Recently, one of the fastest spreading Internet memes to hit the web was the brilliant OK Go treadmill video.  The link to the video spread so fast that within a day everyone I knew had seen it and I was not even passing out the link.  People where remixing the video and even did a Lego stop animation video of it.  This was a marketers dream and it was huge, huge exposure for OK Go.

So now that everyone knows about the band you would think that a segment of those exposed would buy the music, right? Well, according to the band and the label its not translating so well and it is actually a huge challenge to tap into the Buzz and turn that over to sales.

This isn’t just in the music space either, the movie industry has the same challenge.  Look at the huge Internet hype "Snakes On A Plane" had.  This had such amazing Internet backing, blog hype and meme-madness.  T-Shirts were being sold out, forums were being dedicated to SoaP, hell the script and title were even driven by the Internet.  But in the end, it only made $15.3 million on the first weekend.

… for a horror film, the $30 million movie performed respectably. But analysts say that the movie’s failure to match its hype may dispel the notion of the Internet as a wellspring of untapped moviegoers. Instead, they say, Snakes‘ performance demonstrates that cyberspace is simply another place to put movie ads.
– ‘Snakes’ rattles Web hype, by Scott Bowles, USA TODAY

These are not the only examples either.  Many bands have reported having thousands of friends and hundreds of thousands of plays but aren’t seeing growth in music sales.  I don’t proclaim to know the root cause but I believe some of the factors rely on the actual user base and how MySpace works.  Anyone can be someone’s friend, in fact spammers are now offering to buy MySpace accounts from people with more that have more the 20,000+ friends. Your MySpace friend list doesn’t necessarily represent a real tangible fan base that is willing to invest money into music.  There is also misconceptions on plays… anytime someone hits your page a song is played.  So popularity of a track can not truly be gleamed from that number.  Another consideration is the actual age demographic of MySpace and their access to financial services to pay for the music (i.e. Credit Cards and PayPal accounts).  If your fans can’t pay for the music online then they won’t buy it.

To make a long story short(er), there is a lot of misconceptions about how Internet buzz translates into sales.  It’s not as simple as building hype and then cashing in.  The first challenge is building the hype, but its even harder to turn that into something that will help you make money doing what you love.

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Actually, I probably should take a step back and give a little intro to CC and why it is cool and important to us. Creative Commons is a project that was started by Lawrence Lessig to help facilitate a more easy to use system to share copyrighted material. One of the major challenges (and of course benefits) with copyrighted material is that it is All Rights Reserved. This means that if you want to use anything (from text to video) that is Copyrighted you have to get explicit permission to use the source. This is great protection for the copyright holder, but if you want your material to have some freedom this creates a lot of headaches and hurdles for both the copyright holder and the person wishing to use the material.

With CC, they have created different levels of “permissions” for copyrighted material. This allows the copyright holder to quickly license something as CC and instead of All Rights Reserved the material is now Some Rights Reserved.

For example, I have a song that I wrote and I want to allow people to remix it but not make money off the remix (because I still want to retain some of my rights). I could then post my song on my site and put up the CC badge that states in the license that you have to credit me, it must be non-commercial, that you may make derivative works but you have to post it under a similar CC license. We now have a quick and easy way to share material and still retain rights.

So, back to the salon. Joshua of FireAnt showed what their project is all about. FireAnt is both a web based and software downloadable aggregator that focuses on Video casts. One of Joshua’s goals for his presentation was to get feedback for the folks at CC and FireAnt about how they can better use CC to help facilitate video editors. From the presentation one of the bigger challenges they have to face is standardization of Metadata when tagging material as CC. This is important because when a video cast is made and posted on FireAnt and the creator wants to mark something as CC there should be a super simple way to do this via the tool. Also, the metadata should be standardized so that other tools and sites can use the data to inform end-users quickly what rights they have with the material.

Eddie, of Geek Entertainment TV (and the man behind Webzine which I was a panelist at) showed us an episode of Geek Entertainent TV and talked about how they are using CC material in their shows. One big use of CC content is images that he pulls from Flickr to be used in the episode. What’s cool is that Flickr has a search system that allows users to find CC’d material of different licenses and then you can search inside that license to find images that are tagged with different keywords. By creating such a system Eddie is able to quickly find material and then he can follow the license and integrate the images into his show.

The last speaker was James, an embedded journalist for Second Life. Second Life is a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) that users can download and play for free. In the game users have the ability to create 3D objects and write scripts that can then control these objects. Once the object is created the user can then pay using an in-game monetary system call Lindens for their object to become permanent. Once the object is permanent the user can then use the object or even sell it. On top of that, the user retains the IP rights to any of the objects they create.

