This is a nice collection of comparison web sites.
I'm going to enjoy reading more from probargainhunter.
Stephen King
It's Not TV, It's Web TV A scene from the 25-episode Web series "Stephen King's N."
Correction Appended
When I think about Web series, I tend to think: Well, I can go to Hulu.com and watch "Lou Grant" free. Why would I watch "Ask a Ninja" or "Hardly Working"?
Links to Web Series
- Gemini Division (nbc.com)
- Stephen King's N (cbs.com)
- Get Hit (ifc.com)
- Sorority Forever (thewb.com)
Justin Hartley and Rosario Dawson in "Gemini Division," which unfolds in short chunks.
That's grossly unfair and reflects, unflatteringly, my age and generally mainstream taste. It's also true. If someone were making "Seinfeld" right now and putting it online a week at a time, I'd be there. (If I somehow stumbled onto its existence.)
But as my colleague Virginia Heffernan pointed out in The New York Times Magazine on Aug. 24, serialized Web shows are popping up faster than ever, partly as a result of the recent writers' strike. (She has posted a handy list of current series at her blog, themedium.blogs.nytimes.com.) And the television industry, hedging its bets, is heavily involved in the format, even if the most notable results so far - remember "quarterlife"? - won't remind anyone of "Seinfeld" or "Lou Grant."
Many "original" series on network Web sites are simply marketing tools for television shows. And a look at a few current, more truly original Web series with television connections demonstrates that if you're not packaging "Big Brother" outtakes, it helps to have an independent revenue stream. Nielsen isn't covering these things yet.
Hence "Gemini Division," the first four episodes of which can be found at nbc.com or more easily at geminidivision.com. It's a generic science-fiction thriller, in three-to-five-minute chunks, starring Rosario Dawson as a New York cop on vacation with her boyfriend, a vacation that goes bad in so far not very interesting ways. It's also a series of ads for Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system, a futuristic version of which opens each episode, locating Ms. Dawson's character on a 3-D map of Paris.
"Gemini Division" is the work of Brent Friedman and Stan Rogow, the executive producers of a more established sci-fi Web serial, the creepy "Afterworld" (afterworld.tv). They have some interesting visual ideas (which you can see them talk about in the many "Gemini Division" behind-the-scenes extras) having to do with recreating the feel of comic books on screen.
But perhaps because of the cost of hiring a known actress like Ms. Dawson, the execution is lacking. The actors are pasted on top of static photo images of hotel rooms and Paris landmarks, and very little animation has been done beyond the annoying use of graphics to indicate that we're actually watching video transmissions from Ms. Dawson to a friend back home. It's like watching "Sin City" or "300" without the digital effects, which - need I say? - were just about the only reasons to watch those movies.
Over at cbs.com the product placement is the product in "Stephen King's N.," a 25-episode series that serves as a teaser for a new short-story collection from Mr. King. (A combined effort of CBS, Simon & Schuster and Marvel Entertainment, it's available on a bunch of Web sites, including nishere.com.)
"N." is entirely animated, and it's great to look at, as you'd expect from the comic-book artists Alex Maleev ("Daredevil," "The Crow") and José Villarrubia ("Promethea," "X-Factor"). For aesthetic or financial reasons, or both, their naturalistic, autumnal drawings don't move; instead the camera slowly pans over or zooms in on them. This isn't a problem, given the episodes' roughly two-minute running time, but it gets tiring if you watch 20-some episodes in a sitting, as I did.
(Oddly enough, waiting through the commercials at the beginning of each snippet didn't bother me. I could have avoided them by going to YouTube, but the lower video quality and ugly viewing environment there - still insulting after all these years - made the ads at the CBS site seem palatable.)
What "N." really demonstrates is that the Internet could use more Stephen King. The story, involving therapy, obsessive-compulsive disorder and an evil presence trapped in a New England field, is C-grade King. (It was adapted for the serial by Marc Guggenheim, a creator of "Eli Stone.") But it still has enough narrative pull to drag you from snippet to snippet, even when there's less than a minute of new material.
The Web series are less promotional and more plentiful at the Independent Film Channel (ifc.com), where "Web series" is the first button at the top of the home page. The sensibility here is a lot closer to that of sites like funnyordie.com and collegehumor.com than it is to prime time's. One of the current serials, "Get Hit" (ifc.com/gethit), has a cleverly nonsensical premise: it's a six-part, step-by-step primer on how to make a successful viral video, presented by the creators of a (fictional) crotch-kicking video that drew 1.6 trillion hits.
The comedy duo of Peter Blomquist and Jeff Wiens bring a surprising level of commitment to their video-geek roles, and it's endearing somehow to watch this sort of sophomorically funny material done without the winking condescension it usually receives. In one of the better jokes they fawn over the YouTube star Liam Sullivan, who then dismisses them as losers. When the auteur of "Shoes" (19.6 million views and counting) calls you a loser, should you consider it an insult or a compliment? The question is wisely left unanswered.
There's a lot more where these serials come from, and even more on the way, as television networks join other media companies in throwing things at the Web wall to see what sticks. Mr. Blomquist and Mr. Wiens have already done a follow-up to "Get Hit" called "Watching Web TV," which will be shown on ifc.com.
Even defunct networks are getting into the act. The WB may be dead but thewb.com was reborn last week and will carry a serial called "Sorority Forever," beginning on Sept. 8. Produced by the big-deal filmmaker McG it stars a familiar face from the short history of Web serials: Jessica Rose. In the compact timeline of the Internet, "lonelygirl15" has already become Ms. Rose's Schwab's drugstore.
http://www.goldstar.com/ free and discounted tickets with e-mail address.
www.Laist.com pencil this in and get out.
www.LAOKAY.com Free places to go.
www.tvtickets.com | Audiences Unlimited
Thanks Rich Demuro for listing these on www.KCAL9.com
The most innovative, entrepreneurial minds in journalism have focused their efforts on collaboration
Will Algorithms Make Human Editors Obselete? Not If Journalists Collaborate
That's the brilliance of Google - it's actually driven by human judgment, by the judgment that someone producing a website makes every time they link to something. Rather than replacing human judgment, Google is actually co-opting it. But Google isn't co-opting the judgment of most journalists and news orgs - because so many of them still don't link to anything. (Notable exceptions notwithstanding.)
From ReadWriteWeb
Written by Bernard Lunn / October 8, 2008
Mahalo popularized the term "human powered search" when they launched just over a year ago. Many of the pitches we get still use that term as part of their positioning. Many of them are bootstrapped, so the price of entry is clearly low. But the upside has not yet been established. In this post we look at the pros and cons of human powered search engines in general, look at some differentiating strategies and ask "what is the future for Human Powered Search?"
Old Wine In New Bottles?
When Mahalo first launched, my instinctive reaction (which I recorded on my personal Blog) was that this was "old wine in new bottles". Traditional publishers have been doing "human powered search" even BI (Before Internet) but these went by boring names like Directory. Human editors work great in well defined niches, always have done and always will. Human editors produce the expert content that Google finds for you. This is long tail publishing. This is Business Media and Enthusiast Media, large but slow growth traditional publishing segments of the media industry.
