Un vrai plaisir de recevoir l’un de mes auteurs préférés en la personne de Trondheim, pour parler de l’une de mes séries préférées, Donjon.

Pour toute la soirée, c’était donc une émission événementielle dédiée à Donjon - 32 albums de bandes dessinées, un jeu de rôles - fête ses dix ans et 1000 ans d’aventures depuis 1998.

Donjon, soit la réappropriation des codes de l’héroïc fantasy et du jeu de rôle par des auteurs indépendants.

Et aussi un dispositif conceptuel réglé par des contraintes de construction formelles baptisées Oubapo.

Cinq invités : Lewis Trondheim co-fondateur de la série, Killofer, Boulet qui était déjà venu l’année dernière pour parler de son blog, Stanislas dessinateur bavard et plein de recul, Kiloffer, dessinateur bavard et plein d’humour, et Benoît Mouchart, directeur artistique du festival d’Angoulême, à l’origine d’un projet de spectacle et pour annoncer une exposition Donjon au prochain festival d’Angoulême.

L’émission est disponible ici :

http://www.tv-radio.com/ondemand/france_culture/MINUIT_DIX/MINUIT_DIX20080503.ram

...

From Boston by bus.

I will stay for a few days with my friend Elizabeth Stark and Jeremy Haymans.

If you live in NYC and feel like contacting a French Lawyer / Journalist / Hacktivist / Artist / Whatever, do not hesitate to drop me an email.

...

I'm one of those women who craves the kind of advice Hungry Girl serves up each day. It's friendly and practical guidance on eating well and still being able to zip your pants. When a friend introduced me to HG's daily emails last year, I was hooked.

But as Lisa Lillien, a.k.a., Hungry Girl, tells her fans, she's not a nutritionist. She's just a chick who's hungry. Her stay slim tricks have steadily attracted an audience of more than 400,000 people over the last five years who gobble up HG's daily emails about guilt-free eating.

The 42-year-old former Nickelodeon producer was not always so wise to the ways of weight maintenance. She grew up in New York, the daughter to a mom she describes as a yo-yo dieter who tried everything from Optifast to Nutrisystems.

"From a very young age, I was very conscious of dieting and food," she told The Well Mom in a recent interview.

Despite all of the focus on fighting flab, Lillien struggled to lose the same 15 pounds through early adulthood.

"I used to pretend that pretzels were a good food and then eat 11 servings while sitting at the computer," she recalls.

Until one day eight years ago, when she decided to go extreme. Lillien cut out all of the starches in her diet.

"Bread, pastas, rice, potatoes...I decided these were my trigger foods and I stopped eating them," she says.

In her mind, this was the final attempt to jump start her weight loss once and for all.

It worked. She ended up losing 30 pounds and turned to Weight Watchers to learn how to maintain her new figure. The program taught her about portion control. It was a revelation that would later fuel HG's success. Today, she's even developed recipes for the weight loss giant. Check out her awesome onion ring makeover.

"On Weight Watchers, you can't lie (to yourself). It holds you accountable for what you eat. And it teaches you that everything you eat has a point or caloric value," Lillien explains.

She decided a lot of people might benefit from what she learned. And frankly, she admits, she's never been shy about dishing out advice to anyone who will listen.

"I'm the woman at the grocery story telling you which fat-free ice cream tastes the best," she laughs. And so what began as a daily email sharing her own dieting tricks to about 200 family members and friends has now evolved into a major brand. With the release this week of her very first cookbook, Hungry Girl: Recipes and Survival Strategies for Guilt-Free Eating in the Real World, Lillien is looking ahead to more books and her own line of food.

"There is a lot that is missing out there. It is stuff that I want that I can't find," she told me.

I asked HG, who has a lot of friends with kids, what advice she has for busy moms who are trying to either shed pounds or maintain a healthy weight.

Here's what she tells her own friends:

HG's Tips for The Well Mom:

- Try to not buy foods for your toddlers that you secretly want to eat.

