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Seesmic has been selected by AlwaysOn as one of 'The 2008 OnHollywood 100.' Marc B. Sternberg, President & COO of AlwaysOn, explains why. In this episode, we also talk about the "Killer Startup" competition, hosted by TechCrunch France, and reveal the winner.
The D Conference as described by their web page is "All Things Digital conference has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way." Here are my thoughts on the conference, and a peak at the schwag I acquired.
At the D Conference yesterday I asked Jason why he wanted to kill the DEMO conference with TechCrunch 50. Chris Shipley, host of DEMO, expressed earlier that she did not understand why Jason wanted DEMO to disappear and not just compete with DEMO. I hear Jason actually has a lot of respect for Chris too, he just wants to kill competition, "nothing personal". I am hoping to catch a video from Chris too with her answer. Here is Jason's video.
Dan Farber says CNET is like a great cafeteria while TechCrunch is the hip restaurant where everybody wants to be seen in. Dan also adds that generally the cafeteria survives and remains much bigger than the hip restaurants that disappear. Ah and also "CNET is the finest cafeteria for tech info on the planet with outlets everywhere...and you can order fine wines".
I really enjoyed spending an hour at D Conference listening to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. I mean really. Bill Gates was charming and completely unstressed, he seemed just totally happy. I really liked the personality of Steve Ballmer, very impressive charisma. Now if I had to write about this hour with them at D, and I do not have to but I still do it for fun, I would really not know what to write about. There was no news except that they call Vista a success when everybody in the corridors were talking about its failure, that is ok, it's corporate. The tiny Windows 7 demo they gave was just embedding some multitouch interface (and was not working very well) that I saw two years ago at TED and was not better than what you get in todays iphones. I was expecting a bit more than that, but still again, I spent a great time listening to them. You can find all the quotes I got on my twitter, here is my favorite one:
Kara Swisher asks "do you consider yourself a business man". Bill Gates answers "revenue minus cost equals profit, yes I am a businessman". Clean, short, nice.
The meat of the evening wasn't really there, as in most conferences, it was in the corridors and in the networking. 400 to 500 very influential people "everybody is here" as I heard many times from the mainstream media to Michael Arrington and from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg. Indeed. I had a great conversation with Mark about shoes. Yes, shoes. Mark traded his famous adidas sandals for very standard marron shoes (sorry no picture) and it looks like even Steve Ballmer told him about them. I think that Mark is damaging his personal branding by not wearing the famous sandals anymore. Joke apart, we had great conversations, I really like Mark.
Now the 3 minutes networking. I met about 50 people with an average of 1 to 3 minutes each, which occupied me for a few hours around cocktails (the Intel ice bar was cool) and great food. That is the number one reason why we were all there, just talk to each other and I have to congratulate Kara and the WSJ team for putting together such a network in the same room. You know that "I am spending time with that guy but in fact I should not" feeling? None of that here, only cool, influential and/or super powerful people. Don't try to catch them more than 1 to 3 minutes though, they are all here for the same objective as you. "Let's catch up" meaning the fastest and most efficient networking possible. That requires you to be able to sum up in that short time:
-what you think about Gates and Ballmer tonight (20 seconds)
-how are you doing (yourself) (20 seconds)
-how is the person you are talking to doing (20 seconds)
-what are the 3 key points of your business activity (20 seconds)
-the same 3 points from the person you are talking to (20 seconds)
-stop here if there is nothing to do together and exchange business card (not even if it is not worth it)
-get an extra minute or two to explore the opportunity and promise you will contact again "to catch up" soon
It may be very frustrating at times being european because we tend to see much less people but spend much more time with them, but that "fishing fast" conference pace is really efficient, let's admit it. I am learning it and now I do not even try to spend more than 1 to 3 minutes with anybody as I would go against the culture. I just let go and adapt. I am very happy, I am coming back with tons of great contacts from my business, some real friends I caught up with, and lots of fun. Gates and Ballmer were just an excuse (and a challenge for the conference organizers to have them both on stage)
Fortunately, my silicon valley and LA friends were here too. There are a few people I spent more than 3 minutes with and one of them is Gabe Rivera, creator of TechMeme. We talked about news and how news is important to drive the stories at the headlines of Techmeme. I was telling him that most of the times I thought the articles on TechMeme that were not specifically "news" were often the most interesting. Look at Techmeme tonight, the headlines are "live from D" covering Windows 7 well I am not sure there is so much news to talk about from Microsoft, but I had lots of fun.
