+ Fred Baron Habitat for Humanity Memorial Home

From Al Ellis via Miriam Hiser - ”Let the construction begin! June 20, 2009 will be a glorious day in Dallas, Texas. On that date, which happens to be Fred’s birthday, we will begin construction of the Fred Baron Habitat for Humanity Memorial Home.

While I realize many of our supporters do not live in Dallas, we would like to invite each and every one of you to participate in the first day of contruction on June 20, 2009. The first contruction day involves framing the home and perhaps installing roof trusses. It is always one of the most exciting days for building a Habitat home in that we start with a vacant slab and end the day with a completely framed home…. I predict beautiful weather and a heartwarming experience as we celebrate Fred’s birthday by beggining the construction of a new home for a deserving Dallas family.”

+ ROCKETBOOM INTERNATIONAL TALENT SEARCH

As we set off today on a new search for talent to anchor Rocketboom [see details here] we decided to take the opportunity to push ahead with the growth of our show, by searching for not just one anchor, but two. Now that we have our Los Angeles studio set up, we hope to soon find two stellar people from anywhere in the world, willing to help take Rocketboom to new heights.

In 2004, when I was just about ready to launch Rocketboom, there was no such thing as YouTube and so I went to Craigslist to search for talent. There I found Amanda and the show turned out to be great. When Amanda was ready to move on, we returned to Craigslist, and found Joanne. Joanne has been incredible on Rocketboom, everything she did was masterful.

So today, it only seems natural to return to Craigslist, where we have placed two ads, one in New York City, and one in Los Angeles. Of course we can not deny the chances that the undiscovered talent we seek is on YouTube so we have utilized our YT account to search there as well.

But what about Ellie Rountree?  Everyone here at Rocketboom and a rapidly growing stable of fans see Ellie as a natural to assume the anchor role at the RB desk, but her proficiencies and interests have taken her down a different path.  Ellie is working her magic by hosting *and* producing the Rocketboom Tech show (created in collaboration with Intel.)  Additionally, she’s continuing her work as one of the creators and hosts of our Know Your Meme show, which has become, by almost all measures, as popular at Rocketboom.

So what about Caitlin Hill? Personally, I believe that Caitlin is perfect for Rocketboom and so when we had the chance to work with her, we jumped right in. If you saw any of the videos she was in on Rocketboom recently, I think you will agree, she is a natural talent.  Both Caitlin and I both really want her on Rocketboom but, unfortunately, we have not been able to come to terms with her company, Hitviews.  We went out of our way to try to work something out, even going as far as taking the show down for an entire week recently (an unprecedented move) and have gone without our staple news programming for the last two weeks in hopes of working out a deal. Maybe we will still find a way to make it happen in the future but for now, we must keep moving.

In the meantime, I dont know about you as a viewer, but not having a strong daily news program to watch is just the worst feeling for me.  While our other shows are doing well for themselves, our daily news is our staple, the foundational center of our Rocketboom universe.  I hope our search will expedite finding the right people to anchor Rocketboom, quickly!

We, of course, considered a contest, we considered crowdsourcing the job of finding talent over to our audience, but never believed that either of these would be the way we should go.  A contest, of course, would lead to more popularity, buzz and excitement, but we don’t think this should be a competition with winners and losers. That being said, we’ll be taking note of all feedback and listening to our audience closely.

And in an effort to maybe be of use to everyone else in this new rising tide of online media, we have encouraged people to submit their application publicly, in case anyone at all might also find some wonderful talent for their own projects.

See http://talentsearch.rocketboom.com

+ And We're Off!

Last night we sent out our first batch of invites and the response has been *great* so far (thanks to Techcrunch for posting about it! - Our First Taste Of Magma)

As I noted to those who are using it now, we still have a few weeks of buckeling down to get the site to a state where it’s ready for the public.

I hope to spend more time writing about our experiences with the site before and after launch and will kick things off with a note about the domain name, http://mag.ma

Magma.com turned out to be over $10M so we were were like, nah. Forced to abandon the name or consider other options, we decided Magma was the right name and needed a way. As it turns out consequently, with the domain we ended up with, http://mag.ma we are solving a nice little problem ahead of time; One of the biggest problems with short URLS is that you dont know where they will go. Will this tinyurl http://tinyurl.com/bqqrvx lead you to a news site or a spam site, perhaps? Because mag.ma is so short, its Twitter-friendly anyway, and when you see a mag.ma link, you will at least know where you are going and that it is a video.

