Bo Doesn't Know Tecmo Bowl

The eternal question finally answered via Newsweek:

I have to ask: did you ever play Nintendo's Tecmo Bowl?
No, but people ask me that all the time. I guess I was pretty good in it.
No—you were unstoppable.

Exploitative or empowering?

The Return of YouTube Release Notes

Released a bunch of cool new YouTube features including easy ability to share a video on Twitter and the return of the status bar during uploads. Accompanying this push was the return of release notes, or at least an expanded version of normal "here's what's new" that we post every so often.

Why am i blogging about our release notes? Well, because it's part of something bigger that we're attempting - to be more transparent. Since the acquisition, we've grown tremendously in size - both as a company and as a community. Although we're obviously thrilled with the success, it has come with tradeoffs. Sometimes lose the connection to our community because we've got so much going on. We appear to be more "corporate" and blackbox.

How are we countering this? Well, we've gotten more interactive on our Twitter and Facebook accounts. Also we're trying to increase the amount of information and data we share on the blog. We also intend to do more open betas where the community can participate in our development process at an early stage. I'm pushing for even more radical transparency -- giving raw data about our upload latency, etc when available. There will always be information we can't share - sometimes for competitive reasons, or when it would be considered financial guidance or even because it has legal or privacy implications. But generally we're going to try and do a better job of putting roadmaps, ideas, successes and failures out there.

To people running their own companies, i'd put the same challenge forth - if there's not a really good reason to keep it a secret, just share it.

Hey! Get Off My Name. Username disputes are the domain squatting of the future.

On the heels of WIPO's announcement that domain disputes increased to a record 2,329 cases in 2008 (8% increase from 2007) a much more interesting question is starting to be raised. What rights do brands have to their usernames on social services such as MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube. As most of the major companies have already secured their URLs, the most valuable real estate for them to cultivate these days is their persistent space within these social communities. And today it's the wild west with each service arriving at its own set of principles mixing various legal arguments with their own business objectives and user protection.

Take Apple for example - one of the world's most powerful and loved brands. Of course Apple.com is their corporate website but what about their social presence? Let's see what the username "Apple" yields on these four prominent social spaces:

MySpace (/apple) = DJ Apple. Brand Fail.
Twitter (/apple) = Squatter. Brand Fail.
YouTube (/apple) = Some user named Apple. Brand Fail.

Wow, so Apple fails to occupy the real estate associated with their brand on three of the most important social publishing and community tools of the Web2 era. You think they'd want to address this, yes? But how? There's no clear WIPO-like rules in place for service usernames. And none of these users are violating Apple's trademark or creating brand confusion so it's unclear that Apple has any legal right to the usernames since "Apple" is a generic term. For clear trademarks or impersonations it's easier to claim your brand.

Basically in this case brands are left with two choices:

1) Negotiate directly with the user and try to purchase the namespace a la buying a domain name.

2) Contact the service provider and try to get them to reclaim the name on behalf of the brand, sometimes using the carrot or stick of advertising spend. This often happens under the cover of darkness when the user account is inactive but what happens when the user has a vibrant community around them? Does the service provider really want to set off blogosphere shitstorm and be accused of selling out their users?

So what's a potential best practice for this new reality?

A) Free market + easy account transfer. Service providers such as MySpace could support the ability to transfer an account and its history to a new user name along with a payment to the account holder negotiated between the brand and the user. Make the transfer option available with a minimum payment of $5k in order to minimize the number of account transfers. Once transferred on the legacy account, support a " has relocated to " for a 90 day period.

B) Separate official namespaces for brands - /brand/name as opposed to /user. Is this part of the Twitter revenue strategy?

Does anyone know of services or communities that are elegantly handling the username issue? (I'll offer up that it's a challenge for us here at YouTube).

Note: I haven't included Facebook because as a Real Name system there really isn't a /apple equivalent. The issue of whether user-created fan pages are being embraced by brands or shut down is a separate post. Coke at least did something very novel with their user-started fan page.

LED Sheep

Samsung ad but great.

fūsen bakudan - Japanese balloon bombs from WW2

Did you know that in WW2 the Japanese launched 9000 balloons bombs towards North America, of which at least 300 successfully landed in the US. Fascinating.

They were meant to cause waves of terror and the US Office of Censorship forbid media from discussing the balloons. In actuality, there were six casualties from one tragic incident.

The other notable explosion was a balloon taking out power lines to the Manhattan Project nuclear reactor, causing a short circuit but backup power saved the day.

