Spurred by national pride and massive growth in Internet adoption in China, CCTV.com, the site run by national broadcaster China Central TV, drew more than 100 million unique visitors during the 2008 Olympic Games. WebTrends Analytics documented an average of more than 6 million unique visitors each day. In comparison, NBC, which maintained broadcast rights to the Games in the United States, reported an average of 4.3 million unique users a day on its Olympics web site. Yahoo!, which also featured extensive online video from the Olympics, averaged 4.7 million, according to media accounts.

“The Beijing Olympics marked the coming of age for the Internet in China,” said Alex Yoder, CEO of WebTrends, a leading provider of web analytics and online marketing solutions. “CCTV.com attracted more than 100 million online visitors for the Olympic Games by providing the right content at the right time for a large and ever-growing online audience.”

• An increase of more than 2.5 minutes in the average time each visitor remained on CCTV.com, to nearly 11.5 minutes during the Olympics.
• The opening ceremonies and other activities on Aug. 8 generated the most traffic on any single day, nearly 8.5 million visits. Aug. 9 and Aug. 18, the day Chinese athlete Liu Xiang was scheduled to race in the 110 meter hurdles, attracted the second and third highest visitor counts, respectively.
• The busiest hour of online traffic was from 11 a.m. to noon on Aug. 18. Nearly 900,000 visits were tallied during the hour in which Xiang was scheduled to race. The second busiest hour was during the opening ceremonies.

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According to a Google press release, the webcasts will include:

- The Mountain View keynote by vice-president of engineering Jeff Huber (10:00 a.m. PDT)

- The London keynote by open source programs manager Chris DiBona and geospatial technologist Ed Parsons (4:00 a.m. PDT)

- Presentations by Google director of research Peter Norvig on artificial intelligence; Google technical director Mark Lucovsky on Google’s AJAX APIs; Google tech lead Adam Sah on distributing applications with Google universal gadgets; and Google Web Toolkit co-creators Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber on building AJAX user interfaces in Java.

And these are the webcast locations:

• Developer Day London
• Developer Day Mountain View Exhibit Hall
• Mountain View Room A5
• Mountain View Room A6
• Mountain View Room A7
• Mountain View Room A8

I wonder if any of the new technologies released yesterday – Street View and Mapplets – will also be covered in the different sessions, though there seems to be no hint in the session descriptions so far.

Ongoing comments

[Thanks Anthony H.!]

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Television does it with their countdown shows and websites do it with lists: "AFI’s 100 Greatest American Movies" or "VH1′s 100 Greatest Kid Stars."

And Darcy offers evidence that he spends too much time in supermarket checkout aisles by demonstrating that popular mass market magazines use the trick on their covers all the time.

The idea of an enumerated list of pointers seems to appeal to us as audiences. We know that there is a finite limit to the information we’ll be receiving and that it has been structured and organized, giving us hope that it will be more informative and useful. We also seem to enjoy the challenge of guessing what might be on the list and comparing our ideas with those of the presenter.

Why not give this a try the next time you need to promote a webinar? Instead of a title like "Xycomeginy Software Release 5.0 – New Features," you could make it sing by combining an audience perspective with a list: "8 Ways The New Xycomeginy Release Benefits You."

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]]> http://www.webpronews.com/using-numbers-for-effective-presentations-2007-04/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/forrester-releases-webcasting-report-2007-01 http://www.webpronews.com/forrester-releases-webcasting-report-2007-01#comments Tue, 23 Jan 2007 15:56:48 +0000 Ken Molay http://www.webpronews.com/?p=34668 Forrester Research just released a new report by Claire Schooley on the use of webcasts in large organizations. ]]> Forrester Research just released a new report by Claire Schooley on the use of webcasts in large organizations.

It’s a rather high level introduction to the topic, going all the way back to the differences between a webcast and a collaborative web conference.

Forrester interviewed 13 vendors for the report: Accordent Technoloies, Adobe Systems, Avacast, Interactive Video Technologies (IVT), Media Publisher, ON24, Online Video Service, Reflect Systems, Sonic Foundry, Streamlogics, TalkPoint Communications, Vcall, and Vodium.

The report costs $380 if you don’t already have a Forrester contract covering this research area. It is 13 pages long. I obviously can’t go into too much detail about the content, as I would be violating copyright and giving away information they are selling. A lot of the content concerns definitions and basic background, such as a simplified example of what a webcast interface might look like to a viewer. That seems like something you could get pretty quickly by simply attending any random webcast promoted on the Internet!

The report goes into more detail on the subject of hosted versus on-premise installed software for producing webcasts, but doesn’t get into the nitty gritty of associated costs and technical considerations when going the on-premise route. There are some large matrix tables of features and services offered by various technology vendors.

