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.
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