Open The Dialogue

Hot off the presses and certainly deserving of its own call-out is a great article that will be appearing in The Screens Issue of this weekend’s New York Times Magainze.

In Multiscreen Mad Men, Jack Hitt moderates a discussion about digital media and the direction it’s heading:

Palmer: There’s a difference. A Super Bowl ad is broadcast and everybody sees the same ad, and it comes from a single source. And so you may have a preference as to whether you liked this ad in comparison to this other ad in the block of ads that you just saw. But when you feel like you’ve discovered something on the Internet, it’s a different relationship to the brand. Say I was one of the first thousand people who saw that Cadbury gorilla ad — where he drums along to Phil Collins — and I send that out to all my friends. There’s a pride that I have in having discovered that, a connection that you actually can’t get with broadcast advertising.

Some great stuff in the issue all-around, eagerly awaiting your Saturday morning coffee.

I really can’t get over how much I love this graph put together by Steve Bryant on the intersection of interactivity and presentation. It’s really, really interesting if you follow the media at all and are involved in trying to get clients or customers into the interactive space.

Ooh, never noticed this either – Lost Remote sez you can embed a widget from TIME magazine with a quote of the day in your own site if you want to. Wow, a widget with a credible source behind it. Go figure.

I’m a big fan of recurring jokes and one of my favorites revolves around hockey. See here in Chicago we have a professional hockey team but we can’t watch it on local TV because the owner feels that broadcasting games would be bad for ticket sales. You can understand his argument considering that’s exactly what basketball, baseball and football leagues do, except that it’s not. So I make jokes about not even knowing what Tom and others are talking about when they mention hockey since it’s not something I usually even have the option of watching in the background and I chuckle to myself because my goodness am I witty.

It seems, though, that the NFL is taking a similar stance when it comes to online video. The league announced news organizations cannot post video longer than 45 seconds online, something meant to protect the interests (read: “web traffic”) of the league’s member teams, a policy that not even the NHL has in place. Quite the opposite, the other professional leagues allow for unlimited use by news organizations of video online. The NFL, though, wants to drive people to team sites where they’re the ones who have sold advertising and where people are just a couple clicks away from buying branded items.

I have no problem with a corporate entity wanting to protect assets it feels are valuable but there comes a point, as any parent will tell you, where you have to ask if you’ve crossed the line into smothering. Occasionally content has to run free, has to scrape its knees and has to meet new people. By restricting usage of video on news sites, the NFL is doing little but making sure content never gets misused but I don’t know if they fully realize that they run the risk of that content not being used at all.

As usual when a corporate entity attempts to over-control the media it’s the customer that loses. Fans, instead of being able to see NFL video on a news site will have to go to their team’s site, where the reporting will likely be less journalistic than that from a news organization.

What’s also interesting to me is how the NFL is repositioning itself from being a sports league to being a content producer, the equivalent of a Hollywood movie studio. There are actually a number of parallels since the studios, too, want to exercise total control over how their content is exhibited and viewed. This in contract to niche producers like Vuguru, the company behind the online series “Prom Queen,” and others that seem to believe it’s not where the content is viewed that is important but the the content itself that rules all.

“How does this impact my audience’s experience?” is a question all content producers should be asking themselves as they map out online strategies and then decisions made based on, not despite, the answers to that question.

I have to agree with Lost Remote regarding posting video online. If you have video on your site, it should be embeddable. LR brings this up because of Comedy Central now allowing people to embed video from “The Colbert Report” and more from their site. Whenever I want to pass along a video now I always not only link to the source (likely Apple’s Quicktime or some other such site) but will also make an effort to search it out on YouTube. If it’s there I’ll grab the code and put it up as well, giving people the option to either view it directly on my site or go to the high-quality version.

But so many video producers don’t get that allowing people to easily pass on the video is a good thing. There might be a “tell a friend” link to email the video to someone but as more and more people are creating content themselves, allowing for embeddable video lets them add some spice to their site. It’s an easy way to let people spread the word in a way that builds brand loyalty for both the publisher as well as the video creator. I’m actively disappointed when I see someone has lots of video on their site and none of it is embeddable, even if I don’t plan on using it. Someone might be and that’s one less tool they have to talk about the product or brand in a compelling manner.

In this story on corporate mergers and other deals, the New York Times did something rather remarkable. They embedded a YouTube video within the online story.

I have to say my first reaction to this was, “Wow!” It’s so odd – but great – to see a mainstream outlet embrace the same tools and toys that the online community is already using like this. This is just the kind of added value that can be created for readers of the online version of the paper and begin to drive visitors.

[Hat tip to Rex Sorgatz]

The “new vs. old media consumption” debate has flared up again. Scoble says he only reads RSS feeds. Others say they still read newspapers.

What if you’re reading the RSS feeds from newspapers?

Here’s my take on all this: A well rounded media diet, just like a good nutritional diet, contains everything in appropriate portions. A scoop of newspapers, a serving of magazines, a portion of blogs, a helping of TV, a bit of radio and some podcasts to fill in the edges. How much of what will largely depend on what industry you’re in. For Scoble, it makes sense that his media consumption is mostly RSS feeds. That’s his industry. For others it’s vitally important that newspapers make up the bulk of their reading. Others need to focus on trade mags in their niche. Find what works best for you and who you’re working on behalf of and go to it.

ClickZ’s Pamela Parker reports Thursday that Lexus is going all new media on us with its latest campaign, LexusFusion.com, which is using podcasts and video to market the new IS model. This marketing effort is specifically aimed at the African-American community, and features music selections in the hip-hop / jazz fusion genre. In addition to the above-mentioned elements, Lexus is also advertising widely on blogs.

[via Marketing VOX]

Remember that Howard Stern Webcast that Yahoo! was hosting on Friday in celebration of his move to SIRIUS Satellite Radio? Well, Yahoo! said this afternoon that 4.4 million streams were shown that day, with more than 200,000 people actually watching it live.

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow posted this morning about Revver, which is a service that lets people easily upload video for show, just like Flickr and smugmug do for images – with one hook. That hook is that the uploader/creator of the video has an opportunity to make some money off of the transaction. Obviously that’s going to be a motivator for some (though not all) to utilize Revver’s offerings.

All that being said, is the whole “Web 2.0″ community even about the money, or is it more about the ability to share stuff, do things through a Web browser that were only pipe dreams for some a decade ago, and the connection between people? A couple of days ago, Anil Dash was wondering about the fact that users of Flickr are subjected to advertisements on photographs they’re viewing – if the user doesn’t have a Pro account. But that fact wasn’t the primary driver behind Dash’s comments – it was the fact that none of those Google AdSense dollars (or pennies, as it were) ever trickled down to the publishers of the various photos seen on Flickr. I’ve got to ask – is it even about gaming the system, or making a buck on every single little thing? In my eyes, these are the same things that were discussed when many a blogger began putting various advertising units on their blogs, which then evolved into BlogAds, AdSense for bloggers, inline ads, adverposts, and more.

I’ve gotta say that anything that helps contribute to the well being (and wallet) of those who are making content and sharing photos, news, and information with the rest of us is great. But at the same time, most people I know who are interested in Flickr and other “sharing” sites are more interesting in how the whole “economy of visits” works and community aspect than they are worried about making a dime on it.