Month: January 2007

A Rant About MySpace

Post ImageI hate MySpace. I simply cannot stand it. The navigation is horrible. The design is ugly. Their URLs are the most unfriendly ever. Random people add me to their “friends” list. Users have too much control over the look of the pages…which usually means that they end up making the pages painful to look at. Dancing text, repeating background images that were never meant to repeat, music that starts playing automatically, etc. I really cannot fathom how so many millions of people use MySpace on a daily basis.

Quite possibly the only thing I like about MySpace is that it runs on .NET and is therefore an excellent case study/example. But that would be the only reason.

Every single time I look at MySpace I cringe. Maybe I just don’t get it?

Marketing Presentation Audio

Post ImageLast night I gave a presentation on podcasting & marketing to students taking MARK 450 (Electronic Marketing) at the University of Alberta. I covered “what is podcasting”, Podcast Spot, some podcasting statistics, podcasting and its effects on marketing, and finished with some final thoughts. The presentation went very well and the initial feedback was very positive, so I hope the students got something out of it. I enjoyed talking to them!

We recently purchased some digital voice recorders and they arrived just yesterday afternoon. They are Olympus WS-100’s, and last night we tested them for the first time by recording my presentation. In general I’m pretty happy with them. We had one at the back of the room and one on the table in front of me. The far away recording isn’t so great, but the close range recording is quite good.

So if you’re interested, you can listen to my presentation here. The only editing I did was to remove the questions (as I didn’t have permission to post them). Otherwise it’s a straightforward recording. You can look in the show notes to see the time codes for the major topics I covered. I don’t know why, but it sounds like I was sniffling quite a bit – apologies for that!

If you have questions or feedback, I’d love to hear from you. I’m not going to post the slides here, but if you’re interested in them, feel free to email me.

Read: MasterMaq’s Podcast

Windows Vista available today

Post ImageToday’s the day. Windows Vista is now available in stores, ready for you to purchase. I went to Best Buy today (for something else, not for Vista) and I have to say, the Vista display was sad. There were only a couple boxes on the shelf, and one demo computer. More people were buying the WoW expansion than Vista.

I guess that is to be expected though. Most people will get Vista when they buy a new computer. That has caused some people to wonder why Microsoft has spent so much on advertising for Windows Vista. I think it’s a tactical move.

Here are some of the more interesting things I have come across today related to the Vista launch:

Make the music free and sell the show

Post ImageChris Anderson’s post today at The Long Tail is about the music industry and provides a really good analysis of what should be happening with music. Essentially, bands should give the music away for free and make their money on live shows. He explains:

Music as a digital product enjoys near-zero costs of production and distribution–classic abundance economics. When costs are near zero, you might as well make the price zero, too, something thousands of bands have figured out.

He points out that the average price for a ticket increased 8% last year, reflecting demand. Indeed the fastest growing part of the music industry is live performances, up 16% in 2006 in North America.

And don’t think that live shows are not profitable. They are extremely profitable for the artists, just not for the record labels. Chris includes a list of the top ten grossing touring bands of 2006 – and their numbers total a truly astounding $970.3 million.

I say – goodbye record labels, hello free music and awesome not-free shows!

Read: The Long Tail

Notes for 1/28/2007

Here are my weekly notes:

  • I’m giving a talk tomorrow night on podcasting to students taking a fourth year e-marketing course at the University of Alberta. Should be fun!
  • I’ve praised Office 2007 in the past (minus Outlook 2007) but it’s worth doing again. The new Word, Excel, and PowerPoint versions are amazing. Believe it or not, using them is fun! If you haven’t had a chance to try them, you’re missing out.
  • Here’s an interesting post from the writer of the Elk Cloner virus – the first known computer virus that spread “in the wild.”
  • Looking for a new blog to read? Check out It’s a Rich, Full Life. The blog is written by Chris LaBossiere of ProTraining.com, the guys that won VenturePrize last year.
  • If you’re under 25 years of age and are interested in video, why not join UNICEF’s one-minute video contest? The deadline is March 30th, 2007.
  • Sir Richard Branson is launching a Virgin-branded stem-cell storage company. Parents will be able to put the umbilical blood of their newborn into cold storage. If I was having kids, I’d do it. Who knows what magic the scientists will come up with in the future!
  • This is nuts…a 23 foot long python swallowed at least 11 guard dogs protecting a fruit orchard in Malaysia before being discovered.

HillaryClinton.ca Podcast

Post ImageToday I am launching a new little project of mine – a podcast about Hillary Clinton and her run at the White House. Each Sunday I’ll post a new episode with a recap of the previous week’s Hillary-related headlines. You can listen to the first episode here.

