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Social Networking Statistics

Morgan Stanley's March Internet trends report shows that social networking sites are quickly becoming major hubs of online activity: Six of the top ten Web sites are social.

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Arthur C. Clarke & The Importance Of Visionaries

The passing of Arthur C. Clarke last week got me to thinking about the importance of paying attention to the visionaries of the world, to those people who think about about the future and try to look beyond the horizon.

Clarke obviously fit the definition of a visionary. He is widely credited with proposing the idea of satellite communications in 1945. The themes of evolution and artificial intelligence that he explored in such stories as Childhood's End and 2001: A Space Odyssey are well worth keeping in mind as our technology becomes ever more powerful and sophisticated.

While I think we should pay special attention to visionary thinkers society-wide, they are particularly important to those of us in the fields of communications because they can get us thinking about where technology may be headed and therefore, how people will use technology.

iPods and DVRs, for example, have fundamentally altered the way in which people receive information by making messages portable and delayable.

I've been planning on writing about books that I think are important to Internet marketing folks, so let me mention a few writers I'd suggest to help think about the future:

• The books of Alvin & Heidi Toffler, especially Future Shock, Powershift, and The Third Wave
• Generations and The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe
• The stories of Phillip K. Dick
• The novels of William Gibson

Are there others you think are important? Add yours to the list in the comments.

Google For Windows Mobile

Google released today a search application for Windows Mobile devices that puts the Google search box on the first screen, eliminating the need to fire up a browser and hunt for your bookmarks or type www.google.com into the address bar.

Google, of course, touts this as a major time saver, and it is. Google observes a 20% increase in the number of searches performed after people have installed their mobile device. But it also conveniently grabs some of the most important mobile device screen real estate to keep the search company front and center for the coming mobile revolution.

I just installed the app on my T-Mobile MDA and I gotta say, I like it a lot. I already search a lot on my phone but I'm sure I'll be Googling much more now that two steps have been eliminated.

I've been saying for some time that people can demand content on their own terms and while that mostly means time-shifting content, it will increasingly also mean place-shifting content as wireless broadband becomes ubiquitous.

With all the trends pointing to a mobile future, it's time to start seriously thinking about ensuring that your content is mobile-friendly.

Flexible, Wearable, Adaptable Computing

The Nokia Research Center and the Cambridge Nanoscience Center have been collaborating on a ubiquitous computing concept called Morph. The most fascinating thing about the concept is that the nanotechnology could allow for flexible material that can become rigid on demand.

Hulu Does Online Video Right

It is with relief, gentle reader, that I report to you that some mainstream media companies have figured out that sharing your content online benefits online fans and media companies alike.

As you faithful readers know, my biggest aggravation is when media companies refuse to allow their content to be shared. Hulu is offering ad-supported video content from more than 50 media companies for free and they are allowing it to be embedded.

They've done it right. So, happily, this time I get to appauld rather than complain. The selection of TV shows and movies is not bad but you'd think there would be a lot more to choose from fifty contributors. The quality is superb and definitely check out the HD gallery (it is stunning how crystal clear the high-def video looks and plays).

This is a segment from C|Net TV's First Look show, featuring a review of Yahoo! Go 3.0 Beta (which, by the way, inexplicably does not work on Windows Mobile PC [David said, bitterly]):

See Also:

• Mainstream Media Inching Toward Embeddable Content
• MTV's Online Music Video Marketing Strategy
• Will Google's Video Ad Network Expand The Embeddable Web?
• AOL News Beta Integrates Social & Conversational Media
• NFL.com Redesign - Web 1.5
• NBC Finally Offers Embedable Video Clips...Sorta
• NBC's Botched Response To Natalie Portman Online Video

Citizen Journalist On The Scene At Bar Fire

When most people think about citizen journalism, the overcompressed, jerky cell phone video images come to mind. While it's certainly true that those type of images often represent citizen journalism, as we've seen with the Minneapolis bridge collapse, that is not always the case.

This is another remarkable example of not just citizen journalism, but the quality citizen journalism can reach. A popular Minneapolis bar I've hung out at on more than one occasion called Maxwell's caught fire and burned down yesterday morning.

