gregword

I like Alex Iskold’s article over on Read/Write Web entitled There’s No Money in the Long Tail of the Blogosphere.  I said the same thing once upon a time, a while back, but apparently it wasn’t on any of my blogs, so I can’t find it.  But, yes, the only money to be made from the “long tail” is if you’re aggregating it (or as Alex puts it, “on” the tail, and not “in” the tail).

That being said, I still think there’s opportunities to make money not in the long tail, per se, but as a niche content provider.  I guess if you’re making enough money to live off of (which certainly wouldn’t apply to 90+% of bloggers), you’re not really long tail, but the nature of the web is such that you can aggregate a global audience on a niche topic due to the distribution being next to nothing in cost.

Perhaps we should focus less on long tail economics, which are really just aggregation/network models, and promote the idea of niche content.  Could be another book/slogan/conference series in the making…

A few weeks back I was meandering around the Baltimore Craigslist gigs board and came across a posting for a Ruby on Rails position for “a newly funded startup in the Audio/Video Podcasting Arena,” which piqued my interest. The ad states that the startup “will be acquiring a very large presence in the Audio Podcasting space,” and many of the details seemed to point to Odeo, so I was suspicious that Odeo had found a new home. After reading today’s announcement of Odeo’s sale to SonicMountain, it was confirmed.

As for the future plans for Odeo, the ad mentions:

We are going to be enhancing the site with video podcasting and podcast hosting features as well as a patent-pending search system for audio, video and podcast content. The search development is being performed by a company under a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and we have used offshore development for the video conversion engine (.mp3, .mp4, .mov, etc) into Flash (.flv), a custom flash player and the CC billing module for hosting and the podcast hosting / management engine.

Sounds interesting; I think there’s definitely room for a more complete solution for podcast hosting and metrics; I currently use a combination of Ourmedia.org, FeedBurner, Podtrac and Performancing Metrics; if there were a way to tie some or all of that together, it would be very interesting.

And very interesting to me is that the contact listed on the ad is based in Baltimore; the question is: Is Odeo coming to Maryland?

Meanwhile, Odeo itself has been stagnating for a while; I use their podcast player widget for a podcast I do with my wife, and despite my best efforts (pinging, etc.), Odeo hasn’t updated in about two months. Hopefully the new owners can revive the site.

PC World has a really great article entitled Search Engine Shoot-Out. The article asks the question, “Does Google deserve all that traffic, or is it living off its reputation? Are people using it because they’re not aware of other, potentially better search engines?” What follows is some fairly comprehensive test of search engines across several verticals: web, videos, images, news, blogs, and local info.

I’m very happy and proud to report that Blogdigger finished third in the blog search category; of couse, I’d love to do better, but the fact that we finished where we did, to me, says a lot about what Mike and I have been working towards. I’ve written more of my thoughts on the Blogdigger blog, so hop on over and check it out.

The main take-away from the article is, of course: Google is king of search. Their web search results are probably the most frequently viewed single page on the web, and they have strong entries in all the other major categories as well. It would appear to be almost a fools-errand to even consider taking them on. On the other hand, as the article points out, only a few years ago Google didn’t exist and Alta Vista was the king of web search. And as YouTube has shown, it’s entirely possible to enter a market and create a community that can rival even Google’s offerings, and Wikipedia has, for many, replaced Google as the go-to resource for factual information. And remember, Google wouldn’t have a blog search if it weren’t for the fact that many of us showed how useful it could be.

The confluence of two events: the deprecation of the Google Search SOAP API and the release of the del.icio.us JSON API, both point to the fact that the vision of the web as a platform is dying. Instead, the success of online advertising, and it’s corallary, the page view, is dominating. So Google limits their search API to only be used on the web, and allows for greater control over how their data is used (and, doesn’t expose data as before). del.icio.us passes over traditional standards for a format which provides functionality that helps drive traffic back to their property while at the same time doesn’t open/expose their platform too much. The paradigm is widgets, which function to promote the host site, rather than allowing data to roam free and find itself reconstituted in new ways.
On the one hand, it makes sense from a business perspective; why should companies freely open up their valuable data stores if they get no benefit from it (an issue we’ve been dealing with for years, since we made all searches on Blogdigger subscribe-able as RSS feeds, and in terms of monetization, it’s been very tricky)? On the other hand, locking up and restricting data to self-promotion vehicles hinders innovation.

In the page view/advertising world, it makes sense it has come to this. But is it a good thing?

