Yes friends, after many months of 20 hour work days I have decided that it’s time to recharge my batteries. I will be traveling from the beginning of the month until  mid January. During this time I will have limited internet access so I will have to try to survive without posting on my blog, without Facebook, without Twitter. God, I hope I make it! I feel the withdrawal symptoms already starting…

I wish you all a wonderful new year. May the new year bring us all many good posts, interesting startups, and most importantly, deep online connections (Of course you can also insert good health, happiness and success along with it).

Cheers everyone! 

Thanks to Christophe Borgers for this amazing pic.

P.S. If you happen to see me online on Facebook during this time….you’ll understand that every rehab process is a gradual one.

On January 19th I am hosting my Blonde 2.0 Birthday Celebration. This is my humble celebration with all my online and offline friends. I am inviting my offline friends (yes, there are a few of those :-)) along with my Facebook friends and blog readers. That’s you guys. So if you happen to be in the Tel Aviv area and would like to attend, please check out the Facebook event page and request an invite or message me stating that you are one of my readers:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=9408190621

Expect many surprises and a great crowd of people from the industry and beyond.

I wanted to let you all know that I currently have an unlimited number of invitations to MeeMix. So if anyone would like to receive an invite, please just leave a comment below.

For those of you who don’t yet know MeeMix, it is a personalized internet radio community which aims at identifying individual taste and taste prediction in music using its own behavioral-based algorithm and additional methodologies.  MeeMix takes into account your behavior on the site (for example, which songs you added to your favorites) and uses it to predict what music you might like to listen to in the future. It is one of my favorite Web products and I highly recommend you all to try it out.

Barak Hachamov has written a fascinating post regarding our gradual metamorphosis into digital beings as more and more of our every day activities occur in our virtual worlds. Unfortunately since the post is in Hebrew, many of you will not be able to read it so I wanted to share its key ideas with you.

In the past, the internet used to be only an information source for us. However, in the last few years, and especially since the emergence of Web 2.0, the internet has become more than just an information source. It has become our way of interacting with our friends, expressing our thoughts and interests, and handling our day to day activities. Web 2.0 has turned the internet into something completely different than it used to be. No longer are we the passive viewers. Now we are the active users, creating content and building our virtual worlds with our virtual friends and virtual events. The cold, alienating experience of using the Web has turned into a personalized, customized experience for each of us. Information that we view is gradually becoming more and more targeted to our our immediate needs, our interests, etc. through the usage of personalized tools and the early beginnings of artificial intelligence capabilities.

Social networks such as Facebook allow us to interact virtually in ways that were not possible before. If someone were to describe to you ten years ago that in the recent future you’d be able to hug virtually, throw a sheep at someone virtually, even buy and sell your friends virtually, you’d say he was crazy. With all this interaction and the growing number of online friendships that we build, how does one give each of his friends the attention they deserve? How does one deal with this overwhelming amount of of personal, relevant information that requires his attention?

Just like the telephone, cellular phone, and internet are allowing us all today to do more and meet less, our gradual transformation into digital beings will soon allow us to do more and meet more. Our virtual reality creates more opportunities for us online as well as offline.  How many social events have you gone to thanks to Facebook? How many new people have you met with in real life due to Facebook? Those of us who have been internet freaks for a long time, secluded in our homes from the offline world,  have come out of our shells due to Facebook.

Barak writes that Facebook which we now use mostly to entertain ourselves with lots of silly applications and connect with our friends, is gradually turning into the first human attempt to launch a Human Digital Operating System. As each of us creates a profile, adds applications, schedules events online, etc. he creates the digital self. Whether we realize it or not, we are all participants in this human experiment. We are creating and enhancing the prototype of our own operating system.

Our operating system is working all the time without us even noticing and is digitally mapping our way of thinking, our habits, and our interests. Gradually activities and experiences that were only available to us offline are entering our digital world. One day we will all wake up and see that most of our daily activities happen online. On this day we will know that we have become digital beings. Think about how privileged we are to live in this era where we are able to view this evolution from DOS to HOS, from cold windows to warm, emotional, social platforms.