But an Internet scale venture powered by humans rather than software? We look at three reasons why this might work and two reasons why it won't work.
Three Pros And Two Cons
Most ventures in this space highlight three things that a human editor can always do better than a software program. These are the three Pros:
1. Spam control. Humans can easily spot even the most ingenious spam .
2. Duplicate control. 10 articles that all say virtually the same thing are just a waste of time.
3. Disambiguation. Computers need an awful lot of expensive programming to always spot the difference between "apple" as a fruit, a consumer electronics company or a record label. Humans can do it in a flash.
The two Cons:
1. You cannot persuade people to break their Google habit until your searches are better than Google for most cases (not just the few cases where you specialize). This massive hurdle is true for all search engines.
2. You cannot win as a destination site if you are general purpose. You go to the sites that specialize in the areas that interest you. If you don't know what sites to go to, Google will find those sites for you.
So, do three Pros beat two Cons? Not in this case. The Pros are three relatively minor irritants that human powered search fixes. The Cons are total showstoppers.
Pay People To Write Content?
Mahalo pays people to create content. That means they can predict the quality of the results. Paying people requires lots of funding. Mahalo has plenty of funding and it is unlikely anybody else will get funded with the same model. So Mahalo has a fairly long and clear runway before take-off. Mahalo is private company so we don't know how long it will take them to get to profitability or even if the basic economics make profitability feasible at all. In today's climate, nobody will buy Mahalo without a clear path to profitability.
Are you Bullish or Bearish on Mahalo? Cast your vote in our Company Index (powered by TradeVibes). My vote was Bearish and I was in the majority at the time I cast my vote (80% Bullish vs 20% Bearish). The sample size on that vote was too low to be meaningful (40), so the more votes the better.
The Elephant In The Community Generated Content Room
Most other ventures get "the community" to create the content. The elephant in this room is of course Wikipedia. How on earth do you get general knowledge content that is better at scale than Wikipedia? How do you motivate people to create content if, unlike Mahalo, you are not paying their salaries? Google's answer with Knol was to pay them indirectly via Adsense revenue. The market jury on Knol is still out. If Google cannot win, how can any other start-up without their brand power? If the Knol competitor also monetizes through Adsense, their margin is even less.
About The Players
The other well funded venture that wears the human powered search label is Wikia. Founded by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame, this looks like the largest pure Wiki style venture. Content is community generated, but it appears that they have editors/moderators/curators on payroll.
Squidoo looks like a bootstrapped venture. It is hard to tell if it has traction. Looking at Squidoo's page on TradeVibes will point to many other inexpensive Wiki style ventures. The basic technology of Wikis is now a total commodity.
One of the earliest ventures, About.com, is now owned by the New York Times. On my survey of one, About is the one site other than Wikipedia that surfaces a lot in general knowledge type searches. At the scale they operate, it may well be profitable. So Mahalo, Wiki and other human powered search engines may have a bright future.
What do you think? Can general purpose human powered search engines scale and make money? Or will they either fail or move into small niches? What new ventures have a fundamentally differentiated approach to this market?
An innovative tool aims to help users search the Internet together.
Social software is proliferating online, but many of the most common Internet tools, such as search engines, are still used in isolation. "These tools are designed for a single person, working alone by him or herself, but that's not always the way that we work," says Meredith Morris, a researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research. People planning travel with their spouses, she says, or students working on research projects with classmates all too often find themselves repeating work others have done or fail to find sites that others have identified. Morris is designing a tool that could begin to help with this problem.
Called SearchTogether, the tool is meant to help groups whose members are working on different computers, whether they're all logged in simultaneously or one at a time. The tool is a plug-in for Internet Explorer 7 and requires a Windows Live ID to use. Once all the users have the tool installed, Morris explains, if one of them wants to initiate a Web search, she can invite the others to join her. The tool tracks the work done by the group, making it easier for the initiator to assign tasks and for group members to keep track of what they've done.
Before designing the tool, Morris conducted a survey to find out what problems plagued people trying to search as a group online. Among the problems she identified were redundant effort and inefficient communication about results.
SearchTogether is designed to reduce these problems by storing all the queries group members have entered, Morris says, and by tracking comments they make about the pages they find. The search initiator can also use the tool to divide work among group members. For example, the initiator could send half of the top 25 results of a query to one user and half to another. The users can then investigate the results without duplicating each other's efforts. If the search becomes relevant to someone else in the future--for example, if a family member wants to take the same trip that a group previously planned--new users can be invited to the project, where they see the stored queries and comments.
If users are searching simultaneously, they can use SearchTogether's "peek and follow" feature to view the pages others are looking at and to write each other instant messages as they explore the results of their queries.
Morris says that she's interested in adding features that could give users more-sophisticated sorting capabilities. For example, if a doctor and a layperson are searching together for information about a health problem, the tool might automatically send all highly technical results to the doctor.
Madhu Reddy, an assistant professor of information services and technology at Pennsylvania State University, says that in his studies of collaborative information seeking, he's observed that the search problems Morris has identified are very common. Many groups struggle to split up search tasks effectively, to keep all their members aware of what the others are doing, and to bring their results together at the end. A particular challenge, Reddy says, is that a lot of group interactions in the real world are gesture based. A good collaborative search tool, he says, would compensate for the loss of gesture--when, for example, a group member wanted to point out a single item on a Web page. Reddy also sees a need for tools that allow users to tap into others' expertise in navigating different pockets of online information.
Reddy says that one factor to take into consideration is "that we really don't know how people collaborate; we're still starting to develop the empirical research." He says that tools will need to be designed to support different types of searches. "You can envision anonymous users working together across continents," he says, "which is very different from teams working together in organizations to solve problems." Morris's tool, Reddy says, seems well-suited to general users working together over a distance. Reddy's own team is also developing a multiuser search engine.
Morris's interest in collaborative search extends beyond SearchTogether. She has also worked on designing a tool that helps multiple users of the same computer search as a team. An early version of SearchTogether will be released this spring.
Copyright Technology Review 2008.
I love the title of this post. This is where I got it:
http://www.scribemedia.org/2008/08/13/is-bigger-better-not-in-a-digital-...
Big companies talk the talk when it comes to adapting to the digital age. But do they walk the talk? It's difficult to reconcile their desire to be nimbler - and more responsive to their customers - with the fact that at big companies budgets are generally scheduled a year in advance.
What's more, when consumers are increasingly driving the dialogue online about products and services it may be problematic for big companies to be part of the conversation when they deploy a top-down strategy. Athur Ceria, founder and chief creative officer of CreativeFeed Network, says these sorts of business practices are fast becoming antiquated and may be deterring large enterprises from capitalizing on digital technologies.
Ceria has blogged about the need for big companies to think small if they want success in the digital world. He stresses that, for many large companies, process has started to infringe on creativity.
Big companies grappling with the Internet need to embrace a "sense of discovery," said Ceria, who has worked with Cisco, Intel and Yahoo, among other major brands. A sense of mission and a sense of awareness are also crucial if big companies want to take advantage of the Web. I recently spoke with Ceria about why bigger is not better in the digital age - and how large enterprises need to change if they want to stay in the game.
