Digg 3.0 Alive & Well

Digg.com is one of my favorite sites. It's the pioneer of the “democratic editorial control” model. While sites like Google News and Yahoo! use algorithms to determine which news stories are most popular and should be placed on the home page, Digg.com empowers readers to vote and “digg” on which stories receive top placement. Digg calls this user powered content. How nice.

Digg.com is very popular with the technology community. (You can see that influence in the content that’s on the home page. Remember it’s the readers that selected it.) Digg.com’s traffic stats rival that of more traditional sites like NYTimes.com, with over 800,000 unique visitors a day and 9 million plus page views.

This (Monday) morning, Digg.com 3.0 launched. The new Digg continues to showcase users’ editorial selections in technology but will now include “containers” for broader subject categories as well – including entertainment, world & business, gaming, science and online video. Digg’s going mainstream and looking to take a chunk out of YouTube.com at the same time.

With site traffic to Digg doubling every two months, expect to see more – much more - of Digg and also expect to see more news aggregator sites embrace the “user editorial control” model.

What does this mean for PR? It means we must ensure we are diligent in the online communities, getting key influencers to show preference for our stories. In the democratic editorial control model, stories that get “voted off the island” by the influencers will never reach the larger audiences.

Check out Digg.com v.3.0 here.

-aB

Interesting, Albeit Inaccurate Web Site Demographic Tool

Want to know who Microsoft THINKS is looking at a particular Web site? This tool, part of Microsoft’s AdLabs project, tries to tell you. I’m not sure how exactly it works, but it was pretty close for some of my client projects.

Of course, it’s way off on others. Try seeing who Microsoft thinks is using Google. Click the URL button then type in www.google.com.

Interesting. Check it out here.

Thanks to Digg.com for the link.

-aB

The BBC Production Assistant Grabbed the Wrong Guy...

So your name is Guy Keyney (pictured above on the left), and you are sitting in reception of the BBC about to go on air to talk about the Apple Computer/Apple (The Beatles’ publishing company) lawsuit.

You are nervous, because you are slated to go on air at 10:30 and it’s 10:29 and you’re still sitting in the lobby. The receptionist assures you everything is ok.

Then, at 10:30 as you are watching the live feed of the broadcast via the television in the lobby, you see the show host introduce you. The camera then cuts to someone in the guest chair who is certainly not you (the Guy pictured above on the right).

Here's a snippet from Guy Keyney's blog post:

There were several surprising things about my interview. We'll ignore the fact that I wasn't giving it, and had not given it. We'll even gloss over the fact that, judging by my performance, English wasn't my first language, and that I didn't seem to know much about Apple Computer, online music, or the Beatles. People have accused me of all those things, at various stages of my career...

Seems as though there were TWO people named Guy in the lobby that morning. One was a taxi driver named Guy Goma who was there for a job interview, the other one was Guy Keyney, a well-known journalist and respected technology law expert in the UK. The production assistant grabbed the wrong Guy, whisked him to the studio, sat him down and put a mic on him.

Watch the video here.

Read Guy Keyney’s take of the incident here. Read more about it here and here (PR Opinions). Thanks to PR Opionions for the link.

To his credit, the “other Guy” tried his best to answer the questions. I’m sure he thought this was one hell of an interview process!

-aB

TiVo Required For New GE Ads

So, what do you do when you're an advertising agency and the TiVo and DVR are preventing people from watching your commercials? You develop commercials that can only be seen with a Tivo or DVR, of course!

This is pretty neat stuff. GE is unveiling their "One Second Theatre" during commercials that will play this month.

Read about it in this New York Times story here.

Basically, the GE commercials will now include a one-second "flip book" like slide show at the end. It's a mini-commercial sandwiched into one second. To watch this last second, you'll need to watch it frame-by-frame, something you can only do with a TiVo.

Very interesting idea. For some reason, this reminds me of playing old record albums backward when I was a kid to hear the "secret message." Anyone remember the Queen song Another One Bites the Dust and it's secret message?

Visit GE's One Second Theatre micro-site here.

