Leading Information Technologies

So there’s an important distinction developing among “user generated content” sites — the distinction between sites that permit “true sharing” and those that permit only what I’ll call “fake sharing.” A “true sharing” site doesn’t try to exercise ultimate control over the content it serves. It permits, in other words, content to move as users choose. A “fake sharing” site, by contrast, gives you tools to make seem as if there’s sharing, but in fact, all the tools drive traffic and control back to a single site. In this sense, YouTube is a fake sharing site, while Flickr, (parts of) Google, blip.tv, Revver and EyeSpot are true sharing sites. Fake Sharing Sites YouTube gives users very cool code to either “embed” content on other sites, or to effectively send links of content to other sites. But never does the system give users an easy way to actually get the content someone else has uploaded. Of course, many have begun building hacks to suck content off of the YouTube site. (On the Mac, I’ve used TubeSock to do that). But this functionality �” critical to true sharing — is not built into the YouTube system. True Sharing Sites By contrast, ever other major Web 2.0 company does expressly enable true sharing. * Flickr, for example, makes it simple to download Flickr images. (See, e.g., here.) * blip.tv explicitly offers links to download various formats of the videos it shares. (See, e.g., here.) * EyeSpot (a fantastic new site to enable web based remixing of video and audio) permits the download of the source and product files. (See, e.g., here.) * Revver (the site that enables an ad-bug to be added to a video so the creator gets paid when each video is played) builds its whole business model on the idea that content can flow freely on the Net. (See, e.g., here.) * And even Google increasingly enables access to the content it creates and collects. Its fantastic Book Search project enables people to download (funnily formatted) PDFs of public domain books. (I know this link used to work, but now that I’m in Germany, Google is obviously not permitting me access to the work because it is so insanely hard to know whether it is in the public domain anywhere else.) And I am told (though I’ve not yet seen how to do it), Google Videos can be download to a machine. This difference, I suggest, in business models should be a focus of those keen to push the values of Web 2.0. Though Tim O’Reilly’s canonical statement of those values implies this freedom is necessary, it doesn’t really expressly say so. The freedom to access the content seems, in my view, related to the Web 2.0 principle that “the service automatically gets better the more people use it.” Or at least the right to access it if the author chooses (another Web 2.0 principle: Some Rights Reserved) seems essential for this ethic to make sense. As O’Reilly puts it, “Design for ‘hackability’ and ‘remixability’” — precisely what hoarding content doesn’t do. If YouTube is a trend, this is a depressing turn. No doubt, that amazing company has a billion things to think through (including what to do with more than a billion dollars). But one thing it really needs to keep in focus is a very important part of its success: That it was seen to respect the ethics of the web. Why post on YouTube rather Google Video? At least some did so because YouTube was “cooler.” Whether it continues to be as cool depends critically on the values it practices. UPDATE: Joi has a fantastically thoughtful followup on this.

from The Ethics of Web 2.0: YouTube vs. Flickr, Revver, Eyespot, blip.tv, and even Google #

CDC Corporation has launched the integration of Google Click-to-Play Video advertising on China.com; On the English Channel of China.com, Google’s click-to-play video ads will be accessible to both large and small advertisers and will provide brand advertisers with a richer and more engaging format to communicate their messages.

“Google’s click-to-play video ads are user-initiated, so that the quality of the user experience is preserved. As a result, advertisers get more engaged users and qualified leads,” said Johnny Chou, President of Sales and Business Development, Greater China for Google.

“Google’s click-to-play video ads and China.com English Channel working together represent a significant opportunity in servicing the needs of the foreign community in China,” said Mr. Fang Donglei, Acting Chief Operating Officer of China.com Inc. “The introduction of Google’s click-to-play video ads to China.com reflects the success of the first stage of our partnership. We will continue to provide access to the massive China audience sought by Google and in turn, provide the leading technologies from Google and other industry-leading partners in the world to our users.”

On On To Social Marketing An E Biz Theory #
The relationship between social networks, search engines, and blogs mirrors what we already know about the word of mouth function in the real world, except it is much more efficient in cyberspace.

Mobile phones offer plenty more than just voice these days. They can provide news, video clips, local weather and even restaurant recommendations.

Problem is, many customers can’t figure out how to access all that information. That’s where companies like Google and Yahoo, along with a slew of start-ups such as InfoSpace, JumpTap and Medio, see a big opportunity. These companies are developing tools that allow users to search for content. And they’re starting to test search-based advertising to help generate revenue.

"When there were only 10 ring tones and a handful of other sites on the carrier deck it was simple," said Iain Gillott, an analyst with iGillott Research. "But now there’s 10,000 ring tones and it’s really hard to find what you want. It’s like walking into Wal-Mart with only the aisle numbers to guide you to what you want to buy."

Mobile search and the advertising business models that have been proposed to support the service are sure to be hot topics discussed during the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association’s (CTIA) semiannual trade show here in Los Angeles this week. The CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment show begins Tuesday and runs through Thursday at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

As revenue from their voice services continues to decline amid pricing pressure, mobile operators are counting on mobile video, music downloads and other data services to make up the revenue difference. But so far, most of the 190 million wireless subscribers in the United States have not downloaded content onto their phones or surfed the mobile Internet looking for content.

Mobile tracking firm M:Metrics said that only about 15 percent of U.S. wireless subscribers, or about 28 million people, downloaded some type of multimedia content during a three-month period that ended in July. And the Yankee Group estimates only 18 percent of wireless users in the U.S. have even tried surfing mobile Internet, with 6 percent saying they consider themselves regular mobile Internet users.

There are likely many reasons that explain why American wireless subscribers aren’t downloading content and surfing the mobile Internet. The services and content may be priced too high. Users may be uncomfortable with the small form factor on the phone. Some experts also believe that people simply cannot find the content they’re looking for quickly.

"Surfing the mobile Internet is still hard," said Eric McCabe, vice president of marketing for JumpTap. "The wired Internet didn’t really start to explode until search tools like Google made it much easier to find things online."

Experts warn that creating search applications for mobile devices is completely different from creating them for the PC. Smaller screens, rudimentary navigation tools and tiny keypads not optimized for typing all make mobile search very different from its wired equivalent.

Users are also more impatient when they’re using their mobile device to access information than when they’re sitting in front of a PC. They don’t want to wait for screen downloads, and they aren’t willing to look through dozens of search results on multiple pages to find what they want.

Controlling the content
But the biggest challenge for mobile search is likely not the technology but figuring out an appropriate business model. In contrast with the wired Web, in the wireless world the operators themselves control what content users can access.

Most mobile operators offer subscribers a menu or "deck" filled with the carriers’ own content that has been supplied through deals they have made with news organizations, record labels, TV networks and other content producers. Carriers generate revenue by charging for subscriptions to packages or premium content. They also get a cut of revenue when users download content from their decks.

Some carriers allow subscribers to leave their decks to surf the mobile Internet and purchase content, but they still control access to outside content.

"At the end of the day, the carriers make the business decisions," Gillott said. "Some will continue to be very restrictive and others will be more open to accommodating outside content and outside brands."

Managing editor Mike McDonald of WebProNews filed this exclusive look at the SES 2006 San Jose session on social search.

Chris Sherman opened the session by defining social search, calling it a collection of Internet wayfinding tools informed by human judgment. That judgment takes place in the form of tags, click-through activity, search history, and other actions.

That may be as good as the definition gets for some time. There isn’t a standard definition for social search yet, and a lot of companies big and small would not mind being the ones to shape it.

Sherman credited World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee with being the first to create a guide that was the earliest form of social search. At that point, search engines were inefficient; algorithmic search methods had not arrived yet.

Fast forward from 1990 to 2006. Social search is having an impact. "Increasingly we’re seeing search engines coming out with personalization efforts," said Sherman. "That data is going to be fed back into the loop and impact the general search."

"What search engines are doing is saying, ‘hey lets tap into this huge resource of user brainpower’ to improve search results."

What is Social Search?
One can split up what social search is today into several categories:
Shared bookmarks (Delicious, Furl)
Tag engines (blogs RSS - Technorati, Bloglines)
Collaborative directories (ODP, Prefound, Zimbo, wikipedia)
Personalized verticals (Eurekster, Yahoo Search Builder)
Collaborative harvesters (Digg, Netscape, Popurls.com) that focus on news, etc.
Social Q&A sites (Google Answers, Yahoo Answers, Answerbag)

 
 
Social search has hit some problems along the way. The scale and scope of information has grown so much that automation, like Yahoo Search, has had to take the place of the original hand-edited manual directory.

"I’m not sure people, even millions of people, ARE going to be able to keep up with all this information," said Sherman.

The ambiguity of language has led to tagging issues. "On the Web we don’t have controlled vocabulary, even if we did, we aren’t going to use it," Sherman commented, and he is right about that.

Human laziness and search spider dumbness make things difficult, too. But the worst problem comes from those who exploit whatever they can online for personal gain - the spammers.

http://www.msdewey.com/

Interesting…

Husband and wife team Edwin Ong and Alex Vikati first met at Stanford, and then founded a company together called Filefish in 1999. They raised $4.6 million in venture funding in 2000, and the company was acquired by Oracle in 2003.

Now they are preparing to launch their second company, CastTV. It is an ambitious effort focused entirely on video search. And that’s not a bad place to be. As we’ve recently written, rich media search is a very hard problem to solve.

A notable success in video search is Truveo, which launched in 2005 and was acquired by AOL in early 2006 for an estimated $50 million or more. Truveo had a unique way of searching video content. First, finding video can be hard, and Truveo does a good job of locating video on indexed web pages. Second, Truveo looks at text surrounding video links, as well as metadata included in the video file itself, and makes intelligent assumptions about the video.

CastTV is taking many of the successes of Truveo and building on them. Search itself is significantly better than any other video search we’ve seen, and the user interface, which includes really smart filters (more on that below), makes it easier to find what you’re looking for, fast.

Edwin and Alex won’t disclose all of the technology behind the service, but part of the trick is that they are able to track videos through multiple links on a site, collecting metadata along the way. And they also parse the code on the video files as well, gathering additional information about the content. If tags are available for the videos (such as YouTube tags), these are indexed as well. The final step is actually even more interesting - CastTV will take the data they are able to collect about a video and search the web in general for additional data. If there’s a close enough match, CastTV adds that information to the content metadata. And unlike other video search tools, CastTV indexes movies and shows from iTunes and other for-pay services.

All of this doesn’t mean much unless the search performs well. In tests I was able to find full versions of movies and tv shows that simply didn’t show up in Yahoo, Google or Truveo search. A free episode of 24 at a Myspace Burger King page. Full versions of Pirates of the Caribbean 2 with price comparisons ($14.99 at CinemaNow, $9.99 at iTunes), as well as available formats (WMV and Quicktime). Searches for trailers, movie and show clips, and user generated stuff all yielded equally impressive results.

Results can be sorted by shows (to weed out non-relevant stuff), host (such as itunes, CBS Innertube, etc to focus on a favorite service provider), by date, relevance, prices, etc.

Look for CastTV to launch sometime in the Fall, and in my opinion be acquired shortly thereafter. In the meantime you can sign up on their home page to be emailed when they launch. If you’d like to see founder Alex Vikati demo the product in person, make sure to attend Jeff Clavier’s Search SIG event next week in Silicon Valley. She’ll be there, along with other hot video startups.

Additional screen shots below.