I also chatted with Ceria about trends in Web design. Ceria, who has an MFA from Yale University with a focus on graphic design, says far too many companies still treat their Web sites like a "brochure," rather than a living, breathing "organism" that is part of the company's DNA.
Enjoy.
I would speculate that there's so much information out there that no other organizational tool can manage the volumes of content that people online "consume." Search has become an essential utility for almost all internet users.
Pew: Daily Search Usage Approaching Email Levels
According to a new report from The Pew Internet & American Life Project, daily use of search engines is growing and starting to approach email usage levels. New research conducted by telephone among 2,251 US adults, age 18 and older, found that 49 percent of internet users use a search engine on a typical day, compared with 60 percent for email.
In 2002, Pew's data showed that about 30 percent of people online used search daily.
What about sites like www.chacha.com ? Interesting that he didn't include these in this article.
ToAnswer: Twitter Meets Yahoo Answers
Erick Schonfeld from Techchrunch
One of the ways people use Twitter is to ask a question to a large group of people at once: "Does anyone know a good recipe for Lobster Bisque?" "What are the best games for a four-year-old's pirate birthday party?" "What is the best tech conference to attend this year?"
Whether or not you get a good answer depends on how many people are following you and how smart they are. It's not like Yahoo Answers where there are millions of people coming to look for and answer each other's questions. But what if you could combine the two: ask questions via Twitter and find answers via a dedicated Website?
That's what ToAnswer
is. It's the project of Chuck Harmston, a lone Web designer in Mesa, Arizona. (So try not to pound on it too much). You ask questions by sending a Tweet to @toask, and then anyone can answer the questions on the site. Now, if only the service would Twitter you back every time somebody offers an answer, then I'd be impressed.
A post on TechCrunch yesterday suggested ChaCha was cutting the pay rate of its human guides to save costs as a prelude to "implosion." When I had last spoken to ChaCha the company had presented a very different picture so I decided to investigate and contacted co-founder Brad Bostic.
Some of the stats below are impressive... (CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE POST).
Here's a range of information that www.ChaCha.com provided to me:
* Millions of queries per month
* 90% month on month query growth from Jan-June
* Over 10,000 new users per day
* Over 25,000 guides in the system Advertising:
* Early advertising trials showed 5.2% conversion rates in mobile
* ChaCha also said that Nielsen Mobile found that Google SMS has approximately 37 million queries per month. This was achieved over a period of several years
* ChaCha's "mobile answers" service launched in January this year and the company said it expects to hit 30 million queries by December, this year User profile:
* 53% are repeat users
* 83% say they consider mobile ChaCha to be "very valuable"
* Average usage now more than 30 times per month. Compare average mobile search volume is nine times per month
* 88% hear about the service from a friend
* Users are 18-34; use it socially and for utilitarian purposes
Drilling deeper: Niche 'vertical sites' refine Web searching
|
Two years after Merriam-Webster formally recognized "google" as a transitive verb, consumers are recognizing the limitations of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or Ask.com, whose "horizontal" searches deliver vast breadth of information but not much depth. Increasingly, people are "drilling down" into highly detailed and structured sites like Retrevo for consumer electronics; Trulia and Zillow for real estate; SimplyHired and Indeed for jobs; Kayak, Farechase and Farecast for travel, and so on... more |
This is from Jason's e-mail list. I find his approach cutting edge. Just going for it is a breath of fresh air. Mahalo could be the sleeper site of 2009, if he pulls off the vision... See notes below on a great approach by a CEO. I need to have coffee with Jason in the coming weeks to discuss a little TV | Internet start up, Jason and Danny Sullivan would be an interesting combination to work with... Jason you up for it, I'm between Santa Monica, and Burbank now...
__________________
In one of the first emails to this list I asked folks for feedback on
how to make Mahalo better. The winner would get a free DASH GPS unit
(no, not getting paid by them, just love their product so they gave me
a few to give away).
Got over 100 emails almost instantly and I read these while playing
poker (I'm getting crushed right now for the record. Was up 6,200 for
the year and now up only 1,000--lost $5,200 over three games in a
row--brutal). While playing poker I read these on my Blackberry as
they came in (wait, is that why I lost?!?). The result was a non-stop
stream of consciousness about how people view the product. The top
three asks were:
a) A cleaner homepage
b) A customizable homepage
c) A mobile (specifically iPhone) version of Mahalo.
A sample of the suggestions follows below, and for my money the best
suggestion is to clean up the homepage. The first person to send in
that suggestion was Marques Stewart, who works in IT (
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marquesstewart ).
Thanks Marques. You're also invited to the TechCrunch50 event as my
guest ($2,995 ticket otherwise!) if you can make it to San Francisco
on Sept 8-10th.
Mahalo Suggestion Box: Selected Comments
------------------------------
Adam P. from Australia suggested a mobile version of Mahalo for the
iPhone. Brandon S. and Keith C. had this idea as well.
Matt C. suggested a digg spy service where you could watch searches on
Mahalo. There are some major privacy issues with that (think someone
searching for their own name + keyword), but we do already have a
dashboard to watch other user activity on Mahalo. It includes links
suggested, guide note edits, and message board posts. You can find it
here: http://tinyurl.com/mahaloua
Cody suggested letting good contributors make pages about themselves.
Actually, anyone can create a page about themselves on Mahalo right
now--notable or not. To create a page just visit:
http://mahalo.com/Special:Createpage
Henry B. suggests a bi-weekly or monthly podcast "about Mahalo's
challenges, struggles, ideas and also solicit ideas from the community
to better Mahalo." That's a good idea, I think we'll get on that.
Adam M. suggested starting a twitter feed "and post once a day with
the Mahalo page of the day." Good idea Adam!
Marques S. suggested cleaning up the homepage she explains: "People
like to have a good majority of their news/search in the upper area of
the browser and Mahalo should try to capitalize on that. I believe
that having to scroll down to see alot of the features that Mahalo has
to offer isn't a good UI choice." I agree, great suggestions, and we
are working on a new homepage.
Brad McCarty suggests we integrate tighters with FriendFeed: "Let's
say that you create a Mahalo page - once you're done editing, you can
choose to have that page auto-linked into your FriendFeed stream. The
same idea could hold true for major page updates, etc." We're in touch
with FriendFeed on this one already. It's clearly a great idea.
Max D. suggests a random key on Mahalo, saying a "Stubleupon
type of button to get a random Mahalo page" would be killer. We have
one, perhaps we should market it? http://www.mahalo.com/Special:Random
David S. has a great idea along the lines of our "show us your Mahalo"
project: "give away something very cool... to the person who gets full
camera time during either; the All Star Game, or one of the
Conventions coming up. Camera time being: A sign, painted body,
banner, etc... that has Mahalo loud and clear, and has something about
the event that can draw the cameras attention long enough to give you
free advertising that could be ultimately priceless." That's an
interesting idea.