- Make sure you are not overly hungry when you feed your kids. Or feed kids foods that are not "bad" (high fat, processed, or artificial stuff). She likes Amy's and Dr. Praeger's for kid-friendly frozen entrees.

- Stock an "emergency snack kit" in your office or car.
Her own stash includes:
Snack bars. She likes Dr. Melina's brand, almond raspberry flavor.
VitaTops 100 calorie muffin tops
100 calorie packages of almonds or other portion controlled snacks
Apples
Grapefruit

Please sign up for The Well Mom weekly email for more tips and stories on motherhood and the pursuit of wellness. Sign up by May 12th and enter to win a Mother's Day Pampering Kit from Become Beauty.

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After weeks of badgering from the mainstream media as well as right wing talk radio, Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain (R, AZ), summoned reporters to say he was outraged by the President George W. Bush's "divisive, destructive, and frankly, grammatically incorrect" remarks. Scrambling to contain the flare-up in a controversy that has dogged him since clips of some of Bush's most objectionable remarks began circulating on TV and the Internet, McCain finally repudiated Bush's long history of inane rambling and nearly unintelligible comments have been swirling around YouTube and OMGDidYouHearWhatThePresidentSaidToday.com for years now.
"I've just been buried the past seven years and it wasn't until yesterday that I got a chance to sit down and check out the Internet," said McCain. "Wow."

A statement from the McCain campaign read in part, "I wish to apologize to those elementary school teachers everywhere, and for that matter, anyone who speaks English, who may have been offended by these inappropriate remarks that can only be seen as pretty damn goofy. I believe in the greatness of proper grammar and syntax and if I had been aware of them earlier, I wouldn't have felt comfortable actually believing anything the president said.

"Too little too late," contended Fox News's Sean Hannity, who has been pushing the McCain-Bush relationship story for months. "We're not talking about a simple misuse of effect for affect. You tell me he didn't know about the shower of verbal gaffes and malapropisms that have been raining down on this country for over seven years? Here's a guy who's said, 'We ought to make the pie higher,,' 'I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town....and I'll work hard to try to elevate it,' and 'Is our children learning?' How do you miss all that?"

"And that's probably just the tip of the ice cube," added Hannity.

McCain advisor, Mary Matalin defended the delay. "The Senator had TIVO'd the past few years of John Stewart," said Matalin. "It took a few minutes before John realized it wasn't an old The Daily Show or that Lil Bush cartoon. I mean, c'mon...that's not stuff you'd think someone said seriously. We're not talking 'Read my lips. No new taxes.'"

There has been a general divide among supporters on how to handle the distraction from the real issues. Late night talk show hosts, in particular, urged McCain to rise above campaign attacks, saying he is not responsible for what Bush says no matter how much material it provides them. Republicans who actually want McCain to win say they were deeply troubled and baffled by McCain's association with Bush, even before the President reiterated some of his most inarticulate comments at a recent press dinner.

When asked when he would condemn President Bush's "Bring them on" comment concerning Iraq attacks on American troops...

"I'm not going to go crazy," said McCain. "Afterall, I'm the guy who sang, Bomb, bomb, bomb. Bomb, bomb Iran."

Award-winning TV writer, Steve Young, is author of "Great Failures of the Extremely Successful" www.greatfailure.com

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Managing Mail Imperfectly, a post from June 2000 2007 by Khoi Vinh, that has me sigh in relief that I am not the only one not buying the empty inbox theory. I stumbled across it while reading his Subscribing to RSS Theory post in which he compares RSS readers to junk drawers. Had me chuckle and nod in agreement.