Thank you Kara for inviting Geraldine and myself, D conference #1 for me starts in a fantastic way.
This weekend people left Seesmic video comments all over the blogosphere. Mahalo Daily and TechCrunch had particularly good conversations, with Tim O'Reilly leaving a few great comments. I think my favorite all weekend was the Twitter video comments, check it out!
LeWeb'08 Paris fifth edition on December 9th and 10th this year. We have just opened the friends price (below our production cost) registration, only 250 tickets at this price, join us in Paris!
Om thinks we should pay for Twitter. I would pay for Twitter, I have said it many times. Dave has created a ranking of people he has followed to get an idea of how much work they generate for Twitter's system software. I must cost Twitter a lot of money, but also sending them lots of love. Interesting idea, Dave, you need now to get the count in $ per tweet sent/received, that would be lots of fun, and may be a live counter that we see increase permanently as we tweet.
I keep reading everywhere people positioning Friendfeed as a Twitter competitor. For me it really is not. It has almost totally replaced Google Reader for me, h ere is why:
-instead of making me use Twitter less, it makes me tweet even more, because I know it also goes to Friendfeed and I will get comments there. I must admit I start to like Friendfeed comments more than @replies in Twitter, but I read both.
-like in Google Reader, I get all my favorite sources in one simple and design free fast to read format, but I get much more, I get all the social software activity from my friends: pictures, videos, bookmarks...
-it has everything Google Reader has but adds something huge: the conversation. I am getting more comments on Friendfeed these days than on my own blog and that is the most important for me. Friendfeed is making the conversation very easy to follow, without having to go to all your friends blogs, Flickr pages, etc.
-Friendfeed is moving towards integrating even the conversation in the blogs by adding Disqus and their own friendfeed wordpress plugin
-Friendfeed is much better than Google Reader at filtering your new items. Instead of bringing them to you only based on how new they are, Friendfeed brings them back to you each time a friend of yours adds a comment on them and that is just brilliant, it keeps you in the conversation.
-Friendfeed lets you interact with your items using a client (like Twhirl, you bet). Leave comments and like stuff of your friends without having to go there. You can't do this in Google Reader
I love Friendfeed and Twitter. What these make me use less and less is Google Reader. It is microblogging against the old way of blogging, it is much more reactive and it is going to win. Blogs will remain though, we will need them for long posts, like this one (that looks really long with all the microblogging trend, it would have looked very short earlier).
We need to better integrate the conversation though, because see this post? It will get comments on Friendfeed, (see tons of comments already and much more than on this post) on this post with Disqus and video comments on Seesmic, that is three types of comments I need to check and I want them all integrated. (photo, Joi)
This is what Robert Papin then head of HEC Entrepreneurs business school I attended in France kept repeating. Jason Calacanis today points out how important it is to "frackin start". There are so many would be entrepreneurs who never do it just because they never try. And when you start, chances are high you do not crack the code of what you are trying to do at the beginning. It takes time and we all make mistakes. In fact, it is in the entrepreneurs daily life to make mistakes. The important part is to learn, permanently, by listening to your community or your customers. That is what we are doing and we heard most people did not want a 100% flash site so we launched a temporary new ajax simple version and are about to launch a totally redesigned one. We learnt that people wanted the video conversation where they are more than going to seesmic.com (even though there is a video posted every minute there, it works) so we launched our wordpress video comment plugin and integrated with disqus.
We also partnered with Friendfeed and Mybloglog and tons of other integrations are coming. We have an API and more than a hundred developers looked at it. We are bringing the conversation in video everywhere. Of course Seesmic as a destination site is important and we love the community too, but we're starting to have a new growth with more than 1000 blogs who installed our video comments.
