Selling Communities

Check this out.

What's interesting is that the most important selling point (and that was even more evident in the first version of the auction) is the community and the possible financial benefit it represents.

To multitask or not to multitask?

This article on the NYT has quite a lot to say on that matter and underscores what many recent studies have shown. Multitasking is very often not increasing performance but actually hampering it. Here is what the experts recommend:

Check e-mail messages once an hour, at most. Listening to soothing background music while studying may improve concentration. But other distractions — most songs with lyrics, instant messaging, television shows — hamper performance. Driving while talking on a cellphone, even with a hands-free headset, is a bad idea.

Aha!

YouTube Videos onTV

Aha, another case of convergence is seems. CBS plans to show YouTube et al. videos on regular broadcast TV. Read more about that here. Wonder how those blocky clips will do on people's shiny new plasma screens...

boyd

tomorrow's reading is rad (well, most first monday articles usually are i suppose). i just wanted to officially state that i am jealous of this author. if i had spent 2003-2006 doing "ethnographic research" on friendster and myspace...well, i would feel like i had wasted a lot less time, that's for sure.

a demain!

PPTs online, info, etc.

Hi all,

Here is some info after todays session:

• By popular request I put the powerpoints of the last five session on Blackboard.
• Here is the link to "The Big Meshup", the video I showed in class.
  
• For a lot of very informative statistics and studies, PEW / Internet is a very good address.

See you soon,
B.

First Life

Liked Second Life ?

Check this out

Extra Session, Program, RFC

Hi all,

I'm using this post to build / announce / enhance the program for our extra session on march 24. If you have wishes / suggestions / needs feed free to comment below. Current elements are:

• The Internet - How does it work
• Using search engines, queries, operators and tricks to search with more precision
  
• Useful tools for the Information hunter & gatherer

cheers and enjoy your trip!

PEW and Web 2.0

Renouwned research insitution PEW Internet&American Life Projet has some interesting data on Web 2.0 in this findings summary. Especially the Wikipedia vs. Encarta and the MySpace vs. Geocities graphs are quite interesting...

B.

Google Analytics: The Marketing Frankenstein

The idea behind the Google analytics concept is that of website optimization. Briefly explained, this consists in maximizing the number of visits to one’s website, but also in studying the demographics and statistics that would help the website’s creator or manager in reaching his or her goals.

Google’s presentation of this service explains that it is about “acquiring, converting and retaining customers” hence a priceless Web 2.0 tool for e-business varying from small to big business.

Google analytics is an invaluable free service for e-business websites because it allows for its profit maximization via marketing and statistical tools available at the user’s request. A perfect illustration of the marketing tools available is the Marketing Optimization section of the website, which determines the number of visits, the pages viewed per visit and the cities or geographical locations from which most visits originate.

Within the visitor statistics, the subsection entitled “visitor loyalty” gives an overview of the number of visitors who return to the website and their visit frequency. This in turn is also linked to the conversion rate of Google Analytics illustrated by its “Goal conversion tracking” subsection and its “conversion summary.” In summary, a conversion rate consists in the number of visitors that reach the goal set up by the website. In short, this goal is whatever the goal of the website is, thus ranging from membership registrations to downloads and product sales.

Although Google Analytics is a free service, it is sustained by the company’s patented technique of advertising called AdWords. According to Google, AdWords’s main innovative techniques are pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. It also allows the targeting of groups on an international level as well as on a local or national level. In addition, it also allows the user of Google Analytics to exploit or maximize his or her campaign strategies by looking at the number of conversions that are due to the campaigns undertaken in the form of referral links (Campaign conversion) as well as the number of conversions with regard to the referral sources(Source conversion).

What is to be remarked with the geo-targeting of advertisements and its site optimization goals is that Google Analytics is a new approach to marketing. According to its creators, it is a “new cross-disciplinary approach” that encompasses the roles of executives, marketers, content developers, merchandisers and webmasters.

Google Analytics also distinguishes itself by the fact that it is a free online tool that is characteristic to Web 2.0. It allows implicit and explicit data to be managed for site optimization purposes; this, in turn, can be viewed as a form of collaborative filtering for it allows to optimize marketing strategies based on visitor data.

Nik Bhowmick

Viral Marketing; Friend or Foe?

This is an interesting article for those of you hot on the Viral Marketing trail:
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/1850.asp

Rebecca Weeks takes a look at Viral Marketing's potential for growth and clear advantages.

Need visitors? Buy them!

There is a nice article over at Wired News that shows quite well that the social news movement might run into problems sooner than later. The author hires a company to get his bogus blog into the rankings and is quite pleased with the results:

U/S had done what it promised: The company had helped me buy my way into Digg popularity, and my site traffic had gone way up -- overnight, I'd been hammered with so many hits that the diggers had to set up a mirror.

B.