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A slice of cyberculture history: Over twenty years ago, people who met online began to meet in person at the WELL office in Sausalito. These interviews from a WELL party, circa 1989, include me, the late Bob Bickford, Stewart Brand, Matisse Enzer, Janey Fritsche, Flash Gordon, M.D., the late Tina Loney (woman with the bird), Elaine (Booter) Richards, Hank Roberts. Party material courtesy of and copyright by InCA productions. (lire la suite)

The SingStar franchise has hit 12 million unit sales in PAL regions since debuting in 2004, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has announced. (lire la suite)

Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto IV gets a global release Tuesday, and you half expect the working world to grind to a halt the following day as people mysteriously call in sick. (lire la suite)

CNET reports that Twitter have signed for “either $15 million or $20 million” in funding. VentureBeat and others are following this up, but nothing official from Twitter yet. They do pimp an e-card focusing on the release out of prison-story with Twitter as the saviour. That’s something I guess. (lire la suite)

Cela fait quelques jours et quelques milliers de billets que Facebook a lancé son service de messagerie instantanée. J’avoue m’être complètement désintéressé de cette fonctionnalité qui me semblait complètement inutile. Mais hier soir je l’ai utilisé.

A la base, je partais du principe que tout le monde utilise déjà une ou plusieurs systèmes où il a déjà ses amis et que celui de FB n’avait pas de sens. Ensuite, créer un chat dans un navigateur cela n’est ni original, ni une performance technique, je trouvais donc ça pas très glorieux pour un site qui pèse quand même quelques milliards de dollars.

Mais avec un peu de recul, on peut voir quelques aspects intéressants. D’abord, la politique “fermée” (et critiquable ?) de Facebook, qui vise à captiver l’utilisateur sur la plateforme, la logique d’offrir un IM interne permet aux utilisateurs de communiquer facilement et plus rapidement que via les messages, cela leur évite d’échanger des coordonnées supplémentaires et ajoute un petit peu de convivialité au site, les gens sont là “pour de vrai”. Bien sûr le but est de générer des pages vues, donc des affichages de pub.

Ensuite, il faut voir dans cet outil, la mise à disposition d’un outil qui semble une évidence pour beaucoup d’entre nous mais on peut imaginer que parmi les utilisateurs de facebook certains n’étaient pas passé à l’IM.

Je pense aussi qu’en fonction du type d’utilisateur, l’intérêt peut être réel, pour le vrai utilisateur qui n’a que ses potes sur le site, il a la possibilité de discuter de partout avec eux (dont du bureau) et pour les pros du networking cela peut être un bon moyen d’entrer en contact avec les facebook’s friend sans avoir à donner son adresse de messagerie instantanée favorite pour la garder pour une sphère très privée.

Pour conclure, je dirai que cette fonctionnalité me parait finalement être une bonne idée, un bon levier dans la démarche de rapprocher les gens (ce qui est le but d’un réseau social, non ?) mais qui souffre quand même de son manque d’ouverture vers “le reste du monde”.

Bon, on en reparle quand je peux l’ajouter dans Adium.

Partenaire: Ubergizmo, le blog des gadgets et des nouvelles technologies

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Cela fait quelques jours et quelques milliers de billets que Facebook a lancé son service de messagerie instantanée. J’avoue m’être complètement désintéressé de cette fonctionnalité qui me semblait complètement inutile. Mais hier soir je l’ai utilisé.

A la base, je partais du principe que tout le monde utilise déjà une ou plusieurs systèmes où il a déjà ses amis et que celui de FB n’avait pas de sens. Ensuite, créer un chat dans un navigateur cela n’est ni original, ni une performance technique, je trouvais donc ça pas très glorieux pour un site qui pèse quand même quelques milliards de dollars.

Mais avec un peu de recul, on peut voir quelques aspects intéressants. D’abord, la politique “fermée” (et critiquable ?) de Facebook, qui vise à captiver l’utilisateur sur la plateforme, la logique d’offrir un IM interne permet aux utilisateurs de communiquer facilement et plus rapidement que via les messages, cela leur évite d’échanger des coordonnées supplémentaires et ajoute un petit peu de convivialité au site, les gens sont là “pour de vrai”. Bien sûr le but est de générer des pages vues, donc des affichages de pub.

Ensuite, il faut voir dans cet outil, la mise à disposition d’un outil qui semble une évidence pour beaucoup d’entre nous mais on peut imaginer que parmi les utilisateurs de facebook certains n’étaient pas passé à l’IM.

