Watch YouTube Videos In Google Earth

Google wants you to watch YouTube videos everywhere. Now you can watch geo-tagged videos inside Google Earth. Any video tagged with a latitude and longitude will show up when this new layer of Google Earth is turned on. So you can watch videos about the places you are exploring inside Google Earth.

It’s a good way to show videos in the context of where they were shot, and also gets more plays for videos that might have otherwise been lost in the YouTube vortex. Of course, people have been embedding YouTube videos in 2-D Google Maps for a while now. But that seems to require more of a manual process. I’d like to see all geo-tagged videos automatically pop up in a video layer on Google Maps as well.

Projects like this point to a day when the entire world will be tagged by its citizens—with videos and text and photos and hyperlinks. Add mobile maps to the equation, and the line between what is virtual and real will begin to blur. Imagine flipping open your phone to see how other people have tagged the spot that you are standing in (although, this is more a Google-Maps scenario than a Google-Earth scenario, at least until you can run Google Earth on a phone). It would be a great way to create travel video guides.

Netscape Was Better As A Digg Clone: Viewers

Traffic on AOL’s Netscape portal has plummeted since the site dumped its social news voting model and reverted to a new portal, at least according to Alexa.

Unfortunately the comScore figures for Netscape aren’t yet available for September so we can’t confirm the traffic crash, but despite Alexa’s argued issues the crash in traffic as shown by Alexa is unlikely to be an Alexa only quirk.

Tony Hung, who first picked up on the traffic crash notes that “[the traffic crash] validates Jason Calacanis — and indeed all the hard work Netscape folks have done over the past year or so to cultivate a community in Digg’s shadow — that so many of the people at Netscape were genuine fans *of* social news.” He’s right.

If Alexa is to be believed, Netscape’s traffic is now at its lowest level ever and ranks at a miserly 2,200th, a far cry from the days where Netscape was in the top 10 destinations online or even in the Top 600 during its time as a Digg clone. Some one at AOL may have some explaining to do given that the decision destroyed the traffic (and value) of Netscape by over 50%.

The Clock is Ticking for Joost

There’s a time bomb out there with Joost’s name on it. Full-screen, broadcast-quality video streams—the main selling point of Joost’s peer-to-peer Internet TV client software—is quickly coming to the Web. Brightcove will soon be offering such streams to its video publishers using BitTorrent DNA. But the real threat to Joost will be coming from Adobe and its ubiquitous Flash player.

Sometime in the next few months, Adobe is expected to incorporate the H.264 codec in all Flash players with the general release of Flash Player 9. You can already download a beta version from Adobe Labs. The H.264 codec is part of MPEG-4 and is the codec that Apple uses to compress all of the video downloads on iTunes. Once H.264 is part of Flash, the quality of streaming video on the Web will roughly double at current bandwidth speeds. That means YouTube videos will look twice as good—and those will likely remain on the low end in quality.

Every video site on the Web (and quite a few that are still in stealth) is just waiting for Flash Player 9 to be distributed widely and become the new standard. That will allow them to launch their own full-screen Internet TV services with video streams that are just as good or better than Joost’s, and that will require nothing more than a regular browser to watch.

Joost’s greatest asset right now is not its peer-to-peer technology. It’s the momentum it’s gained so far by being an early mover. When Joost finally came out of its private beta on October 1, it had already signed up one million beta users and seeded its network with 15,000 shows. But the vast majority of that video is not exclusive to Joost. All the Internet TV services are lining up the same content. And better-quality video is not going to remain a differentiator for long.

As compression technologies get better, video sites will be able to dial up the quality of the video streams. Joost’s P2P approach is not a benefit to the consumer as much as it is a benefit to Joost (because it offloads the bandwidth costs of the most popular video streams to the users themselves). But streaming video on the Web is about to get a whole lot cheaper—and as Web video advertising takes off, a whole lot more lucrative. Some people argue that once the economics kick in, centralized Web streaming will offer a better, more consistent viewing experience than P2P streaming. That’s why H.264 is so important. It will change the economics of streaming.

Joost’s only remaining competitive barrier will be its network of viewers and their interactions among each other, along with the third-party apps built around it. If viewers feel that the experience of watching videos on Joost is more social or pleasurable than watching streams by themselves on the Web, maybe they’ll stick around. But social features are not exclusive to Joost, and neither are its platform ambitions. The slam-dunk days for Joost will soon be over.

