Media 2.0 continued - relevance & automation

In continuing on the theme of being able to parse and digest the current wave and coming tsunami of microchunked content from my previous post, I would like to offer a potential idea for a service offering in this area up for debate. Since the blogosphere is full of customers of this type of service - and I’m sure many of you are still choking on all of the content being sent or pulled your way - I’m thinking of this as a sort of focus group.

Brad Feld posted on this topic after seeing hundreds of redundant postings that largely said the same thing about the “Yahoo / del.icio.us” deal. For me, this may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. I’ve been seeing this problem among the feeds that I read for some time now, but this deal was over the top in terms of redundancy.

One of Brad’s readers questioned whether there are built-in reasons for this in the current blog-search market. That is, bloggers are hooked on Technorati / Google for relevance, and get it by posting about and linking to the hot stories, regardless of how many times it is told. The problem is, by analogy, if I’m subscribing to every small town newspaper from across the country, I’m not going to look at the World/National section in every one. I’ll read the WSJ or NY Times or equivalent for that, and read only the local news for relevant stories in any particular paper.

There is a larger issue here - is finding the best blogs or best individual posts a search-driven process? When I think of the Web, I think of it as a vast body of information and services that are available to me. Search is an appropriate metaphor, because I generally know what I want and I just need to parse the available options for what it is that I’m looking for. The search method works for this … and using links as a proxy for relevance seems to be a good algorithm.

Now, when I think of blog reading and subscribing to content, I have a different mindset. I do not know what the news is on any given day, nor do I know what original analyses, insights, topics, etc. people are going to want to publish on any given day. Here I look for trusted sources and referrals. I then subscribe to the sources, parse the content, and recommend / discuss with others. And the cycle starts again. In the old world there were not many choices - WSJ, NY Times, Forbes, Meet the Press, etc.

With the world of content syndication - blogs, podcasts, and video - the choices are too numerous to be able to find all of the trusted sources that would be relevant to me. Plus, from those trusted sources, not all of the postings are going to be relevant, so I’m more interested in the microchunks of content - specific posts or segments of podcasts from any given source. For example, from which of my numerous sources do I want to read about the Yahoo/del.icio.us deal? Who do I trust the most on that topic?

So, if this is the case and the search metaphor does not scale for microchunk subscription content, how does one scale a trusted source & referral model? I do think that it starts with word of mouth and some searching …. that is to build your initial list of trusted blogs and other subscriptions. But these will not be enough, nor will the list be dynamic.

From there, I think there needs to be a service offering in the market that can (1) find relevant new trusted sources for me regularly and dynamically, (2) parse those sources for relevant postings / microchunks and deliver them to me, and (3) allow an automated filter for redundant posts from across sources.

The service I’m imagining would require that users upload all of their existing subscriptions in a categorization or list structure from their existing feed reader (with rankings if the feed reader allows for export of rankings). The service would then apply an intelligent filtering algorithm (probably based on a collaborative filter) to recommend new content sources based on what others in the network are reading and finding valuable. The user can syncronize with the service to get these recommended new feeds.

As a second order of value, the service would allow users to receive only those postings or microchunks of content that other subscribers like them in the network found to be valuable. This filter would use the trusted sources and again do some form of collaborative filtering to determine which individual postings and microchunks are relevant. In order to score the quality of a posting, it is likely that some form of meta data about that post would need to be uploaded from the user to the service for each post (e.g. tags, rating, or whether the post was read).

A well functioning service such as that described above, would benefit all in that (1) readers get better content from across more trusted sources while having to read fewer postings and (2) the quality bar for content will go up dramatically since only the most relevant content will reach readers (and the post-spamming of hot stories to get listed on search will decrease). Well I guess the least relevant bloggers would not benefit much.

The business model for all of this …. assuming the algorithms work and it’s easy enough to use …. could be a service subscription model and advertising. The advertising could be shared with the bloggers. It would be likely that subscribers could use the feed reader / microchunk reader (when we start digesting podcast chunks, etc.) of their choice (maybe with a plug-in to deliver the appropriate meta data for the algorithms to do their work.