Je pense aussi qu’en fonction du type d’utilisateur, l’intérêt peut être réel, pour le vrai utilisateur qui n’a que ses potes sur le site, il a la possibilité de discuter de partout avec eux (dont du bureau) et pour les pros du networking cela peut être un bon moyen d’entrer en contact avec les facebook’s friend sans avoir à donner son adresse de messagerie instantanée favorite pour la garder pour une sphère très privée.

Pour conclure, je dirai que cette fonctionnalité me parait finalement être une bonne idée, un bon levier dans la démarche de rapprocher les gens (ce qui est le but d’un réseau social, non ?) mais qui souffre quand même de son manque d’ouverture vers “le reste du monde”.

Bon, on en reparle quand je peux l’ajouter dans Adium.

Partenaire: Ubergizmo, le blog des gadgets et des nouvelles technologies

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Originally posted in The Technium

My 1000 True Fans post provoked much discussion on other blogs. One blogger mentioned in passing that Brian Austin Whitney had suggested a very similar idea a few years ago. I had not heard Whitney, nor his proposition, and I missed this reference while researching, but I am impressed with how convergent our ideas are. Whitney organized Just Plain Folks, a community for independent artists. Writing on New Year's Eve 2004, Whitney said,

I have a notion that we're turning a corner (or experiencing a swing in the pendulum) where an artist who focuses on a smaller number of fans and serves them with a high level of direct interaction and communication will be the new model for success, even in the face of new technology and the shift in old school music business procedures. I think a new definition of success will be the artist who has 5000 passionate fans worldwide who spend 20-30 dollars a year on your creative output.

Four months later, on tax day, blogging musician Scott Andrew picked up Whitney's notion and expanded on it under the title of 5000 Fans.

Brian pointed out that an artist who has 5000 hardcore fans to give him or her $20 each year — be if from CDs, ticket sales, merchandise, donations, whatever — stands to make $100K per year, more than enough to quit the day job and still have health insurance and a decent car.

Now, 5000 is a big number, but not that big. That’s like, what, one-eighth of an average baseball stadium? And you might not even need that many. Here’s an exercise: take your own salary, pre-taxes, and divide it by 20. If you were to quit your job right now and start living as a full-time musician, poet or author, that’s how many fans you’d need, spending $20 each year to support your art. So, if you’re making $30K yearly, you’d need 1500 paying fans each year to replace your salary. And it gets better if you’re willing to take a pay cut. In Washington state, where I live, a person working for minimum wage would only need around 700 paying fans.

The attraction of 5000 Fans Theory is that the numbers, while still large, are very much attainable. You really don’t need millions of fans across the globe to be a career artist, just a few thousand who actually care. And: the committment to find them.

Like Whitney and Andrew, I think there is something important and liberating in seeking a finite attainable number of passionate fans rather than hoping for a rare best-selling career backed by millions of folks who have just heard about you. The problem is that while investigating the data for my thesis, I was unable to find much that could convince me that anyone is actually supporting themselves with 1000 or even 5000 True Fans now.  I did get hard financial information from seven creators, in various arts, who are currently supporting themselves in some manner, and to some degree, with True Fans.  I got a lot of partial information from about 2 dozen other artists, but these incomplete profiles were difficult to evaluate consistently, so I have not plotted them. The results are displayed in this table:

Going left to right, the chart lists the type of artist, how many True Fans they think they have, how much each fan spends on the artist in a year, the total annual yield of the True Fans, the percentage of their total income the artist estimates this is, the number of years they have been relying on True Fans, and what they actually sell to the fans.

What my research tells me: there are very few artists making their entire living selling directly to True Fans. The few that are, are selling high-priced goods, like paintings, rather than low-priced goods like CDs. But there are many that partially fund their livelihood with direct True Fans. However, most of these artists make it very clear in their notes to me: It takes a lot of time to find, nurture, manage, and service True Fans yourself. And, many artists don't have the skills or inclination to do so.  The fact that very few creators wholly sustain themselves with direct True Fans may be because it is a job few want to do for very long. 

