Jeff Random

Originally by Carlo from MobHappy

There have been plenty of people, err… pumping up the mobile porn market, not the least of which the mobile porn sellers themselves, billing the content as the ever-elusive “killer app” for mobile. The numbers have been a little suspect all along, whether it’s saying half of Korea has accessed mobile porn, or the supposed billions mobile porn will pull in. But a piece in the Guardian does some calculations, and comes to the conclusion that maybe things aren’t as big as they’re made out to be (no pun intended).

If you buy in to the analyst prediction that mobile porn will be worth $2.3 billion in 2010, there’s a few takeaways: first, that’s not tremendous growth in dollar terms from the $1 billion market they say mobile porn will be this year. Second, there should be well over 3 billion mobile users by 2010, compared with 1 billion today — so porn spending per subscriber won’t even hold steady. Finally, that $2.3 billion would represent just 5% of the overall mobile content market, hardly making it a killer app.

There will always be porn consumers. But it’s hard to believe there are that many dedicated enough to want porn on their mobile phones, as opposed to the TV or internet. As Mike points out at Techdirt, porn helped cable and satellite TV, VCRs, DVD players and the net thrive, mainly because each successive technology offered an improvement in the viewing experience. The only benefit mobile porn offers (alongside a few drawback) is portability, but how many people want to watch porn when they’re on the go, out in public?

But the most interesting comments come from one Julia Dimambro, the MD of mobile porn purveyor Cherry Media, who alleges operators are playing down porn because they don’t want to be seen as promoting it. While carriers do have a love-hate affair with porn, their restraint appears to have more to do with reality about the level of demand setting in than any puritanical leadings, and Ms. Dimambro’s numbers about the popularity of her company’s site seem to prove this.

She said back in February it was getting 1 million hits per month. Now, the Guardian says it gets 300,000 hits a month. The fact that hits are a useless metric aside, the figures raise two possibilities. Either the company’s playing fast and loose with its numbers to try and make the market look bigger than it really is, or it’s seen a dramatic drop over the last six months. Whichever is true, neither one reflects too well on the company or the mobile porn industry.

The real problem here is too much focus on immediate revenues. IMHO the smart play currently for mobile is to worry about building your audience first and cashing in later.

Kottke make a great case for the web as the next operating system here

Compared to “standalone” Web apps and desktop apps, applications developed for this hypothetical platform have some powerful advantages. Because they run in a Web browser, these applications are cross platform (assuming that whoever develops such a system develops the local Web server part of it for Windows, OS X, Linux, your mobile phone, etc.), just like Web apps such as Gmail, Basecamp, and Salesforce.com. You don’t need to be on a specific machine with a specific OS…you just need a browser + local Web server to access your favorite data and apps.

It raises one of the major obstacles facing the idea of Web as Operating System – Lameness

One thing that might deter you from writing Web-based applications is the lameness of Web pages as a UI. That is a problem, I admit. There were a few things we would have really liked to add to HTML and HTTP. What matters, though, is that Web pages are just good enough.

With the introduction of ifthen YubNub could be a solution to the “lameness” of web pages as user interface.

Just as using CSS allows separation of the content from the presentation, Yubnub allows separation of the interface from the application.

This allows for the hypothetical “WebOS” to have the advantages without suffering from “lameness”

Jeff from BuzzMachine says:

– Link

Trust in network environments
The need for a cognitive model of trust
The socio-cognitive model of trust
The beliefs of trust: what X thinks about Y
The “Motivation belief” of trust
Yin-yang trust
Internal and external trust
The sources of trust
Trust and irrationality
Degrees of trust
Trust and risk
Trust and delegation
Trust and control
Trust and adjustable autonomy
The dynamics of trust
Trust and experiences
Trust elicits trust
Trust atmosphere
Trust as a three parties relationship: contracts and authorities
Trust as a communicative act
Trust as a fuzzy network
Trust in contract nets
Trust, security and technology
Trust and technical knowledge
Trust and knowledge management

Originally from Smart Mobs at August 19, 2005, 03:55

For a few years now, my social circle has used the expression:

“If you don’t have a phone you aren’t a person”

Without the flexibility that near instant communication brings you need to block out specific times & ensuring nothing changes en route for every meeting. This raises the ‘cost’ of making plans to an unacceptable level.

“Why DRM Will Kill Mobile Music – Now, how this all affects mobile is that there will be a huge tide of MP3 players from a number of different vendors coming into the market, in the form of music-enabled phones. So what’s going to happen when you’ve got all these different phones being billed by carriers as iPod killers or replacements and people come to find out their music won’t play on them, or they can only listen to music that’s been bought from one specific store or service? They’re going to get pissed off, that’s what’s going to happen. They won’t buy music that’s tied to a specific device or has onerous limitations on what they can do with it — which will probably rule out any carrier’s download store from being a success. Regardless of how the record labels see things, people want to own their music, and owning music means being able to do with it what you like, and play it on whatever device you want. This means that vendors that focus on syncing, rather than playing along with carriers’ dowload shop dreams, will be the winners. Few operators understand this, though, and their stranglehold on the retail channel means it’s going to be hard for manufacturers to succeed.”

Sounds like another market opportunity for a paradigm buster – The open platform handset.

Ship it with the preloaded with emulators for the basic/free phone for all of the major carriers & they become unable to stop it.

Personalized content like ringtones, wallpaper etc become free/easy just like sounds/wallpapers for your PC today. Music unencumbered by DRM is just an upload away.

