One downside of being a cell phone only household (no land line) is losing your phone means you have no phone. And, unlike cordless phones, there is no docking station you can press a button on to locate the darn thing when you lose it.

This problem is fresh in my mind after losing my cell phone at home this morning. Surprisingly, no one was calling or texting me for once, so my phone maintained quietly hidden somewhere in the house. When my wife is home in situations like this, we simply call each other to get our phones to out themselves in their hiding spots, but that wasn’t an option today.

Skype to the rescue: I simply clicked “Call Ordinary Phones” dialed my cell phone’s number, then listened intently for the buzz of my phone in its hiding place. Sure enough, it worked.

And where was it? It was . . . um . . . well . . . on the table . . . behind my laptop’s monitor.

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How many times have you talked to a soon to graduate student who possessed absolutely no idea how to find a job? They have often never held an internship, worked in the field they now hope to jump into upon graduation, and don’t know many people working in the field they’ve chosen for their first post-graduation career.

AFTER graduation, they start searching with growing frustration and are then told that they need to start networking because that’s how most good jobs are landed. That’s great advice, but why didn’t they start earlier?

Translate That Concept into Web Marketing

You just spent months, if not years, developing a new product or web site and now you want to tell the world all about it. Who do you tell? Who do they tell? How large is your network? How influential is your network?

Do you have an established network on online friends who will help spread the word when the time comes to amplify your marketing? Notice that I said “friends” rather than contacts. People who you keep in contact with on a regular basis who you care about and who care about you. They’re the type of people who will go out of their way to help you tell your story when it’s ready to be told.

Frankly, most people and companies are not positioned to broadcast their marketing messages online today. They may create some great stuff, but growth will be slow without a network capable of spreading the word.

This, of course, helps explain why PR firms bill such ridiculous rates. They’re selling access to the invaluable networks they’ve built over time while you were too busy doing other things.

Start Building Your Network

1. If you’re not already, start getting more involved in online communities today. Comment on at least one blog a day that’s related to your areas of interest (business or personal).
2. Start a blog if you haven’t already. You’ll surprised at how many people with similar interests will find you if you blog regularly on topics you’re passionate about.
3. Participate in online networks such as forums, blogs, discussion groups, and other places where people with similar interests hang out.
4. Contact people you find interesting directly. Say, “Hello.”
5. Get out from behind your computer and turn a few online friends into real-world friends from time to time.

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When I started writing for the Internet back in 1997, the general thinking among what few net journalists there were back then was that shorter was better.  Stories were supposed to be at most a few paragraphs long.  Everyone seemed to feel this was the way it ought to be, but the reasons stated varied a lot.  

The most pragmatic writers, it seemed to me, were those who felt that shorter stories allowed more room for ads or perhaps that shorter stories would lead to more frequent page refreshes allowing more banner ads (the only real type of ads we had back then).  

Some editors claimed they read research that concluded shorter was better, with “better” either meaning: 1) more people got to the end of the story (makes sense if the story is shorter); or 2) readers retained more information from the story (makes sense since shorter stories probably contain less information).

I took a different path, not really caring if people read or comprehended.  I wrote long pieces.  L-o-n-g pieces, some as long as 4400 words, which was more than ten times the supposed target length at places like Cnet.  It was the only way I knew, as a recovering magazine feature writer, to get my point across.  And since I was writing for a non-commercial site, it didn‚Äôt seem to really matter.

Nearly 10 years into this experiment, here is what I have learned: longer is better.  Generally speaking, the longer my essays the more popular they were, both in the short and long terms.  That 4400 word monster I really should have broken into two parts was not only popular at the time, it continues to be read — six years later — by hundreds of people each week.  Longer has more information, has more to say, makes a stronger point, and is ultimately more memorable.  There‚Äôs a reason why people like to read books.

Yet still most journalism web sites prefer short stories and they still prefer them for exactly the reasons cited above, despite the fact that it is contradicted by my experience and possibly the experience of others.   Alas, this shorter-is-better tendency seems to have extended to the blogosphere.  This is not inherently bad.  Blogs, after all, don‚Äôt appear to really have a formal definition and can be pretty much whatever their authors want them to be.  But I would be interested to know whether long or short posts are better received by readers?

And the real reason, I think, why the early news sites wanted short stories was pure laziness.  If ‚Äúcovering‚Äù a story meant no more than three paragraphs, any re-write man could cover news all day by simply re-stating wire stories and not having to pay anything for the material.

Internet journalism was seen as idiot journalism back then.  Nobody really expected it to go anywhere.  Today we know Internet journalism is great for breaking news and for stories of interest to niche audiences, but as more and more people get their news solely from the net that will change.  And I hope the next generation of writers comes to believe that longer IS better, and their editors finally figure out that longer is at least okay.

Longer is often better for video, too.  When I started doing doing hour-long NerdTV shows, I was called crazy by other broadcasters who thought three minutes was too long.  Yet now look at how many people are watching TV dramas on-line in their entirety.  I don‚Äôt have TiVO and I have little kids so the only way I ever get to watch Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, for example, is by going to nbc.com.  And for my purposes, why would I do it any other way?  The shows are shorter because they contain fewer ads and I‚Äôm sitting at my PC anyway, darn it.

