von Roland Hachmann | Mrz 2, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Marketing Trends
Sometimes things hit you with several punches at once.
I was listening to an episode of the „six pixels of separation“ podcast by Mitch Joel, and just before I came home he praised twitter. Half an hour later, on his blog, I found a post about twitter, and then, later while going through my feeds, I found another post by Adpulp about twitter.
So what is it? As Mitch Joel writes, …
It’s being called a micro-Blogging platform. […] Simply put you can send a text message (SMS length) either through a website, instant messenger or mobile device to your own customized Twitter page.
There are many people now, who constantly update twitter (and with twitter-widgets, this also appears on their blogs). I am not sure why peole would do that. But Mitch has some thoughts on this:
As consumers take more control of the media, these individuals are building tremendous personal brands and the people who are connected to these personal brands want more connections and information. Twitter takes this idea and brings it down to the core: what is that person doing right now. Imagine how many millions of people buy magazines to read about their favorite celebrity. Now imagine if those celebrities were using Twitter. Micro-chunks of information that keeps everybody in their loop.
And then, again not much later, I find that Meish muses about twitter and classifies some profiles of twitterers (is that what they’re called?)
- The Briefers, who provide only bulletins relating to current location or status. Example: Waiting for the bus. Cold.
- The Detailers, who use Twitter to give an insight into what they’re thinking, eating, listening to, looking forward to, planning, and so on. Example: Wondering what to have for tea tonight. Pasta, maybe.
- The Kitchen Sinkers, who use Twitter as a new form of blogging, recording thoughts and links and opinions and ideas, addressed to no-one in particular. Example: Traffic lights broken at the corner of high street. Phoned work and told them I’ll be late. That’s the fourth time this week. Sigh.
- The Pongers, who respond publically to other users whose updates they are receiving via Twitter (so called because they return each IM ping with a pong). Example: @Jim: Hahaha! Yes!
But it’s not just for people. Technorati and Google News also have twitter channels.
As if blogs, MySpace profiles, videos on YouTube, podcasts and everything else is not enough already. Now we can let the whole world know what we’re doing – every minute of the day.
I like blogs, and I publish some of my photos on flickr. But that’s about as far as I would go. Not sure why I would want to tell everyone about my whereabouts all the time…
von Roland Hachmann | Feb 11, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Marketing Trends, Social Media Marketing
Finally, finally, there are some numbers on the nationalities of Second Life residents. OK, you might argue, they’re all Second Life citizens – true. But nevertheless it was interesting for me as an advertising person to know who actually visits this virtual space.
Now Reuters writes about the latest statistics.And it seems like Europe is well represented – something I never thought:
Europeans make up the largest block of Second Life residents with more than 54 percent of active users in January ahead of North America’s 34.5 percent, according to new Linden Lab data.
Interestingly enough it was especially the French who boosted the european numbers – mainly due to the fact that during their presidential elections in January both parties got actively involved in this virtual world – opening up offices and such.
France has the second-highest number of users after the virtual world became a battleground for the country’s presidential election. Although French residents had long been a part of Second Life, thousands more joined Second Life in January as demonstrators picketed the virtual offices of Jean Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front party. Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal also established a Second Life presence.
Here is the complete overview:
Active residents by country
- United States 31.19%
- France 12.73%
- Germany 10.46%
- United Kingdom 8.09%
- Netherlands 6.55%
- Spain 3.83%
- Brazil 3.77%
- Canada 3.30%
- Belgium 2.63%
- Italy 1.93%
The numbers add up to round about 85% – which means that 15% are spread out over the remaining +/-150 nations worldwide. And I guess that China makes up a large part of that 15% – even though I would have expected them within this list…
The average resident is 33 years old, and:
58.9 percent of residents declared themselves as men when they registered, compared with 55.5 percent a year earlier.
I like the way that is put: „declared themselves as men“. But it’s true. On the web, you never know – and in Second Life this is just as well the case…
One more link: these news were posted within the Reuters Second Life News Center Website. (I just want to keep track of this link for myself…)
von Roland Hachmann | Feb 1, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Marketing Trends, Social Media Marketing
Seems like there is no age limit for any web2.0 application. We were already amazed with geriatric1927, who started fiddling with a webcam and quickly gathered a huge crowd of fans.
As of August 16, 2006, geriatric1927 was the most subscribed user on YouTube. His rise to the #1 position took place in just over a week.
Not quite as „multimedia“, but a little older instead, is Don. He blogs on his blog „Don to Earth“ and with 93 years old, he is probably one of the oldest, if not THE oldest blogger on earth.
I am certain, that in 40-50 years time, there will be millions of 80+ year old webusers blogging and youtubing away (if blogs and youtube then still exist). But at the moment this is an amazing step by these two guys. If I look at my grand dad, who has trouble understanding the concept of any modern digital device, I cannot imagine him writing a blog. (He does own and use a cell phone, though).