+ Question to the Internetz on API usage

For the last couple of weeks with our new Magma site, we have been hitting Digg, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, and a lot of other sites, with over 30,000 requests per day, each. For every video we track, we go out and see what’s going on on each of these sites and then continue to check back time and time again.

At 30,000 requests per website, per day, so far no one has mentioned anything.

We’d ready now to ratchet this up to 100k requests per day and foresee the desire for a million requests per day on the near horizon.

Does anyone know what is considered typical usage? If no one cares that we are making 30k requests per day, will they care if we make 100k? Are we flattering ourselves in thinking a million requests per day is significant? Will anyone care? What are good practice API benchmarks on usage levels for companies that do provide APIs?

+ Lost Views & Tracking Chatter

Just when you thought Google blogs and Twitter search would be a good way to measure engagement for your publications, important, prevalent and significant communities are popping up quicker than they are being discovered & tracked by most people.

This has been one of the joys of discovery with Magma. There is a lot of action out there that no one is seeing or talking about - the kind of chatter that should be getting people pretty excited.

Consider A few examples.

TUMBLR

My blog here at Dembot used to be a PHP blog that I built myself, then it was a Moveable Type blog, then it was a Word Press blog, and now its a Tumblr blog but in each case, it looks about exactly the same (i.e. you may not know or care that my blog is tumblr blog unless you have one yourself).

The reason why I am on Tumblr is because in addition to the RSS readers I have built up, I have found that there is an additional audience of people on Tumblr that subscribe to my blog via tumblr, and thus can easily reblog posts to their communities.

For example, see this post below, most of which was not tracked by Google, Technorati or others.

VIMEO

While no doubt about it, YouTube is where the party is at for the majority of the people and the search, etc., other platforms are enduring and becoming more and more significant. At Rocketboom, for example, we dont upload most of our videos to Vimeo, but we do upload our Know Your Meme series. While these view counts are still small by some standards, every audience member that sees one of our videos is pretty damn important to us and we are finding it very worthwhile to be there.

FRIENDFEED

The below is a good example of another niche community that is significant. With regards to the below video which I posted, most all of this chatter and the views generated by this embed are not discoverable without special attention.

Note above that on the FF platform, when a YouTube video loads (i.e. when the image is clicked on, it then loads the YT video and auto-plays. This means that the video will not receive a count. In other words, **almost all videos that are embeded on all of friend-feed are not reported! **. That is a lot of missed views & activity that the video business should know about because they are missing out on accounting for all this value.

DELICIOUS

Of course del.icio.us is a bit more obvious because its been around for a long time, but it should not be forgotten.

What are some examples you know of that are relevant, for being significant communities but not so obvious?

+ Magma!

Today we let the cat out of the bag on Magma. Here is a quick rundown of what the site is!

Magma is an entry point for online video. When you first land on the page you are presented with two sections. The top section shows you the most definitive view to date of the most popular videos on the internet. This is based on a variety of factors including, total views across duplicate videos around the internet, cumulative comments, likes, blog posts, tweets, diggs, stumbles, etc.

It’s not just about popular videos. The second section is recent videos by platform. For instance, you can can see all of the recent (or popular) videos on Hulu, or YouTube, or the most active videos on Twitter, Friendfeed or Facebook, etc. You can also see videos aggregated by blogs, other networks and publishers. The home page is just the the beginning. You can go on from the home page to explore in depth (e.g. show me all sports videos from Brazil and generate an RSS feed; show me all of my friend Ted’s tech videos). And any individual can add any videos or RSS feeds into Magma so that Magma will track the videos across the internet.

Click Image to enlarge:

From the home page you can only do three actions: Watch a video, add it to your queue to watch later, or dive deeper into exploring more pools of interesting or relevant videos.

Every video has an individual archive page. The experience includes the ability to watch the embedded video of choice (i.e. you can select a setting that will always show you the highest quality version that Magma can find, for instance) while viewing cumulative statistics, in depth. Numbers and buzz feed items update in realtime (e.g. while you are watching a video, you may notice an uptick in the view count, comments, likes, tweets, diggs, etc.).

