Gartner's Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle 2008

Gartner published its (27) emerging technologies, highlights and predictions report. According to this report Green IT, Cloud computing, Social computing, Video telepresence, will reach, as you can see, the plateau of Hype within the next two to five years.

Here are the Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2008

Jackie Fenn discusses Gartner's Hype Cycles for 2008 with Gartner Research VP Jeff Comport this podcast.

more Gartner's Press release (11-August-2008)

People migrate online for news

The PEW Research Center for the People & the Press released its biennial news consumption survey. Overall, news is loosing some importance and traditional newspaper have not managed to attract as many reader online as they are loosing in print ...

Where do people (US) get their news

Source (plus additional findings): PEW

Full report (129 pages, PDF)

Thanks to http://hemartin.blogspot.com/ for providing this info

LEARNING DESIGN FROM OTHERS

Who else can we learn from, except others? Here is a remarkable range of galleries in a range of categories: light on dark, horizontal scrolling, best blog design, best Wordpress design, liquid CSS design, and much more:http://www.mostinspired.com/blog/

WP Cube

http://wpcube.com

A showcase of the best designed Wordpress sites.
Online since December 2007, with approximately 300 items of inspiration.


We Love WP

http://www.welovewp.com

Those Wordpress users really like their CMS, another showcase of Wordpress powered sites.
Online since June 2007, with approximately 350 items of inspiration.

and many-many others also featured at 24 Great Niche Galleries

GodTube - interesting facts and observations

By Allison Perlman, Penn State University:

Founded by Dallas Theological Seminary student and former CBS television producer Chris Wyatt, Christian website Godtube combines user-generated video, live webcasts (many of church services and ministries), and social networking opportunities. Godtube is a for-profit enterprise, earning revenue by accepting secular and religious advertising spots, charging subscription fees to ministries, and selling demographic data to marketers and media producers. The hundreds of videos that are uploaded each day first are approved by site administrators, mostly other seminary students, to ensure that all the content on the site is family-friendly. In these ways, Godtube falls outside of what we often think about when we think of alternative media: it embraces the commercial logics of mainstream media distribution and polices what constitutes acceptable content for its users to see. Godtube—in line with Christian cable networks, genre fiction, music—could be seen as an extension of the Christian media marketplace, one that sees Christians a vibrant consumer demographic.




Significantly, this video clip–which has been one of the most viewed and discussed on Godtube, as well as one of the most criticized—is one of four Mac-PC/Christ Follower-Christian parody ads on Godtube, each of which ridicules the notion that to be a follower of Christ is to participate in the ever-expanding Christian marketplace. Ironically, sites like Godtube could fall directly into the very type of media consumption eschewed in this video. Yet many of the comments following this clip reject its message and reinforce the dangers to the Christian community posed by the mainstream media. Importantly, many of the comments responding to the Christ Follower-Christian clip focus much more on the hostility of the mainstream to Christian values than to the virtues of Christian music itself; the outcome of this talk is not really the promotion of Christian music, but the presentation of Christians as the marginalized Other. Indeed, many of the more popular videos and comments on the site reinforce the idea that Christians currently are victims within a secular American culture who are in need of a forum like Godtube and of alternative forms of cultural expression.

It is in how users position Godtube—as a site that gives voice to a community that defines itself as often silenced, encourages social change, provides a forum for expression and participation to individuals who see themselves left out of mainstream discourses, and offers a critique of the limitations of the mainstream media—that tempts me to think of Godtube as a form of alternative media. It is the ubiquitous presence of advertising, the narrowness through which community is articulated and defined, and (to my mind) illegitimate expression of victimization that tempts me to reconsider.

A cell phone revolution?

Top technology executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Friday said mobile Internet will eventually let advertisers tailor messages based on a user's location.

Here are some quotations from the panel discussion they held:

"In theory location-based advertising will be a very good business and useful to the end user," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt (picture).

Moderator David Kirkpatrick noted the number of people with cell phones far outnumbers those with personal computers.

