Content Matters

OK, so that's probably an exaggeration.  But, I received "Elf Yourself" emails from a half-dozen people yesterday.  And, when I went to click through during office hours, I couldn't get past the "Loading" message.  Last night, on my free time, I was able to get in without problem, so it's pretty clear that everyone's doing this at work, rather than at home.

So, it's a great campaign by OfficeMax (though I doubt most users will remember which company hosted it).  They've simplified user-generated content to make it easy for anyone with digital photos to participate.   The ElfYourself site was first introduced last year and got more than 36 million visitors.  But this year, the hype seems even greater and they should surpass those numbers.  This year, for those who can't get into the holiday mood, they've added a new Scrooge Yourself version.

So, grab a few photos of family or friends and Elf Yourself.  But try it during off-hours.

Only 31 more days to make a tax-deductible donation for 2007.  So, what better time than now for the always charming Lindsay Campbell and the Wallstrip team to showcase DonorsChoose. 

Here's Lindsay's chat with DonorsChoose Founder (and former NYC teacher) Charles Best.  More info available on the Wallstrip blog.  Better yet, help the Wallstrip team achieve their $5k DonorsChoose challenge.

This one slipped under my radar late last week.  TechTarget announced the acquisition of KnowledgeStorm in a $58 million deal that combines the two leaders in IT lead generation.

TechTarget has been the leader in the market, with Q3 revenues of $23 million. According to the press release, they expect KnowledgeStorm to add revenues of $12-14 million in the 12 months following integration.  TechTarget had previously acquired KnowledgeStorm competitor BitPipe, so they now have a solid lock on the IT white paper and lead gen market.

KnowledgeStorm had initially put itself on the block in November, 2006, when CEO Kelly Gay indicated that the company had achieved a $20 million run-rate and was a sustainable business, at the time stating "We are at that point. We've proven we can do it."

Congratulations to Kelly and the KnowledgeStorm team on the growth and successful outcome for the Company.

Via Research Recap comes this summary of a Hitwise report showing that UK web traffic to social network sites has now exceeded that to web-based email systems like Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail.  Social networks like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace accounted for 5.17% of UK traffic in October as compared to 4.98% for the email sites.

While those numbers may come as a surprise, what I found more compelling was the chart below, where Hitwise shows that clicks to retail sites from social networks exceeded the traffic sent by the email sites.  Let me repeat that - social networks in the UK were driving more clicks to etailers than the major web-based email sites.

I find that shocking, especially when you think about all of the promotional email that the etailers send out on their own, all to generate links back. 

I'd like to dig further into the Hitwise numbers to see which widgets or pages are generating the clicks and what online retailers are the greatest recipients, but on the surface, this suggests that the referral-based marketing that is at the heart of the newly launched Facebook ads is already occurring a meaningful way among social networks.

Google has officially launched OpenSocial.  The OpenSocial links are now active and there’s some reasonable content up there.  They have set up a sandbox for developers to play with, building OpenSocial apps for Orkut.  The OpenSocial platform has been built on top of Google Gadgets, so there's a fairly deep framework already in place.  Meanwhile, MySpace and Bebo have joined the party, significantly growing the potential installed user base.

Here’s a quick roundup of what others have to say:

Ning founder (and OpenSocial participant) Marc Andreesen says “What a world we live in. Developers of Open Social apps will have distribution to 200 million users. I'm sorry, I know I'm supposed to be cynical about this stuff, but that's astonishing.”

Mike Arrington seems to have bought into the Google hype: "Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle."

Meanwhile Dave Winer responds that “Google has a long way to go to build the base of users and developers connected using the new protocol that is the subject of all this chest-thumping. Do they exist in any tangible form? How much of a moving target are they? It's like proclaiming the new owners of A-Rod's contract as the winners of the 2008 World Series.”

With all of the announcements flying about, there has been silence from Yahoo throughout.  I’d previously suggested that Yahoo was the big loser in the Facebook war; now, with OpenSocial in the mix, it seems clear that’s the case.  According to Robert Scoble “As to Yahoo and Microsoft? Well, I talked with an executive from Yahoo today and he said he had nothing to announce. Translation: we have no clue. If they had a clue they would have had all guns blazing today. Now their choice is to join up. The industry support is too strong behind Open Social. Or, they could make a deal with Facebook on their “embrace and extend” strategy.”

The video from the Google announcement, at Google Campfire One, is available here.

In a direct response to the Facebook applications platform, Google will announce the OpenSocial platform on Thursday.

OpenSocial is a consortium of key players in the social networking and on-demand application space.  In addition to Google’s Orkut, the initial launch partners will include LinkedIn, Salesforce.com, Ning, Hi5, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.

OpenSocial will consist of a set of common APIs which will be used across all of the above platforms.  The three common APIs will cover the following areas:

• Profile information (user information)
• Friends information (the social graph)
• Activities (similar to Facebook news and mini feeds)

Developers can build applications using javascript, html and flash; there is no proprietary markup language like Facebook’s FBML.  Also, unlike Facebook, where the Facebook platform is the only container, any social network can be an open container for these apps.  Marc Andreesen, Ning founder, has more on why he feels this is the next big leap forward.

