Sclipo Releases Live Video Teaching For Hire

Sclipo, a video how-to site similar to SuTree and 5Min, lets you post short recorded educational videos. Recorded video, however, has it’s limits. It’s largely a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn’t let you clarify your instructions or adjust according to the background of your pupils. To confront these short comings, Sclipo has softly launched a new live video feature, “Sclipo Live”. Sclipo Live lets you teach for money one-on-one through live video conferencing. It’s currently available by invite only.

The live video sessions are organized into a directory listing the time of the session, who’s leading it, and what it’s about along with a price. The actual teaching session features live video feeds of the teacher and student along with chat. The whole session is recorded and synced with the chat for easy review later. After the session is concluded, the student can rate their teacher.

The feature set is currently pretty basic. There are now built in testing features or free-form whiteboard. Screen sharing is a noticeably absent feature.

Sclipo joins a host of other companies aiming to monetize user generated content through a consulting marketplace. Ether and Wengo are two services aimed at helping professionals charge for their consulting time. Ether does this through a pay per call model while Wengo does it through a paid a one-on-one video conference.

If You’re Not A Model, Don’t Bother Reading This

Heard of ModelsHotel? Its a hot new social network that you have absolutely no chance of joining. That’s because the site, founded by Jesper Lannung, is for the models only - enabling “models to stay in touch through a gated community.”

To get in you have to be a professional model and invited by the site or by other members. Once you’re in, you can do standard social networking stuff - post pictures, videos and profile information, and find romantic matches so you can have beautiful little photogenic spawn together.

They’re a year old but have been off our radar until this evening when the Wall Street Journal did a profile on them. A choice quote:

Models spend a lot of time in isolation, traveling from casting to casting, often in cities where they don’t know anyone else. But like Shannon Rusbuldt, a 22-year-old model with Elite Models, many fear exposing themselves to unwelcome solicitations from wannabe photographers, agents and suitors. Mr. Lannung, who is represented by Ms. Rusbuldt’s former agency, persuaded her to join by assuring her that his site is similar to other social networks, “but without the creepy people.”

Poor models. It’s good that they have a place to hide from the creepy people (i.e., the rest of the population).

The site may actually be a bit too selective though. 2,000 people have tried to join over the last year, says Lannung, but he’s rejected half of them. That makes for a pretty thinly populated social network. MySpace, by comparison, adds well over 100,000 members daily. Still, high end advertisers are said to be targeting the site to get access to those 1,000 trendsetters. The company is now trying to raise $1.5 million in venture capital, which I honestly hope they raise so that I can continue to make fun of them (and their VCs) before eventually depositing them in the Deadpool.

If you’re hot but not quite model material, check out Darwin Dating, another obnoxious site that is focused on matching up beautiful people on dates. Their tagline? Online Dating Minus Ugly People.

Google May Add Comment Feature On Shared Reader Feeds

Google Blogscoped got their hands on an internal video created by the Google Reader team where they discuss future plans for their popular service.

There’s a pile of interesting information; highlights include Google developing a new way for publishers to notify Google of updates, plans to integrate more social features into Reader including recommendations based on existing subscriptions, a new service called “Activity Streams” that will be a Facebook style feed of activity including integration with Gmail, and new ways to monetize feeds by tapping into Reader.

On the stats side, the video provided some interesting insights: two thirds of all feeds only have one subscriber, and are only polled for updates every 3 hours. Feeds with multiple subscriptions are polled every hour (so Reader is intentionally slow at picking things up). The Google Reader backend stores 10 terebytes of data from 8 million feeds, and according to Feedburner stats Google Reader is the most popular feed reader, followed by My Yahoo.

Its great stuff from the Reader team, and kudos for their ongoing innovation of a great service; but there was one negative: Google is interested in allowing users to comment on items they share, but this currently isn’t a priority.

Please Google, drop the idea altogether.

We all know about the constant battles Google has had with newspapers over Google News, and what seems by some reports so far to be a failed strategy of allowing comments on News Feeds. With the exception of the licensed wire stories which are now reproduced in full, those news stories are always presented only with a small fraction of the story itself, the equivalent to a part RSS feed; ultimately readers must visit those news sites to get the full story and the use of data in this way is usually argued to be fair use.

Google Reader’s share tools on the other hand republish full blogs post for all to read without obtaining permission from blog publishers. So-called link blogs in Reader already break copyright and in a small way undermine blogs and content creators. If Google offers a comment service on “shared” items they are in effect creating copyright infringing blogs; after all they’ll have chronological entries and comments so they’ll look like blogs, even if they don’t provide a fully customizable CMS.

There will always be those who argue that any syndicated content is fair game for republication; it’s the favorite defense of spam bloggers. RSS feeds are in the most provided for personal use/ viewing and are not provided (unless otherwise specified) for someone to use that information to republish on their own site in full, be that powered by Google Reader, Blogger or WordPress.

Google To Invest $10 Million In Green Startups

Google will be investing up to $10 million in “green” startups, the company said today. Specifically, they are looking to invest $500k - $2 million in multiple for-profit startups that are focusing on electric/hybrid transportation. Details are here.

But startups don’t have much time to fine tune their pitches - proposals requesting funding must be submitted to Google by October 22 2007.

This inches Google ahead in the race with Yahoo and other tech companies to show who cares most about the environment.

Does Social Media Make You Dumb?

The “Mainstream Media” has had somewhat of an antagonistic relationship with “New Media”. Journalists have bemoaned blogging on several occasions, stating simply that “Journalism requires journalists”. Once again journalists are gracing us with another study linking the success of the social news sites to the downfall of society.

The study, conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), compared the mainstream media’s headlines for one week against those of a host of user-news sites. Specifically:

“PEJ took a snapshot of coverage from the week of June 24 to June 29, 2007, on three sites that offer user-driven news agendas: Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit. In addition, the Project studied Yahoo News, an outlet that offers an editor-based news page and three different lists of user-ranked news: Most Recommended, Most Viewed, and Most Emailed. These sites were then compared with the news agenda found in the 48 mainstream news outlets contained in PEJ’s News Coverage Index.”

The comparison looked at the top stories (by percentage) from their news index compared to the top headlines (by percentage) for the social sites.

The study found that while the mainstream media talked about important issues like immigration (10%) and Iraq (6%), the only story gaining traction on social news sites was the iPhone. No surprise there. The study does concede that these user generated newsfeeds may not mirror the important news of the day because they may serve has an auxiliary source. However, it ignores the sheer volume of news that passes across their front pages. While mainstream news sites have a limited staff of journalists and real estate to highlight the days news, Digg and its cohorts can link to these stories with plenty of room for LOL Cats photos. For example, Putin’s dissolution of the Russian government made the top 10 of Digg today. So did the iPhone unlock.

Moreover, the study of social sites reveals what users are actually reading, whereas the mainstream news statistics point only at what they’re writing. Much of that “hard-hitting” journalism may not be getting the readership the coverage suggests. Where PEJ sees this as a clean stream of news, I see an echo chamber.

Similar to when the music industry went online, users are no longer forced to buy in a bundle. Instead they can select the stories/tracks that appeal to them without subsidizing the content they don’t want.

Photo credit ChrisL_AK