UPDATE: It seems as though Sprite is jumping on the "DVR Ready" commercial bandwagon, too. New commercials from hot ad agency Crispin, Porter & Bogusky (that's the Subservient Chicken agency, by the way) call it "SubLYMONal" advertising, bringing back the old Lymon marketing idea for Sprite. Look through the commercials frame-by-frame and there are supposed to be plenty of goodies...

-aB

Which Midget Is Taller?

The median age of the CNN and FOX News viewer is over 60. Ouch.

MSNBC and Headline News aren't much better, with the median viewer 57 and 59, respectively. This is according to Brian Lowry's column posted on Variety last night.

For a business where the 18-49 demo is so critically important, this is a tough pill to swallow. And the networks don't talk about this a lot - leading Brian Lowry to make the following observation:

The cable nets' older profiles have also yielded absurd exchanges about demographic superiority, such as the boast that more young adults view MSNBC's Keith Olbermann than CNN's Paula Zahn. Whichever midget is taller, the truth remains that the vast majority of young adults have no interest in either.

Interesting, eye-opening article. Read it here.

-aB

Mass Confusion At Best Buy

A "prankster group" called Improv Everywhere got 50 people dressed up in Best Buy-like regalia (blue shirt, khakis) and raided the local store.

According to the story, there was mass confusion. Snippet from Gizmodo.com:

Customers were confused, some sales staff were supportive while others got upset, and predictably both management and security went apoplectic.

More pictures here in Flickr and the full story here on Gizmodo.com.

-aB

Was It Viral Coolness Or Was It A Coder Easter Egg?

One of the top stories on Digg.com over the past 21 hours has been about a scene from the television show Family Guy appearing on the JetBlue.com Web site.

It seems as though if you viewed the route map (located here) and typed in "pbj" (think peanut butter and jelly), the route map would be replaced from a scene from the animated FOX television show.

Now, Digg.com is becoming the new Slashdot in terms of identifying what is "geek cool" and this story has received 2,162 diggs (votes) in less than a day. So, this story is very geek cool.

The offending code is now gone. Going to http://www.jetblue.com/travelinfo/routemap.asp now only provides a nice route map. Typing in "pbj" does nothing, other than show you that you have to pretty much fly thru JFK to get anywhere on an otherwise awesome airline.

My question is whether this was intentional (my vote - no). Did Jet Blue "do the right thing" and take the code down ASAP (my vote - maybe, maybe not)? Other than getting a "cease and desist" letter from the folks at FOX, what bad could come of this?

This story had some traction in viral-land. It was moments away from "jumping the shark" into mainstream, via company IT guys sending it around to people in their office (and then those people to others...) This is the type of viral phenomenon that could have been even bigger and beneficial, with just a little thought. What if they kept the "Easter Egg" up and replaced The Family Guy scene with another one, one that had been approved by the company? What if the new scene included a code for 10% off a purchase in their ShopBlue store? What if there was a hat in the ShopBlue store that included the Jet Blue logo and the letters "pbj" next to it?

Now that would be a way to capitalize on viral marketing...

Aside: This reminds me of some company (I can't remember which one) that had an option on their 800 phone customer support system with all of the typical choices (for English, press 1; for technical support, press 2; for questions on a bill, press 3) but also had another choice (to hear a duck quack, press 9). Funny.

-aB

UK Hand Spray Found To Kill Bird Flu Bug

Snippet from DailyRecord.co.uk:

An ordinary handwash costing just £2.99 can kill the bird flu virus in 30 seconds, tests have found. No-Germs, a simple hand spray, has been on sale over the counter for two years. But when the H5N1 avian flu outbreak gathered pace among birds, No-Germs owners decided to test it against the virus.

The results, revealed yesterday, were remarkable - the handwash was more tha 99.8 per cent efficient in killing H5N1. The discovery has been heralded as a "major breakthrough" - particularly if the virus ever mutates into a human form.

So, how soon until we see "Kills the Bird Flu Bug" tagline on every cleaning product here in America? This is the new "Anti-bacterial" starburst that began to appear on everything (from soap to detergent to mousepads to ink pens) a few years back.

Read the entire article here.

