Googled Most in 2006: Social Networking, Video

Google has quietly released its 2006 Zeitgeist for the most frequently used search terms in the world over the last year. Top of the list? Social networking site Bebo, followed by industry leader MySpace. It’s an interesting list, Israel based video sharing site Metacafe is number 4 on the list and the term “video” is 7th on the list.

Bebo is based in San Francisco but is said by third party stats companies to be the leading social networking site in both the UK and New Zealand. Got that? The most Googled word in the world this year was Bebo. That’s almost too wild to believe.

The BBC appears to have covered the list first today, followed by a number of UK bloggers, but there is some confusion as to whether the list is global or UK based. The fact that the BBC didn’t link to the Google page, didn’t make it explicit and perhaps most important the amazing fact that Bebo, most popular in the UK was on the top of the list made me assume it was a list for the UK. The text of the page indicates otherwise, though.

It looks social networking and online video really are the top things that searchers all over the world are looking for.

Update: Two days later the Washington Post wrote a long, interesting article on this list.

Chad Vader Exclusive on MySpace Tonight

The crew behind the short video series Chad Vader - Day Manager sent out a press release today announcing that the show’s next episode is going to debut on the front page of MySpace tonight and show there exclusively for 24 hours. Madison, Wisconsin based producers Matt Sloan and Aaron Yonda (Blame Society Productions) have told other writers that Tom himself will send out a MySpace bulletin with a link to the video.

Sending out press released about your show on MySpace Video or YouTube appears to be a growing trend and in most cases strikes me as ridiculous. The Chad Vader crew has been posting behind the scenes updates on YouTube leading up to this new episode for several months. Previous episodes have been viewed millions of times. Perhaps it’s because Chad Vader is so much better than several of the terrible video shows on YouTube that have issued press releases lately, but putting out a press release on the MySpace exclusive feature makes sense to me.

Appearing below is the first episode of the show, my favorite so far. Here are the other three shows. All are under 7 minutes in length and episode 4 leaves off at a place where the series could have ended. Episode 5 will be allowed to go viral after 24 hours on the front page of MySpace - an arrangement less profitable but otherwise far more desirable than the recent Google Video deal with EepyBird, for example.

Chad Vader - Day Manager is a short form show about “Chad Vader, the younger, less charismatic brother of Darth Vader, who is the day shift manager of a grocery store.” It’s very funny. The show has received media attention from Good Morning America, New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and several others - but the front page of MySpace could be the biggest coup yet. Mainstream media attention may be good for building prestige, but if you want large numbers of viewers I can’t think of any place better than the front page of MySpace. I expect too that the well known icon of a Darth Vader costume, out of context in a grocery store, will make for an unusually eye catching screen shot on the front page.

Where will they go next? This space is so new that trails are still being blazed. Will DVD sales be sufficient to support the Blame Society? Will they be signed by a bloated old media conglomerate and play up sex appeal at the expense of interesting content? Can their star status be sustained, economically and comedically? Will emerging artists like this just be used by big media old and new to drive ad revenue and then be left out in the cold? The game has just begun and no answers to these questions are clear yet.

Oaxaca’s Conflict in Online Media

If new online media is lowering the barriers to participation in journalism, one of the most interesting forms this can take is in international investigative journalism. New York video journalist Brad Will recently traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico to cover what began as a teachers’ strike and has since become a general protest against alleged electoral fraud, corruption and government repression in the area. Critics of the protests argue that the demonstrators’ tactics, including the building of barricades across city streets, are doing more harm than good to the city. On October 27th, in the course of producing media about the events in Oaxaca, Brad Will was shot and killed by a group of unknown gunmen.

The following is a collection of online media about the conflict in Oaxaca. It’s an example of how contextually related media items can be well served by being displayed together. As you can see below, I’ve grouped together a number of photographs, a video and some text links in the body of this post. The media player we are building will enable items like this to be played together in one skinless, resizable player that can have updates in the form of new bundles of content pushed out to all sites embedding that player. I believe that many people watching the situation in Oaxaca, for example, would be interested in placing a player on their websites and receiving updated media when it becomes available from the channel publisher.

