von Roland Hachmann | Dez. 21, 2006 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Digital News, Marketing, Marketing Trends, Online Advertising
Some Links & News I haven’t had time to blog about in the last couple of days:
- Tim O’Reilly was interviewed by German Spiegel Online (one of my main news sources). One of the questions: would Mr. O’Reilly show the current wewb 2.0 content (and here: mainly youtube videos) to aliens, in order to show how far we’ve gotten with our civilisation… He would show Google though he said.
- Adverblog writes about Coke „invading“ YouTube with a brandchannel, where you can upload you own season greetings and send them to friends. Good idea in general… But why would you want to do that through a coke brand channel and not a standard YouTube account? They aren’t the only ones, either. Levi’s allegedly also opened a brand channel.
- Some more CGM: In Spain Pepsi asks users to design a can – the best design will actually be produced as a can and distributed across Spain.
- The new Second Life Newspaper „Avastar“ of German tabloid „Bild“ is selling for 150 Linden Dollars. This shows in some respect, that market prices in Second Life haven’t quite equilibrated yet. Just recently I bought a T-Shirt for a third of that price. The language will be english, apparently, which makes sense considering that the majority within Second Life won’t know German.
- The new book title of Joseph Jaffe will be „Join the Conversation“. This makes absolut sense considering the contents of this podcasts and blogposts, this is the (his) current topic.
- PayPerPost makes disclosure mandatory. Good. Now bloggers have to disclose if they are publishing a blogpost with brand or productreviews. This improves transparency and even though they might loose some advertisers and bloggers it should help them in the long run.
von Roland Hachmann | Dez. 18, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Social Media Marketing
Time Magazin has once again named their person of the year. But this time, it’s following the hype of web 2.0 and all that buzz around it, so the person of the year is us. The people of the internet, the bloggers, chatters, homepage designers, forum contributors, the Myspacers and Youtubers, etc. etc. Because we „control the information age“:
The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution. . . .
And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you. . . .
But at the same time, as people sit down and spend their spare time creating things they probably expected main stream media to do, there is equally a lot of crap going on, that nobody ever wanted to see:
Sure, it’s a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
I like that choice. 2006 really was the year of the social web. Not only in the US. Even in Germany („Old Europe“) web 2.0 has started to become a household buzzword. At least most of the major German newspapers had feature stories on it…
So what’s next, who can be the person of the year in 2007, if everyone has been it already in 2006? An alien?
(via)
von Roland Hachmann | Dez. 7, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital News
I love how you can manipulate or remix datasources in all sorts of ways to achieve „conclusions“ of your choice. This graph, for example shows, that apple is more successful at lower temperatures:
This is from Swivel, a new „community“ for data analysts. You can upload your own data remix, rate other people’s graphs. It’s all the web 2.0 stuff you expect but this time not for pictures, videos or other cool stuff, but rather data. Just data. And of course a lot of graphs.
So is this site of any particular use? – I don’t think so.
Will it attact huge crowds like YouTube did? – Not likely.
von Roland Hachmann | Dez. 4, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital News
TechCrunch writes about Boo.com launching again. Weren’t they the ones that „started“ the burst of the first bubble in 2000/2001?
In 1999 Boo.com, a fashion retail site, burnt through $120 million in six months […] Founded by Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander and Patrik Hedelin, Boo.com’s largest backer was Omnia, a fund backed by members of Lebanon’s wealthy Hariri family, which put nearly $40 million into the company. Over 400 staff and contractors were made redundant when Boo went into receivership in May 2000.
Is it good or bad, if they come back? Not sure, but you better watch out 😉
(hat tip)
von Roland Hachmann | Dez. 4, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Social Media Marketing
I have been into this discussion of Serendipity and Homophily for a while. I consider this an extremely interesting topic that arises with all the discussion about how digital changes information usage and value. But also personal surroundings, user behaviour, group thinking, etc. Some time ago I found an interesting post: O’Reilly Radar „Homophily in Social Software“
In short, you hang out with people who are like you, a phenomenon known as homophily. This happens online, and indeed the Internet can lower the costs of finding people like you. But homophily raises the question for social software designers of how much they should encourage homophily and how much they want to mix it up.
So the internet is – according to this sofar – the main cause of homophily:
It’s often been asked whether this filtering just encourages people to see the news that supports their prejudices and never see news that counters them.
I don’t think so. There are tips of how you can avoid that and provide more serendipity:
Doing this creates serendipity: pleasantly surprising the user. For example, don’t show just the top 10 most similar items in your recommendations list, but show the eight most similar and two from the mid-range. Or call the „less relevant but also likely to be interesting“ results out like you’re advertising them: put a heading like „Take a walk on the wild side“ or „Break out“ on top and act like it’s a feature you’re offering, not a bug you’re fixing.
I think that most platforms will do that quite well. Purely, because people are too different to have too many alike recommendations. There will always be people who add new input to the recommendation system. And secondly, this variable increase, the more likes&dislikes from other parts of life are taken into consideration. If you shop at amazon for books, but the recommendation system takes your preferences for food into account when offering books, you get to see books from people who enjoy the same type of food and read books you might never have heard or thought of…
However, just to make this complete: TechDirt doesn’t believe in technical recommendation systems, though.
And read/write web has an interview with the chief architect StumbleUpon, one of the major „serendipity engines“, if you like.
Wo ich sonst so bin...