Online Media Cultist

Something I think about a lot and mention here fairly often is that people want what they want when they want it. And technology is making that possible more often and in more ways than ever before.

To quote myself from a recent piece:

Sports – live events that draw intense interest at broadcast but which are much less valuable as soon as the game ends in most cases – are a great example. Some games are broadcast locally, while normally a few select games can be seen nationally, though often on cable television.

So there’s a fundamental demand that’s not being met in many cases. And particularly with pro football – where a short season amplifies the importance of each game – this is an area that technology providers have begun to exploit over the last decade or so… with an emphasis on exploit. That is, you can purchase a full season’s worth of NFL games on satellite cable, but just like your regular cable TV bill, you end up vastly overpaying for a bunch of stuff you don’t want or don’t have time to watch.

Enter the Internet. While the NFL is all about raking in cold hard cash, they clearly recognize the dynamics at work. If they don’t aggressively pursue new fans – particularly the young and upscale folk who tend to be online – they won’t have a business one day.

All this is to say that I’m impressed with what the NFL is doing with live streaming games this season, both in terms of distribution and the product itself. As the new season kicked off last night, the game between the New York Giants and Washington Redskins was live streamed for free at NFL.com and NBCSports.com.

And throughout the season, Sunday night games will also be live streamed in the same way. While this doesn’t breakdown any huge barriers, things are clearly moving in the right direction. Here’s what I’m getting at: there’s a market for people who want to see specific games that they don’t currently have access to. These are people who don’t want to shell out a ton of money, but may be willing to pay a reasonable fee to get targeted niche content, or will gladly put up with advertising to get the goods.

As a native New Yorker who has lived in California for many years, for example, I’m not willing to shell out hundreds of dollars to get a full satellite TV package for NFL games. However, would I pay $20 or $30 to see a season’s worth of New York Giants football online? I’d be pretty tempted. Make it $3.99 or so per game with easy one-click purchasing, and I’d be rolling up to the laptop with nachos in hand more Sundays than not.

The bonus for football super fans too is that the online product offers quick and easy ways to tap into multiple camera angles. It’s a nifty feature to check out, and makes great use of the Internet to display content that’s being filmed live (such as the “star cam”) that only gets exposed on traditional television in short snippets.

Spent the long weekend at the beach, a novelty for me even though I live just outside of Los Angeles. Of course, I still managed a goodly amount of online media cultery, though I did make a valiant attempt to stay semi-unplugged.

Hurricane Gustav was a huge story, of course, and thankfully it’s now finally looking like New Orleans and Gulf Coast areas are taking far less damage than what might have been expected. This story, from Web Worker Daily, outlines T-Mobile’s efforts to open up its WiFi “hot spots” for free so that people in affected areas could more easily communicate with family and friends. Good for T-Mobile, and great to see how technology can have some small positive impact during times of emergency.

Twitter is a huge part of course in how people are reporting, communicating, and staying informed during unfolding events. I’ve become particularly interested in services that take advantage of Twitter’s open API to pull data out and do interesting things with them.

That ties into the US presidential election, which is kicking into high gear, and perhaps levels beyond that too. Between Barack Obama’s historic and electrifying speech at the Democratic National Convention, John McCain’s selection of little known Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential selection (you can find me obsessing about all of this on good old Twitter), and the Republican National Convention and the wrench thrown at it by Gustav, there was no end of things to chat about for the political world over the weekend.

Govtweets (found via TechCrunch pulls Twitter “tweets” based on politically-oriented keywords, and serves them up in an eye-pleasing stream. For instance, right now there are lots of tweets displayed based on the keyword “Palin.” They featured a thumbnail picture of the potential Vice President and are color-coded GOP thread. Likewise, “Obama”-based tweets feature the Democratic nominee and are colored blue. The thumbnail picture of the tweeter is also featured as well. It’s a neat little site, and I expect that we’ll see a lot more of these kinds of niche services based on the huge galaxy of conversations taking place on Twitter (and other social media platforms) over time.

Finally, I was up late one night and wound up surfing around Hulu looking for old television shows to check out. Struck by a sense of ’90s nostalgia perhaos, I wound up watching an old episode of Party of Five. I later caught a TechCrunch story rumbling up some theories about how Hulu could end up as a bigger business than YouTube.

My take is that Hulu does a pretty state-of-the-art job of delivering high quality vetted video content and serving ads around it. However, I wouldn’t bet against YouTube (and Google) to lead out the development of a next-gen standardized video ad model.

TechCrunch rolled out a redesign of its site today.

Lots and lots of white space, super minimalist. Now, I get wanting to strip down design to get a really clean look, and Mark Hendrickson notes that the idea was to move toward a less bloated looking and faster loading site.

