ginger’s thoughts

Have you ever been haunted by an old open source package that you wrote once, published, and then forgot about?

The BSD community has just reminded me of the MPEG audio analysis toolkit Maaate that I wrote at CSIRO when I first came to Australia and that was then published through the CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences division.

The BSD guys were going to remove it from their repositories, because since I left CSIRO more than 2 years ago, CSIRO has taken down the project pages and the code, so there were no active project pages available any longer. I’m glad they contacted me before they did so.

Since it is an open source project, I have now resurrected the old pages at Sourceforge. They are available from http://maaate.sourceforge.net/. I have re-instated the relevant weg pages and documentation and updated all the links. I discovered that we did some cool things then and that it may indeed be worth preservation for the future. I expect Sourceforge is up to the task.

Thanks very much, BSD community and welcome back, MPEG Maaate!

In our rail application we do a lot of string conversions to other data types, including Boolean. Unfortunately, ruby does not provide a conversion method to_bool (which I find rather strange, to be honest).

Based a blog post by Chris Roos in October 2006, we developed a rails plugin that enables the “to_bool” conversion.

“to_bool” works on the strings “true” and “false” and any capitalisation of these, and on numbers, as well as on nil. Other strings raise an ArgumentError.

Examples are as follows:

'true'.to_bool #-> true
'TrUe'.to_bool #-> true
true.to_bool #-> true
1.to_bool #-> true
5.to_bool #-> true
-9.to_bool #-> true
nil.to_bool #-> false
'false'.to_bool #-> false
'FaLsE'.to_bool #-> false
false.to_bool #-> false
0.to_bool #-> false

You can find the plugin here as a tarball. To install it, simply decompress the to_bool directory into your vendor/plugins directory.

On Tuesday 24th June I attended the “Commercialising Video” conference held in beautiful Jones Bay Wharf in Sydney’s harbour. AIMIA and Claudia Sagripanti from VentureOne organised it together.

It was a mixture of case studies and panels. The case studies were talks by successful digital media companies, including Sony, Bebo, Viocorp, Clear Light Digital and Fox Interactive Media (really: mySpaceTV). The panels constituted each a moderator and a small number of industry experts that briefly presented on their knowledge on a specific topic and then discussed this topic led by questions from the audience.

I thought the format was very successful and the conference covered a broad range of current topics of interest in digital media. Panel topics included:

• mobile: challenges for getting video onto mobile and making a return on it
• business models: how to make money from online video
• sports video: what business models work with sports content
• metrics: why we need to measure video and what and how
• innovations: what innovative products are to be expected in the near future in video

I was one of the panellists on the metrics panel - my slides are here. The very last slide provides a very basic preview of the video metrics service that is in development at Vquence right now. Expect the final product to look much more professional, once I’ve included the awesome designs that we have just received from Chiz.

One thing that I took away from the conference is that the online video market is finally maturing and we are seeing business models that work. While they can roughly be classified into ad-supported, sponsored, and user-paid, there are many details that you have to take care of dependent on the service that you are providing. Ad-support can be inside the video e.g. in pre-roll, post-roll, mid-roll, overlay, or accompanying ads e.g. in dynamically loaded roll-outs, banners etc. Sponsorship is mostly used for non-profit sites. User-paid models are e.g. subscriptions, pay-per-view, pay-per-download. General video sites work not so well for ad-support as specialised sites. There is a lot of money for videos in specialised areas where your community is very keen to receive the latest video content fast, e.g. in sports.

In mobile in Australia, video business is still hard going, because the bandwidth costs are high, extra production cost is high, and because of challenges to get video into a usable form on such a small screen (e.g. soccer-ball is too small to be more than a pixel). This also means that the cost for consumers to get video is high, while the quality is still low. This obviously does not make for a very good market. The size of the iPhone screen, combined with the slow realisation by mobile phone providers that they have to drop prices for video transfers, may however totally change this situation.

Finally, I noticed that there was a large call for metrics. Measurement of the use of video and tracking the distribution of videos around the Internet, as well as measurement of advertising that relates to videos are all being requested to get more transparency into the business and mature the market. Initial services are available, in particular from existing Web Analytics and Internet Market Intelligence companies. However, the technology is new and we have a long way to go online and even more on mobile. This is a great opportunity for Vquence!

Thanks very much, Claudia, for organising this event and I hope there will be more to come in this space.

Many companies are intending to undertake viral video marketing campaigns.

