Qbox Beta Launches Streaming Music Straight from Social Networks
June 20, 2008 — 09:49 AM PDT — by Alana Taylor — — 4 Comments
In the world of Web 2.0 there’s really no limit as to what you can and cannot make “social.” There’s social networks for everything under the sun and now the latest one to launch is Qbox, a social network music service that lets you listen to millions of songs streaming directly from social networks like MySpace, YouTube, and Bebo.
What Qbox does is take the audience of social networking sites and allow them to interact with musicians through its dynamic music application. Now users of these media sites will no longer be limited to searching just within those sites for music because Qbox’s Qplayer offers over 21 million songs, all streaming directly from musician’s pages and profiles.
On the surface, Qbox appears to be “just another music player.” It has the friendly feel of the Yahoo Media Player, the social warmth of Buzzwire, the flexibility of Snocap and the live streaming abilities of FineTune. And that’s just to name a few.
Qbox does, however, have some pretty innovative features. For example, the Qbox toolbar lets you listen to music whenever you search for bands on Wikipedia and listen to songs when a musician’s name is mentioned in a news page. Just by highlighting keywords from songs or bands, Qbox will automatically stream the music you are interested in listening to.
The way Qbox finds all its music is completely UGC-based and acts as a wiki that keeps growing. Users can listen to songs from a huge database, listen to recommended songs based on their tastes, and keep in touch with their favorite musicians.
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Ping This!Which Niche has the Long Tail in Online Video?
June 20, 2008 — 08:41 AM PDT — by Guest Writer — — 2 Comments
David Burch is the Marketing Manager for TubeMogul, the first online video analytics and distribution company to serve online video producers across a variety of video serving platforms. His guest post today is a deeper look at one of the many statistical analysis pieces TubeMogul publishes on their company blog.
Here at TubeMogul we recently authored a study answering the following question: throughout the life of a video, do most views occur in the first days and weeks or are they distributed randomly over time? Since we track millions of videos, we took a random sample of 10,000 videos, hired a statistician and found a clear answer in the aggregate data: video viewership peaks early.
In that, we found that on average, videos are quite time-sensitive. Trends pointed elsewhere, such as “evergreen” (non-time sensitive) content always fetching views, or videos randomly “going viral,” seem more of a rarity than an underlying trend in the data.
While we were pitching the story to Mashable, Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins asked a cutting question: what if you broke the results down by video category (i.e. “How-To”)?
Good question. Here are the results we broke down for him and the readers of Mashable:
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Thanks to This Week’s Sponsors
June 20, 2008 — 08:25 AM PDT — by Tamar Weinberg — — Add a Comment
Thanks to this week’s advertisers and partners for helping us grow to be the #1 social news blog in the world.
Advertise with us and get noticed.
Help us to help you. Mashable is seeking out site sponsors for our large diverse audience — social media users, venture capitalists, PR people, developers, bloggers, and many more. You’ll receive hundreds of thousands of views a day in addition to weekly recognition to thank you as our premium sponsors. Are you interested? Contact us for more information and to receive our brand new media kit and rate card.
This week, our valued sponsors are Limelight, IDrive AdParlor, and Userplane.
Don’t trust your rich media delivery to any NETWORK BUT THE BEST. Designed for rich media, Limelight Networks is the premier CDN for quality and speed. Instantly and brilliantly deliver your movies, games, music, software, or large content catalogs. Visit Limelight Networks now for a free network test. Limelight Networks — rich media delivery at its richest.
IDrive is a leading Consumer and Small Business focused Online Backup service. IDrive is a simple and safe way to back up all the important stuff on your computer. A copy of user data is stored in a secure, remote location for safekeeping, so that in the event of disaster user data is retrievable from anywhere via Internet. IDrive’s features include automated critical data selection and scheduling via web as well as desktop agent, fast search to backup data, central console to manage multiple accounts, Continuous Data Backup, Open File and Locked file backup, Virtual Drive access and many more.
AdParlor is an advertising network designed specifically for social networking sites. We connect advertisers looking to advertise on social networking sites with developers who are looking to monetize their social networking applications. We offer advertisers specific targeting options and results driven campaigns and we offer publishers some of the highest eCPM’s in the industry! We currently support myspace and facebook and will soon be expanding to include bebo, Hi5, and orkut.
Userplane is the premier communication platform for online communities. The company’s hosted applications enable instant community and communication for websites of any scale and audience. The combination of instant and elegant with robust and powerful has made the platform a must-have for thriving sites worldwide - supporting millions of daily users.
