Ask.com recently dropped the Jeeves from its name along with its butler icon. The name change along with a multi-million dollar ad campaign are part of a brand-building effort designed to help it build more marketshare. From the WSJ…
bq.. Ask handled only 5.5% of U.S. search queries in December, compared with Google’s 48.8%, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. That places Ask fifth in searches, also behind Yahoo, MSN and AOL.
p. No word in the WSJ article on the specifics of how much they will be spending on the ad campaign other than it is in the “multi-million dollars”. Ask.com was purchased by Barry Dillar’s IAC/InterActiveCorp last summer for $1.85 billion
Here’s the latest “Alexa”:1 graphs for Ask.com.
Ask.com reach
Ask.com traffic rank
It will be interesting to see if they can buy marketshare.
[1(Alexa Ask.com info page)]http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&compare_sites=&y=t&q=&url=ask.com
“Halo: Combat Evolved”:1 was originally released on the Xbox back in November of 2001. It’s superb multiplayer play, smart AI, great physics and revolutionary vehicle gameplay (you can drive, or gun or be a passenger in the “warthog”:2 the main Halo vehicle) made it, erh… makes it, one of the best “first-person shooters”:5 around. As said on Wikipedia…
bq.. “Halo” is widely considered to be one of the best first-person shooter games ever, rivaling such classics as GoldenEye 007 and Half-Life.
p. But that’s not really important. What is important is how web-based video distribution is changing the web — and a few other small things like movies, TV, DVDs, etc.
As an example of how things are changing, let’s consider a videogame review and tip site. Even as late as last year, if an individual or small organization wanted to start such a site, it would be heavy with text and pictures, but completely devoid of video. Video creation, production and especially distribution was expensive and costly. However, all of that has now changed. Digital camcorders and video-capable point-and-shoot cameras are cheap, production tools are available free on the net and with services like Video Google, hosting is now free.
Think about how much more engaging video is than text or even audio (like podcasts). As an example, here’s about the best you could have done last year in creating a simple tip for Halo.
bq.. It’s possible to “jump” the flag over the chasm in Halo’s Boarding Action map by laying down a plasma grenade on the edge of the opponent’s flag level, grabbing the flag and jumping over the grenade. If you time everything right, you will be killed by the grenade blast, and the flag will be hurled across the chasm to your flag level.
Laying down the plasma grenade
Jumping, dying and launching the flag
Flag on your level after respawning
Hopefully a teammate will grab the flag and score, otherwise you will have to quickly retrieve the flag when you respawn, before the flag is automatically returned, and score.
p. The text and pictures get the point across, but now it’s possible to really show how this trick is done with video.
Halo Boarding Action map flag jump trick
Captured using Zoinger’s patent-pending ghetto video-capture technology
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then video is clearly priceless. Oh, and just for fun, here’s another example of how to score quickly on Halo’s Damnation map.
Some showboating on Halo’s Damnation map
Yeah, I am using “YouTube”:4 now since Google Video’s verification process suxs
Not the best video quality, and kind of esoteric, and the sound levels are all over the map (hey, I was just hacking stuff together quickly), but with a little effort you could make a kick-ass review site… or a cooking show… or a documentary… or even a full-length movie.
Zoinger says, 2006… the year the distribution bottleneck for video ends. If you’ve got business in movies, TV, DVDs or anything else having to do with video, you’d better be “getting it”:3.
[5(Wikipedia on FPS)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-person_shooter
[4(YouTube homepage)]http://www.youtube.com/
[3(A VC on the future of video)]http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2005/12/tv_execs_need_t.html
[2(Wikipedia on the hog)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vehicles_in_the_Halo_universe#Warthogs
[1(Wikipedia on Halo)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo:_Combat_Evolved
I read an article in this weekend’s newspaper talking about how Lindesy Jacobellis of the US’s snowboarding team crashed in the finals while commanding a race-winning lead for the gold. The article said that Lindesy’s crash was on the penultimate jump… a jump where she tried a trick called a “backside method”:2. She ended up with the silver.
So where to look to find the video on the web? Try NBC’s official “site”:1? Negative… like they’d actually have a useful search?
Hum, how about Google Video? Let’s say searching on “Jacobellis”:3? Yup, there’s a teaser 14 second video of the “finals”:4 which has a link to this “page”:5 on NBC’s site with video of the entire finals race (with an all-important video commercial at the beginning). They could have made it even better if the teaser video had a bit more action from the finals in it, instead of just the first 14 seconds of the race, but whatever.
However, it doesn’t look like you can embed the Google teaser video in a page. This seems kind of dumb, since the purpose of the teaser is to gain distribution.
Here’s a lame screen grab instead of a cool embedded teaser video
Well, at least NBC appears to kind of get it and has “microchunked”:6 the content.
*_Updated 2006-02-21_*
Thinking about it, it’s kind of lame to even have a teaser video. Just let me embed the whole video on my site. Run an ad in front of the content if you like, force some links back to NBC’s site… whatever, just free-up the content or become internet roadkill.
[6(A VC on the future of content)]http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2005/12/tv_execs_need_t.html
[4(Google Video page for the teaser)]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8040680095261409350&q=jacobellis
[5(NBCs coverage of the finals)]http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/5115618/detail.html
[3(Google Video search for Jacobellis)]http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=jacobellis
[1(NBCs offical Olympic site homepage)]http://www.nbcolympics.com/
[2(Get some method air on Wikipedia)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardslide
I’ve been playing around a lot lately with Google Video… surfing through the “popular videos”:2… searching for “WRC rally videos”:3… and generally just wasting a bunch of time.
One of the great features that I’ve found on Google Video is the ability to host your videos. Once you have created a Google account, click on the “submit your video”:4 link at the bottom of the Google Video “homepage”:1. A preference page then loads followed by their “terms of service”:5 (which you might want to read, since you are agreeing to offer them a fairly broad license regarding your videos). After you agree to their terms of service a blank _video status_ page then loads. On this, you’ll find a link that says “_Click here to get started_”:6 which loads this page for downloading Google’s uploader client.
Uploader Client Download Page
The uploader client is pretty basic allowing you to select videos for uploading.
Uploader Client Screenshot
Once the videos have finished uploading, go back to the Google Video homepage, click on the _submit your video_ link and resign-in to your account. This will load the video status page now listing the uploaded videos.
Video Status Page
For each video you upload, you will need to click on the _Click here to proceed_ link in the status column. This brings up the video information page where you add descriptive meta data for the video (useful if you want people to find it via searching).
Video Information Page
The video information page also has a _Advanced option_ link if you want to make your video pay-for-play. I haven’t used this option, so I don’t know how that whole mechanism works. Google then “verifies”:8 the video before it is available for searching and viewing.
But the best part of Google Video is that you can embed videos into your page. On the video’s page on Google Video you can find a _Put on site_ link on the right hand side. This opens a window displaying the HTML needed to embed the video using a Flash player. The code looks something like this (the display of the code breaks in IE and I am too lazy to fix this… but you should be using Firefox anyway).
Which renders to…
A Short Video of the Costco’s “Kirkland Signature Grill”:7
Zoinger says, video is here.
[8(How long does the video verification take)]http://video.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=26563&topic=1488
[7(Zoinger on the Costco Kirkland signature grill)]http://www.zoinger.com/words/archives/2005/07/17/costco-bbq-the-kirkland-signature%e2%84%a2-grill/