This is a big step for the social networking space.  Facebook was a big first step, but most (all?) of the apps built for Facebook to-date have been entertainment focused.  While some of the partners here are consumer (Hi5, Orkut, Friendster), this opens up some critical business platforms like LinkedIn and Salesforce for the development of b2b apps.

The following links are due to go live on Thursday:
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial (technical docs)
http://sandbox.orkut.com/ (sandbox to test apps)

For more on OpenSocial, check out Techmeme, O’Reilly Radar, TechCrunch and the New York Times.

Meanwhile, Dave Winer takes a contrarian position.  As he points out:

Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don't work.

According to CNET, Microsoft has won it's battle with Google for the chance to invest in Facebook.  The site indicates that the deal would include a direct investment in the company and an expansion of their current advertising partnership.

Meanwhile, the WSJ reports that the investment is for $250 million, a fraction of the $750 million to $1.5 billion range floated by the Post this morning.

At that price, Microsoft appears to be the clear winner, shooting down the hypothesis floated by Henry Blodget earlier today.  At $250 million, this deal should make Microsoft a clear winner.  Under their existing partnership, Microsoft has the right to sell banner ads on Facebook's U.S. site through 2011.  This deal should expand that partnership to international sites, and prove that Microsoft remains a key player in the Internet advertising market.  It will be interesting to hear Facebook's rationale for the decision; at that price, it's clear that Microsoft didn't outbid Google; the Facebook team must have decided that they prefer Microsoft as their long-term partner.

Declan McCullagh has an interesting piece on the new journalist shield bill which Congress will vote on this week.  McCullagh and others have argued that the legislation has been watered down in that it no longer includes personal bloggers, but only professional journalists.

The original draft of the bill included a broad definition of journalist: "a person engaged in journalism and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person."

The technical definition in the bill is now someone "who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public for a substantial portion of the person's livelihood or for substantial financial gain and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person."

As McCullagh points out, under this new definition, a blogger who is a serious blogger and breaks news, but who doesn't get compensated (through Google Ads or otherwise) for their writing would not be covered.   CNET's Don Reisinger furthers McCullagh's argument, suggesting that when he began his career, by volunteering, that he met many other credible journalists who were not being paid for their efforts.

I disagree with McCullagh and Reisinger in this case.  I write this blog.  I also twitter my thoughts from time to time.  I also post commentary to Congoo.  But I'm an industry participant, not a journalist.  And, while I may have "inside information" from time to time, that's not the same as having someone share information with a journalist.  I believe that it's critical for us to provide real protection for true journalists to not have to reveal a source in most instances.  Yet with the many forms of online communication today, it's a slippery slope to suggest that anyone who posts any content online should have the same protections as a journalist.  That loose definition could result in a backlash, where those protections are taken away from those who truly need them.

I am in New York this week, so am not at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit.  Luckily, it’s pretty easy to follow what’s going on there.
I’ve provided a quick round up below of the highlights.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg speaks but says little (O’Reilly Radar) while John Battelle tries to get him to commit (Read/Write/Web)

MySpace to open its platform for developers to fend off Facebook (Reuters)

Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz disputes the NY Times article that this is just a repeat of the bubble  (via AlacraBlog)

Meanwhile, Josh Koppelman reminds us that we’ve talked about the bubble at every Web 2.0 conference for the past four years (Silicon Alley Insider)

CNET twittered the conference, saying wireless connectivity was too spotty for full blog posts

Rupert Murdoch and Chris DeWolfe jointly announce that the MySpace cofounders will be staying with Fox Interactive (Guardian Unlimited)

Tim O’Reilly says “don’t pitch me on your Web 2.0 strategy; we’re focused on the slice of the future that hasn’t yet become evenly distributed”

In Facebook, all of the action happens in the feed and mini feed.  The mini feed shows a user their activity, while the feed provides a view of the activity of their friends.  However, not all online activity occurs within Facebook, so this view is, by definition, limiting.

A new entrant, FriendFeed, is making an effort to address this by delivering a comprehensive feed that encompasses multiple platforms.  With FriendFeed, your feed includes your Twitters, music you’ve  listened to on Last.fm, pictures you’ve posted to flickr, changes to your LinkedIn profile, videos  favorited on YouTube, updates to various Facebook apps and many more (23 services in all).

FriendFeed raises the question of whether there is a need for platforms like Facebook, or whether the  Internet itself is the platform.  In essence, it’s another part of the same argument in support of an open social graph and not for walled gardens.

FriendFeed, which is in early beta (by invitation only), is a startup from four Google alum, including Bret Taylor and Jim Norris, who built Google Maps.  This feed mashup is very compelling.  Of course, it’s only as useful as your network, so my friend feed is at http://friendfeed.com/graubart.  Feel free to friend me there or subscribe to my feed.

Some of the newer social networks have looked to leverage your address book to bootstrap your friends list.

