Thanks, Phil, for posting this video:
JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.
Fairly wow indeed. I’m very glad not to be a server jockey for Facebook.
Google’s blog just announced that they are adding a new “star” feature to web search. Essentially, when you see results you like, you star them, and they’ll appear higher in results next time you perform a similar search.
From the Google blog post announcing the new feature:
With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant.
My first thought on seeing this is: hmmm … watch out del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon, and any other social bookmarking service. For starters, this eliminates the need to save the search result on some external site. For finishers, you can bet your last red Olympic maple leaf mitten that what data Google collects, Google will find some means of collating, utilizing, and monetizing.
You can already star, favorite, and share items in Google Reader. Buzz is bringing social connectedness (sometimes too much!) to the earliest of internet media, email. How long before Google Stars make search more social as well as “more personal?”
My guess? Not long!
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We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too.
If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read — and doing it for free — I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share.
via ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.
Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) — Apple Inc., maker of the iPod player and iTunes music software, is in talks to acquire online music service Lala, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The terms of the deal weren’t known. The people declined to be identified because talks are still in progress. Investors in Palo Alto, California-based Lala include New York-based Warner Music Group Corp., Boston-based Bain Capital Ventures and Ignition Partners in Bellevue, Washington.
The Lala service lets users listen to any song on its site once for free. Customers can then opt to buy the track for 10 cents and listen to it on the Web. The service differs from iTunes because the music is stored on servers via so-called cloud computing, instead of being downloaded to the user’s computer. If customers decide to download a track, the cost is 79 cents — compared with iTunes’ price of 69 cents to $1.29.
via Apple Said to Be in Talks to Buy Music Service Lala (Update3) – Bloomberg.com.
Hmmm … some bugs to work out yet?
That’s why they call it beta, I guess.
From the ReadWriteWeb story:
# Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
# Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
# Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
# Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
# “We’re starting to make signifigant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.
# “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”
# There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
# “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”
# It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.
via Google’s Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years.
Some will hate it and some will love it. But many will talk about it:
And yes, booneoakley.com translates to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elo7WeIydh8. Bold – very bold.
(Saw it here.)
Classify this as a happy accident:
I just happened to accidentally align a Mac OS X finder window with the TwitterMass website … which just happens to have a very similar color palette. After a couple of seconds I did a double take and realized what was happening.
Funny!
This is Tara Hunt’s presentation at Web2.0 on the same topic as her recent book: The Whuffie Factor.
Just start – you’ll enjoy it:
OK, here’s the definitive quote of the day:
“When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.”
The source is Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.
This is particularly relevant to me now, having just participated in a new media round table on journalism, papers, and the web: New Media Round Table.
I hate gossip rags at the checkout counter, and my opinion is no different when the medium is a blog. But I love this post on 8 things bloggers can learn from Perez Hilton by Marko Saric.
The fact is, Perez Hilton is a fantastic success story. According to Saric, here’s how he got there:
More details and expansion of each of those points in the original post – if you’re a blogger, I recommend you read them.
A couple of provisos:
Being careful may not be the way to create exceptional art. But it does have some advantages in building relationships and getting things done.
Facebook continues to grow at a torrid rate. Reunion.com is growing almost as fast. Ning, Tagged, and Multiply are also all growing at over 100% annually.
However, Twitter is the runaway winner in unbelievable growth rates. While it’s growing from a smaller base, and therefore it’s easier to get a higher multiple, a growth rate of almost 1400% annually is just astounding.
twitter-february – Free Legal Forms
Those are some scintillating numbers. Wow.
As I first saw on Twitter, the WWW is 20 years old today.
It’s hard to believe that something so ubiquitous and useful and … essential is only 20 years old. I mean, I wouldn’t have a job if it weren’t for the web, and that’s probably true of millions of people today.
Around the web:
Back in 1989, Berners-Lee was a software consultant working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside of Geneva, Switzerland. On March 13 of that year, he submitted a plan to management on how to better monitor the flow of research at the labs. People were coming and going at such a clip that an increasingly frustrated Berners-Lee complained that CERN was losing track of valuable project information because of the rapid turnover of personnel. It did not help matters that the place was chockablock with incompatible computers people brought with them to the office.
Berners-Lee has some great ideas about where the web should go next. His vision is of a major advance that could serve as the foundation for innovations that we can’t even imagine today.
One year ago Berners-Lee said that all the pieces needed to build a new Semantic Web are now in place. Last month he gave an impassioned talk at the high-profile TED conference about a related concept called Linked Data, a set of ideas he outlined in 2006. The gist of the idea is that we need every institution that can do so putting raw data in standardized format up on the web.
ZDnet:
The original “napkin” sketch …
The term ‘Web’ was invented by English scientist Sir Time Berners Lee on March 13th, 1989 and now the wild web has reached 216+ million websites (as per February 2009 data from Netcraft).
Watch Tim Berners-Lee’s talk from TED2009 on TED.com …
I’m about to board an airplane to go to the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, and have been brooding about the fact that I’ll be deprived of the Web for just a few hours while we’re in flight. It’s startling to remember that something as essential as the Web is so new–and that the guy who came up with it is not only still with us but very much involved in shaping its future.
The Web is becoming a massive interlinked computer, and computers need data. As more and more data becomes linked across the Web, the more that it can be accessed, analyzed, and computed. As Berners-Lee says, “Data is relationships.”
Thanks, Tim!
OK. So you’ve launched your new social-viral-mashable-linked-web2.0-connected web place, and you’re tracking a million metrics. Which ones should you actually be paying attention to? Those are your Key Performance Indicators.
As Rhian James at FreshNetworks mentioned in a comment on my recent post about measuring social media marketing efforts, that’s really the key. Burying yourself in a mound of data is unproductive; knowing which data tracks progress to your critical initiatives is pure gold.
FreshNetworks posted on this topic on their blog, and created a valuable SlideShare presentation illuminating the difference:
If you design anything web, you must must must read 30 essential controls by Theresa Neil.
Positively mouth-watering:
As I commented on her site, I want want want these in an OmniGraffle stencil.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
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