Content-ment

Here it is, yet another phone with the WiFi access built in. This isn’t necessarily something new, but this will be the way of the future. I don’t wish to prattle on and on about mobiles, but more and more and more people around me on my daily commute are using them. And they are not talking on them. Email, text, but now more than ever: consuming content.

The unit pictured above is the Samsung XV6800, and it comes with Windows Moblie 6 [and therefore streaming audio capability] and expandable memory up to 4GB. You get WiFi and the EV-DO [Verizon’s somewhat high-speed data service.]

With some of my bus-riding compatriots plugging headphones into their phones radio people might shudder a bit. As we have said before, make your content easy to digest for as many formats as possible [pretty easy] and make yourselves relevant to the audiences in your communities [not as easy.]

Do you see who that is in the photo above? It is Britney Spears, and she is using the new Samsung U-740 mobile phone.

Do you know who else has one of these? Me, of course!

I do a fair bit of consumption of content on my mobile phone, and I thought this would be the better option for me. I didn’t want to change providers to get that totally sweet iPhone, and I didn’t want to pay the extra $40/month to have one of those Motorola Q smartphones or a Blackberry.

So, Ms. Spears and I settled for this. What it does is surprise me. Not for its capabilities, but for the lack of properly formatted content out there. Verizon offers a service they call “Moblie Web 2.0.” It allows you to browse real web pages, if they will gracefully degrade to the Mobile Web 2.0’s level. There is quite a bit of content out there that displays quite well. Kudos to those providing CMSs that facilitate.

Shame on y’alls that don’t. Big name site favorites of mine do not do well. Red Herring and Boing Boing fail miserably, with the device tossing me the dreaded “Insufficient Memory for this Operation” error.

True smart phones account for less than 5% of mobile ownership. There are many more of people like me and Ms. Spears that have the capable devices but not full-on smarty-pants phones.

The lesson here? Program and code your content with graceful degradation of the end user in mind. Not the most up-to-date user, but the guy with the 2-year-old Razr. Everything else will fall into place.

If you don’t, Ms. Spears and I will be out of luck. You certainly don’t want that.

In the past few years we have seen some contradictory events in the realm of privacy and information sharing. Even more events have happened in the past week that add to this odd timeline.

There was the NSA warrantless wiretapping scandal of recent years.

In 2003 our national lawmakers saw fit to enact the Do-Not-Call Implementation Act — the act that enables each of us to place our phone numbers on a do-not-call registry to avoid unwanted telemarketer intrusions. This has been in the news again as lawmakers are looking to make the Act permanent, as it had a sunset period of 5 years.

The Washington Post reports on that a Do-Not-Track proposal is in the works. This would give consumers an opt-out provision to avoid the activities resulting from tracked data, including but not limited to better refined searches and more refined advert serving.

There seems to be a disconnect here — and a bit of dis-ingenuity as well. There is a clear difference between getting a phone call during dinner, and being served an ad [which would be there no matter what] that is selected for you based on your surfing habits.

As Mark Cooper, director of research at the Consumer Federation of America, points out in the WaPo article “In some respects improving the efficiency of advertising could be a consumer-friendly activity… If it’s not abuse, if it’s not coercive, matching consumers with products could be a good thing.”

This is all happening in an interesting new behavioral marketing arena. The Telegraph reports mobile phone companies have a similar and perhaps more intrusive way of doing this. The technology now exists for the mobile service providers to monitor text messages and calls, and serve ads to those users based on keywords texted or uttered. These ads, in some cases, will give fiscal consideration to those using the service in the form of mobile bill credits.

Will users be concerned? It depends. In a discussion I had yesterday, folks of varying age [30-50+] were hashing this over and all arrived at the same conclusion — they are not comfortable or interested in letting that much ‘out of the bag.’

However, the users of Facebook and MySpace have grown accustomed to the notion of providing copious amounts of personal data to the world. For a certain age set, providing personal photos, videos, and data is part of the fun. Having companies use that data to more efficiently sell those people things will seem like part of the deal as well.

The international component of the BBC, BBC World News has established a presence to non-UK web audience on that internet video service you may well have heard about — YouTube. According to their website: “BBC World is the BBC’s commercially funded, international 24-hour news and information channel, broadcast in English in more than 200 countries and territories across the globe.” With this mission in mind, they are likely more willing to take some risks in other areas.

The site it clearly branded, and features news stories produced for their television outlets reformatted for YouTube. Some of these news bits are the harder hitting sort, including their most-viewed clip, an interview with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi to the lighter material about living ‘green.’