Additionally, thanks to the following partners for making Mashable happen:
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“Sleepless in Seattle:” SummerMash Tickets on Sale
June 20, 2008 — 08:00 AM PDT — by Karen Hartline — — 1 Comment
Only 21 more days until Mashable arrives in Seattle to kick off the U.S. Summer Tour. If you didn’t know, Pete Cashmore, Sean Aune and Karen Hartline all love coffee, which is why we’ll be ready to keep the party going all night long in Seattle where the coffee flows like water. It’s our first time in Seattle and we need to be shown how it’s done. Join us at Showbox where we’ll have food and drink, and DJ El Toro mixing things up. And don’t worry, we have a few surprises in store too.
CD Sales Fall Faster Than Digital Music Sales Rise. Or Do They?
June 20, 2008 — 02:32 AM PDT — by Stan Schroeder — — 7 CommentsI’m reading a report published by the International Herald Tribune about the decline of music sales on physical media such as CDs and DVDs, and I’m not sure what the record industry is whining about.
Here’s a quote that boggles me:
“In 2007… Physical sales of CDs and DVDs fell 13 percent to $15.9 billion. Sales of downloaded songs and mobile-phone ringtones rose 34 percent to $2.9 billion.“
Yes, I agree: looking at these numbers alone, the industry is not earning as much money as they did before. But take notice of the percentages. Physical sales = down 13 percent; digital sales = up 34 percent. At this exact rate of growth, in five years the revenue from digital sales will be 12.5 billion. At the exact rate of decline, physical sales will be down to 7.9 billion in five years. Add the two numbers together, and you get around 20.5 billion in overall revenue. Currently, this number is 18.8 billion.
These numbers are crude and they do not take into account many important factors, for example the rise or decline of revenue from previous years. However, they show that the situation is not so bad as the record industry would have us believe: if they weather the storm - which, when you consider how disruptive Internet as a medium was to the industry, was inevitable - for a couple of years, they’ll be back on track of earning obscene amounts of money.
This is far from the usual “piracy is killing the record industry” cry we regularly hear from RIAA and the IFPI. And I bet you one thing: if the percentages, not absolute numbers, looked more favorable to them, the IFPI would put the emphasis on them.
One also must take into account the fact that the record industry has been really slow and inefficient when it comes to adapting their business models to the age of the Internet. It was only last year when the majors decided to drop the dreaded DRM, traces of which still linger on, annoying countless users. I bet that when they stop spending money on lawsuits and start rethinking the way they do business, the revenue from digital sales will soar even faster.
It’s easy to extrapolate some enormous number of money lost due to file sharing. John Kennedy, chairman of the IFPI, mentions “30 billion illegal downloads in 2007“, while “physical and digital piracy cost the U.S. music industry alone $5.3 billion“. But the fact is, those 30 billion downloads do not directly translate to lost dollars. They’re an opportunity, mostly untapped by the industry, to make even more cash. “Even the most innovative business models are totally undermined by free music” says Kennedy. Yeah, right. The industry is doing fine; they’re whining because they’re greedy.
RSSmeme and Bloggers’ (Copy)rights
June 19, 2008 — 11:51 PM PDT — by Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — — 19 Comments
Copyright allegations against the blogosphere seem to be all the rage these days. The last several days on both TechMeme and Memeorandum have been filled with analysis and reporting on the AP’s new policy (and subsequent “retraction”) disallowing blogs from quoting in whole or partiality any of their wire pieces without proper payment and license. This odd trend continues, not from an Old Media source, but from a member of the blogosphere. Louis Gray reports that Benjamin Golub, creator of RSSMeme, has received threat of legal action for linking and re-publishing articles found to be popularly shared on Google Reader:
Today, RSSmeme’s Benjamin Golub, who has developed a tracker for the most popular shared items on Google Reader, saw one unhappy publisher threaten him with legal action after she had found her feed included in the service. [...] Talking with him by phone this afternoon, he said the complainant’s feed had only been shared two times, by a single sharer. But she had essentially penned an e-mail saying to “remove all content, or I will send a lawyer.”
We Like RSSmeme and Services Like It…
We’ve covered RSSmeme extensively in the past, and I’m a fan of the service (as well as its friendly ‘competitor’, Adam Ostrow’s Readburner. Shyftr is yet another service that has been on the receiving end of controversy over this type of thing (though no legal threats I’ve been made aware of). I’ve noted in the past, though, the purely theoretical line in the sand that aggregators and republishers set themselves on the other side of from sploggers, and how difficult that can be to distinguish from those with untrained eyes.
To briefly re-hash all that, a splogger is someone who blatantly rips off content from a blog and publishes it with their own advertisements around it (there are hundreds of examples around the ‘Net, and none need any more link-juice). An aggregator typically republishes headlines and snippets (like, for example, TechMeme and Technorati). Then, in some of the more advanced cases, you have shared items blogs and link blogs (like Google’s Shared Items feature of Google Reader, or Tumblr) which will post either partial feeds, or more often complete feeds of the original posts, but typically without advertisements.
