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Steve Jobs Hates Your Podcast. And Your YouTube Video, Too.

James Lewin — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 05:03:51 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Remember when Apple was the king of tools for creating your own media and it was hyping podcasting and user-generated media?

When Steve Jobs bragged about the company hitting milestones with its iTunes podcast directory? When it added podcasting support to Mac OS X? And when podcasting was a selling point for Garageband?

It looks like the thrill is gone, baby.

At Apple’s Sept 1st iPod refresh event, Jobs rubbed a lot of new media geeks the wrong way when he called new media content the “amateur hour”.

People want “Hollywood movies and TV shows,”Jobs said at the event, adding that “they don’t want amateur hour.”

People don’t want to have a selection of hundreds of thousands of podcasts to listen to. People don’t want to watch Diggnation or Ask A Ninja.

Social networking site Facebook isn’t really the #2 site on the Internet.

Video publishing site YouTube isn’t the #3 site.

And blogging site Blogger isn’t the #8 site.

Arguing that people aren’t interested in amateur and indie content on the Internet is ludicrous.

The cat is out of the bag on this one, Apple. And no content deal is going to put it back in.

What do you think?

Is Jobs right about people not wanting the “amatuer hour”? Or did Steve Jobs forget to turn on the reality distortion field last week?

via Rob Greenlee

Microsoft Finally Does Some Intelligent Marketing For The Zune

James Lewin — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 03:02:14 +0000

The Zune has been the whipping boy of new media since the portable media player’s introduction, because Microsoft made the mistake of taking a iPod wannabee and throwing a bunch of marketing money at it.

The Zune has improved a lot, since then, but it still hasn’t made an impression with buyers. This is largely because Microsoft botched the brand introduction of the Zune, establishing the brand as the biggest tech failure of the last decade.

Now Microsoft has finally done something intelligent with their Zune marketing: they’re putting them on international United Airlines flights:

United Airlines has just given the media player a new lease on life thanks to a partnership that will place Zune HDs into the hands of patrons. Reportedly, United will host around 500 Zune players on extra-long flights between the U.S. and Australia and Hong Kong.

The deal will provide those Zune players with pre-loaded content that can’t be found anywhere else (think pre-release movies), but details beyond that have yet to be made public.

This isn’t a huge deal for Microsoft – but it’s a smart one.

Take a bored, captive audience and give them Zunes loaded with content and you’re going to get a lot of people giving the Zune an open mind.

The next thing Microsoft should do is send free Zunes to the top 100 podcasters in the Zune podcast directory, along with a cheat sheet on getting started with podcasts on the Zune. If it gets 10 of them talking about the Zune, expand the program to the top 500 podcasters.

Then do the same thing with the top 100 new media blogs. Apple press ignores blogs, so it’s one place where it should be easy to one-up Apple.

Send another to the top 100 video bloggers on YouTube!

What do you think of the United Airlines Zune deal? And what do you think Microsoft needs to do to get people to give the current Zunes a chance?

Enticing Purchasers – Closing the Sale

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Compelling customers to take the final step from browsing to purchasing is not always an easy transition. Marketers and entrepreneurs who have studied purchasing habits have found that the following enticements can help encourage potential customers to take the final step to purchase...

Closing the Sale - Enticing the Purchaser

Student Senate

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:00:00 +0000

The student senate is now podcasting.

Three Things About Ping That Will Make You Say “WTF?”

James Lewin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 15:29:24 +0000

The iTunes Ping social music network was easily the most interesting announcement out of Apple’s special music even, last week.

But after using it for even a short while, most people are unimpressed or puzzled – with Fortune asking “Can Ping Be Saved?” and PC World calling it “Not so hot”.

Here are three reasons Apple’s Ping will make you say “WTF?”:

Apple left the musicians out. There aren’t any musician artist profiles to follow in the Ping music social network.

All we could find was these 14 musician profiles:

Lady Gaga
Yo-Yo Ma
Katy Perry
U2
Jack Johnson
Linkin Park
Shakira
Coldplay
Mark Ronson
Taylor Swift
Dave Mathews Band
Diddy
Linkin Park
U2

And, yes, Apple lists U2 and Linkin Park twice to pad the list.

