Gina Carano is going to fight Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos this Saturday, August 15th, 2009 for the Strikeforce Women’s Championship.

Now, I’m not much into making predictions on blogs, but I thought I’d throw in my two cents here ahead of time so I can compare it to what happens during the actual fight.

Unfortunately… (or, fortunately, for some of us :D), American media, and probably media everywhere else in the world puts a lot of value on physical, visual attractiveness. I think that’s a good idea when it comes to commercials and modeling, but a VERY BAD IDEA when it comes to fighting.

Every time I hear about Gina, they’re talking about how cute she is and how she’s “The Face of the Sport”, yadda yadda…

Every time I hear about Cris, they’re talking about how she’s a savage and has been mauling every chick in her path.

Unfortunately, the way the fight game works, as I’ve watched through Boxing and now Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), it’s a ladder-based system where you make sure the best avoid the best until you can make a superfight and make a lot of good money from it. Because of this, I haven’t been able to see Carano & Santos go up against the same calibre fighters in order to attempt to accurately judge what should happen when they meet on Saturday.

Of course, this issue is exacerbated by the fact that there just aren’t very many women that are allowed to fight on television. As far as I know, there are ZERO women in the UFC, ZERO women in the WEC (which appears to be the minor leagues of the UFC?), I saw some rarely when Bodog used to have a show, and you see women fight now and then in Strikeforce, where this fight is going to take place.

Therefore… Basically due to a lack of female fight promotion, this is about to decide the female MMA WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP, very much in the same way that the World Football Champions are decided by the NFL, because there’s no viable competition anywhere else in the world.

The other question is “Where do they go from here?”. What can Strikeforce do to top themselves after this? I think they’d better hope that the fight’s really competitive so that people clamor for a rematch and they can drag this “rivalry” out for a couple of years.

Hopefully, what’s going to happen is that more people will see female fights as entertaining and request more women in the fighting organizations. Any decisions made are going to depend on how much money there is to make from female fights, so we’ll see how things turn out.

As far as my prediction for Saturday……. I’m rooting for Carano, because I’ve been following her longer.. Except I’ve been fully impressed with the ass-whippings that Cyborg Santos has been handing out to any chick that would like to step up and receive one. :D I haven’t been able to see them fight the same quality women, so I don’t have a good handle on this, but it appears to me that Cris is just too strong/brutal for Gina. I’ve seen Gina battle with other chicks. I haven’t seen Cris in trouble AT. ALL… Not that I’ve seen all of her fights.

I would love to see Gina win an unanimous decision over Cris, but realistically, my prediction is referee stoppage in the 4th round, declaring Cris Cyborg the winner, TKO via strikes.

Another issue here, though is that this fight is going to be five 5-minute rounds. For some odd reason, they’ve been forcing women to fight 3-minute rounds, which is obviously going to make this fight tougher to predict as far as stamina. Non-title fights are 3 rounds, meaning that men get to fight 15 minutes, while women only have 9 minutes to make it happen.

The obvious problem here is that when you decide to make a championship fight where women are going to fight five 5′s.. They now have to last for 25 minutes, or almost THREE TIMES AS LONG as their normal fights (3×9 being 27 minutes). The guys in the same situation don’t even have to fight TWICE as long (15×2 being 30 minutes), so this is really pretty retarded and they need to make it so that women are fighting 3x5s in their regular fights just like the men.

So this could throw a major wrench in my prediction, depending on which one of the ladies shows up with better cardio on Saturday. If Cyborg gasses out, I’m changing my prediction to Carano by tapout due to Rear Naked Choke late in the 4th round! :D

Either way, I’m about to enjoy my ass off! :D

Pass The Popcorn!!! :D

~Bill | @BillCammack

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Roxanne & Shane, founders & owners of Bare Feet Studios & Beachwalks.tv have been consulting and in the internet industry a lot longer than I have and I was fortunate enough to receive some vital coaching from both of them concerning Time, specifically relating to being a freelancer.

I physically met Roxanne Darling two years ago in November 2006, but I knew her already from the Yahoo Videoblogging Group. We had some great and important conversations and I knew she had her finger on the pulse of what was going on in this new “New Media” world I was diving into from my Corporate and Broadcast video background.

Rox & Shane did their own show, Beachwalks.tv, but what I didn’t know at the time was that they were also very, very, VERY busy with their consulting business where they have 12 years of experience working in internet technology, streaming media, audio & video podcasting, new media creation and consulting, content management systems, event production, and public speaking.

Fast Forward to March 2007, and I accompanied Rox to NYC’s BlogHerBiz ’07 conference. We were filming or attending discussions all day, which probably amounted to 6 or 8 hours, tops, before we shut the productions down and got ready to socialize for the rest of the evening.

