Another company with a name that looks like a typo.

Apture is a killer new publishing application that lets you hook interactive multi-media modules from the Web onto your editorial. It has to be experienced to be really understood, so, for example, if you were writing a blogpost on the Aurora Borealis and wanted to provide definitions, pictures, and video from top sources like Wikipedia and YouTube, you could do so with just a couple of clicks. And then your audience gets to experience multi-media and related content on your website.

It's rare I say "wow" these days since I'm steeped in the Web all the time, but I have to say that this particular capability is stunning in its implications. Now ANYONE can have a site that is supported by some of the Web's top content providers (the Web 2.0 ones, that is).

Here are some examples of media stitched into a sentence (overdone for effect):
"The Summer's reigning blockbuster is still Iron Man, with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull hot on it's heels. Me, I'm now rooting for The Incredible Hulk. And Will Smith's Hancock has yet to take a bow."

OK, the sentence is bad, but the multimedia in-page is really differentiating. Only real flaw is if there is no great content on any of those properties accessible within the application. For this type of interactive plug-and-play experience I can sure live with that.

At this week's "Graphing Social Patterns" conference in Washington D.C., attendees perched on ends of seats, focused on gleaning hints or tricks or otherwise silver bullets to turbo-boost their web properties' social syndication quota.

"Design for the Viewer," advised a panelist.

"Not just the user. Design for the Viewer."

Focusing on the "Viewer" rather than the user in this context means to "make your widget noticeable." Utilize your arsenal of brand and creative design to grab the user's attention, quickly. As Chris Anderson recently observed, in the "attention economy," a person's time actually is money and gaining even a split-second of it will commensurately enable monetization opportunity.

Make your placements visually vocal. Make them shout "This Thing is Grabbable!" or "This Thing Does Something With Facebook!" or "Like MySpace? You'll Like This Too, Then!" Images move faster to cognitive recognition and association. Images are sexy, free-tv-bundled FIOS where text is generic dial-up.

"Grabbability" - the ability to be taken and embedded elsewhere - was noted as a function without standard iconography and widely misunderstood or plain missed by the target audience. Separately, the Facebook logo (and by extension other logos with a brand afterimage) was cited as an element which "speaks to" Facebook users, and increases clickthrough by a multiple.

Text alone will not suffice to evoke the concept of intersite portability - at least not within the split-seconds available before whimsy or flashing hamsters distract. Often, site owners utilize text to describe a social app's value, and the text gets lost in a quick scan with other page text. To gain notice from attention-lacking social surfers, employ something visual, persistent, and relevant to the viewer's experiences or affiliations offsite.

The inference drawn is to design a system of visual prompts or cues (suggested to me earlier by John Kilpatrick) for what page elements refer to activities a Viewer may carry on to other favorite web destinations. And then, one will hope, back again.

Jonathan Meyers, the Program Manager for AOL News, passed on this great tip that we have posted an open competition cash-reward for an Elections experience. You can see it in the screen shot above at the bottom. All of the basic requirements are listing on the page.

For the uninitiated, TopCoder Studio is "the meeting place for clients who need creative work done and creative people looking to compete for that work." Nice to see an AOL project posted in an open marketplace like this.

Our Key Experiences team has just launched a pretty slick integration of Moviefone directly into the site. This distributed experience even includes functions not available on Moviefone itself such as the ability to invite your friends to movies (you can select theaters and showtimes and send out the invite to your pals seamlessly). Aside from that innovation, the user has the ability to perform the basics such as search for showtimes and tickets and track their favorite movies. Our basic strategy to atomize the core essence of our channels and distribute them around the Web where our users congregate is only just beginning...

Hopefully in a future post we can lure our superstar designers and coders to relay some lessons from the trenches on pulling this assignment off. Let us know if you are interested...

If you have an iTouch or an iphone you're now able to browse one of the leading movie sites on the web in style. Check us out at iphone.aol.movies.com. (If you are not on one of those devices that URL is gonna look funny btw). The effort was completed in exactly one month to the day by the design and dev teams. The app also made "staff Pick" status.

This past week we launched an entirely new AOL News product called Hot Seat.

The concept is simple. Take a question of controversial nature, put it in front of an audience with an average of 25 million pageviews per day and it will start a conversation, maybe even a heated debate.

The main objective is to get the candidate to respond. In our first few days of launching, the John Edwards campaign responded to Mark Halperin's question, "Could John Edwards really win Iowa?".

