eROI NYC Interactive Agency

I really want to try to view this from the corporation side…by “this” I mean of course Net Neutrality. I have spent a lot of time on this in August….but to really understand something you must look at it from all known sides and all known perspectives only then can you truly make an informed decision.  It sounds so easy but its really difficult to do . Because when I look at this thing from the corporate side I see full scale vertical monopoly.  They don’t just want the TV…the movie theater…the music….they want it all.  And that is never good for any of us.  I am reminded of the RATM lyric in Down Rodeo….”Fu*k the G ride I want the machines that are makin’ em.”   That’s exactly how we all should be looking at this. Don’t fooled by the shiny object on the screen….look past the entertainment. We all need the internet to be free.

So in the interest of truly understanding why this is important give Al 13 minutes to break it down. He pretty much nails it even if you hate AF you gotta respect his argument. Free Net Free Us.

Full Article

Jeff Mills, Director of Sales and Strategy at eROI sent this around a few weeks ago and I thought I would share. It was interesting to check out some of these sites now and notice the changes. Think about how Facebook alone has at least 5 times that many users. Remember these days?

A huge milestone for Internet video today…

 Silicon Alley Insider reports: 

• Google reached a record 100.5 million unique video viewers in October, up from 83.7 million in April (six months ago). YouTube drew 99.5 million of those viewers.
• Google viewers watched 53.5 videos each in October, up from 49.7 in April.
• Hulu reached 24.0 million unique viewers in October. They were so tiny they didn’t crack comScore’s top 10 in April, or even in July, the last time comScore released video stats (that we can find).
• The average online video duration was 3.0 minutes in October. Hulu’s was 11.6 minutes, the highest in comScore’s top ten.

We all know the dirty little You Tube monitization secret, but time after time it proves that Americans and perhaps the internet at large loves short stupid video snipits. I wonder how many hits You Tube would receive if the people watching had to pay for it. My guess is very few. So in honor of You Tube’s 100 million milestone here is my favorite You Tube video of all time. These kids = ridiculous

As if we needed the numbers to back this, Forrester Research put out a study saying that only 16% of people surveyed say they trust corporate blogs. Umm..duh right.

Alright, alright I guess its the study makes it valid now, but tell me the last time you read a blog by any big corporation that filled you with warm fuzzies and reminded you of the power and transparency of a blog. Mark Walsh [Online Media Daily] comments…”When it comes to gaining consumer confidence, company blogs are the used car salesmen of the media world.”  He goes on to comment that:

…companies should shift the focus back to consumers. That means using a blog to address customers’ problems, foster an online community, involve employees outside of corporate communications, and provide an authentic voice to discuss internal company tidbits and to respond to critics.

Point Walsh. As I thought about this I wanted to put it to the personal test. I decided to hypothesize and provide some examples of corporations that I thought, or should I say hoped had a blog that was “blogsponsible”. This is of course the name my new 0-5 point scoring system for the test. 0 being the lest “blogsponsible” 5 being the most. Here are my criteria…they got 1 point for the following:

Authenticity, Fostering Community, Addressing their customer’s needs, Recent and Up to date, and Easy to find on the web.

I decided to pick the blogs mentioned in the article and some others that I was curious about. Email me if you have some other ideas. Here are the results.

Walmart  = 1 

They get one point for being up to date, but for the most part its just a huge commercial for their products.

Johnson and Johnson  = 3 

They got a bad wrap in Walsh’s article, but I liked their blog. It seemed authentic and the entries were interesting. They addresses consumer concern with out sounding big brothery. Nice work JJ.

Apple = 0

It still amazes me that Apple doesn’t have a blog. Their secrecy and closed doors are weird.

 Google = 4

Of course I had to rate their blog. I am admittedly biased here as I read their blog at least once a month to see what the latest is, but its authentic, fun, provides info on products, intersting, and relevant

 Wells Fargo = 5

Go Wells! Wow I was very surprised by this big corp. They have a family of blogs that are actually pretty good. The design of the student loan blog is sick. They even have a blog for their second life island. But its not over done at all. They are all targeted and up to date and all have good content.