Views of the clips vary a great deal, with the videos with high-profile figures leading the pack. The Zenawi clip, for example, has garnered 26,673 views as of this writing. All but one of the top 15 clips have 1,000+ views, with the rest settling into the predictable long-tail curve.

26,000 isn’t stellar by many measures — my decidedly un-newsworthy video of an old Sony CD player has over 55,000 views.

Perhaps a great number of views is not what they are after. As with any established broadcast entities in this space, any experimentation should be viewed as a positive move. If it does not work, BBC World News will face neither great fiscal losses nor catastrophic image degradation.

[ Since the BBC has embedding disabled, I shall leave you with the clip of my Sony CD Player: ]

In the above image you will see a screenshot of the new Amazon MP3 Downloader application, superimposed with my single-word evaluation.

Being an incurable music buyer for several years, I have had a great deal of experience with all of the major music download-for-$ places. This is by far the easiest and smoothest deal by far.

The first place I got started was with eMusic.com. I still like eMusic, even though I am no longer a member. The business model has changed there over the years; at one unsustainable point, users paid a modest $10/month fee that entitled them to unlimited downloads from the site. That is not a typo — unlimited. My computer system had neither the hard drive space nor a CD burner, so I was unable to take advantage of this. I knew of some people that downloaded hundreds upon hundreds of albums during that time.

They switched to limited numbers of downloads which have since settled at 30 per month for $10. They have other options, but the bottom rung was always my price. It is an odd behavior, counting the tracks on albums to see if you have enough to get it all this month. For this persnickety collector, it proved to be too much. I kept focusing upon downloading longer tracks to get more for my $. I discovered that there are quite a few full-length albums with just 2 or 3 cuts!

I downloaded a single Bjork song from the MSN service, which proved to be too much to deal with.

The standard service most folks think of for downloads-for-$ is iTunes. I have dropped a few bucks there as well, but only a few. The DRM they slap on most cuts makes my teeth itch.

But, this new deal from Amazon really looks nice. I found an album that is a single track [Henry Flynt’s ‘Purified by the Fire’] for the likely incorrect price of $0.89. [It is now $8.99, FYI.] I was asked to install the Amazon MP3 Downloader. A couple of clicks later and a short wait for the cut to make its way onto my hard drive and I was set.

The coolest thing is that one of the options is ‘Place Song Into iTunes.’ Once it is downloaded, there it goes, into your iTunes library, artwork and all. That is the missing link in a lot of these non-iTunes services, and one that I think that will make a big difference. It is a small convenience, but it sets them apart. Awesome.

For more on this as it relates to pricing, see this MoBuzz.tv clip:

Comedy Central has taken another crack at a redesign of their online content interface [website]. Their high-profile past issues with video content was much discussed on teh Internets. 

They took what was then the unpopular approach of taking their content back from the user-posted world. Comedy Central, it seemed, wanted to control the quality, context, and subsequent potential ad revenue. The site design that followed made the content subservient to all concerns: keeping their content on the Comedy Central site, massive & cumbersome ad placement, and prohibiting embedding on other sites. Only direct links to the interface were provided. To the world of user-posted-clip consumers this was clearly a step backwards.

Comedy Central’s last revision took place last week, and they have put these very features back in. The interface is much cleaner, the videos are larger & higher resolution, and embeddable. A comments section now lets people chatter on about their favorite clips. Adverts are post-roll and much shorter & less painful.

This is a smart move, methinks, as it accomplishes two things: it gets adverts in front of people, and the content can be easily and freely dispersed throughout the tubes of teh Internets.

NBC could learn a lesson here. I tried to view a hysterical clip from last weekend’s Saturday Night Live. I turned to YouTube, found a link, and was greeted with a notification that NBC Universal had removed the clip.

I surfed over the the NBC site to give the source a try. No such luck there. No indications of where I could get it, either. The only thing they provided was a linear rundown of the show. Useless. Perhaps they are hawking the clips on iTunes?

Kind of. I was greeted there with a special section offering 16 – 25 minute ‘best-of’ compilations from each week’s show. Neat, but the week I sought was not available. Even if it were, they might not place the sketch clip on that compilation. Here is the store:

NBC, you waste my time and failed to take advantage of the opportunity to serve me at least 3 or four adverts. You are not letting people consume content in the way they choose. And I am not spending $2.00 in iTunes for it, either. I am not the only one, I am certain.