Loic Le Meur Discusses Social Maps, Nexxgen Media Launches Social Graph Central

Over the weekend Loic Le Meur kicked off a conversation in the blogosphere about the centralization of our web personalities. Le Meur is an avid believer in our personal blogs being our central hub on the web. I agree with him, but as the internet evolves, we’re seeing ourselves spread out into different social networks, aggregators, etc. The conversation revolved around a social map Le Meur drew that visualized how he was connected on the internet with his blog being the central point. I found the concept so interesting that I set up Social Graph Central, a blog solely dedicated to showcasing social maps drawn by or hand or by software, of netizens. I encourage you to email me at juskai at shaw dot ca with yours and I’ll either post it for you or set you up as an author on the blog so you can contribute yourself. Let’s make this the world’s largest collection of social maps, centralized. Check out the video above of Le Meur discussing the whole conversation.

GoogleFace: Google Buys Facebook For $25 Billion

In a quickly thrown together press conference, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that the search engine giant will be acquiring Facebook for $25 billion in cash and stock giving Google a 98.4% stake in the company. Microsoft will retain a 1.6% ownership share thanks to a $240 million investment in October 2007 giving it a valuation of $15 billion at that time.

Now Facebook will be open to OpenSocial and Facebook apps will be used on Google’s Android mobile platform. Now know as GoogleFace, Google’s Facebook will still be run by Mark Zuckerberg after the FCC and Department of Justice approve the deal.

Schmidt said that one of the key reasons Google bought Facebook was due to the many of its key employees defecting to Facebook over the past couple of months. “So now they’re back where they all belong”, said Schmidt. We wonder now if this deal had been in the works for a while now. Did all those Google employees heading to Facebook know about the deal? We think so.

April Fools! via InfoWorld

An Alternative Japanese Vending Machine

While in North America we have 24/7 paper-bag porno shops, in Japan they have the type of street vending machines we’re used to grabbing a can of coke from. Inside the Interesting 16 box is a nice selection of, um, adult materials and if that form of media strikes your fancy, all’s you have to do is pop your driver’s license in the slot on the right to verify you’re of legal age. Do people actually do this during the day?

Loic Le Meur’s Old Media New Media Social Map

Big fan of this pic I came across via Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur’s Twitter feed. Kind of an old media rendition of a new media social map.

Gearbox Boss Says In-Game Ads Are Good For Gamers

If there is one thing that seems to piss off hardcore gamers, it’s advertising in their beloved games.  Gearbox Software president Randy Pitchford has actually had to defend himself publicly on the Gearbox website after Gearbox gamers showered him with wrath following his decision to partner with Double Fusion to integrate advertising into Gearbox games.  Saying that Gearbox hates “exploitive advertising that doesn’t offer value to the gamer”, Pitchford says that in-game advertising actually brings authenticity, better games through increased budgets, and out-of-game promotion that increases the user base for online gaming.  In the end, in-game advertising is good for gamers.  What a spin doctor!

Barack Obama’s Net Campaign Raises Big Dollars, But Is It The Most Cost Efficient

Interesting article from the Washington Post has revealed that for every dollar spent on internet advertising by the Barack Obama presidential campaign, $27.16 were raised in the first two months of 2008. Not all of the $91 million raised in January and February were donated by internet followers, but the majority was.

Obama’s internet strategy all along has been “to build an online relationship” with supporters who will not only donate dollars, but also their time to perform essential tasks such as registering voters. Ads for Obama pop up everywhere from political blogs to traditional newspaper websites, and even on search engine home pages connected to certain search terms.

One potential point of interest that should be noted is the subtle way Obama is able to attract donations. While the Clinton campaign, which lags way behind in online strategy, comes straight out and asks for money in its emails, Obama’s links from ads and emails always direct the potential supporter to sign-up pages for online groups or invitations to Obama events. It seems that by building a real relationship with supporters and not making them feel useful only for their money, Obama has actually attracted record amounts of fundraising dollars. Definitely a useful lesson for those who are looking to use new media technologies to raise money for their various ventures in the future.

But there is another unmentioned point of interest to be taken from the article-the return on investment from the internet campaigns of Hillary Clinton and potentially John McCain actually dwarf the ROI stemming from Obama’s internet ad spending. While Clinton raised $37 million in the first 2 months of 2008, a small amount compared to Obama’s $91 million, she only spent a total of $369, 000 to raise that amount-an ROI of $100.27 for every dollar spent. McCain spent $262, 000 to raise $22 million, though no numbers have been released detailing how much of the $22 million came from internet fundraising. Even if McCain only raised $11 million from his internet ad spending, that would still render an ROI of $41.98 for every dollar spent.

