Shyzer.com

When TIME Magazine writes up a story within a matter of hours about something that happened on Facebook yesterday, you know a lot of people are talking about it.

It would have been nice had they covered the positive side of the story though, such as how the information was already readily available. Or maybe they could have taken it a step further and explained more in depth WHY people are against it and the (false?) beliefs they have compared against the facts.

It’s almost as if somebody over at CNN had the same thought that I did when they saw the amount of emotional outpour dedicated to Steve Irwin.

When I was in Australia last year, my main source of communication and news was through weekly 4,000 word e-mails between myself and Fellner. In fact, we had so much fun with them, that we kept it going when he went to Ecuador and even now while he’s in Austria. Now, when you’re writing thousands and thousands of words each week back and forth, it’s not hard to imagine that we cover a lot of ground. And sometimes, I feel as if we’re always one step ahead of everybody, talking about things that only we seem to care about that suddenly a few weeks or months later become big news.

And the latest e-mail I sent him was no different.

Somewhere along the line we started talking about Stephen Colbert and his comedy bit about Wikipedia and how susceptible it is. In fact, here’s what I said:

But Colbert was proving a good point. In this day and age, some people are starting to see information as being TOO readily available for our own good, leading to more false truths than before. Here’s what I mean. In 1990, if I were given an assignment of writing an essay on ancient mummies, I would most likely go to the library and use various books / encyclopedias. I trusted the sources because they were edited, read over by many people, and hopefully the bad ones were weeded out through the process of not even being printed. But now, not so… We don’t teach kids (or adults for that matter) how to verify information. We simply jump on Google, hit search (and believe me, most people don’t even know how to properly search for info. I mock Clay almost daily for being a Bad Googler) and then we just click the first few links that pop up. But who wrote what’s on those links? Who fact checked them? Who proofread them? And who deemed them the most reliable? Google? Please, they can’t possibly verify everything they index. So now, we are left simply assuming the info we find on the Internet is real.

Anybody can make a page that looks real and legit and then pump it full of false info. I could make a page about all the wars America has fought in, buy a legit domain like AmericanWars.com and then fill it with propaganda or false info. It happens all the time and yet John and Jane Doe who come in from Google don’t know it’s false.

Bottom line: I love the Internet, but it’s time we start teaching people how to use it. It’s become such a staple in our life, yet problems like this and countless others out there are jeopardizing its true potential.

So where am I going with this? What does people not knowing how to use the Internet tie into this post? Well, with Facebook.

Yesterday, they introduced a new mini-feed system that updates you on everything you’re friends have done, from relationship status to when they comment on other people’s profiles to just about every change they make to their account.

And people are absolutely livid.

Anti mini-feed groups are popping up every minute. In fact, the biggest one is gaining thousands of new members by the hour. Last night they were at 70,000 members, now they are already over 100K. People are screaming that it’s an invasion of their privacy, that they don’t want other people to know when they’ve updated such and such, and many are threatening to quit and delete their profiles if the new features aren’t removed. Some are even saying this is going to create stalkers and creepy activities now.

But all I can is laugh. This is far from an invasion of privacy. The only people who can see the mini-feed are people who you are friends with, which means they could see all the changes you made anyways. Sure, they wouldn’t have all the information aggregated into one nice little area for them, but if somebody was hell-bent on stalking you before, they could have easily done so by going around and checking people’s profiles manually to see what activity you’d done. Creepy? Sure. But the conditions for it existed long before these new changes, so don’t act like this is anything new.

It’s funny to me how people ignore the threats of the Internet until they are staring it down the barrel. All it took was Facebook implementing this little feature to get people riled up and have attention focused on the fact that people tend to put too much information about themselves out there on the Internet. It would be great if the Facebook team came out in a few days and said “Gotcha! We simply wanted to prove to y’all that you’re putting too much information out there on the net. Maybe in the future you’ll be a little more careful.” But I don’t give them that much credit for trying to pull off an educational prank.

Yes, Facebook does need to have this feature as optional. They need to make it so that if I want to turn it off, I can. But they aren’t doing anything wrong, much less illegal. You are leaving those comments. You are uploading those pictures. You are changing your profile and inserting too much information. And hopefully Facebook has just made you realize it.

