pn288.com

“Companies make a mistake when they assume that people will come when it’s built. But then you go to a property and find out that it’s empty,” says Barry Gilbert, who directs research for Strategy Analytics, specializing in virtual online environments.

I’ve flown my avatar into more than one Second Life property where it was basically just me and my lonesome. This was an embarrassing marketing mistake by folks who should have known better. Unfortunately, it’s not an isolated incident.

Hard to say how much things have changed. This is the proverbial work in progress and there is an obvious incentive for companies not to screw it up: A session (in a virtual environment) lasts between 45 to 50 minutes versus, on average, a few minutes on a Web site. But marketers are going to have to try awfully hard to blow this opportunity given the popularity of virtual worlds. Consider the following statistics on global unique sessions for non-gaming virtual worlds compiled by Strategy Analytics:

•  2007: 90 million

More than a year ago, Frank Rose wrote a devastating piece in Wired on Madison Avenue’s wasted stampede to set up shop in Second Life, the most popular of the non-gaming virtual worlds. His conclusion: the effort was only “slurping up corporate dollars and delivering little in return.” Ouch.

•  2008 (projected) 137 million

(Credit:
Parks Associates)

Of course, it’s hard to sustain their attention (let alone participation) when companies insist upon turning virtual world sites into cyberversions of St. Helena.

•  2006: 46 million

Amen to that. The behavior and expectations we’ve grown up with on the Web does not uniformly apply to virtual worlds. If you think this is a case of build it and they will come, think again. “They” wont. Virtual worlds are supposed to be interactive media where things change in real time. Instead, we’re winding up too often with “Dullsville.”

An island all to yourselves sounds dreamy if you’re planning a vacation with your spouse. But not so in the virtual world, where that sort of solitude is potential poison for companies setting up shop.

Looking over the horizon, Strategy Analytics projects the numbers will reach close to 1 billion within 10 years. I know. Take market research projections with a big grain of salt. But we’re talking about a pretty big upside when you consider that only 7 percent of Internet gamers visit virtual worlds each week, according to Parks Associates.

MacFarlane, who will receive a percentage of the ad revenue, told the newspaper that the two-minute episodes would be “animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier.”

MacFarlane is also reportedly working with advertisers to create original advertising to run with the Cavalcade content, although neither Google nor MacFarlane would reveal any of the advertisers, saying only that the deals were among AdSense’s largest ever.

Google, which launched AdSense in 2003, expanded its AdSense program last year so that Web site publishers could display and make money off embedded video clips from YouTube content partners that have targeted banner or text ads. Google has experimented with distributing video and video ads on its AdSense publisher network before, but with mixed results. The company has tested distributing in-stream video ads and in-stream video clips with bundled ads.

(Credit:
Seth MacFarlane)

Google has enlisted Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane to create an original animated series that it will distribute on the Web via its AdSense advertising system, according to The New York Times.

Google plans to use AdSense to syndicate the program–called Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy–to thousands of Web sites that are popular with MacFarlane’s target audience, according to the newspaper. Advertising will be incorporated via “preroll” ads, banner ads, or “brought to you by” ads, according to the report.

Seth MacFarlane is creating a Web-only animated series for Google.

Twitterrific is also one of the more complex applications, and it takes its role as a Twitter service seriously, serving up a an environment, tweeting experience, and navigation–complete with hints!–all its own. Twitterrific has also maximized on the iPhone SDK by integrating location-awareness and camera power to let iPhone and
iPod Touch users upload images taken on-the-spot and their location into the message.

>>Catch up on all the latest App Store reviews and iPhone 3G news.

While you won’t be able to add new friends from Twitterrific’s timeline interface, it does come equipped with an internal browser where you can access Twitter.com without leaving behind Twitterrific’s embrace. As a show of real customer service, Twitterrific includes shrunken URLs by course, a tutorial for including a Safari bookmarklet for posting tweets from open browser pages, and an optional configuration for southpaws. Not bad for a “simple” Twitter-helping app.

