When I sat down with Kevin Rose in his loft-style offices south of Market Street in San Francisco, I must admit I felt a tingle of anticipation. It wasn’t just that Rose was a founder of Digg.com, the “social news” website whose remarkable growth has made it one of the most buzzed-about startups around. Nor was it that Digg had reeled in a $2.8 million round of financing from an A-list assortment of investors including Greylock Partners, Omidyar Network, and Marc Andreessen. No, what set my pulse racing was the pair of labels attached to Rose in the press release announcing the financing: “media visionary” and “technology visionary.” I mean, how often do you get to meet the next Nicholas Negroponte?
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Author Archives: Tom
Adidas +10
Martin has been helping out with the new Adidas campaign and pointed me to a mini site he’s been seeding. The site, dedicated to football is also about the release of the new Predator Absolute shoe. A Flash animation takes you on a tour through the features of the shoe (I never knew there were so many parts in a football shoe!) and after the tour, you’re invited to reassemble the shoe against the clock yourself.
Other sections of this branded site are the ‘players’ which features 5 screens where in every screen a part of the powers of the player is revealed and illustrated in an original way.
The ‘TV room’ features commercials, player interviews and behind the scenes edits. It’s pretty fun the see, so you’ll definitely have to check this section. There are 7 commercials. All of them are funny. Concept: twelve international players go through the streets of their cities looking for a dream team to compete against.
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NewsWeek and FeedFlare: RSS Going Viral
FeedFlare has been an interesting idea from FeedBurner from the start, further expanding on RSS to allow RSS subscribers to easier distribute the content they like to their friends and otherwhise interact with the content item, directly from the RSS Reader.
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SEO = PR (Again)
The Web 2.0 Awards: Well-executed link bait development (PR to you and me) courtesy of SEOMoz. Look, press releases! Comes complete with vacuous phrases like “the Web 2.0 Awards help define the emerging area known for fusing new technology and social expression, empowering users to do more with the Internet”.
Sure to get many Web 2.0 bunnies linking up as many probably weren’t on the web for the ye-olde running-a-web-awards-scheme-tactic the first time round. Very Web 1.0, I’m sure we all argree.
Will work well (for a little while) for Web 2.0, and other tech buzz topics. Less well for, say, selling loans 🙂
YouTube Under Pressure
YouTube is suffering heavily under it’s popularity. Recent changes have made many users turn against this video-sharing service which no longer allows clips that are longer than 10 minutes, thus forcing creative artists to edit and cut up their own homemade movies into shorter parts. This damages the project as a whole, and makes it very hard to experience a project as it was meant to be experienced. Many users I used to know on YouTube have seen their enitre video archive been deleted without any warning. Others have just lost their interest and stopped uploading clips. The disclaimers have become omnipresent and very precise to cover YouTube against uploaded copyrighted material from television broadcasts to sitcoms.
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10 Modern Marketing Facts
1. The consumer is in control.
“We need to embrace the urgent implications of consumer control.” Jim Stengel, Global Marketing Officer, Procter & Gamble
2. The consumer is sceptical and increasingly resistant to advertising.
“In the US 69 per cent of consumers are interested in products and services that allow them to block, skip or opt out of advertising and marketing messages.â€Â Yanklevich Partners
Official : PVR Ads Are More Effective
Johnnie and I spoke at the Market Research Society’s annual bash yesterday, at The Barbican in London. We did an overview of the user-generated world to an audience of about 200 before handing over to Dr Alastair Goode of Duckfoot and Julian Dobinson who heads up Sky Media’s research.Â
Alastair presented the findings of research which shows that ads are more effective when viewed at PVR speed (30 x faster than normal) – if and it’s a big if – people have already seen the advert. The reason is all to do with the efficiency of the subconscious – ‘Blink’ style.Â
There is no doubting Alastair’s credentials or methodology but it’s a difficult one for the industry to digest. For instance, one member of the audience asked if it meant Sky were about to launch ad breaks with 1 second long slots? The proceedings were all chaired by Richard Huntingdon, Head Planner at United London (previously HHCL) who has developed a nasty blogging habit here ;-).
Google Leads Search Engine Choice in UK
WebSideStory reports that Google is way ahead of its competitors for most used search engine in the UK. Google processes three out of four searches in the UK. With Google accounting for 74.67% of the market, their competition is way behind. With Yahoo at 9.30%, MSN 5.46%, AOL 4.21%, Ask Jeeves 2.28%.
The test was conducted for the month of February, and showed that Google referred an average of 74.67% of all UK visitors to other sites on the web. Supposedly more people think of Google when they think search in the UK, even more than in the US.
WebSideStory used their HBX Analytics technology to provide real time information about the online visitors and customer behavior. HBX Analytics enables you to increase online sales, improve the return of your marketing activities, reduce customer support costs, monetize content and improve advertising sales.
What should be your corporate blog’s URL?
I was asked via email by a reader whether a company’s blog should live at blog.mycompany.com or mycompanyblog.com.
If the blog will get more links by being at an arm’s length from the corporate site, then I’d have it on a totally separate domain.
For example, if a life insurance company had a blog about health and wellness at www.stayinghealthy.com, I would expect that to garner many more links from the blogosphere than one at blog.lifeinsuranceco.com.
This may seem like an oversimplification, since I haven’t discussed the branding implications, but I believe the “link-ability†of the blog is the key ingredient for long-term success with a corporate blog. Everything else to me is peripheral.
WordPress.com Is Not WordPress.org
Summary: WordPress.com offers free, instant blogging but lacks the full features of the WordPress platform.
A lot of clients are asking me about WordPress and how it stacks up to other blogging platforms like Blogger or Typepad. Only problem is: There are two types of WordPress: WordPress.org and WordPress.com.
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