Kevin Kelly is the Executive Editor of my favorite magazine, Wired. He's also been at the forefront of the evolutionary media we call the web so when I heard he gave a talk at TED you can bet I listened. I've embedded it below, but the wildest part to me is that the web is 5,000 days old, a blink in time that has been about as disruptive to our everyday lives as anything you can imagine. Good stuff.
Google has set up a home page for all things related to the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. There's an applet you can use to track the results from your phone, er, mobile device. There's YouTube videos. There's medal results displayed on Google maps. Kinda cool.
For the longest time Google Maps' "Street View" hadn't been available in this area and then today I logged on and found it live...here on my own corner! That pic to the left (click to enlarge) is a screenshot of my monitor with the street view for my address shown. Kind of wild that it's available here, and it's cool being able to notice that the pictures had to be taken at least a few weeks ago due to some items that appear in my yard that are no longer there and to notice that the pictures had to be taken in the morning because of the angle of the sunlight and the shadows.
Actually street view is now available in a large swath of the Winston-Salem/Greensboro metro areas. The area of the map to the left that is in blue is where the street view is available. I'd love to know how Google does this...oh wait, here's an article in Popular Mechanics with pictures of the camera they use at $45,000 a pop! Way cool.
OfficeMax has an interesting ad campaign online. It's a video (see below) showing a guy paying for a steak dinner with pennies. The proprietors of the restaurant aren't too happy with him and argue with him about why they should accept pennies. The video may or may not be staged, but it doesn't matter because it's funny. At the end of the video OfficeMax has a little "Power of the Penny" graphic promoting all the back-to-school items you can buy for a penny and the end screen has the www.officemax.com/penny URL.
I like this because although the video isn't specifically about back to school items it's a humorous look at the ongoing debate about the value of pennies. Lots of people think the penny should go the way of all flesh, but OfficeMax has found a way to use the debate to their advantage.
BTW, I found the video on video humor site Glumbert.com.
Cross-posted on LowderEnterprises.com
An interesting presentation titled Hyperpolitics, American Style given at Personal Democracy Forum on June 24, 2008, provides some interesting factoids about human networking, past, present and future. Full video below, but first some interesting data shared during the presentation:
Here's the video:
The "new new thing" these days seems to be bar codes. Specifically customizable, two dimensional bar codes called QR (Quick Response) Codes that can be scanned by cell phones that have cameras and the QR Code reader software installed. I'd try to explain the concept, but since I barely understand it myself I'll have to send you to a PDF that does have an explanation.
Ignorance has never slowed me down before so I won't let it now. I'm happy to unveil the official QR Code for www.jonlowder.com:
How would you like your business to be threatened by the actions of a foreign government even though you don't do business there? That's what has happened to an English travel agent named Steve Marshall living in Spain. The story's a little complex so let's see if we can break it down:
Here's the quote from the Treasury Department rep about their action:
A Treasury spokesman, John Rankin, referred a caller to a press release issued in December 2004, almost three years before eNom acted. It said Mr. Marshall’s company had helped Americans evade restrictions on travel to Cuba and was “a generator of resources that the Cuban regime uses to oppress its people.” It added that American companies must not only stop doing business with the company but also freeze its assets, meaning that eNom did exactly what it was legally required to do.
Here's Marshall's reply:
Mr. Marshall said he was uninterested in American tourists. “They can’t go anyway,” he said.
All sounds kind of absurd doesn't it? Read the NYT article and you'll find that there's a few lawyers who think that the government has overstepped its bounds. Huh, go figure.
A couple of days ago I wrote about the new "forms" function that is available with the Google Docs spreadsheet program. I decided to test it by creating a simple survey for readers of this humble blog, and when I say simple I mean simple. I asked one question: "Where do you live?" The pie chart below was generated using the Google spreadsheet program and it was as easy as, well, pie. Very cool.
Google Docs now allows you to set up forms that automatically save results in a Google Docs spreadsheet. In other words you can brew your own surveys now with an interface that's incredibly easy to use. I've decided to test it out by asking you to participate in a one question survey. The question: Where do you live?
Thanks for your help. I'll share the results in a future post.