Twin Cities blogger Ed Kohler at the scene, cameras in hand, shot still photos, some video, and posted the results to his blog, The Deets, as well as to his Flickr account. Here's the video he shot at the scene:

While the quality of these images are of traditional journalistic standards, what strikes me the most about citizen journalism is the You Are There quality it tends to convey and which seems to be missing from mainstream media coverage. Perhaps that's because of the packaging that comes along with MSM reporting.

It feels sorta like Edward R. Murrow reporting from the rooftops of London during the blitz (RAM).

Online Branding In The 2008 Presidential Race

The 2008 presidential race has been called the YouTube election and that is certainly hard to dispute. There have been numerous examples of YouTube videos playing a significant role in the race for the White House.

In each instance, the YouTube videos attempted to brand a candidate one way or another and to varying degrees of success.

Pre-YouTube

The first instance of YouTube-like online branding of a politician in Minnesota, and, perhaps, nationally, occurred during Norm Coleman's 2002 campaign against the late Senator Paul Wellstone.

At the outset of Coleman's challenge against Wellstone, a couple of young Minnesotans launched the now defunct BushBoy.com that featured a hilarious Flash animation depicting Coleman as George W. Bush's lapdog and, literally, hand puppet. The animation used actual clips of Coleman speeches and played on Coleman's close relationship with the White House. I cannot, unfortunately, find the actual animation. The site was instantly popular. It worked so well because the piece exploited some essential truths of Coleman the politician: He was handpicked by Karl Rove to run against Wellstone and he had big monied supporters.

BushBoy.com was followed by JibJab during the 2004 presidential election with a Flash animation that lampooned both George W. Bush and John Kerry. Again, the satire was so effective because it absolutely nailed if not essential truths, then perceived truths of both candidates:

YouTube Politics

Prior to YouTube, you had to be pretty motivated and needed not just some technical expertise to create popular online political satire, but enough marketing savvy to build awareness. When YouTube launched in February 2005, it provided an easy way to publish satirical political videos and offered a centralized, ready-made audience for them.

Senator George Allen's Macaca Moment

What's more, YouTube ushered in the era of citizen generated media, offering a platform and an audience for raw video shot by individuals. During this presidential race, that fact played out most prominently when a worker for the James Webb senate campaign caught his opponent, Senator George Allen, using a racial slur when referring to the Webb volunteer.

Allen was considered a front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. The Webb campaign uploaded the video to YouTube and it soon became news, with television reports airing the video itself. The widespread exposure of that video branded Senator Allen as a racist. Subsequent reports of Allen using racial slurs and his awkward attempts at explaining the video simply solidified the perception that he was a racist. Allen lost his re-election bid and, as a result of the video, was no longer a viable presidential candidate.

Rudy Giuliani in Drag

It's an understatement to say that Rudolph Giuliani faced an uphill climb in securing the conservative base of his party during his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Conservatives saw no difference between him and a liberal Democrat. Though Guiliani failed for a variety of reasons, it certainly didn't help his cause when someone uploaded video of the former Mayor of New York in drag and flirting with Donald Trump. The video reinforced Giuliani's brand as a liberal:

Big Mother Hillary

The Obama campaign's mashup of the 1984 Apple Macintosh commercial was effective because for years Hillary Clinton has been pummeled (and branded) by her right wing critics as cold, distant, and a big government socialist:

This is the original Apple commercial:

Which, coming full circle, is based, of course, on George Orwell's novel about totalitarianism, 1984:

The Clinton's Soprano's Spoof

Riffing off the finale episode of the final season of the immensely popular HBO show The Sopranos, the Clinton campaign spoofed the finale with a lighthearted version of their own. This piece was fascinating because people tended to read into it what they wanted to see. Supporters of the Clintons saw it as a laudable attempt to show people Hillary's lighter side. Clinton critics, on the other hand, thought it entirely appropriate that the Bill and Hillary would compare themselves to a crime family. In this case, branding was in the eye of the beholder:

This is the original ending scene from The Sopranos:

Pretty Boy John

The Edwards campaign had to be mortified when a clip of the candidate appeared on YouTube that showed him obsessing over his hair, reinforcing the perception of John Edwards as a pretty boy:

The negative branding from that video was so successful that the campaign felt obliged to address it with a self-effacing video of their own for the YouTube debates:

Mitt's Many Faces

The rap against Mitt Romney has been that he never met a position he wouldn't change, if it were politically expedient to do so. And if you had any doubts, YouTube was there to remind you that Romney once held the polar opposite positions he now holds:

