I was watching the chatter, and participating in the conversation, with great fascination. I’ve recorded some data using free social media tools (minutes after Obama left the stage), that look at keywords on twitter, as well as ‘traffic’ to websites of the runners. I rarely place much weight in any single use of these tools, but there is a clear trend towards Obama getting a great deal of activity. Is this telltale to the future? I’m not sure.

Above: Twist provides activity of keywords over last 7 days. I recorded this immediately after Obama spoke. No surprise that Obama frequency would be higher during this event centered on him.

---

Above: TweetVolume, date range unknown, making it difficult to place any weight on the value of this graph

---

Above: Tag clouds comparing the three keywords, interesting, but not telling much, other than idea association, of course, context is everything, so the terms could be used in a negative way.

---

Above: Blog Activity Over last 30 days, this is telling, Obama keywords much higher frequency.

---

Above: Alexa Website activity to Candidate sites, Obama has higher traffic

---

Above: Compete website activity to Candidate sites, again Obama

---

Related Forrester report from Josh Bernoff: The Social Technographics® Profile of Voters. Love to hear your analysis on this. Also, leave comments below if you know of other websites that are tracking the web strategy of the campaign.

Was this interesting? Share with others by Digging it. Also, see this analysis on viral videos.

30 comments

Measurement is important
I’m pretty particular about stats, measurement has always been pretty important, in the corporate landscape measurement is needed to help justify success (or failure) even if you already know something is working to executives. After defining ones goals, you should setup a measurement process to benchmark your progress.

Growth in referring traffic from Delicious and Stumbleupon
Lately, I’ve been noticing a crescendo in the referrals from both del.icio.us and Stumbleupon, websites, their currently the 5th and 6th top referrer yet again. Much of the traffic has been coming in my recent Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008, (Update: which has 578 tags on Delicious, and reinforcing comments) which would didn’t do well on Digg (more entertainment geared) I suspect that Delicious and Stumbleupon are more geared towards web professionals. Delicious is a social bookmarking site, where members can tag content, share it with others, and find similar information. Stumbleupon, provides content based upon behavioral matching; as one specifies likes or dislikes, it also recommends content that other members like you prefer. Both are like social based search, as you can see how people really think about your content and how they self-organize.

Others sources
Although there’s not been much change with the dominant referrers to my blog is direct visitors, then Google search, Google refferals, then Twitter, I’m noticing this increase in traffic from Delicious and Stumbleupon. Unlike Digg, which gives high levels of spike traffic, both Delicious and Stumbleupon are providing consistently growing traffic patterns and are often in my top 6 refferes

A Web Strategist should incorporate these tools
If you’re a web strategist, you should be looking inside of these tools, look up your content (and your competitors content) and see how the content has been tagged, commented on, and what members have said. You can both find influencers in your market, learn about how to create metadata, SEO, SEM keywords, and gather other intelligence. If you’re truly savvy, you should be tagging all your own content in both of those websites. More here: Web Strategy: Using Delicious for Marketing Research.

20 comments

Katie Paine shares how internal teams use measurement of social media, she’s been doing PR measurement for years, and has evolved to measure social media. She’s often told me “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. Of course, trying to manage social media has been hotly debated in my last post.

She invited me to present at her metrics conference a few months ago, but new hire training took priority. She’s one of the top thinkings and practitioners in the space, so give her your full attention in this video. Learn more about her company KDPaine and Partners, thanks KD for your time.

---

You may remember the video blog, Web Strategy Show I used to run at PodTech (my previous employer), the show is designed for those who make decisions for websites, (I call it a Video White Paper) and I interviewed many of the top thought and practice leaders in our industry. These videos tend to be longer in duration, I use a tripod, and we discuss the topics in advance. This is different than my quick “street” video shots I do with my digital camera.

