The Keynesian revolution against laissez-faire was costing the corporate sector dearly.

If you’d like to join here are the rules:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56. Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

I think this move strengthens the fact that there is a growing market in Turkey. Earlier we had heard that Myspace was getting ready into the Turkish social networking scene. Looks like there is going to be a nice competition of global players in Turkey pretty soon. On the other hand, it is also obvious that Turkish users are valued way cheaper at 15 euros/member.

I think they shot a very creative video which is inline with the purpose of their existence. I can’t imagine any Turkish government department shooting such a promotional video even if they were working on new media. I think this is way cool for a government organization.

Social web as it stands today is both useful for sharing information, media or any content and it is fun. We mostly enjoy being part of it because we see some value in it. The catch with the social web is that it is more useful as you put more effort in it. What would you say if I told you that you may be able to sell and buy such effort sometime in the future?

Immaterial Labor

In the past few weeks, I have been thinking about the value of this effort a lot because of a project called Meta-Markets which is in private alpha. It is a very interesting project because it deals with the value our social labor. Meta-Markets is the brain child of Burak Arikan who describes it as:

“Meta-Markets is an online stock market for trading socially networked creative products such as YouTube videos, Delicious bookmarks, blogs, or social network profiles. In NYSE or NASDAQ people trade shares of companies. In Meta-Markets people trade shares of bookmarks, profiles, videos, or blogs. Just like companies, socially networked products have ever growing values. When product owners issue their shares in Meta-Markets, they raise capital – today play capital, but tomorrow real capital. With Meta-Markets we aim to help people to retain the value of their immaterial labor in social web services.”

Meta-markets denotes the product of our online labor for creating and sharing in a social web service as “socially networked creative products”. In Meta-Markets, in the quest of retaining our immaterial labor, currently you can offer to the public, via an IPO, shares of your blog’s Feedburner feed, your Facebook profile, your Flickr photos, a del.icio.us link which is first bookmarked by you. In the future, you will also be able to offer YouTube videos and Digg stories. By IPO, you offer a certain percentage of your shares (up to 50%) to the market via a Dutch style auction. This way, you bring online assets to the exchange market and raise capital to invest in shares for other social commodities created and offered by other market players.

The currency in Meta-Markets is a Burak ( ? ). Investors are given a seed fund of 75? at the beginning for immediate investment. This probably reminds everyone the Linden dollars in Second Life but currently there is no real exchange rate from Burak to US Dollar. However, I know that the ultimate goal of the project is to make it possible to convert immaterial labor to real money.

Value of a Socially Networked Product

At the core of the Meta-Markets is measuring the value of a socially networked product. Meta-markets measures this value by quantifying the product’s social impact in its respective network. For example, during an active flow of eventstreaming, many people rush to share media on social web services about an event and bring lots of traffic and views to their respective networks and create a value. Meta-markets aims to measure that value and make it possible for it to change hands in a market environment.

The figure shows my Facebook profile which I opened to public. I had chosen to offer just 10% of my shares to the public. Meta-Markets calculated a fair value for my stock based on the number of my Facebook friends which gives shareholders an idea about the value of this stock. As of this writing, the stock goes for 2.00? a share and someone is selling 61 shares for 2.20? and stock’s market cap is 200? . There is a neat graph which shows the behavior of the stock over time. On the right are the investors who hold shares of this stock. It is also possible to write comments to the stocks. This is especially good as it makes it possible to introduce your stock and explain why people should invest in it. In addition, comments add a social aspect to the system as well. I know that there is a desire to make Meta-Markets a more social place.

Closing Thoughts

As I already noted, in the valuation of stocks, Meta-Markets uses RSS subscribers for feeds, profile views for Flickr streams, number of friends for Facebook, and bookmark count of del.icio.us links. This reminds me of the discussions of metrics like page views used for web statistics. These quantities definitely tell something about the value but are they enough for labor value determination? Immediately after I started playing with Meta-Markets, this was the question I asked myself repeatedly.