When Jason says
"I hated the name, I hated the design, and I wasn't big on the concept of a "video version of Twitter." He smiled when I told him that and said I was right in some of my criticism but that there was more coming. To be honest, I wasn't so sure. It's tough when you see someone you think is very smart doing something you think isn't going to work. Today I'm glad to say I was 100% wrong about Seesmic. I still hate the name, but I love where he has taken it. Video comments on blogs are brilliant"
it makes my day of course. And now my challenge is that the community and also Jason I hope like our new site and find it brilliant too. We have not even scratched the surface of the video conversation, it will take years but it will become huge.
That is what is fascinating for entrepreneurs I think. When they work on new grounds that have not been explored. Like walking on the moon at a very small scale. This is why it is also much more interesting to create new stuff than launching copycats. It makes the days of an entrepreneur stressful but also fascinating (yes Loren, fascinating). Anyway, thanks Jason for your compliments. I think we're far from understanding the video conversation yet, but we will get there.
Of course it should, and check the comments.
Don't be rude, or Gabe will correct your titles. Here is my original post and below is how it appears on Techmeme. Should I not write that bulsh++t anymore?
I hate the term "PR secrets". It only PR for PR companies trying to sell their expensive consulting to the poor startup CEOs. Brian Solis has many valid points about PR in this post "PR Secrets for Startups" and he knows what he is talking about, nothing personal I really like Brian (update Brian takes my post in a good way great). But in fact, I disagree with most of the way Brian talks about PR in this post. PR is no secret science and it is not complicated. Or it was in the past, it is not anymore. No targets or "marketing pitch" will get you very far anymore.
Get a community and focus on your friends is the way to go.
Not a secret #1
who cares about stories, you can get traction and users if you have a good product
There aren't only bloggers and journalists looking for stories, there are also users with passion about a product that can just spread the love as the power equation between journalists-bloggers on the one side and happy users spreading the word with blogs, twitter etc on the other side has completely changed. In fact, I think startup CEOs should care more about the community members than the journalists and professional bloggers. If the product gets traction, it will get coverage anyway.
Not a secret #2
Do not pick a PR person, be the spokesperson of the company
The best person to represent the company is not a PR person and even less an external one. It is YOU. You, the founder, you the CEO. Look at Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, they are the PR machines. Does Michael Arrington himself need a PR person to represent himself get TechCrunch known? If you launch your startup, you need to be the one representing it because you have the vision and the passion. If you are shy, get over it. Get training. Try a daily video for example :)
Not a secret #3
Participation is NOT marketing
The most important asset that a startup CEO has or should build is his community. It has nothing to do with marketing. I took me 8 years since I started blogging in 2003 to have a community and it is no marketing. It is about sharing every day thoughts, tips, advise, learnings with the community. It is about a continuous dialog with thousands of friends that will gladly help you building the company if you do not consider it as marketing. Of course, you can talk about your products and it may be good marketing at times but it should not be artificial. Marketing fails in communities.
Not a secret #4
There are no "targets" either, we're just people, not an audience!
If you think about targets, you will miss most of the opportunities ahead of you. The time of the BCG matrix is over with the long tail. Just throw yourself and your product in the conversation and you will see who shows up, who is interested or not in what you are doing. For example, I had no idea Seesmic would have so much buzz in the deaf community who uses it as a communication tool (gestures work great in video). They would have never been my target.
Not a secret #5
Who cares about the launch day and date. If the product, the idea of the news is interesting and gets traction amongst your community, it will get coverage. I had great coverage on saturdays or sundays (but most PR firms would tell you it would be a catastrophy to do anything on a week-end). In fact, you do not know what other news will be competing with you anyway, regardless of the day, so just post it, when it is fresh.
Not a secret #6
Do not see bloggers and journalists as target either, they will ignore you
Make sure that the PR team DOES NOT RESEARCH individual preferences for contact before they reach out, they will tell you what everybody knows about them and you will contact them in the most boring way possible. Take bloggers. Everybody tries to pitch Scoble and Arrington. They are tired of the same formatted boring pitches that come to them exactly the same. They are my friends and if I had tried to pitch them like hell they would have never have. Relationships with journalists and bloggers are the same as real life. They take years. Approaching them artificially with a strong sales pitch is the best way to make sure these relationships will never happen.
Not a secret #7
Do not measure success and trafic from PR
It's like if you tried to measure your relationships with your friends! Build strong links with your community, learn from them everyday, enhance your product. If you get coverage from the smallest blogger go and comment to thank him. Do not be obsessed by numbers and results, it is long term relationships that matter.
