We’ve been going on lately about how much sense netbooks make.  Evidently, some smart people out in Cupertino might think so too: within the last 2 days, the online rumor-mill about all things Apple has kicked into full gear again, this time started by reports that a Taiwanese firm has just signed an agreement to begin supplying large touchscreens to Apple later this year.

What we’re talking about here is essentially a large (9″ or 10″ screen) iPod Touch - physically, it could well end up looking very much like this mock-up concept imagined by gizmodo (at left) - but under the hood (or ‘glass’, rather), I wonder if it will run a stripped-down version of the Apple OS or follow the closed iPhone/iPod Touch “App Store” model - in other words, will it allow traditional fully-installed applications, or will it allow only the more limited (but easier and safer) widget-like software products (running one layer up on a virtual machine) available on the iPhone?

Either way, if unlike the iPhone and iTouch, this device will (finally) run Adobe Flash (the ubiquitous video streaming application behind Hulu and YouTube), then this will be a hee-uge hit..

I’ve written before on what an ill-suited viewing platform I feel the PC and web browser make for viewing internet video. Keeping that in mind, the big unknown about this sleek full-screen “net tablet” is whether it will run Flash. If so, it could make the whole web video experience a lot nicer - and a lot less tied to the workplace and/or deskop…

I know I promised to keep politics off this blog. Do indulge me, though. 

Besides. It’s much more about the (digital) economy than politics.

The White House web site folks replaced YouTube with Akamai as the preferred video delivery platform for the President’s weekly online video address.

What sparked the decision was privacy concerns over how YouTube-embedded video dealt with cookies placed on the devices people used to access the popular White House Web domain.

OK. I get it! But what about the other, much less discussed issue in this context? Money!

Behind the decision to ditch YouTube for Akamai also were complaints that a tax-payer funded government site should not generate free advertising for YouTube and thus Google, the online video giant’s parent company. (The rational being that someone clicking from the White House domain back to YouTube becomes a potentially valuable set of eyeballs against which YouTube can charge advertisers). 

Well, how about this? (All completely hypothetical of course, and somewhat simplified):

YouTube - which for all intents and purposes has solved its cookies issue. Gone is the privacy concern - continues to deliver the President’s video address to the White House site. The nation’s most prominent government Web destination thus drives traffic back to YouTube as it has in the past. 

But this time, this time we go out and actually buy shares in Google stock. (Believe me, it’s cheap right now).

Yes, rather than complaining about taxpayer money being misappropriated by letting www.whitehouse.gov drive free traffic back to YouTube, how about sharing in the financial upside (and risk, I admit) in YouTube’s incremental revenue benefit from my tax-funded arrangement?

Net, net? The White House site would regain an exceedingly capable video partner; one with unparalleled online brand recognition and viral video marketing ability unlike any other video site today. 

And taxpayers? They would have opportunity to realize a potential return on their stock investment transferring right back into their own pockets. (Capital gains tax not withstanding, that is).

Wait! Does this sound too much like a mini version of the current US stimulus plan, bailing out an already lackluster Internet stock with public money?

Is this a (mini) step towards socializing the digital economy - akin to the previous administration’s proposal to let taxpayers (partially) invest their tax-funded social security, with all the inherent risk attached?

Listen, I am just a telco guy. What do I know?

But quite frankly, to me the bigger picture is that the digital economy has grown and prospered best every time we rewarded value (here YouTube’s unique video delivery expertise) and risk (my trust that buying Google stock) will pay off.

Artificially disconnecting any Web site from a quality vendor makes little sense to me.

Besides, wouldn’t we want to see our tax dollars placed where they are likely to generate the highest return?

What’s wrong with that? Especially in this economy.

PS: Yes, I own a handful of Google stock. And no, this post is not a vote against Akamai.

