Links & News – 30. November
The news-bytes for today:
Study Predicts Spending Shift Away From TV
video ad growth is at a tipping point
Study Predicts Spending Shift Away From TV
Links & News – 27. November
The first Links & News is all about advergames:
(all via adverblog)
Amazon with wiki and tagging
Amazon continues to set standards in e-commerce. Now they have introduced a wiki for the product descriptions. So users cannot only rate and comment the products, they can also add detail to the product features. More info and some screenshots can be found here and here.
As not all user can see this (I can’t either), this still seems to be in beta.
However, what I could see, was the link for tagging. Not sure for how long amazon.com had this, as I usually buy on amazon.de – and the German version usually gets the new features a lot later (the newest feature being: search inside the book! For how long did amazon.com have this already?)
With the tags, you can organise the amazon content your way, and:
Because people’s tags are (by default) visible to others, a great side effect of tagging is that you can navigate among items through other people’s tags. What items have people tagged „gift“ or „Tuscany“ or „robot?“
Nice concept of commercially using two feaures associated with the so called web 2.0!
Seven Digital Consumer Trends
Further to my post below there was a Clickz article about Seven Digital Consumer Trends plus some insights into what that means for marketing, etc.
(It’s from June 2006, but I only remembered about it again now.)
Individuals‘ interconnectivity is increasing. The information playing field is being leveled. Relevance filtering is growing. Niche aggregation is growing. Micropublished self-expression is blossoming. The „prosumer“ is rising. It’s on-demand everything, everywhere.
What that means?
They’re better informed through the increased ability to access and sift an abundance of information anytime, anywhere. They’re better connected through the ability to instantaneously communicate with others across time zones and social strata. They’re more communicative through the ability to publish and share their ideas and opinions. They’re more in control through the ability not only to personalize their information and entertainment consumption, marketing messages, and the products and services they buy, but also to gain satisfaction on demand.
As this evolution continues, marketers are faced with a growing number of challenges to acquire, satisfy, and keep their target customers. They must rethink their approach to brand communications.
Splogs cluttering the blogosphere and the web.
First, Google did great things in helping everyone find relevant information on the web. Now it is one of those helping to add clutter. The blog-provider blogger.com, acquired by Google some time ago, is one of those blogservices enabling splogs. Within the across the Sound Podcast, Steve Rubel also mentions this upcoming problem. There is a couple of stories about this, here, here and here.
The move was designed to doctor search results and boost traffic to those sites by fooling the search-engine spiders that crawl the Web looking for commonly linked-to destinations.
Email spam is bad, as it clogs up user’s email box and make it difficult for marketers to send even permission based emails, as these might not be opened either.
Splogs don’t affect users directly (apart from those subscribed to certain RSS feeds). But it can have a large negative impact on the blogosphere (and consumer generated media, as Steve puts it), as well as information access. As the quote above says, it’s about fooling searchengines and hence distorting searchengine results in the favour of the splogged (ie linked to) websites.
If a bot creates a couple of fake blogs all linking to a site for, say, Viagra, tagged with „pharmaceutical“ and other tags, then this will have a high position within a search for pharmaceuticals. Even though the user will (probably) have searched for more objective information.
Technorati writes, that 2% – 8% of new weblogs are fake or spam weblogs.
So this might indeed have a direct impact for users. If good information cannot be found as easily any more because of bad information, because the search results show too many splogged sites, then the whole concept of the web as a medium for quickly finding relevant information is in danger.
So what can be done?
First option: filter blogs from search results. But this is not really what the search engines will want (remember Yahoo! integrating blogs into news search results). This would kill most consumer generated media and put the web back to where it was 5 years ago. Not to mention of the loss of valuable information that quite a few bloggers provide!
second option: make it impossible for the bots to open blogs automatically. There must be a technical solution for this, Google!!
btw, Fightsplog wants to take action, so go there an help (if you can).
Making meta (mobile) search more convenient: Gada.Be
Sean, (whom I don’t know personally, but happens to a friend of a friend of mine (Ace)) pointed to the fact that a cool meta search engine is live: gada.be
Most notable benefits:
– since you enter the search terms as part of the URL, you can bookmark regular search items (if you regular search for a certain word, you can bookmark http://word.gada.be)
– as the search term is part of the URL, it is much more convenient when entering the URL through a mobile phone.
– it’s a meta search. So it returns results from Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. all at once.
(More infos here, here and here.)
And of course (and not least), the blog post of the originator of all this.
Wo ich sonst so bin...