Social media. Web 2.0. You know what these things are and you take advantage of them every day on the net. Whether you're socializing on Facebook, updating Twitter, or just adding a new bookmark to Ma.gnolia, social media has become an integral part of our daily lives. However, that doesn't mean that it's something that everyone innately understands or knows how to use - especially when it comes to using it for marketing, PR, or other business-related purposes. That's why many of today's colleges and universities are now offering "social media" classes as an option for their students.
Even though last night's big contests in Kentucky and Oregon ended in a split decision, with big wins for both Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, most pundits now agree on who is most likely to be the Democratic nominee for president when the convention rolls around in August. Hint: it's the candidate who has dominated nearly every method we could think of to measure election momentum on the web. We got some data last night from widget-provider Widgetbox that shows the same trend for viral widget installs.
When I read news this morning that AOL's Platform-A would become the exclusive ad provider for Virgin Mobile's 5 million subscribers, I started to think about where web advertising was headed. While it's doubtful that we'll be permanently ditching our PCs any time soon, it is clear that more and more time is being spent accessing the web via mobile devices. So it would follow that the mobile space is going to see a lot of ad money over the next few years (indeed, analysts predict just that).
How will the Semantic Web make the jump to the mainstream? That was the topic of a panel at the SemTech 2008 Conference that is going on right now in San Jose. The panel was moderated by Carla Thomson from Guidewire Group and featured Josh Dilworth from Porter Novelli,
Tom Tague, who heads the Calais initiative at Reuters, and Mark Johnson, who is a product manager at Powerset.
This post is based on notes from that panel.
There are thousands of new services that pop up every day. Too many services imitate, and only a handful innovate. With all of these services, one wonders what their plans are for success. Competition on the web is stiff and users are demanding more from the services they join. While there's no formula for success, there are three keys to a killer web service: search, aggregation, and conversation. In this post, we take a look at successful services that have integrated these keys just right.
The invention of the browser was a huge boon to the internet and a substantial amount of computing now goes on through that interface we've grown to love. The internet is not a place where innovation takes a break, though, and a new generation of applications are emerging that have a different relationship with the web browser.
According to Opera's survey of the more 11.9 million Opera Mini users in March, almost 41% of mobile traffic now goes to social networking -- up to 60% in some countries, including the US. Compare that to about 6% of total web traffic for social networks outside of the mobile web. That's not overly surprising, though, given the recent proliferation of new smartphones aimed at consumers (or at least phones that can view the full web), made ultra-chic over the past year by Apple's iPhone. Says Opera, 3/4ths of mobile web traffic is now to the full web, rather than WAP or .mobi sites, which are quickly becoming out-moded.
There was once an era when website content could only be changed by wrestling time away from someone who specialized in such technical matters. Blogging changed all of that. Applications too, were once the exclusive domain of technical specialists - but a new generation of services is changing that today as well. In the consumer space services like Yahoo! Pipes, Dapper, Feedity now make the creation of simple and composite applications something that a far greater number of power-users can do for themselves.
On Sunday, a YouTube blog post introduced us to Olivia, YouTube's recently hired News Manager. She's going to be in charge of a new Channel on YouTube called Citizen News. This channel will highlight the best of the citizen journalism that's taking place on YouTube, but its ultimate goal is to become a go-to news destination on the web.
There's no denying that the campaign of Barack Obama has embraced social networking and new media like no campaign in history. Obama has accounts on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, Flickr -- even on niche social networks AsianAve, MiGente, and Faithbase. And Obama, or someone in his campaign, actually uses the accounts and keeps them up-to-date. Could it be that likely Democratic nominee for president is actually using bleeding edge, early adopter-friendly lifestream aggregator FriendFeed? Actually, uh, no. That's not him.
