The Big in Japan team in partnership with HD Republic produced a reality television pilot and series (filmed entirely in 1080i HD) called MotorSport Ranch.  “Huh, social media company in the traditional media business” you ask?  Right, we were crazy, but we met lots of great folks in the entertainment business.  How about a traditional media business getting into the social media business?
The 1000 lbs. gorilla in the social networking space is MySpace. Our partners at HD Republic decided to take MySpace into the real world by following three MySpace friends as they travel around the world to meet their MySpace “friends” in a new television series called Project MyWorld.

The show is airing on DIRECTV channel 101 on Monday Nights (lots of other nights too).  Robert and his team had a blast filming the epic tale of three young ladies traveling the globe.  More about Project MyWorld next week after we get the download from the team on the project now that it is complete.

For the past few weeks we have been focused on migrating our servers from suite 2013 (our former data center) into suite 2015 (seen below).  We will be converting the raised floor area of our old facility in suite 2013 into a programming bullpen (seen below the floorplan).  The move has caused interruptions for most of our tools and delayed almost every project.  The expansion of our Podcall service (used primarily for FanCast™) has required us to purchase additional servers and the new facility was required.  Have a look:

Does your Chamber offer proprietary information to members in the form of an email newsletter?  Is your membership excited about getting it each month?  Have you considered making your communication to your members more inclusive?  more social?

During a conversation with a local Chamber we discussed how they might increase the benefit to members by creating a combination email/RSS feed (The Chamber Feed/email) of their information to deliver to members.  Then we suggested that they allow members to insert their own RSS feed into The Chamber Feed/email.  How much more interesting would it be to read information from other members instead of from a single source?  Sounds more like a conversation?  We thought so.  Here are a few ideas:

• Idea #1: Offer a Master Private RSS Feed from all members to all members
• Idea #2: Offer a Master Public RSS Feed from all members to the public
• Idea #3: Host a WordPress MU (multi-user) blog for each member for free
• Idea #4: Create and hosted a Social Podcast (i.e. allow all members to contribute) from all members to the public via iTunes

The ideas are endless, but any association could likely benefit from social interaction via the internet.

You may have noticed that FrankenFeed rarely works.  For quite some time it worked fine.  We had over 40,000 users merging more than 600,000 RSS feeds.  Then someone built a bot to attack the system.  Suddenly we were merging several million feeds bogging down the system.  We would shut him down and then he would pop back up again from a new IP address.  Finally, we stopped trying to stop him, but let the system bog down to a crawl (basically not working).  We figured that eventually he would go away when whatever he was trying to do (Google SEO we think) stopped working.  He didn’t go away.
Rodrigo began work on a new version that would prevent various types of abuse that we had seen in the first several months of use.  He completed his work this summer, but we never got around to bug testing it.  Today one of our clients needed the public version functioning for a project and we made the decision to launch the new version (in true alpha) immediately.  You will need to recreate your feeds (sorry about that ~ but surely you were not actually using the system since it didn’t work constantly).

We will report here on the blog regularly on the new system and let you know what we are working on.  In the meantime, enjoy FrankenFeed 2.0.

We moved the Big in Japan servers to our new data center and during the move PodServe was taken offline.  For some reason we failed to get it back online until this afternoon.  Sorry for the outage!  We hope that our new facilities improved infrastructure will make up for the service interruption.

If you were heir to the throne of England and you were bitten by the “blogging bug” this is what your blog might look like: The Prince of Wales.

Prince Charles thinks his site is a blog, and perhaps if you were a prince your blog might look a lot like his.  Seems more like a website to me, but alas I am not a prince…  [via]

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Charlie O’Donnell pointed out that Sony had YouTube remove all Casino Royale trailers from their site.  I am with Charlie on this one when he says “huh?”

Okay, give YouTube a call if someone posts the actual movie to YouTube, but if someone posts the marketing trailer I would be excited.  Right?  Is there something I don’t understand?  I am sure some lawyer will be able to explain how they “had to” remove it, but I am sure I could figure out how to allow the trailers to remain.
Charlie sums up his feelings better than I can:

If you’re in charge of movie trailers, no matter how big or small your movie is, and you don’t have them uploaded to YouTube, you’re an idiot.  That’s it.  You’re just an idiot.

YouTube can be a great marketing tool for your business (see uShip video from earlier today) or your television show.  Take time to consider how best to incorporate it into your overall social media strategy ~ don’t turn this one over to the legal department, send it over to the marketing department instead.

Certainly click-to-call has limitations and risks for abuse, but implemented correctly it can offer clear advantaged for certain web service providers.  Contrary to some reports, Google’s click-to-call was not pulled (it is still functioning).

Integrated into web based services such as Salesforce.com, Mailroom (woot!), Basecamp ~ our Podcall functionality can offer unique social interactions and services previously difficult to implement and afford.

Yesterday I had an interesting call from a prospective Podcall customer and a feature we had previously not announced came up.  While we provide the phone system, network interconnection and API hooks we don’t necessarily have to provide the minutes.  If you want to negotiate your own wholesale minute rate we can simply connect to your provider and let you pay them directly.  No need for us to markup the dial-tone costs.  (our pricing for North America is currently around 2.5 cents per minute)

Did you know that for over a year, Big in Japan has provided WordPress support services to clients both large and small.  Automattic, the company behind WordPress, partnered with Big in Japan last year.
Specifically, we have experience supporting WordPress based blogs hosted on our systems or on those of other vendors including WordPress.com.  We also have experience integrating CSS and HTML from great designers such as Mule Design and Hyku into WordPress.  Finally, we have built and customized various plugins to make WordPress work the way you need it.

If it is WordPress we can help (sorry we don’t do MovableType*).  From custom development, installation and support we can make your blog big in Japan ~ big wherever you want…

*we can; however, migrate your MT blog to WordPress!

Om Malik reminds us that Amazon’s Alexa service is having downtime issues (14 hours in November) as well as their S3 and EC2 system.  We are excited about the ability to use both S3 and EC2 as a solution for usage spikes, but Om’s warning is well taken.  Our current thinking is that S3 and EC2 are good solutions, but they should not be your ONLY solution.  We are building S3 and EC2 into our operation, but we will be pushing the data at the “right service at the right time” ~ just how we do that might turn out to be an interesting service.  Imagine a control panel that could help you do least cost routing of processing and storage based on any number of factors.

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