I get all of that. I’m not a huge design nut myself – my focus is predominantly on content, particularly when I’m reading a blog, and overwhelmingly when I’m reading a tech blog.

Still, I can’t help being a little critical here. TechCrunch proudly sits on top of the tech blog heap, so it can handle a little criticism from the likes of me!

So… there’s way too much white space going on here. The minimal line divisions on the page are “web 2.0″-looking to the hilt (which kind of hit its peak sometime in early to mid-2007, I’d say), minimal to the point of barely being visible. The result is much less bloat, but particularly above the fold the site looks downright stark and antiseptic.

If I’m rocking the site on my blackberry, that’s perfect. But on the web, can we get just a little bit of color and design going, maybe? Even on a tech blog, I’m sure we all can handle it.

Huge congrats to Blogcritics!

It was announced today that Blogcritics – an online magazine-meets-blog community that I have a long and continuing relationship with – is being acquired by Technorati:

Blogcritics was founded by Eric Olsen way back in 2002. In the nearly as way back as 2004, I recall stumbling across Blogcritics and was immediately amazed and delighted to find a place where smart and talented people who were interested in a little bit of everything (or a lot about a few things) could write and read and comment and interact.

It was early grassroots social networking for the blogger and content-minded set, and I dove right in. So much so that after beginning as a writer and site member, I soon got involved as an editor and eventually began taking on as many other things as I could. I went to become the site’s executive producer and was proud to help oversee a lengthy period of expansion of growth.

Part of that expansion led to the founding of this site in early 2007. By last fall, work and other responsibilities sadly forced me to step away from my day-to-day role with the old BC, but I’ve remained a great fan and admirer, and OMC remains a part of the Blogcritics network of sites (which also includes the fun/snarky GlossLip, run by Eric’s wife, Dawn Olsen).

The thing that I always loved most about Blogcritics is that it provides a great value proposition for both writers and readers. For writers, it offers the opportunity to have your work edited for free – a service I still believe is unmatched on the Internet – and mentoring from a great and supportive blog community to boot. Additionally, I personally testify to the number of doors that have been opened by way of association with the site. For readers, BC provides a delightful array of content (TechCrunch reports that an astounding 73,000 articles have been published to date), magazine-style opinions and news and reviews across the pop culture and entertainment and current events/politics gamut.

So congrats again to Eric and Dawn and Phillip Winn and Lisa McKay and crew. And on top of that it will be very interesting indeed to see what Technorati – another old school blog-focused institution itself – will have in store with Blogcritics and other announced changes to come.

There are a handful of really good places to discover books and interact and share with other booklovers. Amazon is the titan of this space, of course, but there are other scrappy contenders that serve some cool functions, particularly on the social media side of things.

Shelfari has long been a standout in terms of its visual display. Giving the illusion of browsing actual book shelves and the ability to enjoy beautiful and interesting and unique book covers is a way to truly extend the experience of being a real world bookstore (without the annoyance and expense, I’d argue!). Borders.com switched to a similar interface as well, and its easy to see why. On top of cool visual browsing, Shelfari also offers a host of social features.

Well, it seems that Amazon acquiring Shelfari. I’m not sure what this will mean for the health of the online books business, but I am selfishly hoping that Amazon will eventually roll out a version of its Kindle product with a dazzling colorful visual browsing interface.

Speaking of no brainers, CNN.com is getting on board with other major online news outlets in providing embed code for video clips.

There’s almost no use in not providing this standard feature.

Attention video producers: If someone takes the time to grab your video and put it up on their blog, they are in effect promoting your brand and your content for you. Hanging onto it tightly makes sense from a traditional media perspective but doesn’t hold in a distributed web environment.

How do you make from this? You have no idea, right? Well, the good news is that pretty much no one else does either, so relax!

That is all. Thank you.

Technology is revolutionizing the ways in which content can be distributed and consumed. That’s a fancy-ish way of saying that more stuff can now be seen in more places than ever before. That turn has increased the desire for consumers to demand more of what they want when and where they want it. Therefore, the media companies and platforms that make good on delivering content that people highly desire are smart and will likely win out in the long run.

This stuff seems pretty obvious on the surface, but the reality is that many parts of the world are only just starting to align themselves under the new interwebs regime.

I’m reminded of this in reading a story in which ESPN and Major League Baseball have signed a deal to stream baseball games live during the season. With the number of sports nuts out there who would love to throw a game up on their monitor at work, this seems like it would be a no brainer. It seems silly to me that they will blackout games locally, but that plays more into the economics of sports than the web side of things, so I won’t get into it here.