As I see it, in Meta-Markets this quantification works as an attention mechanism. A potential investor may look at a new Feedburner feed IPO, see a good number of subscribers and would most probably check the blog to see the quality of the content before making a buy decision. The quality is not in the equation for fair value computation but it is in the mind of the investor and hidden from the market. I think this is a challenge for Meta-Markets. However, in this case, in tackling this challange, Meta-Markets is dependent on APIs of social web services. The solution to this problem depends partly on how much information a social web service is willing to share through the APIs and partly to the ways Meta-Markets will interpret and combine all available data. My guess is that there is going to be a bigger interest on valuation of our social labor and a bigger push for social web services to provide more data through their APIs.

On the surface, it is easy to describe Meta-Markets as an online stock market simulation game. It is definitely an addictive one at that. However, it is also an experiment with real potential. It is obvious that social web services, especially ad supported networks like Facebook rely on our labor in the network. The value of such a company is indeed partly measured by the number of people putting effort in it. Facebook knows this value and most probably has the means to know this value and capitalize on it. However, we poor social web workers can only gain immaterial returns on our investment. As the social web services improve and become even more popular and depend on our labor even more, we will be more willing to know the real value of our immaterial labor. This is what Meta-Markets is trying to figure out.

[tags]video, art[/tags]

Below is the first episode. I am totally hooked and want to see if “I” will get used to his life being broadcasted. I think the way the producers incorporate user feedback into the show is brilliant. Make sure to check it out.

[tags]youtube, internet video, iChannel[/tags]

Apogee Search is a Search Engine Marketing firm founded in 2001 by McKinsey & Co. alumni. The main focus area of the firm is affiliate marketing and pay-per-call. The main goal of Apogee is to direct targeted visitors to B2B and B2C websites.

Services:

So, what services does Apogee provide? In layman’s terms, the goal is to bring people who do a search on a search engine to a website where what they are looking for is potentially sold. The buzzword complete description of that is “qualified leads from ready to buy customers”. For that to happen, from what I understand, you get in touch with a representative who analysis your website for search engine marketing. The search engine marketing analysis service is supposed to be free. If you accept, Apogee positions itself as a partner to you and “help you get the most from your marketing dollar and quickly raise your search marketing revenues to the next level”.

I can hear you being confused about my tone about the service here. It is not that I don’t see any value in such services. I am sure search engine marketing is a big part of the traffic to a commerce site and being discovered among many similar websites is very important. So, I think that such a service should be valuable for a website who wants to attract potential customers.

Apogee seems to provide six different services:

1. Paid Search Advertising: Pay-per-click campaigns. Mainly translates into Google Adwords.
2. Natural Search Engine Optimization: Plain SEO.
3. Pay Per Call Management: This service kind of turns customer clicks to voice meaning customers are directed to seller’s phones and they pay as they are called.
4. Affiliate Marketing: Seems like Apogee brings affiliate partner sites together with their client to increase their revenues.
5. Search Engine Marketing Training: This is interesting since they claim to give hands-on instructions about SEM best practices.
6. Search Engine Marketing Analysis: As I mentioned, this is a free service where the client’s website is analyzed for search engine performance.

Website:

Apogee Search website contains some information about search engine marketing among all those buzzword compliant advertisement clich?s.

One thing that I really liked about the website after my inspections is that they provide many documents that could help the customer answer some questions about SEO and SEM. They also provide an article called “Avoid Search Engine Marketing Malpractice” to warn clients for not falling into such a malpractice. Another interesting article that attracts attention is the “PPC: Do You Want to Play Inside or Outside?” which discusses outsourcing pay-per-click campaigns.

Their current blog also gives a positive image to them.

