Mint Digital

A new BloomBox-powered site is live. Get Seen Get Heard is a new talent initiative that calls out to the nation’s up-and-coming music stars to get involved for the chance of recognition on MTV.

From a design point of view, we think the quality of the gigs shines through. Logistically, we are pleased to deliver the site in 12 working days (design and build). It is testimony to the BloomBox platform that we are able to turn the project round so quickly.

(We used the BoxOver tooltips to do the rollovers on the front page. It is a great open-source tool with lots of options. Thank you, Swazz!)

I’ve just returned from Future Media.

On my panel, everyone was running social media sites. Some interesting perspectives:

Celia Taylor from Trouble Homegrown is working hard to get advertisers and musicians (including Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake and Oasis) more closely involved in the creative challenges that Homegrown promotes. Reading between the lines, it sounds like Trouble are seeing similar opportunities to the ones we are seeing with Islandoo.

Patrick Uden from Four Docs noted that it is remarkable how their community responds to constraints. When Four Docs launched, there was concern that four minutes was too short for a decent narrative. That has proved no problem. Recently Four Docs had a great response to a Mini Docs competition which invited members to create 59 sec documentaries.

Simon Gunning from Yahoo described how Yahoo Video is a giant mass of content. Advertisers are only interested in getting involved in parts that are closely monitored and editorialised (for instance The 9). He also enthused about the important of competitions - as witnessed by Kittenwar).

In other news:

• Adrian Hon said Perplexcity is being taken in a web 2.0 direction. It will be intereting to see what that means.
• In their talks, both Claire Tavernier (Fremantle) and David Fischer (MySpace) mentioned Islandoo as an example of exciting developments online.

Islandoo has been getting great press.

Paul Kelbie in the Independent says Islandoo is
‘an internet phenomenon to rival the social networking site MySpace’.

Emiko Terazono in the Financial Times says Islandoo ‘has developed into a full-blown social networking site’. The article contains an interesting quote from David Alberts, chairman of ad agency Grey London:

‘What you’ve got is 18,000 people who are desperate to promote themselves, impress people and be outgoing. What we’re thinking about is actually using the site to encourage the entrants to make their own Nokia ad or their own Clover ad.’

Update 27 October

TechcrunchUK says of the Nokia ad idea:

“this sounds either like a sick joke from yet another marketing person who knows nothing, or a very clever idea, I haven’t quite decided yet.”

I think there’s at least a chance it’s the latter.

Also, a nice, perceptive comment from Will McInnes’ blog:

“Islandoo proves that the development of crazy cool new online communities is just starting, and that it’s totally do-able for the right client, the right project, the right niche. YouTube and MySpace and Bebo and SecondLife aren’t the peak of this web2 interjoinedness. They represent the start. Islandoo is brilliantly executed… A huge well done to the Mint Digital team for this achievement - fantastic.”

We are looking for a super talented designer. Someone who doesn’t just make things look nice, but who also thinks deeply and cleverly about user interaction. If you know someone who fits that bill, please point them to this job description.

The lucky candidate will be working on Islandoo and a couple of exciting BloomBox projects in the pipeline. In my biased opinion, it would be hard to find a more exciting, interesting and challenging job if you are a designer with a passion for the opportunities of the social web.

It has been great to see the favourable reaction to the Islandoo launch. For one thing, it makes it much easier to explain what we are trying to do with BloomBox. Here’s some posts: Mashable, The Stage and, my personal favourite, the Selsius Real Estate Blog (MP3 version) drawing lessons from Islandoo for the real estate industry.

It is famously difficult to predict how a community will interact with a piece of software. What has astounded us is how friendly Islandoo is. As I write, our newest islander (our 9744th) is a girl named melodyblue. She joined Islandoo 12 minutes ago. She already has 12 comments and 9 fans.

Our recent research suggests MySpace is like a pub where most people chat to their existing friends, boys ogle girls and occasionally you bump into someone new at the bar. By comparison, Islandoo is the world’s friendliest party. As soon as you open the door, dozens of people want to say ‘hi’ and start a conversation. It is great buzz (and, anecdotally, a great way to meet people).

The flip side of this is “fan spam”. Islanders have quickly realised that a good strategy is to fan as many other islanders as possible - there is a good chance you’ll get fanned back, increasing your prominence. We are currently working on a couple of solutions that should reduce the noise of fan spam, but still maintain the community’s friendliness. Interesting new features coming soon. Watch this space:

Last Tuesday evening, a slip of the keyboard accidentally sent 500
emails that soft-launched Islandoo, the first BloomBox-powered website.