When Rox turned her computer on, she said something about having 80 emails since she had last checked this morning. I remember laughing at that, thinking “ha ha, you have all this spam/bacn to get rid of, hahaha” To my shock & horror, I found out she had 80 actual legitimate BUSINESS emails, with more coming in.

At the time, I was probably only getting 30 emails a day… like, meaning in a 24-hour period… and those were mostly garbage. There was something about Rox’s email situation that told me to pay attention, because I was looking at my future. We headed to the socializing events with both of us knowing that by the time she returned from having a good time (and, less importantly, business networking at the same time), even MORE email would be stacking up…

Vaporware & Future Money

I became bored of the Broadcast/Corporate video world and found out about putting video on the internet/iPod from my good friend & colleague, Athina Krikeli one day when she showed me a commercial she created, one day after a session of Emmy Award judging.

Athina Krikeli & Bill Cammack

As soon as I watched Athina’s work and saw how clear it looked on this little box-thing, and how the stereo sound was perfect, my mind instantly expanded as I considered an entirely new form of self-expression.

It was suddenly clear to me that I didn’t have to put my work on television and watch it disappear. My news articles showing for an hour or two, then disappearing. My commercials playing until they rotated them out for the next big thing in the focus groups, never to be seen again. My segments disappearing forever once they cancelled Studio-Y or GameFace or changed the focus of a channel from Youth to Sports and then to Fashion. Suddenly, I had the opportunity to do good work, put it “on the air” and have it STAY THERE. Also, I was no longer restricted by local or even national broadcast limitations. People could watch my videos in France or Japan, anytime they wanted to and as many times as they wanted to! Amazing! :D

This is how I became involved in the world of vaporware & future money.

In the real world (IRL, in real life) budget comes before production. If you don’t have any money… you don’t get anything done. Period. If you have a little bit of money, you can get your job done poorly and slowly by someone that doesn’t really know what they’re doing. In the internet world, people come up with ideas and then try to figure out how cheaply they can make that idea a reality. This is because (which I didn’t realize for a loooooong time) we’re living in a “startup culture”. Everybody’s always working. It’s never enough. You don’t get paid NOW, you get paid when your company gets funded and eventually gets bought. It’s all about the bottom line, because everyone’s scrambling for funds and then scrambling to prove that they deserve ANOTHER round of funding. Meanwhile, everybody knows this is all “future money” and could collapse at any time, so every dime needs to be accounted for in terms of ROI.

That’s all well and good, except a) like I’ve been saying for two years already (“Monetizing Digital Video” February, 2007), there’s no revenue stream for monetizing internet video because you can’t prove demographics, and b) video, as far as internet communications are concerned, is only ONE of SEVERAL formats in which you can get your point across. You can use SMS, email, RSS subscriptions, text blogging, audio recordings, static websites… If you want to put something on television, there’s only one way to do it. You HAVE TO make a video. On the net, the question is “Why should I spend the money to make a video when I could just type some words and get the same number of hits to show to my advertisers?”.

This is why professionals avoid web video. There’s normally no budget at all, and if there is, it’s whatever allowance was afforded that group by a sponsor or they’re hoping to make their money back via CPM (= impossible). Of course, there’s money in doing Corporate Video that just happens to be on the internet, or, at least, inTRAnet, but that’s the same-old same-old for me *yawn* and I wanted to pioneer something like JetSetShow or SomethingToBeDesired.

So basically, instead of having an actual REASON to do videos which would cause them to have an actual BUDGET to do videos, you have a lot of people and groups that know that internet video is hot and only getting more and more popular, and they want to be involved, but they really have ZERO idea of what they’re doing because it’s only another business concept to them. They’re not actual artists. They’re not actually media makers. They have no idea AT ALL about what it takes to bring a project from concept to completion. This would seem to be a good thing, but it isn’t hahaha.

Handout-Based Environment

This combination of lack of funding, lack of ROI on video projects and this “We’re all trying to make it with a startup” mentality has created this weird, handout-based environment. I was introduced to a woman at a party (so what’s new about THAT? ;) haha) and literally RIGHT AFTER she was told what I do, she goes “Oh… if you have some free time, blah blah my project!” I don’t remember her exact wording, because I go to networking events to hang out with my friends, not to field sporadic questions & comments about business in the middle of the night when I obviously have a drink in my hand and I’m tryin’na chat with the ladies.

Chrissie, Leora, Flo & Bill

So anyway… I exchanged contact information with her… Meaning that I took her business card and told her to Google “Bill”… I sent her an email the next day, and her response had nothing about budgeting in it. ????