Now if I could just get you to realize how much of the crap on Google and Wikipedia isn’t true…

Eh, screw it. I’m going to mess around on Facebook some more. For, you see, I’ve decided to have fun with the new features. I’ve now changed my profile to the picture below and am going around Facebook asking people in creepy messages if they want to be friends. Some of the responses so far have been hilarious.

I hope all you Battlestar Galactica fans out there know about the webisodes that are showing this month. They’re showing two a week from now until October 6th and they explain what’s been going on since the end of season 2. If there’s a better show on TV than this one, then I don’t know about it.

As you all know by now, Steve Irwin died yesterday off the coast of Australia while diving with stingrays. I think I first heard it on NPR and by the time I got to my computer, it was all over the web. CNN.com had it as their lead story for at least half the day, as fif MSNBC and Fox. Even ESPN.com (?!) had it on their main page and many of the local / national news stations didn’t just save the news for the backend of their broadcasts like they do with other celebrity deaths, but instead ran it earlier in the broadcast.

And while it’s sad news, I’m surprised it’s such big news.

I always thought people saw him more as a gimmick than anything else. A source of mild entertainment as they watched from the comfort of their home as he wrestled a croc or stabbed at a snake. As we saw him more on TV, we got used to seeing him around, but there really wasn’t anything beyond that. He simply was that crazy guy from Australia that we all liked listening to partially because of his cool accent and partially because he did things nobody else would do. His TV shows here in the states did moderately well in terms of ratings and his movie didn’t really set any records in terms of earnings. What I’m trying to say here is that while a celebrity, he was a D-list celebrity at best and somebody who you didn’t notice when you went a few months without seeing him on TV.

And yet I can remember when other, arguably “bigger” celebrities died recently and their deaths didn’t get near as much attention as Irwin’s has. I’m not saying it’s not sad he died, but I’m just left wondering how much of these condolences are real and how much are from the “ex-high school” crowd.

I guess I should explain the “ex-high school” crowd. One of my major pet peeves is when people display false emotion. I don’t care what emotion it is, I don’t care what the setting is, if the emotions you’re displaying aren’t real and are simply what you think they should be, then you’ve joined the crowd. In fact, there’s no group worse at this false emotion than all the people you used to go to high school with, which is where the name comes from. You know exactly who I’m talking about - say you’re in a bar and you spot somebody across the room who you went to high school with. As soon as they see you, they come running up and pretend y’all were best friends. They as how you’ve been and want to hear your whole life story just as long as you can fit it into 10 seconds. Then they cut you off, brag about their latest job or kid, and then make some over the top gesture about how you two need to get together and “catch” up sometime.

No, we don’t. We didn’t talk in high school. We don’t talk now. There’s a reason I didn’t hang out with you before and I bet it has something to do with your crappy personality that you so eloquently just put on display for everyone within earshot. Don’t patronize me with this false sense of past brotherhood, as if we were close only to have drifted apart over the years. That’s not how it was, trust me, I’m a history major. Sure, come on over and chat if you want, but don’t insult my memory or my intelligence.

Some people do this far too often in their lives and it only gets worse when they talk to you about somebody who isn’t around or who might even be dead. They conjure these memories out of thin air, lamenting over what they lost and how wonderful that person was. They pretend the person was a saint and that they could do nothing wrong and I just don’t understand how or why people do it. Speaking nothing but good and completely false things about a person after they’ve died helps not their memory or legacy, but instead tarnishes and insults it. Speak the truth, no matter how little the good was.

When I die, I want people to remember and speak of me as for who I really was; warts, faults, and everything else. Don’t make me out to be my generation’s Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. I simply want to be remembered and credited with whatever I managed to accomplish, no matter how little or great. And I think other people deserve just the same treatment.

And thus, I hope that the “ex-high school” crowd didn’t highjack the Steve Irwin memorial today. That said, however, if all the condolences that people expressed were completely real and heartfelt, then so be it. You earned them, mate.

Remember the post I made a month ago about viral videos and making money? Of course you do, seeing as how it’s just a few scrolls below this post since I haven’t written much lately. Anyways, it turns out there’s a website called Revver that is offering a service similar to what I proposed. Yet they’re still screwing things up.