A new entrant, Quechup, seems to be taking this to a new level, by auto-spamming your entire address book without the user's knowledge.  I've received a couple of Quechup requests this past week and, since I had little interest in joining yet another social net, quickly Googled the company name and saw thousands of posts equating Quechup with Spam.

There aren't too many things I could think of that would tick off a potential user faster than abusing access to their network.  Quechup appears to be an offering from iDate, a Las Vegas based online dating service, whose shares are traded on the pink sheets.  That's one penny stock that I wouldn't want to own right now. 

For more on the Quechup spam mess, read e-Week or Boing Boing.

With a measured approach, akin to the way it first introduced advertising on its search engine, Google is now introducing advertising on YouTube.

The new format is a semi-transparent overlay at the bottom of the screen, the same positioning news shows use for their scroll.  The ad appears 15 seconds into the video, an approach that takes into account the way users often sample a few seconds of video before deciding whether to watch the whole thing.  The typical ad will last about 10 seconds; if a user clicks on the ad, it will pause the YouTube video, show the ad in its entirety, then continue with the remainder of the YouTube video.

Google’s approach is smart.  They avoided the use of pre-roll ads, which users find almost universally annoying and instead adopted an approach that was first introduced by video ad network VideoEgg last year.  Initially, ads will be limited to content from Google content partners and will not appear on user-generated or user-uploaded video.  Ads will be sold on a PPM basis (initially $20 per thousand displays, according to the New York Times), although the model could easily be adapted to a PPC approach in the future.  It will be interesting to see how advertisers make their overlays compelling to drive click-throughs in that format.

Video is emerging as a key content delivery platform.  For now, it’s use is largely in the b2c space, but b2b video has begun to trickle out as well.  As an advertising model develops, video will take hold in the consumer and select business markets.

There have been numerous anecdotal stories about companies or individuals editing their Wikipedia listings, typically in hopes of removing negative information.  In other cases, such as that of a campaign manager of a Georgia Gubernatorial candidate, the effort was to disparage a competitor.

Of course, in virtually all cases, other Wikipedia users will quickly notice the vandalism and restore the original page.  But that doesn't keep people from trying.

Now, there's an easy way to identify potential whitewashing.  CalTech student Virgil Griffith has created the Wikipedia Scanner.  The application cross-references listings with the IP address of those who make the edits.

In this Wired article, they describe how it has uncovered cases such as voting machine manufacturer Diebold trying to delete numerous paragraphs about their CEO's relationship to President Bush and WalMart's editing text about its wage policies.  Some of the cases seem more innocuous, albeit strange, such as some user at the CIA changing the lyrics of a song on the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (you'd think they have more important things to focus on).

By making the database publicly available, Griffith is encouraging users to do their own searches and reveal potential whitewashing efforts.  Or, just click on some of the examples on the Wikipedia Scanner page.  The results are interesting.  For example, while the NY Times has 1,285 edits, as compared to just 102 for the Fox News Channel, most of the Times entries are focused on external news topics, while most of the Fox News edits are to their own staff, such as Brit Hume and Chris Wallace or to their nemesis, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC.

Plaxo, makers of the widely used address book maintenance app of the same name, is about to enter the social networking market.

According to VentureBeat, the Company on Monday plans to announce an open social network called Pulse.  The new Pulse application will allow users to view their contacts according to categories such as business, friends and family members.  VentureBeat has more screen shots here.

Robert Scoble met with Plaxo marketing head John McCrea earlier this week.  McCrea explained that Plaxo’s new social network will be completely open.  In other words, if I post some new content on my “Pulse page”, it will be available to everyone, not just those with a Pulse account.  That seems like a direct shot across the bow to Facebook, where you have to be a member to access other pages.

Plaxo also plans to leverage the “friends” categories described above to allow you to manage access to different information.  This is a current weakness of Facebook which I’ve described previously.  There’s no way for me to segment my Facebook data, indicating this section is for business colleagues and that section is for personal friends.

So, will Pulse be the Facebook-killer?  I doubt it. 

Plaxo does have some advantages; they have a user base of 15 million and the new features directly address the challenges Facebook will have in moving to the business community.  But, people view Plaxo as a tool, not a platform.  They may have 15 million users, but none are “active” users.  It’s just a tool that runs in the background for most.  The early adopters, whom Pulse needs to attract in order to gain viability, are now focusing on Facebook.  I’d be surprised to see them switch their focus to Pulse unless it quickly develops a large base of users.  Facebook was able to leverage colleges, then high schools, to grow virally.  A disparate base of business users of Plaxo are unlikely to come together as a critical mass.

That being said, I'll certainly be watching them this Monday.  And my guess is the folks at Facebook will too.

Speaking at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention on Friday, Jimmy Wales provided details on Wikia's plans to enter the search market.

Wales stated that "Internet search is broken".  His biggest complaint is the closed, proprietary nature of the Google algorithms.  Wikia has recently acquired the Grub web crawler technology from Look Smart and plans to combine that with open source search technologies Lucene and Nutch to develop a new open source search engine platform.  Grub is a distributed platform, which can leverage the idle computing power of all those who run it, in order to generate the search index.  In this manner, Wikia can, theoretically, develop a massive search application without the hardware requirements of Google.

