optimize-video-tool.com optimize-video-tool.com http://optimize-video-tool.com en-us Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:36:36 GMT Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:36:36 GMT <![CDATA[Are 'selling' and social media incompatible?]]> http://tinyurl.com/nxm992 
In it, Kim Wingerei said:
"....trying to sell stuff on social media sites is not just difficult, but it may even be contrary to the very purpose of what social media is about:
sharing and interaction between like-minded people".

This reminded me of the goldrush analogy:
where the people who made the money were the Chinese, by selling shovels etc to the hapless gold diggers.
So how does this relate to making money from social media? 
If it's hard for a Twitter or a Facebook to monetize their core activities because people don't want them to change, maybe the answer is to monetize their non-core activities.

Take a superior video navigation tool, for instance............
letting users navigate video with more precision than clicking on page after page of thumbnails.....
a web service they can access as a gadget, where advertising appears alongside their search results.
Would they accept these ads in return for enhancements like this?
My bet is 'yes'.
Tools like this are a step beyond the fun-oriented Facebook apps we see so many of today.
But social networks that allow tools of high utility to integrate and share revenue stand to deal themselves into the 'Chinese at the gold rush' story. 
What other tools are candidates to play this kind of role in monetizing social media?]]> Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:36:36 GMT <![CDATA[De-sensitization and the startup]]> http://mixergy.com/the-woman-who-paid-me-1-million-in-affiliate-revenue-teaches-you-about-affiliate-programs-with-lisa-riolo/ 

Hot or Not is a dating site that started in 2000.
James says Hot or Not was pretty 'edgy' at first, with many people wondering 'is it porn'? 
So for a while, it was too edgy for the big public companies to copy. 
Eventually, AOL came out with 'Rate a Buddy'.
But by this time, Hot or Not was such a common concept that the world had become 'de-sensitized' to it.

This reminded me of a great blog post that talked about why Blink.com (a precursor to del.icio.us) failed, despite securing many millions in funding. http://www.aripaparo.com/archive/001456.html

One of the reasons was that back then in '99, Blink had a public catalog of tags, and people were sensitive about what information they put on the web for all to see. 
But a couple of years later, the "N-sync/spears/Pokemon/Potter generation had come of age online and readily adopted privacy-free collaboration because they'd learned that everyone thinks alike, so there's nothing to hide".  
Enter deli.cio.us.
 
So we became de-sensitized to privacy concerns, and we became de-sensitized to the 'edginess' of dating sites.
Sounds a lot like how we've become de-sensitized to violence and language in films and television over the decades, going back to Clark Gable's famous line in Gone with the Wind that mentioned the word 'damn' in a Hollywood movie for the first time. 

The other interesting thing about James Hong's interview is that he said they thought Hot or Not's competitors would fall into one of 2 classes......
they'd either be big guys like AOL or guys like them...startups that would be relying on the same growth methods........word of mouth and press.

So for the first 6 months, all he did was get as many articles written about Hot or Not as he could.
In this way, he effectively froze his copy-cat competitors out of press coverage (on the safe assumption that the press wouldn't be interested in writing the same story twice: writing about a copycat once they'd written about the original).  

So there's a couple of interesting lessons for startups here: 
1. if you've got something 'edgy', or something that can be MADE to be edgy, freeze out the big gorilla competitors by exploiting the window after your launch before the market becomes "de-sensitized" 
2. get as much press coverage as you can to freeze out your start-up, copycat competitors. 

]]> Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:22:16 GMT <![CDATA[Why it's a no-brainer: social networking will be a huge winner]]> Probably the only sustainable competitive advantage in marketing is: distribution.
What Google bought was Youtube's distribution........its share of the market called video sharing.
And while pundits are arguing back and forth about how to monetize this market, and how valuable this market is in dollar terms, there's no doubting its value in the incredibly precious currency called 'attention'.
Attention is what advertisers crave, and social networking can deliver it to them in spades.
The only questions are: 'how', 'how much' and 'when'.
No?]]> Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:21:24 GMT <![CDATA[Tagmotion Beta - Get your own account]]>
The table of contents ('tag tree') is a way for users to ENGAGE with your content.
Because you describe it not just in staccato keywords (like in a tag cloud).
You describe it exactly the way you want.....like a table of contents with headings & subheadings that reflect your expertise or passion or humour or personality.

