Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

image credit: [AndreaA] (Flickr)

It's hard to believe that the social network space as we know it is today is only a few years old. The summer of 2006 saw MySpace claim the spot as the #1 social network, and a new rival, Facebook, opened their doors to anyone with a valid e-mail address. Over the past 2 years, the two networks have seen some major ups and downs. Facebook, an underdog favorite at the time, was applauded by the web community for opening up their platform and allowing the development of applications. But not that long after came the controversy of Beacon and various other privacy concerns. MySpace, meanwhile, has seen user outrage over everything from reliability and spam to security and child safety.

Although reports vary, most measurements suggest the number of people who visit Facebook and especially MySpace has leveled off over the past few months, possibly even declined. But despite the warning signs of "social network fatigue" early this year, the newswires in the social world and corporate social media plans for 2008 have still centered their efforts around the two industry giants. So the real question is, should they?

Of the $920 million spent this year to advertise on social networks in 2007, 8.2 percent went to niche sites. That is expected to grow to 10 percent in 2008. Niche is big! There are over 300,000 niche networks on Ning alone. We have niche networks being used as tools in the 2008 election. And networks, such as LinkedIn (career) and imeem (music), are growing so quickly that it seems strange to even call them "niche".

Clearly, there is a growing case for the success of niche social. However, how much user base and marketer dollars will it attract? Let's examine the benefits of niche social networks versus niches in big social networks for both the user and the marketer.

image credit: guardian.co.uk
What's Been Happening This Week...

Is Corporate Social Media The Wave of The Future?
Going 180 degrees from last week, Mashable asks, "Could corporations be the real push behind social media?" The article does not deny that corporate adoption has been slow, but states that once the economics of social media is proven that practice will snowball.

I guess companies better start reading the twelve best practices for online customer communities now rather than later. Every list like this is starting to sound the same, repeating the same social best practices: join the conversation, community first, forget traditional metrics. But I found this quote about collaborating rather than marketing insightful:

"Customer communities tend to project customer influence and demands deeper into an organization and create more sustained contact. And the reverse is also true, with the result being outcomes which don't appear so much as marketing but as cooperation, mutual brainstorming, and co-development of ideas and outcomes."

Speaking of collaborative communities...

This will be a fun one to start out Friday.

"It's Mad Men meets nerds... I found this group of slides from a 1975 IBM presentation that are quite amazing. I love the typefaces, layout and '70 corporate patina. I think this would make a great presentation today. Plus, they use the term 'online' everywhere."
Shane Ginsberg

http://www.squareamerica.com/ib.htm

I don't know what's funnier: the needless pointing to large keywords like "decision" and "database" (precursor to the tag cloud?) or that this all apparently takes place aboard the spaceship from 2001.

Flip Video has recently become synonymous with social video. The ease and cost of flip cameras have enabled bloggers to become vloggers, companies to turn events into social content without blowing their budget, and community managers to more easily create engaging conversations between members and brands. People have even done side by side tests with HD cameras versus flip cameras on YouTube to see which is better at storytelling through video.

To bring it full circle and just for some popcorn Friday fun, here is a viral video from Circuit City promoting the social nature of a flip camera on YouTube. I got the chance to chat with Bill Rattner, from Circuit City, about the motivations behind the video:

"Circuit City would never run something like this on a broadcast medium but for YouTube, it's perfect! We don't want to be just another clueless company that posts their commercial on YouTube. Somewhere between Ridley Scott and the Star Wars Kid lies the great opportunity for storytellers. It's kind of the philosophy that ad agencies used to have back in the day. You know, entertain and inform. Those two seem to have gotten separated somewhere along the way."

With the accessibility of simple camera equipment, intuitive editing software, and a hugely popular broadcast medium, the power for entertainment lies in the hands of the consumer. The smart brands know that they need to play in that space or get out of the game.

Thanks to Adam Turinas for submitting the video.

Marta Strickland

image credit: VentureBeat

We were talking about ThreeMinds on a conference call, as a matter of fact, when the door started to rattle.

"Whoa."

The conversation stopped on the line. Some high-ranking Organics from every office were on the call. And here I was in Los Angeles, realizing the mute button wasn't on.

But beyond the conference call foul, I was beginning to focus more on the fact that the ground was swaying underneath my feet... like standing on a pontoon's deck as a wave goes underneath.

"I think...I'm pretty sure we're having an Earthquake."

Silence on the other end. I noticed my Michigan State Spartan Christmas ornament was swaying fairly violently on the desk.

"This is breaking news! You're getting this live!"

As a good, born and bred Midwesterner, I was on some level concerned that I had derailed the conversation. But my heart was pounding. Truth be told, I was happy to be in the middle of some potential news. Soon enough, the phone beeped and I saw it was my wife calling from her office Downtown. And then I knew, LA has just put itself into the news cycle for at least a few hours.

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Marriage proposals, whether simple or elaborate, are always something that people strive to be unique. Luckily, the world of web 2.0 has opened up some new doors for people to be the first in history to propose via a new medium. First we had the Twitter proposal (followed up by a YouTube divorce). Next was a proposal via Reddit, a social news website, where the fiance-to-be could rate the proposal up or down, along with the rest of the world. And now we have a proposal via Google StreetView.

Michael explains more on his website:

"My name is Michael Weiss-Malik, and I work for Google. I don't work on the Street View team, but I interact with them pretty regularly. They decided to coordinate a pre-announced Street View run outside Google's Mountain View offices, with the idea that Googlers could line up along the street and appear in the imagery. So I put together my "Proposal 2.0" billboard and showed up, hoping that it'd be readily visible. And it was!"

