www.nickhodge.com

Blue Day means a clear day. I could see the sky. After leav­ing a dark and rainy Sydney, 4degC Mel­bourne was a rude surprise.

Up at 4:00am. A cat wandered out, stretched and looked at me quiz­zically seem­ingly ask­ing : “WTF?”

After check­ing the online world, my new res­id­ence, drive off to the air­port. Megan’s bat­tery is stuffed. Oh well, time to jump in the other MINI (Scar­lett) and off.

Vir­gin Blue to Mel­bourne left only 10 minutes late due to Mel­bourne being fogged in. The in-flight magazine “Voyeur” has a one-page art­icle on Social Net­work­ing. LOL. It’s main­stream now.

There are two reas­ons for being in Mel­bourne: PR Sum­mit run by Fro­comm. I am a pan­el­ist along with Mar­ilyn Chalkley, Man­ager, CSIRO Media Liaison and Andrew Par­sons, Dir­ector, Pro­duc­tion and Digital Com­mu­nic­a­tions, Depart­ment of Immig­ra­tion and Cit­izen­ship. My title merely said “Pro­fes­sional Geek”

(for those watch­ing my Twit­ter: here is the real Air gui­tar You­tube: Dr Richard Helmer’s Every wanna be rocker’s dream come true)

The ses­sion prior to the panel was by Abi­gail Thomas from the ABC. Abi­gail talked about ABC’s Second­Life island.

So, the panel was inter­est­ing. There is a big gap of exper­i­ence and under­stand­ing of the “online nat­ive” world. Just pod­cast­ing a Press Release will not cut it for Pod­casters and Blog­gers. Cre­at­ing a Second­Life island will cost, and attract 3 dogs and maybe a man (as much as I tech­nic­ally love Second­Life, we have yet to see the future)

My opin­ion on this in a forth­com­ing post.

Inter­est­ingly, the recent exper­i­ence of Cameron Reilly, Twit­ter­arti (includ­ing myself, I admit) and Tel­stra was men­tioned in almost passing. Dr Hugh Brad­low from Telstra’s response is an excel­lent step into the conversation.

Had a break-chat with Gab­ri­ella Stern, Senior Editor from Dow Jones News­wires Singa­pore. Chat was about Journ­al­ism in this new online world we find ourselves. Enron, Stock Option Repri­cing and all sorts of dis­cus­sion around blog­ging and journ­al­ists. After watch­ing the PBS doc­u­ment­ary, News­war, it was enlight­en­ing. One part of our dis­cus­sion related to the “main­stream media” and blog­gers work­ing together.

On the sub­ject of the fam­ous (The Bul­letin fam­ous) Cameron.

So, I have a few hours to kill. Twitter-friend Andrew Barnett was in the Mel­bourne CBD. After con­sult­ing a map of Mel­bourne streets, I nav­ig­ated my way to Star­bucks on the corner of Bourke and Queen street. Twitter’d to all that I was there, ready for anything.

Any­thing happened. Cameron Reilly popped in for a few moments. Later, Froosh and Andrew Barnett popped in for a chat on life, uni­verse, wed­dings, parties and anything.

Upon return­ing to the impromptu Twit­ter meetup, Cameron derided me for my choice of corporate-coffee and insisted we move to Nick’s on Little Bourke Street. Let me say, it’s my new Mel­bourne food joint of choice. We are joined by new Twitter-friend, Garth.

So, off we trot to Nick’s.

Cameron inter­views us all on Twit­ter: ques­tions related to how it has changed our blog­ging; gen­eral Twit­ter stor­ies and if cor­por­a­tions should “adopt” Twitter.

My opin­ion on this in a forth­com­ing post. Same post as above as the topic inter-connects.

Taxi, Jet­star, Sydney, Home. Cat looks at me com­pletely refreshed. I write this blog with the cat asleep. Oh for the cat’s life.

Mel­bourne was beau­ti­fally blue today. Cat missed that.

Demon­strat­ing Aus­tralian farm­ers are innov­at­ive. And a bunch of larrakins.

As I would have prob­ably watched this on Australia’s ABC as a young un’, I now under­stand why I am a geek.

Not all the video I cap­tured today will be used On10.net

So, rather than dis­card the bits: I’ve uploaded them to YouTube.

Fol­low the tag “Bar­CampSydney” or just look at this playlist.

My favour­ite: Geeks in Star­tups are Hot

fixed playl­ist URL, thanks mountainash

So Google pur­chased You­Tube. US$1.65B in shares, paper-work money or an entry in an SEC filing.

In cold-hard num­bers: You­Tube has a repor­ted 100 mil­lion view­ers per day; based on the pur­chase price, each view equates to US$0.0452 over a year. Or, another way to look at it: as long as Google “earns” US5c for each pair of eye­balls for a few minutes, within a year it is fin­an­cially ahead.

Con­sid­er­ing the cur­rent cost of both text-advertising and TV advert­ising; and the oncom­ing onslaught from com­pet­it­ors such as Microsoft and Yahoo!, US5c per view seems rather attractive.

Oppor­tun­ity cost of not own­ing You­Tube: a com­pet­itor would have pur­chased it, first. Fox had already pur­chased the young Myspace eye­balls; and Microsoft is ser­i­ous about the online world and has all those XBoxen, Vis­tas, Zunes to cap­ture other eye­balls. You­Tube was obvi­ously on the block for sale, and each viewer is val­ued at US$0.0452. US$1.65B is not too much com­pared to a com­pet­itor get­ting the brand. You­Tube maybe the “text break­out” and single product weak­ness that dogged Google in recent months. (Robert Scoble has a per­spect­ive on this, too)

Look­ing into my crys­tal tube: Google’s Video Future: It is all about about the advert­ising. Poten­tial changes to Google Adsense:

• Text links inside an ad (trans­par­ent text on bot­tom); through to top+tail video or sound bytes
• Throw more smart maths at tech­no­logy to recog­nise the con­tent inside video and then attach appro­pri­ate a like advertisement
• The ori­ginal pub­lisher of you­tubes (another verb com­ing on, here?) self-categorises, so advert­ise­ments could sim­il­arly be targeted.
• For you­tubes pos­ted on blogs or other non-Google web sites; under­stand­ing the con­text would per­mit smarter tar­geted Adsense ads

Instead of crawl­ing the inter­net, Google is becom­ing the inter­net. This is rather a scar­ily thought that crossed my mind when read­ing this Wired art­icle (The Inform­a­tion Factor­ies) on their new data cen­ter in Wash­ing­ton state, US. Ulti­mately, it may have been cheaper to buy You­Tube than cre­ate a backing-store to hold indexed video and sound.

So next: watch Apple and Google. Not sale or pur­chase, just closer ties. Apple needs the con­tent, Google needs the hard­ware. Microsoft is the com­mon competitor.