Big wine for a big idea ... what is it with geeks and booze? The Bloglines team is going to give away giant bottle of wine. Now if I have a big idea ... I ain't sharin' it with them! QReader is going to get it!
Analytics across the board that will let you mash up information to know if a post it popular in a particular area. Eh, not a big idea.
Now a big idea ... automatic synthesis of content into something digestible. Giving context. Now, I'm wondering is FeedRinse will do this? But ... it would be something I would use.
Bloglines as social networks ... nope.
Ratings of content, eh.
The winner was ... content synthesis! I guess that's a hint.
Steve Rubel: marketing is about conversations, and he works in PR to help companies join the conversation.
Question: How can marketers become more collaborative without giving up control? You cannot control the conversation, only become a part of it. Value is created not in a vacuum, but in collaboration.
Listening is part of the focus, and marketers understand how to do this, but not what to do with the information derived from this listening. That's stage one. Then you need to create programs to respond and interact.
The value relationship is 2-sided. The companies/PR firms want to work with bloggers to give them value back. Not use you as a vehicle for a message, but to give something back of value and relevance.
People want to talk to real people. They don't want a plastic corporate response. Just like with politicians, we want from companies a human touch and response. Also those companies that do a lot of the listening but never take the step to respond - as fake as a bad response.
Doing it (blogs) well: Southwest Doing it badly: Clorox
Find a voice for a product & express it well: encourage dialogue on your own site and those of others.
Boris Mann: product images (with open fair use), permalinks (easy nav), personality.
Don't send word documents (or PDFs!!!) - be interactive. Use a survey online and let me share the results too.
You cannot create a passionate user - but you can encourage it. And you can seek it.
Don't be averse to risk.
Question: How many startups are monetized by advertising?
Lots of hands. Steve and others consider it broken. Someone else clarifies PR is busted and Steve agrees.
Good subpoint that its not advertising which is busted, but our single definition of it in relation to the Internet. Any communication is, in a way, advertising. So, it's a shift in perspective and therefore perhaps it's not advertising that's busted but our definition of it.
Question: How do you leverage technology for better advertising? Make it two-way.
Advertising cannot just give away to conversation. There is a whole industry devoted to traditional advertising one-way models that it cannot just change, no matter how the market appears to be shifting.
Control is a language of marketing, but it's much more credible to give up the control.
It's the product not the pitch.
Advertising is broken for bad products. Pitching a bad product is hard and tedious and so much of our viewspace is saturated with bad product pitches that we tire of advertising in general. Truth here. A good product sells itself, or needs very little selling.
There is an "us versus them" mentality. About reaching the masses. Push marketing. "Consumers" Be a part of the community you serve. Turn "consumer" into "customer" and "person".
Hack marketing the way you hack a program.
Question: What do you think about character blogs?
Steve thinks they are a pathetic way to avoid authenticity (kids' blogs being the exception). People can express life experiences and human emotions.
Scoble: you cannot have a relationship with a facade, but you can have one with a person.
Steve wants to know how marketers can learn to listen better. Darren, true to form, points out that marketers need to read our blogs before pitching us, but then instead of us, as bloggers, slamming the marketer publicly when they gaff contacting them back personally with a little mentoring. I get a few PR pitches a month. So far I haven't had a really good one that I've felt that "oooh I have to write about this ...".
A Word doc with 20 questions to complete! Jeez there are times I'd like to be Boris ... that's not one of them.
Hmm, according to Steve both advertising and PR are busted. Again, I'm not thinking advertising is busted, just that the really cool stuff hasn't been done, yet.
Is releasing control of your advertising the solution to fixing the model? Is letting the brand run on it's own the way to succeed. Or is it that, as Darren suggests, that you have to have a good product first. Being involved in both sides in the equation, I think I have to noodle this around a bit.
Tara Hunt thinks better partnerships are needed ... less us vs them. From Geek News Central, advertisers need to lighten up and let people talk about your products openly.
Character blogs ... W00t! Steve pointed me out specifically as a character blog supporter (which I am). We didn't get to talk much about it. Scoble made a great point that he can't have a relationship with a character. Point taken, but I think it really depends on the character reacts. What about the people who write an advice column under a pen name. Is that a character or just a pen name? I'd counter that sometimes that person is a character. Well, Marc Canter is starting to talk ... more later.