Marta Strickland

image credit: kristylopez, Flickr

A study of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people from around the world, researchers have concluded that any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation, meaning that they could be linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances. The database covered all of the MS Messenger IM network in June 2006, or roughly half the world's instant-messaging traffic at that time, researchers said.

Check out the article at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/01/AR2008080103718_pf.html

While on the one hand this is easy to smile at - it is also quite profound and I wonder if it applies to more than just people - for example how about web links - is every web page separated by no more than six links... I always thought the answer to life the universe and everything was 42 - well maybe its 6, and then again 4+2 = 6!!!

Baron Conway

Heekya: Wikipedia for Stories from DavidAdewumi on Vimeo.

Earlier this year, Penguin Books launched a high-concept web site called, We Tell Stories. The site challenged six authors to remake six classic books in a more web-native and engaging format. The results included a Google Maps mashup, line by line live "storycasting", and a scattered story told across several blogs and Twitter.

While the results were quite engaging, the project missed on out on exploring storytelling as it relates to the social web. With the prevalence of user generated content, wikis and crowdsourcing, it feels like it is only a matter of time before the storytelling medium becomes more collaborative. But, sites have had mixed success in bringing this trend forward.

Back in 2006, Showtime's The L Word partnered with FanLib and held an exquisite-corpse-like contest in which fans submitted scenes each week and voted on which was the best. The best scene was added to a growing script week after week until it was finished. Since then, though, FanLib has closed down.

This week Heekya launched an effort to attempt to bring "social storytelling" back to the mainstream. The site allows the web community as a whole to add multiple perspectives and content on the telling of a given story or event. Although currently in private "alpha", the video demo of the site gives you an idea of just how compelling such an effort, if successful, could be.

Marta Strickland

We all know the robot takeover is imminent, right? And while robots can be incredibly creepy (or adorable in the case of WALL-E), there are some tasks that they are just going to be better at: chess, exploring other planets, and various household chores. But we are going to have to draw the line somewhere, and my line is draw at food and wine-tasting.

"Spanish scientists say they have developed a portable 'electronic tongue' that can rapidly identify a wine's vintage and grape variety. Designed to maintain quality control in the vineyard, the device consists of six sensors that detect substances characteristic of a certain wine variety, the researchers said. Components such as acid, sugar and alcohol can be measured and from those parameters it can determine the age and variety of the wine." United Press International

The electric tongue or the e-tongue is nothing new. The Washington Post wrote an article earlier this year about how the newest e-tongue and e-nose technologies are rivaling the human physical counterparts. The USDA is even experimenting with robot meat tasters to grade steaks.

Robots may never be able to produce the elegant, ridiculous prose of the nation's top wine writers, like Robert Parker's "the wine is like a towering skyscraper in the mouth". But, one has to question whether giving robots a sense of taste really works to our advantage. For your consideration:

"When a reporter's hand was placed against the robot's taste sensor, it was identified as prosciutto. A cameraman was mistaken for bacon." MSNBC

I guess you are what you eat?

Marta Strickland

image credit: YUKI.N

It's been another big week to talk about social media. It's just something in the air. Maybe it's the Olympics and all the social media campaigns and general chatter surrounding such a huge event. Or maybe it is this startling (and questionable) statistic that half of ALL US adults use social media.

It's big, and it's only going to get bigger, but there are many challenges ahead, including excessive online clutter, lack of standards, and no solid framework around social media measurement.

What's Been Happening This Week...

The Always-On Brand
Despite the challenge of "excessive online noise", lifestreaming and brandstreaming are only growing in strength. Twitter is seeing an astounding rate of Olympic "tweets" (tagged #080808): there is one message every 0.5 seconds!!!

And it's not just Twitter... while Twitter has stayed the #1 microblogging site despite frequent outages, FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse have see a rapid rise in recent months. But beyond those "early adopter" platforms, lifestreaming has also come into play on more mainstream social networks like Facebook.

Increasingly brands from Firefox and Comcast to Southwest and Whole Foods are realizing the value of immersing themselves in their customer's lifestreams. Unfortunately, with no clear way to indicate "official" corporate messaging, services like Twitter are an easy target for "brandjacking". A user recently fooled the Twitter-sphere into thinking she was the voice of Exxon Mobil.

On Sunday morning I woke up at 4am to the sounds of what I thought was bombing! I guess I was dreaming about the Soviet / Georgian bombings and awoke in that reality. Then my mind told me I was in "Safe Toronto" but I still felt anxious as the sounds continued.

I switched on the radio - nothing.
I switched on the TV - nothing.
I went to Google and searched for any news on Toronto - nothing.

Then I reached for my Blackberry and sent out the series of Tweets above. Looking on Twitter Search led me to PhotoJunkie and to Youtube videos and Flickr photos.

This episode in Toronto sparked a great commentary by Jeremiah Owyang on the risks and opportunities of citizen journalism. And last week, the use of Twitter to report the L.A. earthquakes inspired Organic's Mike Hudson to write an article about his experiences. Mike held a different view, in which, he found the phone a more useful tool for his crisis:

"While we all look to the Twitter, text and Facebook or whatever else as the 'next' way of doing things, I'd say the real hero of breaking news is consistently turning out to be the biggest dinosaur of them all, the phone."

But in my case... at 5am, I went back to sleep, feeling way less anxious now that I was better informed. The traditional media were all still asleep! They finally woke up hours later and started reporting on the events. Empowered by Twitter, Youtube and Flickr, I was able to express my anxiety with the World, poll the community to find out more, share information and be educated by and be part of citizen journalism on Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

For my siblings and me, the summers of the 70s went something like this...

