Facebook made Nielsen's last points of comparison anything but close calls, though.  It beat the other social networks by wide margins in terms of "% Reach of Active Social Users," "Sessions per Person," and "Time per Person."

Facebook, then, would appear best positioned to find advertisers and generate revenue outside the U.S.

Facebook made Nielsen's last points of comparison anything but close calls, though.  It beat the other social networks by wide margins in terms of "% Reach of Active Social Users," "Sessions per Person," and "Time per Person."

Facebook, then, would appear best positioned to find advertisers and generate revenue outside the U.S.

"NCAA March Madness on Demand continues to regularly exceed our expectations," said Sean McManus, President, CBS News and Sports.

"It is the perfect combination of programming and the Internet. Our ability to successfully develop the product alongside steady growth in streaming programming for the Internet and wireless content provides many options and truly maximizes the Network's NCAA bundled rights agreement."

Other highlights from MMOD traffic include:

*The most watched game on 3-18 was the double overtime Florida vs. BYU game with 521k hours of streaming audio and video. That's up 50 prcent over 2009's most watched game from the first day of the first round (Washington vs. Mississippi State) which had 348 hours of streaming.

*The most watch hour yesterday day waas 2:00-2:59 ET with 533k streaming hours (16% of the total for the day).

The MMOD is also available on CNN.com, ESPN.com, Facebook, TV.com and CNET
 

"RiotWise Trending Ad Units serve fresh content that's relevant right now," said Tobias Peggs, GM, OneRiot.

"It's perfect for social networks, realtime meme trackers and other social sharing services where users are primarily in discovery mode and rabidly consume content related to trending topics. Now those sites have a smart way to monetize with an ad product that makes sense to their users."

Publishers can call the RiotWise Trending Ad Units the same way they would call standard ad units.

Since its launch last December, OneRiot's Trending Ads have seen exponential growth across Twitter apps, social messaging desktop apps and real-time search engines.
 

Joe Brennan Jr.
IMEGA’s chairman

"In the written decision, the Court clearly indicates they agree with our arguments, and are inviting us to refile, so that the technicality of the standing issue can be resolved," said Joe Brennan, Interactive Media Entertainment & Gaming Association (iMEGA) chairman.

"It's unfortunate, but I can't imagine that Kentucky's lawyers will celebrate a ruling that says 'bring us an owner, so we can rule in your favor'".

iMEGA and the other affected parties, Interactive Gaming Concil and Sportsbook.com, have up to 20 days to file a motion for reconsideration. In the ruling, the Kentucky Supreme Court indicated that no additional briefs or oral arguments were necessary for them to consider the case, and that a petition could be made to the Appeals Court to move the case immediately back to the state Supreme Court.

"All along, it seemed the Court wanted to go our way, and this decision today indicates that is still the case," Brennan said.

"The Court is telling us that all that is necessary is for one domain owner to come forward, and we likely win."

Brennan indicated iMEGA would immediately work with other parties to resolve the Court's issue, and would quickly file a motion to satisfy the Court.

"We obviously would have preferred a complete, clean victory today, but reading the decision, it seems this is a technicality that is only delaying the inevitable," Brennan sai
 

Joe Brennan Jr.
IMEGA’s chairman

"In the written decision, the Court clearly indicates they agree with our arguments, and are inviting us to refile, so that the technicality of the standing issue can be resolved," said Joe Brennan, Interactive Media Entertainment & Gaming Association (iMEGA) chairman.

"It's unfortunate, but I can't imagine that Kentucky's lawyers will celebrate a ruling that says 'bring us an owner, so we can rule in your favor'".

iMEGA and the other affected parties, Interactive Gaming Concil and Sportsbook.com, have up to 20 days to file a motion for reconsideration. In the ruling, the Kentucky Supreme Court indicated that no additional briefs or oral arguments were necessary for them to consider the case, and that a petition could be made to the Appeals Court to move the case immediately back to the state Supreme Court.

"All along, it seemed the Court wanted to go our way, and this decision today indicates that is still the case," Brennan said.

"The Court is telling us that all that is necessary is for one domain owner to come forward, and we likely win."

Brennan indicated iMEGA would immediately work with other parties to resolve the Court's issue, and would quickly file a motion to satisfy the Court.