That’s when I accessed my visual/audio memory to try to figure out EXACTLY what she had said to me. I believe she had said “If you have free time, maybe you can help me with my project!”. I’m assuming the operative word was “help”, which, to me, implies “I can’t do this, so I need someone to help me”, as in “My car isn’t running. I need someone to help me fix it”, which would be the MECHANIC, who is going to BILL YOU for the time he spent working on your car and the materials he utilized in the process. It was clear from her correspondence that she meant “do it for free”.

I had another situation where I had just come from a REAL job out of town and I went to a party. At the time of my arrival, I had nothing planned for the entire rest of the week. A friend of mine asked me, in the course of conversation “What are you doing tomorrow?” to which I replied “nothing”, which meant to me “Nobody’s offered me my day rate to do anything tomorrow other than EXACTLY. WHAT. *I*. WANT. TO. DO, so I might do ANYTHING or NOTHING AT ALL tomorrow, and that’s the way I like it”. His response to finding out that I had nothing to do the next day was “Oh.. I’m doing blah blah event tomorrow. Could you come to the event and film it? :) ” After I finished sipping my brew, I said something to the effect of “Nah”. He looked incredibly perplexed by my answer… Almost as perplexed as this guy.

I attempted to explain the situation to him by saying “I just worked three days in a row. I’m not doing [jack] tomorrow”. Of course, this only confused him EVEN MORE because of this startup mentality that we all have of “everybody’s always working” and “everybody’s always scraping to get out of the barrel” and “if you’re not working on something that makes you money, you may as well spend YOUR time on something that improves MY life”. I’m not saying that’s what HE was thinking. It’s pervasive. Every time I ask someone what’s new or how they’re doing, I get some kind of report about their business endeavors. Meanwhile, people are hiding “Significant Others” left and right and either don’t want to talk about them AT ALL or will bring them up while specifically avoiding saying even their FIRST names!…. “the person I’m seeing, blah blah blah”.

It’s not just individuals either. Companies… Like actual well-known companies that have tens if not hundreds of employees that are all drawing salaries… want handouts. The reason they need guidance is that they JUST found out what I knew in 2006 and people like Jay Dedman & Kenyatta Cheese knew in 2004 if not earlier, that internet video is the wave of the future.

Because nobody seemed to notice this while we’ve all been putting hundreds and hundreds of episodes on the net for years already and handing out entirely free information that entire time to the entire world in the Yahoo Videoblogging Group, NOW, companies are scrambling to try to get on the bandwagon and nobody that they’ve already hired knows what they’re doing AT. ALL.

So it took me a LONG TIME to figure out what was really going on in the space, because I didn’t imagine it was going to take them this long to figure out how to monetize digital video to the degree that they could afford to pay professionals to handle the business. In the meantime, I watched my daily email count rise and rise towards Rox’s level and I stopped using my phone entirely. I literally did. not. have. the. time. to. waste. listening to the long-version of what people wanted from me. Put it in an email and I’ll get to it when & if I get to it.

Time

Rox & Bill

At some time during this period, I ended up speaking with Rox & Shane individually about TIME, because I knew that they had already been living the life I was now living for years. I needed AT LEAST a starting point or some kind of foundation that I could build my own concept of TIME on.

People with staff jobs have it easy. :) You go to work when they tell you to. You come home when they tell you to. You go back to work when they tell you to. You get a check every other week.

Freelancers in the real world have it easy. Here’s my rate. You can afford it or you can’t. You have my money or you don’t.

Freelancers in an handout-based society have to work with the lowball budgets presented to them or pass on the project entirely (as not worth spending the time to even THINK about) while constantly fielding ?deflecting? ?deleting? all kinds of RFCs (hahaha I made a funny! hahaha Requests For Charity! hahaha) from acquaintances AND NON-ACQUAINTANCES!

Just 11 days ago, on January 01, 2009, my ideas about TIME completely solidified for me, and that’s what this series of posts is going to be about. How do you efficiently organize your time so that you can do the REAL work, do what YOU want and/or need to do, accommodate lowballers and hand out charity all at the same time? :D

~Bill Cammack, January 12, 2009

Continued in “Time, Part 02″

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I’ve been planning on doing a few different shows for quite a while now. Just about everything is in perfect position… however, before going forward, there’s an important consideration… scaling.

My friend Tyme White is always yakking about scaling. “How does it SCALE?” “That’s not going to SCALE!” blah blah blah blah blah…… Unfortunately (fortunately?) she’s right IF you’re looking at your show being a success from when you’re still in the early planning stages.

The way I’m going to define scaling for the purpose of this article is the ability to grow your show, social site, whatever. Just GROW it. Increase your membership. Increase your viewership. Improve your google rank. Get more people interested. Receive more UGC (User-Generated Content). Get more page hits…..