We'd fly to places we'd never heard of like Taxco, Mexico. Mom, my sister and I would buy tiny souvenir silver charms, mined and made only in Taxco. Dad would buy a red sombrero from a street vendor, later regretting his purchase. My 16-year old brother would skip the silver and sombreros, get sloshed on locally made tequila and concentrate his efforts on a locally grown, um, local. But, that's another story entirely.

Soon after returning home, we'd get bored and start driving our parents nuts. So, Dad would pile us into the custom Buick sedan and drop us off at Grandma and Grandpas house for a weeklong, summertime break from us, er, visit. We'd spend our days at Grandpa's watch shop where he'd make one-of-a-kind timepieces, Grandma would teach us to make "kiddie" coffee - one part coffee, 3 parts milk - and curse in Polish (purely accidental on her part). We'd have two choices for lunch: the original Pancake House, before the word "original" needed to be in the name; or 31 Flavors, where we'd learn to "accidentally" push the ice-cream off the cone with our tongues so Grandma would buy us a scoop of the next flavor on the list. And, yes, ice cream for lunch.

After work, Grandma would make her secret recipe Kapusta and Kielbasa (sauerkraut and sausage) while we listened to The Faygo Song on the record player . It seemed that was the only record they owned, but we loved it.

Life was good.

Now, in the 00s, life for me is something like this...

I travel again to Mexico, this time with my husband, hoping to mark the occasion with a locally made piece of jewelry. I search high and low for something unmistakably Mexican only to find the exact same jewelry on my travels that I saw a month earlier at a jewelry show in Novi, Michigan. But familiarity doesn't stop me from buying a lovely blue topaz ring. After all, it IS jewelry and I AM a girl.

Whether you love it, hate it, or ignore it... the redesigned Facebook is here to stay. Many in the blogging world have been theorizing why Facebook has made the design choices that is has in the redesign. Are they trying to focus their efforts on becoming a new social bookmarking and sharing site? Have they been drinking too much of the Silicon Valley kool-aid? As Eric Eldon at VentureBeat puts it:

"I've long argued that the value of Facebook is in the fact that it has convinced millions to share real information about themselves -- versus the fake information you see on MySpace and many other social networks. But the thing is, it seems Facebook users want to share real information along the lines of glittery photos. It wouldn't surprise me if Facebook sees a sustained protest from millions of users who don't care about publishing, in the first place, who just want to decorate their profiles to show off to their friends."

And so they have. With bloggers pondering and Facebookers petitioning, I thought it would be interesting to see what people around the office think...

"They've improved the control you have over your profile and privacy. Who can see what of your content and so on. That is always an area close to my heart as I don't like to share personal info with my business network and vice versa. And they really start to elevate the most recent content, so it's easier to keep up with friends who update their pages more frequently. I like the refreshed look and feel, it's definitely easier to navigate. But I think they also sneaked in more ad space, I didn't notice these big ads before on my profile pages."
Sonja Scharrer, Operations

"No likie. At first I thought it hadn't finished loading, when in fact it had. My reaction was 'really?'. And when I reverted back, I felt better."
Vaibhavi Bhide, Engagement Management

"The 'new' Facebook does a good job at separating out the content of what you really want. What was once cluttered and often times kept below the fold is now easily accessible. When viewing someone's profile you can see their wall, their info, photos, or more separately; something that was cluttered into one page before. I think overall there is a cleanliness to it and I think this also has to do with the way we are viewing webpages (widescreen, better screens) then when Facebook first started. The ability to only have to look through certain amount of pages will help with how users interact with the network.

"One thing you will see is a lot of people hating it. Well remember how many people 'hated' mini feed. Now that is the most popular feature. So we are very quick to hate on something when we get familiar with it."
St. John Oneil-Dunne, Global Business Development

If I asked you who you thought the Most Followed Person on Twitter was, I'm sure I'd get a number of interesting and viable answers. I am forced to wonder, however, how many people would have picked the correct answer: Barack Obama.

"Barack Obama?!" you say? Yep, it's true. According to C|Net, Obama recently passed Digg creator Kevin Rose as the Most Followed Person On Twitter. I admit, I was pretty surprised - a politician? Using social media? And actually using it pretty well? That is not something I expected to see.

So, I figured "hey, why not?", and I decided to follow him too. In doing this, I got another surprise - less than 10 minutes later, I get an e-mail from Twitter that Barack Obama is now following ME on Twitter. OMG! Following ME?

It's pretty clear the Obama camp is really on the ball with this - no doubt they have a volunteer whose job it is to ensure that everybody who chooses to follow Obama on Twitter immediately gets a response in kind. Imagine being a young, impressionable voter, getting an e-mail that Barack Obama - THE Barack Obama, the (presumptive) Democratic Nominee for the Presidency of the United States, is following YOU on Twitter! The potential power of that simple e-mail alone is enormous. Like never before, social media is allowing people to feel like they're really in touch with a candidate for office.

Add to this Obama's 1.3 million Facebook supporters, and the fact that it looks like he's about to surpass 2 million online donors, and this becomes even more impressive.

Obama is not the first politician to benefit from the Internet or social media. As many of you probably know, Ron Paul received a staggering amount of Internet support in his bid to become the Republican candidate. His YouTube channel currently has over 130 videos, and over 7 million views. Nobody paid much attention when he entered the race, but thanks to people in his camp who were Web and social media-savvy, he became a household name, whose opinions could not be ignored.