Conclusion:

I tried to review the Apogee Search Engine Marketing firm. Although I have not tried their services and I am not a potential client for them at this point, I tried to write up an objective review trying to understand if they would be a useful partner. It is difficult to make that assessment without trying but the fact that they provide many downloadable resources to help the client understand the concepts of the partnership made me feel they are worth a look if you are looking for such a service.

[tags]sponsored review[/tags]

There is more information in the WSJ article (free). Below is the promotional video (a good sign is that it can be embedded) that is on the Onion web site.

Technorati Tags: onion, onion news network, news, cnn

[tags]news, internet video, onion [/tags]

Tomorrow, on March 22nd 2007 podcasters will send a message to the music industry. The goal is to make the indie group Black Lab to #1 on the iTunes list.

All you need to do is to spend couple minutes of your time and $0.99 to buy the Black Lab song “Mine Again” using the image link above. To learn more about this social movement check this page out.

Technorati Tags: bum rush the charts, black lab. mine again

[tags]bum rush the charts, indie music movement[/tags]

However, this must have not been enough for Viacom since today they announced that they sued YouTube for a total of 1 billion dollars for a “massive intentional copyright infringement”. I think “massive” and “intentional” are the interesting words in this quote.

We will all see how this turns out but my opinion is that YouTube will be able to get out of this. As Fred Wilson says this is very different from the Napster case and it will be interesting how Viacom will accuse YouTube (apart from the obvious way) and how Google/YouTube (GooTube) will defend themselves.

In situations like these, Google usually leaves the announcements to YouTube but this time it is widely reported that they came out with a statement:

We have not received the lawsuit but are confident that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders and believe the courts will agree. YouTube is great for users and offers real opportunities to rights holders: the opportunity to interact with users; to promote their content to a young and growing audience; and to tap into the online advertising market. We will certainly not let this suit become a distraction to the continuing growth and strong performance of YouTube and its ability to attract more users, more traffic and build a stronger community.

Let’s see how this will turn out. What do you think the outcome will be? Do you see Viacom as the victim of a “massive and intentional copyright infringement”?

Technorati Tags: youtube, viacom, viacom sues youtube, copyright infringement

[tags] youtube, viacom, copyright, law, legislation[/tags]

An interesting question that came to my attention lately is who removed the videos first: YouTube or the creator of the video. As most people I thought it was YouTube who immediately removed the clip but turns out that the clip was removed by the uploader not YouTube.

I also learned this morning from a comment on my blog in Turkish that someone Turkish created a video in response to the offending one. I think it is a good one among all those stupid and possibly equally offending responses from Turkish people.

So, the ban is gone but the impression that Turkey is a country that restricts free expression remains.

Technorati Tags: youtube, turkey, turkey bans youtube

[tags] youtube, turkey, censorship, law, legislation[/tags]

It makes me really sad that my country is taking an action that supports censorship and aligns herself with the likes of China and Iran when it comes to trying to block internet.

I read (in a Turkish source) that the same court ruled the ban said the ban may be lifted if YouTube removes the offending clips from the website. What is funny to me is that YouTube had removed the clips before the ban has started. So, I am not sure where this leaves the decision. My guess is that the ban will be lifted in a couple of days. But the damage is done and Turkey’s action is took its place in the history of attempted censorship.

To be fair, Turkey is not the only country who is struggling with the new legislative demands of the Internet. As I read in IP Democracy’s post, France is also taking action for making a large part of video-based citizen journalism illegal. Moreover, less than a week ago US Justice Department targeted image sharing sites in their quest to be able to increase their Internet surveillance.

Technorati Tags: youtube, turkey bans youtube, turkey

[tags] youtube, turkey, censorship, legislation, law[/tags]

Techmeme is going crazy with this discussions on Jobs’ thoughts. With his rant Jobs seem to take a position alongside anti-DRM crowd and sort of blames major record labels for its existence. The writing is a very well thought out piece which gives a background on how Apple iTunes made landmark deals with record labels.