It is certain that Facebook will invest enormous efforts in improving navigation capabilities between the different applications and information sources it offers as well as the communication and semantic capabilities between them.  These capabilities will improve over time and develop into the first platform which will allow me to create the Digital Me.

Just like in Lego, we will build the digital us out of hundreds of “small applications” which consist of our way of life. As we build the digital us through what seem to be “innocent” actions and games, hidden sophisticated algorithms of artificial intelligence will gradually learn who we are, as well as possible semantics with other applications, and will allow these applications to communicate with each other, draw conclusions, and handle tasks for us automatically. 

The management of my life through my digital world in combination with the collective intelligence of Web 2.0 and artificial intelligence create exciting possibilities for the future. The combination of all these capabilites will allow us to  break through the information barriers and limitations we have today and allow us to better process the overwhelming amount of information we are exposed to. In the future we will be able to handle a few tasks at once without damaging the quality of our actions and without wasting precious time. We will then find it very hard to perform in a world without digital technology. Yet more than this, in the basis of our thoughts there will be virtual terms and underlying digital metaphors, and perhaps we will even feel in a technological format. To many of us this future world may seem quite scary, however ironically, as we become more digital, we will also become more social and emotional with a larger number of people. 

Thanks to Jeff Swearengin for the pic.

Do you have a small startup with insufficient funds for a QA department? Or perhaps you work in a large hi tech company with an under-utilized QA staff when waiting for versions to test or over-extended when a new version comes? A new service called uTest can provide you with a solution.

uTest introduces the first global marketplace for software application testing. uTest enables companies in need of software QA testing to access professional testers on-demand whenever/wherever they need them. The platform is all Web-based, therefore it is accessible anywhere, anytime from any computer screen by customers and testers alike.

Other advantages uTest offers to companies include:

1) Pay Per Bug model - companies only pay for actual bugs found by the uTest testers. This helps companies greatly reduce their QA costs.

2) Releasing a quality product from the start - companies don’t get a second chance in releasing products to market. Poor releases (as we saw with Vista) often result in a large percentage of defects being found by users first. This in turn leads to poor user satisfaction and a ”buggy” reputation which may never be repaired.

3) Ability to organize all your QA activity with uTest’s unique management tools - companies are able to manage QA cycles, projects, and processes on the platform with a very clean, easy to use interface. uTest is able to easily integrate into all major bug tracking systems for internal bug track management.

Application vendors can load or link their applications to the uTest testing platform, define target testers profile, and get information quickly regarding bugs and usability from the types of testers they have specifically chosen. The uTest system can also automatically alert duplicate bugs with its own proprietary (and patentable) technology.

uTest essentially provides companies with access to a lower cost workforce via a platform that enables management of full QA cycles without them having to commit to long-term contracts.

In conclusion, uTest helps companies reduce time to market, release higher quality products, receive real market feedback and usability reports, eliminate under-utilized testers, handle peak QA periods effectively, and increase user satisfaction.

uTest has recently started recruiting testers and is expected to launch in February 2008. For testers this is a professional opportunity to gain great and diverse professional experience, become part of a groundbreaking social network of people in their field, and earn a significant income based on their performance. The more actual bugs they find, the more they earn and the higher they are ranked.

Roy Solomon and Doron Reuveni, the founders of uTest, tell me that a few very exciting companies have already signed on with them, including GroupGain, a new marketplace that gives you the ability to join together with other shoppers to buy a product at the lowest price possible through bulk buying.

I believe that uTest answers a real need in the market and will better enable technology companies, however large or small, to come out with improved products for us, the users. 

I have recently added the “Friends For Sale” application on Facebook and I’m lovin’ it. At first I noticed a lot of bugs. According to the developers this was due to an overload on their servers. Now the application seems to be working smoothly.

