Thursday, March 29, 2007

Web drama to make debut on MySpace

"Prom Queen" is the first show to be produced by a new studio formed by former Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner. It will consist of 80 episodes, each lasting 90 seconds.

Each episode will appear during a 12-hour window on MySpace before showing elsewhere, including on its own dedicated Web site.
Web drama to make debut on MySpace - Yahoo! News

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Twitter: All Trivia, All The Time

Is instant blogging the next big thing or is it the peak before the big drop-off, read on and decide for yourself.
Instant blogging reaches warp speed, but more and more, there are cries of information overload... The service's followers love its quotidian tidbits. Others cry: Enough already!
Twitter: All Trivia, All The Time: "

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Thursday, March 22, 2007

The New Avatar In Town

A new crop of online multiplayer games is coming, targeting a broader audience with simpler navigation and customization than Second Life. These games also rule out lewd behavior. The companies behind them have a novel way of making money, selling digital goods such as avatars and their outfits. The games themselves are free.
The New Avatar In Town

NBC and News Corps' challenge to YouTube

This has the potential to be really big boost for licensed content. NBC and Fox are both planning to make their hit TV shows and movies available via the new online channel in an ad-supported model. YouTube could take a big hit as a result of this venture, especially considering they are partnering with AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! which gives them huge exposure.
News Corporation and NBC Universal will launch the largest Internet video distribution network ever assembled with the most sought-after content from television and film, it was announced today by Jeff Zucker, President and Chief Executive Officer, NBC Universal and Peter Chernin, President and Chief Operating Officer, News Corporation. The video-rich site will debut this summer with thousands of hours of full-length programming, movies and clips, representing premium content from at least a dozen networks and two major film studios.

AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! will be the new site's initial distribution partners. Their users, who represent 96 percent of the monthly U.S. unique users on the Internet, will have unlimited access to the site's vast library of content. This media alliance will offer consumers free long- and short-form video and create a compelling platform for advertisers, targeting the rapidly growing audience of online video consumers.
NBC Universal and News Corp. Announce Deal with Internet Leaders AOL, MSN, MySpace And Yahoo! to Create a Premium Online Video Site with Unprecedented Reach: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Monday, March 19, 2007

Think: The changing media environment



KERA's Think has a video podcast on the subject of the challenges traditional media is facing due to today's constantly changing media environment. Very relevant to any Emerging Media student.
Think, March 16, 2007 DALLAS TX (2007-03-16) How does a newspaper editor manage and meet the challenges of today's ever-changing media environment? Watch host Krys Boyd discuss this with Bob Mong, Editor of The Dallas Morning News. Krys then previews the Dallas International Film Festival with Michael Cain, CEO and Artistic Director of the AFI DALLAS International Film Festival.
KERA: Think

YouTube to present video awards

Next week, the online video-sharing Web site YouTube will present awards for best user-generated videos of 2006.

Starting Monday, YouTube members can browse through videos in seven genres at http://www.youtube.com/YTAwards/ and rank their favorite short-form videos. Polling closes on Friday. Trophies will be handed out on March 26.
YouTube to present video awards - Yahoo! News

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Socializing online luring an older crowd

This article offers a slightly different view on the growing popularity of social networking websites, different from one of my previous postings. However, I would argue 20-30s is not really an "older crowd" :-)
Teenagers are being joined by more people aged in their 20s and 30s on social networking Web sites as the trend of socializing online continues to expand, according to a survey on Wednesday.

Figures from online intelligence service Hitwise showed visits to the top 20 social networking Web site such as MySpace rose by 11.5 percent from January to February.
Socializing online luring an older crowd: study - Yahoo! News

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Free Operating System Developer Challenges Microsoft And Google

In the third quarter, a little-known Swedish software company plans to release a free operating system with the potential to radically alter the economics of software development. If successful, Xcerion could erode the power Microsoft derives from controlling the desktop, beat Google at its software-as-a-service play, and make commodity Linux boxes more viable as a platform for the masses.

"What Skype did for telephony, we want to do for software development," says CEO Daniel Arthursson. "We're enabling the 'long tail' for business software."

For five years, Xcerion has been working on an XML-based Internet operating system, XIOS, that runs inside a Web browser. It's an abstraction layer that sits on top of a true operating system like Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows, just like Transmedia's Flash-based Glide Next media sharing environment.