Paul L. says "I think it would be nice to see the rankings of # clicks
per link for each Mahalo page." I agree, this is something we have on
our list. It's groovy to see which page is clicked the most by users.
Steve H. smacks us down about the homepage as well: "My recommendation
is to unclutter the main home page. Make it streamlined and something
you don't have to page down to start your topic search. The
'featured' list is way to long and distracting." I agree. It's my
fault and we're fixing it. Kieran H. and Matt B. also say clean up the
homepage!
Daniel R. has suggestions about the homepage as well: "the main
suggestion I would have would be to be able to personalize the mahalo
front page once you are logged into your profile. Nothing fancy, but
there are some sections I like to see, but others I don't care at
all." Agreed. Personalization of the homepage might only appeal to the
top 2% of the audience, but we want that 2%! Charles M. M., Russell
E., Bobby E. and Steve K. also suggested we make a personalized
homepage.
Kevin W. had a lot of suggestions, among his best was "* To help drive
traffic, how about a referral program where you earn a couple of
points for everyone you get to visit the site. You can then redeem
your points for cash, music downloads, Mahalo merchandise, or
whatever." I love this idea. In fact, we've been thinking about doing
this since day one, but we've focused like a laser on the core
product. Maybe next year on this one.
Nathan P. suggests coming up with an incentive program for folks who
make the site better. We've been thinking about this from the start.
However, it's very complicated and we're going to focus on it after we
have the core functionality of the site completed (i.e. new homepage,
perfect Guide Pages).
Josh Rappoport asks "how about Mahalo Follow for Safari?" I love this
suggestion and we did a massive search for Safari developers. Turns
out there is no plugin structure for Safari, so we would have to hack
it and that would be cost prohibitive. I'm bummed too.
Alan J. suggests "using the API from Dash to incorporate Mahalo.com
into the DASH unit itself." Brilliant! We've put it on the list.
Benjamin T. suggests focusing on mobile and supporting OpenID. I can't
believe we don't support OpenID already... we should. I gotta figure
out how that one slipped through the cracks!
Russell N. suggest "A simple rating system for each article. 1-5
stars or something like that. Simple, quick and easy." Not a bad idea
at all.
Jonathan R. says "make the Top 7 and Guide Notes bigger and stand out
from the rest of the page." Good point.
Patrick C. suggest we add polls to Mahalo. I like this idea a lot.
Google and creator of 'Family Guy' strike a deal
Monday, June 30, 2008
LOS ANGELES: Google is experimenting with a new method of distributing original material on the Web, and some Hollywood film financiers are betting millions that the company will succeed.
In September, Seth MacFarlane, creator of "Family Guy" on television, will unveil a carefully guarded new project called "Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy." Unlike "Family Guy," which is broadcast on Fox, this animation series will appear exclusively on the Internet.
The innovative part involves the distribution plan. Google will syndicate the program using its AdSense advertising system to thousands of Web sites that are predetermined to be gathering spots for MacFarlane's target audience, typically young men. Instead of placing a static ad on a Web page, Google will place a "Cavalcade" video clip.
Advertising will be incorporated into the clips in varying ways. In some cases, there will be "preroll" ads, which ask viewers to sit through a TV-style commercial before getting to the video. Some advertisers may opt for a banner to be placed at the bottom of the video clip or a simple "brought to you by" note at the beginning.
MacFarlane, who will receive a percentage of the ad revenue, has created a stable of new characters to star in the series, which will be served up in 50 two-minute episodes.
In an interview, he described the installments as "animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier."
For a more substantial fee, MacFarlane has been working with advertisers to animate original commercials that will run with "Cavalcade." Google and MacFarlane would not reveal any of the advertisers, but the two said that several deals are among the largest ever landed by AdSense, which went into business in 2003.
Google, which calls the distribution service the Google Content Network, until now has only dabbled in distributing original content. In May, it announced a deal with The Washington Post to distribute real estate listings from the newspaper's Web site in a similar manner.
But the partnership with MacFarlane represents a bold step into the distribution business, one that, if successful, will surely send shock waves through the entertainment business. "Cavalcade" is not only from a high-profile Hollywood talent, but also carries a multimillion-dollar production price tag, by far the largest amount spent on original Internet content to date.
"We feel that we have recreated the mass media," said Kim Malone Scott, director of sales and operations for AdSense.
Until now, budgets for original Webisodes have peaked in the low six figures because creators have not been able to figure out a business model that allows for higher spending. Either advertisers have not wanted to pay, or it has been too difficult to attract a large enough audience to support the cost of television or movie-quality work.
But Media Rights Capital, a boutique production company that has the ability to invest about $400 million a year in movies, television and Internet episodes, thinks it has figured out a sustainable business model with the Google Content Network. Every time someone clicks on one of the syndicated videos, the associated advertiser pays a fee, with shares going to MacFarlane, Media Rights, Google and the Web site that generated the click.
"We believe the revenue could be formidable," said Karl Austen, a lawyer who worked on the deal. "What is exciting is that this is a way to monetize the Internet immediately. Instead of creating a Web site and hoping Seth's fans find it, we are going to push the content to where people are already at."
Media Rights sells the advertising inventory. Asif Satchu, the company's co-chief executive, would not reveal how much advertisers were being asked to pay, except to say that it is "significantly higher" than if they were placing the same ad via AdSense.
Hollywood's powerful Endeavor talent agency helped shepherd MacFarlane through the negotiations, which started during a recent gap in the animator's contract with 20th Century Fox. MacFarlane said he wanted to take a stab at an original Internet program because he was feeling constrained by the "taste police," a k a the Federal Communications Commission.
Sitting in his office wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, MacFarlane described feeling stifled as a comedian by an FCC crackdown in recent years on what it views as unsuitable language and situations on television. MacFarlane said he believed that the public's appetite for raunchy humor and coarse language was only expanding and that television networks like Fox were having a harder time capturing viewers in part because they had to tread carefully or risk fines.
"I just felt I could be a lot more honest on the Internet," he said.
MacFarlane started the project on the assumption that he would do 20-minute television episodes and break them into segments to dole out online.
"But that seemed a little odd and a little pointless," he said. "Why wouldn't you just release the whole thing at once?"
Google executives also provided him with stacks of data showing how people interact with Web video, including how long the average user will watch before clicking on something new. That prompted MacFarlane to scrap his original project and rebuild the idea from the ground up.
Each installment is different, but a typical one is titled "Mad Cow Disease." The clip, which is 38 seconds long, opens with a news anchor reporting on an outbreak of mad cow disease in a dry fashion, detailing the debilitating effects of eating tainted beef. The clip cuts to a shocked male and female cow seated in a tidy kitchen with giant steaks on their plates.
For MacFarlane, 34, the venture is more than just adding to his already sizable fortune. (His new multiyear contract with Fox, signed this spring, is valued at nine figures.) One goal is to use the venture as a testing ground for new material and a way to ignite attention. At the very least, "Cavalcade" will become a DVD, but the hope is that part of the series will click with audiences and perhaps lead to television or even animated movie projects.