Islandoo lets you apply for Channel 4’s hit reality show Shipwrecked. Shipwrecked gets tens of thousands of applications. Islandoo uses Web 2.0 techiques to let the fans filter the best candidates to the top.

A couple of BloomBox features we are particularly pround of:

1. The user can upload photo or video in pretty much any format. If a photo is uploaded, it is centred, resized and converted to jpeg. Video can be uploaded in over 160 formats. It is resized and converted to Flash. The user can then choose between 6 frame grabs to use as the thumbnail image.

2. The profile page makes extensive use of Ajax techniques to improve the user experience. Comments and fans can be added without the need for a page refresh. We’ve been amazed by how much the inhabitants of Islandoo communicate with each other and how friendly they are. The slickness of the Ajax interface must take much of the credit for this.

Here’s what users say:

“This site it more addictive than crack!” Burnsybaby

“I’m literally just doing this and making a cup of tea roughly every 45 minutes… MySpace has already got me by the balls, and now this!” Gabsy

In the internet spirit of ‘release early, release often’, there are parts of Islandoo that aren’t to our satisfaction. However in a week we’ve learnt a huge amount about how users interact, and we are working hard on incorporating that thinking into future versions.

One thing we are struggling with is how to make ‘popularity’ as good as possible a measure of who should be on Shipwrecked. If you’ve got any ideas, we’d love to hear: andy@mintdigital.com.

Our latest session interviewing MySpace teens turned up a bit of a different pattern of MySpace usage. Check out the contrast with a previous, perhaps slightly male-dominated session here.

Main use of MySpace
The girls we interviewed this week said they spent around 70% of their time on MySpace looking at the profiles of and communicating with people they know well. They communicate through private messages, public comments and a bit through their blogs.

Minor uses
They spend about 20% of the time finding new bands and listening to music. The remaining ten percent or so is divided between surfing profiles of those they don’t know at all and keeping in touch with those they know vaguely offline.

No time spent on profile, then?
They put absolutely minimal effort into their profiles. So they either have a profile with basically no information and no design, or have a more complex one that they did put some time into originally but now don’t bother to modify. Despite (because of?) being good-looking in person they have only jokey, appearance-obscured photos on MySpace.

Jokey eh?
In fact irony and in-jokes play a huge role for much of the time they are on the site. Sarah described what they do on MySpace as “just joking, just messing around. The comments we leave are pointless, really”. Katie echoed this, “It’s just a big joke. We use it out of boredom”.

So why not just use email or SMS?
MySpace is seen as being more convenient for communication. Also, particularly leaving a friend a public comment is seen as more enjoyable than, for example, an SMS text. One of the group, though, still uses email as much as MySpace for communicating with friends.

What’s the most important thing on a profile?
The song… although that can be a joke too.

Attitude towards MySpace?
“If everyone keeps themselves to themselves then its great” said Sarah, “I am wary, but that goes with everything on the internet”. This group didn’t feel guilty about spending time on MySpace. The feeling was that although from one perspective using MySpace could be thought of as a waste of time, at root it is good fun.

Will you still use MySpace when you are 30?
“Probably. It’s a fantastic way of having a laugh… plus I’ll use it for music”.

MySpace friends? Meeting people through MySpace?
They would never communicate (now) with people they haven’t met. All get a steady stream of friend requests from strangers, but either delete them without looking at them or leave them unopened. “In the early days” (i.e. 8 months ago), one girl met someone who has now become a collaborator in music and good friend offline, but that could never happen now.

Other social-networking sites?
Bebo had never been used by any of them. Faceparty and hi5 had been used for a little while but no longer: “MySpace is where my friends are”.

Mint is planning a world tour of Munich and London. We’ll be talking about:

• our research into how teens use MySpace
• ideas of how media firms can harness UGC to generate hits
• case studies of BloomBox in action

And much more.

Catch us live at:

Media in Transition
Media Content Management
Andy Bell
7th September - Munich (20% off with partner code: UGTV06)

London Media Summit
Topic TBC
Andy Bell
27th October - London

Digital Hollywood
Web 2.0 - Blogs, User Generated Media, Mashups, Social Media as Agents of Change
Tim Morgan
1st December - London

TV Outlook 2007
User Generated Content - A real cash cow?
Andy Bell
1st December - Munich

More dates coming soon!

“So, the thing you do most on MySpace is check out profiles of people you don’t know. Do you ever communicate with any of these people?”
“Never!”

Notes from a recent session interviewing teens about MySpace.