The reason scaling is important… Rather, the reason that YOU should consider your project’s ability to scale is that you might be broadcasting to a niche market. Let’s say, for instance, you want to make a show about DiY Clothing (DiY = Do it Yourself). There are only going to be a certain number of people interested in making their own clothing. A segment of that population watches videos on the internet. A segment of that population will be aware of your show. A segment of THAT population will like your show and recommend it to other people and/or come back and watch it again. A segment of THAT population will become ‘passionate’ about your show and become your core fans.

Threadbanger.com => Rob & Corinne, Justin & Marissa

I remember when I became aware of / fascinated by the concept of scaling. I was hanging out in Bed, Bath & Beyond…. I know, I know. It wasn’t my fault. Blame it on Dan McVicar. :/

Bill & Dan

Anyway… I’m hanging out by the checkout line, and there’s this endless stream of people slowly making their way to the register to pay. So I start imagining how many people are passing me, and it occurs to me that it’s A LOT! :D Then it occurs to me that more people passed me in the last 5 minutes than the total number that subscribe to my show in iTunes. :/ THEN, it occurs to me that if I stood there all day, the number of people that passed me would be greater than the number of people that subscribe to many popular, established internet shows. What I took away from that contemplation was that even if you’re considered popular within your own space or echo chamber, there are still more people to reach…. A LOT more people.

One of the most successful internet video shows that I’m aware of is Rocketboom. In 2006, each daily episode was being downloaded ~300,000 times. Even with numbers like that, comparisons were being made to cable television shows, not network shows, which count their viewers by millions. Recently, this show called “Quarterlife” got booed off the stage for ‘only’ pulling in 3,860,000 viewers on NBC… Obviously more than ten times the daily Rocketboom viewership.

Of course, none of this means anything to people that are expressing themselves by putting video on the internet and have no interest in numbers, stats, revenue-sharing, sponsorships, etc. For those that do care, and whose show’s future may very well depend on scaling, it’s important to consider the “what if?” of potential success.

Actually, before you figure out whether your show is scalable, you need to figure out if your show is SUSTAINABLE, which is an entirely different issue. For the most part, there are no “seasons” in internet-show-biz. It’s a new week… You need a new show. Period. Whatever your cycle is… daily, weekly, monthly… you need to come up with a concept that you can produce consistently and deliver on a regular basis. If you can’t do that, scaling’s useless because your viewers will drift away due to lack of output on your part.

So, do like Tyme does… “Ask NOT, Will it Blend?… but Will it SCALE?”

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Yesterday was a fantastic day. :D

I got to meet Kfir Pravda, who was here for a few hours in NYC Friday morning awaiting his connecting flight to Israel. I was familiar with Kfir from blogging as well as our involvement with the Yahoo Videoblogging Group.

We’ve had interesting discussions about the direction of online video and television, but I never figured I’d meet him in person, since I had no plans to travel to Israel.

Fortunately, our schedules and locations coincided, and I was able to enjoy the morning with Kfir, Kathryn Jones, Jeff Pulver and Keren Dagan.

One of the benefits of social media is that you can learn about people and their ideas at your own pace. If you see something interesting, you can bookmark their site or add them on a social network or follow them on a status update service. The effect is that you can gain a respect for someone without ever having met them in person, or if you’re a lurker, without them ever even knowing that you exist. I already appreciated Kfir for his ideas before I walked into “The Library” at the Regency Hotel. The intangibles of meeting him in person amplified that appreciation.

As much as you might be able to tell about someone from reading their blog posts or comments, there’s much more to be gleaned from having real-time, F2F conversation with someone. How do you greet each other? Do you have similar senses of humor? Is this person as sharp in a real-time, constantly-evolving conversation as they are in text, which they may have taken an hour to write, or in a video which they may have scripted or rehearsed many times before recording it? Is this someone with whom you would probably have been friends, had the “accident of birth” placed you in the same geographical location?

Previously, I asked “How Social is ‘Social’ Media?”. Yesterday, there was a ton of “Social” and a ton of “Media”! :D Jeff Pulver was broadcasting live to Qik utilizing his Nokia N95 and his portable hotspot (described/shown in the video below).

I recorded a Seesmic video with my MacBook Pro. So, not only did we share breakfast with each other, we shared ‘sharing breakfast’ with our friends on other social media sites as well. :D

This time, social media came through BIG TIME! :D Fortunately Keren was keeping an eye on the clock, because our conversation had become three hours long with no end in sight. There really ought to be laws against having so much fun before 2pm! :D

It was a pleasure meeting Kfir & Keren. It makes such a difference when someone steps off of a blog page or computer screen and you get to experience them IRL. It was great to hang out with Kathryn & Jeff as well. I’m going to strive to sift through the QUANTITY of consistently increasing adds and contacts and have more QUALITY interactions like this one through social media. :D

Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC

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