This past Monday Daniel Graf and Erik Abair launched Kyte.tv, one of the newest ideas in the realm of what Graf and Abair call “TV out of the box.” As advertisers and content creators look for ways to integrate TV into the Web 2.0 experience intriguing hybrids are cropping up–and Kyte.tv is one. The technology behind Kyte combines some of the hottest features of Web 2.0–user-generated content, viral video, social networking and blogging–with the metaphor of TV to bring it all together into a cohesive, interactive medium.

Kyte begins with users creating their own “television channel” which they can do either on the Internet or on their cell phone. Each channel consists of the photos, video, music, opinion polls and text that users upload. In order to entice viewers, you can embed channels in a blog, Web page or MySpace page. Viewers then log on to watch and interact with your channel by answering polls you have created and using Kyte’s live chat feature to talk to other users.
If successful, Kyte.tv will mobilize and destabilize our definition of TV. On the site’s glossary the question, “What is TV?” is answered:

A TV is an embeddable Flash player that is tuned to a particular channel which enables you and your friends to watch shows. You may also place a TV on your blog, website or social networking profile page and interact with your audience, no matter where they watch.

Kyte’s creators don’t just want us to think “outside the box”–they want us to become our own producers, critics and distributors. Oh, and if you still think of TV as that box in your living room, they would certainly challenge you on that notion as well.

Google has made it known to the market for a very long time that they’re in the business of organizing the world’s digital information for people to access via their online properties. What they don’t trumpet as loudly is that they’re also in the business of becoming “the” one-stop shop advertisers can go to for text ads, radio ads, news ads and now with the acquisition of DoubleClck: display ads.

Even though DoubleClick stopped being an ad network and focused on becoming a technology solution for publishers interested in running their own advertising platform through its technology partnerships, the DoubleClick acquisition provides Google with direct access to deep-pocket advertisers that spend their ad dollars mainly on brand or display advertising. In 2006, display advertising represented about half of the overall online ad spending. If this is an area where Google still needs to make improvements, the DoubleClick acquisition makes perfect sense. Why try to grow the business when they have the financial muscle to buy it.

In the chess game of corporate strategy, Google’s move can be categorized in many different ways. On the offensive side, they’re positioning themselves to grow their display side of the business which just so happens to be the bread and butter of Yahoo and MSN. On the defensive side, the acquisition keeps DoubleClick off the hands of their archrivals. Regardless of how the acquisition is viewed, only time will tell if it’s going to yield a positive effect on Google’s bottom line.

If you are interested, a great resource for tracking this issue is John Battelle’s Searchblog, go here to monitor the conversation.

As we mourn and learn more details concerning the Virginia Tech tragedy we are paying special attention to the effect citizen journalism is having on mass media’s dissemination of information. In particular, cell phone and various other video produced by the Virginia Tech community is making its way to the big news networks, who are prominently featuring this content on both their web properties and TV broadcasts. With their I-report feature, CNN is one such network that is making it very easy for viewers to submit text messages, audio and video of news events as they break.

One such reason networks are rushing to facilitate the use of user generated content is pretty obvious. Instead of relying solely on a staff of reporters and affiliates, a network can maintain a troop of millions of eyes and ears who are tech-savvy and have the equipment to capture events as they unfold. However, I suspect there may be another reason for the flux of this content.

As media outlets attempt to cut costs in hopes of higher profits, user-generated content becomes an attractive alternative. Besides the fact that news outlets can keep a lower staff if the amount of user content remains high, the outlets also don’t have to pay fees to obtain photographs or videos from professionals and instead settle for the free real-time content that is submitted right to their inbox from their own site.

Keep track of the popularity of user-generated content being used by the big networks; it may be a preview of how the news will look in the years to come, a view that could originate from me or you.

American Airlines announced a new Web site last week with a goal of appealing to female travelers. Instead www.aa.com/women has rankled many a savvy business woman and skeptical blogger alike. American Airlines seems to have stumbled right out of the gate with the choice of lavender–as opposed to their traditional blue–for the site’s color-scheme. The color has since been changed–tag lines such as “Separate but lavender” were arguably not the sort of attention the airline was hoping would spread across the Internet in the wake of their announcement. But their attempt at niche marketing on the Web has so far produced more ire than excitement in the very niche the company is targeting.