Breakdown of time spent on MySpace
(figures are percentages, names are changed)

[However all said they spent a lot of time setting up profile initially]

Attitude towards MySpace?
People are slightly embarrassed/ guilty about spending time on MySpace. A few hours spent on MySpace is seen as wasted time. Someone might sarcastically joke when going home from pub, “I am going on MySpace now”, because its kind of a sad thing to do. Charlie feels he has kudos from having deleted his MySpace account.

Meet new people through MySpace?
Very rare. Only Charlie met someone for real having first met them on MySpace, and that was something to do with music. Fred spends time communicating with MySpace-only friends, but could never imagine meeting them in the flesh.

Develop peripheral friendships through MySpace?
This seems to be a way MySpace changes peoples’ offline lives. It’s possible to develop a friendship with someone you met briefly at a pub/club. Phoning would be too much. But you might become friends with them through communicating on MySpace.

How do users surf?
Often/usually they spend time looking through friends’ networks of friends and then those peoples’ friends, with no interaction. Usually limit it to people in the same geographic area. So if they reach a profile of someone who lives far away, they will retrace their steps to return to profiles of local people. Mostly surfing seems to be about checking out how good-looking people are.

What’s the most important thing on someone’s profile?
Definitely the photo.

Useful tools?
You can save as ‘favorites’ profiles you like to look at (without the people who own those profiles being informed). Fred didn’t know this but was very excited on hearing about this tool. Also, they thought being able to see number of times a profile has been viewed would be a good feature.

How realistic are profiles?
Users very selective about photos they use. People always significantly less good-looking in real life than on profile.

MySpace also used for?
Charlie said the one thing he will miss is not being able to keep track of club nights and bands on MySpace. Lucy used MySpace a lot to check out clubs and pubs; what’s on, opening hours, entry price.

Attitudes towards businesses using MySpace for marketing?
Not worried about it at all. No feeling of intrusion. Users often hear about things being marketed through ‘bulletin’ on MySpace homepage (e.g. X-men), but easy to ignore.

Use MySpace in 10 years time?
Charlie said “I don’t have time to have a life and be on MySpace”. They indicated they only used it because they had a lot of time on their hands. None could imagine spending much time on a social networking site when they are 30.

Other social networks?
Basically they just use MySpace. Charlie and Fred thought Bebo maybe for younger people. Lucy hadn’t heard of Bebo.

Emails enticing you to join social networking sites…
Considered really annoying. Charlie said if he received such an email he will delete it straight away and make a point of not joining the site concerned and advised us, ‘Stay away from emailing people’.

Promotion of social networking sites in other ways?
They were of the opinion that either a site would work organically, or not at all. Advertisements for a site would make no difference.

Use of MySpace forums and chat-rooms?
None of 3 used these.

On 19th July, 100 or so interested parties from broadcasters, TV production companies, web firms, newspapers and advertising agencies travelled to UGTV ‘06 from as far as Germany and Spain to meet, chat, eat, drink and discuss. Some highlights from the speeches:

Gavin Newman, Deputy Head of Interactive, Trouble TV

Gavin talked about Trouble Homegrown.

Trouble Homegrown is a website that gathers and makes available for view user-generated video clips. It is part of Trouble TV which is a British satellite/cable channel aimed at 15/24 year olds.

Trouble is one of four channels owned by Flextech, which is itself owned by Telewest.

Gavin was charged with making Trouble first-to-market in the UGTV field.

The thinking behind the website was to give viewers/users as broad a brief as possible and see what kind of video they came up with.

So far footage uploaded to the Trouble Homegrown website has been used in continuity slots on the TV channel, but soon there will be a half-hour programme every week showcasing the best of the submitted clips.

Also the website is being used to select contestants for “Bump & Grind”, a talent show on Trouble TV.

He said making the website “was not easy”. It could not just be bought off-the-shelf […at that time, he hinted that if he was starting the project now he would use BloomBox - Ed] and so had to be made bespoke.

Another point he made was that the technical quality of clips has not been much of a problem - the clips on TV “look great”. In fact, that they are a little low-fi and not glossy works well.

All uploaded video is screened - in fact watched all the way through twice - by outsourced moderators Tempero - before being put up on the website.

At present there are 5000 clips on the site with another 200 being added every day.

Matthew Kershaw, Head of Interactive, MTV Networks UK & Ireland

Matthew Kershaw (standing in for Angel Gambino) said MTV, with its upcoming major user-generated initiative, is basically 3 months behind Trouble TV.

MTV aims at the same demographic as Trouble and so he was heartened by the apparent success of Trouble Homegrown.

MTV has been a pioneer of viewer-interactivity, via texting and message boards (for example, one show has a presenter who reads out a lot of message board content).

