More Videos from FIS World Championships

Here's a great site with video interviews with some of the racers like Lindsey Kildow, Bode Miller, Julia Macuso and Swedish stars Jens Byggmark and Anja Parson. I can't find the source home page (one of the issues with a Flash-based site) but make sure to click on the home icon and check out the reporter on the Are 2007 Update. (Update: I found a link to the home page on Are2007.com)

Looks like the Men's Super G should be on in the morning. It's very cool to be able to experience something happening across the ocean.

Nothing yet on Flickr or YouTube (searching tags for Are, 2007, FIS). It would be cool to be able to add some citizen/fan reporting to the virtual web viewing experience.

More Links:

Are2007.com

FIS Ski Racing on Internet TV

I blogged about this more than a year ago when I first found MediaZone's coverage of FIS World Cup Ski Racing on the web. Now they've got competition. WCSN.com apprears to have secured the rights to most of the FIS season for a $4.95/month subscription fee for both same-day delayed (usually 6 hours later) streaming plus archived on-demand viewing. I'm an ex ski racer and easily got hooked.

The FIS World Championships were scheduled to start this weekend (first two events were postponed due to weather) and it did not appear that WCSN was providing coverage (though they never communicated that clearly on their web site) - a few Google strokes later and I found that MediaZone had the World Championships both live and delay for $19.95. Both WCSN and MediaZone use the Windows Media Player which can be flakey. If I were running one of these businesses I'd be looking at moving my infrastructure over to Flash as soon as I could. Flash just works.

Internet Broadcast Rights will create a whole new revenue stream for sports and events that have not been able to garner enough of an audience to make it on the traditional networks and cable systems. It will also keep the lawyers busy as the contacts for these rights must be getting extremely complicated.

What about VOD on cable? There's also no reason why content aggregators couldn't also try to get distribution on cable systems. Seems like the cable guys could significantly increase their revenues and possibly fend off IP-based video delivery if they could provide enough content with a reasonable search and discovery system. Would I be just as happy paying Comcast $19.95 for the FIS World Championships as I am MediaZone?

All I can say is thank you WCSN and MediaZone for pushing the edge of this new revolution of Internet TV - I'm enjoying every minute!

"Most bloggers toil in total obscurity"

Blogs to Riches - The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom -- New York Magazine

Great article by Clive Thompson in the NewYork Magazine. It explains why it is so hard for some to build any audience for their blogging efforts and why those who were early in establishing traffic and links are increasingly hard to displace.

There are some great quotes in this article such as "a blog is like a shark: If it stops moving, it dies". Success of a blog goes beyond having great content that is is updated regularly - you need to build an audience and that can be done in two ways (assuming you are a grassroots blogger) - the first is to get linked-to by an A-list site - the second is to get promoted in a traditional media. Someone with an audience needs to point to you.

If you consider blog reading a less-than mainstream activity (lots of upside), it begs the question of if how traditional media can leverage their audience to either establish their own blog properties or at least leverage their audience? If a newspaper writes a lot of editorials about blogs or referencing 3rd-party blogs are they accelerating their own demise or do the newspaper's editors become the "human filters" that help users find the information they need?

User Generated Content's Soft Underbelly

Wired News: Podfading Takes Its Toll (via JD Lasica)

Steve Friess at Wired writes about one of the challenges in building sustainable business around under generated content with a story about people who just stop podcasting. After living through a wave of excitement about User Generated Content at Trellix during the bubble (we powered personal web site communities such as iVillage, Bolt.com, FortuneCity and the software use on Tripod), the pattern is repeating itself with blogging, podcasting and videoblogging. The big difference now I think is that there are enough people experimenting and entering the churn funnel that for some personal publishing will become sustained behavior.

It seems like those who jump in the deepest are the ones who suffer the greatest disappointment if they don't get an audience or feel the greatest pressure if they do. No matter how easy the technology gets (I'm using the Performancing plug-in to Firefox as we speak - it can't be much easier than that) it still requires time and effort. It does bring to light two issues, the first is if you are producing really good stuff, how does it get discovered so that you keep doing it? and secondly, it there something other than ego gratification that authors/producers should be getting from the platforms that are delivering (and many times profiting from) these services?

Great Podcast - The Future of Newspapers

On Point : The Future of the American Newspaper -

Tom Ashbrook and the OnPoint guys do a great job of covering a very meaty subject in an hour.

With the explosion of digital media from traditional outlets and the emergence of the citizen journalist/blogger as a viable source of news and views, the future for the dialy printed newspaper is uncertain. It is not like these guys have not had ample opportunity to see this coming. When I was off trying to sell The Boston Globe on local online services like Boston CitiNet in 1984, Knight Ridder was investing millions in Viewtron. Knight Ridder's lack of persistence in electronic publishing is referenced in a great paper from George Day at Whatron titled Avoiding the Traps of Emerging Technologies.

There is a role for journalists and editors in this brave new world, it is just different than it has been for the past 100 years. We are heading into an environment with always-on and participatory media that there will be a vast sea of content. How we extract the signal from the noise will be the challenge. Those could be the signals that are important to be heard by the larger community and those narrow signals that might be of interest to a small group of individuals. One option is to follow in the footsteps of Helen and Scott Nearling (of The Good Life), move to the woods and tune out!

Roanoke Times launches daily video newscast online

From Cyberjournalist.net



Traditional media gets into the act. TimesCast, a new daily 2 minute videobog from the Roanoke Times in Roanoke, VA. Amanda and Rocketbooom's influence is being felt far and wide. I think the split screen format works pretty well. The future of news - hang on to your hats, we're going to see a lot of these in 2006.

World Cup Skiing On Demand on the Web

MediaZone presents Alpine Skiing


For $9.99, you can buy access to live and streaming coverage of World Cup Skiing races. This is priceless. You get the whole race, not an OLN highlight report. I'm buying a long cable to connect my Media Center PC to the TV over my treadmill!

MediaZone is headquartered in Redwood City, CA and is part of a public South African media company called Naspers.

What a great example of content that you can't get anyplace else and is priced reasonably. 2006 is going to be a fun year!

Moving in................

I've gotten much more interested recently in digital video, videoblogging, citizen journalism, social networking in addition to digital photography so the Camera2web.com URL and site was a bit narrow - so digitalmediaviews.com will be a new blog home with a wider angle view on digital media. Stay tumed!