Flashy, Targeted Ads Fuel Boom

"'We're seeing this bifurcation in online marketing,' said Nate Elliott, an analyst at Jupiter Research. 'Rich media is about creating a more positive brand image. Keywords are about direct marketing and accountability.'

So far, it's accountability that's generating the bigger bucks. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, keyword search ads accounted for a staggering 35 percent of all online advertising spending in 2003, by far the largest chunk of any category. Rich media made up 8 percent of spending, the bureau said."

Wired News: A Web of Electronic Denial

"The same goes for music files, games and video clips -- hardly anyone will admit to downloading, installing or using these things on their work computers, but despite protestations of innocence, somehow these time-, space- and bandwidth-wasting applications and files have infested corporate computers across America, according to the Web@Work 2004 survey of network administrators and corporate employees that was released Wednesday."

Everyone is an editor

"Inviting the community to participate in such a project has its risks, of course. Thanks to developments outside the Wikipedia community, the project has seen its media profile surge in recent weeks. The episode started when anti-Semitic Internet users pulled off the agitprop technique known as 'Google-bombing' -- repeatedly linking the word 'Jew' on Web pages to the Web site JewWatch.com, a site that bills itself as 'Keeping a Close Watch on Jewish Communities & Organizations Worldwide.' When the tactic propelled JewWatch to the top of Google search rankings, outraged bloggers, led by the site Remove JewWatch.com, responded by linking the word 'Jew' to the Wikipedia entry."

Advertisers face up to TiVo reality

"A majority of national advertisers plan to cut spending on TV commercials by 20 percent in the next five years, when they believe that ad-skipping devices like TiVo will take hold in households, according to a new survey. The Web is at the top of many advertisers' lists for a replacement medium, according to a survey Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research released Monday."

Advertising and Branding in Virtual Worlds

"When I say advertising and branding in virtual worlds I really mean in virtual worlds. All examples discussed are various forms of in-world advertising. The marketing of vw's to the general public is not covered. But within virtual worlds, I've found that advertising and branding projects have taken the following forms so far:



[1] Community members who create their own brands and ads to advertise virtual products they are creating and selling to other members



[2] Official ads for products made by the company that owns/operates the world



[3] Contextual advertising campaigns by real, offline companies who are now branding objects within virtual worlds (Nike & Levi's in There, McDonald's and Intel in TSO)



[4] Entire virtual worlds created to advertise or promote a company or organization (Coke Music, America's Army, Aero House, Mokitown)



One interesting trend I also discuss in the paper is how teenagers seem to be more receptive to in-world advertising than adults are, often bringing elements of branding into the worlds themselves. In fact, many of the fully branded worlds are targeted to teens and kids."

Essay about trends

"Several crucial shifts in technology are emerging that will drastically affect the relationship between users and technology in the near future. Wireless Internet is becoming ubiquitous and economically viable. Internet capable devices are becoming smaller and more powerful. Alongside technological shifts, new social trends are emerging. Users are shifting their attention from packaged content to social information about location, presence and community. Tools for identity, trust, relationship management and navigating social networks are becoming more popular. Mobile communication tools are shifting away from a 1-1 model, allowing for increased many-to-many interactions; such a shift is even being used to permit new forms of democracy and citizen participation in global dialog."

Why Study Rome When You Can Build It?

"Lets take a look at online games, such as Lineage, which are a much larger phenomenon than most people are aware. This particular game holds the record for having the most people online at once, probably hundreds of thousands. It is immensely popular in Korea. Or, in this country, consider Sims Online or EverQuest. If you take into account not only the game itself but also all of the peripheral activities (activities happening around the edge of the game such as the support sites, the chat rooms, and so on) you find a rich social ecology constantly unfolding. But just focus on the game itself which involves all the players building and evolving a complex world, and you see a new kind of nonlinear, multi-authored narrative being constructed."

Media Lifestyles of the 18 to 34 Year-Olds

"Michael Zimbalist, president of the OPA, noted that the 18 to 34 year-old group is the demographic most highly sought by advertisers. 'They are the first generation to grow up with the Internet,' he said. 'Their habits will help us understand the future of media consumption.' The findings that media was consumed simultaneously were not entirely surprising, but John Carey, managing director, Greystone Communications, also found nuances among the multitasking. Under observation, the 18 to 34 year-olds often used media in tandem with one another, alternating between foreground and background consumption. For example, individuals may watch a televised sporting event while surfing ESPN.com from their laptops to get more sports-related information, or talk to each other via cell phone while simultaneously surfing the same Web site."

Seeking Riches From the Poor

"In Africa, there is a huge demand for simple technologies that can be used by people who lack access to banks, phone lines, credit cards and computers that Westerners take for granted. Living in the only country on this continent that has a modern infrastructure -- even while most of its citizens remain firmly entrenched in poverty -- South African entrepreneurs are in a unique position to develop and deliver these products to Africa's poor, says Raven Naidoo, a founder of Radian, a small technology-consulting firm."

From Shared Resources, Your Personal History

"Now those who want to research their Danish heritage can send Mr. Lundin a family tree in a format called Gedcom (from genealogical data communications), and his software will search a collection of family trees from other contributors for shared ancestors and cousins. The Gedcom file format, originally developed by the Mormon Church, is the lingua franca of the genealogy community; it allows users to convey information about ancestors, their birth and death dates and other information. Mr. Lundin's software looks for the best matches with other Gedcom files. When it discovers that two people have ancestors in common, Mr. Lundin said, he writes to both of them."

