Our latest top 20 list of inane musings from the Brainstorm office white board: Top 20 New Wireless Projects
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Tags: Recent Thought, Featured, Inspiration, Consumer Electronics, Technology marketing, Klig's Prose, Branding, Marketing
$1000. Write away.
Need some cash—right away? In celebration of The Marketing Technology Blog hitting the triple quadruple (1,000 posts, over 1,000 unique visitors daily, and over 1,000 feed subscribers) Doug Karr, FormSpring, and eight other sponsors are ponying up a cool $1,000 to the best blog post featuring a sentence or two about each of the contest sponsors.
Check out the rules for yourself and write on.
Tags: Recent Thought, Featured, Technology marketing, Blogging, Marketing
Is Google’s OpenSocial the new
Microsoft Windows of Social Networking?
Campy but Good
Google announced the launch of OpenSocial—their set of standardized application programming interfaces (APIs)—at “Campfire One” last Thursday.
Thrilled Social Network developers attending the event laud the benefits in the highlight video above (4:15). See the full event here (57:23).
S’More of a Good Thing
And why not be happy? Those developers are now aligned with Google and Google’s next big thing, and they also join a growing list of prominent OpenSocial online networks and supporters with whom to collaborate, including:
Engage.com, Flixster, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, iLike, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.
Their combined reach equates to over 200 million subscribers.
Roasting Distribution
Most importantly, OpenSocial promises developers a way to optimize development costs through the creation of a common platform available (thus far) only to OpenSocial affiliates.
A single source development platform means more rapid distribution and greater reach since developers can now build one app for multiple social networks, eliminating the need to create multiple network-specific applications.
Passing on the Hot Dogs
Conspicuously missing from the list of Google OpenSocial faithful was social media darling, Facebook. Facebook passed up a $1 billion offer from Yahoo last year, then a week ago sold a 1.6% stake to Microsoft for $240 million, inflating Facebook’s value to an estimated $15 billion.
Google’s OpenSocial countermeasure is expected to significantly reduce that estimate.
If OpenSocial delivers as promised and becomes the global de facto standard for social network development, Facebook may one day need to face compliance just to remain relative and viable. Probably not what Microsoft or Facebook had in mind when they inked the deal late last month.
Branded Just Right
All of which bodes well for for brand marketers, advertisers, developers and users. OpenSocial’s standards and conventions should drive streamlined creation, processing, access and distribution of messaging, bringing deeper reach and measurably greater returns for marketers.
Of course, sometimes standardization translates to stifling and stale—we’ll see. But the commercial benefits of ubiquitous and proprietary standardization are hard to deny.
Just ask Microsoft.
Update. From Techcrunch: Facebook may already be talking to Google.
Tags: Higher Ed Marketing, Productivity, Public Relations, Social Marketing, Featured, Consumer Electronics, Technology marketing, Branding, Foundation Marketing, Marketing, Advertising
Our copy of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, already on its way to a good dog-earing.
Serious about marketing your brand online? This book will teach you what you need to know about web analytics.
Published by Wiley’s Sybex brand, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, by Avinash Kaushik, the Analytics Evangelist for Google, and author of the widely-read Occam’s Razor blog, is a must-have resource for online marketers.
About the Book
The book went beyond what we were expecting, i.e., how to better read analytics dashboards. What we found was a sophisticated and marketing-oriented book that teaches how to use the available data to create a clear picture of return on investment in the online world. This is more than your typical programming book, this is a marketing book.
Kaushik does a great job with the format. As with any subject you’re committed to knowing, reading the information and applying it in small pieces is the best way to learn. Most of the content is arranged by subject and is segmented into daily readings, allowing you to focus and build upon the knowledge one piece at a time.
A Worthwhile Library Addition
The book is easy to read, full of practical application, and one that will be tattered, bookmarked, and referenced often here at Brainstorm.
Best of all, Kaushik has committed every dollar earned from the book to charitable causes.
Order a copy on Amazon now.
Tags: Uncategorized, Higher Ed Marketing, Search Marketing, Featured, Electronic Communications, Consumer Electronics, Technology marketing, Healthcare, Process, Foundation Marketing, Marketing
Address
Brainstorm Principal Bart Caylor will be making a presentation on Web 2.0—how the Internet has evolved and what it means to business leaders now and for the future—at the Main Street Institute’s 2007 Web Marketing event on August 24th.
The Main Street Institute, a partnership of the Greater Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce and Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, is a year-round series of educational programs focused on the latest developments in sales, marketing, customer relations and growth management.