Click Image to enlarge:

(*note: In the above screen shot, you can determine that this video is most popular at this time on Reddit first, and then 2nd most popular now on Digg, it appears as though it was Extremely popular on Twitter, but that was probably earlier on, and it may just now be hitting StumbleUpon. From this, we can infer that because this video is Digg/Reddit-popular, it likely suits the kind of niche personality stereotypically found on these kinds of sites. Play it, Keyboard Cat!)

The third element of the website includes the ability to collect videos, become a tastemaker/curator by building a community of people who like to watch the videos you aggregate, and in general, queue, watch, share and experience videos online with your family, friends and followers. This is where things can get really interesting in terms of filtering and finding less popular videos that are more suitable to your personal interests.

Click Image to enlarge:

In addition to providing the most comprehensive aggregated public view for any video so far, most of our data is available through APIs so other statistical businesses, platforms and developers in general can use Magma’s data set to enhance their own projects.

Thus, there are three main use scenarios for Magma that position it to become an entry point for video online:

1. The majority of people who use Magma will likely come to the home page, watch a few videos, and then leave. Due to the dynamic changes that occur across a day, it’s possible some of these people will enjoy hitting the home page up to a few time per day, habitually as a source of entertainment.

2. Publishers who put videos on the internet may want to direct their audience to Magma to show-off the most impressive viewpoint of surrounding buzz. (e.g. instead of sending their audience to a link on YouTube to see the video, they may want to send their audience to a link on Magma because it may show more views, comments, etc. than on YouTube.) Furthermore, as Magma grows, it could become an important bench mark for anyone creating video online, much like the Billboard charts is to music. Even today with what we have built already, if your video hits the top charts, thats pretty impressive.

3. The third major usage of Magma is by people who create accounts, add videos they find around the internet into Magma, add videos to their Magma stream (to collect) and/or build up their own community, to naturally become tastemakers by propagating videos through to their friends. (e.g. if someone has 100 followers on Magma, every time they add a video into their stream (say a video that they found on Magma or even on YT that they think is funny), that video will then get sent out to their 100 followers who may watch and further propagate the videos, adding more views and distribution, naturally. By integrating with Twitter, Facebook, etc., Magma users can auto-post through (e.g. you can configure Magma to automatically send out a Twitter message when adding a video to your Magma stream).

The business model is simple. Statistics and advertising. Magma demonstrates the democratization of video statistics from the center of a transparent fire-hose. Re: advertising, we have integrated a premium space (not seen in above screenshots) that sits right next to the most popular or most relevant videos on Magma, for anyone who has a video that wants it to be seen. For example, if a company like Next New Networks or CBS, or any individual has a new show that they wish to promote, they can buy a premium space on the Magma home page, or on a relevant related page to gain extra exposure to a particular video.

Finally, if you remember, way back in the day, when you wanted to watch TV, there was only one place to go and funny enough, it wasn’t TV. It was the TV Guide. It had its iterations in print, but it was a key selling point for any Sunday newspaper and if you wanted to know what was on TV, you had to have a TV guide.

From charts to  guides to stats to friends to likes, there is one thing that has not changed: People like to watch the moving images that they like to watch. All together, everything about Magma is obvious. Its just that the time for Magma wasn’t six months ago and in six months, it will have been too late.

Want to get involved now? Beta testing will begin with 100 people this week and the site will go live in about two weeks. Interested in investing? We have just begun talks for assembling a small seed round and are open to anyone interested.

Thanks to Jamie, Greg and Todd who built Magma from ground up, line by line, and to Kenyatta and Ellie for helping to run the show.

I’m excited to reveal the actual website URL for Magma. Until then, you can find the sign-up on our temporary dev site at http://hotlikemagma.com

+ Artists Commandeer Manhattan Billboards

NPA Outdoor operates over 500 street level billboards in NYC ranging in size from approximately 4’x4’ to 50’x12’ all of which are said to be illegal.

NYC artist Jordan Seiler formed The Municipal Landscape Control Committee to improve the offended space.

The group mapped out and targeted locations around New York City.

On Saturday April 26th, 2009, the NYSAT (New York Street Advertising Takeover) siezed approximately 120 billboards around midtown Manhattan by painting the signs white, and then adding their own art to the space.