HOW
Email me at tagmotionbeta [at] gmail dot com

I'll send you a username, login and tutorial.
And away you go.

I'd love your feedback, comments and ideas.
You can SEND THEM TO ME as comments HERE..............
]]> Mon, 25 May 2009 21:14:51 GMT <![CDATA[How to read a book]]> Finally, I feel much better about being a slow reader and letting my brain soak new ideas up and explore them, rather than racing through in the mistaken belief it's more productive to do so.

http://30sleeps.com/blog/2008/07/14/how-to-read-a-book/
]]> Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:10:55 GMT <![CDATA[Yahoo's vote of confidence for manual tagging ]]> getting humans to tag sections within a video, to see what terms they use to describe it...........
just as Google did with Google Image Labeler. (See link below).
Yahoo's calling it the VideoTagGame, and it's now available publicly through the Yahoo! Sandbox.
At least 3 people are involved watching a video simultaneously.
And adding the tags they think of as they go.

When 2 people select the same tag, they get points.
One imagines Yahoo! are using this to improve the search results within video, so they can serve up segment-level search results rather than whole videos.
(This will obviously be useful with longer-form content like keynote speeches etc).  

The interesting thing to me about it is that:
it points to the use of humans to codify the meaning within videos.
And thereby underscores the value of manual tagging.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoos_new_videotaggame_lets_you_tag_within_videos.php 
]]> Tue, 09 Dec 2008 03:59:26 GMT <![CDATA[New lessons in web analytics (including the 4 R's)]]> first generation of web analytics was backward-facing - measuring visitors, page views etc
The second generation took things further to also measure (I think) actions on the site......click-thru rates etc.
And they see the third generation as integrating all this data with offline data.
Such as customer transaction data.
To give you a 360 degree view of the customer.

For marketers, they talk not about the 4 P's (Product, Price, Place and Promotion), but the 4 R's:
1. Reveal
2. Reward
3. Respect
4. Retain.

Expanding on these.....
Reveal means understanding the current interests of visitors, so you can build a meaningful customer segmentation model.
Reward means rewarding behaviours with relevant offers and opportunities.
Respect in the sense that relevant offers lead to an increase in the trust and respect the customer has for the brand. (As opposed to repeatedly offering stuff a customer's so far failed to express any interest in). 
And Retain customers by stimulating them to interact with your products through fun and extensions........
they may have nothing to do with the products.......it's about community, web 2.0 tools, maybe games. (Note to self: idiosyncratic/customized/fun/quirky tag catalogs to describe particular video or podcast content).

The key concept for them was: engagement.
And: how do you measure customer engagement with a site? 
They showed the usual 'heat map'-type of mechanism to show where people had clicked.
Easyjet example
And they mentioned an interesting example: Easyjet.
Easyjet put a banner top left of their homepage in a contrasting colour (blue).
They thought this would be the hottest ad unit on the homepage.
Turned out it was the worst, out of 6 units they had on the homepage.
Seems the other ads - in good old EasyJet orange - didn't stand out as much, but they looked more like how Easyjet usually looks.
(In other words, more like editorial than advertising).
With price-driven messages the Easyjet customer is used to, and looks for.
Easy in hindsight, I guess.
They still have a blue ad top left, I just noticed:
http://easyjet.com/en/book/index.asp 

Think: events not pages
This was the catchcry that made sense to me.
The switch from measuring and thinking about page impressions and visitor numbers to what the customer's actually doing. 
And being able to develop segmentation models from that which become the basis for future marketing activity.
(Forward-looking).

