Monthly Archives: May 2008

Beet.TV on Adobe Media Player and Advertising

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Beet.TV has an interview up with Deeje Cooley, an Internet TV Evangelist here at Adobe, on some of the advertising models inside of Adobe Media Player. AMP is one of the more interesting products that Adobe is working on I think. We’ve got some really great analytical tools in the background and it sounds like publishers are also starting to take notice. Deeje provides a good overview of the platform and a bit about how it works.

One of the things they cover is how you can get your own content into AMP. One way is to create a media RSS feed for your video content and then anyone can add that feed to their AMP playlist. To get listed in the catalog it sounds like we’re still working on the specifics, but we’re hoping to make it very easy down the road.

There was also recently an interesting article in Forbes about YouTube and more generally some of the findings of content providers as they move to the web:

YouTube has done a lot of experimenting with ad formats and found some surprises. Pre-roll video ads prior to the main video cause the audience to click away up to 70% of the time. Better: short banners that pop up from the bottom of the video window. The NBA channel runs rollover Patrón tequila ads that turn into a video how-to for making margaritas. “It’s finally a way that advertisers can leverage the massive amount of video streams without the fear of being next to the soccer kid getting kicked in the nuts,” says Davis Brewer, lead strategist for emerging channels for media planning firm Spark Communications. People click on those rollover ads 8 times as often as on standard display ads next to the video. The rollover ads are most effective if they appear 15 seconds into the video. Any earlier and people get turned off. When the rollover is run in tandem with a display ad next to the video box, the chance of someone clicking can be 46 times as good.

Those are all things AMP supports and things that Flash makes very easy. Interactive video has been a strength of the platform from day one and I think going forward that’s going to be very valuable to advertisers, content providers, and stat geeks trying to figure out how to best reach an audience.

Heads Up: Firefox 3 Breaks Some Flash Applications

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Update: They’re going to rollback the change that caused the problem with Flash. Thanks to mjg for the heads up.

I wanted to give Flash developers a quick heads up because when Firefox 3 gets rolled out you may be getting emails from your users about existing Flash content not working. The problem is a bug in the recent builds of Firefox 3 which doesn’t handle some of the keyboards events correctly.

Unfortunately it doesn’t sound like this bug is going to be fixed before the final Firefox 3 release (we have to wait for a point release) but you can vote for it on the bug page. Please don’t comment as that adds to the noise, but voting is encouraged! (You have to register, but it’s pretty painless).

The Latest Flash Player Exploit

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There was some big news about a flaw in Flash Player 9 that was supposedly a zero-day exploit which affected all versions of Flash Player 9. That is not the case. Flash Player 9.0.124.0, which is the most recent version, is not affected and this was handled in a previous security bulletin.

More info is available on the Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team blog. And we suggest you upgrade to the latest version of Flash Player 9. If you already have, you’re not at risk of the exploit.

Break the Guiness World Record For Downloads? Flash Already Did It

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Simsons Did itMozilla is doing trying to break the record for software downloads in 24 hours with Firefox 3. Having used Firefox 3 I’m pretty impressed, I like it, and the downloads thing is good marketing. But it’s nowhere close to Flash. Here’s the quote from their FAQ courtesy of Larry Dignan:

This is the first record attempt of its kind so there is no set number. We’d really like to outdo the number of Firefox 2 downloads on its launch day, which was 1.6 million. Let’s shoot for 5 million–the sky is the limit!

So there’s not actually a world record to break, but to put that in perspective, we get 8 million installs of the Flash Player…..on an average day. I don’t even know what it is on one of our release days (but I’ll try and find out).

The image reference.

FriendFeed is a Great Evangelist Tool

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FriendFeedTo be honest I was a little lukewarm on FriendFeed. And I still don’t use it much to interact with my readers. I think in a lot of cases it only works if you’re one of the uber-popular like Robert Scoble or Mike Arrington and you have a lot of commenters which generates a lot of discussion. But I’ve been using the search feature for a couple of weeks and have found it’s an incredibly valuable way to find and interact with people using Adobe technology.

Specifically, I use it to track mentions of Adobe AIR. I get blog posts, twitter messages, events, and anything in between. It not only lets me talk to people who find bugs or have specific platform questions, but it gives me almost instant feedback when a new AIR application generates a lot of interest. I start seeing blog posts, stumbleupons, and digg links.

I realize this doesn’t scale and that the FriendFeed crowd is on the very early side of early adopters. But I think early adopters demand a lot from their technology and so they provide some good insight. This way I can collect that feedback and solicit more which will hopefully make it back into the engineering team at Adobe. If you haven’t signed up with FriendFeed yet, I encourage you to do so. It’s pretty low maintenance to add your blog, twitterstream and whatever else to the FriendFeed account. And it’ll make your stuff easy for me to find.

And there are also plenty of good FriendFeed AIR Apps out there.

David Mendels and the Definition of RIA

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James Governor has a great post which includes a quote by David Mendels on the definition of RIAs. David is going to be hugely missed here at Adobe. As I mention in the comments over at James’ blog I was always impressed as a blogger that David would take time comment on what I was saying. He is more on top of information and external communication than any other exec that I know of. I wish he had a blog but his comments always gave a high level face to Adobe that I think everyone appreciated.

David was one of the first people that coined the term RIA. His note to James is a great writeup of why the term still applies today but through the explosion of Ajax and Flash isn’t quite as useful as it might have been. And it’s a perfect example of why David is so good.

