Well, What Is Your Story?
This is your personal invitation to share your Me the Media ideas and experiences by leaving a reply below this post
Having read the Me the Media Book or having seen the Me the Media Movie, you now are cordially being invited to leave messages after this posting. We will evaluate them on a weekly basis and make new blog posts from all the input you gave. Thanks in advance for your kind cooperation !
A reminder to help you along: Part 5, the dramatic Epilogue, concludes with the following memorable words:
The third media revolution has put the spotlight on Me. But how will we deal with all these different Me’s? Will ICTainment bring us all back into line? Are blogs really a weapon against the evil producer? Or will social networks enable us both to engage? Can you imagine the producer and the consumer sitting as equals at one table?
We, the individuals, have taken control. But when everybody is in control, who exactly is in charge?
The Hopi tribe of North American Indians has an old saying, which goes: “He who tells the stories, rules the world.”
So, What Actually Is Your Story . . . ?
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One thoroughly researched story for instance is “Being Human. Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020″.
Being Human 2020 covers the past, present and future of Human-Computer Interaction. You can read about it here.
The research team is here.
Bill Buxton’s web site is here.
Hi, this is Holland calling.
We’ re working on a new project called http://www.mediame.nl for the Dutch Public Broadcast organisation.
We collect Media Me material:
“Show us your liberated e-heaven or your digital hell.”
It’s all based on the Media Me Group on Flickr.
Check: http://www.flickr.com/groups/media-me/pool/
Found Your Story, Sausage Machine. TNX
Found Your Story, Rob Gonggrijp. TNX
LinkedOut
I’m really tired of social networking. In the beginning, my beginning was on Orkut, I thought it was great. I found all these people I had long lost sight of and it was fun browing through other people’s contacts to see who else was there that I knew.
With LinkedIn came the hundreds of invitations, some of people I didn’t know at all. The awkwardness of thinking about whether to accept or reject an invitation, multiplied by at least one such awkward invitation a week just got me thinking…
What has LinkedIn done for me lately? It has caused me work, and awkward cringes and it has given, well, absolutely nothing in return.
So, I just cancelled my account (which needs to be done by emailing customer support). I’ll cancel my Hyves and Orkut accounts too, since I never log in there anymore.
So don’t worry if you see me disappear: it’s nothing personal…
Found Your Story, Managementboek.nl. TNX
Found Your Story, Tom Foremski. TNX
Lessons of Blogger Media: No End to Your Day
Dan comes down and we walk out to have lunch. He chooses a restaurant that has real tablecloths. “I need to eat some real food,” he says. I nod in agreement, the single, blogger lifestyle, doesn’t encourage good eating habits.
It is always a pleasure speaking with Dan because we speak the same language. I’m not saying this in an elitist way, but there is something that happens to you through the experience of blogging, that does change your perception of the media industry, and provides an understanding of what is going on that cannot be attained by reading about it.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve been a media professional for decades, or how young or old you are, understanding the changes going on in the media industry comes from experiencing it first hand. You can see what I like to call the “trajectory of ideas” in the mediasphere, how media is consumed and shared.
And it is that understanding that Dan Farber brings to his new job, as editor-in-chief of News.com, one of the first online news organizations.
Dan nods as I say that we speak the same language. “Things have changed a lot in this business. There is a velocity to news media and you can see it as a blogger,” he says. “There is no end to your day.”
Found Your Story, Matt Richtel. TNX
For bloggers, a digital sweatshop called ‘home’
A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.
Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.
Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Florida, funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.
Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.
Found Your Story, Inside the Snakepit. TNX
A Note On the Dying Media Monopoly
One of the big trends in media has been the increasing rate of technological innovation with regards to information. The average person can, with ease, copy any digital file and transfer it at will thanks to the cellphone, the personal computer and the Ipod.
This has cut pretty deep into corporate wealth. Some corporations are even afraid of a possible future in which entertainment stops generating any cash at all. The advent of semantic web looms on the horizon like a perfect storm, for these people.
File sharing is not an immoral act. Most people want to respect copyright and want the artists and content producers to get paid. But they also want to use the neat new devices they have bought, like the iphone, the ipod, etc.
Found Your Story, Donna Bogatin. TNX
YouTube: Don’t Quit Your Day Job
Will there EVER be any money in YouTube videos, for the users that “broadcast themselves” there?
Google CEO Eric Schmidt gets a kick out of claiming how many thousands of “rocket scientists” now enjoy daily free lunches, courtesy of the Googleplex. The touted engineering phenoms, however, apparently are not similarly gifted in math.
Google’s YouTube today hails the number one video viewing site on the globe has “exceeded its expectations” in projected payouts to “partners.” Google, then, apparently never had any real intention to really share the video wealth.
I shed sunlight on YouTube’s bogus claims of partner monetization several weeks ago. SEE my exclusive: Silicon Alley YouTube Star to Google: WHERE Is My Money?
YouTube confirms its below user expectations performance now, asserting “$1,000,000 in total revenue to user partners as part of the Partner Program.”
The program is one year old. As Google makes money–indirectly or directly–off of every single YouTube video view, and given the yearly tally of total YouTube video views, an effective CPM rate for shared monetization over the totality of YouTube videos is 3 cents.
As I have underscored, however, YouTube does not even manage to actually disburse the pennies it dangles before the users that generate all the video content for the multi billion dollar corporation. SEE Voodoo YouTube: Missing Partner Money, Phony Video Stats
Found Your Story, Danah Boyd. TNX
From the conclusion of “Why Youth Heart Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life”:
As Hannah Arendt wrote long before the Internet, “everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity.” What has changed with the emergence of new tools for mediating sociality is the scale and persistence of possible publicity. For most people in history, public life was not documented and distributed for the judgment of non-present others. Only aristocrats and celebrities faced that type of public because structural and social forces strongly limited the “widest possible publicity.” Not everything could be documented and spreading information was challenging. Only the lives of the rich and famous were deemed important enough to share.
The Internet has irrevocably changed this. Teens today face a public life with unimaginably wide possibly publicity. The fundamental properties of networked publics – persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences – are unfamiliar to the adults that are guiding them through social life. It is not accidental that teens live in a culture infatuated with celebrity - the “reality” presented by reality TV and the highly publicized dramas (such as that between socialites Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie) portray a magnified (and idealized) version of the networked publics that teens are experiencing, complete with surveillance and misinterpretation. The experiences that teens are facing in the publics that they encounter appear more similar to the celebrity idea of public life than to the ones their parents face.
Found Your Story, fauxtoeil. TNX
25 Top Online Communities Sources
Found Your Story, Vodafone Receiver Mag #19. TNX
The ideas of web-based community building and social media have been around for quite a while, but only recently have we seen networking sites really burst onto the scene. With their help, the community phenomenon has gone large-scale.
And while the controversy continues over whether or not the idea of Wikipedia-style knowledge creation can be trusted, the concept has given rise to myriads of seminal mass collaboration projects.
This Vodafone Receiver issue is all about tracking the miscellaneous connections between individuals turned into ‘familiar strangers’ through mediated communication.
Found Your Story, Alex Nesbitt. TNX
Conquering the Social Media Blues: Five Steps to Social Media Performance Management
This is a management approach that applies a metrics philosophy to product development, product marketing, and business planning, so that resources can be focused and success can be repeated. The metrics philosophy that’s employed typically needs to be consistent with the performance criteria of broadcast media, but incorporates the interactive dynamics of social media.
Please sign up to receive our white papers. There is no cost or obligation. Just fill out and submit the form.
Found Your Story, Nicole Ellisson & Danah Boyd. TNX
YASNS means “Yet Another Social Networking Site”.
Found Your Story, Found/Read. TNX.
The first comprehensive survey of how people use social networks to manage personal and professional relationships. Are social networks delivering the value you expected when you joined? Whether you use social networks for business or pleasure, your perspective is vital to the success of this unprecedented study.
Found Your Story, EconSM. TNX
EconSM, tha Economics of Social Media, is the first conference, focused on business models and deals as much ad the creative process and enabling technologies in the social media ecosystem.
Found Your Story, Annika Lidne. TNX
P&G have fired an employee after industry rag Resumé quoted his blog. Who is really to blame; the employer. the employee or the paper?
In my views P&G have made the following errors:
= The company does not seem to have a blog policy (or at least have not referred to it). Every company of some standing should have a blog or social media policy outlining what is alright and not in the eyes of the company.
= The blogger seemed to be fairly newly employed, but the employer seemed to be caught by surprise of the news of his blog. A Google search should have found it and the employer should have decided before signing the employment contract whether the blog (or any other public activity) was acceptable or not.
= If they still signed that contract, they should stand by their employee, not be easily swayed by possibly malicious press coverage and fire him – which is what happened. (Since firing someone for personal misconduct is very difficult in Sweden, I guess he got a sweet severance deal). By firing the blogger, they only show that they do not make proper research before hiring someone.
Found Your Story, openflows. TNX
Social Media and the 2008 US Presidential Election
Funny how the bloggers have gained cred with the corporate media (by outing them, largely) and are going to police the campaign-but the same open-access process with YouTube and Facebook may result in spoofers and saboteurs that are hard to detect. But, uh — won’t the bloggers police that? Thank goodness the corporate media are doing their jobs. Can I vote with my wallet here?
Found Your Story, SocialMediaToday. TNX
Join the Conversation You Want to Have…with the People You Really Want to Talk To
With more than 200 million people around the globe now participating in one or more online communities, social networking has become an essential tool for companies to engage, listen to, and interact with customers and potential customers in ways that have never before been possible.
Also see: Social Media and the Banking Industry, containing a list of independent banking blogs.
Found Your Story, Steve Rubel. TNX
Study: A Billion Dollars in Internet Advertising is Wasted
The Eyetools/MarketingSherpa eye tracking study, released last week, found that about 60% of web site visitors see the ads that are 100% visible and “above the fold.” Below the fold - e.g. the part of a web page where users are required to scroll - the situation is grim. These ads are visible to roughly 70% of web users, but only about 25% actually see those ads.
Let’s do some back of the envelope math here. Assuming that all of the above data is accurate and that 50% of display ad impressions fall below the fold (this is a conservative guess - it might be significantly higher) that means that nearly a billion dollars in online advertising - $937M based on these calculations - is below the fold and ignored by 75% of web users.
The situation is actually be a lot worse when you factor in trust. A Nielsen study released late last year found that only 26% of consumers trust banner ads. So even if your display ads are visible and seen, they’re not trusted by the vast majority of the public. That ain’t good news.
Found Your Story, Linda Stone. TNX
Dave Weinberger put continuous partial and friendship together as a way to describe what he enjoyed about Twitter. Twitter and Jaiku might consider the slogan, “continuous partial attention to continuous partial friendship.”
Found Your Story, Marc Davis. TNX
From “Garage Cinema & the Future of Media Technology”, an invited article for the 50th anniversary of the ACM in 1997:
Media Producers and Users. In the next 50 years, the emergence of a global media archive and tools to access and manipulate this archive according to its contents will enable fundamental changes in the relationships between producers and users of digital media.
The most profound changes will occur at the traditionally “lower end” of video production. Changes in technology will bring about a merging of independent video producers and home video makers into a broad and active market sector. Today people speak of the “New Hollywood” and refer to the merger of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
When the tools and infrastructure are in place to enable cheap and effective home use of video annotation, retrieval, and repurposing tools, the garages of the world will be the sites of the “New New Hollywood” creating hundreds of millions of channels of video content.
The conditions of production and use will have changed such that a large group of amateurs and home users will be regularly making video that can compete in the information marketplace of networked computers. The television networks will be supplanted by a situation in which the “Net works.” As the PC revolution of the 1980s brought the text and numerical processing power once held by corporations to people’s desktops, in the next decades the production and distribution power of Hollywood studios, television networks, and stock footage houses will reside on people’s desks and in their garages.
Found Your Story, Kudzu. TNX
Social Network Hell
A few years ago my sister asked me to see why her computer was running so slowly. I looked and found she had installed Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger, AOL AIM, ICQ, and several others I did not know existed. I promptly introduced her to Miranda which does all of them. I asked her why she had all of these, and she said “So I can talk to everyone”. Most of these programs (especially ICQ) are notable memory pigs. Her IM programs used more memory than Outlook and Windows combined. This is where I think we are headed with all the new “social networks” I’m being asked to join.
Found Your Story, Joseph Jaffe. TNX
Join the Conversation. How to Engage Marketing-Weary Customers with the Power of Community, Dialogue and Partnership
Case studies from Comcast, Starbucks and more.
Found Your Story, John Caddell. TNX
The New Media Onslaught Is Making Entrepreneurs Out of Creators
Venture capitalists from Silicon Valley and creative types from Southern California are having difficulty cooperating to create financial and partnership models for new media. One of the biggest obstacles is the Southern Californians’ focus on upfront cash rather than long-term equity.
Now production costs can be much smaller, for music, video, text, etc. Prices for distribution are coming down too as new outlets emerge for digital distribution. And media companies are looking to hedge their risk as the old moneymakers (CDs, DVDs) erode.
As a result, an entire new entrepreneurial class has emerged, between the suits and the talent, combining the ability to raise money, cut deals, etc., with songwriting, producing, or acting. Around this “middle class” is a new set of technology and business enablers that are providing key pieces of the production and distribution infrastructure for these creators.
Found Your Story, Endless Innovation. TNX
The May 2008 issue of Portfolio magazine (”the brilliant issue”) has a listing of the 73 most brilliant thinkers in business - the rebels, upstarts, game changers and connectors who are changing the way we think about business.
There are some familiar names, of course - Steven Spielberg, Rupert Murdoch & Lloyd Blankfein - but also a number of people you may not have heard of, like Anne Wojcicki and Linda Avey of 23andMe.
(Actually, come to think of it, you may have heard of Anne Wojcicki - she’s the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin!)
Found Your Story, Eline Alhadeff. TNX
ExitReality promises to transform the social networking experience by offering virtual versions of every social network site profile. The London, UK headquartered startup is pitching its product as an interactive value add for any social networking site.
Each space is created on the fly so that every social networking profile has a 3D Space in ExitReality, even if the profiles owner doesn’t have an account there.
When the service launches later this year users will be free to visit any virtual representation of a social networking profile without the need to register, but registration will be required for things like chat and customizing a personal space.
Found Your Story, Saul Hansell. TNX
PaidContent vs. TechCrunch: Two Visions of Blogging’s Future
Michael Arrington and Rafat Ali are both forceful, sharp-tongued, quick-tempered and plugged in, and both have built successful technology blogging ventures. So it’s no surprise that there is more than a little sparring between them.
When Mr. Arrington heard that Mr. Ali’s company, which runs four blogs including PaidContent, was seeking to raise venture capital, he published a late-night “rant” on his TechCrunch blog, saying that the “money flowing into the blogosphere is disrupting the complicated and emotional, but also stable way things are done.”
Mr. Ali responded that Mr. Arrington was “wrong on all counts.” But Mr. Ali has indeed been plotting an expansion, and Thursday he announced that he had hired a new chief executive, Nathan Richardson, who ran Yahoo Finance through much of its growth.
This gave me the excuse to call both of them, and Mr. Richardson, to flesh out their competing views of how blogs will evolve.
To start with, their views of blogging itself differ. Mr. Arrington, as any reader knows, proudly lets his personality and emotions flow into his writing. Mr. Ali aspires to subordinate his views to a more analytical voice, an approach endorsed by Mr. Richardson.
PaidContent, Mr. Richardson says, is defined by “journalistic integrity that transcends just being a blog.” Comparing it not only to TechCrunch but to other sites like Valleywag and the new Silicon Alley Insider, he said that PaidContent “has not gone down the road of following personal foibles.”
Found Your Story, Randall Stross. TNX
Struggling to Evade the E-Mail Tsunami
Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering new Internet companies, last month stared balefully at his inbox, with 2,433 unread e-mail messages, not counting 721 messages awaiting his attention in Facebook.
We all can learn from H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), the journalist and essayist, who corresponded without an amanuensis like for instance Thomas Edison did. Mencken’s letters were exceptional not only in quantity, but in quality: witty gems that the recipients treasured.
In his correspondence, Mencken adhered to the most basic of social principles: reciprocity. If someone wrote to him, he believed writing back was, in his words, “only decent politeness.” He reasoned that if it were he who had initiated correspondence, he would expect the same courtesy. “If I write to a man on any proper business and he fails to answer me at once, I set him down as a boor and an ass.”
Whether the post brought 10 or 80 letters, Mencken read and answered them all the same day. He said, “My mail is so large that if I let it accumulate for even a few days, it would swamp me.”
Found Your Story, Darren Waters. TNX
Microsoft researchers have been working on force sensing technology that would let you bend/twist/stretch/squeeze your handheld device in order to control it.
The research has been carried out at Microsoft’s Cambridge lab by James Scott, Lorna Brown and Mike Molloy.
Found Your Story, Max Lowe. TNX
Top 10 Music Social Networks
If you are in a band, these are absolute must use sites for the promotion process. You should have accounts on as many as possible, at least to explore and test out their features.
Found Your Story, Le Monde. TNX
Social Networks Around the Globe
Réseaux sociaux : des audiences différentes selon les continents
Found Your Story, ImpactLab. TNX
“The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today,” he said. “In three years’ time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.”
Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.
Cicconi, who was speaking at the event as part of a wider series of meetings with U.K. government officials, said that at least $55 billion worth of investment was needed in new infrastructure in the next three years in the U.S. alone, with the figure rising to $130 billion to improve the network worldwide. “We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010,” he said.
Found Your Story, Nemertes Research. TNX
The Internet Singularity, Delayed: Why Limits in Internet Capacity Will Stifle Innovation on the Web
Our findings indicate that although core fiber and switching/routing resources will scale nicely to support virtually any conceivable user demand, Internet access infrastructure, specifically in North America, will likely cease to be adequate for supporting demand within the next three to five years. We estimate the financial investment required by access providers to bridge the gap between demand and capacity ranges from $42 billion to $55 billion, or roughly 60%-70% more than service providers currently plan to invest.
It’s important to stress that failing to make that investment will not cause the Internet to collapse. Instead, the primary impact of the lack of investment will be to throttle innovation” both the technical innovation that leads to increasingly newer and better applications, and the business innovation that relies on those technical innovations and applications to generate value. The next Google, YouTube, or Amazon might not arise, not because of a lack of demand, but due to an inability to fulfill that demand. Rather like osteoporosis, the underinvestment in infrastructure will painlessly and invisibly leach competitiveness out of the economy.
One could even whimsically speculate as we did in the title-that the lack of investment could be holding back the time at which the Internet reaches a singularity (a point at which accelerating change creates an unpredictable outcome, such as the Internet becoming independently sentient).
Found Your Story, Jeremiah Owyang. TNX
Widgets, Gadgets, Applications, Canvas Pages, Embeds, it goes on and one. One thing is clear, the rate of widgets continues to increase, take for example Facebook’s application platform has over 15,000, 20,000 applications in just about 9 months. Granted, many of those are slightly tweaked clones of each other, the top 100 widgets clearly has adoption.
Found Your Story, Jeremiah Owyang & Matt Toll. TNX
Tracking the Influence of Conversations:
A Roundtable Discussion on Social Media Metrics and Measurement
A Dow Jones White Paper
For corporations serious about tracking their “return on influence” – that is, not just standard “ROI,” but a broader, more long-term, long-lasting return – in social media and the blogosphere, being able to measure, track and compare the results is a requirement for determining next steps and strategy.
And for organizations that want to join the conversation using social media tools but that now realize that traditional Web analytics alone are not sufficient, the next question is crucial: Which attributes should be measured?
when looking through the impressives video’s and being into the internet a long time, it makes me start to think about some of the older SF novels about networks and digital being etc ….. in these novels there’s allways a group of outcasts trying to break the system…. Is that not what is happening right now? All the online social media, all the technology is the group of people not being able to keep up becoming bigger and bigger? At some point some people might willingly turn there backs on all this…. this is happening in china right now! Only like 5% of the population has 80% of the wealth …..
Found Your Story, Chris Anderson & Ross Mayfield. TNX
Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki
This site began as a collaboration between Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine) and Ross Mayfield (Socialtext).
Found Your Story, Starbucks. TNX
Help shape the future of Starbucks—with your ideas
You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What’s your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple—we want to hear it. Share your ideas, tell us what you think of other people’s ideas and join the discussion. We’re here, and we’re ready to make ideas happen.
Found Your Story, Laura Spencer. TNX
McDonald’s corporate blog Open for Discussion is another in our ongoing series of corporate blog reviews. Previously, we’ve taken a look at the Kodak blogs, the General Motors blog, Starwood Hotels and Resorts, and Wal-Mart.
Found Your Story, Dan Beyers & The Washington Post’s local business staff. TNX
CollectiveX is yet another name in the world of social media. Most of the better known social networking Web sites connect people with profile pages to each other. Facebook focuses on school friends and colleagues, MySpace has a knack for music, LinkedIn connects professionals. Rather than being a single network itself, CollectiveX lets groups create their own social networks around particular topics.
Around 14,000 such groups have been created, most of them private. A directory of public sites is at Group Sites. Companies, clubs and other like-minded people are creating sites. The largest and most popular include the UrbanPhilly.com Professional Network; the International Network of Social Entrepreneurs; and NolaYurp, to support New Orleans. Companies and organizations using the site have included the Nature Conservancy and an international group of consulting company Accenture’s alumni.
Based in Columbia, the site’s audience has been doubling every few months, now reaching 2.5 million page views of month, Wooten said. It has generated some buzz in tech circles. TechCrunch, the influential blog about technology news, has written about it occasionally, with editor Michael Arrington once saying “CollectiveX is better than LinkedIn.”
Found Your Story, ICWSM. TNX
ICWSM 2008 (the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media) was held late March / begin April in Seattle. The link above gives you the papers and posters, as well as some background on the contributors.
Invited speakers:
= Marc Smith (founded the Microsoft Research Community Technologies Group, and is now part of the Internet Services Research Center in Silicon Valley)
= David Sifry (Technorati founder)
= Brad Fitzpatrick (LiveJournal founder, now with Google)
Found Your Story, Brian Morrissey via Scott Goodson. TNX
HARDLY BREAKING NEWS BUT NEVERTHELES VERY TRUE !
Consumers in the U.S. and Western Europe are more likely to be passive participants, while those in emerging markets often create content. The U.S. and W.E. severely lag behind Asian and South American countries in participation rates.
Found Your Story, MSNBC via Scott Goodson. TNX
The Internet will usurp television as the biggest advertising medium in Britain by the end of 2009.
Britain has the most developed online advertising market in the world which the report by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Advertising Research Centre said was worth 2.8 billion pounds ($5.6 billion) in 2007.
It said last year’s 38 percent online ad growth was driven by the rising number of people online, the introduction of cheap laptops and the growing popularity of catch-up TV on the Internet through services such as Channel 4’s 4oD.
“With broadband speeds on the up and consumers spending more time on more sites, the outlook for online advertising is rosy — in fact we expect it to overtake TV in 2009 when it will become the UK’s biggest medium,” IAB chief executive Guy Phillipson said in a statement.
The report said the Internet was the biggest driver of overall advertising growth in 2007, with the entire sector in Britain experiencing 4.3 percent growth to 18.4 billion pounds.
Online ad spend had a market share of 15.3 percent, up from 11.4 percent in 2006, but behind display press advertising at 19.9 percent and TV at 21.8 percent.
Found Your Story, Clint Boulton. TNX
Collaboration: The $588 Billion Problem
E-mail, instant messaging, and blog-reading are costing the economy billions in lost productivity.
The result is an egregious lack of productivity that may cost the U.S. economy $588 billion a year, according to a report by Basex, which has tabbed information overload as the “Problem of the Year” for 2008.
Found Your Story, Chris Nutall. TNX
Bitstrips made waves last month with its launch of a cartoon-building website that makes creating your own strip easy.
Now the internet-savvy Scott Adams has launched Dilbert 2.0, an online version of his strip that allows readers to change the punchline.
My Dilbert, where fans will be able to rewrite the whole strip, will follow in May, along with Group Mash, which allows users to collaborate and write different panels together.
The cartoonist already allows readers to search, rank, comment on and receive RSS feeds of his strips. He aims to work with his audience by authoring random frames and seeing if groups can successfully develop strips.
Found Your Story, Wikio. TNX
The Top 50 worldwide most influential weblogs for April 2008. As usual, most of the blogs are from the U.S.
Found Your Story, Erica Naone. TNX
New CEO Mark Kingdon confirms Second Life’s immaturity:
Second Life is still early in its development in terms of the audience and the kinds of activities residents engage in. If you look across all social media and social computing over the last two years, there’s been a huge amount of experimentation by brands. None of the initiatives broke the bank when they failed-as inevitably experiments do-and the ones that were successful were wildly successful. So I think if you put it in context from a big-brand perspective, it’s not like companies went into Second Life and built a presence and lost their shirts. I think it’s been part of the natural evolution of social media and social computing. When the time is right and that community is more expansive and more mature, and companies have more experience, perhaps at that time we’ll be looking at it again.
What would you see as signs of that maturity?
I think what would be important is that there be a larger resident base than there is today, and that brands think about the pact that they need to make in social computing. I’ve always believed that in social media and social computing, brands have to give to get. So you have to give the resident community something of value, something exciting, in order to get their positive attention on your brand. I don’t think all of the experiments of brands in Second Life factored that in.
Can you talk about other ways that Second Life might become more mature?
As the resident base continues to grow, we need to make sure that the platform is stable and scalable so that it works really well for residents. The last thing you want to do is invest in bringing new residents in and waste their time because they can’t enter and enjoy Second Life. On top of that, we need to make the interface more enjoyable and more usable for current residents and prospective residents.
Found Your Story, Kirsten Grieshaber. TNX
“Mauerguide” is a multimedia guide to the history of the Berlin Wall. The gadget lets users zoom in and out on a colorful map of the city to figure out where they are. The wall’s route is marked in red.
Audio files and video tell the wall’s dramatic history, starting when East Germany began building it to wall off the capitalist enclave of West Berlin in a bid to stop a westward exodus from the communist state.
It took a team of historians and programmers a year and $797,000 to develop the software for the guide.
Found Your Story, Yahoo! Mobile. TNX
Introducing: Yahoo! Go 3.0 Beta. The best internet experience for your phone. Period.
Found Your Story, Chi.mp. TNX
Chi.mp is building a flexible, permanent home for your online identity on your own domain. You own and are in control of the facets of your digital life, not any one service provider.
One place for your profile, your contacts & content, where you have control over who gets to see what.
Chi.mp is as open as you are.
The Revolution Begins Summer 2008
Found Your Story, Random Acts of Journalism. TNX
Citizen film-making
Spike Lee and Nokia have teamed up to create a film using User Generated Content produced by Nokia users on their cell phones.
Nokia surveyed 9,000 consumers last year and concluded that by 2012 one out of every four consumers will create, edit or share entertainment with friends, instead of getting it from traditional media outlets like television or movie studios.
Found Your Story, Lara Sinclair. TNX
Tv networks in Australia are just beginning to experiment with social networking and how it engages the users. When a Facebook page was set up for the program “So You Think You Can Dance Australia”, it ended up attracting 28,000 fans.