Having left PodTech, (a great place for content creators, as I get to take my show with me) I didn’t get a chance to publish all my tapes (there’s just a few interviews left), and put out a blog post to see if anyone wanted to publish them on my behalf. Cece, from On24.com, a webcasting and media company for some well known brands, immediately contacted me and followed-up. They have a quite a few other videos focused on IT and Marketing topics, on Insight24. They’ve even created a specific channel for the Web Strategy show.

Thanks to Cece and the very professional On24 team!

2 comments

I had the pleasure to interview with one of the Web Analytics gurus, Jim Sterne, who is the host and coordinator the popular eMetrics conference that takes place around the globe. I asked Jim on the broadpicture of the web analytics industry, and he gave us some specific goals, strategy, and objectives for web analytics.

Find out how this growing (yet small) industry is getting underway, find out what you can do to get involved and get started into this industry. It’s a small niche and growing industry, so get involved and show interest.

At 14:00 minutes into it, we get into another discussion, focusing on web campaigns, and answer “How to determine where your resources go in a web campaign”. Many web marketing departments arbitrarily place resources on campaigns, perhaps focused on political reasons, but another way to look at where resources should go is by using web analytics.

---

You may remember the video blog, Web Strategy Show I used to run at PodTech (my previous employer), the show is designed for those who make decisions for websites, (I call it a Video White Paper) and I interviewed many of the top thought and practice leaders in our industry. These videos tend to be longer in duration, I use a tripod, and we discuss the topics in advance. This is different than my quick “street” video shots I do with my digital camera.

Having left PodTech, (a great place for content creators, as I get to take my show with me) I didn’t get a chance to publish all my tapes (there’s just a few interviews left), and put out a blog post to see if anyone wanted to publish them on my behalf. Cece, from On24.com, a webcasting and media company for some well known brands, immediately contacted me and followed-up. They have a quite a few other videos focused on IT and Marketing topics, on Insight24. They’ve even created a specific channel for the Web Strategy show.

Thanks to Cece and the very professional On24 team!

1 comment

I was able to interview Gary Angel, CEO of Semphonic on one of my favorite topics: Measurement. There’s three reasons why Social Media Measurement is important: 1) Proof: Companies deploying social media need to measure, as it’s a ‘new’ type of program. 2) Manage: You can’t manage what you can’t measure proves to be true, and lastly, 3) Whoever controls the measurement for this space drives the revenue, go to Ad:Tech and you’ll realize how important this is.

As this industry starts to standardize, Gary discusses his ‘functionalism’ framework that he’s put together, it standardizes a measurement methodology for any web template. Can a standardization be applied to any webpage? Gary thinks so. I questioned him if webpages can have multiple functions, hear his answer. His White Paper: Functionalism, A New Approach to Web Analytics (PDF), there’s a dozen templates listed in the framework.

---

You may remember the video blog, Web Strategy Show I used to run at PodTech (my previous employer), the show is designed for those who make decisions for websites, (I call it a Video White Paper) and I interviewed many of the top thought and practice leaders in our industry. These videos tend to be longer in duration, I use a tripod, and we discuss the topics in advance. This is different than my quick “street” video shots I do with my digital camera.

Having left PodTech, (a great place for content creators, as I get to take my show with me) I didn’t get a chance to publish all my tapes (there’s just a few interviews left), and put out a blog post to see if anyone wanted to publish them on my behalf. Cece, from On24.com, a webcasting and media company for some well known brands, immediately contacted me and followed-up. They have a quite a few other videos focused on IT and Marketing topics, on Insight24. They’ve even created a specific channel for the Web Strategy show.

Thanks to Cece and the very professional On24 team!

3 comments

I was sitting next to Avinash Kaushik, one of the top web analytics bloggers out there, he works for Google and evangelizes Google Analytics (which I use) and analytics at large. I was one of the folks that prodded him into blogging, and took this example to show him how I was using MicroMedia (Twitter and Utterz to start with). Since I missed his speaking session, I asked him to summarize his presentation. A while ago, I interviewed Avinash on the Web Strategy Show, I think it was one of the most viewed shows (second to Michael Dell).

