Alfa Bravo

Here is a very informative and inspiring analysis of the YouTube phenomenon from a very human viewpoint:

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

This video is produced by Michael Wesch, a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University. It is long (55minutes) and unfortunately it does not have any interactive navigation tools. But it is worth seeing if you are interested in social media, Web 2.0, videoblogging and why video is such a powerful form of personal communication. The video contains numerous very interesting examples of the YouTube culture and its social, collaborative and creative successes since the launch in April 2005.

Quotes from the video:
“You are not going to convert passive consumers into active trollers on the internet.”
- Stephen Weiswasser, ABC Television, 1989

“We are moving from place-to-place connectivity to a person-to-person connectivity.”

Some interesting numbers:
The three national US TV networks (ABC, NBC, CBS)  were founded around 1948, 30 years ago.
3 networks * 60 years * 365 day/year * 24 hours per day= they have so far produced up to 1.5 million hours of programming in total during the last 30 years!
But the users of YouTube uploaded more video than that in the last 6 months only!
YouTube uploads are now around 9232 hours every day! This is equivalent to 6.5 hours of video being uploade every minute,  24 hours per day!
around 200 000 3-minute videos per day!

One major difference is of course that a vast majority of the YouTube videos are addressed at less than 100 people.

Michael Wesch is most famous for his video “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us.”, as stated on wikipedia:

“Wesch created a short video, “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us.” Released on YouTube on January 31, 2007, it quickly became the most popular video in the blogosphere and was viewed over 6 million times. Wesch has won several awards for his work with video, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award and the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Media Praxis from the Media Ecology Association.”

Google is in high-speed pursuit now of new functionality for YouTube.  Google has acquired one of my favourites: Omnisio, a US company offering a very smart and nicely designed video service. Omnisio allows you to share compilations of different videos in a simple way, but their most interesting service is a video player with embedded user comments, tagging and a very nice synchronized slide timeline.

See this example, a speech by Paul Graham, entrepreneur and founder of the US incubator Y Combinator, (who backed Omnisio):

I really like the divided video window with the slides to the left and the live video to the right, with the slide timeline at the bottom, it is intuitive that you can navigate by clicking in the time line. This is the best user interface I have seen for speeches!

The Omnisio founders say this about being integrated with YouTube/Google:
“We believe we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of what’s possible with online video, and we are really looking forward to taking the video viewing — and creating — experience to the next level.”

YouTube says this about acquiring Omnisio:
“…having this kind of talent at YouTube should help us further explore ways to enhance your YouTube experience.”

Indeed! As I have said before: we are only at the beginning of a marvellous online video development!

Henrik

PS. Google and I seem to have the same nose for interesting internet-based applications

• In the summer of  2005 I tested the brand new YouTube video service and thought that it was going to become a big hit since it was so easy to use. YouTube was acquired by Google in Nov 2006.
• I started using an online word processor app called Writely in august 2005, they were acquired by Google in March 2006 and turned into Google Documents, which I have been using heavily ever since.
• Jaiku is a Finnish microblogging system that I am fond of since meeting the brilliant co-founder, Jyri Engeström at a conference in Stockholm in Nov 2006. Jaiku was acquired by Google in Oct 2007.
• In May 2008 Omnisio launched their app for synching slides with video presentations, I loved it immediately for its beautiful and intuitive interface and smart annotation tools. Well, Google acquired them on July 30, 2008…

As I have written before in my post Empowering internet video, automatic voice-to-text for online videos is already here. It means that any words spoken in a video is automatically transcribed into text.

The transcribed text can be shown in the video window or be used to search for the part of the video where something of particular interest is said. This is of course very powerful for videos from speeches and seminars etc, but there are many more possibilities such as automatic translation.

I have said for some time that this will become the 2008 killer application for online video.
So I’m not  surprised that Google just started adopting it on YouTube. They start now in a moderate way with US presidential campaign videos:

Try it: search the election videos  here. Your search term is highlighted in yellow lines in the video timeline, point your mouse to the lines to see snippets of the transcript. See also an interview with Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube.

