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.

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?

Here is a a new Public Service Announcement regarding the Medical Side Effects of Social Networking Addiction.

Created by: Jeffrey Sass 

Starring: Jeff Pulver, Chris Brogan, Seth Harwood, Ed Roberts, Laura “Pistachio” Fitton

I have written in the past about SuTree.com, a site which aggregates instructional “how to” videos. I really liked the concept of SuTree from the time it launched six months ago, as it offered users a one-stop-shop to find instructional videos on any topic of their choosing. SuTree aggregates videos from 5min, VideoJug, MetaCafe, and more. The only criticism I initially had regarding the site was its lack of community features. Users had no profile pages and could not connect with one another. Today SuTree has relaunched its site with all the needed community features and much much more.

Each member can now create his own profile detailing his interests (topics that he is interested in and wants to learn) with the use of tags. These tags can help other users find friends on the site based on common interests, talk to them, and ask them questions by leaving a message on their blackboard. Members can also list contact details, videos they liked, courses they joined, list of their friends on the site, and more.

Sutree has also add a “Courses” feature. A course on SuTree is a set of specific instructional videos teaching a certain topic. Every registered user can create a course. The creator of the course can decide the order of the videos, add his own personal comments and guidelines to each video, and manage a bulletin board for all the members of the course. This feature is intended for people who consider themselves experts in a certain field and who can’t or haven’t filmed videos of their own. For example, a mathematics teacher can create a course under the heading “preparation for the 10th grade” and integrate into it as many video segments as he likes from different sources. He can also add his own guidelines and comments to each segment and send it to all his students.

SuTree has also increased the number of video segments on the site by a 100% since it first launched. Today there are over 10,000 video segments on SuTree from 248 different sites. Yossi Maaravi, the CEO of SuTree, tells me: “SuTree’s vision is that any instructional video that is available online will be indexed in SuTree.” 

Every section on the site (videos, courses and people) now has tags. These tags help the users search and navigate the site between the different sections. SuTree has now improved its internal search mechanism and while navigating and searching the site, the user receives relevant results on any topic in regards to video segments, courses, and people. If you use FireFox or Internet Explorer 7, you can also add the SuTree search box to your browser.

In regards to the upload of content to the site, in addition to the upload of content from users and the SuTree team, the site currently supports automatic indexing of video segments from partner sites such as about.com, foodwishes.com, 5min.com (as mentioned before), viewdo.com and many more. Automatic indexing requires SuTree’s approval and is implemented using RSS feeds of partnering sites.

SuTree is also offering two great new widgets. Site owners or bloggers can now embed the widgets which enable their readers to easily search for instructional videos on SuTree directly from their site. You can check out the widget I added on my sidebar.

In addition, every visitor on SuTree can now subscribe to receive an RSS feed of all the latest videos posted on the site, videos relating to a specific category, or videos by tag.

A cool new social feature which SuTree added called ”Heroes”, allows registered users to receive points for various activities they do on the site. Users can then use these points to add icons of different famous figures that are recognized for their wisdom and unique way of thinking to their personal page. The different figures are given based on the number of points a user has. Users can also give each other icons as a token of appreciation. In the near future, leading users will be invited to join SuTree’s community as moderators.

Another great feature added is called “Wrap & Send”. This new feature allows any registered user to “wrap” a few of SuTree’s videos together and send them to his friends, family, or students as a package. For example, if your parents are going on a trip to India or if you’ve got a friend who you’re trying to help quit smoking, you can create a helpful video package for them.

SuTree has also added educational games to its site. There are tons of games on the Web which help develop your thought process and cognitive skills. SuTree’s team has gathered a bunch of such games that are suited for kids and adults alike and these can be found under the category: “Brain Games”.

Apart from all this, the SuTree site has also had a nice facelift. The site’s original design was very plain and simple. In the new version of the site, you’ll see a new “spiced up” version.  SuTree has also added its own blog written by Susu the bird who you’ll see throughout the site.

It is always nice to see a startup that actually listens to its users’ feedback and suggestions. Yossi tells me: “Our vision is that SuTree will become a live and active knowledge community where every person who wants to learn something can start his/her way on the Web.”  I definitely think that with all the added features, sense of community, and thousands of videos to choose from, SuTree is a great place to start learning everything you want to know.

Congrats to my friends over at Yedda who have just announced their acquisition by AOL. I had the pleasure of working with this amazing team in its very early stages back in 2006 and I must tell you that it is seldom you meet such a strong team of players.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Yedda is a question & answer service which allows users to specify their tags of interest and only receive content based on this information. Therefore users are not bothered with questions about topics that don’t interest them. Each time that I posted a question on Yedda, I received great, relevant answers from other users. I can see why AOL would be so interested in purchasing this service. Especially given the fact that Yedda has partnered with other services such as ePals, FileRatings, and ArticlesBase, a move that has brought much traffic to the site. Yedda has also integrated its service with Twitter (see here) and Facebook.

Terms of the deal between Yedda and AOL have not been disclosed yet. Yedda says the current plan is to keep the company as an independent business operating from its current location in Tel Aviv with the current team. It will gradually integrate it into the AOL properties.

Yaniv, Avichay, Eran, Daniel, Osher, congrats to you all! You deserve it!