So far the poll has generated 70,914 votes from users across the nation and has spurred Edwards' campaign to respond. His response appears just below the poll results along with hundreds of user comments.

We've gathered a few of the best minds in the political blogesphere to engage the candidates that will be on the Hot Seat. This group includes Arianna Huffington and Bill Maher from the Huffington Post, the Politico's John Harris, Slate's chief political writer John Dickerson and many more.

John Edwards this past Friday. Who will be next? New Polls each weekday...

Political Machine | Hot Seat Archive | Most Commented

Elizabeth Bruneau (Head Photo Editor for AOL Music) and I recently interviewed Photographers Smallz and Raskind to chat about musicians they have shot for AOL Sessions. The boys are our most prolific shooters, documenting a hodge-podge of musicians ranging from girly pop acts to dirty boy bands. Check out the video below for insight into the artists we have featured, and some exclusive photos you wont see anywhere else on AOL.

As part of the recent IAB Mixx Conference on online advertising I had the chance to face the cameras and discuss content and user experience strategy. These videos have surfaced on about.com, including some interesting interviews with other presenters at the conference.

Be on the lookout for an online ad campaign geared to drive traffic into AOL Programming websites over the coming weeks. Just yesterday I screen-captured this simple flow that is actually quite effective in its execution. (A) is a simple and irresistible ad banner I stumbled upon while playing online games with my kids on Miniclip (they got suspicious of me when the adult declared we just HAD to click the ad on Scandals of the Year!). You then arrive at an AOL News page with a great Scandals roundup gallery (B) embedded on the page, but then (C) is the most interesting part of the flow. An AOLNews branded widget sits under the gallery for one-click adding to your google dashboard. Overall the simplicity of the experience is actually quite refreshing and it's great to see a team that has been doing such great work over the years be finally supported by a simple yet innovative marketing campaign. This is progress. Now we just have to convince everyone it is ALL FREE. Let me know if you spot the others live.

Last week I presented at the iDMAa conference an overview of the challenges that AOL faces moving forward and what we are doing about it. The usual suspects were part of the presentation: audience fragmentation, 5-person up-starts with VC funding, mobility, ourselves (as in getting out of our own way and embracing innovation), and how social networks got away from us and our coming responses to this fact.

The audience was composed of deans and professors associated with digital media programs around the world. (The sheer intellectual firepower in the room was a bit intimidating I will admit.)

Most resonant with the audience was the slide below that hits on how the current and next generation of design talent needs to be versed in far more than simply aesthetics.


Click "Read More" to see my thoughts on this...

The New York Times recently published an article discussing the collaboration between the creators of the hipster hit-mag VICE, and the omnipresent MTV-- a channel rebranding itself through an adoption of internet content. VBS TV is a combined effort from the two media giants (giants in two very different yet depressingly similar senses) to create an eccentric yet relevant series of internet TV programs. Ranging from hallucinogenic Columbian flowers to ultimate fighting, the webisodes mix the visceral nature of VICE with the digestibility of MTV-- converting the taboo-ness of the topics into totally taboo-less, and therefore very COOL.

Fortunately for us, the mini-docs are cool and touch upon compelling issues that you wont currently see on the evening news. My personal favorites? The candid conversations with art idol Richard Prince and Crime Scene Photographer Enrique Metinides, on the Art Talk! show.

Leopard, Apple's latest operating system, is "nice" overall. I say that because it is in no way a critical upgrade. Yet there is a feature in Safari working in concert with the operating system that is pretty important in its implications. There is a "one-click" desktop widget maker built into the upper left navigation of the browser. You can "click and crop" any element from a web page to convert it into a living desktop widget instantly. It is that simple. In the screens below I made a digg feed desktop widget in, say, 5 seconds.

Step one: select your widget on the page. In this screen I have just finished clicking the little scissor icon in the upper left (it is now grayed out).


Step two: enjoy. It even applies some shading to make it visually feel like a custom app. Powerful idea.

It is an exciting week as I am delivering the keynote at the iDMA conference in Philadelphia this Thursday. That hefty acronym stands for the International Digital Media & Arts Association by the way. Consistent with their theme of "Beyond Boundaries" I am going to discuss some of the challenges AOL faces and how we need to keep innovating to be successful. I am also going to hit on what skills are expected from future graduates of academic interactive education programs.