“Big Brother Australia” will be getting a Facebook page that will feature things such as a news feed for what is going on in their house, and MySpace will be used for all of their video hosting needs.
The official website, BigBrother.com.au will also be adding user generated content in the form of videos for the first time ever, and expanding their blog coverage.
Found Your Story, Clay Shirky. TNX
Gin, Television and Social Surplus
You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus-”How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article-fighting offstage all the while-from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”
So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project-every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in-that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is.
Found Your Story, Blake from LISNews. TNX
10 Blogs To Read In 2008
The Annoyed Librarian
David Rothman
iLibrarian
Judge a Book by its Cover
Law Librarian Blog
Library Stuff
Marylaine Block
Off The Mark
ResearchBuzz
Stephen’s Lighthouse
Found Your Story, BBC News. TNX
TEN MOST IMPORTANT STORIES AT ONCE
Luminaries look to the future web at its 15th anniversary
Tim Berners-Lee, W3C
Nigel Shadbolt, University of Southampton
Wendy Hall, University of Southampton
David Belanger, AT&T
Kai-Fu Lee, Google China
Mitchell Baker, Mozilla
Mark Bernstein, Parc
Robert Cailliau, Cern
Robert Scoble, blogger
Tim O’Reilly, Web 2.0 inventor
Jack…
Have enjoyed your site very much and benefited from the information. Thank You….
Found Your Story, John Cornwell. TNX
Technology is moulding a generation of children unable to think for themselves or empathise with others, says leading brain scientist Susan Greenfield.
Her theory goes like this. The more we play games, the less time there is for learning specific facts and working out how those facts relate to each other. This can result, she maintains, in a failure to build highly personalised individual conceptual frameworks – the whole point of education and the basis of individual identity.
If the purpose of a game, for instance, is to free the princess from the tower, it is the thrill of attaining the goal, the process, that counts. What does not count is the content – the personality of the princess and the narrative as to why and how she is there, as in a storybook.
Greenfield avers that emphasis on process in isolation becomes addictive and profoundly mind-changing.
Found Your Story, Reed Stevenson. TNX
Lego’s latest brick trick: a virtual world
Millions of children pick up Lego bricks each year to spend hours — 5 billion, in fact — creating their own imaginary worlds.
Now the manufacturer of the little plastic playing blocks wants to take them online to Lego Universe, a virtual world for fans of the ubiquitous toy.
Found Your Story, Marc. TNX
How to build the mesh: 7 excellent stories until now.
Found Your Story, BBC News. TNX
Electronics’ ‘missing link’ found
Hewlett-Packard’s Stan Williams helped develop ‘memristors’
Details of an entirely new kind of electronic device, which could make chips smaller and far more efficient, have been outlined by scientists.
The new components, described by scientists at Hewlett-Packard, are known as “memristors”.
Found Your Story, DIZ’AIN. TNX
Future-Making Serious Games: the best of serious games that challenge us to play at building a better future.
Found Your Story, Marriam Fam. TNX
In Egypt Facebook has evolved into a lot more than just a social-networking Web site: It has become one of the latest tools for political dissent in Egypt.
Facebook activists are calling for a day of nation-wide strikes Sunday — coinciding with President Hosni Mubarak’s 80th birthday — to protest the surging prices of basic commodities like bread and meat. Their efforts got a boost this week when the Islamist political group Muslim Brotherhood backed the call, saying that the planned strike promotes peaceful opposition.
Found Your Story, Amit Agarwal. TNX
A Netcraft report suggests that the total count of websites (including blogs ?) is around 156 million.
Since the Netcraft chart says “hostnames”, I guess the numbers include blogs as well that are hosted on subdomains of Blogspot, Twitter, TypePad, Windows Live Spaces or WordPress.com.
Now Technorati claims that the total number of blogs alone is currently in excess of 100 million while Netcraft puts Blogs+Websites = 156 million so there’s probably a mismatch somewhere. Anyone got clues ?
Found Your Story, John Biggs. TNX
Imagine the Wii with 3D vision. The console would understand if you were behind an object and images would move accordingly and you could reach out with your hand to “touch” items on the screen. The technology is real and it works and PrimeSense, a small Israeli company, is trying to release it into the wild.
Found Your Story, Chris Messina. TNX
How would a universal “location layer for the social web” change the design and implementation of existing applications? Would it give rise to a class of applications that take advantage of and thrive on knowing where their members live, work and play, and tailor their services accordingly? Or would all services eventually make use of location information? Or will it depend on each service’s unique offering and membership, and why people signed up in the first place? Just because you can integrate with Twitter or Facebook, must you? If the “location layer” were made available, must you take advantage of it? What criteria or metrics would you use to decide?
I would contend that these are all questions that anyone with a modern web service is going to need to start dealing with sooner than later.
Found Your Story, Alberto Antonello & Fabio Cangianiello. TNX
Web 2.0 doesn’t seem distorted in its continuous evolution, but can be seen as more intuitive, rapid and functional; an example of the often cited folksonomy, or simply the methodology of characterising information present on the web through key words (or so-called “tags”) created not by the creators, but by the users themselves, increasing still more the trend of user generated content that is the foundation of web 2.0.
From appearing, to being, this seems to be the most suitable key of reading to carry us towards web 3.0, where a decisive and substantial upgrade on the road to singularity and intelligibility will be created, in a context in which there will be a need to respect above all the human dimension.
Found Your Story, Dean Takahashi. TNX
Funware’s threat to the traditional video game industry
Funware includes applications such as eBay, which made it fun to earn rewards as a competitive buyer or seller on its auction site. The term may also be applied to alternate-reality games such as “ilovebees.com,” where masses of players collectively solved a mystery about an invasion of earth.
Flickr traces its origins to game industry veterans Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, whose team stumbled upon photo-sharing while they were trying to make a game. Bunchball has made a tool, dubbed Nitro, that makes web sites more engaging by instilling them with reward-based activities. Entellium has built game principles into its customer relationship management software and Seriosity has a game-like email program.
One of the ominous things for the video game industry is that almost none of these Funware ideas or businesses have come from game companies, which are now failing to catch on to an expansion opportunity. It’s an odd situation, given that game designers are the ones who best understand how to keep consumers addicted, Zichermann says. What’s more, it’s possible that social networks that use fun game mechanics may actually be robbing games of their audiences, he adds.
Found Your Story, Ned Madden. TNX
B2B in a Web 2.0 World, Part 1: Digital Media Relations
Harnessing the Power of New Media Platforms, a joint 2007 survey by the Association of National Advertisers and BtoBonline.com, reported that new media platforms fall into three distinct tiers.
The top tier includes proprietary Web sites, e-mail marketing, online ads, search engine optimization, search engine marketing and webinars. The middle tier includes blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts and video on demand. The bottom tier consists of wikis, mobile , viral video, social networks and Second Life, the Internet virtual world and MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games).
“The bulk of the budget dollars allocated to new platforms will go to the entrenched forms — the company’s own Web site and e-mail marketing,” explained Frank Dudley, marketing vice president at Guideline, a Boston-based global market research firm.
With the notable exception of a company’s own Web site, demand generation is the primary objective of B2B marketers using new media platforms in the top tier, according to the survey. The middle and bottom tier platforms are viewed as more suitable for brand-building activities.
Few B2B marketers in the survey found social networks or viral video to be very effective in demand generation. B2B respondents said the two main barriers to the adoption of new media platforms were lack of experience and a perceived inability to prove effectiveness and return on investment (ROI).
Found Your Story, BBC News. TNX
Boom times for virtual playgrounds
Some virtual worlds are hugely popular. Habbo has 90m accounts, Neopets 45m, Club Penguin 15m and Star Doll 15m. All these virtual worlds are aimed at children under 13.
This popularity is based on three factors: friends, freedom and fun.
Found Your Story, danah boyd. TNX
Much to my dismay, American politicians primarily treat the digital world as yet another broadcast medium. They seem to think that they will be worshipped online if only they port their TV-styled material to the Internet. With this framework in mind, they pay consultants to build structured, formalized content for citizens to passively consume. When these endeavors fail to capture massive attention, politicians blame the medium.
Found Your Story, NetGuido. TNX
The vision of social networks as centres of gravity of all electronic exchanges of an individual leads to the following: the social network is the future of telecom.
Found Your Story, Brian Haven & Jennifer Jones. TNX
Brian Haven, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, tells Jennifer Jones that although social marketing is taking off and many corporations are engaging in conversations with their customers, the science of brand engagement is far from complete. Haven mentions Nike and its use of social marketing as one fine standout example today.
Found Your Story, FCW. TNX
We all remember the 1990s when an agency wasn’t cool until it had something called a Web site. Today, nearly every agency has a Web site. Now it’s all about community, interactivity and collaboration — and using tools, mostly Web-based ones, to make all that happen.
The first federal blogs that we could find came from the Federal Trade Commission in November 2006. FTC staff members used it to comment on hearings about protecting consumers in the “Next Tech-ade.” There are now at least 31 active public blogs run by federal agencies, according to the USA.gov federal government Web portal. Another 10 federal blogs have come and gone.
Found Your Story, Mark Tarallo. TNX
Government bloggers are now writing about every conceivable subject, including the Middle East peace process, federal agency management techniques and rock singers with drug problems. The era of government blogging has dawned.
Federal officials are using blogs to stimulate policy debate and engage the public, correct press reports, communicate with agency employees, and highlight the resources agencies have to offer.
Federal officials have launched at least 30 official blogs and are continually adding more.
Found Your Story, ionutalexchitu. TNX
Google Maps is evolving from a driving directions and business search tool, to a comprehensive representation of all the world’s information, on a map.
Found Your Story, Ed Oswald. TNX
MIT students show off array of Android apps
The students came up with a broad range of ideas, all of which show the overwhelming power the operating system has to change the way mobile phone applications are regarded.
With a key feature of the phone being its GPS and mapping capabilities, many focused on this as a basis for their work. A interesting approach to this is GeoLife, an application to remind users of certain tasks when they move past locations where the task is to occur.
Another uses locations to automatically change phone settings, called Locale. For example, the phone could know to ring when outside, but change to silent within certain locations such as a user’s place of work, a church, etc.
That application won a $25,000 prize as part of Google’s Android Developer Challenge. Created by four students, they now move on to compete in future rounds for cash prizes of up to $275,000.
Other applications included Re:Public, a location-aware social networking service, Loco, an event finder, and Snap, a guide to interesting places nearby. The only application submitted not to use location as a basis was KEI, which enables the cell phone to be used to unlock a car.
This SciFi story of Isaac Asimov has almost coming become reality:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It’s_Such_a_Beautiful_Day
Found Your Story, Jonathan Richards. TNX
McKinsey: Virtual worlds such as Second Life will become an indispensible business tool and vital to the strategy of any company intent on reaching out to the video-game generation.
I think the suggestion of “Julius Ceasar taking to Facebook” is great. I will use that in my upcoming presentation “Party at my Place” at http://www.thewebandbeyond.nl, in which I will elaborate on the idea of status-increasing ‘closed’ social networks linked to personal websites.
Found Your Story, Ashley Fantz. TNX
Teen alleging rape turns to YouTube
16-year-old Crystal was upset when a prosecutor dropped her case. She posted a tearful video on YouTube begging for help. Many victims are posting details of their attacks on Facebook and MySpace. Victims’ advocates say it can be dangerous to give too many personal details.
Found Your Story, Sarah Perez. TNX
Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web
Gen Y is taking over. The generation of young adults that’s compromised of the children of Boomers, Generation Jones, and even some Gen X’ers, is the biggest generation since the Baby Boomers and three times the size of Gen X. As the Boomers fade into retirement and Gen Y takes root in the workplace, we’re going to see some big changes ahead, not just at work, but on the web as a whole.
Found Your Story, Menorca TechTalk. TNX
TechTalk is an unstructured event gathering top tech entrepreneurs at Martin Varsavsky’s Torrenova farm in Menorca.
You can see pictures and videos from TechTalk 2008 on the website or you can look for them on Flickr, Youtube, Technorati.
Found Your Story, Steve Hodson. TNX
There is this whole internal buzz within the blogosphere of how social media is going to be the big game changer when in fact all it is doing is creating a new buzz word for things that have been around for as long as computers have been able to talk to each other. It is just a revamped proxy for non-personal; or rather faux personal communication. Sure things like blogs and social networks might have old media running scared but even as Michael Arrington pointed out on TechCrunch this Data Portability is just a whole new set of walled gardens.
Found Your Story, Olga Kharif and Catherine Holahan. TNX
It’s been nearly three years since News Corp. acquired MySpace, and still no one’s answered that $64 gazillion question about who’s going to make the real money from the social networking phenomenon. Uncovering the answer will only get harder as sites across the Web add social features, making the definition of social networking ever fuzzier. “In two to three years, the entire Internet is going to be more social,” says Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice-president for communications and communities at Yahoo!.
Found Your Story, BBC News. TNX
Ministers are to consider plans for a database of electronic information holding details of every phone call and e-mail sent in the UK, it has emerged.
The plans, reported in the Times, are at an early stage and may be included in the draft Communications Bill later this year, the Home Office confirmed.
A Home Office spokesman said the data was a “crucial tool” for protecting national security and preventing crime.
Found Your Story, Josh Catone. TNX
It’s really quite amazing to look a things like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and widgets to measure a US presidential election — the last time around most of these tools didn’t exist (or at least weren’t nearly as important).
Found Your Story, Adario Strange. TNX
Designer Takumi Yoshida is looking to the future of social networks with a concept device called the Geotagger. The device would allow real-time tagging of locations via a device that looks more next-gen iPod than common GPS device. Yoshida calls the system “physical social bookmarking on-the-go.” If the social networking meme survives the next few years, this kind of device is certain to pop up eventually.
Found Your Story, Sarah Perez. TNX
Enterprise 2.0 To Become a $4.6 Billion Industry By 2013
A new report by Forrester Research is predicting that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is going to increase dramatically over the next five years. This increase will include more spending on social networking tools, mashups, and RSS, with the end result being a global enterprise market of $4.6 billion by the year 2013.
What it doesn’t include is consumer services like Blogger, Facebook, Netvibes, and Twitter, says Forrester. These types of services are aimed at consumers and are often supported by ads, so they do not qualify as Enterprise 2.0 tools.
Found Your Story, IBM Watson Research Center. TNX
Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project.
Found Your Story, Ned Madden. TNX
As familiarity with Web 2.0 features like video-sharing grows, businesses have found a new outlet for company-produced information. Corporate video material once made only for TV news outlets has found a new niche on the Internet. Business’ relationship with the media has changed.
Found Your Story, Ash Dosanjh. TNX
Nearly 40 per cent of all mobile web traffic is directed to social networking sites, according to a new report by Opera Software.
The Norwegian corporation’s State of the Mobile Web report looks at the aggregate, anonymous traffic of more than 44 million cumulative Opera Mini users worldwide.
Over 11.9 million people used Opera Mini in March 2008 to browse 2.2 billion pages, generating more than 32 million MB of data traffic for operators worldwide.
Found Your Story, Jason Kaneshiro. TNX
FriendFeed May Be The Google Of Social Networks:
== FriendFeed has largely replaced my use of Google Reader.
== FriendFeed has essentially replaced my use of Twitter.
== FriendFeed has definitely replaced my use of Facebook.
== FriendFeed is fast.
== FriendFeed has search (also fast).
== FriendFeed isn’t standing still - they launched “rooms” out of nowhere.
== All the tech bloggers I want to communicate with are on FriendFeed.
The general trend in my online life, at least: FriendFeed is taking over all my online social activity.
Found Your Story, MG Stiegler. TNX
I decided to sit back and watch for a bit as the blogosphere belched out a nice robust “bitchmeme” about FriendFeed killing Twitter. As far as I can tell, there is only one coherent thing to pull from all of this: People are very angry about Twitter’s downtime.
Certainly that is reasonable. The service’s reliability has gone from bad to worse, culminating in an admission that it isn’t sure what is wrong and that it will basically need to be re-built. As anyone who has read any of my dozen or so posts about Twitter over the past couple weeks will realize, I’m annoyed as well.
I’m annoyed, but thinking rationally.
FriendFeed is not going to kill Twitter. It’s a nice thought that we could already have a service which many of us use that will replace our beloved, but failing Twitter — but that simply isn’t the case. FriendFeed and Twitter are different services. Each do different things. Each has a different purpose. It’s that simple.
In fact, if anything is going to kill Twitter, I’m in agreement with Steven Hodson of WinExtra: It’s Twitter.
Found Your Story, BBC News. TNX
Virtual worlds can be valuable places where children rehearse what they will do in real life, reveals research.
They are also a “powerful and engaging” alternative to more passive pursuits such as watching TV, said the BBC-sponsored study.
The research was done with children using the BBC’s Adventure Rock virtual world, aimed at those aged 6-12.
Found Your Story, Sharon Begley & Jeneen Interlandi. TNX
No one knows what kids will do with the cognitive skills they hone rescuing the princess. If they just save more princesses, Bauerlein will be proved right: Gen Y will turn out to be not just the dumbest but also the most self-absorbed and selfish. (It really aggravates him that many Gen-Yers are unapologetic about their ignorance, dismissing the idea that they should have more facts in their heads as a pre-Google and pre-wiki anachronism.) But maybe they’ll deploy their minds to engineer an affordable 100mpg car, to discover the difference in the genetic fingerprints of cancers that spread and those that do not, to identify the causes and cures of intolerance and hate. Oddly, Bauerlein acknowledges that “kids these days are just as smart and motivated as ever.” If they’re also “the dumbest” because they have “more diversions” and because “screen activity trumps old-fashioned reading materials”—well, choices can change, with maturity, with different reward structures, with changes in the world their elders make. Writing off any generation before it’s 30 is what’s dumb.
Book: “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30)” by Mark Bauerlein, Emory University professor of English.
Found Your Story, Richard Waters & Chris Nuttall. TNX
Many members of the Web 2.0 generation of internet companies have so far produced little in the way of revenue, despite bringing about some significant changes in online behaviour, according to some of the entrepreneurs and financiers behind the movement.
The shortage of revenue among social networks, blogs and other “social media” sites that put user-generated content and communications at their core has persisted despite more than four years of experimentation aimed at turning such sites into money-makers. Together with the US economic downturn and a shortage of initial public offerings, the failure has damped the mood in internet start-up circles.
Found Your Story, Karen Aho. TNX
Customer Service Hall of Shame
When the economic going gets tough, some companies apparently get tough-minded about customer service, squeezing out the last dime of profit by cutting back on critical customer-facing positions such as phone personnel.
“We’ve seen a fall in customer service as we’ve gone into a recession,” said Richard D. Hanks, the president of Mindshare Technologies, a customer-service consulting company. “As the cost cutting occurs . . . they start to cut the wrong things.”
Found Your Story, Bruno Giussani. TNX
The Value Chain 2.0: Bringing In The Consumer — an essay by Xavier Comtesse and Jeffrey Huang.
When consumers turn into active stakeholders in the economy, they become integral part of the value creation process. A new dimension is thus opened: the “value chain 2.0“.
This dimension is, in some sense, a continuation of the value chain concept established by Michael Porter in 1985. However, here the focus is on a participative economy.
Value chain 2.0 takes into account the active consumer in the production of value, across every level of a company’s activities. Henceforth, we call the active consumer the “ConsumActor “ to indicate this reality.
Found Your Story, ENISA. TNX
ENISA, the European Network and Information Security Agency published Security Issues and Recommendations for Online Social Networks.
Contributors are:
Alessandro Acquisti, Carnegie Mellon University
Elisabetta Carrara, ENISA
Fred Stutzman, UNC
Jon Callas, PGP Corp
Klaus Schimmer, SAP
Maz Nadjm, Rareface
Mathieu Gorge, Vigitrust
Nicole Ellison, MSU
Paul King, Cisco Systems
Ralph Gross, Carnegie Mellon University
Scott Golder, Hewlett-Packard
Found Your Story, Dorion Carroll. TNX
“More than half a million blog posts are created every day. Technorati.com provides a real-time stream of what the blogosphere is creating, paying attention to, and valuing,” said Dorion Carroll, vice president of engineering, Technorati. “Truviso enables us to analyze and illustrate how these things evolve, literally right before our users’ eyes.”
Found Your Story, Ruben Robert Nieuwenhuis. TNX
Enjoy making your Consumers Prosumers!
Please view the video about Consumer Innovation & Co-creation. Co is currently active in crowdsourcing projects, consumer communities, lead user groups, feedback platforms, and open challenge boards.
Doyouknowco.com features ‘THE BIG CO Challenge, searching for the 12th reason’. This exciting crowdsourcing project is searching for Co’s motivations to participate. The challenge was launched last week and Fellow Force is partner in this global adventure.
Found Your Story, James Mowery. TNX
Fake stories are gaining popularity because a nice chunk of bloggers tend to skip the tiny details and believe everything they read. Throw social networks like Digg into the mix, and you have trouble on the horizon. I am not one of those people, and I do scrutinize (maybe even too much) nearly every story I read on a daily basis. This is why I am asking that the blogging community take a step back and realize that this is only the beginning of a big problem. People are going to try to hurt the image of the blogosphere.
I, unfortunately, have lost some faith in the blogosphere over the past few months with regards to credibility. Bloggers are beginning to prove why journalists still have jobs. Scammers are beginning to realize that the blogosphere is the perfect opportunity to run their fake stories and lies to gain popularity and fame. It is likely that the same people that have provided us the need for spam inboxes will now give us the need for more scrutiny within the blogosphere.
Found Your Story, Josh Catone. TNX
Offline, I have a network of under 50 people that I interact on a regular basis as friends. But online, the concept of “friend” is completely different. On Facebook I have nearer to 250 friends, on Twitter I have just over 300 followers. That’s just a blip compared to how many friends some of the true power users on those services have, but it brings to mind the question of how many friends is too many? Surely, the answer varies person-to-person, but there have to be some universal upper limits to the concept of “friendship.”
Found Your Story, Jeremiah Owyang. TNX
Forrester Underway to Catalog the White Label Social Networking Space
A White Label Social Network is a social network that any company can rebrand. Look here.
Found Your Story, eMarketer. TNX
eMarketer forecasts that over 800 million people worldwide will be participating in a social network via their mobile phones by 2012, up from 82 million in 2007.
Along with the growing audience, marketers are drawn to mobile social networking because it creates a unique context in which to promote their goods and services. It goes beyond simply linking people with digital content by adding the immediacy of sharing with friends.
Found Your Story, BBC News. TNX
We are beginning to understand how the brain works using brain-machine interface technology.
Found Your Story, Beth Snyder Bulik. TNX
According to new research from BlogHer and Compass Partners, 35% of women aged 18 to 75 participate in the blogosphere weekly. The study also reported that, of online women, 53% read blogs, 37% post comments to blogs and 28% write or update blogs. Not only that, but of online women who contribute to blogs, 58% post entries at least weekly, and of those who actively read blogs, 80% do so at least once per week. Women bloggers blog for a variety of reasons: 65% do it for fun, 60% to express themselves, 46% to get information, 41% to stay up to date on family and friends, 40% to connect with others, 34% as a diary, and 28% participate in the blogosphere in order to connect with others.
Found Your Story, Kenneth Chang. TNX
Whoever thought a NASA spacecraft could be so adept at social networking and Web 2.0?
For users of Twitter, a Web microblogging service, the Phoenix Mars lander has been sending pithy news “tweets” to the cellphones and computers of interested “followers.”
As of late Friday, the Phoenix lander had 9,636 followers at Twitter, more than triple the number of a week earlier. According to twitterholic.com, it ranks No. 30 among all Twitter feeds in the solar system.
Found Your Story, Stephen Downes. TNX
Ten Futures is a presentation, delivered to Joint Conference of Campus Saskatchewan and The Educational Technology Consortium.
Found Your Story, BBC Trust. TNX
Service review bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk is an excellent service that is highly valued by users and meets the majority of its Service Licence commitments.
Improvements to management’s control of the service are needed and we will restructure the Service Licence to offer better accountability.
We endorse the development of the service but will not approve new investments until we have considered their likely public value and approved proposals for improved management control.
In our public consultation, users broadly agreed that bbc.co.uk makes the BBC more accountable and acknowledged that it may have deepened their relationship with the BBC. But they questioned whether the BBC was fully committed to genuine dialogue with them.
The BBC’s blogs are already highly appreciated by audiences. Our audience research suggests that even those who do not use them recognise their value and those who do use them are enthusiastic.
Found Your Story, Kate Green. TNX
When Steve Jobs strides onstage at Apple’s annual developers conference on June 9, many will be expecting fireworks, which could include games that use the phone’s accelerometer as a control, new mapping software, and quick ways to update profiles on social networks such as Facebook or MySpace.
One rising company that’s hoping for a mention during the Steve Jobs Show is Pelago, a startup that recently garnered $15 million from funders, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. Pelago will soon offer a version of its software, called Whrrl, for the iPhone. The software enables something Pelago’s chief technology officer, Darren Erik Vengroff, calls social discovery: using the iPhone’s map and self-location features, as well as information about the prior activities of the user’s friends, Whrrl proposes new places to explore or activities to try.
Found Your Story, Eben Moglen. TNX
Social Networking Software (SNS) are tools, owned by private capital, to subvert the essence of the Net for the benefit of capitalism and its capitalists: to include advertising, to add surveillance devices, to know who read what and when, and to focus on the individual and not the community.
Found Your Story, Roland Piquepaille. TNX
According to Nature News, a team of French researchers has used medieval documents to create the oldest detailed social network ever constructed. The mathematicians and computer scientists looked through thousands of records of land transactions dating back as far as 1260 in a Southwest part of France. The result of their study shows ‘how medieval peasants and lords were connected.’ Even if the title of the Nature News article is somewhat ironic — ‘Researchers give a French province the ‘Facebook’ treatment’ –, this mathematical study is pretty serious.
Found Your Story, KillerStartups. TNX
ILikeMyStyle.net is a social network that brings fashion lovers together in one online forum. Whether you’re a designer, a devoted fashionista, or just love looking at clothes, this site is something you must check out. Registered users can log on and post pictures of themselves in their favorite, most hated, most creative, or nuttiest outfit for all the world to see. They can share fashion ideas, swap info on fabric, shops, labels, and designs. Registered users can comment on other users’ outfits, offering their suggestions and critiques, or asking questions on the ensemble. Users can browse based on various criteria, including stores and trend names.
Found Your Story, John Tierney. TNX
Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.
Found Your Story, IEEE Spectrum. TNX
“The Singularity”: an IEEE Spectrum Special Report. Not to be missed !
Also study this here Countdown to Singularity chart.
Found Your Story, Jason Kincaid. TNX
The media recommendation engine “The Filter” has opened its doors to the public. The Peter Gabriel-backed company offers an entertainment start page that provides recommendations on movies, music, and online video (it is mostly focused on perfecting its music recommendations for the time being).
Found Your Story, Iain Dale, TNX
I have never been someone who believes the blogosphere and the mainstream media should be at each other’s throats. I suppose I would say that, wouldn’t I, seeing as I earn my living from various MSM outlets nowadays. There’s an increasing overlap, whereby bloggers are now writing for and appearing on the MSN with increaed regularity and mainstream jourbalists are now blogging.
