Maureen Dowd, Now with 100% More Stupidity

September 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

In tomorrow’s NY Times, Maureen Dowd essentially blames Barack Obama for the craziness of the Tea Party and the rise of crazy people who are now running as Republicans for the US Senate:

Obama’s bloodless rationality has helped spawn the right’s bloodletting of irrationality. His ivory tower approach to the nation’s fears and anxieties about the economy gave rise to a tower of angry babble.

You gotta be kidding me. It’s stunning that the NY Times pays her a salary for these kind of stupid, intelligence-free turds.

There are so many things wrong with this, one hardly knows where to start. Is Dowd trying to out-insane Christine O’Donnell?

Calling Vanity Fair — would you please send Maureen back to Saudi Arabia for six months for another assignment on burqinis?

Filed Under: Uncategorized

In Case You Didn’t Know It, Video is Huge

September 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This chart (and related stories) released by Comscore got a lot of attention last week.

Facebook is now the #1 site in the United States as measured in “time spent” with 41 billion usage minutes per month. Google is now in second place, with 39.8B minutes, and Yahoo in third place (37.7B minutes).

It got me wondering: how do YouTube and other video sites stack up in terms of time spent?

First interesting discovery: based on the chart below from Comscore, “video” (meaning, YouTube) accounts for 37.5B out of Google’s 39.8B minutes of usage (math is: 144M unique viewers X 261 minutes usage per viewer). That means almost 95% of the time people spend on Google is spent on YouTube. 95%! Unbelievable.

But it makes sense. The chart above shows Google’s percentage share of minutes spent increasing steadily and rapidly from Q3 2006 onwards — right when they bought YouTube.

Given Google’s mission to capture more display revenues (partcicularly branded video display revenues) the value YouTube has provided is incredible. It was a steal — a steal — at $1.6B.

Wrap your head around that for a moment.

Total time watching video online according to Comscore is 154 billion minutes per month (177M people X 870 minutes per viewer), or 2.6 billion hours per month. Or the equivalent of 4 Facebook’s worth of usage.

While Facebook scores reasonably high in terms of total viewers for video on its site (43M), total minutes spent watching videos pales in comparison to YouTube and Hulu; roughly 866M minutes of usage, compared to 37.5B on YouTube and 3.3B minutes on Hulu and 2.7B on Vevo. (As an aside, I’m curious whether the Facebook measurement includes minutes spent watching embedded videos on Facebook, or just Facebook-hosted videos).

The fact that YouTube accounts for such a massive and overwhelming percentage of time spent on Google services is the thing that boggles my mind. Have I somehow gotten my math wrong?

UPDATE: One additional observation: unlike Google, minutes spent watching videos is just a small fraction of the time people spend on Yahoo! While Yahoo! is #2 in terms of reach, it’s a laggard in terms of minutes spent; just 755M minutes of usage per month, or 2% of the overall time people spend with Yahoo! services. Clearly an area where they’ll need to make progress if they are to compete for brand dollars in video advertising.

Filed Under: Digital Media, Google, Video

People, the New Distribution Platform: Part 1 of 3

September 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

One of the more interesting pieces of informational art to grace the web recently was this depiction of Gawker’s traffic growth driven by social networks:

via Allthingsd

There are a number of remarkable things about this graph: the heterogeneous array of social media sites, all driving relatively large amounts of traffic to Gawker; that Stumble Upon as a source of traffic is nearly as big as Facebook and growing; and that Facebook has become a much, much more important source since its introduction of a web-wide “Like” button last year.

But what the graph shows, above all, is that we’ve clearly reached the point where social media — or put in plain English, people sharing links and media and information with other people — matters.

People, it turns out, are the new distribution platform.

For most people who work on or write about the Internet and digital media, this is very old news. The evolution of social media platforms, from Delicious to Digg to  Twitter and Facebook, has been the focus of much commentary the past three to four years (including on this blog). But many people — including, I know for a fact, many media company executives — believe to this day that “social media” and “Web 2.0″ are just empty buzzwords without much relevance or real-world import to their bottom lines. The Gawker chart, emphatically, gives the lie to all that.

