Peter Chun

In the age of social media—when everybody is busy creating personal broadcasts on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, blogs, Justin.tv, you name it—what happens to the notion of the broadcast? I am not talking about TV or radio, where traditional broadcasts still work the way they always have. I am talking about broadcasting an event or a message on the Web. Does the notion of broadcasting even make sense anymore in a narrowcasting world where anybody can read, watch or listen to any piece of information on their own schedule? And if it does make sense, how do you pull together the personal media of the Web into a coherent experience rather than produce something in a top-down fashion to be released upon a no-longer-passive audience?

These are the kinds of questions that Tola Oguntoyinbo wrestles with all the time. Tola is the CEO and co-founder of Sonecast, a bare-bones social media marketing startup in Chapel Hill, North Carolina that is credit-card funded. His sonecasts (social network broadcasts) pull social media from practically any source into a dedicated, branded site. The closest thing to it is perhaps a combination of Meebo Rooms and SplashCast (which just raised $4 million earlier this week). Sonecasts tend to work better around a live event, like this one for a DJ Spooky concert or this one for the Crunchies that he ginned up after the fact (see also screen shot below).

In the Crunchies sonecast, there is a floating frame on the page with little tabs that bring up clickable thumbnails of Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and blog posts from the event. There is also a live tab that would have shown the live video feed from Mogulus during the awards ceremony. Each photo, video, or blog headline you click on opens up a new window and lets you comment on each item. The DJ Spooky one broadcast live video from a concert at Duke University, which is now archived and still viewable. Other tabs include photos from Flickr and Facebook, DJ Spooky videos, music, and posts from MySpace, a podcast interview from the event, and a fully-featured music widget with complete streaming songs, music videos and links to posts about the artist on music blogs.

Please note that these are demo sites, they are a little slow to load, and probably cannot handle a ton of traffic. (The service is still in a closed alpha). But the approach taken with the user interface is instructive. It is both economical and all-inclusive at the same time. And while it is tapping into social media for marketing purposes, it is not trying to create a corporatized social network along the lines of Mzinga or Networked Insights.

“We’re really about leveraging existing content networks,” says Tola. He makes a distinction between “ego-centric” social networks and “object-centric” ones where the “objects” people organize around are photos, videos, and links. Ego-centric social networks, in contrast, like Facebook or MySpace, are organized around user profiles. They are about “people surfing versus content surfing,” he says.

The sonecasts can combine professionally-produced video or other broadcast material with relevant audience-produced material about the same event. Flickr photo streams, Twitters and YouTube videos can all easily be pulled into a sonecast. The idea is to create social activity around the events. Sonecasts can also be created around brands or products. For instance, a sonecast for the Pleo toy dinosaur (click on the middle dummied-up screen shot below) could include Flickr photos from enthusiasts, posts from the Pleo blog, or videos of the Pleo being hacked.

A Sonecast is a place to collect the lifestream of a product or a brand, if you will, just as people are beginning to gather their own lifestreams from across the Web into services like FriendFeed. Except there is also the broadcasting component—that initial, compelling content that will draw people to the Sonecast in the first place. That is the biggest challenge here: Getting people to the Sonecasts in the first place and making sure there is something there for them to do.

A good place to start would be syndicating its widgets across the Web to draw people back into the richer experience of each full site. (SplashCast, in contrast, only does widgets. Having both widgets and a destination page could be an advantage). It also needs to do a better job with showing who else is in a Sonecast and what they are doing there. But it does open your eyes to the possibilities of broadcasting in a totally different way.

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Its Good Friday and while millions will be enjoying the day off, others will be attending church and praying for salvation. According to a Pew survey in 2004, 64% of American Internet users perform spiritual and religious activities online, so here’s a few sites appropriate for the day.

GodTube

We covered GodTube in April 2007 and the site is still spreading the word. GodTube is a YouTube like Flash video sharing site focusing on using “technology to connect Christians for the purpose of encouraging and advancing the Gospel worldwide.”

People2Pray

According to ChurchMarketingSucks.com, “If you’ve ever complained about the smut and garbage that can happen on community-driven sites like MySpace, then People2Pray is the answer to what good is all this online community.”

CrossConnector

Billed as a 37signals for Jesus followers, CrossConnector helps users plan and manage mission trips and church activities.

Faith2

Faith2 is a Popurls/ Alltop style site for “the Christian Web 2.0.”

eBible

Search the bible through a search box or navigate via tag cloud, eBible is “your personal online Bible that is easy to search and fun to use.” See our May 2006 review here.

Lolcat Bible

For those looking for something lighter, the lolcat Bible offers a different interpretation of the Easter Story. Matthew 27, 1:5.

