Broadband Jungle Blog

Presidential Redesign: Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov

YouTube embeds from the White House homepage? Obama's cracking new media team didn't lose a second and relaunched what appears to be a cleaned up and user-friendly WhiteHouse.org while the nation was watching the inauguration this morning.

Mark Hefflinger reports for Digital Media Wire:

"The official website of the president, Whitehouse.gov, experienced a dramatic makeover at 12 P.M. ET today, just as Barack Obama was being sworn in and giving his inauguration speech.

The redesign features some of the same interactive elements that were present on Obama's campaign website, including a place where people can sign up for email updates from the President and his administration, an "Agenda" section that lists the administration's positions on major issues, and a new White House blog."

Macon Phillips, Director of new Media (!!) for the the White House expands on the newly established  White House Blog: 

'A short time ago, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States and his new administration officially came to life. One of the first changes is the White House's new website, which will serve as a place for the President and his administration to connect with the rest of the nation and the world.

Millions of Americans have powered President Obama's journey to the White House, many taking advantage of the internet to play a role in shaping our country's future. WhiteHouse.gov is just the beginning of the new administration's efforts to expand and deepen this online engagement.

Just like your new government, WhiteHouse.gov and the rest of the Administration's online programs will put citizens first.'

According to Phillips, the White House's new media efforts will revolve around the following:
Communication, Transparency, Participation.

Sounds like any other successful social networking community out there trying to connect...
Fantastic to have not only Our Guy in office, but also to finally have our guys in the office.

Barry Diller talks Boss

A few well articulated words from one of the great old tigers in the entertainment world: Barry Diller in an interview with Shira Ovide of the Wall Street Journal.

Particularly impressive how excitable Diller remains, how well he understands the completely different dynamics of the Internet world compared to film and television. Ending up with 1.3 billion in cash after the IAC breakup might also do its part.

Read the full length interview here, right next to the video player on a very handsome UE by the way.

 

iWidgets - Socialize your Brand

Ever wondered what would happen if Facebook applications weren't so damn expensive and so hard to produce?
What if any advertiser, media company or even the tiniest non-profit had access to a widget-building service to get their message out?
And not only on Facebook and MySpace but onto every social networking platform, blog, video community, dashboard or website destination?

Too good to be true?

iWidgets recently released just such a tool into public beta, and apparently made quite a stir at Facebook f8 last week. No wonder really, considering the lineage: The brains behind iWidgets is Silicon Valley veteran Peter Yared,  formerly CTO at  Active Grid,  Sun Microsystems and Net  Dynamics. The refreshingly opinionated founder assembled quite a team to provide the first  application builder that handles smoothly like Photoshop and puts native widget technology into the hands of every power user with a story to share out there.

"iWidgets is about giving you the ability to rapidly produce, publish, and promote engaging interactive widgets for your customers with an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface. iWidgets takes full advantage of the features of destination platforms, such as profile information or social graphs, so you can mix your website's data with your customers' social data and maximize the experience."

If you still need help figuring out the need for widgets, read up on these apps in a comprehensive article Peter wrote for Business Week.

Check out this informative video tutorial and then quickly build your own!

Internet Metering - Back to the good old bad days?

During peak times, 5% of Internet users are hogging 50% of the bandwidth?

How to reply if you're a service provider? Metering? Open access? Tiered plans?

Mark Cuban already cast his vote and kicked of a thunderstorm: Why Tiered Broadband is a Wonderful Thing and ASIVS.

'Leave and take your bit torrent client with you.'

While cable giants like Comcats and Time Warner and telecoms like AT&T are figuring out how to add valves to their pipelines to reign in some of their hard-core users, industry mags like Mediapost's Blogs have long been engaging in the debate.