Indeed, in a watch-what-you-want, when-you-want world, the standard processes of rolling out new television programs are breaking down. Even a decade ago, putting a new show on a network schedule would assure that it would be exposed to most of the country; people would either respond or they wouldn't. Today, with television ratings in particular dwindling, creators like MacFarlane have to find new ways to introduce new material.
Nobody knows how content can catch fire in unexpected ways more than MacFarlane. In 2002, "Family Guy" was canceled for poor ratings after running for three seasons. But the irreverent series continued to make new fans through DVD sales. In 2005, Fox reversed itself, citing strong DVD sales, and "Family Guy" has gone on to be one of the biggest comedy hits on television.
The idea of old media's loss of control, promted me to realize that most of us seeking to invent the media future, not only deal with the normal challenges inherent with content creation, but also must define and create the environment and tools needed for institutional media and user generated content/media.
Institutional media combined with ongoing conversations creates informed TV viewing. It once was that our TV viewing was always in sync with others so the next day we were able to discuss last night's programming. However with TIVO, DVRs, and time shifting, we no longer watch 'in sync.' However, Social TV can be reintroduced with interactive components and became a kind of informed viewing experience that we share with others, either in real time or via comments that can be read later...
Tens of millions of people are honing their leadership skills in multiplayer online games. The tools and techniques they're using will change how leaders function tomorrow-and could make them more effective today.
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?ml_action=get-article&articleID=R0805C&ml_issueid=BR0805&ml_subscriber=true&pageNumber=1&_requestid=75471
by Byron Reeves, Thomas W. Malone, and Tony O'Driscoll
Tomorrow's business landscape could well be alien territory for today's business leaders. At many companies, important decision making will be distributed throughout the organization to enable people to respond rapidly to change. A lot of work will be done by global teams-partly composed of people from outside the institution, over whom a leader has no formal authority-that are assembled for a single project and then disbanded. Collaboration within these geographically diverse groups will, by necessity, occur mainly through digital rather than face-to-face interaction.
What on earth will leadership look like in such a world-a world whose features have already begun to transform business?
Suspend your skepticism for a moment when we say that the answers may be found among the exploding space stations, grotesque monsters, and spiky-armored warriors of games such as Eve Online, EverQuest, and World of Warcraft. Despite their fantasy settings, these online play worlds-sometimes given the infelicitous moniker MMORPGs (for "massively multiplayer online role-playing games")-in many ways resemble the coming environment we have described and thus open a window onto the future of real-world business leadership.
True, leading 25 guild members in a six-hour raid on Illidan the Betrayer's temple fortress is hardly the same as running a complex global organization. For starters, the stakes are just a bit higher in business. But don't dismiss online games as mere play. The best ones differ from traditional video games as much as universities do from one-room schoolhouses. In fact, these enterprises are actually sprawling online communities in which thousands of players collaborate with and compete against one another in real time within a visually three-dimensional virtual world-one that persists and evolves even while a player is away.
The organizational and strategic challenges facing players who serve as game leaders are familiar ones: recruiting, assessing, motivating, rewarding, and retaining talented and culturally diverse team members; identifying and capitalizing on the organization's competitive advantage; analyzing multiple streams of constantly changing and often incomplete data in order to make quick decisions that have wide-ranging and sometimes long-lasting effects. But these management challenges are heightened in online games because an organization must be built and sustained with a volunteer workforce in a fluid and digitally mediated environment.
Getting a look at how leadership works in online games isn't easy. To see the best players in action, you need skills that allow you to participate at the highest levels of play, and those can take 400 or 500 hours to acquire. When IBM commissioned Seriosity to study leadership in games, Seriosity used a team of a half-dozen veteran players, with more than 50,000 hours of cumulative experience, to observe and record the actions of leaders in this rarefied setting. The eight-month study also included interviews with more than a dozen prominent gamers about their leadership endeavors in this arena. A follow-up survey at IBM of people with both gaming and business leadership experience helped validate some of our findings and suggested how they might be translated to fit real-world corporate contexts.
A number of our conclusions about the future of business leadership were unanticipated. For one, individuals you'd never expect to identify-and who'd never expect to be identified-as "high potentials" for real-world management training end up taking on significant leadership roles in games. Even more provocative was our finding that successful leadership in online games has less to do with the attributes of individual leaders than with the game environment, as created by the developer and enhanced by the gamers themselves. Furthermore, some characteristics of that environment-for example, immediate compensation for successful completion of a project with nonmonetary incentives, such as points for commitment and game performance-represent more than mere foreshadowing of how leadership might evolve.
Adopting some of these signature qualities of the game environment could actually make it easier to lead people in today's real-world companies. The startling implication: Getting the leadership environment right may be at least as important to an organization as choosing the right people to lead.
Click the link to red the entire article.
May 12, 2008 - By Jon Swartz -- SAN FRANCISCO -- As the Internet's Next Big Thing, social networks are drawing inevitable comparisons to TV networks.
USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2008-05-12-social-net-side_N.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2008-05-12-social-net-side_N.htm
The analogy goes like this: Social networks that reach tens of millions of people -- particularly MySpace and Facebook -- will assume the role of the major networks (think Fox, CBS, ABC and NBC) as advertising vehicles.
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Second-tier sites (LinkedIn, Bebo and Ning) will fill the roles of cable TV networks (CNN, MTV, USA Network) for more specialized audiences. Vertical sites (Xing, Global Grind) will fulfill the role of niche TV properties (Food Network, Sci-Fi Channel) for advertisers to reach highly targeted enthusiasts.
The appeal? "Social networks have sold the idea of targeting consumers by their interests and demographics," says Daniel Taylor, a senior analyst at market researcher Yankee Group. "They short-circuit the process for advertisers."
What is more, advertisers can get creative online. "There are so many formats -- video, print, photos -- and sizes to reach and engross people," says Brian Hall, general manager of Microsoft Windows Live Business Group.
As NBC's Must See TV on Thursday night was constructed to appeal to young, affluent consumers, social networks offer the same type of media platform today, say ad buyers and other analysts.
"Fortune 500 companies certainly are looking more quickly to non-traditional media to advertise," says Noah Kerner, CEO of Noise, an advertising and marketing agency that specializes in reaching young adults who use new media such as the Internet and cellphones.
It recently launched a JPMorgan Chase campaign exclusively on Facebook.
As younger viewers switch their viewing habits increasingly to PC screens, advertisers will adapt their marketing strategies accordingly to reach them.
"Every advertiser -- car company, travel service, packaged-goods company, financial-services provider -- will need to learn how to communicate with users in a social setting," says Seth Goldstein, CEO of SocialMedia Networks, which helps create ads for social-networking sites. (c) Copyright 2008 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
The Elevator Pitch Is Dead. Introducing The Twitpitch
May. 6, 2008 at 6:35pm Eastern by Muhammad Saleem
The landscape of corporate public relations is changing fast. First the press release died and we told you how to write a press release for the social media audience. Now the elevator pitch is dead and here's how to adapt.