We’ve written before on how ill-suited the personal computer is for viewing long-form internet video - and on the strange inability one often finds in the personal computing industry (and in a lot of new media analysis) to distinguish between how a 2 minute YouTube video and last week’s full episode of Lost are actually consumed.  The point is not lost on the CE industry, though: there will be a deluge of internet-enabled video hardware coming to market within the next 6-9 months (both televisions and set-top boxes), and while the few devices already out there (i.e. Apple TV, Vudu, and Roku) have all been based on closed “walled-garden” models, this new generation of hardware will instead be open, offering the promise of access to multiple internet video sources directly from the couch.

Which begs the question: what should the user interface for a system that aggregates multiple (and often competing) video services look like?  Clearly, a wide-open web browser model isn’t the appropriate solution for what is, after all, a consumer electronics device.

From an application design perspective, it’s an interesting question. Although I’ve already written about the approach Yahoo/Intel are taking with their Connected TV initiative, last week I had the opportunity to speak with Bob Poniatowski of TiVo regarding their upcoming internet video solution (currently in beta testing).  Two things I took away from our chat: (1) TiVo continues to place a substantial premium on UI design and ease of use, and (2) they’ve determined that focusing on a searching (rather than browsing) model neatly solves the problem of how to integrate multiple internet video services into a single cohesive user experience.  In fact, the name of the initiative (to be rolled out later this year as an additional feature on existing Series 3 and HD boxes) is “TiVo Search” - as CEO Tom Rogers puts it, “what Google did for the Internet, TiVo is now doing for the TV”.

It’s all about the search: users will be able to look for short-form content from sources such as YouTube, The N.Y. Times, and The Onion (among others).  As for premium content, if you have an account  with Amazon VOD, CinemaNow, or Netflix, you’ll enter a TiVo PIN on the respective website and be good to go.  However, one caveat: searching on Netflix is not yet supported - like the  Roku device, only whatever “Watch Instantly” titles already added to the Netflix queue via their website are available.

As an example, search “No Country for Old Men”, and you’ll be able to compare, purchase, and view the title from either Amazon or CinemaNow if you have accounts there (TiVo transparently handles any transactions).  You’ll also get reviews and related articles (from the N.Y. Times, for example), and from Youtube, you’ll get trailers, clips and fan raves/rants (Poniatowski likens the YouTube content to that of a “global DVD Extras menu”).  Search Tommy Lee Jones and you’ll get bio information, any other available films and/or television programs he’s appeared in, and again, any related short-form and user-generated content.

In addition, TiVo Search will include a (very TiVo-like) internet video “Discovery Bar” of suggestions based on your previous searches, and will also allow you view images from any computers on your home network… all in all, it’s easy to imagine this being pretty cool.

Things to watch:

• How will TiVo’s subscription revenue model compare to Yahoo/Intel’s Connected TV advertising-supported model?
• How will TiVo’s traditional in-house software development/deployment model compare against the Yahoo/Intel Connected TV “widget” model (and/or Apple TV’s App Store model)?
• When will Netflix “Watch Instantly” content become searchable too?
• Will TiVo expand into the lower end of the IPTV market by releasing a more affordable streaming-only (no HD, no DVR) device to compete with devices such as the Roku?  Having already done the heavy lifting of implementing the search system together, this would seem an likely move.

All in all, this looks to be a powerful and (as one would expect from TiVo) a well-designed long-form internet video solution.  Although TiVo’s market share has been under pressure from lower cost carrier-bundled DVRs in recent years, TiVo Search could be just the differentiating value-add the company’s looking for.

This caught my attention, only because it’s the first time I’ve seen it: yahoo! sports is now syndicating content from youtube…

hmmm.

A little recent history: in an “if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em” move, last year yahoo! had planned to outsource a major part of its paid search results business to google, until google walked away due to antitrust concern.  Other than that short-lived attempt to do business together, though, the two companies are competitors on several fronts:  search, email, and yes, video.