With all the debate about social media going on right now, one thing's for sure - a political candidate who ignores the potential power of social media does so at their peril.

In the meantime, I'd better be careful what I say on Twitter - Obama is watching!

Daryl Brewer

"What if your photo collection was an entry point into the world, like a wormhole that you could jump through and explore..."

No, this is not a tagline for an upcoming sci-fi film. This is the tagline for a breakthrough technology brought to you by... Microsoft?

The technology is called Photosynth. It's an application that is able to map hundreds of photos geographically in three-dimensional space. The software creates "orbits" that allow users to rotate their viewpoint and have the photos change based on the new perspective. The result is the ability for users to explore the photos similar to the way they would navigate the actual place in real life. Basically, if enough photos are taken of the same famous monument, like say the Eiffel Tower, you are able to see it from all angles and zoom levels.

Photosynth is actually a 2 year old project and the Microsoft site is jam packed with demo videos, but the incredible tech preview that just debuted this week at SIGGRAPH 2008 kicked it up a notch. The new Photosynth demo features color correction, smoothing, and time of day. Just sit back, and be amazed:

The awesomeness of Photosynth is ultimately reliant on the wealth of photography. With the popularity of photo sharing sites and the continual advancement of mobile phone cameras, that might not be such a big problem afterall. And since Yahoo! owns Flickr, it certainly makes one rethink the value of the Microsoft-Yahoo! takeover, as well as their stakes in Facebook. Maybe Microsoft does know what their doing afterall.

Marta Strickland

Building on the Sexy Subaru Forester Sumo Carwash viral video that was a hit on YouTube, Subaru created a nice little follow-up site (in conjunction with Canon) that allows one to take the sexy action into their own hands. You are the official photographer on a photoshoot involving a scadly dressed sumo wrestler and a Subaru Forrester.

Go ahead, you know you want to take a few shots:
http://www.sexysubaru.ca

Lau Ardelean

Recently, LivePlace.com (owned by Brad Greenspan one of MySpace co-founders) accidentally provided a brief preview of a 3D virtual world called City Space. It is rendered in OTOY - an technology capable of rendering cinematic quality 3D visuals in a web-browser. From this particular footage - it also appears to be employing a cloud-based rendering engine - rendering images server-side so that almost any computer or device can display the impressive real-time lighting effects without needing a powerful-but-pricey graphics card.

With the actual launch date of City Place still unknown, it may be a bit too early to proclaim it as the next-big-thing in the marriage of virtual worlds with social media. However, Second Life and Google's efforts with 'Lively' will have a great deal of catching up to do in their graphic's departments when LivePlace begins to bustle with real users.

Tomas Roldan

For the launch of their new mini-site, Face The Task, Nokia borrows some influence and aesthetics from one of the most well-known kung-fu films to demonstrate the slickness, performance, and international appeal of their latest mobile phone, the N96. This extravagant mini-site is a good example a video-heavy execution done right. Notice the well-thought out cinematography and choreography and how there is barely any lag or loading time!

Beyond entertainment value, the site gives you a chance to win a Nokia N96, and more importantly, it highlights the current threat to the Red Panda in Napal. Nokia has partnered with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to help save the endangered Red Panda by giving users the opportunity to donate to the WWF and receive a Limited Edition Nokia N96. The Limited Edition comes in decorated ash tree boxes and raw silk bags with an extra storage card device weighing in at a whopping 24 GB, three times the regular size.

Lau Ardelean

What's Been Happening This Week...

Can You Feel The Twitter-mania?
Love it or hate it, people just can't stop talking about Twitter. Over the weekend,Twitter proved itself again as a valuable tool in citizen's journalism when it was first to pick up the story and spread the photos of the Toronto propane plant explosions. But just as more people are flocking to the site, Twitter decides it's about time to set some limits to just how many people you can follow. 2000 people might seem like more than anyone would ever want to follow, but for certain users, and I'm not just talking about Scoble, this cap could be devastating. The biggest blow (unless Twitter makes an exception) will be for the #1 followed person on Twitter, Barack Obama, who is surprisingly not using Twitter as part of his big VP announcement. Even though politics and social media seem to really be coming together, apparently most brands still suck at Twitter.

Who's Playing Social Network Catch-Up?
The social network races continued this week with some interesting and unexpected twists. Apparently, Imeem is now beating MySpace as the #1 music social network. In a strange turn of events, fastest growing network out there. Don't celebrate yet! Even with all this growth, social networking is reportedly leveling off in North America. It seems like everyone has a different angle on the Comscore data.

This story is sure to continue to be interesting over the next few months as new players enter the social space. Now that Movable Type is going social, every blog can become it's own social network. The field is quickly becoming cluttered and many are hoping the times of data portability are right around the corner. Otherwise, our online identities are going to become even more unmanageable.

Is PR Friend or Foe?
Speaking of new players in the space, did you ever wonder how bloggers find out about all these technologies in the first place? Well, some of them stumble upon it on their own. Some get recommended by their friends and peers. However, an increasing number of bloggers are closely connected with the PR world, and are getting told about these technologies from people that represent them, people with a vested interest in getting exposure for their clients.

This has been the subject of much debate over the past week. It started with a post on MicroPersuasion claiming PR as obsolete. Then, Scoble, Mashable, and ReadWriteWeb all chimed in with their own take. Many come back to the point that PR is evolving and good PR these days is about listening. It's about playing matchmaker to bloggers and giving them the stories that will inspire passion and not playing the game of how to get to the top of Techmeme.

