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JoCo Live

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Joanne is hosting a new live streaming show called Hollywood Now. Tonight she is interviewing some of the cast from Heroes, one of the most popular TV shows out there.

For her debut on Monday, Joanne interviewed R&B artist, JoJo and over 5000 people were watching live. I have not heard of another case where this many people were on all at once. Surely there must be some?

I was in one room that had a full 500 people in it and the chat was insane. As soon as I typed in the word “Hi everybody” it scrolled off the page before I could even read it.

There was an incredible moment where JoJo was singing a chorus “Yea, Yeah, Yeah” and then sang: “Everybody sing with me, Yeah, Yeah, Yea.. . .”

Everyone was entering in “yeah yeah yeah” in the chat – it was a hyper crazy collaborative experience that actually worked. Thousand of yeah’s scrolling to the live music. Pretty cool.

First time? You should give yourself a good 15 or 20 minutes to get the PalTalk player installed and find the room. Not an easy task, but well worth it in this case.

Next week she’ll be interviewing cast from Entourage.
Tonight and every Wednesday at 8pm ET – Link.

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China Online

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“Chinese military hackers have prepared a detailed plan to disable America’s aircraft battle carrier fleet with a devastating cyber attack, according to a Pentagon report obtained by The Times.”Link.

I like to keep checking back on ‘China’s effect on the internet’ and ‘internet’s effect on China’. Both of these terms in Google have nothing but posts from me and David Weinberger.

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Priority Web Traffic OK’d

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Net Neutrality takes a serious blow.

“The Justice Department on Thursday said Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic.”

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Social Graph

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Barcamp Block

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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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Stewart/Cobert Subpoenaed by YouTube

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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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Rocketboom No Longer Using Pligg

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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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nWhy do Video Networks Fail? One Reason: The Contentn

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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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Twitter Infestation

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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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Room for More Shows

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This week Rocketboom got shot down pretty bad by Michael Arrington while being compared to a new entry in the online videoblogging world, Webb Alert. The headline reads “A lot Like Rocketboom Except it’s Interesting”. This is the second headline this week announcing a Rocketboom killer. From a new series called Radar: “Webshow pilot takes on RocketBoom (and destroys it).

I see these kinds of headlines almost every week. I always hold my breath when I read them and get all mentally unsettled each time as I gear up to watch. It’s flattering to receive the comparisons yet also a bummer – even though its just a personal, subjective opinion, I’ve been in a funk all weekend on the Techcrunch article just knowing that they think Rocketboom is not interesting.

A lot of people have left comments to Rocketboom’s defense and many people posted about it to their own weblogs. Michael’s post received more comments than most of his other posts I think and the next day he posted again along with a defense for liking the show.

The sentiment that we all feel each time a new Rocketboom killer comes along (probably Michael’s feelings as well), is damn, it’s been almost three years now since Rocketboom came around and despite the explosion in personal media, we still dont have much out there that has struck a major chord. Our options for valuable, entertaining and independent information in a daily is really limited.

In the meantime, I dont think we need to pit Rocketboom against other shows like football teams, there is plenty of room for anyone who can put the pieces together. The harshness of the effect can be positive as it certainly helps to keep us trying as hard as we can – complacency is death – though there are positive ways of supporting growth.

While important comparisons to other popular shows like Geek Brief and CommandN (classics) can be made, the hope for Webb Alerts, which really does make it a compelling and fresh entry, is the adoption of a regimented, daily, regular schedule. That’s smart. Very few independent productions have been able to commit to a full time, regularly scheduled show and by doing so, the show enters into a wide open market with a lot of demand.

It will be important for this show to not follow in the path of a prior Rocketboom killer, Yahoo 9, which in my opinion is still weak for feeling fake on the “fake-to-real” feeling scale. With everything else in place, as long as Webb Alerts can develop it’s own personality with the writing and a personable presentation, it should become really popular in no time at all.

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