Battelle in AdAge on CrowdFire:
“We want to get a cloud of media to become something fungible that people can see and work with to create new things,” he said. “I want the performance to go from one-to-many to many-to-many.”
Very cool.
Reading one of my colleague’s blogs today (FM is rife with bloggers, wouldn’t you know it?), I got interested in checking out a podcast he mentioned: a lecture by Michael Pollan, of The Omnivore’s Dilemma
To actually listen to this podcast, I have to remember — when I get home, after a busy day at work — to fire up iTunes, search for this podcast, and subscribe. Yeah, that’ll happen. Not.
One thing I love about my TiVo service is that I can go to the Web interface (still not as good as the ReplayTV service was, but pretty decent), and subscribe to a season pass of a new show that I recently heard about. On Netflix, I can go over and queue up the newest, hottest independent film reviewed in the NYT, months before it’s actually released on DVD. On Amazon
In all these case, my entertainment is basically sent to me, after a few keystrokes, and it’s ready for me to enjoy whenever I find the time. Why can’t I do this on iTunes? Am I missing something?
I’ve been so wrapped up in the latest project I’ve been involved with at FM that I haven’t had time to post about it: the FM Holiday Gadget Guide.
Though it’s sponsored solely by Best Buy, the FM authors involved — some of the Web’s most well-known gadget aficionados — have complete free range, editorially. I’ve gotten a real kick out of reading their posts, and have developed a hankering for a couple of things featured. Anyway, it’s been fun, and it’ll be up and running through the end of the year.
So, researchers at University College, London, have come up with geographical classifications of the various levels of e- (as in electronic) awareness, and are allowing people to put in their postcodes to see how their area ranks.
I entered in my husband’s old postcode in Scotland and, och, the results were depressing:
The ‘E – unengaged’ are typically groups that do not have access to electronic communications or technologies. Most are too old, too poor or too poorly educated to be able to access them, and instead traditionally rely upon personal contacts they trust for advice. Within this Group there are low levels of literacy and many people do not feel that their life outcomes are much subject to their own decisions. Within this group there is a very low level of ownership of personal computers, very little access to them at work and little ambition to master the skills necessary to take advantage of information technologies. Unsurprisingly, these people have a very low level of using email at any location (home, work and other locations) or participating in other on-line activities.
Members of this Group tend to live in the poorer areas of traditional mining and manufacturing towns and to have conservative social attitudes. A high proportion of the Group is made up of elderly people, many of whom live in social housing or sheltered accommodation.
Type A04 : Mobile’s the limit
This Type has particularly low levels of use of computers and the Internet, knows next to nothing about the technology and has no motivation to do so. They enjoy more traditional modes of communication, but the mobile phone represents the limit of their technical ambition. Many of this Type are female and elderly.
No digital savvy, and no motivation to learn. It probably says more about me that I’m horrified at this. They may be perfectly satisfied with their lot in life.
Here’s the BBCi write-up.
[via PaidContent.org]
I’ve been checking out a couple new travel search engines that add the element of time to the equation. First is FareCast, which John Battelle blogged about recently. Second is FareCompare.com, which was written up in the WSJ yesterday (free link for 7 days).
To be honest, until I have a real trip to plan, and until these sites get a little further developed, it’s hard for me to offer an opinion. But I wanted to highlight them here in case you’re interested in taking a look yourself. I’ve got 23 invitations for the FareCast beta left, so e-mail me at theriver *at* mcnigel.com if you want one.
UPDATE: Gary Price shares why FareCast was formerly called Hamlet. In keeping with the idea that a fare forecast can tell you whether to purchase now or wait for a better deal, their motto was “to buy, or not to buy….”
Mark Cuban hits the nail on the head with a post titled “The end of boredom”. His point? In this technology/media-fueled modern world, one need never stare into space. One need never spend a few moments inside one’s head, just thinking. One need never look around at other people who may be sharing one’s space — at the gym, on the train, on the street. Instead, we’re listening to music, watching TV, and otherwise keeping ourselves entertained during those little pauses in our lives. Is this a good thing for society? (It may be a great thing for media makers and advertisers….)
Everybody’s talking about Yahoo! Mail’s integration of RSS, but — despite the fact that I use Yahoo! as my primary e-mail client for all non-work mail — I can’t use it. Why? Because I’m a Yahoo! SBC (soon to be AT&T?) customer and I have a different (read:lame and behind-the-times) interface. It’s so pathetic that those of us paying Yahoo! (and SBC) for access get these little bells-and-whistles rolled out so much later than everyone else. Also still waiting for the Yahoo! Photos feature that lets you attach a bunch of pictures to an e-mail. What’s the deal, Yahoo!? *Sigh*
The product for the next great wave of spam (if it hasn’t already happened already): Tamiflu. Or Tamiflu-copycats.
UPDATE: Yup.
“Spammers are registering hundreds of domain names to market and sell bird flu medication,” said Mark Adams, Technical Support Director for SpamStopsHere. “At one point we were blocking over 150,000 bird flu related spam emails per day. We expect that as media coverage and public concern increases, the bird flu spam problem will get much worse before it gets better.”
I’m going to be at the Web 2.0 Conference later this week, and am really looking forward to it. It looks to be a little more technology-centric than marketing-centric, but somewhere in all these new gee-whiz gadgets there’ve got to be some ad-supported business models or ad-enabling technologies. Look forward to meeting people, etc. It’s my first conference post birth-of-baby, so I might force folks I know to look at pictures or videos of the little one on my camera phone. Don’t say you weren’t warned. Drop me a line and let me know to look out for you if you’ll be there.
Two little anecdotes, involving my retirement-age aunts, illustrate the mainstreaming of new technologies.
Aunt #1 instant messages me. She needs to know contact information for a certain realtor in a certain Central Texas town. Instinctively, she knows she can find this information online, but she’s not sure where to start. I recommend local.yahoo.com or local.google.com. She’s got her answer within seconds. First result, too.
Aunt #2 is preparing for the approach of Hurricane Rita. Her son has told her she needs to investigate this thing called text messaging, because he’s heard texting worked when voice cell phone calls didn’t, post-Katrina. Without too much trouble, she noses around the menu of her mobile phone and manages to send a message. Receiving was a little more difficult. She heard the beeping but didn’t know where to look for the message. By the next day, she’s figured that out, too, and is texting with confidence while stuck in traffic fleeing the storm. (BTW, she and the rest of my family weathered the storm just fine. Everyone in my clan has even got electricity back, I believe.)