When the police and other authorities questioned the group’s activity, a decoy work order was proven effective.

Expanding curatorial responsibilities in the city.

The complete interview available on Rocketboom:

+ Welcome Aboard Rocketboom Anchor Caitlin Hill

Thank you Caitlin!!!

+ Ban on Comic Sans

There is an interesting article today on Comic Sans, the typically unlovely font that you have no doubt seen before. People are pulling together to ban it. There are flickr pools, T-shirts, myspace groups (do people still use myspace?) and petitions.

We recently caught the famous font designer Vincent Connare on tape at this year’s NYC ROFLcon:

+ Joanne

Today I am so sad to say farewell to Joanne from Rocketboom! Joanne was really, really excellent at what she did here, she will be missed. Keep your eyes open for announcements from Joanne on what’s next for her! And stay tuned for more from Rocketboom…

+ Intel & Rocketboom Team up for 'Rocketboom Tech'

I just wrote about our Know Your Meme series and how the show has worked as a spin-off. It took a long time for the branch off to happen.

Another obvious branch that we have been thinking about for a long time is “Rocketboom Tech”. The Rocketboom news is filled with tech-related stories and a large portion of our audience is tech minded.

When we were speaking with Intel about some of their objectives and some of our objectives, we realized that we had a lot in common and decided to launch Rocketboom Tech, with their help.

We set this up in a way where our objective at Rocketboom is met with the extra resources and support to get the show up and running, and both of our objectives are met through a collaboration to get people aware of and interested in new technologies while also learning ourselves from the experience. Intel is creating a massive amount of media already (Intel pressroom is www.intel.com/pressroom and Intel YouTube is www.youtube.com/channelintel ) so understanding the Rocketboom process is just one of many branches they can add to their growing tree of knowledge.

In terms of the content, we have invited a member of the Intel team to join our creative team, to help come up with ideas for stories to cover. Intel processors and the impact of its vast research and investments are helping bring new technologies to people all over the world, but people inside the company also love using new technologies too.  And like Rocketboom, Intel is fascinated in how people are using technologies in interesting or peculiar ways, rather than just “speed and feeds” of technologies.

We are certainly not just going to talk about intel stuff.  On the contrary, we’re focusing resources and brain power on finding interesting stories about innovation and how people are using technology in interesting ways. The best story idea each week wins and becomes a segment. In fact, nevertheless, Rocketboom remains in complete control of the editorial and decides what we will do for each episode.

The entire production process is experimental, and we hope the results help Rocektboom and Intel learn from each other while creating segments that are interesting, useful, insightful and inspiring to anyone who enjoys using tech in their daily lives.

With Ellie at the helm of this project, I have no doubt we’ll be in good shape here. Ellie has been at Rocketboom for over three years now and she’s seen it all. She is also starring in our Know Your Meme series, which is currently our most talked about production. With regards to the comments and feedback we have received on the first several episodes of Rocketboom Tech, everything is going even better than hoped.

Here are a few extra points about the relationship between Rocketboom & Intel which I think are noteworthy:

#1

Intel is not interested in simply sponsoring or running advertisements on Rocketboom. They are exploring new media themselves and with every relationship, appear to be keeping fresh and on top of the pulse of what is going on. With us in particular, they wanted to get to the bottom of how we tick, it seems, so they they can use the experience, storytelling and production insights to improve their own online media creation and bring more meaning to news and future product releases.  As you may know we are always interested in exposing our workflows & methods with the hope that we help others to embrace the media.

#2

Rocketboom, Intel and Sony Pictures were all involved in the deal, which means there were also three sets of lawyers involved so you can imagine what it might of taken to get a project like this off the ground. Yet amazingly, everyone was willing to just say ok and it all just happened. Just like that. This was an unprecedented experience that shows how some of the biggest of bureaucracies can rise to the occasion to create something that is contemporary and progressive.  This is a good example of smart risk-taking.

#3

We are not just getting a cash deal here, we are learning a great deal from intel as well. They also have a *huge* audience already, spread out all over the world and they are sending people our way, too.  When they post our videos on their Intel pages, or twitter about us, there is an important impact we see from it. You usually expect this exposure to be a one way thing but in this case, its a reciprocal coevolution.  I think this is a good example of smart collaboration.

*update: Thanks to Liz at Newteevee and Andy at Beet.TV for posting about this!