Wikia states four guiding principles on its web site:

1. Transparency: Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
2. Community: Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community focus.
3. Quality: Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.
4. Privacy: Must be protected, do not store or transmit any identifying data.

Wales envisions Wikia to leverage a human-assisted approach, much like Jason Calacanis' recent launch Mahalo, although it sounds like Wikia will use humans in a more limited capacity, for disambiguation of terms.  Jason's initial thoughts on Jimmy's entry into the human-assist search field can be found on his blog.

Never one to shy away from bold statements, Wales suggests that this open source search approach could "shift the power of balance from the search companies back to the publishers".

In my opinion, it's unlikely that anyone will knock Google off its perch in the near-term.  At the same time, the search experience, which had improved dramatically from 1995 - 2002 or so has really stagnated during the past five years, and you could argue that it's gotten worse due to shopping and spam sites and SEO.  New approaches, like those of Wiki and Mahalo, are certainly worth our support and attention.

Can business users get value from Facebook?

That's a question that I've seen & heard from a number of sources in recent weeks.  As Fred Wilson twittered this morning, its the same question he had about LinkedIn in the early days, but now gets value from it. 

So, what does Facebook have to do to create value for business users?  Here are a few thoughts:

First, it needs to provide the tools to support business relationships.  Today, the only business relationship they support is "worked together" (or I guess "hooked up" may apply to the workplace, but I'm not going to go there).  Business relationships can be much more complex.  We should be able to reflect relationships like client:vendor, investor:portfolio company, biz dev partners and more.

Next, Facebook should allow its users to set a sharing threshold of "friendship".  There may be details that I'd share with "friends" but not with business colleagues.  I'd like the ability, when I add a friend, to categorize them as a friend, a colleague or an acquaintance.  Then, when I add apps to my profile, I'd like to flag them to whether they'll be shared with each category of friends.  That helps me separate business apps from personal apps, while still keeping them all in one place.

Once a framework like this is put in place, it will support business applications.  It would be simple, for example, to provide "degree of separation" relationships like LinkedIn offers. 

So, why do we need to build that in Facebook, if LinkedIn already offers it?

Facebook provides things that LinkedIn cannot easily match.  With the open platform, it's reasonable to expect industry-specific networking applications to emerge.  There are attributes of relationships which differ from industry to industry.  For example, a lobbyist might want to have a party attached to each of her contacts.  Horizontal apps could also be easily built for recruitment, reference checking, business development and more.

As a platform, Facebook is well-suited to replace the "home pages" most people use today such as my.yahoo.  I can pop an RSS reader into Facebook, so I can read all of my RSS feeds off that page.  I can integrate a calendar and address book (which should be able to synch with my corporate (Exchange) files and my Blackberry.  I can also access it from a mobile device, without having to fumble through sites that don't work well on the mobile. 

So, eight weeks after the platform was announced, it's clear that Facebook has not yet transformed itself into a business networking application.  But with a few enhancements to the core platform, and a bunch of creative developers using the platform, I'd bet it's there by next spring or summer.

This week I created a Content Industry group on Facebook.  My goal is to provide a forum for business networking as well as a venue for sharing information.

Facebook users, just click here to join.  If you don't have a Facebook account, take a minute to create one then join.

In the past week I’ve gotten a handful of questions (both in the comments here and face-to-face) about how Facebook applications will be monetized.  I’ll provide some initial thoughts here and welcome your comments.

First, we need to acknowledge that it’s early in the process.  The Facebook API was launched May 25 – exactly seven weeks ago today.  So, while there are some fairly obvious methods of monetizing Facebook traffic today, we can be sure that more interesting models will emerge in the months to come.

The second acknowledgement is that Facebook is a platform; it does not come with a built-in monetization mechanism.  Let’s remember how long it took before Google monetized its traffic, and then again before it provided the mechanisms (via AdSense) for others to do the same.

What the Facebook platform does provide is a distribution vehicle, enabling you access to a rapidly growing addressable market that already exceeds 24 million users.  The platform also lends itself well to two well-established Internet monetization methods: advertising and eCommerce.

• Advertising: While other social networks have restricted the ability for 3rd party developers to run ads on their “widgets”, Facebook places no such restrictions.  So, the most obvious method of monetizing a Facebook app is through development of an app that generates a lot of traffic and can serve ads.  This model should work for traditional media businesses.
• ECommerce: The second method for generating revenue is through eCommerce.  Today’s top Facebook app is iLike.  iLike is a simple application that allows users to indicate their favorite music.  iLike is positioned as a music discovery service in the same vein as Last.fm or Pandora.    The iLike app for Facebook includes a link next to each song title, allowing users to buy that song, generating eCommerce transactions.  They also have a concert tour module where you can see which performers are on tour, then purchase tickets.  Developers could easily leverage existing affiliate marketing platforms (such as Amazon) to monetize traffic for books, movies or any other products.