If you’re passionate about Web Analytics, former Jupiter Analyst and current Web Analytics pro Eric Peterson is running a survey on web analytics, take the time to help him out, he often releases his data at his keynote presentations and his blog.

During the Mark Cuban keynote, I used Twitter to give real time alerts to my followers with just the high-level nuggets that Mark was saying, if you couldn’t afford to be there (Vegas can be expensive) this was a good way to hear the highlights. You can read many of the highlights still on my Twitter feed (it’s in reverse chron order).

So how do you measure the success of your blog? What attributes do you use to define that you’re blogging is time and resources well spent? Even if you don’t blog to make money, you still need to be mulling this over. I blog for thought leadership, which results in all kinds of great real world opportunities and gives me certain attributes to measure.

2 comments

Wow, I woke up this morning to find 70,000 viewers to this post, now on Digg. There are over 100,000 viewers to the image on flickr.

Interesting the traffic from this post completely outnumbers the traffic from the last time I was on Digg, the audience grows larger. The last time I was on Digg, it hit 8000 readers. It’s nearly 10 times that amount a few months later. If you’ve questions about SMO, talk to ACS.

Update: Here’s the traffic data from the Digg spike. I was averaging 1450 visits a day before Oct 11th and then it spiked to 55k and it’s still trailing off

10 comments

In the spirit of self analysis, Dennis McDonald often posts the top downloaded documents on his blog. If you don’t know Dr Dennis, he’s an experienced, and level-headed IT consultant that I’ve known and been communicating with since 2005 (I guess we were thinking ahead). In fact, we started a white paper in late 2005 called “Business and I.T. Must Work Together to Manage New “Web 2.0″ Tools”.

Although we wrote that white paper nearly two years ago, it continues to be downloaded and consumed (ranked number 6), as it’s finally becoming relevant to the enterprise workforce.

If you’re a new reader to my blog, you may be surprised to find out, that before I became so focused on social computing, I was actually an enterprise Intranet manager on the business side, and have worked on a total of 4 intranets, for some of my career, internal knowledge management was my passion.

Although I don’t have many docs on my blog, I logged into Google Analytics, and pulled this data.

Here’s the top 5 posts in the last 6 months:
The first was the blog index page, so I don’t need to include that.

Views are ‘page views’ and Attention is duration spent on post (very important), I’ve included other interaction elements too such as comments, add them up and you’ll get a sense of user engagement.

You’ll notice that for the most part, the traffic for these posts are not high, but it’s the interaction, the multiple comments, that make them stand out.

If I had more time, I would go into Delicious, Magnolia, Technorati, and Stumbleupon to find others tags, comments and metadata associated around the content.

For more information on social media measurement, check out this white paper I co-authored.

1) List of “White Label” (Applications you can Rebrand) Social Networking Platforms
The market is clearly hungry for this information. Techcrunch used it for their posts and analysis, and VCs refer to it before funding into this market I’m told.
Views: 19,520 Attention: 00:03:26 Comments and Trackbacks: 201

2) Marissa Mayar, VP of Google on The Future of Search and Announcing Google Gadget Ventures “We pay you $100,000″
Got on Digg.com, causing a tremendous spike and residual traffic of about 5%.
Views 12,079 Attention: 00:03:14 Comments and Trackbacks: 23 (although if you go to the Digg page there’s quite a bit)

3) Web Strategy: What the Web Strategist should know about Facebook
This was passed around, and repurposed on MarketingProfs.com
Views: 7,690 Attention: 00:03:13 Comments and Trackbacks: 68

4) Web Strategy: How to evolve your irrelevant corporate website
This went global and the community started to translate it into multiple languages
Views: 4,743 Duration: 00:03:35 Comments and Trackbacks: 78

5) The Many Forms of Web Marketing for the 2007 Web Strategist
I noticed that some of the reffere traffic for this comes from Stumbleupon and Delicious
Views: 3,765 Attention: 00:02:50 Comments and Trackbacks: 58

I hope you list out your top 5 posts for the last 6 months, it’s a good exercise to learn what’s worked for you, leave a comment when you do, I want to see.

