The ongoing professionalization of amateurs ?

It seems like Next New Networks is raising the bar (or is it lowering the threshold) in terms of soliciting and promoting _user-generated content_.

Via the New York Times

Internet Start-Up to Take a Hybrid Media Approach
BRAD STONE
March 8, 2007

Several cable television veterans are putting their band back together and taking their act to the Internet.

Next New Networks, a New York-based Internet start-up run and backed by former executives of MTV and Nickelodeon, will announce plans today to begin a series of video-oriented Web sites — what the company calls micro-networks — on niche topics like do-it-yourself fashion, comic books, car racing and cartoons.

[Snip ...]

Next New Networks plans to blend elements of old and new media into a type of hybrid entertainment that is different from traditional television and user-generated sites like YouTube. Its various Web properties will revolve around professionally produced videos of three to eight minutes, which it plans to pitch to sponsors as safe and predictable places to advertise online.

Many of the programs will solicit contributions from their audiences, but the company will screen submissions before they approved as final product. The company plans to generate some programming itself while also identifying talented video contributors and bringing them into the Next New Networks fold.

It is starting with six Web sites, including Fast Lane Daily (fastlanedaily.com), which features a daily news program for auto enthusiasts, and ThreadBanger (threadbanger.com), which offers a five-minute weekly show with MTV-style anchors who discuss the homemade-clothing culture.

Mr. Seibert, the creative director, is bringing two existing video sites to the network: Channel Frederator (channelfrederator.com), a weekly program on animation, and VOD Cars (VODCars.com), a curated collection of video clips from the car culture.

The founders believe the Internet offers a programming opportunity similar to the early days of cable, which traditional media firms are not exploiting.

“The nature of big media companies is about incumbent brands and repurposing and refashioning their material for the Web,” said Mr. Scannell, the chief executive. “We have no incumbent brands. We’re a white sheet for creative people.”

Mr. Miller, who left America Online last October under pressure from his bosses at Time Warner, cited the founders’ cable experience as the reason he is backing the company.

“To me these guys are returning to their roots,” he said. “They are unshackled from large media environment where it is much more about what your quarterly goals are, and can go back to developing new networks and ways of communicating with audiences.”

In part, Next New Networks is also challenging the idea that the chaotic terrain of sites like YouTube and MySpace can be a friendly place for advertisers.

“Video sharing is awesome, but advertisers are knitting their brow,” Mr. Scannell said. “They want to know what they’re backing. There is a place for brands to deliver something that is consistent.”

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... for bloggers not to download and try the new Q-Ads tool and service, other than a blogger exercising a complete ban on advertising.

There are many many bloggers who put up Google advertising on their blogs and then basically forget about it ... or if they are really serious about advertising on their blog will expend a lot of effort creating interesting content but just leave the delivery to Google without any means of controlling what they receive as advertising, since Google's algorithm's deliver what they are designed to deliver.

Using categorized keywords tailored to your audience(s) is an effective way to begin developing an advertising strategy and tactics for your blogging that allows you to control what advertising you choose to expose to your readers, and this ability to choose and control advertising has always been at the heart of Qumana's tools' ability to insert advertising with the selection of a keyword and a click.

Let's see:

1.  Qumana (the blog editor) and the Q-Ads ad insertion tool are free.

2.   Signing up for a Q-Ads account is free, and only takes 5 minutes

3.  The  Q-Ads revenue-sharing program is generous and fair.

4.  There is a powerful and easy-to-use ad design function available in both the Q-Ads tool and the Qumana editor.  We intend to add templates and other ad formats just as soon as humanly possible.

WE WILL BE ABLE TO CREATE AND DELIVER MORE INNOVATIONS SOONER IF WE GET MORE AND MORE USERS ... IN OTHER WORDS, HELP A FRIEND OR THREE TO DOWNLOAD AND TRY QUMANA AND THE Q-ADS TOOLS.

5.  Once signed up, you don't HAVE to use advertising all the time, or in every blog post .. it's completely up to you as to how often you insert an advertisement.

6.  If you download the Qumana editor, you can choose to advertise or not .. if you don't want to, just don't use the Insert Ad function.  You still get to use a powerful, feature rich and versatile blog editor, whether you blog using a Mac or a PC.

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For the last 8 weeks or so we've known about and have been searching ways to resolve the problems which showed up the most recent Mac version of Qumana, with OS X 10.4.7+ ...

I think we are just about there in terms of being able to offer users a new release for the Mac that operates pretty effectively ... so far I have found just one instance of quirkiness (a previous post that did not fully refresh) on one of the various blogs I maintain for testing purposes.

Thus far I have tested posting to Wordpress, Typepad and Blogware platforms ... mixed results.  Typepad fine, Blogware fine, and I knew Wordpress would not publish the Q-Ads I inserted ... but I was not prepared for it to ignore the YouTube html.

So, with a bit of fair weather following the pretty substantial snowfall here in Vancouver, we should be able to post a link to the new version of Qumana for Mac within the next 24 hours.

We will also update the download link on the Qumana website.

UPDATE:  THERE IS A NEW DOWNLOAD LINK AVAILABLE FOR THE MAC OS X VERSION

UPDATE #2:  We are tracking down the issues reported in our comments section.  It seems that a crucial step in the uploading of the new version to the Qumana web site was not carried out yesterday due to power outages off the coast of British Columbia (the joys of a decentralised organization ;-)

We have people working on the problem(s).