So, is Facebook a cash machine for developers?  Hardly.  Building a business on the Facebook platform requires development of a compelling application that remains useful to the user over time.  It will require tapping into viral markets, but also providing underlying marketing and PR to drive usage.  The Field of Dreams approach will not work in this competitive landscape.

It’s also important to understand that generating traffic on Facebook is slightly different than that on other social networks.  Most social network apps get viral by having users post a widget to their page, then having other users interact with it.  As Lance Tokuda, CEO of RockYou points out in this VentureBeat article,

“...the viral loops for Facebook (there are several) revolve around the news feed, the mini feed and the invite request.  Not around people coming to your page and interacting with it.”

Meanwhile, Lightspeed Venture Partners' Jeremy Liew provides a better sense of how Facebook apps are valued.  To Jeremy, there are four metrics that will determine the value of a Facebook app:
1. RPM (revenue per thousand page views (technically iframe views)).  This metric captures the revenue, whether it’s driven by a CPM, CPC or CPA (cost-per-action) model.
2. Page views per  user per month: many apps don’t generate many pageviews, as they simply display in a single iframe (such as a daily horoscope).  Those that generate interaction with multiple pages will have higher value.
3. Monthly churn: the stickier the app, the more likely it will be retained over time.
4. Virality of the app (as described in the Lance Tokuda interview).

I also see opportunities to make money in serving the emerging Facebook ecosystem.  In the first few weeks since the platform was announced, more than a thousand apps have been launched and tens of thousands of developer keys have been distributed by Facebook.  As more and more apps emerge, there’s a need for a more comprehensive directory for users to find the apps they need.  The existing “Top 10” list and broad categories are OK for starters, but they will always be dominated by large consumer apps.  There’s a tremendous opportunity for someone to launch a more navigable app directory that connects users with the more specialized apps they require.

Of course, there will be companies who specialize in app development (as already exist for developing MySpace widgets) and for marketing of your apps, just as the SEO/SEM market has emerged around Google.

So what’s the best way to monetize Facebook?  I think that Charlie O’Donnell says it best.

“It shouldn't be up to Facebook to figure out your business model”. 

The Facebook platform can dramatically shorten time-to-market of new applications, and help drive traffic.  But, it’s up to us to develop the applications and supporting business models to turn it into a business.

Alacra launched the Alacra Wiki about two years ago.  The wiki provides detailed information on the companies, people and products that make up the business infromation and content industry.

Recently, Alacra added two new categories of content to the wiki: Recruiters and Consultants.  I get asked regularly for referrals in both of these areas.  Both segments are led by boutique firms, often sole practitioners, who have unique industry experience.  By adding these to the Alacra Wiki, it will make it easier to identify these niche providers (though I'm still happy to provide referrals to those who ask).

The People section of the Alacra Wiki is a "who's who" of the content industry, profiling key leaders from all aspects of the media and publishing community.  If you're not listed on the Wiki (check here), all it takes is a minute to register and add your information.   Or, if you'd rather have Alacra add your details, just drop a note to and they'll post the info to the Wiki for you.

The Alacra Blog has more details on the new categories and the Alacra Wiki in general.

Via TechCrunch comes news of the next step in the emergence of Facebook: a VC fund offering seed investments only in companies developing Facebook apps.

Valley VC Bay Partners has launched a new program called AppFactory, targeting developers of Facebook apps.  The investments will be small – typically in the $50k - $250k range, according to Bay partner Salil Deshpande, and is designed as a "fast-track" program with few investment hurdles.  Interested parties can find out all the details on the AppFactory FAQ.

While some will question the idea of betting on a platform that’s less than two months old, the concept has merit in my opinion.  By leveraging the Facebook platform, the time (and cost) to get to market is minimized.  And while it’s possible that Facebook is a fad, more and more serious players in the industry see it as the new dominant social media platform. 

The Facebook apps that have been launched to-date are little more than eye candy, allowing users to share their preferences (whether music, movies or political causes).  Of course, as Marc Andreesen points out in his “Five f__ weeks” post, the Facebook platform has been out for less than two months.  That’s not a lot of time to conceive and launch meaningful software.  He predicts that by September, when students go back to school and business people finish vacations, we’ll see strong adoption of a compelling group of Facebook apps.  Betting against Marc in the past has not been a rewarding endeavor, so I’m going along with him on this call.

Many in the content business read John Blossom’s Content Blogger religiously.  The blog includes a daily recap of “must read” articles along with his own highly insightful takes on issues in the content industry.

A few weeks ago, John added a daily vlog to the mix – the ShoreViews Video blog.  While video blogging isn’t new, its use has been limited.  Video can be a compelling format.  In this case, it gives John the opportunity to get his personality into the posts.  Those who know John (or who have attended a content industry conference in recent years) know him to be smart and thoughtful with a somewhat wry sense of humor.  That personality doesn’t always translate in print, but on the video it comes through.

I had the chance to catch up with John last week to learn more about his experiences with video. 

Content Matters: John, you’re the first blogger in the content space to try video blogging.  What’s the response been so far?

John Blossom: Pretty good response so far, but it’s not yet clear to me that it’s a traffic builder.