Dark and lustrous, Twitterrific for
iPhone is one of the best-looking apps from the iTunes App Store I’ve seen all day. The application, originally built for
Mac by software publisher Iconfactory, is a premium Twitter updater a free trial that sells for about $15. This iPhone app, however, comes as a free ad-serving version or as a premium version.

“We’ve been looking at a few technologies (for digital album art) and have been trying to bring these to Apple, to encourage them to bring that level of experience to the
iPod,” George White, Warner Music Group’s senior VP of strategy and product development told Wired. “A very simple demonstration that we’ve done takes the Gnarls Barkley liner notes and does a fly-through (using Adobe Flash Lite). You’re actually moving through the lyrics and artwork…It’s really cool-looking on an iPod.”

Before the emergence of digital music, album covers were an integral part of music buying.

Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love, Led Zepplin’s Houses of the Holy, Peter Gabriel 3, The Rolling Stones Let It Bleed and The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band are just a few classic works.

Cover of Jimi Hendrix Experience's Axis: Bold As Love

As people thumbed through record racks, eye-catching album art could prove to be a deciding factor on whether people bought. The cover could convey something about the music inside or whether the act was creative or cool.

But in the digital age, people hunt for music on computer screens, and an album cover is often reduced to a thumbnail print if it even accompanies the music at all. Wired.com has a couple of stories on how designers are trying to keep up with the changing times.

Students in the rural town of Corinto, Colombia, work in their school’s computer lab using decade-old computers as part of a project aimed at improving local agriculture practices.

This year, though, just getting matzah has been a challenge. There’s something of a shortage in a number of places, including here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I went to at least eight grocery stores without procuring a single box.

In the rural community of Corinto, an area at the crossroads of the country’s civil war, I saw students using decade-old machines that could barely access the Internet. Still, they had found great use for what we consider obsolete computers. They were using the PCs to chart crops, as part of a broader effort that aims to use technology to help those in rural communities find sustainable agricultural work in an effort to stem the defection of people either to cities or to the guerrilla groups.

Update 4:30 p.m.: This YouTube video, clearly made in anticipation of a more plentiful matzah environment, shows some fun other uses for the stuff. My mom sent me the link, so I had to add it.

For modern Jews, the culinary challenges of Passover are relatively minor. Despite some kvetching over things like how to trying to bring matzah to work in fewer than a million pieces, the Passover ritual is not that difficult. In big cities, Americans have access not just to plain matzah, but also to all kinds of baked goods made from the wafer-like bread.

As someone who’s never had to struggle to have enough to eat, there is something fitting about having to scrounge around to get sufficient matzah to last for the week-long festival.

But around the globe and even in places close to home it means more people are going hungry. Food is perhaps the most pressing scarcity, but there are so many areas where our global abundance of resources is not reaching many in the community.

In Colombia, I saw how access to computers meant employment possibilities for people that had been maimed by land mines. In a country without many laws promoting jobs for the disabled and where unemployment is high even for those without physical challenges, those who have such injuries face little opportunities for work.

The yearly ritual is designed to recall the unleavened bread eaten by our ancestors as they fled Egypt without time to prepare proper food provisions.

SAN FRANCISCO–Every year around this time, many Jews spend a week eating just one bread product: a bland flatbread called matzah.

Neither Passover nor this blog is about coming up with all of the answers immediately, but it is a reflection on the work that remains unfinished. I am reminded of the Jewish teaching, popular at Passover, that “It is not upon us to finish the task, nor are we free not to begin.”

A sign at Good Life Grocery in San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood apologizes for being out of the Passover staple.

Matzah isn’t the only food in short supply these days. Staples like rice and corn are also in short supply. For many of us in techland that means an extra few pennies when we go out to lunch.

At home, my partner and I have been figuring out how to make do with a box and a half of year-old matzah. The shortage was the prime topic at a large seder (Passover meal and service) this weekend. Several of us were still talking about how we were still short on the needed Matzah, when one friend announced that he had a few extra boxes and gave those less well off some of his spares.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News.com)

I found the exercise fitting for the holiday. Passover is about remembering the exodus from slavery in Egypt in biblical times, but also about paying mind to the inequities in our own lives.

