See, Toni Basil on a stout-girl pyramid isn’t enough to make the new generation stop in their channel-flipping tracks. And when so many other networks aren’t fully taking advantage or even grasping the transformation taking place, Viacom seems, after a lot of time on the innovating bench, ahead of the game.

Interactivity is the name of said game, and keeping the attention of the ADD generation takes a lot of work. But this is the way all of it is going: completely interwoven content.

In April, MTV is working with Yahoo! to allow users to submit their own movie spoofs as a part of an MTV Movie Awards promotion. One will be selected as the winner of the "Best Movie Spoof—User Generated" award on the show, from five user-nominees.

During the live broadcast on June 3, the awards show will be tied in with Web surfers, whose (edited for content – and always very, very deep) comments will appear on the so-called World Wide Web Wall, or as Downtown Julie Brown used to call it, the wubbawubbawubba.

"Viewers are constantly telling us they want to dig deeper into the content they see on-air, and they are obsessive about following our programming from one platform to the other — and back," said Christina Norman, President of MTV.

"When the TV show ‘The Hills’ inspires a community of fans to connect with their favorite cast members and devour exclusive content online and on the handset, the payoff for viewers is a more immersive experience all the way around."

MTV.com streamed 84 million videos in January, and over 85 million in February, this year, increases of over 200 percent year-over-year. On average, the site gets about a million visitors a day.

Looking at trends across more than 80 industries and nearly 10,000 Websites, WMA’s Internet Standards Assessment Report (ISAR) is the fruit of the WMA’s WebAward competition. The report revealed that industries overall excelled in content creation, but the most successful sites received the highest marks in design, ease-of-use, and innovation.

William Rice, president of WMA, says that the lack of focus on design and ease-of-use across industries “may close the door to many users.” This echoes Dr. Jakob Nielsen’s assertion that Website usability will be the biggest driving factor for success.

“Innovation, while critical to a Web site’s success, actually received the lowest average scores across all industries,” said Rice. ” We believe this is due to the fact that innovation is so elusive and difficult to maintain – what is groundbreaking in one industry may be commonplace in another.”

The report found that gaming, music, automobile, and sports sites excelled in the three areas most critical to online success. Over the last decade, consumer-focused sites featuring vibrant content and high interactivity have excelled because of their ability to meet the high expectations of the audience.

Gaming sites, like SOCOM II, came out as natural leaders. These sites are manned by experience designers who understand the intricacies of Flash animation and the benefits of online communities, including message boards and chat features. The younger audiences typically demand more of the sites they visit.

The younger demographics drive the success of music sites like Red Bull Music labs as well. Like gaming sites, the user experience makes the difference.

“Music sites have conquered the age-old dilemma regarding the use of technology, where too little equals boring and too much means the site can be overwhelming. The music sites we’ve evaluated over the years have demonstrated the ability to build a loyal following by effective uses of technology to stream rich media content without sacrificing usability.”

One of the most hotly contested industries, automobile sites realized early that customers were most likely to engage an auto brand in the privacy of their home or office, rather than in a showroom with a commission-driven sales person. As a result, this is one of the few industries that has beaten the average scores for the WebAwards every year since the competition’s inception. Toyota Scion was a big winner in this category.

Sports sites like Nike Basketball won out in the areas of design and content. Fanatics keep the bar high when seeking out perpetually updated content. A better design just seems to add to the content experience.

“As Internet bandwidth developed, so did the ability for Web sites to deliver a dynamic rich media experience that merges online entertainment with e-commerce to create a compelling interaction for users,” added Rice. “While content is still king, it’s a Web site’s ability to interact with users in interesting ways that keeps an audience coming back.”

Because podcasts are built on RSS 2.0, the lingua franca of the blog world, podcast content is easy to subscribe to and blog about. This encourages other publishers to add their meta-comments about a podcast.

Because podcast feeds are often built with blog-tools, they frequently support comments and track back, which encourage a two-way dialog about the content. This two-way conversation is important, because it creates 3rd party content about your podcast, and encourages links to your content.

I’m inclined to agree with Lewin’s observations, particularly in light of my own experience with “For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report.” So I was intrigued when Rebecca Leib, executive editor of ClickZ Network, wrote in an article titled WhyPod? that podcasts are flatly one-way:

Podcasts offer zero interactivity. Once downloaded, a podcast is an audio file-plain and simple. Nothing more, nothing less. The subscriber can listen. She can’t click, fill out a form, or navigate elsewhere.