CM: Which is faster for you to create, the video or written content?

JB: Overall, I think that writing is about as fast as video.  I can do most of the video in a single take but it takes a few minutes more to do the post-production work.

CM: How do you plan to integrate the video with the traditional text?  Are you planning to use audio for short posts, then expand in text?

JB: I did one video where I talk about some of the weblog posts.  I think that it works out pretty well that way, but it also works to talk about headlines that I wouldn’t necessarily write about, where some simple show-and-tell just works better.

CM: Any other thoughts for those who might consider video blogging?

JB: It’s a time-eater, but less so as I get the hang of the process.  I’m not sure whether I’ll continue to do a daily video.  I may switch to a weekly or event-driven format, such as for interviews.

CM: Thanks, John.  We’ll be watching the blog to see where you take it next.

My take: I think that vlogs are interesting, but I’m not yet convinced that they’re compelling in the business market.  In speaking with clients in the financial markets, they seem to have no appetite for video; it’s quicker to skim or to search text than to watch video, and the open and noisy trading floor environment is not quite a home theater setting.  I think that we’ll need to see improved video searching before Wall Street accepts video.  However, the corporate market is probably more ready for video today.  Meanwhile, entertaining video, such as that of Wallstrip or Rocketboom has already demonstrated the ability to attract an audience.  For those who have the time to experiment, I think it's smart to get out ahead of the technology and play with video now.

Those interested in seeing John’s vlog can find it on the Content Blogger site or on Robin Good’s MasterNewMedia site.

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting post on acquisition of Facebook applications.

The latest this week was the acquisition of Favorite Peeps by slideshow creator Slide.  Favorite peeps is a fairly simple apps that lets users display their favorite friends, providing their own details about them.  It's a nice complement to Slide's TopFriends app.

With Facebook's new platform, thousands of applications are being developed.  There will be a bit of a land rush as people strive to gain exposure to their apps.

The confusion of what apps are worth installing creates opportunities, particularly for companies who can package together bundles of apps.  Going forward, I think there will be a need for a site to emerge (think Tucows or CWS Apps List) which will help users navigate and select Facebook apps.

What's most interesting to me is the speed at which this new Facebook ecosystem is emerging.

Via ZDNet comes word that LinkedIn plans to open up its platform to developers, seemingly in response to the recently launched Facebook platform.   According to LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman, the site will enable third party apps in about nine months.  That's quite a long gestation period in the world of Internet development, so this clearly sounds like a defensive counter to Facebook.

It's apparent that Facebook is positioning itself to become a social networking platform for the business community.  LinkedIn has held that position to-date, but have not been able to leverage it to become part of their user's every day workflow.  Only a third of their users login once per quarter, while 60% of Facebook users login at least once per day.

The new Facebook platform is generating many new applications.  That's both a blessing and a curse, as it's incredibly difficult to assess what's worth installing and which of your friends have what apps.  However, I expect a small ecosystem to emerge surrounding the Facebook platform.  Third party tools will be developed which will organize, rate and manage the new Facebook apps.  And, of course, there will be blogs to provide commentary, much as they do today for TypePad widgets.

In order to become relevant to business users, Facebook will also have to make minor UI modifications to become more businesslike.  When defining a relationship between two business associates, you need to have better choices than "lived together", "took a course together" or "we hooked up".  While "worked together" is a start, it's much too broad to define the many business relationships like "client-vendor", "biz dev partner" or others.

Yet those seem like modest changes to make, whereas LinkedIn will need to move beyond its current connections lookup functionality to get users to visit regularly.  I wouldn't rule LinkedIn out yet, though.  While I find myself turning more and more to Facebook, I still use LinkedIn for business critical functions like recruiting.  I have many more contacts on LinkedIn and find it better for recruitment and biz dev.  However, that gap could easily be closed in less than the nine months it will take before this new platform is launched.

Page 3 article in today's Sunday Times profiles Mahalo and the opportunities for human-assisted search.

Nothing new in the article; just a quick review of how valuable the search market is and that, despite its current position, there are still companies looking to challenge Google. 

I'm still not sure how Mahalo will scale, but it's a pretty interesting experiment and is worth watching.

More interesting posts this week on the potential and implications of the Facebook platform.

Marc Andreesen describes how, despite the failures of the walled gardens of AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy, few  web properties have focused on the need to develop  platforms. Yes, some have API's, enabling interaction from the outside, while others support basic widgets, but not the full development platform needed to foster a development ecosystem.

Andreesen also delves deeply into the pros and cons of the Facebook architecture.  Interestingly, he points to what may soon be known as the Facebook Syndrome (a variation of the TechCrunch Effect), where when  your application goes up on Facebook you are very happy because you have lots of users, and you are very sad because your servers blow up.