Per my post about Media General's reaction to bookofjoe's habit of pasting their entire articles on his site with links and full attribution I've been having an interesting debate with Esbee in the comments. One of the things that the debate highlights for me is the fact that old-media norms and rules are being challenged by new media tools and habits and the old-media owners are struggling with how to deal with it. In particular I think many of us are having a hard time grasping the evolution of what some call the internet and what others call the web. Just when most of us were beginning to get comfortable with how the web had changed information delivery and consumption the web was revamped and now readers have become cut-paste-sharers. This evolution has been stamped by some as "Web 2.0" and it's literally changing how people use information, but pity the person who tries to explain the "hows", "whats" and "whys" of Web 2.0. That's why I found the video below by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University so compelling (hat tip to Ed Cone for the link). It's the best explanation I've yet seen for what's going on in new media, and I think it highlights the challenges that folks at old-media companies are facing.
One of my favorite blogs over the last couple of years has been bookofjoe.com. It's a compendium of interesting items, not the least of which are articles that the blogs owner/author has read in the New York Times or other newspapers and has reproduced on his site with full links and attributions to the source. The fact that he doesn't excerpt but instead provides the article in full has caused some consternation with some of the ink-stained wretches lawyers.
Case in point is the Charlottesville Daily Progress's (Joe lives in Charlottesville, VA) lawyer Andrew Carington. He sent a lengthly cease and desist letter to Joe who promptly posted it on his blog for all to see. Joe points out that he's pretty sure that the authors of the articles probably wouldn't agree with the lawyer's move since getting a placement on his site vastly expands their audience. I'd have to agree, and I'd go so far as to say that Media General is making a business mistake by going after him (I'm not going to argue the legality of Joe's practice since I'm no copyright expert).
Here's my thinking. The Daily Progress is a local paper owned by the same company that owns my hometown paper The Winston-Salem Journal. I'd say it's safe to assume that both newspapers get the majority of their traffic from folks within their region. On the other hand Joe gets a lot of his traffic from all over the internet tubes so by getting a link from his site the newspaper is getting exposure to a much broader audience than they do on their own. And guess what? We're talking major traffic.
I went to Compete.com and ran a quick comparison between bookofjoe.com and dailyprogress.com. If you look at the screenshot on the left (click on it to see it at full size) you'll see that while the Daily Progress does have a bit more traffic than Joe it ain't by much (63,341 visitors vs. 55,262) and you'll also see that Joe's traffic is trending up much more quickly than the Daily Progress. You'd think they'd love the opportunity to get their name and a link to their site out there to such a growing audience. Heck, Joe's offering them free syndication.
But I'm sure the honchos at Media General are thinking that Joe's getting rich off their work...oh wait, he doesn't take advertising. So maybe he's not getting rich off of their work, so maybe it's the principle of the thing. But I'm a cynic so I'm thinking they're just ticked because one guy writing in his bathrobe in his condo is pulling almost as much traffic as their newspaper with dozens of employees and they think they can push him around. Whatever their motivation it's a dumb move.
Xeni Jardin is one of the co-editors of Boing Boing. She posted a piece on Edge.org called Online Communities Rot Without Daily Tending by Human Hands that essentially fleshes out the thinking behind her very descriptive title. (Hat tip to Ed Cone for pointing to it). Among the very smart things she wrote I found this bit to be flat out brilliant:
Finally, this year, we resurrected comments on the blog, with the one thing that did feel natural. Human hands.
We hired a community manager, and equipped our comments system with a secret weapon: the "disemvoweller." If someone's misbehaving, she can remove all the vowels from their screed with one click. The dialogue stays, but the misanthrope looks ridiculous, and the emotional sting is neutralized.
Now, once again, the balance mostly works. I still believe that there is no fully automated system capable of managing the complexities of online human interaction — no software fix I know of. But I'd underestimated the power of dedicated human attention.
I suspect Ed is hunting for a Typepad version of the disemvoweller as we speak. If I got more than my normal quota of one comment per millennium I probably would.