That's it for this week

Marta Strickland

image credit: Paul Ferguson

In something straight out of a SciFi novel from the 80s, Russia used the web as the first wave of their recent assault on the breakaway country of Georgia. Recent reports form the CBC and BBC state that the attack actually began nearly 3 weeks ago when many of the Georgian government servers were hacked. The hacking can be traced back to the Russian "mafia" who for weeks has bombarded the servers will billions of bytes of, you guessed it, spam. These are the same individuals who infamous for stealing identities then selling them en masse - even via the web.

While there has been no direct connection made between this underworld element to the Kremlin, it may explain why some of the first targets for the jet attacks were cell towers. By effectively eliminating wired and WiFi capabilities, the Georgians are unable to communicate via normal channels. The depth of the damage remains to be seen, but it could, in theory, go well beyond military operations, and effect financial institutions, and even individuals within the Georgian government.

Not as deadly as the brute force of bombs and tanks, it has and will likely continue to wreak havoc on the inner most workings of the small country's parliament.

Vito Greto

Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires--the constant switching and pivoting--energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we're supposed to be concentrating on.

Stopping or quitting Freedom will not re-enable your network adapters. This is purposeful. To re-enable your network before the time period elapses, you must restart your computer.

image credit: Laurel Papworth

Erlene was involved in a car crash moments after tweeting this. She passed away at the scene...

As social media continues to grow, it will come to create a detailed online representation of your life and its daily activities, your passions and dreams. It will represent reputations in all their truths, and any of their fallacies. Your online persona is a reality of today and many wise individuals expend effort and time protecting and nurturing that identity.

What happens to that identity when you've gone? It doesn't suddenly go away when you do.

Each time you post on twitter, share photos on flickr or create content on a blog, you are leaving behind an artifact of your life. What will become of the person you created?

This is an element of social media I had never considered until reading an article on The Guardian about how social networks are having to come up with policies for the profiles of dead users.

It is interesting to postulate how strange (comforting or disturbing?) it is that our online personas will live on long after our deaths. If we assume the internet will be there forever or at least for the next century... How will the things that we have posted online be interpreted 100 years from now? By our great-grandchildren?

It's not fading memories, it's there in digital black and white, it is open to everyone and anyone, bad or good. It is infinitely reproducible and it is forever. Historians will study it. Already we are seeing forum entries, blog notes and Facebook pages continuing to "live" after their authors have "gone on".

I could take a journalistic approach and remain objective about being "online forever ". Surely there are potential down sides to it, but I have determined that I like it.

I believe that an understanding of the inevitability of our digital legacy will at least make us better people online and give ourselves the motivation to evaluate ourselves in the real world. The phenomenon causes us to ask if we are putting online what we really want to leave behind for others to remember - for a very long time.

Your online existence will give your descendants a chance to know you and hence themselves unlike ever before. The net will someday be a place to mourn, to remember, and to celebrate our lives.

A few tips for eternity...
1. Be honest and accurate. Time will uncover everything.
2. Language and customs will change so much of what you say
    will be open to interpretation later. Clarity is important.
3. Observe appropriate etiquette for the application you are using.
4. Be fair, whenever possible give people the benefit of the doubt.
5. Be diplomatic, but don't ever sell short your convictions.
6. An online journal with the details of each pseudonym we had used
    online will be priceless to your decedents.
7. Be Disciplined! You are creating a legacy.

Leah McChesney

One of the big tenets of Web 2.0 has always been "open data". The move towards opening up statistics and public data along with APIs has lead to a great deal of phenomenal mashups, such as the Chicago Crime Mashup. But that's not all, this open data movement has lead to some very interesting development in the practice of data visualization.

Data visualization is any technique for creating images and diagrams to communicate a message. With the power of open web 2.0 data and data tools, recent visualizations have grown even more engaging. As part 1 of a three part series, we will be looking at 10 staggering data visualizations, those that use the data behind them to illustrate their message for maximum impact. This is far from a complete list...

1. Death and Taxes (above)
"Death and Taxes: A look at where tax dollars go" details the amount of federal budget, specifically federal income taxes, that is spent on military vs, non-military efforts. The staggering impact comes from the reasonably equal distribution of money towards "death" vs money towards... everything else. Like many good data visualizations, this one you can buy as a poster.

2. WorldMapper
WorldMapper is a site that contains over 350 maps that relate to particular sets of data taken from around the world, from disease and disaster to military spending and carbon emissions. The size of the country distorts based on irregularities in the data, meaning a country that has more of something, in this case it is HIV-infected citizens, will swell in size, whereas countries with low numbers will shrink. Other interesting maps include countries effected by disaster and military spending.

3. They Rule
They Rule explores information and connections about the "US Ruling Class". The idea is that some of the people on the boards of top US companies and in other powerful positions occupy spots on other boards and in other powerful positions. The interface allows users to browse through these interlocking connections and make their own conclusions. Users can save and share these visualizations they create. The one pictured below shows how six board members on the New York Times sit on 13 of the top 500 companies in the US.

Taking their cue from people like statistician-fine artist Edward Tufte, many data visualizers have turned numbers and information into museum-worthy pieces. The opportunity that web 2.0 has brought is the ability for these visualizations to evolve over time or change based on the social connections of the people involved. For part 2 of this three-part serious, we will be looking at 10 gorgeous data visualizations. Again, this is far from a complete list...

1. Digg Labs (above)
It might seem surprising, but I think some of the most inspiring examples of data visualization can be seen over at the Digg Labs. Digg realized at some point that the sheer amount of links submitted on a daily basis had the makings for some great visualizations. Like Twistori, the beauty comes not only from the presentation of the data, but in knowing that it is unfolding in real time and using content from real people who aren't really aware that their interactions are creating art.