Meanwhile, in advance of her Web 2.0 presentation, Esther Dyson explores the non-technical  implications of the growth of social networks.  Esther points out that the new Facebook model:

• Mirrors the social relationships of the real world, which will require tools and applications to manage interruptions and to provide gradations of levels between "friend" and "stranger".
• Changes the business model online, allowing businesses to tap into existing social networks, rather than simply opening up a website in a vacuum.
• Supports the attention economy, where you establish a presence and gain attention back

It seems at all the recent conferences, there's been discussion of the need for businesses to establish a presence in Second Life.  For those in the content and technology space, I'd put that on the back burner and begin to focus on their Facebook strategy.

There’s little doubt that search has improved over the past ten years.  The jump from Alta Vista to Google in the late 90’s represented a seismic improvement.  Yet, in recent years, the rate of improvement has slowed and with spam sites, affiliate marketing and improved SEO, you could make a strong argument that the quality of search has declined.

Many are awaiting the semantic web as the next major shift in search.  But while semantic search holds promise, today its deployment remains limited to niche applications.  Having worked with semantic technologies for years, I believe that they are many years away impacting mainstream use.

Jason Calacanis has released an alpha version of Mahalo, a new search engine designed to bridge the gap.  Mahalo is a search engine that combines the best of search, user-generated content and old-fashioned editing.  To bootstrap Mahalo, the first 10,000 search terms are being hand-written by guides.  Mahalo result pages look more like a wiki than a Google search engine results page.  These landing pages are designed to help you navigate content, rather than just listing the pages that scored the highest.  Like wikipedia, search terms with multiple meanings are presented with options to help the user disambiguate the results.  Mahalo adds social software capabilities to the mix.  Users can comment on each page and Mahalo also offers a Digg-like “Top 7 bookmark” feature. 

Whether or not Mahalo ultimately succeeds, the human-assist model makes a lot of sense.  Tagging providers, like ClearForest, found much of their value came in combining human judgment with technology.

Using guides to build results pages is not a new concept; it was the basis of some of the earliest web search applications such as LookSmart.  The challenge of this model is to build the pages on a cost-effective basis.  Only time will tell if Mahalo can achieve that for the broad set of topics and search terms required for a general search engine.  But for content providers with strong presence in niche markets, the Mahalo model could be a compelling one.  While a general search engine will need to define results for hundreds of thousands of terms, within a vertical market, you may cover all the common searches with a fraction of that.  I have long argued that vertical search is a great fit for content companies, who typically understand niche markets and have editorial skills which can be used to gather and organize information.

Internet search, driven by semantic analysis may be the holy grail of information retrieval.  In the meantime, human-assisted search may provide a compelling user experience.

UPDATE: To accelerate Mahalo's expansion, Jason has created the Mahalo Greenhouse, which allows users to get paid for development of new terms.  Further details are available on Jason's blog.  SearchEngineLand adds their thoughts, including whether or not Mahalo is comparable to Seth Godin's Squidoo (along with Jason's compelling retort in the comments).

As social networks take hold, the site that gets the most attention (and the most traffic) is MySpace.  For the business community, however, the social networking site to watch is Facebook.

Facebook, founded in 2004 by Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg and a few classmates, was initially oriented towards college students.  The basic premise was to automate the printed "facebooks" or  directories used by all students.  Last year Facebook opened up its network to non-students.  You can join a network for your company or simply for a city or geographic area.

Recently, Facebook became an open platform, allowing applications to be created to add functionality to your Facebook page.  Applications for Facebook today include a Flickr interface, a last.fm widget and Flixster, for movie reviews.  Rather than simply allowing embedded scripts (in the way that a blog or MySpace permits), Facebook has provided an open API, which should enable more sophisticated applications than typical script-based widgets could support.

Facebook today has more than 21 million registered users and is the 17th most visited site in the world (according to Alexa).  While that number is impressive, what's even more impressive is that more than 90% of those users are "active" users who visit Facebook at least once per month and 60% login on a daily basis.  For comparison, LinkedIn reports that roughly a third of its 10 million users log on at least once per quarter.  Even more compelling is that the 21 million users currently generate more than 1.5 billion page views per month.  That translates to more than 2,300 page views per month per registered user.  Meanwhile, more than eight million photos are uploaded to Facebook each day.  Talk about sticky!!

Facebook seems well-positioned to transition from the college market to a broad and diverse user base.  As more plugins are added, the service will increase its utility and provide compelling reasons for business professionals and others to join.  A more diversified user base will also give Facebook greater staying power, while MySpace faces the risk of the fickle teen market falling in love with a new entry.

Today there are only a handful of business-oriented applications for Facebook, but that should change, particularly with their opening up the platform.  Traditional content providers should certainly be exploring ways to integrate with the Facebook platform.  To-date, the only one who's done that is Forbes, but I'd expect others to follow soon.  Facebook also needs to tweak their app to recognize the needs of business users.  Today, linking to friends is very school-oriented and doesn't support relationships like client-vendor, business partners, etc.  Even the concept of "friend" doesn't really capture typical business relationships.  Those are pretty easy changes for Facebook to make though.

It was well-reported that Yahoo last year attempted to acquire Facebook for $1 - $1.6 billion.  Every few weeks the rumors of a Yahoo acquisition heat up again.  But in the meantime, Facebook has demonstrated spectacular growth and a strong vision.  If Yahoo does succeed with an offer, you can be sure it will be for more than $1.6 billion.