Fred Wilson has a great post titled What My Kids Tell Me About the Future of Media in which he evaluates the current and future state of media based on the consumption habits of his kids. Here's an excerpt:
1) When they walk into a DVD store, they rarely walk out with a movie. It’s almost always the first season of a TV show they’ve heard is good. They’ll go see a movie in the theater but don’t really enjoy watching movies at home or on their computers. They feel that TV shows are better written and more interesting. And the entertainment value is certainly more compelling. For roughly $40US, they got something like 25 episodes of Brothers and Sisters...
2) They will play games whenever given the opportunity. My oldest, Jessica, favors brick breaker on her blackberry and admits to be close to addicted. She claims to know kids who play it under the desk at school...
4) The only time they listen to radio is when we have it on in the car for short rides. If it’s a long ride, we almost always plug in the iPod and they’ll take turns DJ’ing...
5) They still read books the way we did as kids. That doesn’t seem to have changed a bit...
6) They love magazines and read all the fashion, cooking, and gossip magazines they can get their hands on. They read about the same topics online and on TV (particularly food), but they show no signs of moving away from the magazine. In fact, I detect a growing obsession with magazines among my family. They literally fight over a new issue the day it arrives.
7) They don’t seem particularly interested in newspapers. They get most of their news on the Internet. Josh will read the sports pages over breakfast and the girls will glance at the front page. Important current events and politics will sometimes generate enough interest that they’ll read the front page portion of a story and then launch into a discussion over breakfast. But I don’t see a commitment to newspapers like we have in my generation and my parents generation.
If you're interested in the future of media I'd definitely read the rest of his post. I'd say that my kids' habits closely mirror his, and I've been struck by how my kids also enjoy books and magazines but only look at the newspaper when they have to cut out an article for a current events project at school.
One thing that is intriguing to me is how much more fun my oldest finds gaming when it's done online against lots of different players. He'll still play games offline if that's his only choice, but he gets really charged up for the XBox Live games and it almost doesn't matter which game it is. And the thought that there are millions of kids (and adults) like him out there truly boggles my mind. I think that's a truly game-changing, culture-shifting phenomenon.
How the kids watch TV is also interesting. If they're
worn from a long week of school they might veg out for a couple of
hours in front of the tube, but really they just watch it in short
bursts and then head to the computer to fiddle around online, or read a
magazine or read a book. They aren't as likely to passively watch TV
as we were growing up back in the 70s and 80s, probably because they
have more choices but also I think because that they get interaction
when they go online. Actually going outside and interacting with other
kids at quaint pastimes like, oh, football or basketball is another
story entirely.
As for music, in our house the kids seem to find their music via word of mouth, whether it's online or offline. I know this because I have a Rhapsody account set up and they have to come to me to purchase songs to download to their MP3 players. When I ask them where they find the songs the answer is always "It was on some friends MySpace" or "So and so told me about it at school" or "my best friend let me listen to it on her iPod on the bus". In my day we found most of our music from listening to the radio in addition to recommendations from friends and being bombarded with someone else's music selections bellowing out of his boombox. Also, if you wanted just one song from an artist you had to buy the album or get a friend to tape a song off of their album (and later CD) for you. Now with services like Rhapsody the kids mix and match what they want: one Black Eyed Peas tune, a couple of Fergie tracks, etc. I think they'd fall over if they had to spend $15 to buy a CD that has just three songs they like. For that matter I'm right there with them.
I'd say it behooves all of us to watch how our kids operate because in a few years the media companies are going to change how they deliver their wares to meet those habits and we'll be following their lead.
Despite my earlier lamentations about running a home office network I do want to make a recommendation for anyone that is setting up a network in their house. Definitely check out powerline network gear as an alternative to wireless. FYI, powerline networks allow you to plug a network cable from your router into a small converter that plugs into any power outlet in your house, then you plug other converters into any other outlet in the house and run network cables from those to the computers you want to connect to.
My office is the hub for our home network and is located on the top floor of the house. The kids' computer is just down the hall from mine and Celeste's computer is downstairs. Both are close enough that they shouldn't have an issue with wireless signal strength but unfortunately they do. Celeste in particular would have very sketchy connections that varied from moderate to very weak, and that made her online experience not-so-pleasant.
