PAN Blog

 

We got some rest over the Independence Day holiday and hope everyone else did too.  And we needed it; summer time--traditionally the agency world's slow season--seems to be every bit as busy as any other point in the year.  Maybe more so. 

 

There are lots of inquiries and formal RFPs are on the rise.  Despite the spike in gas prices and what seems to be a never ending stream of international crises, we remain in a good economy; or, maybe it's not *that* great but marketers realize their dollars go way further with a PR program than they do with advertising or other forms of direct marketing, or it could be a combination of the two.  Consultant friends of ours are doing well also...whatever the case things look good right now for the industry at large, with some exceptions. (hat tip to Dave). 

 

Now back to populating this site again. 

 

Technorati Tags : Downtime, vacation, blogging+break

 

 

 

     

 

YouTube doesn't need anyone else to talk about its popularity, we're all guilty of taking a few minutes of the day to watch a funny video, but the conversation recently moved into interesting territory as noted in yesterday's post by John Battelle.   

 

Is YouTube worth a billion dollars?  I have no idea--how startups are valued vs. what they generate for revenue often doesn't make a lot of sense to the casual observer.  But, John and those in his comments section debate a great point: most of the content on YouTube is copyrighted material.  They say content is king, but what happens when someone else owns the content? 

 

The line gets very blury between copyright infringement and "fair use," which states people have a reasonable right to use copyrighted material for their own enjoyment.  Going beyond that vague definition, either through file sharing or making copies, etc., apparently violates Fair Use. 

 

Just for fun, let's say watching a video from the YouTube service does constitute Fair Use (give it the benefit of the doubt).  What happens, then, when people rip videos from the site and embed them in emails to friends, on their blogs or other sites?   Doesn't YouTube just become another pre-RIAA-neutered Napster? 

 

Technorati Tags : Fair+use, online+piracy, file+sharing, YouTube

 

 

 

 

Mary Hodder, known for her prolific writing over at napsterization (among other accomplishments) just launched her new venture, Dabble. 

 

Pure social search for rich media.  Very slick.  Upload, find, view, tag and share rich media of all sorts.  Even create and share play lists of videos. It's addicting, as I found out during an hour or so at work.  Dabble requires the interaction of people sharing videos from sources all over the Web and from more than 240 hosting sites which accept video uploads.  Judging from what was already available on the site, the concept has really taken off. 

 

Dabble's "pure" social search for media is similar to  PreFound's social search, which requires the interaction of people to share what they've found on the Web (as it relates to any subject through collections of links, Web pages, data, etc.) collected as users travel the Web and share what they've found about their interests with the rest of the PreFound community. 

 

Social search is getting too big to ignore.  Think of the possibilities of a social search site where everything on the Web--rich media and all other data--was indexed completely by people, rather than a Google-style algorithm. How much more targeted would search results be?  What would that do to the science of targeting ads?  

 

 Other people talking about Dabble:

John Battelle

Top Ten Sources Queen Halley Suitt

And a bunch more.....

 

Technorati Tags : Dabble, Social+search, tagging, media+search