Corporate pitches are usually unnecessarily long, filled with useless buzzwords, and an unfortunate lack of transparency (in favor of overstatement). An elevator pitch is supposed to solve that problem by forcing the person making the pitch to do it in 30 seconds or 150 words (the time it would take you going from the lobby to your floor in an elevator). The time restriction ensures that all formalities and verboseness are dispensed with and only the most important and relevant information is shared between an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist.
The Essential Elevator Pitch
With no more than 30 seconds to convince someone to give you a couple million dollars, what do you focus your pitch on?
- What is the core idea and what problem does it solve?
- Has it been done before (is there competition?) and is there a viable market for your core idea?
- Why are you best suited to solve the problem and what is your business model?
These are some of the most important basic elements that you have to cover in 150 words or less. But what if you only had 140 characters to make an impression, what would you do?
Enter The Twitpitch
Stowe Boyd, an information technology consultant, recently decided that elevator pitch is way too long and that the only way he will accept pitches is through his idea of Twitpitching.
A twitpitch takes the following from:That's it.
- A twitter message of the form "@stoweboyd [pitch goes here without the brackets] #twitpitch". (Note the #hashtag means that these will be accessible at www.hashtags.org/tag/twitpitch.)
- A second, optional twitter of the form "@stoweboyd [single URL goes here without the brackets] #twitpitch". Just one URL, please.
- A third, optional twitter of the form "@stoweboyd [proposed time(s) to meet or call go here without the brackets] #twitpitch".
What's more, anyone who doesn't conform to that method will be automatically marked as spam after three strikes.
To be fair, you have three Twitter messages (therefore 420 characters) to make your point. The first one allows you to succinctly describe your service, the second lets you link directly to the product or service you're pitching and the third allows you to set a time and place to meet. What intrigued me about the idea is that it isn't a whole new way to pitch, it's another way to make the same pitch without adding any noise to the conversation. For example, here's what a successful Twitpitch looks like [via @thoughtfarmer]:
@jeffdachis #twitpitch For your new venture: ThoughtFarmer is social software for enterprise intranets. ReadWriteWeb: http://snurl.com/26hmn
The reason why the press release is dying is because these releases are usually boring, susceptible to hyperbole, and have a singular focus on the company. Similarly, no one is interested in your pitch of a product because no one finds value in your one-sided, obviously biased look at the product. The Twitpitch forces you to talk only facts (because you have only 140 characters for the first message) and then link to one (and only one) URL related to your product. If you want to make the biggest impact, this link won't be a link to your press release or even a link to your product, it will be a link to the best or most prominent coverage that your product has gotten (much like the link above for ThoughtFarmer). As you can see, this process is incredibly similar to the decisions you make when you submit an article to or vote on an article on a social news site. Essentially, all you have to go on is a title and description from the article and some things that you can infer about each submission from certain trigger points.
The Twitpitch streamlines the same process for Twitter. The title and summary are condensed into one tweet and the link in another. And assuming the link takes you to coverage of the product on another site, you bypass the corporate speak and get the facts from a human voice (and you are already getting social proof). Compare that to getting an email from someone you don't know (and probably can't get additional information on - sorry no about pages for PR companies), with no text in the email body, and a 2-3 page (if you're lucky) document attached that you are supposed to read and respond to. A Twitpitch is open and transparent, delivers on social proof, creates value without adding noise, and is somewhat personalized. The final great thing about the Twitpitch is that even when it is personalized, it isn't limited to the person it is directed at. You can simply send a message on Twitter, tag it with #twitpitch and anyone can track all the pitches being made at anytime by simply going to: http://www.hashtags.org/tag/twitpitch. That way, even if you forget to direct a pitch at someone, chances are it will find its way to the right people.
Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. The Let's Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.
~ NEW WEBSITE LAUNCH ~
Storybids today announced the launch of their product placement marketplace where video content creators can get paid to feature products in user-generated videos and episodic webisodes. Advertisers may select video content creators via a search tool that tracks views, comments and ratings across multiple video hosting sites. Storybids closed a Series A round of financing last August.
Storybids offers distribution and video analytics measurement by optimizing finalized video for search engines and submitting to several video hosting sites such as YouTube, MySpaceTV, Veoh, AOL Video, Metacafe, DailyMotion and others simultaneously allowing dashboard reporting on the video's performance via views, comments and ratings aggregated across the various video sites.
10 Killer Texting Tricks
By Rick Broida, PC World http://tech.msn.com/howto/articlepcw.aspx?cp-documentid=6999041&page=3
Text messaging isn't just kid's stuff anymore. Use these amazing online tools to turn any SMS-capable phone into a productivity powerhouse.
To many people over 30, text messaging can seem like one of those strange, complicated behaviors only teenagers understand. In reality, it's one more great tool in your productivity arsenal, right up there with e-mail and instant messaging.
In function, texting treads a fine line between those two communication capabilities, essentially serving as a basic form of e-mail for even the simplest of today's cell phones. Text messaging relies on a decades-old technology called SMS -- Short Message Service -- that's used to relay brief messages (usually no more than 160 characters, equivalent to a couple of average-length sentences).
You Get What You Pay For With Online Q & A Sites, Study Shows
ScienceDaily (Apr. 11, 2008) - A new study by University of Minnesota computer science and engineering researchers revealed that the answer quality provided by online question-and-answer Web sites, such as Yahoo! Answers and Google Answers, depends on two factors--how much you pay and how many people contribute to your answer.
See also:
The University of Minnesota study posed 126 questions across a variety of Q&A sites and found that paying $10 or more to get your question answered at the now-closed Google Answers site yielded the highest-quality answers as judged by a panel of evaluators. These answers were long and detailed, with many links to source material.
Surprisingly the Web site Yahoo! Answers, which provides answers for free, performed as well as Google Answers when the fee was low ($3) and outperformed reference librarians and an "ask-an-expert" site. Researchers attributed this success to the large online community that contributes to that site's answers.
University of Minnesota researchers involved in the study include computer science and engineering professor Joseph Konstan and graduate student Max Harper. Their study examined a variety of questions eliciting facts, opinions and advice on topics spanning entertainment, technology and business. Examples of some of the questions posted are:
- Which actress has the first female line in a talking movie" I found on Wikipedia that Al Jolson had the male line, but I can't find any record of which female had the first line.
- What is the best technique for making BBQ spare ribs" I'll cook it if you can find me a recipe that's really worth the time and effort.
Of the findings, Konstan said, "Solutions that simply direct questions to a single individual don't achieve results as well as those that open the question and answers to a larger community."
The results of the study are reported in the academic research paper titled "Predictors of Answer Quality in Online Q&A Sites." The paper was published in the Association for Computing Machinery's 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008) proceedings, and presented at the conference in Florence, Italy, April 8.
Dec. 18, 2006 at 11:13pm Eastern by Bill Slawski
Why Do People Google Google? Understanding User Data to Measure Searcher Intent
What are people looking for when they type "Google" into Google? What do they want to see when they use "eBay" as a query? How does a Google or Yahoo learn from their log files, and other user information? What does it tell them about user intent?
