. After a year, there were more than 20,000."

Angelina Yahoo Adopts Digg Says Burtanator

hi kelly txtisgr8
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

The maestro of meme engines and RSS, Kevin Burton, says the inevitable acquisition of digg is to happen by Yahoo. I uttered often digg and youtube would be first to go this year, and next week we may hear re digg Kevin says. Time for Yahoo HR to get some employment contracts ready, IT some servers and laptops, while their "we're not competing in search" CFO can make a cheque out to the digg founders, who make their first share of $30m minus the (pretty decent eg 50% dilution) from VC round they did in 2005. Feedblog.org : "I've now heard from two sources close to Yahoo which tell me that Yahoo is going to be buying Digg for nearly $30M. I haven't yet heard from anyone working for Yahoo that this is 100% (they obviously had 'no comment') but I'd be surprised if we didn't hear an announcement by early next week."

Gisele goes to Beach on Social Networking Startup

cookies + cream
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

I got teary when I read WisdomArk who just raised some serious VC dough - $6.3m. From their site : "WisdomArk is the developer of a new consumer webservice for the collaborative capture, sharing, preservation, and rediscovery of the story of our lives." Very Hollywood. Unfortunate then Gisele has moved on from Leonardo to Surfer Kelly Slater.

Aussie Blog Day We Remember Trevor Chappell and Boonie

Someone down the local told me to get a Marketing Plan. You have to separate the needs and wants he said, and you are onto something. So I'm onto it. It's not another aussie film like malcom or that one with Dave O'Neil at the fish and chips shop. So I'd figured out my costs, added 1000% percent margin and express posted my bankers the forecast : they seemed happy. I went back to the local, happy I had finished the plan, and looking to celebrate : then everyone said 'give it away for free like MX'. I said that's no way to run a pub, but then forked out $3.10 for a pot of Carlton, and said 'thats a bit rich' : which got me a 'its only a website' look : Mumbling over the head of my beer i accepted defeat, sms'd the bankers, and made it free. So everyone told me the 'action point' was to get an advertising agency to print up some business cards and get some swish ads on the new Bert Newton show when it launches on Channel Nine, esp the section with his daughter Lauren. 'Get in first'. 'Hire Interbrand. They do a swell job'. I could only afford Spotrunner tho who said they had some great spots and creative available : They jedi'min tricked me, insisting I may want David Boon, but what I really need is Trevor Chappell : to promote gnoos. And damn them if they weren't right. I knew I didn't need interbrand to mispell a word. Deep inside, I thought maybe they said this because of price or the dstore contract had ended. I stood up to them, not wanting to fall for that whole 'look at what Kamahl did for Diet Coke' but they hit me between the eyes, when they said David Boon, in the Bat Pad position, was overexposed - and he no longer had the Transatlantic 52 Beer Can Record. At one point, the associate creative (we're a low billing client) started talking about the Coke Zero ad party starting on Wednesday, but I'd zoned out, and started thinking about what went through Trevor Chappell's head when he rolled that underarm, and if 'back in the day', post early WSC where Kerry wore gangsta polos and had loaded guns, when cricketers wore proper helmets, imagine if Trevor Chappell had a blog. His own voice, the younger of brothers. 'Stuff these Australian cricket captains. I bowl some offspin. Bat at 6. And I've got a mean underarm. Ian may have played baseball, but he certainly wasnt no good with the bigger, softer ball in the other 3 bases game.' What would have he posted as he logged onto his free blogspot account on the commodore 64. I thought "Wow, imagine, fastforward, if he could promote gnoos today. He wouldn't even need to know what it is. It'd be like his own little postsecret, and he could search for other underarm bowlers that changed the course of history as much as a corporate ad agency softball hit in faulkner park.'



Leight Star Dust gets it too. I think he's got a larger ad budget and can afford Boonie : Without blinking he picks up a '2 slabs for one' supermarket deal, gets the 4 cents off the unleaded, and steers the VL 3.0 Turbo Original Spec 87 Series One Model into the garage : One slab under each arm, and a boonie doll on the head - because where eck else u going to fit it. The Missus aint happy with the turn of events. But she ain't your real missus anyway, not with Boonie at bat pad. LSD : "Happy Aussie Day for tomorrow! Now I know there’s been a few things this year that have meant that maybe we shouldn’t be as completely proud of being an Aussie as we always have, but there have been good things too, like Talking Boonie, who embraces multiculturalism by constantly asking for nachoes, but hasn’t yet gotten up on the gender equality as he keeps asking me to get his socks." I also think we should rename today Aussie Blog Day. We'll get Trev and Boon along next year. Help us decide who we should go for as spokesperson. Other suggestions welcome.






