Kind of…

Our elite team of two people are actually flat out trying to make some sites work at the moment…And we’re learning some important lessons along the way….such as involving your web specialists at an early stage…

We’ll let you know what other lessons you might need…including the need to define taxonomies before building your actual site….

A friend and colleague of mine runs a pretty good blog at http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com, which is a fairly good way of keeping up with a lot of internet news in one place… I’m even meant to be a contributor when i get the chance…

But his latest update shows increasing signs of a common sickness amongst new media commentators….the dreaded buzzwords…

In the past, web geeks and nerds used tech speak to communicate in a way which would show our superiority over the uneducated masses. Which was fine, until now, because we actually have to speak to normal people in everyday life, and now they’re looking to us to explain what they should be doing with their businesses…

So here, I pledge to avoid using any marketing or internet terms which have absolutely no point to them. FasterFuture uses a great term today ‘video snacking’. I’ve used a similar term in the past which is ‘short video clips’. Can you spot the difference?

Web 2.0 has already inspired several backlashes, because it just means that people are using the latest technology to bring people and content together… User Generated Content is one that is valid, because it’s a short term for a lot of things, but it isn’t the only answer to everything for the future, and shouldn’t be touted as such… It’s one answer to one set of problems…

For me, the best websites; google, pandora.com, linkedin.com etc have a simple premise, and increasingly websites are using simpler designs with more space. So why can’t new media commentators do the same?

Everyone is falling over themselves to dissect the Google>Youtube purchase….so when there’s a bandwagon to jump on, rest assured my colleagues and I will be forced there….

For me, it’s not a question of whether Google will drive advertising revenue from Youtube. They will. They wouldn’t have invested so heavily if they didn’t have a superior model to the current Flizzya examples of ripping out Google Adsense code to pay users and drive advertising.

The question for me is whether they integrate Youtube and Google Video, both of which have problems with their content/service/payment etc…and whether they are able to overule any legal challenges.

Personally I know that they’ll have strategists that will claim to have a viable solution, and I’m confident they will manage it. My interest is in how well any solution will work to placate rights holders, and how they manage to retain huge user numbers at the same time.

At the moment neither of their video services have huge community aspects. Google Video’s payment options are broken, and Youtube is primarily a service for people to sneak a glimpse at copyright material from TV etc…. Youtube also has problems with functionality, and I wonder how many people are returning audiences who don’t actively upload videos themselves…

Dennis are set to launch a men’s weekly exclusively online, according to Media Week. It’ll be delivered via email, with embedded video and audio content, every Wednesday.
http://www.mediaweek.co.uk/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=details&nNewsID=597548

So it’s basically an email newsletter, or e-sub, with embedded vids and audio…..genius.

Next someone will launch something exclusively on the internet….we could call it a ‘website’.