Zipidee Wants To Be THE Marketplace For Digital Goods

In 1995 eBay sold a laser pointer online and kicked off the online marketplace for selling physical goods. As networks improved in the intervening years, the idea of what can be bought and sold online has grown to include digital goods, such as music, e-books, and videos as well. Zipidee wants to be a market for those digital goods, and is expected to launch some time in the next week.

It’s by no means a new concept, there are several sites out there that trade in digital bits: Payloadz, Tradebits, e-Junkie, Lulu, Edgeio, and more. eBay already sells digital goods, with delivery often handled through these third party sites. iTunes can also sell your content, but requires an approved label if you want to get paid.

However, Zipidee will offer considerably more control over pricing and distribution than these other sites. Merchants on Zipidee will be able to create their own virtual store where they can list their digital wares for sale on the site directly or across Zipidee’s website widgets. It’s an ideal setup for anyone selling an instructional video series or their own audiobook.

zipidee_player.pngAudio and video can be uploaded to the site to be rented or bought at whatever price the creator wishes and consumed via downloads or streams. Other services often only allow downloads.

You will be able to track the sale of their good in real time and adjust the price accordingly using their analytics dashboard. Creators will also have the option of protecting their product with Zipidee’s own DRM system. DRMed goods come with a license to play the media through their web or downloadable player on any computer with your Zipidee credentials.

Zipidee will make money through a $1 listing fee (waived to start) and roughly 80/20 split of the purchase price, like Lulu (Zipidee takes a smaller cut for higher priced goods).

To start, Zipidee will focus on digitizing the kind of media now sold at conferences and trade shows as DVDs or Books. For launch, they’re digitizing materials from a series of consultants and speakers such as DreamUniversity and MightyVentures who currently sell millions of dollars in physical merchandise directly to their customers.

Yet, there’s still a big question over whether and where people will buy “long-tail” digital content. Zipidee is fighting the trend toward free digital content (wikipedia, 5 min) and people are reluctant enough to even pay for big-media’s content (most songs on iPods do not come from iTunes). There is also a question as to whether the best way to sell this content is horizontally in a single marketplace, or vertically by topic. There are a great number of digital content verticals out there already that could serve as points of sale for independently produced content (DocStoc, Scribd, Amie Street, 5 Min, Snocap). We’ll have to see how it all pans out when Zipidee launches.

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Stixy: Free-Form Collaboration and File Sharing Spaces

The internet ought to have made it dead simple to share files long ago. But for some reason, I still scratch my head every time I want to send a batch of photos or a collection of documents to a non-technical friend without resorting to email (which is not a dead simple solution in my book).

That’s why I get excited when I see companies like Stixy attempting to make file sharing not only as easy as it should be, but more pleasurable and intuitive along the way.

Stixy’s underlying concept is simple, and one that we have seen elsewhere in different forms: provide a desktop-like space in the browser where you can upload and share files. We recently gave out a batch of invitations to another new service, Wixi, that does this very thing.

Stixy provides a “free-form” area to drop your files, but it’s also very much like PikiWiki in the sense that it doesn’t settle for simple desktop icons. The files and other items placed in a Stixy workspace are more expressive. For example, photo files are displayed as small versions of themselves and sticky notes can be stuck anywhere. Therefore, Stixy is less like a traditional operating system desktop and more like a bulletin board.

The ability to access and interact with elements in a Stixy workplace (whether they be files or other widgets) is not yet very extensive. Currently, you can add only four element types to a workplace: sticky notes, photos, documents, and to-do notes. Both types of notes are pretty simple widgets and documents are displayed as simple icons. But there is a lot of potential for Stixy to expand the collection of widgets (and perhaps eventually create an open platform for widget development) as well as to improve the current widgets so they are more interactive. It would be great to be able to preview Word documents and PDFs in the bulletin board environment instead of downloading a local copy or opening them in another window. The same thing goes for video and audio files.

Despite the usefulness of the free-form workspace for files, it would also be great to see a more traditional file system view built into Stixy as an option for when I want to sort quickly through a bunch of files stored in the system. Currently, you wouldn’t want to add more than a couple dozen elements to Stixy because it would get too crowded. If Stixy were to develop more standard file views (as an alternative, mind you), it would be moving in the direction of a Web OS while remaining cognizant of the fact that preview functionality is paramount in an online storage environment (people don’t want to download a file each time they want to check it out).

