News from the Launch!
Some Cool Applications of the Talkr Widget... and a few mea culpas
For yesterday's launch, we intentionally avoided press coverage to have a chance to react to any issues that arose. Nevertheless, within the first hour after our limited beta opened, over 30 bloggers had signed up... THANKS!
And there has already been some great feedback... bloggers are very curious about this technology. Here are some ideas and clarifications that might benefit all:
1) OK... first, we should have mentioned more prominently that you might need to update your Java. We need JRE 1.5 or better. And, if you want to talk, rather than just listen, you need a microphone. We could have been more clear about both these things. I'm sure more of my slips will be called to my attention later...
2) And I should have really emphasized at the outset that this voice conferencing service will be free to the bloggers and free to their audiences... our goal is to make it audio-ad-supported! And revenue will be shared with the bloggers once it starts flowing. More on this below...
3) Bloggers can embed the new Talkr widget on their blogs and their audience members (with a simple click, no downloads of a client or anything) can join in a live, multiparty voice conference call.
The blogger can be in the voice conference leading the discussion, or simply leave it open for his/her audience to talk among themselves on the blog's topics, 24/7.
4) In addition, a group of blogs focused on a similar topic (say "liberal US politics" or "Web 2.0") can all embed the same widget which points to a single "shared" voice conference on that shared topic... all these blogs could point to a single voice chat, and each blog's audience can interact with the other blogs' audiences. This can "aggregate audience" across blogs willing to cooperate to build traffic.
5) These conference calls can also be password protected if a blogger want to limit access to "subscribers" or something... and the pasword can be changed regularly to enforce good behavior, for example.
6) We'll soon be releasing the tools that will allow a blogger to record their conference calls... for example, a blogger can record his/her chat featuring three "guest experts" discussing the state of Web 2.0 with a few audience members. Then the blogger can attach this mp3 to a podcast (an interactive, multiparty podcast, at that) on the topic.
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So... we are giving bloggers an easy, free way to get into live conversations with their audience, as well as other bloggers interested in the same topic.
To what end? Hopefully... money...
As we said when announcing the Talkr acquisition, we plan on attracting audio ads to the traditional text-to-speech Talkr which is why we've eliminated the old subscription model for end users.
We'll also be trying to introduce audio ads to the live voice conferencing as well... for example, every audience member will soon hear a very short audio ad as they enter a voice conference. They currently hear a "Welcome to LiveOnTheNet" placeholder...
And we'll also be placing audio ads in the podcasts of the live chats as well...
When we get the revenue flowing, we'll be sharing that with the bloggers that create and drive the voice conference calls. There's a lot to be figured out there, but that's the kind of "high class problem" that the bloggers and we would like to have, I imagine.
