February 2012
1 post
January 2012
1 post
How Money Determines Elections
If you look at the last five Presidential races, in each case, the candidate who spent the most money, won.
Over the years, I’ve learned a few things about politics because my Dad was a major influence to the Democratic party and I payed attention to a lot of the things he was doing. He was a great man in my book and became one of the happiest people I have ever met, a workaholic...
December 2011
1 post
The Greatest Biggest Most Important Furthest...
All the world is a meme. So what are the most outstanding for 2011? The lists are already rolling in. There is a list of Best Memes (as in “best pizza”), Top News Memes (informed directly by the “Best Memes” list), Top Twitter Hashtags, Most Shared Stories on Facebook, Top Google Insights, you name it.
To add to the lot, I decided to broaden the perspective beyond a...
November 2011
4 posts
August 2011
1 post
Horsemaning A Forced Meme? A day in the life of...
Kids these days.
Horsemanning is making the rounds, and it’s a creepy one. When authentically posed, one person hides their head and another person shows their head somewhere else. Over the last week, many people have been inspired by the idea, performing their own versions. It’s undoubtably caused joy and fun for many who have contributed. But.
When I first read about it on Buzzfeed,...
June 2011
1 post
April 2011
1 post
Charlie Sheen Expectations
The interesting thing about Charlie Sheen is not so much that he is crazy, but that he chooses to reveal his craziness so freely. Other movie stars who might be plenty crazy have a different approach to knowing when to show themselves, and when not to. When apart of a major production, for example, the typical movie star can be brilliant for acting a certain way, just as that person is being...
March 2011
1 post
THE ROCKETBOOM INSTITUTE OF INTERNET STUDIES SELLS...
[note this news was broken a bit earlier than I was prepared for and now it’s spreading and people are wondering whats up with Rocketboom, so I’m still editing this article but wanted to get it out there!]
Today at Rocketboom I’m happy to announce the sale of Know Your Meme to The Cheezburger Network. Cheezburger recently raised $30M and offered a super seven figure deal...
November 2010
1 post
The Future of TV is HTML
The title of this post is both a very old idea and a very new one. With the prevalence of fiber connectivity and pervasive broadband speeds, this year has been a hot one for bringing together the home computer and the living room TV. While companies like Apple and Google battle over share of TV viewers, they have left open and promoted the web for content distributors to control their own...
October 2010
1 post
September 2010
4 posts
The Office (Space)
Fred Wilson put up a neat post about the value of the office, and how it matters. I feel very strongly about this. Contrary to the advise of some people, I think it’s important to be sure you have a good office space in particular, especially if you are going to be there all day, every day.
It’s a hard bill to swallow because rent money is money you are not going to see again. And...
RSS Not Dead for Online Media
Several people were saying that RSS is dead, kinda like Wired declared the Web is Dead, but in both cases, the claims were do to emotional feelings and statistics that were narrow in scope.
The online audio and video marketplace, for example, is fueled through a solid backbone of RSS at the core of it’s infrastructure, still yet today. Twitter and Facebook have done almost nothing to...
August 2010
5 posts
Future Webtrends
I’ve always wondered about large scale web trends - the over arching movements, or trends, that define certain periods of the web. The Dot Com Boom. Web 2.0. The Real Time Web. The Mobile Web. If you have ever seen me speak, there is a good chance you have seen my talk on The End of Time.
The premise of The End of Time, as it applies to the internet, is that we are there now. The meaning of...
Magma Voted Best Viral Video Chart By...Silence
The other day I put out a challenge via Twitter & Facebook to put forth the URL of a better viral video tracker and no one had anything.
I wanted to make sure the authorities and the haters saw my challenge.
I sent out those tweets because I feel Magma is working really well in this regard, and I wondered who else is doing what we are doing. I don’t think anyone is, and so I put...
FDA TIME STAMP
I think it is really strange that no one knows where their food comes from. You have no idea usually from what farm or what region the food comes from and when it was harvested or added to the store. I imagined it would be nice for someone to set up an FDA backed system that stamped all products each time they changed hands, so that if you were in the grocery store, for example, and picked up a...