If you are an owner or maker of media, whether a blogger or broadcaster, you’re in the business of getting your content distributed. And in the coming years (perhaps decades) that will require you to enlist people to be your distributors — to share your content with their friends, or with people who have similar tastes and interests.

And so you’re faced with interesting new strategic questions. Do you rely on Twitter and Facebook to provide that distribution for you, on their terms and under their control? Or, do you invest building out social media distribution platforms over which you have more control?

Some media companies tried to address this question in 2006 & 2007, in the wake of the Myspace boom, by buying or building their own social networks. But almost all of these efforts conflated controlling a “social network” with “social media distribution.” They attempted to replicate Myspace and Facebook, offering their own proprietary “friending” platforms, instead of thinking more broadly about how to build different, more specialized social graphs around their content.

Newer companies like Quora and StackOverflow might suggest a better approach. Each are building very specialized social graphs around specific topics or categories (“content verticals” in the industry parlance). They utilize existing relationships and connections on Facebook and Twitter but then enhance them, building new connections between people based on interests, tastes, expertise. We are doing something very similar at Vodpod, by building a specialized graph around discovery of video online.

Over the next few years, I expect an explosion in services and companies looking to offer specialized social graphs. Media makers and owners need to decide if they want to own these capabilities, or outsource them.

In the next  two posts, I’ll address:

Part II: Why “Winner Take All” Doesn’t Apply to Social Graphs

Part III: The Facebook Effect: Why are people scared by FB, and should they be?

Filed Under: Digital Media

Chris Anderson: How web video powers global innovation

September 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Filed Under: Uncategorized

The Bogus Speech by Paul Otellini to the Aspen Institute

September 1, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I read about a speech Paul Otellini gave last week and this lead from CNET caught my attention:

Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini offered a depressing set of observations about the economy and the Obama administration Monday evening, coupled with a dark commentary on the future of the technology industry if nothing changes.

Rather than rely on the CNET report I first read (which was somewhat confusing), I decided to do some primary research and try to find his speech. There is a video here and a transcript here provide so helpfully by Intel.

Otellini spends several minutes bemoaning the current situation particularly in education:

The trends are worrisome.

At one time, the US could boast about the best students in math, science, and engineering.  Our research centers were without peer.  No country was more attractive for start-up capital or global investors.  We seemed a generation ahead of the rest of the world in information technology.

That simply is no longer the case.  Over the past decade, our competitors have focused on the very things that made America’s innovative economy the strongest in the world.

A study released last month by the college board noted that the US has dropped from first to twelfth in the world for people ages 25-34 with college degrees over the past 30 years.

I thought this was all a buildup to some praise for the work done by the Obama administration and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to fix this state of affairs. After all, initiatives like the “Race to the Top” have garnered praise from the Left and Right (and even Republicans who are convinced Obama is a Muslim) and have done more to reform the public education system in America than all other federal efforts combined over the last 40 years.

But nary a word about that. Instead, Otellini, in an ominous tone, said this (which is what got such attention from folks who reported on his speech):

Unless government and business take firm actions to improve education, create a culture of investment and job creation in this country, then the next Intel or the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here. And wealth will not accrue here. Ultimately, we will face an inevitable erosion and shift of wealth — much like we are witnessing today in Europe.

(I guess he didn’t notice that Germany is kicking our ass right now economically).

Turns out all this fear-mongering was really just a set up for Otellini’s central plea — America is in jeopardy because our corporate tax rate is too high. And like a petulant baseball owner who threatens to move his team to another city unless the public builds him a new stadium, Otellini essentially says Intel will take its toys and move abroad if the corporate tax rate isn’t lowered.

(As an aside, I’m inevitably stunned that folks like Bill O’Reilly and other dime store patriots never jump on corporate yellow-bellied traitors like Otellini who’d stab their country in the back, throw their countrymen overboard, and move their companies to China to increase their profits by a few pennies per share. I’ll have to come back to that sometime).