This should come as no surprise, since video is undoubtedly the most effective content on the Web: “People are about twice as likely to play a video, or replay one that started automatically, than they are to click through standard JPG or GIF image ads.”

Even Techcrunch has a thing for dodgy viral video advertising approaches.

The definition of a “viral video” is however not quite clear.

Wikipedia defines “viral video” as “video clip content which gains widespread popularity through the process of Internet sharing, typically through email or IM messages, blogs and other media sharing websites.” This describes more the process through which viral videos are created rather then what a viral video actually is.

I tried to analyze the types of viral videos around to understand what a viral video really is. I found that there are three different types and would like to provide a list of descriptive features of each (leave a comment if you disagree with the types or want to suggest more).

The reason for this separation of types is that if you are a company and want to create a viral video advertising campaign, you need to decide what type of viral video you want to create and choose the appropriate approach and infrastructure to allow for that type of viral video to be successful.

Here are the three types of viral videos that I could distinguish:

popular video

A video that has a high view count (in the millions) - possibly emerged over a longer time frame - is viral because in order to get such a high view count, many people must have been told about it and been directed to go to it and watch it.

A prime example of such a video is the “Hahaha” video of a baby laughing, which is currently at position 10 of YouTube’s Most Viewed of All Time page. I would also put the “Evolution of Dance” video into this category, which alone on YouTube has seen over 81M page view and has therefore the top rank on the Most Viewed of All Time videos on YouTube. This video has some aspects that make it a cult, but I don’t think they are strong enough.

The features of videos in this category are as follows:

• high page view count
• not subject to fashion or short-term fads
• interest for many audiences
• hasn’t spawned an active community

The reason for the last feature is that a popular video is simply a video that is a “must see” for everybody, but it doesn’t instill in people an urge to “become involved”. This is a bit of black-and-white painting of course - see also how many people created copies of the “Evolution of Dance” - but it is a general feature that applies to most of the audience.

cult video

Videos that become “cult” are not necessarily videos that achieve the highest view counts. They will however achieve a high visibility and almost 100% coverage in a certain sub-community. Such videos are regarded as viral since they virally spread within their target community. Sometimes they even create a community - their fan club.

The main aim of these videos is not a high view count on a single video, but an active community that is highly motivated to have the video be part of their culture.

A typical example is the “Diet Coke and Mentos” phenomenon. I would not be able to point to a single video on this phenomenon but there is a whole cult that has emerged around it with people doing their own experiments, posting videos, discussing it on forums, helping each other on IM etc. There are even fan clubs on Facebook.

The features of videos in this category are as follows:

• many videos have been created on the same topic, in particular UCG
• often, it is not clear which was the originating video that started the phenomenon
• there is a substantial view count on the individual videos
• not subject to fashion or short-term fads
• interest for a sub-community mostly
• has spawned an active community, possibly with their own website

I would use the “Ask a Ninja” series of vodcasts as another example of a cult video. It has a central website and a very active community of fans around it.

trendy video

The term “Internet meme” has been coined for the videos in this category. They are essentially videos that create a high amount of activity around the Internet for a short time, but then people lose interest and move on. They are trendy for a limited amount of time.

A typical example in this category is the “Dramatic Chipmunk” with more than 7M views on YouTube on this one video, and further millions of views on the diverse mash-ups that were created. At one point, it was a “must see” and you had to have mashed it up to be “in”. Now it has been replaced by Rick Rolling - the activity of pointing people to a URL of something but then falsely directing them to Rick Astley’s video of “Never Gonna Give You Up” on YouTube with more than 9M page views.

The features of videos in this category are as follows:

• videos achieve high page view in a short amount of time
• audience interest vanishes after a limited time
• often consists of funny, shocking, embarrassing, bizarre, or slanderous content
• there is a substantial view count on the video(s) related to the phenomenon
• creates high user activity for a short time e.g. through mash-ups, remixes, or parodies

Now that we have defined the different types of viral videos there are the lessons for viral video marketing campaigns.

If you want to create a popular video, create a beautiful, time-less video like the Sony Bravia Bunnies ad that everybody just has to have seen. Then make sure to release it on the Internet before you release it on TV by uploading to YouTube and a set of other social video hosting sites. Feel free to complement that with your own Website for the video. Start the viral spread through emailing your employees, friends, social networks, etc and rely on the cool-ness of the video to spread.

Typical Australian ads that have achieved popular video status are Carlton Draught’s “Big Ad” and the more recent VB “Stubby Symphony” ad.

