So many of the videos seen on the Internet are those viral videos with funny cats or Saturday Night Live clips that people share over email or IM. But for those of us who want to use Internet videos for promotions, the Internet is becoming a friendlier place to raise awareness using the important video medium.
I made the above video for a book about football in Alaska. It took only a couple of hours using the Ken Burns effect on iMovie, the simplest video editing program I know of.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Facebook App -- Fan Page
The Facebook App I wrote about last time is working and in full-gear. Every day roughly 40 new users upload the application to track their favorite Olympic sports. Unfortunately, the application usage has grown linearly, rather than exponentially as we'd hoped, but there are some bright spots.
One of these bright spots is the fan page. Every application has a fan page--those users who are so pleased with the application that they become "fans." Usually this is a relatively minor percentage of overall users. For example, the Michigan St. Football Application has more than 6,000 users, but only 150 fans. Our Olympic Games 2008 application has only 200 users so far, but 44 fans.
Facebook, for all its flaws, allows for some pretty neat data collection. The fan page enables us to run numbers on even a relatively modest sample size, and to come up with some neat findings.
The table to the left, for example, shows the gender and age range of the fans page. It's startling to see that more of our Olympic Games Application fans are women rather than men. And, looking at the ages, 40% are minors.
It would be interesting to compare these numbers with Facebook's overall demographics or the Neilsen rating demographics for the Beijing Olympics on NBC. My guess is these numbers are much closer to the former group than the latter.
In an unrelated surprise: the 44 fans of the application aren't just Americans. There are users from Switzerland, New Zealand, China, Canada, Australia, Morocco, England, Lebanon, and elsewhere.
One of these bright spots is the fan page. Every application has a fan page--those users who are so pleased with the application that they become "fans." Usually this is a relatively minor percentage of overall users. For example, the Michigan St. Football Application has more than 6,000 users, but only 150 fans. Our Olympic Games 2008 application has only 200 users so far, but 44 fans.
Facebook, for all its flaws, allows for some pretty neat data collection. The fan page enables us to run numbers on even a relatively modest sample size, and to come up with some neat findings.
The table to the left, for example, shows the gender and age range of the fans page. It's startling to see that more of our Olympic Games Application fans are women rather than men. And, looking at the ages, 40% are minors.
It would be interesting to compare these numbers with Facebook's overall demographics or the Neilsen rating demographics for the Beijing Olympics on NBC. My guess is these numbers are much closer to the former group than the latter.
In an unrelated surprise: the 44 fans of the application aren't just Americans. There are users from Switzerland, New Zealand, China, Canada, Australia, Morocco, England, Lebanon, and elsewhere.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Olympics Facebook Application
I'm happy to announce that the Facebook application I created (with George Mandis of Snaptortoise) is now up-and-running.
Olympic Games 2008 is a fun way to track medal standings by country,
rank, or event. And though we don't have high usage numbers yet, this project has taught me a lot about the opportunities and challenges surrounding the promotion of a Facebook application. I've put links on content-sharing sites like Digg and Reddit, posted on group forums like Yahoo groups and Tribe, and mentioned it on StumbleUpon. So far, my best luck has come directly from Facebook, where friends and friends-of-friends have helped our little sports app take off.
The best part of this experiment has been what I've learned about running a project that unfolds in real time. If Uzbekistan gets a medal and we don't have a flag ready for that country, or there's a tie for bronze, we need to adapt quickly or lose viewers.
The hardest part of this project has been entering in stats for each event. Was there a way to automate this? Next time I'm looking for an open source data feed.
Olympic Games 2008 is a fun way to track medal standings by country,
rank, or event. And though we don't have high usage numbers yet, this project has taught me a lot about the opportunities and challenges surrounding the promotion of a Facebook application. I've put links on content-sharing sites like Digg and Reddit, posted on group forums like Yahoo groups and Tribe, and mentioned it on StumbleUpon. So far, my best luck has come directly from Facebook, where friends and friends-of-friends have helped our little sports app take off.
The best part of this experiment has been what I've learned about running a project that unfolds in real time. If Uzbekistan gets a medal and we don't have a flag ready for that country, or there's a tie for bronze, we need to adapt quickly or lose viewers.
The hardest part of this project has been entering in stats for each event. Was there a way to automate this? Next time I'm looking for an open source data feed.
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