Revver allows users to upload their homemade movies to their site, just like somebody can on YouTube. However, Revver sticks a short ad to the end of the video. Any time a visitor clicks the ad, Revver splits the profits 50/50 between themselves and the video’s creator. Sounds like a decent plan, right? Not really. My main problem with the whole self-made and viral video craze sweeping the net is that the content producers are getting hosed in the end result. They create the content, star in it, produce it, and publish it. Yet they don’t see a dime simply because YouTube or some other website hosts the video and puts their ads up, which is a problem in two ways. First, the little man isn’t seeing his fair share of the cut, which both my plan and Revver’s tries to address. However, Revver’s idea is simply to rely on traditional methods of earning money on the Internet - click through advertisements. And this only sets them up for failure.

It’s time companies start realizing that PPC (pay per click) is going the way of the banner ads. They just aren’t effective in some of the major website settings anymore. Sure, there are some cases where they can be effective (hello there, Hey, It’s Free!) but there are also times where it’s as effective as trying to put out a forest fire by spitting on it. (I’m looking at you, Shyzer!)

Think of it this way. In order to induce your visitors into clicking an advertisement, you need to have something relevant to your content. Take my previous examples for instance. With HIF, the site revolves around getting stuff from the Internet for free. That means that in order for me to use PPC ads effectively, there needs to be other freebie related sites on the Internet who want to advertise on sites that have a strong demographic in people who are looking for free stuff. Luckily for me, there are, and thus I can make a few extra dollars by people clicking on the relevant links on my site. But what if I were to put up ads for used cars? Or injury lawyers. Or anything else you can think of that has nothing to do with other sites where you could get free stuff? Well then nobody would click the ads and I wouldn’t make a dime.

So what if I wanted to put ads here on Shyzer? Who would advertise here? Other blogs? Yeah right - who is going to pay money to advertise their blog? And as I proved over the course of last year when I had them up, Google Adsense certainly doesn’t know how to match relevant ads with a blog. They were all over the place, from the best places to buy tires in Columbia to Thai restaurant reviews in Seattle. In fact, I just checked out the predicted Google Ads for this very post (which can be seen if you click the comments link and scroll down.) You know what my results were? The True Iraq (an anti-Iraq war website), Philippines Dating, Stay at Hampton Inn Hotel, and Top Trade Schools. I shit you not. Now how do ANY of those have ANYTHING to do wiht this post? Well, the reason Google has such trouble is simple. There’s no clear demographic here on Shyzer, nor is there any clear topic to match the ads with. Thus, Google just goes crazy and slaps some random ads up, meaning that putting PPC ads here on Shyzer would make as much sense as slapping a flashing banner from 1998 up there next to the logo and expecting it to convert well.

Which is why Revver’s idea is completely in the wrong direction. How are these ads at the end of the videos even relevant to the videos that are being displayed? What if I upload a video every week of my brother and I doing crazy and wacky things around our house? Or of me lip synching a Britney Spears song? Or any other number of random things that people record and then upload to the Internet? What company out there is going to have a appropriate ad? These types of videos being uploaded to media sites are just like blogs - few have any clear and consistent topic and those that do are still within a small window of similar pertinent ads.

And even if you do manage to match up a weekly video about, say, shoe fashion with an ad for NIKE, what are you going to do the next week? Most of these semi-regular videos have fairly high visitor retention numbers, which means the 2nd week and each week thereafter, you are faced with people who have already seen this NIKE ad during the first week. Are they going to click it a 2nd time? A 3rd? How about three months later? So now you have to keep finding not only relevant ads, but NEW relevant ads every time a new video is released! Talk about fun!….

With the way the PPC market is right now, I’m surprised Revver would even build a site around it. Heck, Google just settled a lawsuit regarding fraudulent clicks with their Adsense PPC program and one against Yahoo isn’t far behind. It just seems absurd to me that instead of setting up a system like I proposed, they’d go with PPC and stupid, non-relevant, big corporation ads at the end of viral media. That’s the whole point of viral media!! People creating what they want instead of relying on TV and movies to provide it. So then why would you assume the viewers would want to watch a freaking commercial at the end of the video, even if it’s short? If I’m watching something and once it’s finished, an ad start, I simply turn it off. It’s not rocket science we’re dealing with here.