In the NY Times article: “Maybe a Lavender Web Site Wasn’t How to Attract Women” one of the female executives quoted asks, “Why does AA feel that female travelers need things explained to them that male travelers don’t? Are we that dumb? That inexperienced in the ways of air travel?” Other remarks in the article and in the blogosphere at large were equally scathing. While some neutral reactions have surfaced, no one appears particularly taken with the new site.

As one blogger on www.blogher.org points out, the airline wants to hear feedback–but the changes she and other female travelers really want require more money than a change in the site’s color scheme or a list of “insider tips” on air travel. An American Airlines representative is quoted on www.blogher.com saying, “We had to start somewhere. There’s more to come.” Until then, I think I will stick to visiting their regular site.

The topic of video search optimization was tackled by a group of panelists at the Search Engine Strategies conference held in New York City this week. Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search for Performics, talked about some of the trends he’s observed in the video search space. In particular, he made references to user-generated tags that segment scenes within a video file, so that instead of waiting several minutes to get to the part of interest, viewers can jump to a particular portion of the video to begin watching the content by clicking on one of the tags.

In the absence of a transcript to help search spiders crawl and properly index video files, it’s of no surprise to see real humans and not machines taking the lead to organize and segment video content available online. Video search engine PodZinger is tackling the tagging problem by running all of its indexed audio and video through proprietary speech-to-text technology to create text files that put a time stamp of every word mentioned in a file. Through this automated process, PodZinger makes it possible to search the entire content inside a video, and take the user directly to the section of the video of interest.
Neither approach to tagging video content is flawless. In the manual way, human errors can be made and it lends itself for the spamming of content by rogue content creators. Manual tagging will depend on online-users for policing and fixing misleading tagging of content. The automated way to tagging is not free of errors either. Even though machines and algorithms are making the decisions how to tag content, the human factor is still present and is much needed to continue refining and tweaking the algorithms to avoid incorrect tagging caused by music playing in the background, poor sound quality, or a thick foreign accent.

Personally, I believe automated and human tagging of video content will co-exist and not become mutually exclusive of each other since there are way too many factors to take into consideration for tagging video content correctly so that it can be properly indexed by web search engines.

(when video attacks is a recurring feature that exploits the embarrassment of others in a world where everyone and their uncle owns a camcorder)

While this old-school Levi’s ad is far from the work of an amateur with a camcorder, it is safe to say it’s an embarrassment for whatever professionals were responsible. Join our narrator, as he takes the Levi’s “trademark” (how he refers to the walking logo) out for a physcadelic neon hippie-lovin’ stroll to meet some of the cool kids sportin’ the jeans and livin’ the life. Narly!

Advertising Age has an article this week “Beyond Pre-Roll: New Options That Could Help Monetize Online Video” that discusses the Web’s lack of an equivalent to TV’s 30-second ad spot. The article touts this lack as “arguably the biggest question hindering the growth of the online video ad market.” And yet finding a one-size-fits-all advertising model for online video–as varied as it is–may not prove the best answer. While consumers may willingly accept the limited commercials that interrupt their viewing of network TV shows—considered premium content–online, some companies believe consumers will respond more positively to non-interruptive ads when it comes to other online content such as shorter video clips and user-generated content.

These companies focus on the idea that opt-in advertising should be contextually relevant. Their ads do not interrupt, therefore annoying viewers far less; rather they entice consumers to click through if the Web publishers get their targeting right.

In order to make marketers happy opt-in ads will truly need to appeal to the consumer to a much higher degree so that the viewer chooses to interact with the ad. The creativity that goes into designing such ads will therefore be as important as getting ad/content context right. Whereas the consumer is accustomed to passive consumption of an interstitial ad, it takes a bit more intrigue to get us to move that mouse away from the play/pause button to the realm of the interactive, click-through ad.

After years of slow albeit steady growth, the number of those enjoying and creating podcasts is taking off. According to a report on podcastingnews.com, the audience for podcasts has grown 18% in the past year and furthermore, awareness of podcasting has grown even more, jumping from 22% in 2006 to 37% in 2007.

