New Media Guidelines for Search and Access
August 13, 2009
Imediaconnection.com’s “Metadata Secrets for Expanding your Content’s Reach” struck me as a useful back to basics for traditional media executives. Ben Weinberger has gathered seven tips that provide some useful advice (use analytics) and some that is going to be as clear as Aramaic to media executives (intelligent metadata in a metadata management framework). If you want a shopping list of what to do to stay in business, you will want to add Mr. Weinberger’s write up to your archive. The killer omission is the plumbing required to permit implementation of some of his tips. Mr. Weinberger may want to acquaint himself with MarkLogic. MarkLogic, may I suggest you brief Mr. Weinberger?
Stephen Arnold, August 13, 2009
Kids and Downloading. And the Parents?
August 12, 2009
Short honk: TechDirt’s “New Study States the Obvious: Kids Download a Lot of Music.” The most interesting comment in the story was:
A new study, sponsored by UK Music (the UK organization that’s looking to get ISPs to put in place some sort of blanket licensing plan) has found that over 60% of kids in the UK admit to file sharing, with 83% of those admitting to doing it regularly, and those surveyed claiming to have downloaded an average of 8,100 tracks. Think about that for a second. 8,100 tracks.
As the kids grow up, what changes?
Stephen Arnold, August 12, 2009
Google and the Open Source Card
August 7, 2009
Digital video is a high stakes game and only high rollers can play. Hulu.com has the backing of several motivated outfits with deep pockets. Smaller video sites are interesting but the punishing costs associated with dense bit media are going to be too much for most of these companies over the next couple of years.
Google is committed to video. A big chunk of the under 40 crowd love to fiddle with, wallow in, and learn via video. I don’t, but that does not make any difference whatsoever.
There are two different views of the Google acquisition of On2’s video compression technology. On one side of the fence is a traditional media company, the Guardian newspaper. You can read “Google Buy Up Will Help Cut YouTube Costs.” The idea is that Google is not making money via YouTube.com. Therefore, the all-stock deal worth about $110 million gets Google some compression technology that will reduce bandwidth costs and deliver other efficiencies. The On2 technology also has the potential to give Google an edge in video quality. This is an AP story, so I don’t want to quote from the item. I do want to point out that this on the surface seems like a really great analysis.
On the other side of the fence is the viewpoint expressed in The Register. Its story “Is Google Spending $106.5 Million to Open Source a Codec”?” is quite different. Cade Metz, a good thinker in the opinion of the goslings here in Harrod’s Creek, wrote:
But if you also consider the company’s so far fruitless efforts to push through a video tag for HTML 5 – the still gestating update to the web’s hypertext markup language – the On2 acquisition looks an awful lot like an effort to solve this browser-maker impasse.
Mr. Metz sees the On2 buy as a way for Google to offer an alternative video codec which sidesteps some issues with H.264 and other beasties in the video jungle.
In my opinion, The Register is closer to the truth that the Guardian. Google is playing an open source trump card. Making open source moves delivers two benefits. The first is the short term solution to the hassle over video standards. Google offers an attractive alternative to the issues described by Mr. Metz. The second advantage is that Google reaps the benefits of contributing to open source in a substantive way.
Open source is a major threat to Microsoft and some other enterprise software vendors. Google is playing a sophisticated game and playing that game well in our opinion. The Register’s story gets it; the Guardian’s story does not.
Stephen Arnold, August 7, 2009
Flickr Thunderstorms
August 6, 2009
Right after inking a yet-to-be-approved deal with Microsoft, Yahoo rolled out enhancements to Flickr’s image search. If you have not tried the new-and-improved Flickr, click here and give the system a whirl. My test queries were modest. I need pictures of train wrecks, collapsed houses, and skiers who are doing headers into snow drifts. These illustrations amuse me and I find them useful in illustrating the business methods of some dinosaur-like organizations. The search “train wreck” worked. I received image results that were on a par with Google’s. Yahoo’s Flickr did not allow me to NOT out jpgs or narrow the query to line art. The system was fine. My query for “house collapse” was less satisfying, but the results were usable. I had to click and browse before I found a suitable image for a company that is shaken by financial upheavals and management decisions.
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tbruce/193295658/
What surprised me about Flickr was the story “Cloud Storage Nightmare with Flickr.” Hubert Nguyen reported:
A Flickr user learned the hard way when his account got hacked and 3000 of his photos were deleted by the hacker, who also closed his account. The account owner is now campaigning against Flickr’s support. You can imagine how mad that person was, but it gets worse: Flickr cannot retrieve his data and we guess that this is because they were deleted in a seemingly “legitimate” manner (from Flickr’s point of view). We think that Flickr is built to survive some catastrophic hardware failure, but if an account is closed, the data is immediately deleted – permanently.