Last week I was reading a small-biz magazine and came across an article that said that the latest generation of powerline networking gear had eliminated a lot of the problems experience with the first generation gear back in the late 90s and now offered more reliable and faster connections than most wireless networks.
On Friday I was in Staples and saw that they had a Netgear Wall-Plugged Ethernet Extender Kit - XE102G for $99.95. Since that price matched what I found in my online searches I snagged it and brought it home. The setup was incredibly easy:
I did this and fired up her browser and found that she was connected and had great connection speed. The only problem that we've found is that certain appliances, like a vacuum or hairdryer, can slow down the connection by providing a little interference but it's not a major issue.
According to Netgear's info we can connect up to five devices in a similar manner so I'm probably going to get adapters for the kids' computer and for the XBox 360 that the oldest son is saving up to buy. That way he can game online and maybe we'll see him on the weekends instead of having him disappear for two days to a friend-with-XBox 360's house.
A couple of things to point out:
Working out of a home office has some definite upsides and downsides. The upsides include not having to shave every day and working in sweats. The largest downside is being your own tech support. Take this morning (please)...I get up to my office and find that I cannot get to my email or get my browser to "find" the web. Strangely my VOIP (Vonage) phone works and I can access my client's VPN (virtual private network). To rectify my situation I resort to all my old tricks:
I run down to Celeste's office to see if she can connect. No problemo for her, so that means that the problem's with my PC. Using her computer I Google my issue and get some tips involving manually resetting DNS's, pinging and other nefarious and hideously technical actions. I continue cursing.
Upon returning to my office I decide to plug the cable from my router directly into my computer, thus bypassing Vonage. Voila I'm online. Still haven't totally resolved the issue, but hopefully I'm getting close.
Still cursing.
As reported in today's Winston-Salem Journal, Digital Forsyth has digitized with all kinds of photos from Winston-Salem's past. Sources include local libraries and universities.
I like how they've organized the photos and how they've utilized techniques like tag clouds for searches (see the image to the left for an example). They also have it formatted much like a blog with each image having it's own "post" with details about the picture in the post. My hat's off to the folks over there at Digital Forsyth.
My cousin Jeff plays a real bass guitar in a real band, so the video below from South Park would probably qualify as his ultimate nightmare. If you don't feel like watching it let me give you a synopsis: kids watch each other play Guitar Hero; dad shows them that he can play real guitar; kids say it's 'gay'; dad is mystified; later that night dad sneaks downstairs in his tighty-whitey's to try Guitar Hero; dad sucks at it and slinks off to bed. It used to be that being able to play a guitar got you the girls, now it gets you humiliation in your underwear. Times are a-changin'.
Lex points to a video featuring teenagers poking holes in the Army Corps of Engineers' Katrina-levy investigation (video is posted below). I can definitely see my kids getting in on a project like this. They don't suffer fools gladly.
I've been reading about a web service called Tumblr. Lots of the online writers (okay, bloggers) I follow have started using the service and I decided to give it a test drive myself. You can check out my Tumblr page at www.jonlowder.info.
From the best I can tell Tumblr is a free and easy way to pull all of your online interests together in one place. For instance I've set up the site to grab all of the information that I tag on del.icio.us, photos I upload to Flickr and posts I make to this blog. So all of that stuff automatically gets pulled into one place and can be viewed by me or anyone who's interested. I can also post original entries there with great ease so I might be adding original content that won't appear here or anywhere else. We'll see.
I've only scratched the surface of this thing but I'm willing to give it a go because the people that I use as canaries in the online gold mine (Fred Wilson, Steve Rubel, etc.) have been using it and sing its raves. I'm pretty sure that as I use it I'll discover dozens of ways it can be used as a tool that I never would have dreamed of on my own. Stay tuned.
One of my more often told stories is of my first grocery shopping experience as a married man. Celeste is a lifelong coupon clipper and I'm not so our first Sundays together I spent reading the Washington Post while she shredded what in our household has come to be known as "her section" of the paper. After much snipping and planning she announced that we were off to Safeway to shop for our first round of groceries together.