"We obviously would have preferred a complete, clean victory today, but reading the decision, it seems this is a technicality that is only delaying the inevitable," Brennan sai
 

Heather Hopkins, Senior Online Analyst, Hitwise, collected the numbers using clickstream data. The metric reports the percentage of visits by source (i.e. Google, Yahoo! Google News, Facebook, etc) that were new versus returning. New visitors are defined as those that haven't visited the site within the past 30 days.

"Interestingly, visitors from Google are less likely to be returning visitors than average for either Google News or Facebook," said Hopkins.

"This reinforces the long term value to News and Media organizations of working with the likes of Google News and Facebook."
 

There was no shatteringly impactful takeaway from SXSW 2010, as it seems we’ve entered a (sure to be brief) innovation lull. But, I absorbed many smaller lessons that will help guide my thinking about the conference, technology, and social business in the coming months.

1. There is More Than One SXSW
As the conference continues to grow (interactive registrations up 40% over 2009, to more than 15,000 total), attendee segmentation follows apace. There seems to be a distinct collection of sessions, parties, and hang-outs for the social media crowd, and then a completely separate collection for developers, entrepreneurs (and of course film attendees). Several people I know who live in the developer or entrepreneur world frequently checked in on Gowalla at panels and parties that I had never heard of, and were completely off my radar. The feeling of community, and “we’re all in this together” is slipping away.

2. Bigger Isn’t Necessarily Better
If registration climbs again, SXSW organizers will have a real dilemma. This year, nearly every session had a line to get in, forcing attendees to arrive meaningfully early to find a seat. Thus, if the session was a disappointment (see below), it was impossible to jump into another session. Further, it was unlikely you’d be able to attend back-to-back sessions unless they were in the same room. Realistically, you can only catch a session in every other time slot, and that’s a problem. Even with more and more sessions being staged outside the convention center in adjacent hotels, SXSW cannot get much bigger without serious impact to the attendee experience.

3. The Conference Isn’t That Good
Whether it was their fourth time or first, every person I spoke to within my social media bubble (and I asked about 50) said the same thing – “I was surprised by how bad some of the sessions were.” More so than any other event I attend, SXSW is conference roulette. Evan Williams’ (co-founder, Twitter) keynote was so disastrous that an anecdotally estimated 80% of those in the room left before conclusion. South by Southwest is distinct in its programming methodology, letting attendees vote (in part) for which sessions will be staged, which unfortunately makes for a lot of extra-pithy titles with weak content.

SXSW needs a much better vetting process if it’s going to retain even a modicum of educational value.

4. The Periphery Exceeds the Core
The best parts of this year’s SXSW largely took place outside the framework of the actual conference. The best parties are always those that are purposely kept quiet, and this year was no exception, with David Armano and Dell’s Richard Binhammer reprising the daytime All Hat party for social media types.

But now, even the best content is beyond the official SXSW boundaries. The best sessions I saw this year were at Get Ready to Live, a one day “shadow conference” put on by BazaarVoice, BlueClover, and Chris Brogan. I suspect we’ll start seeing much more of this parallel programming to meet the needs of advanced practitioners.

5. Location, Location, Location
The biggest story of the event was the widespread usage of presence services foursquare and Gowalla. Check-ins were plentiful (as evidenced by the many thousands of people noting that they had been at the airport), and sessions describing how businesses can take advantage of local social were numerous. While the privacy issues continue to be a stumbling block for some, the ability of these services to enhance your experiences in real-time by showing you who’s nearby, and insider tips for each location is enticing. Both companies (as well as a second tier of contenders) are working on new features and ramping up their business development teams. foursquare has a very interesting new dashboard that shows business owners data about how and when people have checked-in. I’ll write about that soon.

6. Twitter is so 2008
The buzz about location came largely at the expense of Twitter, as most of the social media brigade updated their Twitter status infrequently, if at all. As I wrote about yesterday in “7 Reasons Not to Put All Your Eggs in the Twitter Basket” as your number of Twitter followers grows, the percentage of those followers that care about your current activity plummets. Thus, to avoid boring their followers with #sxsw tweet barrages, many people bypassed Twitter in favor of foursquare or Gowalla.

7. Scan Me? Not Yet
I had high hopes for the emergence of QR codes (the newfangled bar codes that allow you to instantly access a Web site or rich media). At SXSW, each attendee had their unique QR code printed on their name badge. Smart phone-toting attendees could snap a photo of each others’ code, and instantly follow one another within the my.SXSW social network. Largely, it didn’t happen.

Whether it was the darkness of the bars, the dorkiness of pointing your camera at someone’s chest, or the limited shelf-life of following someone on an event-based social network, most folks at SXSW snapped a couple of codes, and then shrugged.