Gaming Women Outnumber Men

Yep, in the important 24-35 age group, the number of women gamers outnumbers men. Don't believe me? Snippet:

A new study from the Consumer Electronics Association indicates that there are many more women gamers in the 25-34 demographic than males, largely because of the popularity of the casual games market, with card games like solitaire and puzzle games like Tetris.

We already know that male pre-teen and teens are spending more time playing video games than watching television or DVDs. Note that these gamers are more likely to play console games on their Playstation or XBOX.

Casual gamers are playing a different type of game - less competitive, less violent and usually less expensive games like solitare, Tetris or other puzzle games.

The opportunity for marketing sponsorships in these casual games is actually higher than with the traditional console game. Right now, the main sponsorship option in console games is product/branding placement, such as passing a McDonald's restaurant in a racing game or passing a cologne outdoor board in a skiing race game.

Then there's Burger King who went all-out with their sponsorship in EA Sport's Fight Night Round 3. The game starts out with traditional sponsorship like logos in the boxing ring and on-screen graphics. But then, you actually get to fight the King! (with his funny, albeit creepy King-head).

With casual games, the brand can be more woven into the game itself. Budgets for development/licensing are a lot smaller, too. And these are the games that are more likely to have mobile implications - such as a download game for a mobile phone. Think if you could "weave in" proximity into these games, a la GeoCaching...

The full story from GameDaily appears here. This should likely change marketers perceptions of this yet untapped medium for reaching consumers.

-aB

Citysearch.com Traffic up 185% Over Last Year. Huh?

There is an interesting story on WashingtonPost.com today about where Internet traffic is growing and slowing.

No surprise - traffic to blogging and social networking sites has skyrocketed. Blogger.com traffic is up 528% year over year and traffic to MySpace.com is up 318%. Guess Rupert's $580 million gamble might be paying off...

Other interesting tidbits include traffic increases to Wikipedia.org (up 275%). I'll be interested to see if wiki traffic begins to cannibalize blog traffic and/or if we'll see a traffic plateau in the entire social networking arena. (I wrote about this topic on the PersonalizedMediaBlog.com last week.)

Google saw 21% growth, but Yahoo, MSN and AOL all saw relatively flat growth, under 5% each. eBay actually saw a 3% traffic drop. Interesting. Guess all those people doing auctions are now blogging and chatting up on MySpace.com... (Not really, remember that eBay still gets millions of visits a day.)

The most interesting part of the story for me was the Citysearch number. Most local Internet sites closed their doors during the Internet bubble bust. Citysearch was on life support. But there seems to be growth in local-oriented online content. Perhaps this has something to do with the emergence of local news video online (accessible in part because the majority of online Americans now have broadband). Perhaps there is a renewed focus on real community content (to complement online communities). I'll tell you - this is a very interesting stat. It will be interesting to see if this is just an anomoly, if it's just a Citysearch thing, or if we'll see more growth in local-oriented online content. If so, it will prove the point that the online communities are becoming an integral part of our entire culture and that the distinction between online and "live" is narrowing.

Check the story out here. ComScore actually provides some pretty detailed data.

-aB

ABC Sends the NFL Out With A Bang

Sunday's big game is ABC's last NFL production for many years to come. NBC now has the NFL for six years, thanks to the $600 million it paid for the rights to one game a week (the Monday Night Football game). But it won't be showing the game Monday night - it will be on Sunday night prime time.

Anyway, back to the Super Bowl. ABC is going all-out with some neato gizmos and high-def goodies to make sure you don't forget this game. TVTechnology.com talks about the wireless high-def, new Canon lenses and other goodies here. Here's a snippet about the "rigs," or those big eighteen wheelers that park outside with all of the cables going into them:

"Sports is always at the cutting edge of hi-tech on television," said George Hoover, senior vice president of engineering at NEP Supershooters, the mobile division of NEP Broadcasting in Pittsburgh that will bring three trucks to Super Bowl XL. "Since the first super slo-mo cameras five years ago, the NFL is generally a driving force for new TV technology." NEP is bringing Supershooter 26, the HDTV rig used to shoot Monday Night Football on ABC for the past three seasons, to the event. NEP also is bringing in Supershooter 20, the HDTV truck used to shoot Sunday Night Football for ESPN.

The three-and-a-half hour pre-game show and the shorter post-game show will be shot in HD using Supershooter 18.