When we arrived at the store I was mortified to see that she had a whole box full of coupons and a calculator that she stowed in the part of the cart that would later be occupied by one of our rugrats and I just knew that my Sunday afternoon of football watching was dead before arrival. I groused as we methodically went up and down each aisle and Celeste would look at all fifteen varieties of every item, pull out her coupons for said item and then determine which was the best deal. I kept saying over and over that the savings couldn't possibly be worth all the time she, and now I, had invested in this venture. I was a firm believer that time was more valuable than money, but that's because I'm inherently lazy so anything that requires lots of the former to save or make the latter just isn't high on my priority list.
Long story short we get to the checkout line and our food total comes to something like $130 and then Celeste hands her coupons over and I watched the total plummet to $89. Saving 31% is big time no matter what kind of income you have, but when you're 25 years old and broke that's a lot of tacos. Believe me when I say I also started to get excited when grocery stores would announce double coupon days.
All of which leads me to an interesting item I read on The Post Money Value blog. The blog is written by venture capitalist Rick Segal and you know he's from the tech-geek pool when you read this:
Back when I could code without creating a hard drive failure (about the time electricity was invented), I coded up a Coupon Management System for my own use and, eventually, shareware. Long long time ago. You entered in all your coupons and then could enter a grocery list which got matched to the coupons. I managed to link all of this to the local Stop & Shop where we lived at the time and could line the shopping list up so it matched the flow of the store. I added other store layouts and soon was inputting specials from the newspaper to match coupons. Yeah, as I said, hard core coupon person.
I suffered from the occasional "Daddy, are we having chicken pot pies again?" but we saved tons of money. I knew this was a big deal for families with small incomes. My software was designed to save you money and manage your shopping list. (Geek alert: Paradox, thanks for asking).
That's some serious geekery, but I can promise you that when Celeste reads this she'll wonder how she managed to marry me (king of all worthless knowledge) and not the guy who shares her love of coupons and is smart enough that he wrote a piece of software that could have made her life so much easier. But I digress.
Mr. Segal also points out that coupons have a historically low redemption rate and rightly points out that the main problem is the time you have to spend clipping and organizing them. As a web guru he thinks the time might have come and his following observations are food for thought:
1. Value for effort. Not enough people will dance for a $2 savings on a $40 grocery bill. 5% just isn't cutting it. 50%? 75%? Different story. For those kinds of savings you get the kids to input all the stuff and make it a kids game.
2. Big Revenue Stream. I believe that if you like Pepsi, you will grab the coupon for 50 cents off. But I super, really, totally believe, Coke will pay good/serious money to target that Pepsi drinker with a super larger coupon to try to convert that customer over to Coke. So far, nobody has broken the code on how to get this done in such a way that protects privacy and generates big big results.
Enter Facebook. Will coupon clippers migrate/be on Facebook? I don't know. Could a Facebook coupon app, coupon community, etc work? I don't know.
The larger point of this blog post is this:
Before the Internet and lots of always on/always connected people, Ebay was impossible. No chance of mass adoption trying to do Ebay on Compuserve. So, with the Internet and "web 2.0" and "Social media" and all the rest of the buzz words; What's possible? What can you do now that we couldn't do before. Walk around and 're-think' it all. All those ahead of their time projects may have found the right time.
I think there's huge opportunity here as well. Some stores are already experimenting with coupons that show up on peoples' cell phones so that the customer merely has to show the screen to the clerk and the savings are recorded. Obviously you can't do this with dozens of grocery items, but what if you had a way to have your coupons fed to you online, already organized so that they could be printed off with bar codes intact and in the order that you want them? Much like I set up my Netvibes account so that all my information is automatically fed into various "pages" I could just add a coupon feeder and tell it what kind of items I want coupons for. Literally I would set it up so that I get jelly coupons in one batch, canned vegetables in another, frozen treats in another, and so on. I could print out those that I find interesting and head off to the store and safe lots of time in the process. I think it would work.
The key here is simplicity and speed. I think the average consumer is like me: I still let Celeste do all the clipping because I don't enjoy it (she really does) and I view it as a time suck. Maybe if Celeste didn't do it I would, but I doubt it. On the other hand if I had a service that automatically pulled it all together for me I'd do it in a heartbeat and I think many others would too.