True-fan-dom is also certainly not a goal that very many creators have life-long yearnings for, which may be another reason few are doing it. Who dreams of having only 1000 True Fans instead of making a record that goes platinum, or penning a best-seller? Nobody. At not yet.

But ever the optimist, I am heartened that with some work, it is possible to find partial support from direct True Fans. Micro patronage has always been an option, and indeed a part of, most artist's livelihood. What is different now is the reach and power of technology, which makes it much easier to match up an artist with the right passionate micro patrons, keep them connected, serve them up created works, get payment from them directly, and nurture their interest and love.  In previous generations the hefty transaction costs of doing all this made living off of True Fans impossible in practice. My chart shows that it is now possible in practice, though very few are doing it extensively.  I think as role models emerge, as business models shift, and as technology continues to lower the transaction costs, more artists will avail themselves of this path. Time will tell.

Jaron Lanier at the piano at a house concert, a choice venue for True Fans.

Let me leave this topic with one last challenge. This comes from my friend Jaron Lanier, himself a musician (and inventor of virtual reality). Jaron has been researching a similar space as True Fans, and as I have, he is also seeking actual cases of "them that is doing it."  He did not find many claiming to be doing it. In fact Jaron concludes that at this moment, most of those musicians making a living in the new direct-fan environments are musicians who made a name first in the traditional mediums of labels, CDs, contracts, or TV, commercial sponsorship. Jaron is investigating only musicians, and his definition of the type of emerging musician he is looking for goes like this:

The musician’s career is not a legacy of the old system (such as Radiohead).  The musician has not merely gotten a lot of exposure, but is earning a living wage.  I’ll define a living wage as a predictable income sufficient to raise a child. Finally, most of the musician’s income derives from sources that would still be robust in an “open” world that is highly friendly to massive, unregulated file sharing.  These include live performances, paid ads on the musician’s website, merchandising, and paid downloads (like iTunes), but does not include label contracts, movie soundtrack placement, and other revenue streams that rely on old, declining media.

Jaron claims that he has not found a single musician that meets this definition. In other words, he claims that there are no musicians who have risen to a successful livelihood within the new media environment. None. No musician who is succeeding solely on the generatives I outline in Better Than Free. No musician born digital, and making a living in the new media.

I  bet Jaron there might be three musicians (or bands) out there who meet his definition, but I did not know who they were.

To prove Jaron wrong, simply submit a candidate in the comments: a musician with no ties to old media models, now making 100% of their living in the open media environment.

If none are offered, I surrender the case to Jaron.

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everyone's identified in the Boing Boing comments   (lire la suite)

"Everyone who has tried posting books online has done it again. That's a pretty good indicator it works. An artist's enemy is obscurity, not piracy." Maclean's 04/27/08 (lire la suite)

Two Google scientists presented a paper (pdf embedded below) at the World Wide Web Conference in Beijing last week that outlines their vision for the future of image search.

Notably, the new image search technology doesn’t just index text associated with an image in determining what’s in it. Google is now talking about using computers to analyze the stuff in photos, and using that to associate it in a ranked way with keyword queries. In effect, they’re talking about something similar to PageRank for images (but without the linking behavior).

Today when we talk about search all we really mean is text search. That’s sort of like only being able to see in one color. And when we search for image, video and audio content, the only data that search engines use to do those searches is the text that is associated with those files. That’s like trying to describe the color green when you can only see in red.

To date Google and others have spent a significant amount of effort on making the metadata around rich content better. One example of this is Google’s Image Labeler game that uses human labor to properly tag images. Innovative, yes. But it’s still trying to “describe green” when you you can’t actually see it.

Once computers are able to analyze rich content as easily as they can analyze text, a whole new dimension to search will emerge. Humans will no longer be needed to do the heavy lifting in describing what is included in rich content, and that means that content will no longer be invisible on the Internet.