That‚Äôs the last part of this watching-TV-on-your-PC thing.  Whether you talk about lean-forward or lean-back TV, most people would PREFER to watch on a bigger screen in a more comfortable environment so that‚Äôs where the market is heading with all these new gizmos to shunt our PC video to the TV in the family room.  I‚Äôm not at all opposed to that, by the way. Bring it on.  But there is a big difference between what people prefer to do and what they are WILLING to do.

Someone who spends 40-60 hours per week sitting at a computer display may well prefer to be entertained at home with a big plasma display, but the fact is that for much of their waking life they are in front of a smaller display and that’s becoming a perfectly viable target for the same content because people are WILLING to view it there.

There‚Äôs an insidious effect happening in our work places.  The slave drivers have banned radios and there were never TV‚Äôs, but we can have both running on our computers virtually full-time.  Internet radio is a workplace Godsend and Internet TV is headed in the same direction.  This is all good.  And it is all lean-forward no matter what the content, because big screens and leaning back haven‚Äôt made it to many offices and probably never will.

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We have all heard the arguments before in video, music and print both pro and con Digital Rights Management. Content creators like DRM because it helps prevent users from stealing their work. Consumers hate DRM because it prevents them from moving the content they have purchased to other devices. There is one specific market I would like to touch on: eBooks.

I have a Sony Reader. This is a really cool device that makes it super easy to read my books wherever I am. Paper books can be large and a pain in the butt. The Sony Reader is sexy, elegant and goes with my just about everywhere now. Some of the books I would like to read are available on the Sony Connect eBooks site, but many are not. An example of a book I would like to get for my Sony Reader but have been unable to is Naked Conversations.

Naked Conversations is available in encrypted PDF form which means it’s riddled with DRM. I can’t print it, I can’t copy/paste from it, I really can’t do anything but read it on my computer. Unfortunately this also means that I can not read it on my Sony Reader since the reader won’t decrypt DRM protected PDFs. End result: I won’t buy the book in either paper or digital format, I’ll just borrow it from a friend. Did DRM help the content creators here or did it hurt them? How many copies of the book were stolen vs. how many were lost due to the DRM in the PDF?

That brings me to eBooks in general. Most eBooks have DRM of some form and there are many different types. It’s extremely difficult to move eBooks from one system to another. In the music realm Apple came in with FairPlay and created a DRM system that’s out of the way for most users. No one has done this in the eBook space. I’m not saying that eBooks have to be DRM free, but it should be loose enough that I can move my books from eReader to eReader and I should be able to read my eBooks on different computers easily.

There’s the bigger picture here too. How much money are these corporations losing in developing DRM that’s cracked before it hits the streets, implementing the DRM, taking support calls on DRM based material and lost sales because users would not tolerate the DRM? Is it really worth all the headache to stop a few pirates? Won’t the pirates find a way to steal the content anyhow? Why not allow the law abiding consumer to do with the media as they please? Seems to me that it’s just as easy to steal a paper book as it is to steal a digital book. Now rather than protecting assets, DRM seems to be pissing people off while the content is still stolen. It appears to me to be a lose-lose situation.

Who will be our savior? Who will come in with a large collection of eBooks that can be used on eReaders and/or computers? Who will fix the horrid DRM that we have in this space today? Will it be Google, Apple or Sony? Is there someone who does this already? How can I get my copy of Naked Conversations on to my Sony Reader legally without jumping through hoops?

Maybe I’m just too early to the market, and want to much of my technology. You know, being able to actually use it and all.

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At CES 2007 the video crew had help from Jeff Deitch in the form of Gopher, programmer, photog and all around great guy. This was Jeff’s first time to CES and Ed Kohler took a minute to sit down with Jeff and get his impressions as well cover how Jeff was able to fix our horrible WiFi connection. Anyone who suffered bandwidth problems at CES 2007 may want to have a quick listen.

Total Run Time 9:37 | Direct Download | Non-Explicit

Download the AppleScript Internet Script here.

We’re testing something new on this latest Technology Evangelist podcast. Typically we distribute the podcast as a MP3 file but this time I’m trying to use the chapter and image enhancements that M4A files give us. These enhancements can be seen in iTunes easily and should play back in most AAC capable players. The player above is an MP3 file as is the direct download, just in case you have issues, otherwise you can download the M4A file here or subscribe to our feed in iTunes.

Would you like to join the conversation? There are three very simple methods to do so:
1 - Leave your comments below
2 - Send us a Skype Voicemail and we’ll add you to our next podcast
3 - Send us a SightSpeed Video Mail and we’ll add you to our next videocast
We look forward to enhancing and continuing the conversation with out fellow techies.

