MediaPost Publications – Big Weeklies Sputter, Smaller Pubs Soar – 09/04/2007
Daily reading 10/17/2007
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Daily reading 10/16/2007
MediaPost Publications – Unisfair: Virtual Events Generate Leads – 09/12/2007 Annotated
a majority of attendees were more likely to interact with an exhibitor, speaker, or other attendee while online than in person–as the social pressures that can accompany live events are absent. It’s these factors that are bringing both event hosts and sponsors from outside the media industry–what Best calls “enterprise companies” to the virtual event space.
Daily reading 10/12/2007
Nielsen: Word-of-Mouth Most Valuable Ad Platform – MediaPost Publications, 10/03/2007 Annotated
Seventy-eight percent of consumers say they trust other consumers’ recommendations over all advertising/marketing avenues. Next in the trust line: Ads in newspapers, at a 63% score. Consumers’ opinions from online blogs came in third at 61%. Brand Web sites were at 60%.
Of the 13 different ad platforms Nielsen surveyed, new digital platforms–including some of that group’s biggest categories–took the last three spots. Search engine ads only generated a 34% trusting score; online banner ads were at 26%; and–dead last–was text ads on mobile phones.
Traditional media, on the whole, did much better than new digital platforms. Television and magazine were in the middle of the pack, each with a 56% score; Radio was at 54%; and brand sponsorships, at 49%.
Daily reading 10/11/2007
Daily reading 10/10/2007
Google Buys Phone Software Firm – New York Times
Blue Ridge Business Journal Annotated
“Honestly,” says Holloway, “in marketing and public relations education, we need to teach our students to send a great promotional text message.
“We are moving quickly to a world in which we all are media content creators and information providers.”
MediaPost Publications – Welcome to the Neighborhood – 10/09/2007 Annotated
Fatdoor uses Microsoft Virtual Earth to map neighborhoods, letting residents position icons over photos of their houses and streets. They can create profiles, rate restaurants, post images, leave messages for other neighbors – and the more they participate, the more points they earn, building their credibility. Even before residents join, the local sites are prepopulated with information already available on the Web.
Google’s Orkut: A World of Ambition Annotated
Orkut recently pushed past the News Corp. (NWS) subsidiary in the Asia Pacific region. Orkut’s following in that market, which includes China and Japan, has nearly tripled, to roughly 11 million visitors a month, over the past year, according to the consultancy comScore (SCOR). MySpace, by contrast, has been drawing between 9 million and 10 million visitors in recent months.
Meanwhile, Orkut’s usage in Latin America has continued to climb: In August, it received 12.4 million unique visitors from that region, double the Latin American traffic of MySpace and Facebook combined.
MySpace is crowded; Amanda Beard is a ‘GoDaddy Girl’ – USATODAY.com Annotated
f you looked at the press 18 months ago, you couldn’t pick up an article or watch a TV show without hearing about MySpace founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe as the media darlings.
Now, Facebook is the next media darling, and in between there was YouTube. They are highly differentiated products. We are seeing growth in both.
Daily reading 10/05/2007
Tech giants poke around Facebook – USATODAY.com Annotated
Social networks are used by two-thirds of the estimated 220 million online users in the USA, says Karsten Weide, an analyst at IDC. (IDC) An estimated 200,000 new folks sign up for Facebook each day.
Facebook’s influence runs deep because the Internet is at the same stage that the computer operating system was in the mid-1980s, says analyst Peck. The tech company that controls the mechanism for buying and selling ads online will hold remarkable sway over the Internet industry for years to come — just as Microsoft did through its Windows operating system.
BusinessWeek Launches Major Art, Editorial Redesign Annotated
Throughout, the magazine features a cleaner, bolder look with department slugs and oversized page numbers that are designed to aid navigation. To elevate the profile of BusinessWeek’s long-form stories, Adler recently appointed Robert Hunter as assistant managing editor for features; with the redesign, features will open with dramatic spreads.
Daily reading 10/04/2007
Demo stuff for IT organizations
Note: Video presentations of the products mentioned below, as well as most other presentations from Demo, are available here. Blogger won’t accept the embedded videos and I don’t have time to mess with it.
As an event that brims with streaming video and eye-catching GUIs, Demo has never been the ideal venue for IT infrastructure companies. Startups that make servers perform better, for example, or that improve bandwidth utilization have an impossible task matching the slickness of their consumer-oriented neighbors.