Exxon Mobile = 0

If they have a blog I couldnt find it. I gave it 10 mintues. Please let me know if you find one. There was a twitter impersonater though..Check it

Ok…this is obviously a cursory list and was more of an exercise than anything else. It was sweet to research though as I am not one to take time to read Corporate blogs. I certianly was surprised by what I found. Let me know of some other corproate blog’s that affirm or refute that Corporate Blogs Suck!

PS – I do realize the contridiction of this as technically this is a Corporate blog right? What’s my “blogsponsible” rating?

As the internet and its use grows so to does the amount of oppression associated with it. The power of the internet is so global and so immediate that it threatens those who don’t want their secrets out. Amy Goodman reported today that online journalists are jailed more than any other type. Keep up the good fight my fellow bloggers and writers even when those try to silence you.

Here is the brief report from www.democracynow.org:

Online Journalists Top Media Jailings

In media news, a new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists says more internet journalists are jailed today than journalists in any other medium. 45 percent of all jailed media workers, around fifty-six people, work in online media. Print journalists were next, with fifty-three currently jailed. 

Hey Nation,
I read a great column today by Dave Morgan of Online Spin and I wanted to share. He discusses the future of the banner ad and how it compares to other online advertising tools. Here is the meat of it:

Search will win:
Google is the world’s greatest yellow pages and it will continue to grow. Google has lots more small and medium-sized businesses to sell to, lots more national markets outside of the U.S. where it doesn’t have significant penetration, and lots to do yet to optimize the basic user search experience. In other words, it still has a lot of headroom to operate in. This crisis will certainly slow down the meteoric growth significantly, but given its ability to deliver ROI-based marketing, Google and search generally will still grow at a healthy pace over the next two years, probably in the 10% to 15% range each year.

Web video ads will win:
More and more users around the world are watching video from the Internet on their personal computers. The usage is accelerating, and there is nothing about the economic crisis that would make one think that this phenomenon will slow down. I certainly don’t. Video ads on the Web are effective. Whether they are more or less effective than TV doesn’t matter; the bottom line is that they work and advertisers like them. We will see more of them. While the category is still quite small, and no one has yet created a scalable model to monetize user-generated Web video content, I still think that this sector will grow 20% to 25% each of the next two years, just based on audience growth alone.

Rich media and integrated sponsorships will do all right:
While rich media and integrated sponsorships will feel the headwinds of the economy like other advertising, I do believe that advertisers and agencies will put more of their spend behind more impactful units, and ones that are proven to work, which both of these have been. For those reasons, I think that we will see rich media and integrated sponsorships collectively grow in the 5%+ area each year over the next two years.

Banners will lose:
In a flat industry with a couple of winners, someone has to lose. It will be the banner. It will continue to be the workhorse for performance marketers and will support many brand campaigns, but I think the pricing for banners and the overall ad spend allocated to banners over the next two years will drop considerably, probably 15% to 20% for quality content sites and 30% to 40% for undifferentiated sites and those taking pure performance programs each year for the next two years. It won’t be pretty.

Hey Nation,
I write this post after many conversations with @socialmedium about chicks on the web and how it all fits together. It seems that most of the time we bitch about girls that suck on the web and not girls that rule. That being said, I saw a great tweet today by my friend and party cohort @socialmedium and I wanted to do a piggy back post.
Here is a list of women in the industry that actually do stuff for the greater good. I am of course a feminist at heart and love to give props that the other half of the population.

(L to R: Leah Culver, Pownce; Rashmi Sinha, Slideshare; Dina Kaplin, blip.tv; Marissa Mayer, Google; Cyan Banister, Zivity; Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins, and Elisa Camahort Page, BlogHer; Caterina Fake, Flickr; Gina Bianchini, Ning; Kaliya Hamlin, OpenID; Mena Trott, Six Apart; and Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post.)