Users who want music, videos, games & data on their mobile will go where they get the best value. Super users become leading edge volunteer developers. Third party applications & innovations enable leading edge distributed R&D at little cost.

See where I’m going with this?

Best apology ever

Clearly, there is no place in modern reporting for this kind of unregulated, unprotected access to readily available facts, let alone in capriciously using them to illustrate areas of concern. We apologise unreservedly, and will cooperate fully in helping Google change people’s perceptions of its role just as soon as it feels capable of communicating to us how it wishes that role to be seen. – Link

Recent items.

Amazon has ‘em: a sidebar that shows the last few books, DVDs, or CDs I looked at.

Salesforce has ‘em: a sidebar that shows the last few accounts, contacts, and opportunities I looked at.

Every web site needs a “recent items”. Every application needs a “recent items”.

My email client needs a sidebar with the 5 most recent emails I viewed. iTunes needs a sidebar with the most recent songs I played. My web browser needs a sidebar with the most recent web pages I viewed. My calendar program needs it. My IM program needs it. Et cetera et cetera et cetera.

Why? Because if you looked at something recently, there’s a good chance you want to look at it again right now!

The recent items need to be in a sidebar. Not hidden behind any menus. There should be exactly zero clicks required to get to the recent items.

Sayonara, babycakes.

Great idea. Especially for contact management software.

The impetus for this started a little while ago at Cybernet Expo.. I was lucky enough to win the top spot on Sleazydream during the traffic seminar. (Thanks Sleazy!)

Prompted by Sagi from Adult Friend Finder I started thinking about what sponsor to use. He being the good rep that he is suggested that I use AFF, and even suggested a specific approach that he thought would work best. A conversation with Sleazy on a bus in Mexico (trust me it’s slightly less odd than it sounds) sprang to mind reminding me that Sleazy promotes AFF heavily on his site. I started thinking about his traffic being already exposed to AFF vs the great conversions, and spun off into an internal debate.

As I considered it more, 2257 concerns vs effective galleries, which sponsor is best to use for the traffic, what sort of template to use, and many other questions came to mind. For some adult webmasters this would be just another gallery spot. I on the other hand don’t submit to TGPs. I primarily do organic SEO because it allows me to spend as little or as much time as I have available. It also means that I haven’t had to deal with some of these issues before.

Working for AVN has brought me a network of contacts at the top of the industry. Naturally, I thought to consult with them and get their advice, especially those who focus on TGP. Then I started thinking how useful their advice, and the results would be for everyone in the industry. I decided that I should document the process, and blog about it. I brought up the idea to a couple of people and got very positive feedback. However, like so many “good ideas” it kept slipping in my todo list.

During a conversation with Jack from ProfitLab we decided to synergize my TGP Case study and his “Impoverished Noobs” showcase project. We agreed to follow this rough outline:

* The Catch. I get the data & publishing rights. The entire process is documented every step of the way. Advisor discussions, gallery submissions, sponsor submissions, traffic stats, sales stats, screen shots – the whole shebang. Of course I’m not planning on keeping this to myself, hence the case study.

With the time and energy of the Noobs, the advice/resources of the advisors, and help from the sponsors I think this could turn out to be a very interesting project.

Some comments

“Evolution has a nearly infinite multiplier on its search power and it just happens to invest its search effort in the mathematically optimal most efficient search allocation” link

Sometimes closing your eyes gets you exactly where you want to go. Evolution is blind, in that mutations occur without design. Yet even so, evolution produces the most optimal adaptation for any given environment over time.

“Evolution is an information processing system building vast database of information and synthesizing complex measurements of that information and doing an incredibly powerful search and mining of that information database to discover and refine improvements.” link

Sounds a lot like what some of the Big Boys and others are up to, as well as some of other players.

One of the obvious models that Search can learn from Evolution is consequences.

In nature, adaptations/mutations have consequences. Constant feedback is provided by the environment using signals ranging from prosperity to death.

The adult entertainment industry has been doing this for years via Toplists, TGPs (self sorting based on productivity), and partner accounts (symbiotic relationships).

Google is on the track with the toolbar voting buttons, and others like del.icio.us are even further along.

More accurate/efficient feedback means shorter cycles/generations which means less time to optimization.

Not many people bother to give feedback unless it is automatic, or they see immediate benefit from doing so. Personalization or Customization is terrific incentive for people to give feedback.

Maybe what Search needs is to introduce Death into the equation?

Do yourself a favor. Close the door, turn on your speakers and devote seven minutes to watching this flash movie .

When I first came across this about a year ago it blew my mind. It’s a tiny bit dated, but still incredible. Go ahead, watch it now! (then read the rest of this post)

While I think some of the specifics are unlikely (or even silly) the examples of the New Media Economics and business models are brilliant. The personalized content meme is definitely out there.

Today at SEO Blackhat I saw a very interesting question tied to the Googlezon idea.

“Who is really pioneering the computer generated content, the rewording and content scraping technology of the Web?

SEO Black Hats

Search engine spam technology keeps improving, so search engines keep evolving. The best SE spammers are the ones who provide as close to EXACTLY what the search engine is looking for as possible. The best search engine is the one that finds as close to EXACTLY what the user is looking for as possible. Therefore as search engines improve, SE spammers will have to evolve as well to deliver EXACTLY what the user is looking for, transforming them from a hated nuisance to a valued resource.