Yep. Three rigs. Two more than most events. Each of these rigs has millions of dollars of equipment in it. Each one. In other words, a good portion of the high-def equipment in the US will all be situated next to Ford Field in Detroit this week.

Cool stuff. Gonna love it in HD...

Via Gizmodo.

-aB

Amazon's New Podcasts That Aren't

Amazon is getting some heat in the blogosphere for not allowing their new weekly original programming "Amazon Fishbowl with Bill Maher" to be available for download.

Personally, I like the idea of this program (from a marketing standpoint). And I bet it will convert to sales.

When you're a site like Amazon that has several million visitors stopping by the site every hour, anything that can keep consumers on the site 3-4 minutes longer (and listen to product pitches) is a windfall. And with Maher, they have (in my opinion) the right mix of entertainment/pitchman to make it work.

And I can understand why Amazon doesn't want it to be a podcast. (Yet.) They know from research that the buyer's attention span is pretty short. Every second that goes buy where you don't click the "BUY NOW" button, you're that many times more likely not to buy. If you're not in front of the BUY NOW button at Amazon.com when you're listening, they've lost their "call to action" and sales conversion opportunity.

They want you there - on the site - buying stuff - while you're listening. It's not that much different than those time share places in Florida where you get the free gift certificate for the lobster dinner if you go and listen to the real estate sales spiel. Same thing here - if you want the free entertainment (the lobster or Maher, your pick), you'd better be sitting in front of our Web site at the time.

Jeff does bring up a very good point - the idea that the volume of listeners would increase exponentially if they opened it up for download. My guess is that they want to see if the show can put "seats in the pews" first before allowing you to listen to the sermon from home.

-aB

Spy On Yourself. For Profit?

Seth Goldstein wants you to be able to sell your Web stats. He wants to create a new software category, called "myware" that can allow all of your Web tracking, cookies, time spent online, favorites, etc. to be sold to the highest bidder. Snippet from a CNNMoney.com story:

"Everybody else is spying on me," he says, "so I want to spy on myself."

But Goldstein wants a better copy of his online behavior than anyone else has, and he wants to have complete control over who gets to see it. Instead of spyware, he calls the software that will let him do this "myware."

I thought Nielsen MediaMetrics was already doing this, albeit for their small selection of online Nielsen families.

Interesting idea, but scary. I agree with the story that the "return" we as cosumers get from cookies and other tracking mechanisms isn't worth the invasion. (As a Web developer however, the data is quite valuable to making Web sites and user experiences better.)

Via Slashdot and CNNMoney.com.

-aB

SEE ROCK CITY. Now v.2.0.

Growing up in the South, it was almost impossible to go down an interstate or highway without seeing a barn roof with the words "SEE ROCK CITY" painted on them.

As the Web site Two-Lane.com shares:

It all began in the 1920's, when Garnet and Frieda Carter developed a garden walkway on their estate atop Lookout Mountain, in northern Georgia, overlooking Chattanooga. America was in the Great Depression when the Carters opened their gardens to the public in 1932. In what would become one of the most unique advertising gimmicks ever, Carter hired Clark Byers to paint "See Rock City" on hundreds of barns located along highways leading to Chattanooga.

Clark Byers died February 19, 2004 at age 89. From 1937 until his retirement in 1969, Byers painted over 900 barns in 19 southern states.

Seems as though roof advertising is coming back in vogue, although in a slightly different fashion thanks to Google Maps. Got a big, flat roof? Free advertising thanks to the Google "eyes in the sky!"

Via Gizmodo, TheInquirer.net and Adverlab.

-aB

Behind The Scenes At The Simpsons

Via Slashdot, The Seattle Times has a great article on how an episode of The Simpsons comes together. Snippet:

Each week, it begins at the "table read" on the Fox studio lot. Here, cast members try out a new script as writers and producers take careful notes, sometimes based on the reactions of the roughly three dozen guests ringing the room in padded blue chairs.

Part assembly line and part creative gestation, it will take another nine months for the finished episode to see the light of a television screen.

And you thought putting a "Simpsons" episode together was some chaotic laugh riot thrown together in a week?

If you're a Simpsons fan, check it out.

-aB

Do You Squidoo? I Do.

Squidoo.com is a new spin on consumer generated media (CGM). It's not a wiki, it's not a blog, it's something somewhere in the middle.

Those who write on Squidoo.com are called LensMasters. What they write are called Lens.

I took a stab at writing a Squidoo Lens a few weeks ago on Personalized Media. You can take a look at it here at www.squidoo.com/personalizedmedia.

As we start 2006, it's going to be interesting to see where consumer generated media is going. CGM is a lot of work for writers. Are today's blogs going to become the GeoCities or Tripod ghost towns of this decade? Remember those? Free Web sites! Many set them up (or just registered for them) but never went back to update.

I like the Squidoo.com idea. I don't quite understand the revenue model, but I am sure that Seth Godin and Friends have thought about that.

-aB

The new "Earn Money Working From Home..."

Have you ever seen those homemade signs that are attached to utility poles, usually around stoplights? They say, "Earn $$$ working from home!" and include a phone number.

Usually, they're either a Ponzi scheme or a job stuffing thousands of envelopes a day. Fun. Joy.

Well, our friends at Amazon have decided to take this idea to 2.0 with their Amazon Mechanical Turk concept. They promote it as:

Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it. Choose from thousands of tasks, control when you work, and decide how much you earn.

It's an interesting premise. There are a lot of jobs that a human can do quite easily, but a computer has difficulty in completing. I decided to take a look at the HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) that were available.

If you're expecting big bucks, keep on looking. Only three HITs came up for me, two had no "reward" (payment) and one was paying $0.02 to listen to songs and determine the exact name of the album's primary artist. The good news is that there are 105,035 songs available to identify, or about $2,100 for a lucky audiophile.

Very interesting premise. Most HITs require Qualifications, either a fancy resume or experience in delivering high qualiy answers. I assume the rewards for higher end tasks are higher than FREE or $0.02.

Take a look at the site here.

-aB

I Bet the Neighbors Love It. Not.

Meet Carson Williams. He has done some decorating for the holidays. About 25,000 lights twinkle in his front yard. Did I mention they twinkle to music? To Trans-Siberian Orchestra's "Wizards in Winter"?

It's great. No, it's awesome.

Take a look at a 3 minute video here.

Read about it in The Cincinnati Enquirer here. Thanks to AdRants.com for the link.

You have to check it out. Still laughing.

-aB

New SBC/AT&T Logo...

SBC's acquisition of AT&T is finally complete, and last week they launched the new AT&T logo. What do you think?

I like the way it looks - it's definitely more "AT&T" than "SBC," but it doesn't say anything to me. It just looks like the "Death Star" AT&T logo gussied up a bit and tilted on its axis.

Now, for SBC, anything is better than their dreadful logo:



But I don't see any SBC branding in this new logo at all. With the amount SBC has seemed to spend on national marketing over the past year, that would seem to me to be a mistake.

I blogged on the Sprint/Nextel new logo here, not realizing that it's main graphic is a representation of the "pin drop" (very cool once you see it). But the new Death Star doesn't tell us anything, other than AT&T is about world domination.

Love to hear other thoughts...

-aB

Gladwell's Blink To Be a Movie, With Leo...

The Tipping Point author Malcom Gladwell's latest book Blink is to be a movie.

And Leonardo DiCaprio will be the star in the adaptation of this best-selling non-fiction pseudo-business book.

Here's a snippet about the book:

"Blink," published in January, is a story about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. Author Malcolm Gladwell posited that when you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. "Blink" is a story about those two seconds when instant conclusions reached by people are really powerful, really important and, occasionally, really good.

Here's a snippet about the movie:

Stephen Gaghan, who won an Oscar for writing the drugs saga "Traffic," is adapting and directing the Universal Pictures project... Gaghan's take is being kept under wraps.

The studio is shelling out $1 million for the rights from Gladwell, and is paying $2 million for Gaghan to write the screenplay. If the project goes forward, the entire deal could be worth upwards of $6 million.

This should be interesting. I'm sure Malcom Gladwell is pleased. I think it's an ok book (I blogged about it here in February) but not nearly as good as The Tipping Point.

-aB