This is an admittedly far less entertaining video than the last one, but it’s impressive nonetheless.
Oh, I was totally going to embed the video, but since it starts playing automatically, it sucks. Click here to watch (it’s worth a click, but seriously, who thinks it’s a good idea to have videos start playing automatically?!).
Paul Bass at the New Haven Independent (a new media news outfit: it’s all digital and all networked) reports on Yale sophomore Victor Wong’s new web business:
GPaper hopes to accomplish the first goal through “flyerboards,” a new technology that mimics kiosks or bulletin boards with flyers. A strip of low-cost, shrunken “posters” — for time-sensitive events, like store sales or public events — would appear on the side of a homepage, for instance. The reader could see one that looks interesting, click on it, and have it appear enlarged on the screen. (A larger version of this, not tailored to hyperlocal news sites, operates on the Yale campus. Click here to view it.)
Wong’s idea is one that makes you slap yourself on the forehead and ask, “Why didn’t I think of that?” The example linked above (and here) is just a digitally transcoded bulletin board. I have a regular board above my computer as I type this. We have bulletin boards all over the Tunxis campus. Supermarkets and restaurants have them too.
We walk by them all the time, but if a well designed flier catches our eye, we stop and take a look. Wong is taking the same concept and monetizing it. If I understand the concept correctly, thumbnail fliers will hang out in the sidebar of local media sites, and if one catches the reader’s eye he can click to enlarge it right there without leaving the site. That’s key.
If I see a good posting on the Tunxis bulletin boards, I can just walk up and read it, then get back to what I was doing. The way advertising on the web generally works now is that a small ad draws your attention, but to click it means to leave the site (or open it in a new window) to learn more. That’s kind of like seeing a posting on the Tunxis bulletin board, but having to go to the Library to actually read it.
So as I delve into the Futures project with my teammates, maybe we can hone our big idea by taking a step back and looking for something so obvious that it hasn’t yet occurred to anyone.
Either way, this commentary on MySpace is a compliment to Professor “ERSIGHAUS” whoever he is:
Steve is right, MySpace is overrated.