Category: General

Content Is No Longer King: Curation Is King http://bit.ly/bEExRk Parallels some of my own long term thinking.

I’ve long thought that curation is becoming at least as important as the content. If content that’s perfect for my interests exists but I can’t find it that’s no help to me, or the creator. How we

Then, the web came along and blew that up. Kaboom! Now content has gone from being scarce to being ubiquitous. Bloggers make content. Flickr photographers make content. Facebook posts are content. Tumblr publishers make content. Content isn’t King because it isn’t scarce. It’s everywhere, it’s overwhelming, and it’s gone from quality to noise.

Boxee Looking to Get Hollywood Content With RoxioNow Deal http://bit.ly/amE5ZA Boxee’s on a roll even though the hardware is delayed.

Important step for Boxee: having that direct access to premium movie content will make the service that much more valuable. Boxee already does a good job of indexing and making available web video. Hulu keeps blocking them, though.

Boxee is looking to expand the amount of premium content it has available with a deal that could soon enable its users to purchase feature films. Boxee is integrating Sonic Solutions’ RoxioNow video platform into its software as a way to gain access to a wider range of film titles — including new releases and major Hollywood hits — from content providers like Blockbuster and Best Buy.

Adoibe drops 64bit Flash for Linux http://bit.ly/acbHEM I thought they liked open standards (like Linux) 🙂 Flash is 32 bit currently although browsers are heading for 64bit. Plug-ins and host have to be in the same architecture so Flash will have to be a 64 bit plug-in for 64bit browsers.

ArsTechnica comments:

It’s likely that the push for 64-bit compatibility took a back seat while the company focused on improving support for mobile computing products. Flash’s notoriously poor performance and excessive energy consumption have kept it from making inroads on handheld devices. Adobe claims that the new 10.1 version, which was released last week, will address these long-standing problems

HTML Gaming Engine http://bit.ly/aZ61ut Another way HTML5 can compete with Flash.

If you’re upset with Apple for not letting Flash games (in a browser) on the iDevices; then do it in HTML5:

Do you remember being really impressed by the initial Aves game engine that uses Canvas and HTML5 technology to deliver a compelling social gaming platform on Web technology? Well, now the Dextrose crew are back in action having released their second prototype of their upcoming browser-game middleware at E3 2010 in Los Angeles:

iAds get 6x the click-through of ordinary ads? http://bit.ly/crIncN All the way up to 1.5%! Annoy 98.5 people for every one interested!

I generally dislike ads that are irrelevant to my interests, which is 99.99999999% of all ads, so I don’t really like them. Fortunately I can tune them out on the web with ad blocker and Click to Flash, but ads in applications worry me.

Fortunately the iAd format doesn’t appear too intrusive when you want to ignore them in an iApp and seem nicely done, but let me tell you any developer that puts ads in a paid app is not getting my business. I pay with attention (ads) or with money, but I won’t pay with both. Let’s not repeat the mistakes of Cable TV.

Anyway, it seems the early testers are clicking through at up to 6x the normal rate: between .9% and 1.5%. That means, for every 100 viewers of the iAds only 1 will click through. And that’s considered a good result? By extrapolation, that means that normal ads get one click for every 600 people that are subjected to the ad.

No wonder 70% of Americans want to pay to avoid advertising, and yet we don’t get appropriately priced options to do that.

40% of Revision3’s shows watched on web connected TVs http://bit.ly/aboYHr Well, geek audiences will likely have geek TV setups!

While a great number for Revision3, it probably doesn’t portend too much of a trend, at least not yet. Revision3’s shows tend to appeal to tech-savvy people and they’re much more likely to have a web-connected TV. I guess our Apple TV setup would qualify as the Revision3 shows would be downloaded via iTunes on one of the Macs on the network, and then streamed to the Apple TV and then to the big screen TV.

Only thing is the Apple TV has to be hacked to make it really useful (sorry Apple but there is content not in H.264) and you need that little Apple TV Fooler Applescript to fool it all into working.

Apparently I am a geek.

If there is geodate with tweets and checkins, then cross correlating a crew list’s tweets and footage would give location metadata!

The news that Twitter was adding more location data (aka metadata) to tweets (because location is data about where the tweet came from) set me thinking. I want to be able to capture useful production metadata – like location – without any effort on the part of assistant or editor (or producer).

So I set to thinking that if we cross-correlated the Twitter and Foursquare identities with the production, we’d be able to roughly guess location from the concentration of tweet or check-in locations. Wouldn’t be GPS accurate, but possibly enough to differentiate from one setup to another? (Or at least location to location.)

Probably won’t happen for privacy reasons, but it’s fun to think about. (My kind of fun.)

A Web-a-thon to fund a web series? http://bit.ly/az2jXF Anyone But Me plans to give it a go.

While the first two seasons of Anyone But Me were funded by a private investor, show creator Susan Miller said via phone today that said investor contributed to the show’s production only to give it momentum in its initial launch. “We now feel obligated to pursue [a third season] without tapping that resource,” she said. “People don’t have unlimited funds, after all.”

Knowing this going into season two, at a Strike TV panel last December Miller said that she and co-creator Tina Cesa Ward were considering a subscription model for the third season. But they’ve since changed their minds, and instead, Miller and Ward are initiating a donations program, but with a twist: On July 27-29, they’ll run a video “web-a-thon” to engage with fans and solicit their contributions.

Why not give it a try, I say. It might work!

Will Tiered Pricing Lead to “ProxyNets” and Destroy The Universe? http://bit.ly/c35alS INstead of more revenue, no customers for Telcos?

A very interesting take on how increasing cost for data on mobile devices could ultimately lead to an almost complete drop in revenue to the Telcos because networking would be all peer-to-peer, what Shelly Palmer is calling ProxyNets.

You can think of this network as a self-assembling, self-healing, invitation-only social media sharing network on steroids. It won’t need the Internet or any phone network because it will simply connect to whatever device invites it to connect; hence the idea of a Proxy Network or ProxyNet. I really wanted to call it a “Subnet” because it’s a network that exists under the radar. But, subnet is a term of art in the network world and it has a very specific and very different definition.

Any way, the end of the world comes in the following form. People download the ProxyNet apps and they start to form personal networks that almost mirror their social media networks. This happens automatically. Want to think about it in a contemporary way, think about Foursquare or Twitter. If a ProxyNet app simply connected to your friends’ devices when you were in proximity to them, you would not need the Internet or a phone company data network. The WiFi radios in the devices would do it all.

If this were the case, it would be easy to imagine five hundred students in a Junior High School whose smart phones and laptops are all connected to each other, but not connected to the Internet. The students would decide to share everything 1) ’cause they could. 2) ’cause it’s free. You can’t get into the network unless you’re invited. You can’t shut down the network because it doesn’t really exist. You can’t get the identity of anyone on the network because they are hidden by proxy (in the true network sense).

Independent Filmmaker’s take on bittorrent release of his film http://bit.ly/cJaT6a Only doc filmmaker making money back, thanks to ‘breach’.

In the Filmmaker’s words:

I contacted the uploader of my film and asked she spread a message of support with the torrent, asking for donations if a viewer likes the film and explaining that was a self-financed endeavor. The result? I received many donations and emails of support from those who downloaded the film, but I furthermore believe that viewers spread the word of the film to their non-torrent-downloading friends and that DVD sales increased due to the leak. For me, the torrent leak was ultimately “free advertising”, and I am the only truly independent documentary filmmaker I know making his money back this year.

Only bad or mediocre films need fear unauthorized distribution? According to Sam Bozo.