The events depicted in the following media may be quieting down for now, see the last link in the text section below, but they are obviously of long term consequence. Below you’ll find a series of photographs from Oaxaca, followed by a 16 minute video made by Brad Will that contains interviews with local residents and footage from conflicts with the armed men who in the end of the video shoot the videographer. Below the video are a list of related links to related sites on the web and a series of photographs of people who have allegedly been “disappeared” by security forces in the conflict. The final item in the media below are credits for production of the items above. Credits will be generated automatically when the media player is available.

I chose the media below because it’s some of the most impactful work I’ve seen online in some time. Beyond demonstrating the potential that user generated content has, it’s media that deserves to be seen widely in its own right. Note: The video below concludes with the death of the videographer shooting it, so be forewarned.

More on the Topic

AliveInMexico, a video blog from the makers of Alive in Iraq.

English Wikipedia on the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO - the leading organization of Oaxacan demonstrators)

Mexican federal police leave Oaxaca City center in sign conflict is ending International Herald Tribune, Dec 16th

Friends of Brad Will
Memorial and support site from support group.

Credits

Oaxaca Mop by Alex Pears
oaxaca [Church Door] by Jami Dwyer
Lila Downs @ Oaxaca by Borya
Last Video of Brad Will

The Morning’s Web Media News

Some highlights from the morning’s news reading.

Hedge fund manager Cody Willard writes at the Financial Times, Buy Into the Internet Video Business While You Still Can. Take that, cynics who say the market is oversaturated! Willard writes, “YouTube is certainly a home run, but it is a home run on the fourth pitch in the first inning of internet video. YouTube is to internet video as the original three TV networks were to television.”

Speaking of YouTube, the AP published quite a solid article last night on the Top 10 YouTube Videos of 2006. It went beyond videos and really described memes that have flourished on the site. Or, if the top 10 was too chipper for you, there’s an AP story this morning on YouTube’s role in the world’s misery over the last year. I thought the role of YouTube in the Iraq war was one of the biggest omissions in last night’s Top 10. Anyone else thinking of things that were missed?

Bebo launches widgets

Giant social networking site Bebo began offering limited 3rd party media widgets for embedding in user profiles yesterday. Bebo, if you’re not familiar, is said to be one of MySpace’s biggest rivals internationally. Photobucket, RockYou and Slide are the three companies selected for the initial widget offering. It’s a slow start, but it’s moving in the opposite direction of MySpace, whose statements and actions have long pointed towards a deep hostility towards 3rd party widgets. Initial coverage at Mashable, where it’s reported that Bebo users created more than 100k new widgets in the first 12 hours they were available.

As Steve Bryant pointed out in a post yesterday titled In a Web Powered by Video, Pageviews Are Passe, web analytics and thus advertising are changing. While the navigation of MySpace piles up pageviews, the company’s in-house widget dominance will let them have their cake and eat it too by capturing media plays as well. I wonder whether sharing analytics, media plays and advertising was part of the agreement between these select new Bebo widget providers. That’s something that would be much harder to achieve with an API that was open to all widgets. Just for reference, the SplashCast player will be embeddable in social networking profiles and will roll up the functionality currently offered by many of these individual service providers.

Widget talk makes me look forward to the day when we simply no longer presume that the contents of a web page come from a single source.

VideoCage Opens For Premium Video Producers

VideoCage announced today that the pre-launch site is now accepting video uploads that producers will be able to charge viewers for access to beginning in the new year. Good coverage at E-Commerceblog. Producers can set any price to view videos, viewers pay with PayPal and VideoCage takes a %30 commission. The front end of the site doesn’t look too hot yet and it was even reported to have been hacked early this morning, but it’s an interesting concept. I’ll be curious to see how it looks and performs at launch next month.

Video Mashups Accelerating

John Musser of ProgrammableWeb, the premier site for tracking mashups, writes that video mashups are being added to the site’s database at more than twice the pace in the second half of this year as they were in the first half. The first half of 2006 of saw 21 video mashups added, so far there have been 51 new services added that incorporate video in the second half of the year. It’s great to see cross-site creativity ramping up in the video space.

