the j. botter weblog

Update: You guys really gotta start leaving email addresses. If you want an invite, drop me a line (botter@gmail.com). I’ll get you hooked up.

I’ve got twenty invitations to NewsVine, and I’m giving them out on this blog. The only way to score one is to leave a comment on this post telling me WHY you want it. I’ll pick the best ones and send invites your way.

And boy, NewsVine is good. REALLY good. If Digg is worth $35M, then NewsVine is going to approach MySpace levels for a purchase. You can count on it.

I signed up for a MeasureMap invitation in either late September or early October.  I’m used to having to wait a little bit on these beta services; I understand that there’s a bit of a game in pushing the scale up when you have millions of bloggers who will sign up for anything with the “beta” tag attached to it.  It’s one of the “cool” things to do; sign up for the latest trendy beta service and advertise that you have an account on your blog so that you’ll be the envy of everyone around you and hopefully push your “status” up the list.  Bloggers are the ultimate marketers, especially when you are advertising a service aimed at Bloggers.
It’s nearing February, however, and I’ve never heard from MeasureMap.  I don’t believe I ever even got a confirmation email, nor anything correspondence updating me about the service and where they stand.  Maybe they don’t need to be in touch with users, but if I were pushing a new service that targeted bloggers first and foremost, I would probably do something about staying in touch with those bloggers.

The market for a stats package targeting bloggers is wide open.  People want to know more about what kind of traffic they bring and what kind of categories or tags are more popular than others.  WordPress.com has a great system (that’s powered by Google Analytics), but there are very few services aimed at people like me, who want a simple yet comprehensive overview of their blog.

MeasureMap could take a few pointers from Tara.

Bill over on TechCrunch asks the following question about TagWorld’s inclusion of video on the site.

What is the revenue model? And, moreover, what about google video?
Adding video to the social network is interesting, and fun, but how it’s going to be central to revenue generation is beyond me.

I’ll answer this as best as I can.

Video (and audio) works on social networking systems because users want to keep checking out what their friends are posting. Take MySpace, for example. I have friends who religiously change their profile audio and even add video via one of the many Flash-oriented “video codes” sites. It’s very much like blogging, in a sense, because these users are sharing what they’re currently enjoying with a network of friends and the rest of the world by default. Instead of putting current faves and tastes to paper like bloggers do, they put it via audio and video. It’s very viral in nature, because oftentimes those video codes and audio snippets will find their way onto the profiles of people in their network, and it continues to spread.

Personally, I don’t visit pages to see music videos. I usually have Greasemonkey strip that stuff out, anyway, so I won’t see it when the page loads. Ocasionally, however, I’ll see one that tickles my fancy, and I’ll end up doing a bit more research into it. I hate Toby Keith with a passion and I think he’s a bigot redneck (which might be the worst kind of bigot to actually be), but I did see the video for “As Good As I Once Was” on someone’s page, and I laughed a bit. Just a little.

So how does this translate into revenue for MySpace, or TagWorld, or anyone else who includes audio and video in social networking? Because they can put advertisements on the top of every page. It’s just like the rest of the web, where you’ve got advertisements on blogs and sites and whatnot, except you have a LOT more activity going on in a social networking site than you would on a normal blog.

Let’s say there’s three friends, okay? Two of them have videos on their page. They change out these videos all the time, sometimes three or four times a day. The friend who does NOT have a video on their page will still be checking out his social circle, and he’ll probably be interested in what the other guys will post next. This translates to a lot more pageviews on that profile, and therefore a lot more impressions on the ads that are placed at the top. 1GB of storage space is meaningless, even when dealt with on a scale of a million users, and the ad revenue that comes from those “repeat checkers” is going to blow any costs they might be dealing with out of the water. They can also add streams of revenue from folks who see videos on profile pages and then decide to buy a record from that band by sending them to the MySpace/TagWorld profile and having them purchase the record from there.

Make no mistake about it, there’s a lot of revenue to be had from allowing users to post videos. I would go one step further, even, by inserting a quick ad at the beginning or end of the video that users upload. There’s a monstrous ability to make money here, and they’re doing the right thing by allowing users to have a place where they can share video clips and audio, because it’s just another form of advertising.

Mike has some interesting tidbits about TagWorld over at Techcrunch.

My original post about TagWorld has been, by far, the most popular post on my tech blog here at WordPress.com. I’m not sure if this is because some type of buzz is building about the service or if TagWorld employees are reading to see what else I’ll say about it. I’m finding that the majority of Technorati searches leading to my blog are regarding the Tagworld category, which I’ve barely posted anything into.

