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Medieval Archaeology Journal Online For Free

Not for everyone, but if you’re a history nerd like I am, this is a great opportunity:

An early Christmas present from the Society for Medieval Archaeology:

Good news from the Society for Medieval Archaeology and the wizards at the Archaaeology Data Service. The first fifty (50) issues of Medieval Archaeology are available for free online. Its not quite open access, because the issues can’t be archived elsewhere, but that’s no real problem as long as the ADS stays funded.

The Society exists to ‘further the study of the period from the 5th to the 16th century A.D. by publishing a journal of international standing dealing primarily with the archaeological evidence, and by other means such as by holding regular meetings and arranging conferences.’ It’s clear making the journal freely accessible is going to do a lot for their work, but even so when you also have to balance the financial needs of the Society it’s still a courageous step in a field where most publications are subscription-only.

But the real reason to celebrate is that the journal is very good. There is plenty of stuff in it that deserves a wide audience. For instance Pictish symbol stones are a bit of a mystery. However I can read about them in the article Investing in Sculpture: Power in Early-historic Scotland by Meggen Gondek, which is available as a PDF from Volume 50 of Medieval Archaeology.

(Via Alun: Ancient Science and the Science of Ancient Things.)

Facebook Pages in Google?

GigaOm has an important scoop…

Now I have some skinny on a recent development that could have long-term ramifications, among them Google sending more traffic to Facebook.com.

The company will soon announce that some application canvas pages (ones that don’t require a special login) will become publicly indexable by search engines like Google. So for instance, our GigaOM Question Of The Day app can be indexed and made available in some limited form to people not logged onto Facebook. Apps get a public-facing web presence of their own.

If this is the case, imagine the SEO’ers scratching their head as they try to optimize their FB pages. At any rate, this is as good a reason as any for your company to start taking social media seriously.

From a Direct Marketing Perspective, Facebook Beacon is a Terrible Idea

Facebook really is boring me with their marketing attempts. I’ve basically begun to snub my nose at it because, quite simply, what they’ve rolled out so far will never work or sustain any sort of revenue for advertisers (or marketers). There are already too many concerns over privacy, data ownership and FB’s long term sustainability as a platform to cause much skirt hiking.

Beacon is a horrible idea and has been sloppily executed. It reminds me of the toolbar apps from 2002.

I like (love?) Facebook as a social network, but as a marketing paradigm, it’s just not a good fit… at least for marketing in its current stage of evolution. Perhaps one day marketing will be able to find employment in social networks, but at this point we’re still too closely linked to offline models and metrics that break down when you try to translate them to the social networking world (or the web in general in my opinion).

Google owns advertising and will continue to do so (especially after they move into mobile and/or release their GDrive application and start paying users to host their data in exchange for ads to compete with Amazon who will do the same… yeah, you heard me).

Tony Hung has a good run down of possible futures for Facebook if Beacon crumbles.

Reality Check

Thanks to Phil at BadAstronomy for the reality check…


In the new Hubble image of the galaxy M74 we can also see a smattering of bright pink regions decorating the spiral arms. These are huge, relatively short-lived, clouds of hydrogen gas which glow due to the strong radiation from hot, young stars embedded within them; glowing pink regions of ionized hydrogen (hydrogen that has lost its electrons). These regions of star formation show an excess of light at ultraviolet wavelengths and astronomers call them HII regions.

Go out and look at the stars tonight. It’ll make you a better human.

Look Who’s Back: Local TV

television.jpgCenterNetworks has news of a partnership between Google and Hearst-Argyle Television:

Hearst-Argyle Television (NYSE:HTV) and Google have entered a new strategic agreement today where Hearst-Argyle, operator of 29 TV stations and more than 30 Websites, will become an official reseller and will use its Web sales force to provide marketers in its 26 local markets access to Google AdWords.

What this means is that Hearst-Argyle will now sell more comprehensive advertising solutions to its clients. Instead of just print and television, now they can also leverage online – helping to increase control over a client’s advertising budget.

Hearst-Argyle isn’t your daddy’s TV conglomerate anymore. With web properties such as HighSchoolPlaybook, they are branching out into a collaborative media group that is leveraging the existing (and dedicated) viewership of local TV stations to do a combination of traditional media buys, cost per action advertising and now collaborative deals with players such as Google.

Couple these social web properties and the deal with Google with increased political spending in ’08 and the upcoming Olympics (Hearst-Argyle owns NBC affiliate stations), and the picture is quite rosy for the company.

Don’t overlook companies such as Hearst when discussing the future of media or social media… they could be pointing to the future of media attention and spending.

Seesmic is The Next Big Thing (I Think)

MarketingProfs has a nice piece on the up and coming Seesmic video site. While it is easy to dismiss Seesmic as Yet Another Video Site, there is a good deal of market differentiation which sets Seesmic apart. Think Twitter with video and the ability to really scale once the kids start playing with it:

What do you get when you combine video, social networking, micromedia, and a very savvy French entrepreneur? You get Seesmic.

The site is a social network where the primary content is video. Users record video, post it to the site, and other users reply in video.

Seesmic is the brainchild of French blog star Loic Le Meur and aims to do to video conversations what Twitter did to text-based conversations.

And here’s a little video I just did:

http://seesmic.com/Standalone.swf?video=cZDXD40rKt

Video as a Personal Communication Tool