YouTube has annnounced major new features for their API. These include:

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

So what does this mean to you? Essentially this makes it even easier for you to leverage YouTube as a video platform. You can directly integrate YouTube into your own website. The key difference is essentially YouTube has to date only really offered Read access to their videos. You can pretty much do everything you can do on YouTube itself.

Example

You want to allow visitors to submit video content to your site for a competition.

• Visitor fills in the competition entry form on your site.
• Visitor uploads video on your site.
• You use YouTube to transcode the video to Flash and store it on their platform (for free!).
• You retrieve the videos and display them on your site in a customised player.

It now makes even less sense to try and build your own online video capability. What’s not clear, is what advertising might be delivered around your video content, however, I imagine they’ll introduce an advertising free albeit paid option in the future.

What do you think you could use this for?

Technorati Tags: youtube

It is no secret in my home and office that I hate mail. When you are the owner of a business you go on the publicly available Companies Office register you end up in numerous databases and become a target for an untoward amount of "personalised" direct mail. I also hate the other mail as well as this is mainly bills and stuff from the tax man. Let me count the ways:

Personalisation

This is a joke. Most marketing departments have terrible data which is invariably out of date because they or their agencies insist on creating copies of their customer database. Examples I can personally attest to include:

• Being asked to join a Kiwi Saver superannuation scheme….one month after I had already done so. What, you want me to join it twice??
• My three year old daughter receiving a special offer to join a rental car company’s priority membership scheme!!
• Various letters from web design companies offering me a special deal - Why would I want to pay you for something that has been one of the main ways I make a living for over 10 years now?

Carbon Credits

Forget about air travel, think about how much natural resources are consumed and carbon is generated with the creation and delivery of direct mail. What makes it even worse is that they usually use those window envelopes with a bit of clear plastic to show the address at the top of the letter so you can’t even recycle them. Send email or better yet, set up a blog with an RSS feed, and save some trees people.

It Costs Me Money

We have to pay for a post box redirect, plus a courier to clear the post box and deliver it to our office. Some days all we get is direct mail.

How to deal with it

Okay, rant over, you get my point.

So imagine my delight to see this link on Katie’s blog to a letter carefully written by someone just like me in Australia which he posted back to the marketing department of some unfortunate company as well as obviously sharing it with the world via the power of the blogosphere. As Katie points out, how many recipients of their DM campaign did not bother to respond with a witty complaint letter.

I know people go on about spam, but this is far less intrusive and easy to deal with. Marketers also talk about permission marketing and the recent flurry of activity around getting permission for email marketing databases in September 2006 with the new legislation in New Zealand. When has a company ever given you a clear opt out option in a direct mail piece. A simple website you can go to where you can tell the company that you no longer wish to receive direct mail please. You can go to this website and have your name removed from all databases in theory, however, it is up to the individual marketers to keep their database up to date with those that have asked to be removed. I’ll let you know if I notice any difference in a few months.

Am I just being overly cynical? Does anyone out there like getting direct mail?

I’m at the Barcamp event in Auckland today. This is a meet up for web developers where you turn up, and put your name and presentation topic forward and it goes up on the board in the available time slots.

There is a broad group of people from the industry here, including web dev/design shops, independent contractors, and guys/girls who work for corporates.

There is also a guy here from Mozilla, who are the organisation behind Firefox, who is presenting after lunch on what will be in Firefox 3. I’ll definitely attend that one.

My posts will be over on the Marker Blog, check out the photos on Flickr.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcampauck07

I have recommended brightcove.tv to a number of people as an additional option to YouTube because they tend to produce better quality videos once encoded into Flash.

It seems they are going to end consumer uploads (the free option) this month.

I can understand that this is obviously not profitable. I would say then that you should stay with YouTube for the best free option.

Dear Brightcove.TV member,

Beginning December 18, 2007, we plan to end support of direct consumer uploads to Brightcove.TV. As a result, you will not be able to upload new videos to Brightcove.TV after December 17, 2007. But videos you have already uploaded to Brightcove.TV will remain available on the site and through your Brightcove.TV channel. Videos you have embedded in other sites and blogs will also continue to play.

If you have a Brightcove Platform or Network account, which means you use the Brightcove Console, then you will still have the option to promote videos on Brightcove.TV.

Brightcove.TV will continue to be a guide to great video from Brightcove media and business partners. The site will have new videos added to it daily from these partners and these videos can be saved as favorite videos in your channel.

If you work for a media company, marketer, non-profit, or business and are looking to purchase the Brightcove platform to publish and distribute video on your own site, please visit the Brightcove Products Overview section of our website.

We appreciate your interest in Brightcove and apologize for any disruption this change may cause you.

Sincerely,

The Brightcove Team

Thanks to Lucy, Shane and Rod at Xero for giving me the opportunity to present to their customers and partners on the subject of Web 2.0 for Small Business. It was a great session with lots of interesting questions and discussion.

Breakfast sessions with a smaller crowd around a table is by far the best format in my opinion.

Thank you to everyone for coming, it was great to meet everyone and I really enjoyed it.

Here are some of the links to site I discussed today:

• feedburner.com
• copyblogger.com
• brightcove.com
• Revision 3
• Twitter

Definitely read this post on Facebook Business by our resident Half-Geek, James Fleet.