July 2010
2 posts
Oh Chatroulette
What to make of it? Those who know me, know I’ve been skeptical. Right from the start, I didn’t think that this Chatroulette thing would ever turn into something more than a bell or a whistle. I was working on a blog post suggesting as much a couple of weeks after it hit the news in February, noticing that the hype was pretty far reaching. But then something happened which caused me...
The Next Phase of TV Will Look Like This
Steve Cheney outlines a compelling example of how Apple’s new Facetime feature on the iPhone will likely bring the much awaited video phone calling action to the mass market due to Apple’s ability to integrate the hardware and software just right, but especially now due to Apple’s advantage of a massive user base on standby ready to adopt it.
It’s also interesting to...
June 2010
4 posts
An Open Letter to the The International Academy of...
It’s been unlike me to be completely quiet about this. I received the first email and have ever since been on “the list” I guess. I’ve been invited to participate in the Streamy’s which you are concerned about and possibly run, I’ve been invited to vote on them, Rocketboom has been nominated on some counts, I think we were supposed to win one this year but we...
Techcrunch TV Launches
My expectation is that Techcrunch TV is going to work out well. I am somewhat surprised there is not more press around the launch, this being Techcrunch. There are a few blog posts on Techmeme only (and without commentary) and I dont see any main stream media mentions. I’ve noticed no matter how cool an online video play is, and no matter how ahead of the game it is, if it’s not...
Rocketboom: 125 Million Served
Congrats to Next New Networks on reaching a Billion views, that’s quite a few views! We just went through the exercise of putting together stats on views served here at Rocketboom and couldn’t get to an exact #. Greg spent a couple of weeks on past logs, we interpolated a bit on some early data, and when we came up with a general range, we decided to go ahead and pick the lowest...
The Winnebago Man Meme
The story of the Winnebago Man meme is an interesting one that warrants special historical consideration for making its way via much harsher environmental conditions than memes travel through today. While memes can flourish more naturally now through internet distribution, the Winnebago Man meme, spawned from a set of out-takes filmed in 1988, was originally passed around through the physical act...
May 2010
1 post
Everybody's Got Something To Hide
I grew up listening to the Beatles and was such a Beatlesmaniac, I knew every lyric to every song they ever released. I would get my sister Courtney to quiz me with a book to be sure I got every word. I also knew everything about them and had a box full of Beatles memorabilia that was so special, one day when my school burned down, they found that the only thing in tact from the entire school was...
April 2010
2 posts
March 2010
1 post
Why The Daily Show Left Hulu
Today Hulu announced that John Stewart and Stephen Colbert would be departing the service. The content will however be available at The Daily Show and The Colbert Report websites.
As many note, this is a serious blow to Hulu in terms of losing a major performer and content draw.
Brian Stellar from the New York Times added some additional facts surrounding the relationship though suggests this...
January 2010
0 posts
A Decade In History of Online Video
Aside from a few notable uses of video by the likes of jennicam, Justin Hall and the archive.org, you could play around with video online, but for the first half of the decade, the audience wasn’t there. As war often begets technology, US political campaigns often begets online trends and with the 2004 presidential election, Howard Dean’s campaign took the online world by storm not...
December 2009
8 posts
The Tsunami of 2004, Online Video's First Major...
Today marks the five year anniversary of the great Asian Tsunami of December 26th, 2004. This was a turning point for online video as it was the first time people from all around the world went online to watch. For all who now take online video for granted, this was even before Google Video. Here is a story I wrote about my own experience which happened just two months after I had launched...
Favorite Video of 2009
In 2006 I started a personal tradition of naming my favorite online video each year. Then, it was Weird Al Yankovic’s White and Nerdy, as explicated here. (this became popular on Google Video just before Google bought YouTube).
Unfortunately, I would go on to break my annual tradition each year until today, as I name my favorite video of 2009, JK Wedding Entrance Dance.
The video...
