LINKS FROM August 2006
Facets of Facets, Tagclouds And Trust
"As we develop a literacy for tagclouds, they let us peek inside a person’s mind. We get more out of these clouds than just an idea of a person’s reading- and classifying habits. Tagclouds are inspiring. They contain hints."
Tags: tags identity tagclouds attention trust
They run the fastest-growing Web site on the planet. They have 100 million friends. Not bad for two guys who just wanted a place to hang out.
Tags: myspace business socialnetworking community
"Sites like GigaOm and TechCrunch are rushing to list help-wanted ads, but is there room for all?"
Tags: jobs longtail business trend
Marketing Cannot Cover Up for Company Shortcomings
About Renegade suggesting to a potential client that they fess up to their less-than honest ways rather than pretend everything's dandy with a new campaign. (I'm quoted.)
Tags: business marketing rmg trend customerservice
what brands can learn from colbert and lonelygirl15
Influx hits us with the five rules of new media.
Tags: media2.0 business marketing video
Avoid the myths, find a good niche
"The trick isn't to fill up a niche. It's to fill up a customer."
7 things I learned at wieden and kennedy (portland edition)
Russell Davies reflects on the advertising industry.
Tags: advertising business branding design management planning tips
Why marketing should make the user manuals!
"What if we stopped making the docs we give away for free SO much nicer than the ones the user paid for? What if instead of seducing potential users to buy, we seduced existing users to learn?"
Tags: business marketing passion trend
"Winning� isn’t a zero sum game. This isn’t a 100 yard dash or a boxing match or a F1 race. It’s building a sustainable business. There’s lots of room for lots of those."
Tags: business entrepreneur longtail
Opening Space for Emerging Order
"Open Space Technology, as a definable approach to organizing meetings has been in existence for somewhat more than a dozen years."
Tags: emergence organization meetings conference productivity
Three Ways to Ride the Long Tail
Steve Rubel offers some tips for marketers to ride the long tail: Rethink reach, fund niches and demand more from media.
Tags: longtail marketing business
What Ever Happened to Half.com, Oregon?
The story of the town that Half.com paid to change its name in 1999.
Jobs Boards: A shotgun or a rifle?
"But if you want to hire the right person then you’ll need to do something different to reach that person. You need to hang out where they hang out. You need to like what they like. You need to aim accurately."
"Much of avant-nerdism has borrowed from what Wasik calls 'the idea that you can take connections that exist online and suddenly actualize them in this kind of real-world physical way, among the uninitiated.'"
"Since word of mouth helps good movies while punishing weaker ones, it may result in a new Hollywood emphasis on playability  a film's intrinsic quality  instead of marketability . . . "
Tags: movies marketing wordofmouth reviews
"What if [publishing companies] took advantage of the network's unique virtues?"
Tags: books advertising media internet
"Playing a game with frequent save points is kind of like being the child of a billionaire: You can soar through life without worrying about financial problems because if you fail, there's a "restore" point waiting for you."
Tags: videogames culture
"The decision to set his résumé in default-font Times–New Roman "deeply, personally, and irrevocably" offended a prospective employer of Seth Hershey Monday."
"The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that."
Tags: terrorism travel war politics security
Web Guitar Wizard Revealed at Last
"If you follow the leads, this Everest of electric-guitar virtuosity, like so many other online artifacts, turns out to be a portal into a worldwide microculture."
Tags: music culture youtube video longtail
Up Periscope: YouTube as the raw feed of contemporary culture
"There are too many things out there, moving too quickly, and too many things in here, colliding too often, for a single editorial perspective to serve. As usual, the middle falls out. What I want is key word notice plus raw feed follow up."
Tags: youtube culture media2.0 magazines advertising
"In summary, there's no easy solution. There's a big opportunity (though very tough job) for someone to come up with a meaningful metric that weighs a bunch of factors."
Tags: attention internet trend statistics business advertising
Agency Business Opportunity: Brand Archaeology
"If agencies were smart, they would be scrambling to set up Brand Archeology departments staffed with researchers and lawyers whose sole job is to find lapsed trademarks."
Tags: branding business history advertising marketing
MySpace Should Let Users Create Their Own Magazines
"MySpace could sell advertisers into an ad page pool and then let the USERS choose which ads to put in their publications. Such user placement would be a great implied endorsement to friends who read each other’s custom publications."
Tags: myspace magazines advertising
"I am suggesting we stop calling them widgets, so we can try and think a lil more deeply about why they are economically powerful."