I would love comments …..

– bkm

Media 2.0 - solutions from innovators needed

So, Fred Wilson posted trying to get the attention of TV executives and inform them what they can do about the current and impending decimation of their business models. A few may listen, but most will not until it is late in the game (as we can see from today’s NY Times headlines on the newspaper industry - a mere precursor what may happen to other old media types).

I am intrigued by Fred’s post and by Umair Haque’s post at Bubblegeneration on TV 2.0, which Fred referenced. If you read these two posts, and skim the presentation on the New Econmics of Media that Umair also posted (link on Umair’s right sidebar), you may be as intrigued by the possibilities and potential that still exist in the new media game, and by the implicit fact that the old-line media companies will be hard pressed to truly adjust to this “flat world.”

As an entrepreneur, that signals fertile ground to me. As a vast microchunk content consumer (blog RSS/Atom feeds, del.icio.us, alerts, podcasts, video, etc.), the world is my oyster in terms of potential content, yet my time is extremely scarce. It’s only going to get better from a content choice perspective, and worse from an available time standpoint. Exactly the points made in the above referenced blogs.

What to do? I have what I consider to be one of the best free feed aggregators on the market - BlogBridge - yet I still spend way too much time parsing my feeds for interesting content. I subscribe to countless podcasts, yet even the best ones only provide me with a fraction of valuable content. With podcasting the parsing is even harder than RSS et. al. feeds, because it is not easy to skip segments and tracks in a podcast the way you can skim text. Thus, I hardly ever listen to what are probably very interesting and valuable segments of podcasts.

Umair’s framework of potential new media opportunity areas (a) Smart Aggregators (b) Micromedia platforms, and (c) Reaggregators sound like things that would be extremely valuable to me (and I’m sure countless others).

I asked Umair (via comment) to list great (and even good) examples of companies providing products addressing any of his above listed solution areas. I’ll put out a similar request here - please post comments.

I’m aching for a solution to parsing and digesting the current wave and coming tsunami of microchunked content this includes all types.

In parallel, I’m going to begin a project to assess the market of existing solutions, a potential entry product and business model; if the opportunity is there I may release an offering that starts on the way to Umair’s description of a Reaggregator. The alphabet soup of technologies are there to get us underway - xml, tagging, rss, atom, opml, sse, etc. etc. - yet there is a long way to go.

– bkm

An Actionscript preloader application

For those that are struggling with how to show the loading status of their flash application or website before the main file initially loads, I have a solution included in this blog. The problem this code addresses is when you need to load a large flash file all at once (i.e. don’t want to load it piecemeal) and want to show the user the status of the load.

Actually this is a derivative of a contributor to the flash forums (OOPete), and the credit is due mostly to him - click here to read the forum. However, I have added a progress component and included the entirety of the code for re-use in this posting.

There is an alternative to using a pre-loader application such as this, which is to set all of the large components in your library to not export on the first frame of the flash application and create a preloader function within the main file. However, there are reasons not to do this, this approach is beyond the scope of this posting, and the code below works fine.

This code will display a flash window that is 800×600 in size and a progress bar component that displays the percentage of the main .swf application that is being loaded as it loads. The window size can be altered in the .fla file. When the main .swf application is loaded, it is transferred to the _root timeline and it runs the .swf application and kills the preloader application.

You need both files, and they should reside in the same directory (unless you change the import statement in the .fla file to reflect a different path).

Also, the application is designed such that both .swf files reside in the same directory (the preloader .swf and the .swf that is being loaded). Be sure to publish the preloader .swf to the right directory and the path to the file is specified in the fileName parameter in the .fla file.

Download InitialPreloader.fla (340.0K)

Download InitialPreLoader.as (1.2K)

Be sure to modify the ‘fileName’ parameter in the .fla file to properly reflect the .swf file you are trying to load!

– bkm

Installing LUAPlayer on PSP firmware 2.0

This is a specific post to guide those that are embarking on the same task that I just completed (with lots of outside help), namely installing LUAPlayer to run on the Sony PSP firmware 2.0.