1 tag
Platform Explainer Video Surprise
I was going to title this “Magma’s Recent PR Event”, but it wasn’t exactly a PR event, we just made a video and put it on Rocketboom. Though it turned out to be so important, it’s worth mentioning. Rocketboom is a content studio, but Magma is a platform for content, two completely different businesses. We have a small but growing user base on Magma and putting out a...
Magma to Tumblr: Can you hear me? Tumblr: Copy.
Magma now supports full integration with Tumblr! When adding videos to your Magma account you can automatically cross-post toTwitter, Facebook and now Tumblr simultaneously, with support for any of your Tumblr blogs, including group blogs.
We are excited to announce a few other new features too:
New Add to Channel Interface
We’ve also redesigned the channel video add experience, making it...
TV Everywhere Launches, No One Notices
Last month on November 4th at the Ad Tech New York conference the President of Comcast Interactive, Amy Banse said TV Everywhere would be available in the first part of December, but I had not heard of anything so I just Googled it and in fact, it just launched, within the last day…according to lot of the bigger publications (nytimes, wsj) though surprisingly, it didn’t cross any of my...
Video Distribution Trending Towards Centralization
It’s been interesting to watch and participate in the ebb and flow of the online video space. One unique trend that I have noticed recently is that the “be everywhere” motto with your video has not so much changed but the technical means for being everywhere has.
In the recent past, the video tool TubeMogul was a good idea. They do the heavy lifting of re-distribution; you can...
Why News Won't Work Like Murdoch Wants It To
There is a great deal of information worth paying for, but for the most part, it’s hard to understand why anyone would be incentivized to pay for the news for news is as free as the freedom of speech.
Consider this article from The Wall Street Journal, Google to Start Selling Own Phone Next Year. The article starts off “Google Inc. has designed a cellphone it plans to sell directly to...
November 2009
2 posts
October 2009
2 posts
September 2009
1 post
5 tags
How Twitter Could Lose The Game By Design
Do you know how to use the twitter logo? My guess is that you are far from able to navigate the Twitter website in general, and that in particular, you can not explain the why’s and wherefore’s behind the intricate and complex functionality that exists behind the Twitter logo. Don’t feel bad. I have used Twitter daily for years and I still can’t figure out how the...
August 2009
9 posts
A Timeframe for TV's Future?
Printed today in The Guardian: “The TV industry has as little as two years to create viable digital businesses or face a version of the “iTunes moment” that saw the music business cede the online future to Apple, according to Ashley Highfield.”
With regards to the various threat levels to traditional media, the TV and Film businesses are converging and it’s much more...
Select Magma Tweets
alecorreo: I am really digging Mag.ma http://ow.ly/lugQ 19 minutes ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
BuildIntel: Just wanted to let everyone know that I love #Magma. Check it - http://mag.ma/ about 3 hours ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
nickdemartino: RT @jonarcher: Impressed by new video aggregator Magma http://mag.ma/ about 6 hours ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
...
Know Your Meme Makes TIME Top 50
rocketboom:jamiew: “Know Your Meme was selected as one of TIME Magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2009! 50/50 :) We wrote our first scientismic episodes in Dec 2007 and launched the ‘Meme Database’ website in Dec 2008. It’s seen amazing growth — we’re now at more than 500 meme entries, 10k images, and will serve over 4.5 million pageviews this month!”
Building Big Dreams With Just a Little
As we gear up for the public launch of Magma, I’m starting to feel as if we are heading out into the unknown. I’m worried and excited for the same reasons: We are going at it with no investment, no PR company, no advertising or sponsorship deals in place, no anything really, just a website and a few computers.
From my experience with Rocketboom, I know this is not going to be easy....
Where is Molly?
People have been asking about Molly. Molly is in the UK and we are waiting to be sure that our governments approve Molly’s work visa before we are finally allowed to work together. We are hoping it will happen this upcoming week in which case Molly will be begin hosting Rocketboom daily asap, thanks for keeping a look out! In the meantime, the rest of the Rocketboom crew is rocking it out...