I could go on and on. Forget a little focusing about PR and stop looking at journalists and bloggers as "targets" and "how good your marketing pitch is". For me it is the best way you will fail getting coverage. Get a community first, then listen to it all day long. Having said all the above, I am sure Brian and myself agree, it is just a question of how we present it. What do you think?
I launched a conversation on Seesmic and a conversation on Friendfeed too.
Thanks, JY who spotted the raccoons in French carribean, Guadeloupe island.
A few days ago my friend Dave Mathews came into the office and told me about his new project Boxee. Dave is probably most well known for the Slingbox, he definitely knows what he's talking about. Check it out. Don't worry, my neck is ok now.
Technology journalist Steve Gillmor came by the Seesmic Cafe today to talk with me about his show, "The Gillmor Gang," which is a much longer show than mine! So we also talked about what a good length is for online audio and video content. We also chatted about Twitter, Seesmic, Mesh and other emerging technologies and the effects they have and will have on human communication.
Mahalo Daily is looking for the next vlog idol, you can win a free MacBook Air by leaving video comments.
I am so happy to see that more and more people every day start sharing our vision:
"In a normal conversation there is always pressure to say something when the other person finishes. With Seesmic, that pressure is not there. If you want to reply, you can take as long as you would like think about what you want to say.
At the same time, having the face-to-face interaction seems to bring out the civility in people. -It removes the anonymity that turns so many people into jerks online.
I can honestly say that watching a video made by a newcomer from South America was the first time I’ve felt the internet truly making me more connected to the rest of humanity in any meaningful way."
Arthur Madrid, Co-Founder and CEO of Wixi, visited the Seesmic office to share information about his new site With Wixi, you can upload your media and organize your files like you do on your computer's desktop. You can also add friends and make & share your playlist! Very cool stuff.
Mike Butcher organizes a startup pitch contest in video comments on TechCrunch UK to win tickets at Being-Digital on June 10th. So cool.
Loren, thanks for the good laugh! I will answer in video.
Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf, Karen Allen and Cate Blanchett on Seesmic! It's the Indiana Jones team replying to journalists via Seesmic. It was a big and exciting event - so here is Vinvin to tell us how it happened, who was involved and how people reacted on Seesmic...
Jemima Kiss
Paulo Coelho takes video questions on his blog using our video comment plugin to prepare the 20th anniversary of The Alchemist, and will respond to many during the event. We hope to get a video of the event and will edit both the questions and the answers into one video. Leave your video questions to Paulo!
Thanks Jason and the Mahalo daily team for enabling our video comment plugin to Mahalo daily! Lots of video comments already.
Here are on one post all my videos from the amazing Menorca gathering by Martin Varsavsky.
My Seesmic shows about Menorca
I also started doing video profiles of my friends, what do you think about the idea? I am thinking about video profiles becoming big in the future and an opportunity for Seesmic, so I am playing with them
I am boarding now to London for Google Zeitgeist Europe where I spoke last year. Probably the worst time to go offline...
Seesmic servers have been up 99.99% for months but yesterday we had a few short outages. We are back to normal.
Since we enable video comments on hundreds of sites we fully understand the need of being up permanently and make sure that if despite our efforts we experiment problems we do not affect anything else than recording/playing videos on our partners sites.
We already made server updates that should ensure our video comment plugin has no impact on the site in case of outage and are updating our wordpress plugin as I am writing these lines.
Here is how I propose to inform our partners and users:
-status page on seesmic.com, status.seesmic.com coming asap
-email list that any partner or user can subscribe to and get status updates
-dedicated twitter account for status updates
-warn hours in advance in case of planned maintenance
update: we are also one of the companies that uses GetSatisfaction the most, talking about transparency and communication, check it out, and if the outages had been long, it would have showed up there in a big way, not that this excuses our short shortages.
Please let me know if you would like any other type of information, apologies for the short outages, we are working hard to not have them happen again.
here is a short video I recorded about this in between two flights.
Pic by sizemore showing the impressive setup in Cannes with Seesmic on the computer, ready to receive the movie stars!