50,000 developers use Amazon web services

"More than 50,000 software developers have signed up to use web services technology that allows Amazon.com products to be incorporated into third party web sites. 'Web services is new and very exciting. We are one of the few providers that has made it clear that it's not just a technology, but there's a business model to go along with it,' he said. The company provides a toolset for developers to set up ecommerce offerings using Amazon's catalogue. Web site operators receive between 2.5 and 15 per cent of the value of goods sold."

Should Broadband Providers Offer Content?

"Apparently, the talk of a recent broadband conference was on how broadband providers needed to focus on charging for 'premium' content to expand their business, which seems to miss the point (once again) of broadband services. The content that draws people is already out there, and bundling it with an internet connection only serves to add one more mouth to feed out of a small pie - and doesn't help anyone make much money. When broadband providers look at providing content, they immediately fall back into the 'broadcast' mindset, where users are passive consumers of content that is pushed to them. That's not what people use the internet for. They use it for interactive services (such as email, web surfing, VoIP and file sharing), where they get to choose the content and what they do with it."

The future of Weblogging

"There is much to celebrate in the development of Weblogging – but the discussion of it is often uncritical and un-ambitious. If Weblogging is the answer, as so many claim it is, what was the question? As with the discussion of electronic voting, there is an assumption that there barriers have been put in the way of a democratic and public activity. It follows from this view that the Internet in general, and Weblogging in particular, are conscious answers to these challenges."

Many Started Web Logs for Fun, but Bloggers Need Money, Too

"The blog watchers agreed that the vast majority of the estimated 2.1 million Web logs out there today would never even attempt to make money. But even now there are exceptions, like AndrewSullivan.com, DailyKos.com and PaidContent.org, and bloggers speak of them with reverence because of their profitability."

Virtual Trader Barely Misses Goal

"'It's been a debate: Can people really earn their living doing this?' Castronova says. 'And the answer is, 'Heck yeah.' I knew it, but it was so nice that Julian actually did this, so that now when people ask (me) about it, I can say it's more than just my supposition.... It's a great contribution to research in this area for someone to actually try it. It took a lot of guts.'"

The End of Linear Media

"If the prediction comes true, it looks like a rosy picture for people in interactive today. We're setting the stage for the future of all media. The principles we're establishing today, such as user measurement, real-time tracking, and accountability, will be incorporated into all media in the near future. When savvy marketers have a solid understanding of how online media works, they ask for the same measure of performance from all their marketing efforts. Nothing like detailed performance data to determine the real return on investment (ROI) of marketing efforts."

Blogging is Booming

"Whether it's 2.5 million or 8.8 million, we're still talking about the number of blog writers, not readers. The same Pew study, fielded a year ago, found that 11 percent of respondents read Weblogs with some regularity. Last summer, I conducted a survey for the email services agency Quris, in which we included a question about blog readership, which similarly found 10 percent of the 1,691 respondents regularly read Weblogs (see details of that research in the table 'Characteristics of Weblog Readers' below). Bearing in mind that those numbers have doubtless grown in the year since those two surveys, that is still 13 to 14 million Weblog readers. Furthermore, I would venture a lot more people are reading Weblogs without realizing those sites are called Weblogs."

Look, Listen, Walk

"People have been talking about virtual reality for decades now, the idea that we can create imaginary environments that engage all of our senses and that we can move through as if they were real environments. Augmented reality turns that premise on its head, ”heightening our awareness of the real world by annotating it with information conveyed by mobile technologies. Augmented reality has powerful new applications for education, tourism, and storytelling."

Mogi: Second Generation Location-Based Gaming

"Castelli talks about this desktop-mobile connection in the context of typical massively-multiplayer online game: 'Casual players don't seem so useful for a guild in a regular MMOG. In [Mogi] the casual player is somewhere, the casual gamer has his location going for him. For a team, the location of the player is something useful. The desktop player can send a tool to the mobile players, and teach them how to use it.' Think of this way: the web interface becomes a means for the hardcore players to orchestrate the experience for the mobile (casual) players. This is a beautiful, mind-boggling scenario: have the gaming veterans teaching and leading the casual gamers. Interdependence - with the right interface, many skill levels might play together."

Gates's vision -- and failure thereof

"Bill Gates just gave a talk at a Gartner symposium where he predicted that hardware would get so cheap as to be essentially free. This is a pretty visionary idea -- and, I think, plausible enough; you can buy a $0.99 singing greeting card today with more computing power than all the world's digital computers at the launch of Sputnik (multiple Soviet space-programs' worth of cycles for under a buck!), so the idea of powerful, useful hardware going ubiquitous and cheap is pretty nifty and pretty credible."

Situated Software

"There is another strategy, however, analogous to asking the user to recognizing icons; the designer can simply assume the group has a certain capability, without needing to recapitulate it in code. If you have an uncollected payment in a communal buying pool, the software can kick out a message that says 'Deadbeat alert. Deal with it.' A real world group will have some way of handling the problem, usually through moral suasion or the threat of lost reputational capital, or even, in extreme cases, ostracism. This is no different than what happens in offline groups every day, but the solution feels wrong, in Web School terms, because those web applications can't assume there is a tacit reputation system. By relying on existing social fabric, situated software is guaranteed not to work at the scale Web School apps do, but for the same reason, it can work in ways Web School software can't."