The elephant in the room
As Jeremy Tang from Telstra/Sensis said afterwards, it's damned impossible in many if not most large organisations to integrate online and offline data in the way Webtrends describe.......
whether for technical or cultural or political reasons. 
But if things inevitably move from proprietary towards 'open' as markets mature, then this could well be where we're headed.
Yes? No?]]> Wed, 26 Nov 2008 20:54:49 GMT <![CDATA[Idea: 3D advertising application]]> http://mikeseyfang.com) about a very cool piece of software: Video Trace.
It lets you create 3D representations of objects appearing in videos, for example a car, or the Sydney Opera House.
Both of these examples are in the great demo video here:
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=vda2RAEuW_g

You use your mouse to roughly trace over the different planes or surfaces or sides of the object.
Including curves.
Then the program estimates how the image would look in 3D, and renders it for you in 3D.
 
They talk about it as a workflow-type tool for graphics, architecture etc.
I'm thinking: what about advertising?
How about turning still photos of models wearing fashion products into little 3D animations?
Would that be a valuable way of bringing the merchandise to life?

How about turning 2D shots of housefronts into 3D animations.......
could that help real estate agents sell more houses? 

Video Trace talk about it as a workflow application for games developers and the graphics industry etc
Check it out and let me know what you think.
I'm thinking: mashup with Tagmotion to create 3D video catalogs (of fashion products, home furnishings and high ticket items). 

]]> Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:43:16 GMT <![CDATA[What Warren Buffett said]]> He said: it's good to be greedy when other people are fearful (and fearful when other people are greedy) 

it's my fervent hope that there are 'greedy' angel investors out there who know a good early stage tech company when they see one.
And that I'll be in front of the right one at the right time. 
]]> Sun, 26 Oct 2008 18:22:13 GMT <![CDATA[The future of content]]> What he said back then rings amazingly true today, which is important if - like me - you're taking a punt on bringing technology to market that you hope will tap into one of the big trends of media usage on the web. 

In a great Peter Hirshberg video from the TED series here......
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/peter_hirshberg_on_tv_and_the_web.html 
he says:

We’re in the middle of a tremendous clash between the oldand the new. 
The medium does things to people and they’re always completely unaware of this.

They don’t really notice the new medium that is wrapping them up into the old medium because the old medium is the content of the new medium, as movies tend to be the content of TV.
And as books (novels) used to be thecontent of movies.
And so everytime a new media arrives, the old media is the content, and it is highly observable, highly noticeable. But the real roughing up and massaging is done by the new medium, and it is ignored.


This passage caused me to realise that I am guilty of ignoring the roughing up and massaging of content that's going on now, in the form of video mashups, for example.
My thinking has been that:
surely, any tinkering you do with the author's work can only dilute or cheapen her message.
Of course, this betrays my prejudice as someone who grew up with 'proper' journalism where talkback radio and 'letters to the editor' were the closest thing the average citizen had for expressing herself on a big stage. 
Roughing up and massaging amounted to plagiarism.
And plagiarism is bad.
Now even I am writing a blog, mashing up the quote from Marshall McLuhan.
And the following one from Peter Hirshberg in the same video: 

Content is moving from shows to particles that are battered back and forth, and are part of social communications.

I get it. The currency is particles, not whole shows.
It's a bit like marketing theory that says every market fragments over time.....where power shifts from the seller to the buyer. Are we seeing the same phenomenon applied to media per se, whether it's bought or just consumed?
Where fragments or particles - not just whole articles or videos - have a value in and of themselves, and are used and re-used in new ways, constituting the 'new medium' as McLuhan would have it.
And where the unedited, untouched, un-massaged content is the 'old medium'.
Make any sense?

One of the young girls interviewed by Hirshberg said it best: 

One of the reasons we put the computer before TV is that nowadays we have TV programs ON the computer and you can download it onto youripod.

Doesn't that tell you that the old medium (TV programs) are now the content of the new medium (iPod)?
Am I about 3 years behind everyone else?

]]> Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:09:27 GMT <![CDATA[The future of browsing]]> Blaise Aguera y Arcas  http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129 
He demonstrates his technology that takes something as complex as a whole book, and lets you zoom in closer and closer on any part of it from afar, and read it with the same clarity as if you hadn't had to zoom in on it at all. 

