How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet – its not dead but its not growing and its attached to a rotting corpse, a bit like Yahoo! Finance and Sports. Everything else outside Asia should be lit up and burnt
It was three years since I last took a look at Google’s commands and operators. The services and shortcuts that I highlighted then are still valid, so I thought I would list out some additional ones for your convenience:
allintitle: as in allintitle: monkeys “social media” brings up only those items that have a relevant title
cache: as in cache:renaissancechambara.jp Google’s current cache of the web page renaissancechambara.jp. I have saved contents from websites that have gone down using this; but you should back up files regularly
related: as in related:renaissancechambara.jp shows sites that are similar or in some way connected to the site you are searching with. For instance it is a great way of finding out the social media profiles of bloggers
info: as in info:renaissancechambara.jp is a good catch-all command that is likely to bring up links to the cache command, inbound and outbound links, pages that Google has indexed from the site and related command content. Info would be my first point of attack in research because it gives out so much, if you remember only one of these, go for info
We were looking around for inspiration today in the office for some animation that we are getting produced and found the Tufty public information films. I have vague recollections of these films as a young child.
Looking back at the films now is really interesting:
How vehicles have changed
How the houses looked like a proto-council estate
The assumption of a nuclear family with a stay-at-home Mum
The formal looking clothing of the squirrel family
The video is on YouTube so may not be available to all readers.
Uniqlo has continued its work with Tokyo agency Projector, who developed Uniqlo’s Uniqlock and Uniqlo Calendar to come up with a better alarm clock that is indicative of delight through design of Uniqlo’s brand.
Uniqlo Wake-Up wakes you up with a piece of music, screen colour, icon and voice instructions which announce the time and the weather.
Over the past few years the number of web-based RSS readers has dwindled as Google used it’s search property to build out into other areas (including RSS readers) rather like the way Microsoft used its Windows and Office franchises to build out its monopoly.
Admittedly, Google doesn’t have the reputation for sharp elbows that Microsoft had, so it probably hasn’t done anything illegal per se. But to give you an idea of how pervasive Google Reader is; even desktop RSS readers like NetNewsWire use Google Reader to synch status across desktop, iPhone and iPad applications.
I don’t think that is a particularly healthy market situation; where is the incentive to innovate in the space? And socialising everything like the Google+ grey goo that has seeped over many of Google’s properties provides a compromised user experience.
Now some people may argue that they get everything that they need from Twitter, but that relies a hell of a lot on serendipity. For people who act as social editors, signposting content to others, or look to have a more structured approach to their online content consumption RSS readers are indispensable.
How complete is is Google’s monopoly on RSS readers?
Since NHN Corporation announced that it would be shuttering its Fastladder service at the end of this month, I have been evaluating alternative readers. The two viable alternatives I found were Cheetah News built by a Polish developer which is fast, but the user experience is clunky and Newsblur which is developed by Brooklyn-based developer Samuel Clay and his pet dog.
I decided to go with Newsblur in the end. At the time of writing I haven’t been able to get my OPML file up on to the system; but I am pretty confident that Samuel will sort it out.
So, how do you move from Fastladder to Newsblur?
This is what Fastladder users would have seen most of the time using the RSS reader.
Once you log-in now you see the following screen. The red box links to a blog post. This basically tells you the service is going offline and provides a link to fastladder.com/export which is allows you to download an OPML file. This is a file that has a list of all the blogs that you follow and the folder system you use in a format that can be read by other RSS readers.
The fastladder.com/export page is really simple. Click on the export link and the file should download to the default location that your browser downloads files to (most people set this up as their desktop). The file will be called export.xml. Make a back-up of it for old time’s sake.
Newsblur can be found at Newsblur.com. The image above is what the initial page looks like. There is a simple sign-up section on the page, so simple that I didn’t think it worthwhile screen-grabbing it. Press the radio button for the premium offering and pay the suggested $24 annual payment. This allows you to load up more than the default 64 feeds – if you are knowledge worker, or even just naturally curious you’ll need the premium version.
After you’ve signed up and paid up, this is what your first page is like. You now need to make use of the OPML file that you saved earlier. Click on the button that is signposted first things first at the bottom left of the image and you get this screen:
Browse and find the export.xml file saved on your computer. You can see where I did this right near the bottom of the box. After Newsblur processes this file you should be up and running with a service that is similar to use to Fastladder if you use Newsblur in ‘feed mode‘.
Comedian Bill Hicks accused marketers of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. Consumers behaviour online could be accused of not knowing the price or the value of the implicit and explicit information that they give away.
This is something to bear in mind when you use a mobile application or share information with Facebook; consumers don’t know the value of what they are giving up and that they could not put the genie back in the bottle.
Created by: OnlineMarketingDegree.net
Is the 1,9,90 Rule Outdated? – Only Dead Fish – models aren’t accurate predictors but ways that we get our heads around concepts, we take them too seriously. Despite this premise some interesting data here consumer behaviour
Panasonic loss balloons 10-fold ‹ Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion – betting on convergence (doing it badly) and forgetting about quality. They made the mistake of thinking that people buy their brand for being the company logo rather than a complex sum of ‘Made in Japan’ quality, product design that delighted and high performance. They also tried to go for blockbusters rather than niches
Why China? – interesting op ed on Chinese innovation
Goodbye, hardwired switches and circuits: we’ll miss you (maybe) – “But there’s a downside to the indisputable efficiency of the soft key and touch screen approaches: it’s a much longer path, functionally, from initiation to final action. Perhaps we feel more removed from the consequences of our actions and how they are implemented; that’s a psychological aspect which is hard to assess.” Interesting that EET is talking the man machine interface so seriously on this
I am doing some part-time study at the moment and teamed up with some of my fellow students to look at gamification trends. We had a grand total of just over 2 1/2 hours to score sources for information about gamification and its use in marketing.
Gamification is only new in respect to the way one looks at the problem rather than a new, new idea. When one thinks back to the early days of the web and the way AOL chat room moderators where incentivised this employed gamification before the concept was discussed. In it’s present form however there hasn’t been that much research done about it.
Gamification the way we now understand it from a digital marketing perspective probably goes back to the work done at Carnegie Mellon University about Games With A Purpose.
The incentives that seem to work best are in order of priority:
Status
Access
Power
Stuff
Interested surged in the concept of gamification from the second half of 2010, but the body of literature about it is only a small fraction of that about digital marketing AND the bulk of the literature about gamification is focused at how it can be applied from a technological or business process point of view. From a mainstream media perspective the level of interest has surged since the beginning of the year.
In terms of research, Gartner seems to have led the way in terms of predictions about the growth of gamification within enterprises, this is probably why it is getting so much attention around business processes rather than marketing.
Measurement of engagement according to M2 research revolves around four aspects:
Engagement: unique visits, time spent on site / page views
Loyalty: repeat visits, invite a friend
Virality: sharing, appearance on social channel communications
Monetisation: conversion rates, purchase of virtual goods, registration
Of these four categories the few successful case studies that we found focused on engagement and loyalty. Social networks were used as a conduit and a platform for gamification layers. For instance, allkpop.com used Badgeville to drive increased engagement and sharing of their site content.
Since this is a relatively young area of digital marketing we found some serious gaps in available information about gamification including:
Project failure rates
B2B case studies
Examples of commerce / conversion
The critical factor in planning a programme based on gamification seemed to be in the selection and fine tuning of the game mechanic and how it was applied.
The presentation is on Slideshare so may not be available to all readers.
I attended the Econsultancy Digiterati event at Manchester Metropolitan University on Thursday evening: Imran Farooq presented on how to implement digital marketing campaigns that need results fast. Some good insights on social advertising
Philip Coen talked about big data. It was interesting to see how expert systems are used to sift through the data for particular business cases rather than a general purpose solution.