Google introduces its OpenSocial platform:

MySpace, Six Apart, Friendster, Hi5, Bebo, Hyves, Imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, Orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce,  Tianji, Viadeo, and Xing have already confirmed that they are joining Google’s OpenSocial initiative. Question now remains whether Facebook will be forced to join OpenSocial as well.

Facebook spokesperson Brandee Barker said yesterday that “Despite reports, Facebook has still not been briefed on OpenSocial”. When asked whether Facebook would be interested in joining forces with Google, Mrs. Barker’s reply was: ““When we have had a chance to understand the technology, then Facebook will evaluate participation relative to the benefits to its 50 million users and 100,000 platform developers.”

Even though Mike Arrington was fast to write: “Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle.” Erick Schonfeld adds in a later post on TechCrunch:

“Not so fast, Mike. The anti-Facebook coalition piling onto Google’s OpenSocial platform does not constitute checkmate for Google just quite yet. These are developer announcements. No actual consumers have changed their social networking habits because of OpenSocial. Facebook still has all the momentum with consumers (and, thus, with the developers who want to reach them). It can afford to wait and see how this whole OpenSocial thing plays out.”

In any case, Facebook cannot wait long before deciding its move. From my understanding, apps will be easier to develop for OpenSocial. With OpenSocial, for example, full applications can run on members’ profile pages, whereas on Facebook there are substantial restrictions on what developers can do on those profile pages. Therefore developers may end up preferring OpenSocial over Facebook.

Marc Andreesen, Founder of Ning, comments:

“By making this exact same kind of opportunity available to any other social network or container and every app developer and site on the web, in an open and compatible way — will prevent Facebook from having any kind of long-term proprietary developer lock-in. Developers will easily write to both Facebook and OpenSocial, and have every reason to do so — in fact, 100+ million reasons to do so.”

Since it is known that Facebook is preparing to take on Google with its own social ad network soon, if Facebook joins OpenSocial, and makes it simple for its developers to port their applications elsewhere and power those applications with Facebook ads, then it could really reign victorious.

It will be interesting to see what Facebook’s move will be. What do you think? Will Facebook be forced to join OpenSocial? And should it join OpenSocial?

I liked Jerome’s comment on TechCrunch: “The entire social networking world has announced that they are ganging up to take on Facebook, and Google is their Quarterback in the big game.” Let the game begin!

Most of you have probably heard of Shvoong. Shvoong.com is a world-wide center for abstracts, summaries, reviews, and short essays on a wide variety of topics in 34 different languages. The goal of Shvoong is to serve as a knowledge tool and summarize all that has been written in the areas of literature, scientific research, and popular culture throughout time. All the content is written by users who also earn royalties for their work.

Now Shvoong has come out with a new product - Shvoong Homework. Shvoong Homework lets students write and keep track of their class notes and homework online. They can even share it with classmates and friends. Shvoong Homework is designed to assist students of all ages manage and organize their homework. Instead of using disorganized notebooks, students can use Shvoong Homework to type-up their school work, keep it organized, and then share it with individual or groups of classmates, the entire class, students from other schools, or no one at all.

Some of Shvoong Homework’s key features include:

My Timetable -allows students create a Timetable for their personal class schedules using an intuitive wizard. Students can indicate specific lessons, add exam schedules and attach a teacher’s name.

Each Timetable is linked to Notebooks and allows Students to easily navigate between their Timetable and any particular Notebook they created.

Students can even receive email alerts for upcoming assignments and exams.

My Notebook - lets students write-up their class notes, homework, summaries, and exam preparations. The number of Notebooks students can create and the amount of content in each Notebook is unlimited.

My Notebook features include:

· A text standard editor embedded in the Shvoong Homework interface

· Uploading of Word or TXT documents.

· Sharing functionality: My Friends, My Class, Everyone, Private. Students are alerted whenever any of their classmates/friends finish a homework assignment that is shared.

Shvoong Homework supports 30 languages. These include languages such as Hebrew, Hindi, Portuguese, Polish, Arabic, and Farsi.

Shvoong Homework is currently holding its first essay writing competition for American high school students in grades 9-12. Students need to write an essay on the topic: “If you were elected President of the United States, which issue would you work on first?” Other students will vote on their favorite essay entries and determine the winner. Ten semi-finalists will be chosen first by the public based on entry ratings and popularity (number of visits). The final three finalists will be chosen by an independent panel of judges, appointed by Shvoong Homework and judged based on creativity, appropriateness for the theme and overall presentation.  Finalists will then be posted on the Contest webpage where visitors may vote for the winners. Cash and other prizes will be awarded to first, second, and third place winners.

Shvoong created this product because it noticed that student-oriented Websites were overlooking many of the “2.0 advancements” that have become so prevalent across social Websites. Eyal Rivlin, the CEO of Shvoong explains: “We spoke to teachers who were frustrated with their students’ lack of dedication to homework. We then spoke to the kids and asked them what would make doing homework more fun. We then took all their feedbacks and created Shvoong Homework… With so many distractions it’s no wonder kids don’t do as much homework as they should. We decided to revolutionize homework and make it fun. The result is Shvoong Homework.”

It is a known fact that educational practices of today need to be revolutionized in order to keep up with the fast changing technological and social evolution we are facing. In today’s age when students are spending a great deal of their time on the net and specifically on social networking sites, Shvoong Homework can definitely serve as a friendlier and more enjoyable platform for students to do their homework.

Below you’ll find Shvoong Homework’s introduction video: