My latest OnlineMediaDaily newsletter pointed me to a Catherine Holahan article at businessweek.com about the seeming downward slide of user-generated (read “amateur”) video on the Web. Amazing, considering we really just got started consuming user-generated video in 2005 when YouTube launched. Can it really be a flash in the pan?

A highlight:

Over 57% of U.S. Internet users say they have watched or downloaded online videos, according to a July study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. But they’re not flocking to home videos. According to the study, viewers are most interested in news videos, followed by comedy bits and television shows. Research by Burst Media, an Internet ad network that studies the video market, echoed the findings, ranking news clips, movie trailers, comedy sketches, music videos, and TV shows as the top categories. The category that includes clips produced by users placed ninth out of 11.

I’m not surprised by that ranking, are you? But it’s not about from where, or by whom, the video is generated. This is about quality of content. And in that sense, sure, professionals have the upper hand. More years in the game, bigger production budgets, more contributors with proven chops as writers, editors, and directors. That’s not the point. The point is that user-generated content can be powerful, and can have a hell of a lot more impact than we currently expect from it.

I get that with the birth of user-generated content, the Web was flooded with, as Holahan put it, “skateboarding dogs and beer-drenched parties.” That crap will die down eventually, and good content will both rise up and find niche homes online. I leave the term “good content” vague purposely. I mean the really funny, the really unusual, the very passionate, the very dramatic, the most relevant.

In the past two weeks I’ve talked with folks about using user-generated video to help promote a park by letting visitors post video of their reactions and comments online. I’ve talked with folks who want to build a virtual museum from user-submitted interviews and stories. And I recently posted about Amazon allowing customers to submit video product reviews. All three are great applications of user-generated video. But in all three cases it still comes down to quality of content. People mooning the camera at the park, uninspired museum interviews, and lame product reviews would each render the respective intents worthless. BUT enthusiastic raves about the park, passionate storytelling, and insightful product reviews would each have greater impact than any professionally produced marketing piece could ever hope for.

Don’t write off user-generated video—just help it find its purpose.

In 2000, someone at a party told me that very soon books would be obsolete. The Rocket eBook had been around for less than a year, billed itself as the “first usable, mass-marketed electronic book,” and could hold a whopping 10 novels. Other competitors were also generating a lot of press—these included the Gemstar, the Everybook, the SoftBook, and the confidently named Librius Millenium Reader (I can’t help hearing here the theme to Conan O’Brien’s “In the Year 2000″ skits). The “death-of-the-book” meme—as old as the computer—had once again been revived.

Today we know that reports of the death of books had—yet again—been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the e-book bubble quickly burst, and the digital text utopia did not arrive. People were buying neither e-books nor e-book readers. While the analog book had been evolved to gratify human sensibilities over millenia, e-book readers still had significant problems to overcome in the area of user interface. A 1999 article in the New York Times on whether such devices meant “the end of the story for books” offered some good reasons for skepticism—or at least cautious optimism:

Robert Darnton, a professor of history at Princeton University who has championed electronic publishing for scholarly dissertations, said, ”I think it’s only a matter of time before we can have mechanical devices that will make possible a satisfactory but new experience of reading.”

But he conceded: ”One thing that seems to be missing is paper, the feel of a book when you hold it, its grain, its texture, its elasticity, its whiteness. The sensation of paper is bound up in the experience of reading. We have a long-term kinetic memory of paper. How will we substitute a new medium for it or improve on it?”

Designers of e-book readers were well aware of the need for them to be book-like. The Rocket eBook was the size of a paperback. Other devices were weighted to the heft of an actual book. One device, by Everybook, tried to get closer to the feel of traditional books by using facing LCD screens. But these were not innovations that readers wanted to curl up with. The problem seemed to be the screen itself.

User reticence about digital reading was already a well-known fact. Electronic texts weren’t themselves new: The Gutenberg Project had been digitizing texts since 1971. Yet computer-based reading hadn’t taken off, even on the Palm Pilot, which had been around since 1996. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen was prescient at least in part:

“It’s a pure matter of technology: The screen resolution is too bad. We know from human-factor studies that reading speed is 25 percent lower on the screen than on the printed page.”

Nielsen thought that 300-dpi screens might solve the problem by providing the same clarity as that of print.

But as resolution improved, it became clear that it wasn’t the only problem. The fact that electronic screens are back-lit makes it both un-book-like and unpleasant for long-term reading. What was required was “digital ink” on a screen (or even paper-like medium) that reflected light in the same way as a real book. Xerox and MIT had been diligently working on this problem while the first wave of e-book reader hype came and went.

Eight years later, the fruits of work on “digital ink” (and “electronic paper”) are only just making themselves known. Today we have the iLiad (2006), the Sony Reader (2007), the soon-to-be iRiver eBook Reader, and the just-released Amazon Kindle.

With the Kindle, Amazon has one-upped other available readers by offering a wireless connection (via Sprint’s EV-DO network) that allows access to Web content and does away with the problem of synchronization to a computer. Unfortunately, the device costs $399, books at least $10 apiece, newspapers $15 a month, and blog subscriptions $2 a month. A $399 price point for the device is a problem, and history has not been kind to paid subscription models when it comes to Web content. And as Jay points out, we can’t yet be confident that we can get the books we want in electronic format. Further, PDFs will need to be converted to the Kindle’s proprietary format to be read on the device. So despite digital ink and wireless access, there are still some significant barriers to entry for users interested in e-books.

But beyond cost, content, and format, there is still the question of user interface. Do we yet have a device that gives readers enough of the full experience of reading a regular book to be a real breakthrough (as Robert Darnton puts it, “the feel of a book when you hold it, its grain, its texture, its elasticity, its whiteness”)? Perhaps we’ll need something that is much more book-like in look and feel—including multiple (digitally inked) pages that bend—before reading on an electronic device doesn’t seem, at a primal level, sterile and less gratifying than the real thing.

My MarketingSherpa e-newsletter landed the other day. Students of email marketing (and video producers) may want to check out their lead story about how adding video to an email marketing campaign scored a larger conversion rate. Let’s face it, folks L-O-V-E video on the Internet. But in this case I don’t quite get why it worked.

The case study is about a florist that regularly uses email marketing. In addition to offering the usual photos of flowers, this time around they did two things relating to video. First, they bought 15 seconds of stock video of tulips, and they provided a link to that footage in the body of the email. Second, they included the word “video” in the email subject line. Aside from mentioning video in the subject, they also used some good copy to call folks to action in the email headline. OK, launch email.

Conversions—which in Web analytics speak means sales coming from that email campaign—jumped from the usual 1.35% to 2.8%. Nice, particularly since they learned that using “video” in the subject line seemed to dissuade folks from opening the email. Usually 16.5% of recipients open the email, but this time only 14% did. Perhaps they were afraid they might open a large embedded video file or even a virus. So that leaves us with fewer folks opening the email, but more actually buying. Thank you, stock tulip footage!

And now I’m back to why I don’t get it. To sum up, we just learned that 1) users are willing to make the extra click to see tulip video, and 2) are swayed by a video of tulips more so than by a single attractive photo of tulips. They’re flowers, people, they don’t move!

Oh, the sweet promise of Internet video.

Amazon recently announced that, for the holiday season, they are going to serve up videos to accompany the listings of 450 top toys. So what qualifies a toy for the top? Sales, reviews, or maybe payola from the manufacturer. Speaking of manufacturers, according the Publish World Update, an e-newsletter from Publish.com, where I read the news:

“It’s unclear whether the videos were produced by Amazon or the manufacturers of the products—although the guess is that it’s the manufacturers, to start. But the power of this video effort from Amazon will depend on the content as well as the continuing volume. Will these videos mostly be commercials, demos or candid reviews? Based on the initial few videos on the site—and not all links worked—they’re commercials, and not especially informative ones at that.”

Here’s what I found…commercial indeed.

Amazon, what are you thinking? You guys were one of the first big guns to offer customer reviews, and that social networking aspect of your super store is a big hit with me. Based on how many reviews I see when I visit, it’s big with others, too. Why not stick to that approach?

Rather than slap up commercials, how about letting visitors submit video reviews? You do? Oh.

So, I’m writing this post and I scroll WAY down the Spidey page to see if they offer written reviews to counter the commercial. Damn if I don’t see:

New feature! Amazon now allows customers to upload product video reviews. Use a webcam or video camera to record and upload reviews to Amazon.

OK, then that’s cool. Now all we’re talking about is real estate. So the Spidey commercial gets sweet placement on the page, but at least savvy Amazoners know to scroll WAY down, where they’ll find video reviews. Nice. Sing it, Spidey!

I love how Amazon artfully walks the line to appease manufacturers and consumers alike. They may be offering support for certain “top toys” via manufacturer-produced commercials, but they’re continuing to elevate the way in which consumers can voice their opinions. Manufacturers just better hope their “top toy” is indeed top in the eyes of the consumer, because glossy commercials just don’t win the game these days.

Asus recently began selling a $399 Linux Laptop, the EeePC (on sale here), with a $299 version to be launched soon. That’s a very low price for a 2 lb., 7″ display machine—usually ultra-portables belong to a high-end and expensive category. The Toshiba Portege R500, for example, retails for $2000 or more.

The EeePC is getting great reviews and apparently has been selling one every two seconds in Taiwan. It isn’t the only affordable Linux machine making mainstream inroads—Dell has been selling Linux Unbuntu systems, and Everex just started selling a sub-$200 Unbuntu machine at Wal-Mart. But the EeePC is the first cheap ultra-portable to be marketed to a new niche—not business travelers with money to spend, but average computer users who want an affordable way to take the Internet with them. (The only affordable laptops with a similar form-factor, and perhaps Asus’ inspiration, are those in production for the One Laptop per Child project).

Asus is achieving success in a traditionally perilous niche. UMPCs, for instance, failed to catch on: they were too expensive. And while devices like the Pepperpad are less expensive, they are not cheap enough to capture the market. Tapping this niche isn’t just about creating the right Internet device; it’s also about breaking a certain price barrier. Asus is breaking that barrier both by offering Linux instead of Windows and by eliminating a regular hard drive in favor of 4GB of Flash storage.

Flash storage certainly helps reduce price, but why so few gigabytes? The idea is that customers are doing more of their work and storing more of their data online. With this fact in mind, the EeePC includes links to Google Docs and other online applications (although it also includes the free Microsoft Office-compatible OpenOffice.org suite). Here’s a user review that I think captures the essence of the need that the EeePC satisfies: “Good form factor. Basic apps are all I need. Browser very fast. Boot in a little less than 15 seconds.”

There are a few industry lessons here. The first is that hardware devices are becoming commoditized because of the predominance of Web applications. More and more, such devices are not the endpoint for users, but merely (preferably lightweight and fast) tools to reach the place they really want to be—online.

Here’s the take of Tom Krazit of Cnet:

“End users desire the ability to take the full Internet with them, the experience they have on their PC, in a nomadic or mobile fashion,” said Gary Willihnganz, director of marketing in Intel’s mobile group. That’s language straight from the playbooks of Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt, both of whom this year have emphasized their commitment to delivering a PC-like Internet experience on a handheld device.

Tim O’Reilly also puts it well:

We are starting to see the real blurring of handhelds, cell phones, cameras, and other consumer devices. Everything is becoming connected, and computing truly is becoming pervasive…. As people get seamlessly connected, wherever they are, devices become less important, even throwaway, and the continuity of the user’s data becomes most important.

O’Reilly’s conclusions are borne out by the PC market decline in Japan in favor of smaller devices. They are also borne out by the recent entry of Apple and Google into the mobile phone market. In fact, Google Android could drastically change the phone market by leading the market toward open source, unlocked phones that allow developers to bring wireless devices to the next level by giving users more choices when it comes to applications. It’s a move similar to the opening up of the Facebook API (with new competitor OpenSocial in pursuit) to allow a greater level of connectedness over the Web—not just via links, but via data exchange and functionality. The point is to bring state of mobile phone technology up to speed with the latest developments in Web applications, and that means especially making them more compatible with social networking and video-sharing applications.

So here’s how I trace these connections:

Social Networking–>Web applications predominance over client software–>Open APIs/Open Source–>Hardware lightening and commoditization in favor of social network access

That’s how I think cheap and lightweight hardware like the EeePC, the “cannibalization” of proprietary software by open source, recent developments in social networking, and Google Android are related.

Oh, the humble hyperlink, oft scrapped for the reflective button or chiseled folder tag. Once bright and blue, and underlined just for good measure, the text link has become a victim of design. And it’s hurting usability. I admit I’m a victim, but I’m trying hard to fight the power. Here’s what we designers say:

“That gaudy blue hyperlink color doesn’t work in this design! I have dust blue tabs and a buoyant green reflective button here…man, let’s make the hyperlink fit in with this.”

And before you know it, the hyperlink is so meshed with the page design that you can’t find it—and guess what? It’s not useable, clickable, actionable if I can’t find it! Check out this page from AT&T (note, a big-shot company, not some teenager’s MySpace page).

Now tell me, when you are ready to drop the five large for that smartphone, what do you do? I swear, despite the big “Buy it Now!” message, I scrolled to the bottom of the page looking for the link that would let me make the purchase. That color-themed “Buy it Now”? That’s no link, people, that’s a heading. Sure, I realized that after a second, but why make is tricky like that? Now I feel foolish and blog with scorn!

Listen, AT&T isn’t the only culprit. In fact, our company, Mind & Media, is prepping to launch a redesigned website that, among other things, addresses that same problem. We are (were) pretty much a two-color company, as is AT&T. They’re blue and orange, and we’re purple and teal. It’s tough to agree on a hyperlink color in a rigid style guide like that.

Like AT&T’s main page, M&M’s uses one company color for headings and one for links. But then you have subpages and subheadings, and here come the design issues faster than handcuffs after curfew. The choice is either stick with standard bright blue for links, which I just can’t do (I DID say I’m a designer), or inject something new. We went with option two, and you’ll see it soon enough. So c’mon, AT&T, companies, and designers everywhere, make an effort to create usable sites. Make those links easy to find. You might get more folks buying and fewer sweating the hyperlink.

For further reading on usable sites and even the humble hyperlink, check out Coding Horror. I read his much-dugg post from yesterday, and I’m sure that’s what got me churning. Cheers.

Wikipedia’s recent edits page is long overdue for this mashup, which allows you to watch in real time as recent anonymous editors are located on a world map. Enjoy watching someone in the United Kingdom edit American Old West while a North Carolinian tinkers with Social Darwinism.

Reminiscent of Twittervision’s enhancement of Twitter, WikipediaVision can be surprisingly addictive. And it’s another great example of simple online applications that combine publicly available information to great effect (in this case, using the Google Maps API, hostip.info, and GoNew’s IP to country service).