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Jamie Wilkinson
Evan Roth
James PowderlyAggregating & blasting on the content graph
“What we’re aiming for here is a good cat-to-#FF00FF ratio.”
Weekly art-n-tech videoblog Epic-Fu’s latest post talks about personal content aggregators like FriendFeed and SocialThing, which are (finally) being chatted about amongst the tech2.0-blogerati. Punch in your Flickr, Tumblr, and YouTube accounts and see all your stuff in one place. Your friends’ stuff, too. For all the hubbub around “social graphs” — your profile and friend list becoming universally available, so you don’t need to manually re-add everyone — we’re glad to see folks thinking about the content graph. My students might recall the lecture on this subject and its epic levels of whiteboard diagramming.
But in this kind of Newsfeed-on-crack content aggregation environment, there’s something important missing… this is the Internet dudes… let’s talk about me.
Enter blasters. I like this term a lot. We called it “demuxing” before… you know: one input, multiple outputs. More me, less effort. Hell yes.
Epic-Fu is talking about HelloTxt, which will blast a status update to Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook et al in one fell swoop. We’ve been swearing by TubeMogul, which will blast your video to a dozen+ video sites at once. Read: reach out to forgotten players Yahoo, Dailymotion, Metacafe, and up-and-comer Viddler with zero added cost.
While we still see YouTube’s numbers trouncing the competition one-on-one, in aggregate we’ve seen that widening your distribution will do a serious number on your view counts. You don’t even need to do the hoofwork of clicking “Add Friend” 300 times… just upload, tag, and catch some hits. Go on, try it. We’ve seen videos blasted out in passing perform poorly on YouTube, but get picked up on Yahoo Video and watched its numbers hit the hundreds of thousands. With no added effort. Hell yes.