Rach, come in Monday and we discuss next steps. I'll send you the marketing plan.

Trevor Chappell Considering gnoos Spokesperson Role

Guys - 38 votes later about whether we should include Kiwis in the gnoos aussie blog search index, and its 50% each. The poll runs for another 5 days, but like a good test match, day 3 is really important. Lets see some Gilchrist in his prime batting at Seven or big hitting Daddy Cairns style. On one side we have Trevor Chappell. On the other, the ANZACs. You decide.

Pro Aussie : "I have nothing against Kiwis... per se... it's just that when they congregate amidst Australians they tend to bring up that whole "Trevor Chappell underarm" thing, and I can turn a little nasty. If it's in the rules, it's in the rules. Just cause they didn't think of it."

Pro Kiwi : "Anyway, I think gnoos should be aus + kiwi. If Russ the Muss Crowe can support the All Blacks *and* the aussie cricketers, well fair dinkum I think we should share the best of 2.0 between us. Wrap an Anzac flag around that gnoos logo, son."

Amd Glen McGrath has already applied with his boring hagged bowling. Great innings mate, but get Shaun Tait in there. Lee at one end, Tait at the other.

Brittney uses A9 Meta-Search to Fix KFed's Ferrari

brittney 360 spider
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

Brittney's been driving her 360 Spider sans baby. Fred Wilson got rid of the shark and dropped googol for another officious oracle, while Steve Rubel who's been shorting Web 2.0 for a bit and looking for a triggering catalyst event, has tech.memeorandum'ed the Yahoo CFO News and said - later. Caterina has used cashed out founder privilege turned renegade employee and is using some old school salon.com'esque copy (sans artwork) to state the damn obvious truth. "I've been watching all the blathering about Yahoo! giving up search dominance to Google, which, I might add, is bullshit*. Quotes taken out of context by company executives do not an overarching business strategy make. This is exactly the kind of thing that most annoys me about blogs (and, I guess, media in general)." Maybe the real message is search is just one part of the on and offline media mix. Paparazzi had to push Brittney's Ferrari, which is now being blogged. Circular redux Yahoo 360. Orkut already, out.

Damn Channel 7 has Sacked Headland

OM2W5197
Originally uploaded by Delicious Karma.

This show was my summer free to air guilty pleasure, where I forced myself to jump off the Macs, eat dinner, and watch some fine grown up home'n'away. I guess you got to pay for the AFL rights somehow. I havent seen this covered by the Australian Media. Variety.com break it, I guess there will be a delayed reaction tomorrow : "Seven Network axed its second local drama in a fortnight on Tuesday after it stopped production on university sudsersudser "Headland." Show is a spin-off from successful soap "Home and Away," a hit in Blighty Blighty, where Seven hoped to attract a production partner. Channel 4 eventually came on board but put back its U.K. launch for "Headland" from late 2005 and now may not air the skeinskein at all. "Headland" pulled a respectable 1.3 million viewers when it opened on Nov. 15, but this recently fell to around 800,000."

(DandD + DSC) + Gervais = 2m+ Mth/Pod-Downloads

IMG_5697
Originally uploaded by Delicious Karma.

The Clear Channel guys with their robotic computer music programming have done over 6m podcast downloads in the first 6 months according to an interview played by Adam Curry on Daily Source Code today. Samples were also played of BBC Download numbers, which were also interesting, with many shows doing around 100K downloads, and a few hundreds of thousands. Adam said that Daily Source Code and Dawn + Drew do more downloads than either BBC or Clear Channel based on the numbers stated. That's awesome. "My" ;) basic substitution and division of numbers then is (Dawn and Drew + Daily Source Code) must do more than 1m downloads a month. That's pretty awesome. (Ricky Gervais said on episode 8 today they are doing "A Quarter Million Hits/Listeners a Week - Thats also One Million a month if you want an average (although i have no idea if these numbers are "unique" subscribers or total downloads eg dawn and drew/dsc podcast 5 times a week due to sirius and podshow "benchmarks" while ricky is releasing once a week, his 12 part series... so who really has more unique listeners, impossible to tell, as there are no centralised marketshare and volume numbers that are audited) Anyway Ricky's numbers given how new show is - and being driven from a highbrow UK Newspaper (Guardian) - , with only 7 episodes in the can vs The Podshows who've done 200-300ea+) Wouldnt it be interesting if there was a Ricky Gervais vs Adam Curry mashup poddownload battle (or jointly produced show ala Friends TV Show reuniting for 4 episodes and $5m ea) Now that would be interesting and increase all podcasting ratings !!! And what about Karl, the real star of the Gervais show.

