Jure Cuhalev » ideas

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass – How to Create A Viral YouTube Video

Jure Cuhalev — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 07:45:47 +0000

OK Go recently released video for their song This Too Shall Pass, of their new album, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, and it shows that they really understand viral web video and that their target demographic consumes their content on YouTube and Facebook.

First, check out their video, if you haven’t yet. It’s really worth watching, even if you don’t like their music. Analysis after the jump:

As you’ve seen it’s a Rube Goldberg inspired music video that is doing everything it can to keep your attention. It starts with a shock view of singer that looks like he just slaughtered a cow and as that grabs your attentions it gives you an interesting machine to observe as you watch the video. If they kept your attention for 30s you’ve probably managed to be enthusiastic enough about it to instant message it to your friends as well shared it on Facebook etc.

Based on their recent open letter, this is exactly what brings money today to a band – YouTube advertisements and the only way to actually make serious money on YouTube, besides having 500 videos that you released over last 2 years is to go viral with a well thought our video.

This brings to a completely new problem: what sells of the internet is porn, but if you can’t show that, kittens and lolcats will do. So the best tactic for an indie band that would like to get a lot of views would be to get some cute girls and somehow embed fuzzy kittens and puppies into their video. This way you’ll have a few bonus points in terms of views and maybe you’ll be able to achieve tipping point that will allow you to skyrocket the number of your views.

Did you spot any other details in the video that would contribute towards virality and sharing?

Announcing RealTime WebCampLjubljana

Jure Cuhalev — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:01:50 +0000

It’s been two months after last WebCamp and it’s time for another party. Following the idea of BarCamps with story line, we’ve decided to organize RealTime Social WebCamp Ljubljana.

This time we’ve decided to focus on a single emerging technology space: Real-Time Social Web. If you’re not up-to date with the latest buzzwords, it’s about next generation RSS protocols like HubSubPubBub, RSSCloud, XMPP (that powers GTalk), Synaptic Web, Twitter API and a bunch of other technologies and ways of thinking about the Web and Mobile space.

Intended audience are developers and people who are close to them (e.g. interface designers, product managers, etc.) and will need to innovate in this space in the next 6 months.

We’re doing it a bit more limited this time, just 50 spaces. I’m interested in seeing how a smaller and more focused group changes the dynamics of such gathering.

The rules for the tickets are the same as the last time. Send description of your talk early and you get a ticket, or hope that you can click fast enough for the left-over tickets later. I believe that extra effort should be awarded.

The official language this time is Slovenian since we’ve figured out that locals that are not native speakers understand our geek talk enough that it shouldn’t be a problem and we can understand them as they lecture in their own language.

As always: all the details are at http://www.webcamp.si

Do internet memes ever die?

Jure Cuhalev — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:17:15 +0000

While observing 4chan’s attack on Spar’s “create your shopping bag” online tool, I started to wonder if Internet meme’s ever die or they’ll continue to haunt us well into the future. I’m sure that on the trivial level, we’ll soon see in Jeopardy question type: “popular internet meme’s of 90’s”, but there is a different component. Given that a large amount of our current society and youth is influenced by short and not-so-short lived meme’s – what are today’s anthropologists doing to document and conserve this information? Will we need to resurrect it from old Wikipedia dumps, before they get removed for not being notable enough?

One of the notable things happening in this area is that Jason Scott has an archive of 10 million 4chan threads and while he isn’t releasing it to the public just yet, I’m confident that this will happen in a few years time.

I do hope that there is a whole generation of graduate’s in anthropology that are wondering how to capture all the memes so they can build their careers on top of it.

A confession of newage virtual schizophrenic

Jure Cuhalev — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:09:05 +0000

Hi, I’m Jure and one of the things I do is to help people talk and work with their communities so they can improve their products or services. Often they want to outsource at least part of the talking to me, so I’m given a new online identity. The name is still the same, but you get a new email (with IMAP and everything) and often business cards with this identity. If you’re lucky it’s also a Google Account (via Google Apps) that you need to share calendars, gtalk etc.

As you help different organizations, you keep accumulating these identities that you can’t shut off because you never know who will decide to email you on that address or which account you’ve got registered. On top of that, you almost never completely stop helping them unless the project gets shut down.

So now you have tons of email addresses, that each connect to different identity that you use to talk to bloggers. The only problem is that there is a limited number of meaningful connections that you can have. So you email people from all these identities with different questions, forwards, reply-alls and so on.

This does at the end of the day mean, that I’ll have to talk to myself via different identities, CC other email or info@ accounts (that I control anyway) so that we can make sense of our world. That everyone knows who belongs to who, depending on the email domain.

I have yet to write multiple (personal) Twitter accounts or Foursquare logs, even though I’m sure that this day isn’t far away.

So if you see my replying to myself from a different domain, it’s all normal, it’s just that I don’t want to break online balance of identities.

Buying USA sweets in Europe

Jure Cuhalev — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 08:37:33 +0000

Internet is just one huge amazing opportunity that we’re not even beginning to utilize.

The story goes like this: while chewing on Big Red gum, I’ve started wondering how can I ensure my future supplies of it. A quick search later reveals a magic resource – AmericanSweets.co.uk a service that does exactly that, ensures that EU people have access to USA candy. A very targeted and niche shop that can now sere expats and fans across whole Europe. On top of that, they even ship back to USA (?!?).

So that’s essentially the opportunity and potential of the Internet – infinite amount of highly targeted niches where you’re not bound by local geographical restrictions anymore.

