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MocoSpace’s mobile network has teamed with Island Def Jam Music to link the record label’s artists to the social network’s user base. Similar to how artists are promoted on MySpace, Def Jam’s Playaz Circle will be using a branded profile on the MocoSpace network, as a mobile resource for fans.

Users will be able to get voice tones and other content that’s being offered exclusively through MocoSpace, which recently received $3 million in funding. There will of course be the expected backstage footage from the group being on tour, and video blog entries. And it looks like Def Jam may be looking to take advantage of MocoSpace’s mobile offering, as it may launch additional promotions for other artists, including Rick Ross.

I can see the benefit of this strategy, as many teenagers have constant access to mobile networks, whereas websites may be less readily available throughout the day. Additionally, the promotion of mobile content only makes sense for distribution on mobile networks. Nevertheless, we hardly see this level of promotion on a mobile network that’s not affiliated with a wireless provider, coming directly from a record label. We’ll see how well it pans out for the niche market.

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mDialog, which launched earlier this spring, has just raised $3.15 million in funding. This Canada-based company offers a video-sharing network that’s geared towards professional producers, like indie filmmakers.

It does so by offering a downloadable tool for uploading and encrypting your high-quality videos, which are converted into smaller files without losing out on too much quality. By licensing Apple’s MPEG4 H.264 video standard, mDialog content is also available to be viewed on Apple products, like iPhones, iPods and AppleTV, as VentureBeat reports.

While this is a somewhat narrow approach, I’m glad to see that all content is integrated and available through iTunes as well. So the hopes to appeal to Apple users may work in niche crowds, and the distribution options through the web is sweetened by the inclusion of iTunes. Otherwise, having content available for Apple devices doesn’t mean much if content providers don’t have access to the actual Apple user base.

Nevertheless, most video networks like Imagine are focusing heavily on different ways in which to deliver high-quality content, and it seems as though most are attempting to appeal o th business side of the industry. But we’re also seeing a lot of deals occurring between content providers and widespread distributors, because there’s only so far your content can go when you focus on such a niche, or you simply don’t have a large user base on your own.

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Google will be reportedly be releasing its OpenSocial ”standard” tomorrow. From my understanding, basically this will create a single platform for developing applications on LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo, Ning, and other participants. Facebook of course has its own platform, while MySpace is soon to release their own. It’s certainly an interesting time to be a developer, but in the spirit of Troll Week and Halloween, I ask you:

Which social network do you hope dies a slow and painful death?
• The OpenSocial Participants
• Facebook
• MySpace
• All Social Networks
View Results

Be on the lookout for The Daily Poll in the afternoon every day Monday thru Friday. If you'd like to sponsor "The Daily Poll" or any of my future contests, please contact me.

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Ccube is a free phone service that connects parties to any phone, whether it be mobile or land line, and offers solutions for calling long distance as well. It’s releasing a new feature set called Toolbox, which includes four new options for users to take advantage of Ccube’s calling services.

First, there’s the Web Communicator, which lets users connect with each other via phone without the necessity of needing to remember one’s phone number. This is tied in with Ccube’s account services, and lets you find contacts using keywords. The Call Me Widget is rather self-explanatory. It works like most other call me widgets, which you can place on your website or blog, and let others click on it in order to give you a call, for free.

Ccube is promoting this particular feature for business purposes as well, as the call me widget can also be placed in email signatures and on classifieds sites. You’ll need to be careful as to how you use these widgets, however. As we saw with Jajah, eBay doesn’t take to kindly to having call me widgets placed on auction listings.

There’s also a feature called My Keypad, which is an option for simply dialing a number, and a Virtual Calling Card, which can be sent to others as a way of encouraging them to give you a call. These virtual calling cards offer free nationwide calling.

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The Guardian did a pretty decent job of interviewing Jay Adelson today. Jay is the CEO of Digg and co-founder of the video podcasting outfit Revision 3. Personally, I would have like to see the Guardian broach some of the developmental aspects of Revision 3, but learning a bit more about Digg was interesting, as well.

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Digg on a number of levels. I love it as a news source, but I hate it as a community to interact with. I’m a firm believer in the concept of “wisdom in crowds,” one of the founding principals of Digg. It has very solid statistical roots, is a very old concept, and in most cases work. Unfortunately, I think that Digg, for a while now, has been headed in a direction that breaks the “wisdom of the crowds” paradigm (and I’m not talking about bugs in the system that may make Digg subject to gaming). To understand why I think it is broken, I’m going to have to engage in a short history lesson; bear with me.

