We have been using wikis in our business as well as promoting the collaboration tool to our clients. The Dallas Mavericks are experimenting with a public wiki for use by fans. The Dallas Observer talked to Mark Cuban about the wiki,
But, then, that is the point. Team owner Mark Cuban tells Unfair Park that MavsWiki is intended “a way for fans to have more fun and connect closer to the Mavs” by posting their fond memories of games way past and recently present. Mavs staffers (meaning, interns) will augment the site with old game stories from the Associated Press and other media outlets. Cuban also says, “I think it’s a first of any kind”; certainly, no other pro sports team has a similar site…at the moment.
Check it out here: Mavswiki.com. The cost of deployment is very low compared with traditional fan sites, and it gives your brand a great opportunity to let your fans generate content. It will be interesting to see if dedicated wikis (versus public wikis like Wikipedia) take off. What do you think?
Posted by amuse | January 16, 2007 - 1:20pm | No Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: markcuban, mavswiki, Social Media, socialtools, unfairpark, wiki, wikipedia
For more than a year Big in Japan has been building and hosting social tools for various brands. Initially we assumed that large corporate clients would want to ‘house’ our tools in their own state-of-the-art data centers, but soon we realized that the opposite was the case. 100% of our clients require that we provide our tools as managed services, instead of simply delivering them executable code. We realized that as our client base grew our data center needs would grow as well and as a result we acquired an operational data center from McLeod in late 2006.
Our managed environments include:
- multi-homed IP transit (internet access)
- UPS and generator protected AC and DC power
- Cisco PIX & IronPort security systems
- HP Dual Xeon servers (occasionally Dell servers)
- Managed DNS (multi-site and geographic diversity)
Don’t call us for hosting, but if you need social tools built and managed we can provide a turnkey solution ~ no need to call a third-party hosting company. That said, if your brand is the next Second Life we have great partners such as NeoSpire who can handle huge, million+ user virtual worlds.
Posted by amuse | January 5, 2007 - 2:52pm | No Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: biggu, biginjapan, hosting, neospire, Social Media, socialtools
YouTube announced that Warner Music Group will distribute and license its copyrighted songs and other materials through the companies system. The deal is fairly simple, YouTube will share ad revenue with Warner. The neat part for YouTube’s users is that Warner is going to extend the license to the users for use Warner’s songs in their homemade videos. Very smart!
This deal is very big. Warner, including labels such as Atlantic, Asylum, Elektra and Rhino, is the third largest recording company with revenues greater than $3.5 billion. It is big for Warner, big for YouTube and most of all big for all those kids making videos lacking background music…
Posted by amuse | September 18, 2006 - 8:18am | No Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: Social Media, socialtools, youtube
The Big in Japan team is working with Rupert Murdoch’s FX Networks (owned by News Corporation) to build a customized version of Fancast based on the highly popular PodServe podcast system. Update: For clarification, FX Network is a client of Big in Japan. The system combines a highly scableable ruby on rails application with a VoIP based phone system capable of handling more than 30,000 telephone connections.
This summer we began working with the producers of Nip/Tuck, the Golden Globe winning drama, on their community interaction efforts. The program is cables’ top-rated series with adults 18-49 with more than 2.6 million viewers. The first program consists of two fan generated podcasts. The first is titled the Nip/Tuck Fan Question Podcast. Where viewers can interview each member of the cast or crew. Each week five of the best questions are answered by the appropriate cast or crew member and then the content is posted to the system. The second is titled the Nip/Tuck Fan Comments Podcast. Each week the IVR system will prompt viewers to comment on various topics about the show.
The system consists of a white label version of PodServe using multiple load balanced DELL Poweredge servers to consume and organize recordings generated from Podcall using one or more Dell Poweredge servers running in series to generate dialtone, outbound calls, covert .wav and compress into .mp3 ready for iTunes. The tightly integrated system is known as the Fancast system. The servers are located in our state-of-the-art data center and network operations center. During programming our technicians watch the program on one screen, server and call statistics on another and errors on a thrid. Starting this week FX will begin to promote the launch of the system using television advertising.
Will it work? According to Arbitron/Edison Media Research more than 27 million Americans have listened to a podcast, half of whom are under 35 years old. Using the Fancast system, Nip/Tuck’s producers can empower their own community of 2.6 million viewers to deliver content via iTunes to more than 30 million iPod listeners. Converting just 2% of those iTunes users might deilver 600,000 viewers to the program. Additionally, FX has the option of inserting advertising into the consumer generated content as they moderate and process it allowing for additional marketing channels for their advertisers.
The Fancast system, launched in June 2006 and presented that same month at Under the Radar, combines PodServe and Podcall into a single platform allows users to easily create recordings for inclusion within hosted podcasts. Podcall is a multiprotocol PBX on Linux that provides all of the features you would expect from a high-end PBX and more. Podcall supports voice over IP in many protocols, and interoperates with all standards-based telephone equipment. Podcall can serve as a gateway to PodServe for inbound, outbound telephone lins (POTs or IAX) as well as conference bridges. Features include: Automated Attendant, Blacklists, Call Detail Records, Call Forward on Busy, Call Forward on No Answer, Call Forward Variable, Call Monitoring, Call Recording, Call Retrieval, Conference Bridging, Fax Transmit and Receive, Interactive Voice Response, Predictive Dialer, Route by Caller ID, SMS Messaging, Spell / Say, Talk Detection, Text-to-Speech, Graphical Call Manager, Outbound Call Spooling, and TCP/IP Management Interface.
Posted by amuse | September 16, 2006 - 1:36am | No Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: biggu, dell, Podcast, Social Media, socialtools
The founders of the wikipedia claim that most of the work is done by a small group of 500 contributors. This afternoon I ran across an interesting post concerning, “Who writes wikipedia.“ Aaron explains,
When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.
And when you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.
On the other hand, everyone has a bunch of obscure things that, for one reason or another, they’ve come to know well. So they share them, clicking the edit link and adding a paragraph or two to Wikipedia. At the same time, a small number of people have become particularly involved in Wikipedia itself, learning its policies and special syntax, and spending their time tweaking the contributions of everybody else.
Other encyclopedias work similarly, just on a much smaller scale: a large group of people write articles on topics they know well, while a small staff formats them into a single work. This second group is clearly very important — it’s thanks to them encyclopedias have a consistent look and tone — but it’s a severe exaggeration to say that they wrote the encyclopedia. One imagines the people running Britannica worry more about their contributors than their formatters.
This explaination makes the most sense to me. How could 500 people know everything? It makes much more sense that tens if not hundreds of thousands of people have something to contribute and an elite group of 500 do most of the formatting. Nice work. . .
Posted by amuse | September 4, 2006 - 4:27pm | No Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: Social Media, socialtools, wikipedia
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