I had sports and distribution deals on my mind already this week after learning that New York sports broadcaster Chris “Mad Dog” Russo has signed a deal with Sirius Satellite Radio to bring a new act, now solo, to a national audience. Russo and Mike Francesa have just ended a nearly twenty year run on WFAN radio’s Mike and the Mad Dog show.

As a New York native who has lived in California for nearly ten years now, I often longed to be able to stream, download, or somehow access WFAN in order to get a little slice of hometown sports talk action. Unfortunately to my knowledge this has never been available aside from a few thrown together and occasionally updated clips on WFAN’s website.

Again, this seems like no brainer territory to me: you have a nation full of displaced sports fans who would love to be able to access local sports content. With terrestrial radio facing enormous competition both from satellite and the Internet, shouldn’t it be in their interest to squeeze every potential penny from their offerings?

Maybe this is part of the reason why WFAN couldn’t hang onto Russo. In any event, I’m looking forward to hearing the Mad Dog on Sirius – which I can catch both in my car on the way to work or online anytime!

It’s counterintuitive. Fewer people can accomplish more than more people. Simple ideas are more powerful than complex ones.

This is the basic argument of a great little piece called The power of small teams, by Avi Muchnick, and in terms of the web worlds, I very much agree.

Muchnick relates Jeff Bezos’ concept of the “two-pizza” team, which means that the most efficient and productive team is one that can be fed by a couple of large pizzas. Smaller teams are more effective because communication is more efficient. Of course, the trick is to have the right team, the right group of highly motivated, smart, and cooperative folk willing to buy into the vision of the project at hand.

Muchnick goes on to argue that the most efficient team is a one-person unit, where there’s no communication needed at all. That goes a little too far in my book. I’m reminded for some reason of the J.P. character in the hilariously goofy Grandma’s Boy, which features a genius game designer who has no capacity to deal with real life or the real world. In essence, the vast majority of us don’t have the ability to do it all on our own. While the barriers to entry to get a web product to market have never been lower, perhaps the two-pizza theory also works the other way: the most efficient team is one that would probably get through a couple of pies in one sitting.

The other side of the equation – keep it simple (stupid) – is more meaningful for people who don’t work in the Internet industry. The truth is that no one cares about feature rich websites (which can always run the risk of turning into overblown web monstrosities) if they don’t serve some vital or unmet purpose.

The end of the piece includes examples of simple-yet-powerful social media sites built by small teams. They include some of the hottest web 2.0 properties, such as Reddit, Delicious, and Flickr.

Take those three examples and it’s easy to see why simple is powerful:

• Reddit – Comment and vote on stories
• Delicious – Find and bookmark stories
• Flickr – Find, upload, and share images

All three are super easy to comprehend, and all three are super easy to use. They all also have a tremendous number of other features, nuances, and subtleties that make them unique, but in reality these things are peripheral and were developed on top of the core platforms over time.

The ability for small teams to pump out useful applications and services quickly fueled the web 2.0 boom. The next wave of innovation – in whatever form it takes – will be powered by the same foundation: good/simple ideas powered by good/small teams

Stumbled across some interesting data (via Lost Remote) running down the top 30 “Online Current Events & Global News Destinations for July 2008.”

MSNBC rolls in as the top destination, with Yahoo! News coming in at a close second. CNN, AOL, and the New York Times round out the top 5, with Google News sitting at the number ten spot.

I was particularly drawn to these numbers in light of the story I just published a little while ago sketching out the weirdness around Fox News Channel’s decision to expand its presence on Facebook. Fox News Digital Network falls in at #9 on the list, so perhaps it is attempting to get more aggressive, even if it means neglecting the social networking bigwig (MySpace) that’s owned by parent company News Corporation.

Weird news item #1: Fox News is expanding its presence on Facebook
Fox News Channel, which is part of the same company (News Corporation) as MySpace, is expanding its social networking presence on MySpace’s leading social networking competition, Facebook. The New York Times speculates that the reason may be due to MySpace’s “existing partnership with MSNBC.

Weird news item #2: Fox News SVP claims Facebook is bigger than MySpace
It’s one thing to branch out to a social network that might be more geared to your demographic. Joel Cheatwood, senior vice president for development at Fox News, rightly points out that Facebook’s audience tends to be “a little older and a little more sophisticated” as compared to MySpace.

And it’s another for the “real reason” to potentially be MySpace’s deal with MSNBC. But why would Cheatwood go on to say that “Facebook is ‘currently the leading social network’ worldwide”?

Even if it were true, wouldn’t that be the kind of claim that you wouldn’t want to make about a major competitor to one of News Corp’s highest profile properties?

As always, take it with barrels of salt, but Alexa pegs Facebook as the #5 ranked website on the Internet, with MySpace trailing at #7.