Jobs goes on to make the point that only 3% of iPods hold music with DRM from Apple according to the accurate data that they have and goes on to say that he can’t understand how this is regarded as an iPod-iTunes lock-in.

Today?s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. Its hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

He further points at the number of actual CDs that hold music without DRM and makes the point that there are already mess amount of music without DRM. This forms the basis of his points where he points at the record labels and asks why they insist on DRM on digital music downloads when there are so many CDs sold without any protection.

Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That?s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

Steve Jobs claims that Apple would embrace selling music without DRM if record labels stop asking for it. He sends a message to Europe as well (probably because of the recent Norway case) and invites them to work for persuading the record labels who are largely owned by European corporations.

My take on this is pretty much like Read/Write Web’s. Even though Apple seems to be on the side of anti-DRM crowd, this sounds too much like a propaganda and for some reason does not really sound very sincere to me.

Everybody knows that record labels are not really embracing the digital world and the image that Jobs is trying to reflect seems too weak for a party that could have a strong impact on how record labels think about digital music.

Technorati Tags: thoughts on music, apple, steve jobs, ipod, itunes, drm, fairplay

[tags]music, digital music, drm, apple [/tags]

The blogosphere went crazy over the news as expected and created a lot of buzz about Netflix. Here is the most recent capture of Techmeme about the news.

I guess the only group of people to be excited about this announcement would be the ones who would like having an alternative method of getting their movies and who do not really care about the limitations of offerings.

The most recent player in the field of delivering online video was Amazon and they did not get very positive reviews about the initiative. The case is similar with Netflix because they are not bringing anything new to the table.

First off all, it is not a download service, it is a streaming service. There is no way to download the content to ones computer for watching later, say during a trip. On top of that, you have to be online to get one of the available 1000 (1% of Netflix’s inventory) movies.

Netflix, reportedly will spend $40 million to be able to offer the “Watch Now” movie download service to their customers. $40 million dollars for a streaming service that will only work on Windows XP and Internet Explorer is, in my opinion, a lot of money. Moreover, I do not see a return for this investment other than potentially increasing subscriber base. I am not sure how many people would subscribe just for this service.

Hacking Netflix has a nice demo of the service recorded as a screencast. You can see the demo in the video below.

One criticism is about the fact that it is not possible to burn the movies to DVD. I am not sure if this is a valid criticism. If Netflix were to sell movies instead of renting them, then I would definitely expect this from such a service. However, when we rent DVDs on media we do not get to own them. For this reason, this lack of the service may be acceptable.

I mainly do not think this service is noteworthy because of other reasons. Netflix (and many others) wants to get into our living rooms and compete with the giant TV which can also provide on-demand video via cable and satellite providers. In its current form Netflix service is no different than on-demand video and even more cumbersome.

The main advantage of services like Netflix is that it gives the control to the consumer. I get to rent whatever I want whenever I want and wherever I want as long as I get my hands on that DVD media. Plus, I only need to move a finger to do that, I don’t even need to leave the house.

Netflix gives this service exceptionally good since they became an expert on such distribution. What they are trying to do now is to get into a different distribution medium. However, they cannot see the real potential in that medium and try to adapt their conventional distribution manners to this new medium. This is why they do not bring anything new or innovative to the table.

I think that they should have embraced a powerful distribution mechanism on the web. This could have very well been bittorrent (They would probably need to come up with a good way to authorize the subscriber, and use a private tracker). They could give an option to keep the content and upon the purchase of the customer, set it free so that the customer can do anything with it. This way, I think they could come into the living rooms of people not only via their PC but possibly via their media centers, internet enabled set-top boxes, or may be in the future directly through their internet enabled televisions.

What I am saying here may not be possible. I am just brainstorming. What do you think Netflix should have done or can do in the future in the online video market?

Technorati Tags: netflix, watch now, netflix watch now, online video

[tags]online video, netflix [/tags]