Then there's the example he gives of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.
And the thousands of photos of the cathedral on Flickr.
They'd all been tagged 'Notre Dame', and Blaise's technology shows you a kind of montage of all these different images:
some taken in high res, some with mobile phones. And some were even photos of posters of the cathedral.
And again, you can zoom in on any individual part of the montage to reveal more and more detail about it.

It might be visual detail, or detail revealed in the tags that people have used to describe their images.
For example, the names of the saints who appear as statues on the cathedral's facade.
Blaise paints a picture where all the images of Notre Dame or whatever are linked to other images of the same thing, creating not only an incredibly rich metaverse (universe of tags) associated with that particular subject or image.
But also putting the observer in a position where they're one click away from all my other images, if I'm one of the contributors, thus creating a phenomenal network effect.

But you gotta see it!

The question that I asked myself was:
if we're able to take something as complex as a whole book, and zoom in on a very precise part of it in one movement, does this do away with the need to categorize information using knowledge trees? 
My hunch is that Blaise's technology will be great when you know exactly what you're looking for......when you know what part of the book you want to drill down to. 
What it won't be able to give you is a 'table of contents'-type overview of the content available, whether the content is text (like a book) or multimedia (like the cathedral). 

Especially as the volume and complexity of the content in question grows, my hunch is there will still be value in being able to have that kind of 'table of contents' view across a video or a collection of videos, for example, by browsing the tags (in the form of a knowledge tree like Windows Explorer with its folder and subfolder names) that point to the content

Have a look at the video and tell me what you think
]]> Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:49:12 GMT <![CDATA[Part 2 - the death of manual tagging ]]> in my last post I mentioned that Ray Kurzweil (futurist, web visionary, entrepreneur) has given us a date when he thinks the performance of machines will rival human performance.
He calls this moment "singularity" - when computer intelligence will equal the power of the human brain.
And he says it will happen in approximately 2029.
At this point, machines will have pattern recognition equalling that of humans.
Which means they'll be able to recognize my Aunt Maud and your Aunt Mildred.

And at this point, we will no longer need to manually tag images of Aunt Maud or Aunt Mildred.
So at that point, the need for Tagmotion - as it is today - will no longer exist.

Let's hope I come up with something else between now and then.

Have a look at Ray's terrific TED talk here.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/38
]]> Sun, 13 Jul 2008 03:22:15 GMT <![CDATA[Speech-to-text vs manual tagging]]> It was the inaugural "Video Rules" seminar, organised by AIMIA and Venture One.

On the panel were representatives from Akamai, Adobe, Google, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Pixelmill Films.

On the question of how to optimize video for search engines, there were a couple of interesting perspectives.

A couple of the panellists thought it will be speech-to-text technology that drives the optimization of video for search engines, and makes the spoken word discoverable.

I took a slightly different view: that speech-to-text might be great for generating transcripts that can be published as HTML pages, to create a keyword longtail for the publisher.
(Capturing more viewers as a result).
But for as long as search engines behave as they do today – constantly changing and fine-tuning their algorithms – automated metadata extraction techniques (like speech-to-text) will lack the precision to keep up with all the changes to algorithms.
Which means there will still be the need for a high touch, ‘organic’ or manual dimension to how we optimise video at the pointy end - on top of the longtail embodied in static transcripts, for example.

Of course, I would say that: Tagmotion is all about manual tagging. 
Ray Kurzweil has an opinion about the shelf life of manual processes like pattern or face recognition........
that is, how long we've got before machines can do the job as well as we can.
That also defines the shelf-life of the Tagmotion technology, incidentally.
Gulp.
More about Ray's prognostications in my next post.



]]> Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:08:44 GMT <![CDATA[Great viral video]]> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4&eurl=http://www.dothetest.co.uk/

The message is: 'it's easy to miss something you're not looking for'
Check it out.
It's a great analogy for the problem with keyword search that:
you might miss (not find) stuff that you really want to see.
Why? Because you've got NO WAY of knowing it's there.
(Unless, of course, you're psychic and so you type exactly the right words into the search box).

