IPTV Evangelist pre-published a Video Age Magazine-interview with Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief at Wired Magazine and author of “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More”. Anderson updates his theories of a diversified, yet profitable marketplace for digital goods in regards to the online-video revolution that brought us countless social video-websites & the breakthrough of video-blogs in 2006. “leveraging lower distribution [and production] costs to reach a specific niche and audience” (Anderson) is what drives video-blogs, or ‘Sliver-Casts’ as another pregnant term of Anderson puts it.
one of the most popular ‘Sliver-Casters’ (and a personal favorite) is Kent Nichols, with his highly successful guerilla-comedy Ask a Ninja, a semi-regular vlog featuring Q&A-sessions with the typical “ninja-next-door”. with 20mio downloads in 2006 and a DVD-release pending, the no-budget show is the living prove to Anderson’s long-tail concept. NewTeeVee (a online tv/video-focused blog recently launched by GigaOM) featured a short interview with Kent on the business-side on sliver-casting earlier this week.
Guy Kawasaki continues his stream of great interviews (see here and here), this time featuring Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB. MySQL AB is the company behind open source database-management-system MySQL, which is successfully powering applications at Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, YouTube or Second Life. I found it - positively! - interesting how Mickos recognizes free-riding open-source users as MySQL’s strongest evangelists:
At MySQL we LOVE users who never pay us money. They are our evangelists. No marketing could do for us what a passionate MySQL user does when he tells his friends and colleagues about MySQL. Our success is based on having millions of evangelists around the world. Of course, they also help us develop the product and fix bugs. And the few times they say they hate MySQL, that helps us too because complaints usually contain some good suggestion for improvement.
thinkvitman.com just released an audio-interview with Tim O’Reilly, who created a humongous business based on conferences and books on opensource software. I guess there is no geek out there, who doesn’t own at least one of the books sporting animal cover-artwork published by O’Reilly. O’Reilly Media got bad press recently for claiming trademark of the term ‘web 2.0′ when used in conjunction with tech-conferences. other topics covered in the interview: the where 2.0 conference, Second Life & virtual worlds, people not getting the ‘web 2.0′-meme, the current climate tech-startups are launching in and the possibility of another bubble to burst.
hint: thinkvitamin doesn’t offer a seperate RSS-feed for the podcast, but it’s ok to use their main-news-feed with most podcatchers. for iTunes, just choose “Advanced” - “Subscribe to Podcast” and copy&paste this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/vitaminmasterfeed - the news-items not including audio are simply ignored.
Guy Kawasaki asks David Sifry - CEO and founder of Technorati - 10 questions about the blog-searchengine and blogging in general. in case you wonder what distincts a blog-searchengine from classic web-search: while google & co. let their spiders visit each and every website once every 1-3 days (depending on relevancy, i.e. google-rank) to index fresh content, Technorati works the other way round: the moment a blogger hits the ‘publish’-button, the blogging-system notifies (’pings’) Technorati and other blog-searchengines of the new post. ideally this leads to an index which is always up-to-date.
competitors include Icerocket and Sphere, still Technorati is favoured by most bloggers, probably because of the ranking-algortihm and top-blogs-list.
Secondcast, a weekly podcast focused on Seond Life, published their second audio-interview with Philip Rosedale (aka Philip Linden), CEO and founder of Linden Labs (the april-interview can be found here and here).
philip obviously comments on the currently heavy-discussed changes in user-registration (since about a month, signing up with Second Life doesn’t require a creditcard anymore). many “oldschool” inhabitants criticize the new, lax policy for opening doors to fake accounts and what they call “griefers” - meaning users attacking others (verbally or through scripts) or even bringing down whole regions by exploiting bugs in Second Life. Philips valid argument for the new policy is of course “openness” - Linden Labs ultimately plans to position their platform as a next-generation WWW, restricting access by requiring a creditcard therefor had to stop at some point in time (though Linden maybe should have waited until the system is more resistant against all kinds of user-attacks). personally I haven’t had many bad experiences during the past weeks (and since I just finished my article on Second Life for thegap, I was online quite a lot). what I like even more: the new policy led to a massive shift in user-demographics. while a few months ago 3 out of 4 users were living in the US, it’s only 50% now.
of course there is another motivation for Linden Labs in lowering the barriere-of-entry for new users: currently about 314.000 internet-users in the world have started their “Second Lifes”. compared with about 6.5mio users playing World-of-Warcraft, that’s not a lot. agreed, comparing the game WoW with the platform “Second Life” isn’t appropriate, still, both are labeled ‘MMOG’ and perceived as competitors. btw if you’re interested in the usage-numbers of various MMOGs, I highly recommend MMOGChart
the interview - as past ones - gives insight into how Linden Labs is operated and what Philip’s vision of Second Life’s future might look like. looks like Second Life is here to stay…
Guy Kawasaki posted an awesome interview he did with Dr. Sandor Gardos. Dr. Gardos is a licensed clinical psychologist, sex therapist as well as a board-certified sexologist…and he is founder and CEO of MyPleasure.com, an online sextoy-retailer best known for its ‘Rabbit Pearl‘-vibrator featured on TV-show ‘Sex and the City’. as Dr. Gardos’ scientifc background suggests, MyPleasure isn’t just about selling plastic, but puts emphasise on sexual education by providing articels and advice. the interview highlights many areas of online-retail, not restricted to the busniess-area MyPleasure operates in.
S. Gardos: I was always a bit of a geek- I learned to program on a TRS-80 - so when the Internet starting reaching mass consciousness, I realized this was going to be THE way that most people would get their sexual information in the future. I wrote a paper on the topic about fifteen years ago in which I predicted things like online dating, chat rooms devoted to special sexual interests, and ubiquitous availability of sex education.
I should have saved the rejection letters from the journals I submitted it to. I still remember my favorite peer-review: “This is a superb paper and as soon as the Journal of _____ starts publishing science-fiction, it should absolutely be considered.”
Undeterred, I created the first web site on the Internet that explained what sex therapy was. I even offered a consultation service. This was back in the day when a new website was actually news! So I got a lot of publicity and that led to a string of opportunities being the producer, editor, or “sexpert,” for pretty much every major web site at the time (e.g. Time-Warner’s Pathfinder, About, WebMD, AOL, Excite, Oxygen).
Maybe you could explain me sometime
