Yahoo! redux

Charlene Li of Forrester on the latest moves at Yahoo! which she thinks are really significant....

Technorati Tags: yahoo, social media

Groundswell data presentation 2.0

Groundswell is a new book about the impact of social media written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Forrester analysts both. The web site has a great visual tool for displaying the categorisation system for social media they have developed. There must be hundreds of uses for a cool presentation like this.

Technorati Tags: social media, tools

The New York Times covers blogging

Marc Andreessen reacts to the New York Times article on blogging: In a Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writer Blog Till They Drop.

Google and the new economy

Jeff Jarvis reacts to the news of Google's surprisingly healthy profits in the first quarter with his own theory: Google is rewriting the economics handbook and changed the definition of "the economy".

The old definition meant and measured the performance of big companies and their impact on each other. This was especially the case in media and advertising, which served only companies of a certain size because only large companies could afford to advertise in large outlets. But Google’s marketplace for advertisers of all sizes represents the small-is-the-new-big economy: no limit of small enterprises that can now add up to a critical mass. The fact that it is an auction marketplace also means that this economy is more fluid; it fills in voids.

This means Google may be protected from an economic downturn in quite unprecedented ways:

when there’s an economic downturn that affects, say, travel, that will affect a magazine like Condé Nast Traveler; airlines and hotels of a certain size will advertise less and there aren’t new advertisers to fill in that void at Traveler’s price. But on Google, if American Airlines and the Ritz aren’t buying the keyword “Paris” this month, there are no end of advertisers who will step in to buy the word. The price of that keyword may decline. But in Google’s very broad economy, the prices of other keywords (e.g., “credit”) may rise.

Comscore started a run on Google's stock by pointing out that fewer people were clicking on Google's ads - though Google said it was tuning ad placement to improve relevance. In the end Google ends up looking smarter than Comscore and Jeff argues that the old sampling methodology's days are numbered as it simply can't measure the niches.

Technorati Tags: advertising, economy, Google, metrics

Alexa Announcement

Alexa are changing their ranking methodology by adding in more sources. But as Ciaron points out, since they don't tell us who their new sources are, we won't know whether the new rankings will be any less error-prone than before.

Online ads grow rapidly

A joint study by the IAB and PriceWaterhouseCoopers shows rapid growth in online advertising last year:

Online advertising has grown from being the smallest market sector in 2003 to the third largest in 2007, with a new high of £2,812.6 millions. This represents a 38% year-on-year like-for-like increase, taking the medium to a market share of 15.3% (up from 11.4% in 2006). Internet advertising spend in 2007 exceeded the most generous forecasts and is now larger than press classifieds and regional newspapers.

Tools geeks use

A group of tech-savvy Americans has been travelling in Israel this last week checking out the state of the Israeli tech industry. What web tools do these cutting edge types use on a daily basis? Find out here.

Technorati Tags: tools, web2

Community manager profile

Ever wondered what the profile of a community manager is? Based on a rather unscientific sample Jeremiah Owyang provides his list of characteristics, abstracted from the 19 respondents to a recent job ad he posted.

Technorati Tags: community

Widgets: show me the money

Where is the money to be made in widgets? Jeremiah Owyang provides a few (fairly unconvincing) suggestions.

Technorati Tags: commerce, web2, widgets

Twitter tools

Jeremiah Owyang has a useful post listing all the handy Twitter tools that add value to the popular micro-blogging platform.

Technorati Tags: tools, twitter

Making Twitter useful?

GroupTweet is a service which allows a group account to be set up on Twitter which all the members of a group will then get automatic updates from. I could see it being used by a development team, or a sales team - indeed any small group that have a higher-than-average interest in what each other are doing. Great innovation.

Technorati Tags: twitter, tools

Different ways to see the world

I was watching a really remarkable video the other day - of a talk given by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor at TED. The talk contains a harrowing - and at the same time funny - account of when she suffered a haemorrhage in the left side of her brain which then slowly shut down leaving the right side to run the show.

Our right hemisphere is all about this present moment. It's all about right here right now. Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information in the form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems.

As a consequence of the stroke Jill experienced some really remarkable effects (even if they were scary at the same time). Her perception of the world was fundamentally changed.

About the same time I found this video I was listening on the radio to a deaf Italian Tomato Lichy who is trying with his wife to have a second deaf child by IVF. The couple are both deaf, as is their child. Unable to conceive naturally, they want to have IVF but only pick deaf embryos for implanting. They believe that deafness isn't a disability but a gift which leads to a rich world with its own language, culture and traditions. It goes without saying that they face an uphill battle to have their wishes accepted and I have to confess I have quite a bit of difficulty with the position personally myself.

But as biotechnology and genetics gathers pace it begs the question whether we might not face a future where people are free to choose the senses they want, or the way their neural pathways process data, so they can experience the world in a way different from the one we call normal (and which already many, many people don't share.) After all, red is only red because of the way the human brain processes light signals - there is no such thing in the world as "red". People who suffer from synesthesia already know how malleable colour is - they can hear it.

Wired recently carried an article about the way in which scientists are now reconsidering autism in the light of new evidence. There is another remarkable video referred to where Amada Baggs, a 27-year-old autistic woman, describes the "language" she uses to interact with the world. In times gone past in all likelihood she would have been dismissed as lacking intelligence, but the internet and affordable computing power has given her the chance to show the world quite the opposite.

Could people start to opt for this kind of experience if the science of biological choice makes it possible? Maybe not very likely, but what about those people with gifts which normal-ability people would already regard as remarkable.

Stephen Wiltshire is the 33-year-old autistic "savant" who appeared on television recently and drew an accurate 13ft panorama of London after only a short helicopter ride as a prompt. Might not people choose this gift if it was on offer?

Perhaps the next phase of evolution will be made up by a splintering of what it means to be a normal human being as choice and technology open up limitless possibilities. And, given Man's less than impressive record with difference, that would mean more than a few challenges along the way.

Technorati Tags: genetics, biotechnolobiotechnology

Google moves into internet computing

Google announced it was launching Google Apps, a scaleable computing on demand platform which will host and scale internet applications (watch part 1 of the video presentation here). Techcrunch gives its take on the move. It should give Amazon something to think about.

MS vs iPhone

Spotted on Gare du Nord station in Paris yesterday. The previous day, by coincidence I spotted a series of similar themed ads (although in English of course) on the London Underground. This new ad campaign can have nothing to do, surely, with the news that Apple shot to third place behind Nokia and Blackberry in the global smart phone market by the end of last year.

Downing Street has started Twittering...

...if you are an aficionado you can follow them here.

Technorati Tags: twitter, social media

Google Docs goes offline

Robert Scoble interviews Kevin Norton from the Google Docs team who demos new offline functionality in Docs - more trouble for Microsoft.

Technorati Tags: Google, productivity, video