Tag Archives: YouTube

The Ninth Annual Homestead Talent Show

19 Thursday Jul 2007

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It’s coming tonight!  I can’t wait!

Homestead has been buzzing (OK, maybe I’m exaggerating) about the Homestead Talent Show the past few weeks. I’ve gone around and harrassed a lot of people into doing something, anything silly on stage.  And tonight, the world will finally see that glorious, mind-boggling talents of otherwise humble Homestead employees.

It’s really open to anyone (all 1 of you who might read this blog but don’t already work at Homestead), so come on by:

Cubberley Community Theatre
4000 Middlefield Road
Palo Alto, CA 94303
7:00 pm

Don’t be late…

Videos will be posted to YouTube sometime in the next few days.

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Web 2.0 Expo: Measuring the Participatory Web

18 Wednesday Apr 2007

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I love data.  Data rocks and solves a lot of problems.  It removes (mostly) foundationless opinion, emotion, and spin from arguments.  And that’s why Tuesday’s keynote about measuring the participatory web has been the best thing of the conference so far.  It was chock full of fantastic data from Bill Tancer at Hitwise  and Dave Sifry from Technorati.

Some highlights (with my comments):

  • In the last year, visits to participatory web properties (like YouTube, MySpace, etc) went from 2% to 12% of all web visits.
  • Visits to Wikipedia outnumber visits to the leading “normal” online encyclopedia Encarta 3400 to 1.
  • Participatory photo sites (like flickr, photobucket) make up 56% of all photo site traffic; photobucket makes up 40% (but I assume that’s before MySpace cut them off)
  • Obviously, not all visits to participatory websites are actually participating, but the numbers are smaller than and varies more than you would think.
    • YouTube: 0.16% of visits upload a video (much lower than I would have guessed).
    • Flickr: 0.2% of visits upload an image.
    • Wikipedia: 4.59% of visits are edits (much higher than I would have guessed).
    • What is the percentage of commenters on YouTube?  Much higher, I would think, but still…
  • Editors at Wikipedia skew disproportionately with age, and propensity to edit grows strictly with age. I.e., 55+ year olds are much more likely to edit than 18-24 year olds.
  • YouTube is slightly different: middle age users have the highest tendency to post (35-54 year olds).
  • Editing/posting also skews toward males: Wikipedia 60%, YouTube 76%. Visits are split very close to 50/50 on gender lines.

Now here’s the most interesting part of the presentation. Some company (Claritas, as it turns out) has separate the people on the web into a bunch of different demographic categories.  Hitwise has tracked people in these categories and there are three that are predictors of the next big thing; i.e., the big properties of the new web (like YouTube) were visited by these three groups before they made it big.   The groups are called:

  • Money and Brains
  • Young Digerati
  • Bohemian Mix

And who are they visiting now; who are the “next big thing”s?  In order:

  • Yelp
  • StumbleUpon (just bought by eBay and targeted by Google)
  • Veoh
  • WeeWorld (disproportionately “Money and Brains” because they tend to have kids)
  • Imeem
  • Piczo

Fascinating stuff.

Dave Sifry of Technorati also showed some interesting stats on the state of blogs out there.  Most of the stuff was in this blog post.

The most interesting thing is that Japanese is now the most popular language for new blog posts, accounting for 37% of blog posts that Technorati tracks.  That is amazing in my English-centric world view, especially when you consider the number of people in the world who speak English vs. the number of people who speak Japanese.

He also gave hope to us “long tail” bloggers who get no traffic. 88% of the top 100 blogs as tracked by Technorati are different than they were last year, so the top blogs are changing all the time.  Just keep at it…

BitTorrent trying to grow up

29 Wednesday Nov 2006

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Good post on TechCrunch about BitTorrent trying to grow up, and not just the really impressive distribution deals they’ve signed.

First, I’m impressed with the movie/TV industry that they’ve embraced the new distribution channels (like YouTube and BitTorrent) as well as they have, but then again, they didn’t have much choice.  It took a long time for the RIAA to get on it, and they’ve spent more time in court than selling music.  In fact, if it wasn’t for Apple, they wouldn’t be selling much music at all (and that was more of a success from the iPod, than from iTunes).  The movie people saw the writing on the wall and knew they’d rather join them than beat them.

Second, I for one am glad that BitTorrent is trying to stay legit. It may piss off their users, but I think they have to do something if they’re going to stay relevant.  Relevance still follows money more than anything else, and if BitTorrent can make actual $ off their network and reach, more power to them.  (But it’s gonna be a tough battle; it’s only interesting right now because of the free media you can find.)

Third, I just have to bitch about the people on TechCrunch who commented on the story who said that it’s a bad idea to take out Bram Cohen, or more generally the founders of a startup from management.  I don’t know Bram Cohen, I know nothing about him, but I can say that I’ve met many founders of startups and there is absolutely no correlation between the ability to create a protocol (like Cohen did) or write a piece of software or develop an algorithm, and the ability to run a business.  If anything, there is probably a negative correlation.  As a co-founder of a company myself, I know that success has much more to do with execution and management than it does with that one idea that one guy had that one time.

Long Live the Homestead Talent Show

22 Friday Sep 2006

Posted by in Homestead, Technology

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If I say so myself, the Homestead Talent Show is one of the coolest things that we do. I’ve asked employees before, and they say that the two coolest things we do is the talent show and the retreat (where we all the employees somewhere for a few days of fun and “work”).

The talent show is something completely different.  Every year, I go around harrassing people to do something, anything on stage in front of their co-workers. And the things people do are fantastically creative, even if they’re completely untalented.  It really shows the spirit of Homestead and how much enthusiasm we have for each other and for the fun that we have. There are companies that are much larger than ours, with probably more talented people, and I’m sure they couldn’t gather enough spirit to pull together a talent show like ours.

Even Justin, our CEO, performs every year. He ain’t no stiff suit.

This year, Roger spliced the video and dumped them up on YouTube. Check it out!

Decline of YouTube?

18 Monday Sep 2006

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Mark Cuban is predicting the decline of YouTube over on his blog. He claims that if you take away all the copyrighted videos, “Youtube turns into a hosting company with a limited video portal”.

Yeah, I go to YouTube primarily for copyrighted stuff. I missed Conan O’Brien’s opening to the Emmy’s and I went to YouTube to see it. My wife jumped on the wagon when she discovered all the classic Sesame Street skits that people have uploaded. Actual user created content probably only accounts for less than 10% of what we watch there.

But we all know that you can’t take all of that material away. It’s just not practical. So these snippets, trailers, etc. are there to stay and YouTube will attract users with them.

Even if you could identify them and take them down, who can say that the copyright owners would actually take them down? Right now, I don’t see NBC bothering to take down last night’s Leno monologue. The owners are already trying to use YouTube as a channel. Also, they’re already losing dedicated ad time to the Tivo/DVR movement, so they have to move to product placement.  And once they move to product placement, the more people who see it, the better.

And even if the copyright owners decide to take down the videos, YouTube is stil the default place where you put personal videos that you want to share with others, just like Flickr is the default place to put your photos. That’s not a bad place to be. Ad revenue definitely drops, but then so does bandwidth and hardware costs. I have no idea if it would be profitable…

Anyway, things will get really interesting when the bandwidth and hardware infrastructure gets fast and cheap enough that users can put up and watch full feature length movies on YouTube. Napster is different from YouTube now because full songs/albums, things that people have generally paid directly for, were easily accessible. Most people don’t pay for video content except for movies and DVDs. When those are available on demand for free, the game changes…