The task is mostly straightforward, but with a couple of nuances. Here goes ….

1. Click here to get EBOOT Loader. The link to EBOOT Loader is on the left middle column under PSP homebrew. Fanjita has done a great job with this tool. Follow the instructions in the readme.txt file.

The key to running LUAPlayer apps with EBOOT loader v0.8.5 and PSP firmware 2.0 is that any EBOOT application (other than LUAPlayer) cannot be in the LUAPlayer folder for LUAPlayer to run properly. More on this later, and on message #44 in this forum, which I referred to above.

When finished, your file system on the PSP should look as follows:
\PSP\PHOTO\EBOOT Loader 085\RUN_L081.TIF
\PSP\PHOTO\EBOOT Loader 085\AAA.GIF
\UTILS\EBOOT_SIGNATURE.EXE
\PSP\GAME\LOADER085.CFG
\PSP\GAME\LOADMENU085.PBP
\PSP\GAME\LOADMENU.TGA
\L_085.BIN

Put any EBOOT based homebrew applications in the /PSP/GAME folder (I created a folder called /Applications and put the games there).

** NOTE - be sure to create a custom wallpaper with any image that you want to show. It’s in the EBOOT Loader readme.txt file.

2. Click here to get LUAPlayer. I used the one for firmware 1.5 (I believe it was LUAPlayer 0.14). Follow the instructions in the Readme First.txt file, except per the first post on this forum, do not load the /luaplayer% folder onto the PSP, or if you have, then delete it.

3. Load any other LUAPlayer applications into the /PSP/GAME/LUAPlayer/APPLICATIONS folder.

To fire things up, per the EBOOT Loader instructions, navigate to Photo and run EBOOT Loader.

My final file system looks like this:

\PSP\PHOTO\EBOOT Loader 085\RUN_L081.TIF
\PSP\PHOTO\EBOOT Loader 085\AAA.GIF
\UTILS\EBOOT_SIGNATURE.EXE
\PSP\GAME\LOADER085.CFG
\PSP\GAME\LOADMENU085.PBP
\PSP\GAME\LOADMENU.TGA
\PSP\GAME\APPLICATIONS\all of my eboot apps
\PSP\GAME\LUAPLAYER\EBOOT.PBP
\PSP\GAME\LUAPLAYER\APPLICATIONS\all of my lua player apps
\PSP\GAME\LUAPLAYER\SYSTEM\system.lua
\L_085.BIN

Hope this is helpful. As a complete newbie, I was troubled with figuring out how the EBOOT loader and LUAPlayer played together. Fanjita - the one that continues to bring us EBOOT Loader - and MickJT on forums.qj.net were very helpful. I feel like a jackass for putting the EBOOT apps in the LUAPlayer folder, but this stuff was all completely new.

A further, or replacement reference, for this posting can be found by reading the posts on this forum.

Best of luck.

– bkm

PSP - love / hate, but mostly love

I mostly love the Sony PSP, but do have some gripes. I’m not truly a gamer, but was attracted to the PSP because it looked like the coolest mobile device with excellent processing power and, critically, it was WiFi-enabled.

First the main gripes:
1. I know it could kill Sony’s existing business model, but a device as cool as this one with WiFi and a browser really needs to be open for web application development; at a minimum, build a Macromedia Flash Player for the PSP browser. LUAPlayer may be a way to go for WiFi app development with 0.15, but it seems to need to ride homebrew which Sony slows down with every new firmware release (see #2). If you’re really ambitious, here is a contest for developing a flash player for PSP.

I have a selfish motive on the WiFi front as my company has a web game with a Flash/Actionscript front-end that we’d like to run on mobile devices, particularly the PSP. Sadly, we do not yet have the resources to write a new flash player. However, it does look like Sony is planning to build a flash player at some point soon.

2. Be sure to choose the right firmware. First, you cannot downgrade firmware from any release above 2.0. You cannot run homebrew on anything above 2.0. It is harder to run homebrew on 2.0 than 1.5 or lower and there are fewer apps available. You do not get a web browser with anything below 2.0. You do not get the RSS reader (see #3) or WMA support without 2.6. Also, I don’t think you get MP4 support below 2.0.

