herebenotions

Barrack, paper, scissors

I love this! Clever, simple and fun.



The videos all link to each other depending on what move you make, as the guy filmed all the permutations, and for multiple levels too.

Soup is fab

I love soup.  It's what I've been looking for for ages.  The simplicity is great.

This is my soup.  I will be mostly over there now.

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

Widgets

Interesting post today by Bernard Warner on how widgets will affect mainstream web media companies. Full post here

Two bits that I thought were particulary pertinent:

"... believes that in five years the typical net user will collect all his relevant data and application feeds from one page. Conventional bookmarks will give way to a single aggregator where headlines from rival newspapers and blog commentators will inform our world."

Five years? 2 max. And brands need to be thinking about this now. How do you communicate your brand when people will be looking at updates to your site via a RSS reader that strips out everything except the words and photos/videos (that's if you can create enough of a relationship with them to get them to add you to their reader in the first place)? Flash sites and pretty skins, and many of the tricks brands currently use, are mostly useless in this world. Every brand will need a blog to tell their stories and have converstaions. So many brands can't create a regular website that people will want to come back to; this is going to be an even greater challenge. But if they can crack it, then it's a great opportunity for the brand to reach the consumer fresh everyday.

"One of the tenets of the widget economy is that it will bring about an unprecedented era of personalisation. This much is true. But it also requires a level of openness not yet seen in the net economy. Websites will have to open themselves up to third-party developers, a radical proposition for established online properties. For news outlets, it will mean delivering news via feeds to the eyeballs rather than the established model of attracting the eyeballs to their news."

Motorola and Burger King have done some interesting widgets for Myspace. Very easy to see effectiveness, in terms of take up. But I'm still having too many conversations with clients along the lines of "but we want people to come to our website, not make something for someone else's". The lack of willingness to open up is worrying, or as expected, depending on your point of view.

LastFM, Twitter, eBay, flickr, TechCrunch are all pretty big 'web2.0' companies who have done widgets for Facebook, and there are loads of widget games etc from developers, but nothing from 'big brands'. I suppose they'll get there eventually: branded games and quizes seem obvious easy wins for most FMCG brands, a mobile company could offer an widget that let you see where selected friends were via GPS and google maps, or that let you send X number of free group texts.

There's more on facebooks openess policy and how it's affected the netowrk's growth and the impact widgets can have on brands in this post.

Want to know a bit more about the trend for widgets? Try this...Year of the widget. Mac users love their widgets...flickr pics of dashboard widgets.
And go to iGoogle for a simple way to get used to widgets (if you're not already exoeriencing the widget frenzy on facebook that is). iGoogle is one of Google's fastest growing products.

Turn over a new leaf

Tired of using innocent as a example of using web2.0 media to great effect?  Want another great example, but with the added joy that most of the activity was started and is run by evangelist fans of the brand? Try moleskine.  OK, fairly average website.  So what's the big deal?  Go to the moleskinerie fan blog.  This is visited by about 5000 people a day, and has 9 copycat sites in other languages, and for a long time these were essentially the notebooks only marketing.

The founder of the site has used "web2.0" to great effect.  See the great photos on flickr, fan pages on myspace and facebook, you can visit their squidoo lens and you can check some videos out on youtube, and as always, if you want to know more you can look on wikipedia.

What's even lovelier is the way the official Moleskine team works with, and appreciates, the fans.

And the notebooks are great too...

Music to take you places

Podbop is a great site that's about a year old now, but has finally reached the critical mass needed to make it a really vaulable little tool.

It's a great example of how the web can democratise music discovery. Enter your city and the site shows you the bands coming to your area and links you to free mp3s to check out.  You can even use an RSS feed to automatically download mp3s to you when a band on the system arrives in your area.

The podbop team describe it this way:

"Old way: looking up local concerts on an event site, googling 100 different bands, tracking down an mp3 for each band, then deciding what show you want to go to."

"The podbop way: type in a city, get mp3s, discover a band you like and go see them."

Web2.0 is...

