March 8, 2007

The ongoing professionalization of amateurs ?

It seems like Next New Networks is raising the bar (or is it lowering the threshold) in terms of soliciting and promoting _user-generated content_.

Via the New York Times

Internet Start-Up to Take a Hybrid Media Approach
BRAD STONE
March 8, 2007

Several cable television veterans are putting their band back together and taking their act to the Internet.

Next New Networks, a New York-based Internet start-up run and backed by former executives of MTV and Nickelodeon, will announce plans today to begin a series of video-oriented Web sites — what the company calls micro-networks — on niche topics like do-it-yourself fashion, comic books, car racing and cartoons.

[Snip ...]

Next New Networks plans to blend elements of old and new media into a type of hybrid entertainment that is different from traditional television and user-generated sites like YouTube. Its various Web properties will revolve around professionally produced videos of three to eight minutes, which it plans to pitch to sponsors as safe and predictable places to advertise online.

Many of the programs will solicit contributions from their audiences, but the company will screen submissions before they approved as final product. The company plans to generate some programming itself while also identifying talented video contributors and bringing them into the Next New Networks fold.

It is starting with six Web sites, including Fast Lane Daily (fastlanedaily.com), which features a daily news program for auto enthusiasts, and ThreadBanger (threadbanger.com), which offers a five-minute weekly show with MTV-style anchors who discuss the homemade-clothing culture.

Mr. Seibert, the creative director, is bringing two existing video sites to the network: Channel Frederator (channelfrederator.com), a weekly program on animation, and VOD Cars (VODCars.com), a curated collection of video clips from the car culture.

The founders believe the Internet offers a programming opportunity similar to the early days of cable, which traditional media firms are not exploiting.

“The nature of big media companies is about incumbent brands and repurposing and refashioning their material for the Web,” said Mr. Scannell, the chief executive. “We have no incumbent brands. We’re a white sheet for creative people.”

Mr. Miller, who left America Online last October under pressure from his bosses at Time Warner, cited the founders’ cable experience as the reason he is backing the company.

“To me these guys are returning to their roots,” he said. “They are unshackled from large media environment where it is much more about what your quarterly goals are, and can go back to developing new networks and ways of communicating with audiences.”

In part, Next New Networks is also challenging the idea that the chaotic terrain of sites like YouTube and MySpace can be a friendly place for advertisers.

“Video sharing is awesome, but advertisers are knitting their brow,” Mr. Scannell said. “They want to know what they’re backing. There is a place for brands to deliver something that is consistent.”

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.. and yet truer words may never have been written.

Joe Bageant on free beer, free speech zones, neutered liberals and reason.

In the Reign of the One-nutted King

Janked rats cried for blood and the prosthetic hand of love waved good-bye to reason

By Joe Bageant

Not long ago protesting Danish construction workers won a historic victory against workplace tyranny — they retained their company sponsored on-the-job beer breaks. Heartless employers being what they are, had asked workers to pay half the cost of the beer. Oppression is ever boundless.

About that same time last fall a couple hundred American protesters gathered in a Washington D.C. parking lot. Chronic liberal malcontents, they had the gall to ask why our government was slaughtering hundreds of thousands of abysmally ordinary folks in Iraq, people moreover like themselves who, even under Saddam Hussein, whose reign was so infamously marked by his penchant for black velvet paintings and the most sordid kinds of torture, nevertheless managed to do what most comkon folks in the world do — send the kids off to school every morning, cursed Baghdad’s traffic, and perhaps a little fudged on their taxes. So why are they being wiped out at great public expense, and for no apparent reason?

This being a free republic, the American protesters stood in the parking lot, packed buttock to belly button inside one of our fatherland’s designated Free Speech Zones, a bad case of branding if ever there was one, and though they are no longer called that, the function is still the same.

[Snip ...]

Anyway, the reason liberals are sucker bait for every wedge the Republican think tanks can hand them is because liberals, like every other American, are conditioned to compete against each other — even fellow liberals.

In a monetized rat race society (best called The Company) that continually pits its citizens/workers against one another in a toxic winner take all rat race for quality education, health care, employment, crime free neighborhoods, and political attention of any sort, then dubs it mere "competition," as if it were a happy game of badminton, EVERYBODY rich or poor feels existentially threatened. Republican capitalists feel threatened that liberal humanism might empower workers, which it would, if anybody bothered to practice it. The gay man fears the common homophobe, as if that dumb bastard has any more power than he does. So he grabs the bullhorn at the Gay Pride rally and publicly denounces the homophobe — who really couldn’t give a shit and won’t hear the denunciation anyway — never confronting the real enemy because, like the homophobe, he has been conditioned to combative personal response toward the guy down the street, instead of reason. CBS Sixty Minutes covers his "issue, fifteen minutes a year, thereby validating it in a television managed state.

Divisive politics once again beats the snot out of reason.

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Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post puts it nicely in this column.

There’s nothing left to say, really.

The questions are very interesting, if not tantalising …

Combining them with the answers that

The short blog post here seems straightforward, and no doubt Michael Gartenberg must have suffered through several long nights.

No matter where you sit or stand re: Robert Scoble, he accomplished a lot for Microsoft’s PR.  I wonder how this announcement will affect the next contender.

As the Brits would say, "didn’t even get his feet under the desk, really"

And Back to Analyst …
March 7th, 2007

This is a difficult post to write. But after much of thought, I have decided not to remain with Microsoft and I am returning to JupiterResearch as of Monday 3/12.

Tags: Michael Gartenberg, Robert Scoble, Microsoft

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