So in the end, it seems we’ll have to wait for the election results to see which internet strategy is more effective. If Clinton’s impressive ROI for internet ad spending doesn’t translate into votes, it’s pretty well useless. Maybe ROI should encompass votes renders from internet ad spending as well. We have a while to wait to find out the truth. In the meantime, expect plenty more articles from all the popular news sources about how Obama is revolutionizing online campaigning, even though the numbers state otherwise.

Forrester Technographic Data Now Accessible

Forrester Technographic Data is now available on their website giving marketers some high-end insight into the which social media outlets to target in order to reach their target market more effectively. All the data provided comes from Forrester surveys conducted in the 1st and 2nd quarters of 2007.

Via Web Strategy by Jeremiah

The Many Uses Of Qik

An interesting article from Los Angeles Times Interactive details the many uses of Qik, the new media startup that allows you to lifestream in real-time from your Nokia cellphone. Video streams live to the Qik website where it is saved for re-broadcast and even enable real-time chat as you’re taping.

While a tool that can undoubtedly be used for fun and games, Qik has several more practical uses according to the article. Hardcore user Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo, a human-powered search engine, finds quick a useful addition to his other online social networking activities. “My whole existence online is one big focus group,” said Calacanis, allowing him the insight and connections into his target market that he requires to build a product that people will try.

Besides its obvious business uses, Qik has been used for more compassionate reasons as well. One woman, whose paternal grandmother was in her death throes, was able to broadcast her grandmother via Qik so that her father, located thousands of miles away was able to see her and ultimately get to her bedside the day before she died.

Of course Qik has not-so-great implications as well. Like Calacanis notes, “The worst moment in almost everybody’s life is going to be captured on film”. But then again, we all know how few of us actually learn from our mistakes. History tends to repeat itself over and over again. But with a self-imposed big bro watching over us as technology turns life into one big lifestream, and with big bro’s vision saved on the web, maybe we’ll finally be able to learn from our mistakes by having the ability to review them. Maybe.

Traditional Journalism Continues To Struggle, But Differently Than Originally Thought

Earlier this week, The State Of The News Media report was released by the Project For Excellence In Journalism was released shedding a dark light on the future of the newspaper industry. Not as dark as originally predicted however.

Yes, the physical newspaper is in much worse shape than even a year ago, but while experts predicted the democratization of information would mean audiences would fragment into new sources of news info such as blogs and social networks, online news sites such as my morning reading The New York Times Online are actually receiving more traffic than the legacy media and blogs are receiving much less traffic than originally predicted. Also important is the fact that the most popular blogs are written and produced by writers that are anything but “amateur”. Often, the most popular blogs are filled with content written by professional writers with backgrounds in traditional journalism.

 

I haven’t had a chance to read the fairly lengthy report myself yet, but JD Lasica over at MediaShift Idea Lab has, and has pulled some interesting points from the Major Trends section:

• news is moving from a product to a service-the user wants to know how it can empower him
• a news story is no longer ever finished…stories must always involve incremental updates even in the form of a short email to the reader…it seems this may be taken straight from the blogosphere as most of us bloggers provide incremental updates as a way to develop an internal linking structure for search engines
• news is no longer one person telling a story to another…yes it still involves the storytelling aspect, but it extends in to the storyteller providing the reader the tools necessary to interact with and interpret the story in a way that is useful to him
• news organizations and websites are no longer final destinations… they must be a portal into further discussion about any particular story… this is probably why NYT Online provides ways to share stories by submitting them to social networks and info aggregation services and even links to the most popular blog stories of the day
• “each piece of content competes on its own with all other information on that topic linked to by blogs, “digged” by user news sites, sent in e-mails, or appearing in searches. As much as half of every Web page, designers advise, should be devoted to helping people find what they want on the rest of the site or the Web”

I’ll definitely be looking through the report over the weekend and will undoubtedly have more to share with you.

200 Page PDF Sketchbook Of TED 2008

If you head over to the TED blog, they have a link to a 200 page PDF of sketches and idea maps from all the TED 2008 presenters. Drawn by artists David Sibbet & Kevin Richards, the PDF interprets the presentations in such a way that illustrates new connections not easily seen when just listening to the speakers.

According to Autodesk, the PDF is a compilation of:

“700 spontaneous sketches of the presenters’ ideas using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro software running on Wacom Cintiq tablets and rendered on a Perceptive Pixel multi-touch display. These tools illustrate the power of interactive visualization to present the big picture to foster insight and communicate ideas visually, central principles of design innovation“.

It makes for an interesting visual exploration.