Many of the commenters in Chris’s thread are complaining that they don’t get comments on their blogs, something bloggers eternally discuss. It got me to thinking about how some people create an environment that invites conversation and some people don’t. Since a major reason to blog is for that give-and-take, obviously a lack of comments causes a problem.

Some of the reasons for a lack of comments go back to things like the 1% rule or the fact that you may be operating in a really tiny niche that doesn’t generate a lot of interest.  But after clicking through  to some of the blogs in Chris’s comments thread,  I began to see a pattern of behaviors that I think may be contributing to the lack of comments and therefore are extremely instructive. The result is:

Six Reasons People Aren’t Commenting on Your Blog

Guilty as charged on this one. I think I can fall into all six categories!

What do you think? How many do I fall into?

They broke the list into two categories, New This Year and Classics, with sub categories of audio and video. I agree completely with Chris Albrecht in his commentary at NewTeeVee:

It’s amusing to think of The Onion as “new” and Ask a Ninja as “classic,” but whatever, both make me laugh. And while it’s obvious that both of those podcasts carry an established audience, it’d be nice to know how Apple’s editorial choices match up with the popular choice, but the company’s pretty stingy with stats, listing only the top podcast of the day.

I am a details guy and was intrigued to do further analysis.

Classics: Video

*While Vintage Toon Cast is Indie, their content is public domain cartoon classics. A bit of a mix!

Production reflects Main Stream Media, "Professional" production (Revision 3, DECA, Next New Networks, etc), or Independent.  This is not to say that an Indie property is not professional, rather, it still maintains the 2 people and a camcorder upbringing!  Ads are reported as Online, Offline (downloadable media), Both or None. Hosting is my best guess (after some digging) as to what company, if any, is hosting/publishing the content (hey - we’re a publishing company and I’m interested).

My analysis of ads is only from the past couple of episodes and not over the past year. It does not take into account any of use of non video ads (banners, text, etc) or associated monetization (DVD sales, t-shirts, etc).

For hosting, there are sometimes multiple entries.  For instance, Cool Hunting Video is hosted by Brightcove for flash delivery (online) and on Amazon’s S3 for their downloadable media. I am not wizard enough to tell if there is an additional CMS or publishing system for the self hosted and left it as ‘Self’.

For the Classics, there is quite a spread between Indie, MSM and Pro productions, with Indie pulling a 50% share. 70% of the top ten are using advertising, in one way or another, to support the property. What is interesting in this breakdown, however, is that this is generated by iTunes and only capturing downloadable media and not online plays. Therefore, the monetization for this ranking drops to 50% for the properties.

New This Year: Video

Definitions from Classics apply to the New category.

What is interesting is the definite shift of Indie production to Pro/MSM for new properties. It dropped from 50% in the Classics to 10% in the New category. One conclusion can be that the "Classics" (I guess that is something over a year old!), were founded with a couple of people, a passion and a camcorder. 2007 is the year that production companies and MSM have gone after this segment.  It also makes sense that the newer properties are not monetized as well as the Classics as they are still building audiences and developing ad strategies.

Most important, and not reflected in the analysis above, content is still king. After seeing some of the episodes, I immediately subscribed and look forward to catching up with back episodes. There is a ton of funny, insightful and educational content in these 20 properties. Kudos to everyone involved.

Sampling this content makes me question my Comcast bill for cable that I pay every month!

The Google Chart API is the bee’s knees.  What a great, simple tool for fast web development!  It is so incredibly simple and cool:

50k impressions a day is a limitation that could be challenging, but it is so tempting to incorporate.  My mind is going crazy with the possibilities!

However, API’s also require a certain level of aptitude. The user must understand the basics of programming, know what data to capture, what data to store, etc. In the end, an API may be used by millions but only understood by a small percentage of that.  There is, however, an API that we all know how to use: email.

[Side note: my fiancee pointed out to me the other day that I usually spell it "e-mail" with the hyphen. That's the way it was originally spelled.  She said I was showing my age!]