Adam mentioned on the show, (as I've been blogging about and Adam corrected me on) that Podshow do not own copyright to any shows generated by others within Podshow. This is backed up by a link from curry.com to Roadhouse Podcast who state as such. Roadhouse Podcast: "Contrary to what you may hear elsewhere, this doesn‚t mean that Podshow now owns all my content or has any say in the creation of the show. Quite the contrary. I‚ve retained full creative control and full ownership of the podcast. Very little about the show will change and none at the behest of Podshow. You may now hear some advertising, but even that is at the discretion of the podcaster. And, the address for the show files will change, as everything will be migrated to Podshow‚s Podcast Delivery Network as soon as the final beta testing is completed." He also mentions in comments : "There’s no rider to bar advertising beyond the term of the contract."

My guess from all this is it's as simple as controlling the advertising and possibly subscription fees, for a designated time period ? With some type of exclusive vs non exclusive section of the pod.agreements (assumption ;) that is included or deleted depending on the case-case terms. Just my guess. Anyone ? Feel free to tell me. If so, this does make (that part of the podshow business) a pod ad network competing against Podtrac or Kliptronic. Just as Google Adsense competes against Yahoo Publisher Network competes against Value Click and so on. Podshow is obviously the more google-esque player here, rather than Podtrac who are more ValueClick like. Not to mention that there are real questions to me about a podcast ad network only using regressive tools like timely surveys, badly designed websites and auctions to gain market leadership - that also hasnt generated any revenue for its podcasters, many of whom are struggling to survive : I think the 'podcasting ad networks' pureplays (eg podtrac) are going to find it very hard against the horizontally, vertically integrated Kleiner resourced players. (Update : in my comments section someone may have solved the quandary, depending on whether its a guess, but would make sense - "D+D (Dawn and Drew) are employees of Podshow. They receive a salary and a % of ad revenue. Hence Drew was able to literally quit his day job.The tier 2 podcast producers (mommycast, in over your head etc) are contractors and receive ad revenue % only.")

These updated comments (awaiting confirmation) would solve the remaining part of my post where I said "I'm still not sure what separates a 'Tartan Podcast' from a 'Dawn and Drew' Podcast", where one (who may receive hosting, bandwith, advertising etc) while the other (who is also played on a set Sirius schedule etc) also received a fixed amount of revenue. Let me reiterate this is not one of those Internet Kook podshow conspiracy bashing. I'm just interested in what options are available to anyone that wants to podcast, with a network, beyond a "she'll be right. you own your show", but once you buy that car, you gotta make the payments. Adam did leave an almost detailed comment on my followup post re podcasters relationship with Podshow/Delivery Network, where (while not providing the real juice) he teasingly concluded with "Obviously you've overlooked some other combination ;)" - MMM, so maybe it's as simple as exclusive control of revenue (user subscription and advertising, what other revenue lines ??) for a fixed fee for the "Podshows" (i wont call them Tier 1 shows as Adam corrected me, even though thats a common ad network term) that do receive a 'monthly cheque' so they can quit their day job. Interesting, I await the original-gangsta-podpimp' and pals feedback on the lowdown. As Mena said, News @ 11.

The Kiwi + Aussie Great 2.0 Smackdown

We've had some users, OK one, comment that they're not sure about the ethnographic profile of our gnoos blog index, which isnt live yet (well it is on my machine and web ;) about whether to include Kiwis such as Martin Crowe, who will long be remembered for his great batting, not for being a cousin of Russell Crowe. So in the best Web 2.0 Ajax'd techcrunched Polling application, I've decided to let my blog readers decide whether we should mingle the .au and .nz user generated content creators rss feeds into the gnoos index. Peace out. BB




Dear Sir,

I have been an adamant believer in the value of your gnoos product, but your recent decision to include postings of Kiwi origin has saddened me deeply. I will certainly miss the walled-garden-of-parochialism we had enjoyed up to this point.