I maintain that QR codes will eventually be as huge in the U.S. as they are in Asia, just not yet. Start-up Sticky Bits exhibited at the conference, and their version of QR with custom content, integrated statistics, and crowd-sourced notes may have real promise.

8. Social Data Firehosing
In contrast to the conference at large, I was delighted by the exhibition this year. Larger space, more interesting companies, and better production overall. Several companies I visited are working in the field of social data collection and analysis, an area where we need to make much progress to fulfill the promise of universal social media adoption.

9. Social Integration
Maybe I just heard what I wanted to hear/preach, but there seemed to be a lot of chatter among returning attendees and experienced social media types about integrating social media with other marketing and/or customer service elements. Again, this is an incredibly positive sign, as we can’t treat social media as a unicorn when it’s really just a horse. Good news for my clients at ExactTarget, who got a lot of SXSW tongues wagging with their pre-conference purchase of enterprise Twitter management company Co-Tweet (whose CEO Jesse Engle I was delighted to meet).

10. Social Specialization
There was much talk among the social media consultant set about the need for the industry to deconstruct social media. As David Meerman Scott acknowledged in his session Tuesday, “What does social media even mean?” It’s become a fuzzy catch all for everything from customer service, to customer experience, to customer relationship management, to content marketing, to word of mouth. This level of vagary is useless.

We need to start getting specific about social media services and capabilities, and talk about the components of social media, not “social media” as a whole.

11. It’s About Retention
I was heartened to see that with a few exceptions, most of the conversations, exhibiting companies, and sessions at SXSW positioned social media as a way to engage with current customers, rather than as a way to drive awareness or first-time sales. I hope that we continue down this path, and focus more on the social, and less on the “media”. There was also a lot of talk (especially among the big brands) on operationalizing social media, and creating true best practices for how to thrive in a real-time world where every customer is a reporter.

12. Star Power
As the number of social media “celebrities” increases via book publishing, widespread acknowledgement of skills, or personal delusion, the difference between the good people and the assholes becomes codified. People like Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk are name-brand consultants and speakers because they have great ideas and articulate them well. But more importantly, both of them (and many, many more), genuinely care about people. Chris is incredibly kind and approachable. And Gary put on a mind-blowing display of people passion at his keynote, standing at the front of a cavernous ballroom, shaking hands, hugging, and thanking all of the many hundreds of attendees.

Conversely, there were several moments of high school flashback-inducing douche baggery that are more common with the conference getting so big, that VIP sections and secret invites have become the norm. I’d say “you know who you are” but obviously, you don’t.

13. Experience Trumps Interruption
If nothing else, SXSW is an experiential feast. Everything about it is super-sized and intense, like Hulk Hogan + Red Bull. But despite its many shortcomings, I’ll be back. And it’s not because of the parties, or the sessions, or the corporate sponsors. It’s not about anything that’s on your calendar or in any way tied to the norm of interruption marketing.

What makes SXSW special is the accidents. The kismet. The little things that you’ve never seen, and won’t again. Off the top of my head: Chatting with Julien Smith about the pros/cons of book co-authorship; being handed free bacon by a kid (also, free bacon soap from Sweet Soaps); being a Karaoke backup dancer; talking hockey with Marcel Lebrun; watching dueling theramins (one on fire) at the incredible Man or Astro Man reunion concert; and Mike Corak eating Habanero chili with jalapeno topping, and Jason Falls footing the bill.

If you come to Austin expecting it to be laid out if front of you, for it all to make sense in an orderly, pain-free fashion you’ll leave disappointed. But, if you embrace the randomness and connect your own dots, you’ll learn a lot about the industry, the people in it, and maybe even yourself.

See you next year.

Comments

Global mobile apps will be worth $17.5 billion by 2012, according to an independent report commissioned by app store GetJar. Mobile app downloads across all types of handset are also expected to increase from over 7 billion downloads in 2009 to almost 50 billion in 2012 - a year on year growth rate of 92%. 

This would mean that the value of apps sold would be greater than the projected $13.83 billion value of CDs sold in 2012.

Comments

According to an analysis of social sites by online advertising network Chikita published by Mashable, people go to Twitter for news, MySpace for games and entertainment, Facebook for news and community and digg has a mixed bag.

Another post from Chikita shows that Facebook is far and away the best source of loyal visitors – over 20% of all visitors from Facebook visited the referred site four or more times per week.  Digg came in second place with slightly over 16%.

