Full Transcript:

Benjamin Higginbotham: Does giving away content hurt conferences? Web 2.0 Business Models, ad supported text, subscription what works?, Mash ups for Business, the MixTape show on Feedburner and so much more coming up on this Web 2.0 Wednesday on technologyevangelist.com. Do you like that? That’s my announcer voice.

Ed Kohler: That was great.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Actually, those are pretty much the four talking points. So, let’s start us off here. I am Benjamin Higginbotham with technologyevangelist.com with me in front of me is Ed Kohler.

Ed Kohler: Hello.

Benjamin Higginbotham: And he is our Web 2.0 and search guru expert dude and let’s start off with giving away conference presentations and does it hurt the conference? I think an example of this would be the Web 2.0 or as I lovingly call it Web 20 conference going on ending today, I believe or the TED conference, if you give away the presentations online what's the incentive to go to the conference?

Ed Kohler: Right there is a story earlier this week, I saw online, I think it was New York Times talking about this and they used the TED conference as an example. So, if you are not familiar with TED conference, it is a conference where they bring in lot of big thinkers, ex-presidents or people like from Google or people who are basically the best of whatever it is they do and they give them about 18 minutes to give a presentation on whatever it is that they are passionate about and it is a expensive conference. I think it was around $4,000, I think it is up to $6,000 to $10,000 now. Well, they have recently started giving away the show, the presentations that are done on their website. They can trick them out in the video blog format.

Benjamin Higginbotham: It is really high quality?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, very nice, now you can get them in 720p, before you could get a podcast of them or lower quality video, but they have jacked up that as well. So, I am sure that there was a lot of discussion about if you give away the presentations, are people are still going to show up for the conference, right? Well, it turns out yeah. It doesn’t hurt it at all, in fact I think it has made the conference much better known.

Benjamin Higginbotham: OK, so people know about the conference, why would I spend, if I can get the content online, why am I going to spend six grand to go there, or am I not the target market?

Ed Kohler: Well, it depends on what you go a conference for? If you go to a conference to just sit in a seat and listen to someone present it, the value of that particular conference attendie's style of going to conference may have gone down. May be they can give what they are looking for, just by going online, but most conferences are not as much about sitting there listening as they are about interacting. So, you are not going to be going to the parties after where you get hang on with people, you are not going to meet people in the halls and talk to them and swap business cards and where that’s generally where the biggest value and conferences comes from. So, if you can watch a speech by Malcolm Gladwell and realize that, “hey, if I was there, I would have a chance to actually meet him, woouln’t that be fascinating”, so that’s a different side of things where if you can show just how cool the people are at your conference are. I think that can just build it up even to make it even larger.

Benjamin Higginbotham: What if the conference doesn’t have cool people?

Ed Kohler: Well, if it is good enough conference to have a conference, when you get a pull up a conference there is probably a lot of people who weren’t there, who probably would have found it interesting, so…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Does this apply across the board, in TED which you said make sense in TED, you got a lot of shakers and movers over there doing their thing and been able to hang on room with them is very-very cool. How about a conference like CES? I think it is the largest conference in the US and one of the largest in the world, it is so massively huge that there are so many parties at night and so many different people are you really going to meet the people that you want to meet at a conference of that caliber or do you just want to get a content from Gizmodo and Gadget, Technology Evangelist?

Ed Kohler: It is interesting point, in the Consumer Electronic Show is a different type of conference because it is more about the products than the people, obviously the people are huge part of it too, lot of deals are going down, but the way the conference is covered is basically from a gadget perspective what do people think of these products. Well, if I was in Consumer Electronic Show, I would want to do is as much as I could to help their suppliers. They are representing the industry, so if they can do more to project all the cool products are coming out from the conference and that’s a good thing, may be it is already handled well enough by things like Gizmodo and Gadget, of course us. So, it is a different type of animal in that way where it is not as much about, it is not like industry specific knowledge type show, somewhere of a marketing PR type thing, so different animal that way.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, business models change based on the conference, I would assume?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, but it will be interesting, because there is a business model today that exist for video companies that are producing these conferences, who are actually shooting the shows. So, some I think have based their business around, we will come-in, we will shoot your show, but then we will charge for the content later, but may be that will get flipped around where they just have to obsorb that cost and put the information up for free, because if everyone else doing this pretty tough charge for it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I think you are right, you mentioned this in beginning that it really brings, I hadn’t really heard of TED before I started seeing some of their content online and part of what drew me in wasn’t just the content, it was the super high quality content, it looked amazingly good, it was great looking web video and that drew me in. Just the quality of the video and what was being said and the production values and the whole thing, it wasn’t just a quick little snippet of the thing. It was the entire speech produced extremely well and I think, now I know what TED is and I knew that, I have known that for a few weeks now and I really piqued my interest and looking at although, in all fairness I don’t think that was a conference that I would attend, but you are right, it does bring awareness of the conference and for conference like TED awareness is good.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, the more videos I watch on TED the more I want to go to TED, which I think is why they are doing what they are doing.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Would you spend the six grand?