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Does Affiliate Marketing Mix with Social Media?
June 19, 2008 — 07:57 PM PDT — by Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — — 50 CommentsAfter I and Inquisitr’s Duncan Riley yesterday both expressed a bit of apprehension that the sometimes unscrupulous world of affiliate and MLM marketing might be making its way to the Twittersphere, John Reese (founder of traffic funnelling pyramid scheme BlogRush) decided to “set the record straight” on his personal blog. Unfortunately for John, much like in his marketing verbiage, he was unable to stay very far away from hyperbole and the ridiculous allegation that I didn’t research my position before I promoted it.
Of the many things that John took issue with, the first thing he mentioned was that both Duncan and I didn’t do our research. As evidence of this, he bragged that he’d “never sold an ebook since I’ve been marketing online for over 15 years.” I stand corrected on this point. He gave away ebooks to sell “digital home study materials.” Essentially, books on CD. Not ebooks, per se, but pretty close.
Most of the rest of his post, in retort, reads like the marketing verbiage you probably remember from BlogRush and from the excerpts of his Twitter letter Duncan and I quoted. “I’m the best,” and “I’ve made high traffic sites,” and “I made all this money, and it was only my side project.” I’m sure that impresses a lot of folks, otherwise how else would he have have sold all his “not-ebooks.” His defenses of his actions seem to amount to “I’m rich, so I’m right.” Bank robbers can be rich, too. That doesn’t make them right either.
His thrust of his retorts seem to be that I’m some sort of anti-marketing hippie, and that my “lack of research” is a thorough indication that something is rotten in the state of Mashable (or perhaps even blogging entirely?). Anyone that has followed my opinion pieces in general, or who actually knows me, knows this is laughable, as I’ve many times defended marketing from undue government regulation and attack. What I (and most human beings, for that matter) hate with a passion are hucksters trying to pawn off on me something I don’t need or have any use or interest in. This is something in which, unfortunately, the affiliate marketing world excels in. That isn’t an indictment of everyone who might be an affiliate marketer, but it is an indictment of a lot of the more visible members of this demographic.
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Facebook Search in Your Inbox
June 19, 2008 — 06:19 PM PDT — by Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — — 7 Comments
Facebook announced a short while ago that they’re rolling out a utility that brings true usefulness to their messaging function. They’re going to allow users of Facebook the ability to search through past inbox 
messages.
Ever had a friend send you a Facebook message suggesting a good restaurant? Or maybe you were sent an address or phone number of an old friend. Then time passes and your Inbox fills up, and by the time you’re ready to go out to eat with your old friend you have to page through hundreds of Facebook messages to find the one you need. Inbox Search aims to fix this problem.
In terms of additional features that improve the service directly available to the user (as opposed to developers or advertisers), its been a while since something caught my eye as something that would make me want to look at the service as anything other than a black hole for time and a place to get turned into a zombie (or a pirate).
For folks like me, we’re still a bit concerned about the inability to move data in and out of the system at will, but for the average user, this is likely to have a significant impact in terms of retaining new users and increasing the amount of trust existing users put into the system, at least in terms of communications.
SoCruise Connects the Cruise Community Online
June 19, 2008 — 05:20 PM PDT — by Alana Taylor — — 7 Comments
Web 2.0 has been advancing the way we connect with our friends and family, but it has also introduced all kinds of communities to the Internet that may not have otherwise existed. SoCruise is one of them.
SoCruise is a social networking site focused on uniting the cruise community online. Cruises are a popular choice for sunshine-loving vacationers, and now SoCruise will provide these vacationers with a chance to connect their experiences. From Norwegian Cruises to Caribbean cruises, SoCruise creates networks for hundreds of different ships and communities.
It almost seems ridiculous not to have a cruise social network. Oftentimes it is on holiday trips and vacations that people form close relationships with others they meet along the way, but have trouble keeping in touch. Not only does SoCruise keep its users in a tight-knit community, like any social network, it lets them create profiles, upload pictures, and post notes. It can also help them generate personalized cruise trips, deals, and holiday offers.
For having launched just last week, SoCruise is very advanced. It’s perfect for advertisers because it lets them analyze user information to send specific offers. But I have issues with the fact that it looks too much like Expedia.com instead of a place to socialize, network, and grow a community.
And in terms of travel, perhaps the site is a bit too niche. The users who join this site will have to be the kind of people who love cruise ships enough to travel on them multiple times a year and want to be connected to their cruise ship buddies all the time. If these people exist, more power to them. But for the people who only go on cruise ships once or twice a year, general trip-planning social sites like TripTie or TripWiser may be more useful.
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