Right. And, of course, you can’t click, fill out a form, or navigate anywhere when you’re in your car or walking your dog, but you can listen to a podcast. And because the podcast presumably is narrowcasted to your interests, when you’re back at your computer, you post something about it on your blog and include a trackback, post a comment to the podcast blog, send an audio file, call the comment line, or email the podcaster.

Neville and I often spend half of our show talking about issues raised by our listeners. It’s not a real-time conversation by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s definitely a conversation. While the podcat itself may well be nothing more than an MP3 file, in the context of the social network of which it’s a part, it is definitely an interactive tool.

Leib also suggests that marketing podcasts need to be more professional than the amateurish podcasts produced by individuals. “A low-rent approach doesn’t work for every brand.” I see a difference, though, between “a low-rent approach” and an authentic human voice that doesn’t sound like a professional broadcaster. GM cars are a pretty significant brand, but Deb Ochs sounds like a regular person when she conducts the Fastlane podcast interviews.

Leib makes a few other questionable statements. Quite correctly, the notes that podcasts are RSS-distributed feeds to which listeners subscribe. But she goes further: “Real podcasts don’t stream, nor are they individually downloadable, single files.” Really? “For Immediate Release” is a real podcast. It’s available by subscription through our RSS feed, and we hope more and more of our listeners will access it that way. But our statistics indicate most of our listeners download the MP3 file. Heck, even Adam Curry’s “Daily Source Code” is available for download. And recently, we’ve added a Flash-driven streaming player that lets anyone listen to our podcast directly from our site. Leib seems to want to have it both ways. It’s either a plain old MP3 file (which allows you to do with it whatever you will) or it’s not. To qualify as a podcast, you have to be able to subscribe to the feed, but there’s no rule that says you must limit your podcast to an RSS subscription.

Another point Leib makes:

If your podcast is high in informational value but lacks other audio bells and whistles, such as music, interviews, celebrity value, or sound effects (particularly if the audience is business-to-business), you may be better off with text.

Again, I don’t think so. It’s easy to dismiss the value of the sense of sound, but there’s just something about hearing a real person rather than reading their words. And, again, if I’m in my car, I can’t read anyway. “For Immediate Release” isn’t the only podcast that is largely just a couple guys talking. One of the most popular podcast out there is Dave Winer’s “Morning Coffee Notes,” which features Winer talking, coughing, sniffling, and making a host of other sounds. Even if your podcast is business- or marketing-focused, all you need is an interesting person with something to say to make it worthwhile. (Which is not to dismiss sound effects, music, and interviews, of course.)

Despite all this, Leib’s overarching point is a valid one: Don’t podcast just because you can. Make sure you have a strategy that supports it.

Links: ITWorld.com

Reader Comments…

Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.

What is CGI ?

Common Gateway Interface or CGI is a program that can interact with an html form on your web site, and processes the results on your server using a cgi script. The result generated is a dynamic web page. The cgi script is written in a language called PERL (“practical extraction and reporting language”).

Uses of CGI scripts

CGI scripts are most commonly used for creating user interaction with an html form on your web site. Other uses include: autoresponders, shopping carts, counters, mailing list managers, ad management, surveys, polls, discussion boards, content management, calendars and click tracking.

There are 100s of free cgi scripts that can be found on the Net. Just do a search on Google for “free cgi scripts” or visit the resources at the end of this article.

We will create an html email form to collect the name, email address and comments of subscribers using a secure cgi formmail script. The form results will automatically be sent to your email address.

Steps to installing your own cgi script

1. Check that your web host supports CGI – your web host will have a cgi-bin folder installed on the server. The cgi-bin is a special directory in the server where all the files which require security are kept. This is where you will upload your cgi script once it has been modified.

2. Download the cgi script – this is a secure cgi formmail script. Spammers can’t access and harvest your email address from this script.

http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/formmail.zip

3. Read the documentation that comes with the script – this will give you a thorough understanding what changes you need to make to have it work correctly with your web site and server. It will also provide you with some examples.

Editing your script

4. Open and edit your cgi script using notepad (don’t use an html editor as this can create errors).

5. Remove the html tags from the script (at the top and bottom).

6. Change the path to perl to: #!/usr/bin/perl -wT (this is the first line of the script to be edited).

7. The section of the cgi script shown below, are the other minimum fields to fill out in the script (replace the fields in the script you downloaded with the changed fields in the script below).