Tags: widgets viral internet media2.0 marketing
All the news that's fit for bits
Martin Nisenholtz is presiding over a surge in digital revenue at the old gray lady.
Tags: nytimes business media newspapers attention
youth and those crazy hormones
Maybe, just maybe, it's possible that teenagers aren't as dumb as we think they are?
Up next: 'YouTube' of video games?
Microsoft releases tools to encourage home creators of games for Xbox 360 console.
Tags: videogames creativity cocreation api
"If I'm right that the defining advantage of insiders is an audience, then we live in exciting times, because just in the last ten years the Internet has made audiences a lot more liquid."
Tags: blogs business change bestarticlesof2006 entrepreneur innovation attention
Roger Federer as Religious Experience
"How one player’s grace, speed, power, precision, kinesthetic virtuosity, and seriously wicked topspin are transfiguring men’s tennis."
Tags: sports nytimes bestarticlesof2006
The CIA-Contra-Crack Connection, 10 Years Later
"Reporter Gary Webb was the victim of his own hyperbole, but he never got credit for what he got right."
Tags: drugs politics journalism newspapers
Identity and Identification in a Networked World
"This symposium will examine critical and controversial issues surrounding socio-technical systems of identity, identifiability and identification."
Tags: networking identity law conference
"Come Out & Play is a festival dedicated to street games. It is three days of play, talks, and celebration, all focused on new types of games and play."
Tags: conference design fun games cool nyc
An interactive capture the flag game using payphones around nyc.
Tags: cool nyc technology culture
Understanding the Unconference
"Because the cost to attend is minimal (or non-existent), anyone who wishes to can come. And because everyone at the unconference participates in some fashion, interaction, networking, and the exchange of ideas is a given.
Tags: conference community trend marketing
ComicCon & The Power of the Devoted Niche
"A small audience of super-committed fans can be worth more, in economic terms, than a massive audience of casual viewers and readers."
Tags: comics marketing longtail
"We have designed education to promote certainty (i.e. a state of knowing)...we now need to design education to be adaptable (i.e. a process of knowing)."
Tags: learning education trend
"Dashalytics is a free Dashboard Widget for your Apple Mac that offers quick access to Google Analytics statistics."
Tags: dashboard google apple widgets free
Influx is holding a cool looking conference on October 3, 2006.
Tags: strategy branding conference marketing
"Have you ever struggled with a turgid political biography when secretly you'd rather get stuck into 'The Da Vinci Code'? Put the book down, says Nick Hornby: Reading should be a joy"
Great, Now They'll Never Give Us Data
"In practice we’re nowhere near understanding how to usefully depersonalize this kind of data. That’s an important research problem in itself, which needs its own datasets to work on."
Tags: attention search aol privacy
Three Of Man's Closest Relationships With Brands
"Three of the five deepest emotional investments of local resident Ken Bowman are currently Apple, American Apparel, and Starbucks, sources close to the 27-year-old graphic designer said Monday."
Tags: funny branding business cocreation relationships
"I would like to find a suitable, general. short pair of words for (a) a person paying attention to (b) a person receiving attention. I have often used the words “fan� and “star� to mean something a bit similar, but not the same."
Tags: attention
"I would say that most Americans qualify as expert music listeners. We have the cognitive capacity to detect wrong notes, to find music we enjoy . . . an activity that involves a process of meter extraction so complicated that most computers cannot do it"
Our Favorite Invader Piece Ever
"Made with 323 Rubiks cubes. Lovely."
Tags: streetart
"So what’s changed in the last several years that gave designers a seat at the boardroom table and why do we have technology and information overload to thank for it?"
Tags: design business strategy trend
"From the boulevards of Washington D.C. and the sunny fields of Silicon Valley, we bring you the latest in new media spaces, emerging programming, communication practices, and online standards."
Tags: blogs nicedesign
A New Way of Tracking Users' Browsing Habits
"Jeremiah Grossman came up with a really clever way of using Javascript to find what pages you've visited recently."
Tags: privacy javascript attention
The Politically Incorrect Alphabet
"Lacking any tact or decency, I therefore determined to create an alphabet using only subjects that, while they might have been unremarked a few decades ago, are now outside acceptable usage."
"In short, we don't have a company creation crisis. But we might have a company destruction crisis. Something is off in our ecosystem - there's simply not enough failure out there right now."