I came across this very cool site called Maps of War (via Boing Boing) and found the map you see below. It depicts the spread of various religions throughout recorded history. This is a fantastic tool to grasp both the historical relevance of religions and their scope. You'll notice that in the grand scheme of things Christianity and Islam are "johnny come lately" and their spread has largely occurred in the recent past.
Yesterday I wrote about winston-salem-crime.com, a free web service that "mashes up" Google Maps with crime data from the Winston-Salem police. Today I found this handy little service called RottenNeighbor.com. It's not really a "mash up" since they simply want people like you and me to add rotten neighbors to their own Google Map database.
I put in my zip code and the closest neighbor was one town over in Clemmons, NC. Here's what someone wrote about their neighbor:
Mr. --- (name redacted) gets stoned and rides his ATV through other peoples property spinning donuts and tearing things up at 2 a.m. What a loser.
This leaves me wondering what recourse someone might have against a person posting such information about them on a website. While I can't imagine anyone using his own name when posting a comment I do wonder if it would be possible to get the IP address of the poster if someone were to sue the site's owner to get it. Oh, wait...I just found one where a girl signed her own name. Sheesh.
The site does have the usual disclaimer page, but that basically indemnifies them and not the user. I'm thinking you're taking a pretty big risk if you post something nasty, whether or not it's true. However, it does make interesting reading. Check out this one from someone in another part of North Carolina:
This man has 2 children( his own) and 2 step children. I had to go through the courts to get him to pay his Child support as agreed. He pays 350.00 a month for one child, one is grown. He pays the 350.00 and that's it. He doesn't want nor does he feel the need to give anything over that 350.00. Even when his child goes to him and begs him to help him out with school activities that require alot of money. When he found out how much he was suppose to pay each month he told me and his son he'd quit his job before he'd pay me that. What does that say about the love and concern he has for his own flesh and blood. He is a piss poor excuse for a dad. He doesn't spend quality time with his son and now he's almost grown. It's too late now the damage has been done and he reaps what he has sown. His son has a job now and doesn't want to have much of anything to do with his dad. I wonder why.
And then there's this beauty, which I found when I put in our old zip code in Northern Virginia:
I GET BEATEN BY MY WIFE HARSHLY. SHE ONCE THREW ME DOWN THE STEPS AND I LANDED ON THE PITBULL WHICH CAUSED HIM TO BITE THE BACK OF MY THIGH AND I COULDNT EXPLAIN THE LIMP TO MY CO-WORKERS DUE TO EMBARRASSMENT, I COULD SIT AT MY OFFICE. HELP!!!!
Last Friday evening I received an email from Nathaniel Eliason of Hypothesis, a Winston-Salem-based web design firm, and in it he pointed me to winston-salem-crime.com which is a crime map that his firm designed for residents of Winston-Salem. He must have also emailed Esbee because she posted it as well, and to be honest I guarantee you they got a lot more traffic from her than they will from me. By coincidence I stumbled across a Oakland crime map callled Oakland Crimespotting developed by Stamen Design.
It's interesting to see two firms using their expertise to provide a public service and at the same time show off their capabilities, and I do think this is a public service because it's far easier to understand the crime data when you can see it presented graphically on a map. Not sure why the city doesn't offer this service themselves, but since they aren't I'm glad someone's doing it.
Rex Hammock loves Google Earth. In his post about how cool the newest version of what he calls the "Best Program Ever" he writes this:
Not quite so significant, but really cool, the new version has a hidden feature, not publicized by Google: An F16 flight simulator, as described by a student in South Africa. It was discovered by someone who — and hats off to you people who do such things — held down the keys, Ctrl+Alt+A (or, if you’re running OS X it’s Command+Option+A). I’m sure, if you’ve grown up playing videogames or coding software, or whatever, you may think to click Ctrl+Alt+A when you’re trying out software, but I’m always impressed when I hear about the games developers play and the users who ask themselves, “I wonder what will happen if I do this…?”