USER CONFIGURATION SECTION

Modify these to your own settings. You might have to contact your system administrator if you do not run your own web server. If the purpose of these parameters seems unclear, please see the README file.

BEGIN
{
&nbsp&nbsp $DEBUGGING = 1;
&nbsp&nbsp $emulate_matts_code= 0;
&nbsp&nbsp $secure = 1;
&nbsp&nbsp $allow_empty_ref = 1;
&nbsp&nbsp$max_recipients = 1;
&nbsp&nbsp $mailprog = '/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -t';
&nbsp&nbsp$postmaster = 'youraddress@yourdomain.com';
&nbsp&nbsp @referers = qw(yourdomain.com);
&nbsp&nbsp@allow_mail_to = qw();
&nbsp&nbsp@recipients = ();
&nbsp&nbsp%recipient_alias = ('siteowner' => 'youraddress@yourdomain.com',);
&nbsp&nbsp@valid_ENV = qw(REMOTE_HOST REMOTE_ADDR REMOTE_USER HTTP_USER_AGENT);
&nbsp&nbsp$locale = '';
&nbsp&nbsp$charset = 'iso-8859-1';
&nbsp&nbsp$date_fmt = '%A, %B %d, %Y at %H:%M:%S';
&nbsp&nbsp$style = '';
&nbsp&nbsp$no_content = 0;
&nbsp&nbsp $double_spacing = 1;
&nbsp&nbsp $wrap_text = 0;
&nbsp&nbsp $wrap_style = 1;
&nbsp&nbsp $send_confirmation_mail = 0;
&nbsp&nbsp $confirmation_text = <<'END_OF_CONFIRMATION';
From: youraddress@yourdomain.com
Subject: Subject of Your Contact Form

$postmaster = Who's sending the email
@referrers = Domains that are allowed to host the script
%recipient_alias = Whom the script will send email toIn my form:

[form action="http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/formmail.pl"
method="POST"]
[input type="hidden" name="recipient" value="siteowner"]

You can see how the siteowner variables match up in the .pl script and in my form. This way, nobody can tell what address the form is being emailed to!

8. Rename your cgi script – name your script something else besides formmail (ie contactus.pl), as this is the most common name people use. This will prevent spammers from harvesting your email address.

9. Create your html form (contactus.htm) Note: Replace [ ] with < > for your form to work.

[html]
[head]
[title]Contact Us[/title]
[/head]
[body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"]
[form method="post" action="http://www.yourdomain.com/
cgi-bin/contactus.pl"]
[input type=hidden name="recipient" value="siteowner"]
[input type=hidden name="subject" value="Subscribe Me Please"]
[input type=hidden name="required" value="fullname,email"]
[input type=hidden name="redirect" value="http://www.yourdomainname.com/thankyou.htm"]
Full Name[br]
[input type=text name="fullname"]
[br]
Email Address[br]
[input type=text name="email"][br]
[br]
Comments[br]
[textarea name="comments"][/textarea]
[br]
[br]
[input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Submit"]
[/form]
[/body]
[/html]

10. Create a confirmation page (ie thankyou.htm) – this will automatically thank people for filling in your form. It can be a simple html page with the comments “Thank you for your interest. We will respond shortly”.

Uploading the cgi script and html email form.

Use your favorite FTP program for uploading to your server (I use SmartFTP.com which you can download for free).

11. Set permissions to 755 – in SmartFTP right click on the script file you wish to upload, click on Properties/CHMOD and set the permissions to 755.

12. Upload the cgi script – there are two modes of uploading, ASCII and Binary. Upload the cgi script (contactus.pl) and any txt files in ASCII mode. Upload the script to the cgi-bin folder. If you don’t follow this you will not be able to execute the script.

13. Upload the html form and any image files like .jpg or .gif in Binary mode.

14. Test your cgi script by filling out the html email form and submitting it. You should receive an immediate confirmation.

By adding interactivity to your web site using a cgi script, you can expand the functions of your web site and create a more interesting experience for your visitors. This will keep them coming back and help you stay ahead of your competitors.

Resources

Formmail script

http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/formmail.zip

Free CGI scripts

Scriptarchive.com
Hotscripts.com
cgi-resources.com

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Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com. Affordable
Web Site Design and Web Hosting. Subscribe to his
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