I must say I do find it incredible that one man bands like me seem to be getting higher or equivalent numbers of readers (based on absolute unique visitors) than big MSM companies like ITN or the main political parties.
Found Your Story, Chris Ladd. TNX
The Consumerist, a Gawker Media-backed blog read by 2 million people every month, is one of the weapons behind this phenomenon of digital consumer justice. To understand companies, argues The Consumerist’s editor, Ben Popken, we should think of them as forces of nature, governed not by the laws of physics but by profit and loss. These are as absolute as gravity. If addressing your complaint is the cheapest or easiest thing to do, they will. If not, then they’re very sorry—they value your business, but there’s nothing they can do. “They’re not making emotional decisions,” Popken says. “They’re making a balance-sheet decision.”
There is, of course, nothing new to this. The difference today is that the internet has mobilized an army of consumers dedicated to dodging ridiculous company policies and hurdling script-reading customer-service representatives. With their sheer weight, they are driving a sort of revolution, pushing case after case from one column to another.
Found Your Story, Leslie Poston. TNX
Citizen Journalism Goes Mainstream
YouTube recently introduced an entire channel for citizen journalism and reporters, causing many to applaud it for its foresight. While I agree that a channel devoted to citizen journalism on a mainstream site like YouTube is a good thing, citizen journalists don’t need the approval of a main stream web site to be heard. We are already attuned to their message - we hear them loud and clear.
Found Your Story, Robin Good. TNX
Ken Thompson, high performance teams expert and author of the Bioteaming Manifesto, Bioteams and The Networked Enterprise, suggests that social software designers should look in the principles that make living systems succeed.
He contends that it is possible to successfully “apply living systems design to social systems” but only if, living systems theory is applied to each one of the three nested systems making up a living unit: the individual, the group, the system itself.
Found Your Story, Ed Silverman. TNX
As the Internet mushrooms every day, pharma seems destined to be left behind. Beset by a conservative culture shaped by regulatory concerns, trade secrets and other legal worries, drugmakers haven’t figured out how to use social networking to engage the public. A very few official blogs have been created, but the concept has yet to take hold in an industry that seems, more than ever, to need new ways to communicate with consumers, some of whom view drugmakers with suspicion.
Found Your Story, PR Newswire. TNX
“Today’s enterprise leaders are increasingly savvy to the fact that
incorporating social networking tools into their business model is now a
necessity to stay competitive,” said Michael Wilson, CEO of Small World
Labs. “The point behind this social networking shoot-out is to educate
these leaders on the differentiators between the leading vendors, to help
them recognize which vendor’s approach best fits their needs and to create
a platform for an open exchange of dialogue in a fun, relaxed environment.”
Found Your Story, Paul Krugman. TNX
So much, then, for the digital revolution [of the so-called New Economy]? Not so fast. The predictions of ’90s technology gurus are coming true more slowly than enthusiasts expected — but the future they envisioned is still on the march.
In 1994, one of those gurus, Esther Dyson, made a striking prediction: that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product — software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to “distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”
Found Your Story, Scott Allen. TNX
Now the web is social. OK, it’s always been social, but now it’s mostly social. According to Comscore, “The number of worldwide visitors to social networking sites has grown 34 percent in the past year to 530 million, representing approximately 2 out of every 3 Internet users.” In some countries, such as the UK, social networking sites account for more than 75% of all web traffic.
So where’s the super-aggregator for the social web?
Facebook wants to be it. So does MySpace. Google too. A host of startups are aggregating social networking profiles, online video and more - even multiple Twitter and Jaiku accounts.
Users are starving for this, even if many of them don’t realize it yet. As more and more social networks pop up, particularly those with niche focus, the space becomes increasingly fragmented. A new social network focused on one particular topic no longer competes with just other social networks on the same topic, but with all social networks vying for the user’s attention. And as anyone who’s ever studied GTD or any other productivity methodology knows, fragmented attention is counter-productive.
The inevitable trend is that unless social networking sites make it easier to aggregate their data, they’re going to lose their most active users to social network burnout (it’s already started). A widely-adopted, highly effective aggregation tool could stave off that trend and put the social web back on course to being an indispensable productivity tool, rather than a waste of time and a security risk.
Found Your Story, Linda Stone. TNX
You Have My Complete Attention: Beyond Continuous Partial Attention
We manage our time. We don’t manage our attention.
Managing time is all about lists, optimization, efficiency, and it’s TACTICAL. Managing attention is all about INTENTION, making choices as to what DOES and DOES NOT get done, and it’s STRATEGIC. Managing time is an action journey. Managing attention is an emotional journey.
New Vocabulary
Ages of Attention
When I talk about my research, I talk about twenty-year socio-cultural eras their accompanying attention strategies. I’ve given names to each Era. I’ve also given names to each Age of Attention: starting in 1945, the Age of Servant Attention; starting in 1965, the Age of Multi-tasking; starting in 1985, the Age of Continuous Partial Attention; and starting in 2005, the Age of Uni-Focus.
Attention density
How much attention a certain type of communication requires (for example, a telephone call has high attention density; a text message is relatively low attention density)
Attention foreplay
I can best describe this with a story. Here you go — as told to me by a wife and mother in New York City in November 2006. “Our husbands come home from work, glued to their Blackberries. They don’t talk with us or with the children. They don’t connect with us. And then, when we go to bed, they want sex. I don’t think so.”
Email apnea
A temporary absence or cessation of breathing, or shallow breathing, while doing email.
Eras (as I see it; related to attention)
Each era is characterized by the ideal that emerges as most commonly held by society at the time. Ages of Attention are in service to pursuit of the ideals. Starting in 1945, Era of Service to Institutions (I serve); starting in 1965, Era of Self-Expression (I create); starting in 1985, Era of Connection (I connect); starting in 2005, Era of Protection and Belonging (I protect).
Semi-sync
Communication that is not fully synchronous (like phone calls) and not fully asynchronous (like email). I.M. and text messaging are often used semi-synchronously.
Found Your Story, Jim Wilson. TNX
Still using a mouse, keyboard, joystick or motion sensor to control the action in a video game? It may be time to try brain power instead.
A new headset system picks up electrical activity from the brain, as well as from facial muscles and other spots, and translates it into on-screen commands. This lets players vanquish villains not with a click, but with a thought.
Found Your Story, Dan Mitchell. TNX
Many workers believe instant messaging causes less interruption than other forms of communication like phone calls, e-mail and talking face to face.
Instant messaging means an increase in the number of conversations, but those conversations tend to be shorter, said R. Kelly Garrett, an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State and a co-author of a study conducted by Ohio State University and the University of California. The study was published by The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (jcmc.indiana.edu).
The key takeaway is that instant messaging has some benefits where many people had feared that it might be harmful.
Found Your Story, Rob Walker. TNX
The Silence Generation
One thing that makes city life inspiring is also one thing that makes it oppressive: other people. Technology may be able to help. The evolution of community and technology was one theme of “Design and the Elastic Mind,” a recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The title of an essay in the show’s catalog, by Paola Antonelli, a curator, suggests the exciting possibilities of the emerging dynamic: “All Together Now!” Yet Antonelli also acknowledges the flip side of that togetherness. Citing one “very mundane example of one versus many,” she mentions a crucial line of defense against the chatter of others: “First-rate noise-canceling headsets. Don’t leave home without them.”
Found Your Story, Jeremiah Owyang. TNX
Five questions companies ask about social media:
1 What is Social Media?
For many folks, corporations, the question to answer was “What is a BloB”. Blogging was the primary tool that we saw in the marketplace, for some, it wasn’t taken seriously, for the savvy, they quickly adopted. We saw scare tactics from the threatened mainstream media, such as “Attack of the Blogs” and light of amateurisms, angry customers and crazies were painted. For many, we wanted to know what are these tools, how to they work, and what’s the impact. Early on, this impacted corporate communications, PR, and mainstream media.
2 Why does it matter?
As we’ve evolved, many were realizing the impact of exploding batteries, brand hijacking, and blog evangelism. Savvy companies were starting to adopt these tools, a few provided integrated communities that were scrapped together or built from existing platforms. For the majority, trying to understand why these tools matter to a business. In addition to corporate communications, PR, we started to see other marketing and business units being impacted by these tools, as well as adoption.
3 What does it mean to my business?
We’re here now. This is the year of ROI, measurement, and experimentation. Many corporations have deployed resources, headcounts and budgets. Corporations are afraid to make mistakes, so plans are created, and measurement is critical to help manage and prove the worth of new programs. ROI was proven, new social media measurement attributes were defined, and many new tools were deployed, I did what I could to further this industry (see all posts). In addition to Corporate Communications and PR, business units are starting to experiment with these tools, often out of the PR budget. A new role started to appear more frequently, the digital marketing manager, the community manager, the social media strategist.
4 How do I do it right?
Now that experimentation is done, and business units are starting to apply these tools, like advertising, PR, field marketing, and customer references, companies will want to do it right. Frameworks will be developed, consultants will offer packages, and a loosely developed process will be used. For companies that don’t have enough internal resources to listen, manage, and deploy, consultants will be a very sought after service. Nearly every brand will start to have an ongoing budget for social media, the new role to manage these tools will appear. IT departments will start to deploy enterprise 2.0 tools.
5 How do I integrate across the Enterprise
Normalization is happening, A checkbox for ’social media’ on every announcement, product launch, product development and support will be using these tools. Social media tools to listen, converse, collect knowledge, and build new products will integrate across the customer cycle. It’s not just external, intranets will start to deploy suites for collaboration, such as blog accounts issued to many internal and external employees. Product Teams, IT departments, HR, Finance, Executives, and of course Marketing will be using these tools.
Found Your Story, Robert Scoble. TNX
The sixth question companies ask about social media
I was just reading TechMeme and saw that Jeremiah Owyang has a great post on the five questions that companies ask about social media.
I have a sixth one: “how will doing this help my sales?”
How do I know that? A multi-billion-dollar-a-year company just asked me that.
Yeah, that’s similar to #2 on Jeremiah’s list, but gets much more directly to the point.
Of course, this is a question that isn’t answerable. Even if you think you can answer it, this is “code” for a way to tell the person asking to please go away and don’t come back.
Why do I say that?
Because there’s no way to prove that ANYTHING a business does will lead to more sales.
Even those “pay per click” ads on Google aren’t guaranteed to increase sales.
Found Your Story, MySocialPrime. TNX
Stay Organized… Anywhere in the World!
MySocialPrime is the perfect online companion for people who want a better-organized social life. Easily manage your friends, schedules, and communication with one powerful application.
= Manage who is in each group and reach them by email or SMS text
= Automatically send out event reminders
= Set or request items for your group members to bring to events
= Encourage communication among group members with the Forum
= Define events in your calendar once and share them with your groups
= Store files, pictures, and video online, and control who has access to them
= Create a public website about your group for everyone to see
= Manage payments and billing for your events
MySocialPrime is the ultimate social group organization tool. It’s free, it’s fast, and it’s easy to use. Get started today!
Found Your Story, Ted Wallingford. TNX
Media Information Wars Resemble Neuromancer
This week’s attack by Hollywood hired gun MediaDefender against Revision3, an ad-supported online video site, brings to mind thoughts of the William Gibson cyberspace novel, Neuromancer. In the book, a guy is sucked into a giant information conspiracy when he’s recruited as a hacker to figure out a mystery. What he discovers is that an artificial intelligence called Wintermute trying to take over, yup, the world.
The more information warfare is employed by industry, the more I wonder how long it will take for industrial espionage and sabotage to turn into all-out war a la Neuromancer. When will media copyright holders turn to artificial intelligence to nab would-be pirates, and how many more legitimate information businesses will suffer when Hollywood’s volleys against anti-piracy go out of bounds?
The Denial of Service attack launched against Revision3 targeted the trackers it operates to distribute its own content. The trick here is that those trackers (which provide BitTorrent clients with the locations of downloadable file chunks) also contained references to Hollywood property–and that’s the devil in the details.
After half a year of work, I finally took a week off. I was going on holiday with a group of painters somewhere in the south of France to a small town only michelin could find. The painters were going to paint in the nature and I was going to read my book Me the media. When I got there I discovered that the book was my only connection with web 2.0. (Unfortunately 3G was not able to reach me).
I started reading the book and somewhere really in the beginning it was said that ’soon there won’t be any printed newspapers left” than I looked up from my book and I thought: “What am I reading in this place so far away from the third mediarevolution. And these people with whom I am travelling with. Painters who come here to paint nature, looking at the composition, shapes, colors, light, shades. all beautiful things made by mother nature. They are really not into the third mediarevolution.
So I closed my book, took my camera and enjoyed nature and the painters.
Found Your Story, Dean Takahashi. TNX
A couple of years ago, Cisco started forming its own startups inside the company aimed at moving the big networking giant into adjacent markets. Now it’s launching a couple of new emerging technology products that were born from that effort.
Today, Cisco is announcing two of those products. The first is Enterprise TV, a YouTube-like video posting and viewing service aimed at enterprises. The other is a security camera that extends an existing line of “physical security” and video surveillance products.
Found Your Story, Keyona Summers. TNX
VIERA, Fla. — A judge here is using YouTube to punish two boys who used the video-sharing website for a prank that ended with battery and criminal mischief charges against them.
The prank, known as “fire in the hole,” has become common in the past year. It happened July 25 to fast-food worker Jessica Ceponis at the drive-through of the Taco Bell in Merritt Island, about 50 miles east of Orlando.
Ceponis handed a carload of teens their soft drinks. When she returned to the drive-through window to give them their change, they yelled, “Fire in the hole!” hurled a 32-oz. cup of soda and ice at Ceponis and sped off.
The teens posted a video of the incident on YouTube.com, alongside a number of other videos showing similar pranks. Today, the teens are scheduled to post another video on YouTube: an apology that shows them face down and handcuffed on the hood of a car.
The judge, prosecutor and defense attorneys who devised this punishment hope it will serve as a deterrent.
Found Your Story, Lauram1111. TNX
Bastille Day will mark my fifth year of blogging. That’s like 50 in people years. Time for bitchin’ Camero and a face lift. The blogosphere has changed quite a bit in that time. I think that there’s less cross linking, a drop in traffic, less clicking by readers, and some fatigue in the old timers. I’ll probably wax nostalgic on July 14th, but in the mean time, others are describing the changes.
Found Your Story, Alan Rappaport. TNX
Blog at Your Company’s Risk
John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, may be back blogging again —now that the Securities and Exchange Commission has decided not to take any action against him or the company for his anonymous online scribblings last year —but that does not mean that the agency has turned a blind eye to the blogosphere.
To the contrary, John White director of the SEC’s division of corporate finance, issued a warning to would-be corporate bloggers not to be lulled into complacency by the format’s conversational tone. Speaking at the annual National Investor Relations Institute conference Monday White urged companies to “use blogs with caution.” Although he acknowledged that company blogs are a convenient and interactive way to reach investors, he said that any information on them must be accurate.
Found Your Story, Jessica Wapner. TNX
Blogging - It’s Good for You
Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.
Found Your Story, Chris Morrison. TNX
Got a story to tell? Capzles hopes to build multi-media social network
A slick interface and clever design for framing pictures, video, documents and other media sums up the latest niche social network to launch, a “social storytelling” startup called Capzles.
Cross-breeding the notion of a timeline with the growing ability of consumers to put their personal media online, Capzles hopes it will attract the same sort of users who meticulously upload and organize all their photos onto sites like Flickr.
Found Your Story, Beth Whitehouse. TNX
You think a ‘tween is too young to have a MySpace page? That debate is so 10 minutes ago.
Soon, there will be a site meant for children ages birth to 5. Think of it as Facebook for toddlers.
On June 24, TotSpot is scheduled to make its national debut. On it, moms and dads can create free pages about their children, posting photos and videos and dates of their first smiles, first steps and first day of kindergarten.
Found Your Story, CitySense. TNX
Citysense was built to show you where the action is, right now.
Using a billion points of GPS and WiFi positioning data from the last few years – plus real-time feeds – Citysense sees San Francisco. from above and puts the top live hotspots in your hand. You don’t even need to sign up, just go to citysense.com on your BlackBerry, download, and open. Soon also on iPhone.
Found Your Story, Greg Sandoval. TNX
Boxee wants to give Steve Ballmer what he wants.
The Microsoft CEO complained recently how unsocial the television set is compared to the Web.
“My son will stay up all night basically playing Xbox Live with friends that are in various parts of the world,” Ballmer told The Washington Post. “And yet I can’t sit there in front of the TV and have the same kind of a social interaction around my favorite basketball game or golf match.”
Boxee, a start-up that will launch a test version of the service on Monday, has plans to enable users to transfer their digital content from computers to their TVs and eventually turn the TV set into a “social-media center,” CEO Avner Ronen said.
Found Your Story, Heather Havenstein. TNX
At the request of its SharePoint and Office product development teams, Microsoft Corp.’s Office Labs operation has created and is testing a prototype of an internal social network that can provide employees with feeds and updates about their colleagues.
Chris Pratley, general manager of Office Labs, is slated to disclose details of the prototype — called TownSquare — Thursday at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. He spoke to Computerworld today about the project, which was launched in January and has already been used by about 8,000 Microsoft employees.
Found Your Story, Nicholas Carr. TNX
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
Found Your Story, Matt Richtel. TNX
Some of the biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., are banding together to fight information overload. Last week they formed a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with the digital deluge.
Their effort comes as statistical and anecdotal evidence mounts that the same technology tools that have led to improvements in productivity can be counterproductive if overused.
Found Your Story, David Radd. TNX
One Billion Virtual World Users in Next 10 Years
Virtual worlds, such as Habbo Hotel and Second Life, are set to explode over the next decade, leading to an eight billion dollar services opportunity.
Found Your Story, PEW/Internet. TNX
The Internet and the 2008 Election
A record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others. And Barack Obama’s backers have an edge in the online political environment.
Found Your Story, Cory Doctorow. TNX
Associated Press expects you to pay to license 5-word quotations (and reserves the right to terminate your license)
In the name of “defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt” the Associated Press is now selling “quotation licenses” that allow bloggers, journallers, and people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words. The licensing system exhorts you to snitch on people who publish without paying the blood-money, offering up to $1 million in reward money (they also think that “fair use” — the right to copy without permission — means “Contact the owner of the work to be sure you are covered under fair use.”).
Found Your Story, Alisa Miller. TNX
Distortion of the news in the US. Why Americans know less about the world than ever.
Local tv news looms large and unfortunately only dedicates 12% of its coverage to international news. The combined coverage of India, China and Russia often reaches just 1 percent. Celebrity news get most attention, for instance the death of Anna Nicole Smith or the life of Britney Spears. Web channels don’t do any better. Much of global news from US news creators is recycled stories from the AP wire services and Reuters, and don’t put things into a context that people can understand their connection to it. Today’s college graduates as well as less educated Americans know less about the world than their counterparts did 20 years ago. Is this distorted world view what we want for Americans in our increasingly interconnected world?
Found Your Story, Jonathan Fildes. TNX
‘Oldest’ computer music unveiled
A scratchy recording of Baa Baa Black Sheep and a truncated version of In the Mood are thought to be the oldest known recordings of computer generated music.
The songs were captured by the BBC in the Autumn of 1951 during a visit to the University of Manchester.
Found Your Story, Ken Schachter. TNX
On Thursday, The New York Times rolled out the beta launch of its TimesPeople social network.
The new feature will let registered users of NYTimes.com share Times stories, post comments and maintain a personal page.
As the frequently-asked questions section points out, however, TimesPeople should not be confused with Facebook or MySpace.
“You won’t have Times friends, and it won’t get you Times dates,” the FAQ says. “Instead you’ll assemble a network of Times readers. Then you’ll be able to share interesting things on NYTimes.com with others in the network.”
Found Your Story, TNX
HelloTxt is a web service that lets you send out status updates to your contacts on a wide array of social networking and micro-blogging services. The site makes it easy to send identical updates to Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Plaxo, Plurk, Tumblr, and other popular and not so popular services. But up until recently there was one major problem with HelloTxt: The communication was one way. You could send, but not receive status updates.
Found Your Story, Vanessa Arellano Doctor. TNX
Social Network Sites Offer Unique Way To Experience Presidential Campaign
Social networking analysts have noted that the social sites have been burning up in the wake of the debates, as users create more content than it’s possible to follow.
Social network giant Facebook specifically set up an area for debate viewers to post messages and take surveys during the events. Some participants found it a bit worthless, and the article refers to the experience as ‘information overload’.
“No doubt, the political twitterers must’ve felt empowered to know their Soundboard comments were being beamed out to an audience of potentially millions of Facebook users, and, if plucked by ABC’s designated Facebook-monitoring reporter on TV, millions of offline viewers as well.
Still, it’s a little unclear whether the comments will prove all that useful for campaigns looking to boost their candidates’ standing”, an unnamed online analyst noted.
Found Your Story, Paul Walker. TNX
The ultimate in participative Web2.0? Creating your own social network
Whilst we were on the recent RUN Conference, it was announced that it would be possible to engage in ongoing conversations with seminar speakers via RUNSpace, a social network created specifically for the conference participants. Poking around on the site, I see that they’ve built the site with Ning, a Web2.0 startup that promises to provide the tools for anyone to build a social network of their own.
Found Your Story, Enrico Giubertoni. TNX
Fashionspace.com is an international “social-trading” site for anyone who works or plays in the fashion & arts industry. This site offers designers, creatives or anyone interested in fashion the opportunity to create a personalized profile and e-commerce platform to showcase, swap and sell their products and services.
Found Your Story, Michael Arrington. TNX
Germany based Plazes, a location based social network (and one of the first startups we ever wrote about here on TechCrunch, back in 2005), has been acquired by Finland-based Nokia, the companies are announcing today. The price is not being disclosed.
We most recently wrote about Plazes new iPhone application in May 2008, which will take advantage of the cutting edge location technologies available on the phone (cell triangulation and GPS).
Found Your Story, redOrbit. TNX
The AP, a nonprofit news service funded by thousands of subscriber newspapers, has been using a system from Redwood City [Calif.]-based startup Attributor. Like other content recognition systems, Attributor’s software extracts a small digital fingerprint — a string of bits unique to a given article, song, or video — and collects them in a database. Then it continually crawls billions of Web sites and blogs, much as Google does when a user launches a search, to detect where that fingerprint recurs. In the recent incident, AP had unearthed instances where its content — at times whole articles — was posted to the liberal-leaning Web site Drudge Retort. Other Attributor customers include Thomson Reuters (TRI), Conde Nast Publications’ CondeNet, and the Canadian Press. The AP and Attributor declined to comment for this story.
For a media executive, the appeal of a content recognition system is clear. With a glance, a publisher or studio head can plainly see where, when, and how their content is being viewed. In a demonstration for BusinessWeek earlier this year, Attributor executives showed how many times scenes from The Sopranos had appeared on 20 leading video sites since they first aired on TV. In all, 1,500 scenes from 52 episodes had been viewed 32 million times. For Time Warner’s (TWX) HBO, those viewings might have brought in more than $1 million, said Attributor Chief Executive Officer Jim Brock.
Availability of technology like Attributor’s represents a sea change for companies that until recently had to track online content manually or hire an outside company to do it. The new systems can automate the job and do it more cheaply. Most big TV and movie studios, including Viacom (VIA) and Walt Disney (DIS), use systems from companies such as Audible Magic and Vobile to monitor the massive traffic at online video sites such as Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. Even phone giant AT&T (T) plans to use Vobile technology [BusinessWeek.com, 11/7/07] to help it root out piracy over the Web.
Found Your Story, Aliza Sherman. TNX
Broadcasting to Your Social Networks
I’ve been working with clients to set up social media “satellite sites” as I call them to extend their brand and take advantage of the exponential power of social networking for reaching out to consumers. The question I hear time and time again is “How in the world can I manage all these social networks if I can’t even get to the rest of my work?”
I know we are all crunched for time. Sometimes, I don’t even know how I keep up with all of my writing and blogging, client projects and social networking sites. But I have found some cool “social aggregation broadcasting tools” that are making at least some of my tasks easier to handle.
Found Your Story, Laura Sydell. TNX
At YYeTs.net an army of volunteers creates Chinese-subtitled versions of English-language TV shows — within hours of their initial broadcast stateside.
Found Your Story, Bryant Urstadt. TNX
KickApps is an 80-person social-networking startup with its head office in a loftlike space just off Fifth Avenue in New York. In less than two years it has created the underlying structure for more than 20,000 social-networking sites-”mini-Facebooks” with an aggregate of 300 million page views per month. You’ve probably never heard of it.
Found Your Story, ConnectPress. TNX
Welcome to ConnectPress, the Community Company
At ConnectPress our mission is to build joyful community by connecting people, interests and markets.
With a mix of traditional and innovative community gathering, ConnectPress allows community members access to like-minded people.
What is a community? For some it is a conversation of shared interests. For others it is access to past experience, experts or resources. At ConnectPress, we believe community evolves when people’s interests overlap.
At ConnectPress we believe all members play a role in community: casual or peripheral affiliates, leaders, buyers, sellers, promoters, experts, and regular members.
Currently ConnectPress hosts communities in the fields of technology, energy and leisure time. We are adding more communities all the time and making our community building tools available to others.
Found Your Story, Bruce Katz. TNX
Neuroengineering the Future: Virtual Minds and the Creation of Immortality
Look at the Future of Man and Machine. We are on the cusp of a broad revolution, one with startling implications for perception, cognition, emotion, and indeed, personal identity. Still in its relative infancy, this rapidly progressing field is poised to move from perceptual aids, such as cochlear implants to devices that will enhance and speed up thought, to the ultimate goal of researchers-that of downloading the mind from its bound state in the body to a platform-independent existence. This controversial book describes the science that will make these transformations possible. It begins by describing how the brain works, including an overview of the architecture of the brain. It then examines the current state-of-art neural technologies, including devices that read from the brain, and devices that can write information into the brain. The book also describes how insights from the nascent field of consciousness studies show how the full transfer of the soul could be realized. Finally, it considers what it would be like to be a mind unbound, and the possibilities beyond those found in ordinary corporeal life.
Found Your Story, Robert Lee Hotz. TNX
Studying the brain behavior leading up to the moment of conscious decision, the researchers identified signals that let them know when the students had decided to move 10 seconds or so before the students knew it themselves. About 70% of the time, the researchers could also predict which button the students would push.
Does this make our self-awareness just a second thought?
Found Your Story, Bernard Charlès. TNX
Bernard Charlès, President and CEO of Dassault Systèmes, on CATIA V6 and PLM 2.0
“Welcome to the Dassault Systèmes virtual world. For 26 years we have been using the power of 3D to help our customers create, optimize and even produce the best products. We call this Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). Today we are about to redefine the market, again.
“We won’t stop until all physical products on earth will be digitally designed, digitally prepared for production and digitally managed during their lifecycle. Our vision is to have a digital model that allows you to define, monitor and control the physical world.”
(Bernard Charlès in Fortune Magazine, 7/2004)
PLM 2.0 is about this new environment that will enable user communities to take advantage of online applications to create, imagine, share and even experience the future real life of the products they are about to create. V6 will enable to develop new categories of applications that will be connected all together, integrated and will be so easy to use that communities of innovators will be able to share this experience, which is required to make the most optimal products.