I’ll also use the podcast to test and demonstrate some of the features available at Podcast Spot. For now it’s just audio, and the weekly recap will likely remain that way, but I might do some additional episodes in the future. As I mention in the first episode, there’s about 92 weeks to go until the election. Wouldn’t it be cool if I got to interview Hillary Clinton herself during that time? Highly unlikely, but you never know.

The first episode was recorded pretty quickly this morning, so production quality might not be spectacular. I’ll work on it though. If you have feedback, I’d love to hear it!

Read: Episode 1

Thoughts on Digg Podcasting

Post ImageOver at Geek News Central today Todd Cochrane had some harsh words for Digg’s newest feature, their podcast portal. Most of his argument is based on the traffic he apparently isn’t receiving from Digg:

Lately though I have come to the conclusion that for all the traffic Digg gets very little if any of that traffic in the way of downloads or pure referals [sic] comes from that site.

He goes on to offer some advice to podcasters:

My advice to podcasters is this, look at the directories you are listed in and figure out if they are doing anything to build your audience or giving you equal exposure on the front of their respective websites. If they are not find sites that are and support them in your shows.

That plan of attack might have worked when podcasting was just getting started, but we’re beyond that now. I would suggest that podcasters do in fact add themselves into Digg’s directory, flawed as it might be. Why pick one directory over another? The idea isn’t to play favorites, it’s to help the audience find what they want, wherever they might be looking. There’s more to being in a directory than just getting listed on the front page.

As for Digg’s podcast portal, here are my thoughts:

  • The way you add a podcast into the directory sucks. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and the feedback you get is really unhelpful.
  • Only iTunes-compatible feeds may be added into the directory. Why Digg felt the need to perpetuate Apple’s hegemony is beyond me.
  • It would be better if episodes had a “front page” as well, instead of just podcasts. Right now you can only look at episodes for a particular podcast.

The podcast section of Digg hasn’t been around very long, so I’m pretty sure they’ll be making changes over time. There’s definitely room for improvement, but the directory is not useless.

Read: Geek News Central

Midomi worked for me!

Post ImageMichael Arrington wrote about a new startup called Midomi today over at TechCrunch, and he reported that he couldn’t get it to work. Midomi is a voice-based music search engine, which means you can sing or hum part of a tune and it will tell you the artist and name of the song.

I first saw a service like this back in 2003 at the Imagine Cup finals in Spain. I forget where they were from, but there was a team with precisely this kind of search engine. It worked pretty good too, if I remember correctly.

I just tried Midomi out for myself, and it worked great! I hummed the chorus of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”, and it came back as the first result (the reason I chose this song is that I had to hum it on New Years Eve during a game of Cranium…and I did very well that time). Pretty impressive. Give it a shot, see if it works for you!

The only thing I don’t like about Midomi so far is the social networking features they evidently felt compelled to add. I think it is largely unnecessary for the site, even if it is the feature du jour.

Read: Midomi

Amapedia by Amazon.com

Post ImageWikipedia is a superb resource for general information, but I think there’s room (and demand) for topical “wikipedias” too. Such as a wikipedia for product information. Which is exactly what Amazon.com recently launched:

Amazon has just released a new Wikipedia clone, called Amapedia. It’s described as “a community for sharing information about the products you like the most.”

I took a quick look at the site, and so far it’s not very impressive. It has potential though. I have to agree with Richard:

The site looks pretty raw currently and has little info in it – it is after all brand new. But a wikipedia for products makes perfect sense for Amazon. Who better to spotlight products and gather product information from the community, than Amazon?

With enough contributions, Amapedia could become the site to check before you purchase something. Good idea Amazon!

Read: Read/Write Web

Google Video searches YouTube

Post ImageGoogle announced today that it has integrated YouTube results into Google Video. This is the beginning of a transition for Google Video from hosting provider to search. Liz over at NewTeeVee wonders if this is necessary:

In thinking about video search, we’ve been concerned that with the huge number of videos coming into and and video streams coming out of YouTube, there would be little need for — well — video search.

I think there’s a huge need for video search. Just because most of the videos are in one place doesn’t make the search good or effective. There’s lots of things Google can do with it’s video search product to make it the destination. I’m thinking about speech and visual recognition to improve accuracy, and other really complex things.

When it acquired YouTube, Google got more than just a video hosting site. It got unfettered access to one of the largest test beds for video search around. That’s a big asset to have when you’re trying to build an excellent search engine.

Read: NewTeeVee