Message from Michael - Online Video - October 26, 2009

Message From Michael                                 

                                                                                                                        October 26, 2009                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

      BONO AND CNN AND NATO

      WASTING AWAY AGAIN IN VIDEO-VILLE

      CELEBRITY CULTURE COSMOS

      TOO IMPORTANT NOT TO NOTE

      WHICH SITE IS SMARTER

      COCKTAIL CHATTER – DOGS AND DAWGS

 

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      BONO AND CNN AND NATO:  What happens when you put the three of them together?   Well, nothing actually, but it gave me a good headline for this week’s MfM about online video.  First, it’s Bono and band mates U2 taking part in a live streaming event Sunday night, with their concert from the Rose Bowl live on YouTube.  It’s not exactly a ‘first’ for YouTube, but it is a milestone.  The concert played live in 16 countries from Australia to Brazil, India to Ireland, Israel to Italy, and is being rebroadcast continuously, with running comments from people around the world.  At 4 o’clock in the morning, (yes, that’s when I got up to watch), there were 109,000 people still online commenting, often times, interestingly, in languages other than English.  Then comes CNN which Monday morning unveiled its already popular but newly re-designed hyper-video website.  Except for one little problem -- I’m sure it will be fixed by the time you read this, but in a test run by yours truly, every video linked to the same one interview with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.  A story headlined One Soldier’s Tale – Hamid Karzai.  Photographer Falls in Love – Hamid Karzai.  Not Your Average Lowriders – Hamid Karzai.  Whoops!  Of course, CNN isn’t the only website incorporating more video.  Time recently revamped its website to add more video; Ditto USAToday, Newsweek, BusinessWeek; even the somewhat staid Wall Street Journal now provides twice-daily video news updates.  And proof that online video is moving beyond entertainment and snackable viral videos, the Secretary General of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, is posting his messages to member countries online.  Not exactly riveting stuff but interesting as a development.  NATO is using a video and mobile platform known as Kyte, but it is only one of dozens and more video delivery systems.  What I wonder, as we look at various video delivery systems for our station website, is how do you choose?  Kyte versus vimeo versus veoh versus joost versus whatever.

      WASTING AWAY AGAIN IN VIDEO-VILLE:  If you’re looking for your lost shaker of salt, go to website ovguide.com.  It lists everything from Anime to Adult, Food to Fitness, Games to Guns, and Music to Military videos.  Of course there are the ‘usual suspects’ in the line-up of video sources, but there are other unusual ones.  The War Profiteers which shows video shot by soldiers in Iraq; PressTV which provides an Iranian view of the world and Iran itself, including such topics as “health tourism in Iran”; Or LifeinItaly which, well, that’s obvious; Rawfoodhowto which provides guidance for a vegan lifestyle; Japander which shows A-List American celebrities doing commercials in Japan, like Charlize Theron doing a spot with a puppet for Honda; Sumo.tv which has nothing to do with Japan but is instead the “UK’s leading video sharing community.”   Under the “general/viral” category, there were some 300 websites listed; under education/ instruction, some 150; another 100 under the Anime category.  Anyway, you get the point.  Interestingly, many of the videos from the States as well as overseas, were hosted on YouTube despite the various video platforms available.  As a side note, I found it interesting that increasingly popular video website Hulu specifically notes that it can not be accessed outside of the U.S. because of rights issues.     

      CELEBRITY CULTURE COSMOS:  It lives on Twitter where seven of the top ten Twitterers being followed are celebrities with Ashton Kucher (roughly 3.9 Million followers) topping the list with his blahgirls.com website in tow, followed by Britney Spears (3.618 Million), and Ellen DeGeneres only two thousand behind (3.616 Million).  Then comes CNN’s breaking news twitter (2.8 Million and Twitter itself (2.5 Million).  Then it’s back to celebrity row with Kim Kardashian, Ryan Seacrest, Barack Obama, John C. Mayer and Oprah rounding out the top ten; and all of them hovering around the 2.5 Million number.  I don’t know what it says about Twitterdom metrics, but number one Kucher had 3,779 tweets while number two Spears only had 299; But, Spears was following 431,270 while Kucher was only following 255.  President Obama only had 390 tweets but was following an enormous 752,552 others.  Actually if you count the President and English alternative rock band Coldplay, 17 of the top 20 Twitters are celebrity twitters.  Besides CNN and Twitter itself, only the New York Times made the top 20 list, according to website TwitterCounter.

      TOO IMPORTANT NOT TO NOTE:  The folks at Microsoft have come out with an updated Windows 7 operating system.  Despite the controversy surrounding the Vista system, the new OS is getting good reviews, including the New York Times influential technology writer David Pogue.  The folks at the Federal Trade Commission have proposed a new set of rules governing bloggers who are “influencers” getting free products to review or getting paid to review the products.  The rules have stirred up a controversy in the online and word of mouth marketing groups.  Meanwhile, the folks at that ‘other’ governmental agency, better known as the Federal Communication Commission are proposing a set of rules to govern Net Neutrality.  I know I’ve mentioned this before, but as the headline says, it’s too important not to note.     

      WHICH SITE IS SMARTER:  Is it iTunes or YouTube?  Both of them are now offering hundreds of online lessons, and from some very prestigious universities.  For example, iTunes has the University of Cambridge Judge Business School along with Yale School of Management and even HEC Paris, a leading French business school.  As website MarketingVox put it, get ready for an iMBA.  The iTunes folks have added a software update now that allows you to download these lessons to your iPhone and iPod Touch.  The folks at YouTube can also lay claim to Cambridge as well as Nottingham, Harvard, along with the University of California and San Diego State University just to name a few.  But they don’t have the field sewn up by any means.  Website AcademicEarth.org which was named by Time, magazine as one of the top websites of 2009, offers an impressive array of Ivy League courses.  The top course when we visited was Stanford University’s one on string processing which is an introductory computer programming course.  Although it’s pretty funny when you visit the actual on-line course, the top question – when is the mid-term?

      COCKTAIL CHATTER:  On the flip side of the educational spectrum, you may have heard this, because the list came out in late Spring, but the top “party school” in the United States, according to Playboy.com, is the University of Miami.  My own University of Georgia came in at seventh behind arch-rival University of Florida at fourth.  Others making the list are University of Texas/ Austin (2); San Diego State University which the list makers say has consistently made the top ten list every year since they started (3); University of Arizona (5); University of Wisconsin/ Madison (6); Louisiana State University (8); University of Iowa (9) and West Virginia University (10).  According to MoneyWatch and CNN.com, the ten least stressful jobs are civil engineer, occupational therapist, software architect, speech language pathologist, telecommunications network engineer, technical writer, software developer.  The top three or least three, depending on how you look at it, were college professor, physical therapist and in number one – education/ training consultant.  One of the consistent points in nearly every one of the jobs on the list was one word – flexibility.   Finally from the book Inside of a Dog, a Beagle nose has 300 Million receptor sites compared with a human being’s six million.  Better yet, or even stranger, the book says researchers studying the temporal patterns of dogs interacting with people found the patterns to be “similar to the timing patterns among mixed-sex strangers flirting.” 

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