And just in case you’re one of the 63% who is still in the dark or a little fuzzy on the term, wikipedia has a comprehensive explanation.

With this good news, I figured I would share some tips for those who are interested in getting into podcasting:

• How to create your podcast - So you have an idea for a podcast, but really no clue as to the resources needed to produce or host it online. Check out our Podcasting 101 section by our in-house podcasting guru, Henry Houh for a thorough tutorial.
• Naming your podcast – When naming your podcast you want to be careful to be concise and avoid redundancy. People who are searching for your podcast generally know that it is a podcast and therefore placing the term in the title is a big waste of space. Also, you should note that placing a web address as your title can be pretty confusing and doesn’t look so nice to searchers.
Example of good podcast titles: Southwestern Florida Real-Estate, Bob Mackey Celebrity Interviews
and the bad: The Real Estate Podcast, celebrityinterviews.com
• Meta-data: Describing and tagging your podcast – When creating a description for the meta-data associated with your podcast be clear and keep it short. Listeners want a brief overview of what they’re about to hear, not a novel. Also, many are tempted to associate a large number of tags with their podcast in hopes of popping up in a larger number of searches and directories. While you may be successful in this endeavor, you will undoubtedly also succeed in annoying listeners who aren’t looking for your podcast and making podcast search less effective in general.
• Letting others find your podcast – Once you create an RSS feed for your podcast register it with PodZinger! It’s quick and simple and will allow all of our users to find your podcast. Also, through our sign-up page, you can create your very own customized html search box to enable easy search of your podcast from your site.

A recently released Millward Brown study encourages companies to increase their spending on Internet ads. The CTV-1 study, conducted by the Millward Brown Futures Group, started off a series of investigations into digital media. Millward Brown uses the term CTV in these studies to describe consumer-controlled television/video viewing. The long term goal is to explore digital media’s impact–both potential and realized–on branding.

The CTV-1 study compared the effect of 30-second ads when viewed during TV shows at air-time, time-lapsed via DVR and on demand at the networks’ Web sites. While the advertising performed positively in all three viewing situations, the online viewers demonstrated a higher level of engagement–making brand consideration and favorability far more likely. The support behind this conclusion comes from the observation that online viewers were 53 percent more likely to pay attention to ads than their live TV-viewing counterparts. As for DVR, we all know how easy it is to fast forward through the ads thus bring an hour long show down to a convenient 45 minute viewing time.

Because the same ad is played 3 or 4 times when a show is viewed online, this group of viewers demonstrated ad recall at four times the rate of those in the air-time TV or DVR groups. Consumer engagement seems to be key–while ads aired on regular TV led to 54 percent brand awareness and 18 percent brand recall the online ads trumped at 82 percent awareness and 77 percent recall.

The prospect of YouTube continuing it’s dominance in online video has big media companies scrambling to create strategic alliances with friends and foe alike, to challenge YouTube’s supremacy in the online video space.

Just this week, it was announced (Listen to CNET News PodCast on PodZinger) NBC Universal and News Corp. will band together to create a joint venture that will launch an online video destination to rival, and in their expectations, surpass YouTube in terms of reach and revenues. To help distribute all their video content to the online masses, the usual suspects (AOL, Yahoo, MSN, MySpace) have signed in hopes that the magic of “premium content” will rub off, and help prevent defection of their user base to sites like YouTube.

There’s no arguing NBC and News Corp have lots of video content to make any one, young or old, interested in killing time watching their content. The problem I see with their strategy is that they have chosen to partner with distribution partners (with the exception of MySpace) that are not necessarily in the user demographic both NBC and News Corp want to reach—the young, web-savvy, less than 30 years of age user. It’s important not to forget that Google spent $1.6 billion dollars to acquire YouTube for it’s vast video collection, but most importantly because of the prime demographic user base that flocks to the YouTube site. If the Google brand was getting stale among the under-30 crowd, the acquisition of YouTube allows Google to stay relevant with this user base via an attractive, Web 2.0 brand.

If staying relevant with dynamic online users means any thing to NBC and News Corp., I seriously think they should rethink their distribution strategy and focus instead partnering with online companies that will present them with a desired audience.