I ooVood for a good cause

I only ever got around to doing one of the ooVoo sessions I had set up and always felt kind of bad about that. That’s mainly because I knew the company was donating money to the Frozen Pea Fund, a breast-cancer support charity, for every person who participated in their My ooVoo Day With… promotion that was organized by the guys at crayon.

Over on MediaBullseye you can see the $30,000 check that was presented to the Frozen Pea Fund during this past weekend’s Blogger Social ’08 in New York City. I’m happy I was able to participate to the extent that I could and am honored to be counted among the others who did so. Good on everyone involved in this.

Giving RSS numbers their due

I’m sure everyone who has devised and executed a social media campaign, particularly one involving outreach to writers of blogs and other sites, has been asked to provide some sort of metric to justify such efforts. Often what’s asked for are pageviews or visitors or (gulp) impressions.

But here’s the story I tell all the time when people ask about my personal site’s reach: I get, on MMM, about 800 hits to the site a day. But a good amount of those come in, via searches, to posts I wrote months, if not years ago. So if you’re including MMM in your blog outreach plans and you’re basing its inclusion on that 800 +/- daily visits, you need to know that not all those 800 people are coming in through the front door.

That means some portion of that overall number of people are not seeing whatever you’ve just pitched me – yet – though some of them are. Unlike overall visitor numbers we can tell who’s hitting the front page. That is one advantage of the web versus traditional metrics like overall circulation – we can see how people move around on a site.

The 1,000+ people who subscribe to my RSS feed, though, definitely are. That’s because via the feed they’re always seeing the most recent content and updates, and they’re seeing them at a time of their choosing, whatever time they’ve blocked off to catch up on their reading. But I don’t think RSS subscriber numbers is something that’s often asked for or included when measuring success. This despite the fact that, based on my experience, far more publishers make their RSS subscriber numbers visible on their sites – largely through a FeedBurner chicklet – than make their site visit stats publicly viewable.

The same rings true here on OTD, where the number of people snagging the RSS feed vastly outstrip the number of hits to the site.

Considering there’s such a demand for numbers as a means to justify online public relations efforts; and considering there seem to be more publishers who use that FeedBurner number on their sites; and considering that number translates into a higher percentage of the audience that’s going to see the successful results of your outreach, I think it’s past time to start factoring RSS numbers into the numbers agencies provide to clients.

Now I’ll be the first to state that swapping one number for another does little or nothing to address the fact that influence in a particular vertical niche or community held by one person does not always correlate to certain numbers. But aside from anecdotal impressions given by those familiar with the online space there isn’t much we can do to back that up. Numbers are always more reassuring since that’s how traditional media has always been measured and that’s what people are looking for.

So as long as it’s numbers being asked for it’s incumbent on those of us navigating the online space on behalf of our clients to provide the best ones available. Considering all the factors above it seems to me RSS subscribers is probably one of the better numbers we can provide.

“Slower than the first Pentium chip”

That’s about the only safe-for-work line in this hilarious Star Wars Gangsta Rap that’s been making the rounds. Again, can’t stress enough that this is Not Safe for Work so plug in your earphones or save it for later, but you should definitely watch it. [Via Tom]

Get me off this crazy thing!

This sounds about right. From BusinessWeek:

The number of people who say that “always feel rushed” more than doubled between the mid-1960s and mid-1990s in the United States, with people aged 25 to 34 feeling most anxious about everything that needs to be done. Older Ys in particular, those who have entered the workforce, are likely to feel busier and more stressed than ever.

Blockbuster hints as direct-to-TV plans

Blockbuster is reportedly on the verge of launching a direct-to-TV streaming service that would present a direct rival not so much to iTunes but to video-on-demand providers. The company has not confirmed rumors other than to say it fits with their strategy of trying to build outside the bricks-and-mortar sector it currently dominates.

Such a service would likely include yet another set-top box for consumers to stack up and would be an extension of the Movielink download service they acquired last year. Netflix has long been said to be working on something similar.

This comes back to my belief that what online downloads need to really take off is seamless bridging to the television set. Watching movies on my computer is fine if I’m on the go, but if I’m relaxing with a movie I still turn on the TV. Whoever can be first to market with a product that provides a good user experience with a good selection of not just current hits but long-tail movies will be the winner in that market.

I would expect, though, that since this competes directly with VOD there will be push-back from not only cable companies but studios that negotiate high margins on VOD distribution.

And of course, while this is interesting, it doesn’t address the actual release window problem. But let’s get something like this off the ground first and then we’ll discuss that.

The Grand Clusterfuck

(ed note: Wow. Two uses of “clusterfuck” in as many days. I has madd writing skills.)

Sorgatz and Arrington have the two best write-ups of the ongoing war of press releases and leaks being waged by Microsoft, AOL, Microsoft and Google. I’m of the same mind as Arrington in wondering if there’s going to be anything left of Yahoo worth fighting over at this point. Eventually something needs to get finalized. And let’s face it, if Yahoo were as strong as it keeps claiming it is this would have been over definitively weeks ago.