Cool idea. At Experience Curve I found something about the site iWait, where you can either offer to wait for someone in a line, or alternatively bid for this someone to wait for you in line. It apparently became very relevant for some people during the iPhone launch last Friday…
Steve Rubel writes about communities – online or offline, virtual or real, and there is one key point that I really agree with:
This is just the beginning, however. The most exciting moments will come when online communities are increasingly used to foster offline connections. That’s the big idea behind Meetup.com, for example, and why it’s thriving. It’s also why eBay Live and Gnomedex (and soon Techcrunch 20) are very successful events.
Robert Basic pionts me to a map of the online communities of this world. Nice idea. The size of the „Nations“ represents the size of the memberbase. So Yahoo! and Windows Live are the icy north, while AOL is a small country right in the middle of it… Maybe I should print it out, so I can always see where I got lost when wilfinging…
(Click on the map to see a larger version)
Micro Persuasion points me to a piece of research about the fact that:
The online world is just as important as the real world, feel a large portion of internet users in the United States. […] 43 per cent of internet users who are members of online communities „feel as strongly“ about their virtual community as their real world community.
I wonder if those figures are similar in Germany or Europe in general. What also means, especially for us marketers: build a strong community around your brand (in any way possible: blogs, forums, etc.) and you should – in theory – reach a certain level of relevance and „feel strongly“-factor for your brand.
ZDNet writes about Swicki tapping communities for search and really describes a new way of making search more relevant. This is the question most search engines are currently trying to solve and the model of Swicki seems to be similar to Rollyo:
„Rollyo offers the ability to search the content of a list of specified websites, allowing you to narrow down the results to pages from websites that you already know and trust.“
… but then again, not quite. Since they don’t only allow for predefined filters, but also measure user behaviour to identify which results will be relevant in the future. This also what might differentiate them from Google: it’s not just about what people „voted for“ by placing a link but also about what they actually visited.
Swickis combine Web crawling with filters defined by site owners and algorithms that analyze user behavior (keywords and pages accessed) anonymously and automatically, re-ranking results based on the community’s search actions.
(Just as I typed this I thought: who knows, if Google isn’t already measuring our behaviour anyway? – I mean, how would we be able to tell? In theory, they can measure our clicks on the pages of the search results – but in addition they can track us on any page that has Google Adsense Advertising – which would mean a lot of pages across the hit- and niche-websites of the web.)
Seems to be an interesting tool – if I have some time over the weekend, I might start my own Swicki search in this blog…
Wo ich sonst so bin...