From vidipedia

Currently reading...

I'm currently reading a lot of old stuff that's out there critising digg and other sites for their influence on news stories, e.g. here and here. 

It's interesting to look at the differences, at the same point in time, in the top urls at digg, del.icio.us and reddit (below). It's as different as reading the FT, the BBC or The Daily Mail. Obviously the digg urls reflect the site's tech focus and reddit is newsy, but del.icio.us is the most interesting to me because it's the only one of these three where users don't vote on others submissions, so the community effect is diluted. 

I dip in and out of digg, reddit and a bunch of similar sites (who's top urls you can check out at popurls), but I'd never really considered until today that chosing one of these sites as your main source is really the same as picking your daily newspaper.  Each has its own bias and emphasis to attract a certain audience, and major contributors/participants have as much influence in shaping the content as newpaper editors. Plus ca change....

 

Rise and fall

Some interesting charts from the Pew Internet Project. 

They show that photobucket, very much a socially integrated, web2.0 photo sharing service, is kicking the arse of Kodak Gallery. Photobucket allows easy posting of photos to blogs and other sites, whereas flickr doesn't (which I discussed briefly before).  Photobucket also combines video hosting (like YouTube) which seems to be a natural partnership allowing people to keep all their images still or moving in one place. Photobucket doesn't have ratings or interestingness features like flickr or YouTube - so it'll be interesting to see how it fares longer-term against these sites.

The difference is even more dramatic when you compare the child of web2.0 Wikipedia with its corporate (though also free) cousin Encarta.  It's worth noting that MSN's Encarta doesn't have an entry for web2.0, whereas Wikipedia has a very full entry on the subject, which illustrates nicely why one is become the default information resource and the other is languishing.

The rise of myspace, as the old model of entry to internet communities promoted by Geocities crumbles, shows the importance of direct, personal connectivity to the new generation.

Encarta and Geocities were always digital/online enterprises, and yet they are still struggling in the changing web environment.  It makes you reaslise what a job offline brands have to make themselve relavant in the web2.0 world.

Search 2.0

This is a very interesting post by Asi Sharabi which you should go read now.  Both the YouTube and flickr sites aim to use collective intelligence to help the user searching for content, but as Asi points out they do it in different ways, with arguably different objectives in mind.   

Tracking the surfing patterns of users (like flickr does for the interestingness rating) is great for finding connections that might otherwise be missed to people browsing, but what I also think is worth thinking about is the way tagging works in on each site. 

Tags are added by users when they post their content, so their usefulness depends largely on the person entering them.  On YouTube I find searching by tag or keyword very effective at delivering the type of content I'm looking for. On flickr it's much harder, and it took time to learn how to search most effectively (possibly because photographers over tag?).  At the moment the search software on the sites don't 'learn' which tags are most relevant, and users can't create a tag relevancy rating. Also there is no information about the sematics or meaning of a tag (i.e. the tag 'apple' could return the fruit, the computer or The Beatle's record label).  The example belows shows two photos that both appear on the first page for relevancy when searching flickr for photos taged with 'apple'.

Also, photographers on flickr tag photos taken with a digital camera 'digital', and as so many photos are digital, this renders the tag almost useless.  This is especially true when searching for digital things that are not photos.  Once tags become more intelligent, and the sematics problem is overcome, search will be on the way to a 2.0 model that will be much more useful and powerful (I'll try and talk more about this on the weekend).

It's also worth noting that YouTube promotes itself symbiotically by allowing people to forward a link easily or by enabling bloggers to easily link to the clip they want to, which then ends up with YouTube branding on it when it's posted, whereas flickr doesn't have these features, and so has missed an opportunity for self-promotion. 

Furthermore, neither of these sites has adopted the features that the other has.  Flickr would be more user friendly with better sharing options, and YouTube would add a new dimension to its searchablility with a version of flickr's interestingness rating system.  It will be fascinating to see if Google's purchase of YouTube shakes it out of it's complacency and drives some improvements to the searchability.