Tim Armstrong - You've Got Mail

Really happy for Tim Amrstrong and his new challenge at AOL. I've had the opportunity to work with him in both my AdSense and YouTube roles since 2003. He's a visionary, honest and strong leader. His AOL team will now get to hear the details of the AOL and MySpace ad deal negotiations. Both of which were classicly awesome gets on his part. One of which involved running to a helicopter if i recall correctly.

This past summer I had the chance to join Tim and his sales leads in an offsite to discuss how to best organize their teams against the growing display advertising business. There were lots of viewpoints in the room but Tim let the group reach a consensus via setting clear goals, facilitating discussion and holding people accountable. It was a masterful job of leadership and one of the touchstones I'll remember after Tim is gone.

Privacy is now a microtransaction

On the heels of Google getting into interest-based advertising, it occurs to me that privacy is a microtransaction.

Look, for the web here's the deal. Web publishers need to generate revenue for their services. As a consumer here are your three options. You can pay with:

• Attention: Ads are getting bigger and more interruptive (interstitials!) in order to get your attention and preserve big CPMs. If you don't mind a future where the rich media ads drip all over the page and you're clicking through "watch this ad while the article you want loads" gateways, then continue to pay with attention.
  
• Real dollars: Whether it's subscription or microtransaction you can reach into your wallet and actually contribute your own dollars to the cause.
  
• Privacy: Give up some data about yourself to lead to better ads targeting. This means ads can be effective without being interruptive. Higher RPMs for text ads as opposed to needing to give up the homepage to a huge Wendy's Bacon skin.
  

People who want to remain fully anonymous on the web - that's no problem, just reach into your wallet and pay directly. Or get ready for a noisy webpage. I'll trade some knowledge about what interests me for an enhanced web experience.

Google's Interest-Based Advertising. Finally!

So i'm thrilled that Google has finally jumped into the interest-based advertising space. Because of the great respect Google has for user privacy it's been a long time coming, but as an internet user I'm excited. Why? Because this is going to make ads more relevant to me at a time when advertisers seem too willing to interrupt or distract my web experience to otherwise gain my attention. Earlier this week web publishers committed to even bigger ads to try and do away with banner blindness. Groan, what a race to the bottom.

A few weeks back i got the chance to look at my individual interest-based profile on an internal demo. It was really accurate - i like basketball, rock music, politics, and a few other categories. It gave me the option to opt-out of any of those categories or remove my profile all-together. There were no "OMG" moments where something i had read or done on the web now was exposed for everyone to see. It's just machines talking to machines. Anyway, if this info can be used to help personalize my web experience I'm all for it.

And if the result is better ads that i'm more likely to click on, well that's one important way to support websites who deliver incredible value to me for free each day.

Recession special: Local events offering free booze

MyOpenBar.com provides email/feed/tweets for local free booze events such as art gallery openings. Currently working for NY, SF, Chicago, Miami, LA or Honolulu.

The "Freakonomics" of Bill Collection

WSJ reports that the slumping economy has resulted in a boom for voice actors needed to record "your payment is late" messages used by collection agencies. Best facts from the article:

• From pleasant to aggressive: the collection agencies use friendly voices for your first few calls to deliver helpful reminders. But ignore a few of these and they bring out the more gruff and aggressive voices on autodial.
• Unlike call centers, collection societies often look for voice actors with light accents, especially British. Why? "People tend to listen to anything that is different even if I am just saying 'Hey, you owe us money.'" Oh, and male customers respond particularly well to female British voices. In the words of one executive: "They think Elizabeth Hurley is on the other end."
• People listen longer to messages delivered by female voices but the male voice outperforms female in terms of spurring action.

A first look at Wikirank

By sending a "Wikirank beta release" email, Jeff Veen gave us nerds something else to do tonight besides see Watchmen. VentureBeat has a write-up and there's a recent video of Veen talking at Startup2Startup.

Now if you'll excuse me, i need to go use Wikirank to conduct important research - namely investigating the popularity of various metal bands and 1980s wrestlers.

Thank Obama - for a larger CA jury pool

Here's another unintended but positive byproduct of the Obama victory in November - you're going to be called for jury duty less frequently. During my own jury duty stint last week the judge told us there has been such a large increase in California voter registration that citizens in most major CA cities will be called every ~18-24 mths instead of annually as the courts work their way through these new eligible jurors. This calculation might assume the new registrants respond to their summons at the same rate as the current pool but overall good news.

Depression-era Cooking Tips on YouTube

From the DepressionCooking channel on YouTube.

The Onion: Are Violent Video Games Preparing Kids For The Apocalypse?

These Onion News videos are getting pretty good -- Sony's "Stupid Piece of Shit" and Apple's Laptop w/o Keyboard.