The personal computer, for example, has reached approximately the first 1 billion people, but that leaves several billion that have yet to experience its possibilities. I saw some of this first hand earlier this month as I traveled to Brazil and Colombia to look at efforts to broaden computer access.

As the FCC fuddled around trying to figure out whether to approve the merger, numerous alternatives for music fans have grown stronger. Terrestrial radio’s still a dying joke, but the rise of mobile devices with anywhere connectivity is a real threat–I’m thinking about the imperfect but interesting Slacker, as well as the iPhone+Pandora combination that’s going to take over the world. Instead of having a DJ broadcasting his selections to the world, these services narrowcast a specialized station based on your personal taste. There’s still something nice about a great DJ, one who scours new releases looking for that nugget the fans will love. But even if Sirius/XM has that DJ on staff, is it worth $12.95 a month? Most music fans will say no.

As I’ve written before, I was a Sirius subscriber for one year, before canceling my subscription in early 2007. It sounded bad–much worse than my current kludge of plugging my
iPod Shuffle into an aux-input that connects to an unused frequency on my FM radio (don’t ask…it’s an ‘06 Subaru thing). It was a physical pain to set up. Most of all, it just wasn’t worth paying $12.95 a month to hear what was essentially terrestrial radio without the advertisements. The DJs talked too much, their voices were annoying, and they stuck mostly with fairly safe major-label music fit into tightly conscribed genres. That’s not how I listen to music.

There’s one audience that could find the new landscape of satellite radio indispensable: hard-core sports fans. One drawback of XM and Sirius is that sports coverage was split between them, although I’m an NFL fan, so Sirius worked for me. The merger eliminates the split, meaning that fans will be able to hear just about every game they could possibly want.

The FCC’s approval Friday of the merger between satellite radio providers Sirius and XM won’t solve the fundamental problems with satellite radio.

The Change Ring is a key ring inspired by Barack Obama's campaign. Naturally, its creators are pitching the product at the Democratic convention.

While start-ups were on display in the Big Tent, the delegates are benefiting from the eagerness of corporate America to participate in the political process.

The delegates from Washington state were treated to a reception hosted by Microsoft.

“It’s exciting to have the convention here in Denver,” Kary Rivera said. “It’s a right-place, right-time sort of thing, so we wanted to take advantage of it the best we can.”

The Big Tent, where bloggers are spending most of their time, has become a veritable trade show of tech-oriented products and businesses.

“There’s lots of companies here pitching themselves and their businesses to their state delegations,” said Washington delegate Patrick Gunning. “Most of (the delegates) are pretty influential in their home states.”

The key ring comes with key retrieval system called Boomering SMS. A dog tag with a serial number is attached to each ring, and the owner of ring is supposed to enter the serial number, along with their cell phone number and e-mail address, onto the company Web site. The dog tag has instructions for anyone who finds a lost Change Ring to text the Boomering SMS code to the company’s short-code. Change Ring then bridges communication between the owner and the finder of the key ring.

DENVER–Political conventions nowadays are as much about capitalism as they are about politics.

“Fling it Girl is not a political site at all, so we looked at this as more of an opportunity for us to shake hands and see faces,” Kary Rivera said.

Kary and Gerhard Rivera are Denver locals–they’re both spouses and business partners–who are taking advantage of the convention events to promote their site Fling It Girl, which launched last month. Kary describes the site as a kind of “Digg for women.” Formatted like Digg, the site lets users submit, vote for, and bury items items from the Web. Most “flung” items are female-oriented, including fashion and home decor, though the site does have a “guy stuff” section.

Two Change Rings can be purchased for $19.99, and a portion of the cost goes to Obama’s campaign, and a portion goes to American charities.

