Ged Carroll

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  • Semantic web + more news

    Semantic web

    Tim Berners-Lee Says the Time for the Semantic Web is Now – The semantic web is designed to be machine readable. The underlying technologies supporting the semantic web are used to formally represent metadata. For example, ontology can describe concepts, relationships between entities, and categories of things. The most interesting thing about Berners-Lee’s interview is that he thinks that the semantic web will be closer to Google’s vision through database manipulation rather than folksonomy. I think you will need a combination of both for a semantic web that works

    China

    Masters of Media, New Media MA Amsterdam » Chinese low-wage workers disloyal for a reason  – Chinese workers sticking it to the man and wanting an independent China to kick multi-national mega corp. bootie

    Consumer behaviour

    Technology Can Be a Blessing for Bored Workers – New York Times

    Americans Trust Online News More Than TV | WebProNews – online trusted more than TV. Does this say more about the rise of online or the pitiful state of TV news journalism? I don’t know

    White working class ‘voiceless’ – A majority of white working class Britons feel nobody speaks for people like them, a BBC survey has suggested. Some 58% said they felt unrepresented compared to 46% of white middle class respondents to a Newsnight poll.

    Design

    Normal Room – home for global homes, wonderful lifestyles and fabulous interior design – Home – for interior design junkies

    Olympus Announces ‘World’s Smallest and Lightest’ DSLR – Consumer-SLR – but you dont want a camera thats too light because then you get issues wtih camera shake

    Ethics

    YouTube – Edison Chen Sex Scandal Apology – Hopefully this will finish once and for all the scandal and allow all the starlets to keep their jobs in the Asian entertainment industry. It would be a shame if Maggie Q had to retire :)

    I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Leadfoot | PBS – interesting post on the false green measure of lead-free solder

    FMCG

    Kit Kat Lucky Little – interesting japanese offline / online integrated marketing idea

    BBC NEWS | UK | Tate & Lyle sugar to be Fairtrade – In terms of size and scale, this is the biggest ever Fairtrade switch by a UK company, will the company get held to a holier than thou status and get beaten up on big food issues the way the post-Prius Toyota got beaten up by environmentalists about the conventionally powered cars that it still sells?

    How to

    7 Food Hacks to Stay Alert Without Caffeine | Zen Habits

    Ideas

    apophenia: Where HCI comes from (and where it might go)

    BIL Conference – Minds Set Free. – TED meets barcamp

    The New Economics of Brands – Harvard Business Online’s Umair Haque – Umair has an interesting article on how Google built their brand

    Innovation

    The World’s Most Innovative Companies | Fast Company – I am surprised that Facebook has scored so highly in this article and we don’t have any of the results of IDEOs commissions described

    Japan

    SMS Text News » Archives » Japan gets new MVNO and starts price war

    Michelin Gives Stars, but Tokyo Turns Up Nose – New York Times – if I go restaurant hunting in Japan, I want to be told by by the Japanese not some French interlopers the best places to go. Also Japan is more wired than most other nations on earth, why the dead tree edition instead of using viaMichelin’s much vaunted mapping on a mobile service?

    Tokyo Taxi Drivers get Ranked | Japan: Stippy – not all taxi drivers who pass The Knowledge are equal now Tokyo is recognising their most highly qualified drivers wtih a star system. Cool idea

    PingMag – Goodbye Madame Butterfly: Sex And Marriage In Japan – interesting author interview about changing society roles in Japan

    Luxury

    Digital World Tokyo | World’s first holographic RFID tag to stop Vuitton knock-offs

    Hoods Hong Kong Previously Opening Exhibition | Hypebeast  – Japanese label Neighbourhood opening their first store in HKG

    Marketing

    Brand persuasion wheel – Ulli Appelbaum – Six most common principles of human persuasion that can be used by marketers reward, threat, expertise, liking, scarcity and social proof

    Media

    Boom times for Chinese film, but what comes next?

    Two takes on essentially the same data set about Google’s clicks Google’s Paid Click Business Slipping – ComScore – Seeking Alpha

    British ISPs to Delve into Behavioral Ads, Too – deal by Phorm, these guys seem to have stepped up a gear. Prospective acquisition material by AOLGoogleIACMicrosoftNewsCorpYahoo?