The anecdote that is the genesis for the concept of wisdom of crowds I’ve heard many times over is the story of scientist and statistician Francis Galton from the late 1800’s, who was surprised that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the butchered weight of an ox. What made it interesting was not that any one individual came close to guessing the actual weight, but that the crowd did. When their individual guesses were calculated to the median, the resulting number was much closer to the ox’s true butchered weight than the estimates of most individual crowd members, and perhaps most surprisingly also closer than any of the estimates made by cattle experts. Bringing it around to Digg, the idea is amongst the 21.5 million unique users to Digg per month, the wisdom of the crowds will tend to dictate that the most important, relevant, and interesting stories will rise to the top.

There’s a distinct difference, though, in what Digg tries to utilize the Wisdom for, and how the Wisdom was discovered in the first place. On Digg, what answers are being solved? The hypothetical question with only subjective answers. In Galton’s case, where the Wisdom was discovered, it was a very objective answer that was being sought. The answer wasn’t what most folks would *like* the butchered weight of the ox to be, it was what it actually is.

Another place I think the Wisdom is being misapplied is in that even if you think you can apply Wisdom to a subjective answer situation, you aren’t using a true crowd in Digg’s case. They’re trying to apply sound business strategy to a situation where philosophical questions should take priority, as is evidenced towards the end of the interview when the Guardian asks what Digg is doing to protect their various verticals. “There’s value in vertical focus, [and] there may be a vertical we choose not to go into. I would rather empower someone else to go down that route rather than do it myself,” said Adelson.

But by limiting Digg to certain niches (like technology news, or only certain types of media advantageous to the interlocking board members of the company with organizations like Rev3 and Pownce), you’re limiting your crowd to folks only interested in the niches and mediums you’ve defined as important. Galton didn’t survey just experts - it was everything from the scullery maid down to the butcher who probably had a much better idea. The Wisdom arose from the average of the stupid guesses to the educated ones.

Climbing out of the world of hypotheticals and philosophy, and into the real world for a moment, I’ll use an example from my life. A very good friend of mine, one with conservative viewpoints, recently made several comments on an article that, if memory serves, had to do with Al Gore and global warming (or maybe it was partial birth abortions - all I remember is that it was a hot-button topic, and that the premise of the article was based on completely fabricated facts).

I watched the comments build up starting from about minute two or three from the story being posted to Digg. Overwhelmingly, the comments were coming from those of a liberal bent, agreeing blindly with the article without doing a lick of homework to check out the facts involved (a lot of back slapping, Bush-bashing, and Christian-hating took place). My friend tried several times to engage other commenters on the issues of substance the article raised, questioning the authenticity of the facts and such. My friend is a very well-spoken individual, not known for a propensity for vulgarity or smug commentary, yet consistently his comments were “dugg down,” by the herd mentality, without so much of a substantive debate taking place.

Here’s my point (and I do have one): if you pull your entire crowd from which you wish to derive Wisdom from the same monoculture, it will skew your median results toward a place that is very unwise. Based on the strategy Adelson divulges in the Guardian interview, everything Digg does to upgrade the system moves towards further niching and herding of it’s users into smaller and smaller monocultures, thus further diluting the system’s Wisdom.

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Internet Brands, the Internet holding company with several e-commerce websites, is looking to raises up to $45 million with an IPO. Initially announced over the summer, Internet Brands will sell 3.75 million shares at $10-$12 each, on the NASDAQ under the ticker INET. Another 5.8 million shares will be sold by existing shareholders.

It’s revenues have actually declined this year, but not by much, sliding down from $65.2 million to $64.9 million. This has been attributed to the slowing interest in the consumer Internet segment, especially for the auto industry. With 35 acquisitions this year, including Jelsoft Enterprises’ vBulletin and ePodunk, it’s been looking to improve the communications technology across its growing network of commerce sites.

While the financial terms of vBulletin’s acquisition were not disclosed, the acquisitions by Internet Brands total $84.8 million. Microsoft has also spoken towards an acquisition strategy, aiming for 20 companies per year in order to achieve aggressive growth and development.

[via paid content]

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