While Mercedes Benz amazes me with a fascinating microsite, BMW fascinates me because of the way they are testing new channels of interaction and user involvement:
Much of what they distribute through these channels are typical PR things (news, (video-) interviews at tradeshows, etc.). All in all a good way of keeping their fanbase engaged with the brand!
Speaking of a higher purpose, Google, NASA and Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos will shake hands on an agreement to collaborate on space missions.
Just a short note: Don Dodge has an interesting post on what’s The Next Big Thing in 2006. Summarised:
Communication and connection are the big opportunity areas for 2006.
But there is more in his post, go read it. 2006 will be a good year!
A lot of sources have already talked about this site: The million dollar homepage, where a guy is selling off 1 million pixels of his homepage at $1 per pixel. By the way, he needs more than the average screen resolution of 1024×768, because that’s just 786432 in total – that means more than 200,000 Pixels are definitely not visible when visiting the site!
Now he’s selling of the last 1,000 Pixels on ebay. Which is always good for publicity – selling on ebay, that is.
Amazing fact: the bids are already over $160k!
So I go on to ask myself the same question as probably 1 million other people worldwide: Why didn’t I come up with such nonsense? All my other ideas are usually just as stupid!
Oh, and while we’re wondering who might be the lucky bidder: my guess is that it’ll be the Golden Casino, once again. They already bought the car of the pope, some burned piece of toasted bread, the linconl fry, etc. All via ebay – the must have a coop with ebay on this. (There was once a blogpost by someone on how to create a buzz through useless ebay auctions, but I can’t find it any more – this was definitely before de.licio.us!)
TechCrunch had a post almost a week ago about a Favor Exchange called Favorville:
Favorville facilitating the exchange of helpful acts.
Favorville.com is a social networking tool which provides members with the opportunity to help and be helped by others. With Favorville, members can post help requests, offer help and help grow the community.
Of course, the site also has a rating system, just like you think it should have, when you’re used to sites like ebay.
I really like this idea! And apparently, there are a first couple of people in Frankfurt, Germany taking part in this!
Spread the word, this could easily become one of the most useful communities on the web!
Wow, what a cool move by Yahoo!
Kudos to them for making this move after having bought flickr already. BuzzMachine pointed me to this piece of news, and also to some more info on the del.icio.us Blog and to the blogged „press release“ of Union Square Ventures.
Yahoo! is on to the tagged, semantic web. Onto user empowerment and all the other wish-wash that is summed up under that loosely defined meme of web 2.0. I can’t wait to see how Yahoo! leverages their two new acquisitions (Flickr and Del.icio.us) in the future to enhance their portal…
It’s an interesting battle between Google and Yahoo!, both trying completely different approaches in organising the web. We can only wait and see what’s going to be more successful, but Yahoo!’s strategy is clearly more engaging and fascinating.
Kudos also to Joshua Schachter, who is the maker of Del.icio.us, and, according to Union Square Ventures spend most of his spare time in the beginning making it come true. For his sake I hope he made a fair share on this deal.
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Updated:
Wo ich sonst so bin...