Signed, Concerned.

Ten Random Aussie Blog Posts from Today

Here's my 10 Random Aussie Blog Posts from my gnoos aussie blog index for the 8% of my readers that are Australian. Posts generally from the last 8 hours of the 24th January.

1. The FreshRead blog tells us Denton Corker Marshall (DCM) Melbourne's leading design/architecture practice has released espresso cups. We all need caffeine in the morning ! Except those tennis players, which Knotted Path writes up the latest at the Aussie Open.

2. For those into Rugby and the Super 14, Rugga World is talking about The Cats, and it aint about Gary Ablett selling his footy gear to fund his Christianity. CricInfo Blog says Chris Cairns, who announced retirement is a legend.

3. RedWolf mentions for ebay sellers on the China site, they have scrapped transaction fees. While Legless in Perpetuum's voice sounds like a cross between Chewbacca and Lauren Bacall, thats funny.

4. John Quiggin gets serious about Global Warming. It's gonna be damn hot in 50 years eh ? Disambiguation blog gets nicely post-grad-modern too.

5. The Australian Newsagency Blog debates whether newspapers are clunky, and whether Gen Y want to get ink on their hands. Just put it on my ipod already.

6. Your Democracy gets political as you'd get by their domain, I'll let you read that at your own leisure. Oz Coversative is quoting a British study that men are discriminated against in IT Jobs. Oh, the British, not sure how they explain the gender make up of IT then.

7. Bed and Breakfast Man Blog cuts a funny tune comparing crocodiles and apartment living. Smoke and Mirrors over in Perth is apologising for self-indulgent blog posts. I thought every blog post was self indulgent ;)

8. Miss Wired had a dream about a 'hospital room in a hospital.' A door may have been involved as well. Surreality in Red CSS. The Needs to be Glassed Blog is hilarious and we hope its Australian or one of those .co.uk fellows over for a visit and a pint that doesnt return.

9. Hervey Bay Gossip blog says there is going to be a new 125 room hotel there. Now where is Hervey Bay again ;) ? While AussieLass is always arriving early to wedding receptions.

10. David Farrar's a Kiwi, as is Cameron Brewer on the Generation XY Blog. Steve Jobs would call it a funny photocast. And we'll allow that. Kiwis In.

Sundance Film Festival Elevator Pitch Tweek

hi angie
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

The Masters of the Elevator Pitch at Sundance at the moment, would probably enjoy David Cowan's campfire story on Verisign's early elevator pitch iterations, as might Nik on his big US VC pitchingfest : "When Jim Bidzos first explained to me Ron Rivest’s idea for selling public key certificates (Rivest is the R in RSA), it took a while for the math to sink in. But as I came to understand how public key cryptography facilitates encryption, authentication and (theoretically) non-repudiation, I reveled in the cleverness. Like so many spectators of greatness, I congratulated myself for comprehending this wonderful meme. So when Jim and I launched Digital Certificates, Inc (later renamed Verisign), I proudly (and thoroughly) explained public key crypto to whomever I was recruiting as a partner, employee or co-investor. “You see, people encrypt messages today using a numeric key that they must first share with each other…blah blah… Now using one-way functions like multiplication of large prime numbers…blah blah… So if the public key decrypts the message, then that must mean…blah blah…” Surely the brilliance of the idea must compel them! Compel? More like confuse, bore and repel. I don’t think anyone (including me) really understood what our little startup needed to do until we hired our CEO Stratton Sclavos. Stratton dispensed with the math, as well as the notion that people feel the need to buy obscenely large integers with incomprehensible mathematical properties. Instead, Stratton announced that we are bringing Trust to cyberspace, and our first product is a Driver’s License for the Internet. (One of these Driver’s Licenses evolved into SSL certificates.)"