Guardian Journalist Jemima Kiss was one of the Seesmic community members who asked questions to Steven Spielberg, Harisson Ford, George Lucas, Shia Laboeuf, Karen Allen and Cate Blanchett. Here is how Jemima describes the experience (you can see here all Jemima questions and reactions):
"It's a simple enough idea but incredibly exciting; I just posted a few direct questions to Spielberg and Karen Allen (Marian was always one of my favourite heroines) and it's quite a buzz watching them reply directly to your own questions. Seesmic is quite intimate too - like most people, I just use my webcam and was still wearing my pyjamas when I recorded. But hey, pyjamas have a good internet heritage."
I wish we would have given some notice to our community but we did not know obviously until the last minute if it would happen or not and the production team had requested the videos being posted in private first, then unlocked, which would not have allowed us enough interactivity. Some videos were posted in real time, but it was a good surprise and not planned, so no way to tell people to show up. I have to give full (internal Seesmic) credit to my partner Cyrille de Lasteyrie (who describes it in French as his best day in his life!) aka @vinvin who made this happen with the Picture Production Company.
Dan Light (dannyboy on Seesmic and danlight on Twitter) is behind the original idea. Dan Light since the beginning wants to get Seesmic closer to the cinema world and we had already collaborated to promote a movie in Seesmic in January, Untraceable. Since then Daniel Light and Vinvin have worked to make such an event happen and they finally did it.
Mike Atherton Sizemore and Gia Milinovich giagia (thanks!!!), Seesmic members were in Cannes and installed the computers, explained how Seesmic works and worked with the production teams to make the entire event happen as well as the conversation with the celebrities.
The original idea was to have journalists around the World ask private questions to the actors and they would answer in private, as a way to give access to them. Instead of a fully private interview, most of the conversation has been public during about two hours but there were also many private videos which were posted and answered by journalists.
To be perfectly honest, I was even sure it would not happen and promised Cyrille to cut myself a **** if it would happen, now what... I would like to thank all the team behind this amazing project and all the Seesmic community members who helped so much make it happen.
This experience illustrates how video on the net and Seesmic can be a fantastic way to get our community closer to celebrities and ask them questions directly. They would not have accepted live and the asynchroneous Seesmic format worked very well. They took many more questions from journalists that they would have in face to face as Seesmic passwords were distributed to journalists around the world.
What we had agreed with the production team was that the videos would be posted private first, and then after the event (a few hours after) they would become public (request from the team). To our suprise they finally accepted to post videos in real time and in public. This is why we have some videos posted with a few hours delay and others with reactions from the Seesmic community. Most videos were private then made public while others were posted immediately like the Harisson Ford one. If we had not accepted the principle for a first experience to post in private first then unlock them, they would not have done it. They wanted to see how it went and also reserve some exclusive answers to the press. Again, the fact that some were directly posted to Seesmic was a surprise, everything was agreed to be posted with delay, explaining why we could not tell the community in advance and guarantee they could ask them questions in real time. There is a high chance that based on this successful experience now they will accept near real time next time.
Here is the footage if you want to check it out:
STEVEN SPIELBERG
Steven Spielberg who is now seesmic.com/steven you can find all Steven Spielberg videos under his profile, Steven replied to 5 questions: here, here, here, here and here
HARISSON FORD
one of the rare videos posted in real time here and here
GEORGE LUCAS
Here is George Lucas in Seesmic.
More stars who answered questions in Seesmic this morning:
Shia Laboeuf here and here
Karen Allen here and here
Cate Blanchett here, here, here and here
As promised, Dan Dubno shows us the technology that tells us who is hot and who is not. Then Martin Varsavsky talks a little about why he hosts TechTalk and what it is.
Thanks, Friendfeed, for having me in such a good company... 
Thanks ReadWriteWeb for bringing to my attention that Twhirl is #1 Twitter app based on the research of Twingly. Woot! Try Twhirl now if you have not!
In Menorca I had many conversations with people who make web pages that copy existing sites. Is this a model that can actually be successful? Here is what they had to say, what do you think?
update: please answer as a video comment here or reply in video on the Seesmic thread we will add you in the next show (or add most of them) thanks!
The new episode of the Great Village answers this question... Kind of...