Digg collaborated with Stamen Design to produce 5 unique projects. The best are Digg Arc, which displays stories, topics, and containers wrapped around a sphere, and Digg Swarm, which draws circles for stories as they're dugg and diggers swarm around the stories to make them grow. In addition, Digg has also released a public API for their data so that anyone can turn it into their own inspired visualizations.

2. The Shape of Song
Have you ever wondered... what does music look like? The Shape of Song makes an effort to visually map out musical patterns in songs in the form of overlapping arches. Users can submit any composition available on the Web. The result in a simple but striking representation of the deeper structure of the song. There is also a gallery of some of the most interesting results.

For those that are not familiar, Drop.io is a dead simple solution to the current issues surrounding privacy and sharing. It allows consumers to create their own private online spaces where they can share photos, videos, documents, and other types of media. For those that are not familiar with Chad Stoller, Chad is a friend of Organic and the former Executive Director of our Emerging Platforms group.

In July 2008, Drop.io added Chad Stoller to their management team as Vice President of Marketing. In that role, Stoller was put in charge of crafting Drop.io's central messaging and coordinating the company's community outreach and marketing efforts, both online and offline. Chad is a driving force of innovation, adding to whatever team that has the pleasure of working with him.

Last week, I had the opportunity to sit down with my old colleague and talk to him in depth about Drop.io and why what they are doing is something that we should all be paying close attention to.

1. What is the elevator pitch of Drop.io?

It's the easiest way to share files online.

No other service provides the number of inputs and outputs for your media. We have based our business on four distinct pillars: access, inputs, outputs and media views.

Access... we provide everywhere from the simplest to sophisticated for the most private. In fact, we are just getting started when it comes to access. We will be announcing some really interesting access and availability methods in the next four weeks.

Inputs... we asked, 'How do we make it absolutely easy for you to get into our system?' You can e-mail. You can leave a voicemail. You can fax documents. Everything gets converted into web format, Flash video, mp3, PDF. We provide all these way to get files into a drop.

Outputs... anytime a drop is updated, subscribers can get e-mail alerts, text messages, or RSS notification. We recently launched Twitter notifications. If I'm a journalist, I can be out, message a picture to a drop, and everyone who is subscribed on Twitter can see my new content.

We provide thousands of different solutions for thousands of people.

Launching appropriately during the heat of the 2008 elections, SaysMe.TV allows individuals to create their own TV commercials about the cause of their choice. The big draw is that for as little as $6, users can pay to have their video or a pre-existing video trafficked on cable TV in their area and have their name appear at the end. Of course, it has to be up to specs and meet FCC guidelines for content.

Still this is a great example of the democratization of television and use a traditional media in a way that we have almost taken for granted with social media sites like YouTube... as the site puts it, "Says Me is a vehicle for your passions, beliefs, grievances, causes, events, and ideas. Use it to make your voice count."

Bill Camp

I am a huge fan of Family Guy. Next month, the creator of Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane will launch an animated Cartoon comedy, called "Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy", distributed exclusively by Google over the Web. YouTube, a Google-owned property, will also dedicate a channel specifically to the content.

While internet-exclusive content created by real TV and movie talent is nothing new, what is interesting is that MacFarlane also cut a deal with Burger King to create online ads which will play ahead of the clips.

Burger King couldn't be happier:

"The customized lead-ins fit our personality," said Tiana Lang, Burger King's director of media and interactive. She added, "His fan base fits perfectly with ours." NY Times

So what is more surprising is MacFarlane recognizing the inevitability of pre-roll advertising and deciding to get involved in improving the quality of that content. How much better is it as a creative to have the advertising match the tone and humor you've created in your passion project? And of course, I'm sure the money Burger King offered also helped.

Sonja Scharrer

The popular playlist sharing site Muxtape was taken down this week, because the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) found it guilty of "hosting illegal content".

You might remember Muxtape, when we covered it on ThreeMinds about 4 months ago:

"Sometimes I get lost in all of the music-based social networks and recommendation engines and I forget that a lot of my favorite next-gen Web solutions are dead simple. I'm also a sucker for wistful remembrances of old media... File Muxtape in the 'do one thing and do it well' shoebox." Dan Sicko

We weren't the only ones who loved it's simplistic beauty. ReadWriteWeb said that "the news will run chills down the spines of countless music sharers. It's a tragedy, really, and one we hope to see reversed quickly." And while Muxtape claims that no artists or labels have complained and they won't be down indefinitely, the talk around the internet is pretty bleak.

Was this inevitable? First Muxtape, next Pandora, will the RIAA and social media ever play nicely? Even though artists like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails are fighting to change the music industry from the inside, what will it really take for the revolution, Music 2.0?

"It's sad, really, to watch the RIAA thrashing like a drowning rat, biting and clawing at everything around it. All you have to do is take a look at history, going back to days of sheet music -- any time technology makes a copyright unenforceable, the solution is blanket licenses for use of copyrighted material. Whether the RIAA likes it or not, that's the way this is going to end. They should be hammering out the details of securing their revenue stream, not picking fights with the very people who consume their product."
Damien Boyes, Information Architecture

"Aggravation and sadness are definitely present, but I think my overwhelming emotion is impatience. This is all going to get worked out...eventually. Music isn't going to evaporate. And there will always be a way to make money in the industry. I just wish they'd hurry up and figure this out. TechCrunch has an interesting POV where they discuss whether or not one of the big players, such as Pandora, will need to go down before things really change. A sacrificial lamb of sorts. I think there are a lot of middle men who need to go under before things really change. Tough medicine, but necessary to really fix things."
Stephen Murray, Strategy

"I want my muxtape back :("
Eric Diem, Integrated Media

Current conventional wisdom: How do you create ad revenue on sites that repurpose television content? With interstitials. With the longer content you don't have to be constrained by file size or viewing time like you do with a banner. And in many ways it's a lot like a commercial - with one crucial difference. People hate interstitials way more. Way, way more.