Grass is always Greener in a GTX1 Roadster

ford gtx1 roadster #001
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

Marc Cuban (who sold to Yahoo at the peak for $5B+ and ensured his wealth management strategy immediately) talks about "getting it right once" and I repeat this phrase to myself all too often. It's easy after some experience to get the 'opportunity' or 'business model' or 'execution', 'technology', 'people', and so on right. GET IT ALL RIGHT. ONCE. Much Harder. Anyway, this post from Jeff Bussgang, a VC at IDG Ventures, is 100% accurate except it lacked one character : "The Corporate" : A 6 figure white collar worker who dreams of being an 'entrepreneur' but isn't in to not making the car, mortgage, credit card payments and that whole 'risk thing'. Excerpts from Jeff : “The grass is always greener on the other side” (a very capitalistic and classically “American” saying, which actually has its origins in Erasmus’ 16th century Latin writings, admiring the fertile look of a neighbor’s corn!)... Entrepreneurs are recently famous for sulkily observing that the VCs have the cushiest of lives. Unlike entrepreneurs who live and die by quarterly and annual milestones, VCs get paid generous management fees whether they seem to actually perform or not.. VCs are recently famous for grousing about how much money their private equity cousins are making. A VC struggles to invest $5-10 million at a time while their private equity cousins pour hundreds of millions of dollars, and recently even billions, into a single deal.. Private equity executives are recently famous for expressing their envy for hedge funds... And hedge fund executives? The top of the heap? Hardly. I often hear them discuss with envy the life of the entrepreneur – cycling through exciting new start-ups every 5-6 years and then taking long sabbaticals in-between gigs... Perhaps the Chinese proverb is the truest: “think about the misfortune of others to be satisfied with your own lot.”

Selfishness in User Generated Content

i sing 4 u
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

Mike Arrington, the 2.0 Don, linked to a very interesting post on user generated content by Ethan Stock - It certainly isn't as easy as it looks. Kids, do not try this User Generated Content Experiment at home : "Delicious bookmarks and Flickr photos. I primarily bookmark and take pictures for myself -- because I want to remember, or because I like something. I use these web-based apps instead of client-side equivalents because I personally get more value out of them. While the social benefit is apparent, I view that social benefit strictly through a selfish lens -- instead of emailing pictures to my Mom, I can just point her at Flickr. I encourage other people to use these sites for selfish reasons as well -- it makes it easier for me to keep track of their UCC. Another great example of selfish UCC is every auction on eBay. Those sellers are not putting those auctions up there to help anyone but themselves - any general benefit is strictly a secondary effect. It's not necessary for any individual item of UCC to relate to any other item - a picture or a bookmark has its own stand-alone value."

Technorati's Today vs Google's 3 Days Ago

hotel meeting
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

Very good article on google at London Review of Books. I especially like this line about why google search results are often 3 days old. (The inverse being the gap filled by recency/blog search at a global level by technorati, feedster etc) : "As for how it works in practice, the first thing to realise is that Google does not search the internet. If it did, the internet would grind to a halt under the strain of all the searching taking place, because Google alone (let alone the competition) makes upwards of 100 million searches every day. Instead the program searches a copy of the internet stored on its own computers. It sends out a ‘crawler’ which downloads copies of internet pages. A full circuit of all the web pages in the world takes roughly a month, which is why the information on Google is often a few days old."

BrandChannel.com Top 10 Brands 2005

1. Google
2. Apple
3. Skype
4. Starbucks
5. Ikea
6. Nokia
7. Yahoo
8. Firefox
9. Ebay
10. Sony

The Internet Outsourcer's Internet in India

stick in motion
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

Some interesting stats and observations on the Indian Internet market, with Anand Sridharan pegging the active userbase at around 5m, which makes it smaller than Australia for that segment of users. Interesting. I know someone from my biz school who was making alot of money selling Khakis to the emerging Indian Middle Class while everyone else was building eyeballs. I'm sure they're doing better. Excerpts from Anand Sridharan : "India internet: not yet. Growth is decent (subs, e-commerce, ad spend), but no hockey-stick effect yet. Given the small base, evolutionary growth isn’t good enough to quickly reach significant scale. We are not seeing the equivalent of cellphones circa-2003, where the industry exploded (triggered by CDMA entry, free incoming and a $10 entry cost to go mobile). A base of 4-5 million Indian homes have PCs, with new PC sales to households hovering slightly north of 1 million/year. To put this in context, the PC base is roughly comparable to the base of passenger cars (remember, the average car costs 10x that of a PC) and the number of households with an annual income of over Rs. 0.5 million. PCs are yet to penetrate the Rs. 0.2 to 0.5 million annual household income segment, that forms the mainstay of the Indian middle class (this segment has roughly 14 million households)... There are assorted estimates for subscribers, e-commerce, broadband etc (I heard a range from 10-70 mn subs, with the median at an official-sounding 38.5 mn). Rather than get into estimates, let me say that we need to apply a quality-filter (e.g. not just talk about internet subs, but address hours used, frequency, non-email usage, quality of connection etc). I didn’t see any estimates for subscribers for whom Internet is a habit, with reasonable usage beyond email. I put this at 5 mn, give or take."