I Got A Crush On My Candidate

Barack Obama has been the biggest beneficiary to date of online branding through YouTube. When Barely Political launched the Obama Girl video, the branding of Obama as a sexy candidate easily took hold because he is a very charismatic man. The video has only been a positive for the campaign:

With the phenomenal success of I Got A Crush On Obama, Barely Political followed up with Obama Girl vs. Giuliani Girl:

Too Hot For Hillary

The Me Too videos followed shortly after the Obama Girl made such a big splash but not always to the benefit of the candidate. Taryn Southern, for example, released Hott 4 Hill, containing a rather obvious lesbian theme:

Huck Me

The Huckabee Girl video mocks Republican candidate Mike Huckabee's belief in Creationism:

Yes They Can

Finally, Barack Obama again benefits from independent online branding with the Yes We Can music video featuring musicians and Hollywood stars singing along to an Obama speech. The video brands Obama as an inspiring, lyrical, poetic speaker. Again, the branding is effective because it's true:

Who Needs Swift Boats?

Forget 527s, the new Swift Boat Veterans are going to be even more opaque than the shadowy groups of elections past. If you like anonymous, unaccountable attack ads, stay tuned to YouTube. We are entering a new era of political campaigns because now, with the ease of YouTube, digital cameras and editing software, one person with a clever idea and some skill now has the power to affect an election.

Mainstream Media Inching Toward Embeddable Content

However slowly, the traditional media is beginning to make their content embeddable.

I noticed a few days ago MSNBC promoting that the videos on their site were now embeddable--they claim to be the first news network to make the move. Here's a segment on the Millennials' role in t his election cycle:

MSNBC uses the IFRAME tag set to embed the videos; not my preferred implementation, but you can't have everything.

Locally, only the Pioneer Press allows people to use their videos off-site. Here's a recent review by PiPress tech columnist Julio Ojeda-Zapata that demonstrates rather amusingly that the Ford Sync ain't quite multilingual:

The Star Tribune won't let you embed their video.

Twin Cities Public Television does not allow the videos on their site to be embedded and though they have uploaded their content to YouTube and Google Video, they have disabled the embedding feature. At Yahoo! Video, the TPT content is embeddable but it is old. Here is a segment featuring then-candidate Amy Klobuchar:

None of the local networks allow their video to be embedded.

However shuffling it is, I've got to count this as progress.

UPDATE: Add the New York Times to the list. Though you can't get embed code directly from the Times' video page, they've got a YouTube page through which they allow embedding:

Colts.com Internet Marketing

I've been meaning to write about this for a month but since the Super Bowl is today, I figured it's now or never.

Early last month a got a call from Dwight Adams, a reporter for the Indianapolis Star, who wanted my opinion for a story he was working on about the online marketing efforts of the Indianapolis Colts in particular and the NFL in general. He called me because of a two posts I did on the redesign of NFL.com.

When a reporter calls asking me to talk about my two favorite subjects--Internet marketing and football--I'm definitely game.

After taking a look at the Colts' online presence, it became quite clear quite quickly that the team is ahead of the curve compared to a lot of other teams' online marketing efforts.

That didn't really surprise me, though, because Indy's online presence is overseen by the Colts' Executive Director of Digital Business, Pat Coyle. I've been following Pat's excellent Sports Marketing 2.0 blog for a while now; it is the only blog that I know of that gives you a perspective of the Internet marketing issues being faced by professional sports franchise.

The Colt's maintain three web sites: The team's web site at Colts.com and the social networking sites MyColts.net and MyIndianaFootball.com. MyColts.net caters to the team's fans while MyIndianaFootball.com associates the Colts' brand with high school football. (There's even a team page for the high school I attended.)

The Colts are embracing social and embeddable media in a big way. The site features a podcast, a widget you can add to your blog or MySpace or Facebook page:

And embeddable video:

At MyColts.net, fans can discuss any and all things Colts on the site's forums or they can read Head Coach Tony Dungy's blog where he actually does post. Having your head coach maintain a blog is way ahead of the curve. Kudos for the Dungy and the Colts for having the courage and the insight to launch it.