Tags: business web2.0 internet
A False Sense of Insecurity [PDF]
How does the risk of terrorism measure up against everyday dangers?
Tags: security terrorism politics
"Review these typical interview questions and think about how you would answer them. Read the questions listed; you will also find some strategy suggestions with it."
Tags: interviews tips jobs business
Everything Is Media: The Online Retailer Edition
"If consumers could actually see how this type of advertising on retail sites was effectively lowering their prices  and not just interrupting their shopping with unsolicited brand messages  that would be way cool."
Tags: advertising internet amazon
Brands Will Have a Tough Time on YouTube
"Here’s some advice for brands looking to tap into the success of YouTube  remember that the users are in control, and what they think is entertaining and worth their time."
10 things you should be monitoring
"In order to manage your reputation you need to track the right things, so here's a list of 10 things that you absolutely need to be monitoring."
Tags: marketing attention blogs business pr rss
Why Advertise For Free on MySpace When You Can Pay News Corp Instead?
"MySpace has started to reach out to companies that are setting up commercial pages on the site, encouraging them to reach some kind of financial agreement and forgo the free ride."
Apple Making Huge Social Software Push?
Does Apple have social software in its future? Also, when reading this I had a thought: Wouldn't it be perfect if Apple bought Last.FM?
Tags: collaboration os apple socialsoftware
Next Search Wave: It's What you do with the Data
"Certainly, it is valuable to be able to compare prices from several carriers. But all that is presentation of data. The use of that data? That represents a significant, disruptive breakthrough. This is the way search engines should be thinking."
Tags: search innovation internet
Thought Fashion: Are You In or Out?
"is your digital identity your personal intellectual property?. . . And by extension, is your clickstream a personal expression (carefully chosen and shaped by you)? In other words, can you copyright your clickstream and exert ownership?"
Tags: attention privacy search
Interface Culture 10 Years Later Notes
"Interface ecosystems. It's now easy to think of the world in terms as modules. Don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. You deal with this problem, I'll deal with that one. Easier to stitch together innovations."
Tags: attention trend internet community api
On Ethical Weblogging (Part Two)
Tome Coastes of plasticbag.org lays out the ethical guidelines for his blog.
Internet killed the TV star from Guardian Unlimited
"Hardly a day goes by now without the minting of a fresh internet celebrity. Some of them will no doubt go the way of Mahir Cagri and the Hamster Dance, but most no doubt hope that they are making their first steps towards mainstream stardom."
Tags: celebrity community video media2.0 internet
Google CEO wants $74 billion TV ad market
"Google is preparing to deliver 'targeted measurable television ads' and Schmidt says Google has 'a good shot at it.'"
Tags: advertising television google
"Money and power are handy, but millions of ambitious people are after something other than the corner office or the beach house on St. Bart’s."
Tags: attention celebrity psychology
The invisible hand on the keyboard
Why do economists spend valuable time blogging?
Tags: blogs economics education attention
Are Advertisers Suffering From Addiction?
"If we are headed to a world where consumer attention becomes far less attainable with paid media, then where does that take us? I believe it means we’re approaching an age where real competitive differentiation becomes a better overall brand experience
Tags: advertising marketing attention branding trend
The Industry of Consumer Advocacy
6 ways marketers can be advocates for consumers.
"Have you ever wondered how and why IKEA products are named the way they are?"
Motivation for online behavior
"I’m not fully convinced yet, but I’m increasingly thinking that successful social software is nothing more than an online Skinner box. Positional, status-conveying goods. . . entice people to contribute their valuable content for free."
Tags: psychology culture attention community media2.0
"You treat those core users to your site, those who make comments, those who send suggestions, those who drop you an email to say you suck, like they are freaking gods."
Tags: attention media2.0 connectedness
Bus Ticket Origami from REZ in Liverpool
"i know that at least personally people tend to fold, fiddle or tear their tickets . . . so i started folding, designing and then placing origami instruction stickers on the back of seats all around the liverpool area."
Looking back on 25 years of MTV, "More and more, it feels as if there is no longer such a thing as mass culture. MTV, for good or bad, still reassures me that there is."
Tags: culture history youth music
The man behind the 'Girls Gone Wild' soft-porn empire lets Claire Hoffman into his world, for better or worse
Tags: business celebrity consumerism culture gender media sex video
Search the entire AOL data dump. "This includes over 20 million search queries from 658,000 of AOL's users. Apparently 658,000 AOL users are estimated to be around 1.5% of the total Google search population."
