Baidu Receives $50 Million To Build Video Site
The creation of the Chinese equivalent of Hulu is now officially underway. Providence Equity Partners, which invested $100 million in the original American video site, will give Baidu $50 million to create Qiyi.com. Qiyi should similarly offer premium content and rely on ad revenue.
Qiyi will indeed be a completely by-the-book operation, judging from an “About Us” section that’s in English. It explained, “Qiyi will strictly abide by copyright laws and administrative regulations, to take copyright protection measures to protect the legitimate rights and interests of copyright holders.”
Then another paragraph later added, “Qiyi keeps making efforts . . . to spread the advanced socialism culture by undertaking its social responsibility as an outstanding corporate citizen. Qiyi is playing a positive role in developing a harmonious society.”
Unfortunately, not a lot else is known about the project. The site’s official launch date hasn’t been publicized, and other details (relating to advertisers’ identities, hours of content available, and so forth) are also unavailable.
One important thing that’s been made clear, at least, is the fact that Baidu will retain majority ownership in Qiyi despite Providence’s large investment.
What if Facebook Added a "Blog" Tab?
Facebook wants to keep users on Facebook. So far, they are doing a pretty good job of that. More and more people are spending more of their online time on Facebook, not to mention, spending more time connected to the web in general (at least partially due to rising use of smartphones).
How much time do you spend on Facebook in a month? A week? Let us know.
Facebook recently made it a point to show users how to use the social network to keep up with the news. Users can simply become fans of their favorite news organizations’ pages (feel free to include ours in your mix), and group them in a “news” list just as they would create a group for friends or co-workers. The bottom line is; spending more time on Facebook getting news headlines is spending more time on Facebook period. There is also talk of Facebook working on its own web email service. Again, more time spent on Facebook.
One way Facebook could capture even more of its users’ time, is if it introduced a “blog” tab. Facebook currently has a “notes” tab, and quite a few people do use this. It’s a similar concept, but what if it was given more prominence and renamed “blog?” A blog tab might keep Facebook users even longer. First of all, the users blogging with it would obviously be sticking around to write their posts. In addition, their friends and fans would be sticking around longer to read those posts, which would generally be much longer and require more time than the average status update.
Would more people become bloggers?
I suspect that the word “notes” doesn’t quite resonate the same as the word blog in the minds of many Facebook users, although for all intents and purposes, the feature operates like a blog. You can post longer-form content for your friends and fans to see, and they can comment on it, while it all remains in tact in one spot for future reference. Not only could the addition of a “blog” tab keep Facebook users around longer, but it could have a significant impact on the Blogosphere. Simply calling it a blog and having it available right from any user’s profile page might just inspire.
Is social media killing blogs?
No, but it’s hard to say that use of sites like Facebook and Twitter (and now Google Buzz) don’t lend to less blog posts being created. If nothing else, it’s simply a time issue. It is easy to push out a quick status update if you have something to say. It’s easier than blogging. For longer-form content, blogs are generally the better option, which is one reason they are still alive and well. But if Facebook had a blog tab, the social network could cut into the Blogosphere even more, given its huge userbase, while establishing itself as a go-to place for blogging (another area in which Facebook could compete with Google, I might add. Don’t forget that Google owns Blogger).
If Facebook did this, it is very unlikely that all current bloggers would immediately go running there to do their blogging, but Facebook users who may not already be blogging may find the urge to do so when that tab is right in front of their faces. And frankly, I’m confident many current bloggers would go running there. Facebook is a powerful tool for building an audience or expanding upon one.
It works on MySpace. Look at director Eli Roth’s blog, for example. He gets a lot of engagement there (although he hasn’t updated in several months). Facebook is another animal altogether, and its growth is unprecedented. Just look at Facebook’s latest round of stats.
Facebook is frequently adding and changing features, as any user can certainly attest (for better or for worse). It is not hard to imagine them doing something like this. For the record, the company has made no mention of going such a route, to my knowledge. There are currently ways to blog within and around Facebook if you look hard enough, but if Facebook made blogging a focal point, I think it could take off, and perhaps lend to the concept of Facebook as a news source, and even add greatly to the Blogosphere by encouraging more blogging.
Should Facebook Have a blog tab? Would you use it? Share your thoughts.
YouTube Streams Tiger Woods Press Conference Live
Most people I know are pretty tired of hearing about Tiger Woods, but the world is still apparently eager to hear what he has to say at his press conference today. Currently, “what time is tiger woods press conference” is listed on Google Trends, and “Tiger Woods” is a trending topic on Twitter.
Clearly a lot of people still care. If you fall into this category, you may be interested to know that YouTube will be streaming his press conference today live at 8am PT at YouTube.com/citizentube.”We’re experimenting with a live-streamed press conference on YouTube,” YouTube’s Chris Dale tells WebProNews. “Anyone in the world can watch the Tiger Woods press conference.”