The team does not appear to have a presence at the most popular social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube & Flickr. That absence, I suspect, has a lot to do with the NFL's attitude toward those sites than anything else: The league routinely asks YouTube, for example, to delete game highlights that users have uploaded.

Nevertheless, the Colt's online presence points the way toward those social networking sites. I'm betting that before too long, the Colts model and outposts at YouTube, Facebook, et. al. will be standard operating procedure.

The End Of Nostalgia Marketing

  prince 
  Originally uploaded by A N G E L

If you've read my blog on a fairly regular basis, you know that I'm a music fan and, as a result, fascinated with music marketing. Music marketing is especially fascinating to me because, as Seth Godin points out in his Music Lessons post, since the music industry is falling apart, it provides a unique glimpse into the rise and innovation of online marketing and a demonstration of conversational marketing.

It began to dawn on me as I began following MP3 blogs that due to the phenomenal variety and volume of music that is now easily accessible through MySpace and MP3 blog aggregators like elbo.ws and Hype Machine, through music discovery services like last.fm and popular music blogs like stereogum, indiefeed and Aquarium Drunkard, the audience for bands and musicians is fragmenting radically. Music is no longer easily classified by genre.

This phenomenon has been discussed by New York Times columnist David Brooks and was recently a topic of conversation for Minnesota Public Radio's Midmorning program.

For the music fan in me, this fragmentation is fantastic because it means I have a vast array of new (for me) music to which, until now, I would never have had access.

But the marketer in me sees the death of nostalgia marketing. For whatever reason, music has a unique ability to trigger emotions. I have memories of listening to the hit songs of 70s rock bands through the crackly AM band on my dad's transistor radio. Songs from the 80s spark general memories of my college years.

It is because of this phenomenon that you see the nostalgia marketing of music compilation CDs from a given era through late night infomercials replete with your "hosts" saying remember when all the time. I couldn't find an actual example on YouTube, but this is a clever spoof of those infomercials that gets the idea across:

Specific songs recall specific events and that phenomenon will remain. But because the channels through which we hear music are now practically infinite--terrestrial-, Internet-, and HD-radio stations, television, YouTube, music blogs and podcasts, our phones and video games--the concept of a broadly popular music star is fading away.

The same dynamic will likely hold true for movies and television programming.

With no broadly popular music star or movie or television show, the common touchstone, the shared experience of liking the similar thing that makes nostalgia marketing work, is eliminated. Is, then, nostalgia marketing viable? I think not. At least not on a broad scale.

Corporate Blogging - The Team Approach

Though most people understand the concept, corporate blogging is still a relatively novel concept that encounters a significant amount of reluctance to employ as a marketing tactic. Often, one of those barriers is a perceived lack of resources. Who will be the blogger? How much time will it take?

Team blogging is often the answer.

Last November, the Marketing Voices podcast interviewed Southwest Airlines' PR Manager Paula Berg about their team approach:

• Southwest Airlines Blog

Does Barack Obama's Youth Vote Signal A Generational & Political Shift?

I'm more inclined than most people to be optimistic about young voters actually turning out to cast their ballot; specifically, this generation of young voters, the Millennials. I say that because I've been paying close attention to generations since reading William Strauss and Neil Howe's book Generations, which completely changed the way I think about generations in general and historical cycles in particular.

In short, the book examines American history in terms of generational change and argues that the reactions of one generation to another create a dynamic that produces four distinct generational archetypes that recur throughout our history.

Those generational archetypes and their most recent adult accompanying generations are Hero (the GI generation), Artist (the Silent generation), Idealist (the Baby Boom generation), and Nomad (Generation X). The newest generation, the Millennials, therefore would be a Hero generation and aligned with the WWII-era GI generation.

The GI generation's accomplishments include saving the world from tyranny by fighting and winning World War II, building institutional pillars such as Social Security and the United Nations, fueled the post-war economic expansion, conquered space, and led the nation through the Cold War and the demise of Communism. The GIs were a civic-minded organization of builders.