In some way it is like Web 2.0, where communities of people can connect to each other, can share ideas and experience. This is something we want to make available to our consumers around the world.
The virtual world is so powerful that it can - it will help to improve the real world. Imagination, testing, verifying in the virtual world help to create the best product - the best product for the consumers, the best product for the environment, in short to improve our quality of life.”
Found Your Story, Calley Nye. TNX
Massively Me claims that the intention behind Kiwi Heroes is to promote social awareness and responsibility to children by addressing environmental issues and global concerns.
Found Your Story, Open Gardens. TNX
Yes, sites have impressive user numbers ..
Ning has 267,787 sites, Bebo sees 22 million visitors a month, Club Penguin sees five million, LinkedIn gets nearly five million unique visits. Facebook saw 33.9 million unique U.S. visitors in January 2008, and MySpace saw nearly 72 million unique visitors in the same month.
However .. getting revenue is a problem .. although facebook is valued at $15 billion dollars, it is still likely to lose money and Google has been unable to monetise it’s $900 million investment in MySpace . CPMs on social networks are also a problem .. Facebook sets a minimum CPM of $0.15 for its “social ads,” and the MySpace banner ad rate stands at a CPM of less than $2.
Found Your Story, Bill Hartzer. TNX
How many times has someone come up to you and say, “I know someone who looks exactly like you!” Just yesterday I was at a car dealership and one of the service guys started talking to my wife, just as if he has known her for years. The problem is that my wife has never seen that guy before. He must have thought that he was talking to her look-alike.
Found Your Story, Show Us a Better Way. TNX
The first govermental social network ?
Calling all social media experts - UKGov your ideas for new data mashups, and there’s GBP20,000 to support the best ideas:
Some of the things it will include
* Mapping information from the Ordnance Survey
* Medical information from NHS Choices
* Neighbourhood statistics from the ONS
* Pretty much all Offical Notices (bankruptcy, official appointments, etc) from the London Gazette
* A carbon calculator from Defra
Found Your Story, TeacherTube. TNX
Hear are some comments from staff and students about E-Learning and the benefits of use ICT within the curriculum.
Found Your Story, Paul Murphy. TNX
. . . this is a problem affecting all of cloud computing: trust your business to an Amazon, a Microsoft, or a Google, and you become vulnerable to a wholly new kind of denial of service attack - one that can be triggered by essentially unrelated employee actions or opinions and hold your entire business hostage to the service provider’s business processes.
Found Your Story, Henry Williams. TNX
Many companies are unaware of recent changes to the law surrounding ‘fake blogging’, according to agency bosses.
Practices such as ‘astroturfing’, where employees pose as ordinary members of the public to post favourable reviews about their company, are banned under the new Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations.
Also banned is ’sock-puppeting’, where a marketer poses a question online, then logs in as different people, all posting favourable responses. These practices have been punishable by a fine or imprisonment since the end of May.
‘Most people don’t know about this law,’ said Gareth Thomas, director at Brands2Life. ‘Also, there is a misconception that these devices are clever, but they can backfire.’
Drew Benvie, director at Hotwire, said: ‘This law change affects everyone in PR. If customers have any presence online, it’s definitely their business to know about it.’
Found Your Story, Elliott Ng. TNX
Raph Koster, Doug Thomas and Dave Elving at Supernova 2008 on how massively multiplayer games bleed over into real life.
Found Your Story, KillerStartups. TNX
Got a shiny new smartphone you’re itching to load up with new apps and software? Why not take advantage of the crop of mobile apps coming out of Europe? For instance, try Shout ‘Em, a startup from the former Yugoslavian country of Croatia. Shout ‘Em brings the world of mobile internet browsing to you or your company. Essentially, Shout ‘Em provides white label solutions for companies that want a mobile social network. It also enables anyone who wants to build their own social network to do so easily and quickly. Shout ‘Em has all the tools and templates necessary to make your own network. On top of that, they handle all the technical aspects so you don’t have to. You’ll be able to send messages, upload pics, share your location, and much more. It currently has an Android client and is scheduled to work with iPhone, Windows Mobile, and Symbian among others.
Four Your Story, Rob Gonda. TNX
Facebook has official surpassed MySpace in terms of monthly unique visitors. In April 2008, both monsters attracted 115 million people a month. However, MySpace is still dominates Facebook in the U.S.
Found Your Story, Chris Brogan. TNX
I’m curious why you and/or your company is interested in social media. What brought you to the shores of thinking that blogging and podcasting and belonging to social networks was something your company (or you as an individual) needed in your life? What are you hoping to get out of it all? Why do you come here every day to read?
Lots of comments on this question!
Found Your Story, Polymeme. TNX
Wisdom of Clusters
Polymeme.com has a database of about 25,000 leading blogs covering specific topics. Every few hours our unique buzz-detection system analyzes each topical cluster and determines what are some of the “hottest” articles — be they from the traditional media or other blogs — discussed by the blogs in our cluster. We believe that relying on this “wisdom of clusters” and not just “wisdom of crowds” provides for superior buzz detection than most regular buzz-aggregators.
Found Your Story, Peter Kafka. TNX
Google Can’t Figure Out How To Make Money On Web Video, Either
Google says YouTube will generate about $200 million this year* — and that’s not enough. So while chief salesman Tim Armstrong tries to overhaul YouTube’s overly complicated sales process, the company is considering much more drastic measures.
Found Your Story, Dan Kaplan. TNX
The reign of content at its end, top VCs back MEVIO with $15M
Even Wall Street analysts are acknowledging that content is no longer king, but MEVIO, formerly known as Ron Bloom’s and Adam Curry’s Podshow, has just received funding from some of the biggest names in the VC world.
Found Your Story, Stephen Abram. TNX
Google has entered the Second Life virtual worlds space this week with Google Lively: “Create an avatar and chat with your friends in rooms you design.”
Found Your Story, David Chartier. TNX
MyYahoo 2.0: Yahoo’s social network assault
Yahoo has rolled out a major refresh of its market-leading MyYahoo startpage that brings it up to speed with more feature-rich competition. Leveraging new web technologies and content from major new partners, MyYahoo 2.0 is Yahoo’s first major step towards opening up the platform, embracing third-party developer apps, and flipping the switch on its plans for social network domination.
Found Your Story, Michael Arrington. TNX
In May Ars Technica was picked up by Wired. Today Kara Swisher and Marshall Kirkpatrick report that blog network Paid Content’s parent company ContentNext Media is being acquired by The Guardian Group for $30 million or more, including earnout.
Found Your Story, KillerStartups. TNX
Fresh out of private beta mode, the much anticipated launch of UGAME, a social network for gamers has finally occurred. The site is intended to serve as a space where gamers can go to share their scores, meet other gamers with similar tastes, join teams and also post blogs and pictures of their finest gaming moments.
Found Your Story, Nik Cubrilovic. TNX
MySpace and Google demonstrated an interesting mashup of the MySpace Data Availability API, oAuth and the iGoogle gadget specification at the oAuth Summit a couple of weeks ago. The application, which pulls the core MySpace feature set into iGoogle, is not yet publicly available, although MySpace has said to expect in in August.
Found Your Story, Killerstartups. TNX
Israel-based Sightix is a search engine platform designed to give people the results that they are not currently receiving from Google. The platform is available to any site that contains social elements and it enables individual users to receive different search results based on their social graph. Simply put, the Sightix algorithm takes a user’s friends and connections into account whenever they search for something on the platform.
Found Your Story, Jared Baiterman. TNX
In China, not answering your mobile telephone is considered rude, no matter where you are, whom you are with, the time of day or what activities you are engaged in. And voice mail does not exist. Despite this cultural imperative to be available anytime and anywhere, there is a simple work-around practiced by hundreds of millions of Chinese.
Manually removing the telephone battery creates a message to in-coming callers that the telephone’s owner is out of range and thus unable to answer the phone. This regular subversion of the cultural imperative functions as an open secret, even playing a prominent role in a popular 2003 Chinese film called Shouji (”mobile telephone”).
Found Your Story, 8hands mobile. TNX
8hands Mobile is not just 8hands-on-your-phone. It provides a truly unique mobile experience with a dedicated mobile interface which will keep you up-to-date on all that’s going on in all your social networks, focusing on events and friends, designed for the 8hander who’s on-the-go, and includes some new cool mobile-only features.
Another cool thing is that it is completely FREE! We’re really excited to invite you to take 8hands Mobile for a ride. We’re currently supporting a limited set of devices, but we’ll keep rolling out some more so stay tuned. If your device is not yet listed please email us with a device you’d like to be supported.
Found Your Story, FactualTV. TNX
Are you tired of reality shows and soap operas? We give you the best of smart, sophisticated television.
Found Your Story, Apple. TNX
MobileMe and Me.com are new cloud services for your iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, and PC.
Found Your Story, Lifehacker. TNX
Web site Sendible schedules sending messages to contacts in the future over email, text message, or social networks like Facebook and Myspace. Not only can you send messages to anyone on a schedule, but you can also update your status on sites like Facebook and Twitter on a schedule too.
Found Your Story, Rivva. TNX
Wer sitzt in der Nachbarschaft und worüber schreiben Blogs hier und dort?
Die Karte enthält insgesamt 1295 verortete Blogs und Online-Medien. Das Zoom stellt weitere Quellen dar, ein Klick aufs Placemark zeigt die jüngsten Artikel.
Found Your Story, Jeremiah Owyang. TNX
Many brands (and their agencies) are deploying “interactive marketing” (user to website) experience rather than relying on the tools of social networks “social marketing” (member to member). As a result, many brands are wasting their time, money, and resources to reach communities in social networks without first understanding that the use case is very different than a microsite campaign. Don’t just take my word for it, research from Deloitte suggests the same.
Found Your Story, Holly Jackson. TNX
“If you can’t devote four hours a week to not getting e-mails, then you have a very special job-you’re a brain surgeon on call or you control the button that launches the nuclear missile.”
-Nathan Zeldes, president, IORG
Such numbers led Intel engineer Nathan Zeldes and other tech industry insiders to form the new Information Overload Research Group. The nonprofit consortium-whose members include Microsoft Research, IBM, and Google employees-held its first conference this week in New York, with members meeting at sessions with titles like “No Time to Think” and “Visionary Vendors.”
Now that the group has had its inaugural gathering, Zeldes, its president, said IORG will continue to recruit members and financial sponsors from a scope of business sectors. With more minds applied to finding a solution to what IORG calls “the world’s greatest challenge to productivity,” Zeldes hopes to generate innovative ideas that can benefit both businesses and individuals.
Found Your Story, Economist. TNX
Great minds think (too much) alike.
Far from growing longer, the long tail is being docked.
Electronic searching means that no relevant paper is likely to go unread, but narrowing the definition of “relevance” risks reducing the cross-fertilisation of ideas that sometimes leads to big, unexpected advances. As a wag once put it, an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until, eventually, he knows everything about nothing. It would be ironic if that is the sort of expertise that the world wide web is creating.
Found Your Story, Donna Bogatin, TNX
Enterprise RFP: Calling All Web 2.0 Collaboration Platforms!
Contrary to poular convention, the enterprise is NOT a “battleground” for social networking, but it has long been a lucrative target for sophisticated software which supports ROI-boosting employee knowledge sharing and collaboration.
How does the pharmaceutical industry improve collaboration between internal and external stakeholders through the provisioning of technologies to drive information capture, improve data analysis and leverage Web 2.0 to improve medical affairs communications? Join me at the CBI conference on Web 2.0 tools October in Philadelphia to find out: I have the honor of presenting a featured showcase on how to choose the best software or service to drive collaboration in the enterprise, particularly those businesses whose business it is to provide health services and products.
Found Your Story, Donna Bogatin, TNX
Googley private-jet flying, space-ship voyaging, multi-billionaire, Russia-born Sergey Brin is keen on commemorating fellow Russia-born notables with cutesy logos on the most valuable Web homepage in the world–Marc Chagall, Yury Gagarin–and has now green lighted his own Googley takeover of a big, controlling piece of Russian Web real estate: BEGUN @ $140 million.
Rumor has it that not only does Begun parent company Rambler share top search engine market share honors in Russia with Google, but Begun itself is en route to “owning” the Russian online contextual ad market, boasting a 143,000 partner network and 40,000 advertiser accounts.
Found Your Story, FreshNetworks Blog. TNX
Do branded online communities fail?
Today a lot of people are talking and writing about a new report from Deloitte looking at online communities, the 2008 Tribalization of Business Survey. The report is based on interviews with 100 firms that are sponsoring branded online communities, looks at what they are doing and what benefits they are reaping.
steven spielberg and video games…
As you seem to know what your doing blogging wise, do you know what the best time of the week is to blog and have them read?…
Found Your Story, Cory Doctorow. TNX
Tor, my US novel publisher, has launched Tor.com, its major, fantastically awesome website, which is part sf zine, part group-blog, part social network. They’re publishing great original fiction — they’ve got stories by John Scalzi and Charlie Stross up now, and I’ve got one coming soon, called THE THINGS THAT MAKE ME WEAK AND STRANGE GET ENGINEERED AWAY — with original illustration by the talented Tor art team. They’re running fascinating blog-posts on diverse subjects from a team of bloggers that includes in-house people from across the business and outside “friends of Tor” including novelists, fans, critics, and sundry others. And there’s a social networking system that ties it all together.
Found Your Story, Serkan Toto. TNX
Japan’s biggest social network is called Mixi, launched in February 2004 by the company of the same name. Drawing in one in five web users in the country, Mixi now boasts over 15 million members. The site ranks sixth on Alexa Japan and racks up over 14 billion page views monthly. Google Trends for Websites shows the Japan-focused service attracts more visitors than Bebo on a worldwide basis (about 2.3 million daily).
Found Your Story, Adena Schutzberg. TNX
SocBut: The Local Social Network
Yes, the name does sound odd, but when you realize it’s short for Social Butterfly, and pronounced “sock boot” perhaps it’s more appealing. The idea behind SocBut is a social network where you include your ZIP Code and a distance to just receive messages from others within that area. It’s sort of “hyperlocal” social networking.
Found Your Story, Calley Nye. TNX
MedPedia is a new project, currently in development, that will offer an online collaborative medical encyclopedia for use by the general public. In order to keep the content accurate and up-to-date, content editors and creators have to have an MD or a PhD. Several highly-esteemed medical colleges will be contributing content to MedPedia, including Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and University of Michigan Medical School. Medpedia is also receiving support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and many other government research groups. The content from these organizations will then be edited by MedPedia’s community of medical professionals.
Found Your Story, Joe McDonald. TNX
China’s booming Internet population has surpassed the United States to become the world’s biggest, with 253 million people online despite government controls on Web use. The latest figure on Web use at the end of June is a 56 percent increase from a year ago, the China Internet Network Information Center said. It said the share of the Chinese public using the Internet is still just 19.1 percent, leaving more room for rapid growth.
Found Your Story, Sami Torma. TNX
After Wikipedia , the wikicar.
A Finnish Internet community is seeking to apply the collective approach taken by online collaborators like the authors of Wikipedia to start a mass movement toward electric cars. The plan is to encourage the conversion of used gasoline-powered cars to run on electricity, with the first rollout due this year.
The Finnish-language forum, eCars - Now!, claims to be first of its kind in the world, and is working in the tradition of the open source projects used in information technology — like the Linux computer operating system, which was also started by a Finn.
Found Your Story, Mark Hopkins. TNX
Duncan Riley put out an interesting, if not provocative, editorial this evening entitled “Television will be the first traditional media medium to fall.” Personally, I have always felt that radio would be the first to falter, though in a neck-and-neck race with newsprint, but Duncan Riley puts some new stats to work in support the prediction today:
The television switch off is real. In the United States, 2.5 million viewers switched off in the spring on 2008 compared to the same time in 2006. Statistically this is only a small percentage of the overall viewing audience, but among those still watching television, the amount of television they watch each day is declining.
The decline in television viewing is stronger among younger statistical groups. In Europe, a 2005 study from the European Interactive Advertising Association found almost half of 15- to 24-year-olds are watching less TV in favor of browsing the web. A study reported in The Guardian in 2007 headlined with “Young networkers turn off TV and log on to the web.” The television switch off in the United States among younger people has seen the average age of a TV viewer increase to 50.
Found Your Story, Reuters. TNX
“Facebook Connect” will transform the social network from a private site where activity occurs entirely within a “walled garden” to a Web-wide phenomenon where software makers, with user permission, can tap member data for use on their sites.
“Facebook Connect is our version of Facebook for the rest of the Web,” Zuckerberg told the second annual F8 conference.
Found Your Story, MG Siegler. TNX
Facebook and MySpace get most of the press, but another social network out there is growing much faster than either: hi5. The social network is the world’s fastest growing among the top-10 networks in that category, according to June data from analytics firm comScore.
Hi5 grew 79 percent in the first half of 2008 — twice as fast as any of the other top social networks. The site’s unique visitors grew from 31.4 million in December 2007 to 56.4 million in June 2008. Interestingly, hi5, which is headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., says that over 80 percent of its users are outside of the U.S.
Found Your Story, Internet Evolution. TNX
The Thinkernet is Internet Evolution’s moderated blogosphere, where the leading minds of the Internet blog and exchange opinions – as well as interacting with registered members of the Internet Evolution site via message boards.
More than 60 of the Internet’s leading luminaries have signed on to blog on the Thinkernet – including world famous authors, entertainment executives, economists, politicians, CIOs, investors, activists, and Internet entrepreneurs.
Sponsored by IBM.
Found Your Story, Stephen Shankland. TNX
Even after removing exact duplicates, Google now sees a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.
Found Your Story, Marc Lefton. TNX
Everyone I know is talking about co-creation - having an open dialogue between consumers and brands. Some brands are doing it better than others, but at a certain point there will be so many brands jumping on the bandwagon and likely doing a half-assed job of it that consumers will again be turned off by all the clutter.
Social networking is a big part of this because now brands are trying to integrate themselves with fan pages on Facebook and profiles on MySpace, or worse idea, trying to start their very own. (Unless you do it like Nike has, please don’t bother.)
So at what point are we going to tire of the friend requests, the contests to come up with slogans or submit videos to corporations. Will it always be worth a nominal prize to spend our time making our own Mentos geyser video?
What happens when people are sick and tired of “co-creation” or realize that for the most part, companies are still just not listening.
Found Your Story, Duncan Riley. TNX
Blogging 2.0 runs counter to the prevailing ethos in blogging, which is maximize your Google juice, your page views, your links in, and refrain from sharing that traffic with others, without putting the end user first. Blogging 1.0 is all about maximizing the opportunities for the blog owner while ignoring community, where as blogging 2.0 maximizes the experience for the end user (reader).
In focusing on the experience for the end user, via linking, sharing and enabling the conversation across many places, blogging 2.0 rallies against today’s accepted norms.
Blogging 2.0 tools are still evolving and emerging to fill this void, and we are still fairly early in to the process. The growing popularity of everything from Twitter through to FriendFeed, Disqus and many other fine services show that people are seeking a change for the better. The counter revolution of Blogging 2.0 has just begun.
Found Your Story, Dan Nystedt. TNX
A former Google employee and her husband launched a new search engine Monday called Cuil (pronounced “cool”), aiming to topple Google by indexing more Web pages than the search giant.
Found Your Story, John Naughton. TNX
Today’s Gutenberg is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web. In the 17 years since he launched his technology on an unsuspecting world, he has transformed it. Nobody knows how big the web is now, but estimates of the indexed part hover at around 40 billion pages, and the ‘deep web’ hidden from search engines is between 400 and 750 times bigger than that. These numbers seem as remarkable to us as the avalanche of printed books seemed to Brandt. But the First Law holds we don’t know the half of it, and it will be decades before we have any real understanding of what Berners-Lee hath wrought.
Found Your Story, Richard MacManus. TNX
Online reputation company Rapleaf has released a new study of 49.3 million people, revealing gender and age data about social network users. On most of the main social networks - including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 - women outnumber men by a considerable amount. On Facebook, the 18-24 age group is largest, with 1,685,029 women in that age group compared to 977,753 men. In MySpace, the same age group dominates, with 7,091,214 women and 5,226,788 men.
The only social networks studied that didn’t have more women than men in the 18-24 year old group were venerable old LinkedIn (where incidentally the 25-34 age group was tops) and a site called Perfspot.
Found Your Story, Marc Benioff. TNX
For almost ten years now, we have been witnessing a decisive shift from client-server software to software as a service. Google, eBay, and Amazon.com established the value of multi-tenant internet applications in the consumer market, and salesforce.com, Google, and others have been proving that this same multi-tenant model is winning in the enterprise as well.
This shift to Web-based applications has generated two powerful waves so far. Now, we are seeing a third wave—one that we are calling Web 3.0—and it may prove to be the most significant and disruptive yet to the traditional software industry.
While the world doesn’t need another buzzword, I feel that both the emerging generation of entrepreneurs and developers, as well as traditional software ISVs, need to grasp the enormity of Web 3.0 and its potential to create change, disruption, and opportunity. Web 3.0 is about replacing existing software platforms with a new generation of platforms as a service.
Found Your Story, MG Siegler. TNX
While even the popular social networks nowadays aren’t making that much money (Facebook expects to make $350 million in revenues this year), the burgeoning field of mobile social networks could be big business shortly, a new report by ABI Research indicates. Specifically, location-based mobile social networks could earn revenues of $3.3 billion within five years.
Found Your Story, SMP. TNX
GeoSentric Oyj (GyPSii) has announced that its geo-mobility social networking platform GeoSolutions BV Business Unit is to integrate with Chinese mobile handset company Ramar International Co. Ltd. Following an agreement between the two companies, GyPSii will be included as standard in Ramar’s new package of location-based services.
Found Your Story, Serkan Toto. TNX
Complacency and failure to adopt to cultural differences - Why MySpace and Facebook are failing in Japan
Sized at an estimated $5.6 billion in 2007, Japan boasts one of the biggest online advertising markets in the world – a huge potential just waiting to be tapped by foreign social networks. The world’s two largest social networks, MySpace and Facebook, barely register in Japan. As the Google Trends for Websites chart above shows, local social network Mixi is outpacing both in Japan. On Alexa, Mixi is ranked the No. 6 most popular site in Japan, compared to No. 95 for MySpace (Facebook doesn’t even make it into the top 100). MySpace and Facebook are trying - but why are they failing?
Found Your Story, Virginia Hefferman. TNX
The Anglosphere — a term first used in 1995 by the writer Neal Stephenson — is not co-extensive or even especially friendly with the multilingual nation of America. The Anglosphere comprises the former British Empire (and even those places — the Netherlands, Germany, Iceland, Scandinavia — where people have uncanny skills with English as a second language).
So it was surprising when members of the non-Anglophone community — in this case, the Japanese and the French — asked me to socially network. In the spring of 2006, an e-mail message arrived from Shizu Yuasa, a Japanese friend; it contained blocks, boxes and characters from at least three character sets: Roman, Japanese kanji and Chinese. The legible text said: “Invitation for mixi community. You have to register to see the contents.” I thought: Go back.
Found Your Story, Veronica Khokhlova. TNX
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Gulag Archipelago, has died on Sunday. He was 89.
Reactions to Solzhenitsyn’s death are already beginning to appear in the Russophone blogosphere.
Found Your Story, Loïc Le Meur. TNX & Enjoy Your Week Off(line)
I am going entirely offline for a week and focus on my kids and family. No blogging, tweetering. seesmic-ing, identica-ing, friendfeed-ing or even flickr-ing. Not even emailing, I will just try to read them on my blackberry once a day in case my team needs me and it won’t happen because I have the best team in the world. Sometimes it feels really good to go offline and enjoy. See you next week.
Found Your Story, Chris Brogan. TNX
100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media
Found Your Story, Gary Hayes. TNX
2008 Metaverse Tour Video: The Social Virtual World’s A Stage
I am doing a commercial report and curriculum development on the evolving range of social virtual worlds and have recently ventured into fifty of them to review and sample the culture, creative, business and educational potential. On my travels I got out my virtual camera and decided to capture a bunch of small vignettes which quickly turned into a body of audio visual delights - so decided to create a nice seven minute video for posterity.
Found Your Story, Lea Woodward. TNX
whilst I do use our blogs as a marketing tool for our business projects, I don’t pay a huge amount of attention to the blog stats. And here’s why…
== We used to use the blog stats as KPIs to measure our business success but I became suspicious of how useful they really were, when trying to tie them to our bottom line performance measures.
== Whilst blog stats gave us an idea of the reach & scale of our blogging and front-end online marketing efforts, they didn’t give an accurate overview of how this impacted some of the really important KPIs for our business (such as Client Lifetime Value = how much each client is worth to our business, Client & Project profitability = how much profit each project/client generates, etc.)
== Because of the nature of blogging, the lead time between someone discovering your blog and then deciding to sign up as a client can be a relatively long period of time. Within that time, many other factors come into play which help determine whether the reader becomes a client; things like interaction with you on Twitter, LinkedIn & other social networking sites. It becomes very hard therefore to say that it was purely the blog which influenced a prospect’s decision to work with us.
And finally, the primary reason I don’t pay much attention to the blog stats…I blog because I have things to say which I think & hope will be useful and of value to others; and whilst traffic/subscriber/comment numbers might give me an idea of whether this is the case, in reality they’re not that accurate.
I’d far rather put out a post which I think is useful and receive very few or even no comments than put out a post which is full of fluff, written for social media votes & generates lots of comments but adds no real value to anyone (the latest post on the Location Independent blog was a good example of this).
So I guess the real questions for me are these:
Do the stats that typically measure a blog’s success & popularity really measure the actual value a blog adds to its readers lives? How do your blog stats tie into the bottom line performance measures of your business?
Found Your Story, Linda Roeder. TNX
Delver is a new search engine that doesn’t search the whole Web. It only searches social networking sites. The social networks it currently searches are MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Hi5, FriendFeed, Digg and Delicious. They’re building an app for Facebook and other networks will be added later.
Found Your Story, Vovici. TNX
Vovici Community Builder empowers non-technical professionals to easily build and deploy online communities that give a voice to customers, employees, and other stakeholders. Vovici’s unique online community software bridges the gap between standard qualitative feedback approaches—forums, blogs, suggestion boxes—and quantitative survey research—such as customer satisfaction surveys.
Found Your Story, Dr. Phil. TNX
Internet Mistakes
Would you post shocking and provocative photos of yourself on the Internet? Many women are doing just that. But are there unforeseen consequences to showing the world your personal life?
The New Female Bonding?
Girls dancing on bars half-naked, passed out on the beach, hugging the porcelain … these are photos posted for all to see on the Web site Facebook, in a group called Thirty Reasons a Girl Should Call It a Night.
Town Drama
The mayor or Arlington, Oregon, recently came under fire for posting a photograph of herself in lingerie on her MySpace profile. Residents of the town are outraged.
Online War of Words
Amanda and Mary have been feuding online about the group Thirty Reasons … Dr. Phil brings them face to face.
Daughter in Peril?
Mary is only 17 but says she loves to drink. Her mother, Pam, says she’s caught Mary drunk a few times but can’t get her daughter to take no for an answer. Is Mary’s drinking a bigger problem than Pam thinks?
