Friday, December 08, 2006

John Battelle has some interesting insight on "conversational media." This is a better term than "user-created content." The simple explanation is that conversational media is any sort of media published on the internet that isn't expressly for commercial purposes. My current favorite example:
Singing skeleton marionette
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Hee hee, he dances and so does the pair of legs behind him. This sort of video has been around for a long time- the dancing baby, the Star Wars kid, and innumerable videos of cats are all examples. The dancing baby was originally intended as a demo for some prefab animation software, but nobody knew it. Conversational media is different from viral marketing in that the content is purely for enjoyment. If you clicked on the link above (then you're a geek like me), you saw the rundown of big media companies and their attempts to get in on web 2.0 content distribution. Newscorp bought Myspace, much to the chagrin of Viacom, for a hefty sum of money. Google bought Youtube with a built-in bugged for the wave of infringement lawsuits from big media copyright holders.
It seems to me that the short-term value of these assets is the ad revenue that comes from multiple users navigating through several pages of content, seeing new ads with each new page. Meanwhile, consumers are blocking and skipping advertising more and more. In light of this apparently growing trend, the web advertising model starts to look short sighted, if not willfully ignorant of the user base. However, I see these conversational media outlets as a great investment for trend watching. When a company owns the media servers, they can search and compile all kinds of data on what's popular while it's still popular.
Movie sites are popping up on Myspace now in order to connect with the target audience for the majority of studio films, and networks are using Youtube to market programming to an audience that has largely tuned out in the hope of getting their attention again.
And I just realized that I don't really know where I'm going with this. It's been on my mind for a while, since I did a project on the subject last year.

Monday, December 04, 2006

It got cold here in a hurry this year, after a pleasantly warm Thanksgiving week. I think we're fighting nature's population cap by living here at this time of year, but until we get satellite powered ubiquitous wireless internet, we're not leaving our northern population centers for warmer weather. I have the heater in my apartment blowing full-blast whenever I'm there and awake, though the effective radius is the size of an Ewok's strike zone. Sometimes when I'm cold and impatient I sit on the vent to warm my mostly uninsulated bones. Oddly enough, though it was turned off, I thought I heard it this morning. I assumed it was the neighbors, but then I found it running despite the switch being off. Apparently, there's a thermometer failsafe so I don't freeze to death in my sleep, which was rather considerate of the designer. If the thing didn't run on a pencil sharpener motor I'd call it good design.

Some people I know don't read (old joke), but those of you who do may be interested in this site: Unsuggester. Enter a book you've read, and the site will give you a list of books that you are statistically unlikely to read, based on site members' reading lists. It seems to be heavily weighted by people with lists of nothing but Christian/inspirational books, or perhaps I'm just a heathen for reading John Steinbeck, Neil Gaiman, and Douglas Adams.