PageRank For Image Search

Googlers Yushi Jing and Shumeet Baluja argue that Google is now ready to see beyond text. In their paper they talk about their efforts to apply state of the art image recognition software to figure out what stuff is in an image. “Commercial search-engines often solely rely on the text clues of the pages in which images are embedded to rank images, and often entirely ignore the content of the images themselves as a ranking signal,” they say. Their experiments in actually digging into the images themselves “show significant improvement, in terms of user satisfaction and relevancy, in comparison to the most recent Google Image Search results.”

Google is looking at the visual characteristics of popular images and then determining rank based on similarities between images. In the figure below, the largest two images contain the highest rank.

PageRank for Product Image Search - Get more documents

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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TuneWiki est une startup israélienne qui  fournit les paroles de chansons pour de la musique sur PC et mobiles.

Le service fut lancé en Décembre 2007 et est devenu rapidement un succès avec des centaines de milliers de téléchargements pour des iPhones débloqués

Pourquoi TuneWiki est-il si populaire? La vidéo ci-dessous explique comment est faite la synchronisation avec les paroles (façon Karaoké) sur un iPhone.

Une source nous a révélé que la startup a bouclé un premier tour de table avec BenchmarkCapital, un fonds israélien. Michael Eisenberg rejoint aussi le conseil d’administration. Nous essayons d’en savoir plus sur le montant de cette levée de fonds.

Les paroles de musique sont assez difficiles à trouver légalement sur Internet. L’année dernière, Yahoo avait commencé à publier des centaines de morceaux dans un format image réduit; afin d’éviter les copies grâce à un partenriat avec Gracenote

TuneWiki en tant que site légal de paroles de chansons est intéressant (ils ont annoncé un accord avec Universal Music). Mais c’est surtout le logiciel de synchronisation qui s’avère être un vrai business. Il devrait d’ailleurs “décoller” quand des applications tierces seront lancées sur l’iPhone cet été.

TuneWiki a été fondée par deux entrepreneurs en série et anciens pilotes, Amnon Sarig et Rani Cohen.

Promo: CrunchBoard jobs est de retour: offre de lancement 2 pour 1

Tags: iPhone;, paroles, musique

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Clay Shirky, who teaches and speaks about “new media,” has posted the transcript of a speech he gave at the recent Web 2.0 conference, in which he talks about how TV as a whole is effectively a societal response to a surplus of leisure time — and how much better it would be if those excess brain cycles were used for something valuable, such as contributing to Wikipedia or other forms of “social media.” I really wish that Clay hadn’t written this particular speech. Why? Mostly because then there would still have been time for *me* to write it.

I must admit, the part about the gin never really occurred to me (go ahead and read the speech — I’ll wait). But the rest of it is right on track. Particularly the part where he describes the four-year-old looking behind the TV for the mouse. I’ve spoken to a number of groups about social media, and I always use my three daughters as examples: the oldest uses Facebook more than she watches TV, the middle one loves interactive fiction-writing sites like Gaia Online, and with the youngest it’s Club Penguin and Webkinz. To them, the most interesting kinds of media are interactive media.

Not surprisingly, more than one commenter among the dozens who have responded on BoingBoing’s post about Shirky (since his blog doesn’t have comments) argues that the author is guilty of social-media triumphalism, and that he is merely stating a preference for time-wasting with Wikipedia or Lolcatz as opposed to TV. One commenter says that his speech is like saying “now that we have Oranges no sane person is going to eat Apples, and anyone who grows Apples doesn’t understand how f’n juicy and delicious Oranges are… what a bunch of twits! amiright?”

This point has some truth to it. For every person who thinks that World of Warcraft builds leadership skills and watching TV is one step above drooling and whittling, there is another who thinks that CSI is gripping drama, and anyone on WoW is a brain-damaged geek living in his mom’s basement. There are plenty of ways for human beings to zone out and get very little accomplished — just look at golf, for example (or poker). But Shirky’s point is still a good one, I think: namely, that social or interactive media, however lame or goofy, has an added quality that sitting in front of a box does not. I’ll go along with that.