5 comments

ComScore has released it’s usual monthly roundup of industry data based upon their 2 million user survey. Some of the highlights of the survey are:

Top five web properties
Yahoo, Google, Time Warner, Microsoft Sites, and Fox interactive media. No interesting change there, those are the typical big five.

Top advertisers
The leading Advertising networks are: Advertising.com, ValueClick, Google Ads, Tribal Fusion, and Blue Lithium

Web Campaigns and Seasonal Trends

“The Simpsons Movie drove traffic to the Burger King site, resulting to increase of 4.2 million customers or increase of 774%.

The release of several anticipated films including Transformers and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, traffic to movie ticket sites also propelled the tickets category up 12 percent to 44.9 million visitors for the month.

The month also saw traffic increase to car rental and ground/cruise sites as travel season continued its strong presence in the monthly rankings, while job search sites experienced gains as Americans sought summer jobs and new careers.” (Analysis by 901)

It’s interesting to see how the successful Simpons/Burger King campaign is doing. Rohit has a comprehensive list of how the Simpsons have been marketing themselves online.

No comments

Tim Kopp from Webtrends, one of the largest and oldest Web Analytics companies, shares with me the goal to measure Engagement, a term I’ve tried to define for some time. According to the news page on the Webtrends site, they are launching “WebTrends Unveils the Power to Measure Customer Engagement with Launch of WebTrends Marketing Lab 2″. They new product? It’s called “Score”.

“WebTrends Score is the industry’s only patented solution that measures and reveals which visitors offer the most potential value to your business. It’s a revolution in the measurement of visitor engagement that gives you the power to target your messaging, improve your conversions and build long-term loyalty.”

Engagement is a difficult attribute to measure (but highly coveted as the advertising dollars shift from TV to the web. For other videos, check out my interview with Eric Peterson or Avinash Kaushik of Google Analytics.

1 comment

Yesterday on a call with a client who’s a Fortune 100 company, the Web Strategist of a community program confirmed that The Corporate Website is Irrelevant and needs to evolve and his analysis of the web analytics agreed with that.

His Findings?
“Web Analytics revealed that users would spend more time (attention) on objective (product info content), and less time on subjective content (we are the best).” (paraphrased) The need to build a community site to return bring credible and authentic conversations to the brand was key.

I typically find the Fortune 1000 is more savvy than smaller companies who don’t have the resources to be as aware to the changes around them. That’s certainly a trend, but not a rule, as some smaller companies have really jumped on to social media.

There are four questions I get which really helps me to gauge the level of sophistication the organization is 1) What is it? (just starting) 2) Why does it matter? (waking up) 3) How do we do it (ready) 4) How do we measure (proving to management) 5) Let’s integrate (running).

Translators Needed
I’m seeking folks that can translate the Irrelevant Website post, it’s already German, Greek, and Italian. Can anyone translate to Spanish? Chinese? Japanese? or any other language?

6 comments

I’ve many friends that are in the web analytics space, in fact, I’ve interviewed many of the top names in that industry on my show. Web Analytics has it’s place, it’s important, and it’s only going to increase in value. Web Analytics is great for understanding what’s happened on the server in the past. The rest is inferences and educated guesses.

[Relying on Web Analytics ONLY for web decision making is the same as driving on the freeway, but only looking backwards]

The limits of Web Analytics
Web Analytics can’t tell us, why did someone come to our site, what they want to accomplish, what their emotional experience was like, what their eyes actually looked at, and what they told others later. But we’ve got to stop ourselves and realize that it’s only ONE form of understanding the direction of a website. In addition to using Web Analytics, the serious Web Strategist will be using other methods and processes to understand what users have done, and what they want.