Up to now MTV has had websites about channels (and it also has MTV Overdrive, a website which is a channel) but having a channel about a website is completely new.

He reckons the key is to be a facilitator - a crucial part of the success of MySpace is that it hasn’t tried to dictate what its users do.

Also, Matthew related hearing a 14-year-old talk about how a video-game triumph seemed meaningless because there was no one watching him do it. “Kids don’t want to do anything without being watched”.

He talked about how we are now seeing a ‘long-tail for celebrities’ or ‘niche celebrities’. There has been a proliferation in the number of celebrities in the last five years and perhaps user-generated content can be expected to accelerate this trend.

Nevertheless though its great to be famous in an underground community, people would much prefer to be famous on TV. That’s still seen as real fame. In the same way even though the Arctic Monkeys had a high profile on MySpace, they still wanted a mainstream record deal. Getting your footage onto a channel is like getting into the VIP room of a club.

Matthew talked about the legal problem he sees UGTV as having. He said ripped-off content is not such a big deal for websites, which can just take the offending clip down when notified, but it is a big deal for broadcasters. Once such a clip has been shown on a TV channel, the rights’ holders will be owed possibly a lot of money. Equally, he said the RIAA is “on the warpath” right now about publishing rights violations in all the user-generated videos that involve lip-synching.

He said UGTV is not just a fad. He brought up the example of talk radio, which has stayed with us despite all the competing forms of media. He said ultimately being able to create your own content taps into a fundamental human need, the need to communicate.

Tim Morgan, Commercial Director, Mint Digital

Mint’s very own Tim Morgan explained how producers and advertisers can easily solve the technical side of any project involving user-generated footage by using BloomBox. I’ll limit what I write about this speech for fear of casting doubt on the objectivity of this blog, but suffice it to say that it was pithy, uproariously funny and extraordinarily well-received.

***

A big thanks to Dug Falby from Donkey on the Edge. The three smaller photos are taken from his UGTV ‘06 Flickr photoset.

We’ve been bowled over by the enthusiasm for UGTV ‘06
and have filled the venue. (There’s a waiting list in case people drop out, email events@mintdigital.com if you would like to be added.)

Confirmed attendees include executives from: Ogilvy, Mindshare, Wieden + Kennedy, Grey London, Tequila\, TMW, Emap, SonyBMG, BBC, Channel 4, ITV, The Guardian, Variety Magazine, RDF Media, ThamesTalkback, Endemol and Monkey Productions.

“We should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.”

David Foster Wallace isn’t writing about user-generated content but I really think he could be. By uploading or watching you can’t avoid making connections with other people. You are no longer an atomised soul detached from the rest of the community being anonymously piped entertainment by giant corporations. Engage and the world becomes a warmer place.

In the last few months, there have been lots of interesting developments in the world of user-generated TV. We thought it would be good to get all the chief protagonists in one place (to save some of their spouses from endless over-excited work chat, if nothing else).

And so UGTV ‘06 was born.

We’ve got a top-notch panel of speakers. The audience will include representatives from all the major terrestrial channels, a fair selection of niche channels, some of the most exciting firms in new media and a bunch of faces from the world of advertising. We’ve found a suitably futuristic venue (The Visionarium). We’ve got lovely nibbles from Maison Blanc and jugs of Pimm’s to quench your thirst.

Space is a little limited, but if you’d like to come drop us a line at events@mintdigital.com.

Robbie Stamp of Stamp Bros had been closely involved in the Hitchhikers Guide across many platforms. He said:

Focus on one media and make your idea as good as possible on that media. Then think about rolling it out.

That’s exactly the opposite of what we are doing with Buried Alive and BloomBox. We think (hope?) that his advice doesn’t hold for ideas that are intrinsically multi-platform.

John Booth of Sony Entertainment said their research showed that three things consumers don’t want (on playstations or PSPs) are:

• linear media
• technology for technology’s sake
• editorial control from above

That’s more like it. That fits with the BloomBox vision.

Mark Rogers of Market Sentinel said Rupert Murdoch’s great skill as a business man is seeing the choke point. In the satellite era, his key purchase was NDS and their encryption technology. Mark asked who will dominate the new media landscape. His answer: aggregators. What was Rupert Murdoch’s first significant purchase in the internet era? MySpace.

Hallelujah! BloomBox is a tool for creating aggregators.

David Putnam’s keynote was an excellent introduction to the changing media landscape. He really gets the excitement of the internet. I thought this was interesting:

Five years ago a functioning TV studio would have cost £800,000. Now it costs approximately a quarter of that. A camcorder you can buy from Dixons today is higher resolution than anything the BBC owned in 2000.