Fired Over a Four-Letter Word?
Ian knows firsthand how personal content on the Internet can have negative consequences. He says he got fired twice from his substitute teaching job for what he posted on his MySpace profile.
Found Your Story, Jeff Jarvis. TNX
Paul Coelho finds the perfect alchemy of print and digital
Paulo Coelho certainly has nothing against selling books. He has sold an astounding 100m copies of his novels. But he also believes in giving them away. He is a pirate. Coelho discovered the power of free when a fan posted a Russian translation of one of his novels online and book sales there climbed from 3,000 to 100,000 to 1m in three years. “This happened in English, in Norwegian, in Japanese and Serbian,” he said. “Now when the book is released in hard copy, the sales are spectacular.”
For his next novel, The Winner is Alone, Coelho asked his readers to help explain the pull of fashion brands. And for his last novel, The Witch of Portobello, he asked readers to film parts of the story from any character’s perspective. If the results are any good, he’ll have an editor turn it into a movie, The Experimental Witch.
Found Your Story, Tangos. TNX
Beijing 2008 is the first web 2.0 Olympics ever, we will start to consume and enjoy the Olympics in social media, rather than only in main stream media. I will try to summarize China’s social media campaigns on the Games. If you know any good Olympics social media campaign, please leave a comment below, I will add it into the post.
Found Your Story, Luke Winn. TNX
The real impact of YouTube on the sporting world — which has grown into an 83.4 million-video giant in just its third year of existence — lies in its ability to distribute a breadth of content to a massive audience. It’s estimated that the bandwidth on YouTube in 2007 exceeded that of the whole Internet in 2000.
Found Your Story, Aaron Uhrmacher. TNX
40+ Topics for Corporate Bloggers
There will be times that you have to contribute a post for your company’s blog and you just don’t have one idea that inspires you to start a conversation. We’ve all been there and that’s why we’ve created this resource with more than 40 topics for corporate bloggers to help provide that much need inspiration . . .
Found Your Story, Sarah Perez. TNX
Next Social Networks Will Be Powered By WordPress and Movable Type
With Six Apart’s recent release of Movable Type 4.2, a new revolution has begun. The new release provides DIY tools for building your own social networking platform which includes member profiles, forums, friending capabilities, rating of content, and more. WordPress isn’t too far behind, either - a new platform called BuddyPress, is being built on the WordPress core. Is this the future of blogging? Or is this the future of web publishing altogether?
Found Your Story, Andy Beal. TNX
Personal Life Media has just launched a new customizable widget-creator. With it, you create the branded widget, and Personal Life Media will fill it with great audio content. Personal Life Media is headed by social media legend Susan Bratton who tells us, “So many of our sponsors and prospective advertisers requested a way to showcase our content on their site that we created this widget for them.”
Found Your Story, Eric Schonfeld. TNX
Even though Facebook is now the largest social network in the world,—with 132 million unique visitors in June—it is also still the fastest growing.
(At least among the major social networks). According to figures compiled by comScore, Facebook’s visitor growth is up 153 percent on an annual basis. This compares to anemic 3 percent growth for MySpace. Other social networks showing strong global growth include Hi5 (100 percent) and Friendster (50 percent), despite each of those being less than half the size of Facebook. Orkut and Bebo fall in at 41 percent and 32 percent growth, respectively.
Found Your Story, Pingdom. TNX
At Pingdom we have looked at 12 of the top social networks to answer a simple, but highly interesting question:
Where are they the most popular?
The social networks we included in this survey were MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster, LinkedIn, Orkut, Last.fm, LiveJournal, Xanga, Bebo, Imeem and Twitter.
= Facebook is most popular in Turkey and Canada.
= Friendster and Imeem are most popular in the Philippines.
= LinkedIn is most popular in India.
= Twitter is most popular in Japan.
= LiveJournal is more popular in Russia than it is in the United States.
= Orkut is more popular in Iran (10th country popularity-wise) than it is in the United States.
= MySpace is the only social network which is most popular in the United States.
= MySpace, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Xanga, and Twitter are the only social networks in this survey which have the United States in their top five countries, popularity-wise. That is just five out of twelve.
Found Your Story, Tom Foremski. TNX
The Fallacy of Internet Ad Personlization . . . and the Bleak Future for Social Network Ads
Found Your Story, BBC News. TNX
Researchers at the University of Texas, Austin are studying ways in which MMO history could be recorded. Key events mentioned as perhaps worthy of documenting include an outbreak of virtual plague in World of Warcraft, the assassination of Lord British in Ultima Online and the death of Morpheus in The Matrix Online.
Said Prof. Megan Winget: “A lot of people have mentioned [Lord British's death] to me as a pivotal moment in their lives. I would like to talk to people who experienced that, saw it happen or where they were when they heard about it. Maybe we can talk to the people who did it and whether they knew Lord British was [Ultima series creator] Richard Garriott.”
Found Your Story, AltSearchEngines. TNX
Search is Happening in Israel
Last week we saw a of four different Israeli search engines covering an array of search specialties—Smart search with Semantinet, health search with iMedix, internet relay chat search with IRSeeK, and strength in numbers with Gogimon. Today we’ll look at another four specialty categories.
Found Your Story, Serkan Toto. TNX
Mobile social networking is still in the fledgling stages in the West. In Japan, it is already a reality. One company in particular, DeNA, has taken Japan by storm with its mobile SNS/virtual world/gaming platform Mobage-town. DeNA opened a US office in San Mateo earlier this year, with plans to offer an English version of Mobage-town this fall.
Found Your Story, Jonathan Richards. TNX
Extraordinarily lifelike characters are to begin appearing in films and computer games thanks to a new type of animation technology.
‘Emily’ will set a new precedent for photo-realistic characters in video games and films, says her creator, Image Metrics.
Lifelike animation heralds new era for computer games.
Found Your Story, Philipp Lenssen. TNX
You can enter any subject into Addictomatic – like “google” or “comic book” or everything else – to view a customizable instant news overview page on it. The news bits are presented as little widget boxes and pulled from all over the web; some by APIs, but most by RSS, as creator Dave Pell says. (Addictomatic – or Addict-o-matic, as the logo says – was programmed by Crowd Favorite and designed by Bryan Bell.)
Found Your Story, James Mowery. TNX
Authors, professors, entrepreneurs, experts, and journalists use blogs these days to communicate with the world. However, have you ever imagined a blog being an origination of academic research? Never before have I considered this a possibility, but now I believe differently.
Found Your Story, Donna Bogatin. TNX
Wikipedia is a source that even Jimmy Wales warns students ought NOT to rely on. Wales may harken to the classical Greek traditions of education for his “branding,” but his entire modus operandi mocks Greek philosophical respect for the truth.
Found Your Story, Web-pedia. TNX
Youku.com is Chinese website that provides a world wide videos of all the categories. This total site and it’s and every page are witten in Chinese language. So to understand this site you must have to knowledge of Chinese language. To permit users to upload video youku, whether the length. with the participation of the youku several TV stations, film and television production company in China to search for media content for the time to upload on the site. It is a user-generated videos uploaded. compete.com according to the survey, at least 6.5 million annual visitors as this year.
Found Your Story, Rob Knies. TNX
Collabio Game Explores Social-Network Data Mining . . . And Social Psychology
What’s the most powerful, untapped information repository on the Web today?
If you said Wikipedia, please go stand in the corner.
Actually, it’s people, the billion or so of you who are tapping your keyboards and clicking your mice right now. Increasingly, researchers are getting curious about the power of people’s knowledge, and how social networks can potentially be used to tap into that vast reservoir.
Now, Facebook users can add the Collabio application and start slapping descriptive “tags” on their friends — lovely, Milwaukee, MIT, computer science, photography, mother, valedictorian, curly-haired, hamburgers, and so on. The tags range from geographic locations, to professional organizations and expertise, to hobbies and interests, to names of significant others or pets.
Found Your Story, Eric Mattson & Nora Ganim Barnes. TNX
The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently conducted one of the first statistically significant, longitudinal studies on the usage of social media in corporations.
Research shows that just 11.6% of the Fortune 500 currently having a public blog, so it is astounding to see that 39% of the Inc. 500 are blogging. The addition of 3.6% more Fortune 500 companies to the blogosphere pales in comparison to the addition of 20% more of the Inc. 500 companies after the same time period.
Found Your Story, Rick van der Wal. TNX
We use stories for more than entertainment, stories hold tremendous value for social progress and preservation of culture (history), the industry (advertising), creativity and inspiration (fiction), expression and nearly any other field of human interest. To communicate these stories we’ve used a number of media types so far, and very effectively at that, but they all seem to struggle with the up and coming trend of the 21st century: Interactivity.
Found Your Story, comScore. TNX
= Dutch Internet Audience Decreases with 1 Percent
= Regional Online Penetration Highest in the Netherlands and Nordic Countries
= Russia Has Fastest Growing Internet Population in Europe
= European Internet Audience Soars to More than 240 Million Visitors in June
Found Your Story, Social Media. TNX
Air America Radio host Rachel Maddow interviews Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Democratic National Convention about how the Internet is changing politics. There’s also a Flickr photo set.
Found Your Story, Michael Liedtke. TNX
Google changed the world in one short, fast decade
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc. on Sept. 7, 1998, they had little more than their ingenuity, four computers and an investor’s $100,000 bet on their belief that an Internet search engine could change the world.
It sounded preposterous 10 years ago, but look now: Google draws upon a gargantuan computer network, nearly 20,000 employees and a $150 billion market value to redefine media, marketing and technology.
Found Your Story, Corvida. TNX
Yoono: Social Media Tool for Mainstream and Early Adopters
Social media tools are some of the latest crazes these days. Yet the biggest problem with most social media tools is that they aren’t for everyone. There’s a constant debate on how early adopters can persuade more mainstream users to try these tools out. We might have the most flexible social media tool available for any user: Yoono!
Found Your Story, Mathew Ingram. TNX
New high score: Avril Lavigne’s video tops 100 million views on YouTube.
Found Your Story, Joshua Fox. TNX
At the Intel Developer Forum on August 21, 2008, Intel CTO Justin Rattner explained why he thinks the gap between humans and machines will close by 2050. “Rather than look back, we’re going to look forward 40 years,” said Rattner. “It’s in that future where many people think that machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence.”
Found Your Story, 3dgps. TNX
Global Positioning Systems (GPS) have changed the way we travel. Once a rarity GPS has now become a standard piece of equipment in almost all cars. So what is next for GPS?
Leading companies such as Teleatlas (who make software for GPS brands such as MIO, TomTom and Pioneer) are investing heavily in a new generation of GPS systems which display 3 dimensional images of the buildings and landmarks that surround the user, helping them to pin point their position quickly and easily.
To create these three dimensional maps a is truck mounted with eight cameras around it’s sides, and a further four on top, and is sent out trace all known routes, capturing 360 degree images as it goes. Images are collected at a rate of four per second. The process is very similar to that employed by Google when producing “Street View” for Google Earth.
New York, Los Angeles and Toronto have already been mapped. The next cities to come on line are Rome, Paris and Berlin.
Found Your Story, 3DVIA. TNX
3DVIA Studio is the online showcase for fully interactive 3D experiences built by the 3DVIA user and partner community.
Do you have a game, interactive experience or other 3D project? Gain exposure and get noticed! We will soon release a whole new way to publish your 3D work online. Top content will be included here in the showcase pre-release.
Found Your Story, Geoweb Today. TNX
GeoEye Inc. has publicised the launch of the world’s highest resolution commercial Earth-imaging satellite, due tomorrow (4th Sep) from Vanderberg Airforce Base, California. The ITT-built imaging system can distinguish objects on the Earth’s surface the size of a regular laptop computer and map the location of an object to within about three metres of its true location. Coupled with GeoEye’s IKONOS, the GeoEye-1 can collect almost one million square kilometres of imagery per day. The ability to revisit any location every three days makes it ideal for large scale mapping projects.
Found Your Story, Suw Charman-Anderson. TNX
Email becomes a dangerous distraction
In a study last year, Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email. So people who check their email every five minutes waste 8 1/2 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.
Found Your Story, John McCormick. TNX
Obama mobilizes rapid response on Web
Campaign targets media when attacks aired
Found Your Story, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins. TNX
The Wall Street Journal rolled out their long awaited new look over the weekend. What’s interesting, aside from the design itself, is that they’ve implemented community and social networking features that are almost completely unique to the web we all know and love; the WSJ socnet is (like much of the featured content) behind a paywall.
Found Your Story, Robert L. Mitchell. TNX
Delver.com works by giving priority ranking in searches to results associated with people in your social network.
Delver trolls the social network ground inside MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Hi5, Friendfeed, Digg and Delicious (It also supports Facebook profiles but has no access to other Facebook content). Once you’ve customized the interface and entered your social network profile information for your social networking services, Delver pulls it together into a unified view of your bookmarks, media and social network connections. You can then search your extended social network to find out what people you know are saying about a subject.
Found Your Story, Susan Gunelius. TNX
BusinessWeek has joined the social networking bandwagon with its own social network called Business Exchange. This social network is a bit different from the Facebooks and LinkedIns of the world though. Instead of being a place to make connections, poke people, compare movie preferences, and the like, Business Exchange is meant to be a place for members to share great business-related content, making it more of a social networking/bookmarking site than a true social network.
Found Your Story, Owen. TNX
I’ve been playing with Ping.Fm and going to be using it to update all the social networks I’m part of. Turns out there are 16 social networks that I’ll be updating when I send something to Ping. Yup, I have an account on 16 different network, and that’s not a complete list, as I can list a bunch of social bookmarking sites I have accounts on that aren’t on the list.
Unfortunately, I don’t believe this fragmentation is useful as the real power of social network centers around the people you interact with, and interacting with a few people in each network really doesn’t do much good. For example, I signed up on Pownce, but there aren’t too many people there I interact with, so it fell by the wayside. Again, I also joined Brightkite, but still haven’t had any traction there. Well, now I can just Ping and all my networks get a notification. Twitter is still my main way of finding out what’s going on in the world though.
Found Your Story, Ralf Bendrath. TNX
Conference “Privacy in Social Network Sites”
Onother interesting conference here at TU Delft which I am looking forward to: “Privacy in Social Network Sites” on 23 and 24 October 2008. Registration and participation is free, and Delft (right between The Hague and Rotterdam) is always worth a visit. The conference is organized by David Riphagen, who is affiliated with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and currently is finishing his M.A. thesis at our department on the same topic. His blog on the same theme is also worth a look.
Found Your Story, Fred Stutzman. TNX
Nicole Ellison highlights a new Facebook controversy - whether the site is a social networking site (a place to connect with and make new friends) or a social utility (a site designed to reinforce real world contacts). This is a particularly strange and circular distinction; the idea that one can draw a boundary between types of friendships is particularly useless in our increasingly-mediated social milieu.
Found Your Story, David Bradley. TNX
Stay Safe, Join Every Social Network
If you haven’t got a Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, ecademy, Plurk, Pownce, Digg profile, then it’s time you signed up, even if you have no intention of actually using the site. Why? Well, there are signs that spammers, scammers, phishers, and spammers are already make land grabs on these sites and it’s only a matter of time before your name, personal brand, or favorite username is taken and those scammers begin pretending to be you and pinging and poking your friends and business contacts.
Found Your Story, MSNBC. TNX
To Write Love on Her Arms is a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide. TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire and also to invest directly into treatment and recovery.
Found Your Story, Matt Asay. TNX
I’ve stopped accepting requests to join new social networks. I can barely keep up with one, much less 10. More to the point, I don’t want to have silo’d data repositories. It’s this last point that keeps me grounded in e-mail.
Sure, we now have OpenID to provide a central clearing house for identity online, but what I really want is to be able to send a Facebook message and have it show up in my e-mail, or somewhere central that I routinely use. I’ve come to accept that my IM client will be separate from my e-mail client, but I’m not prepared to add a Facebook “client,” LinkedIn “client,” etc.
Found Your Story, Robby Berthume. TNX
It seems like every day a new social networking web site launches, but very few of these sites provide enough value and utility for users. Meanwhile, there are many larger and established social networks that are gaining new users, yet retention, frequency, and ad rates are all on a downward slope. You2Gov is different and will be successful because they’ve found a way to provide excellent content that not only leads to conversations and communities, but action. This site is going to become a powerful force in the political spectrum very quickly.
Found Your Story, Rafe Needleman. TNX
Amazee, unlike most social networks, is built around workflow modules, like a discussion forum, a file repository, a calendar, and other functions. The company’s team plans to layer in Basecamp-like tools for deeper task tracking.
Amazee CEO Gregory Gerhardt told me the goal for the site is to drive collective action. The tools the service offers are in support of that. But while Amazee has got the tools part of the equation well in hand, the collective part is lacking.
Found Your Story, Matt Rhodes. TNX
It’s official. Where once pornography was the most popular thing searched for on the Internet, social networking has now taken it’s place. So says research reported in today’s Daily Telegraph. The finding comes from the the work of Bill Tancer, Head of Research at HitWise, and is based on analysing the search habits of 10 million Internet users.
Found Your Story, Damon Darlin. TNX
Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds
Google makes deep reading impossible. Media changes. Our brains’ wiring changes too. Computers think for us, flattening our intelligence.
If you managed to wade through that, maybe you are thinking that Twitter, not Google, is the enemy of human intellectual progress.
With Twitter, people subscribe to your “tweets.” Those who can make life’s mundane details interesting garner a large audience. Several services have been created to compete with Twitter. Others have been started to help people manage the prodigious flow of information from Twitterers.
Found Your Story, Dan Farber. TNX
Confirmed: The blogosphere is mainstream
With nearly 1,000,000 posts a day, the blogosphere is overflowing with content and now fully established as a mainstream rather than fringe phenomenon. Traditional media have adopted blogs as a complementary form of content to the traditional news and feature stories. According to Techhnorati’s latest report on the state of the blogosphere, many bloggers are making money. Technorati surveyed a sample of about 1,000 bloggers and found that the mean annual revenue for advertising is $6,000, but sites with 100,000 or more unique visitors are generating more than $75,000 in revenue.
Found Your Story, Clinical Cases. TNX
Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008: Who Are the Bloggers?
Bloggers are not a homogenous group, but they are an educated and affluent one:
Two-thirds are male
50% are 18-34
More affluent and educated than the general population
70% have college degrees
40% have an annual household income of $75K+
25% have an annual household income of $100K+
44% are parents
They are experienced: 59% have been blogging for more than two years.
Found Your Story, Marianne Richmond. TNX
Technorati is just not reliable enough to be relevant
Techmeme questions the Technorati conclusion that blogging is mainstream.
You know you have been blogging for a long time if you can remember when Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere meant something and influential bloggers announced its release and listed the results with few questions asked.
Technorati is just not reliable enough to be relevant. Tish Grier expounded on this back in July. Mack Collier switched to Feedburner to tally his weekly Top 25 Marketing Blogs. In years past, Techmeme would feature the story and dozens upon dozens of bloggers would be listed as past of the discussions and/or related.
This year, Techmeme has aggregated 5 posts about the report and Marshall Kirkpatrick, who states that the report is a great service and that he appreciates the data, also questions the Technorati conclusion that blogging is “mainstream.”
Found Your Story, Jordan McCollum. TNX
Blogosphere Grows, Posting Slows
The second stat in Technorati’s graphic is sobering: of those 133 million blogs, only 5.6% (7.4 million) have posted in the last four months. Even fewer are what we’d probably consider “active”—1.1% had posted within the last week.
Found Your Story, Paul Boutin. TNX
TimesPeople is a new feature on the Times’ website that lets logged-in members “share articles, videos, slideshows, blog posts, reader comments, and ratings and reviews of movies, restaurants and hotels.” It’s been in beta as a Firefox plugin for months, but will go live as a built-in website service and a Facebook app Tuesday morning Sep 23.
Found Your Story, CNICC. TNX
CNNIC: China’s Internet Will Be Short Of IP Addresses Soon
The Internet in China may soon run out. According to the China Internet Network Information Center, under the current allocation speed, China’s IPv4 address resources can only meet the demand of 830 more days and if no proper measures are taken by then, new Chinese netizens will not be able to gain normal access to the Internet.
Found Your Story, CNN. TNX
Tino Schaedler is an architect-turned-digital design artist whose groundbreaking work has been seen in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”
Tino Schaedler, Jean-Lucien Gay and Michael J. Brown talk about design, virtuality and the future
Schaedler’s next film project is “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” a fantasy epic starring Jake Gyllenhaal and due in 2010.
In 2007 he joined with Michael J. Brown and Jean-Lucien Gay to found NAU, a cross-disciplinary design collective positioned between architecture and film.
CNN talked to Schaedler and his NAU colleagues, as well as collaborator Ken Leon, a graphic designer.
Found Your Story, CNN. TNX
Cocooned in a virtual world
The Cocoon creates a virtual world that allows us to live the experience
The technology is based on software used in the film “Minority Report”
Advances in Internet speeds will allow for high definition picture quality
Found Your Story, Genevieve Bell. TNX
The deeply personal is changing, our friendships are taking on a more permanent and ambient quality, and we live in the awareness that our conversations are stored, our pictures shared, our names Googleable forever. How are we changing? And can we connect?
Found Your Story, I.Z. Reloaded. TNX
WikiWorld is a series of comic strips based on various articles found in Wikipedia. The comics summarise and highlight some of the fascinating but little-known articles in Wikipedia’s vast archives and represent the artist’s visual interpretations of them.
Found Your Story, Murad Ahmed. TNX
The dawn of a new internet age has begun. A network of supercomputers, known as the Grid, is to revolutionise the speed at which information is downloaded to personal computers.
The Grid, a network of 100,000 computers, is to be connected to the world’s largest machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It is designed for projects, such as large research and engineering jobs, which need to crunch huge quantities of data, but scientists believe it will eventually be used on home computers.
Found Your Story, Chris Salzberg. TNX
Alpha Bloggers announces a free event [ja] in Tokyo entitled, “Mirai: synthesis of gadgets and the net” (MIRAI：ネットとガジェットの融合), to be held on October 20th from 7pm to 10pm near Kudanshita station (see map [ja]). The event will discuss the possibilities of a future in which gadgets and the Internet are united, through a set of three different sessions: “New services and new gadgets”, “Possibilities and future of PCs”, and “Digital camera and digital video in a net era”.
Found Your Story, Cesar Castro. TNX
Superstruct is the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game created to help visualize how we humans might solve the problems we’ll face in 2019. The game starts October 6, 2008, and it will last for six weeks.
Found Your Story, redOrbit. TNX
Britain’s spy chiefs have turned to social networking website Facebook to reach “a large and wide variety of people” in their latest drive to recruit secret agents for MI6.
(c) 2008 Daily Record; Glasgow (UK). Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.
Found Your Story, Ray Cheung. TNX
Elgg is an open, flexible social networking engine, designed to run at the heart of any socially-aware application. Building on Elgg is easy, and because the engine handles common web application and social functionality for you, you can concentrate on developing your idea.
Found Your Story, Dissident. TNX
The Ten Commandments of Blogging
I picked this item up from The Times newspaper yesterday. Church leaders have drawn up a new set of Ten Commandments aimed at delivering “God bloggers” from the temptations of the blogosphere.
1 You shall not put your blog before your integrity
2 You shall not make an idol of your blog
3 You shall not misuse your anonymity to sin
4 Remember the Sabbath by taking one day off a week
5 Honour your fellow bloggers above yourselves and do not give undue significance to their mistakes
6 You shall not murder someone else’s honour, reputation or feelings
7 You shall not use the web to commit adultery in your mind
8 You shall not steal another person’s content
9 You shall not give false testimony against your fellow blogger
10 You shall not covet your neighbour’s blog ranking. Be content with your own content.
I seem to have already broken one commandment, since I’m updating my blog on a Sunday. I wonder how many can say they haven’t broken number 10?
Found Your Story, Nicole Ferraro. TNX
Hi5 Aims to Boot MySpace From No. 2 Spot
If you live in the U.S., you may be unaware that there’s a social network that isn’t called Facebook or MySpace . But hi5 is one of those social networks doing well internationally, particularly in Spanish-speaking countries, where it happens to be the leader.
Now, on top of its impressive standing in Latin America, the company is seeking growth in the U.S. — and it has every intention of replacing MySpace, or at least booting it to No. 3.
Found Your Story, live crunch. TNX
We know what ping.fm does right? It updates all your social networks with one move. You might call Updating.Me clone but seriously how can somebody clone Ping.fm if it’s not the same? UpdatingMe is nice web app that will allow you to update social networks at the same time such as Twitter, Rejaw, FriendFeed, Indentica, Plurk and many more social networks.
Found Your Story, Serkan Toto. TNX
Facebook Recruits Street Troops To Grow in Germany
Even assuming StudiVZ doesn’t get anymore new users, it would take Facebook over 20 years to catch up at this rate of growth. In Germany (where I hail from), organic growth doesn’t seem to be an option for the company and it seems Facebook understood that reality: After taking action in July (when StudiVZ was sued for infringing Facebook’s “look, feel, features and services”), Facebook is now taking another (quite unusual) stab at its clone by partnering up with Smaboo, a Zurich-based promotion agency.
Found Your Story, Limbo. TNX
Limbo, one of the fastest growing mobile social networks in the world, announces the availability of its network to three and a half billion people in more than two hundred countries. Limbo was among the first location-aware social networks to launch an iPhone application this July, and becomes the first to expand to international markets.
Found Your Story, Svetlana Gladkova. TNX
Google Blog Search Completely Revamped
The homepage now shows the most discussed stories in all topics (a total of 11 categories are present). Stories are clustered and ranked depending on popularity of a topic (that is calculated based on the number of blogs discussing them and time since the story first appeared). It is also possible to choose a particular category to see what’s hot in politics or technology or entertainment. Right now the hottest section is obviously politics since the homepage features political stories on the top three positions but the fact that you can always focus on the category that you are particularly interested in makes it easier to track exactly what you want instead of what is popular in the blogosphere in general.
Found Your Story, Martyn Daniels. TNX
As social network sites go its hard to judge Questia’s new Research Wizard. In principle it make sense to link researchers into a community application that enables them to share thoughts but is it enough and is Questia the right centre? It has aligned the Research Wizard with Facebook which obviously adds an attraction to many and provides potential new subscribers.
Questia is a major online library, with over 67,000 full-text books, 1.5 million articles, and an entire reference set complete with a dictionary, encyclopaedia, and thesaurus. It provides materials in some 14 major disciplines and its new social site has further fragmented these into what they claim are 6,000 plus research categories.
Found Your Story, Bobbie Johnson. TNX
Courtesy of Oxyweb, here’s a map of the most popular social network in each country around the world.
Anyone who follows the rise and fall of social nets will notice a few recognisable bits of information - Facebook’s growing domination, Friendster’s continuing popularity in south east Asia and Hi-5’s stronghold in central America.
The big surprises? MySpace is only top dog in the US and Bebo’s number one in Ireland. Still, the data’s taken from the mercurial traffic service Alexa - so it needs more than a few pinches of salt.