What is a standard? How do we evolve the standards? How do you disseminate the standards (top down or ?) ?
RSS was an open standard that we all embraced & nobody owns it. And people make a lot of money from RSS.
We want to embrace other open standards in the same way. Create new standards.
What should be standardized? What not? What can be company specific/proprietary. For example, what part of a Calendar is the same, and what can be unique? Vendors need unique features over and above the open standards in order to differentiate. Have their own value-add.
At what point is it appropriate to draw the line?
If vendors cannot have proprietary features then the unique things they do have, their value add, are simply re-integrated back into the open standard and they have nothing left to sell you or provide you value with.
On the flip side, when do features become irrelevant? When they are added for the monetary value but provide nothing to the user, or even detract from it.
What do you when we encounter 'closed'? ex. When Myspace tells people no YouTube and we own your data.
Myspace does not own those users or their data. The social capital those people invest in their friendships is theirs only. If they want to take those relationships somewhere else (Tribe, etc) they should be able to. To export it and go.
Being open is a two-way street. You must commit to import & export, for example, with your APIs.
What is the new publishing model?
It's not about publishing content any more, it's about providing an experience. A Digital Lifestyle Aggregator / portal or whatever. Amazon.com is a portal - Buy.com still operates on the publishing model.
The point now is to build a user experience around the open standards. The end of the day, marketing is this user experience. The base product is not the "sell" itself. Basic marketing teaches us that what we need to do is fill a void. A toaster is a piece of technology, but it solves a need to make your bread into toast and satisfy your hunger in a way more meaningful than if it were untoasted. It's the end product -> product + user experience = value
Quote:
"It is the open standards that are the bridges and causeways that interconnect the small isolated islands [of startups] together."
Companies are going IPO now with very few unique features on these standards. So it's not about being completely unique anymore. It's about embracing standards and adding some value on top - a little or a lot, it doesn't take much anymore.
Open standards allow for competition and for growth. If there are no open standards, the only 'out' or 'growth' for a small company is to be bought out and funded. Open standards allow for small companies to thrive on their own.
What will it take to move companies like Digg, MySpace, etc to jump to the mainstream? Buzz Brugerman then asks the important question about will the loss of Net Neutrality mean to these young compaines. Steve Rubel doesn't think that advertisers won't be able to foot the bill, contrary to popular wisdom. Michael doesn't agree with Steve and I'm with Michael. I agree that the ad market is growing so fast and new dollars are pouring in with a paucity of places to put them.
I was wondering how the whole discussion leader/forum discussion format would work ... okay it's really interesting. The opinions are fun to listen to and not only that having an opinionated leader (which Michael is) really makes the interaction exciting.
Ah the important question ... why is this different than 1999? Companies aren't going public right away. They aren't costing as much to start and (my impression) is that they are more realistic. Real business models.
For those of you not here at Gnomedex ... follow as much you can on Technorati. Cause the pot is being stirred and great ideas are going to come out of this time.
eBay Canadahas introduced eBay Member Blogs to build up an eBay community. The blogs add to the company's member forums, about me pages and eBay reviews and guides.
With the Member Blogs feature, eBay users can create and publish journal-like entries within their own dedicated space and share personal experiences or discuss their categories.
You're a small Internet startup based in Canada, and you want access to U.S. venture capital, but you don't want to have to move to Silicon Valley or hand over 45 per cent of your stock to a big VC group. What do you do?
For Vancouver-based Dabble DB, you find a guy like Paul Kedrosky, a Canadian-born venture capitalist and former technology analyst who is based in Silicon Valley but has ties to Ventures West, a Vancouver investment group.
Dabble DB announced Tuesday morning that it had closed a financing round with Ventures West, and that Mr. Kedrosky would be joining the company's board of directors. Mr. Kedrosky's relationship with Ventures West is also changing, in part as a result of the financing deal.
The amount of the investment was not disclosed, but industry sources put the figure in the $2-million range (U.S.).
Dabble DB was founded by Andrew Catton and Avi Bryant, two veteran programmers who are in their late 20s and hoping to ride the wave of enthusiasm about interactive Web-based applications known collectively as "Web 2.0."
I'd like to open the floor for some usability feedback on our new font features.
The ability to change fonts and font sizes was our #1 feature request, so we were very excited to have it in our latest release (see Qumana is font crazy). However, the feature design was something we debated and, after the release, we are sensing some confusion.