I think anyone who has a kid that plays video games has experienced a similar phenomenon. On the rare occassion that I sit in with my kids to play X-Box they'll invariably point their avatar towards some inanimate object, say a big rock, then press the A, B and Z buttons simultaneously which causes their avatar to do a flip while busting a massive fart that causes the rock to melt and reveal a hidden passage. I ask them how they figured this out and they always say something like, "Well there's no other way off this level so I figured there must be some way to get to the other level. On my other game, ButtBlaster 5.0, if you hit A, B and Z you get a nuclear fart that kills the Super High Priest of Poop and those same guys made this game so I figured I could try the same thing on the rock." This is said in about two nano-seconds as they can't afford to be distracted from their conquest by actually engaging in thoughtful conversation (I'm convinced that commas aren't used in communication by anyone under the age of 25) and after my brain has caught up with what they've said I decide that:
Yesterday I wrote on my business blog about searchCrystal and noted that I liked the graphical display of its search results. Today I stumbled upon a couple of sites that deal with visual information management. First I came across VisualComplexity.com which is best explained by this description from the site's "About" page:
VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.
From the VisualComplexity site I found TheBrain.com. These guys have visual content management products, one for individuals and the other for enterprises. They describe their products this way:
TheBrain Technologies is the leading provider of visual content management solutions. The company was founded in 1996 and has been delivering award-winning information management solutions for over a decade. By connecting people, processes, and information, TheBrain's products provide unparalleled context for smarter information discovery and more informed decision-making.
TheBrain technology can be utilized on corporate intranets, desktops, and the Internet. Some applications include: customer care, project management, dynamic mind mapping, IT management and helpdesks, impact assessment, competitive intelligence, marketing and sales support, and personal information management.
TheBrain has two primary products: PersonalBrain for individual users and BrainEKP, an enterprise knowledge platform for group collaboration.
I've always struggled with content management. In the physical world I'm a "pile don't file" kind of guy because when I file it I forget about it. (A happy compromise for me is binders; active projects are organized in binders that I keep on my desk and then I shelve the binders once the project is complete). I'm constantly hunting for files online because my folder systems tend to get too complex and so I forget if I saved a file under "Taxes" or "Accounting." These products offer hope for folks like me.
Seth Godin has a post on his blog about shipping and handling. He points to an item on Amazon.com that costs $2.25 but has an S&H charge of $8.57 and then explains why this is a bad idea for the merchant (it kills repeat business). Seth is right of course, but the reason I'm posting about it is that by sheer coincidence I received an email from Amazon yesterday with this subject line: "We Pay YOU for Overnight Shipping on Shoes & Handbags". Here's a pic of the email:
As Seth points out in his post it's been common practice in the direct mail industry to split out shipping and handling charges as a way to allow buyers to compare the base cost of an item with the cost of the same item in a bricks and mortar store. When you think about it, however, it's really irrelevant because what the consumer cares about is what they're paying total. If you add shipping and handling and the item costs more online or from a catalog than in a store then the consumer is likely to go to the store. An online or catalog merchant would probably be better served promoting the convenience of buying from them versus dealing with a store (no parking, standing in line or surly clerks!).
What caught my attention about this email is that it says they are going to give me $5 on top of free shipping. They didn't say they were giving me a $5 discount on any item (i.e. a coupon) but they said my shipping would be negative $5. I don't recall ever getting a similar pitch and it's an interesting way to take a negative (S&H) and turning it into a positive.
I could be wrong but my take has been that online merchants are using insanely low prices on items so that the items do better on product search comparisons and then make up the difference in shipping. This has led to the increasingly common practice of applying S&H charges that are multiples higher than the actual price of the product, and as Seth points out that practice is likely to kill customer retention because it just feels slimy. That's why I'm assuming that Amazon.com's marketing team was influenced by that trend and decided to use it to their advantage.
On a completely unrelated tangent I want to know what part of my customer profile at Amazon.com would prompt them to send me a marketing message related to shoes and handbags? It's kind of disturbing.
I received an email this morning from Ofer Tziperman of Israeli company. He'd read my post about Google's new SMS service and sent me a note about his company's amAze GPS service. (He was amused that I used "amaze" in the title of my post). I've not used amAze and my phone is not compatible with the service, but it looks like a very interesting application of the mobile GPS-based service I was writing about in the Google post. If you're interested in the service and want to know if it will work with your phone just take a look at the "Handset" page on their site, or you can also browse their message boards to see how others find the service.