Well, maybe “competitors” is too strong a word, at least in the short-form online video space - google’s youtube has of course largely marginalized all other short-form video websites out there (maybe you’ve heard).

But so much so that yahoo! sports is now linking to youtube for video content?

Two ways to look at this: on one hand, not a great sign for the yahoo! video brand - but on the other, perhaps this level of cross-syndication is healthy…

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a new and interesting way some recording artists have started to use the internet: in an "if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em" move, several pop acts have decided to embrace the medium to the extent of making even the individual elements (the discrete instrumental and vocal parts that make up the recording as a whole) of some of their work freely available online.  The general public can download these ’stems’, alter them, edit them, add new material, and put it all back together as a new (and hopefully interesting) creation of their own.

Completing the circle, these remixes can then be uploaded back onto the original artists’ websites, for sharing and commentary.

Just a few artists hosting public remix "contests": Radiohead , Mariah Carey , Franz Ferdinand , Third Eye Blind , and Nine Inch Nails …

And so you have fans, aspiring DJs, and recording studio professionals all sharing their creations side by side on the original artist’s website: a fundamental redefinition and flattening of of the artist/audience relationship, the composition/production relationship, and an obvious musical corollary to web 2.0 - ‘open source music’, if you will…


All well and good. But while that’s what the cool kids have been up to, along comes Microsoft Research with a decidedly uncool demo of their new $29.95 Songsmith application. This program will take a melody sung into your computer’s audio input and generate chords and accompaniment based on on the pitches it detects, the styles you select, and the settings of parameters with names such as "Happy" and "Jazzy" (more on the modeling and algorithms behind all that here) .
Whether or not this is an intriguing or a sadly misguided use of technology is open for discussion - what’s more interesting (to me, at least) are the cover versions of popular songs now starting to appear up on Youtube using the original vocal tracks as Songsmith input material. Some (such as this version of Oasis’ "Wonderwall") are almost musical - while others (such as this take on Van Halen) are just kind of cringe-inducing.


It would be all to easy to come down on Songsmith as fundamentally anti -musical (a lot of people have seen that unfortunate Microsoft demo video and done just that) - but consider this: if you believe (as I do) that a little play-time is healthy for us grownups too, what’s so bad about software that lets people have some fun with their computer creating these Soundsmith cover version/remixes?  Maybe they’ll be inspired to use the software to take it a step further and at least get at least a whiff of what it might be like to write a song on their own from scratch…

So while it might not be for everyone, I think Microsoft Songsmith is just fine, for what it is - unleashing the inner Moby within all the John Hodgman s out there…

I know this is not a political blog. But Washington’s elected officials seems to have gone (finally) seriously digital. 

And I just can’t help myself but chime in.

I recently wrote about the Obama administration’s fervor for online social networking and viral (political) marketing.

Turns out US Congress representatives have long taken similar interest in making Web 2.0 their own. 

No matter where you stand politically, I believe this is generally good news for the technology industry, plus associated consumer software products and applications.

From mundane announcements of “one minute speeches” to instantaneously delivered results on House votes, at least since November 2007, the Clerk of the US House of Representatives regularly provides copious live updates “scraped” right from daily session inside the House chambers.

Then I got curious. Did I also miss the US Senate’s foray into micro-blogging? 

Sure enough, I did 

Although seemingly limited to Senator votes on the floor alone, Twitter has been carrying those posts at least since November 2007.

Turns out, they all nicely track back to govtrack.us, an independent Web site to “help the public research and track the activities in the US Congress.

Little did I know, D.C.’s interest in twittering created a new virtual C-SPAN if you will, sort of the “local access” approach parsed out one online message at a time.

And during yesterday’s historic session (voting on a trillion dollar support budget no less), US House representatives took to Twitter like college students (secretively, under their desks), pushing Blackberry and smartphone keys - eager to issue last-minute statements right from inside House chambers.

To top it all off, now even closed-door Presidential meetings experience their first Twitter “leaks”.