Otellini could have noted for balance and context that the United States has the one of the lowest overall tax burdens in the world (and the lowest among developed nations) as a percentage of GDP. And that our corporate tax rates are high because we have insisted on absurdly low individual tax rates and aren’t willing to contemplate other ways of raising revenue through things like a consumption tax. All policies lobbied for by folks like Otellini and his peers. But that would have required intellectually honesty.

It was the lack of logic, of intellectual cohesiveness, that was so striking in the end.  Otellini argues (1) that government ought to do more, particularly with regard to education; (2) fails to acknowledge the stunning achievements in just the last 18 months by the Obama administration on this front; then (3) says his taxes are too high and Intel shouldn’t have to pay for anything or they’ll move.

Why all this hyperventilating about one speech by some guy who is the CEO of Intel? Because people who know better seem to take him seriously, even though they ought to know better. For it’s pretty clear he’s just a hack and a shill for the Republican party and not some Sage of San Joe — at least when it comes to public policy pronouncements.

One last note: folks like CNET ought to learn to do a little reporting and provide some context next time. Even a simple sentence like “Republican and Carly Fiorina supporter Paul Otellini said in Aspen…”

Filed Under: Current Affairs, Internet, Politics

It’s What You Node

July 23, 2010 By 3 Comments

Chris Dixon has an excellent blog post up about social graphs — a must read if you’re in the social media or social apps space (Mathew Ingram wrote a nice follow up here on Gigaom).

Chris says:

In social graphs, the nodes are people and the edges friendship. <emphasis is mine>

And he goes on to suggest that we’ll see, in the coming months and years, new types of graphs around taste, endorsements, payments (“financial trust”), and local data. I think that’s right, but just partly.

The starting point for this discussion really ought to start with the node — that is, how and where we represent ourselves digitally.  Given  the gigantic success of Facebook, there is an implicit assumption that all our nodes are belong to Facebook — that it will be the primary place we express ourselves digitally —  and Facebook will thus own all the graphs that matter as a result (I think this is, essentially, the argument Mathew makes on Gigaom).

But for most of us, one node to rule all graphs just won’t do. Think about your interests, what you like doing, how you spend your free time, what your passions are, what music you like. Can you really express your full sense of self — all those things you both love and do — on and through Facebook, with your contacts on Facebook? Are your Facebook friends truly interested in all of the details of all the things you do and like?

For most, I suspect, the answer is no. In fact, one of the biggest complaints I hear from people about Facebook is how “noisy” it is — that we’re subjected to a flood of information from friends and acquaintances we really don’t care about. I care about my friends and their families and where they went on vacation. But I might not care as much about my friend’s obsession with, say, fly fishing. Or how much they just loved that Rush song. I suspect this is a large part of Facebook’s poor consumer satisfaction results compared to other services. Their rush to facilitate sharing of everything, instead of sharing by and between friends of things related to their friendships, has come at a cost.

We need different nodes to express all the things we like, all the things we do. Ironically, though we mock Google’s cluelessness  when it comes to social, the best research I’ve seen on this comes from a Google employee. Each of us has different interests and passions which we in turn want to share with different groups of people. It’s why many of us share some things on Facebook, others on Twitter, and more still on our blogs or other sites and services. We each need to express ourselves through many nodes, on many different graphs.

Indeed, we’ve already see plenty of examples of this: communities on Flickr for those into photography; or last.fm for people passionate about their music; or flixster for movies. Big opportunities still exist to create services that allow for distinct and specific expression of self combined with the right graph. And these opportunities don’t play to Facebook’s strengths, because so much of this is about expression and publishing — not just the graph mapping the nodes. Indeed, this may be where Google still has a few very strong cards to play with assets like Blogger and Buzz and YouTube.

