Registrations are now open for PodCamp Montreal 2008. The event, focused on podcasting and other new social media, is free and will happen on September 20th and 21st at Pavillon de Design de l’UQAM in Montreal.
Schedule is here.
It’s organized by many of my good friends in the Montreal web community. Just go and register! They are also looking for sponsors if any of my readers are interested in showcasing their brand and technology in front of early adopters and influencers.
As most product managers will attest, the temptation is always great to add new features when building a product. Evan Williams, Twitter’s founder, did a short presentation yesterday afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit to talk about how we can build better products by removing features instead.
Knowing that Williams created Blogger at Pyra Labs, he defines Twitter as a blogging application with a maximum of 140 characters and no formatting. But he says that Twitter does not compete with current blogging applications as it offers a different experience. They originally built their technology to use with an already existing ubiquitous friend status network: the SMS, and SMS basically come with a command line.
They quickly realized that the majority of people went directly to the Twitter web site, many of them using 3rd party apps built on their API. They now have hundreds of applications today because “text integrates well with everything”.
He offered additional examples of sites or technologies that kept things simple (or that should keep things simple):
In my daily work, I often use the expression “social media”. I’ve been asked to define it before but I always end up talking about user-generated content and reciprocal, two-way conversation between the user and the media. Wikipedia has a good definition but Joe Marchese from the Mediapost’s Online Spin adds more meat:
“Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives and media itself. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. These sites typically use technologies such as blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs to allow users to interact. A few prominent examples of social media applications are Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Gather.com (social networking),YouTube (video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Digg (news sharing), Flickr (photo sharing) and Miniclip (game sharing).” (source: Wikipedia)
Marchese begins: “first I think one of the biggest myths regarding social media is that it equals user-generated content. (…) Second, there is nothing about social media that demands user creation. The “media” part of social media can be anything from professional content to home videos. Just because “America’s Funniest Home Videos” consisted of user-generated content certainly didn’t make it social media. Conversely, just because “Heroes” is professionally produced doesn’t mean that it can’t be social media.”
He continues: “the real difference between broadcast media and social media is not the media itself, but the system of discovery, distribution, consumption and conversation surrounding the media. (…) What many of us are defining as social media today are actually just technologies specifically architected to facilitate people’s natural tendencies to seek out, share and discuss media content. Think about it. How is MySpace social medium? I would certainly say that MySpace is the largest and most influential social media platform of our time, but it doesn’t create media (at least not for most of it). The media one finds on MySpace is a mix of professional, semi-professional and (I hate using the term) “user- generated” content, and that media is made social by the context of its distribution and its ability to create dialogue between people. ANY TYPE OF MEDIA CAN BE SOCIAL MEDIA — and eventually all media will be social media in the most literal definition. This will have serious implications for media companies and advertisers alike, so it is important that we are not dismissing social media as the user-generated portion of the Internet.”
What it means: so my quasi, minimalistic definition wasn’t too far off. I agree that social media is all about the conversation but I think that, as part of that conversation, there will be some “user-generated content” happening. I agree that all media can be social media. I would even say that all media will have to become social media. Consumers are getting used to contributing to the conversation and that’s not going away. BTW, I like his thoughts regarding America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Details of a new eMarketer report on Podcasting have surfaced in Media Week (via Frank Barnako’s blog)
Highlights:
What it means: based on that information, podcasting is still very much a niche market. The winner will probably be the company that manages to aggregate enough ears or eyeballs to create critical mass. Standard measurements will also be key if pro podcasters want this to become a true media. Would love to know what my friend Mitch Joel, a pro podcaster with 38 “Six Pixels of Separation” podcasts under his belt, thinks of this new report.
Details of a new eMarketer report on Podcasting have surfaced in Media Week (via Frank Barnako’s blog)
Highlights:
What it means: based on that information, podcasting is still very much a niche market. The winner will probably be the company that manages to aggregate enough ears or eyeballs to create critical mass. Standard measurements will also be key if pro podcasters want this to become a true media. Would love to know what my friend Mitch Joel, a pro podcaster with 38 “Six Pixels of Separation” podcasts under his belt, thinks of this new report.
Business Week is reporting on a Pew Internet & American Life Project podcast downloading survey and gives readers a pretty good summary of the podcast landscape. Highlights from the Business Week article include:
What it means: even though podcasting (and listening to podcasts) is growing, volume usage is still limited to traditional media consumption. Is podcasting a way for traditional radio broadcasters to offer time displacement like Tivo or PVRs are doing for TV? This clearly seems like a great opportunity from a traditional media point of view, an opportunity to extend the reach and frequency of radio and TV shows (via video
podcasts).
Harry says: Public broadcasters have already embraced podcasts as a way to timeshift; many NPR, CBC and BBC programs are available within hours of their original radio broadcast. As for traditional media outlets having the upper hand, they do have the talent, technology and promotion machines to stake out the top positions. The world’s most popular non-traditional media podcast, This Week in Tech (reportedly with hundreds of thousands of weekly listeners), features media personalities that produce the show on the side, in addition to their ongoing mainstream media jobs. Reminds me of the adage, giving someone a paintbrush doesn’t make them a painter.
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