The Media Supermarket

After getting my hands over my new computer, I was engaged in my typical childish excitement, that I always had whenever I got something new in my life. I would wake up feeling that there is a certain addition to my life, and that I’m surprisingly just a bit happier that day. What makes this more interesting, are the five minutes of meaningless happiness that I feel trying to remember why I’m happy in the first place. And I become happier when I remember what that “something” is.
So I started wondering how far this computer can take me, and how far I can take it. Can it give my life a new boost, in terms of productivity and speed? How different would my life be after I start using it?
And so I started thinking about this new gift. Some other questions popped up in my mind also; do the products that I work on provoke similar questions in the minds of end users? Scary! Do they anticipate the changes that we make as intensely and as happily as I was anticipating the features of my new computer? Scarier!
Other scary questions also started crawling into my mind, “Do people who work with me have these anticipations about working with me?” Very scary! “Do they think that working with me is an “addition” to their work and life?”
It’s can really get fun to ask yourself these questions and move away from the stupid daily mundane questions and wonderings. Just for a change. It’s also a healthy approach. Try it!

Just while I thought that The Long Tail would kill all forms of traditional media, Spotrunner has found ways of utilizing The Long Tail to resurrect this (dying?) medium.
It’s quite difficult to imagine how a company can provide a link between a huge number of medium to small (and they have big) advertisers, with highly localized TV networks and stations. But this is exactly what they are doing.
First, the cost of producing the TV ad (which is usually outrageously high) is considerably reduced by providing generic customizable templates. These are premaid ads for certain industries. If you, as an advertiser, see that they represent your business and are suitable for your campaign, they can customize the ad for you. This is done through adding a new voice-over, and inserting your contact information. There is also the option of adding certain images if needed. Advertiser would not want their ads to be shown by other advertisers, you may think. This is true, but when it is a localized ad, there is no problem in showing in another part of the country where audiences don’t watch the same networks.
Spotrunner can get you lower prices, because they usually go for the spots that are not sold, where the TV network can sell them at a low prices, sometimes as low as $18.
Network effects are the only that will improve this service. If a large-enough number of people start using it, and enriching the history of usage, this system should be great. A great suggestion by Mashable was to open up the video library for video producers, so they can participate with their video commercials. They will want to promote their work, and of course get paid for it, and Spotrunner will have free additions to its vast library.
If this is implemented well, it will open up new huge markets not only for amateurs with a good taste, but for professional film / commercial makers as well. The ultimate perfect state would be to become a platform for producers and consumers of TV ads where they can both login in a self service manner, and manage their work from. This would be wonderful to watch, and it would be a true Web 2.0 application, although most of it is not for the web, it will be a great model that uses web 2.0 by linking online and offline media together.
Spotrunner managed to attract some serious investors, and therefore a lot of media coverage (WPP and CBS among others). They also announced in October 2006 that they managed to attract $40 Million in investment. Looks really cool.

Establishing your website, and securing an excellent web presence, is not only becoming a must, it’s becoming really easy, and dirt cheap. The speed at which prices are going down, while features are increasing makes me really wonder how these companies make any money. Although it is becoming a highly sophisticated industry, I believe we should all have the basic knowledge and actually create our site(s) as an extension of our work/personality.
While researching for the best webhosting companies available, I have found one that offers great services and options at very low prices, and flexibility. Bluehost is one of the top rated hosting service providers, and they have great features that can really help one grow their business online, and probably take that hobby one or two steps further. Here are the main features:

Unlimited domains in one account: Many hosting companies will provide you with a certain number of domain names per account. Some of them even limit you to only one. There is no meaning having so much storage space if you have only three sites. Moreover, many companies charge you a setup fee for activating your sites. With Bluehost, you have as many sites as you want.
The value in this feature is that it gives you the freedom to be experimentatl in your approach to building your sites, if it only costs you $10 to start a new site, why not try out that idea you had in your mind? You can also manage these sites through one login.
This can be taken one step further, and you can start selling your services to manage other sites.

Live chat: I’ve tried their live chat system, and it’s good to be able to ask a question on the go, and have your immediate answer.

Huge data transfer: 3,000 GB of data transfer, or bandwidth, is really a huge amount. Judging by the fact that you can use third parties to host your images and videos, like Youtube and Flickr, you will practically not reach that limit, unless you have a very high-traffic portal.

A lot of storage space: 300 GB of storage is quite impressive. Very few websites use that much of disk space on their servers.

Awards: If you want to check out their quality, you can see their awards page. By the way, they claim to have around 285,000 domains hosted. I guess these customers are happy with the service.

$50 Yahoo! and $25 Google advertising credits: These are given for new accounts. If you use this advertising to get some traffic to your site, you can easily get back your investment if you have products to sell, or affiliate programs on your site.

Pricing: $6.95 per month for 24 month accounts and $7.95 per month for 12 month accounts. You don’t pay anything other than the domain name price which is $10 annually. As I mentioned many companies charge around $25 - 30 just for setup.

Free privacy: Again this is a feature offered for free. This is the option of keeping your information private, and not having to deal with spammers.
Try them.

Getting to know the Web in its second version was quite interesting, to say the least. Addictive, to be more exact. The intellectual challenge that I need to have on an ongoing basis is one thing. Being a long tail person myself also magnified the effect, since Web 2.0 has more space than any person can imagine, and there is something for everyone in it.
This report includes a heavy explanation and analysis about what makes a great Web 2.0 application / website, and what are the main practices these organizations are applying. The report is prepared by O’Reilly Media, the inventors of the word “Web 2.0″, and it summarizes the findings of the conference held at the end of 2006 regarding this new phenomenon.
Watch out, this is only for the heavy readers, I shared it with some colleagues of mine (Internet professionals) and they struggled with the material in it.
Full of structured examples and live citations it can actually be so much fun to go through all the examples in light of the principles discussed and thinking about how to apply them.
It’s an absolute must-read for the dedicated Web professional trying to make sense of all the chaos and turmoil going on.
A lot of presentations and interviews are available here for that conference and other conferences by O’Reilly. Highly recommended.

I just finalized a very good deal with the owners of Talasim. This is a site that is really cool and hilarious. It collects, or rather allows users to submit all the funny ads and ridiculous communications that we see in our daily lives.
They will be having a full channel devoted to live feeds from their site to be added to the Shabablik Toolbar. At the same time a download link for the toolbar will be added on the Talasim site.
Shabablik will benefit from gaining new users and becoming more interesting through more interesting content. At the same time, Talasim will get more users, and will be “one click away” from their current users. They will have their logo on the browser screens of users all the time while they surf the Web. This will hopefully improve traffic for them.
The main strategy for this toolbar, is to gain the support of a few really interesting communities by having them featured as the main content contributors. Each channel will be focusing on their own specialty, and Shabablik will be an aggregator and anchor to get more users, and communities interconnected.

I just got back from Dubai after attending a training course on Mediadisk. This is the world’s leading media database, and includes around 800,000 contacts from 200,000 media outlets. The main advantage for this database is appreciated by anyone working on media communications on a daily basis.
Building and filtering lists according to many different criteria, grouping the data, and distributing emails and press releases is much easier with this system. I also saw how much hard work it takes for the researchers to gather and constantly update the regional data, which is in itself a feature of the product.
Mediadisk has a Middle East & North Africa module available, and anyone interested can book a free demo, to get to know the system. More details are available on the Products page of Mediadisk.