We're trained to be passive viewers with TV (TiVo and clickers aside), but online everybody expects a lot of control. That's probably why brands that have simply repurposed their TV commercials have seen dismal click through rates. Online viewers don't like feeling hijacked.

Generally we advertising types try to circumvent this with interactivity, so that viewers become participators. Games, avatars, interactive storytelling and user-generated content are the usual tactics - concept, style, content, and design all effect whether each instance is successful.

Rarer is an entirely passive interstitial that manages to compel click throughs. You have to offer something else to foster a sense of active engagement. Sometimes just a "what-the-hell-was-that?" quirkiness will do the trick.

AdGabber had a few thoughts about an unusual ad that Organic did for the Chrysler Town & Country on abc.com: Lots of Words, and Something About a Pony.

Dave Sylvestre

The new thing for this year are business apps, and nobody has more interesting business apps than those coming out for the iPhone. Tapulous, who some are calling the RockYou of the iPhone app world, is set to release an application called "Handshake" in the near future. The application allows you to put two iPhones together, perform a simple handshake gesture, and swap out business information of your choosing. It couldn't be simpler than that.

Handshake, of course, isn't the only exciting business application for the iPhone. The newly released LinkedIn app was just named the new "Must-Have App" by ReadWriteWeb. It allows you to access your feed, view your connections, and search through your database of contacts.

Other apps include virtual rolodexes, time trackers, and expense recorders. Personally, I can't wait for ScanLife to integrate into an expense recorder somehow. I'd love to just take a picture of my receipts and have them magically upload into my business expense program. One can dream.

Marta Strickland

It's a simple story, but it is a story that never would have happened 10 years ago. We have reached a space beyond YouTube users creating reactions and parodies of TV commercials. We have reached a space beyond YouTube users creating their own commercials. We are now living a time where a brand will pay money and hire a celebrity to create a video response on YouTube to user-generated content.

EA just PWNED Levinator25!!

Levinator25 put up a video on YouTube display a glitch he found in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08. The glitch was called the "Jesus Shot" and featured Tiger Woods walking on water to take his next shot. EA produced a video response in which they show Tiger Woods (the real person) walk out on water (real water) to take a golf shot. It proposes that Levinator25 thought he might have found a glitch, but "It's not a glitch. He's just that good."

Marta Strickland

Let's open on a random fact that may disgust you:

"29 percent of internet users have purchased goods from spam emails," reports internet security firm Marshal.

29%!!! Look around the room, that means 1 in 3 people you are looking at has purchased something from spam. And with sex, drugs, and software topping the list of purchased items, we are talking about "buy viagra"-style spammy spam. Really?? Well, now that we've gotten that out of the way...

What's Been Happening This Week...

What's Up, What's Down, + What's On It's Way
The much anticipated Microsoft Photosynth came out of beta this week to "surprising" enthusiasm. Well, it was up until it went down under the server strain. Yahoo! Buzz, possible competitor to Digg, finally opened its submissions to the public. Previously, you needed a partnership with Yahoo! to get onto Buzz.

As for what's down, unfortunately popular playlist sharing site Muxtape is due to an ongoing battle with the RIAA. And it looks as though Pandora might be next due to the hike in web radio royalty fees. While many mourn, others feel that something this sad has to happen before the whole system can be reworked.

There is a lot of stuff upcoming. Yahoo! wants to bring the internet to your living room with the launch of a widget channel. Garmin gets social by partnering up with uLocate to bring BuddyBeacon to their devices, which shares a user's location with their friends. And more is in the pipeline for Microsoft, including launching a social bookmarking competitor to Delicious and some initial applications for Microsoft Surface.

But we can't get through the newsweek without our obligatory Facebook and Twitter news:

Alright Already! What's Up With Facebook + Twitter?
Well, Facebook is getting ready to launch "engagement ads", which will allow brands to create more widget-y advertisements. Then, there was the announcement that traffic is approaching that of MySpace, slowly but surely. Take a turn for the strange, there was a rumor floating around this week that they were going to get bought out by the Mormons.

Let's talk about Oregon's favorite microblogging tool, Twitter. Things didn't start off so well as CNN's tweet pissed off a whole bunch of people by announcing the Michael Phelp's 8th gold medal before it had aired in the primetime. Even though Twitter is become friend to journalists and PR professionals alike, maybe sometimes real-time is a little too real-time.

Marta Strickland

The Apple App Store appears to have got off to an incredible start.  In a few months there are several thousand applications available both free and for a minimal price, and consumers have responded.  In its first month alone, it generated around 60 million downloads and $30 million in revenue for Apple. Those are incredible numbers when you realize that 90% of the Apps are under $10, and on the applications side there have already been several that have had million+ downloads.  It is clearly a game changer and is going to redefine the nature of not just software distribution, but also software development. 

I however think the model is so much more than that; and that is where the concept of a Trojan horse comes to play.

The amazingly named Usain Bolt may be the fastest man in the world, winning gold and setting world records in every event he competed in at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Puma created a casual, but fun game where you can race against the Olympic champion. It's very nicely designed, *simple* and funny. Pick your colors, and use the spacebar and arrow keys to try to outsprint him.