Regardless of whether or not you will be tuning into the Tiger Woods press conference, the larger picture is that YouTube has simply become a legitimate news source (they do supply non-celebrity news as well). It has grown a lot since its launch. It used to be considered a great place to upload silly cat videos, and while it still is, it is also now a place to get breaking news as it happens.
This is not the first time YouTube has offered live streaming of a press conference. For example, back in April, they offered an Obama press conference on his first 100 days in office.
YouTube is the second largest search engine on the web, so a lot of people are bound to be watching Tiger’s words there. The more events YouTube streams live, the more people are likely to consider it as a go-to news source.
It is worth mentioning that a variety of other sites will be providing coverage as well, but considering the size of YouTube’s user-base, I’d say it has an advantage.
LinkedIn Can Be One of Your Most Valuable Traffic Sources
LinkedIn is often discussed as a powerful social networking tool, particularly for business professionals, employers, and jobseekers. What is not discussed as frequently is the site’s ability to simply drive traffic to your site. We talked to entrepreneur Lewis Howes (who claims that LinkedIn is one of the top traffic sources to his blogs) about how powerful LinkedIn can be for driving traffic.
Is LinkedIn part of your strategy? Comment here.
We asked Howes why he thinks people don’t generally associate LinkedIn with driving traffic like they would with other social networks like Facebook or Twitter. “Their perception of LinkedIn is of a resume, or a way to get a job, but they don’t see all of the powerful tools within LinkedIn that allow you to drive traffic back to your site,” he tells WebProNews.
LinkedIn has announced that it is now being integrated into Microsoft Outlook, in one of the numerous convergences of social media and email that are increasingly taking place.
“Anytime you can increase the size of your network on LinkedIn, it will give you the opportunity to distribute your content to more people, therefore driving more traffic back to your site,” says Howes. “The Outlook integration is a way to connect more with your current LinkedIn contacts, and also help you grow you network as well.”
In some ways, LinkedIn traffic may even be more valuable than traffic from other social networks and sites. This is simply due to the generally professional nature of LinkedIn itself.
“You need to take into consideration that LinkedIn has the highest average household income per user over any other social networking site (even NYTimes.com and BusinessWeek.com readers),” Howes tells us. “That being said, these are business decision makers you are targeting with your traffic from LinkedIn. The network is for real, and it will only continue to grow in time as there are currently 60 million professionals.”
Now consider that LinkedIn could be one of your top traffic sources if you put enough effort into cultivating it as such. On a scale of 1-10, Howes says he’d rank it as a 7 or 8 on importance level for using it. “For me it is always one of the top 5 referring sites that drives traffic to my blogs,” he says.
Howes went through ten steps in a post at ProBlogger.net. While the post is geared at driving traffic to your blog, you may find the advice helpful for other types of sites. In summary (he goes into much more detail about each of these in the post), the ten steps are:
1. Complete your profile.
2. Increase you connections.
3. Customize your website links.
4. Answer questions.
5. Update your status.
6. Join niche groups.
7. Post comments in groups.
8. Add RSS feeds to groups.
9. Create a group.
10. Add the blog application to your profile.
Now that LinkedIn can be integrated into Microsoft Outlook, I would suggest looking at getting that set up as well (steps here), if you want to get serious about including LinkedIn in your traffic strategy.
Of course there are plenty of other ways to use LinkedIn as a tool to increase the success of your business. As Howes lists, you can sell products, find new clients/employees, generate leads, receive funding, obtain sponsorships, sell tickets to events, as get press coverage to name a few.
Have you considered LinkedIn’s potential as a significant traffic source? Do you already get significant traffic from LinkedIn? Let us know.
Google: "Buzz Will Be Just Another Node"
When Google announced Google Buzz earlier this week, the company made it abundantly clear that it was interested in Buzz being as open as possible. Looking at the Google Buzz API page, you’ll see that support for Activity Streams, AtomPub, OAuth, PubSubHubbub, Salmon and WebFinger are things that are “coming soon.”
What all of this means is that Google is working to make Buzz content something that can be used in as many services as possible, while letting as many services as possible come into Buzz.
“The idea is that someday, any host on the web should be able to implement these open protocols and send messages back and forth in real time with users from any network, without any one company in the middle,” says Google software engineer DeWitt Clinton. “The web contains the social graph, the protocols are standard web protocols, the messages can contain whatever crazy stuff people think to put in them. Google Buzz will be just another node (a very good node, I hope) among many peers. Users of any two systems should be able to send updates back and forth, federate comments, share photos, send @replies, etc., without needing Google in the middle and without using a Google-specific protocol or format.”
Google has most recently turned on WebFinger in Gmail (via RRW). WebFinger is described as being about making email addresses more valuable, by letting people attach metadata to them. According to the WebFinger page at Google Code, that can include things like:
- public profile data
- pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)
- a public key
- other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)
- a URL to an avatar
- profile data (nickname, full name, etc)
- whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it’s NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com
- or even a public declaration that the email address doesn’t have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.
WebFinger is enabled for all Gmail/Google Profiles with public profiles. Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick discusses more technical details about it here.