It is important to keep in mind that Stixy is ultimately a collaboration tool (as any Web OS-like service probably should be). The company has decided to keep ownership of Stixy workspaces very simple, in fact so simple that usually there is no real ownership. If you share a “stixyboard” (it’s name for a workspace) with one or more other users, you give those users equal power over board management. Any participating user can edit any aspect of the board, and any user can delete the whole thing completely. Therefore, this is a tool for people who trust each other and not one suited for a broad social networking environment. Stixyboards can be kept entirely private, shared with other users, or opened up to the public at large (for either editing or just viewing).

Currently, Stixy has placed a 10mb cap on each file upload but no cap on total disk space usage (which will inevitably change as traffic increases). The company plans on making money from advertisements (not yet on the site) and premium memberships (also not yet available). The company is currently working on chat and messaging functionality to enhance collaboration. The ability to drag-n-drop files straight from the desktop (a la PikiWiki) is also in the works. And in the longer term, Stixy will probably feature a file versioning system along with an activity history log.

Stixy, which is based in Karlshamn, Sweden but also operates in Mill Valley, CA, launched just a couple weeks ago around the same time it exhibited in TechCrunch40’s DemoPit. I’ll be looking forward to seeing whether Stixy remains as a standalone product and/or becomes incorporated as a feature of other websites that facilitate file sharing.

Minti: Parenting Advice For The UGC Generation

Minti offers a collaborative parenting advice service that ignores the one-to-many we know best style service that is the norm in this space, and instead empowers individuals to share their stories and experience.

As Michael Arrington wrote his initial review of the site in March 2006, the overall concept of Minti isn’t entirely new. As a service it sits somewhere between an advice site such as BabyCentre (a site I visited regularly when I was on the road to parenthood) and a forum. The difference is in the implementation.

Weighing User Generated Interactions

Minti is powered by the Vibe Engine, a custom built CMS owned by Vibe Capital (the majority shareholders of Minti) that also powers sites such as Refurber.

Minti has over 20,000 active registered members (as opposed to inactive or casual visitors, they are doing 7 figures in traffic) who comment, vote, tag, and contribute advice. Consider something like Breastfeeding; Minti has many user generated advice articles on the subject but it’s how they are weighed that makes the service usable and perhaps something different.

minti1.pngThe Vibe Engine weighs votes on an article based on a number of factors. Anyone can vote, but an unregistered visitor’s vote is not weighed as heavily as a registered user. Users themselves fall into ten member categories based on the amount of activity the undertake on Minti itself. Each level has a higher weighing meaning that users who are more active have a stronger vote than those who aren’t. It should be noted that none of this is evident to the user; these are all primarily backend levels, although at certain levels users get extra privileges including the ability to mark a contribution for review/ deletion is it is not of a reasonable standard. Users at higher levels also get to vote on reviews/ deletions as well in a truly distributed management model where regular users have ownership in decision making.

Overall the model delivers user rated results that serve to filter lots of information in a more accessible fashion for all readers.

Rocketboom Moves to Blip.tv

The popular daily videoblog Rocketboom is joining online video network blip.tv, which will now host all of Rocketboom’s videos and sell ads for the show. Rocketboom joins a growing crowd of other top videoblogs that can be found on Blip.tv, including Wallstrip, TreeHugger TV, Alive in Baghdad, and Goodnight Burbank. As with most of those shows, the relationship between Rocketboom and blip.tv is not exclusive. For instance, Rocketboom will continue to sell ads on its own site. But the more top-quality shows that blip.tv can sell ads against, the stronger its position becomes in the embryonic world of Web-only video.

rocketboom_screen.pngWith its launch this morning on blip.tv, Rocketboom gains a new sponsor in Comedy Central’s The Sarah Silverman Program. And blip.tv is concurrently launching a new ad unit, an Flash-like overlay that can be seen on Quicktime downloads (the kind you get off iTunes). According to blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack, these ads will be viewable on iTunes even though Apple generally prefers the paid-download model to ads. Blip.tv has offered pre-roll and post-roll ads on video downloads for about a year, but this is the first time a mid-clip overlay is available. Overlays, which usually look like a banner that pop up during the video, are preferable because, Hudack tells TechCrunch “pre-rolls have the potential to turn off viewers and post-rolls don’t get watched.” Eventually, blip.tv will have the capability to track how many times each ad is viewed or clicked on as well. Up till now, such metrics have been more common for streaming videos than for downloads.