Andrew Hunter was at the Big Tent on Tuesday to promote the the Change Ring, a product capitalizing on Barack Obama’s popularity and his theme of “change.” The Change Ring is a key ring or pendant modeled after Delta, the mathematical symbol for change.

Gunning said it was important for the Democratic party to have a strong relationship with large employers like Microsoft, but added, “It’s definitely a big party for corporate America here, and I’m not entirely sure what to think of it.”

Florida delegate Amy Mercado on Wednesday carried around an Oracle tote bag. The Silicon Valley company, along with Florida Power and Light and Disney, is sponsoring Florida’s efforts to send a “green delegation” to Denver.

His fellow Washington delegate, Caitlin Ormsby, said she didn’t mind the corporate presence, “as long as they’re on board with Democratic policies.”

(Credit: The Change Ring)

The Riveras were asked to volunteer at the Electric Vehicle Rolling Showcase but ended up at the Big Tent on Tuesday. Along with meeting the founders of Daily Kos and Colorado Rep. Jared Polis, the couple ran into actress Daryl Hannah for a second time this week and gave the celebrity a Fling It Girl tank top.

AT&T vendors here pass out Chapstick and cup cozies with the company’s logo. Delegates wander around in CNN caps. Lanyards for official credentials sport a Qwest logo. Coca Cola tote bags are carried into the Pepsi Center, while entrepreneurs hand out free samples (or sometimes try to sell them).

Video is the next big thing on the Web, and more and more organizations are embracing it as the way to provide an equal experience for Web surfers who don’t necessarily have the time to watch television during the day.

But Hulu’s programming goes far beyond just good TV shows. The service has countless offerings available at any time and its movie selection, although brutally unbearable just a few weeks ago, is starting to improve each day and now offers some hits like The Karate Kid, Men in Black, and The Fifth Element. Sure, they may not be The Godfather, but it’s certainly a good step and a much better set of movies than those that originally launched with the site.

But trust goes far beyond believing in a service and believing that it can adequately address the desires of consumers. Hulu should have also promoted a sense of trust in consumers, who have proven beyond reasonable doubt that they’re more than happy to spend time watching shows on the service, rather than illegally download them. That’s not to say that illegal downloads have stopped or that they won’t be a part of the future, but Hulu’s success does highlight one important point: if you give consumers what they want–high-quality programming for free on the Web–they will return the favor by watching the shows and allow you to reap the rewards in advertising revenue.

With just a few simple clicks of your mouse, you’re able to watch the show you missed last night (in most instances) and only sit through a handful of short commercials to do it. Now that’s what I call a bargain.

Unlike any other video service on the Web, Hulu has been able to capture the desire of viewers and create a product that delivers on everything we would want. And although I’d still like to see better movies and more episodes of popular shows would be ideal, Hulu is easily the best in the market and deserves to hold its place as the best video service on the Web.

According to analytics retrieved from Compete.com, Hulu is currently enjoying unbelievable growth and has almost broken the top 1,000 list of most popular sites. Even better for the service, its inventory of ads is already filled and the demand for advertising on Hulu has outstripped supply.

Networks
As much as I’ve taken television and film studios to task for the way they (mis)treat viewers, I can’t help but applaud their efforts with Hulu. For the first time, these studios finally embraced the Web and have realized that there is a world outside the box sitting in a living room.

Programming
Hulu’s programming may not be perfect, but it certainly eclipses any other video service on the Web. Where else can you find legitimate episodes of The Office, Battlestar Galactica, Family Guy, and Law & Order without needing to drop a few bucks or search through a programming guide to find out when it’s coming on again?

Of course, the reasons for this are numerous and generally revolve around the fact that the programming is controlled and the demographics of viewers can be retrieved quite easily. But that doesn’t downplay the fact that Hulu has quickly become an incredibly popular service because of the quality of its programming and the trust studios have placed in it.

But the beauty of Hulu goes far beyond programming. Hulu is real proof that the entertainment industry is slowly coming around to the idea of embracing the Web and not being afraid of it, and proves a point I’ve been making all along: most people are honest and are more than willing to do the right thing to enjoy their favorite shows.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.