We’re increasingly focused on building a very particular graph at Vodpod, based on our unique type of nodes — collections of videos, many of them very deep, many of them very focused.  For the first couple of years, we concentrated just on the utility of our service — making it dead simple to build a video collection, using your favorite videos from any site on the web, and to share it on your blog or elsewhere.

But now that we have attained significant scale (nearly 6M videos, nearly a million members with many thousands with very deep collections, 10M unique visitors each month, videos from over 17,000 sites) we have the opportunity to build one of these more specialized graphs. In our case, it’s about connecting you with the right collector so that you can get a video feed tailored to your interests and tastes. Whether you’re interested in soccer, politics, viral videos, technology, or electronica.

We’re now able to do this with increasing sophistication at Vodpod. For example, if you visit my collection and sign up from that page, we’ll recommend other, similar collectors for you to follow:

While we’ve enabled “following” on Vodpod for years, we’ve not focused on building out a graph between and around our video-centric nodes until now. The data represented in these nodes  – these video collections — enables us to do this in ways other cannot.

We started this effort in just the last week, and are beginning to see very profound results. Will we build a graph as big and as important as Facebook’s? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean the opportunity isn’t huge — we think we’re in a unique position to provide the best way for people to find and watch videos, via our members’ extraordinary collections and the graphs we’re building around those nodes. That’s nothing to sneeze at, and I suspect there are other, similar opportunities out there.

Filed Under: Digital Media, Facebook, Internet

What Washington Has Become

April 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

One of the myths propagated by the Right and by pseudo-moderate sympathizers like David Brooks is that Washington D.C. as home to legions of bureaucrats, an empire of regulators and do-nothings trampling on our freedoms. For example, this snippet from Brooks in the New York Times yesterday captures the mood:

But, alas, we are living in the great age of centralization. Some Democrats regard federal commissions with the same sort of awe and wonder that I feel while watching LeBron James and Alex Ovechkin.

That’s classic Brooks, with a Reagan-like constant anti-government drumbeat.  The problem is, it’s just so misleading.

For Washington has been taken over not by bureaucrats but by corporations.

I walked this morning to meet a friend for coffee at 1oth & New York Avenue, an area that was a devastated wasteland in the 1970s after the riots in 1968. There are now dozens of blocks covered with new, gleaming office buildings full of “Government Relations” departments from every major company in the US and beyond. It used to be the biggest outposts in town were for the unions (the big AFL-CIO building on 16th & I for example) and the lobbyists were constrained to a few blocks on K Street.

Drive out to Dulles Airport and the corridor is full of office buildings, mile after mile of them, from government contractors. Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, Boeing, and on and on. None of this existed when I grew up in the Washington suburbs in the 1970s.

Listen to FoxNews or Sarah Palin or the TeaBaggers, and you’d think Washington and these gleaming office buildings are full of ACORN workers sucking off the government teet, sending all our tax revenues to the poor. But of course the truth is these buildings are now home to thousands of corporate outposts looking for the government to goose their profits. The government host taken over by parasites from the financial, insurance, oil & energy, and health care industries.

Hardly a bureaucrat or regulator to be found these days.

Filed Under: Design, Politics

Tale of Two Cities

April 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Apple (blue, up and to the right) vs. Microsoft (red, flat-lined) stock performance since 2005.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

The Transition to HTML5 Video

April 10, 2010 By Leave a Comment

With the launch of the iPad, and Apple’s effective declaration of war against both Flash and it’s maker, Adobe, a lot of fanboys have been taking pot shots at Abobe and Flash (like a bunch of Steve Jobs mini-me’s!).

I’m no Flash (or Adobe) partisan, I just look at the facts. And the facts are that more video has been made available, and watched, online than ever before, almost all of it in Flash. Just look at the numbers. A lot of the video explosion has happened because of sharing — embedding of videos into our blogs, our Facebook pages, and through sites like the one we run at Vodpod.

In general, I would hope that most people think this has been a good thing. It’s fun to share a video through your blog or Facebook or Twitter or Vodpod; it’s fun to discover a new video through a friend’s Tumblr or Facebook page or Vodpod collection. If you do think it’s a good thing, take a moment to thank the Flash format — it made it all possible.

