blogTV.ca, Canada’s first and only live, user-generated video website, is broadcasting content 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from the streets of Toronto. All month long beginning this week, a blogTV.ca Hummer will travel the city offering Torontonians the opportunity to broadcast their stories, opinions and talents. This initiative is part of a larger national blogTV.ca marketing campaign rolling out throughout the spring.

“We are very excited about blogTV.ca and the power it gives to people to be their own broadcasters,” says Claude Galipeau, Senior Vice President of Digital Media for Alliance Atlantis. “We’ve decided to hit the streets to show off its power and showcase this new platform to Canadians while providing content 24/7 to our online users.”

This is way too cool! For me, anyone or anything that allows people to contribute content, or broadcast content for this matter, is exciting. So, I visited the link, wanting to watch Torontonians tell their stories and opinions. This is what I got… Sad…

Originally posted on March 12, 2007 @ 10:28 am

With profitability way off their radar, Friendster finally found a better and easier way for them to make money. The social networking pioneer finally realized that they can join the crowd of web sites that relies on Google for a large piece of their advertising.

Under an expanded deal Friendster will soon display ads from Google based on Web search requests– a method that has proven to be one of the Internet’s biggest moneymakers, yet has escaped Friendster’s radar over the past.

Last year, Google pocketed a $3.1 billion profit while distributing another $3.3 billion in revenue to its thousands of online ad partners. Friendster hopes to have some of that pie. Good. Next time, please don’t be late.

Originally posted on March 12, 2007 @ 7:29 am

Another One To Bite The Dust?

The venerable WSJ (Wall Street Journal) suffered a 10% slide in ad revenues for the tech, financial, general and classified sections. I can’t see a paper this big going under, as long as they leverage their web presence. In similar news, E.W. Scripps company is not getting out of newspapers but may sell some properties. If you’re interested in what the future of American papers might be, read CJR’s very long The Race [via], which suggests that the mid-sized dailies are at risk.

Red Herring Doomed?

Red Herring, an excellent magazine that covers a variety of technologies, is on Valleywag’s Deathwatch. A million dollar funding deal didn’t materialize, and paychecks apparently were late. Now consider their website. They get referenced a lot from other sites, have a Google pagerank of 8 (bloody rare), and an Alexa rank of 10,178. And yet, there are only about two ads on the home page. Surely they ccould monetize their website a whole number of ways including text links, Google AdSense (or better yet for their likely traffic, Azoogle), direct ads, etc. They may still have to cut some staff, but such a great magazine shouldn’t have to die, only transition completely to the Internet.

Ann Coulter’s Column Syndication Shrinks

Ann Coulter, the diehard right winger with a hate on for “godless liberals” – as she calls them – called former Senator John Edwards “a faggot” during a speech she gave recently. The resulting boycott of advertisers who are in the various newspapers carrying her column has lost her several publications. (She’s previously suggested similar things about Clinton and Gore.)

Does she have a blog? She can spread her hate there. In fact, she’s already doing so, with her website suggesting that Edwards’ campaign manager is fronting for Arab terrorists. Republicans would do very well to distance themselves from this incredibly hateful, immature person. I wonder who pays her to be such a bonehead. Of course, this kind of retaliation isn’t much better.

Don’t know if Edwards was in a sucky mood, but he later refused to participate in FOX News presidential candidates’ debate, saying there were scheduling conflicts – but possibly due to a suggestion by DailyKos.com blogger Markos Moulitsas. Maybe he just needs his own Internet TV channel a la Senator Barack Obama.

Originally posted on March 8, 2007 @ 7:31 pm

The long held concept in new media, that a small number of “influencers” have an undue influence over everyone else, is bunk, according to Professor Duncan Watts of Columbia University.

In a story at BrandWeek, Watt’s claims that most of the time buzz is spread by networks and a “critical mass of easily influenced people each of whom adopts, say, a look or brand after being exposed to a single adopting neighbor.”

The crux of Watt’s claim is that it is impossible to apply a uniform theory of influence upon individuals (as famously suggested in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point) as the way each individual demonstrates influence is different, and that data used to support theories of influence retrospectively is biased.

Watt’s told BrandWeek that his advice to a marketer wanting to start buzz would be:

First, they should focus less on who people influence and more on how people are influenced. It sounds like just the other side of the same coin, but the difference is important—identifying easily influenced people, and how they are influenced raises different questions, and requires different research design than looking for influentials. Second, they should also think more about networks, and network structure, rather than treating everyone as behaving independently. And third, they should move away from the idea that buzz can be engineered to achieve some prespecified outcome, and get better at measuring and reacting to buzz that arises naturally.

In itself it will be interesting to see if, or even how so-called influencers react to being told that their positions are bunk, after all the blogosphere has developed informal hierarchies of influence (such as A-List, B-List bloggers) and an argument that those at the top may not necessarily be as influential or powerful as others perceive them to be, or as they see themselves can only be interpreted as an attack of sorts on the status quo.

Food for thought.

Photo Credit: BrandWeek

Originally posted on March 8, 2007 @ 6:00 pm