The always informative and wise Jeremiah Owyang has a top 10 list of posts regarding social media strategies. This is a must-bookmark post:
I’m answering a lot of questions and see myself referring to the same blog posts and concepts over and over. There’s a few posts that I recommend that you read, some of them were published a few months ago, but are starting to become very relevant. In fact, I’ll send this post to a few clients that need to get up to speed…
A few backs the continual innovative team at Zoho announed the integration of Google Gears into the Zoho Writer web app. Zoho Writer is analogous to Google Docs and similar online word processing applications. The first cut had offline viewing facility alone. However, this release pushes the online word processing space ahead as it allows for offline editing.
Here’s a video from Zoho explaining more details:
http://zoho.com/zohowriter-zoho/zohowriter-zoho.html
Robert Scoble recorded a 13 minute video laying out his main beefs with Amazon’s new ebook Kindle reader. Most of his points pertained to the Kindle’s poor design (which I agree with). However, one of his points include:
4. No ability to send electronic goods to anyone else. I know Mike Arrington has one. I wanted to send him a gift through this of Alan Greenspan’s new book. I couldn’t. That’s lame.
While the Kindle (and ebook readers in general) is still a very niche product, it is interesting to see that social network sharing via gifts and commodity purchases is becoming seen as a required standard feature for new devices or platforms in this increasingly “socially networked” world. There’s a reason Facebook applications that encourage sending gifts, etc become popular quickly even though they require cash… people like sending gifts.
Look for this trend to continue.
Looks like YouTube is down…
Yes, YouTube appears to be down currently. Looks like it’s down at least 30 minutes now (as of 12:45pm Eastern) based on Corsin’s note. I’ve received nine emails and a batch of Twitter messages asking if it’s down so here is my confirmation that it’s down for me as well.
Try out Magnify.net.
It’s back 🙂
I’m not a “video person” but I am liking Seesmic a great deal these days…
Mary Hudson says hello to Seesmic:
If Mark Cuban were to hypothetically run for president in 2008, he might want to consider Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens for his running mate based on these types of sentiments…
In an open letter to Internet service providers published earlier this week, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban calls for telecoms to put an end to peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing. Cuban expresses concerns that P2P “freeloaders” are clogging the tubes with commercial content. His letter doesn’t focus on piracy, however, and instead primarily attacks companies that use P2P for legitimate commercial applications. We’re always interested to read the musings of Mr. Cuban, but this time we’re pretty sure he’s missed the point…
This argument comes from the man who funded Grokster’s legal defense back in the day and invested approximately $1.7 million in P2P company Red Swoosh. Cuban has been focused on the problems of bandwidth to the home for some time, however, telling Ars in 2006 that he is in favor of a tiered Internet.
Seriously, how out of touch is Mark Cuban?
Mark Cuban to ISP’s: block all P2P traffic; Ars to Cuban: um, no
Great study on the alarming declines in reading by young adults and college educated adults from the National Endowment for the Arts:
The story the data tell is simple, consistent, and alarming. Although there has been
measurable progress in recent years in reading ability at the elementary school level,
all progress appears to halt as children enter their teenage years. There is a general
decline in reading among teenage and adult Americans. Most alarming, both reading
ability and the habit of regular reading have greatly declined among college graduates.
These negative trends have more than literary importance. As this report makes clear,
the declines have demonstrable social, economic, cultural, and civic implications.
Dave Winer writes today regarding TinyURL’s recent downtime and what it means for the web:
Now that URL length has become an issue for users, it might be even better for designers to view URLs as part of site design. Look at the address for the page for the Wii at Amazon. Wouldn’t it be easier to find if the address were:
Try clicking on it — it actually works!
Why should a user ever see the longer crappy url?
In other words, url-shortening isn’t just for Twitter users, it’s for everyone. Maybe most people don’t look at the urls, but some do, and maybe more would if they made more sense?
Imagine if web developers would start taking link optimization into account along with search engine optimization. As Winer points out, long link strands are increasingly becoming irrelevant as most people just go to Google if they need a link they can’t remember and click from there.
However, if you’re selling a product or a service, how valuable is it that the link to that product or service have an increasingly easy format and structure for users or customers to remember? Perhaps not valuable for all merchants or advertisers… but potentially very valuable for many.
Expect to hear more about link optimization as the web grows up and grows out to mobile.