That’s a morning wrap up, check back later today for more. Hopefully we’ll have some highlighted media items here today.

What’s the Best RSS Reader for Rich Media?

I’m looking for a new RSS feed reader that offers good support for video, audio and photos. This post will discuss what I’ve found in that search. It’s not pretty so far. The content available in the market is moving much faster than the tools to consume it. SplashCast will play a roll in this situation, but for now I’m just looking for an RSS reader that will help me do my job efficiently at an online media company. Perhaps you are too.

The following is a discussion of the problem, then a description of the criteria I used to review 10 leading RSS readers on the market, a paragraph about each product and a chart comparing features. Features are honestly open to some interpretation and I may have missed some important vendors, but I think this should be useful for both readers and myself.

The Problem

It is inefficient, unpleasant and feels behind the times to have to launch another application like a browser or iTunes to play media files delivered to my feed reader. Online syndicated media is an exploding market; as methods of communication go, it’s one of the fastest growing, most compelling and potentially most commercially viable new developments that has emerged in some time. An estimated 30 million people (5% of broadband users) watch at least one video online each day. There are currently an estimated 4.2 billion total video streams per month arround the web. In order to effectively engage with this media, many of us are going to need RSS readers that are equipped for the task.

Right now none of the leading RSS readers for Mac or Windows let users capture, preview, play, tag and share items within the application itself and in the order that they arrive in your aggregator. In other words, I cannot find any feed reader on the market today that combines rich media support, integration with 3rd party tagging and sharing services and a “river of news” view. That’s a problem.

Tools Available Today

The following are short descriptions of the 10 leading commercial RSS readers and a comparison of their features. Who’s the winner? No one is a clear winner by the criteria I’ve chosen.

Summary of Recommendations

As a Mac user, I’m going to spend more time with NewsFire on my desktop. If I was a Windows user and wanted to consume video inline and needed a river of news view - I would cry. If rich media is more important to you then go with Google Reader. If a river of news is more important then go with FeedDemon.

The Chart

click to expand

Review Criteria

Le Web Europe

I spent the past two days at LeWeb3, here in Paris. People from 37 countries attended the event. It sold out. After two days talking to people, it’s clear that the European market is looking pretty good here. One venture capitalist said it looks better than it has since 1998, which struck me as a bit odd. 1998? That was the height of the web bubble. For this VC, that’s not a problem. The market is growing. A web bubble is no where in sight.

The VC’s comments reflected much that I heard from the people I met at LeWeb. Entrepreneurs want the excitement about “leweb,” so palpable in the US,  to spread faster to Europe. And so in part, there is some feeling that they would like to see some aspects of the late 1990s boom time. Perhaps not as wild but growth enough to fuel more innovation and an increase in investments.

Even with the hope for more growth, Europeans are skeptical about what may happen if the excitement is overblown. And like many of their American colleagues, the concern is clear that we may perhaps be heading for a bubble. I say no, the events that happened in the late 1990s were ones that will not be repeated for decades, not even in my lifetime.But what would that bubble look like? The VC’s can’t agree. In a panel discussion, “Will There Be A Web 2.0 bubble?,” Danny Rimer of Index Ventures said he’d be wary of micro-bubbles, the kind that can hit regions especially hard. He pointed to the video sharing market, where regions may see several companies vying for the same share of the pie. But others were not so sure as even with a swarm of companies vying for the space, there will still be those worth funding.

I head back to Portland tomorrow with a new view of the European market. I am sure I won’t be gone too long. The market is just too hot. Hey, its not just about San Francisco anymore!

Why I’ve Joined SplashCast

Today’s my first day here at SplashCast and I thought I’d take the opportunity to share a little bit of my thinking about why I decided to join the company. There are general considerations like the appeal of working with a group and gaining more real world experience working in a startup, but most important to me are a few things about SplashCast itself.