My initial feelings about TagWorld are this: it’s a great service, and they’re making it better every day. It’s a bit confusing for your normal everyday user, which is why I don’t see it ever being real competition for eyeballs with MySpace. What they lack in ease of use, however, they’re making up for in features: today, the Tagworld team rolled out user video storage. Every single Tagworld user gets 1 gig of storage space, and you can upload just about any type of file you can imagine. If you upload video, you can share it with friends, or just use the vault as your own private storage locker. You can also “bookmark” videos on other video sharing services such as YouTube, and either share THOSE or keep them private as well. You can also stream videos directly from your locker into your Tagworld profile page, which means no more copying and pasting video codes from horrible sites for use in your MySpace account.

Can Tagworld take over MySpace? Nah. They’ve got over 500,000 users, but MySpacers are not going to abandon the service just because Tagworld offers more powerful control over your own material. 90% of MySpacers are people who just want to fire off quick messages and leave comments on other people’s pages, and MySpace is perfectly fine for a user like that. If you’re like me, however, you want more control, and Tagworld is offering that. However, I have no problems admitting that I’m in the minority and probably will continue to be so. Early adopters won’t make TagWorld a success; the only thing that can make Tagworld a success is if they’re able to pull some of those eyeballs away from MySpace, and I don’t see that happening on a large scale of any sort.

Microsoft Research Group Shot

I’d say this is probably the first thing I’ve seen from Microsoft in a long time that’s actually pretty cool and not a ripoff of any other service or program.

FeedLounge finally opened to the public today, and I bought a subscription immediately.  I love Bloglines and have been faithfully using it for six months or so, but the FL interface is so dang spectacular that it was only a matter of them opening it up to the public before I dropped Bloglines for good.

This is the best web-based RSS reader out there, bar none. I’ll have a longer review in a few days once I’ve gotten used to everything.

Being that I’m getting more and more into photography with every passing day (courtesy of my new Canon Digital Rebel XT), I’ve also been putting a lot of thought into switching computer platforms as well.

Right now I’m running a Gateway 7330 laptop, and I love it. The screen is beautiful, I’ve got it optimized to run like a charm, and I really have no complaints. I do photo editing on here quite painlessly via either Photoshop CS2 or, when I need something simple, Picasa. You know how people have certain machines or toys that they prefer above all others? I’m the same way with my Gateway. I’ve had zero problems with it, and it’s performed admirably.

All that being said, I want a Mac. Specifically, I want one of the new iMacs with the Intel Core Duo processors.

The reasons for this are many.

• I want FrontRow. Ever since I demo’d it at the Apple Store in Austin, I’ve been attracted to the ease of use and simplicity of design. I want to be able to sit back on my bed and control my iMac with a remote, be it for watching movies, listening to music, or checking out my latest photos.
• It looks sweet. Apple is known first and foremost for having some of the best designers in the industry, and everything they release from the iPod on down the product line looks strikingly simple and beautiful.
• The built in camera is just too cool. I guess I’m not big on video conferencing, but I *need* to be, especially given the blog network I’m preparing to launch. And again, the interface for iChat is really, really cool. I also like the virtual photo booth feature; going into those little vanity photo booths at malls is always appealing for some reason, and the iMac allows you to do it quite easily. I could easily foresee that thing becoming a center of attention at parties.
• Aperture. Need I say more? Apple’s product looks to be THE must-have software product for photographers who work in the digital RAW format. One of the things I love about Picasa is the simplicity; I’d love to be able to have something along those lines that’s geared more towards professionals instead of just regular consumers. I’m no professional yet, but I do want something that gives me that kind of power without the steep learning curve that Photoshop presents.

So what should I do? Make a complete switch? I’m never giving up my laptop, because there’s going to be times when I want to work in the Windows environment. I could easily, however, see one of the $1299 17-inchers becoming my primary computer for everyday stuff such as blogging and photo editing.

Thoughts?

Scobleizer – Microsoft Geek Blogger » Things I don’t do

Good list, albeit a bit short.  Since you asked for it, I’m going to list a few things that I won’t do, no matter how trendy or cool they may seem.

• I won’t write bulletins on MySpace that says all my friends will die if they don’t forward a message from Microsoft.
• I definitely don’t do Plaxo
• I’ll never sign up for a Xanga account.
• The same goes for Orkut.
• I’ll probably never finish my TagWorld page.
• I’ll never say no to a friend request on MySpace.
• I’ll never use a mixture of capital and lowercase letters when leaving comments.

After hearing all the buzz about it from friends, I really wanted to try out the new AIM Triton and see what the fuss was about.  I downloaded it, installed it, and tried to sign on with my screen name — and unfortunately, that’s as far as I get.  It hangs on “Validating” and never goes any further.

Is this thing still in beta?