Nevertheless, I saw some noteworthy innovations at Demo that should interest corporate computing departments.
Fusion-io – For sheer “Wow!” factor, Fusion-io’s ioMemory and ioDrive were hard to beat. The company claims to have squeezed the capacity and power of a storage area network onto a single PCI-Express card. The product it plans to release at the end of this year packs 640GB of non-volatile storage into a card that fits in the palm of your hand. It uses the same memory technology that’s embedded in Apple’s iPod Nano. Some people believe that breed of flash memory will eventually replace disk drives altogether.
The performance claims by this company are astounding. Fusion-io says it can improve storage performance by up to 100 times with better reliability because the product has no moving parts. At an estimated cost of around $20,000, the product will no doubt be the most costly expansion card ever produced, but Fusion-io says it will be far cheaper than the storage area networks it replaces.
CEO Rick White says a fully loaded SAN costs about $80 per gigabyte, while his product will come in at about $30 per gigabyte. That’s because there is no need for the racks, power supplies, controllers, air conditioning supply and floor space that conventional SANs need. Multiple cards can be placed in the same box and RAID-style striping can be employed for data integrity and redundancy.
The show guide said Fusion-io’s products “may prove to be among the most important products ever to launch a Demo.” If the company’s claims are true, that’s probably not an overstatement.
Solid ICE – This on-demand virtual environment from Qumranet combines the best features of virtualization and thin-client terminal services. Users can have multiple virtual machines running on their desktop, all hosted and served from the data center. IT organizations can fluidly scale of the power and resources provided to each user, and desktops can be customized and saved for access from any location. Users can even install software into their virtual machines, as if they were local computers.
Talari Networks – One of the few areas of IT infrastructure that has yet to succumb to
Talari claims to have come up with a way to adapt routing patterns to variations in the network and achieve frame relay-like reliability at a fraction of the cost. It layers in some secure data delivery and packet engineering to achieve reliability of more than 99.95%. Talari says is can deliver between 30 and 100 times the bandwidth per dollar and eliminate the need for frame relay or MPLS services in many cases.
The company’s web site is still two pages deep, so it may be awhile before its claims can be verified.
Blogging your book to the top
I’ve had many inquiries about the role of blogging in book promotion. As regular visitors know, I posted the chapters of The New Influencers online for several months and asked for comments and feedback. The strategy was successful not only for improving the quality of the content but also for building advanced awareness that has translated into reviews in the blogosphere.
Now a group of authors and PR people have put together Blog Your Book to the Top, an e-book about successful blog strategies for book promotion. It costs $29.95 and it looks to have some decent first-hand advice and case studies from successful authors.
Full disclosure: I’m quoted in several places in this book, but I don’t get any royalties for it. I’m mentioning this only because other authors may find this advice to be valuable.
Meanwhile, on my other blogs…
I’ve let this blog lie fallow for a couple of weeks, but it hasn’t been for lack of activity on some of the other blogs I maintain.
I just returned from a delightful two-week honeymoon in
My Newspaper Death Watch blog continues to chronicle the decline of major metro daily newspapers. I was particularly interested in this recent debate about the health of the job marketing in newspapers. It appears that the catastrophic declines in advertising sales are beginning to ease, but the overall prognosis for major metros is still pretty bleak. The good news is that small-market and community publishing is picking up some of the slack. As I’ve written on this blog many times, small markets are where it’s at.
Over at the Innovations blog I write at Ziff-Davis, recent entries include:
- An interview with free software advocate Eben Moglen about why software wants to be free. He makes a compelling comparison between software and arithmetic, arguing that if humans had had to license arithmetic every time they wanted to use it, we’d all be much worse off.
- There’s also an interview with David Weinberger, author of the new book Everything is Miscellaneous. David argues persuasively that the solution to information overload is more information and why organization and cataloging schemes as we know them are largely obsolete.
- I also had a three-part series on corporate applications of social media tools. They include an essay on The Hidden Blogosphere, an overview of tools for capturing corporate knowledge and a piece on how blogs and podcasts are revolutionizing corporate communications.
David Strom and I continue to record a weekly podcast for PR people on how to work with technology media and the new class of personal publishers. It’s called Tech PR War Stories, and recent programs have included:
- How to work a trade show, a two-part interview with events veteran Bill Sell;
- A conversation with InformationWeek’s Mitch Wagner about the power of Second Life; and
- A discussion with viral marketing expert BL Ochman about how to make viral campaigns work.