A partial list of understanding users
While Web Analytics is important, there are many other methods that should be done to find out what users want:

-User testing
-Surveys
-Heuristic Evaluations
-Ethnography
-Search Logs
-Social Media listening (on other sites)
-And most important: just ask them (interviews)

Many other ways to understand users
This is not a comprehensive list by any means, as there are complete industries devoted to User Experience (UX), Human Computer Interaction (HCI), User Interface Design (UI), and Information Architecture (IA). The newest group to the bunch? Social Media Measurement, which measures what is said or gestured by who, when, and where. It’s assumed that the web user experience has spread off the website, so start planning accordingly. Web Analytics is limited in that it only measures the activity on your corporate site –not other areas where customers may be talking.

The User and Customer Experience has moved off your website
What are some other examples that your website has moved off your domain? There’s a list of third party extranets (yes, this impacts YOUR customer support site) and my theory that Web Marketing is not limited to two domains (your website and google search results).

5 comments

I’m here in Portland at the Internet Strategy Forum and heard a brilliant speech from Tim Kopp the CMO of Webtrends.

During his presentation he showed videos of the died coke and mentos mashup, and showed how the views and visits skyrocket up for coke.

The subject of Engagement has been discussed frequently, my own definition has been simplified to “apparent interest“.

Webtrends The product is called Score, and will be released in 10 days. Keep an eye out, we’ll see what this brings.

Also, I’ll be speaking at the eMetrics conference in DC on Oct 14th.

7 comments

To many marketeers and advertisers, nothing matters more than click stream data. While this has recently fallen under attack (as user engagement can be measured in ways that have nothing to do with clicks) there’s still a need to observe the holistic experience by using a wide variety of tools.

Crazy Egg is one of those tools for your chest to use in your ways of finding out what users are doing, and guess what? There’s a free limited version that can get you started on your homepage. Crazy Egg is a heat map tracker, which means it will help to tell you the story of WHERE your users clicked on your site and WHEN. This is yet another tool in the web measurement toolset.

“Crazy Egg makes it easy to: Test different versions of a page to see which works better, Discover which ad placement gives the best results, Find out which design encourages visitors to click deeper, Learn which content leads to improved sales”

Useful features: The overlay helps you to find out what was clicked and when did it happen? (after how long) The confetti tool was interesting, as you can clearly see exactly where users clicked on your site.

What did I learn?

I knew that my index page was used frequently on my blog (google analytics tells me this) and now I can confirm that they click on the upper left area of my banner.

I also learned that users click on the ‘more comments’ section on my post, rather than clicking on the title text, maybe I should bring more attention to that to make it easier to find.

People want to know who I am and often click on my profile link, but not my ‘face’ which goes to the same page, interesting.

Users also went to previous pages (down at the bottom of my blog), maybe I should display more posts per view.

It appears that users were clicking on the Guy Kawasaki ustream player

Please remember that this is just one tool of many that you should be using to gauge your website, don’t forget, the most important one is to just ask your users what they think.

I recommend you try this free tool for your blog, your company homepage, or consider expanding and purchasing it for major landing pages, another great free tool that should be in your arsenal of Web Analytics, Feed tracking, Google Alerts, and Technorati.

Recommended Reading

Handbook: Observing the User Experience (I’ve used this book quite a lot when I was a web manager)

All posts tagged User Experience

All posts tagged Web Analytics

Crazy Egg Dashboard

Overlay screen: After installing a script, CrazyEgg will track your site, and let you see a realistic overlay

Overlay screen with exploded flyouts that provide additional info

Heatmap shows high area of clicks on your site

This “Confetti” feature shows with pinpoint accuracy where users clicked.

