Typing “utube” instead of “YouTube?”
There are really this many ignorant people using the internet? Story here.
Viral Video: Consumer breaks up with advertiser
From what I can tell, this video was posted for the first time yesterday and is number five on the viral chart today:
Good message to advertisers. I, even as a marketer myself (for a small non-profit) am a significant cynic about any kind of advertising. Thus, I’m feeling some sort of disconnect in realizing this is supposed to be an ad to advertisers from — of all the corporate giants — Microsoft. In fact, it almost ruins it for me. How come this couldn’t have been done by someone like the Anti-Advertising Agency?
LinkLuv: 17 May
Via eMarketer: Some interesting words about TV on the internet. Even my very own wife is getting into some of this action; she watches Ugly Betty Friday mornings, since we’re out with our cell group Thursday nights.
Via Rocketboom, Twittervision and Flickrvision: Two fun mash-ups with Google Maps and Twitter/Flickr. It’s interesting to see how both flit around the globe; these aren’t just U.S. websites.
“I don’t visit websites anymore”
Two weeks ago, while out for dinner in celebration of certain M-DAT achievements over the last seven years, I was privileged to sit across the table from my friend Jeremy. He informed me during the course of our conversation that he “doesn’t visit websites anymore.”
He is a web programmer.
Of course, I take his statement as a generalization to some degree. I would generalize in the same way. Over the last few months I’ve vistied fewer and fewer websites, after settling on Bloglines as a way to keep tabs on new information via RSS feeds.
The websites I do still frequent are things such as Google and Desktop Tower Defense. There are also a couple blogs I like to visit whose feeds don’t work for one reason or another. The ShortTermMissions.com search engine is another example of a website you actually have to visit.
Frankly, there is just too much good information online to not use an aggregator.
Digg taken over by its users
A very interesting story on TechCrunch this morning:
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“To say what happened today on Digg was a “user revolt†is an understatement. The Digg team deleted a story that linked to the decryption key for HD DVDs after receiving a take down demandand all hell broke loose. More stories appeared and were deleted, and users posting the stories were suspended.
That just got the Digg community fired up, and soon the entire Digg home page was filled with stories containing the decryption key. The users had taken control of the site, and unless Digg went into wholesale deletion mode and suspended a large portion of their users, there was absolutely nothing they could do to stop it.
Digg CEO Jay Adelson responded on the Digg blog earlier this afternoon but it was clear he did not yet understand the chaos that was coming. The post only added fuel to the fire. Just now, co-founder Kevin Rose posted yet again on the Digg blog, effectively capitulating to the mob’s demands: He says
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
Until today, it seems, even Digg didn’t fully understand the power of its community to determine what is “news.†I think the community made their point crystal clear.”
I’ve used Digg sparingly (on account of its lack of categories relating to my topics, on my other blog) but quite like the idea of the service. The above story quite displays the power of Web 2.0, it seems, and user generated content. For the users of the website to persuade the establishment in such a way is, well, democratic!
Conversation in the blogosphere
Yesterday I unwittingly commented on another blog post. My wife had pointed me to this website (via Watchtan) to look at some of the ink drawings.
My comment was taken by readers and the poster in a completely different way than I intended. Where I hoped to encourage, everyone else seemed to think my reply quite snarky. I continued in the conversation, though, and smoothed things over with the blogger.
I’m usually quite careful in my writing, and in fact much more careful in writing than in speech (to my own detriment). After re-reading the post and my comment a few times, I think I understand the readers’ protests — but the only reason I think I understand is through a singular personal experience. In that experience, I received what was intended to be an encouragement as discouragement.
That was face-to-face. Conversation in the blogosphere is much more complicated when one considers the weight of non-verbal communication — or even the presence of tonality and inflection in verbal communication — which is not present in writing (with the somewhat useful exception of smilies). I’ve been aware for years of this deficiency in electronic conversation having frequented chat rooms, forums and in more recent years blogs. I dealt with other posters misinterpreting my meaning, and actually expected it from time to time after years of internet discussion.
I’ve actually been growing more and more tired of electronic media of all kinds in recent months, and experiencing something like this only exacerbates this sentiment. TV, film and internet. Of course, I’ve always been a very tactile person; I prefer palpable experiences. But I still love the internet and its power to bring people of like mind and interest together. I’ll much sooner be decreasing my television and movie viewing than giving up my blog ; )
One third of internet users use Wikipedia
This report just out from Pew/Internet:
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“More than a third of American adult internet users (36%) consult the citizen-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia, according to a new nationwide survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And on a typical day in the winter of 2007, 8% of online Americans consulted Wikipedia.”
