Auto Show Tweetup/Meetup January 23rd

January 4, 2009 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

With a ton of people coming to Detroit for the NAIAS auto show, I thought it in order to have a Tweetup, especially since we’re actually downtown and just a couple people mover stops or blocks from Cobo Hall.  Perfect for all of you folks in town who might not have rented a car, or those who want to drop in between festivities.

View From The OfficeSo here’s the deal – Friday, January 23rd, starting at 6ish, come on down (or over).  Food, Wii, etc. as well as live-streaming from our podcast studio.  Not sure what we’ll create, but we’ll create something together :-)

So join us in our HQ located in a 1905 Beaux Arts beauty of a building, steps from the People Mover and right next to Compuware, Greektown and the Stadiums.

Update: Go ahead and join the event on Facebook!

Our location is on the contact page – but as we get closer, I’ll be posting easy parking directions, as well as routes from the major hotels downtown.

Filed Under: Business, Fun, User Generated Content Tagged With: detroit auto show, naias, tweetup

Web Success: It’s not the features, it’s the community

December 28, 2007 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

Thought I should something that we’ve known for a bit, but Leo Laporte’s “Tech Guy” Radio Show/Podcast mentioned and so it brought it to the forefront of my mind.

Leo was talking about his experience at Jaiku – he left Twitter for a combination of feature and legal reasons (namely, the name of “Twitter” being very close to his netcast network, “TWiT.”) And he found, that although Jaiku has all kinds of functionality, no one was there and it wasn’t as useful or fun.

Although Twitter is much more basic and has way fewer features, it is more important and valuable because it has the weight of the community – it’s where everyone is at. This also applies to services like SmugMug which has many more features than Flickr.

What’s the lesson? Find that thing that builds a community, and stick with it. The more mainstream you want something to be, the easier it needs to be to use. Build a group of users and support them and implement their feedback. Anyone can use Twitter – the amalgam of alphabet letters of RSS and all the like don’t come into play like other presences.

Technorati Tags:
, , , , ,

Filed Under: User Generated Content

Lessons to be learned from over-agressive advertising

December 3, 2007 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

There is a very important lesson to be learned in the Facebook debacle.

Opt-in, not opt-out.

The AP put it perfectly: “The backlash against Beacon illustrated the delicate balancing act that Facebook must negotiate as the company tries to cash in on its popularity without alienating the users fueling its success.”

As much as I want to rail against the stupidity of whomever came up with the idea of “opt-out” instead of “opt-in” for this program, many others have. There’s no more to give there. The horse is dead.

But I will talk about the fact that we’re going to see more and more experiments as these social networking and Web 2.0 companies keep trying to make money in different ways, leveraging their most valuable asset – the data that they have of users and their preferences.

The amount of data people are strewing all over the internet about themselves is staggering – and also the surprise when a prospective employer looks you up and finds what they think is a racy MySpace page.

This data can be pulled together in various ways to hyper-target advertising, making it very valuable.

It will be interesting what the next experiment is. I have the feeling we’re going to have a rough year as far as privacy as these highly-valued companies try to justify those valuations with actual revenue, using the data that users have handed over to them.

If a company can walk that line of privacy vs. revenue, then it will be very, very successful.

Maybe even offer premium accounts that share no data with advertisers, so the real value proposition is up front. Free, but your data is shared; or paid, and the data stays locked up.

Technorati Tags:
, , , ,

Filed Under: Advertising, User Generated Content, Web Sites

A peek into the pitfalls of UGC (User Generated Content)

November 19, 2007 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

This blog post from NIN.com – Nine Inch Nails – highlights a very, very interesting situation online.

The media titans, while fighting each other, have created a bit of an uncertain environment.  So many sites rely on UGC – but the blog post correctly highlights that there are tons of sites that could be affected adversely if it’s shown there is no safe harbor with uploaded content that may or may not be copyrighted.

Ars Technica had a great excerpt that was mentioned in the NIN piece:

The DMCA’s Safe Harbor provisions aren’t just important to video sharing sites; they’re important to almost every sector of Internet-based business.

“Nearly every major Internet company depends on the very same legal foundation that YouTube is built on,” said von Lohmann. “A legal defeat for YouTube could result in fundamental changes to its business, potentially even making it commercially impossible to embrace user-generated content without first ‘clearing’ every video. In other words, a decisive victory for Viacom could potentially turn the Internet into TV, a place where nothing gets on the air until a cadre of lawyers signs off,” he said. “More importantly, a victory for Viacom could potentially have enormous implications for Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, MySpace, and many other Internet companies, because they all rely on the same DMCA Safe Harbors to protect many facets of their businesses, as well. The stakes are high all around.”

Filed Under: User Generated Content, Web Sites