Month: August 2007

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I’m off to San Francisco and then 37° 26′ 34 N, 122° 9′ 40 W and surrounding blocks for Barcamp Block.

Everytime I see the Golden Gate Bridge I wonder how Joseph Strauss convinced everyone that it could be done. It would of been interesting to see how he got everyone to sign off on the idea.

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Regarding the suit against YouTube brought on by Viacom (MTV, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, etc.), Larry Neumeister from the Associated Press writes: “YouTube didn’t say exactly what it intended to gain from questioning the Comedy Central comedians. Colbert hosts “The Colbert Report,” a spin-off of “The Daily Show,” which is hosted by Stewart.”

It seems clear to me that YouTube would like the court to hear Stewart and Colbert’s perception of the harm vs. gain argument. It’s hard to imagine that the widespread distribution of the Daily Show on YouTube could harm or take away from the show’s value compared to the massive PR gain that drives traffic back to their program along with elevating their cultural relevance.

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NYC Videoblogging Meetup tonight at 6pm at the Rocketboom studio. Any and all are invited to come meet with local area videoblogging enthusiasts.

For the first hour, everyone will take 2min to introduce themselves and their project(s) and then we will discuss three of these projects in-depth altogether as a group. For the second hour, we can just hang out and chat.

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Pligg is for sale. Though I mentioned before that we adopted Pligg on Rocketboom, we actually wound up adapting some of Pligg for Moveable Type, and forked off the rest.

Jamie got almost everything we needed so far into just a couple of pages.

I actually just started participating in Digg myself. Im slowly ramping up but I feel a major swing coming on. I think YouTube and Digg are my top two favorite websites on the internet right now.

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**UPDATE: Scoble not leaving Podtech (I edited to remove the misunderstanding out of the post).

I read an article where CEO John Furrier states an additional $2 million had been invested in the company in the middle of July which he expected to last only “a few months”. Wow. What are they doing over there?

I don’t know any of the details as to why the company is not making it except for the one I could always see myself and I believe it’s the most important part of a network: quality of content.

The network has about 20 shows they list on their website. Have you heard of any of them? Aside from The Scoble Show, quick, name another show. . . Yea, I always have a hard time with that question too. I’d rather see the new networks making it but they are mostly missing that important role of creating compelling content that will resonate with enough people to sustain and grow.

Podtech is clearly a tech company. Pod. Tech. From what I can tell, they never had anyone in their company that was a professional and experienced video content producer. And not just someone but someone with good taste who can understand how the content will fit in with everything else that is out there.

First adopters are techies and the new networks have the DNA of Silicon Valley all over them. Where is Hollywood in this thinking? Content is business mostly driven by professional content creators, not the technology industry. The problem is biconditional. The traditional studio are not listening to the technologists very well on how to support the flow of their good content. There needs to be more of a collaboration.

When we take a moment to step out of the 2.0 bubble and have a look around, its easy to see that the power of the moving image is not going to burst. Online video, personal publishing, content – this type of stuff is not about today’s shiny new gadgets and Ajax. When the iPhone becomes an archaic collectors item and Facebook and YouTube are only known by the old and stodgy, people will be still be creating content that will strike a chord in a big way and there will always be a big market for it.

I’d rather see the new networks making it but they are mostly missing that really important role of being able to identify compelling content that will strike a chord in enough people to sustain and grow.

** update 8/12: Allen Stern has some good suggestions. I also want to be clear that I believe all the content on Podtech is valuable – the greatest value is not about popularity and monitatiztion. As always, its truely sad how money hampers us.

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The relatives filled up the ‘ol email box today because they saw me on MSNBC Nightly News last night. The story was about email bankruptcy. You can watch it here (doesn’t seem to work on Apple browsers). What’s my advise on how to deal with email overload? “Eh, not sure yet.”

Thanks to Apple for featuring Rocketboom on the front page of iTunes this week!! Ive been a quintessential Apple fan forever but for good reason, they have the best interface, best design and push innovation like nobody’s business. Ive yet to review my iphone though to give you some idea, I finally stopped carrying my blackberry last week (‘been using gmail and flipping the board sidewise for speedy thumb typing). A+++ I remember well when the idea was but a dream.

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Today I received the following in my email box:

Yep, Twitter blog spam. These kinds of sucker fish latch on to the RSS feeds of others and then repost the same exact information, but with surrounding contextual banner ads. They set up each website once and then it all happens automatically. Whoever sets the site up can just check their bank account each month to see how many click-thrus they got. The more blogs they can set up, the more they can automatically make.

I figured this stuff out because there are some spammers that regurgitate Rocketboom feeds too, though I have always reported them to Technorati and Google Blogs (currently there is just one or two).

The Techcrunch article Rocketboom was cited in got regurgitated by over 40 different spam blogs (BTW, thanks to Paul L. for pointing out a comment from Michael Arrington clarifying that “Interesting” just meant “Interesting to him”).

You can imagine Techcrunch is happy to have 40 blogs per article link to them just to start with, let alone all of the other blogs that link to them that are actually intentional. Thus the auto-blogs have an easy time existing and perpetuating because they increase the link status of the fish they are feeding on.

One of my favorite blogs in the world, Gizmodo, probably has the most spam blogs attached to it that I have ever seen. Here is a headline from yesterday that has 70 links (over 50 spam links) with the same exact headline, “Jet-Man Is So Cool It Hurts“.

What should be done about this? Anything?

**update: Rex Hammock calls these kinds of blogs “splogs” (in a comment on Heather Green’s Business Week column). Splog is actually short for “Spam Blog”, I’m just leaning. It seems that they are in fact often created by the bloggers themselves for link authority. I guess when applied to Twitter it would be Spit Splogs.

It would make an interesting study to see how the ranking of Technorati might change without all the fakes.

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