We had two basic models to consider when integrating these features: blog editors or word processing.
In many of our design choices, we try to move towards the familiar word processing model rather than change behaviour patterns. Hence our integration of WYSIWYG image-wrap options.
Just like with the word processing model, we put Font and Font Size in pull down menus.
However, unlike word processing, we cannot display the font your blog is currently using. A blog design usually includes preset default font attributes in the CSS style sheet: this style sheet tells the blog what font to display and in what size.
Next problem: Qumana cannot tell you what fonts are in your CSS style sheet. The APIs Qumana uses to speak with the blog platforms does not give access to the style sheet. So, unlike in word processing, it cannot show you what you use now to see if you want to change it.
Obstacle #1: the CSS Style Sheet has default fonts already set Obstacle #2: Qumana cannot access the CSS Style Sheet
Our solution was to use the word processing model but to have a shorthand reference to the fact that a font is already set. First we had only "Font" listed instead of "Default Font" - that ended up seeming as if no font were selected. We chose "default font" as being the shorthand for "Qumana will use the default font as set in your CSS Style Sheet".
Early feedback suggests we have not quite hit the nail on the head here. Some people think it means you have the ability somewhere in Qumana to set a default font. Others think that it means Qumana will override their Style Sheet settings.
Is this a problem of language or of the model (drop-down menu) we have adopted? So, if not "default font", what?
Big companies have for years installed industrial-strength content management systems in the hope of sparking collaboration among workers. There was just one problem: People didn't use them.
Now, tools that people are familiar with on the consumer Web, such as blogs and wikis, are staking out ground inside businesses, often led by the end users themselves.
"The key part of Web 2.0 is that there is something about these new tools that enable new practices of collaboration," said John Seely Brown, a consultant and former chief scientist of Xerox, who spoke at the Collaborative Technology Conference in Boston last week. "Web 2.0 is a profoundly participatory medium."
Like others, Seely Brown expects to see a wide range of techniques common on consumer Web applications–including blogs, collaborative Web page editing through wikis, tagging and RSS (Really Simple Syndication)-based subscriptions–to bleed into mainstream business applications….new Web standard products could push people to stop using e-mail to share documents and instead collaborate through shared workspaces like wikis….The onus is back on the incumbent providers, especially IBM and Microsoft, to (react). This stuff is beyond good enough, and it's easy to work with," [said Burton Group analyst Peter O'Kelly].
LaMonica's story goes on to say that Microsoft is responding by building wiki functionality into a forthcoming version of its Sharepoint collaboration technology. LaMonica also picked up on this zinger:
"This way of capturing collaborative wisdom, collective knowledge is a different take on knowledge management, which was fundamentally flawed" [said IBM Lotus Division general manager Michael Rhodin].
I think this is one of those watershed moments that we'll look back on in a year or so and see as a turning point in the blogosphere. Fox Media by partnering with b5 Media instead of launching their own blogs has acknowledged the power of an established blog network. They have also given a ringing endorsement of blogs as a way to connect with fans and sneak behind-the-scenes tidbits out. Oh and get a little advertising and branding in there too.
All good things, all things that will help the blogging medium push more into the mainstream as a source of information and news.
Disclosure: Arieanna Foley and I both author blogs on the b5 Media network.
Just noticed whilst browsing .... dragged and dropped it, fixed a link, chose a few categories, added some tags and hit "Publish Post".
Google Testing Ad Supported Premium Video Google is running a test offering about 2,000 premium videos available for free streaming viewing, inserting a persistent banner-type ad at the top of the screen and showing an additional post-roll video ad once the premium content has finished streaming.
The test is expected to last about a week, according to Peter Chane, group business product manager, Google Video.
Of course, all sorts of bloggers who know how to play with html and embed video clips into their blog posts. But most newbies, and many of us more practiced amateurs, still don't like wrestling with image and video upload and the publishing function inside the major blog platform editors. Even if it isn't complicated any more, it still may seem complicated to many users, so they don't get into the habit.
And it can really be fun to publish video clips easily ... and often.
Qumana now makes it really really easy to publish video clips from YouTube or other similar services. It's not elegant (yet), but here's how ... now.
Update: I had a whole section here .. well, actually only three or four sentences ... describing the "How-To", but hadn't noticed Arieanna's earlier post. I've deleted mine
