Just in case you were wondering - no! d i g i t a l m i s s i v e has not gone into hibernation or is contemplating early retirement. Far from it actually. 

It’s just we’ve all been rather busy with jobs, projects, plus some vacation time here and there, which has caused us to post less than we have since we started this blog in August of last year.

Which brings me to the topic of my (long overdue) post: What happens if a blogger doesn’t blog each and every day? 
Read the rest of this entry »

OK. I admit. I am pretty psyched about president-elect Barack Obama’s recent commitment to video-taping the weekly Democratic radio address.

Psyched because it seems much more than a simple “move-over-radio” battle cry; more than just postulating the World Wide Web as the latest of many presidential (one-way) bullhorns available.

For one, the “YouTube”-ization of the weekly Democratic radio address means that a rather arcane political messaging system is coming of age.

In other words, the good old weekly radio address (finally) preps to going (legitimately) video and viral and social, in the same way as anyone’s video blog out there could.

In a way (unknowingly) echoing this season’s ABC and NBC marketing slogans, Barack Obama and team invite us to “start here” and “chime in” - but this time outside the very TV broadcasting system that for so long determined what we would see, when, and for how long.

It is certainly nothing new that a publicly elected official is unafraid to engage in a form of political messaging that - once out the door - is no longer in his control.

That’s how traditional TV (or radio and print media for that matter), works. In this the Web is no different.

But it is major that aforementioned politician whole-heartedly embraces the collaborative Web and the truly conversational two-way nature of online video given that this is past his election campaign, and that he is none less than the next President of the United States going social on his entire constituency. 

Recently asked by CNN’s Sunday talk show host Fareed Zakaria about what advice if any he would give the incoming president, Al Gore’s response was simple: “Make more expository speeches. … [the] people are downloading”.

The presidential radio address as a viral video message for all to engage with plays right into that, ups the ante for you and me, the White House versus traditional media.

Let’s see if and how this will pan out.

Have you pinged the president-elect lately?

Wow.  Wow in italics.  That’s how the NY Times’ Virginia Heffernan recently described the availability of vintage Warner’s/WB Network content on the recently launched thewb.com.  And we’re talking vintage: ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, ‘Felicity’, ‘Friends’, ‘MadTV’ – shows many years out of production.  Although a very limited amount of fresh programming is also promised, to the extent the site is primarily about exploiting Warner’s more stale content as fully as possible (and from a quick visit to the site, it sure looks that way), I would disagree with Ms. Heffernan.

Strangely, the article fails to even mention hulu.com, the NBC/Fox joint venture that predates thewb.com by about a year and a half now.  And not only was hulu first on the scene - it’s also more noteworthy for being a joint venture between two broadcast competitors, for offering a wide selection of current broadcast content, and for making several NBC shows available before their fall 2008 premieres.

Add to that the fact that Comedy Central has been making its current content (including ‘The Daily Show’) available online imediately the morning after airing for months now, and it becomes clear that theWB.com is not exactly wow-worthy – on the contrary, the exclusion of current broadcast content and the general age of what is available on the site indicates something of a hedged bet on the part of Warner’s.

In any event, hulu.com would have been the service to write about.

I imagine professionals in any field wince when they see their field covered incompletely or misleadingly in the general media, but Ms. Heffernan’s article misses a more major point: any Flash Player/browser-based video over IP solution (even those offering content from this century) will ultimately be limited by its dependence on the PC – because when it comes to content much longer than the 90-second long tail videos we all snack on from youtube, what’s commonly known as ‘watching TV’ is (and will continue to be) done in front of a coffee table, not a desk.  That’s not to say the paradigm shift to video over IP is not inevitable and already well underway - it is.  But what it’s first going to take is an innovative hardware solution to get that television onto the home network (either a dedicated set-top box or an Ethernet-enabled TV, DVR, or DVD player).  Only then will video over IP services (even the more viable ones such as hulu.com) have the opportunity to really change the game.