Like many people Adam Gee from Channel 4 is not a big fan of the phrase ‘user-generated’. He loves the idea behind it though. When he made a list of 8 projects he was excited by, he realised all of them had a user-generated element. Ones he mentioned include:

• 1-2-1: co-authored international blogs
• Germ: UK’s first competition for viral digital content (got good press)
• Lost generation: people can add media of all sorts
• 4Docs: high-end user-generated content
• 4Laughs (forthcoming): talent discovery in comedy

I was hugely impressed by Steve Cullen and the guys from someth;ng. For the festival they had created a system that allows a user to bookmark a moment in time and space via a RFID tag. It matches you with people who have gone to similar events at similar times. It’s fun, it’s cool and it might even be useful. What is more, they had built the system from scratch in 6 weeks. Great work, lads.

Over the last month a whole raft of user-generated TV initiatives have been announced. For example:

• Flextech have launched Trouble Homegrown.
• MTV have announced they’ll be launching an ‘audience-controlled channel brand’.
• Both BBC and Channel 4 announced user-generated comedy sites.

At an industry event I met a man who claimed: “Porn used to be the highest margin content in the world. User-generated content is higher.”

If this is true, it’s clear why broadcasters want to get involved… but what will distinguish the winners from the losers?

Time will tell, but here are some thoughts.

1. Make the question interesting
What motivates a user to create and upload content? There is the YouTube approach - create a giant area for all types of content.

There is also a more niche approach - combine user-generated content (UGC) with a TV show that focuses the desire for users to contribute. We believe this is a rich seam. We’ve been talking to TV producers and broadcasters as we launch BloomBox and it seems the possibilities are almost endless. UGC could well be the next wave of reality TV.

(This iMedia Connection article demonstrates five contrasting approaches to framing the question for user-generated advertising.)

2. Ease of use
Vimeo set the standard for uploading and previewing clips. YouTube gets our vote for community features, helping the user get widespread viewership of his clip. I’m yet to see a broadcaster’s UGC initiative that can match these.

3. Network effects - success breeds success
Lots of bytes have been spilt trying to explain MySpace’s success (here’s a good article). I’d wager that networks effects are the most important. Content creators want an audience. Popular sites become more popular. (To demonstrate, MySpace isn’t the social networking leader everywhere. It is trounced by Orkut in Brazil and Bebo in Ireland).

This post wasn’t supposed to be an advert but the first two factors show where BloomBox excels. BloomBox removes the technical hassle from user-generated content, freeing producers to make the question interesting. It’s ease of use, as we will be able to reveal soon, is excellent.

Get these two right and the compounding reward of network effects will kick in. You’ll be as rich as a porn king.

Extra reading: Cracking NY Times article on some of the dangers of user-generated advertising.

One of our greatest cheerleaders but also greatest critics here at Mint is one Paul Fisher. Paul has moaned about our website forever and we seemed destined never to please this discerning web connoisseur (Fisher is to websites what Michael Winner is to restaurants). Until now that is!

Paul loves the new Mint site, he is going to spend the whole weekend looking at it on his widescreen laptop.

Our next challenge: to try to get Paul enthusiastic about going to the theatre (something else he traditionally doesn’t like).

I’ll be speaking at b.TWEEN06 in Bradford on 26th May on the subject of ‘Opportunities for new media producers in the TV world’. That should be a short talk. Joke. Honest, that was a joke. There are lots of opportunities. Well, maybe ‘lots’ is a bit strong but there are some. Anyway… come along, it will be brilliant!

Mint’s site for Nudo was featured on the respected Signals vs Noise blog. These dudes are like the daddies of web design, so we were very happy to get the mention.

We’ve just got back from MipTV in Cannes where Mint won its category in the Content 360 competition. It was a hugely exciting week - we spoke to lots of people who were enthused by our entry Buried Alive and who had interesting ideas for how to extend the concept.

Gary Hayes from the Laboratory of Advanced Media Production, Sydney said Buried Alive was the “best project from all the pitch sessions as it really combined user generated, community, rich media and potentially mobile”. Shockingly he also claimed Mint Digital was a “nice company” (read more).

Other highlights of the week include:
1. Getting a mention on the back page of Broadcast for a ‘kerfuffle’ involving 3 confiscated passes.

2. Tim’s over-excited acceptance speech. He called David Frank, Mint’s chairman, ‘the greatest man in television’.

3. A glowing write-up from Il Manifesto (login requred, surely not a problem for our predominantly Italian communist readership).

The MipTV site has a full list of winners.