Now the New York Times is weighing in with a clarifying survey from Brian Stelter.
His article from June 15 compares the potential of 'Internet metering' to the industry's clumsy business models from the early days:

'The Time Warner plan has the potential to bring Internet use full circle, back to the days when pay-as-you-go pricing held back the Web’s popularity. In the early days of dial-up access, America Online and other providers offered tiered pricing, in part because audio and video were barely viable online. Consumers feared going over their allotted time and bristled at the idea that access to cyberspace was billed by the hour.'

Stelter compares some of the plans in discussion and the perspective is grim: Bandwidth allotments appear to favor the very casual Internet user simply sending e-mail and reading the news.

Streaming an hour of video on Hulu, which shows programs like “Saturday Night Live,” “Family Guy” and “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” consumes about 200 megabytes, or one-fifth of a gigabyte. A higher-quality hour of the same content bought through Apple’s iTunes store can use about 500 megabytes, or half a gigabyte.

A high-definition episode of “Survivor” on CBS.com can use up to a gigabyte, and a DVD-quality movie through Netflix’s new online service can eat up about five gigabytes. One Netflix download alone, in fact, could bring a user to the limit on the cheapest plan in Time Warner’s trial in Beaumont.   

What this could mean to our fledgling rich media loving industry is pretty obvious:

“We hate it,” said a senior executive at a major media company, who requested anonymity because his company, like all broadcasters, must play nice with the same cable operators that are imposing the limits. Now that some television shows are viewed millions of times online, the executive said, any impediment would hurt the advertising model for online video streaming.

Yahoo's Steve Mitgang new Veoh CEO

Has Dmitry Shapiro's pioneering VeohTV broadband network finally found who it needs to  turn into a portal that really matters? Niche talk is on.

Abbey Klaassen writes in AdAge: Yahoo Veteran Looks for Veoh's 'Great Business'

Steve Mitgang arrived at Yahoo via its Overture acquisition in July 2003. aBut now as Veoh CEO, he believes there's a big business in online video advertising. That is, if marketers can figure out how to target the intentions of viewers.

Ad Age: Why has it been so hard to create a viable business around online video? It seems to be wildly popular among consumers.

Mr. Mitgang: According to the reports, YouTube only sold $30 million in ads last year because they didn't build a system to support ... that healthy tension between editorial and advertising. They just didn't build it.

The flip side of understanding those user behaviors and recommendations is for targeting purchases. We can say, look at the car enthusiasts ... [these ones] are primarily interested in German cars or muscle cars. Being able to tell that to the brand manager of Mustang or Mini, we'll be able to help them better than anyone else. Whether watching user-generated or premium content we'll help target against the right users.

MediaPost goes SciFi and looks back

Here's a very clever analysis of things to come in a TV Board post dropped by Joe Mandese, editor in chief at the reliable MediaPost. Camouflaged as a report filed in 2009, Looking Back predicts successful TV and Internet video convergence for 6 months from now in all our living rooms.

"Who would have thought when we launched this discussion board of industry thought leaders back in 2006 that television would go the way of the telegraph and become one of the few mass media to actually become extinct?"

Speaking my mind exactly. Here's how Mandese envisions the shift finally taking place:

"The turning point came 18 months ago when Google acquired Gemstar TV Guide and merged the universal remote control with its Universal Search service, once and for all ending the need for channel surfing or dial flipping."

Couldn't agree more. Until these or similarly equipped forces finally merge, all that's left to help us connect video from several portals is GoGooroo, which is why we started the whole thing. Couldn't find anything!

"My right thumb still twitches with phantom muscle memory every time I pick up my Apple iRemote to change the channel — er, video screen platform — even though the nifty new device relies solely on a retinal interface. And I’ll never get used to those Eyebuds. I don’t care how freakin’ cool they look, they keep falling out."

Sounds like a Philip K.Dick novel?  He's not quite done yet:

"Google’s server farms simply spider the content directly from the master control systems of local stations, and the satellite uplinks of networks reroute video programming to the screen of a user’s choice."

A brilliant book waiting to be written. Enjoy!