Comments

• Twitter.com accounted for 0.14% of upstream visits to News and Media sites last week. (Note that we are measuring website visits from Twitter.com only.) This compares to 3.64% from Facebook and 1.27% from Google News.
• Facebook was the #3 source of visits to News and Media websites last week. Google News was the #11 site and Twitter.com ranked #39.
• Upstream visits from Twitter.com to News and Media sites have grown by 54% over the past year.

Comments

"You can post buzz about a great meal you had and share photos of the new restaurant. To save time, your posts will upload in the background, letting you get back to your scrumptious dessert without a wait."

The widget is currently available in English for Android phones running 1.6 and later. Google says it plans to add support for other languages soon.

Search for Google Buzz in the Android Market to download the widget. Once installed, you can add it to your home screen: tap "Menu" while on the home screen and select "Add > Widgets > Google Buzz".
 

- Over 72% of users who clicked on the engagement became fans
- 59,000 people published the story to their news feed
- Over 70,000 clicks were received on secondary feeds
- In 24hours, Bing had over 400,000 new fans to keep

Microsoft said its goals for engagement and social media efforts have been to:

- Add or create relevant value (stuff that's not even necessarily a Microsoft property)

- Add depth to Bing's personality

- Lead someone to a relevant engagement with Bing or each other.

- Yield passionate or emotional response from people

- Be intimate and/or scalable (can we be both)?

Bing's Farmville experiment achieved all of these. However, the point of this is not that you should go out and immediately start a campaign through Farmville (although maybe it's worth looking into if you think it's a fit). The point is that there are more ways to harness a massive social network user-base (Facebook recently surpassed Google as the most-visited site in the U.S. for the week), according to Experian Hitwise). That's a pretty impressive feat. Also consider that consumers favor brands who are on Facebook and Twitter, according to a recent study.

Really, it's not even about Facebook or Twitter. It's about getting out there wherever people are, and this is where they happen to be at the moment. That may change by this time next year, or the year after, but the principle will not. We're at a point in history where it's never been so easy for consumers and brands to engage with one another. Perhaps even better for brands, is that it has never been easier to reach customers in places they choose to entertain themselves, and I don't mean just get in their faces, but actually reach them and get that engagement from them.

If you are searching for information on Google about effects of chemotherapy, and you are met with an article written by an expert on the subject, with facts checked by doctors, is there really anything wrong with that? Would you rather get a Wikipedia entry? Remember, we're not talking "news" here. We're talking information, and in other cases entertainment.

Demand media does use some Google ads, as iEntry CEO and WebProNews publisher Rich Ord pointed out in an article a while back. He wrote:

The problem as I see it is that while Google is highly ranking the content of these mass production publishers it also has a financial incentive to do so. Almost all content farms use Google Adwords for their revenue. So while Google on the one hand encourages publishers to make content for their readers and not just for search ranking, it is in partnership with sites that do just that.

This should make publishers wonder about their business models. Should they spend thousands paying reporters and editors to create quality content for their users or should they simply create a content farm that pays little for bulk quantities of articles and videos but gets lots of Google love?

I guess if you can make content for the purpose of ranking in searches ... but make it targeted, unique and not horrible, then you might find that Google well reward you quite well.

The issue of Google's own practices with regards to this are really a separate issue from Demand Media's practices. As far as Rosenblatt is concerned, they're just producing the content that people want, and will find that through either search or discovery. And they're making a killing doing it.

Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends... what you think about it.

  "As a society we have become increasingly reliant on the Internet as a first point of reference for a lot of information, and it is crucial that we make Britain's young people aware of exactly where they can turn to for dependable information and support. Get Connected is the safe gateway to these services."

Young people's preference for using the Internet to look for advice is reflected by the continued increase in incoming contacts online to Get Connected over the past year. Since the launch of its Web chat service in 2006, almost one in ten (8%) of all enquiries are now made via instant messaging. More young people (13%) are also choosing to contact the charity for help and support through email.

"Young people in Britain have grown up with the internet and mass communication engrained as a part of their daily lives," said Fiona Clark, Chief Executive, Get Connected.

"Beyond their family and friends they need trusted sources to help them make an informed choice, whatever the problem may be."
 

One of the more interesting parts of the keynote was when Van Buskirk took a question from someone on Twitter about Spotify's advertising - something along the lines of if somebody listens to a lot of down-tempo music, will Spotify start filtering ads by mood?