In an interview posted earlier today with Luke Wroblewski, Yahoo's Principal Designer for Social Media, we're told that the amount of user data that Yahoo has to work with while designing may be almost overwhelming. A point we haven't seen made much by the search engines, it's the second time today I've heard it. The first was during a presentation from Google senior research scientist Dan Russell.
Last Tuesday, Keri Morgret went to the December BayCHI, where Dan Russell spoke about How People Use Search Engines. She reports on some of her thoughts as well as some interesting observations about eye-tracking studies at Google. In her post, she includes a link to a video of an earlier version of the speech, How do Google searchers behave? Improving search by divining intent. The questions I started this post with are ones he asks in his presentation. He's one of the guys who tries to find answers to questions like that.
Dan Russell joined Google from the IBM Almaden Research Center, and also worked for Xerox PARC and Apple's Advanced Technology Group, as well as teaching at both Stanford and Santa Clara Universities. His homepage includes three sets of slides used during different versions of this presentation. The video weighs in at almost an hour-and-a-half, so if you want the shortened version, or want to read along, you may want to download one of those big PDF files.
The presentation is long, but it provides some nice glimpses into how Google works. I tried to find out when Dan Russell started working at Google when he give the presentation at Stanford linked to above, but it wasn't easy to locate a date. It wasn't long enough for him to not discuss some of the insights he had when he first started looking at searcher intent while at Google. His thoughts:
1. Intuitions are terrible when trying to figure out what people are searching for.
2. In particular, your intuitions are terrible.
3. That's why Google does studies.
4. Fallacy 1: "I do it this way" so others do, too.
5. Fallacy 2 "My Mom does it this way" so others do, too.
6. Deep truth: You are statistically insignificant.
7. Deeper truth: (As a computer scientist/student/audience member) you are a couple of sigma from the norm
8. So are your friends
Understanding User Behavior and Types of Queries
While Google focuses upon search as its core mission, we're told that the effort is of little use if we "can't understand what the question is." What are users looking for? That's true not only for organic search, but also for things like images, Google Earth, print, and video, which don't have the benefit of pagerank and link structure to index. Most of these services are in beta, and they can get it wrong now. Applications can be changed on a very quick basis, or as Dan Russell calls it, rapid prototyping on a delivery model. Especially if they can look at the usage data of those services and somehow understand it.
An example is Google Video, which at first provided the most popular results, with snippets. But it wasn't getting the clickthroughs that they expected. So they quickly changed it to a richer display and the clickthroughs increased dramatically.
Another example was Google Maps - A couple of months after starting, the links were on the right side. After looking at log files, they decided to move them to the left, use a larger font, and add a tab for more details. They found that user behavior is influenced by small changes - and saw significantly differences in clickthrough rates for things like minor size changes in fonts. We're told that measuring millions of clickthroughs provides interesting results.
Another issue arises when making changes to something like Maps Local. Those changes need to be echoed in places like Maps Local for Mobile. Another challenge that they face is training a culture to use a new interface - smaller changes are easier to get people used to using them.
It's not unusual to see queries broken down into three different types, as described by Andrei Broder in his paper, A taxonomy of web search. We get to see some percentages, and a greater breakdown of query types in this presentation describing what people are searching for:
Navigational - 15 %
Transactional - 22%
- Obtain 8%
- Interact 6%
- Entertain 4%
- Download 4%
Informational - 63%
- List 3%
- Locate 24%
- Advice 2%
- Undirected 31%
- Directed 3%
Search Patterns
What patterns might emerge when people search?
We're told that it is usually a two step process:
1. Searchers find a good site, and;
2. Look for information there.
Another strategy is teleporting, or going directly to somewhere else.
The reasons for teleporting:
- Users don't realize they can search directly for the information
- Difficulties in formulating a query
- The user trusts the source that they are going to
Presumably, that two step process can be a good strategy if you know something about the resource, use its search engine if it has one, and understand the structure of that site. A video of a user session is shown at this point, illustrating someone exploring a site search, snippets, and the possibility of refining their query back at the search engine.
Information about Query Sessions
Instead of just looking at individual searches, considering user sessions are an important part of the analysis of searches.
How often do people do query reformation during a user session, and what do they do when they reform those queries?
1. Spell correct helps lots of people, and shortens their sessions.
2. People often make a minor change to a word, or add a word, which may not provide the best results (people often get stuck in inefficient queries, and don't change those much).
Some other things that they see:
1. The more words used in a query, the longer sessions tend to last. Their assumption here is that more sophisticated queries involve people spending more time searching.
2. People use longer sessions on weekends.
3. The longer the sessions, the more often they see multi-tasking (multiple search subjects in a session) and interruptions.
Advanced Searchers
Advanced searchers make up an extremely tiny fraction of the folks who search. Some of the characteristics of an advanced searcher are that they:
Have lots of meta-knowledge about content and sites
Take notes (on the machine, or paper, or bookmarks)
Try alternative word sequences
Use quotations correctly
While they may take advantage of these things, they don't do a lot of it.
The Challenges of Analysis of User Data
I started this post mentioning the problem of having an almost overwhelming amount of user data. Dan Russell shifts gears at this point of the presentation, and starts talking about how to analyze and reduce that data to manageable levels, so that instead of relying upon intuition, they are making meaningful use of the information.
There are two parts to meeting that challenge. The first is building a scalable data analysis system, where a portion of the data can be looked at, and parallel systems can be used to analyze the rest of the records. That type of analysis is described in a Google paper - Interpreting the Data: Parallel Analysis with Sawzall.
The second part of the analysis involves usability. The importance of field studies and lab-based usability tests of prototypes is covered in detail.
For instance, a user would perform a realistic task with a prototype, while thinking aloud. Researchers would watch to see:
- Where they have problems.
- Fail to complete a task, or take too long.
- Make an important mistake and don't realize it.
- Misunderstand an important part of the UI.
Efforts are made to avoid helping or influencing the user, and focusing upon their actions rather than their opinions. Eyetracking is often used in this type of testing.
Field Studies consisting of interviews at the places where people actually use their computers are conducted, as well as diary and ethnographic studies.
We're told that a large percentage of people who use search engines have very different mental images of how search engines work than people who work on search engines. An analogy used - someone opens the hood of your car, and points out a part, and asks you what it does. How likely are you to know?
The presentation describes a number of the issues they see when conducting field studies, and how they try to act upon them. The bigger issue here is how to take these types of studies and perform them in a manner which might be statistically significant. How useful might it be to get a greater sense of demographics involving different user segments and different cultures?
Some Questions and Conclusions
Some good questions that aren't necessarily answered from this presentation:
Is one click good? Better than two clicks?
Is no click better than one click - such as when the answer is provided in the snippet?
What's the best way to help searchers avoid distractions?
Should some diversity be mixed into results for breadth?
Why are SERPs so boring? Or are they?
How did a standard evolve across the major search engines in how search results pages look?
We're told that Google's focus in understanding how well they are doing in meeting searchers' intentions has transformed from a static IR-styled analysis of query results towards longer-run, session analysis of how users interact with the search engine. This approach involves incorporating data from many kinds of studies, and using many different approaches instead of looking at a single point of data.