But XIOS isn't simply an interface for media sharing. Rather, it's a complete XML-based operating system and development platform that replicates the desktop computing experience from inside the browser and adds the benefits of cloud-based computing, making applications and data available over the network.

Watch it in action and you'll see the threat it poses to Windows: Double-click on XIOS and the familiar desktop interface appears inside the browser window. Expand the browser window in full-screen mode and the Windows desktop vanishes beneath it. Of course, the XIOS environment could just as easily look like the Mac OS desktop or something else entirely. This is what Microsoft feared Netscape would do--turn its main asset, the operating system, into middleware.
Small Software Developer Challenges Microsoft And Google With Free Operating System

Open-Sourcing Of College Education

Take advantage of this if you can.
College education has gone open source: A number of top universities are placing their course materials online, free. No course credit is granted, but self learners can have access to all the same materials as those shelling out tens of thousands of dollars annually. That's great news for IT pros who are either unemployed or looking to acquire new skills and knowledge.

The movement includes prestigious universities MIT, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, University of California at Irvine and others.
InformationWeek: The Open-Sourcing Of College Education

Is Social Networking Destined To Go Bust?

This article makes some good points about the eventual decline of social networking sites such as MySpace. Food for thought.
Michael Hirschorn takes an in-depth look at online social networking and predicts that sites like MySpace will soon go bust.

Hirschorn's thesis is that online trends rapidly go from must-have to has-been. And unless the service or trend in question evolves -- like Google or Web browsers -- the trend tends to go flat just as quickly as it spiked into the mainstream...
InformationWeek: Is Social Networking Destined To Go Bust?

NBC to offer on-demand mobile television service

NBC Universal said on Wednesday it will sell prime-time television shows like 'The Office' and 'Heroes' on demand over cell phone networks in the United States.

Viewers will be able to purchase full episodes of top-rated NBC shows starting at $1.99 for a 24-hour period. NBC said it is working with MobiTV to provide the service, part of a mobile television network first created in 2003.
NBC to offer on-demand mobile television service | Reuters.com

Startup to offer the 'personal radio'

Interesting concept that un-tethers online radio from the computer; but it still requires a Wi-Fi connection to update itself. Wonder how they will differentiate themselves from cell-phone based music services that allow the user to listen via subscription.
A new service is taking personal taste in music to another level by combining elements of Internet radio, portable music and satellite distribution.

A startup led by a team of veterans in the digital music arena seeks to offer 'personal radio' that lets users choose the tunes, genres or artists they want, and listen to them on the go.

Slacker Inc., based in San Diego, launched its radio service Wednesday, making its Web site, http://www.slacker.com, available in a beta, or testing, stage.

A separate Wi-Fi-enabled pocketable gadget that will be able to play the personalized selections will be available in the early summer, with models ranging roughly from $150 to $299, the company said. A car kit that will deliver the music via satellite signals will be available later in the year at a price yet to be disclosed.
Startup to offer the 'personal radio' - Yahoo! News

Saturday, March 10, 2007

The CEO Guide to Corporate Wikis

Here's a podcast that gives a good overview of how wikis can be used within an organization to increase productivity and collaboration.
A wiki is a Web site that lets visitors easily add, remove and change the content. The first wiki was created in the mid 90s by computer programmer Ward Cunningham who named his invention,'wiki,' after the word for quick in Hawaiian. The best-known wiki is perhaps Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia which is written collaboratively and can be edited by anyone. Wikis are now making their way into corporations where they are used as collaborative software to handle such tasks as project management, tech support, research and development, event planning and customer relationship management.

Download this episode (requires QuickTime 7 or iTunes)
BusinessWeek: Corporate Wikis

Friday, March 09, 2007

Online Video Dos and Dont's

Another good article with guidelines on the "Do's and Dont's" of online corporate videos.
How to adopt online video as an effective corporate marketing tool -- without falling prey to the booby traps.
Tipsheet: CEO Guide to Online Video

Business Goes Straight to Video

This BusinessWeek article discusses the pros and cons of how online video is being used by corporations, how some have used it successfully while other's have failed. A must read for those who are considering video on their own websites; it may also help you avoid making the same mistakes.
A growing number of companies turn to online video, and the word of mouth that accompanies it, for everything from advertising to recruiting.
Business Goes Straight to Video

Matching Sustainability with Profits

Excellent article about why product designers should be thinking more than just the cool factor in the products they design. Read the entire article here.
We live in a society of consumption. Our voracious and seemingly endless appetite for more, better, bigger, and easier is leaving our planet overrun and creating an environment that may not be able to sustain human life.