Tags: privacy search attention
"Last week, AOL revealed three months' worth of people's web searches -- and the data is oddly fascinating."
Tags: privacy search politics attention
"This week, FontShop takes a trip to the supermarket in search of palatable packaging. Among the shelves cluttered with superfluous drop shadows and chaotic typography, it was easy to spot the few beautiful boxes."
Tags: typography font packaging design free
The official SVA site for the pill bottle that target purchased.
interesting things that are going on
"Russell Davies talks about some of the interesting themes/topics/trends he's seeing in the media/marketing/advertising world."
Tags: marketing business media2.0 community advertising trend
"The summer-camp ink blot, then, is universal. You are how you camped, even if you never camped at all."
The Big Difference Between Old And New
"Old media is begging for attention. New media is attention."
Tags: media2.0 attention video internet business
"High on the list of new rules is an entirely different approach to advertising . . . This is what smart ad executives mean when they refer to "transparency"  precision in a world formerly dominated by blue smoke and mirrors."
Tags: marketing advertising business television commercial
Number 1 is YOU, the consumer as creator.
A very deep look at the top 100 videos on YouTube. Some interesting numbers, especially that the top 100% only make up 2% of views. That's a long long tail.
Tags: youtube video statistics longtail marketing
The Coca-Cola Company and chunky marketing
"Yes, a new culture is upon us. But the real challenge is the old cultures that still prevail within the corporation. It may be possible to cultivate lots of diversity within the corporation but I suspect that "skunk works" strategies will be called for
Tags: business marketing longtail trend
"Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface . . . as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives."
Tags: movies typography font
Country Snoop Dogg Dogg Gin And Juice
Snoop Dogg listens and sings along to a country version of Gin and Juice that I first saw online. This is incredibly meta in some kind of bizarre way I can't figure out right now.
"A quote from Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters starts off one of the chapters in my PhD thesis. Now Graham's got some tips on presenting to investors. Hear him out."
Tags: tips presentation venturecapital
Going to Barcelona (if the new passport arrives)
Lots of great suggestions on things to do in Barcelona (where I happen to be going on Thursday)
Tags: travel Spain recommendation
India Rejects The $100 Laptop.
"The $100 (actually it's up to $140) laptop for children at the BOP--Bottom of the Pyramid-- is taking a sharp hit with the rejection by India of the entire concept."
Aa ATM equation to get your money: "To make a withdrawl, please solve for x: y=264^15/99xyz*2n+1-(Pi+Phi). Then press ENTER."
Tags: funny culturejamming money
"When I'm deciding what links to post here, I'm essentially curating ideas, collecting them to "send" to you (and to myself, in a way). And unconsciously, these seven points factor into my decision on what to post here."
On the design of American State flags...
A look at a few of the best and worst designed state flags.
Tags: flags design history politics
THE SHIV IS NIGH! FESTSHIVITIES BEGIN 09.05.06
Tags: funny
"'What if the New York Times decided to have readers vote on where things should be placed in the paper?' Only a very narrow slice of the population - the Web 2.0 true believers - would view this as anything other than a rhetorical question."
Tags: web2.0 internet technology culture geeks
Lawyers, Priests, and AOL's Data Release
"Here’s the bottom line: what’s inside our minds is no longer private (or a lot less private). Nothing we do on the Internet is private. And there is a not insignificant risk that if we don’t come to terms with this as a society."
Tags: privacy attention security identity law
10 Reasons Readers Donâ t Leave Comments
"Compelling content causes comments." Good point.
Potential to change the structure of markets
"We invest in IT enabled services that have the potential to change the structure of markets."
Tags: strategy business economics venturecapital
Marketing In An Attention Economy
Max sums up John Hagel. The new collaboration marketing is about the three a's: Attract, assist, affiliate.
Tags: marketing attention media2.0 business
A defense of the much-maligned word.
number games and social software
"Who is motivated by what number games? Who is demotivated? Does it make a difference if the number game is about the group vs. the individual, about one's self directly vs. about some abstract capability?"
Tags: socialsoftware psychology attention
"I love YouTube, but there's something you need to understand: YouTube just stomps around, recklessly murdering innocent bystanders." Anil Dash chronicles the latest tragedies.
Apparently "forever" has been over-rated
"Diamonds are no longer a girl's best friend, according to a new U.S. study that found three of four women would prefer a new plasma TV to a diamond necklace."
