Flip Video - the revolution will be in high-definition

So I bought the Flip.

If you haven’t heard of the Flip, check it out - it’s a very simple, high definition video camera about the size of a cell phone. The best part, and why I thinks it’s a game-changer, is that you can buy one for about $200, making the Flip the cheapest, high quality video camera on the market.

But this isn’t a product review for the Flip. Instead I want to share my thoughts on what I think the Flip means to the internet and our day-to-day lives.

According to Flip-makers, Pure Digital Technologies, their product currently accounts for over 13% of all U.S. camcorder sales. That’s over 1 million of these tiny cameras being carried around in people’s back pockets in the US alone (they’ve recently been launched in the UK and Canada). And that, in turn, means a lot more opportunities for people to capture all that is weird, funny and disturbing in this world - in other words, a lot more video of what we (sadly) consider news. This is very cool and for the internet I think it means a heck of a lot more interesting video being uploaded everyday.

So what does this accelerated proliferation in video uploads mean to the way we live?

To illustrate my point, consider the multitude of police beating videos online or the famous video footage of the man tasered by police at an airport who later died. How many more instances of such things will be caught on tape now that people can carry the Flip with them wherever they go, 24/7?

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My Twitter and Re-Tweet traffic rules of thumb

I’ve been on Twitter now for about a year and spent enough time watching the referral traffic to my blog posts to start to nail down some general rules of thumb on how much traffic you can expect from the micro-blogging phenom.

In general, I’ve found that I get about 6 (yes, 6) unique visitors within an hour of posting a short, catchy descriptor along with my URL.

That’s 6 unique visitors from a single post on my Twitter feed and I have 1,500 followers right now and have had over 1,000 for about 6 months.

So, I would say a good rule of thumb would be 1,000 followers = 6 unique visitors. I have also found that the same rule can apply for re-tweets (when one of my followers, reposts the URL on their own Twitter feed).

So 1,000 followers = 6 unique visitors + 6 more for every Re-Tweet. It just so happens that a quick look at my most active followers, shows that most have around the same number of followers as me, so this Re-Tweet factor makes sense. This multiplier effect can actually be pretty significant if you start with 6 and then get 40 Re-Tweets that’s 6 + (6 x 40) = 246 unique visitors. Not bad, when you consider that it takes about 15 seconds to compose the twitter post and hit submit.

An interesting thing that I also noticed over time is that posts that are directly related to Twitter on average get about 10 unique visitors, versus the usual 6.

For example, this post on my Twitter feed - “My top ten tweeters not on Twitter, what do you think? http://reque.st/1687″ - referred 10 unique visitors to my blog. I haven’t written too much on Twitter, so this one is still in the “strong hunch” phase.

These numbers might sound a little depressing, I’m sure you spent a lot of time building a great Twitter profile in the hopes (at least in part) that it might end up driving some nice traffic to your site. 6 for every 1,000 followers doesn’t sound like much, but it actually is a lot.

As I mentioned, drafting a submitting post on your Twitter feed takes about 15 seconds. Those 6 visitors take a micro-second to get. Compare this to the hours it takes to work on the perfect Digg-bait post, only to see it shrivel and die on the general submission page and zero traffic back to your site.

With the way follows are set up on Twitter those 6 visitors are also the types of people who are genuinely interested in your blog post and for me at least many of my followers are fellow bloggers. So if one of those 6 write a post on their own site, that’s a HUGE pay-off for very little time investment.

And finally, remember the rule of 6 is per one thousand followers, so if you have 10,000 followers, plus 100 Re-Tweets that’s a good bit of of highly targeted traffic for doing very little. I would also assume that the 6 per thousand rule would also increase as you become more influential on Twitter and followers in that range.

Now you can imagine the nice bit of traffic Top Twitter users like Robert Scoble are generating for their posts.

But, hey this is just my rule of thumb based on a year of observing traffic referral behavior. I haven’t had the time to do any actually data analysis, so if these numbers seem way off I would stand to be corrected.

What have your observations been? Do you have any Twitter traffic rules-of-thumb?

Oh, and please follow me on Twitter if you’re interested in this type of information, I would love to get to that 10,000 mark someday!

Why Newspapers are Failing Online

There’s been a lot of stories lately about failing newspapers. In fact, in late December, 2008 the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that the internet is now used as a news source by more Americans than newspapers.