6 comments

Website Analytics video by Newfangled Web Factory

This helpful primer video on web analytics by Eric Holter. Find out “What in the world is your website doing?”

If you want to check out some other videos, I’ve interviewed some of the top names in Web Analytics, see all posts tagged Web Analytics.

No comments

As you know there’s been a recent surge in new users signing up for Facebook, now that it’s open for anyone (not just college students like before). Comscore released some results, here’s a few stats that should be highlighted (and what they mean to us):

The largest segment area appears in the 35+ age.
Comscore didn’t break out that age group, so it’s somewhat skewed

The 25-34 age group (my range) has the highest percentage growth
I’m not surprised, most people I know are moving to Facebook

The average time spend on site per month is 130-200 minutes per user. that’s 2-3 hours
Of course, we know attention is a horrible metric to track as users can leave tabs open

Features and Applications will mature
While I’m being somewhat sensational with that title, I predict in addition to the ‘best friends’ API that let’s people poke, hug, and kiss each other, that we’ll start to see some practical APIs from investment groups, maybe a classmates.com plug in and other tools that let older demographics benefit from the network effect. It’s a good thing!

One example of that is already coming true, as Zoho has released an office application to use within Facebook. You can now created, edit and share documents (word processor, spreadsheet, and other tools) with your network of friends.

What would be really interesting if Sharepoint finally opens up and becomes relevant by having a play within Facebook, watch Sharepoint Buzz to find out if they ever do.

Facebook Predictions
By the way, have you read my predictions on the future of Facebook, LinkedIn, APIs and Identities? A lot of my predictions came true.

3 comments

A few days ago I questioned if Digg traffic would sustain a long-term growth. It’s been a few days after the spike of my post on Marissa Mayer’s keynote speech (I was the only blogger in the audience that posted in real time) and it paid off.

I live my blog traffic pretty transparently, (I mean, why hide it anyways) as a social experiment as I’m very focused on Social Media Measurement to see what works and what doesn’t. You can also see previous metrics I posted on the 1 year birthday of this domain.

Findings? I don’t believe that Digg traffic provides long-term sustainable traffic for the following reasons: 1) It’s more of ‘viral’ or ’spike’ traffic that hits and moves on 2) I’m not writing about the right content that the Digg audience cares for. I may be wrong, are any of you from the “Digg Army” and have stuck with me?

While I see a little bit of a long term effect, I can’t conclude that it’s a direct result of Digg traffic. I don’t see any growth in feed subscriptions either. Maybe there’s a long term ‘imprinting’ type of effect that may happen if one gets on Digg over and over, but I doubt that will happen in the near future.

Above: Click to view a screenshot of Google Analytics, and see bump from Digg.com: Nearly 12,000 readers in 48 hours.

Above: The free service Alexa has a similar trend, although it appears more smoothed out

Above: little uptake in subscribed readers according to feedburner (which the pro account is now free for everyone)

16 comments

Nick Denton at Valleywag has some an excellent resource of which social networks are dominant in which country. Sadly, the map doesn’t have China, the largest population on the planet.

Although a bit dated, Read Write Web has a list of the top Chinese websites (be sure to click on the other countries listed). When in Singapore last week, I asked some of the top bloggers what they thought were the top websites in Asia.

2 comments

Digg traffic is notorious for a huge spike then a return to normal traffic with residual effects. Last night Julio Garcia text messaged me that I was on Digg from coverage at Searchnomics conference. I noticed at the Marissa Mayar keynote that I was one of the few or only bloggers that were live blogging, I guess my hard work paid off.

I’ll guess that 5% of this traffic will stay with me over the next week, but it you’re here because of Digg, stick with me if you want to learn about Web Strategy, how companies use the web to connect with customers. I think that I was submitted by my new friend at Pro Net Advertising, who you should consider hiring if you like traffic.

I live my blogging life pretty open, and I’ve published a link to my traffic today, as well as my stats for the last 12 months. I don’t have “A-list” traffic, but I’m ok with that.