Props to all the girls who kick ass!

Hey Nation…I love hearing about how the internet evolves. Here is some crazy behind the scenes stuff. Posted by www.timesonline.co.uk:

A network of 100,000 computers providing the greatest data processing capacity yet unleashed has been created to cope with information pouring from the world’s largest machine.
The Grid is the latest evolution of the internet and the world wide web and computer scientists will announce on Friday that it is ready to be connected to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Scientists at CERN, where the world wide web was invented, created the €500 million Grid because they realised that a single computer would not be able to cope with the amount of data the LHC is expected to produce each year – 15 petabytes, or 15 million gigabytes, which would fill 20 million CDs.
It is designed for schemes where huge quantities of data need crunching, such as large research and engineering projects. The Grid has the kind of power required to download movies in seconds, and the ability to make high-definition video phone calls for the same price as a local call. More importantly, it should help to narrow the search for cures for diseases. However, it is unlikely to be directly available to most internet users until telecoms providers build the fibre-optic network required to use it.

The Grid allows scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, to get access to the unemployed processing power of thousands of computers in 33 countries to deal with the data created by the LHC. They said that it was an extra facility laid on top of the internet, which originally linked computers around the world in the Seventies.

Dr Bob Jones, a CERN scientist, said: “The [world wide] web allows you to access information on other computers. What the Grid allows you to do is not only access the information, but make use of their computing resources and power.”

He likened it to the National Grid. Users would be able to tap into massive amounts of processing power, but the source of the power would change, depending on availability. Processing tasks will be distributed between 11 gateway computer centres in ten countries, including Britain, which will share them out between more than 140 sites. One of the first jobs the Grid will tackle is handling the raw data for CERN’s experiments into finding proof of the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle.

Hey Nation,
I am not sure about you all, but I loved Family Guy from the first episode. That show just get’s it and week after week it makes me laugh. The fact that they constantly push the envelope with the FCC is probably why I like them the most…not to mention their relevancy to current pop culture and of course their great musical numbers.
Creator of Family Guy, Seth McFarlane, is now embarking on a new internet venture. The new site sethcomedy.com features ad supported comedy shorts. The content of the site is dubbed “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy” and is part of Google’s Content Network.

Currently there are only snippets on the site but it looks hilarious. The interesting thing about the venture however is the revenue distribution model. I could rehash it but Jacqui Cheng from arstechnica.com explains it well enough:

“As with much web video these days, episodes of the Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy can be shared with friends and embedded onto blogs and websites. The videos will be run on sites across the web, basically as both content and advertising. Each time a viewer clicks on a Cavalcade video or ad, advertisers will pay a fee that gets split between MacFarlane, Google, the production company partner Media Rights, and the site hosting the video. Media Rights declined in July to offer details on pricing for ads in the Cavalcade series, saying only that its rates are “significantly higher” than if the same ad was placed in AdSense alone. Whether or not you dig McFarlane’s style of humor, the novel approach to content distribution could help change how content creators and advertisers approach this kind of thing in the future. Videos don’t have to be limited to a kiddie pool of online destinations—paired with advertising, they can be blasted across the web as ads themselves.”

Nice work Seth and Google. Let’s see how it pans out. Here is one of the shorts from the site. Great stuff.

Nation….
Google is set to launch its new Open Source browser dubbed CHROME. News of the browser came from and “accidentally” leaked comic book aimed at promoting the new software. They hired famed comic book writer Scott McCloud to author the comic book. A pretty interesting way to introduce a product.
Check it out:

There are a ton of opinions on whether or not the browser will measure up but I gotta admit I am curious. I would consider myself a loyal Google supporter so I hope it really does raise the bar on search. Here is an excerpt from Google’s blog:

A fresh take on the browser
9/01/2008 02:10:00 PM
At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available — you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.