Here is a link to an excellent article on the topic of choosing the right firmware for you.

3. The RSS reader in Firmware 2.6 is really a streaming podcast player. You can download your MP3 or MP4-AAS or WMA podcasts and listen to them, but if you use the PSP RSS reader, you can only listen to streaming podcasts when you have a live WiFi connection. This is not an RSS reader.

Other than that, I love the PSP. I ran on firmware 2.6 initially, but returned that device to get one with 2.0 so that I can run LUA applications with LUAPlayer and homebrew apps. The streaming podcast player was nice, but not that compelling, especially since I’m an iPod owner.

For those of you interested in running homebrew and LUA applications on the PSP firmware 2.0, I went through a learning curve as a newbie to this whole thing, and I’m going to create a follow-up post outlining the sources for installing this and the pitfalls to avoid.

I’m hoping to write a test app to see about running our web game with LUAPlayer 0.15 on WiFi over the holidays. You’ll see it here first if I actually pull it off.

– bkm

Leveraging P2P for MMOGs

As broadband connections get wider and more prevalent for consumers, the desire to interact with others over the web in rich media formats will no doubt continue to grow. MMOGs are a great example of this trend to-date.

With IMON Media, we are currently developing a massively multiplayer online entertainment property. As we start to contemplate the notion of having hundreds of thousands to millions of SIMULTANEOUS users/players, having enough bandwidth to support this from the server-side becomes a huge problem. This is particularly so in cases where the game itself may not be suited to a subscription based business model, but rather an ad-based play-for-free model.

For example, a “small” 4kb message that is transferred to 1mm players in a second requires bursting capability up to 32mbps of bandwidth just for that message. If the number of players gets to 5mm or 10mm, or the message sizes start to grow (and they will), then we start to drive up the peak bandwidth requirement and therefore cost and complexity rapidly.

As for the ongoing bandwidth costs …. here is a link to some good information on the costs of running an MMOG at levels of 10,000 to 30,000 subscribers. To get to millions of simultaneous players cost-effectively, we need to continue to make strides in increasing the size of the pipe at lower costs, while also being smart about how we use bandwidth and distribute MMOG information to the players.

My thought is to finally leverage P2P for something other than stealing large protected media content. It seems that a BitTorrent client embedded in the MMOG application is one way to go here to significantly reduce bandwidth consumption. It would be a hybrid P2P approach, where the server is handing a lot of the load of managing an MMOG - authentication, processing, etc. But the client will take on some of the responsibility of communicating the game messages to the other players. If distributed among enough clients and intelligently enough, this approach could work to allow games to be played among millions of people simultaneously.

I’m beginning to research the possibility of this approach to MMOGs, and here is a link to a post from Eran Globen at HellOnline.com with a similar notion to that listed above.

Please point me to other sources that have begun to explore P2P for MMOGs, and provide your insights. I’m eager to begin this discussion.

– bkm

Introduction

There seems to be no good way to get started with a blog other than finally just doing it. So, I have finally decided to create an inaugural post for this site.

I am hoping to introduce topics of discussion with this blog, and enable others and me to benefit by a discussion that will ensue from the initial topic. Additionally, I will pick up on interesting topics from other blogs and hope to continue and add value that those discussions. In short, the more this turns into a collaborative discussion forum than a one-way broadcast, the better for all.

My primary interest area is in New Media and all that it entails, from blogging to gaming to video ads (webmercials) and so forth; I will be posting on challenges in New Media in areas such as business models, technology development, and content development.

As an avid reader of blogs, I am beginning to learn what makes a useful blog versus one that is not so useful (for me at least). With these findings in mind, I am going to do my best to hold myself to the following ground rules for my readers:

1. Be concise yet thorough (less, written well, is more)
2. Add value - new insight, data, and/or analysis; synthesis of existing information or discussions
3. Commit enough time to post on a regular basis, yet hold to #1 and #2 above.

That is all for now.

– bkm

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