When it’s complete SplashCast will be a media aggregation and distribution platform powered in large part by RSS. I think RSS is magic. The quick flow of text and media has never been easier than it is now and RSS has increased our access to information by orders of magnitude.

Embedded media is also a very important development in the history of the web. The ability to embed a single video in any website made online video, especially user generated video, the incredible force that it is today. YouTube got big in large part because you could embed a video in MySpace. The ability to embed and update channels of multiple files of all types of media on any web page will be the next big step. I think SplashCast could nail that big step.

The interface that SplashCast is developing will make it very easy for nontechnical users to use RSS to deliver multiple related media items together through distributed SplashCast players. What’s more interesting than a single cool video, photograph, text feed or audio file? Creatively bundled, easily updated, thematic groups of all these media types delivered over a network of sites around the web. That’s what SplashCast will make easy. The company has a great vision and is already taking care of many details that will make that vision a solid reality.

As soon as the SplashCast player is ready to show off, I’ll be using it to publish channels of media on a wide variety of topics here on this site. I’ll also be bringing guest editors onto the site to put together channels of their favorite media on their topics of expertise. Until that time I’ll be using this space to participate in conversations emerging online about new media. I hope you’ll join us while we highlight the best on the web and work to create an infrastructure to take online media to the next level.

-Marshall Kirkpatrick

Director of Content

SplashCast

Welcome, Marshall!

Today is Marshall Kirkpatrick’s first day at SplashCast! 

Just a few days ago Marshall was writing for TechCrunch.  Today he is our Director of Content.  Indeed, this past week has been an especially busy one for us.

We are absolutely delighted to have one of the most talented, resourceful, and influential bloggers spearhead our ambitious agenda for covering the wild, wild west of  user-generated content (see yesterday’s New York Times article on UGC).  Marshall will not only be the voice of SplashCast, he will act as executive producer, folding in the best writers, podcasters, and vloggers in our industry.  We have big ideas for ”SplashCast Media”, and can’t wait to integrate these ideas into the SplashCast syndication network for all your publishing desires (public beta coming soon, I promise!). 

I hope you will join me in giving Marshall the warmest of welcomes.

Welcome aboard, Marshall! 

We’re In Paris

We just arrived. Great to be back in Paris. I can’t believe it has been 20 years.

We received word last week that we were accepted to present at LeWeb. I’ll be on Tuesday, speaking at 15:50 in the start up room. I’ll be giving a glimpse of the Splashcast syndication network.

Judy and I are getting ready to go out for a bit so I have to go. Great to be here. We’re staying at a little hotel on Rue de Rennes, near Montparnasse. Here for LeWeb? Let me know. I am looking forward to meeting folks here for the conference.

technorati tags:leweb, splashcast, paris

A Tough Day — James Kim, May You Rest In Peace

Background: CNET Senior Editor James Kim and his family went missing eleven days ago. They were stranded in the Oregon wilderness on remote forest service roads while trying to get to Gold Beach on the Oregon Coast. James body was found yesterday. His wife and children were rescued on Monday.

Yesterday was a tough day. I had been watching the reports about James Kim. Then the email arrived from a colleague. Rescuers had found his body. I did not want to believe it. I felt hope when I went to CNET and read that nothing had been confirmed. I checked Google News. There it was. James body had been found by rescuers at the bottom of a ravine.

I choked up. The news really hit me. I felt it somewhere deeper, more so than ever before have I had this kind of reaction to the death of someone I did not even know.

I have a feeling I know why this one hurts so much. James worked for CNET. He covered the digital audio space. He worked in the tech community. He is one of us.

I am part of the tech community. I have colleagues who knew him well. On a personal level, James got lost in the Oregon wilderness trying to save his family. I live in Oregon. I am a Dad. I’ve traveled in that area with my children over forest service roads.

In some ways, Kim’s death makes me realize how many friends I have in this world of bloggers, podcasters, videobloggers and all the others in this new media world. The bummer? It’s such a sad way to be reminded.

James Kim, may you rest in peace.

Friends of the Kim family are accepting donations at: http://jamesandkati.com/