1 So liek iz teh mornins and all teh ppl sez tehy duznt liek Jesus and wantz to kills him;2 So tehy ties him upp and maed him goes to Pilate.

3 Judas feels teh stoopid and bringes teh moniez back,4 becuz he iz liek, “I iz stoopid, made invisibul err0r. Jesus iz innucent, k?”

And teh big catz sez “whtevr.”

5 So Judas sez “Do not want!” and he trows teh moniez and then killz hisself wiht sum yarn.

If God isn’t your thing, check out YouTube Awards finalist AngryLittleGirl on YouTube; her nominated video on religion here.

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LinkedIn, the boring social network that won’t find you a date but may land you a job, is expanding beyond people profiles.

On Friday morning they will launch company profile pages that partly serve as fact sheets for about 160,000 companies and partly serve to reveal the connections that members have with them.

These private pages (you have to be signed in to see them) pull in some information from Capital IQ, a sister company to BusinessWeek, such as company descriptions, industries, types, statuses, headquarter addresses, sizes, founding dates, and websites. Many of the companies to which people belong on LinkedIn, however, aren’t big enough for Capital IQ to recognize them. So the bulk of the data shown on these company pages comes from LinkedIn’s own knowledge of people’s careers.

LinkedIn uses this knowledge to display recent hires, related companies, recent promotions, top locations for employees, and so-called “popular profiles” (people who get lots of profile views and mentions in the press). The data has also been used for company comparison purposes. You can see which companies employees usually come from and leave for, as well as which companies the current employees are most connected to.

Additional features include relevant news articles to a company (first discovered on LinkedIn last December) and personalized job listings.

The company says that it plans to wiki-fy these company profile pages in the next few months, allowing employees to edit company overviews, upload logos, and add other custom modules. Some of the information on these pages will also be distributable via widget.

The addition of company profile pages (which, dare I say, remind me of Facebook network pages) and the plans for more user generated content are good moves for LinkedIn, since the company needs to give users better reasons to return and use the site on a regular basis.

LinkedIn says it attracts one million new users each month and plans to have company profiles for a million companies. The social network has raised $27.5M so far.

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BlogCatalog, one of the oldest operating blog directories is expanding with a with the beta launch of Social Search, a cross-network aggregation search engine that searches multiple social networks.

The Social Search feature is built on top on BlogCatalog’s Social Dashboard, which (like many services lately) aggregates member activity across other popular networks. The search feature allows users to search by single user, friends, or by anyone who has opted in to use the Social Dashboard feature.

I haven’t visited BlogCatalog in a long time, so I was surprised by some of the other features they are also offering. Personal news feed widget SocialStream allows members to broadcast their personal aggregated social network activity, wherever they place it, a similar function also available from Plaxo Pulse. This on top of a decent enough social networking platform that is built around a members blog listing and includes friends a topical group discussion.

Ultimately any site is only as good as the number of users it is attracting, and BlogCatalog is pumping through some great numbers, with comScore reporting just over 2 million unique visitors a month for the site on 6 million page views for both January and February. As the chart shows, this is significantly more than Plaxo, who offer some similar services. Newer aggregation services (including Friendfeed) were either not available or too small to be recorded by comScore so could not be directly compared. Alexa does provide some size and influence comparison here for those interested.

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Over the last couple of years, Google has been making a variety of changes to the quality score impacting paid search.  First it was more then CTR*Max CPC’s, then the “more” became a dynamic ad ranking model which included landing pages, then that was stretched further into min/max CPC’s as well as “content” on landing pages being valuable.

Effective April 1st, Google will be strictly enforcing a “new” policy that display URL’s must match Destination URL’s.  This will likely have a large impact on free-loading search publishers that aren’t adding much value through the “real-estate” model.  Here’s a list of changes that we should expect with some examples to help explain things better: (more…)

The rumor mill is hot with the latest word that Google has purchased the address book turned “social media” hub.

Plaxo has been in the press lately “shopping around” and LinkedIn has repeatedly stated that they are not interested in going public in the “near” term.

I’m a fan of plaxo - as it allows me to sync from device –> corporate email/calendar –> google calendar –> iCal. While it’s buggy, it gets the job done and IMO does it the best out there. I haven’t dabbled too much in the “pulse” features yet, but cmon make the “de-duper” free please!

If you know any folks at plaxo - you may want to keep an eye out for them here.

Wow.