Found Your Story, ExitReality. TNX
ExitReality is a free internet plug-in that allows anyone to view every web page in 3D:
3D Search
3D Chat
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Found Your Story, Darren Rowse. TNX
Did you know that you can get your site featured on major news sites like CNN, CNET, Newsweek, USA Today, and even the Wall Street Journal. It’s one of the best kept secrets in the blogosphere and I’m going to reveal it in this article.
There are actually three ways you can get your blog articles published on major news sites: BlogBurst, Blogrunner and Sphere.
Found Your Story, Ernst-Jan Pfauth. TNX
Think about it, doesn’t it make more sense to share interesting links on Twitter instead of Digg? They don’t get lost in the clutter and all your friends and acquaintances get to see them right a way. When browsing around on a few Twitter streams, you can immediately tell that most people realize this. It’s one big treasure chamber full of interesting links.
Found Your Story, Ernst-Jan Pfauth. TNX
Amiz.fr, a French social network with over two million members has been acquired by French Steek SA. But the buying party isn’t all too interesting if you take the selling guys in account. Two Dutch fellas, Sebastiaan Moeys (19) and Tijmen Crone (20), founded the network in the summer of 2006 - right after highschool graduation.
Foud Your Story, OpenCalais. TNX
At Calais (powered by Thomson Reuters) you can find everything you need to get started with Calais to bring state-of-the-art semantic functionality into your blog, content management system, site or application.
We want to make all the world’s content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais.
Found Your Story, Helzerman. TNX
Dipity, a Friendfeed like social network aggregator that lets users view updates in a timeline, has been launched to the public. The network allows users to import their updates from services such as Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and their personal blogs to a single timeline.
Found Your Story, Angela Gunn. TNX
Even its proprietor says it’s not a good thing when you have to join the RareShare social network, but for those suffering ultra-obscure diseases and disorders, it’s a powerful resource.
Found Your Story, Jay Berkowitz. TNX
With our economy in a downturn and oil hitting new highs, many business owners are seeking alternative ways to promote their business and many are turning to the web. Internet marketing expert and founder of the Internet marketing promotions and advertising firm, Ten Golden Rules has created a video series and list of “Ten Free or Low Cost Ways to Use the Internet to Help Your Business in Down Times.” Here you can see his recent interview on Fox Business as well as the first of 10 videos being produced on ways to maximize your website traffic.
Found Your Story, Shanghaiist. TNX
Mobile Madness in China
Jeremy Wagstaff comments in the Jakarta Post how two generations of one-child policy has led to a generation of lonely Chinese kids who are using online social networks like Friendster as a replacement for real life relationships rather than to supplement them. The article also quote Harry Hui of Pepsico who quotes a unnamed China Mobile survey that states “the mobile phone is more important than boyfriends or girlfriends for 90 percent of the younger generation”.
Found Your Story, Dan Thornton. TNX
Useful study on Social Network Marketing on Facebook and Myspace
I’ve finally had a chance to sit down and read Tom Chapman’s study of Social Network Marketing, Engagement Marketing and Brands, which specifically looks at marketing on Facebook and Myspace from the perspectives of both social network users, and brand executives from the likes of innocent drinks and BBC Radio 1.
Found Your Story, Maki. TNX
The Future of Content in the Age of Information Overload
The decline of newspaper popularity has been attributed to the rise of the internet and the proliferation of web-based content. With an extremely low barrier of entry and variable cost, the web allows anyone with a computer to become an independent publisher: As a result, the amount and variety of content online far exceeds print publications in most fields.
So how can newspapers survive and do well as a business in the future? Perhaps by cutting back and going more niche to provide content that features deeper analysis and investigative reporting. In an article entitled ‘The Elite Newspaper of the Future’, Philip Meyer suggests that the money and audience comes from specialized, not general media.
Found Your Story, DailyMail. TNX
For centuries, writers have attempted to predict the future of the human race. Some have argued that we are destined to evolve into super-beings, others that we are turning into dim-witted goblins incapable of anything more demanding than watching TV. But according to a leading geneticist, both visions are wrong because human evolution has ground to a halt.
Professor Steve Jones, of University College London, says the forces driving evolution - such as natural selection and genetic mutation - no longer play an important role in our lives: “If you are worried about what Utopia is going to be like, don’t. At least in the developed world, and at least for the time being, you are living in it now.”
Found Your Story, Eric Schmidt.TNX
Google CEO Eric Schmidt called the Internet a “Cesspool” in reference to the quality of content and the amount of false information residing on it.
Found Your Story, David Lazer. TNX
Before there was “crowd sourcing” there was the “madness of crowds.” The current economic crisis raises an interesting question: given an increased systemic tendency to “global groupthink”, and given systemic benefits of diversity, how does one regulate the collective mind?
Found Your Story, NewTeeVee. TNX
NewTeeVee Live: Meet the Future of Media
NewTeeVee Live is the premier event showcasing the online video industry’s hottest topics, most talented video producers, promising technologies, leading innovators and top funding executives.
Found Your Story, Gordon Peters. TNX
Social Network Conversations
Social Networks were all the rage at the start of 2002, but more recently, the “rage” has become the standard. Facebook recently reached 100 million users and social networking has become the platform for communication among people of all ages, across almost all countries. But it is an ever-changing ecosystem, and is difficult to understand from an advertising point of view.
Found Your Story, Daniel Lyons. TNX
As if waking from a dream, Silicon Valley has suddenly realized that the collapsing economy means trouble for tech companies, too. Especially at risk are the new startups created in the wake of the last dotcom crash in 2001. The signal traits of these Web 2.0 companies are cutesy logos, odd-sounding names—Twitter, Zooomr, Digg, Ning, Loopt—and flimsy business plans based on a vague notion of luring millions of people to free Web sites and someday selling advertisements. Most lose money. Some have raised enough venture-capital funding to survive for a year or more. Some may be able to raise more from venture backers, albeit at onerous terms. But many are going to flame out.
Found Your Story, Dan Gainor et al.. TNX
The Great Media Depression: News reports depict economy far worse now than during the 1929 stock market crash.
One can argue that daily news media in 1929 were too boosterish. In the midst of a stock market collapse, journalists took an incredibly positive position. In 2008, journalists may have gone too far in the other direction, emphasizing only the negative.
Found Your Story, LawyerKM. TNX
I came across a interview with Laura Fitton, founder & CEO of Pistachio Consulting, on Global Neighborhoods. Check out the whole interview, but here’s the takeaway:
All my work now comes from people I know through Twitter. All of it. Not only do all my clients come from Twitter, by the time someone contacts me, they thoroughly understand how my mind works and have already decided I am the one for the project.
While the size of my Twitter network is crazy, the quality of it is what *really* blows my mind. I now routinely stumble across someone absolutely fascinating and brilliant who I had no idea was following me. My Twitter network includes some extraordinary and influential professionals including VCs, CEOs, CIOs, VPs; the executive producer of Curb Your Enthusiasm; the editor in chief of CIO Magazine, authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto and hundreds of other extraordinary people, many of whom I have never met face-to-face.
Found Your Story, Anthony Bradley. TNX
Driving awareness might be the real value here. Twitter is an alert system that can cut into e-mail’s strangle hold. Here is where Twitter can fit into Web 2.0\E2.0 frameworks like the SLATES framework from Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee (S is for Signals) and My PLANT SEEDS framework (or free podcast). The T is for Tipping Point and the D is for discover-ability and these are where Twitter can play a significant role.
However, this can be a double edged sword since the potential for overload is even more enormous than e-mail. One thing I like about the Twitter approach and what may yet bring me to tweet regularly is the focus on people. I get to choose exactly who I wish to hear from. This is difficult with e-mail. I can join an e-mail distribution list but this is topical not really social (social with a focus on people).
Found Your Story, Paula Thrasher. TNX
Knowledge Management title is dead. The new title is “Social _____ ” (Can’t be Social Software because it includes more than Software. Hmm
Found Your Story, Research and Markets. TNX
Worldwide telecom statistics at a glance - mid-2008
Population 6.7 billion
Fixed lines 1.3 billion
Mobile subscribers 3.5 billion
Mobile text messages sent 2.3 trillion
Internet users 1.2 billion
Fixed broadband subscribers 380 million
(Source: BuddeComm estimates)
By the end of 2008 around 18% of the global population will be online. Growth in the developing countries is still hampered by poor telephone connections, but mobile applications will assist future growth.
Developments in mobile communications cannot be described in any way other than being spectacular and by the end of 2008 there should be almost 4 billion mobile subscribers worldwide.
Found Your Story, UMTS Forum. TNX
The UMTS Forum anticipates that 3G/UMTS subscriptions will reach 340 million by the end of 2008, representing around 7% of the world’s population. It is also predicted that HSPA subscriptions will reach 75 million in the same timeframe.
Found Your Story, Jan Roos. TNX
How to Create an Online Business Thats Recession Proof
Found Your Story, Erik Schonfeld. TNX
No Hi5’s Today. No. 3 Social Network Lays Off 10 to 15 Percent Of Staff
A tipster told us that the cuts came mostly in Design, HR, and QA. I called to ask for a comment and Hi5’s VP of marketing Mike Trigg confirms:
Found Your Story, Beth Kanter. TNX
What’s Your Twitter Influence? Social Network Analysis of Your Twitter Network
TwInfluence uses social network analysis techniques to analyze your Twitter followers.
Found Your Story, Don Dodge. TNX
Start a company in a recession? Absolutely!
In good times all the really great people are busy doing fun projects…and not available to join you in a startup. In bad times projects are cut, people are laid off, and big companies retrench to improving the existing stuff. New projects don’t get any budget. So, great people get bored and start looking for the Next Big Thing…a cool startup.
Everything else is cheap and readily available too. Office space is always cheaper and more available in a recession. Existing companies will sub-lease space really cheap to offset some costs. Computers, software, networks, desks, equipment…everything is cheaper.
Found Your Story, Andy Merrett. TNX
UK-based Social Media Portal (SMP), which tracks the global use of social networks, believes that it’s vital for companies to build their brands through blogging.
Found Your Story, Mike Gunderloy. TNX
One of the fancy terms that gets thrown around in Web 2.0 discussions is “disintermediation” - in other words, cutting out the middleman. Authonomy is a new site from Harper Collins that aims to do just that in the world of book publishing. If you’re a web worker with a book inside battling to get out - as so many of us are - it offers an alternative to the traditional ways of trying to break into publishing.
Found Your Story, Paul Kedrosky. TNX
By accident, the Internet was also an enabler of the current credit crisis. It brought us together, but it also did the reverse, creating communities with narrow affinities. These are often echo chambers where people can find others like themselves—scrapbook makers or train-spotters or builders of exotic new products for the now $668 trillion (not a misprint) derivatives market.
Greenspan saw that the tandem of the Internet and fast computers were perfect for splitting mortgages into tiny pieces, repackaging them and then shunting them to yield-hungry investors across the country and around the world.
A VERY FUNDAMENTAL PACKET-SWITCHING CONSEQUENCE SO TO SPEAK.
Found Your Story, Media Architecture Dot Org. TNX
Media facades create utterly new connections between digital space on the one hand and architecture and urban space on the other hand. Never before was there an interface between the physical and the digital world, which was public to such an extent, that it appeals not only to individual users, as in the case of a personal computer, but also to whole groups or even to a whole urban population and that furthermore also allows to “reply”, i.e. to interact with a facade or to design its content. In this case, a powerful potential for design and effectivity is created, involving a range of chances and risks that are difficult to estimate and that require thorough discussion. The producers and the users of media facades equally face a range of challenges, and it will need time for fully differentiated opinions and positions to evolve from the discourse which is just taking shape.
Found Your Story, R&D/AFP. TNX
The technology is the same as that of the simple inkjet printer found in homes and offices, but Japanese scientist Makoto Nakamura is on a mission to see if it can also produce human organs.
Found Your Story, Twitters Anonymous. TNX
Hi. My Name is . . . and I’m a Twitter Addict
Do you sneak into another room to Twitter via your cell phone or neglect work & serve frozen meals to keep up with your tweets? Welcome!
Found Your Story, Rick Turoczy. TNX
Qik, the service that turns mobile phones into handheld streaming video cameras, is pushing to make mobile streaming video accessible to the masses - no matter what handset they’re carrying.
Earlier this month, Qik announced that it had added support for consumer-focused phones - generally falling outside the “smart phone” category - like the Nokia and Sony handsets. Now, Qik is making its way on to the handset that most business users carry: the BlackBerry.
Found Your Story, fring. TNX
MobilePress takes WordPress mobile: iPhone & others
WordPress, one of the most popular and possibly the “coolest” blogging platform around has just been given a very unique new plugin from a South African company who’s name says it all. The hard working guys over at Younique, working together with the team of Project Wolf have just launched a shiny new WordPress plugin simply called MobilePress.
Found Your Story, Nicholas Carr. TNX
The ultimate social network
The British design collective rAndom International, together with artist-programmer Chris O’Shea, have created an exhibition, called Audience, that provides, literally as well as figuratively, a mirror image of our hyperconnected selves. The installation consists of 64 robotic mirrors, each of which “moves its head in a particular way to give it different characteristics of human behaviour. Some chat amongst themselves, some shy away and others confidently move to grab your attention.”
beste collega’s,
als docent op de hogeschool inholland wil ik jullie boek als verplichte literatuur op de boekenlijst plaatsen voor het van ‘psychologie van de communicatie’.
willen jullie mij een gratis docentexemplaar sturen?
graag ook even de prijs voor studenten vermelden want dat willen ze altijd weten.
u kunt het boek sturen naar
rik roelfzema
hogeschool inholland
jan hudigstraat 66
3065 sn rotterdam
hartelijke groet
rik roelfzema
Found Your Story, Easton Ellsworth. TNX
The Future of Blogging: Interview with a Blogger from 2018
TBH: Is it even called “blogging” in your time?
X: Yes. But what exactly do you mean by “it?”
TBH: Well, you know. Regularly published articles containing text, audio, images and/or video content, typically arranged in reverse chronological order, housed in a search engine-friendly content management system and piped around the Web through RSS. Blogging, right?
X: Okay … yes, I remember how it was back in ‘08. I think you’re only now beginning to grasp the power and influence of the new media. It’s going to permeate everything you do, everything you take in. You won’t be able to go anywhere on earth without being connected - without being expected to broadcast something, to share some part of you with the cloud. It’s sad in a way.
TBH: Sad - how so?
X: Well, take the last time I went on vacation. The whole world knew exactly where I was going, how long I was gone, and what all my friends thought of my spending $27 a gallon to drive my old ‘06 Sonata out to my grandma’s cabin in the mountains. It’s like there’s a dotted line around where you are - you’re almost blogging your life and thoughts even when you’re avoiding doing so.
Found Your Story, Meilir Page-Jones. TNX
From 1998:
A “mediocracy” is an organization in which the mediocre prevails. Most people in a mediocracy are mediocre in both mind and soul, and most products of a mediocracy lack merit. Although a few individuals in a mediocracy may strive to rise above the second rate, their attempts are likely to be doomed by the prevailing ethos of their surroundings.
Mediocracies are typically composed of overly competitive, undisciplined factions, which war with one another in attempts to gain relative advantages.
Found Your Story, Terrence O’Brien. TNX
New research from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) shows that the Internet and technology is already changing the development of the human mind. Gary Small, the director of the Memory & Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior and the Center on Aging at UCLA (phew…), has found that activities such as text messaging and Internet searching improves a person’s ability to filter information, perform complex reasoning, and make quick decisions.
Found Your Story, Ernst-Jan Pfauth. TNX
Harm your business, block Facebook
“His research concluded that trying to control the use of sites such as Facebook, which alone boasts more than 100 million users worldwide, could even harm organizations.”
This is a line from a news message Reuters pumped in the blogosphere today. Obviously, we can expect a lot of blog coverage about this matter. It’s saying exactly what we, early adopters, already knew: companies shouldn’t think you can control social networks. Better try to benefit from them.
Found Your Story, Trendhunter. TNX
$73,000 Facebook Profiles - Man Auctions Off His Social Network Identity
Recently we saw a woman auctioning off her virginity online, and now a man is taking his turn to climb on board the ‘cashing in’ bandwagon.
A guy from Massachusetts is currently auctioning his Facebook profile on eBay with a starting bid of $73,000.
Found Your Story, Greg Cruey. TNX
Too Many Friends? Social Networks Could Implode (or Not)
THE INQUISITR had a cute post on Sunday about the growth of social media. The image it created in my mind was one in which social media is something like a growing carbuncle that will one day simply pop. Maybe soon…
Found Your Story, Richard Tomkins. TNX
Pirelli calendar comes home
The prototype appeared in 1963 but, although shot by the then up-and-coming photographer Terence Donovan, it later came to be seen as a flop. Fully-clad models appeared alongside vehicles fitted with Pirelli products and the whole thing looked painfully contrived.
The 1964 calendar was very different. Shot by Robert Freeman in Majorca, it focused entirely on two fresh-faced young models in bikinis on the beach, with no attempt at product placement. By today’s standards the images were tame; there was not a nipple to be seen. But the lingering close-ups of the girls’ semi-naked bodies were regarded as provocative at the time, setting the tone for the calendars to come.
By the mid-1960s, London had become the swinging city of The Beatles, Twiggy and Mary Quant, breaking new ground in pop music, fashion and design. Reflecting the zeitgeist, the 1966 Pirelli calendar, although still nipple-free, pushed the limits of what was thought acceptable in advertising. Two images in particular raised eyebrows as well as pulse rates: one in which a model’s bottom was clearly visible through her diaphanous undies and another showing a close-up of a model’s face with the tip of her tongue visible between her parted lips.
Found Your Story, Richard MacManus. TNX
On the product side, Microsoft had two major Web announcements: 1) the release of Azure, a cloud computing OS; and 2) browser-based versions of four Office products. Google was also active this week, releasing the third beta of its new browser Chrome and announcing it will support OpenID. On the trends side, we wrote in-depth analysis pieces on LinkedIn and Hulu, advised you how to use the new Google web search RSS feeds, and more.
Found Your Story, Curt. TNX
Tom Johnson, a professor in journalism at Texas Tech, emailed me to ask if I could put out an invitation to the FA readers to take a survey on how you use the internet and blogs during this election. They have done these surveys for each of the last four election cycles. Here is a sample of how they use the data.
Found Your Story, redOrbit. TNX
Second China Gives Foreign Service Workers First Look
A team of University of Florida computer engineers and scholars has used the popular online world Second Life to create a virtual Chinese city, one that hands a key to users who want to familiarize themselves with the sights and experiences they will encounter as first-time visitors. The goal of the federally funded research project: To educate and prepare foreign service or other government professionals to arrive in the country prepared and ready to work.
Found Your Story, Eric Krangel. TNX
Big Media Starts Shrinking
With the Yahoo-AOL deal in limbo, the big story this week was contractions across old media. Time Inc is laying off 600, Condé Nast is eviscerating Portfolio and Men’s Vogue, and the Christian Science Monitor is abandoning print altogether.
Found Your Story, Liam Maxwell. TNX
How the internet took Obama back to the 1950s
At bottom it’s really just a very well executed but traditional campaign that uses the internet to get the central message out consistently every time. It feels like the mass market politics redolent of 1950s Britain; the internet has taken this campaign back to first principles and it has been successful beyond their wildest expectations - watch for Indiana to see if they are realised.
As I explain in my pamphlet, How the Internet took Obama back to the 1950s, published by the Centre for Policy Studies every campaigner gets their own online office and the tools they need.
The shop floor contains some of the most talented new media brains in the world (a Facebook founder sits anonymously in the middle of the open plan office - six Google Analytics guys just showed up one day) all of them working flat out. What really struck me was the speed of the operation.
Found Your Story, EducationPR. TNX
“Blogging is slow, it’s boring, it doesn’t generate buzz. If you want to make friends, go on Facebook; if you want to influence people, try Twitter,” says Richard Bailey at PR Studies. WIRED magazine’s Paul Boutin even says Twitter is to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004.
Yes, I consider Facebook fun, and helpful. And I occasionally Twitter. But I don’t find it influential because the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad. At least so far.
Found Your Story, Bosse Hammarström. TNX
Three recent academic books on blogging
Blogosphere: The New Political Arena
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/073911672X
The Rise of the Blogosphere
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0275989968/jilltxt-20
Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0415973163/jilltxt-20
Found Your Story, kermit / Anti-Strib. TNX
Blog Fatigue Rears It’s Ugly Head
I can sense it around the local center-right Blogosphere. Analysis Paralysis. Months and months, thousands of man-hours expended to this end. The crushing weight of media saturation of political ads. Speculation vs. speculation. More revelations than could possibly be adequately processed by the casual reader.
Blog caption:
“Welcome to the dark side of blogging. We are the people that other blogs warn you about. Enter at your own risk.”
Found Your Story, Dutched Pinay. TNX
Fears on blogging and social networking
There’s an interesting article on BBC about Facebook — Bosses should ‘embrace’ Facebook, and why companies should welcome social networking at work. It’s a good read that talks about the pros and cons of using social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Friendster and many more.
This topic touches a sensitive nerve on me. I have to admit that up to now, one of my biggest fear is being googled and searched on social networking sites and searchers ultimately landing in this blog. I know, it sounds like this blog is a sort of clandestine operation, haha, but my real name is quite unique in the world and will definitely stand out in any online search.
Found Your Story, Ted Tjaden. TNX
Spokeo and me.dium - two new “social network” search engines
Found Your Story, Gary Hayes. TNX
Inching Towards the live Web 3.0 - Layered Social Virtual Worlds
Found Your Story, David Armano. TNX
The Marketing Spiral
Found Your Story, SUMO Paint. TNX
SUMO Paint offers professional and easy to use tools for creating and editing images within a browser.
Found Your Story, Steve Levenstein. TNX
Newspaper Blog from Six Apart and Movable Type boosts literacy, readability and ease of content management
“Print Screen” doesn’t just mean capturing a screenshot anymore. Six Apart’s award winning Newspaper Blog adapts the familiar newspaper look to serve the needs of bloggers, educators and more.
Found Your Story, Renee Feltz. TNX
Barack Obama’s campaign reaches out to activist bloggers in order to communicate with and mobilize campaign volunteers and feed them into its online social networking site, MyBarackObama.com. In contrast, John McCain’s campaign takes a top-down approach, using blogs—many of which it helped incubate—as an echo chamber for channeling mostly anti-Obama attacks into the mainstream media, in order to create an impression of grassroots online support.
The use of the incubation technique is evident in a map of 8,000 blogs produced by Morningside Analytics for a joint investigation by Columbia University’s Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Reporting and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. In addition to two large clusters of mostly longtime conservative and liberal bloggers, the map shows a ‘halo’ of about 500 relatively new blogs in two isolated clusters. One cluster includes several hundred anti-Obama blogs (orange) and the other contains several hundred pro-McCain and pro-Palin blogs (green). Most of them were created in mid-July 2007 or afterwards, and are listed listed on “blogrolls” such as McCain Victory 2008 and the NoBama network.
Found Your Story, Brian Watson. TNX
Top 10 Disruptive IT Trends
1. New Media
2. Augmented Reality
3. Social Networks
4. Information Transparency
5. Web Waves
6. 3D Printing
7. Molecular Computing
8. Cloud Computing
9. Semantics
10. Web as Reasoning Engine
Found Your Story, Rick Turoczy. TNX
Obama’s Social Media Advantage, Act II
If change.gov - the new site for the President-Elect - is any indication, the second act of Obama’s social media strategy may have even more impact on the United States than the impressive - and historic - first act.
Found Your Story, Saul Hansell. TNX
Web 2.0 Gets Big & Corporate:
As the economy totters, it’s easy to make fun of the concept of “Web 2.0” — the rallying cry of a generation of chipper start-ups spawned over the last few years with an unusual aversion to vowels.
One of the most significant trends is how the big companies that make very complicated systems are reworking them using the principles of Web 2.0 companies, particularly the notion of programs that talk to other programs. They are breaking up their technologies into discrete modules that can work alongside data and applications from others.
Found Your Story, Iain Thomson. TNX
Web 2.0 leading to information overload. Experts warn of increasingly cluttered future.
“Moore’s Law is both our friend and our enemy,” said James Powell, chief technology officer at financial information firm Thomson Reuters.
“All forms of information are being added at a tremendous rate. It’s the job of people in the industry to manage that fire hose of information.”
Powell cited the current financial crisis as an example of how this build up of information can be dangerous. The credit crunch occurred at a time when there had never been more information available to the industry, he said, but this excess of data had masked the warning signs.
Found Your Story, Dan Farber. TNX
The future of the cloud
Cloud computing won’t be very compelling without what is variously called Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web.
Found Your Story, Claire Cain Miller. TNX
Forget about swapping party pictures on Facebook and other “gee-whiz stuff,” says former Vice President Al Gore. “Web 2.0 has to have a purpose.”
“The purpose, I would urge all of you — as many of you as are willing to take it up — is to bring about a higher level of consciousness about our planet and the imminent danger and opportunity we face because of the radical transformation in the relationship between human beings and the Earth.”
Found Your Story, Live Mesh Beta. TNX
Your work computer. Your home laptop. Your Mac. Your mobile phone. Devices live in multiple places. But the files you need—and the programs that open them—often don’t. Live Mesh changes all that.
Found Your Story, Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten. TNX
Dutch Plaxo Competitor
Soocial, the Dutch Plaxo competitor, is officially launching today. They have been in closed beta for a while now but are confident enough about their technology to invite the general public now. Soocial enables you to sync your data between your computers, your phones and web applications like Gmail and other web based information managers.
Found Your Story, Three. TNX
With INQ1 you can have Facebook© on your mobile like never before. You get Facebook© alerts direct to your mobile. Status updates straight to your contacts and loads more.
Want to see who’s on Skype, Facebook or Windows Live™ Messenger anytime so you can keep up with your mates? With INQ1 all the info is pulled and loaded straight into your contacts. Just like that.
It’s easy to move between your favourite web sites and applications. The INQ1 switcher and carousel lets you do it with one simple touch of the button by whizzing through them all as they sit at the bottom of your screen.
Found Your Story, Michael Arrington. TNX
Google’s stock price closed yesterday at $291, the first time it has dropped below $300 since 2005. It’s 44% off of its 52-week high of $725. Most analysts think its cheap and getting cheaper - the average price target is still over $500. Former analyst Henry Blodget, however, thinks it could fall to $200 (I prefer the bullish version of Blodget myself).
The scary thing is that we’re talking about Google, which has the ability to withstand just about anything the economy can throw at it right now. But that’s not the case for the rest of the Internet, even the public companies. Google is sneezing, but everyone else just got the flu.
Found Your Story, Michael Arrington. TNX
Microsoft’s Live.com portal will change significantly this evening. No longer will it be a simple search engine with a few other services bolted on. It’s now a social network, too, pulling in activity information and content from around the web. They’re also launching Windows Live Photos and Windows Live People, and other services. Check it out at Home.Live.com.
Found Your Story, Heather Havenstein. TNX
Military gets own social network after YouTube is blocked
The U.S. military Tuesday launched TroopTube, a new site to upload and share videos, more than a year after the U.S. Department of Defense banned YouTube from military networks for being a bandwidth hog.
TroopTube is designed to help military families connect and keep in touch when separated, according to a note on the new site. Users can quickly upload videos that can be shared privately with a subset of users, or with all users on the site, the note said.