Technorati Tags: xero

I recently gave a presentation at the yMedia Challenge event and they have sent me through some feedback from some of the people that attended.

"Really interesting - would like to talk to him some more."

"A key point in his presentation that stood out for me was building a community rather than marketing/advertising. Also his advice on avoiding CPM advertising and on using "geek marketing" like pay per click tools."

"I hung onto every word and realised that I had heard some of these words before but did not understand them. I learnt so much from Jon. Jon started a journey for me which will take me deeper into the world of computers."

"I enjoyed Jon’s presentation, but I felt he didn’t make enough allowance for the wide range of previous experience in the audience. Some of what he said was too technical for many in the room, especially many people from the not for profits who are not engaged with the topic. His examples were all interesting, but felt out of reach. On the other hand, his five things to do next week seemed very relevant."

"A very useful presentation, but sometimes Jon assumed too much prior knowledge and experience. However, of all the speakers I think his overall presentation was the most useful in a practical sense, once someone had translated the jargon etc."

"Great content about social- media, networking, capital. Loved the ‘Will it Blend’ vid."

"Engaging and enjoyable. the valuable message i took away from his presentation was to go where your audience already are rather than trying to drag them to you - particularly relevant when your audience are young people. "web

I thought that the presentation was aimed at an introductory level, but based on some of the comments I clearly need to re-look at this. Great to get this sort of feedback though.

I’m very excited to be invited by SaaS accounting system provider Xero to do a presentation to their customers and partners.

Xero is an amazing New Zealand company and if you haven’t already you should demo their product. Currently only available in New Zealand, but will be coming to the UK and Australia very soon.

Here are the details if you would like to attend:

The advent of social media, the increased uptake of broadband worldwide and the growing choice of communication tools have changed marketing forever - to a new era of customer participation.

Xero, along with interactive agency Marker, invites you to attend a breakfast to discuss this new participatory era and the impact for New Zealand businesses like yours.

Date: Friday 16 November 2007

Time: 7:30 am

Place: Xero, Level 1, Old Bank, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington, New Zealand

Register to: Lucy Hempseed lucy.hempseed@xero.com or phone: (04) 819 4837

Technorati Tags: saas, web 2.0 events, xero

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the Uber:savvy event this morning to kick off the yMedia Challenge.

"the yMedia Challenge is a 2 week competition designed to connect media students with not-for-profit organisations."

I think my presentation went down okay, I got lots of questions at the end, but they did offer small bottles of 42 Below Vodka to anyone who asked one, so that might not be a fair reflection of interest from the audience!

I met some interesting people though:

Mike Brown who is the organiser of Webstock, easily the essential local event for the web community which is coming to Wellington in February. Very much looking forward to that one. Mike was the first speaker and did a fascinating intro into how people really drive web 2.0, not the technology.

Nigel Parker from Microsoft who gave an excellent overview of the emerging ways in which digital media can be consumed. This included demos of some of the latest Microsoft technologies including Siverlight, PhotoSynth and Microsoft Home Server. You can not understate the amount of investment Microsoft puts into research and development as well as the developer community.

I didn’t get a change to meet her personally, but Janet Mazenier, Programme Director, for the government’s Digital Strategy gave a speech. She admitted it was very hard to activate progress web projects, even within the organisation that is supposed to be leading the country. Three months to get a blog live. I can’t actually find the blog though. I think this organisation can make a real difference, if they can provide direction for government departments and state owned enterprises around blog policies. Tell the public sector that having a blog where people might make a comment that disagrees with your view is okay. This is still a democracy isn’t it?

It was well worth giving up a Saturday morning for this, everyone I met had something interesting to say and the organisers Pamela, Adele and Jade at yMedia are all exceptionally friendly people to deal with…plus they gave me Vodka as a thank you.

Technorati Tags: ymedia

I had posted about PayPerPost.com after I saw a presentation from their founder in New York earlier in the year. It seems they signed up TiVo for a campaign which was subsequently pulled.

PayPerPost is a marketplace where advertisers can pay bloggers to post up content allowing a marketer to seed a viral campaign. Bloggers who are paid to post must disclose that it is paid content, however, there is no shortage of critics who believe the concept of paid content will destroy the largely forthright nature of blogs in general.

It appears this is a similar issue to that which Microsoft faced when they gave Ferrari Acer laptops to bloggers when they launched Windows Vista. In that case, Microsoft was not very clear on what was expected of the blogger. It appeared to be a bribe when in fact all they really wanted to do was make it easy for bloggers to experience Vista without having to upgrade their own computer. They issued a statement later clarifying their position, but it was too late

TiVo paid for video clips to be posted on PayPerPost, but they didn’t make it explicit that this was essentially an ad.

The lesson for marketers is this:

You can not be disingenuous because you will get found out. If you are doing an advertising campaign, don’t try and dress it up as a consumer generated viral campaign, just be up front. Better yet, forget about trying to advertise and think about how you can truly engage with your customers in a conversation, not a campaign. That is the real opportunity online, not video ads.

For more on paid content read out Chad’s post “Why paid blogs will kill the blogosphere”

Technorati Tags: payperpost, tivo

Web 2.0 for financial services - yes it does apply to this industry. Thank you to everyone who attended our event this evening "Web 2.0 & Social Media – An overview for service &amp professional services marketers"

If you would like a copy of the presentation, please let me know.

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