UPDATE #3:  We think that all that remains to do is refresh the server upon which the Qumana site is hosted ... unfortunately the person who can do that is located on an island 30 kilometres to the west of Vancouver, and it seems the power is still off over there.

More news re: the live updated Mac OS version as we get it.

UPDATE #4:  It should be correct now ... the download will appear on your Desktop, and then just drop it into Applications.

It's probably a good thing to do to uninstall any previous application of Qumana, just for the hell of it.

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When will that marker be reached ?

Tonight Technorati states it is tracking 49.4 million blogs, so I assume it will be towards the end of this coming week that the 50 million mark will be passed.  Friday ?  Next weekend ?

Certainly many of them will have been abandoned some time ago, or shortly after being created, and no doubt many are moribund or generally inactive ... but Technorati is still tracking them.

And it's interesting .. and useful for us ... to note that they are still being created at a rapid clip.

It was on September 18th, 2004 that I posted that Technorati had just crossed the 4 million blog mark.

So, there have been at least 46 million new blogs created in just over 22 months by the time the 50 million mark is reached on Technorati. That's a heckuva growth rate.

You'd think that at least one or two million of the bloggers who have kept on blogging would want a simple, elegant, effective and free offline blogging tool ... like Qumana.

If for no other reason (though making blogging easier is a big benefit) than to avoid the frustration they seem to experience when whatever blog platform they are using experiences a service outage (which is at least as frustrating as the dropped call cell-phone experience that is now such a problem that the cell industry's advertising focuses on the issue).

I also wonder how many of the 50 million are from countries such as Spain, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Central American countries, California ;-), France (and Quebec ... technically not a country, but ...), Holland and Germany.  Bloggers who blog in those languages now have access to Qumana operational in their native language (German coming in  a day or two).  Good thing Qumana plays nice with Typepad ... they have a growing base of users in those European countries / languages.

Surely more than a handful will want to try it out.

Tags: Qumana, Qumana Spanish, Qumana French, Qumana Dutch, growth of blogging, Typepad, Typepad Europe

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I often find myself wondering what will be next .. and then next .. and then next .. in the endless stream of applications that help us manipulate, manage and sometimes mangle the process of writing and publishing to the Web.

At Qumana we have been conscious for a long time that every individual has her or his own working style (have you ever watched over your friend's, or your sister's, or your dad's shoulder whilst they are doing something on the computer, or on the web ?  I'll bet you're just like me, and everyone else I have ever seen ... you just instinctively want to reach out ands steer, because they aren't doing it the way you do) ... ;-)

The Web is now a major part of hundreds of millions of peoples' lives.  Personal publishing of some form or another, whether it's called blogging or something else, won't be going away any time soon.

On the Web, info flows in to your conscious awareness all the time .. continuously.  Whether it's via an RSS aggregator, or through some search activity, or just by browsing and link-hopping.  You're always watching, reading .. using your cognitive capabilities and style to *interact* with the flows of information passing in front of your eyes.

Ours (and many other peoples') quest is to design, make and offer applications that give you maximum time for reading and thinking whilst you are at the center of this continuous flow of information.  Ideally, we would get most operations - most anything you want to do, other than  typing itself - down to one click, but it's not likely that we'll get every operation down to that level of simplicity.  But many, if not most will be.

In the blogging / personal; publishing environment, we want to make publishing all sorts of other digital content (think podcasts, self-created mp3's, photo slide shows, video clips) as easy as publishing text, links and images are now.  We want to make Qumana, and Qumana integrated with Lektora, formidably simple *information pivots* which will allow you, the personal publisher, read, think, write and express yourself as clearly and elegantly as possible ... whilst still offering you significant flexibility, versatility and power to address the wide range of individual's personal publishing habits.

We want to help you become more effective in the ongoing, never-ending, flow of information.  We will welcome any and all feedback that helps make this quest a reality, for you and all your fellow personal publishers.

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It's been a while coming and since we're in Boston, Waltham actually, meeting with Lycos Jen and I thought it would be a great time to do a little podcast talking about Lycos-Qumana partnership.

Enjoy!

Walkabout Podcast Apr 25 8.7 megs 13 mins.

Tags: Lycos, Qumana, podcast, walkabout podcast[

Less than a week after the launch of the Lycos-Qumana partnership, Lycos has completed the upgrade process of their blogging packages so that Tripod and now Angelfire bloggers can use Qumana to post to their blogs.

So, welcome to the fold Angelfire bloggers!  A little bird told me, okay it was Jen, that your blogs have been upgraded to be able to use Qumana.  Like 30 mins ago!

We just had an update meeting on this project and we're all just overwhelmed at the positive response we've received.  We're all enjoying working together and working on getting the two teams together for some fun.  I dunno which is better, whale watching in Victoria or a Red Sox game in Boston.   Hmmm, that's a tough one.

Regardless, I know that Lycos has some really cool stuff up their sleeves to be coming out and of course Qumana does too!

As the saying goes ... watch this space and this one too.

Come on, give Qumana a try.  Hey, it's even free.  Nothing to lose!

Tags: Qumana, Angelfire, Lycos, blogging