As designers, are we partially responsible? Are we helping or hurting?

The common and understandable perception is that designers just make more stuff the world doesn't need, but this is unfair. Good designers—conscientious designers—work with sustainability in mind. They know they need to create products, services, and environments that make sense for clients, and work for and with our earth. In other words: Profitable sustainability.

How is it to be done?

A simple—but not sufficient—answer might be to design more environmentally friendly products and processes. This might be called the 'diet chocolate cake' approach: Keep doing what we are good at and giving people what they want, but somehow do it less harmfully. At the other end of the spectrum is the abstinence approach: Plead guilty to the charge that designers spend a lot of time designing 'elegant landfill' and stop doing it. The great designer Dieter Rams, for example, called for a less wasteful approach in his monograph, 'Less But Better.'
Matching Sustainability with Profits

Sony to launch virtual universe

Capitalizing on the popularity of social networks and online worlds, Sony will launch its own virtual universe and another 3-D game built almost entirely by players. 'Home' is a real-time, networked world for the PlayStation 3 in which players create human-looking characters called avatars. They can buy clothing, furniture and videos to play on a virtual flat-screen television in their virtual apartments.

The concept is strikingly similar to Linden Lab's 'Second Life,' a Web-based phenomenon with nearly 4.5 million residents. But Sony's world will feature heavy doses of video games for avatars to play, as well as virtual arcades, music, movies and other Sony-approved media downloads.
Sony to launch virtual universe - Yahoo! News

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Rocketboom's Powerful Lift-Off

These are the early days of video blogging. Most of the postings on the Web are rough and tedious -- little more than home movies. But the success of Rocketboom and a few sites like it underscore the potential of video blogs. Cheaper video recorders mean just about anyone can make videos, while the spread of speedy Net service means almost anybody can watch clips posted online. The result? The Internet is coming alive with a mix of video, from the polished parody of Rocketboom to the raw interviews of reporters. As these videos flow into the living room, they will reshape what we think of as television. "TV will be transformed," says Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corp. (IBM ) and now an investor in Participatory Culture, an online video startup. "People will look at it as historically quaint that you had to watch something that others chose for you."

Rocketboom's Powerful Lift-Off

Is the Web the New Hollywood?

Take Jeff Macpherson, the indie filmmaker in Vancouver who started Tiki Bar with his friends. He's getting plenty of attention from Hollywood types, but instead of trying to parlay Tiki Bar into a gig in big-budget TV or movies, Macpherson wants to raise money to create a series of similar shows for the Web. 'This is the beginning of something big,' Macpherson says. As people spend a growing portion of their lives online, some would-be movie moguls view Internet TV as an end in itself. Some are even finding that they can make money doing it...

The Internet is turning into a breeding ground not just for shows, but also entire networks. ManiaTV, a startup launched 17 months ago to be the MTV for the online set, broadcasts its own live show over the Internet and offers on-demand videos about music and videos. It draws 2 million visitors a month.

KEEP IT SHORT. But as marketing evolves, it will need to adapt to its new environment, ad experts warn. "I don't think that just transposing the 30-second-spot model works in this space," says Mohan Renganathan, associate group director in New York City for ad agency MediaVest Worldwide. "Video over the Web is more about getting content you're interested in seeing that you have searched for."

BusinessWeek: Is the Web the New Hollywood?

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Second Life Opens For Business

Good article discussing the pros and cons of "doing business" in SL. What companies are doing in this online world, how it is affecting their real world operations and what they can do to improve there presence.
Toyota, Circuit City, Dell, Sears, and Adidas have set up shop in the Second Life virtual world. But their stores are empty. Can businesses find a place with any real-world payback in this fantasyland of overindulgence?

Second Life Opens For Business - InformationWeek

Podcast Bunker

Here's a site that claims to list only the very best podcasts; both the mainstream and the off-beat. They have a weekly top 20 list, as well as a "slew" of RSS feeds. Check out Podcast Bunker.