"It will not be long before we are all carrying video (transmitting) cell phones. What we now call the cell phone is becoming the de facto Internet device. The technology industry is rapidly becoming the mobile technology industry," said Kirkpatrick, who is the senior editor for Internet and technology at Fortune Magazine.

Wang Jianzhou, whose company is the largest mobile provider in China, noted China boasts a half billion mobile users and is adding to the number at a rate of 6 million per month. The future, he said, was with "location advertising" enabled by the devices' global positioning system.
SONY CEO Howard Stringer was more skeptical, saying young users of mobile phones don't like advertising.

Read the full sory

Top 5 Viral-Video Ads of 2007 Ranked

According to the MarketingCharts report, Cadbury’s gorilla drummer ad, with more than 5 million views for the original video on YouTube, was the top viral-video ad, followed by Smirnoff’s Green Tea Partay, with 3.4mm views, according to agency GoViral, reports the Financial Times.

The top 5 viral-video ads:

1. Cadbury - Gorilla Drummer, launched online in August; agency: Fallon.
2. Smirnoff - Green Tea Partay, launched online in August; agency: JWT, New York.
3. Ray-Ban - Catch Sunglasses, launched online in May; agency, Cutwater.
4. Blendtec - Will it Blend? launched online in July.
5. Lynx/Axe – Bom chicka wah wah, launched online in May; agency BBH, Copenhagen.

Additional info available in the FT report.

Ten Key Online Predictions for 2008

eMarketer has issued predictions for 2008 in key online areas, including those related advertising, videos, social networks, e-commerce and entertainment, saying online advertising will ride out potential economic storms in the US - and YouTube will decide political elections.

The 10 predictions for 2008 according to eMarketer:

1. Online ads remain resilient.
2. Video surge slows.
3. Social-network advertising hits $1.6 billion.
4. Networking goes beyond MySpace and Facebook.
5. YouTube decides the election.
6. Beijing Olympics pumps up ad spending.
7. Buy online, pick up in-store becomes expected feature.
8. Movie downloading hits the mainstream.
9. Music marketers roll out new business models.
10. Dynamic ads heighten gaming revenue potential.

Read more...

Three cornerstones of an effective site

Regardless of what your website is designed to do, there are a few primary objectives you should keep in mind before you start building: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2007/oct/5.html

They actually are: Focus, Depth and Stickyness of your site. These are to think about all the time. Short but very helpful article.

Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts of 2007

An impressive list with more than 250 entries with short descriptions - a compilation by Tamar Weinberg (techipedia) ... this should keep you busy for many weeks to come.

Tremendous work. Thanks you so much, Tamar!

What Doug McGill Learned Teaching Citizen Journalists

A guy who teaches basic journalism skills to citizens in community education classes in Minneapolis learned a lot himself out of these classes (see Doug's Report webpage)

Here are the main lessons he's learned from his students, so far:

1. Citizens are an untapped source of expertise and positive civic energy that journalists can help unlock.

2. There is no substitute for a strong, independent, institutional journalism.

3. Citizens can help journalists reconnect to the wellsprings of their craft.

4. Journalists need to learn citizenship skills, as much as citizens need to learn journalism.

5. A good citizen journalism class, like a great newspaper, allows for all types of expression – artistic, poetic, literary, photographic, musical, comical and fun.

6. Citizens create vital community consciousness through the discipline of writing journalistically.

See details here.

Dave, What Makes a Magazine a Magazine?

David Renards (mediaIDEAS) definition:

A magazine is a very distinct unit which has the following six key properties regardless of the delivery medium used:

1. Metered: a magazine is divided into defined "pages" of content that are presented together; in print this is not only bound sheets of paper but also, as has become more prevalent with the stylepress, pamphlets, lithographs or other objects; ...