Tags: gender television technology panasonic
How a husband-and-wife team used clever marketingâ€â€and health claimsâ€â€to turn a weird fruit into liquid gold.
Tags: business fruit health marketing
Klosterman gets all postmodern and discusses fantasy football as simulacrum.
Tags: postmodernism sports fantasyfootball
The Ten Biggest Themes of 'What Teens Want'
A great roundup of teen trends from Anastasia at YPulse.
Tags: youth research trend branding business marketing
Dangerous Beauty: The Art of the Shiv
A beautiful collection of shivs.
Tags: art culture death prison design hacks
A Conversation with Steven Johnson, Part 2
"In part two of Jesse James Garrett’s interview with author Steven Johnson, we look at cultural attitudes and innovation in interface design."
Tags: culture interface design technology books ui
Lily Allen, Britainâ s New Pop Star, Has Cheek, and Bite, to Spare
"She symbolizes a new blogging-age, middle-class girl: cockily ambitious, skeptical yet enthusiastic, technically savvy, musically open, obsessed with public expression and ready to fight back."
Tags: music nytimes blogs myspace attention
Attention is Fluid and, in Its Way, Quite Fungible
"This is a partial look at the ways Person A can pay attention to Person B."
Tags: attention
"Authoritatively declaring your mastery of rounded corners, drop shadows, gradients, glows, friendly fonts and The Web2.0 Filter, this card promises to establish your dominance and subdue even the hardiest filter-hater."
"You really should be paying your users for the value they create, but if that value is still an acquisition or advertiser base down the road, keep in mind that for many, being cool or prominent trumps being paid"
Tags: community money attention
"The idea that authority is best transmitted by a coarse-grained gesture like linking is bankrupted by the sheer volume of gaming that is emerging."
Tags: attention gestures google linking
The death of the double entendre
"Advertising has forgotten how to be subtle. Worst of all, it requires no cultural competencies to decode."
Tags: advertising culture marketing sex bestarticlesof2006
Scoble on gestures and not linking.
Newspapers to Use Links to Rivals on Web Sites
Baby steps . . .
Tags: newspapers linking aggregation business nytimes
A few more Presentation How To's
Some presentation tips from Creating Passionate Users.
Tags: presentation passion marketing tips
"These are my passions, but they reflect the part of me that is about horses, running, skiing, skating, the environment, writing, or creating. If I relabel them to reflect my gender, I believe both (my gender and the labeled thing) are diminished by the "
Tags: blogs gender culture identity technology
Yet another self-serving corporate blog!
The first post at the new Yahoo! corporate blog Yodel.
The "Snakes on a Plane" Problem
The tragedy of the best titled movie in the history of film
Tags: movies culture blogs marketing
"Blogs -- like all modes of contemporary media -- are not historically unique; they draw upon and resemble a number of past traditions and forms, depending on their focus."
Tags: blogs journalism
"Smart companies are thinking about how to exploit all the power of all these individuals to sell shit. Smarter companies are being set up to bridge that gap between individuals and the companies that need them."
Tags: attention business connectedness marketing
"Ozzie has made it clear that Microsoft is thinking extensively about 1) the value and utility of attention data, 2) the fundamental role it will play in a web services world, and 3) the importance of user control."
Tags: attention microsoft privacy
LG taps into the power of blogs
"LG appears to have enlisted the power of bloggers to help promote its new Chocolate phone. "
Tags: design mobile technology marketing blogs
Promotion from LG about their new "Chocolate" phone. They are incredibly open about wanting to recruit bloggers to talk about the product. Cool stuff. (If anyone there happens to read this, I'd be happy to help.)
Tags: design mobile technology blogs marketing
Understanding the 1% Rule: Motivations
The history of one-percenters from motorcycle riders to bloggers.
Tags: history marketing media2.0 cgm
"Web 2.0 never changed the rules on what makes something successful, it simply gave us more tools to play the game."
Tags: web2.0 media2.0 business myspace celebrity
Wonkette's Ingredients for a Successful Blog
"The idea that someone could enter into a conversation, you know, based just on having an opinion and an argument. And it’s a conversation that includes people who have real power in the world."
Some notes on YouTube, including "YT bandwidth costs are $1m/mo; $3.6m in people costs a year --> $300,000/mo"
Who Will Make Money with User-Generated Online Video?
A look at revenue models for online video sites.
Tags: business media2.0 video youtube myspace socialnetworking