Ed Kohler: That’s a trick, it is very steep fee, but six grand with the right contact coming out of it can be a good investment.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, let’s talk Web 2.0 in business models. What is working online right now? Ad supported, text link tag, subscription models, what’s the Web 2.0 business model? What’s the best one today, at least?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, I think there are lot different things that people are trying, first just defining what we mean by Web 2.0 business models in this context is, basically community driven content sites, so sites that are bringing people around together around some sort of share interest and most of the content on the site is then created by the users on the site. So, that could be something like MySpace or FaceBook or it also be like say Menuism within restaurant reviews or there are lot of different things that would qualify within that category. So, one thing that people are finding out I think is that, it takes an extraordinary number of page views to make a business out of ad support, for this type of website. The nice thing is you are not spending a ton of money and actually creating the content, so your page views will increase overtime, as more and more pages are just created by your community. So, it has that going for it, so picking a good niche for your particular Web 2.0 company, I think is key, so something like Menuism, their advertising is going to primarily, probably be restaurant driven of course, so know if they would just slaps some ad sense ads on the sites I believe, they do have now. Now, the ads just based on the content of the site will be such, but then you some links Zillow.com  where not all of their content is driven by the community a lot of it is, but they also have a lot of work they are doing themselves to come up with their house estimates.

Well, Real Estate ads are that’s a petty good market to be in, because just the nature of the web, Real Estate ads are more expensive than Restaurant ads, so in some ways they have picked a better niche for their business that way. Then because they have got in the site large enough at this point, with I think 1.2 million visitors or something to that last month, that’s big enough where you can actually start to look at whether you can build your own ad network in to the site, which is something that Zillow has decided to do, because Real Estate agents are, why not just get them to come straight to you rather than just putting the revenue with Google, for example, he had to do big enough to justify that type of thing.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Right, absolutely. So, let me ask you, I have just seen an article I think it was on Cnet.com or news.com, that was talking about Web 2.0 businesses and how the community driven sites are very small, very-very small percentage of them are actually having users contribute. Most users are just viewing the content, how does that affect the business model or does it?

Ed Kohler: I think there is always going to be a combination of publishers, the lurkers and that’s fine, if as long as there is enough content to keep people looking at it, then it doesn’t really matter how the content got created or how many people create it. You take something like Wikipedia where it is Web 2.0-ish type company, they don’t happen to have a advertising based business model, at least not yet, but their percentage of people who are actually contributing content or whether it is new page or had been pages, just a fraction of the users to the site, but the site continues to grow because people are finding that information valuable enough. So, that’s not necessarily around the world, you don’t need to have like one to one ratio of users to editors or even subscribers to the sites or…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Although it is like .1:1, I mean it is really-really small which makes it really hard, if you are thinking of Web 2.0 company and you want to develop a business model, trying to get that initial content rolling is got to be hard, because the number of users that they are reporting in this one report at least is willing to contribute isn’t very large as compared to, let me reword that, there are a lot of users willing to contribute content in the world is just that as compared to viewers, users versus viewers and I suppose, if you are really-really large that way, you are right, that ratio doesn’t really matter, because if you have got 20 million people on the website and only 100,000 people update per day oh darn, right? But, if you are just starting you have got no users on the website, what you do? How do you make money at that?