Web 2.0 conferences in Europe

#uksnow Map 2.0

Jure Cuhalev — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:20:06 +0000

It’s snowing around Europe at the moment and Twitter is trending with term #uksnow. Nothing special about it, besides the fact that’s is a beautiful orchestra of crowdsourced tweets that get aggregated to the #uksnow Map 2.0

Why is this important?

While this is a single focus application, that will probably stop getting attention in a few days, there is no reason why anyone couldn’t go out and build generic mobile and web platforms that would enable such crowd-sourcing and trend aggregation around important public happenings.

We already have great open software for this, e.g. Ushahidi could be a great platform to build on top of.

Our [insert project here] is many things to many people

Jure Cuhalev — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 16:49:46 +0000

For the last few weeks, I’ve tried to figure out how to tell a story of different communities around me. They’re all doing great things, but the general perception, within them, is that the public is not recognizing their efforts and that getting more recognition will help with other aspects of their work (getting funding, members, more feedback, etc.).

Very much inspired by Jono Bacon’s book – The Art of Community, I’ve started analyzing different public pitches, strategies and road-maps that they have. The answer that I hear often or at least is implied is that they’re open spaces and that people make of it, whatever they want.

In case of Kiberpipa, it’s very usual to hear: “Kiberpipa is something else to everyone” and as such it is a very complex idea, that’s hard to communicate clearly.

Which is perfectly fine, if you’re in there for last five years and are practically a founder. The problem is that this is not the story that we can go out and present to upcoming and promising teams. It’s too vague, if feels to big and it’s scary as an empty wiki.

So the big plan for the upcoming weeks is to talk to many people and artificially set constraints on their projects. Not in a way that would prevent them from doing whatever they’re e doing now, but it a way that would home their pitch at least in one direction, making it easier to attract new people and upgrade existing ideas.

In short: let’s decide on one thing that our project is to a few people and build a solid foundation around that, before moving to the next one.

Exploiting Dunbar’s number for your business model

Jure Cuhalev — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:48:11 +0000

Seth talked yesterday about Dunbar’s number, that Wikipedia defines as:

Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.^[1] Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.

One take on this is that there is no way of stretching this number without blurring people over 400 into a meaningless stream of faces that you fail to remember who they are.

I believe there is also a second approach, where you turn constraints into a business model. A big part of the 150 limit will be occupied by your non-professional friends and work colleagues, extended family etc. Leaving you just a limited room for true professional contacts.

Here is where the business model comes in: if you’re willing to sacrifice the relative amount of your personal network, you can in turn resell it to others via introductions and networking facilitation. One could call this occupation community management (as you need to know and have relationship with influencers), but it expends to all sorts of managerial out-reaching roles such CEO or public relations officer. At the end of the day, it also might be the reason why you’re a better freelancer.

How many of your personal contacts are you willing to sacrifice for your career?

How to achieve complete focus to listen to a podcast

Jure Cuhalev — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 17:24:44 +0000

There are two ways to read your RSS feeds. You can skim through the text and the titles, getting general idea on the topic, or you can sit down, take a sip of the coffee and contemplate what you are reading. The problem with the second approach is that it takes real-time and dedication as those long posts often include videos that are several minutes long. A lifetime in terms of real-time web!

Somehow a video from Merlin Mann caught my eye yesterday. In the video (embedded below, that I highly recommend), he talks about play and how we have to give our bodies something to distract them while we think and come up with creative solutions. Like playing with pans, balls, etc.

Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now) from Merlin Mann on Vimeo.

The second interesting post I came about, and that I really wanted to talk about was from Dave Winer, where he wrote about Bruce Sterling’s talk at Reboot (mp3 of the talk).

He recommends the talk with the words:

Anyway, most of the time most of us are not in position to do anything about the mess in our lives. But listen to Sterling’s talk. It’s only 43 minutes. It might be the best 43 minutes you’ve ever spent.

So how do you go about listening such an important talk (and I’ve heard Bruce talk before, so I knew it’s good), without being distracted by everything around me?

Simple: put the running shoes on, load the talk on an iPod and go running. Since it’s a rather long talk, a 10km run is just about right.

What you’ll experience is a full submersion in the talk. Since your whole body is preocuppied with breathing and moving the muscles, and your ears are hearing interesting talk that your brain has to process, there is no time for wandering thoughts.

The only problem with this approach is that you have to pick up really stimulating talks that interest you as otherwise you’ll just suffer. But luckily our trusted gatekeepers keep posting links to them all the time, so it’s rather easy to find them.

Runners log: July 2009

On communities

Jure Cuhalev — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:49:36 +0000

Communities lives and die by its core members that define the rules and norms for it at any given time. They’re often very fluid and can change rules almost on a weekly basis, it’s more often a much slower process.

During the summer I joined (offline) community that is different from my usual one – the Roller Skating community of San Francisco Friday Night Skate. In comparison to skating groups of Ljubljana, where we seem to have a shared purpose of recreational skating, here the idea is of a rolling party that just happens to involve roller skating.

The difference in shared purpose is easily seen in the little things, like what people actually talk about. While one group talks mostly sports, where they went over the weekend (to do sports), what kind of form are they in and their achievements; the other group goes out of its way to organize roller disco events, dress up in flashy clothes, brings their own boom-box along and spends a month of planning a roller disco camp in a middle of a desert as a part of Burning Man festival.

Lesson learned

There’s nothing wrong with either community, but it helps a lot to have an idea of what you want to do so potential members can figure out if your group is right for them.

Groups can usually easily fork out if they want to, but they still need to elaborate their shared purpose and if it’s a fork – how and why is this group different from the first one. (Notice that it’s not “better”, it’s just different).