2. Edited: the editor selects the articles and images, and on-line the videos and sounds, that fill each “page” as opposed to supplying a stream of aggregated data (news, articles, images, video) that is selected automatically by virtual intelligent agents;

3. Designed: the included content is arranged and formated to enhance the reading and visual experience;

4. Date-stamped: an issue is published on a specific date which becomes the indelible time stamp of the publication;

5. Permanent: in a magazine all the content for an issue is set by its release date; even though the edited content for an issue can be more than what each reader is presented with, to allow for varying levels of customization, once it is created, it is set and can no longer be changed or corrupted apart for minor revisions;

6. Periodic: a magazine is created to have subsequent issues and it may have more than 52 a year or, in the end, only be published once.

Read his full article 'The Definition of a Print and Digital Magazine'

What do you think?

"Market Leninism" within companies

Ross Mayfield, CEO of the corporate wiki company SocialText, has a deeply insightful post on how web and open source technologies create more choice inside companies, and how that leads to better decisions. This is the best sentence in the piece, and you could build a PhD on quantifying and understanding the implications in it:

I often think of institutions as making the transition from Marxist Leninism to Market Leninism, although they at least believe in internal markets to drive down transaction costs, and external markets as the reality that keeps them in check.

It helps to have a little background in Coase's theory of the firm (about minimizing transaction costs) and that old business school quiz about why it is that democracy and capitalism can be the best systems for countries, while most companies operate on an internal system of Soviet-style command-and-control totalitarianism (short answer: countries exist for the good of their people while companies exist to achieve a shared purpose, which is determined by their leaders).

Ross's point is that social software is a way to bring more market-driven (which is not to say necessarily democratic) efficiencies inside companies. It doesn't happen overnight, however:
But that control instinct is deeply rooted, perhaps all the way to the psychological insecurities we all have as individuals. It is hard to trust that more democratic decision making processes can result in better outcomes.

Originally posted by Chris Anderson here

The Long Tale - explanation

Here is the short but good quick explanation of the Long Tale concept. Presented originally here by the author of idea Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine.

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

One example of this is the theory's prediction that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio. In other words, the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don't individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may someday rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar.

The term refers specifically to the orange part of the sales chart above, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to hard goods. The vertical axis is sales; the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the hits, which have dominated our markets and culture for most of the last century. The orange part is the non-hits, or niches, which is where the new growth is coming from now and in the future.

Traditional retail economics dictate that stores only stock the likely hits, because shelf space is expensive. But online retailers (from Amazon to iTunes) can stock virtually everything, and the number of available niche products outnumber the hits by several orders of magnitude. Those millions of niches are the Long Tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the Short Head of hits.

When consumers are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed. And it turns out to be less hit-centric than we thought. People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).

Editor-in-chief of Wired magazine on integrating onto the social networks

As Chris Anderson writes in his blog devoted to The Long Tale effect (and to the book promoted thereby :-) )

Right now the world is focused on stand-alone social networking sites, especially Facebook and MySpace, and the fad of the moment is to take brands and services there, as companies build Facebook apps and MySpace pages in a bid to follow the audience wherever they happen to be. But at the same time there's a growing sense that elements of social networking is something all good sites should have, not just dedicated social networks. And that suggests a very different strategy--social networking as a feature, not a destination.
At the moment, my sites range from virtually no social networking (BookTour and this site) to heavy social networking (DIYDrones, which is built from the ground up on the Ning platform). Wired is on the minimal social networking side, with only our Reddit news submission and voting service doing much of it at all.

(BTW, by "social networking" I'm not including basic "chat amongst yourself" stuff like comments, wikis and voting. Instead, social networking to me means the tracking of individual preferences and behavior and giving users the ability to draw upon implicit or explicit connections between them and other users to do something useful).

In the case of Wired, social networking is clearly a feature that we should have more of. But we shouldn't move the brand onto a MySpace page or a Facebook app simply to gain access to the tools that could connect our readers to each other (which is not to say that we couldn't image a Wired Facebook app of some sort; we just haven't released one yet). Instead, it's mostly something we should build or buy and integrate into wired.com wherever it makes sense.