    Telegraph Opens Tech R&D Lab | paidContent:UK

    Futuretainment: The Asian Media Revolution – O’Reilly Conferences

    Online

    SyncWizard – SyncWizard takes your contacts, appointments, music and documents and zaps them onto the Net. You get a MyStuff page. Using this web site all your personal information is in one password protected place available from any net aware device.

    Digg, Stumbled Upon Is there Room for Yahoo! Buzz

    Delver – Home – Interesting new social search project

    » Social Media in Russia sixtysecondview – David Brain on Russian netizens

    Welcome to Hello Kitty Online! – World of Warcraft puh, this is where online gaming is at. I can see a can of feline whoopass being unleashed on Disney’s Club Penguin

    Yahoo Attracts Younger Users, Google Has Bigger Spenders | WebProNews – interesting data on the demographics of different search engines user base

    New Yahoo tool gathers favorite Web places on mobiles – By Georgina Prodhan, European Technology Correspondent HANOVER, Germany (Reuters) – Yahoo, still fending off a $42 billion takeover bid by Microsoft, unveiled a bookmarking tool on Tuesday that lets users keep track of favorite Web topics on their…

    MediaPost Publications – Yahoo In Control Of Open Search – 03/04/2008 – Trusted web concept gets a bit of a bashing, but the truth is that user intent and context is hard to compute

    Shopnik – experiment in data organisation (thanks to my colleague Nathan for flagging this one)

    Local search in the UK

    Software

    Judge on privacy: Computer code trumps the law | CNET News.com

    Style

    Nike “St. Patrick’s Day” Wildwood 90 Free | Hypebeast – I love these St Pats inspired Nike trainers which are a hybrid of an old school top and the Nike free sole. Top of the morning to ya!

    Technology

    Stegen Electronics – Scandinavian hardware hackers are selling the first multi-region Blu-Ray players from Sony and Pioneer.

    OLPC Review – ICONEYE

    The Technology Chronicles : Apple shareholder meeting Tuesday – hippies try to hijack Apple AGM with green agenda

    The trouble with Steve – Mar. 4, 2008 – Fortune gets tall poppy syndrome and let’s a journalist loose with a scythe on America’s most admired company and its CEO

    Wireless

    400,000 unlocked Apple iPhones turn up on China Mobile – and more are in HKG, Singapore etc

    Hoping to Make Phone Buyers Flip – New York Times – cell phone design and consumer behaviour

    Ian Wood’s reports from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona: Digital Evangelist: Ist day at MWC, Digital Evangelist: Day Two @ MWC and Digital Evangelist: Final Thoughts on Barcelona

    Europeans may be forced to pay for incoming cell calls – email your MP, email your MEP, email Gordon Brown: nip this in the bud

  • Bradley Horowitz + more news

    Bradley Horowitz

    On Leaving Yahoo… : Elatable | Bradley Horowitz – Bradley Horowitz leaving Yahoo!, on its own a bit of a sad day for the big Y! as Bradley is probably the smartest guy I have ever stuck in front of a journalist. Bradley Horowitz had come to Yahoo! as part of the surge on search under then CEO Terry Semel. He was one of a senior management team that reported into Jeff Weiner

    Design

    NASA Workmanship Technical Committee – handy hardware hacking reference guide

    The Manga Bible – Pages – Japanese artists have done the story of Buddha and text books in manga, so I guess this is the logical extension. Its not really drawn in a manga style but has a good pedigree with one of the artists having worked for 2000AD

    Economics

    The dark reality – interesting realistic economic analysis on India that could apply to China just as well

    How to

    Developing Intelligence : Caffeine: A User’s Guide to Getting Optimally Wired

    Innovation

    Popgadget Personal Technology for Women: Socket Sense: “Adjustable surge strip to fit your adapters – OMG this is such a duh why didnt I think of this idea

    Japan

    The Green Lantern – green and quality concerns kick in on Japanese restaurant offerings

    Marketing

    SMS Text News » Archives » Text a Mars Bar!  – UK agency copies Korean idea for Mars / Masterfoods. Nate.com has had this on a social network-wide level for a good while. It just goes to show you that there is no such thing as a new idea

    Media

    Half Of All Clicks On Display Ads Are Worthless  – A study put out yesterday by comScore, Starcom Media, and Tacoda suggests that half of all clicks on display ads (as opposed to clicks on paid search links) are generated by only 6 percent of Web surfers.