This Friday’s program at the IUPUI School of Informatics also includes presentations on:
To register contact Alane Summers at 317.464.2213 or go to indychamber.com.
Tags: Higher Ed Marketing, Search Marketing, Social Marketing, Featured, Electronic Communications, Consumer Electronics, Technology marketing, Healthcare, Branding, Brainstorm News, Foundation Marketing, Web 2.0, Marketing
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in Step Inside Design’s recently released, 2008 Best of Web Annual for the design and development of Lumina Foundation for Education’s Camino a la Universidad site.
under Branding. Grouped by topic, Alltop aggregates stories from “all the top” sites across the web (that’s their story and we’re sticking to it). View our .think listing, here: branding.alltop.
Here’s a free Mac app allowing you to call up, via customized abbreviations, any text string you copy and paste frequently. Best of all the text is placed pre-formatted - returns, bullets and all. It’s become a staple here at Brainstorm. You can download your own at app4mac.
If you can get past the vapid brand identity and UI, PimpMyNews, the talking social news site, is an interesting concept. The site will read your RSS feeds to you over your mp3 player, iPhone, etc. or computer.
[via: PR-Squared]
NPI’s personal cosmos transport. Like Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine Happiness Machine, the iPlanet, a holiday product parody, promises a “thoroughly self-absorbed social media experience.”
Robert Scoble explores the notion in this BusinessWeek piece re: the running debate over where we’re headed with aging, albeit ubiquitous, email paradigms versus spam-free Tweets.
[via: Scobleizer]
Aggregate the aggregators at Popurls.com—simultaneously follow the most current posts from all the top sites like Digg, Newsvine, YouTube and Flickr. Or, “find your favorite thing,” over at Buzzfeed.
Peter Bruhn’s Swedish type foundry is preparing a new freshet of fonts to flow forth and flourish among us—according to Typographi and Bruhn himself.
[via: Sheer Brick]
A word from A List Apart about design based on simile.
Looking for a digital color scheme that will last the ages? Colour Lovers explores masters inspired color schemes.
Can’t see how your two soda bottles a day are impacting the environment? Chris Jordan’s images will help you visualize it. View his amazing statistical depictions at Running the Numbers, An American Self-Portrait.
Regardless of your geopolitical views you’ll likely appreciate the satirical humor of this product parody sketch run amok.
Okay this would just be a goofy flash-based Spirograph-esque toy if it didn’t generate downloadable .svg (Scalable Vector Graphic) files—which it does. Pattern enthusiasts, meet Qbesq.
Here’s Google’s take on the phrase, “Across the pond.” Visit Google Maps, enter New York to London in the search field, scroll to step #24.
How to reduce Firefox from a memory hog to a piglet. Caught this Firefox usage tip over on Ade Olonoh’s blog (see comments).
If you’re a developer or just interested in CSS, check out this article entitled, #IEroot — Targeting IE Using Conditional Comments and Just One Stylesheet,” over on the PIE site.
An iconic-rich, one-click site on how hundreds of the planet’s most noteworthy brands came to be. Updated daily.
From the Bonn Physikshow—A lesson on YouTube regarding the denser than air properties of hexafluoride (likely sulphur hexafluoride) gas.
Enter at your own risk. A proof of concept that design does matter. Havenworks.com hailed on Digg recently as perhaps, “…the most poorly designed website in the world!”
Originally published in Communication Arts November Design Annual 2006, here’s their list of 50 essential bookmarks. Conspicuously missing, sites such as Delicious, Technorati and Lifehacker.
Sure to appeal to the megalomaniacal extraterrestrial in all of us. World, meet geoGreetings. When you care enough to send a satellite image.
An interactive glimpse into the the random and spontaneous feedback Jackson Pollock once realized in his medium—sans the clean up.
Pressed toast with panache. From the, “Table Manners Collection,” Delfts Toast Pan by Minale Maeda. As seen on “ohmygooshness.”
76% of 2Q 2008 U.S. internet broadband subscriber additions came from top cable companies versus top telephone companies.
Source:
Leichtman Research Group
Via:
Center for Media Research
25 August, 2008
Items we find compelling, of late.
Our latest top 20 list of inane musings from the Brainstorm office white board: Top 20 Things to do (we did) on the 4th of July
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Our latest top 20 list of inane musings from the Brainstorm office white board: Top 20 Thoughts on What No.15 Means
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Our latest top 20 list of inane musings from the Brainstorm office white board: Top 20 Reasons Hiroki and Jenni Work with Shoes Off
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Objects of interest, engaging designs, diagrams, downloadable visuals and any other imagery we felt worth sharing.
