Monthly Archive for December, 2007

JibJab 2007 Year In Review and Seasons Greetings

Published
by
Karl
on December 20, 2007
in Fun Stuff
. 0 Comments

Well I’m just getting ready to leave for the airport, I have a midnight flight to Taipei and then on to Vietnam for a motorcycle tour through the northwest mountains. I don’t think i’ll be blogging much but i’ll try and keep flickr and twitter updated via my N95 8gig :-) Hopefully I can keep my batteries charged both literally and figuratively for the Full Moon party in Thailand which is the destination for new years eve. So here’s wishing you all an early Merry Christmas, happy holidays and an excellent New Year.

Hat tip to laughing squid for the jibjab vid

First Facebook Virus?

Published
by
Karl
on December 18, 2007
in Viral-Persuasion
. 3 Comments

Just got this message purportedly from Mark Zuckerberg via my “fun wall” on facebook asking me to forward it on to my friends to make sure I’m still an “active member”, with the idea that they will start “deleting” inactive members. Sure this is totally false, but it just shows how a social tool like Facebook is potentially open to malicious social engineering. It even sets people up for scamming some money later with the idea of getting donations later if facebook is still “overpopulated”.

Attention all Facebook membeRs .
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages around to see if the
Members are active or not,If you’re active please send
to other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks,
The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
this message to show me that your active and not deleted.

Founder of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg

UPDATE: It’s already been parodied

Attention all World inhabitants.
World is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that all commute
is becoming very slow. Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many World members.
And on the other side too many new babies.
We will be sending this message around to see if you are alive or not. If you’re alive, please send
to other members using Copy+Paste to show that you are alive.
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks, will be announced dead.
The member will be “deleted” without hesitation to create more space.
If World is still overpopulated we kindly ask for “donations” but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
this message to show me that your alive and not dead.

Founder of World
Zark Muckerberg
Forward!!

Trying Sometimes Cheaper Than Deciding - New Strategies

Published
by
Karl
on December 18, 2007
in New-Strategy and Strategy
. 7 Comments

Fullb Alltied 01
T-shirt All Tied Up From Full Bleed via tcritic

Having read this on a post at LinuxWorld it got me thinking:

Google is one of the few large companies that gets one fundamental rule of the Internet: Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it. (Compare the cost of paying and feeding someone to do a few weeks of P* hacking to the full cost of the meetings that went into a big company decision.)

So when the cost of deciding to do something becomes much more expensive than doing something, what do you do? Here are a few ideas:

  • Empower teams to launch experiments
  • Develop a process for manageing projects as a portfolio of experiments
  • Evaluate projects regularly
  • Killing projects should be as easy as starting projects and everyone needs to understand that, and the criteria
  • Start cheaply
  • Get ready to fail faster
  • Prepare to fail in public and be ok with that
  • Create a “beta” culture
  • Put basic legal boilerplate frameworks in place that minimize risk, don’t reinvent it each time

Those are just some rough ideas, any more? Anyone facing this issue?

NPD Report 63% of Americans Playing Video Games

Published
by
Karl
on December 12, 2007
in Viral-Persuasion
. 2 Comments

According to a new NPD Report video games are becoming and increasingly mainstream activity with a reported 63% of Americans playing video games, and 30% of them playing them more than last year. It’s rather amusing in many ways that “video games” essentially got hijacked by teenaged boys (both figuratively and literally) for the last decade (me being one of them). But with innovations in gameplay like the Wii, social games like Guitar Hero, and Rock Band video games are becoming again, just games, encouraging us to play, and play together.

A few people have been making suggestions for what the trends for 2008 are going to be and I may be biased but I think there is going to be continued innovation around what games can actually be. This includes video games, mobile games, “big games”, and Alternate Reality games. David Armano has stated he thinks 2008 is going to be the year of mobile media and I agree, and I think that includes games and how we consume and interact with social media (which of course I think are kind of like games).

Also check out Greg Verdino’s trends of 2007,

Digital Agencies vs. Ad Agencies

Published
by
Karl
on December 6, 2007
in Advertising and Branding
. 2 Comments

In response to the Ad Age article To Lead Overall Brand Strategy, Digital Shops Have Much to Do David Armano has posted on the Critical Mass blog the 10 things he thinks Digital Agencies have to get better at, he calls it a moment of truth for digital agencies.

It’s worth reading and chewing on.

Technorati to focus on core customers, Bloggers

Published
by
Karl
on December 4, 2007
in Marketing
. 3 Comments

Hallelujah, Tech Crunch just reported that Technorati has made some drastic design changes and is commiting to support their core customers, ie. the blogger themselves. For the moment I don’t see very much evidence of real tools or support for bloggers but it is early days.

Last week I saw a demo of the new products, which CEO Richard Jalichandra and VP Engineering Dorion Carroll say reflect the company’s re-dedication to their core audience: bloggers and advertisers.

Hmm, I don’t like the “and advertisers” caveat, but hey, at least they got they have figured out who their customers are.

I wrote an article back in August called “can blogger save Technorati” and here were my list of feature requests:

  • Merging domain names of claimed blogs, I’m sick of having two scores for experiencecurve.com and blog.experiencecurve.com and i’m sure any wordpress and typepad folks would appreciate that one
  • A more meaningful multi-metric “authority” measure, who cares how many linked in the last 6 months, all that measures is link baiting
  • Real blog categorization and vertical blog scoreboards, Boing Boing is not in the same ball park as TechCrunch, or Web-Strategist, or Marketing Profs Daily fix, so lets move on from the top 10K
  • If I have a pro account my blog should get priority indexing :-)
  • Track comments as well as trackbacks
  • Take the lead in establishing engagement metrics
  • Help people build “top ten blog” lists save everyone reinventing it all the time

I’d definitely still like to see some of these features, currently the only thing that I see being evidence of their commitment to bloggers is the “blogger central” area of the new technorati site, which is really a collection of articles of interest to bloggers.

bubble 2.0 video

Published
by
Karl
on December 4, 2007
in Advertising and Fun Stuff
. 1 Comment

LOL, is it me or is this guy taking some swipes at scoble:

“blogging even if your wrong” when scoble was talking about search and then the closing classic picture of scoble leaving the apple store in triumph with the iPhone?

Is there a bubble, absolutely, but as with all bubbles there are some companies that are doing brilliant work and are creating tremendous value. The trick is to pick the companies that are creating real “value”, and IMHO I would avoid business models that rely on driving people to advertisers. Yes, yes, I know Google, but I actually think Google creates value by connecting people with what they need, advertising is secondary, a fine distinction but one worth thinking about and maybe elaborating on more.