An example James used was of fashion designers. Some players of Second Life began creating custom fashions in the game and then selling them from stores they built in the game. Here is were it gets interesting, you can turn around and sell Lindens (the money) in the open market for real money, right now the rate is about 250 Lindens to $1 USD.

At this point some of the designers are making about $60,000+ a year just selling their online clothes. In fact, some of the designers have been approached by real life clothing companies to take the online fashion into “analog” forms.

As I mentioned, James is an embedded journalist. He plays the game, talks to players and then blogs about what is currently going on in the world. He was brought in by Second Life’s developers, Linden Labs, to do this and let them know about what is going on in their own game. One of the challenges the developers were facing was that there was so much going on they did not know what people were doing or how they were using the system. By bringing someone like James in, they can then get detailed information about the good, bad and the ugly in their world.

The reason James was speaking at the Salon was that CC and Second Life are working together to provide the rights and licensing system for the creations by the users. Since the user retains the IP rights to their creations, CC helped design a simple in-game way of licensing the creation as CC, giving other gamers rights to the creation if so desired. It was impressive how integrated this all was into the game and by playing the game you were actually performing licensing. On top of that, you can actually go to the CC office in the game and then donate Linden dollars to CC that will then be converted to USD and PayPal’ed into CC’s bank account. Wild.

Overall, I had a great time at the first CC salon and learned a lot about how others are using CC and what potential CC provides not just for the obvious things like music or video. Also, Jon Phillips of CC has asked me to speak at the next Salon and I am really excited to talk about podcasting and the using Creative Commons inside this medium.

Jack Shofield wrote an interesting article over at the Gaurdian about how VHS trumped Betamax and took over the market. The points that Jack made back in 2003 are really important in the upcoming Blu-ray/HD-DVD consumer battle in 2006 and the success of “the whole product”.

This week we have seen the gauntlets thrown down and all the media producer juggernauts are throwing their hat into the ring. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Sony rolled out their first Blu-Ray consumer players, Toshiba is showing off their HD-DVD Players, HD-DVD backers such as Warner and Universal are promising 24 movies on March 28th and Blu-ray backers such as Fox, Lionsgate, and of course Sony are promising 20 some titles when Blu-ray is launched. Some companies, such as HP are not taking a specific side and are offering both formats, but the lines are being drawn.

Looking at the current DVD world, many people have huge collections of movies and the hard core fans will start to port their collection over to the new technologies. But, in the meantime will consumers want to have multiple players to view both their new and old content? Or would they prefer convenience of one player that supports both new and old DVDs?

An interesting tidbit about HD-DVD is that the format provides backwards compatibility with standard DVD formats. Backwards compatibility is a huge advantage and is considered one of the key points to the Playstation 2’s success over the Gamecube and Xbox.

Why do I bring up game consoles? Well, here is the perfect example of content is king. When PS2 launched it had the ability to play all of the PS1 catalog. So right out of the gate PS2 owners had a massive selection of titles to choose from, and if you already owned a PS1 you could play those games on just one machine and not have both your PS1 and 2 set up at the same time, proving that customer convenience is a selling point.

Continuing on the console topic, Microsoft announced yesterday that they would be releasing a new HD-DVD player for the Xbox 360. In my mind, this could be a huge blow to Sony and both their Blu-ray technology and the upcoming PS3. When the 360 launched in November, Microsoft announced that they would not be including an HD media technology in the console. I feel this was a brilliant move because at the time there wasn’t really any public backing of either technology by media producers. One of Microsoft’s goals is to make the 360 a next generation entertainment media center that is the core of the HD system. For them to put a stake in the ground before any public announcements by the media giants would be a risky gamble, especially if the media producers choose the opposite technology Microsoft picked.

Now that a lot of the major studios are picking sides, Microsoft is throwing in their chips and this may help swing other studio’s choices in future media production. If you look at it this way, a studio wants to make an offering to the largest consumer base that wants HD content. Because the 360 is so HD centric, this means many of the owners of the Xbox will have HD TVs and therefore the system owners will want HD content. Now that Microsoft has established the 360 as a hit (some will debate the reality of this, but for arguments sake let’s say it is considered a marketing success) then studio’s will want to produce media in the format that the 360 supports because it is one of the earliest HD market player penetrations.

From what I have been reading it really looks like HD-DVD is jumping into a strong lead. But, Sony still has some cards up its sleeve. The PS3 is in the wings and having a huge base a fans this could be a huge boost to Blu-ray. On top of this, Sony is a major movie producer and they have also been buying rights to many major titles over the years. In 2004, Sony bought MGM and received licensing rights to such franchises as James Bond. While Sony was buying rights they were also investing in firms that specialize in super high resolution film transfer technology that will actually produce much higher scans then even today’s HD can support. This all boils back to content… if the movies you want are in a specific format you will buy that format.