Bid for London office space and ghosts on eBay
There have been some very odd things sold via eBay - it really is a website that seems to create demand for everything. Even 'a ghost in a jar' managed to find an owner, who spent more than $15,000 to acquire the bona fide gift of somebody else's lifetime, and a jar.
Seriously, you can use eBay to sell anything. A ball of aluminium foil sold for $3.10. A videotape with 'Death Tape: Do Not Watch' written on it sold for $18. Take a blowtorch to some cheese on toast and you can make a million...
Nick Denton's Gawker Media sheds staff, awaits reversal
Nick Denton is hunkering down, it seems. The Daddy of Gawker Media is reducing headcount and offloading two blogs, having determined that “it is time for a perversely countercyclical move”.
What does he mean by that? He means it is getting harder to make money from blogging, which was never especially easy in the first place.
Fans and bands collide - grassroots lessons
Want another example of how your customers can communicate your message for you? Check out upcoming new Australian band Wolfmother, which is asking fans to snap and send mobile video clips that will form the basis of the act's next promo.It's supported by a moblog powered by the London-based moblogUK service, which was popularised when survivors of the city's 7/7 bombings posted camera phone pictures to the site last summer.
Using Web 2.0 to harness innovation in your organisation
Web 2.0 means different things to different people, yet it isn't just about the web, but is also about how your organisation works. Think intranet, as well as internet. Does your organisation work in a 2.0 way?
At the moment there seems to be three primary focuses around Web 2.0:
1) there are the technologists who are figuring out new technologies (there are many libraries and frameworks out there already).
2) there are the marketers and entrepreneurs, who are trying to figure out how use new 2.0 technologies and principles to generate profits, or help empower consumers (call them business people for now) in some way.
3) and finally, there are the users, who are increasingly using and enjoying the results of these new technologies.
But how does all that filter into your organisation in a useful way, feeding into your own innovation cycle?
Ajax driven London Tubes route finder
David Tran has launched an Ajax driven route finder widget for London tubes, with Rails driving the backend. And it works pretty much as it says on the tin too!Is Fjax the best use of Flash ever?
When the big tech brands like Amazon start using Ajax to improve their user interface you know the tipping point has been reached. So how long will it be before the great and good embrace Fjax, aka ‘Ajax 2.0’?
MetaWeather aims to build a better forecast
Have you ever checked the weather online, only to find competing forecasts from different sites? Did Michael Fish's 1987 reassurance that a hurricane was
not
on the way leave you with a mistrust of meteorologists? If so, MetaWeather may be worth a shot.
Developed by two producers at British games content agency Ferrago, the site combines forecast data from multiple sources to round up the predictions to an average - and supposedly more trustworthy - outlook.
Web 2.0 is changing the content battlefield
It used to be that there was this top down content pyramid in operation (operated by traditional media and the big online players), where the quantity and quality of news / content was controlled by relatively fewer organisations.
This is changing rapidly, becoming flatter and more diverse (we’re not really interested in the why’s right now), which can either be seen as an opportunity or a threat. Organisations that embrace this change are going to benefit (think Murdoch buying MySpace), so the question then becomes how one capitalises on the opportunity...
Let's look at some of the key strategic issues to consider.
Using Digg for web PR is dangerous
There's an interesting piece of advice from Steve Rubel on using sites like Digg for PR . In short, don't!Wetpaint social wiki’s launch - user generated content silver bullet?
Wetpaint is something that I came across a while ago when researching Wiki’s and the effect they’re having on knowledge in the enterprise, and as a subset of social software as a whole.
To be honest I was both really interested but also quite concerned about their business model. They seemed to be long on innovation, but short on long term sustainability. That said, they are working with VC so perhaps someone holding the purse strings knows more than I do!
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
