A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

von | Jan 19, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Marketing

This is an excellent truffle: A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. Excellent source of inspiration. Some visualisations are known, some are inspiring (at least to me). Here are the categories:

  • Data visualisation
  • Information visualisation
  • concept visualisation
  • strategy visualisation
  • metaphor visualisation and
  • compound visualisation

And the whole thing looks like this:

But you should really click through to the table (made in Flash) itself, because for each of the squares, the visualisation is shown as a popup.

Online spending will increase even more in 2007

von | Jan 15, 2007 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Online Advertising

Clickz mentions a survey in which 500 direct marketers were asked about they spending plans in 2007. The result? A visible shift towards online.

As many as 85 percent of direct marketers and service providers say they will move dollars to e-mail and Internet channels

Now this is great, but:

Meanwhile, a comparatively meager 51 percent say they will increase their offline budgets.

Hey, that’s still half of the sample asked in this survey! The reason: there will be a general increase of budgets in DM:

“The survey indicated there’s going to be a lot of growth across the board, but especially online and e-mail marketing,” Alterian Director of Marketing Joe Stanhope told ClickZ News.

E-Mail will be the winner, so watch out for even more clutter in your inbox:

Eighty-one percent plan to increase spending on the channel, while 50 percent intend to up their direct mail budget and 45 percent say they will spend more on personalized landing pages.

The last quote once again proves that one of the main benefits of the online channel – the measurability – is yet to be discovered by many. But if they do, they know.

Companies most comfortable with online and e-mail marketing are in large part the ones that have invested in analytics. “There is a correlation between channel integration and analytics,” said Stanhope. “If a marketer has gotten to this sophistication level where they’re doing integrated marketing campaigns, those are the people sophisticated enough to have that kind of infrastructure to carry out analysis.”



Edelman report on the international blogosphere

von | Jan 14, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture

Martin points us to this PDF by Edelman, which is a report on the state of the blogosphere in 10 countries worldwide. It’s an interesting 40-page whitepaper, but of course I started with the German blogosphere. However, Germany is disappointing:

In comparison to several of its counterparts, the
German blogosphere is still in its infancy. The
Edelman Omnibus Blog Study found that 85% of
Germans never read blogs, which was the second
highest percentage, after Belgium, among the
10 markets examined. Unlike France and the
United States, few of the blog conversations
that originate in the German blogosphere seem
to find their way into offline conversations or into
mainstream media coverage.

Again and again I wonder why this is the case. But sofar, I haven’t found any satisfactory answers. Media influential Geert Lovink says that it is due to the german editors of the mainstream press – not because of a lack of something in our net-culture. But I don’t see how this could be a strong enough influence on the german blogosphere.