This strikes me as a policy issue, but it underscores the types of challenges that Microsoft may find itself trying to free itself from the thorn bush. If the revenue from the yet-to-be-approved tie up does not produce a truck load of dough, the situation could become even thornier for Microsoft.
Stephen Arnold, August 6, 2009
YouTube Upload Volume
July 28, 2009
Short honk: I saw this factoid in TechCrunch a while ago. I neglected to pull it out. In May 2009, MG Siegler reported that “every minute just about a day’s worth of video is … uploaded to YouTube.” You can read the story on TechCrunch. The metrics are, according to TechCrunch:
Think about that for a minute. In that minute, nearly a days worth of footage will have been uploaded. And the pace is quickening. Back in 2007, shortly after Google bought the service, it was 6 hours of footage being uploaded every minute. As recently as January of this year, that number had grown to 15 hours, according to the YouTube blog
. Now it’s 20 — soon it will be 24. That’s insane.
Bottomline: lots of video with more coming. iPhone users are videographers with black belts. Now when will the Google unleash its automated video findability technology?
Stephen Arnold, July 27, 2009
Media Mavens Face Generational Threat
July 24, 2009
You are a publisher. Maybe you are in the media business. Perhaps you fancy yourself a band promoter. Pick your pigeonhole and then read “How Teenagers Consume Media: The Report that Shook the City”. I point to this summary of teen wonder Matthew Robson, Morgan Stanley’s secret weapon in the analysis wars. Why the synopsis? Most people don’t read. Among the points that I wrote down in my dinosaur skin notebook were:
- On demand TV is of interest
- Newspapers are dead ducks or geese
- Stolen music is common
- Mobile gizmos are in vogue
Books don’t make the loser list. For me, the key point was that these kids may have traditional media contexts. Yet despite what parents and schools say, the teens march to a different synthesized drum beat. Mom and Dad at work try to stop the shift, but I think the generational threat is here and now.
Stephen Arnold, July 24, 2009
Microsoft and Video Search
July 22, 2009
Bing.com received kudos for showing frames of videos on a search results page. Google does not provide this feature. For a short time, I thought Microsoft was gearing up to deal with Google on a service-by-service basis. I was wrong. I learned from Cnet’s “Microsoft Closing YouTube Rival” that Soapbox would be reinvented in nano scale. What about video search at Microsoft? I am confident that it will be positioned at the cat’s pajamas. Oh, cats don’t wear pajamas. YouTube.com may be a money loser and controversial, but the Google has oodles of patent applications for monetizing video. If the Googlers crack the code, Microsoft may be forced to play catch up. Traffic is the issue. Monetizing is an interesting problem but one which may have a solution. Just my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, July 22, 2009
Google and UPnP Functions
July 15, 2009
UPnP is a standard that enables devices to be plugged into a network and automatically know about each other. Most people don’t worry too much about standards for networked devices behaving and doing what their owners expect.
My thought is that savvy readers of this Web log might want to take a gander at four patent documents filed on December 7 and December 8, 2008, and published on June 11, 2009. Please, dear reader, do not remind me of these points:
- Patent applications may mean nothing; in fact, for one former Microsoft person, patent documents are often red herrings
- Patent applications may be little more than management keeping some engineers happy or giving their parents something to show the neighbors to help explain what their progeny does for a living
- Patent applications may not contain anything new, existing to recycle other, more prescient innovators ideas because the patent system is broken.
I think these four patent documents are reasonably interesting. You can get your very own copy from the ever snappy USPTO service or by paying one of the commercial outfits who will do the retrieving for those with better things to do than fool with mere busy work.
The four documents that caught my attention were:
- 20090150480, Publishing Assets Of Dynamic Nature In UPnP Networks
- 20090150481, Organizing And Publishing Assets In UPnP Networks
- 20090150520, Transmitting Assets In UPnP Networks To Remote Servers
- 20090150570, Sharing Assets Between UPnP Networks
I am reluctant to ignore these because the Google revealed that the inventors form what looks to me like an innovation team; to wit:
The italics show the three Googlers who played a part in all four patents. One can conclude that this group of seven individuals forms a core of UPnP knowledge at the Google.
So what can one do with the Google inventions disclosed in these four documents?
I will be discussing these in detail in my client briefings, so I will highlight one of the documents and offer some observations. For more, you can find out the method by looking at the About page for this Web log.