I’ll give Revver props for realizing content creators would be attracted to a system where they get a piece of the pie. I’ll even go so far as to say that unless some other website starts where they implement an idea similar to mine, Revver will last. But trust me, as soon as that Shyzicorp website launches and people see how much more money they can make simply by ditching the ads at the end of their video and charging a mere penny per video, they’ll flock to that site and Revver will die a quick and painful death.

I watched the first episode of The Sopranos tonight. And I have to admit, I can see what all the fuss is about.

Now I guess I need to watch an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

There’s nothing quite like sleeping under the stars.

I hate people who post or e-mail something along the lines of “BIG NEWS COMING SOON!” People like that annoy me to know end imaginable, for why don’t they just wait until they can tell me the damn news! Half the time they never even come through with it, but it’s times like these that I understand why they do it. Because if they don’t, they’ve got nothing else to say and yet they don’t want to say anything in the fear of jinxing whatever they are working on.

That said, I’m in a bit on limbo here - I’m waiting to hear back from a certain lady named Hera to find out if I’ll be able to something I dearly want to. Hopefully I’ll know what’s up either way in a week or so here, because if there’s anything I hate more than Bob Costas or El Nino, it’s The Waiting Game. Never fear though, once I hear back from my Greek Goddess, I’ll let all six of you who still read this site know what’s up.

In an effort to take my attention off my cell phone (RING DAMN YOU!), I’ll do a quick recap here. Almost immediately after making my last post, I climbed into a car built for 7 with no luggage room and somehow crammed 8 people, 1 dog, and 49 suitcases into it. Then it was off for a leisurely 12 hour drive to the beach. Oh, how I long for the days when the beach was only a 15 minute bus ride away.

It was a great week at Myrtle Beach, though. I had contemplated renting a car to drive to Spartanburg to see some old friends, but it was simply going to cost too much money in the end. But other than that? Nothing beyond being back in Virginia and playing that damned game while trying to rush three new websites to active status, one of which I need to get launched in a day or two max due to the fact that it centers around school work, tests, and the such. And what better time to launch a site like that then when everybody is heading back for yet another year?

And hey, Juno, give me a freaking call here. I’m ready.

I have ideas. Lots of ‘em. I’ve got a notebook right here full of ideas for products, websites, journeys, books, Mariners lineups, etc.

One such idea that I’ve had recently has centered abound the whole consumer created media wave that’s been sweeping the Internet for the past few years now. I’m of course talking about podcasts, vlogs (video blogs, where instead of typing out a post like this, the author records himself speaking it into a camcorder and just uploads the movie) It’s finally reached the point where the “fad” label can be taken off and instead we can look at this section of the Internet market as something that is here to stay, whether we know and understand it or not. (in fact, here’s a good article about it with some great sites at the bottom.)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you know about sites like YouTube. Based on traffic (20+ million visitors monthly) and downloads (100 million videos daily), YouTube has been pegged as somewhere between the 15th and 25th most trafficked site on the net and it only takes a few minutes or surfing around on their site to realize why. It’s a virtual landmine of entertainment and enjoyment. Want to watch a video of a kid hitting another kid in the crotch? No problem. How about a funny SNL or Daily Show clip? They’ve got ya covered. And if watching Chinese adolescents lip-synch to Backstreet Boys, you’re in luck. And it’s all for free, watchable in a matter of seconds and easily shared amongst friends, blogs, and other websites.

Now, business model aside for a moment (How in the hell is YouTube making money and covering the cost of streaming 30+ million videos monthly?! Simply from ads? I don’t buy that for one second. So far, they seem to have relied on investments, the latest being $15 million dollars this month. But once they use that to blow through bandwidth over the course of a few months, they’re right back where they started. I don’t see where they are getting their profit from.), legal questions soon pop up. Who owns these videos? Surely NBC and Comedy Central do not profit from the SNL and Daily Show clips on YouTube, so what’s in it for them? Not a thing and as such, YouTube says they honor such requests to delete copyrighted material. But to put it plainly, they don’t. Try it out for yourself, do a search for Daily Show or Family Guy or any other funny show out there. THOUSANDS of videos will pop up in the results from those respective shows. But these are large, multi-billion dollar companies, they can absorb the blow until the legal questions can be settled.

But what about you and me?