“Friends For Sale” allows you to buy and sell your friends. Once you’ve bought someone he becomes your pet and you can make him send gifts, poke, dropkick or karate-chop your other friends. You can also give your pet a nickname, for example, Michael Arrington was purchased and nicknamed “Crunched”. Currently Mike is the most expensive pet on my friends list. You can buy him for a meager sum of $45,605.

Once you add the application, you are valued at $100. Every time someone buys you, your value increases. You start off with $2000 in the bank and can use this money to start buying.  You earn $250 every 4 hours for logging in. You also earn a profit every time somebody buys a friend away from you or when somebody buys you. You make $150 for every friend you invite. If you get tired of a certain pet, you can also refund him.

Once you start using the app, you will see that there are gruesome wars going on over friends that people try to steal away from you. A feature I would add is allowing you to decide on the price you want to pay for someone so as to strategically disable others (who don’t have that amount of cash) from stealing your pet. Some extra things I would add:

1) Show attributes of pet on his page so as to let you know exactly what kind of pet you are getting

2) Allow people to request to be bought by specific friends

Yes it’s silly. Yes it’s ridiculous. Yet it’s still entertaining as hell. So go get some of your own pets and be warned: Do not touch any of mine!

Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group, had recently written a guest post on TechCrunch regarding the strategies his company uses to promote his clients’ videos online. He writes:

“Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine.”

Dan argues that content is not king and you can get at least 100,000 views even if your video doesn’t have killer content, given that you use the following techniques:

• Make it short: 15-30 seconds is ideal; break down long stories into bite-sized clips
• Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others. Ex: Dramatic Hamster
• Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia
• Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: UFO Haiti
• Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!” Ex: Stolen Nascar
• Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video. Ex: Yoga 4 Dudes

Then Dan continues to go into the specific marketing strategies that his company uses in order to make these videos attract at least 100,000 views.

He writes:

“The core concept of video marketing on YouTube is to harness the power of the site’s traffic. Here’s the idea: something like 80 million videos are watched each day on YouTube, and a significant number of those views come from people clicking the “Videos” tab at the top. The goal is to get a video on that Videos page, which lists the Daily Most Viewed videos.“

How do they do that?

• Blogs: They approach bloggers who write about relevant topics and actually pay them to post their embedded videos.
• Forums: They start new threads and embed their videos. Sometimes, they even kickstart conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different (fake) users.
• MySpace: They embed the videos in the comments section of MySpace users’ pages. 
• Facebook: They build a large friends base on Facebook and then share the video with their entire friends list. Other times they create an event that announces the video launch and invite friends to watch it by writing a note and tagging them. They also post the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
• Email lists: They send the video to an email list of users.
• Friends: They make sure everyone they know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.

Dan adds: “Each video has a shelf life of 48 hours before it’s moved from the Daily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed list, so it’s important that this happens quickly.”

Here are some more techniques Dan’s company uses:

1) Title Optimization - they use catchy and misleading titles for the first few days, then later switch to something more relevant to the brand. Examples of phrases used: “exclusive,” “behind the scenes,” and “leaked video.”

2) Thumbnail Optimization - attractive video thumbnails, Dan says, are what will get users to click on your video as opposed to the rest of the videos on the Most Viewed page. Edit the video and make sure that the middle frame is interesting. The middle frame is important because YouTube provides three choices for a video’s thumbnail, one of which is grabbed from the exact middle of the video. The thumbnail should also be clear and should preferably have a face or person in it.

3) Commenting - different people in Dan’s office log in to their YouTube accounts and post heated comments back and forth in the comments section under the video so as to create a controversy and get attention. They also delete negative comments about the video or brand. Dan writes: “We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.”

4) Releasing Videos Simultaneously - if they have multiple videos, they post them all at the same time. The logic behind this is that if someone watches the first video and is intrigued then he would want to watch more later, so why make him wait?

Once the first video is done, they delete their second video and then re-upload it. This gives them another 48-hours to push it to the Most Viewed page. They repeat this with all the next videos.