And it’s that trust that these studios need to remember when they consider the impact the Web will continue to have on their business models. Sure, television is still the key to their success and still brings in more revenue that Web programming ever has, but the future of programming is online and by getting a jump start on it now, they’re readying themselves for the future.

But for all the video services, and there are many, Hulu easily stands above the rest and provides us with the best programming and experience. Call me a cynic, but watching the junk on YouTube or the ridiculous garbage on Funny or Die just doesn’t do it for me. Instead, I prefer to enjoy professional programming in a way that has never been allowed before.

Hulu is the first example of how to overcome the debilitating crossroads that we’re now standing in and has shown with each passing day that where there’s great programming and a free service, people will flock.

All of which means that much as Google has learned from the disruptive Web, it has perhaps learned more from the desktop. Microsoft, king of the desktop, makes comparatively little from its businesses outside of Windows and Office, but all the add-on value ensures that the vast majority keep feeding its cash cows to the tune of billions in profits every quarter. Microsoft is a habit, too. People could fairly easily switch to Linux and OpenOffice, but they don’t. The bother of change doesn’t outweigh the ease of habit.

But why is Google the search leader?

Ultimately, then, I think we use Google out of habit, not superior search. For most of us, it’s the search engine to which our trusted computer adviser pointed us, and we’ve never looked back. Why would we? Because we don’t have any way of independently verifying that a competitor would give us better search results, there really is no justification for switching.

I’m not sure any of ours does, ultimately. I’ve spent the last two days tinkering with searches on Microsoft Live Search, Google, and Yahoo, and on a pure quality basis it’s hard to tell the three apart. I’m sure some objective science could be made of Google’s superiority, but that’s not how people search. If you’re looking for “table salt” on Google, how do you know that the results returned are better than those on Yahoo? Answer: you don’t.

Cuil, the new and “improved” search engine created by Google veterans, has failed abysmally to make a dent against its alma mater, Google, according to TechCrunch. Clearly something other than a full-frontal assault is going to be needed to displace Google as the search leader.

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The only way to displace Google in search may well be to follow Apple’s approach to displacing Microsoft on the desktop: change the game. Apple turned the desktop business into a creative/entertainment pursuit, blending the desktop (iLife suite of products, plus extensions of the desktop like the
iPhone and
iPod) with the cloud (iTunes, App Store). Apple has a long way to go, but it’s taking market share from Microsoft at a respectable clip.

(Credit:
ComScore)

Tim O’Reilly points to Google PageRank as the “Google’s breakthrough in search” that “quickly made it the undisputed search market leader.” Maybe, but consumers don’t think that way. My parents’ use of Google actually has little to nothing to do with the quality of the search.

So, Google is a habit. But it’s not one that Google is willing to lackadaisically take for granted. Instead, it is building all sorts of ancillary value (Gmail, Picasa, etc.) which by themselves provide little add-on revenue opportunity but ensure that when we search, we never have reason to look beyond Google, its cash cow.

In other words, for competitors looking to kick the Google search habit, you can’t take the Cuil route and compete on search. It just won’t matter if you’re better. You need to create a different, compelling habit.

In fact, the times that I can’t find something with a search engine have much more to do with the quality of my search terms than with the quality of the algorithms informing the search, and no search engine really helps much with prodding quality search terms. How could they?

What this indicates is that the top record labels are not always in agreement on how to handle copyright cases.

A Sony BMG spokesman declined to comment.

Kudos to Silicon Alley Insider for answering the question about why Sony BMG was not among the major record labels filing a copyright lawsuit against Project Playlist.

Hilary Lewis at SAI reported that Sony BMG is in negotiations with the music start-up.

On Monday, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) claimed in documents filed in New York that Project Playlist makes it easier for users to find unauthorized reproductions. The company provides an embeddable music player used at MySpace and Facebook and claims not to infringe on intellectual property rights because it doesn’t host any music files on its site.