When I wake up, I generally take a coffee (and as often as possible I go running) and here is what I do generally before anything else, it takes me about an hour:
-check my tweets, @replies and direct messages on Twhirl
-check techmeme, read key blogs
-check incoming seesmic videos and the conversations there
-check new comments on my blog
-check Seesmic on google blog search
-read and collect on del.icio.us all the feedback there (today about our Disqus launch of video comments)
-leave a few comments on blogs, left a video comment on TechCrunch
-read my Friendfeed and the conversation on my items
-add new friends on Facebook, I don't check inbox there because 99% is crap and marketing generally but the rest is fun
-write a post: today Seesmic and journalism
-share or post a few videos on Loic.tv and Seesmic
-post some of these videos on my blog, Facebook and Twitter
-chat with a friend on Facebook (339 friends online there now, scary?)
-check getsatisfaction feedback about Seesmic
-finally check emails, a pain
-and last but not least, sort my tasks on rememberthemilk which I love, really
Ooops did not find time again to check my google reader...
Now the same in video and the conversation in Seesmic:
Paul Bradshaw, also known as onlinejournalist on Seesmic and paulbradshaw on Twitter, experiments and comments Seesmic for journalism. See this video conversation about journalism and Seesmic Paul started.
Paul did not see the point of Seesmic at first (like many) and explain now why he finds it very interesting for the future of journalism. I must confess I did not think too much about the potential use as Seesmic for journalism, but thanks Paul for giving me ideas to think about. I really liked Paul's video below and bullet pointed some of the topics below. Thanks, Paul, please keep suggestions coming our way we will improve Seesmic so that it is useful for journalists. I like the idea.
Why journalists should come on Seesmic according to Paul:
-it will become pervasive like Twitter even if it will take time
-journalists ability to communicate in video is increasingly important for them
-if you treat video as a broadcast medium like TV you are making a mistake
-using Seesmic will get you used to conversations in video
-you learn the language of online video in Seesmic
-not for news gathering yet but it will come
-not for ideas gathering for stories but soon
-very useful for distribution
-best place to learn your video language
Paul also asked me a few questions for my first interview via Seesmic, so more is coming on that topic soon.
I had the pleasure of spending a morning in Menorca with Joi Ito, John Markoff and Thomas Crampton. We talked about the future of old media in a new media world. I also had the opportunity to speak at TechTalk about the cultural differences that I have noticed as an entrepeneur in moving from Europe to the US.
We are thrilled that after the success of our Video comments plugin for Wordpress that got installed on nearly 300 blogs, disqus enabled video comments using Seesmic this morning. I see lots of people wondering if they will work or not. I think it is way too early to get to any conclusion, it is a very new way of communicating and it will take time.
We are not used to talk to a webcam alone and if you remember when we started blogging, everybody thought it was kind of weird. Well talking to a webcam is much more weird. The way I do it every day is I imagine the people I am talking to. For example my videos on http://loic.tv get an average of 3000 views a day and are approaching one million views in total. I try to imagine talking to all these people, like if you are in a conference addressing the audience. What is difficult is that you don't "feel" them as when you speak in public. Still, they are here. Depending on the community of the blog where you leave the video comment, you may not reach that many people, but is it the number of people that really matter or who you are talking to?
1. get to know your community better
Video gives you a much better sense of who is talking: you get to see her or him, hear, see, view gestures and get feelings. Somebody said recently "on Seesmic you know if people are honest", I loved it. They are very authentic.
Video comments allow publishers to connect with their reader in a much better way
2. less spam
unless you put a bag on your head, video comments are not anonymous. It is like in real life. You could say you don't like me in my back or you could tell me directly in front of me. A video comment is much more direct, and straight. It will reduce spam as people have to show their faces. (Yes, they can show something else than their faces too, but you get the point)
3. it gives some accountability to people
It is really easy to leave an anonymous comment in text, insult people, criticize etc. On a video comment, you have to be yourself and take responsibility for what you say. I like that.
4. they are great promotion for you
There aren't that many video comments around for the time being, that is true, and it is an opportunity to get noticed. Leaving a video comment on a TechCrunch post for example catches the readers' attention amongst 100 text comments.