    Victrola Favorites book and CD – interesting mix of stuff, expect to hear some of it on an Orb album soon

    Online

    The Game – WSJ.com – For Facebook, GeoCities Offers a Cautionary Tale Can Rise and Fall of Once-Hot Site Sway Decisions on Funding, IPO?

    Xiaonei – chinese social network similar to Facebook

    Stats: Facebook and MySpace lose their draw

    Retailing

    Overkill Shop Berlin | Streetwear, Graffiti, Sneaker Shop – achingly cool shop in Germany

    Software

    Theme Garden | Drupal 5 Themes – handy themes and ideas for the open source CMS

    Yahoo’s socially integrated messaging service, oneConnect

  • About renaissance chambara and Ged Carroll

    Much as I would like this to be a media megacorp of randomness, renaissance chambara is written by just one person me: Ged Carroll.

    blogqrcode

    renaissance chambara started off as an experiment to find out about the capabilities of blogging by trying, originally it was postings on the AlwaysOn Network back in 2002 – 2004, which at the time was an innovation-orientated analogue of Medium. I then moved it to a Blogspot blog; though none of the posts on the AlwaysOn Network survived. Who said publishing on the internet is forever.  It then moved to a now dead blog that was hosted on Yahoo! Small Business Hosting with my own URL. Relatively early on I roped in a couple of journalist friends who contributed a couple of items.

    About Ged Carroll

    Every day, to earn my daily bread I go to the market where lies are bought. Hopefully, I take up my place among the sellers. – Bertolt Brecht

    I am a brand planner and sometime digital marketer, living in London (on and off for the past 20 years, living in between in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China) delivering programmes for a creative, communications and advertising agencies and their client base. More on that here.

    So back in 2002 it made sense to find out about blogs as a way of directly communicating with public audiences. This is back before social media marketing really became a thing like it is now. Instead we had chat rooms, forums, IRC (internet relay chat) and instant messaging.

    I have passed on digital skills as part of the Econsultancy training team, was a contributing author to The Social Media MBA and Share This Too, done public speaking and have been a business adviser to an architectural studio based in Shenzhen, China.

    I have freelanced for different agencies working on projects for clients like Mandarin Oriental, Sony and Unilever. You can find out more about my work, re professional stuff on this page.

    Prior to falling into agency life I worked in a number of roles, from McDonald’s prep rooms building racks of frozen chips for frying, to heading a shift team in an oil refinery and a brief spell in marketing for financial institutions.

    Probably the role that was closest to my heart was club DJ, because of my love of music. I still like to step behind the mixing desk and play new records with some classics and surprises thrown in just to keep people guessing. Vinyl is still king in my book.

    I guess this kind of gives you an idea of the lens through which I view the world when I write the posts:

    • An inquisitive nature
    • A love of reading instilled by my parents
    • An engineers view of quality from my Dad
    • Being a stranger-in-a-strange-land having come from an Irish household in the middle of the UK
    • A contrary outlook on life coming from being an only child
    • Being a counter-culture fanboy

    I found my way into technology mainly because I wasn’t afraid of it, rather than any real ability. I learned about technology in a very hands on way because there wasn’t any budget for an IT department in many of the early companies where I worked. I got experience on Macs, mainframes, DEC VAX mini-computers IBM and SGI UNIX boxes during five years or so in industry. I had my first email address early in 1994. In the tradition of the early net, I was a number rather than a name. I also managed to send my first spam email pretty soon after as I tried to offload some unwanted Marks and Spencers’ vouchers on my unsuspecting colleagues. Back then people were more concerned that I was creating and selling counterfeit vouchers (I wasn’t, but then I would say that wouldn’t I?) rather than the act of spamming itself.

    I took up technology that made a difference to my life: pagers, mobile phones, PDAs and Mac laptops. I still use Macs, though the pager, mobile phone and PDA has now been replaced by an iPhone.

