Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category

Ross has a scathing post on Microsoft. Having competed against them for many years this is an all too familiar scene.

…now, with MSN Filter, the convicted monopolist, is creating their own nanopublishing venture — competing against it’s customers. That’s OK in monopoly land. Where profit is a function of property, and eminent domain falsely considered a right.

He goes on to flag a defining issue – that is – who owns your post when contributing to MSN Filter. In this case it is Microsoft. To any blogger this should represent an almightly stop sign. Microsoft, in the process of corrupting definitions of Wikis and the like is insulting our intelligence. Saddly this babble looks to be coming from a PR person.

comScore has just released a new market research report (co-sponsored by SixApart and Gawker) on Blogging Behavior. Lots of great great stats and validation of blogging industry. Some of the highlights include:

• Nearly 50 million Americans, or about 30 percent of the total U.S. Internet population, visited blogs in Q1 2005
• Five hosting services for blogs each had more than 5 million unique visitors in Q1 2005, and four individual blogs had more than 1 million visitors each
• Of 400 of the largest blogs observed, segmented by eight (non-exclusive) categories, political blogs were the most popular, followed by "hipster" lifestyle blogs, tech blogs and blogs authored by women
• Compared to the average Internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger and connect to the Web on high-speed connections
• Compared to the average Web user, blog readers visit nearly twice as many Web pages, and are more likely to shop online.

If I’d really thought about it, you’d be linking to www.andylark.com/blogs. I would have thought carefully about my URL. But hey, I was all swept-up in the rush and excitement of blogging. Now I’m kind of stuck with it. Unless I can get everyone to update their links and do all that other necessary stuff.

Harry Joiner just made the big URL switch so I’ll be watching to see how he does. You can now find him over at Marketing Headhunter – which says lots to those that don’t know Harry about what he does.

And bonus… straight from Harry’s site, a link to Larry’s site with some interesting marketing trends.

… this whole blog thing according to a BW usability study:

• No participant understood the mechanisms associated with RSS/subscribing to a blog – not even the minority familiar with the term “RSS.”
• Few participants even recognized that they were on an actual blog – and once they did, had a very different reaction to the information presented.
• A minority of participants understood how to navigate within the blog itself – with most being confused by areas for recent posts, categories, trackbacks and even the comments and archives functions.

Download the study if you’d like more. Their conclusion is:

broad comprehension is fairly far away – and better design and terminology are essential.  All those tested were optimistic about blogs following the test, with many expressing interest or enthusiasm for what had been a new experience.  However, few felt that the presentation of functionality and navigation was intuitive, and many wondered why more effort had not been put into education.

Oh what to do…

Good intro here… "Social network analysis [SNA] is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, animals, computers or other information/knowledge processing entities. The nodes in the network are the people and groups while the links show relationships or flows between the nodes."

CIO Magazine extends this notion into the realm of knowledge management. Thanks to Corante for the pointer… and other reco for HR professionals.