In order to survive newspapers are re-doubling their efforts to gain presence online and remain relevant.

And, apart from a few standouts, most newspapers are not doing a very good job of it. I want to share a brief, but very enlightening experience I had with one newspaper outlet that is just not getting it, The Syndey Morning Herald. Now it might seem that I’m picking on the Herald, and I kind of am, but there’s a huge number of other newspaper websites that are making the same mistakes.

So let me set up the situation.

A leaked Australian Defense Department report  was obtained by some intrepid reporters at the Sydney Morning Herald.

It was a very juicy story. So one of the bloggers on DeSmogBlog, a site I manage, wrote up a quick post based on the Herald story. So far so good. But I thought that the post would be a lot better if I could get a copy of the actual secret military report. The report was nowhere to be found on the Herald website.

So now you know the background and based on this and my attempts to get a copy of the Defense report I’ll share with you what I think are some very good reasons newspapers are failing online.

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Do you like Google’s new favicon?

I thought something was looking a little different online today.

I don’t know about you, but I’m on Google pretty much 24/7. So I am wondering what you think about Google’s new favicon?

According to Google the backstory is that it was inspired by a design submitted to them by a computer science student named André Resende, at the University of Campinas in Brazil. If that’s the case, then I think it’s a great new design and I’m happy to look at it. Now if it was in fact designed by a bunch of social psychologists to make me click on more Google ads, then…

Thoughts? Like it? Hate it? Don’t care? Leave a comment telling me what you think.

Dashblog Firefox plug-in for quick blog posts

Just checking out this cool little Firefox plug-in that helps me post short, quick little blog posts with screengrabs. Very cool so far.

Want big traffic from Stumbleupon?

Was just re-reading this very comprehensive guide to driving big traffic numbers to your site using Stumbleupon by Maki who runs the site Dosh Dosh. I came across this article over a year ago and I keep going back to it to as a reference, as it has helped increase traffic to my websites big time.

I hope it helps you now too!

Video Lectures from the Annual Semantic and Digital Media Technologies Conference

I knew there was a reason I didn’t fly all the way to Koblenz, Germany to learn more about Semantic Search and Digital Technologies. All the seminars have been posted online!

These are well worth the time to watch if you want to learn more about the so-called “bleeding-edge” of the online world.  In fact, it’s been really interesting to see a proliferation of popular news stories about semantic web in the last week alone from the likes of Google and Ask.com.

Here’s a few of the lectures  I particularly enjoyed (and understood):

Tracking the Progress of Multimedia Semantics - from MPEG-7 to Web 3.0

Data by the people, for the people

Tag Suggestr: Automatic Photo Tag Expansion using Visual Information for Photo Sharing Websites

And here’s one that I don’t even understand what the heck they’re saying in the title:

Context as a non-ontological determinant of semantics

Google is updating PageRanks

It looks like another round of Google PageRank updates is underway, as I am starting to get scores on some of the new blogs I have created over the last couple of months.

For those unfamiliar with Google PageRank, here’s a quick rundown.

There are very few measures out there that clearly tell a blogger what the Google gods are thinking about their website. One of the best ones is Google PageRank - a score from one to ten that is assigned by Google to every page that it indexes. In really simple terms a blog’s page rank is determined by the number of quality external links it has referring to it on the internet.

The easiest way to figure a web page’s page rank is to download the google pagerank plug-in if you’re using Firefox or go to a site like PageRank Checker.

Here’s the Wikipedia definition of PageRank that gets into all the nitty gritty.

Like in anything to do with search engine optimization (SEO) though, it’s important that you don’t obsess too much about any single factor. Good SEO and a successful blog overall is a culmination of doing a whole bunch of things well, so don’t read too much into a blog’s PageRank. For example, Perez Hilton only has a PageRank of 7 out of 10 and he gets millions of visitors everyday.

I use PageRank as a relative measure of blog health that gives me a report every few months. Do I obsess about it? No. But if over a year I see the PageRank of a particular blog continue to fall, it’s probably a good indicator that I need to re-think what I’m doing.

5 very funny online videos (take 2)

And yet one more reason I feel queasy when I see little boats and big whales:

Ladies, probably good advice to not get on an elevator when encountered with this:

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5 Very Funny Videos - 12/27/2008

The Fast and the Stupid

Yet another reason ice fishing sucks:

Sarah Silverman’s f**king Matt Damon is still totally hilarious a year later:

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