5) Strategic Tagging - Dan’s company discovered that instead of using tags to optimize the video for searches on YouTube, one can use tags to control the videos that show up in the Related Videos box. They choose three or four unique tags (tags that are not used by any other YouTube videos) and use only these tags for all of the videos they post. This allows them to have full control over the videos that show up as “Related Videos.”

When views decrease, they start adding some more generic tags that will help people find the video when searching on YouTube and Google.

In conclusion Dan writes:

“The Wild West days of Lonely Girl and Ask A Ninja are over. You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever. These days, achieving true virality takes serious creativity, some luck, and a lot of hard work. So, my advice: fire your PR firm and do it yourself.”

Well, it wasn’t surprising to see that Dan got a serious beating in the comments section of this post. Michael Arrington himself commented: “I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted by this.” And later…”I think it would have been better to have published this anonymously, and certainly without the links to Dan’s business.”

Another reader commented:

“Misleading titles, creating fake user accounts and talking to themselves, deleting comments they don’t like, paying bloggers to post videos … what a great company that would be to work for, I can’t imagine why anyone (knowingly) would use them, with all of the “fake” views the videos get because of them.”

Dan comments back:

“What we do is grease the viral wheels. If that means commenting back and forth between fake users, who cares? It’s all about entertainment - we’re just making the whole experience entertaining, not just the video itself.”

To which another person replies:

“Of course, Dan. Who would care about a little fraud in pursuit of a buck? I mean, as long as it moves the goods, there’s nothing wrong with fooling the populace.

Idiot. The reason your trickery is necessary that your venal predecessors in advertising have burned their credibility in other media already. And now here you are, a leech on a new medium, feeding off the trust that other people have built up. Pathetic.

I can’t help but note you don’t provide a single verifiable fact about your business above. The simple assumption is that you lie to your clients just as glibly as you lie to the general public. If fake videos and fake comments, why not fake views, fake click-throughs, and fake campaign success? I’m sure it pays just as well.”

For me, it was quite interesting to read this post, entertaining to read the comments, and hilarious to read Dan’s follow up post of apology and defensiveness. Especially since all of this seemed quite coincidentally to cause quite a controversy.

In any case, here are my thoughts on this post:

Some of these tactics such as creating an attractive thumbnail and title optimization make sense. However, why mislead people? Why not give the video a relevant and catchy title so that if someone is looking for a video of this kind or from this brand, he will find it?

Using a company like Dan’s to spam random people to death on various social networks with videos they don’t want to watch, about topics they’re not interested in, with misleading titles, and fake commenting, can only damage your brand, not help it. If I as a user, receive an irritating spam video from a certain company, I would only think negatively of it. These sorts of strategies abuse the democracy of Web 2.0 where people come to view and rank content that is relevant to them. These schemes create false impressions of high ratings and manipulate the democratic ranking system on which Web 2.0 is based. 

In my opinion, Content IS king. Relevant content is even more king.  - if you produce an entertaining, creative, clever video and share it with people who actually find an interest in the relevant topic or brand, then you win. Why push people to watch content that doesn’t interest them? What is the point of delivering your content to an audience that will only get irritated? 

I’ve said it over and over again, when you market your brand on social networks, you must make sure that you’re delivering the right content to the right people. Find the people who might be interested in your product within your social network. Converse with them. Find out what their needs are. Make sure that the content interests them. Don’t just spam people. Social networks are all about your honest interaction with others. Don’t create fake profiles. Don’t create fake commenting. Be yourself. You should get to know your community and become a truthful and active participant in it. Marketing on social platforms if done in an open, honest, and intelligent manner can be very effective indeed. However companies like The Comotion Group only hurt the reputation of other marketers who try to sincerely interest users in products that match their needs and do not try to mislead them into clicking on content based on false declarations.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for the picture.

The Web 2.0 “bubble” had it coming…hilarious Silicon Valley music video by the Richter Scales.

Technorati tags: web 2.0, web 2.0 bubble, song, silicon valley, music video, richter scales

The next Oliver Stone movie?