Rocketboom Tech episodes on Rocketboom: http://www.rocketboom.com/category/tech/

Rocketboom Tech on Twitter (new) is http://www.twitter.com/RocketboomTech

Intel consumer blog Inside Scoop is http://scoop.intel.com

Intel on Twitter is http://www.twitter.com/intel

+ Proof that the medium is the message

+ Rocketboom Nominated For Webby Award!

Rocketboom was nominated for a Webby! Rocketboom has been nominated by the Webby’s in the past, as well as for the Vloggies and the Streamy’s. This is a bitter sweet recognition; I relate a lot to Woody Allen on this kind of a thing because we are not in it to compete. We are driven and love what we do but nevertheless this kind of acknowledgment feels great. So Thank you!

Congrats also to BoingBoing TV, Epic-Fu, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon and The Best Short Films In The World.

+ 10 Entrepreneurial Concepts to Live By

This is a post I created awhile back which outlines ten major concepts I live and work by. This may seem pedestrian to some though I think it’s a good foundation for conducting entrepreneurial business activity on the internet:

1. Always work with people who are better than you. You can only do a few things really well. One of them should be understanding your weaknesses and looking for the best possible help to fill the gaps. Seek help to manage MOST of everything else it takes to run a successful business. Hire people who will do a better job than you.

2. Treat everyone with the highest regards and pay the people who work for you greater than their value. While most people do not want to be leaders, most people want to feel good about themselves and be fulfilled. If people are paid better than normal, have good benefits and get a lot of appraisal and bonuses, they will be happier in life and in return will likely be more productive too. The smallest gestures, even for a poor company such as adding a bit more onto a pay check (giving surprise bonuses), paying for a cab - paying for lunch, all go a really long way. The greatest implementation of value for people is to have positions that allow for infinite growth. Nobody that works for you should ever have a fixed ceiling of opportunity. Consider cutting back on material expenses and pay more for people. Aspire for everyone to have a greater life-style. No matter how important your business is, this is life we are talking about and it’s short. While being caught up with speed towards the future, remember others who live for the day.

3. Do everything right and fair. Make sure that you are always honorable, especially with yourself. Live up to your oral agreements. When it comes to operating your business, make sure and set it up correctly - pay every cent of tax that you legally owe. As long as you take the extra effort to do things right, you will eliminate a huge amount of stress. Even knowing yourself that you are keeping everything in order will make you feel better about yourself on a day-to-day basis. The people that work for you will also take you more seriously and also feel better themselves.

4. Learn to love consequence and happenstance. Things will happen all the time that will throw off your plans. Turn the stress around and into a challenge. Use the opportunity to think of new opportunities. Perhaps there are many new paths to take that you would like even more. Consequence is the stuff that artists dream of; It’s what creates new technologies and drives innovation.

5. Be transparent. This is almost cliche now, though this is why it is important and should not be missed: Without disregard for being humble, the more you reveal, the more people will understand where you are coming from. It’s not about blurting out some statement suddenly. It takes time to show yourself, who you really are. This motto applies to most aspects of life and business. The idea behind transparency is much more of a human personality trait. It’s for you yourself and the people that you care about; It’s for the audience that want to know when they ask; It gets to be that you no longer even think of this idea, it just becomes a part of your lifestyle. When you are fair, transparency will occur naturally because you will be proud and secure to reveal your true thinking.

6. Create a comfortable environment. A girl friend once told me about a miserable phase she went though when she and one of her girl friends were living in a basement with no windows, lots of dogs, mildew, low ceilings, old carpet, low lighting, etc. It sounded dreary to say the least. She wasn’t aware of the concept of space enough to understand that it was drastically effecting her mood. When she moved into a more comfortable apartment that was full of light and had higher ceilings, she regained her spirit. Having a great work environment is just the same. And websites are like spaces too. When you create your physical space or your space online, consider making it comfortable as possible.

7. Listen to your audience, friends and advisors. The more you can get feedback and audience participation, the more you will understand the positive and negative effects of your efforts. The more you understand the effects you are having, the more you can understand what to do in the future. If you trust yourself to filter the ideas and information that others give you, be quiet and listen more often. Allow the audience/journalists/experts in your field to describe your activity for you.