It’s clear, though, we’re at the beginning of the transition to an HTML5 world. In general, I think this will be a good thing. And in general, I think over time we’ll have as much video sharing through HTML5  as through Flash.

*************

But there will be some hurdles to cross first. And because of what we do at Vodpod, and the fact we talk to almost all of the major video players regularly, I thought it would be good to lay out some of the issues the industry is confronting:

1. Stream Security

The really cool thing in the HTML5 spec is that video is now a tag, just like an image. Awesome. But, you know you can right-click and save an image from a browser? You’ll be able to do that with video, too. Awesome, right? Well, not if you’re someone who doesn’t want your video to be saved and shared. Like Hulu. Or most major media companies. Or filmmakers.

Providing stream security is easier you’re hosting the video on your own site (a little javascript will do the trick). But harder if you want to make the video shareable. There will need to be some innovation in the coming months before people feel comfortable handing out embed codes for their videos in HTML5. And it may even take a few years before mainstream media companies get comfortable with this.

2. Advertising

A whole industry has been built around enabling in-stream advertising within Flash players. Few people love sitting through a 30-second commercial before that funny SNL clip; but that advertising is what has enabled so much video to be published online.

Will this happen in HTML5? Yes, but work still has to be done. Flash provides nifty player controls that make it a little easier to program in your in-stream advertising; support for that in HTML5 has to get built out. That will take some time.

3. Analytics

Another key thing enabled through the Flash player has been tracking and analytics. Video publishers want to understand how and where their videos are being watched. That’s understandable. Replicating this with HTML5 should be doable; it’ll just take some work. And that will take time, too.

The long-and-short of it is that there is a lot of work to be done before HTML5 video is as easy to share as Flash video is today. There are a lot of press releases out there being bandied about, talking about how folks are ready for HTML5. But dig a little, and you’ll find there are lots of holes.

*************

One of the smartest things I’ve heard in a while about all this was at a SXSW panel on HTML5 video led by Christopher Blizzard, head of developer relations at Mozilla (UPDATE — I should have also linked to this excellent post from Blizzard on the thorny format issues still to be resolved). He fielded a flurry of questions about some of these practical issues I’ve noted above and said (I’ll paraphrase here, and Christopher can correct me if I’ve got the paraphrase wrong) “People should look at HTML5 video as something new, and we’re excited or the new things people will do with it. Don’t look at HTML5 video as a replacement for something that you’re already doing with video on the web.”

And indeed, Firefox walks this talk; it will support both HTML5 video and Flash. It lets developers and consumers and video publishers decide which formats fit their needs. Isn’t that the way it should be?

*********

That the transition from Flash to HTML5 will ultimately happen I have little doubt. The big players are moving now. It just won’t happen overnight. And it may be a long time before you see video sharing enabled by major media companies in anything other than the Flash format.

The folks for whom this transition is hardest are all those video publishers out on the long tail. Sites like TeacherTube, fora.tv and Pitchfork.tv.  Those are the folks caught in the crossfire of this Adobe-Apple war. Flash — and a whole set of businesses and industries built to support it — has made it easy and simple to get videos published online, with advertising support if needed, and made shareable. Time, energy and resources will have to be expended to replicate all that in HTML5.

Apple could have acted like Mozilla. They could have provided robust support for and encouragement to adopt and use HTML5, but also included some support in the browser at least for the Flash plugin. That would have allowed all of us — consumers, publishers, developers — a say in which format worked best and how and when to move to HTML5. It would have made browsing on the iPad a much richer experience in the shorter term, while still pushing the migration to HTML5 in the longer run. I guess time will tell if it was the right call. (And it’s worth noting that almost everyone else — including Google and Microsoft — has made or is making a very different call, one like Mozilla’s).

In the meantime, this line from Brian Lam’s excellent iPad review continues to resonate with me:

I check my surf and snow sites and most of them work fine. Once, I see a video from some no-name site of the big storm that hit Tahoe with 50 inches of snow last week while covering the iPad launch in NY. It doesn’t work…. I bet that video was really good. Every time this happens, I get a little upset, which eats away at my affection for the iPad. This happened 3 times today, and will happen many more times before mom and pop websites get rid of Flash.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

The Tablet: It’s the Future of Entertainment (Not Computing)

April 10, 2010 By 3 Comments

I’m a week in to using an iPad. And I find that my relationship with this new device is complicated.

Take last night. I got home from work, and said to myself: “I’m going to use nothing but my iPad for the next 24 hours. No laptop.” That lasted for about 15 minutes; I was trying to write a business e-mail, and got so frustrated I gave up and grabbed my laptop. A minute later I was browsing the web with the iPad, and wanted to share a link with a colleague; it took me literally 10 times longer to accomplish that simple action. As I wrote last weekend, I remain convinced the iPad is not a machine for doing things.

But an hour after that, I had a completely different experience. I had played around with the Netflix app, but not yet watched a movie on it. So I crawled into bed, launched Netflix, and watched a movie. What a revelation! It was awesome (my ergonomic issues watching video solved by getting a case which you can turn into a stand).

This is really what the iPad is good for; at its essence, it’s a lightweight, portable, digitally connected screen.  It’s a passive device, one that gets better with less interaction. It’s not a computing device. Watching movies. Casually flipping through photos (or a simple magazine like publication).  Light browsing of the web. The best applications are those like Netflix (NPR is also good) that require the minimal interaction to set up a mostly-passive experience. And games — it’s a good gaming device.

With that insight, my reaction was: “The iPad is the future of entertainment, not computing.” But then I thought about it a minute longer. And realized that the tablet is the future of entertainment, not the iPad.

My experience with Netflix on the iPad will be available on a wide range of Android and Windows-powered tablets later this year. If I mainly want to browse the web, or watch movies, do I really need a $500 iPad, or will a $200-300 Android tablet do just fine? Is the AppStore really going to be full of one-of-a-kind applications I won’t be able to get on the Android? No.

This is where the decision to kill Abode and boot Flash is really likely to hurt Apple. With an Android tablet, I’ll be able not only to use Netflix, I’ll be able to watch all of the video out there on the Web.

Say I stumble upon a great SNL clip on the Huffington Post or a funny Daily Show clip on Talking Points Memo.  With the iPad, I’ll see a big blank space where the video is supposed to be (because, trust me, Hulu and Viacom won’t be supporting HTML5 embeds anytime soon). Maybe I’ll be curious enough to see if there is a Hulu app; install it (assuming Hulu builds such an app); launch it; search for that SNL video; and, finally, watch it. But really — look at the hurdles you’ll have to go through. Think about how you discover content — through blogs (Tumblr, WordPress, Posterous), links on Twitter to those blog posts, things embedded on sites you like and visit frequently, stuff in your Facebook feed or even on Vodpod.

Think about that experience on the Android tablet. I’ll come across the embedded Flash clip on the Huffington Post and guess what — it’ll play back just fine. Full screen, even. The video quality will be just as good.  This will happen on Android phones, too.

As a consumer, this is just better. And if the video is available in HTML5, that’s great too — the Android will handle that every bit as well as the iPad. The world will move to HTML5 video over the next 2-3 years; but it will take that long. The fact that that universe of programming will work just fine on an Android tablet, and won’t on an iPad, creates an interesting dynamic.

I’m convinced now that the tablet form factor will be increasingly important for the entertainment world. But I’m now much less convinced Apple will dominate that world, despite their head start.

UPDATE: I’m looking back at this post some 20 months later, and most of it holds up. But the big things I got wrong were (a) my view that the lack of Flash support would cripple the iPad and (b) that Android would seize on that missing thing and deliver a better tablet. Whoops! Jobs and crew were totally right to boot Flash, and my ranting about that was, in retrospect, well, stupid.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
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