They don't want to make decisions without lots of testing, they don't want to rely upon intuition, and upon a world view centered around Silicon Valley and Stanford.
I really like what these guys are doing.
Great concept, but they've actually acted upon developing it.
| Price is too high | You !pinx it | ||
|---|---|---|---|
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| You like the product but the price is too high! | You simply !pinx the product - meaning you tell us which product you like and the current price. |
 We monitor the price We monitor the price of the product for you. |
 Price drop email Once the price drops, we send you a price drop notification email. |
|---|
Online Shoppers Trust Each Other
New research out from eMarketer again, argues that shoppers are increasingly trusting each other when it comes to finding credible information advice about products or companies:
The fact is that knowledgeable and trusted peers provide valuable advice and insight to people trying to find the right products to buy and gain the advice and information they need. In fact, JupiterResearch reckons that online social network users were three time more likely to trust their peers' opinions over advertising when making purchase decisions:
So, what does this really mean… Well, I think that people are actually getting more savvy in how they find and absorb information and that people are now looking to credible expert sources and trusted peers compared to just lists and lists of anonymous or not-related reviews. Ultimately no-one wants to be fooled by advertising or biased reviews, and having trusted sources from experts, opinion leaders, peers, and friends - can really help people feel more confident in their product research.
Social Graph + Research + Shopping -> 2008 is the year..
Popular deal sites - February 2008
from ProBargainHunter.com by
This is February 2008 revision of the Popular Deal Sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.
The change in rating shows the difference compared to January results. The list has a total of 29 web sites which is 3 less than the last month. There are 52 more in my database that didn't meet the Alexa Rank < 100,000 requirement.
It is another down month for the deal sites. Alexa rank is red for all but three sites and those three are up in single digits. The 3 sites that are gone from the list this month are keepcash.com, dailydeals.com, and bargainshare.com
The biggest decliner is gottadeal.com (-25.44%) which still falls from the huge spike of Black Friday activity (Alexa rank is a 3 month rolling average). The runner up is judysbook.com (-19.8%). The last I heard about them is that they were for sale. DealTaker has been bought as well, I wonder how that reflects on its ranking a few months from now
| # | Web Site | Alexa Rank | Page Rank | Online Since | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | slickdeals.net (info) | 978 | (-0.31%) | 6 | 10-Nov-1999 | |
| 2 | fatwallet.com (info) | 1550 | (-2.58%) | 6 | 29-Nov-1999 | |
| 3 | anandtech.com | 4461 | (-1.2%) | 6 | 24-Aug-1997 | |
| 4 | deals2buy.com | 5489 | (-2.43%) | 4 | (1) | 15-Nov-2002 |
| 5 | dealnews.com (info) | 5531 | (-0.51%) | 6 | 20-Jan-1999 | |
| 6 | techbargains.com | 7449 | (-4.81%) | 5 | 03-May-1999 | |
| 7 | bensbargains.net | 8029 | (-0.1%) | 5 | 21-Mar-2000 | |
| 8 | dealsea.com | 8394 | (1.35%) | 5 | 27-Jun-2001 | |
| 9 | dealcatcher.com | 13075 | (-2.05%) | 5 | 28-Jul-1999 | |
10 ( 1) |
dealspl.us (info) | 15227 | (-3.26%) | 5 | 15-May-2006 | |
11 ( 1) |
gottadeal.com | 16653 | (-25.44%) | 5 | 27-Jan-2003 | |
| 12 | edealinfo.com | 19189 | (-2.13%) | 4 | 12-Dec-2000 | |
| 13 (1) |
xpbargains.com | 20400 | (-1.04%) | 5 | (1) | 29-Nov-2001 |
| 14 (1) |
dealtaker.com (info) | 21537 | (-8.13%) | 5 | 08-Feb-2004 | |
| 15 (1) |
dealigg.com (info) | 21761 | (1.56%) | 4 | 04-Sep-2006 | |
| 16 (1) |
cheapstingybargains.com | 22373 | (-6.3%) | 5 | 20-Jan-2005 | |
| 17 | resellerratings.com (info) | 23548 | (-3.62%) | 6 | 18-Jun-1998 | |
| 18 | dealsofamerica.com | 23670 | (-2.53%) | 4 | 06-Sep-2003 | |
| 19 | spoofee.com | 24503 | (-1.2%) | 4 | 31-Dec-2000 | |
| 20 | dealofday.com | 33213 | (-1.05%) | 7 | 30-Aug-1999 | |
| 21 (1) |
bargainist.com (info) | 53253 | (-0.87%) | 6 | 21-Nov-2006 | |
| 22 (2) |
gotapex.com | 62947 | (-4.94%) | 5 | 29-Apr-1999 | |
| 23 (2) |
bradsdeals.com | 64410 | (-0.79%) | 5 | 29-Jun-2005 | |
| 24 (1) |
judysbook.com | 69916 | (-19.8%) | 6 | 11-Aug-2003 | |
| 25 (1) |
dealslist.com | 75334 | (1.46%) | 4 | (1) | 18-Jul-2000 |
| 26 (1) |
ableshoppers.com | 82687 | (-1.81%) | 4 | 08-Oct-2000 | |
| 27 (1) |
bargaineering.com | 87904 | (-0.42%) | 0 | 01-Dec-2004 | |
| 28 (2) |
dailyedeals.com | 94810 | (-1.84%) | 4 | 18-Feb-2000 | |
| 29 (2) |
couponalbum.com | 96175 | (-2.14%) | 5 | 18-Jan-2006 | |
Popular price comparison sites - February 2008
Published March 12th, 2008This is February 2008 revision of the Popular Price Comparison web sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.
The change in rating shows the difference compared to January results. The list has a total of 33 web sites and there are 17 more sites in my database that don't meet Alexa Rank < 100,000 requirement.
List hasn't changed since last month except for ugenie.com (59.16%) who had a nice come back to replace the last position held by streetprices.com. Ugine was in fact the best performer this month. They seem to have had a traffic surge late January after a long decline. Don't really have an explanation to this other than possibly increased marketing spendings.
The worst performer this month is mpire.com (-44.32%) who I would guess are too busy with their new toy, WidgetBucks, to be able keep an eye on the price comparison business.
| # | Web Site | Alexa Rank | Page Rank | Online Since | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | shopping.yahoo.com | 1 (*) | 8 | 18-Jan-1995 | ||
| 2 | froogle.google.com | 4 (*) | 8 | 11-Sep-2001 | ||
| 3 | shopping.msn.com | 6 (*) | 7 | 10-Nov-1994 | ||
| 4 | shopping.aol.com | 51 (*) | (-18.6%) | 7 | 22-Jun-1995 | |
| 5 | shopper.cnet.com | 251 (*) | (-10.09%) | 7 | 05-Jul-1996 | |
| 6 | shopping.com | 433 | (-13.05%) | 7 | 03-Jul-1997 | |
| 7 | dealtime.com | 539 | (-9.55%) | 7 | 07-Oct-1998 | |
| 8 | nextag.com | 822 | (-6.34%) | |||