No Jay-Z, no David Guetta, no Vampire Weekend, no Sade, no Black Eyed Peas, no John Mayer, no Alicia Keys……

Worse, Apple won’t let you create an Artist page for your band or your podcast or even stuff that you’re already selling in iTunes.

WTF?

Apple left the social networking out. You can’t connect with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc…..

Ping isn’t a social network – it may be the most un-social network of al social networks. If you try it, you won’t be able to find your friends if their on there and you won’t be able to invite them unless you’ve got their email address handy.

You can’t even post your status.

WTF?

Apple Ping doesn’t protect you from spammers and scammers.

Every social network has problems with spammers and scammers – but Ping doesn’t do anything to protect you from them.

Thousands of fake user profiles are being created on the site, many in the name of famous artists, and their being used to promote phony iPhone deals and worse.

If you follow one of the dozen artists that are on Ping, you’ll have to wade through the spam to find comments from real fans.

WTF?

Bottom line – Apple hasn’t created a social network for iTunes yet – they’ve made it easy for spammers to scam you on Lady Gaga’s Artist profile.

Unless Ping gets a fast update, it’s going the way of Apple’s last closed music platform – iTunes LP.

Remember that?

Four short links: 3 Sep 2010 – Design Principles, Mario AI, Open Source Wave, and 3D Google Earth Sound

Michael W. Dean — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:59:34 +0000

Arranging Things: The Rhetoric of Object Placement (Amazon) -- [...] the underlying principles that govern how Western designers arrange things in three-dimensional compositions. Inspired by Greek and Roman notions of rhetoric [...] Koren elucidates the elements of arranging rhetoric that all designers instinctively use in everything from floral compositions to interior decorating. (via Elaine Wherry) 2010 Mario AI Championship...

Google Launches Stats for Blogger

Chris Crum — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:52:37 +0000

Google has launched Stats for Blogger, a Blogger feature that was previously available in the experimental version of Blogger, Blogger in Draft. The feaure is fairly self-explanatory in that it provides Blogger users with stats about their blogs.

More specifically, Stats for Blogger provides stats like real-time tracking of each time your blog is viewed, and insights about your audience, such as top search keywords, countries, browsers, etc. The user interface comes with easy-to-read graphs and charts.

Stats for Blogger actually has some improvements over the Blogger in Draft version. For example, it includes self-view exclusion - it will exclude your own pageviews if you turn that option on. It also has more effective bot traffic filtering.

"We've extended our list of known 'bots' (the non-human visitors, such as crawlers), another measure to provide more accurate pageviews from real visitors," says Blogger's Chang Kim.

There are also now rate-limiting visit counts from the same user and internationalization - availability in over 40 languages.

Four short links: 30 August 2010 – H.264 Patents, Pakistan Flood Crowdsourcing, YouTube to MP3, Bloom Filter Tips

Michael W. Dean — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:32:55 +0000

Free as in Smokescreen (Mike Shaver) -- H.264, one of the ways video can be delivered in HTML5, is covered by patents. This prevents Mozilla from shipping an H.264 player, which fragments web video. The MPEG LA group who manage the patents for H.264 did a great piece of PR bullshit, saying "this will be permanently royalty-free to consumers"....

How to Subscribe to An RSS Feed

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:00:00 +0000

There are generally two different kinds of tools that allow visitors to subscribe to RSS feeds. These tools are known as aggregators, or RSS news readers. As the content of an RSS feed changes, the RSS reader/aggregator will update itself automatically and display the new RSS feed items.

There are two types of aggregators -- desktop aggregators, and web-based aggregators...

How to Subscribe to an RSS Feed

Four short links: 27 August 2010 – Audio API, Book Search Helps Publishers (Gasp!), Tracking Antiquities, Guaranteeing Diversity Fail

Michael W. Dean — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:29:54 +0000

Working Audio Data Demos -- the new Firefox has a very sweet audio data API and some nifty demos like delay pedals, a beat detector (YouTube) and a JavaScript text-to-speech generator. (via jamesaduncan on Twitter) Estimating the Economic Impact of Mass Digitization Projects on Copyright Holders: Evidence from the Google Book Search Litigation -- [T]he revenues and profits of...