Also, check out this PDF of a Financial Times article describing how LocatioNet is planning to build it's business. These three paragraphs from the article describe what I was envisioning re. the future of mobile advertising:
It (LocatioNet, ed.) has decided to distribute its local search and navigation application free and generate revenues via targeted advertisements and sponsorship integrated into the application. Typically mobile navigation services are based on subscriptions.
For instance a chain of petrol stations is interested in giving its customers a branded version of the application. Similarly, mobile phone distributors see it as a way to maintain a customer relationship that lasts beyond the initial sale.
Locationet is also utilising the Yellow Pages model, based on revenue sharing for local search.
A key point here: amAze is free which means it stands a real chance of exploding the universe of mobile phone GPS users. Think of it this way: would you use MapQuest or Google Maps if you had to pay for it? Probably not. Would Google be the monster it is if you had to subscribe to use it? No way. I'm not saying that LocatioNet will be the Google of the mobile phone GPS market, but I think their business model is basically what the winner in this market will use. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if Google becomes the Google of the GPS market, but until then it's nice to see a service like amAze making a go of it.
For more info on Ofer and LocatioNet check out this interview at inbabble.com and this Q&A at Services Mobiles.
Google has launched a service that allows you to send them a text message with a search phrase from your phone and then they send a text reply with the results. Here are some examples:
Think about this for a second. You're trying to get from point "A" to point "B" and you aren't sure of how to do it. You find the closest address and then text message that address, "to" and your destination and in seconds you have directions. How cool is that. Check out the information page for full details, but I can tell you that other search functions that are equally as cool include movies, flight status, stocks, translation from one language to another, currency conversion, and on and on.
Eventually I think that all mobile phones will be GPS-enabled or have some sort of 'place recognition' via triangulation of the tower signals and then you won't even have to actually know where you are. Then services like this will enable you to feed you information based on a query like "pizza restaurants within 2 miles" or "directions to 8800 Elm Street, somewhere, usa 22222".
This is the kind of stuff that makes my head want to explode.
Faces of Faith in America, this year's project for News21, a journalism initiative of the Carnegie and Knight Foundations, offers a glimpse of new media applications for tomorrow's journalists. I especially like the Data Road Trip which displays data about different statistical extremes on a map of the U.S. For instance you can click on a county in Arkansas that has the highest per capita rate of divorce in the country and it pops up a window with a one paragraph overview, some stats and an embedded video story. Very nice.
Found via Boing Boing.
So you're a geek like me and you've started using Google's My Maps function and you think, "Gosh darnit I want to put one of my maps on my blog" but you don't see one of those convenient "embed" buttons like they have on YouTube and other Web 2.0 sites. What to do?
Well, you can visit My Maps Plus, sign up for a free account and before you know it you have your embed code. One caveat: when you update your Google Map you need to go back to My Maps Plus and update it there too, but until Google adds the embed feature themselves I think this is the best you'll be able to do.
Here's an example on Triad Eats, a new blog we're developing to subsidize our rather ludicrous eating out habits. FYI, if you'd like to be a correspondent for Triad Eats just shoot me an email at jon.lowder AT gmail.com. We don't pay but if you feel like sharing your opinion on area restaurants we'd love to hear from you.
One of the things I do for my day job is manage the sales of sponsorships, exhibit space and advertising for a non-profit professional society. For a variety of reasons I'm often asked where our customers' offices are located. For instance my client might have a local event and want to target companies in that region for sponsorships. Typically I just do a search of my database by zip code or state, which works fine for areas I'm very familiar with, but it's tough for me to get a sense of how many companies we deal with in an area I'm not familiar with. For instance I'm very familiar with the northeast corridor of the US so I don't have a problem pulling the data together very quickly for a Philadelphia event, but I'm not at all familiar with the western US so I'm not at all sure if a company in Calabasas is a good prospect for a local event in San Francisco.
Yesterday I decided to take some time and use Google Maps' new My Maps feature and load in my vendor database. Note: I wouldn't do this if you couldn't make the map "private" so that it can't be searched or found by others, but I can share the page with whomever I want which makes it a good collaborative tool with my cli