Found Your Story, Greg Cruey. TNX
President-elect Barack Obama delivered the Weekly Democratic Radio Address this morning - on YouTube.
Several blogs commented on the fact that the coming Obama Administration looks set to use social media tools pretty regularly.
The Inquisitr pointed out, correctly, that no one ever hears the radio addresses that Presidents have done in the past - except when they are included in news clips. On YouTube people might actually listen to them.
TechCrunch thinks that seeing Obama use YouTube is only right considering that 1800 YouTube videos of him got watched 110 million times leading up to his election.
Wired Blog Network had this to say:
Expect many more such “enhancements” in the weeks and months to come as Obama makes use of the tools he did during the 2008 campaign, such as Twitter and text-messaging to build a direct relationship with the people of America, and the rest of the world.
Found Your Story, FrankTaylor. TNX
Google has released a big upgrade to Google SketchUp 7 - their 3D modeling tool. SketchUp 7 is available in a free version, and a Pro version which includes a number of features helpful to professional modelers (such as a presentation tool, more model making features, printing, and e-mail support - see comparison). The Pro version costs $495, but is available for free to educators and only $49 for students.
The free version of SketchUp allows you to create models, upload/download them to/from the Google 3D Warehouse, and place them in Google Earth.
Found Your Story, Jeff Jarvis. TNX
In this crisis, we are witnessing more than the failure of mortgages, derivatives, banks, and regulation. We are also seeing the dawn of a new economy; one best viewed and understood through the lens of Google, the one company that – by design or by luck – is built for the emerging world order.
Google’s first advantage is being digital. Who wants to be in the business of stuff any more – building cars, printing newspapers, selling CDs, growing food? Owning and controlling stuff was the basis of most business. And the reflexive response to a collapse in finance and equities used to be to return to the real: buy property. No more. Now the best retreat is to the value of knowledge.
Found Your Story, TYWKIWDBI. TNX
This week Google announced that they are (it is?) making available all of the LIFE magazine photographs - not just the covers, mind you, but all of the photos - including ones that were never published in the magazine itself.
10 million photos.
Found Your Story, Jessica Hartstein. TNX
If you haven’t gone Web 2.0 yet, you just might be the last one to do it! Even the Miss World contest is creating an online social network for this year’s competition. Wondering what a beauty pageant social network is like? The competition’s partnership with the New York based media platform Amuso offers visitors several possibilities.
Found Your Story, Ross Dawson. TNX
Launch of the Enterprise Social Network Strategy report: what senior executives REALLY think about social networks inside the organization
Found Your Story, danah boyd. TNX
Living and Learning with New Media:
Findings from a 3-year Ethnographic Study of Digital Youth
For the last three years, I’ve been a part of a team of researchers at Berkeley and USC focused on digital youth practices. This project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, brought together 28 different researchers (led by Mimi Ito and my now deceased advisor Peter Lyman) to examine different aspects of American youth life.
As many of you know, I focused on normative teen practices and the ways in which teens engaged in networked publics. We are now prepared to share our findings.
Found Your Story, Nubby. TNX
The relationship between personality, branding and blogging.
Found Your Story, Jason Palmer. TNX
IBM has announced it will lead a US government-funded collaboration to make electronic circuits that mimic brains.
The key idea of cognitive computing is to engineer mind-like intelligent machines by reverse engineering the structure, dynamics, function and behaviour of the brain.
Found Your Story, Ray Kurzweil. TNX
The Singularity is Near. A True Story About The Future (early 2009)
At the Onset of the 21st Century, it will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil presents a view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.
Found Your Story, Thomas De Maesschalck. TNX
A report by Nemertes Research claims demand for Internet bandwidth may exceed its capacity by 2012. Last year Nemertes predicted this would occur by 2010, but the current economic crisis is expected to slow the growth of the Internet so the problem will be delayed.
Found Your Story, Steven Finch. TNX
Lycos Europe To Close Its Doors. Is This First Step to Tech Company Closures?
There have been a lot of huge companies here in the UK shut down of late because of the economic crisis, such as Woolworths, MFI and others. In the technology world there havent been too many casualties so far. However that being said, it has been reported this morning that Lycos Europe will be closing its doors. A date still hasnt been confirmed but it is rumoured to be before the end of the year.
Found Your Story, Sreejiraj Eluvangal. TNX
Google will “significantly” reduce its 10,000-odd contract workers worldwide, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Found Your Story, Issuu. TNX
Explore a world of publications by people and publishers alike. Collect, share and publish in a format designed to make your documents look their very best.
Found Your Story, Ernst-Jan Pfauth. TNX
Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis predicted that the economic downturn will boost social media. In an age where experiences are more important than expenses, social media advertising will flourish, Calacanis wrote.
Advertisers will start cutting print, outdoor, TV, and radio (probably in that order) in favor of the internet’s action-based offerings such as CPA (cost per acquisition), CPL (cost per lead), and CPC (cost per click).
Conversation Agent Valeria Maltoni foresees the same.
Found Your Story, Peter Cashmore. TNX
Nokia has debuted, in beta, a Flash application called Nokia Build. The pitch: remix your phone. You can design a 100% original Nokia 7310 Supernova cover using simple drawing tools, image uploads and a library of themes and iconography. Then, have it delivered to your door.
Much like NikeID - the site to design your own custom sneakers - this beta launch is a sign that mass personalization is here to stay.
Unfortunately for our US readers, this is one great web app that didn’t debut stateside first: this is the UK launch of Nokia Build, which originally debuted in France.
Found Your Story, Jeanne Cummings. TNX
Obama, The Billion-Dollar Man
When the 2008 campaign books are closed, the Democratic president-elect will shatter the fundraising record by coming close to, or capturing, the title of the first billion-dollar candidate.
That’s roughly how much the Obama finance team has raised for his campaign, convention, transition and Jan. 20 Inauguration events.
Found Your Story, AIMS. TNX
Engaging New Media, Challenging Old Assumptions (229 page report)
Over the last few years, the rapid growth of new media has dramatically transformed the way we communicate, live and work. In the process, new and increasingly complex social, ethical, legal and regulatory issues have emerged which society and policy makers will have to grapple with. For example, problems such as protecting children from access to harmful and inappropriate content, Internet addiction and cyberbullying have become more pronounced. At the macro level, issues such as how Government can continue to play a role in managing social tensions and maintaining a balance between individual expression and communal values will need to be addressed.1.2 To review these issues, the Advisory Council on the Impact of New Media on Society (AIMS) was established in April 2007. Chaired by Mr Cheong Yip Seng, formerly the Editor-in-Chief of the English and Malay Newspapers Division at Singapore Press Holdings, AIMS is made up of 13 professionals and academics from diverse backgrounds. Professor Tan Cheng Han, a Senior Counsel and the Dean of the Law Faculty at the National University of Singapore, is the Council’s deputy chairman. Annex A provides the full list of AIMS members.
Found Your Story, Lidija Davis. TNX
Obama Says Internet Key to Economic Recovery
This morning, after President-Elect Obama laid out the key parts of his economic recovery plan during his weekly address, he turned to the Internet and told the country that he intends to “renew our information superhighway.”
“It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption. Here, in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they’ll get that chance when I’m President - because that’s how we’ll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world,” he said.
Found Your Story, Sean P. Aune. TNX
2008 on the Web: The 20 Key Events
Found Your Story, Daniel J. Wakin. TNX
YouTube’s Got Talent: Putting together an online symphony orchestra
The project, called the YouTube Symphony Orchestra (youtube.com/symphony), has two essential parts. The composer Tan Dun has written a four-minute piece for orchestra. YouTube users are invited to download the individual parts for their instruments from the score, record themselves performing the music, then upload their renditions. After the entrants are judged, a mash-up of all the winning parts will be created for a final YouTube version of the piece.
Found Your Story, Sarah McBride. TNX
The Way We’ll Watch
Coming soon: DVDs that let you chat with friends watching the same movie. Kiosks that burn movies while you wait. Super-crisp movies in theaters. And more.
The industry is also working on ways to easily send movies from gadget to gadget — so you might download a movie on your iPhone and stream it onto your TV.
However, really compelling holography is still 20-plus years away.
Found Your Story, Om Malik. TNX
In response to a post by Steve Hodson, “Is Social Media Becoming a Social Mess?,” Elliot Ng said something that resonated with me deeply, even more than the valid question being asked by the original post.
“My problem with social media is that it is heavily focused on itself. Tweeting about Twitter. Blogging about blogging. You know what this reminds me of? The house of cards that our friends in Washington and Wall Street have created. Mortgages sliced and diced and resold many times… This is exactly what the social media community is doing. Reverberating from one tool to the other. Reaggregating onto aggregator services.”
Found Your Story, Stephen Mihm. TNX
Econobloggers to the Rescue (Title from Stephen Kinsella)
When Secretary Henry Paulson demanded Congress cough up three quarters of a trillion dollars to buy up bad assets, submitting next to nothing to make his case, a sprawling network of experts in economics and finance began picking apart the Paulson plan - live, in public, on blogs.
This wasn’t a bunch of hacks howling from the sidelines. Their numbers included some of the nation’s top academic economists, such as Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, and Tyler Cowen, along with a host of financial-industry insiders who actually knew a great deal about credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and all the other esoteric instruments at the heart of the crisis.
As the bailout plan unfolded, the bloggers offered historical context along with cutting critiques of the proposal. More important still, they offered counterproposals: direct capital injections into banks, for example, or direct purchases of mortgages. Many of their readers began badgering their senators and representatives to oppose the plan. A few weeks later, Congress rebuffed Paulson, sending shockwaves through global financial markets.
Though it’s still unclear how much credit the blogs can take for shaping Washington’s response to the crisis, it’s already evident that policy makers charged with monitoring and fixing the markets are no longer operating alone. A fast-moving, highly informed economics blogosphere now tracks and critiques their every move. The result is that this may be the first national crisis to be hashed out by experts in full public view.
Found Your Story, NokiaConversations. TNX
Nokia Maps 3.0 with Maps on Ovi - Beta Labs
Found Your Story, luiss. TNX
Messaging at Nokia World 2008
Found Your Story, TIME. TNX
President-Elect Barack Obama Time Person of the Year 2008.
Found Your Story, Claudio Schapsis. TNX
My list of Location Based Social Networking sites
Found Your Story, Steve Rubel. TNX
According to Basex, a research firm, information overload cost the U.S. economy $900 billion per year in “lowered employee productivity and reduced innovation.”
Now Basex has created a a free, Web-based “information overload calculator” so that anyone can now can estimate the dollar impact of the Attention Crash on their own business.
Found Your Story, The Economist. TNX
The way the brain buys
Retailers are making breakthroughs in understanding their customers’ minds. Here is what they know about you . . .
Found Your Story, Ted Dziuba. TNX
There Will Be No Web 3.0
The recession reached its hand into Silicon Valley’s now lukewarm tub and yanked the plug. It’s still draining out, and I wish it would go faster, because there are just too many fucking people in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’m talking about you, guy in your Prius taking the left hand turn on to Middlefield Road too slowly. Leave, now. And don’t come back. Bonus points for wrapping your expression of environmental consciousness around a tree. Be one with nature.
Found Your Story, Gregory Schmidt. TNX
Broadway’s Marketing Turns Interactive
The bright lights of Broadway draw millions of people to New York’s theater district every year, but having a celebrity’s name on a marquee does not always guarantee a full house. So to fill more seats, theater producers are turning to MySpace to make a few new friends.
Found Your Story, Shrekster. TNX
SHREKSTER is an online social network where theatre fans can:
CONNECT with and learn about friends and other cool “characters”
CREATE a photo profile with full privacy control
INTERACT with other theatre fans from Far, Far Away
JOIN and create friend groups and take fun quizzes
Found Your Story, Noah Berger. TNX
Amateurs are trying genetic engineering at home
The Apple computer was invented in a garage. Same with the Google search engine. Now, tinkerers are working at home with the basic building blocks of life itself.
Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering — a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories.
Found Your Story, Procrustes. TNX
Of course, the blogosphere in 2009 will show an increasing amount of Obama bashing. The RBO blog (RealBarackObama) is an early example.
Found Your Story, Dennis Bournique. TNX
The Third Largest Social Network on the Web [Hi5] Goes Mobile
Found Your Story, Peter Kim. TNX
Social Media Predictions 2009
Fourteen great minds on social media have shared thoughts on what 2009 may have in store for us. For instance:
“The tipping point has not only *not* been reached, but could still tilt *away* from Social Media.” - Todd Defren
Found Your Story, Jessica Buchsbaum. TNX
Generation Y Goes to Work
According to a recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company of The Economist, Net Geners place more emphasis on personal recommendations than on brands when deciding which products and services to buy. Hence the importance of hanging on to clever youngsters who have grown up with Facebook, MySpace and so forth, and who know how best to create buzz among their peers.
Net Geners who find themselves out of a job are likely to use the same know-how to create a buzz about themselves so they can find another one. Charlotte Gardner, a 25-year-old Californian who was made redundant by a financial-services firm in November, has since been using online job and social-networking sites, as well as micro-blogging services such as Twitter, to promote her skills to potential employers. Ms Gardner, who is optimistic she will find another job soon, describes herself as “a glue kid”—someone who can get different kinds of people to work well together.
Firms battling through the recession will need plenty of “glue managers” who can persuade Net Geners to stick around and work with their colleagues on important projects. They will need to provide regular feedback to young staff on what is happening in the workplace and why—as well as plenty of coaching on their performance.
Found Your Story, Mark Ward. TNX
3D films may soon no longer be the sole province of movie studios with big budgets.
Found Your Story, Alice Lipowicz. TNX
Joining a handful of other federal agencies with an official presence on YouTube, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has established a channel on the popular Web site to publicize its disaster-recovery efforts in video format.
Found Your Story, Nathan Hodge. TNX
Gaza War’s New Front: Facebook
Israel, at first glance, seems to be dominating the information war over Gaza. The Israeli government has launched a campaign to dominate the blogosphere: Pro-Israel hackers are waging cyberwar against Hamas, and the Israeli military has kept the international press off the battlefield.
But as the Financial Times notes, social networking site Facebook has become an important venue in the Arab world for protesting the Israeli campaign, as well as a potent fundraising tool for supporters of the Palestinian cause.
Found Your Story, Pieter Ugille & Karin Raeymaeckers. TNX
A bottom-up revolution? The rise of citizen journalism and prosumers.
Found Your Story, Edelman. TNX
Barack Obama’s Social Media Toolkit
Barack Obama won the presidency in a landslide victory (by a margin of nearly 200 electoral votes and 8.5 million popular votes) by converting everyday people into engaged and empowered volunteers, donors and advocates through social networks, e-mail advocacy, text messaging and online video. The campaign’s proclivity to online advocacy is a major reason for his victory.
Since the election, the social media programs adopted by Obama’s transition team have foreshadowed significant changes in how Obama, as president, will communicate with - and more importantly - through the mass of supporters who were collected, cultivated and channeled during the campaign. Obama wants to be the first president to govern with BlackBerry in hand; he will certainly be the first with a legion of 13 million advocates at his fingertips.
Found Your Story, DigiWorld Summit 2008.TNX
Traditional media audience still above Internet audience . . . except among the 15-24.
Found Your Story, Online Journalism Blog. TNX
I limit who I follow on Twitter because otherwise I struggle to keep track of conversations and I find a busy feed too distracting. I know I can use an app like Tweetdeck (which I love) to filter and group followers which would enable me to read what’s ‘important’ and discard/ignore what’s not, but given I frequently access Twitter on my mobile phone, that doesn’t solve the problem of being overwhelmed by thousands of people’s tweets.
Found Your Story, DLD2009. TNX
Interactive democracy or the new Videocracy. Report and comparison of U.S. and Germany.
Found Your Story, Nonsociety. TNX
Meet lifecasters Julia (dating columnist), Meghan (geekette) and Mary (style snob). They are on the Web since last July. Nonsociety is sponsored by Kodak and Cisco.
Found Your Story, Rupert Neate and Rowena Mason. TNX
Facebook is planning to exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150m members by creating one of the world’s largest market research databases.
In an attempt to finally monetise the social networking site, once valued at $15bn (£10.4bn), it will soon allow multinational companies to selectively target its members in order to research the appeal of new products.
Found Your Story, Microsoft. TNX
Microsoft following Apple’s Mobile Me with My Phone.
My Phone syncs information between your mobile phone and the web.
Found Your Story, Randall Stross. TNX
Consumers are increasingly avoiding newspapers — and books, too — because the text mode is now used so infrequently that it can feel like a burden. People are showing a clear preference for a fully formed video experience that comes ready to play on a screen, requiring nothing but our passive attention.
The video mode has been reinforced by the rise of YouTube. In December, almost 100 million viewers in the United States watched 5.9 billion YouTube videos, according to comScore. Tellingly, YouTube has not cannibalized TV viewership — it has instead carved out another chunk of our leisure time for video on a screen.
Found Your Story, Michael Chui, Andy Miller, and Roger P. Roberts. TNX
Over the past two years, McKinsey has studied more than 50 early adopters to garner insights into successful efforts to use Web 2.0 as a way of unlocking participation. We have surveyed, independently, a range of executives on Web 2.0 adoption. Our work suggests the challenges that lie ahead. To date, as many survey respondents are dissatisfied with their use of Web 2.0 technologies as are satisfied. Many of the dissenters cite impediments such as organizational structure, the inability of managers to understand the new levers of change, and a lack of understanding about how value is created using Web 2.0 tools. We have found that, unless a number of success factors are present, Web 2.0 efforts often fail to launch or to reach expected heights of usage. Executives who are suspicious or uncomfortable with perceived changes or risks often call off these efforts. Others fail because managers simply don’t know how to encourage the type of participation that will produce meaningful results.
Wat een prachtig archief zijn jullie aan het aanleggen. Wat gaat er mee gebeuren?
Found Your Story, AdAge. TNX
NBC’s Brian Williams Lampoons Digital Media Hype
Do you sometimes think the hype about digital media has gotten totally out of control? So does NBC Night News anchor Brian Williams. Speaking at the recent Ad Council Public Service Awards ceremony, he lampooned the digital geek-speak that so often ignores the realities of traditional media.
Found Your Story, Mediamatic. TNX
Apparently it’s just Great To Be Dead these days.
Visit this Amsterdam exposition on digitality & afterlife.
Found Your Story, Barack Obama. TNX
Your Money at Work
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be carried out with full transparency and accountability — and Recovery.gov is the centerpiece of that effort. In a short video, President Obama describes the site and talks about how you’ll be able to track the Recovery Act’s progress every step of the way.
Found Your Story, Daniel Lyons. TNX
Old Media Strikes Back
Hulu, founded by NBC and Fox, has become a better moneymaker than Web darling YouTube. The moral: better content wins.
Found Your Story, Prachi Patel-Predd. TNX
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst have found a simple way to coat square inches of substrate with block copolymers. The highly ordered pattern formed by the copolymers could be used to create hard disks with 10 terabits squeezed into a square inch.
Found Your Story, Alex Wright. TNX
“Most search engines try to help you find a needle in a haystack but what we’re trying to do is help you explore the haystack.”
“The crawlable Web is the tip of the iceberg,” says Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix (www.kosmix.com), a Deep Web search start-up whose investors include Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon.com. Kosmix has developed software that matches searches with the databases most likely to yield relevant information, then returns an overview of the topic drawn from multiple sources.
Found Your Story, Clever Zebra. TNX
Virtual Worlds for Business is a continuously updated, comprehensive guide to enterprise virtual worlds for meetings, training and collaborative work.
Found Your Story, Demoscene.TV. TNX
Demo-scene can be defined as a community of creative people fond of IT in the broad sense. The demoscene community cannot simply be explained with a defintion as it finds its roots in a constantly evoluting underground digital culture (hard and software, trends…)
As the Demo-scene is way too unknown from the public, ADAN (Association pour le Développement de l’Art Numérique) strives to share and diffuse all creators artworks via Demoscene TV. We offer a video stream and associated services to allow groups from the digital scene to broadcast their creations.
Found Your Story, Darren Murph. TNX
If you thought Chumby would stop at digital photo frames, you were wrong. Dead wrong. Today, the widget-loving company has announced a tie-up with Broadcom that will integrate its rich media internet platform onto system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions that will eventually find their way into HDTVs, set-top-boxes and Blu-ray players. Essentially, Chumby is making sure it doesn’t miss out on the quickly filling insert-your-connected-device-here bandwagon, and quite frankly, we’ll be shocked if any of those other guys can rival what Chumby’s bringing. After all, widgets are this company’s forte, and we’re downright giddy at the thought of having over 1,000 internet-connected snippets of information at our fingertips while intently watching future episodes of Lie To Me. Hey, TV / STB makers — jump on this. Now.
Found Your Story, Emily Singer. TNX
Cyborg beetle: by equipping a giant flower beetle with a processor and implanting electrodes that deliver electrical jolts to its brain and to its wing muscles, scientists have created a living machine whose flight can be wirelessly controlled.
Found Your Story, Ionut Arghire. TNX
LG Electronics will demonstrate the world’s first market-ready Touch Watch Phone and the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The new LG-GD910 comes with 3G Video Telephony (VT) service and GSM Network capabilities, and was first announced at the Consumer Electronics Show about a month ago.
Found Your Story, Socialmedia8. TNX
Case Study of Effectiveness:
The Barack Obama Campaign
Found Your Story, Marketingfacts. TNX
Microsoft’s future of technology in business:
PPT
video
Found Your Story, Duck Duck Go. TNX
Duck Duck Go is an Internet search engine that makes it easier to find the information you’re looking for. When you search a topic, in addition to links, we provide a synopsis of that topic with zero clicks.
Duck Duck Go also gives you links to related topics, news, and images on the same page. And because our search results draw from human-edited sources like Wikipedia, they have significantly less spam and clutter.
Found Your Story, Bill Johnston. TNX
The State of Online Community 2008 : Key Findings from the Online Community Research Network
Found Your Story, NeuroSky. TNX
The Force Trainer (expected to be priced at $90 to $100) comes with a headset that uses brain waves to allow players to manipulate a sphere within a clear 10-inch-tall training tower, analogous to Yoda and Luke Skywalker’s abilities in the Star Wars films.
Found Your Story, Michael Marlatt. TNX
The Future of Recruiting is in the Cloud
Found Your Story, The Economic Times. TNX
Giving a new dimension to the internet, the Indian research arm of the US-based IT giant IBM has developed a technology that will allow users to talk to the web and create voice sites using mobile phones.
Found Your Story, The New York Times. TNX
Pick up your own video camera and record the memories and lessons from the generation that lived through the Great Depression.
Found Your Story, Pat Kane. TNX
The next journalism (1): a retro-futurist view from 1998
The Next Journalism (2): the citizen as co-journalist, & the joy of reading on street corners
Douglas Rushkoff puts Pat Kane in Johan Huizinga’s “Homo Ludens” (1938) tradition. In 2004 Kane’s book “The Play Ethic” was published.
Found Your Story, Blaine Cook. TNX
Chat with Twitter’s lead architect: SMS sucks!
Found Your Story, Ed Richards. TNX
On March 16 at LSE Ofcom Chief Executive Ed Richards outlined the future challenges for telecoms in an era of significant technological and economic changes, as policy-makers increasingly highlight the growing role of communications services.
Found Your Story, Peter Diamandis. TNX
Singularity in 50 years…yes or no?
Diamandis: Ha hah! No, because I think its going to happen sooner than that.
Found Your Story, Nicholas Deleon. TNX
Internet traffic drops by 33 percent in Sweden after anti-piracy law passes.
Found Your Story, Miral Fahmy. TNX
Caught Twittering or on Facebook at work? It’ll make you a better employee, according to an Australian study that shows surfing the Internet for fun during office hours increases productivity.
The University of Melbourne study showed that people who use the Internet for personal reasons at work are about 9 percent more productive that those who do not.
Study author Brent Coker, from the department of management and marketing, said “workplace Internet leisure browsing,” or WILB, helped to sharpened workers’ concentration
Found Your Story, Douglas A. McIntyre. TNX
Facebook Takes a Dive: Why Social Networks Are Bad Businesses
The business of having online sites with content created by amateurs to be viewed by other amateurs never had a reasonable chance of making money.
Social networks are bogs filled with people who are there to befriend one another, tell their stories, or voice their complaints. For those who want others to know all about them or who have unrevealed grievances about life, these are wonderful online destinations.
Found Your Story, Brad Stone. TNX
Bradley Inman wants to create great fiction, dramatic online video and compelling Twitter stream — and then roll them all into a multimedia hybrid that is tailored to the rapidly growing number of digital reading devices.
Mr. Inman, a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, calls this digital amalgam a “Vook,” (vook.tv) and the fledgling company he has created with that name just might represent a possible future for the beleaguered book industry.
Found Your Story, SocialText. TNX
Five Biggest Blunders to Avoid with Enterprise Collaboration
#1: Overlook the key point: helping people work together
#2: Assume adoption can be mandated
#3: Assume everyone works the same way
#4: Fail to liberate information
#5: Grossly underestimate Total Cost of Ownership
Found Your Story, Wokai. TNX
Wokai is a 501c3 non-profit organization that enables Chinese people to lift themselves from poverty. Wokai is Chinese for “I start,” demonstrating our commitment to helping the impoverished help themselves. Through our website, we connect contributors worldwide with entrepreneurs in rural China to help them start small businesses.
For a more detailed description, we invite you to watch this presentation that Wokai’s Co-Founder and CEO, Casey Wilson, recently gave at Google.
Found Your Story, Microsoft. TNX
June 2010: Internet to overtake traditional TV
But no death knell for TV content, as TV on the PC and other connected devices take off.
Found Your Story, Anita Hamilton. TNX
According to a new study by doctoral candidate Aryn Karpinski of Ohio State University and her co-author Adam Duberstein of Ohio Dominican University, college students who use the 200 million–member social network have significantly lower grade-point averages (GPAs) than those who do not.
Found Your Story, Hal Varian. TNX
Predicting the Present with Google Trends
Can Google queries help predict economic activity?
The answer depends on what you mean by “predict.” Google Trends and Google Insights for Search provide a real time report on query volume, while economic data is typically released several days after the close of the month. Given this time lag, it is not implausible that Google queries in a category like “Automotive/Vehicle Shopping” during the first few weeks of March may help predict what actual March automotive sales will be like when the official data is released halfway through April.
Found Your Story, Tom Glocer. TNX
“In this sort of disaggregated world, the NYT would not need a staff of hundreds to produce a fully integrated newspaper, any more than Apple needs to manufacture its own hard drives or touch screens. I imagined that to really focus on one or two core strengths that it could do better than any other publication, the Times might need 30 star journalists – the Tom Friedmans and William Safires, a couple of great editors, and then an up and coming group (or farm system) of 30 junior staff who could grow into the next generation of stars. I readily admit this would be much different from our current view of what a newspaper should look like, but ironically this alternative reality is not so far removed from that apparently described by the great Times editor Max Frankel in a memo to management several years ago (see The Inheritance Vanity Fair, May 2009).