Fred Wilson Prefers Y-Impressions @ 26 P/E vs G-Clicks @ 90 P/E

ems bladerunner
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

Isn't it funny how there are lots of VC's blogging, but aside from internetoutsider, internetstock blog and its brethren, there are few investment bankers blogging. Like journos who took up blogging, when are the bankers going to ditch their analyst reports and regal us with public company stock movements, as Bill Martin at Findprofit has done from blog day dot. It's like online advertising itself. Once one advertiser in a segment does it, the rest follow. Deck of Cards. Fred does good banking method acting and makes a del.icio.us point I totally agree with - Branding in a 2.0 world is far from dead, in fact its probably undervalued relative to other online advertising (search) and traditional above the line techniques. Da Fred : "But I also feel that paid search as a percentage of the overall online marketing budgets will decline in 2006. Many big marketers are moving significant dollars online in 2006 and you simply cannot throw money at search. Paid search only consumes money when people click on CPC ads. You can buy more ads, more keywords, on more search networks, but its going to be a lot easier to spend 50-100% more money online by purchasing CPM advertsing than CPC. And so I suspect that Yahoo! may have a "banner" year in 2006 with banners. I doubt that Google will be able to make a big move in CPM any easier than its competitors are finding competing with them in paid search. So what would I do if I owned both stocks? I honestly like YHOO at 26x earnings a lot more than GOOG at 90X earnings, but I think that Google will have a better Q4 than Yahoo!"

The 40 Degrees+ 10 Random Aussie Blog Posts

Got to a very hot 43"C today, which is well over 100F. I've been checking my gnoos aussie blog index to see what the heat is doing to everyone. Thus follows 10 posts from aussie blogs :

1. Daniel Bowen says Today's a Scorcher and the 41 on the Nylex clock isn't easy to read. Semaphore Junction uses maps to confirms Daniel suspicions. Slatts says Phewww. And some have air conditioning.

2. Neffertilly just wanted to tell everyone life is fine, but moving very quickly. A.E Brain on a deeper level is worried about another Cronulla. Even Andrew Bartlett is blogging today. As are others about the Australian wheat bribery scandals in Iraq.

3. The Spin Starts Here, Aussies' Mega-Entertainment blog, are almost getting as much schwag as those at Sundance, or at least a free haircut.

4. An Aussie Payroll's officer bucks night for a friend, ends up in hospital.

5. People on MSN Spaces are talking about Shane Warne being on Neighbours, which was in the paper this morning. And like all bloggers, Kim's over getting zero comments.

6. Frankie's pretty pumped about the Aussie Lamb Ad ! And Dollop's had two dinner dates in a row and is pretty happy about it. And there was Sarah's 18th last night !

7. Suburban Hen had her first day off on since starting a new job a few months ago. Other people are doing the 5X Meme. (5 jobs i've had, 5 movies i could watch over and over...) And Steph debates whether she is 16yrs or 24yrs, her therapist and disassociative states.

8. ClubTroppo puts on the analyst hat on Macquarie Banks attack on London Stock Exchange. Andrew just noticed the Optus purchase of Virgin Mobile.

9. Ponderance are getting into Cyberpunk and William Gibson, while finishing a post-grad degree.

10. The Supermercado Project, esp after Australia's crap effort in the cricket against Sri Lanka, have awarded Tom Moody a retro award.

Delivering Local News aint just another LA Bar

blonde asians with large breasts generally only live in los angeles
Originally uploaded by Malingering.

Topix.net, that Web 1.9 news aggregator, blog about an issue I totally relate to 'Algorithms at a local news level' : - at a country (australia), city (melbourne), and suburb (rye) level - while also delivering recency and popularity : "We've had a devil of a time, for example, with Silicon Valley tech business stories ending up on our Palo Alto page, since so many tech companies are located here. Technically we're getting the location of the subject of the stories right, but they're not local news. Local news is about sandbags to prevent San Francisquito Creek from coming in your front door, not Google's earnings. That's another channel. The same sort of thing happens in LA with celeb stories, DC with world news, NY with "wall street", etc. We can remove much (but not all, alas) of this off-topic material now."