Ed Kohler: Right, I think it is going to be a long time before you get enough traction to really make some money. You can make money from day one, by just slapping some ad sense ads on the site, you're not going to make a lot of money and probably can pay yourself, but, you can still get running that way. How you setup your business model, it will make a difference too, in terms of how easy is to people to contribute information. There is a huge difference between Wikipedia, where information that you contribute, is supposed to be encyclopedia quality, so there are a lot of people who know something about a particular issue, may be they could contribute something to the page about the town they live in, that’s not really a high bar, but it is still, if it is going to be an encyclopedia level of contribution. There are people who hesitant to make that type of contribution to the site, on the other end you have something like MySpace where people are more like to signup with MySpace, because you can only see so much of your friends profiles until you have signup in the site anyway. So, they can have a care for you right there, just to get you signed up and then what you contribute in MySpace page is this information about yourself, so obviously you know plenty about yourself, you know what your hobbies are, what schools you gone to and things like that, so that’s really-really easy stuff to kind of build out.

So, just to get it is important to pick the appropriate bars where information contribute and I think sites vary a lot in terms of how good they are at helping people with different types of contributions they can make. Like, say with the restaurant review site, there is a big difference between just clicking on a one to four star type rating, where you say, “ I give this restaurant three stars” versus writing an extensive review of your dinning experience there, where there are people who only want to contribute to, say, at different level. So, having systems built in they can allow for more levels of contribution, I think they are valuable too. So, actually Amazon does a real good job of that where you can rate a book or you can review a book or you can tag it or Wiki it or there is tons and tons of different ways that will allow you to contribute information into the site. So, it is been kind of interesting see how that builds out.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, what is the cutoff point? So, I start off with my website, my Web 2.0 community driven site and at first there is not a whole not of traction, but as more and more users start signing up and adding content, then you get that snowball avalanche effect. When do I decide to get away from the text link ads and the subscription based systems and move to my own in-house advertising model?

Ed Kohler: I think, if you have a unique type of audience that would be easy to monetize then it is time to think about whether having your own ad model make sense, because there are lot of decisions that need to go into that. You have to think about can you run an ad model for cheaper than say a Google can? They know a lot about this stuff and the economy is scale and definitely play a role in this sort of thing. So, I think Zillow is the one that might be able to pull it off, because they are niche being Real Estate in the United States at this point is big enough and there are so many real estate agents out there, that they can tap to for advertising, that one probably has a good chance of working for them. Now, if you are say a Menuism, if they are trying to get local restaurants to advertise on their site, that’s going to be a little bit tougher, because restaurants is, they are not on web as much and just trying to get money out of individual restaurants is tougher I think than out of real estate agents. So, it is tougher decision to make on that one, but it is not cheap to run a program by any means. So, whether they can justify doing it, that’s the question they will find out. The other thing can do of course with that model is just to switch to having some sort of premium features on your website which is what Flickr has done. And Flickr does have ads on their site, but they are pretty subtle and I don’t think they make a lot of money on that, but they have the annual subscription that you can get which gives you the ability to upload lot more content into the site. So, anyone who becomes a real a Flickr user…

Benjamin Higginbotham: A fuser.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, I think the limit is 25 megabites a month you cannot upload without having a paid account.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s pretty low.

Ed Kohler: If you are using Flickr at all to upload your own content you are going to…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Like four pictures.

Ed Kohler: Right, so you are going to blow that out, but then you can go to for 30 bucks a year, I think it is you can get 2 gigs a month of content upload into the system. So, that’s a huge difference there, so I don’t think there is lot of resistance to making that upgrade at Flickr, so they have done pretty well with that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, let’s move forward, Mash-ups for Business.

Ed Kohler: It is interesting how a business's have always different opportunities now to pull content from other sources into their own site, when it comes to different types of mash-ups probably the easiest one that, I don’t understand why more companies don’t do, is add a map to their contact page, inside of Google maps mash-up. Tie that in, so people can just figure out where the heck they are.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, absolutely.

Ed Kohler: It would be nice even below that, it would be nice if more companies would just put their address on their website.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I don’t think I have really encountered  a website from a company that doesn’t have their address on. You have actually seen that?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, it will happen from time and time, I think you will see it most often, I think with say like startups where they are stealth mode, they won’t even want to admit where they are in the world.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, TalkShoe is saying that they have seen a ton. I guess I have just never really noticed that before.

Ed Kohler: I don’t get it, you have no credibility, if you won’t even say where the heck you are in the world.

Benjamin Higginbotham: No, web cred?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, seriously. Another example of that was, it is just painful to me is, when you see restaurants where they don’t put the address on every page. If you are location based business, your address should be on the footer of every page.

Benjamin Higginbotham: And blinking and red.