Adobe AIR Supports Enterprise Deployment

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Oliver Goldman wanted to make sure you knew that and I agree. As he says, right now, in AIR 1.0, you can make your application enterprise-ready and deployable in a number of ways:

  • -You can deploy AIR and AIR-based applications via enterprise deployment tools like Microsoft SMS and IBM Tivoli,
  • -You can disable auto-update of both AIR and AIR-based applications, and
  • -You can configure which applications, if any, AIR will permit to be installed

    • The last two are biggies that we haven’t done a good enough job of getting the word out on. You can customize what can or can’t be installed in AIR. Just want your enterprise app to be installed without opening up access to other AIR apps? Done and done. So enterprise it up AIR developers.

    Dreamweavers, Fireworks, and Soundbooths, oh My!

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    We’ve released 3 products (Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Soundbooth) from the upcoming Creative Suite 4 release so that you can check out the new features and the new user interfaces. If you’ve purchased CS3 then these products will work until CS4 comes out but if you haven’t then you’ll have 48 hours to test them out.

    My personal favorite is Fireworks (with Dreamweaver as a close second). We’ve done a ton of stuff in Fireworks to make doing graphical assets for RIAs very, very easy. And Fireworks will play really nicely with Thermo when it comes out so it makes sense to brush up on your Fireworks skills.

    The Day Google Erased Me From the Internet – Why I Want Microsoft to Be Competitive in Search

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    Update 2: Just making sure people know that I’m back in the index and Google was very helpful about it. All in all it was a good experience (if still shocking).

    Update: Matt Cutts blogged and provided some insight into the process. I want to make sure people know I’m not angry with Google – I broke the rules. It was just a wakeup call for me that Google’s rules are the only ones I care about and I’ll give them whatever they want so I can play.

    Yesterday was one of the scariest days I’ve had in a long time and it put in total perspective the power that Google wields. It also made me hope that every single company with an idea about how to improve search, including Microsoft, continues to try and beat Google. I was working on a blog post and was searching for something I’d written before so that I could reference it. Instead of using my blog’s search, I of course used Google’s site feature, like I always do. Only this time, I got nothing:

    Invisible

    At first I thought it was just because I was in China and my blog had been blocked. But after asking my Twitter friends to check for me I realized that wasn’t the case. My blog had been completely removed from Google’s index. All of my blog posts were effectively gone to everyone that uses Google, which is basically everyone and especially technology-minded folks that I try to reach as an evangelist.

    I was confused, angry, and I felt completely helpless. Everyone uses Google. It was a big referrer to my blog and when I posted tips and tricks for Flash/Flex/AIR I did so knowing that someone could Google the problem and find my blog. My name? No longer my own. The first result was now my blog on ZDNet, which is something I don’t fully control. The other sites which are related to me on the front page were Twitter, and Mike Downey’s Flickr stream – both sites that I have absolutely no control over. My online identity for anyone using Google was now in the hands of domains and brands beyond my reach. It was a scary feeling.

    I calmed down, and did some research (using Google of course). I found a blog post that referenced a help@google.com email. After emailing that I got this auto-response:

    Thank you for writing to Google. We’d like to assist you, but we only respond to messages submitted through our online contact form. Please visit http://www.google.com/support/ to submit your message, and we’ll get back to you soon. We apologize for any inconvenience, and we look forward to hearing from you.

    This is where things get a little spooky and made me realize the full extent of my reliance on Google. I’m not some crazy privacy nut – I live my life very openly on the internet and I’m fine with Google’s business model. But because of how often I rely on Google and how important it is to so many people I’d started treating it like a utility. Just like I have water, electricity, and gas, I have Google. Not so.

    Going to the Google Support site and searching led me to this page which says (emphasis mine):

    If your site is blocked from our index because it violates our quality guidelines, we may alert you about this using our Webmaster Tools. Simply sign in to our Webmaster Tools, add your site URL, and verify site ownership. The Overview page provides information about the indexing of your site.

    Hollow ManI understand that being included in Google’s index is a privilege, not a right. But in order to apply to get my my site re-listed I have to both have a Google account (which conveniently allows me to access all of Google’s wonderful services) and associate my URL with that account. Interesting. So doing all that I was finally able to see what the problem was. I’d been hacked. I had a bunch of spam links that were only showing up to the Google bot.

    I have no idea how long they’d been there. I had been fighting spam for a long time but this was worse. I’ve been traveling so I haven’t been able to make sure my blog is totally spam free. I removed the offending spam and applied for reinstatement. Unfortunately according to the message I need to allow several weeks for the request to go through.

    Now I realize I should have had better control over my blog. WordPress should have been more secured, I should have been aware of vulnerabilities, and that the responsibility is mine. But I’m a blogger, web developer and evangelist. I don’t know the security side as well as I should and I don’t have time to make sure everything is rock solid. After this experience? Of course. I realize how important it is to conform to Google’s rules.

    But I think that’s kind of the problem. I had no warning, no heads up. I like to think I’m a pretty good Netizen – not some SEO firm trying to game the system. My Page Rank is (was) supposedly a 9 for goodness sake (which of course makes me more attractive to spammers). And yet I got totally removed. I use Google because it DOES keep search results free of spam. That’s great. But I realized last night that Google is holding all the cards. They can do whatever the heck they want to. So Microsoft, keep going after search. Get us better results, give webmasters more options. Startups, keep trying to find the weak link. Make Google make itself better. Improve the search experience across the board for everyone – users and webmasters.