Look for me today on Zooomr TV, I’ll be heading over to the Palo Alto Apple story for the circus.

Update: I’m getting reports that people are having a hard time leaving comments on my blog, and some IE users are getting an error that says “Stack error at line 7″. When I look at my source code, that points directly to the javascript line of Google Analytics. I think this is just due to this Digg traffic, so bear with me. This is the first time this started happening that I know of, so I’m hoping it will go away.

3 comments

I just saw Robert Scoble sitting outside of the Palo Alto Apple Store in a PodTech beanbag, he’s going to spend over 30 hours there with his son Patrick for the iPhone. Other PodTech media was there as well as CNN and other large media networks.

I’m here at Under the Radar at Microsoft campus in Mountain View, and sitting next to Chris Pirillo again. He was a judge this morning. I got hear about 1pm, so I missed the earlier companies that were presenting. Half these companies won’t be around in a year, but it’s still interesting to see all these business models developing.

CrazyEgg
CrazyEgg presented, they’re a user experience analysis company that tracks clicks of users. It displays this in a heatmap, while clicks is a powerful thing to track, the ability to track eye movement is also very valuable.

Cruxy
Cruxy, it’s a website that anyone can upload any file, There’s players tools and widgets to embed this in your own website, so you can sell through widgets. Its started by two guys in Brooklyn. The opportunity is if their widget can help trade and sell media content in different networks. They’re using Amazon’s S3 services.. They have a hook into virtual worlds. So what is it? it’s online data storage with network hooks. No offense guys, but this seems like a feature, not a product, the one chance for success? pure widget play.

Vidmeter
“The online video analytics authority”. Two products, vidmeter 100, and vidmetrics. They can show the top videos of the day. They can make money by selling this service to social media marketers to find out which video is playing well in which video network. They scape data from the video network sites (like YouTube, Blip) or they have agreements. Emphasis that the company is a services company, also announced a partnership with Veoh.

Visible Measures
“New metrics for internet video”. They provide intelligence about video by obtaining data from different sources, mainly third party. They have some proprietary analysis and statistics. Seems like they want to move into the comscore and nielsen market. Out of the four companies list here, this is one that I would invest in. I’m not sure if I should add them to my list of companies that measures social media, as I’ve not fragmented it out by video.

Fora.TV
“The world of thinking. FORA.tv delivers discourse, discussions and debates on the world’s most interesting political, social and cultural issues, and enables viewers to join the conversation. It provides deep, unfiltered content, tools for self-expression and a place for the interactive community to gather online.”.There are public events around the world, and they aggregate them. The quality is higher than youtube, the content is somewhere between PBS and Cspan. One of the judges suggested this content is not that exciting.

Splashcast
Splashcast lets anyone be a star. Three steps: 1) upload media, 2) personalize it 3) broadcast. They provide access to a vast amount of content, they can edit it, and then distribute it to their network. For example, facebook users can embed a splashcast widget into their site, which will provide lots of content. The judges asked how is this different than brightcove over a year ago. Great content + Great Tools + Great Distribution.

Ustream TV
It’s live interactive video for everyone. Live and interactive is interesting because it helps the users shape the content and that’s engaging. usream is looking for partners, distribution, viewers, content creators, advertisers, and sponsors. I’m on the board of advisers of ustream because I’m a big fan of their service. Challenges from host and judges: How can we make lifecasting interesting? Is is about live or recorded? What tools are you providing to allow users to promote. Local TV is a natural evolution for this. The biggest challenge is getting good content.

Zattoo
Watch live TV on your computer. Virtual cable network for you PC. Launched in May 2005. “Zattoo is live TV on your PC - it’s the football game as you chat, the news as you email, and Lost as you pay your bills. Zattoo is also TV when you don’t have a TV - it’s the channels you want, when you want, where you want”. These guys are right in the same space as Joost.

5 comments