I am convinced that Google and YouTube will go full ahead with voice-to-text services, for several reasons:

Video has many advantages but two major drawbacks:
1. It is hard to search video content. Most videos can only be searched by their titles or meta tags.

2. It is time consuming to watch. A 5 minute video takes 5 minutes to watch, but a text that takes 5 minutes to read normally can first be glanced through in 15 seconds to give you an idea of what it is about and let you decide to read it, all or not.

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Voice-to-text solves both these problems effectively! Search engines can search for anything said in a video and it is easy to create video controls that lets the user jump directly to the interesting parts in the video, for example by clicking on a word in the text transcript or in a word cloud.

Monetization!

Exact information of the media content is a key factor for all kinds of monetization. Voice-to-text enables targeted video ads in a much more effective way. This is undoubtedly a key factor for Google’s interest in this technology. The obvious start is to integrate it with Google’s Adsense and include video commercials in search results. But it will be much easier for all the new online video sites to create valu-adding business models with this technology.

Another giant step for voice-to-text technology will be taken later this year when Adobe reportedly will integrate it into their Flash technology, thereby enabling it to a vast majority of all internet users.

So, 2008 will indeed be a breakthrough year for a more powerful and interactive online video!

I just love smart tools that helps me work more efficiently. Especially when they are simple to use, web-based and cost-efficient, like this one:

Evernote, a very smart, simple and free online tool for powerful management of notes and clips.

Also check this video, it is the founder of Evernote doing a 52-second pitch. Run the video to the end (52 seconds) and you will see a smart “overlay menu” with other related videos. A beautiful and intuitive interface!

This is a good example that I use when evangelising companies on smart tools that increase the usefulness of online video.

Whenisgood is another smart little tool for booking meetings with several participants, and not having to mail around different dates and times until you settle on a time that suits everyone:

It is free, simple to use and requires no registration or login!

Dan Gillmor doing an inspiring speech about the citizen journalism movement.

Two great conference days in lovely Copenhagen at Reboot10.

It was an inspiring event with a great crowd, but my focus here will be on the conference format and organisation, adding to my previous posts on how to organise internet-focused conferences.

Reboot is a very different type of conference compared to for example SIME in Sweden and LeWeb in Paris. Reboot is much simpler and more improvised, taking place in a public sports hall. The Reboot website is one of the worst conference sites I have ever seen, confusing and very hard to navigate and lacking even very basic information.

But Reboot more than compensates for this with lots of Danish charm and very warm reception by the energetic staff. One very smart move was to organise a free boat sightseeing tour for all the attendees the evening before the event. We cruised around the canals, sipping free sparkling wine and landed on a very cosy open air bar/restaurant. Great networking and setting a good mood for the event! See my photos.

The focus at Reboot is less about internet business opportunities and more about trend watching in all possible directions combined with broadening the mind on social and other issues. I like it as an alternative to all the business idea and startup conferences I am attending!

One thing about Reboot that struck me as strange was, considering the  youthful and non-traditional setup, that the speaker selection suffered from the same syndrome as most other business internet conferences: all white, all males, many Americans. All the male, white Americans speaking at Reboot had interesting things to convey, but especially Reboot would benefit from more women on stage and more speakers of different ages and multinational backgrounds. As Nicholas Negroponte says: “Creativity comes from difference!“.

Reboot should also be more interactive and participatory. There was no interaction or forums with attendees on the web site, the moderators did not use the backchannels to get feedback from the audience and Q & As were forbidden during the sessions. Internet today is about collaboration, sharing, and creating value and knowledge together. This conference should reflect that not only in the content of the speeches but in the way it is organised.

But in summary: Reboot was great and I hope to see you all there again next year!

See also my other Reboot pictures at Flickr.

I don’t want to own my music!

