The Hype is Real: Social Media invade the Inc. 500

Posted on by John

The folks at the UMass Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research have released results of a study involving a telephone survey of companies in the Inc. 500 for 2006. They got 121 participants, including “4 of the top 10, 7 of the top 25, and 22 of the top 100 companies” in the list.

Their conclusion?:

This research proves conclusively that social media is coming to the business world at a
faster rate than many anticipated. It also indicates that corporate familiarity and usage of
social media is racing far ahead of what many have predicted.

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Is User Generated Video a Commodity?

Posted on by John

I’ve been looking over the last few months at vendors and platforms in the user contributed video space. It’s become, especially since the infamous Google acquisition of YouTube, a rather crowded category, with a number of vendors vying for your uploads. (Ever since “You” were named Person of the Year everyone wants your content).

It seems, though, that the basic “upload, transcode, display, embed” cycle YouTube made popular has become something of a commodity, in the sense that it is offered by a broad number of sites, with very little appreciable difference in quality. (Take a look at Chris Pirillo‘s comparison of Christmas Videos on “Soapbox vs. YouTube vs. Break.com vs. Vimeo. vs. Jumpcut vs. Blip.tv vs. Metacafe vs. Revver vs. iFilm” for example – or “YouTube vs. Google Video vs. Revver“).

But what does it mean for something to become a commodity?

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Back to the default theme

Posted on by John

Last Update: Decided to abandond Flickrfy_cats as it seemed like filters weren’t being applied to calls to list_cats() or wp_list_cats() anymore. Instead I’m using a wigetized version of the Category Tagging plugin. (Making it into a widget just for placement in the appropriate sidebar but otherwise leaving the call to cattag_tagcloud(); pretty much alone).

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Updated Again: Thanks to the Linkblock widget and a bit of light reading in the WordPress Codex (to change a function call from wp_get_links() to get_links()) I am back up and running, with blog links in the sidebar. Now to get back to Erik’s flickrfy_cats plugin, which is also broken.

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Updated: Turns out it is the Links widget I was using in the left sidebar to display a blogroll of blogs by other Optaros folks. So, back to my real layout, but without those links until I get it rewritten to account for the changes in 2.1. (Now the categories of links are in the same table as categories of posts?)

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If you read Open Parenthesis by coming to the site, rather than in an RSS reader, you may have noticed it just reverted to the default theme.

I just upgraded to 2.1, and apparently my theme’s customizations aren’t playing well with some of the changes between 2.0.7 and 2.1 of WordPress.

I will reset it to the theme y’all are used to as soon as I can.

digital.life

Posted on by John

The folks at the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) have been publishing a series of reports about the internet since 1997. The latest, from December 2006, is called digital.life.

As they describe it:

. . . the 8th in the series of ITU Internet Reports, entitled digital.life, begins by examining the underlying technologies for new digital lifestyles, from network infrastructure to value creation at the edges. In studying how businesses are adapting to fast-paced digital innovation, the report looks at how they can derive value in an environment driven by convergence at multiple levels. Moreover, a great challenge lies in extending access to underserved areas of the world. In light of media convergence, a fresh approach to policy-making may be required, notably in areas such as content, competition policy, and spectrum management. And as our lives become increasingly mediated by digital technologies, digital identities (both abstract and practical) take on a new dimension. Concerns over privacy and data protection do not seem to be sufficiently addressed by today’s online environments. In this context, the report examines the changing digital individual, and outlines the need for improving the design of identity management mechanisms for a healthy and secure digital world.

It’s well worth a quick read, if “quick” can be applied to a 135 page report by an NGO (and that’s without the detailed statistics, which are available for purchase).

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Is Apollo the future or RIAs?

Posted on by John

Apollo Mike Chambers recently posted an updated Apollo presentation on his blog.

If you’re not familiar with Apollo, it is a cross-platform (purportedly Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux) application which will run applications developed using HTML & Ajax as well as Flex/Flash applications: a rich internet application container of sorts. It’ll also understand the PDF format and be able to open PDF documents.

The interesting challenge, I think, is whether Apollo, or something like it, could replace the web browser as the fundamental container for internet applications. (A corollary question: if it could, would that be a good thing?)
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