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Love this Diesel XXX campaign. Bit saucy but it’s very well done

Texting Your way to Love. US is really embracing texting these days. This is quite funny, came from a Stanford blog

Seesmic – i really want to like them, want to use it but just can’t see why I would. Of course, I may not be the target audience but I just don’t get why i’d want a non-real time video conversation that has so much friction (time to make it, send it, watch someone else’s commets etc…). I think Loic Le Meur is v cool, has bags of energy but I just don’t get it currently….if I want real time then video/phone/IM works, if real time not an issue then I use email, text but video? Help me someone?

well, everyone thought the RIAA or majors took them down. Not exactly, but sort of.
Full story here

Just as the news came in that Napster had been sold to Best Buy for $121m, i received this shareholder notice which I have to admit made me chuckle. The description of the dissident group’s experience included Musician (obviously inappropriate experience for a digital music company?), and then Ice Cream Franchisee etc…Hee Hee. On a more serious note, the deal pays $2.65 per share which is twice the closing price but still far below historical positions.

Thinking back on my time at the Guardian I remembered a viral video we produced (before they were really called viral videos- it was basically a TV Ad concept but too expensive to put on air so we sent it via email to friends). It wasn’t terribly successful but YouTube exist back then and so there were very few outlets to ‘Broadcast Yourself’ and here it is. Still makes me smile.

Had a wonderful lunch the other week with Vic Keegan from the Guardian and Mark Headley (too shy to have a professional web presence but can be found in his creative outlet here). Back in 2001 we worked together on Text Message Poetry – which was one of the most interesting projects I’ve ever had the privilege of being involved with. Looking back now and seeing how mobiles have advanced it seems a little primitive (we’re no longer restricted to 160 characters) but it’s still charming on many levels. I still recall bits of the winning poem from the first competition (it was so successful we ended up repeating it the following year).

txtin iz messin,
mi headn’me englis,
try2rite essays,
they all come out txtis.
gran not plsed w/letters shes getn,
swears i wrote better
b4 comin2uni.
&she’s african

This competition was a great example of how ‘restriction breeds creativity’ but this is at odds with the infinite nature of digital media…but I wonder if there restriction can be applied to digital media in other ways?  Perhaps mini sagas could be taken in to the digital world

Vic’s a real enthusiast for mobiles and during the conversation the topic of how do people get music on their mobile and I recalled seeing some research so bit of digging. According to m-Metrics in Jan 2008 a staggering 83% was sideloaded.

“83% of mobile music was sideloaded onto cellphones in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. M:Metrics also found that the second most common way of getting music onto mobile phones was to share it with friends via Blue-Tooth” but this was only at 12% in the most popular market.
Full details here

Just spotted this on Media Guardian. It’s gonna be mobile mobile mobile in the news for the next few days…

“Significantly, Amazon has confirmed VentureBeat‘s story that it has created a music retail application for the G1 that will let users search, buy, download and play music from the Amazon music store. That has a catalogue of 6m songs from all four major labels and, just like the iTunes store, will only be accessible when the user is on a wireless network – so as not to cripple the data network.

How can the Amazon app better Apple? TV and video, says VentureBeat. Even better, MySpace‘s very imminent Music store is powered by Amazon and there would seem to be a natural extension onto mobile… but MySpace says that’s not the case because it is still sorting out rights for the mobile side of its music service. Oh do get on with it”

This is so cool. I love it.

“Telemegaphone Dale stands seven metres tall on top of the Bergskletten mountain overlooking the idyllic Dalsfjord in Western Norway. When you dial the Telemegaphone’s phone number the sound of your voice is projected out across the fjord, the valley and the village of Dale below”. Hurry tho, its only until Sept 6 as that’s when the Deer season starts.
See more here

Thanks to VSL for spotting this

for some reason i keep needing to know scales of MSNs and can never have them to hand. So here are my estimates

1. Peperonity (>7.7m users, 340 million page views/month, May 2008)
2. Mocospace (>3 million users, 1.5 billion page views/month, May 2008)
3. Itsmy (>2 million users, 250 million page views/month4)
4. Mig33 (>11 million users, March 20083)
5. Bluepulse (Unknown)
6. Mobango (User numbers not disclosed)
7. Facebook iPhone app =250K daily active

Went along last night to the Chinwag event on Search vs Recommend  billed as ‘competitive or collaborative? chalk and cheese or will they seamlessly blend’?

A really good event. A number of things struck me listening to the panel and some of the points of view from the floor.

• The distinction is really quite artificial – they can happily co-exist as they currently do the difference is perhaps more about destination vs distribution?
• Recommendation and Search engines are both trying to crack the same problem – they’re trying to guess what a human wants using differing kinds of inputs and signals and then provide the human with the tools to make a decision.
• Recommendation sites are basically a bunch of strangers trying to help me find something or make a decision, and search (in Google world) is a bunch of mathematicians trying to guess what I’m looking for.
• Guessing what you will like or want is (in the absence of telepathy) is always going to be a game of probability – Google rules because Google gets it right more often than not when I type a search term in to it’s white box, the other big benefit of search is its universal coverage – Recommendation will never be able to compete with this.
• Recommendation sites such as Revoo, Trusted Places provide added value (where they have coverage) as they often give quantitative and qualitative context, assuming they can both be trusted/not gamed etc..but as the audience on the night suggested on a number of occasions, you trust your friends more – and it was interesting how recommends from Twitter friends were given more weight/relevancy than recommendations from review sites and search engines….so social graph relevancy could provide significant user benefit and utility, IF the hurdles of adoption/ effort are low
• Very few people in the room had heard of ‘Social Graph’ including the Chair – a Google Consultant and expert in SEO/ PPC.

Few other things worth noting

• The Filter is working with Nokia WW on deploying it’s recommendation engine which the CEO described as ‘smart discovery engine for content/entertainment’ using blend of AI, ‘vapour trail’  [stuff you consume on other services]
• Facebook Polls -neat way to gain quick market research. Basically specifiy interests, location, age and sex and then post up to 5 questions. You can set the price you’re willing to pay per response – higher the price quicker the results.
• TubeMogul - site to meta-distribute your videos to all the main video sites (useful if you’re in that game)
• iMeem - apparently massive in US relative to last.fm

The other aspect that struck me was how the language quickly changed during the event from ‘Search’ to ‘Google’ which could be expected given the dominance of Google but the other point here was that in a room of 100 or so people – the majority of them were ‘Google ecosystem feeders’ – SEOs, PPC experts, online media agencies, affiliates etc… it suddenly occurred to me that these jobs/businesses only exist because of Google or rely on Google significantly for traffic etc…Goolge really is a phenomenon. We should all perhaps remember the ‘other benefits’ of Google when you eye with envy their earnings and profits – Google’s probably done more for employment and welfare than most government policies

Oh, and the other thing that struck me was that I first started using Chinwag in 1999 – not only did it make me feel old but seeing all the suits in the room…things have changed, but that’s a good thing!

Direct, unambigious and beautifully analogue.
I’m going to use this as my auto responder next time i take a vacation.
Sorry, it’s a poor photograph [note to self: remember to use flash in sunlight you twit]

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