Or unless you have a 'table-of-contents'-type view of all the tags that describe the content.
Tag clouds give you a very limited view of the tags describing a coliection of content.
So they're great for showing what's popular, but they'll never be able to show you any hidden gems that you might be after. They're primitive. And not scaleable.

A table of contents showing hierarchical tags, however, lets you see at a glance the full richness of even a large collection of video.

See the Example in this post:
http://www.optimize-video-tool.com/2008/May/The-Vietnam-War-Big-BrotherTV-and-Context-.htm

Gotta love the Awareness Test video.
I think I've now got my 'mantra' for Tagmotion and knowledge tree tagging (with thanks to TED.com and Guy Kawasaki).
It is, of course: 'It's easy to miss what you're not looking for'.




]]> Sat, 21 Jun 2008 07:18:04 GMT <![CDATA[SEO as distribution ]]> in its ability to put your brand out there in front of a wide audience. 
And if distribution is perhaps the only sustainable competitive advantage in marketing, does this point to how important SEO is, or should be?
Does it depend on what type of business you have, perhaps? 

One of the things we love about the web is surely that Davids can slay Goliaths in all sorts of categories.
(I just love how TradeMe, a competitor to eBay in New Zealand, succeeded in that country at eBay's expense. And was eventually sold to Australian media company Fairfax for around US$500m).

Undoubtedly, there are lots of Davids that became successful without any focus on SEO.
How?
Presumably they:
a) ended up with a pretty-well optimized site without consciously knowing what they were doing, and/or:
b) they had a product that the market wanted, the search engines saw this going on, and it translated to high rankings, and/or:
c) they've simply been around long enough that the search engines give them points just for this.

But if you're starting up an online business today, or starting to promote your business online today, how far can you get with the web as a distribution platform without SEO at the centre of your online marketing strategy?
Put it another way, how much of a gap are you leaving between the traffic you generate and the traffic you COULD generate if a serious SEO effort is NOT part of the equation? 

Your pre-existing competitors already have their place in the rankings.
And as a new entrant, you have to overcome their inertia and the credibility they already have with the search engines.

If you're lucky, they haven't been as focused as you're able to be.
And you can carve out a niche with valuable seed words and keywords that places you high in your prospects' the search results.

And if you're an established business that's seen its online traffic and leads fall away, you might have the same opportunity to claw back some of that territory from your competitors.

In other words, to reinvigorate your (web) distribution.
The way I see it, SEO is central to your ability to do that.
Is this just bleeding obvious?
Is SEO synonymous with distribution in a web world?
If so, is this an important idea, or just more of the bleeding obvious?
 




]]> Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:43:58 GMT <![CDATA[Video ads: the next longtail market?]]> Reporters are now doing the job that video editors used to do.
No longer do reporters mark up on paper and give it to the editors to work with.
Now the reporters can produce the roughcuts themselves.

As the tools of production become more and more commoditized, the process will reach further and further down the value chain.
And eventually we will see millions of small businesses putting their own webmercials, training seminars and customer testimonial videos on the web.
And optimising them so they reach new customers and drive business growth.
And create a video advertising longtail market in the process, just as we’ve seen Google create a mammoth text advertising longtail market.

Who will be the early adopters in the video advertising longtail market?
Will it be the bigger, better-resourced businesses?
The smaller, tech-savvy ones?
Businesses operating in high value markets, where it’s a no brainer to use video to sell?
Businesses in highly competitive markets where it’s vital to stay ahead of the pack?

]]> Wed, 28 May 2008 18:04:57 GMT <![CDATA[Browse video with knowledge trees]]> http://youtube.com/watch?v=ewjzlI6hrf8

Now, through what context might you see it?

1. Philosophy

> Carpe Diem?


2. Advertising

> Television?


3. Animation

> Advertising?


4. Entertainment

> TV program

> interruption?


You can imagine how these different ‘parent and child’ terms might sit in a knowledge tree that people could browse to find content that interests them.
.
And you can imagine that different people could arrive at the same video by taking very different paths through the knowledge tree………..
browsing it according to their own particular interests or whims (eg philosophy, advertising, animation or entertainment).
And how they could click on these tags to generate video search results matching their query.

