A new service that has been developing under the radar.

It's the brainchild of Steven Berlin Johnson, author of Emergence, Mind Wide Open, The Ghost Map, Everything Bad Is Good For You

and ...

John Geraci, a well-know builder of virtual communities

A high-profile investor and lots of high-profile angels and advisers .. in the first camp Union Square (Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham) ... and in the second

We've still got a great list of angels involved as well. Marc Andreessen just wrote in out of the blue to say that he really liked the site, and to ask if he could help out with the financing. Esther Dyson, John Borthwick, George Crowley, and Richard Smith -- it's a fantastic list of people to have behind you. (Along with our other founding investors, John Seely Brown, Mark Bailey, and Andy Karsch.)

Outside.In

Neighbors are registered users of outside.in. Each neighbor has a profile page that shows a bio, photo, neighborhood, website, plus all the stories, comments, and places they’ve contributed to outside.in. (Right now it’s a little tricky to find a specific neighbor, much less communicate with them — but we’re working on it!)

Stories and Comments are the content you add to outside.in about your area. When you add them to the site, they appear on the home page of the area you specified for everyone to see, as well as on your neighbor pages.

Stories are content that comes from other sites, like blogs or newspaper websites, that you submit to the site via the submit a story link in the right column of the page. Add stories to outside.in that relate to your neighborhood and that you find interesting and want to share with your neighbors.

Comments are content that you write yourself, directly to the outside.in website. You add comments to Places, which are any location or venue in your area. Add a comment to any Place you want, either to point out something you like, or just to talk about something interesting in your neighborhood.

Places can be everything from restaurants to playgrounds to schools — or even more subjective categories (most dangerous intersection, best spot for winter sledding.) Any story or comment can be attached to a Place. The cool thing about these Place pages is that the become an archive of everything that’s been said online about a given place — comments from outside.in Neighbors, blog posts, newspaper reviews, discussion threads.

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Piper Jaffray's predictions for online ad spending keep going up, and are now expected to go beyond the $80 billion mark by 2011. Higher growth rates at the close of 2006 are one factor, but the research firm points to the people as the true driving force. As more consumers take the reins when it comes to controlling their media diets, and spend more time online and creating their own content, advertisers will continue to boost online budgets. Several prognostications are made in the firm's new "User Revolution" report, including the domination of video online, a Google dynasty, and the death of the portal.

In December, Piper Jaffray & Co.'s Internet ad revenue forecast for 2011 was at $78 billion, but today's report raises that estimate to $81.1 billion. "We have more confidence in the growth rates," of the Internet, said Safa Rashtchy, managing director, senior Internet analyst for the company. According to Rashtchy, when measuring Internet ad spending, the firm includes search advertising, display ads, text links, video advertising and e-mail, but excludes mobile and iTV.

The explosion of niche content online and the related segmentation of audiences will continue to drive online ad spending by small advertisers that otherwise cannot afford mass market vehicles. This "will actually give more power to small advertisers," Rashtchy said. Still, big brand advertisers will continue to shell out the lion's share of online ad dollars, he continued, noting consumer packaged goods and automotive advertisers will maintain their big spender positions. "Over time, there won't be much difference between the Web and the rest of the media channels….It will reflect overall advertising dollars out there," he added.

Source link:  http://clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625088

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From this report on CNN, it's about what you would expect ... cultural differences yield a difference in look, feel and dynamics.  I expect we'll see more and more of these kinds of cultural shadings and nuance, and that there will come to be observable patterns in how people share, comment and use advertising in such a space.

The tools and services offered by Qumana are designed from an ease of use point of view, and hopefully offer little in terms of cultural barriers to their use.  The content assembly and advertising selection and placement capabilities we offer users let them make the choices and stay in control of what they want to do and how they want to do it.

If we had an arrangement with a major Japanese advertising supplier, the users of Mixi could go about assembling and publishing content, and could use advertising supplied by Mixi in a work-and-revenue sharing arrangement .. getting content into circulation with appropriate Mixi-approved advertising woven into the content.

MySpace faces cultural hurdles ... and Mixi ... in Japan

Mixi is projecting 4.8 billion yen ($40 million) in sales, mostly advertising revenue, for the fiscal year through March, more than double what it made the previous year. Its initial public offering last year earned more than 6 billion yen ($50 million), catapulting Kasahara to dot-com stardom.

Fumi Yamazaki at Technorati Japan, a blogging search company, isn't too upbeat about MySpace's chances in Japan as people usually don't want to switch social-networking services.

"Mixi and MySpace may be able to appeal to different needs," she said. "But there are some hurdles MySpace needs to overcome."

Even MySpace Japan Vice President Naoko Ando acknowledged MySpace isn't about to put Mixi out of business, but she believes Japanese can use both.

Ando is hoping that Japanese may want to check out American musicians, who offer tunes, messages and virtual friendships on MySpace. The site plans to use its Softbank partnership to sign on Japanese artists.

MySpace also has strengths in video sharing. It's among the leading sites where users post video clips, but MySpace does not yet offer video sharing in its Japanese service and is trying to win over copyright protection groups here, said Softbank spokesman Takeaki Nukii.

Mixi started offering video sharing earlier this month.

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For Windows users, here's a new and improved version of the Qumana offline blog editor.

The gradual introduction of the new improved Blogger platform coincided with our ongoing search for the best way to make Qumana work effectively.

But .. we are pleased to announce that the most recent version of Qumana for Windows ... available for download here ... now works with the new Blogger platform.

We have more stuff coming along soon, and don't forget to try out the versatile Q-Ads tool, a browser extension for adding advertising content to a range of blog platforms

We're still looking for someone with the appropriate Java 1.5 experience to help us adapt the Mac version of Qumana.  If any of you out there know of anyone with great Java and Mac OS skills, please point them (or yourself) our way.

Tags: Blogger, Qumana, better blogging, blog editing

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