Even if this vision of a more open and interoperable newspaper were financially viable, it will be difficult for the current generation of integrated papers to get there. I know from painful personal experience at Reuters that it is much easier to build new from zero to 60 staff than to reduce 1000 to 60. Moreover, there is no reason to believe (just because I came up with a low number to be intentionally provocative) that the “right” number is not 200 or 300. The principle, however, is the same. When I fly on American Airlines, I am actually pleased they feature Starbucks coffee rather than American Airlines coffee. I don’t want Starbucks baristas flying or maintaining the 777, but I see no reason other than inertia why every function must be staffed by “insiders.””
Found Your Story, LATFH. TNX
The LATFH photo book is Me the Media par excellence.
Found Your Story, Liz Losh. TNX
Liz also has a Virtualpolitik book out. Virtualpolitik is “An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes.”
Found Your Story, Anne Eisenberg. TNX
Earbuds can pipe audio directly from a portable player to the ear. But did you ever imagine that eyeglasses or contact lenses could deliver digital images directly from a smartphone to the retina?
Found Your Story, Paul Golding. TNX
The device interfaces available to widgets can also expose sensor information, such as location, temperature, light, and even emotion in the voice. Widgets running on our mobiles, able to access the sensor data, are hence uniquely placed to seize every aspect of the mobile moment
The medium is the moment
Not long ago, phone calls (’ring ring’), texts (’beep beep’) and the alarm clock (’brrr brrr’) were the only ways that our mobiles might ‘interrupt’ us. With Twitter and widgets, this is changing. But don’t mistake these moments as interruptions. These are the moments that make the stepping stones of our daily timeline across the ocean of people and info chatter. We weave them into our timeline and they weave us into theirs. The tools invented to seize the moment have began to define the moment.
Found Your Story, Tom McNichol. TNX
Google introduced a new feature this week it calls a “Google profile” that users can create so that a thumbnail of personal information appears at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages. Once users create a Google profile, their name, occupation, location (and photo if they choose), appears in a box on the first page of the search results for their name. Next to the thumbnail info, there’s a link to a full Google profile page that in many ways resembles a Facebook page.
Found Your Story, Ars Electronica Futurelab. TNX
Digital NewsPaper Device: video for running prototype.
Found Your Story, Wakoopa. TNX
I’m happy to announce the release of the inaugural edition of our quarterly software trends report, named The State of Apps.
Since we started with Wakoopa, we’ve acquired over 525 million hours of software usage data from 75,000 members. In total, 200,000 applications have been logged on our platform so far. Wakoopa users have also shared more than 3 million application recommendations to date.
I am interested in citizen journalism and am starting up a new localized online project called ‘The Castleknock Print Blog’ for locals in my hometown to write blog content online, rate other user blog content, give demographic profile, give feedback, and the best content wil be voyed on other readers. Finally, the best content selected by the editor, ie myself will be published in a weekly round up of the digital content distributed locally. The hard is working with other community local papers to share my thoughts with them. They are unprepared for the change happening worldwide with media journalism. I also think people will have to work with journalists and get used to being ‘citizen journalists’ as it is seen as a reporters occupation. I also think there is a generation gap with the speed and change of tech at the moment and the fundamental shift with social media and collaboration currently. It might be a more gradual transition yet.
Found Your Story, Jeremiah Owyang. TNX
The Future of the Social Web: In Five Eras
We found that technologies trigger changes in consumer adoption, and brands will follow, resulting in five distinct waves, they consist of:
1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share
2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system
3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social
4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content
5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and services
Found Your Story, Futurist. TNX
The Impact of Computing grows at a scorching pace of 78% a year
Now, I want everyone reading this to tally up all the items in their home that qualify as ‘Impact of Computing’ devices, which is any hardware device where a much more powerful/capacious version will be available for the same price in 2 years. You will be surprised at how many devices you now own that did not exist in the 80s or even the 90s.
Found Your Story, Julie Bort. TNX
Holographic meetings, gestures as mouse clicks and the Microsoft magic wand
WebEx is almost barbarbic. Microsoft would much rather see us all engaging in something more civilized, such as holographic office meetings. Earlier this month, Microsoft applied for a patent for “Virtual Office Devices” which would allow users to have meetings with holographic images of other, remote attendees.
Fould Your Story, Nick Douglas. TNX
BOOK: Twitter Wit, Fall09. Written by prolific blogger Nick Douglas, who told the Chicago Tribune that he received a five-figure contract for the book.
Found Your Story, Walt Mossberg & Kara Swisher. TNX
Web 3.0 and the Econalypse
First, though, a few words about the elephant in the ballroom: The Great Recession. Or, as we like to call it on the AllThingsD.com Web site: The Econalypse. We started work on launching D during the last tech bust, and we believed then that — despite the very real economic woes afflicting the industry — the digital tidal wave sweeping the world wasn’t stopping. In fact, it was during that last recession that the iPod, iTunes, Windows XP, Mac OS X and early social networking services, like Friendster and LinkedIn, were born.
Found Your Story, Charles Woodward. TNX
Augmented and Mixed Reality – Virtual and Mirror Worlds
Found Your Story, Project Natal. TNX
No Strings (or Controllers) Attached.
Introducing Project Natal, a revolutionary new way to play: no controller required. See a ball? Kick it, hit it, trap it or catch it. If you know how to move your hands, shake your hips or speak you and your friends can jump into the fun — the only experience needed is life experience.
Found Your Story, Claudia Hess. TNX
Dissertation: Trust-based Recommendations in Multi-layer Networks, notably pp. 35-63 on Trust Networks.
Found Your Story, Rob Speekenbrink. TNX
Get Real! Reflections on Trustworthy Virtuality - Part 2
Found Your Story, Ivana Borovnjak. TNX
Real Virtuality.
Found Your Story, Wilson da Silva. TNX
IMAGINE A FUTURE where engineers build a computer with greater-than-human intelligence. This hyper-intelligent being expands its knowledge and brainpower exponentially over days and weeks as it learns how to improve on its own hardware and software design. It starts building ‘offspring’ even smarter than itself.
Found Your Story, John Fontana. TNX
IBM/Lotus released a 3D virtual environment conferencing service complete with avatars and whiteboards as part of its Sametime line of real-time collaboration software. The company also said it will introduce LotusLive Connections, a hosted version of its social software, including instant messaging, file sharing and activities.
“We are putting social networking in the cloud,” said Bob Picciano, general manager of IBM Lotus Software.
Found Your Story, Orson Welles/Alvin Toffler. TNX
A little known documentary based on the book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. The movie came out in 1972 and features Orson Welles as the narrator.
Found Your Story, Paul Harris. TNX
A sexy saga of Facebook’s birth - but is it fantasy? A Jackie Collins-style romp that claims to expose the secrets of the Harvard students who made billions from social networking is set to become a major movie.
Found Your Story, DoD. TNX
Now it’s getting real: U.S. DoD on Facebook.
Found Your Story, David Ricketts. TNX
Fidelity Investments and Deutsche Bank, which have also established a Twitter presence, have so far failed to post any updates, Mr Enskat points out.
He adds: “We see these new communication tools as low-cost high-impact ways of reaching distributors, clients and the broader public, specifically for product development and distribution.”
Managers in the US and Europe are prohibited from posting material that could be deemed as giving financial advice. This, in turn, has an effect on what messages can be relayed via social networking sites.
European managers using social networks could soon face added regulatory pressure.
An independent advisory group to the European Commission, known as the Article 29 Working Group, is calling for more stringent regulation of social networks in order to protect users’ data.
Found Your Story, Twitter Status. TNX
Earlier today (July 5, 2009), we accidentally suspended a number of accounts.
We regret the human error that led to these mistaken suspensions and we are working to restore the affected accounts—we expect this to be completed in the next several hours.
One additional note: some the accounts suspended were using the third-party site Tweetlater. However, Tweetlater is not to blame for these suspensions nor is it in violation of our Terms.
Found Your Story, Brian Stelter. TNX
Rise of Web Video, Beyond 2-Minute Clips
New Web habits, aided by the screen-filling video that faster Internet access allows, are now debunking the rule. As the Internet becomes a jukebox for every imaginable type of video — from baby videos to “Masterpiece Theater” — producers and advertisers are discovering that users will watch for more than two minutes at a time.
The viral videos of YouTube 1.0 — dog-on-skateboard and cat-on-keyboard — are being supplemented by a new, more vibrant generation of online video. Production companies are now creating 10- and 20-minute shows for the Internet and writing story arcs for their characters — essentially acting more like television producers, while operating far outside the boundaries of a network schedule.
Some are specifically introducing new shows this month with the knowledge that TV networks generally show repeats and reality shows over the summer.
Found Your Story, Kevin Anderson. TNX
Web pioneer launches fund, pulls back curtain on Facebook
Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen reveals that Facebook is on track to generate $500m in revenues this year and predicts it could earn billions in five years
Marc Andreessen, who with Eric Bina developed the seminal web browser Mosaic, has launched a $300m venture capital fund with his partner Ben Horowitz.
They plan to invest $50,000 to $50m depending on the stage of development of the company, which spans the range from angel investor to major player. They are quite clear about what they are planning.
They are looking to invest in “consumer Internet, business Internet (cloud computing, “software as a service”), mobile software and services, software-powered consumer electronics, infrastructure and applications software, networking, storage, databases, and other back-end systems”.
They are not looking to invest in “‘clean’, ‘green’, energy, transportation, life sciences (biotech, drug design, medical devices), nanotech, movie production companies, consumer retail, electric cars, rocket ships, space elevators.” In a refreshingly candid admission, they say, “We do not have the first clue about any of these fields.”
That’s all interesting, and Andreessen has a great track record of success, first with Netscape, which AOL bought for $4.2bn in 1998, and then with data automation company Opsware, which HP bought for $1.6bn in 2007.
More interesting than the launch itself is that Andreessen and Horowitz are giving a round of interviews and revealing financial details about some of our most popular topics here at PDA, Twitter and Facebook.
• Twitter has spent $15m to acquire about 30m users, he told TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy. Twitter has raised about $55m in total. If $15m is all it has spent to get where it’s at, then it has plenty of cash.
• Twitter needs to focus not on making money but on improving the service to prevent others from encroaching on their market, he told Lacy. In an interview with Reuters, Andreessen and Horowitz said said that MySpace focused “on selling advertisements — to contribute to News Corp’s bottom line — and not enough on developing the platform, leaving room for Facebook to come in and take market share”.
• Facebook has never disclosed its financials, but in the interview with Reuters, Andreessen confirmed previously reported numbers that it will gross about $500m this year. In five years, it will be generating billions in revenue he predicted. The social networking site could generate a billion this year if they adopted a single-minded focus on revenue.
If the image of conservatively run companies with plenty of cash to burn is accurate, then it would mean that the companies learned lessons from their dot.com era predecessors. Spending was profligate during the dot.com boom, with cash burn rates in the millions, often for only short-term gain. In 2000, I knew that the party would soon be over when companies were launching a second round of funding just to pay $25m for a 30-second ad spot during the Super Bowl.
With the recession biting into advertising revenue and making funding difficult to secure for all but the strongest companies, many companies will have to adopt this conservative approach to weather the next year. Andreessen has a vested interest in presenting a positive view of these companies, but with little other information about these two companies, this is the closest we have to a financial report.
Found Your Story, The Guardian. TNX
Unsurpising MediaGuardian 100 2009
Found Your Story, Abbey Klaassen. TNX
What’s Your Brand’s Social Score? Razorfish, Ogilvy Test Model of Business Health Based on Net Promoter.
Found Your Story, Patricio Robles. TNX
Why real-time on the consumer internet isn’t the real deal.The buzz in the consumer internet right now is real-time. Twitter and Facebook have put the spotlight on real-time but now tech giants like Google and Microsoft are giving real-time the time of day.
Found Your Story, Guardian. TNX
Digital Natives Concept Flawed
As comScore’s Sarah Radwanick pointed out, as technology becomes more common, teens and college students aren’t the only people in the population that can be considered “technologically inclined”. She said:
…trends are much more prone to take off in older age segments than they used to.
It challenges the idea that the youth are the only people who are “digital natives”. Charlie Beckett, director of journalism think tank POLIS at the London School of Economics, challenges the whole idea of the digital native.
Found Your Story, Michael Josefowicz. TNX
‘Printernet’ Vision Brings Custom Print Publications to Masses
Imagine networked desktop publishing where the desktops and printers are spread throughout the whole world. Publishing means newspapers, newsletters, books and posters in mass market quantities, but versioned and personalized for specific communities and individual users.
From the point of view of a writer, it would be easier than ever to see your story in print. If you’re a publisher, it means an efficient way to move from the web to print products that can attract advertising. If you are an advertiser, it means one more mass media with a low carbon footprint, unparalleled reach and a clear way to know if it’s working. For the citizen, it means the world as bookstore.
In the jargon of networks, this so-called “printernet” can have the same benefits as the Internet — massive parallel manufacturing with standards-based interfaces, real time production information and easy access for everyone. Each printer — the combination of the machinery and the intelligence that manages the machinery — is a print output node.
Found Your Story, Roberto Rocha. TNX
Montreal Gazette featured Maggie Jackson’s alarming bestseller “Distracted. The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age” in a piece on the first-ever Information Overload Awareness Day (August 12, 2009).
Found Your Story, Isabel Walcott Hilborn. TNX
Supernova Interview: David Weinberger on The Cluetrain Manifesto 10th Anniversary Edition
Thanks! Good news
Thanks!
Found Your Story, Elizabeth Bernstein. TNX
How Facebook Ruins Friendships
Like many people, I’m experiencing Facebook Fatigue. I’m tired of loved ones—you know who you are—who claim they are too busy to pick up the phone, or even write a decent email, yet spend hours on social-media sites, uploading photos of their children or parties, forwarding inane quizzes, posting quirky, sometimes nonsensical one-liners or tweeting their latest whereabouts. [...] It’s what we are actually saying that’s really mucking up our relationships. “Oh my God, a college friend just updated her Facebook status to say that her ‘teeth are itching for a flossing!’” shrieked a friend of mine recently. “That’s gross. I don’t want to hear about what’s going on inside her mouth.”
Found Your Story, Phil Stewart. TNX
President Barack Obama warned American teenagers of the dangers of putting too much personal information on Internet social networking sites, saying it could come back to haunt them in later life. The presidential words of advice follow recent studies that suggest U.S. employers are increasingly turning to sites such as Facebook and News Corp’s MySpace to conduct background checks on job applicants.
Found Your Story, IBM & National Geographic. TNX
A Landmark Study of the Human Journey
IBM and National Geographic have designed the Genographic Project to help answer the fundamental questions about human migration. Where did we come from? And how did we get here?
Your friends may be closer to you than you think. Opt-in for a Friendship DNA match.
Found Your Story, ExperimentaDesign (EXD/’09). TNX
World 2.0
A better future, by design: The considerable environmental cost of development , and the attendant climate change consequences, means that in order to save the planet we have to almost re-design it from the ground up – and this will affect the buildings we inhabit, the cars we drive and the industrial processes our companies engage in.
In fact, over the next 40 years, we will have to develop a World 2.0 – a fundamental over-arching movement to reshape the world– and this would place design as one of the most important disciplines in business and Academia – coupled with a green consciousness. And so, innovators are in hurry to fast-track World 2.0. Witness the advent of the X-Prize – which has put up a $10 million award to the innovator that develops the first commercially viable 100 mile per gallon car! Incremental change is not good enough for these guys – they want radical, frame-breaking change that could change the course of the planet over the next few decades.
Found <a href=”“>Your Story, Vook. TNX
The Vook Team is pleased to announce the launch of our first vooks, all published in partnership with Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. These four titles—Promises, a romance by Jude Deveraux, The 90 Second Fitness Solution, a fitness book by Pete Cerqua, Embassy, a thriller by Richard Doetsch and Return to Beauty, a health book by Narine Nikogosian—elegantly realize Vook’s mission: to blend a book with videos into one complete, instructive and entertaining story.
Hey, I found your blog in a new directory of blogs. I dont know how your blog came up, must have been a typo, anyway cool blog, I bookmarked you.
Found Your Story, Shawn Dawson. TNX
“Putting the Me into Media” is a practical “Me the Media” predecessor from 2003.
Found Your Story, Claire Cain Miller and Brad Stone. TNX
Silicon Valley may have discovered the perfect business: charging real money for products that do not exist. These so-called virtual goods, like a $1 illustration of a Champagne bottle on Facebook or the $2.50 Halloween costume in the online game Sorority Life, are no more than a collection of pixels on a Web page.
But it is quickly becoming commonplace for people to spend a few dollars on them to get ahead in an online game or to give a friend a gift on a social network.
Found Your Story, Emmanuel Gobillot. TNX
Interesting new roundup by Mr. Gobillot:
“The average email user will receive 65,000 messages this year alone. More than 300,000 books are published every year. The average weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than someone would have come across in his or her lifetime in 17th-century England. 40 exabytes (one exabyte is 1018 bytes) of unique information is produced in a year – more than was produced in the previous 5,000 years. A typical supermarket stocks around 40,000 items. Pieces of direct mail to hit letterboxes in the US every year number 87.2 billion. You can access more than two billion web pages. Internet traffic doubles every hundred days. It is estimated that the internet is 500 times larger than the 91 million daily Google searches can ever show.”
Found Your Story, Michael Specter. TNX
Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives
In this provocative and headline-making book, Michael Specter confronts the widespread fear of science and its terrible toll on individuals and the planet.
The issues may be complex but the choices are not: Are we going to continue to embrace new technologies, along with acknowledging their limitations and threats, or are we ready to slink back into an era of magical thinking? In Denialism, Specter makes an argument for a new Enlightenment, the revival of an approach to the physical world that was stunningly effective for hundreds of years: What can be understood and reliably repeated by experiment is what nature regarded as true. Now, at the time of mankind’s greatest scientific advances-and our greatest need for them-that deal must be renewed.
Found Your Story, Microsoft Research. TNX
The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery
Presenting the first broad look at the rapidly emerging field of data-intensive science
Increasingly, scientific breakthroughs will be powered by advanced computing capabilities that help researchers manipulate and explore massive datasets.
The speed at which any given scientific discipline advances will depend on how well its researchers collaborate with one another, and with technologists, in areas of eScience such as databases, workflow management, visualization, and cloud computing technologies.
Found Your Story, Christine Lindberg. TNX
Have you ever removed someone from your list of friends on your Facebook, Orkut, MySpace etc. accounts? A lot of you have not only done it, but have been spreading the word “unfriend” to describe it. You’ll be happy to know that “unfriend” has been named the Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. It was chosen from a shot-listed group of tech-savvy words. For those with a grammatical bent, “unfriend” is a verb. So the related words would be “unfriends”, “unfriended”, “will unfriend”, “unfriending”.
A statement from Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program tells us that the judges believe the word has “currency and potential longevity” meaning it is widely used and is going to be around for a while. As she pointed out, it is indeed an interesting choice for Word of the Year.
Found Your Story, Guardian. TNX
When Barack Obama told students in Shanghai last week that he had never used Twitter, there were two responses. In the west, surprise from some of his 2.6 million followers. And in China, reportedly, a surge in queries on Google China: “What’s Twitter?”
Two of Twitter’s most popular local rivals – Jiwai and Fanfou – were taken offline shortly after 197 people died in clashes in Xinjiang. State media have alleged that social media “spread misinformation” and even that outsiders used them to orchestrate the violence.
Found Your Story, Salesforce. TNX
Salesforce Chatter will completely transform the way you collaborate with people in your company.* As both a collaboration application and a platform for building social cloud-computing apps, Chatter helps you connect and share information securely like never before—all in real time. Welcome to the new world of collaboration for the enterprise.
Found Your Story, Andy Beckett. TNX
The dark side of the internet
In the ‘deep web’, Freenet software allows users complete anonymity as they share viruses, criminal contacts and child pornography.
“Many many users think that when they search on Google they’re getting all the web pages,” says Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, one of a new generation of post-Google search engine companies. But Rajaraman knows different. “I think it’s a very small fraction of the deep web which search engines are bringing to the surface. I don’t know, to be honest, what fraction. No one has a really good estimate of how big the deep web is. Five hundred times as big as the surface web is the only estimate I know.”
Found Your Story, Todd Defren. TNX
Many agencies looking to capitalize on the Social Media wave decided to create specialized groups — an “agency within the agency” — to hone in on this area.
Don’t be fooled.
This Social Media stuff looks like a scary hairy mosh-pit to traditional marketers, so it’s safer, cheaper and easier to devote resources to a “separate” division.
Safer because failure is a less frightening option when confined to a small group. If the “Social Media Department” fails, it can be shut down or re-tooled without impacting the agency’s core business.
Cheaper because these agencies tend to hire one expensive rockstar and surround them with a handful of freshly-graduated (read: cheap) worker bees.
Easier because it is actually quite hard to get up-to-speed and stay current on this fast-moving Web 2.0 stuff, especially when the traditional Media Relations and Client Service work continues to be quite intensive.
Time is money. Training is arduous and expensive. Failure (especially in this economic climate) is scary as hell, especially cuz failures nowadays tend to be more public and more impactful. Betting everything on making the entire agency Social Media savvy is a tough pill to swallow.
But what is safer, cheaper and easier for the agency is rarely in the best interests of the client. In fact when you “bolt on” a specialized group of Social Media rockstars, you do a disservice to the client (short-term) but also to the rest of the agency (long-term).
Found Your Story, Jaap Bloem. TNX
DOWNLOADABLE MUST READS /1
= Outline of the U.S. Economy
= The Fourth Paradigm. Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery
= Virtual Concept > Real Profit with Digital manufacturing and Simulation
Found Your Story, Stephen Baker. TNX
Beware Social Media Snake Oil
Hordes of marketing “experts” are promoting the value of wikis, social networks, and blogs. All the hype may obscure the real potential of these online tools.
I am not a gadget girl. I am not an early adopter. I am a dinosaur. I am in love with books. I like the feel of them, the smell of them, and I am a passionate supporter of independent booksellers. I am the last person in the world who would buy a Kindle. However, Amazon likes me. They gave me a Kindle 2 as a reward for services rendered. Well, who would turn that down?
Here’s the shocker… I LOVE it! I can’t even believe how much I love my Kindle. A friend of mine wrote a detailed critique of the first Kindle, and I have to say that the new design is a vast improvement. Aside from being slimmer and sleeker, there are plenty of places to hold the device comfortably without activating any functions. The screen is easy to read off of, and I honestly believe that I can read faster on a Kindle than I do with a traditional book. I’m not sure why. Faster page turns? What I can tell you is that it’s exceedingly comfortable and easy to read off the Kindle anywhere, but especially when you have limited space-like on public transportation. You can easily hold the Kindle and turn pages with a single hand.
The Kindle has several features that could best be described as… cool. My eyesight is fine, but I can choose the font size that suits me best. Likewise, I love the text-to-speech feature. A big frustration in my life is that I can’t work on my embroidery (I’m a dinosaur, remember?) and read at the same time. Now, I can have the Kindle read to me while I stitch. Yes, it’s sort of tinny and mechanical, but it’s still a really nice option to use occasionally. In addition to reading published books, I read a lot of unpublished manuscripts. It’s not uncommon to see me schlepping around 600 pages of loosely bound paper. The other day I had the amazing experience of forwarding an email with a manuscript attached to my dedicated Kindle address. Within seconds, the entire MS was in my Kindle, formatted and ready to go. Amazing! I can even make notes on the MS in the machine.
However, possibly the best thing about the Kindle is the fact that I can get internet access for free, almost anywhere. I use it to check my email all the time now. I wouldn’t want to write a novel on the keyboard, but it’s sufficient for brief communications. Now when I go away for the weekend, I can leave my laptop at home! It also works fine for basic internet surfing.
One last thing I was unaware of is how much free or nominally-priced content there is for the Kindle. I’ve got plenty to read, and I haven’t purchased one $9.99 book yet. My first Kindle “purchases” were all free public domain titles. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle-how can you do better than that? I also read the Kindle Daily Post in the Kindle store religiously. You never know when you’ll be offered free content like a back-listed Lee Child novel or some contemporary fantasy. Other authors such as Boyd Morrison and J.A. Konrath are offering novels at prices ranging from $1 to $2 dollars, as a way to find new readers. One more favorite is the free Amazon Daily blog, which is like a fun, timely magazine with short articles that update constantly. The perfect entertainment for brief snatches of time.
No, I never would have bought a Kindle. And “real” books will still be a big part of my life, but I will never be without a Kindle again. This dinosaur is evolving.
Found Your Story, The Economist. TNX
Let it never again be said that old-media firms are slow to deal with new technology. On December 8th Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corporation and Time Inc invested in an as-yet-unnamed venture that will create and sell digital magazines and newspapers for the new generation of e-readers that is likely to succeed Amazon’s monochrome Kindle in the next year or so. It was as if a group of explorers had announced plans to settle a country that had not yet been discovered.
On the very day the publishers agreed to set up their venture, record companies launched a Hulu of sorts for music videos in America. Vevo is partly owned by Universal and Sony and licenses other content from EMI. Although it is run in conjunction with YouTube, it is intended to be a separate, cleaner world. Such is the evolving wisdom for traditional media firms that want to engage with digital technology: put some distance between your content and the dross, and make sure you have a stake in any new outfit that appears.
Found Your Story, IT Skeptic. TNX
The Crowd is not displaying much Wisdom. In fact it is displaying adolescent abandonment of basic human courtesies.
Found Your Story, danah boyd. TNX
Twitter back channel kills danah’s Web 2.0 Expo speech
The Twitter stream was initially upset that I was talking too fast. My first response to this was: OMG, seriously? That was it? Cuz that’s not how I read the situation on stage. So rather than getting through to me that I should slow down, I was hearing the audience as saying that I sucked. And responding the exact opposite way the audience wanted me to. This pushed the audience to actually start critiquing me in the way that I was imagining it was. And as Brady went on, he said that it started to get really rude so they pulled it to figure out what to do. But this distracted the audience and explains one set of outbursts that I didn’t understand from the stage. And then they put it back up and people immediately started swearing. More outbursts and laughter. The Twitter stream had become the center of attention, not the speaker. Not me.
Found Your Story, Pauline Jelinek. TNX
Insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan have hacked into live video feeds from Predator drones.
Found Your Story, Michael Arrington. TNX
We’ve received multiple tips right around 10 pm that Twitter was hacked and defaced with the message below. The site was offline for a while.
The message read:
Iranian Cyber Army
THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY
[email protected]
Found Your Story, Meta Collab. TNX
Meta Collab is an open research, meta collaboration (a collaboration on collaboration) with the aim to explore the similarities and differences in the nature, methods and motivations of collaboration across any and every field of human endeavour.
Found Your Story, WCIT. TNX
WITSA’s 17th World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT): the role of ICT in Challenges of Change. Amsterdam, May 2010.
Found Your Story, BBC. TNX
The BBC Trust, the corporation’s governing body, has given a provisional go-ahead for a project which could kick-start demand for internet TV.
Project Canvas is a partnership between the BBC, ITV, BT, Five, Channel 4 and TalkTalk to develop a so-called Internet Protocol Television standard.
The Trust ruled that Canvas would have a series of positive impacts, including furthering the growth of on-demand TV and increasing the opportunities for internet service providers to develop so called triple play - phone/TV/broadband - services.