Social networking is still in its infancy and the current applications have yet to deliver strong value for the business community.  But that's beginning to change.   And Facebook seems well positioned to become the leader in social networking for business.  And they are clearly one of the Fifty Content Companies that Matter.

You can visit my Facebook page here.

I wrote about this deal and why I thought it was great for RSS last week when it was still a rumor.  It's now official; Google has acquired Feedburner.

More details are available from Union Square Ventures and the Feedburner blog.

For anyone involved in content delivery, this deal should be a good thing.  Google's business is all about monetization and if anyone can figure out how to monetize RSS, they'll be the ones to do it.  Congratulations to Dick Costolo and the Feedburner team.

I'm a big fan of the ASP model and try to minimize the installation of software wherever I can. 

However, there are times when I just cannot or prefer not to be connected.  I get frustrated on an airplane, when I can't type in my contact notes because Salesforce.com made "no software" their logo and mantra.  I take a commuter train each morning and have to write blog posts offline in Word, then copy them into TypePad when I'm connected.  I use an offline RSS reader to read posts on the train, even though I'd prefer the navigation of online-only reader Netvibes.

Google has taken note of this and has just announced Google Gears at its Developer Day event.  Google Gears is an open source development environment designed to run both online and offline.  Gears is driven by javascript APIs which support data storage, application cacheing and multi-threading technologies.  Google hopes that this plugin can become a standard for offline applications.

As part of the launch, Google has added Gears offline capabilities to its Google feed reader.  It will soon Gear-enable its office applications such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Calendar.

With Google, it's hard to anticipate whether they will put a serious push behind their new offerings, particularly those outside of its core advertising platform.  If they put a big push behind Gears and it gets takeup in the open source community, it could have a significant impact.

For more on Google Developer Day, take a look at http://code.google.com/events/developerday/
For more on Google Gears, see these posts from TechCrunch, O'Reilly Radar and Robert Scoble.

Blog search engine Technorati relaunched over the weekend.

Until now, Technorati's position has been as a search engine for blogs.  They have done a fairly good job, but it was a position that could not be sustained over time with competition from Google.  In this new incarnation, Technorati is trying to position themselves as a search engine for user generated media, including video, podcasts, photos and more.  You can read the details on founder Dave Sifry's blog.

In theory, that expansion makes sense.  In practice, I'm not so sure that they pull it off.  In the past, I'd enter a search on Technorati and get an easy to navigate set of results.  Their "authority rankings" made it easy to winnow the blog post results to those from credible (or at least highly linked) sources.

The new interface, while visually more appealing, is difficult to navigate.  There are a confusing set of choices.  Do I want to look at blog posts, video, photos or audio?  And when I drill down into blog posts, while I can see their authority ranking, there no longer seems to be a way to filter by it.  That was one of the biggest differentiators they had.  Thankfully, they've moved the legacy blog search to a new location at search.technorati.com.

In the long run, this may be a good move for Technorati.  It probably makes them more attractive to a potential suitor and gives them a chance to sit at the user-generated video table.  From the end-user perspective, I'm not sure that it's an advantage.  Specialized search engines are useful because they are specialized.  In amalgamating different types of content, I think they subtract from the value they offer.

CBS Corporation has acquired social media music site Last.fm for $280 million.

Last.fm today has roughly 15 million users of the largely free service, which takes a "wisdom of crowds" approach to music recommendations.  While other services, such as Pandora, are compelling, what makes Last.fm so successful is the fact that it's not intrusive.  Users simply download an iTunes plugin which monitors the music they play.  For example, you can see the music I listen to on my last.fm page.

According to the press release,"The Last.fm management team will work with all relevant CBS divisions to apply their community-building and technology expertise to extend CBS businesses online and within the mobile space."

This acquisition, coming on the tail of the smaller Wallstrip deal, makes it clear that CBS is taking a more serious look at new technologies.  It will be interesting to see whether they can leverage these new capabilities across their traditional businesses.

TechCrunch reports that Google will acquire RSS feed management company Feedburner in a deal reportedly worth $100 million.

This deal could be big for a number of reasons:

First, it suggests that Google will put its force behind RSS adoption.
Second, it means that Google believes that it's feasible to monetize RSS feeds. 

Feedburner offers a feed and blog advertising network.  To-date, publishers have struggled to figure out a way to monetize the reading of their RSS feeds.  While most people think of Google as being in the search business, they're really in the traffic monetization business. The acquisition of Feedburner suggests that Google believes that RSS can be monetized through advertising.

Another way to look at this, as suggested by WebProNews, is that while Microsoft, through Vista, will be pushing user adoption of RSS, Google will be pushing publishers into creating more RSS.

Feedburner was founded in 2003 and has raised $10 million to date, led by Mobius Venture Capital, Union Square Ventures and Portage Ventures.

Many people (including me) have touted the "year of RSS" for the past few years.  With Microsoft and Google pushing it, it looks as though the time for RSS may finally have arrived.