The reason vlogs, podcasts, and random consumer created media in general is so popular is because anybody can do it. There’s no reason for Seth McFarland to make a funny vlog when he can instead he can be paid millions to make a funny episode of The Family Guy. The same goes for Jon Stewart making a satirical podcast when instead he is paid to do so on cable TV. But you and I don’t have the luxury of being paid for our funny and unique ideas, so in the old days, that meant tough shit for us. But now, we can simply go ahead and create whatever videos, songs, or other media our little heart’s desire, upload it to the Internet, and viola!

But how are we supposed to get people to see our media? That’s where YouTube and other services step in, offering us to upload it to their websites. The catch is that almost every website that offers such a service has a little clause in their TOS stating that they own any uploaded material. So that means that YouTube can simply sit around, let all of its content be created by the users, and then profit from it without sharing.

Fair? Hardly.

Sure, I might be happy at first simply with getting more eyeballs on my content. If I made a vlog here and only got 10 people to see it versus uploading it to YouTube and getting 10,000, then it’s a no-brainer. But after I’ve built my fan base, then what? Shouldn’t I get at least some of the pie for doing all the work? And if I somehow find a way to get people to pay for my content, what if others go and upload it anyways to YouTube, thus allowing freeloaders to skirt around the issue. And you think YouTube actually gives a care who uploaded the video? Think again.

What the Internet needs is for some sort of universal payment method that will allow users to conveniently pay only a few cents for things like video views and podcasts. Creators could sign up for the service and host their videos, podcasts, etc only through them. The service would then in turn allow users to pay a small, small fee to access the media. That’s the type of service that needs to be created and yet for some reason, nobody has done so yet.

For the sake of argument, let’s pretend such a service was started tomorrow named Shyzicorp. If I have 20,000 people viewing my vlog (which might sound like a lot, but I could sit here and rattle off a twenty page list of people who have such followings, many of which get double, triple, or more in viewership, myself being a huge fan of one or two in particular) and I get them to spend a mere penny a pop, that’s a $200 right there. If Shyzicorp splits the profits with me 50/50, I’m making $100 per episode.

Most of these are created and updated daily or semi-daily, so let’s pretend I make a new video three times a week. That’s $15,600 a year and while it might not sound like much, remember this is a side project (ie, disposable extra income on top of your normal job) and that many, many people are already doing for free. If content creators were to have 100,000 daily viewers and they created a new clip every weekday, they’d be pulling in $2500 per week, after Shyzicorp’s equal cut, and thus would be making $130,000 a year. With that type of income, who needs a day job?

Some might ask if users would actually pay for content, but think about that for a second. As a user, I’d be paying a penny per episode and thus over the course of a year, I’d be paying $1.56. For half the price of a coffee at Starbucks, I could support my favorite vlogger or podcaster for an entire year. If people will pay a buck a song on iTunes, I promise you Shyzicorp could get people to pay a few bucks a year for their favorite sites and content.

You could even make content like “Ask A Ninja” and other exceptional material three or five cents since it’s only updated weekly or so. I’d pay a nickel for Ask A Ninja. Heck, I’d pay a dime to listen to TWiT. With the numbers they claim to have, at a dime a download, that’d be over 31 grand an episode, per week.

Just make it easy to pay a few cents and “viral” becomes “Viable.”

The payment method could even be simplified to the point where a user pays $5.00 and gets 500 viewable credits so that they don’t have to through the payment method every time they wanted to watch something. You could operate under the method where once a user pays for something, they can watch it however many times they wanted. Or you could even license the content so that once it’s paid for, it’s viewable for, say, a week. After that, they have to drop yet another penny to watch it again, thus making the archives of the content continue to generate money.

You could embed short, 15-second advertisements at the start or end of each video. Viewers could either watch / listen to them or maybe pay $5-10 per year to have access to ad-free content. There are countless other options here as well.

What I’m getting at is that companies like YouTube and Myspace currently are blowing through bandwidth, making little to no profit, and sharing none whatsoever of what they actually make with the content creators. There are a few sites, like Revver, that simply stick ads at the end of videos and pay the content creator a few cents each time the ad is clicked, but that’s just a single rung on the ladder up from YouTube and the such.

I can promise you this. If Shyzicorp burst onto the scene tomorrow with an easy, quick, and cheap website/program and offered vlogers and podcasters half the cut of whatever was earned on a pay-per-view license, 90% of the market would shift to them.

And at a base rate of a penny a pop, you’d have absolutely no trouble getting the users to follow.