Adam Curry Correction + Podcast Ownership

Update : I've recently been posting about the launch of podcasting networks like Podtrac and Kliptronic. It's also impossible to talk about podcasting without talking about Podshow (Adam Curry/Ron Bloom), who are launching their Podshow Delivery Network currently. I'm also influenced (in general, private conversations) by a local Melbourne friend Cameron Reilly, Co-Founder of The Podcast Network : One of the (if not the) original podcasting networks, who has over 30 Pod Channels and commercial agreeements with podcasters. While posting on this topic I wrote :

"Anyway, you need to watch podshow here as well as their Podcast Delivery Network aims to deliver and enable podcasters (for free) all their bandwith, feed syndication, advertising and reporting needs - in return for copyright, ownership and share of revenue/profit."

Adam Curry left a message on the post re : "in return for copyright, ownership and share of revenue/profit.".. " This is incorrect. Please do not state things as fact that you know nothing about. "We do not own any show or its copyrights, nor do we intend to."

What I have updated the sentence to read is : "Anyway, you need to watch podshow here as well as their Podcast Delivery Network when it is officially announced (is likely to) aim to deliver and enable podcasters (for free or a fee) all their bandwith, feed syndication, advertising and reporting needs - in return for either payment by the podcaster or some level of control of the monetisation (and other metrics) of the podcast."

I believe Adam when he says "We do not own any show or its copyrights, nor do we intend to." I apologise for stating otherwise. My understanding, as articulated by Keith and the Girl on one episode, that with Podshow once you did "quit your day job" and became a (lets call it) Tier 1 Podshow'cast such as Dawn and Drew, where you get paid a monthly cheque your 'catalogue' or 'content' ie your 'podcast' is owned by Podshow, or the ability to monetise it for the near future is owned by Podshow. Is this wrong or incorrect ? I really want to know. If for example Dawn and Drew decided to quit Podshow tomorrow, could they just take their podcasts, and put them on Libsyn and monetise them with Podtrac ?

Maybe where I was wrong was in my delienation of Podshow podcasters. (eg Dawn and Drews situation - where they (have said they are) paid and Drew quit his job - vs Soccergirl (who - i assume :( - doesnt get a monthly cheque, but has a 'possibly' preferred situation vs paying full market rates elsewhere on hosting/bandwith) : Even though both run their 'casts from a .podshow domain) I understand there are different scenarios for each podcasters. The 3 scenarios below are not 'facts' I know, they are my synthesis of what I would think Podshow will do based on what Adam, and other podcasters have said, and what makes sense to me. If it is wrong, please tell me :

1. Pay for Podcasting Enablement : Podshow (may) provide a combination of podcasting creation tools, to hosting, bandwith, reporting etc, with no advertising revenue share or assignment of copyright etc. ie Podcaster Pays Podshow for a Podcasting Solution on a Monthly Fee. (ala Libsyn on steroids)

2. Free Podcasting Enablement/Advertising Revenue Share : Podcaster utilises Podshow services and enters into advertising revenue share agreement with Podshow, with no assignment of copyright, content ownership etc

3. Podshow Tier 1 Show : Podcaster enters into contract with Podshow and receives full podcasting enablement and company resources, plus are paid a guaranteed salary/payment (ala dawn and drew), as well as bonuses potentially based on audience levels and advertising levels (vs budget)

I would really like to hear from Adam and people in the podcasting community (and not just typical Podshow/Adam Curry bashers) about what the commercial deal structure would be for Podshow, and other Podcast networks. Jason Calacanis recently made some fascinating points about how (his/AOL) bloggers can use material about what they blog online, to create a book, which they own 100%. Some of the blogging network issues hold strong parallels for podcast networks, so I was just trying to explore that. Its a large shade of grey is what I've learnt so far. Please tell me if it is still factually incorrect. To restate my update :

"Anyway, you need to watch podshow here as well as their Podcast Delivery Network when it is officially announced (is likely to) aim to deliver and enable podcasters (for free or a fee) all their bandwith, feed syndication, advertising and reporting needs - in return for either payment by the podcaster or some level of control of the monetisation (and other metrics) of the podcast."