8. Have spirit!

9. Time is of the essence. It starts with the age-old model of speed that can be applied to everything in life. In a war, for instance, the side that obtains the information first about where the other side is will have the advantage; The investor who knows the news first will have the stock advantage. The technologist who creates the first this-or-that will have that advantage to begin with. Speed=Potential. If you have something new, take action before it becomes old.

10. Stay in control by giving control away. The more you give up control to others, the happier everyone will be. Not only will the people who work for you be happier, it will allow you more time to focus on the things you do best.

+ Know Your Meme Spin-Off

I’ve been talking a lot recently about how Rocketboom is growing in a way that is different then the shows around us. You may have heard me say, some of our colleagues have leveraged the popularity of their shows to gain investment to build a network of many shows, so on and so forth, and you may have heard me point out that there are almost no examples of a “second” show doing as well as the first.

If we came out one day and said, here is Rocketboom’s second effort, it would be a scary day. If there was a new show that appealed to a new audience, obviously our current audience might not be into it and thus it would be hard to grow from scratch, especially if our current audience was, ahem, critical. In our particular case, I tend to feel there is this extra expectation for Rocketboom to innovate technically, as if we were putting out a new invention.

The regular audience that we have is not watching because they expect innovation, however. They say they enjoy the creative style of the content. The feedback we get matches our unwavering mission to provide entertaining information from the internet. Quite frankly, I still feel like Rocketboom is not as good as it can be. Maybe thats a good thing, I hope I never become content with it. So with that in mind, while we continue to grow the quality of the show, we are allowing our content to spin itself-off, when it happens naturally.

From an earlier related post:

Anyone remember who lived next door to Archie Bunker in All in the Family? Yep, The Jefferson’s which went on to became it’s own show. An even better example stems from Stephen Colbert, the once rare correspondent of the “The Daily Show”. The audience loved him so much, the show kept bringing him back and by the time they were ready to branch off with a new show, The Colbert Show, they had a formula, a system, the brain trust, support systems, tested pilots and especially the audience all in place and on stand by to nearly guarantee the success of the show. As it relates to Rocketboom, we realized this last year consequently with our Know Your Meme series. Over the winter holidays, in order to give ourselves a break, we decided we would prerecord an entire week of Know Your Meme episodes and run them back-to-back, breaking down the memes and viral videos of the year. By surprise, our audience went nuts and the episodes became some of our most popular content ever. Since we loved the series too, we decided we would spend the year developing the show and continue to sprinkle episodes into Rocketboom as test runs and pilots while building up the idea with our audience.

Our Know Your Meme series has officially spun off and the work has become bigger than Rocketboom. That is to say, Know Your Meme now has it’s own destination at www.knowyourmeme.com, there are consistently more views per video, more chatter on Twitter, Facebook and other destinations around the net, and in general, much more participation.

The memes are being covered in other places, in other ways, but the Know Your Meme database has naturally evolved out of the character of the show itself. In just a couple of months, the database has accounted for over 100 memes and over 1000 images.

The idea for the community site started out of a need for a simple forum, but the use patterns demanded more and the site quickly grew into a community where people can sign up to become members and actually create entries themselves. People are also enriching the entries by adding additional information via comments, images and videos.

This is not sad but great for Rocketboom! We love Rocketboom just as much and many people love it even more. And Know Your Meme is still a part of, and distributed through Rocketboom. Obviously the content that Know Your Meme covers is much more popular (i.e. the most popular memes), yet it’s difficult to compare when it come to actual value.

What’s great here is that our “second” show has arrived and it’s working!

While everything is evolving naturally and consequently, behind the scenes, the vision is being led by the Rocketboom team. Kenyatta is writing and overseeing the production of the whole Know Your Meme series; Chris, our assistant Rocketboom writer is researching, writing and populating a great deal of the database; Ellie is staring in, and contributing to all areas of production, while Jamie is staring in and leading the vision and development for the KYM database, built entirely from scratch. Greg our full time interface designer/programmer is working the front end and of course our final cut editors are bringing the episodes to life with extra flair and fancy.

Today, we kick off a special week of Know Your Meme episodes *everyday* and will then return to our regular weekly release, next week. Next week we’ll also be kicking the Rocketboom news into high gear, w00t!

Know Your Meme video view counts on Vimeo:

Know Your Meme video view counts on YouTube: