We can all relate to the idea of the brilliant TV show canceled before its expiration date. Oh blast the network executives that don’t give shows their room to grow and the audience to come. But isn’t that the fun of them too… the cult classic, the sleeper hit.
However, it doesn’t exactly work this way for the world of web. No other medium is so integrated into the audience experience. There are brilliant ideas out there everywhere, but they are wasted and fade away because the community never comes to join them, because the web master never has the avid audience to inspire them to continue. One of my favorite “brilliant but cancelled” websites has been Disturbing Auctions, a site that helped to catalog and put hilarious commentary on Ebay’s weirdest auctions. But unfortunately, the site never turned into more than a hobby for the web master and never gathered a big enough audience to switch it over into the amazing web 2.0 comedy site it could of been.
A list of other web deaths resides here: an Internet graveyard.
So, what websites of today are the e-gravestones of tomorrow? In the sea of Web 2.0 betas dependent completely on user adoption and generated content, who will survive and who will become buried under the waves. And to think for every few sites that even make it to beta, a dozen died before making it through development. I’d love to see Mashable start an obituary report of all the betas it announced in its days that never came to fruition. Farewell, good idea, good execution, but no one in the forest to hear it make a sound when it fell.
I’d love to hear from other people about their most memorable web sites that have come and gone and never got the chance they deserved.
Web Site: Rouxbe - The Recipe to Better Cooking
As a bit of a foodie and an experimental chef, I find myself online almost daily looking for exciting new recipes to try. The first place I hit up is AllRecipes.com, which does a great job on wealth of content and community features. I can search for recipes via ingredients I have in the kitchen, rate recipes I’ve tried, read reviews of recipes, pictures, browse categories, create a virtual recipe box, and even print out a usefully organized shopping list. What more could you ask for?
Well, recently I stumbled upon Rouxbe.com, a cross between an online cooking show and recipe resource. With its professionally shot videos that are heavy on high quality close-ups, it provides elegant instructional and inspirational qualities that are not available anywhere on AllRecipes. The site is loaded with your typical fun features like downloads, bookmarking, commenting, etc and some not-so-typical features such as separate music and VO track volumes. But what I am more excited about are the features that show a higher level of thought paid to the end user.
There are packages of downloadable iPod and HD videos (main dish, side, dessert) that would make it easy for the user to follow along while working in the kitchen. I’m not sure who is clean enough in the kitchen to feel comfortable putting their iPod near the stove (not me!!), but for people with large screen TVs or computers viewable from the kitchen, this is also a valuable option. Another great feature is the “drill-downs” (which could have a better name). These are conveniently isolated sections of recipes that highlight skills, techniques, and ingredients.
What Rouxbe lacks however is everything that makes AllRecipes so useful. With over 80 videos on the site and presumably more coming every week, they need to develop a better way to organize content, help users find the information that they want to find, and create a structure that will grow as content and community expands. Also, they need a more exciting landing page. Once you register to the site, you are presented with a less than engaging profile page with a few small pictures of new recipes and content. Since the web of the future is all about “personalization“, Rouxbe should hop on board by allowing user to have the content they want on their home page. On “My Rouxbe” I’d want healthy snack recipes, recipes that use wine as an ingredient, and dark chocolate desserts. Yum!!
web concept: In-game advertising
Would you believe that the first in-game ad was placed in 1978? Since then, and in particular in the last two years, in-game advertising has evolved leaps and bounds, making it one of the most interesting and attractive prospective outlets for advertisers. While many companies take a literal translation to in-game advertising: billboards, 15 to 30 second ad clips, and traditional product placement, the true innovators take advantage of the unique interactive and seemingly endlessly flexible format of the medium. Particularly creative campaigns have included Burger King’s advergames, ordering pizza via command line in Everquest II, and Starwood’s virtual hotel in Second Life.
But why is in-game advertising so important, why should it be paid amidst all the other up and coming ad mediums (rss ads, social networking, mobile technology)? There are a few cut and dry reasons, and then a few more interesting ones. First, all the big brands are doing it, and the annual advertising dollars spent in that area is projected to grow to near $1 billion by 2011. The reasoning being that the audience consists of a highly desirable demographic: 18- to 34-year-old men, high levels of disposable income, deeply engaged for an average of 12.5 hours a week (that’s more than they watch TV). In-game advertising has the most positive reception compared to other means, such as pop-ups and banner ads. Gamers have actually shown interest in how companies can creatively represent their brand in video game environments, if done well. If not, this is a highly critical group with a low attention span and a tendency to voice their opinion on the blogs, forums, and social sites.
So how does an advertiser tap into the true flexibility of the platform and communicate to the audience in a way that is engaging and memorable. You could create useful tools, “give back” to the community you are advertising too and you will create a lasting positive brand impression. You could redefine your product offering and focus on your brand, you don’t have to build cars in Second Life because you are a car company. You could create an experience that crosses channels and becomes a complimentary interactive experience all on its own. Or if you are good, you could do a combination of the above. Good examples include the Puma True Crime campaign that branded real life sneakers that gamers could purchase with True Crime design in conjunction with True Crime virtual sneakers with Puma design. Another example would be the Lost Experience, which managed to fill a need (summer reruns) in the Lost fan community with a multi-channel online experience game that spanned websites, newspaper ads, phone lines, YouTube videos, etc.
But none of those examples fulfill the true potential of a multi-channel experience that could really grab the limited time of that valuable gamer demographic. Here are some example campaigns I dreamed up:
The bigger picture is that advertising in games, while not in this year’s or next year’s budget for the large majority of advertisers, is here to stay and should be something to get very excited about. The bigger picture is that it is good for everybody. Gamers receive innovative brand experiences not available in any other venue. Risk-taking advertisers get a brand new untapped medium to get excited about. For every dollar spent, publishers are able and encouraged to take more risks on less mainstream games. For every dollar spent, developers get more money to develop more interesting games. Which all ads up to better are more exciting games, which makes everyone happy.
technorati tags: in-game advertising, wii
web concept: Web 3.0
I was planning to write today about my dream wine site, for the growing population of wine loving Millenials (let’s call them Vinenials). Then I discover a fascinating article that takes a shot at defining the much hated term “Web 3.0″ in a way that has made it tangible for me and digestible for the first time. I had a revelation that the site I was dreaming of was not a wine 2.0 site at all, but is within the realm of Sramana Mitra’s web 3.0 equation. And thus I have been filled with a new love of the previously meaningless term, and now I will share my love.
The components of my ideal wine site would collect all the functions I now do separately and put them in one useful place. Instead of going to Wine Spectator for expert reviews, Cork’d for community reviews, winery web sites for wine labels and pairing suggestions, using Excel to build shopping lists and catalog purchases… I want it all to be centralized, and most of all, I want it make my life more efficient. It needs to help me out in all 4 key behavior categories:
Browsing
Rather than having to find time to read numerous wine magazines, online articles, blogs, vlogs, etc, I would want my site to slurp up RSS content from any useful source, and spit it back out at me in a way I find relevant. New and highly rated content should bubble up to the top based on preferences that I set. This could be manual, like say I know I want to start learning about Montepulciano for my upcoming trip to Tuscany. Or it could be tuned into my previous browsing and purchasing behavior, like (formerly known as) The Page You Made on Amazon.com. Or ideally, a combination of both.
I want useful color coding for content buckets (video, articles, ratings, user comments) and the ability to tag content as interesting. There should be landing pages for wineries, varietals, and wine rages with top user voted and top rated wines pushed to the top, with fun related content and images. And even better, why not an Etsy-type whimsical search experience, a swirling spiral of wine flavor profiles (butter, strawberry, grapefruit), or wine label art.
Hunting/Gathering
Search should be highly usable and customizable. This utility should allow the user to determine what attributes (i.e. price, region, fermentation period, featured on my favorite wine vlog) they want to be included in the results page. The user should control all rows, columns, filters, sorting, etc in an intuitive ajax-y fun way that allows them to easily find the wines they are looking for and then repurpose the information. Many sites stop at finding the information, with no thought as to how to get the user to their ultimate goal. Users should be able to “flag” content as interesting, and go back later to read more.
Individual wine pages should draw in from traditional variables (varietal, price, wine region, vintage) as well as not traditional variables such as flavor profile tags, food pairing suggestions (with links to highlighted recipes on allrecipes.com). But more importantly, the wines should pull a variety of ratings from magazines, online databases, user ratings, etc. and create a combined rating and consensus description (a la Rotten Tomatoes). When the user is ready to move into “gathering” mode, they should be able to export or print out the wines they are looking for, which will be conveniently organized by wine region and varietal to make the physical shopping experience easier (Allrecipes does this when creating a grocery list).
Consuming
Once the user has purchased the wines, either via a physical store (zip lookup) or online for the fortunate states, they should have an easy way to identify wines as being part of “my cellar”. My Cellar should integrate with commonly used tools such as CellarTracker. The results of the cellar should be sortable by food pairing matches to make it easy for users to pick out a wine for their nightly meal. It should be easy for users (and encourage) to add notes and ratings about drank wines back into the system. And finally, to make things all the more targeted towards the Vinenials, the users should be able to identify or scan in labels of their bottles and then create a slideshow/thumbnail widget to post on their blogs, MySpace pages, etc.
Recalling
Final stage, users should be able to pull up anything they have drank in the past with the help of the sites usable search tool. They should be able to skim through their notes, and select “favorite” wines that will be utilized to recommend wines that “users who liked this wine also liked this” and set up an alert system that will tell the user when their favorite wines have been written or if the wine is on sale. All users inputed content (reviews, ratings) and behavior (liked these wines, researched these wines, didn’t like these wines) should be pushed back into the environment to make a smarter browser experience for future web users. The site (on an opt-in basis) should offer smart suggestions, suggestions that stay within a comfortable wine zone (price threshold, don’t like sweet wines, etc), but help you to experience new things. Users should be able to socialize with other users within the community, and invite their friends in. Similar to Netflix, users can send each other “wine notes” about wines they thing their friends would like, see how their taste compares to their friends, and see their friends or “trusted users” ratings float to the top of all other user generated wine ratings.
So how does this compare to the Web 3.0 formula:
3C = Content, Commerce, Community | 4th C = Context | P = Personalization | VS = Vertical Search
Check on all 6 counts. So what was the point of this exercise? To make everyone dream with me for a moment, of how beautiful this evolving web landscape really can be. Oh the fun, oh the efficiency. Peter Morville told me when he found out I was writing this article:
Just to play devil’s advocate, audience and topic verticals have been the future of the Web since the beginning of the Web…it’s tough to define the topic/audience just right and to change those definitions as people’s interests/behaviors evolve…and to keep up with new technologies and platforms…which is why I would go to Amazon to buy a book about wine rather than a wine 2.0 or 3.0 site…verticals/communities are great but have their limits.
But I read the books and the magazines and the websites, and I say if you make the tools smart enough and useful enough, they will evolve with their audience rather than have their audience grow out of them. So a toast to web 3.0, and the boys at Cork’d and Wine Library TV. Please make my dream a reality.
technorati tags: Web 3.0, Wine Library TV, Gary Vaynerchuk, Millenials
websites: http://winespectator.com, http://corkd.com
As I began to draft this article out, an amazing announcement came that Gary Vaynerchuk, famous wine vlogger at Wine Library TV, acquired Cork’d, a web 2.0 community site for reviewing wine. This could mean great things for a continually growing online community of the knowledge hungry wine youths. Since 2005, wine has overtaken beer as America’s drink of choice, and the marketers have targeted in on the Millenials and with good reason. The wine market has an intimidating learning curve to a beginner, and simple things like unique packaging, flashy labels, or quirky names, can set a wine out amongst the sea of indecipherable foreign labels with chateaus and medieval fonts. Millenials are drinkers not collectors, drinkers that can easily become brand enthusiasts, loving to share the knowledge they have with peers, which is why Cork’d exploded ever since its launch last year.
So with a web-savvy, info hungry audience looking for a helpful guide into this sometimes gated community of wine appreciation, it would make sense that Wine Spectator Online would be a safe haven, perhaps not on the cutting edge of social web technology, but at least a highly useful online Encyclopedia Brittanica of all things wine. Oh… but no, so far from it, so very far from it. I cannot fathom how the slick oversized glossy pages (makes the in some ways more friendly, approachable Food & Wine pathetic in comparison) could be translated so poorly into this uninspired chaotic design:
I could go own for pages about what drives me nuts about Wine Spectator Online. The biggest crime to its name is that it actually has a wealth of content, useful industry respected content. It’s just so unnecessarily hard to find. In the sea of dull grey and blue that is the boring WS homepage, it took me nearly a full year’s paid subscription to even realize there was blogs, forums, travel information, etc. Wine Spectator the print version is packed full of content already, to aimlessly pile more content creates a disorienting browsing experience. There are no individual RSS feeds for the blogs, or an easy way to distinguish one from the other, or from the exclusive WS online articles for that matter. Wine Videos… is this like a wine vlog or educational videos, I’m not sure and WS isn’t helping. They direct me to view from various different channels with no definitions of what is what, no helpful tags to cross channels, and its certainly not exporting any sort of XML making the video content searchable. Everything just seems to be throw in haphazardly and without proper thought. Ask Dr. Vinny, a wine expert column that isn’t integrated into the overall site search, no RSS, no categorization. It’s the everything but the kitchen sink policy to web design.
Well at least they got their primary site use functionality nailed, right? At least searching for wine reviews is easy. While a recent update has taken it from “disastrous” to “lacking”, the inability to customize the display of the returned list, especially when it is supposed to act as a shopping guide, is a major problem that makes me really wonder how far into the experience the creators of the site thought. It seems that all the paths get you as far as information retrieval without allowing the user to actual use the information they are being inundated with (and there certainly is a flood of it). Part II… where the world of online wine needs to go to get me truly excited.
technorati tags: Wine Spectator, Cork’d, wine
website: http://wordpress.com
One blog among a million, my reasoning for setting this up is a completely selfish one. These are the days of constant consumption in mass amounts. Everyday I intake servings full of online articles, radio news, television, film, rss, phone conversations, research reports, and other streams of information. This blog is to server as a record of my digestion. This blog will be my own way to microchunk the incoming data into my life.
It’s funny that I hadn’t thought of doing this earlier. I am somewhat of an order-philiac. I get all tingling over well organized decks of information. One look at my box of alphabetically organized wine note cards documenting every wine we’ve ever had and liked, complete with an accompanying Excel sheet guide of wines sorted by region, varietal, price, date consumed… you get the idea. The only thing I am more psychotic about organizing than my wine consumption record is vacation plans. I laid a large taped together Google Map of France and Italy with note cards depicting various cities, activities, mood pictures, and asked my husband where he wanted to go. He was appreciative, but secretly thought I was crazy for planning a vacation in February that we were taking in November. But it was enjoyable to me, something I looked forward to doing every day after work, my reward for my painfully long work hours.
The good news and the motivator for this blog: I have begun a new career as an Interactive Strategist at Organic. I have enjoyed my first two weeks, but have been feeling an overwhelming but fantastic pressure to become better than I already am. I am no longer the one person web department, but a small fish in a sea of intelligent web-savvy co-workers. I’ve been cramming an especially large amount of data about web trends, new technologies, online advertising, unique marketing vehicles, and statistics statistics statistics. As much as ooey-gooey web2.0 tools such as NetVibes have made my consumption a bit easier, I’m not retaining as much as I consume. Its exactly like learning a new language, unless I start to reuse what I read, I’m not going to be able to speak fluently.
Inspired by my peers, who have been blogging for years, I will now join the ranks of what PEW calls the internet “omnivores”. Expect to see many posts about the world of the web, but also movies, television, wine, and anything else I consume on a daily basis that has been exceptionally inspiring (positively and negatively). Speaking of negative inspirations, I think I will make my first true content post about a site that continues to uninspire me even though I pay to use it: Wine Specator Online.
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