5. they are not heavy and do not slow down your blogs
I have read in some places (including Fred Wilson this morning) that video comments enabled on your blogs would slow them down and make them heavy. Pay attention to the fact that the Seesmic player is only launched when you click on the thumbnail. The thumbnails of the comments are light and load fast, they do not slow down your blogs.
6. why not?
Why kill them before even giving them a chance? It's new, it's not in our common way of using the web and our computers, let's see if it sticks. Why would we have so many conversations in text on the web and not in video?
We have newspapers, books, radio and TV. They are not replacing one another, they are different. Why not video conversations?
7. conversations are huge on TV
See the success of talk shows on TV. They are everywhere and I enjoy watching them from now and then. I was invited regularly on two TV talk shows in France, "en aparte" et "n'ayons pas peur des mots" on Canal+ and i>tele. I really enjoyed it but was also very frustrated that we were only few people debating to an audience that could not react. Video conversations let anybody react and talk if they like.
8. Seeing my friends is cool
I like seeing friends. I like seeing people I do not know yet and you get to know them much better than in text. I feel I know some people on Seesmic much better than people I just read and have not met yet.
9. it is almost like meeting them
Someone on Seesmic recently was saying that he or she could not remember if she had met or not somebody he or she is used to see in video. Video gets very close to meeting someone, it is as close as we can get to meeting in person.
11. the geek world may not reflect what will happen in other communities
we tend to think too much with our geek world in mind. Think about a political blog. Think about dating. There are many conversations where video will make tons of sense, I think.
12. video is a much better way to show you things than describe them, see Robert Scoble's example below.
13. it is conduit for more emotional response compared to just leaving a text comment
Can't wait to see them enabled on some political blogs. Text brings more emotions and debate will get very intense when people have passionate debates.
14. They tear down that barrier that the internet is just a cold, spaceless place
Meeting people on the internet through video is much warmer than reading text. I have never felt that close to some people in my community than since I "met them" in video.
objections and how we try hard (or will try) to address them
1. they take time to watch
This is true. Much more than a text comment. We are thinking about how to solve this and an obvious answer is metadata. This one could be generated by software/voice recognition+human help like spinvox does.
We are also thinking about adding a visual sign if they are less than one or a few minutes so that you know before having to watch it.
2. they are not accessible to the deaf
True, subtitles is probably the way to go and unsure how we can subtitle all the comments, maybe enable wiki-style subtitling like dotsub does, but do not forget deaf can use video too
3. people generally talk for too long
That can be a problem but also a great advantage if you are interested into what person says. In this case you really want to learn more. Metadata is the answer.
4. with text all the power is in the reader, while with video, the power is in the author
I like this one, but I kind of disagree as you can always stop the video and go to the next one.
5. they are not searchable
That is true and metadata, again, is the solution.
6. they disrupt the conversation
Should they be integrated in text comments or kept separate like what we did in any Seesmic video conversation thread? We don't know, this is why we enable both and we will see what people prefer. I like both text and video integrated, we do this in Friendfeed too, people can leave text comments on any seesmic video on Friendfeed.
Disqus now supports Seesmic video comments.
Here are the first blogs that have enabled them (including this blog!):
Dave Winer
LouisGray.com
SheGeeks.net
Fred Wilson
HowardLindzon.com
WinExtra.com
Disqus is compatible with most blog platforms. Blogs discussing this: Fred Wilson, CenterNetworks, The Bivings Report, WinExtra, The Blog Herald, The Social Times, Scripting News, Scobleizer, The Boy Genius Report, louisgray.com, and more.
What can we learn about ourselves from the Wii fit? I play the Wii fit with Martin Varsavsky and an audience of entrepreneurs in Menorca to find out. Based on my own results, ahem, it's clearly not very accurate.
I've just returned from Menorca, Spain, where Martin Varsavsky hosted 'Tech Talk 2008.' I met great people, had amazing conversations and played with the Wii fit as well as as some other neat gadgets. This week will be a recap of that great week so here is a sneak peak of what is to come...
A relaxed conversation with Martin Varsavsky, Joi Ito, Thomas Crampton and myself at Martin's farm in Menorca about where an entrepreneur should start its next business: Europe, Asia or USA. I have started a few startups in Europe and decided to move to Silicon Valley. I think you can definitely succeed in Europe, but I feel that for Seesmic, the chances of success are higher in Silicon Valley because it is easier to get adoption, do partnerships, etc. What do you think?