Interestingly (and refreshingly), Forrester offers a money-back guarantee on the order page. If you are not completely satisfied with your research document for any reason, you can return it for a full refund within three weeks of your online purchase. That’s risky business practice for a product that can be read for the information value and then returned with no loss to the customer, but it shows good integrity by Forreseter.

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With a background in software development and marketing, Ken has been producing and delivering business webinars since 1999. His background in public speaking, radio, stage acting, and training has given him a unique perspective on what it takes to create a compelling and effective presentation. Currently Ken offers consulting services through his company Webinar Success (www.wsuccess.com).

Click down to “I Met You on MySpace.” Destined to get at least 200 more plays. Heheh.

Sean Coon, can you make me a borg card like that? That’s cool. We could collect the whole set!

I love the “stick it” closing arguments by James Spader on Boston Legal. It’s amazing how many things Americans have just kept quiet about lately.

Oh,TabletKiosk is taking orders for Origamis (er, UltraMobilePCs).

Are you into IIS, well there’s a group of excellent Webcasts coming up this week all for you and all free.

Professor Lynda Gratton, of the London Business School, has a cool video on The Power of Good Conversation. Great companies value conversations, she says. I love the 50 Lessons idea where they have successful business leaders who share their experiences in the form of short video stories.

April 1 is the day to take pictures of everything you put in your mouth. At least if you buy into Oralpixation. Sounds like a fun thing to do on April fools day.

Wanna listen to the USA’s National Public Radio on your cell phone? Well, Rob Greenlee told me that Mobilcast now is doing just that.

I’ve been using the new NewsGator Inbox 2.6 for a few days now and it runs great. Lots of little new features (better synch, for instance, and it gives you a list of errors so you can find out if a feed is permanently down now). Congrats to Greg Reinacker and team on shipping that and a new FeedDemon. More on Greg’s blog. This is still the feed reader I use (NewsGator in Outlook).

Improbulus, on the Consuming Experience blog, is complaining about nextsplog abuse on Blogger. Oh, boy, yet a whole new form of stealing traffic.

And, with that, I’m off to bed. Have a busy day tomorrow due to speeches and other stuff (Shel Israel and I are speaking at Microsoft in building 113, room 1021 tomorrow at 1:30 p.m.). Unfortunately only open to Microsoft employees, but we’ll try to get it videoed and up in public.

Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …

Microsoft made several announcements recently, related to its business-focused Dynamics line and other products. In the CRM arena, the company said it had gained several thousand seats in the US and abroad as tax preparer H&R Block and other firms.

Brad Wilson, general manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, said in a statement that the product delivers “a radically better CRM value proposition for large businesses,” which should get a interesting response from people like Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.

On the small business side, Microsoft made a few announcements stemming from its Small Business Summit taking place in Washington state. Microsoft has made webcasts available of the various seminars taking place in four tracks: computer security, productivity & mobility, sales & marketing, and financial management.

One area where Microsoft has tried to apply some leverage is on the financing side. Until recently, a business had to commit to a $10,000 transaction to be eligible for financing through Microsoft. They have dropped that figure to $3,000.

Microsoft also has a deal with electronics retailer Best Buy aimed at Microsoft’s potential retail customers. A version of Microsoft’s Point of Sale application will gain a spot on Best Buy’s shelves, in software form and in a hardware package preloaded with the software.

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The organizers say there will be 2,340 participants from 89 countries including 15 heads of state or government, 13 union leaders and over 30 heads of non-governmental organizations. This year, 735 participants are at the CEO or Chairman level.

What makes this year’s meeting especially interesting is that many of these movers-and-shakers will be blogging the event.

This is not private or ad hoc blogging – the World Economic Forum Weblog is an integral part of the 2006 meeting. The blog doesn’t yet list who all the bloggers are but some of them have already begun posting. An indicator of what to expect as the meeting gets underway:

[...] We will blog here summaries of the sessions we participate in and some personal ideas about them. As I said, this is an experiment and should be taken as is. In no way should the notes you will find here express the voice of The Forum itself but rather our personal experience of the Summit, as participants.

That text looks as though it was written for the 2004 meeting. Nevertheless, that’s what the ‘About this blog’ currently says.

And not only blogging at Davos – podcasts and webcasts as well. With the podcasts in particular, I think we can expect some interesting and worthwhile content for our listening enjoyment when the first podcasts are available starting tomorrow (I’ve already subscribed to the RSS feed).

At last year’s meeting, blogging played a key role as the catalyst for a highly-controversial issue leading to the resignation of Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN. Jay Rosen described that event pretty well.

There is a clear disclaimer and guidelines on what is allowed for blogging at this meeting, and what isn’t:

On- and off-the-record policy for the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2006. All sessions in the Congress Hall, and in addition Sanada 1 & 2 of the Congress Centre, are on the record and you may attribute panellists’ remarks to their owners. All other sessions in the Congress Centre are off the record. You can report on the tenor of the debate, but you must not quote participants directly. If, however, you receive their subsequent permission you may quote them. All of the private sessions are “off-the-record meetings” and are not to be blogged.

This semi-transparency makes it clear what’s public and what’s private. Yet it was a private or closed session last year that was blogged (on an individual’s blog, not the WEF one) leading to Jordan’s downfall, which brings to mind one reality for me – little these days seems to be off the record. So the maxim of being cautious about what you say even in a private session is worth keeping in mind, especially when there’s wi-fi (and podcasters with portable MP3 recorders) around.

Still, I expect to see some good personal commentaries on this blog to balance the official stuff we’ll read about in the media. Not only on the official blog, though, on others as well (follow the Technorati tags, below).

Loic Le Meur is the driving force behind the WEF blog and will be in charge of that show. Good luck, Loic!

Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

The premiere of “Amazon Fishbowl with Bill Maher” won’t be broadcast from the Georgia Aquarium, but taped at the Sundance Film Festival, to debut with a June 1 launch. The Wall Street Journal quoted Kathy Savitt, Amazon’s vice president of strategic communications, on the initiative: “We are very dedicated to that mission of helping connect artists to new audiences. If customers connect with the artists, there will be product sales.”

The format announced by Amazon follows the classic style of late-night programming going back to Johnny Carson: an opening monologue by Maher, interviews with guests, and a musical performance. The guests will be people like authors, directors, and actors with products on Amazon’s site.

Three content areas, books, music, and movies, delivered big for Amazon. The Journal stated that nearly three-fourths of Amazon’s $1.86 billion revenue came from the trio. This happened despite Amazon’s broadened line of product categories and partnerships that have expanded the site greatly from its debut as a bookseller offering substantial discounts.

Amazon discussed the premiere episode in a statement, noting that highlights from the Sundance debut would appear on Amazon in advance of the June 1 series launch:

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MSN Search doesn’t update its blog very often, but the latest entry offers a half-dozen webcasts targeted to developers seeking to expand their knowledge of MSN’s products.

Developers can extend the functionality of a variety of MSN services, and readers of WebProNews probably will have some interest in the discussion on MSN Search APIs. A total of six webcasts over a two-week period starting today will feature the MSN Search Toolbar twice, Gadgets, Virtual Earth, and Messenger.

The MSN Search API webcast will take place on December 12th, and features the topic “Building Web Search into Your Applications” as the theme. Microsoft described the forthcoming webcast online:

More information including dates and times can be found at the MSN Developer site.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

In a post yesterday GM offers two podcasts about the launch of two new car models at the Chicago Auto Show – the Cadillac DTS and the Buick Lucerne.

I listened to both podcasts, each introduced by Gary Cowger, President of GM North America. If he was the one who blogged it, then he would be the third senior GM exec to blog, joining Vice Chairman Bob Lutz – the original blogger when the blog launched at the beginning of January – and Tom Stephens, Group Vice President, GM Powertrain, who started blogging at the end of January. However, it’s not clear if Cowger is the blogger as this post is one of the few where the individual blogger isn’t identified (so likely to have been one of the PR folk).

So, to the podcasts, each one a bit over or under five and a half minutes. They’re actually the sound part from webcasts GM did for the Chicago Auto Show launches. They are not audio presentations created specifically for distribution as podcasts. The presenter in each one clearly is speaking to a live audience who can see what’s being talked about – there are specific points in both where the presenters use phrases like “As you can see…”

You can actually see as well as hear the slick event presentations if you view the webcasts at GMTV.

But, for this first step, I don’t think it matters at all that the audio is taken from something else. GM is experimenting with this medium. As an experiment, the podcasts are bound to attract interest simply because GM is doing it. If they judge it to be a success, then no doubt we’ll see future such efforts produced specifically for this aural medium.

As to how they will measure success, well, comments via the Fastlane Blog are one sure way to get feedback on what visitors think about the experiment and build those comments into a focus for discussion. If a recent post is anything to go by, where a visitor’s comment prompted it, I’d expect to see a specific post discussing the podcasts, what people think of them and what GM plans to do next with them. This will be dynamic conversation and real transparency if that happens!

In any event, I take my hat off to you, GM, for trying this out.

Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.