    I am not very talented in the programming skills area, but was self-taught to write macros in Lotus 1-2-3 to automate optical fibre testing equipment. But that was a long time ago and I have forgotten more in that time than I’ll ever know again.

    Why renaissance chambara?

    The name is all in lower case because the web is built on the foundations of Unix. Linux is just a cheap knock-off, even Microsoft’s modern operating system borrowed much of its underpinnings from a Unix analogue called VMS. iOS and macOS are based on BSD, which stands for Berkeley Systems Distribution (of Unix). Unix only used lower case in its syntax, that’s the reason by email addresses and URLs are case insensitive.

    renaissance as in a wide range of interests – everything is inter-connected. chambara (チャンバラ) as in period samurai films (Ran, Hidden Fortress, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Rashomon, Hitokiri, Sword of Doom, Zatoichi series, the Lone Wolf & Cub series ) – because of my interest in East Asian culture. (chambara is also rendered into western script as chanbara – I made a choice, deal with it). renaissance wushu didn’t have the same ring and hallyu wasn’t really a thing until after I started writing back in 2004.

    If you need to ask more about the name you just won’t get it, just roll with it and we’ll be in like flynn.

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  • Piper Jaffray trends

    US investment bank Piper Jaffray put out some of the smartest publicly available thinking about the internet space at the moment: last week they issued a new detailed report called The User Revolution: The New Advertising Ecosystem and The Rise of the Internet as a Mass Medium. Piper Jaffray customers can get a copy from their representative, I am on their email list because of my long-term interest in this area.

    Reading it at first, my initial reaction was that I thought that it was quite patronising, but then I realised that the document has to assume little to no knowledge because its main audience is going to be fund managers of all ilks.

    The Piper Jaffray report has some great industry data points and articulates many of the key concepts that are shaping this market in an easy and articulate manner. In the accompanying industry note the technology analyst team pulled out those key points as an executive summary; some of which I expect to see being incorporated into PowerPoiint presentations at a meeting near you:

    The User Revolution

    The User Revolution – consumers taking control of content consumption and branding. User-generated content as well as user indent driven services (like Amazon, Last.fm and Yahoo! Music’s Launch radio stations).

    new media world order.jpg
    Communitainment – The three areas that historically drove demand for internet services like Yahoo! and AOL of comunity, communication and entertainment are being directly addressed all at once by new services acting as an accelerant for for the market

    why google wins.jpg
    The Golden Search – ’search as the new portal’. When I used to work at Yahoo! search was described as the front door to the web. A much quoted statistic was that over seven out of every ten internet sessions was started from a search enquiry. Piper Jaffray thinks that search will be increasingly used in branding campaigns (marketers really need to crack this as contextual and search adverts have encouraged brand disloyalty – Kelkoo’s whole business was built on the back of Google ads with pretty much zero brand marketing, and you have a generation of online marketers who use quantative data from search marketing without any regard to brand value, instead focusing purely on transactional data).

    Video ads

    Video ads will be the next thing – this is kind of counter-intuitive as ads have moved from banners and animation to text ads, but then services like YouTube facilitate in-programming ads a la television.

    targetability.jpg
    I found the following section of the report executive summary particularly pertinent, and as a PR consultant it is the concept that clients I have spoken to find the most difficult to grasp: The Revolution Is About Control. The uprising by the users is over control – control of the type of content users want, control of the place and time content is delivered., control of the advertisements that the users are willing to take, and control of the brands they want to create. Unlike most revolutions, where the masses revolt because of major hardship and grievance, the User Revolution was largely driven by the proliferation of media options, the emergence of the Internet, and the growing sophistication of consumers.

    I find the last point of particular interest, particularly when I think of the adverts that run on UK television for products like the now defunct Courts Carpets or Cillit Bang – perhaps there isn’t that much wisdom in marketing.

    And finally just a couple of the business risks that I through of interest:

    • The loss of confidence by advertisers in the effiacy of online advertising and emerging business models.
    • A decrease in efficacy of online advertising including display and search advertising

    Media fragmentation

    I particularly like how they show the fragmentation of media over the past 40 years! ;-)

    40 yr fragmentation.jpg

    More related content here.