I talked with Willem-Jan Schutte and Ian Hayward, CEO & Founder of Glubble, about their site... Glubble "allows your child to freely discover the best of the web you choose with your family circle online."
Last week, I was rear-ended by a drunk driver and it turned out to be quite a story. We filmed me telling Vinvin the story so I could share it with all of you. So here it is. Oh! And we were able to generate a pretty accurate re-enactment of the experience... Don't worry I'm ok now.
I had not one, not two, but three great guests in the office recently. Michel Chioini, Kerry Fleming and Claude Malaison told me all about their site inpowr.com. Inpowr is "A quick, easy way to explore your well-being and measure the progress you make as you pursue your goals." it's still in Beta, but everyone should try it out!
Chris McGill, CEO of Mixx.com, who just added its buttons to every single CNN.com article, explains Mixx as "your link to the web content that really matters... There's a lot of information out there and, let's face it, you don't have all day to find the good stuff (if you do, we're totally jealous)."
Eric Rice was in town for the web 2.0 conference and stopped by the office to have a chat. I was busy for most of the day so Vinvin took the interview with Eric. Here they are at the bar!
Thank you Paulo for adding video comments to your blog, I left one of the first ones. Looking forward to fascinating video conversations. Note: you can also follow Paulo on Twitter.
Sean Bonner just announced that they added our video comments plugin to the 60 blogs of Metroblogging in 54 cities. All their local authors and readers can join a local video conversation. I love it. Thanks Sean and the Metroblogging team.
Here is Sean announcing it:
Thanks @veronica for so much love at 14:15
Or simply protecting its brand. Nadia Plesner, a Dutch designer and artist has launched a Darfur campaign asking people to support Darfur with "a simple living t-shirt or poster" below:
Problem is that the purse she has chosen to illustrate her campaign is one of the the world famous Louis Vuitton bags. Louis Vuitton threatens (pdf) nadia plesner who answered (pdf) that the bag "does not refer to a Louis Vuitton bag". This answer is honestly not really smart I think because it obviously looks like a Louis Vuitton bag. I doubt she will win saying that it does not look like the brand...
Having said that 3 lawyers want to help Nadia and she received tons of sympathy comments on her site with a conversation starting around artists rights to paint or draw something that looks like a protected brand product to express an idea. This is very interesting, do you think she might win? I think that LVMH could damage their brand by playing too much the bad guys, let's see what happens.
This morning I noticed that 224 of my 4359 Facebook friends were online and I could talk to them in chat. Fascinating that I could talk to any of them right at this second I thought. This started a conversation on Twitter (link) and Friendfeed (link), so I thought it was worth a blog post and a video. I also started a video conversation about it on Seesmic. You can reply in video on this thread, no need for invites anymore just hit the reply button and signin.
-"it goest against the meaning of Facebook"
I discussed this with my Facebook friends (the ones who work there) they say I should switch to a "fan" page like Dave Morin has one. I don't think so because I do not see my friends as "fans" but more as people I can learn from and talk with. Which is what I really miss in Facebook that is not happening so far. The discussions I enjoy on Twitter and Friendfeed are simply not happening on Facebook. My Facebook friends send me in Facebook emails that I cannot find the time to answer it takes too long (add shortcuts!). Anyway back to the question of the "meaning of Facebook" I don't know what you mean what is that?
-you will never talk to them
This is so wrong. I talk to hundreds of friends all day long. I post on Twitter, Friendfeed, Seesmic. I read my replies, my direct messages, view my direct videos and my conversation on Friendfeed. I can't answer all of them but as many as I can. I talk to my online friends much more than some of my "real" old time friends that I only see from now and then in real life. I was discussing this yesterday with one of my "real" - as you say - top 3 friends I have known for 15 years and I talk more to many of my online friends than to him, because he does not use social software much. I of course, pushed him using them.
-you can't possibly follow these thousands of people stream on Facebook and Twitter
I read all my Twitter replies, direct messages, Seesmic video replies. When I have some time I also open the live stream of my Twitter friends in Adium (coming soon to Twhirl with XMPP) and I listen to all of them. With 6 or 7000 it goes super fast but