At the same time, I am curious (as I already wrote earlier on), how much (personal) content will float around a most probably gigantic social web. There might be 80+ year old bloggers who have an archive of 40+ years of blog posts…
von Roland Hachmann | Jan 27, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Marketing Trends, Social Media Marketing
Nicholas Carr has an interesting post titled: Honey, I shrunk the culture
In this post, he goes on about the fact that the new possibilities to deliver and consume content – i.e. through wikis, blogs, youtube-style videos, etc. – we all receive micro-chunked particles of information that increases our propensity to turn into ADD victims. That might be useful for managing that information but it also means, that our attention decreasingly focuses on longform content:
Many of man’s greatest works demand and deserve extended, steady attention. They can’t be boiled down. They can’t be snippetized, widgetized, or otherwise turned into bite-sized morsels. You can’t compress culture into a Zip file.And that’s the danger here. The new medium doesn’t just promote the proliferation of small pieces; it devalues the long form. In fact, it doesn’t even make room for big, extended works. It’s actively biased against them, technologically and economically.
Scary, if we loose the ability to focus on longform content in the future! But at the same time I think you need to differentiate between types of content. I don’t need the news in longform content, as long as the main facts are delivered. Many articles I read in newspapers in the past focused too much on storytelling for news where I was only interested in the main facts.
But: sometimes storytelling is important. Either because there are news that I want to have some background information on (and while newspapers and magazines are generally prognosed to face a difficult future, I still think this deliverance of background information is a good niche for them, when trying to compete with online media). Or, because we are really interested in the story, the athmosphere and the characters, much more than pure facts and the plot (i.e. facts).
I don’t think, for example, that it would delight many people, to read the last Harry Potter through a number of interlinked microchunks on the internet. We want that book, and we will take our time to read it, the more pages, the better!
von Roland Hachmann | Jan 13, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital News, Marketing Trends, Social Media Marketing
Now you thought YouTube is already a bad site for yoyeuristic nerds. But then I stumbled upon Stickam. This is absolutely crazy. It’s almost like YouTube, but there is one major difference: it’s LIVE!
Live video can feel very strange, I just noticed. The only times I have experienced live video streaming were during skype calls with my brothers in Hamburg or my Cousin in Arizona.
But this is different. You click on one of the links and all of a sudden you end up in the living room of a stranger. So while checking out the live feeds, I actually sneaked into one person from Denmark who started – quite openly – to smoke a selfmade hashpipe or something that looked like it. Made out of a plastic soda bottle. There was the option to chat, but quite frankly, I didn’t want to disturb the guy.
The next live stream I visited was the DJ performance of a breakbeat DJ. In the videostream it seemed that there are two people DJ-ing. But neither of them bothered to answer my question if there is any OK, one just answered. A little later, and he admitted that he is quite drunk. (And I just got reminded of the fact that chat syntax is revolutionary: “lol kwl im goin now sum1 else will tlk soon ok c u l8r m8“).
The most surprising live-surprise: the DJ actually greeted me via the stream! (â€wanno make a loif shouuwt ouuwt to roouwlaanâ€)
Very kwl, m8.
(found here)
von Roland Hachmann | Dez 22, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Marketing Trends
An editor of wired, Robert Lemos, has stopped watching regular TV and replaced everything with internet content.
Suddenly, our family was not sitting together in the living room watching television — except for the occasional DVD movie — but instead scattered around the house. My wife and I watched our shows on our office computers, and our kids watched theirs on a laptop in the kitchen. Within a few days, the diaspora driven by digital content already made the house seem, well, less homey.
Apparently, TV has never been the center of this family, but nevertheless, the fact that everyone all of a sudden watched „TV“ at their preferred PC-location changed everything.
Plus: watching live sports online is apparently impossible. This will be one of the only things left for programmed television: Sports, elections, ceremonies such as the Oscars or Royal Weddings. Things you have to watch live. Everything else can be customised, downloaded, and watched whenever you want.
The role of TV will have to change to keep up. And there will be some social implications when this media usage is shifting. No more common TV room. No more watercooler discussions about show xyz from the evening before (unless it’s one of the exceptions named above). TV will be in the same corner as any website or even a book. People will watch it a all different times and under different circumstances, TV programmers (and advertisers) will not know any more, in which personal context people will watch certain shows.
Robert Lemos concludes:
As for my family, we’ve decided to remain cut off from cable television, and live with the net as our entertainment lifeline. Before the Wired assignment came along, we were already headed toward paring our television consumption down to a few shows a week and the experiment showed that the internet could do that much.
In the end, getting videos from the internet is not the same as live television programming. However, in a few years, I believe it will be better.
Wo ich sonst so bin...