Businessweek Online has a „Tech Special Report“ online with lots of interesting articles. And also a slideshow about „Your Favorite Bloggers“ – the guys behind boingboing, engadget. People like Seth Godin, Mark Cuban, etc. Nice flick through those slides. Unfortunately, the corresponding list for Germany would be different. We still don’t have that kind of blog-celebrity culture over here…
Other than that there are a few other things worth reading:
According to the Pew Internet Life Survey, on any given day, 40 million Americans go to the Web for no particular reason, just to pass the time.
An article about the (on the web) neglected target audience of the 50 year old baby boomers:
Today, baby boomers make up the Web’s largest constituency, accounting for fully one-third of the 195.3 million Web users in the U.S., according to JupiterResearch. They also spend more money on online shopping than your average Web user.
And an article about Six Apart, and how it evolved from the very first journal entries of Mena Trott to the company it is today.
Not bad going for Microsoft. With this kind of advertising they might actually invade the iPod space. I guess they had already practised. At least that’s what it looks like in this video, that was supposed to be „internal“ but then hit YouTube nevertheless. (That must have been a well-orchastrated publicity stunt.)
Now they sent the Zune Player (couldn’t they have chosen a better name?) to so called influentiers and opinion leaders, such as Ellen, who presented the player in her TV show.
What I particularly like about the Zune Player, though (without actually having seen one myself – is the landscape display for movies, which probably makes it more fun to watch movies on this thing than on the iPod Video!
But back to my point: it seems like Microsoft might actually get their marketing right this time AND apply it for a good product. These two things were rarely seen before on their own, if at all – and almost never in combination.
ZDNet writes about Swicki tapping communities for search and really describes a new way of making search more relevant. This is the question most search engines are currently trying to solve and the model of Swicki seems to be similar to Rollyo:
„Rollyo offers the ability to search the content of a list of specified websites, allowing you to narrow down the results to pages from websites that you already know and trust.“
… but then again, not quite. Since they don’t only allow for predefined filters, but also measure user behaviour to identify which results will be relevant in the future. This also what might differentiate them from Google: it’s not just about what people „voted for“ by placing a link but also about what they actually visited.
Swickis combine Web crawling with filters defined by site owners and algorithms that analyze user behavior (keywords and pages accessed) anonymously and automatically, re-ranking results based on the community’s search actions.
(Just as I typed this I thought: who knows, if Google isn’t already measuring our behaviour anyway? – I mean, how would we be able to tell? In theory, they can measure our clicks on the pages of the search results – but in addition they can track us on any page that has Google Adsense Advertising – which would mean a lot of pages across the hit- and niche-websites of the web.)
Seems to be an interesting tool – if I have some time over the weekend, I might start my own Swicki search in this blog…
So, there is a machinima video by the PR company Text 100 filmed completely in Second Life:
Two things I find amazing:
the fact that we will probably see more of these kinds of videos, since it is so much easier to have all the actors and the buildings put together.
the thought that there might actually be a need for virtual PR, the way it is described in the video
Is this already web3.0, as some say? Not sure, but there is certainly still a lot more potential to leverage these virtual worlds. The only thing worrying me is that amongst the 700k residents there are only 330k that have logged in during the last 60 days. And that is not a lot, especially on a worldwide scale…
As you may know, we will be traveling across the country in the next few weeks. On our way we will visit all kinds of people and places– we may even run into you. So we’ve created this wiki to interact with you.
We are asking you, THE FORCE, to suggest points of interest across the USA. You live in lots of different places and are all experts in those various places….you are also experts in the places where you used to live.
Not as funny any more, but still very entertaining and with more substantial content, which could actually make it the more interesting show!
We all know and like „cool hunting“ blogs like BoingBoing and coolhunting.com. But since recently, companies rely on these sources, as TheAge writes.
blog-watching and mining is big business and companies such as Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Cymfony have developed software to sift through and interpret the millions of voices talking in social network sites […] their software can help „process technology with expert analysis to identify the people, issues and trends impacting your business
A trend derived from true „streethunters“:
the concept of „cool-hunting“ evolved in the early 1990s and refers to a new breed of forecasters who spot trends and add their interpretation to developments in fashion and culture.
Only nowadays many trends are taken from (influential) bloggers:
innovation based on trend information is a hot topic. „We get virtually all of our ‚big spottings‘ – consumer behaviour-changing ideas, concepts, big-picture thinking – from blogs written by smart business thinkers such as Jeff Jarvis (http://buzzmachine.com) and Seth Godin (http://www.sethgodin.com),“ he says.
Which is smart, in a way. Why not tap into the vast network of people who aggregate information for you? You just have to decide which aggregators to listen to (because there are too many to listen to them all!). Further on it says:
Before the internet, a designer would have had to buy hundreds of magazines to keep in touch with what was happening in design around the world. Today they just take a look at 20 or so blogs each day and get the best information anyone can get
Combine that with an RSS tool, and your well set up…
Interestingly, many companies are starting software to even do the ground work:
A combination of technology and human analysis helps blog-watchers to spot a new trend or marketable product. At a cost of $US30,000 to $US100,000 ($A40,000 to $A133,000) a year, they use technologies known as „natural language processing“ and „unstructured data mining“ to unscramble the often ungrammatical writing and slang found in the estimated 100 million blogs worldwide.
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