The Awesome Power of Apple
Yesterday I did a blog post over on my Brightcove blog that got above the fold on Techmeme. It was timed with our HTML5 press announcement and it got an insane amount of coverage.
As I have looked into the origins of the traffic, it has become clear that a huge driver of the popularity of the post was the fact that it caught the eye of the globa Apple customer tribe. A variety of Mac publications covered the news and linked to the story.
I had observed, but not personally experienced this phenomenon, and it is amazing. What Apple has achieved in terms of brand enthusiasm is just shocking. To have such a passionate, switched on, and articulate group of customers/fans is incredibly powerful.
I did not agree with everything that the Apple crowd had to say in their commentary on the story. Their passion was often over the top. However, I know power when I see it, and what I saw yesterday was powerful.
Redbull Stratos Supersonic Freefall
The look on the face of the would be pilot in this video is priceless. He doesn’t exactly look fired up.
Talk at Brightcove Video Monetisation Summit in London
Blocking Users Who Block Online Ads
From Ars Technica:
Starting late Friday afternoon we conducted a 12 hour experiment to see if it would be possible to simply make content disappear for visitors who were using a very popular ad blocking tool. Technologically, it was a success in that it worked. Ad blockers, and only ad blockers, couldn’t see our content. We tested just one way of doing this, but have devised a way to keep it rotating were we to want to permanently implement it. But we don’t. Socially, the experiment was a mixed bag. A bunch of people whitelisted Ars, and even a few subscribed. And while others showed up to support our actions, there was a healthy mob of people criticizing us for daring to take any kind of action against those who would deny us revenue even though they knew they were doing so. Others rightly criticized the lack of a warning or notification as to what was going on.
via Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love.
Everywhere I look, media companies are feeling pushed to the breaking point by their failure to monetize their content online. On the other side, users are feeling pushed to the limit by increasingly desperate online advertising schemes. Check out the following comment from the Ars Technica article:
I admit, after reading this, I felt kind of guilty for adblocking on this site. So I decided to disable Adblock, reload, and see what happened…
1 banner ad, and 1 sidebar ad.
No flashing.
No jiggling.
No audio.
No faux-error messages.
No pop-ups.
No pop-unders.
Good enough for me. Welcome to my whitelist.
/note: you’re off it as soon as the above changes
Clearly there is a lot of tension out there.
I think that 2010 is going to be a year of many fits and starts in monetization strategies. For better or worse, pay walls and authentication walls are coming to news sites and television portals near you. It will be fascinating to see how it all works out.
Long Live Adobe AIR – Macromedia Central RIP
I just came across this article over on TechCrunch:
Adobe Taps PlaySpan To Power Payments For AIR Developer Platform Shibuya.
It reminded me of one of the low points of my Macromedia career, which was presiding over the slow dismantling of Macromedia Central.
Central was the precursor to Adobe AIR, and was just three short years ahead of its time. Here are some URLs that provide background on it:
Rich Web Apps Beyond the Browser: Macromedia Central – an article by Sean Neville
Internet Applications: A New Frontier – a white paper by Kevin Lynch
You will find more than a little resemblance between Central and AIR. Central offered a runtime for offline cross-platform applications with an app store distribution with transactions and revenue sharing handled by the platform provider. This was several years before the iTunes App Store existed, and was cobbled together with payment technology provided in partnership with Yahoo.
The problem was that it was ahead of it’s time on every dimension. Flash was not powerful enough to build high performance apps. Creating apps with Flash was too hard. The payment technologies of the day were too limited and brittle. And the developer community was not conditioned to expect to pay big distribution royalties on their apps. We had to shut it down while we retooled and re-conceived the Flash Platform, and the end of life process is never a lot of fun.
AIR is fairing much better because all of the above problems have been solved. But it’s important to remember that AIR has been built over the grave of Central. Long live AIR. Central RIP.
In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It.
“many phones will not support HTML5 for 7+ years”
via In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It.
Richard Wong nails it in this article on mobile platform fragmentation. We’re certainly seeing this at my company, but the good news is that we’re in a position to make money by helping customers deal with the complexity of a fractured mobile world.
Extensions are the primary reason I choose to to continue to use Firefox over Chrome. Chrome doesn’t support many of the extensions that get me through the day. It also seems to be a little more CPU heavy and a little less stable on the Mac than Firefox. Now comes this article from TechCrunch:
Chrome Is Rapidly Approaching Firefox In Extension Numbers.
If the extension picture evens out, as this article suggests is happening, and if the Mac version of Chrome stabilizes a little more, I may be tempted to switch. I’d love to hear from my friends at Mozilla what their take is on the situation.
What (Really) Makes a Great Teacher?
I’ve had great teachers that fit all of these patterns. My wife is a sixth grade teacher, and I wonder which of these patterns best applies to her.
Stuff I Like: Mountainsmith Lumbar Pack
I’ve had a Jansport clone of this pack for a while and I really like it. But the original looks much more robust. Lumbar packs are more comfortable on hikes than a traditional backpack. It just makes the whole experience more enjoyable.
SocPub.com launches
It is great to see Bryan Ruby of CMSReport.com picking up the social publishing torch with the launch of his new site SocPub.com.
When I was working at Acquia, I spent a lot time thinking about the convergence of social software technologies into what I called “social publishing.” Since that original post back in 2008, I’ve seen the term gained a lot of currency in the market and the pattern continues to emerge.
I’m excited by what Acquia is doing with their Drupal Gardens project, which will bring the leading open source social publishing system to a much broader audience by combining the incredible innovation of the open source development model with the convenience and ease-of-use of software as a service.
Some people will misunderstand what Drupal Gardens is all about, assuming that it is just a Drupal equivalent of WordPress.com. That is true to some degree, but Drupal and WordPress are similar but not the same. Drupal is not primarily about blogging, although blogging is one of the social publishing patterns that it addresses. Drupal is about delivering sites that blend multiple social publishing patterns together to create an engaging community oriented web experience that brings people together around conversations.
I spoke recently with the team over at Acquia about the target market for Drupal Gardens. They told me that their initial focus is on corporate micro sites that are used in conjunction with marketing campaigns and/or specific community development initiatives that need to be launched quickly. I think that this is a smart approach to take because as social media has become such an integral part of marketing strategy, it has placed a lot of pressure on organizations to be able to get social publishing sites up quickly. Drupal Gardens is going to be a big help in that.