Ed Kohler: Yeah and may be linked out to Google maps or yahoo maps or something like that where people can then build their own driving directions.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yeah, absolutely. So, what are other objects would you mash-up in a normal business? I see a lot of companies may be scared to pull in outside data, because they lose control of it a little bit, now I will mash-up for a map for a location map not a big deal, what else would you throw on a company website?

Ed Kohler: It will vary a lot by industry, but something like having say a Flickr photo feed, photos are relevantly business or a company events you have had or if you are a retail site, you could pull in photos of products that are relevant to each product page. If you are on Amazon and you are selling the Wii  or some other retailer, why not include a feed of photos from Flickr that are just streaming all the different things that people done with the Wii.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Because they can’t control that feed, so they can’t say, if someone posts a picture in Flickr, that’s of questionable content, that’s tagged Wii with the intend of screwing up Amazon, it is very hard for them to take that off, they have to with Amazon right now someone posts a comment or something that they don’t like, they can just go into their backend and remove it, if they posted a picture to Flickr, how is Amazon get rid of the Flickr from that paper? Flickr image from that page, unless they remove the entire stream?

Ed Kohler: Right, they won’t be able to, so in Amazon’s case they are large enough for they just build the stuff in their own site, where you can upload photos directly to Amazon…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, that same concept applies to many other companies as well. Why would I go to the trouble of doing that when there is an inherent risk in doing that?

Ed Kohler: Well, I think people will look at the stuff and aggregate rather than worrying too much about the exceptions. If you are a real estate agent and you can pull on pictures from the neighbor hood, where you are selling a home, I think you are adding value there and of course some of the pictures might not be the best example of what you want show off about the house, but still people will find that valuable, so it is a mix-up that way.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, it do the benefits outweigh the risks are?

Ed Kohler: That’s what I think they do.

Benjamin Higginbotham: You do?

Ed Kohler: Yeah, but I don’t think a lot of people are there yet.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I am not, well I am on the fence, I see where it would be cool and I see where it would be interesting to have like, let’s use a Flickr stream for example again, but I also see where to be potentially very deadly and it could, even if you are just ignoring the idea of that, it doesn’t show off all the best pictures of a house and whatnot, the potential for sabotage is very high and I can’t control it at all, so I can’t just go to Flickr and say you have to remove that picture, if it is blatantly obscene, you can probably do that, but if it is not, if it is just one step down and Flickr is like no we are going to leave it…

Ed Kohler: Well, it might be able to address that by having a feature on your site where people could click a button seeing this picture is not appropriate and using Flickr’s API you would have those photos ID so you could filter it on your own end, I think.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Now, TalkShoe is agreeing with you right now, they are saying especially in real estate, if a listing has no pictures, they move on, they won’t even look at it and this is a great-way, if you are real estate agent, I suppose, and you didn’t take pictures of the house, just incorporate a Flickr stream, may be someone else did, use some tags and see if you can find some details of the house, at least the neighborhood get something out there and I would actually agree with that statement as well, if there are no pictures of the house, I am going to move on.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, I hope that we are beyond the time of not having any picture of houses in that…

Benjamin Higginbotham: One would hope that, but have you shopped for a house lately?

Ed Kohler: We know that’s not with the case, but it's nice when you use sites like Craigslist.com or things where, when you go to a lot of real estate sites, these days where you can just filter for houses that have images, so all the houses where the agent didn’t take any pictures, “boom” they are gone. You are not even going to see and they are not even in the soup in your search levels.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s awesome, that’s exactly how it search, because I would also like be able to search and say “you know what, anything that has less than 3 pictures don’t care, because that’s going to be an outside shot, a worse outside shot and in short of a kitchen. So they always are or may be an outside shot, bed room, kitchen and I don’t understand, why they don’t have. If I were real estate agent, I personally would have about 800 pictures of the house on there, but that’s me, I would over whelmed them with pictures, because I don’t want to have to bring people out.

Ed Kohler: As a home shopper, I know it is a investment of my time to go and look at thing where I could have just seen in a picture, I would rather qualify myself further by looking at pictures of the home, pictures of the neighborhood or as much information I can find out about that property, before I get out the door, so…

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, you hit my hot button, I think you push me off the fence towards, yes, you should do this, because, thinking about this, if they have no pictures of the home or may be the listing just went live and they haven't a had a chance to go and take pictures of it yet, if you can just get something up there, that would be awesome although I think it should be analyzed on a one off basis, I don’t think Target.com should have a Flickr stream, but I can see real estate agents. I think the smaller areas where it is little more one-on-one, I can see where that would be useful, but the huge corporations, I think they are going to want to control the data little bit more than Flickr is going to give them the ability to and it doesn’t has to be Flickr, can be any external source where you can’t control the content. I see a little bit of fear there, they would want to bring that in-house and have the ability to control that content.