He says they have targeting, and they continue to learn more about users, and more and more brands are discovering Spotify. "We've seen a lot of promising results with advertisers who have included artists," says Ek. He says click through rates have been 3, 4, and 5%. "If you look at traditional metrics, that's super high."

As far as the question asked, Ek says, "that's definitely something that we want to do."

You can figure out brand preferences, and if people are in the same demographic (like live in same place, listen to the same kind of music), they might get a different ad if they drive a BMW vs. an Audi, he says. He also says the ad model's "getting better every month."

On another note, Ek thinks playlists are the new mixtape. With Spotify, among other services, they can be shared with others. Spotify users (of which there are seven million), he says, have a hundred million playlists, and about thirty percent of playlists are albums. "A lot of people say the album is dead," says Ek. "I disagree  - maybe pricing needs to be adjusted..."

All in all, the future of music delivery, according to Spotify, appears to be that users should be able to access their music libraries from virtually any device (through the cloud), share playlists with friends, and they can subscribe and/or get highly targeted advertising.

A lot of work remains to be done as far as making this all a universal reality, but in a nutshell (at least with Spotify), this seems to be the vision for what's to come.

In the statement (which was posted on the YouTube Blog), Zahavah Levine, YouTube Chief Counsel, raised several interesting points.  One group of claims made Viacom sound like an absolute villain, too.

Levine wrote, "For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there.  It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site.  It deliberately 'roughed up' the videos to make them look stolen or leaked.  It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses.  It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom."

Sound far-fetched?  Well, here's another accusation of Levin's, and this one has been verified.  He wrote, "Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site.  As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement.  In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself."

Obviously, YouTube feels very strongly that it's in the right.  If a judge decides otherwise (and it remains unknown when a ruling might come down), we remind you: Viacom asked for $1 billion when it first filed its lawsuit.

  *6 percent of those 13 to 54, and 9 percent of 18-to-34 have cut back or cancelled their TV service in the past year due to their online viewing of network programming, or plan to do so in the next year
 

Key features of the Zillow Android app include:

*Home details and historical data on 95 million homes in the U.S.

*Curbside images of homes using Google StreetView

*Multiple photos, home details, and contact information on homes for sale and rent

*Users can filter their home searches by sale price, rental price, number of bedrooms, bathrooms and listing types


"Since the launch of our highly successful  successful Zillow iPhone App, which has been downloaded nearly one million times since April 2009, home shoppers have been asking us to build an app for the Android," said Spencer Rascoff, Zillow chief operating officer. 

"It's clear that people want access to all of Zillow's data and information like Zestimates, listing information, and prior sale price while they are out looking at homes or exploring neighborhoods. We saw this as a great opportunity to be on a platform with enormous potential for real estate and home shopping."
 

"For those customers around the world who don't yet have a Kindle, Kindle for Mac is a great way to instantly access and read the most popular new releases as well as their old favorites."

Kindle for Mac features Amazon's Whispersync technology that automatically saves and synchronizes bookmarks and last page read across devices. Kindle for Mac allows users to read some on their Mac and some on a Kindle, while saving their place.

Amazon says several new features will be added to the Kindle for Map app in the near future, including full text search and the ability to create and edit notes and highlights.
 

"While social media is not the silver bullet that some pundits claim it to be, it is an extremely important and relatively low cost touch point that has a direct impact on sales and positive word of mouth," said Josh Mendelsohn a vice president at Chadwick Martin Bailey.

"Companies not actively engaging are missing a huge opportunity and are saying something to consumers - intentionally or unintentionally- about how willing they are to engage on consumers' terms."

The study also found that people view brands not engaging in social media as out of touch.

When asked the question "What does it say about a brand if they are not involved with sites like Facebook or Twitter?" they said the following:

* "It's EXPECTED that a company have some digital face - whether it's on FB or Twitter I don't know - but they need a strong electronic presence or you doubt their relevance in today's marketplace." Female 50-54

* "Either they are not interested in the demographic that frequents Facebook and Twitter or they are unaware of the opportunity to get more exposure in a more interactive method." Male 35-39

* "It shows they are not really with it or in tune with the new ways to communicate with customers." Female 18-24.

 * "If they're not on Facebook or Twitter, then they aren't in touch with the "electronic" people."  Female 55-59

 

At that rate, we might be hearing how 30 hours' worth of video is uploaded every minute by St. Patrick's Day 2011.