Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Scobleizer believes in longer videos:

Advertisers also will pay a lot higher rates for those long-form ads.

Why?

Because someone who’ll watch a 30-minute video is HIGHLY ENGAGED. They are far more likely to become a customer than someone who just watches a two-minute entertaining video.

I think that “video” is too broad for this topic.  To consider only educational and entertainment videos, I see a huge difference.  I don’t believe that entertainment videos will become longer.   Entertainment is a sort of thing that doesn’t have to go either deep or long.  Thus it doesn’t need large chunks of time.  Educational video is a totally other story.  While there are many “howto” type of videos, many topics require more than 5 minutes to explain.  Take Google Tech Talks for example.  They are pretty popular and each one takes about an hour.

There is also this factor of production costs.  It’s much harder to create 60 minutes of high quality (and I don’t mean pixels or bytes) video material, than 10 minutes.  Or 5.  Filmmakers know that.  And the audience knows that.   While less and less filmmakers will risk it, and more and more of those who do risk it will produce crapy long videos, the audience will learn the benefit of a short video and will be more inclined into choosing shorter formats.

However, since I am not at all involved in any video production or distrubtion, I might be totally wrong on this.  Judging purely from my own experience.  And my own experience mostly comes from YouTube and Google Video.

I’ve recently enjoyed the “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” movie.  However there was one particular scene which sticks out.  It was the moment when Indiana yet again avoided his certain death, this time by hiding in the kitchen fridge.  He was supposed to die of a nuclear explosion, but the fridge saved his hat.

Impossible?  Of course.  But there was something more to this.  Something that bothered me for the last few days.  Something that I could not find the words to express.

It turns out, I am not the only one.  There was a hot discussion at IMDB forums, and at other places that have crowds of movie watchers and reviews.  And apparently, a new term was born - “nuke the fridge“.

This is also a nice example to illustrate how the world changes with the Internet.  Lots and lots of people talk about lots and lots of things.  24×7.  Non-stop.  That generates lots of ideas, sub-cultures, products, and services.  And, in tern, lots and lots of money for people who dig it.  Nice.

Over the last couple of years I’ve been working a lot with these four applications - WordPress, CakePHP, SugarCRM, and RT.  Each of these is beautiful in its own way.  Each of these tools is an Open Source Software. Each of these tools has a large community. Each of these tools has a free and commercial support and development. Each of these can be used in a number of ways to solve a whole range of problems.  Let me briefly introduce each one of them.

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Back in the 1990’s, when the Web just got popular, it seemed like every more or less large web site had to have a bunch of awards.   Awards were the first web promotion tricks that I’ve learned of.  Anyone could establish his own award.  All you needed was a little image that looked like a medal or a star.

Awards were demanded by the “big guys” who wanted to show how “special” they were.  And they were often taken advantage of by really small guys, who were making the awards, and used them to promote their own “award giving” web sites.

Then there were so many web awards that nobody cared about them anymore.  And it was quite for some time.

The new wave started with trust certifications.  Lots and lots of people on the web were followed by all sorts of scammers, spammers, crackers, hackers, and what not.  Many got worried and afraid.  So, the certification boom started.  Trust of that, protection of this, guarantee of something, warranty of something else, etc.

Surprisingly, after all these years, so many web sites still use this non-sense.  What is even more surprsing is that so many of them are prepared to pay money (and huge money in some cases) to get the award or certification.   Why?  That’s really beyond me.

Web Worker Daily is asking an interesting question:

which sites and services on the new web (defined however you like) are important enough that you’d pay for them? And how much? Or are you dedicated to always finding ways to do things online for free, no matter what the entrepreneurs might like to hear?

I try to find things that I need for free. But sometimes I don’t. Or things that I really like give me an option to pay for them. And then I do. Currently, I only pay for my Flickr account and Linux Weekly News subscription. I also donate frequently to sites and tools that I like, but that, I guess, doesn’t count.

If I had to pay for the tools I’m using today for free, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Goolge Docs, Google Analytics, Twitter, and del.icio.us would be on my list. I’d also had no problem at all paying for software: WordPress,  Firefox, Vim, Pidgin, Fedora Linux. And I would subscribe to TechCrunch, Web Worker Daily, and Slashdot. This probably sounds like a lot, but I really can’t imagine how I could keep up with the world without using all of these.

What about you?