  • Peanut Buttergate


    Peanut Buttergate broke over the past few days. It is also better known as the Peanut Butter memorandum. What is it and why should you care? In the post below I write about it from my viewpoint as a former Yahoo! employee in the European marketing team focused on search. I am familiar with the business units and the personalities involved.

    Who is Brad Garlinghouse?

    Brad Garlinghouse is a natural and compelling presenter. I had seen him speak in internal presentations about Yahoo!’s communications and messenger products. Garlinghouse has written a four-page memorandum looking for internal change at Yahoo! which maps out a possible future direction for the firm.

    Brad Garlinghouse makes some very pertinent points in his now famous peanut butter memo about Yahoo!, but ultimately shows a more selfish agenda than ‘saving’ the company he loves.You can read the full memo here, but I have just pulled some of the key items out to provide a European perspective on some of the points that he made. YMG = Yahoo! Media Group – the team that Garlinghouse led at the time.

    Garlinghouse was frustrated with what he saw as competing products and approaches:

    • Flickr vs. Photos: To say that Photos competes with Flickr is ridiculous Yahoo! Photos was tired, boring and a pretty shoddy product

    • YMG video vs. Search video

    • Deli.cio.us vs. My Web

    • Messenger and plug-ins vs. sidebar and widgets

    • Social media vs. 360 and Groups

    • Front page vs. YMG

    • Global strategy from BU’vs. Global strategy from Int’l

    Part of the reason for this was a complex silo’ed matrix structure and an the result of an organisation struggling to fight a talent and ideas war against very strong adveraries like Google and Microsoft.

    Some of the Yahoo! products should have been killed off, whilst other duplications occurred because internal products like 360, Messenger and MyWeb sucked at crucial iterations in their product life.

    In addition, Yahoo!, particularly Music and the Comms & Community BU which Garlinghouse runs has a poor record of building products fit for early adopters like Music properties that aren’t Mac-compatiable, the new Yahoo! Mail which doesn’t work on Safari and a Messenger client which was much poorer than open source equivalents like Adium X making it hard to build a buzz that will trickle down to mainstream users.

    Develop a focus on the vision

    Absolutely, and drive this down into reinvigorating the brand for the 21st century. In the US, Yahoo! has a brand that resonates with consumers, but in Europe the Yahoo! brand doesn’t stand for anything. Whilst my former boss Georga could recite the values of the brand and we all had purple folders highlighting what they were, this hadn’t changed in consumer perceptions. Focus on the vision is the first part of making that work.

    Restore accountability and clarity of ownership

    Two things are needed here – measurements that ensure long-term thinking rather than stort-term performance peaks and selling the future. The right people in the right roles to fulfil this. In Europe, this means going from from the top down.

    Long-term thinking means building a brand to make Yahoo! a must-go online destination, rather than just using arbitrage calculations to buy clicks on Google. It means giving European users a higher quality user experience and prioritising the products users want rather than executive whims

    Redesign performance and incentive schemes: This is only any good if it is tied into the right measurements and I don’t think that Garlinghouse has got these measures right.

    Peanut Buttergate as part in power play

    This paragraph I found particularly interesting, yet has got the least publicity is ‘Align a set of new BU’s so that they are not competing against each other. Search focuses on search. Social media aligns with community and communications. No competing owners for Video, Photos, etc. And Front Page becomes Switzerland. This will be a delicate exercise — decentralization can create inefficiencies, but I believe we can find the right balance.’

    Garlinghouse is basically going for a power play here.

    Social media has been alligned to search because that’s where a lot of the smart people who get it are: community and communications from a product and technology perspective don’t get it.

    Search has embraced social media because the algorithimic war is one of attrition whereas social media offers a breakout situation. A more radical and business savvy play would be to adopt Google search again and augment it with social media.

    Garlinghouse blew it at that paragraph, its not about doing the best for the company, its about building his empire in the face of worthy opponents like Jeff Weiner who heads-up Search.

    It would make more sense to put Communications mail product and all the communities products into Search alongside desktop search.

    Final gaffe in Peanut Buttergate

    Finally being a marketing person I was horrified to see such a high profile marketing gaff ‘I love Yahoo! I’m proud to admit that I bleed purple and yellow.’ Yellow has not been an official corporate colour for over a year, somebody please give him a brand guide folder. More Yahoo! related content here.

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