So, if you had a video tagged using knowledge tree tags, you would be allowing searchers more paths for finding your video.
And more paths means more page impressions, more ad revenue, more sales, more awareness of your product, service or subject, for example. 

The key advantage of this over keyword search, of course, is that the searcher doesn’t have to second-guess what the (exact) search term is before they type it in.
They simply browse the knowledge tree to get a table of contents-type overview of what’s available.
And click to generate a results page of matching video from there. 

Come back in a couple of weeks to see an example of a knowledge tree working with a video archive at www.vervofinancial.com.
(The site's up but the knowledge tree will be incorporated into the site search shortly).

]]> Tue, 20 May 2008 16:43:45 GMT <![CDATA[Contextual tags and browsing video ]]> cosy ally (1983) vs Saddam Hussein as an axis of evil (2003).

And different contexts present a huge challenge when it comes to searching video: if a picture paints a thousand words, and video clocks up 24 pictures a second, we’re talkin’ 24,000 words a second.

Lots of complexity. Huge challenge to search with precision.

I was reminded of ‘big picture’ differences in context recently in a great documentary called ‘The Fog of War’.

Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense under Lyndon Johnson was talking about how the US went into the Vietnam War in the context of the Cold War (with the overarching aim to stop the spread of communism).

By contrast, the Vietnamese context (he learned much later) was civil war.

And with the benefit of hindsight now, he believed things may have been different if the two sides had taken the trouble to understand each other's context upfront.

The human cost of this clash of contexts was 58,000 Americans, 520 Australians and millions of Vietnamese dead. OK, so I’ve made the point that context is important, even profoundly so.

Where is all this leading?
The ability to capture context was one of the key ideas behind the design of Tagmotion, as a tool for tagging and searching video. (Nice segue, huh?).

We made the assumption that – with more and more video on the web, and with more people searching it - being able to use context as a shorthand, higher-level way of navigating it will become more and more useful.

And we made a couple of other assumptions:

1. Keyword search is just as limited with video as with text content. If not more so.
2. These limitations are due in no small part to the fact that keywords are flat. No higher or lower levels. No hierarchy. No context.
3. These limitations will be amplified as the volume of online video grows.
With me so far?

Example
Imagine the thousands of hours of video created in a Big Brother series.
I know, I know, why do that to yourself.
By browsing a ‘tag catalog’ containing terms like the examples below, and clicking on terms that describe what you’re interested in, you'll find what you're after without the trial and error we've become so used to with keyword search.

Housemate
        > Fred

Behavior
        > Bullying

Week 1
        > Monday

Here, you'd click on each of these three terms to create a ‘compound query’.
It would give you search results consisting of all the video of  Fred bullying other housemates from Monday of Week 1.

But if you tried to find this content using keyword search, you wouldn’t have the benefit of browsing the tags to see what video was available.
You’d have to know exactly the right words to type in.

And a tag cloud that attempted to contain all the tags describing (even) a Big Brother series would be hopelessly impractical.

A knowledge tree of tags lets you to discover what’s there to be viewed.
And in an application like Tagmotion, it lets you select one or more of the tags to form ‘compound queries’ like this Big Brother example.

So in this way, Tagmotion is an antidote to the 'hit or miss' nature of keyword search.

Here, 'Behavior' is the context for 'Bullying'. So you can navigate down through the tree to a very specific (lower level) term like 'bullying' from a contextual (higher level) term like Behavior.

There.
My first blog post done and dusted.
Taking you on an uplifting journey from the Vietnam War to Big Brother.
From the depressing to the ridiculous.
Off to a flyer, eh?

Do you think the idea of browsing knowledge trees to find video has merit?
Do you think keyword search will always rule?
I'll show you how we're using Tagmotion, and how SEO fits the picture in subsequent posts.

]]> Sun, 11 May 2008 22:46:31 GMT <![CDATA[Welcome to optimize-video-tool.com]]> Wed, 07 May 2008 19:52:55 GMT