Let’s look at 20090150481. The title provides a clue: “Organizing and Publishing Assets in UPnP Networks”. The first order of business is to get up to speed on UPnP because the Google doesn’t provide the basic information needed for a person not skilled in the art to figure out what’s going on. You can start with this Wikipedia page. The information is useful but not 100 percent of the picture. I think it is a useful place to begin, however. The write up explains that connections in the home are one place where UPnP plays a role. Good clue that, particularly the reference to entertainment.
Now let’s look at what Google says the patent document 20090150481 is about:
System and computer program products for allowing a renderer in a UPnP network the capability of being able to render general Internet content of static or dynamic nature, which the renderer was not designed to render in the contents original data format and file type. The system queries all devices on the local network, queries specific remote servers over the Internet, and retrieves data feeds from remote sources. The queried and retrieved data that is not in a format and file type that can be rendered by the renderer is loaded into a template and turned into a format and file type acceptable by the renderer. The queried and retrieved data in the proper format and file type is organized in a custom format and made available for rendering to the renderer. The system has the capability of transmitting content or the metadata of the content within the devices on the local network to a hosting service over the Internet. Additionally, a second local network has the capability of accessing the content stored on the first local network.
The invention points to a more sophisticated media system, involving devices, content, and metadata. Strikes me as germane to Google’s interest in online games and other rich content.
Stephen Arnold, July 15, 2009
UFC 2010: HTML 5, Air, and Silverlight
July 3, 2009
Mary Jo Foley opened my eyes to a new unlimited online fighting battle in 2010. Her story with a lamentably cryptic headline appeared on June 11, 2009 as “Microsoft .Net RIA Services: Not until 2010.” You can find the article here. He story revealed that Microsoft will try to push its Rich Internet Application technology into the market in 2010. She wrote:
.Net RIA Services is designed to allow coders to bring together the .Net programming model with Microsoft’s Silverlight competitor to Adobe Flash. Microsoft made a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the technology available in March, but didn’t provide any final availability information.
The RIA acronym means stuff like Adobe Flash and Google’s HTML 5 methods. The idea is that a computing device with an Internet connection can look and feel like a traditional application, a DVD player, or an immersive game. The end of shrink-wrap software and the money machine that made Microsoft and Adobe the big dogs each is today is likely to whine and stumble to a limp along, not a footrace.
I want to capture my thoughts about the dust up:
- I think Adobe is the weakest of the three combatants in the UFC 2010 digital slugfest. Adobe’s pushing the envelope with its license fees now. The sudden spate of security problems coupled with the balky nature of some Adobe Air implementations means that whatever cash Adobe has will not be enough to cope with the GOOG and the Softies.
- The Google team has a quasi-open source angle. The Microsoft team wants everyone to get with the Windows agenda, memorize it, and live it. This is a toss up because Google has been stumbling of late with regard to security, government regulations, and that old annoyance copyright. Microsoft is Microsoft, so it is a force no matter how wacky the Silverlight code may be.
- The financial climate, despite the sunny news from TV commentators, looks bleak to me. As a result, each of these UFC 2010 fighters will be ready to rumble. I think fingers in the eyes, low blows, and blows to the back of the neck will be entertaining tactics to watch.
In short, Ms. Foley reminded me to make time in 2010 for this traveling road show.
Stephen Arnold, July 3, 2009
Google Offers a Digital Olive Branch July 1
July 1, 2009
In my Google: The Digital Gutenberg, I describe an invention disclosed in a Google patent document for a “partner” to use Google like an integrated motion picture studio. The invention, in effect, allows a partner to create content, post it, control access to the content, run an ad campaign using Google tools, and essential operate like those fun loving moguls Sammy (I am a lamb) Goldwyn and Louis (I am a cupcake) Mayer. Google, according to Reuters, is promoting this “run your own business” service to newspapers. You can read Joseph Tartakoff’s “Google Wants Newspaper to Post Their Videos to YouTube” to get the Thomson Reuters’ slant on this story. For me, the most intriguing comment was:
That [the new offer from Google] contrasts with Google News, where publishers do not get a cut of any of the revenue from the ads that are placed around their headlines. Still, it’s unlikely that many publishers will want to abandon other video platforms, like Brightcove, which also allow them to sell their own ads against their video content—and to link up with several ad networks. Google had already begun to slowly integrate YouTube news videos with Google News last month, when it added videos for the first time to Google News, and the new push should further that. For Google, it’s also a free way to add more professional content to YouTube, and thus attract more premium advertisers.
Will newspapers grab the digital olive branch? Good question. I think that some publishers may do the math and conclude that Google has tipped the odds in favor of the house. I think that’s a wrong way to look at the Google offer, but that’s why I am a fat, addled goose, paddling in the pond with mine drainage run off. I don’t sit in an office tower with air conditioning cooling my pin feathers.
Stephen Arnold, July 1, 2009
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