So, if this is not a political blog, why am I (still) writing about this stuff?

I am simply excited about how Web 2.0 is rapidly growing up, maturing from its early teenage “angst” appeal to a “mainstream” text and video channel - all within a couple of years.

Think of it.

As more politicians, news outlets and civic organizations thrive to adopt Web 2.0-style concepts, instant viral messaging from elected officials and others raise the legitimacy of collaborative software as a whole.

From Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, Qik, or Utterz, you name it, this is good for the devices and the connecting broadband services that support Web 2.0 at home and on-the-go.

If you still think this trend is not real, the US Postal Service announced today a fiscal-year loss of at least $6 billion, due to a 4.5% drop, or 9 billion items replaced by email and other forms of digital viral communications. 

And although it is not entirely clear to me that the same $6 billion shifted into Web 2.0 software in its entirety  (most social networking and micro-blogging services are free or ad-based at best), it clearly shows a fundamental shift in how we capture and disseminate information these days.

On that note, have you twittered today?

I’m looking over some recent numbers from nielsen online and I’m struck by something: while hulu may indeed be a big fish, long-form internet video is still a pretty small pond.  Consider:

Of the four major broadcast networks, hulu partners Fox and NBC saw the largest month-over-month increases in October 2008:  Fox was up 165%, while NBC (helped by Tina Fey’s triumphant if temporary return to SNL as America’s favorite eye-winking, Russia-seeing hockey mom) saw a whopping 312% increase (by contrast, ABC was up 105% and internet video laggard CBS was only up 38%.)

312 % and 165 % increases over the course of one month? Let’s celebrate - professionally produced long-form video has finally come into its own, right?

Wrong.

From that same Nielsen report, here’s another statistic: during October, YouTube had almost 82 million unique visitors to hulu’s 6.3 million - that’s a factor of fifteen (even with Tina Fey’s Palin sketches driving users to hulu).

A direct comparison between the two by total streams delivered would skew unfairly towards YouTube due to the shorter running time of the average user-generated video - but what the heck, let’s do it anyway, just for fun…  because the difference between those Nielsen numbers is even more stark than you might imagine: YouTube delivered almost 38 times the total number of streams delivered by hulu.

That’s thirty eight times more streams from YouTube than hulu.

Granted, hulu is one well-executed website.  Yet clearly, long-form premium video over the internet still has a long way to go.  What’s the takeaway here?  In my opinion, the answer is somewhat obvious: people don’t want to sit alone in front of their computers for a half hour or more at a time to view long-form video - in other words, the effectiveness of the personal computer as a video-viewing device is inversely proportional to the program length of the video being viewed.

The numbers in this report clearly put Hulu and YouTube in stark contrast against one another in terms of actual usage.  However, it would be a mistake to fail to take into account the fundamental differences between the short form/long-tail (user generated) and long form/short-tail (professionally produced) video viewing experiences - or the fact that we don’t have a truly compelling lean-back device for delivering long-form internet video viewing just yet.  Therefore, it would be a mistake to infer from reports such as this that internet video will remain primarily a short-form UGC medium.

For long-form premium video over the internet, it’s going to take a new generation of device that offers content directly from the couch before we can make any such comparisons.   The user interface on these devices will not be a web-browser, instead it will be simpler and optimized for lean-back media. Companies such as boxee (at left) and Yahoo/Intel are working on just such user interfaces. While I’ve already written a bit on the Yahoo initiative here, Boxee is more recent development. Right now it’s just a Windows/Mac application that aggregates disparate video sources (including Hulu) into a cohesive whole. While that’s pretty cool in itself, what makes Boxee really interesting is that the company plans to bring dedicated set-top Boxee hardware to the market within the next year or so - and in ther meantime, the software can be installed on the Apple TV device today. As I’ve said before, I think the prospect of Boxee on - well, a box - changes everything.