When we created our ftp functionality, we wanted to incorporate an easy method for publishers to be able to use the URL’s and embed statements in their websites without having to log back into Castfire. To accomplish this, after ftp’ing files to Castfire, two e-mails are sent:

1. Acknowledge the files have been uploaded and provide back the URL’s and embed statement for the new episode.  It also states that these files are not currently ready as they are being transcoded.
2. A final e-mail stating that the transcoding has finished and it is available for publishing.

The email is also "smart" because the directory structure of the publisher’s ftp site mirrors the hierarchy of their account. So a network login sees directories for each content producer and channel, as well as directories for each media type (intro, outro, promo).  Each content producer login sees a subset of the network. So a publisher can upload new episodes into the correct channel without having to log in to Castfire - including shows that have multiple content segments.

In addition, default settings, including filenames, metadata, and status can be set for each channel.  This is a huge time savings for the publisher as you can set it once and rarely have to revisit it.

We view these e-mails emails as the most basic API possible!  FTP and email have been around just about as long as the internet and are accessible to a great majority of web users. While it is possible to log in and publish shows through our CMS, it is many times faster and easier to ftp 10 new videos and get an email back when they are complete.

Online Fame Easy; Ads Harder to Get - TVWeek - News

Near the top of the pile sit Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, who have parlayed their "Ask a Ninja" Web program into about $100,000 a month in ad revenue and income from merchandising and licensing.

Andy Plesser from Beet.tv follows up with:

Seems that Federated Media is doing a good job in selling ads for the show.  And the tiny San Francisco start-up CastFire is doing an impressive job in publishing the video.

Thanks, Andy!  You are correct - FM is killing it! They have taken advantage of Castfire’s functionality to rotate ads through archives and downloadable media to maximize profits for their publishers. We continue to see growth in all properties which is being accelerated with our Bebo, Facebook and video search engine integration.

Congrats to Kent and Doug on their continued success with Ask a Ninja.

If you are not familiar with some of the challenges of working with RSS feeds, there are two key areas that needed to be addressed immediately.  First off, the feeds are generally cached by online feedreaders, stripping javascript and other code from the xml.  This removes the ability for an ad server to directly interact with each impression.  Additionally, the many of the large feed readers do not allow for flash components to be used directly in the reader.

Custom players and tracking codes were generated for each of the sites - both the RSS unit and the 300×250 unit, with each of the 8 videos loaded for each.  Publishers were provided a single block of html to place into their RSS feed, for which Castfire is able to manage.  Castfire’s automation and player templates provides the ability for random videos to be played, or for Federated Media to update/change the creative at any time.

Castfire has also worked with many of the online feed readers to ensure that our video players are whitelisted and allowed to be displayed within the reader.  This is a key to this campaign’s success; without being able to view the player, it would be impossible to watch the video!

Scale is a big issue when looking at a campaign like this - RSS can be brutal and some of the sites have the largest RSS audiences out there!  At the time of this blog post, Feedburner reports TechCrunch’s subscribers at 624k.  For each post on all of the sites, a player is displayed, analytics collected, and a video may be played.  Tens of millions of impressions for this single campaign - not including any of the standard episodic content that is published.

The final piece of the puzzle is analytics to which our data warehousing efforts come shining through.  Castfire creates a separate data warehouse for each network.  With multiple fact tables, tons of dimensions, and incredible detail, reports breakdown sites, player impressions, video plays, click throughs, geo information and more.

While 98% of our customers are publishing branded, episodic content, the value of our audio/video platform becomes more apparent as the system is responsible for more and more uses. It is exciting to see our platform continue to grow and expand. </proud parents>

Next up, the San Diego Chargers launched video content on Castfire, with players on the front page and on individual news sites. Our relationship with the Chargers began many, many months ago when Joel Price contacted us after seeing an interview I was in. We woked with Joel to get the property launched with new content and are beginning the process of adding in their entire catalog. In addition to the videos, we will be working with Joel to bring all of their audio podcasts onto the platform as well. This has a ton of sentimental value for me as I lived in Chula Vista, CA during elementary school. I have such a soft spot for anything San Diego and still love them Bolts! (Though, of course, I have no favorite teams in the NFL…

And to finish out the hat trick, the Indianapolis Colts launched hours later, with a very comprehensive solution to handle audio, video, players, playlists, thumbnails and ad rotation. In a weeks time, we added 500+ episodes of audio and video, designed multiple players, updated meta data, and set up all of the feeds. Working with AJ Macht of the Colts was fantastic — knowledgeable, quick and hard working. It was a great case study for us in launching a site with extensive archives, extensive customization, and high visibility.

Needless to say, we have extremely high expectations for the month of October! Best of all, we are no where close to done launching new, large properties this month. Our dev team (and more than a hat tip; a full on, to the ground bow) is firing on all cylinders and are amazing. As I’ve said before, it takes a team, and I am proud to be part of this one!

UPDATE:
Few weeks ago we were searching for good website to download latest movies, and i found it here: download movies, I recommend to use it for searching films.

It was at that moment that I was happy I followed the lead of our friends at Dogster and had retained Laine Campbell from Palomino DB. In our hurried conference call, with everyone throwing out suggestions, she calmly identified the issue and suggested a simple, elegant solution. With her assistance, we had the fix in 30 minutes later and the all of the servers were back to no load and humming along. Laine has quickly become a part of the Castfire team and works with us not as a consultant, but a full member of the team.

If you are a startup looking at growth and scaling, I pass on the same recommendation that Dogster did: contact Laine! She is uber responsible and quite the wizard. Thanks to Dogster and Laine!

The NFL’s Atlanta Falcons worked with Digitaria and Castfire to relaunch their web presence and we think the both the design and the content are fantastic.  As seen above, the video content is incorporated into the site itself, providing an integrated experience between images, text and video.  As Castfire delivers a single flash video file (flv) and not an xml playlist, custom players throughout the site were easy to build and integrate to provide a seamless experience for the Falcons’ fans.

I have been watching the video work by Matt Moore from the Falcons and have been extremely impressed by the amount and quality of content that he is publishing each day.  The web team for the Falcons, like many of the NFL teams, is small and has very little time. For instance, when the team is playing away: the team is not going to wait for the web team to edit and upload before the bus leaves the stadium! They have to get the content together, edited and posted — sometimes while riding to the airport and uploading via an EVDO connection.

The Castfire platform automates much of the process of publishing content, including transcoding, meta data, multiple formats, jpg and thumbnail images, to offload as much as possible. We have worked with the teams at Digitaria and the Falcons to improve the process, speed and functionality and will continue to make improvements over the coming weeks.

The highlight for me is the incredible series they are producing. My favorite? I know you are thinking it is the Cheerleader Bios, but no: David Irons’ Rooke Diary. It is a fresh and real look into the life of rookies in the NFL.  David Irons’ is extremely funny and hams it up for the camera. You can subscribe here.

Castfire has worked with Federated Media and WebbAlert to launch this new property. In doing so, we worked together to roll out new functionality: media groups and a syndicated player. As building an audience is always key for new properties, they have partnered with a handful of sites and traded promotional spots for placement. To automate this, the two features, while separate, work hand in hand.

A basic building block of Castfire is the concept of a template. While they are standard in website CMS’s, they are quite a new concept for multimedia. We have added a new segment type, Media Group, to our templates that groups multiple segments to one slot. Each time a video is requested, a different media segment is played, allowing for automatic rotation of interstitials. Each of the partner sites will get an equal amount of promotion across all of the video impressions — including rss distribution of quicktime files! This feature works great for not only external promotions, but also cross promoting content within a network. Look for this to be rolled out to many of our clients to promote content across their networks.

Slide out Player for WebbAlert

Originally uploaded by castfire

The second piece of functionality adds a javascript widget that can be placed on partner sites. The widgets displays a jpg image, either a static image or one from the latest episode. Upon clicking on the image, the latest episode will slide out of the image and begin playing. The magic is that this can be set once and Castfire will ensure that the latest episode is always played! No need to know the actual url of the latest episode, having to update html, or having some sort of rss reader figure it out — it is all built into Castfire. This is a variation on the feature that is used by the Killington Ski Resort in their successful podcast.

Congratulations to WebbAlert on your launch! This is definitely a video we will watch each morning…

Additional Coverage: TechCrunch, Fred Wilson, NewTeeVee, Gizmodo, John Battelle