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In 1989, David Kennard brought a pro video crew to one of the monthly parties that the (still thriving) WELL community held in the Sausalito offices of Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL. InCA productions was working on a BBC special that never aired. John “Tex” Coate found the film, transferred to video, and made it available. David Kennard granted permission to post it now. I cut a few minutes into my vlog this week. My daughter, then 80, and my daughter, then 5, can be seen. I’m the guy in paisley, as usual. More next week.

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In 1989, David Kennard brought a pro video crew to one of the monthly parties that the (still thriving) WELL community held in the Sausalito offices of Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL. InCA productions was working on a BBC special that never aired. John “Tex” Coate found the film, transferred to video, and made it available. David Kennard granted permission to post it now. I cut a few minutes into my vlog this week. My daughter, then 80, and my daughter, then 5, can be seen. I’m the guy in paisley, as usual. More next week.

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This post is in response to Inside Facebook’s post entitled, What CPM is your app making? As someone who is in charge of quite a bit of digital advertising budget from 12 brands ranging from consumer electronics to financial services and many things in between, I find advertising in/around Facebook applications very challenging and questionable.  As marketers get smarter about their media selection and care about joining the conversation with their audience, extremely integrated opportunities have emerged within the digital space.

For quite a few marketers, their audiences are on social networks such as Facebook.  As many Facebook users are installing applications and such, the marketers are trying to buy their way into the consumers attention span.

Just as we have advertising networks such as Advertising.com, we’re starting to see the same type of networks emerge within the widget/application space.  If history repeats itself (which it very likely will), we will see these widget/application networks create standardized ad units (IAB standard if not already) and go on a scaling spree… how much inventory can they sign up to maximize their reach across the web.  The top 2-3 will be acquired to bundle into a Platform-A type approach by most media companies, and the world will not be any better off than it was prior…. why?  Because these type of ads are non-integrated.  Most of these ads run alongside these applications and don’t have high interaction rates.

Do these ads running in these Facebook applications add any value?  Can they be amplifyed offline?  What is the real value of them?  I think we’re seeing the value from the Inside Facebook posting… <$1.00 eCPMs.

Darren Herman is a digital media enthusiast and serial entrepreneur. Herman writes about technology, entrepreneurship and digital media at his blog, http://www.darrenherman.com.

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I was thinking about the twin techs tonight while I was doing the dishes. That being Techcrunch and Techmeme. I was thinking about the chart that shows how Techmeme has overtaken Techcrunch because it's better to read a link heavy page that aggregates all the important tech blogs than read a single, albeit highly popular, tech blog.

So after dinner, I went and did a search on the traffic patterns of the twin techs on Comscore, Compete, Alexa, and Quantcast. And guess what? The chart I was imagining doesn't exist. Because my premise is false.

The Internet audience still vastly prefers Techcrunch to Techmeme.

This is interesting because it's completely counter to my experience. I have moved away from reading individual blogs. I want to read aggregation services like techmeme, hacker news, reddit, twitter, delicious popular, digg, etc, etc. I find that they give me a much better view of the top stories of the day than reading individual blogs does.

But once again, what I do doesn't map very well to what the average audience member does. I think I need to remind myself of that fact on a daily basis.

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Filed under: Business models, Culture, MMO industry, Opinion, Second Life, Massively meta, Virtual worlds

User generated content. Second Life is built on it. Other games are slowly taking up the banner as well and introducing the ideas of the players into their fold. Are we doing ourselves a favor, or are we starting to completely shoot ourselves in the foot?

MMOCrunch brought up the point that users are looking for a more customizable experience in their games and virtual worlds. They point to applications like Facebook and Unreal Tournament as examples of user generated content bringing in a huge audience and networking people like never before. Their article also goes on to look at why current MMOs don't go to the customizable lengths of these other applications. Problems stem from challenges in programming to the core inability for user generated content to be brought into a world where your actions drive a centralized plot line.

Continue reading Is user generated content the future of MMOs?

 

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

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Collection of vintage logos from a mid-70's edition of the book World of Logotypes. (flickr set)

(via elihorne / via werunthestreets)

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