If you hear the sound of crazy fast keyboard tapping today (and laughing), it's probably from this site.

Jay Bain

The Twitterverse was a-twitter yesterday due to AMC issuing take down notices to a series of fan-created accounts for the characters of their hit series Mad Men. When the accounts went up a few months ago, the characters were embraced by Twitter users, who probably skew on the side of an advertising/marketing/consulting tech-savvy audience. They didn't care whether they represented AMC or not. No, this was a new and exciting form of fan-fiction.

Twitter playing nice, upheld to the notices and temporarily took down the accounts. What came after was a series of protests from blogs, but especially from Twitter users:

stjohn Wow AMC way to hate on your Mad Men fans http://is.gd/1Wt2

pheezy @martastrickland AMC gets lumped in with Hasbro for not realizing what their digital fan-base has already done for them.

mzkagan Why has Twitter hijacked my beloved @don_draper (and friends)? Looks like i'll be drinking alone 2nite.

slange70 @martastrickland sounds to me that AMC was bummed out that they didn't think of that first.

bryanfuhr it's a shame that a show which celebrates innovation in advertising cannot embrace innovation in advertising

The irony was too much to bare and apparently Deep Focus, the web marketing group for AMC, convinced them, "Better to embrace the community than negate their efforts." And so the accounts have returned, and no worse for the wear.

don_draper Doing what I do best - moving forward with my life like today never happened.

Marta Strickland

Unscrew America is the brainchild of An Inconvenient Truth producer Lesley Chilcott and Austin's SG&M Idea City. The site's goal is to increase awareness of more energy-efficient ones in the form of CFLs and LEDs. But it is their Monty-Python-meets-social-responsibility approach that makes this an exceptional experience...

This is the type of interface that could have gone horribly wrong. Sure, it's fun, but that's not usually enough to keep me on any site for very long (especially one that's supposed to be informative). So, as I was getting sucked into the goofy nav, I asked myself "Why am I still clicking on things?".

I think it's because:
- It's a subject I care about
- I was learning something
- They labeled everything so I knew what I was getting into before I
   clicked. They didn't rely solely on a graphic/icon and my desire to
   discover Easter eggs
- They used humor that was just bizarre enough to make me
   interested and not so bizarre to leave me thinking "huh?"

Make sure you click "I hate music" at the bottom right. Thanks to Scott Brennen for the find.

Sandy Marsh

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo

Mozilla Labs announced today that it has released a new experimental solution called Ubiquity. Ubiquity is a method for non-developers to create mashups out of the pages and content they are already surfing.

This is dramatically different that what is already out there. Solutions like Yahoo Pipes! requires you to set up 'plumbing' before you can get output. Ubiquity let's developers make little snippets of code that users easily access data. Think of it like creating very human readable APIs.

The experiment has been provoking some thoughtful conversation around Organic:

"I've always felt somewhat ambivalent about RSS feeds of marketing/product news. Same goes for branded widgets, because you still have to 'go to' them. They require consciously calling them up or else allowing them to clutter your screen/dock until the moment you may need them.

"But the opportunity to provide branded utility via ubiquity commands, which have the potential to become an integral part of the browsing experience? My head's about to explode with the possibilities, like... select items from throughout the web and save them to a merchant-agnostic shopping list that constantly pings for comparable items and best available prices."
Sam Cannon

James Vreeland

What's Been Happening This Week...

Finally a week where I don't have to talk about Twitter or Facebook. It was an interesting newsweek for some other online players, namely Twitter-competitor FriendFeed, and the elder statesmen of the online world, Amazon.

FriendFeed Evolves
FriendFeed launched a new design this week. The new design makes it easier to organize and manage your friends, share photos, and find new friends. In addition, FriendFeed launched a series of widgets that hopes to attract new users, and to prep the floodgates, they are enhancing their RSS capabilities to be more realtime.

And in another wise move that sets them apart from Twitter, Friendfeed's redesign added a way for you to pretend to follow your friends with out really getting their updates. It's a way to be courteous with those who you feel obligated to "follow".

Amazon Goes To School
Amazon announced it's intention to release a new version of the Kindle aimed at the college textbook market. But disappointment came as people discovered the changes weren't so revolutionary and it wouldn't release until next year. Definitely not in time for back to school.

How Social Media Is Changing This Election
Just in time for the Democratic National Convention, there was a whole series of articles on how social media has been implemented for this election season. Digg allowed users to submit and rate questions for the Convention. C-SPAN's Convention Hub featured live Twitter coverage that has now reached nearly 12K posts, making it one of the biggest "news meets social media" success stories and completely overshadowing CNN's announcement that they will now make their video service more viral.

But it isn't just about changing the way the election is covered, it is also about changing the outcome. Kevin Beckner claims that his use of Facebook helped him win in the County Commissioner primaries. The use of social networks are going to become a vital part of the grassroots, get out the vote efforts for both parties come November. And even though McCain doesn't use the internet, apparently someone who works for him does and decided they needed to relaunch their social network and actually have it work this time around.

Finally, there was actually some news about Twitter and Facebook this week, and coincidentally both centered around lack of understanding by traditional media. AMC finds out fans have been twittering in the guise of characters from their hit show Mad Men and puts out, then retracts cease and desist notices. Aaron Sorkin, the real one this time, joins Facebook in an attempt to understand it better for an upcoming movie project about the social network. People are debating whether that is a bad idea or a really bad idea.

Marta Strickland