Coke + Second Life

Cokes newest viral marketing campaign: Second life, you tube and my space are all involved.

"The contest is simple: design a new Coke machine for Second Life. The execution of the challenge, however, is the unique factor that bears mentioning.

Submissions will require entrants to visit the MySpace and YouTube pages that Coke has set up for the contest, which in essence, implements a socially integrated marketing strategy that many have predicted would be the next big promotional movement by the major brands."

For the whole article see the following link: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/04/17/coke-expands-viral-marketing-efforts-online

OECD on the Participative Web

The OECD has recently issued this report on the participative Web and user-created content. This is a very important document tackling some of the questions we have pondered in class:

This study describes the rapid growth of UCC, its increasing role in worldwide communication and draws out implications for policy. Questions addressed include: What is user-created content? What are its key drivers, its scope and different forms? What are new value chains and business models? What are the extent and form of social, cultural and economic opportunities and impacts? What are associated challenges? Is there a government role and what form could it take?

Happy reading!

cheers,
B.

virb.com

if you haven't checked out virb yet, you should. this site wants to be the answer to myspace's sketchiness and last.fm's laziness - hip and sleek and attractive, all in one. and even if that sounds boring, it's worth reading "virb - advanced social networking", which is circulating as the most comprehensive review of the (i must say) kickass site. join or don't join, but it's impressive/interesting to see how it's branding itself and trying to make it into the web 2.0 majors. and it's not all talk - this site is beautiful, technologically smart and works WELL.

- essie

ps - they opened virb up to everybody on march 07 and dropped the "invite only" tag.

also on btb.

Web Regulation 2.0

Featured in Wired Magazine:

Tim O'Reilly's response to controlling data flow on the web.Can this really (help) regulate the internet?

This "good conduct" badge business is like kindergarten all over again, but I guess it might work...

Sharing Secrets Online

The site I mentioned today in response to the presentation on Online Support Groups is:

www.mysecret.tv

The site was created by LifeChurch in Oklahoma, and an article in the New York Times appeared in September 2006:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/us/01confession.html?ex=1314763200&en=87d1db65eec43d47&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

The technology has changed since the site first appeared. The look has been redesigned (much more Web 2.0 than when I first saw it), and there are now options for community involvement(feedback, etc). Tags have been added, as well as videos. It is interesting to see the site now, as opposed to when it was first emerging. Perhaps elements like videos and tags were incorporated to increase trust?

Second life + branding = ?

This article shows how marketers are having a tough time with Second Life. Or when housewives and college kids rule the virtual marketing world.

Flickr

www.Flickr.com

Flickr.com is a Yahoo! owned company that is specialized in the exhibition of people’s photos on the web. In my opinion it is the YouTube of the still picture world. They describe themselves as “almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world” and state that their two main goals are to help people share their photos with those who matter to them whether it is just friends and family or the public, and to allow for new ways to organize ones photos.
Their 1st goal is achieved by getting photos in and out of the system in as many ways as possible. The “in” part is managed through the web, mobiles, personal computers, and it is compatible with any software that can be used to manage photos on the computers. As for the “out”, it is made possible simply through the website or through RSS feeds, email, and blogs.
Their 2nd goal is attained by a process of collaborative photo organizing by allowing friends, family and other contacts arrange the user’s photos by adding comments, listing notes and adding tags. All this information gathered makes it easier to find the photos later because it all “accretes around the photo as metadata”.
When I first looked at Flickr, my thoughts were leaning more to it being a network oriented society than a community based one. Having read and explored the site more, I find it to be leaning more towards a community oriented site. First of all because people on Flickr have one joint interest which is pictures, whether they are looking at friends and family photos or competing with other members for the top spots, or learning techniques from other members, it is all concerning one thing. Secondly it is because of the way this site promotes itself as a community with guidelines of what is acceptable and what isn’t.
Other reasons for why I believe it is a community oriented society is because it is governed by in a democratic manner and its morphology is collective opposed to individualistic. As Castells states in his article that “The consolidation of shared meaning, through crystallization of practices in spatio-temporal configurations creates cultures, this is systems of values and beliefs informing codes of behavior”, which sounds like Flickr.com.
The way it connects between technology and social dynamics is that the technology itself aids in building and tightening those social ties. It is the technology which allowed for the social dynamic to exist. Also the demands of the society brought the technology together to do it.
The site “content” fits into the picture in that it has collected a library of pictures that are so impressive they should be published. It doesn’t stop at picture sharing for family and friends it is more of showing off your art and discussing techniques.

Master of Simplicity

I found this website - and the author's book - to be pretty relevant to the post on multitasking. John Maeda is a graphic designer and part of the MIT faculty. Regarding his book, one of the authorities on management says, "Our lives and our businesses are faster and broader than ever. As such, they are also more complex and difficult to manage, for both customers and managers. Therefore, achieving simplicity in both our products and our organizations will be crucial for securing market share. No one has seen this more clearly than John Maeda, the Master of Simplicity."

Ahhh, Zen, quand tu nous tiens...

Imeem: Another hybrid monster

There is a thin line between the idea of a community and that of a network. As such, Imeem (www.imeem.com) is another hybrid creation that boasts to socially connect people amongst themselves through an array of media-sharing features. This includes the possibility of sharing videos, photos, music as well as playlists, blogs and groups. The latter categories of playlists, blogs and groups demonstrate that Imeem members have the ability to share their tastes and thus their common values. Hence, amidst this array of networks that enable individuals to share their media content, there is also the option to go beyond the superficial stage of a network and look deep into Imeem’s well of sociodigitization in order to find communities that subsist due to their shared meaning. Therefore, just as Facebook is a network in which communities can be formed, so is imeem. In essence, it is another creature, a hybrid beast resulting from the union of a community and network. It is a website where collaborative filtering is omnipresent and where technology reveals the physical shapes of the networks that connect people. However, just as technology shapes social dynamics, it merely organizes the content that is present on the imeem website. Although one can say that the content-organization process found on imeem may lead to sharing more than just media, it is hard to imagine what goal is shared by the website’s members that makes Imeem a community rather than a network. In his book entitled “Internet Galaxy”, Manuel Castells discusses the idea of community networks by using the example of the Mexican Zapatistas who promoted solidarity via a virtual network on behalf of exploited Indian minorities. So where is Imeem’s communitarian side? What do these members share concretely aside from a few megabytes of mp3’s or jpeg files? Some see Imeem as an “open source” network, where the act of sharing media content is perceived as a new social endeavor and can thus constitute the shared meaning of its members, therefore making the website a form of community. The answer to whether Imeem is a network or a community is not that simple because it demands of one that he define something that is in the making. Technology shapes our social structures, thus with the speed at which technology is changing social structures, perhaps to state that a new form of sociability is being created might not be so far-fetched. With the idea of mass sociability, which focuses around the idea that a certain incentive drives a loosely connected mob or crowd, one finds that the terms network and community are getting increasingly closer to each other in the context of virtual social interaction. For now, Imeem is only in its Beta version, and does nothing more than allow its users to share data under a system of “folksonomy”, where each individual can tag his or her favorite pics, videos or mp3’s. It is a network, but with features that are sometimes strikingly close to that of a community.

BBC Takes a Quick Look at Digg

More about Diggs... here they refer to it's functions as social networking tools although they are tools that promote a social community feel.

http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/bbc-takes-a-quick-look-at-digg.html

http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/diggs-unknown-social-networking-functionality12437.html