Probably the saddest photo I have ever seen: ABode Hotel in Manchester which has been a world away (in a good way) from my experience from my previous stay at the Britannia Hotel.
Nokia’s communications team and their ongoing battle with Hong Kong-based mobile analyst Tomi Ahonen which has rolled across my Twitter feed like some bizarre wireless soap opera.
I finally finished Neal Stephenson’s REAMDE novel which I thoroughly enjoyed; probably his closest book to Snow Crash.
The demonstration video I saw of Tizen was interesting if only because it was devoid of UI fireworks. It will be interesting to see what Samsung does with Tizen over the next 18 months.
The Dishonored Sex: German Writer Pleads For Male Emancipation – Worldcrunch – Men’s greatest mistake was not claiming a place of their own. Three words sum up the male life story: career, competition, collapse.” This may sound subjective, perhaps a tad sniveling, but statistics back up what the author writes. On average, men in Germany die six years earlier than women. Interestingly, the author points out that where the lifestyle of both sexes is equivalent — among monks and nuns, for example, or those living in Israeli kibbutzim – there is no such difference in life expectancy. Interesting perspective.
I was looking at this film below on Vimeo and noticed a new element in the embed code to use it, prior to the video code itself:
<!– This version of the embed code is no longer supported. Learn more: https://vimeo.com/help/faq/embedding –> <object width=”500″ height=”281″><param name=”allowfullscreen” value=”true” /><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always” /><param name=”movie” value=”http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=41678735&force_embed=1&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0″ /><embed src=”http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=41678735&force_embed=1&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”always” width=”500″ height=”281″></embed></object>
(I have emphasised the notation in bold for ease of reading).
The Vimeo FAQ section quoted in the note isn’t that expansive in its discussion about this lack of support. It just says that the ‘new embed code’ using iframes is the one to use for WordPress.
By default iframes are disabled in WordPress because they present security risks for the page viewer. This is due to the way that an iframe operates.
At the risk of oversimplifying what an iframe is, imagine that you are reading a newspaper in public and you are around the middle of the paper holding the paper up whilst you do it. Now imagine that a hole is neatly cut in the front page of the paper so that a story from page three shows through and looks as if it is part of the front page to the idle passer by. An iframe does a similar thing allowing you to ‘see ‘through’ a section of one page to see content from another site.
An iframe could be used to pass off malevolent element of one page in another site that is trusted, or mix HTTP and HTTPS elements within a web page. All of this makes it harder for a user to know what site they are actually dealing with and can mask processes that put their computer and network at risk.
Because of this using an iframe on WordPress requires a proactive decision to use an iframe plug-in. And unlike an embed code, these are harder for the neophyte blogger to use:
The code that you have to use is different to what Vimeo gives you (you need to extract these elements yourself
There is a a number of unresolved issues around setting the height of an the content within an iframe
Core functionality like the ability to scroll is turned off by default
Part of the reason why the iframe seems to be a reverse in the overall pattern to democratise content sharing is that the iframe is actually an old standard dating back to 1997
The reason why Vimeo has decided to go down this route is because it can make the video content responsive to the device that is likely to play it, emphasising the increasing importance of devices like the iPad for content consumption. One of the main barriers to universal adoption that Vimeo (and other content platforms) face is that the use of iframes need to be made easier for the average content creator.
Really interesting walk-through the developer version of Tizen – the joint operating system developed by Samsung and Intel; which has some parts of MeeGo in there. I found the user experience a bit disappointing compared to the BlackBerry 10 demonstrations and the bar set by the iPhone, but this may change even further before the public gets to use Tizen in anger.
In terms of Samsung’s relationship with Android , this provides Samsung with a whip-hand against Google and a fallback position against Microsoft’s patent licensing programme for Android manufacturers. The overview is on YouTube so may not be available to all viewers.
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