Steve Jobs said last year that he did not see that the successful iTunes business model of selling individual music tracks would be threathened by subscription models where you pay a fixed fee to access all the music you want.

I am convinced that Steve Jobs now realizes that he was wrong (and probably work hard to catch up). The reason people like iTunes is that it is very easy to use and the pricing seems very moderate compared to what people were accustomed to: buying CDs with lots of unwanted tracks.

But that is just because people have not yet tested the upcoming alternatives such as Spotify and other new services. They offer unlimited listening to music without downloading files, and they are faster and just as easy to use as iTunes.

Spotify, an upcoming topnotch Swedish streaming music service. It will be free to use with ads, a premium version without ads will also be available.

Downloading media files will soon be a thing of the past!

I am quite certain that in a few years time we will laugh at this period of time when we downloaded all these media files and struggled with copy-protection and backups and not being able to play them on certain devices etc.

Why? Well, I love my iTunes but…:

1. I don’t want to own files or CDs, I want to listen to my favorite music and find new music easily.
2. I don’t want to fill up my hard drive with Gigabytes of media files that can vanish in a hard drive crash.
3. I want to listen to my music library on multiple computers and on my iPhone mobile.
4. I want to be able to share my music easily with friends and family.

There are two key factors that will drive this revolution:

1. Ubiquitous wireless internet. We are almost there now in many places.
2. The music industry realizing that this is also a way of solving the piracy problem. If you don’t need to download any files to listen to music, why bother with pirated files?

So the only reason for downloading music will be when you want to play it in locations without internet, such as when jogging in the forest etc. But that is also a temporary problem as new wireless fixed-rate broadband services will soon cover entire countries.

Corporate internet video is exploding!

1. Millions of people are watching video clips, instructional videos and TV shows on internet every day.
2. The production costs of professional video has decreased significantly due to new, inexpensive technology.
3. Thre are numerous new internet-based video distribution channels, for free or at a low cost.
4. There are many ways for companies to use video for marketing, communication and training. Both externally and internally.

But it is now easy to follow this rapid development and knowing what is best for my company of organisation. And most voices about this in the media are connected to various supplies of technology or production companies.

So for these reasons we see a great need among corporations and organsiation for an independent group that offers continuously updated inspiration and strategic advice on internet video as a tool for marketing, communciation and training.

I am launching this together with Mattias Vahlne, he also has an extensive experience of corporate video and a large network among all sorts of suppliers. We offer an inspiring presentation with numerous live examples of corporate video use on the internet.

See our web site: http://ivag.se (in Swedish)

Internetframsyn, “internet foresight” is a project organized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, (Ingenjörsvetenskapsakademin, IVA in Swedish).
The theme is “How can Sweden become a leading internet nation by the year 2015?”

I have participated in the User panel since August 2007, focusing on how internet can be used to improve life for citizens and employers.

See my report text about work life in the year 2015 (in Swedish)
The full report can be downloaded on the Internetframsyn project web site.

Executive summary of my thoughts on how worklife should be in the year 2015:

Our work life in 2015 is based on flexibility and continuous learning. You have different work schemes depending on if you are young without children, have small children, are single, have teenagers or if your children have grown up and moved away. Full retirement is no longer mandatory and many more people are self-employed and have multiple careers at the same time.

There are two new keys that enables this work life flexibility in the year 2015: ”Time shift” and ”Location shift”

A modernisation of our work culture using new internet-based technology and new standards enables us to work to a larger extent independent from regulated work hours (Time shift) and traditional places of work, like an office (Location shift). We move from trying to balance work and life to integrating our work into our life. The focus of the work culture moves from worked time and presence at the work place to the productivity and social abilities of the individual.

Time shift and Location shift requires development of improved internet based tools and social media technologies in order to increase the flexibility in many types of work. The goal is to develop new methods that enables a much richer and more personal communication that is independent of time and place, thereby increasing our productivity and decreasing personal stress and environmental pressure.