Millennials' Political Muscle

Like the GI generation, the Millennials are coming of age during a time of crisis (Hero generations, both) and of a civic-minded bent. On page 231 of Strauss and Howe's 2000 book Millennials Rising, they observe:

The fist Millennials have yet to cast their votes, so they're still flying low under the adult radar, presumed to be alienated cynics who don't care about voting, much less organizing. Yet adults who watch them perform civic tasks may sense something different brewing. Today's school kids take the Pledge of Allegiance, and flag saluting, more seriously than Boomers or Gen Xers did. Growing Up Digital author Don Tapscott describes their "very strong sense of the common good and of collective social and civic responsibility." Check out Kids Voting USA, Children's Express, or the web world, and you'll see kids discussing issues, participating in polls, and organizing mock elections, at times quite energetically.

But the very fiber of the political junkie in me believes in the conventional wisdom of politics that young people do not vote. During my entire adult lifetime, election after election, young voters have failed to participate in the political process to any significant degree. Thus, even though my research indicated that the Millennials could be the exception, I was highly skeptical of the Obama campaign's reliance on turning out not just young voters, but new young voters to an Iowa caucus system that is highly intimidating to newcomers.

The following video features William Strauss discussing Millennials Rising on 11/14/00, prior to the Supreme Court deciding the 2000 election in favor of George W. Bush:

Barack Obama's Youth Vote

  Barack Obama 
  Originally uploaded by Allison Harger

Bucking conventional wisdom and history, Barack Obama did just that. As Time magazine points out, Obama's campaign turned out voters 25 years of age and younger in record numbers: "while overall Democratic turnout jumped 90% [from 2004], the number of young Democrats participating soared 135%...According to surveys of voters entering the caucuses, young voters preferred Obama over the next-closest competitor by more than 4 to 1." That gave Obama a net gain of 17,000 votes and he won with roughly 20,000 votes ahead of John Edwards and Hillary Clinton.

But even Obama's victory on the backs of young voters didn't fully dispel my skepticism of depending heavily upon the youth vote. That turnout could easily be explained by the fact that the Gen X candidate is a youthful, charismatic man who naturally appeals to young people. I would have easily accepted that explanation until I read a story on Saturday about a local election here in Minnesota.

In Northfield, Minnesota, we held a special election to fill a state Senate seat that was vacated due to a judicial appointment. The race pitted Ray Cox, a moderate Republican who had held a state House seat in the district against the DFL (the name of our state Democratic party) candidate, Kevin Dahle, a political newcomer.

"Dahle was boosted by the student vote at Carleton and St. Olaf colleges, despite predictions that few undergrads would turn out for a special election held just as they returned to campus from winter break," the Star Tribune reported. "In the four Northfield precincts where most students vote, Dahle won nearly four times as many votes as Cox. His advantage there accounted for about two-thirds of his 1,600-vote victory margin."

Add this to the data on Millennials' civic-mindedness, and their votes for Obama, and I'm far more willing to believe that a fundamental shift has occurred in youth voting patterns. If young voters continue to consistently show up at the polls, then our nation's political landscape will be fundamentally altered.

Barack Obama's Micromarketing Campaign

Just as fascinating, however, is just how the Obama campaign got these Millennials to participate. As this Time magazine article makes clear, though it doesn't specifically identify it as such, the campaign used the peer-to-peer micro-targeting tactics described in the book Applebee's America to get out the vote.

The book details how the Bush campaign used sophisticated marketing tactics to identify and motivate new voters to cast their ballot for Bush. By layering typical demographic data with psychographic data, they could identify Bush voters with near certainty. Based on 30 some indicators such as magazine subscriptions, what television shows you watched, whether or not you owned a gun, or a boat, and a host of other lifestyle factors, the Bush campaign found new votes in areas that past campaigns ignored because they were considered Democratic turf.

After identifying your voters, you match up those voters with people like them from the campaign to convince them to support the candidate. Peer to peer. As the Time magazine article points out, the Obama campaign did precisely that: "Veterans call veterans, high school students call high school students and so forth."

Such a strategy makes plenty of sense on its face, but it is likely much more effective with Millennials. From pages 232-233 of Millennials Rising:

Millennial teens are very interested in voting--though less interested in actually pursuing politics or government as a career. They're deeply distrustful of the media. They get their political information less through the usual adult news sources than through comedy shows (candidate appearances on Jay Leno or David Letterman leave quite an impression), internet web sites and chat rooms, and--especially--conversations with one another. [Emphasis mine.]

The short of it is word-of-mouth marketing works best among Millennials because they trust one another more than they trust any other source.