I’m about to head out the door to catch my plane to Las Vegas for WebmasterWorld PubCon, and I’m really psyched. It’s my first PubCon, as well as my first time in Vegas. I wanted to write up a post with what sessions I’m going to go to, but haven’t had the time (perhaps I’ll knock a few posts out on the plane; I’ve got a bunch, on various topic, in the works, but time has been short of late). Mostly I’m going to learn all I can from the folks who are the experts at stuff like PPC, affiliate marketing, SEO, etc. I’m now making my living online, and while my current venture is doing well and continuing to grow, there’s always more to learn and perhaps other areas to get into. So I’m planning on going to as many sessions as I can, talking to and meeting as many people as I can, and learning as much as possible. So please come over and say hello if you see me (I’ll be wearing my Blogdigger t-shirt for at least some of the time, or just look for the guy with the lid, otherwise, here’s what to look for). And don’t forget to talk to my partner-in-crime, Michael Miller. He’s a lot smarter than I am.

If you want to get in touch, you can leave a comment here, email me a greg AT blogdigger DOT com. Or, feel free to call me, my cell phone is 443-928-2961. We’re staying at the Renaissance starting on Tuesday (tonight we’re at the Villa Roma, getting in late), heading back on Thursday night. See you there!

Comedy Central, wake up. You owe a large chunk of the success of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to the Internets. Why are you punishing the people who love your content? Why can’t you come up with some revenue sharing agreement with YouTube to make this kind of thing work? I’m all for copyright protection, but look at the reality here. If NBC, CBS or ABC came to you and said, “We’re going to put The Daily Show up at nights…and we’ll share some revenue with you…” you would do it, right? I mean, that’s where all the people are!

Maybe I’m pointing the finger in the wrong direction; maybe YouTube doesn’t want to get into these kinds of deals. Why not? Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just throw out my TV and TiVO, and just watch everything the next day on YouTube? Isn’t that why you named it YouTube?

Either way, there’s huge potential here for one of the other video sharing sites to make some headway. As soon as all the copyrighted material is gone from YouTube, people will start to look elsewhere. And wherever they find episodes of The Daily Show or The Office, you can bet they will flock in droves. Of course, there really isn’t a great business model in the old YouTube-style of doing things, but if you can get to the point where you’ve aggregated a large audience looking for quality (i.e. copyrighted/professionally produced) content, and you can strike some deals with major content owners, then you won’t need to get bought out by Google or Yahoo or anyone because you will be making real money.

Ooga Labs: “Has no one taken you aside and said, “Wait! You’re about to waste 10 years of your life figuring out the path you chose out of college is crap!” [via evhead]

A few follow up notes about Google/YouTube (are we calling this GooTube?):

Susan Mernit has an excellent post about the ramifications of Google spending their money on YouTube and not, let’s say, the New York Times. The conclusions Susan draws. as they pertain to top-down editorialized content vs. bottom-up user-generated content is very important point. Good discussion in the comments as well (the Greg there is not me).

Somehow I found my way to a post by Andy Kessler that has a pretty good overview of what it all means for Google.

Meanwhile, the folks at YouTube have been hard at work documenting the last days of their independence:

Make sure to hit the 2-minute mark, where the Internet’s two newest mutli-millionaires play whilffle ball while the rest of the world waits and wonders.

I usually fight the urge to jump on the bandwagon and comment on the latest thing, but I think it’s instructive to examine the underlying reasons why YouTube sold to Google. The service was insanely popular, but had no business model. Their expenses outstripped their revenues, forcing them to burn through cash. YouTube had no choice but to sell, as without deeper pockets, eventually, they’d have to turn out the lights.

And Google, Yahoo, etc., in some ways, were forced to buy. These guys are all hungry for traffic, users and page views. Without an upfront business model (everyone talks about the new wave of video advertising, but lets face it, there aint much new under the sun), it was inevitable that YouTube would eventually come knocking. And once one of the major players was interested, the other big guys could not afford to ignore it.

It’s a bit ironic, because from a pure business perspective, dollars and cents, YouTube was a failure. But online, value comes in many different colors, not just green, and certainly from the founders and investors perspectives, YouTube is an incredible success. But from a founder perspective, looking at the plan when starting a company, think about how many other video sharing sites there are, and how many of them have even a fraction of YouTubes traffic. You’re better off, statistically, coming up with a service that makes real-world money, than hoping to be the one site that grabs the public attention. There are probably less than seven sites on the web that could work a deal like YouTube did; on the other hand, there’s thousands that are making signficant amounts of real world money. It’s not a bad place to be where YouTube is, but it’s not a simple thing to get there.

As for YouTube itself, well, here’s hoping that it doesn’t become as bland and boring as Google Video.

Landed in Oakland this morning (well, afternoon for me, but whatever), visited with the family, got back to the hotel, and went looking for what’s going on. Wow. Upcoming.org is pretty much not useful in Baltimore, but for Palo Alto, it’s a goldmine. Here’s a list of stuff going on between now and Thursday (when I head back east):

• StartUpCamp
• Chris Heuer is getting old(er)
  
• Cal Henderson (Flickr) on Scalable Web Architectures - Common Patterns and Approaches
• Vertical Search
• SF Tech Sessions: Media distribution

Amazing; I forgot how much is going on on this coast. Hopefully I’ll be able to get to at least one of these.