There is a concept feverishly forming in the social networking space, backed by a well articulated and convincing description of “open social graphs”. Brad Fitzpatrick, founder of LiveJournal, authored the manifesto of sorts, which forms the eye of this hurricane.

Wired also issued an open challenge, entitled Slap in the FaceBook - challenging FB and MySpace to “open up” a few weeks ago, rooted in the same fundamental issue. (more…)

web 2.0, social | No Comments »

The old adage, “go big or go home” just seems so darn… understated …

One week the blogsphere is abuzz with the early screen grabs from Google Health. The next, Google goes beyond Earth into the atmosphere, with the announcement of Google Sky.

I’m betting we’ll see Microsoft’s Black Hole Explorer announcement any day.

maps, diversion | No Comments »

The Sunday NY Times did a great article on AOL, which tangentially chronicled a very key shift rapidly forming in online consumer behavior. John Battelle already excerpted the best bits, copied in the quotes down below.

Important stuff.

To simplify, searching isn’t so obviously the center of the future universe. The old adage of browsing is rapidly taking on a new life form - call it social, call it exploring, call it stumbling - consumers are rapidly adopting new forms of information navigation that do not follow the paradigm of Search. Media is in a fundamental shift beyond search into personal and community exploration and interaction, and it feels (to me) to be approaching a tipping point.

Perhaps the future no longer belongs solely to the Search Box? (more…)

web 2.0, search, social, local social, strategy | No Comments »

I ran across this great image on FaceBook (credit kblabs)

This reminded me of a concept I’ve been mulling around for awhile.

The so-called “wisdom of crowds” has been widely discussed, and is central to the opinion gap that drives real value in local search. However, crowds consistently exhibit predictable “follower style behavior”. The notion of “collective opinion” is not nearly as interesting as the notion of finding the (small number of) voices that are valuable to me. (more…)

social, local social, local shopping, strategy | 3 Comments »

This post by Henry Blodgett presents evidence and good analysis behind the macro shift in market share from traditional media to online. Summarizing, Blodgett notes:

U.S. advertising revenue at all 19 companies increased 8% year over year in Q2, to $13.8 billion ($55 billion annualized). The online portion of this pie grew from $3 billion to $4.2 billion (23% share to 30% share). The offline portion, meanwhile, shrank from $9.9 billion to $9.6 billion (77% share to 70% share). The online companies, in other words, picked up 7 percentage points of market share in a single year.

The breakdown by media type, was also noteworthy:

…the only traditional media business that grew U.S. advertising year-over-year in Q2 was Outdoor (up 13%). Meanwhile:

. Television (cable/broadcast) shrank 1% ($50M)
. Print (magazines/newspapers) shrank 5% ($170M)
. Radio (terrestrial) shrank 7% ($105M)

A different vein of gold for local media might be sitting inside these stats… (more…)

411, Free DA, mobile search, strategy | No Comments »

While John Battelle tracks “jumping the shark” behavior via Time Magazine covers, I prefer Second City Comedy coverage, myself.

I stumbled across this while in Toronto recently. Check out the newest SC Show now running in Toronto. You know you’ve arrived when…

diversion | No Comments »