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When all of us were writing last fall about YouTube being purchased by Google for $1.65 billion in stock, part of that mantra was YouTube‚Äôs traffic consisting of users viewing 100 million videos per day.  Thousands of news stories and blogs mentioned that same 100 million number.  This number came, in part, from Nielsen NetRatings, which counts the number of unique visitors to YouTube.com, but YouTube, itself, was evidently responsible for the actual 100 million videos-per-day calculation as well as saying ‚ÄúWe continue to grow exponentially month-to-month, so check back in for the latest metrics.‚Äù

Checking back in for the latest metrics as they suggest, we find the now Google-owned YouTube is suddenly claiming only 70 million videos downloaded per day (though the 100 million figure continues to be used on the YouTube web page).  This is in all the stories today from Davos where YouTube founder Chad Hurley announced to the World Economic forum that YouTube will shortly begin paying contributors for videos that are successful on the site.

So what has changed at YouTube?  Has traffic really declined?  Has YouTube peaked?  Or were the earlier numbers juiced to make the company look even more successful than it actually was, thus encouraging the Google deal?

Nobody knows these answers for sure who doesn‚Äôt work at YouTube or Google, but the few statistics we can put together raise some serious questions.  One can argue that Alexa.com numbers aren‚Äôt necessarily a true mirror of the net as a whole, but they are available and the probably show general trends.  Well Alexa says YouTube is growing, not shrinking, in both total viewers and page views-per-user.

There are many possible reasons for this decline in traffic.  Maybe YouTube is rejecting more videos more quickly under pressure from industry trade groups.  Maybe sites like Revver that have been paying video contributors all along are siphoning YouTube growth.  Or maybe, as suggested above, the original figure of 100 million downloads was simply incorrect and a slightly more adult Google-owned YouTube decided to correct the number and hoped nobody would notice.

Except we did.

By the way, the exponent for growth from 100 million to 70 million videos per day is approximately 0.9806357.

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Flickr offers a wide variety of organizational tools to help users make sense of their photo portfolios. One option is Sets, which allows you to group photos and set permissions for that group of photos. Creating sets for events, such as weddings, vacations, or trade shows are popular uses of this feature. Unfortunately, the filtering options available on Flickr are fairly limited, which makes what could be a very powerful tool tedious to use.

This seems like something Flickr will eventually address, but it may be far from Flickr’s highest priority on their development to-do list.

Here is a personal example of why this needs to be improved: I have a set of private photos on Flickr I’d like to release to the public one by one. They reside in a set based on a tag they all have in common. Ideally, I’d like the unpublished photos to share a unique set so it’s easy to sort through the unpublished photos to select a new one for publication. Privacy status is not available for set creating in Flickr’s interface, however the data needed to build such a query clearly exists in their system (privacy status of photo and tags).

Fortunately, Flickr’s API allows users to tackle problems like this by building custom tools. In this case, Eric Appel created a powerful Flickr Sets management interface called SmartSetr, creating access to many more photo variables for complex sets creation.

SmartSetr created sets require SmartSetr to modify, which makes sense considering Flickr doesn’t directly support the types of set creations SmartSetr provides. If you use the site, be sure to bookmark it so you can modify sets at a later date.

For more information on SmartSetr, check out the SmartSetr Flickr Group where additional feature requests are being discussed.

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Remember Interactive TV ?  What is today Time-Warner Cable ran a trial in Columbus, Ohio in 1976 for a new kind of cable television called QUBE that would allow viewers to buy goods directly from TV, to vote in polls, play video games, even to select different camera angles in sports coverage.  I had a friend who worked in that trial and the things he told me about it both amazed me and also made me wonder why anyone would bother.  Did we really need all that stuff?

Interactive TV in that incarnation went nowhere in the U.S., though ultimately thrived in Europe as Teletext.  In Columbus it became clear that it cost too much for the benefit derived and the bandwidth that would have been devoted could be better used to bring more cable-only channels, which hadn‚Äôt even existed when Interactive TV was envisioned.  In many ways Interactive TV was killed by HBO.

Interactive TV in a slightly different form was revived in the 1990s when we were going to use Digital TV to accomplish many of the same objectives.  Again we had a surplus of bandwidth so interactivity was one way to use it.

It occurred to me recently that most of the promise of Interactive TV has been realized by the World Wide Web.  We can buy, vote, and select like crazy and of course play games.  About the only part that is missing is being able to select those camera angles for the big game.

Hey, why not?

Online video could easily replicate this coolest of all features from Interactive TV.  There could be as many video feeds as there are cameras from a sports event, for example, and it would be simple for viewers to switch from one to another or even run several side-by-side.  What appeals to me the most about this is that it is something that still can‚Äôt be done on broadcast or cable television.  For sports, especially, this is a capability that could only be obtained over the net.

Imagine, then, a broadcast or cable TV network that covers a sports event with many cameras and markets as a unique Internet service, ALL those camera angles.  It‚Äôs not something many people would need, but real enthusiasts would love it.  And since it comes almost as a freebie on top of existing coverage, why not?

They’d call it My NFL.

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The videos from CES are all posted, but we wanted to show you a little bit of what went on behind the scenes for those videos. Mostly because while Benjamin and Ed say they are professionals, as these outtakes show, they are really not.

(more…)

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