The iDMAa was founded in early 2004 by a group of 15 universities and is dedicated to serving educators, practitioners, scholars, and organizations with interests in digital media. God bless them.

I'll let you know how it goes and post the presentation soon afterward. I have noted that our old pals at Schematic will be presenting as well. Schematic was one of the forces that helped my team and I get the Live8 experience done in record time back in 2005.

Within this post is a slide that I have been using in my last few presentations to represent the shift in consumer behavior and how it impacts online brand strategy. In the first section you can see the old school "death star" approach where the brand has built a big, impressive and scary website or portal that others will flock to due to its sheer gravitational pull.

The middle schematic shows where we are today: a still-there-but-reduced-in-strategic-importance branded portal surrounded by offshoot sub-brands designed to appeal to factions of the core audience. An example you can experience now is AOL.com > AOL Music > the alternative offshoot spinner.com. The clear benefit is that we can leverage technological platforms yet still have audience pitch-perfect content and voice. The final schematic shows 2-3 years from now, where the portal is an influencer in terms of platform innovation (and still "holds down the fort"), but is not where the majority of time is spent by the consumer. You'll also note that consumers have more self-chosen launch points into the slipstream. For portal design this means that more customization and total web "heat" must be exposed for the site to have value to ever more picky consumers. They have to be able to make it more their own. And, of course, those parts need to be distributable around the web like mini-traffic generators for your core sites.

As brands rush to get integrated into the next hot social networking portal (which, by the way, changes every year), they may be missing a bigger opportunity: the long-tail thousands of smaller micro-sites that permeate the web and are under the radar of larger brands. Custom targeting of distributed content and functionality from your site becomes more and more critical.

Part of the answer: create more open services and provide incentives to web developers and designers to leverage tools and access to your platforms. In other words AOL needs to help "power" the Web, not simply itself. Google and YouTube really nailed it here. So as we go gaga over Facebook (well deserved and relevant to integrate within), we have to remember there is not ONE PLACE you need to be. Brands will need to be in HUNDREDS or MILLIONS of places to succeed in the future!

From the people who brought you Kazaa and Skype, comes Joost , a new P2P video distribution system. Now, don't groan and assume they will be sued out of existence by the end of the week; this isn't Napster or BitTorrent or any other kind of open file sharing system like those. Instead, it is only used to distribute licensed programming controlled by Joost. Although Joost claims to have over 15000 shows, this is mostly comprised of some music videos, some B & C-grade sci-fi re-runs, and seemingly every episode of "CSI" ever recorded (which probably accounts for about 14000 of the 15000 shows mentioned). There are also some sports programs, National Geogrphic documentaries, cartoons (including "Ren and Stimpy"), and other miscellaneous content but, unless you are into Australian cooking, most of it is pretty lame.

Joost is not browser based, but is instead an Internet enabled desktop application. Although still in Beta, you can get it in Windows and Mac flavors with a Linux version on the way. The video quality is decent and can be played in a small window or at full screen. The ads are not too obtrusive (short interstitial segments between programs and the occasional pop-up ad in the bottom right corner of the screen). But where Joost really scores big is with the interface. It works like a really good TV interface (imagine an even cooler Tivo). Most importantly, the video starts playing almost instantaneously, with just a little lag-time for buffering. Joost isn't just the TV metaphor on your computer screen, though; you can bring up widgets with news tickers or to chat with other people watching the same program. You can put together your own playlists and share them with friends. Although not a robust social networking platform, it's moving in the right direction.

On the down side, the text in the interface is a tad too small for reading from the sofa (I have a 20" iMac and was sitting about 6 feet away), and I've gotten reports from other users that the video can skip if you are on a less than brilliant high-speed connection. Oh, and did I mention the programming is pretty lame? That said, Joost does have a sugar daddy in the form of Viacom backing them up, which explains why most of the content comes from CBS, MTV, and Paramount pictures. Almost as important, Joost also has already signed a slate of Major Brand advertisers including Coke, Nike, and Microsoft.

Overall, I really like what Joost is trying to do. The interface is simple enough to use and I'm a fan of video on demand in general. Right now, cable TV has the market cornered for video content, and that probably will not change immediately with the arrival of Joost. The content needs to be beefed up before I'll be turning to Joost before I check out what's on my "traditional" TV set. However, there is still enough good programming here that I'll be checking in regularly, if for no other reason than to watch "Ren and Stimpy" re-runs.