Consider the recent Pew Internet & American Life Project Teens and Social Media survey. The study [PDF] about teens' use of social media reveals that the youths that are most active online, content creators, are also more likely to spend more face-time with their friends. By tapping into these teens new word-of-mouth networks, the Obama campaign is harnessing the youth who are most most savvy at, and the most likely to help, campaign online. They are naturals at using the ready-made online campaign infrastructure of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. And they are using the very people who are most influential among their peers and the most likely to get their peers to the polls because they are organizers.

From a cultural standpoint, if Barack Obama's youth vote doesn't fail him--and we should find out if the trend continues tomorrow in New Hampshire--it will affect not only our political life but it will mark the beginning of the end of the Boomers' cultural dominance.

From a marketing point of view, the Obama campaign may provide a textbook case of micro-targeting, peer-to-peer lifestyle marketing in action.

Christmas Season Search Engine Use

I did a bit of keyword research on Christmas-related searches just to see if I could glean any particular trends for these types of searches.

Christmas Eve Search Behavior

On Christmas Eve, the top Christmas searches were for the Norad Santa Tracker tool to track Santa's progress on Christmas Eve. These searches imply family search activity as kids and their parents follow Kris Kringle's gift deposits.

Additional family activity type searches include queries for Christmas carol lyrics and popular holiday entertainment such as "It's A Wonderful Life," and searches for Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart.

Cooking-related searches are also very popular, so grocery stores and other recipe providers would do well to optimize their sites for these queries.

Other types of searches include queries for store hours for those last-second shoppers--demonstrating the importance of including your store hours on your web site and within your local online listings.

Christmas Day Search Behavior

Christmas Day searches, not surprisingly, are heavily populated with post-Christmas sale-related searches as well as store-, and especially restaurant-hours searches.

Cooking-related searches are also popular.

Christmas Day searches also give an early glimpse into the gifts that were popular. This year Zune and iTunes searches were popular, as were Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band searches.

Christmas Searches Start Early, Real Early

When looking a historical search trends for Christmas-related queries, the one thing that stands out is that people appear to start thinking about and, presumably, then, researching Christmas gifts as early as August. That's when Christmas-related searches begin to spike upward.

This behavior is quite consistent from year to year, as this Google Trends chart of Christmas-related searches from 2004 to 2007 demonstrates:

This can be seen most clearly looking at at single year, as the following Google Trends charts shows:

And as the following Christmas searches chart from KeywordDiscovery.com confirms:

There is an obvious opportunity for online retailers in particular to engage customers long before the Christmas season even begins by examining and optimizing search campaigns targeted at these summer searches.

Crowdsourcing Disease Symptoms

I heard a fascinating piece on MPR this morning about a woman who noticed that whenever her severely autistic child had a high fever, the symptoms of his autism fell away to the point where he could communicate with them normally.

When the fever fell, his severe autism returned.

The phenomenon is called the "fever effect" and researchers have apparently known about it for years.

The report got me to thinking that such phenomenon might be more quickly unearthed and, as a result, the aspects of diseases might be better and more fully understood, productive avenues of research might be more quickly and efficiently identified, and medical science for specific diseases might be more quickly and completely advanced if there were a way to crowdsource disease symptoms.

I don't know if anyone's thought of it, but wouldn't it be enormously beneficial if there were some central location where anyone could contribute in a qualitative and quantitative manner their own anecdotal evidence of disease symptoms and phenomena like the "fever effect"?

I could see parents, family members, loved ones, disease sufferers and physicians all contributing to and researchers consulting with such a resource.

I haven't really thought about what the technology for such a system might look like but I imagine that it could be some type of modified wiki format that would allow for open ended comment but would also be able to quantify the number of people who had observed a specific symptom, for example.

Give me a comment below if you know of anyone who might be doing something like this or have any ideas about the topic, what such a system might look like and work, etc.

Are You Ready For Internet-Ready TV?

Is RSS TV Coming To A Home Theater Near You?

Joining Microsoft Media Center, Apple TV, and the Wii Browser are an increasing number of products designed to get Internet content to your television. Sony's Bravia HDTV Internet Link TV came out this year:

And HP has their Media Smart TV. The problem with both Sony and HP's approach is that they appear to be taking a "walled garden" approach by using only select content partners or maybe simply burying direct Internet subscription options.

Chumby Hero
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