Happy Holidays! I'm Zennie Just saying 'hello' to the Seesmic Community!
After months of thinking about doing it, I finally did it: contributed a video on Seesmic.com , Loic Lemur's video conversation venture, featuring my friend Cathy Brooks, who was one of his first staffers.
I remember when Cathy was totting around a laptop showing Seesmic at work; that was last year, 2007 at a STIRR Founder Hacks Meetup! Wow, how time flies!
Report: Small online news sites more proven than large ones » VentureBeat: “The report uses long tail economics to show how small sites can do well by achieving greater distribution among a niche readership. Because operating costs are so low, these sites can still manage to be successful despite lower rates of advertising revenue. The report describes the revenue model for independent blogs and news sites and it offers, as an example, a news site with 1 million unique visitors a month which generates $1.5 million in annual revenues assuming a $2 CPM (cost per thousand user impressions) rate.”
Interview: New NYT.com GM Denise Warren: Tip-toeing Into Aggregation With Guarded Optimism | paidContent.org: “As if heading advertising for the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) Media Group wasn’t tough enough in this climate, Denise Warren is taking on the role of GM of NYTimes.com as the site fends off increased challenges from competitors and the economy. Warren has been chief advertising officer of the NYT Media Group for three years and has been with The New York Times Company for 20 years.”
Look who's into New Media: The Pope and the Vatican. h2onewscrossmedia is the organization that uses the cell-phone-based live streaming online service called Qik.com. According to TechCrunch, they have more views than Ashton Kutcher!
As Qik’s first user, I find the service very cool, but I find that more and more I’m moving away from it for a few reasons:
1. cell phone video is cool at first, but then you keep finding areas where it doesn’t work well and you can’t get the HD quality you can get with a newer HD camera and YouTube, Facebook, SmugMug, or Vimeo.
2. The chat room sucks in comparison to Ustream, Stickam, or Kyte.tv.
3. You can’t use your laptop’s camera, your FlipCam, or other recorded video on the service. That’s why I’ve been showing up on Kyte.tv more lately.
4. The service and/or bandwidth sometimes goes away right in the middle of doing something important (like filming a press conference) and there’s often nothing you can do about it. While on Kyte I can switch to a recording and use the service just fine when the connection comes back up.
5. I like the player on Kyte better and it’s embedable in more places.
But, Qik is better for many uses and I still use it from time to time to take videos of my family because it’s easier to use for many personal things. I hope that 2009 brings lots of upgrades to Qik so I can use it for more than just my videos of my family.
NYT: The New York Times Company plans to borrow up to $225 million against its mid-Manhattan headquarters building, to ease a potential cash flow squeeze as the company grapples with tighter credit and shrinking profits.
The company has retained Cushman & Wakefield, the real estate firm, to act as its agent to secure financing, either in the form of a mortgage or a sale-leaseback arrangement, said James M. Follo, the Times Company’s chief financial officer.”
President Barack Obama's success can be attributed to many factors, but online video is one of the major ones. YouTube, which didn't exist in the last election cycle, 2004, had a profound impact on the communication of Obama's brand, and changed politics forever. Now, authenticity is prized over what are now called "flip-flopping messages" to different groups to get votes.