If you want to create a cult video, you should create something that will excite a sub-community and provide the opportunities for the community to emerge. Blendtec did this very well with their “Will it Blend?” videos and website. I actually believe, they should open that Website even further an allow discussion forums to emerge. They could pull all those blender communities at Facebook into their site. OTOH they could just be involved in the social networks that build elsewhere around their brand to make the most from their fan base.

If your video ad is however just meant to create a high audience activity for a short time, you might consider doing a shocking video like the one Unicef created with the Smurfs. Or something a little less extreme like the funny German Coastguard video created by the Berlitz Language Institute.

It’s great to read at ClickZ that the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is preparing new format guidelines for video advertising. This includes pre-, mid- and post-roll, overlays, product placement, and companion ads (display ads placed alongside video).

The standard is currently in public comment phase, which closes on 2nd May 2008.

It is good to see that the standard also contains recommendations on the ratio of ad-to-content and on capping the frequency of ads to save the consumer from overly getting swamped with advertising.

The effect this standard will have on the video advertising industry will be enormous. Content publishers will build their websites with these standards in mind and provide generic advertising spaces into which they can then include advertising as required from the appropriate advertisers. Advertisers can create ads that will be re-usable across websites. And video advertising agencies can finally start to emerge that provide the market place for video ads to find their locations.

This is a sign that online video advertising is maturing and more generally that free online video distribution will become more viable for content owners.

For Vquence this is great news since all this new advertising will need to be measured for impact - I expect the need for video analytics will grow enormously.

Yesterday, YouTube gave video metrics to their users. If you have uploaded videos to YouTube, you can go to your video list and click “About this video” to see a history of view counts. Very simple, but a good move.

It is great to see YouTube provide this service, even if just for your own, personally uploaded videos. It validates the newly emerging industry category of “online video metrics“, that Vquence is also a part of.

Our colleagues from VisibleMeasures expressed a similar feeling in their blog entry saying: “we view anything that companies can do to help showcase the need and improve the landscape for video measurement as a plus for the entire ecosystem”. I couldn’t express it any better.

Following the blogging community, there is a large need for online video metrics, both for tracking your own published videos - as YouTube has started providing since yesterday - as well as tracking videos published by the market generally for market analysis and intelligence reasons.

The number of players in the field is still small and FAIK we are the only Australians to offer these services.

U.S. spending on internet video advertising alone is expected to grow to US$4.3 billion by 2011. The need for online video publications is predicted to grow even stronger in the near future when each and every Website will be expected to use video to communicate their message. The need for video metrics will increase enormously.

Check out our new Website if you want to learn more about how Vquence measures video.

At Vquence, until now we have used the Thumbstacks chart library for our graphs. TSChartlib is a simple open source charting library that uses the HTML canvas and an IE hack to create its graphs.

Vquence is now getting real serious with charts and graphs and we were thus looking for a more visually compelling and more flexible alternative. If you do a google search for “online charting library“, you get a massive amount of links to proprietary systems (admittedly, some of them offer the source code if you pay a premium). I will not be listing them here - go find them for yourself. However, the world of decent open source charting libraries is relatively small, so I want to share the outcome of my search.

There is the Open Flash Chart libary, which provides charting functionality for flash or flex programmers. The charts look rather nice and have overlays on the data points, which is something I missed thoroughly from TSChartlib.

There is a open source flex component called FlexLib which only does line charts, IIUC.

There is PlotKit, a Chart and Graph Plotting Library for Javascript. It has support for HTML Canvas and also SVG via Adobe SVG Viewer and native browser support and looks quite sexy.

Then there is JFreeChart, a 100% Java chart library that makes it easy for developers to display professional quality charts in their applications. Another Java charting library is JOpenChart. Incidentally, there’s a whole swag of further Java libraries that do charts and graphing. However, we are not too keen on Java for Web technologies.

Outside our area of interest, there are also open source chart libraries in C#, but C#/.NET is not a platform we intend to support, so these were out of the question.

Our choice came down to the “Open Flash Chart” library vs “Plotkit”. Of the two, the Flash library and technology seems more mature, easier to use, and creates sexier charts. Also, we can sensibly expect all Vquence users to have Flash installed, while we cannot expect the same to be true for SVG. However, I was fascinated by the flexible use of SVG and HTML Canvas and will certainly get back to it later, when I expect it to have matured a bit more.

Our choice of the Open Flash Chart was further facilitated by a rails plugin for it. Score!

Of course: I might have totally missed some obvious or better alternatives. So, leave me a reply if you think I did!