We shall see - but in the meantime, a quick reality check is in order: while well-suited to workplace video snacking, the computer and web browser are inappropriate (and ultimately intermediate) solutions for viewing long-form video - no matter how well-implemented a given website (such as Hulu) happens to be.

Oops, I stand corrected. My mid-December post about US presidential interests in post-campaign viral marketing wondered whether European heads of state would follow Mr. Obama’s lead.

Little did I know (I should have checked), Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel has been podcasting weekly since mid 2006. 

Kudos to her (rather early) interest in this still relatively new digital medium. But this made we wonder, whether I had missed others among Europe’s leading politicians. 

As to France, I was unable to find anything on President Nicolas Sarkozy. Maybe this is because he is still relatively new in office and hasn’t quite gotten around.

But so is Prime Minister Gordon Brown over in the UK. But at least he does have his own website.

Although so far void of regular podcasts to the nation (and anyone else, for that matter), his site at least provides YouTube links to various ad-hoc press conference. A start.

Meanwhile, over in The Netherlands, Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkende has not yet taken to video podcasting either, it seems. I am somewhat surprised.

Turns out, neither does the country’s monarch seem interested in this sort of “modern” communication.

What makes me wonder is whether heads-of-state podcasts (or the lack of the same) are an indication for any government’s true commitment to bringing its country into the digital age. 

Like a CEO running a company, if you don’t try your own products, how would you know they work?

Any thoughts on this?

Be encouraged to chime in.

Last week, I quipped about president-elect Barack Obama’s recent commitment to video-taping the weekly Democratic radio address.

The more I think about this though, the new presidential over-the-top social viral video strategy brings up some interesting questions:

For starters, as the new administration is keen to leverage the benefits of ubiquitous online video distribution, what keeps the public from possible Obama video fatigue? 

As of today, we are in week five of the elect-president’s weekly video address and already audiences are dropping off faster than a second rate soap opera could on broadcast TV.

As of writing this post, the new administration’s first video address posted to YouTube on November 15 generated 247,600 average weekly video streams.

However, for Mr. Obama’s more recent weekly messages, viewer attention declined noticeably.

Videos published to YouTube in week three and two generated only 174,805 and 115,106 streams respectively - that’s as much as 46% fewer streams delivered compared to Mr. Obama’s first weekly video address.

But then again, last week’s video addressed the nation’s pressing issue of steadily raising job losses, as a result garnering a record 445,613 streams in only seven days. 

Clearly, subject matter matters as audiences have an acute understanding of what they deem important enough to log on, view, and listen repeatedly. 

The other thought I had, the idea of a regular viral presidential video address will capture eyeballs and minds not just among US audiences, but also around the rest of the connected globe.

By design in and outside of YouTube, Web video by nature is shared freely and abundantly. Mr. Obama’s taped messages make no exception.

Thus, from East to West, North and South, the first of these weekly video messages are likely spreading globally and virally as we speak.

Does that mean Germany’s Chancelor Angela Merkel will soon start her own weekly video campaign?

Are any regular video posts forthcoming from the heads of state in France, the UK, Iran, or Iraq?; prepared to deal with the resulting online feedback of citizens everywhere chiming in?

Interestingly, as little as ten years ago all of this would have been unimaginable.

YouTube and its ample offspring of amateur video snack sites simply didnt exist. Neither did the prerequisite broadband lines, nor PCs with processors fast enough to make Web video fun.

Fast forward, in one swoop the US presidential web video address legitimizes how far we have come in democratizing media in the past years.  

This one’s for the history books.

Rather than trying to avoid (undesireable) discourse and debate, the new White House resident seems to signal honest interest in point-to-point dialogue versus the age-old hub-and-spoke system of commercial journalism. 

The question remains whether the idea of open viral dialog can help jointly create something better down the road. 

Or is the Web’s innate capability of cheap and ubiquitous distribution to and by all merely a zero-sum game?

Well, history books might tell.

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?