UtahSaint: Emedia Rockstar

Amazon has gone live with a beta program allowing bloggers to self-publish content for the Kindle, using RSS subscriptions at Kindle Publishing for Blogs. Amazon keeps 70% of the monthly blog subscription fee and pays 30% to the blog author. With the recent launch of the Kindle DX, the 2nd generation of the ebook reader, Amazon are hoping to get more content into the owners hands and make it even more appealing.

No data has been released yet from Amazon showing how many subscribers, or what percentage of owners are subscribing/paying for content other than the regular Ebook downloads. B2B publishers will be licking their chops at the possibility of charging for content I’m sure.

The hoopla behind the Hulu numbers is highlighting one of the big issues of web marketing - namely: If a marketer spends $$$$ on a site, what exact exposure does he get. On Thursday, Nielsen Online said Hulu served up 373 million video streams in April, up from 348 million in March and 309 million in February. But Nielsen also said Hulu’s unique visitors had declined, from 9.5 million in February to 8.9 million in March to 7.4 million in April. While Nielsen reported 8.9 million visitors to Hulu in March, rival measurement firm, comScore, counted 42 million. Just to add to the fun, Nielsen’s numbers for April show Hulu losing audience while still managing to increase the amount of streams watched.

Whilst Hulu is at the top end of the scale (most companies could only dream about launching less than 12 months ago and have 370 million streams!), a vexxing problem for smaller companies is who to trust to count the data. Personally, I love Omniture, sure it’s expensive, but the details behind the numbers are amazing and can really help sway a sceptical ad-buyer. Google Analytics seems to be coming along quite nicely, typical of Google, they’re adding addtional features every month, and also typical to Google, it’s free - and that’s a price many will find hard to argue with. Read more…

Vanity Fair, not normally known for it’s coverage of the media world has a great article detailing how it’s team of editors think the upcoming extinction level event in the media world will shake out.

The result: blogs like Utasaint will survive, big, ex-print titles such as NYTimes.com will go the way of the Wooly Mammoth. Not a bad result for me, pretty much an Epic>Fail for the big dogs over the WSJ and NYTimes!

Read more…

If you check your Facebook account several times a day you may want to check out the Facebook/Adobe Air application.  It loads onto your desktop and streams all the latest and greatest news updates from your Facebook profile.  So when you Aunt Annie posts photos of her day trip to the grocers or you old school mate posts dodgy photos of you at the prom in 1974 (complete with David Soul haircut) then you’ll be the first to see it.  Here’s the link to the app:  http://www.tinyurl.com/utahsaint - you’ll need Adobe Air to get it cranked but trust me, it’s well worth it.

Microsoft are getting hip to the now with the Beta launch of Vine, a service which “Connects you to the people and places you care about most, when it matters.”  Rather than use IE, FF or Chrome, Microsoft are choosing the better route (IMHO) and going with a standalone platform (Adobe Air?) to allow users to: “Stay in touch with family and friends, be informed when someone needs help. Get involved to create great communities. Use alerts, reports and your personal dashboard to stay in touch, informed and involved.”

I’m liking that Microsoft have joined the social party before Google (the new Microsoft!) get in and create a service with contextual ads all over the place… Watch this space for Microsoft Vine news…

Prepare for the End. The Online Ice Age is at hand! The emedia experts @ The Sun newspaper in London are declaring the web will freeze up in 2010 as it gets too big/busy and it’s all YouTube’s fault. From here on in, stop watching Chocolate Rain, Pug Bowling and other web memes and get busy with your life like it’s 1991 - back to the fax and telex machines, in fact, while you’re at it, unplug that PC with Ubuntu and drop back to Word Perfect 5.1…

Here’s what The Sun is reporting:
Experts predict that, at first, computers will go off-line for several minutes at a time. But by 2012, booming consumer demand plus bandwidth-hungry sites such as YouTube will see the web becoming sluggish and “unreliable”.

In related news, The Sun also reported Peter Andre (who?) had to carry is wife Jordon (again, who?) over the finish line at this weekends London marathon. Slow news day I guess!