Google misses earnings, stock plummets, people “freak” out - before some thoughts, here are some facts:

• Total paid clicks in the fourth quarter rose 30% compared to the same period in 2006, but slower than the 45-52% growth seen during the first three quarter of 2007
• Most disappointing probably was the number of aggregate paid clicks which increased just 9% during the quarter
• For the first time since its initial public offering three years ago, Google’s quarterly profit failed to climbed more than 25%
• Overall, Google reported fourth quarter net income of $1.21 billion, or $3.79 per diluted share, up nicely from $1.03 billion, or $3.29 per diluted share, in the same quarter last year but, the earnings per share number excluding items came in at $4.43, below the consensus analyst estimate of $4.47. Revenue also fell short by $60 million

Now for some Thoughts

• Google search market share is the largest it has ever been (through December of 2007)
• The online advertising market continues to grow with healthy projections into 2012 (with search leading the charge)
• Google adjusted clickable areas through the paid search (top listings) from the “shaded area” to the actual “advertisement” to reduce what they call “invalid” clicks (different from fraud clicks, as they cast a wider net of false positives to catch invalid activity before it needs to be accounted for)
• Google’s investments and entry into new markets/products/services will need to come together over the next few years - the dependency on the advertising business unit will continue to become an issue
• Google needs to diversify the revenue mix and need to manage the street’s/investors expectations - they’re growing…don’t forget that

Social music service MyStrands has completed the second half of their B round, raising an additional $24 million from Spanish Bank BBVA on top of the $25 million we reported earlier. BBVA is a financial services group with more than $782 billion in total assets, 42 million customers in 40 countries and a market capitalization of approximately $95 billion. This brings total financing for the Corvallis, OR based startup to $55 million, significantly more than $5 million raised by London-based Last.fm which started around the same time (later sold for $280 million). MyStands core products are a music recommendation engine for discovering songs you love on your computer, mobile, and even playing them in bars you frequent. They recently launched a music video product that puts a more pleasant face on YouTube’s music video archives. They’ve made over $12 million in sales from these products during 2007. Even with revenues pacing nicely, $24 million is a lot of capital and its not clear they really need it. The company says the money will go towards expanding their recommendation engine beyond music, although they’re not saying how quite yet. The most MyStrand’s VP of Communications Gabriel Aldamiz-Echevarria will say is that “…the general idea is to keep building technologies that will help people discover different products and services.” Well, now they have quite a war chest to pursue that goal.

 

MyStrands

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Slacker

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Last.fm

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News Corp has acquired New York based religious community site Beliefnet, according to a report at FishbowlNY. Beliefnet was founded in 1999 and provides a service that offers commentary and community discussion on various religious beliefs. The company has a checkered history, having declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2002, then restructuring and emerging from bankruptcy in October the same year. According to earlier reports, around 70% of the sites traffic is related to Christian interests, with around 70% of users being females, and the most popular age group being 35 to 45. Beliefnet raised $7 million from Softbank Capital in 2005. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. In related news, a “source fimilar with the matter” has told Reuters that News Corp is not in negotiations to buy LinkedIn, rumors of which first surfaced on TechCrunch UK in November. The source claimed that News Corp was in talks with LinkedIn, but the two companies had been discussing future partnerships, not a takeover. With the Dow Jones (Wall Street Journal) acquisition being finalized a partnership between News Corp and LinkedIn would make a lot of sense; the premium business sites from Dow Jones provide a high-wealth business focused demographic that would sit well with LinkedIn’s business networking product. Update: sources at Fox Interactive are saying they know nothing about the deal; this isn’t to say that its not happening but it is a little strange. The site may have been purchased by another part of News Corp. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The deadline to apply to participate in the FCC’s upcoming auction of wireless 700 MHz spectrum passed on Monday. And we still don’t know exactly who the bidders will be. But we have a pretty good idea. Google is in. So is AT&T, Frontline Wireless, and Craig McCaw’s Clearwire. Comcast and Time Warner are out. But Cox Communications is in. Verizon Wireless isn’t saying either way, but everyone expects it to bid. Sprint Nextel is sitting this one out, as is Microsoft. And T-Mobile isn’t expected to play a big role. At least initially, there seems to be two major camps. Google and Frontline on one side, looking for an opening in the entrenched wireless industry. And AT&T and Verizon on the other, trying to keep the technology pirates from climbing aboard their ships. And Craig McCaw as always, is the wild card. As for other possible bidders, you can never count out Qualcomm, or the handset manufacturers like Nokia or Sony Ericsoon, who might like to bypass the carriers for once. Smaller wireless companies like Alltel or Leap Wireless could bid on a regional basis. I would not be surprised if at some point Google and Frontline combine forces. Any auction strategists or game theorists out there have any advice for how they can improve their chances of winning? Please enlighten us in comments. (Photo by Steve Jurvetson) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0