Ed Kohler: What do you think about say restaurants in the restaurant websites having a Flickr feed of the photos that have been taken at their restaurants?

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s actually really good idea.

Ed Kohler: You can see how people have enjoyed their times their before.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Because, again there is a potential for sabotage, but most people are going to be smiling having fun or just goofing of and that would be, yeah, that would showing shots of beer…

Ed Kohler: Yeah or pictures among say like a paintball course if people have played there before, may be it could help figure out your strategies about what you shouldn’t be standing behind, because you are wide open, you don't even realize it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Absolutely, all right I can absolutely see where some of that would be beneficial. Let’s move to the MixTape show on Feedburner and they are talking about how to podcast.

Ed Kohler: Right, this is actually Feedburner’s podcasts is kind of mash-up in itself, because what they have done is, they won’t actually produce most of their episodes in their podcasts. They just take people’s podcasts, other people’s podcast, who have created a podcast where they happen to talk about Feedburner and something we will probably get on to doing at some point and they just put that on their feed. So, from one podcast to next, it is an interesting podcast to listen to, because everyone has a different production quality and hear different voices and like “what the heck, oh yeah, this is Feedburner thing”, so one time it is some Irish guy and next time it is someone from southern California or just all over the map, but yesterday’s where I guess it was yesterday to me because that’s when I listened to it, but I have no idea when it actually went live on their site, was done by a guy who has a podcast called MixTape show, where he basically, he is a music fanatic and he takes samples, people send into him and he basically does a great job, he calls it his blue-print show, where he just walk through everything you need to know about podcasting. So, if you want to get started in podcasting, just awesome tips, just all the way through about, everything you would need to know and he starts with like gmail, because what he is doing, for example, if you are in the MixTape business or you want sample music instead, you got to use gmail, because gmail will allow you to play the music that’s attached without having to download it to play it. So, it is a that’s huge for him, which is something I never thought about before, then he gets things like Skype, choosing microphones, how to different mixing software…

Benjamin Higginbotham: Did he say you should use KSM 44?

Ed Kohler: Microphones? He said he uses a Sure mic, but he said the reason does, he is like, “I know it is ridiculous, you don’t need a mic that’s good, but I sell drugs”, so I wouldn't recommend that, but I would definitely recommend checking out this particular podcast if you are interested in getting in the podcasting, because it really gives you all the tools that you are going to need to get setup and going and all sorts of budgets, how to build the network and how to build an audience. So, it is really well done, so if you want to check that out it is blogs.feedburner.com/podcast, so just give it a check.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s really cool, I am going to pull the audience really click, both on UStream and in TalkShoe, see if anyone has a question, if so feel free to raise your hand or just shoot something in the chat room, they are asking for URL once again, we will go ahead and post that in the show notes for everyone in TalkShoe.

Ed Kohler: Yes, it was blogs.feedburner.com/podcast.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Fantastic, awesome, all right it looks like TalkShoe is doing pretty good, they thank you very much for giving the URL again and I thank you for your time Ed. It is been a great fun podcast today, we are going to have you back tomorrow for Search Thursday, I believe. Did I get that right? I did, I got that right. I didn’t have to look at the cheat-sheet, I am getting better at this.

Ed Kohler: Yeah and check Technology Evangelist later this afternoon where I have post up about Ben and road rage.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That doesn’t sound any good. I actually have no idea, what’s going in that post. All right, thank you everyone on TalkShoe for listening, thank you everyone from UStream for watching us live, you can actually watch our podcast live, if you go to technologyevangelist.com, Ed is waving to the camera, if you go to technologyevangelist.com at 11 o’clock central time, that’s 9 o’clock Pacific and you can actually watch it right there in the browser if you like to participate live, you can be brought into the conversation via TalkShoe at talkshoe.com that show ID-23696 and all of that detail is available on the technologyevangelist.com website. Please make sure to subscribe to our advanced AAC audio feed in iTunes that will give you chapter marks, pretty pictures, URL’s and other really cool little things that make the experience so much better, it is just so much more fun to be able to click on something when we mentioned it. Thank you all for listening and we will talk with you tomorrow.