“May the good luck / shine a light on you / may every song you sing / be ever with you!” Thanks a lot for constantly stopping by at my blog – I just started datadirt this year and I'm pretty amazed by all the feedback I got so far. I promise that I'll keep things fresh and keep you folks updated about the latest in web 2.0 and online marketing. Thanks for your support, have great holidays! (And treat elks gently!)
Ready from some good ole fun after the dreadful distress of buying all your X-Mas presents? Word your way through Dan's list of Friday Funnies and meet the Tiddy bear! He'll make you feel more comfortable than a pint of pure Christmas spirit or this weekly round-up. So sit back, relax and keep wondering about the miracles of modern web society.
TechCrunch heard an interesting rumor: supposedly Digg is working on their own ad system by adding a social mechanism to determine the click price:
One experiment Digg is working on, says one source close to the company, is a self service advertising product that will be somewhat similar to Google AdWords, but with a twist. The product would insert advertisements into the Digg news stream (presumably clearly marked). Where those ads end up, and how much an advertiser pays per click, would be based on user feedback.
Sounds like a pretty smart plan – theoretically it might improve overall ad quality a lot. On the other hand I highly doubt that user are willing to cast their votes on ads. It's much more likely that Digg-mobs embrace a more profitable kind of business model.
If you want to become a millionaire, try to serve others first. If you offer them something of true value, the will appreciate your work and eventually pay your really good. Work through Crap:
C riticism
R ejection
A ssholes
P ressure
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vldjedAashA[/youtube]
It's all simple truths, cut down to a 3-minute TED presentation without any unnecessary bells and whistles. And there's good news, too: try to have fun, will you? [via Blogpiloten]
People usually are around this time of year and Seth has picked out some ideas like collecting money via twitter or getting peeps to sign up for some new service. That's the true spirit of X-Mas: during other seasons you could never directly buy attention without looking like a complete loser, but hey, it's Christmas: that seems to render any kind of begging and buying the G-love absolutely acceptable! Don't worry though: I'll just give some of my yearly income to charity, but I won't ask you, my readers, to send me money or to sign up anywhere. If it was a successful year for you, pick some humanitarian cause that appeals to you. Give them some of money directly: finding a proper project is easier than ever before – there are literally millions of Facebook groups trying to improve the world, Africa, animal rights, human rights etc. I won't and can't tell you what good deed you should spend your hard-earned bucks on.
Tangible Interaction's graffiti wall takes the illegal part out of spraying house-walls. The only problem is that these interfaces are probably far too expensive to be put up on every city wall. Still, using them looks like a lot of fun:
And there's more greatness on Vimeo: Scott Beale of Laughing Squid test-drove his brand-new Canon 5D Mark II against mighty Doc Popular's Yoyo tricks: the sequence is short, but watch it in HD on Vimeo and behold the incredible video quality:
So much for this week – one more round-up to go, and we're done with 2008 or “the year of 140 letters” as some like to call it. So good luck with grabbing your last-minute X-mas presents, have a nice Sunday and great holidays, see you next week.
Got any news you'd like to read about in my weekly round-up of current blogosphere events?So don't hesitate – just click here for the contact form and give me an update on your issues: Give me input!.
I recorded this 1-minute introduction video for all my fellow tweet-geeks: micro blogging is great, and it's even more fun if you can put a face to the name. So this is how datadirt (that would be me) rolls:
This week, Swedish Start-up Company Twingly launched its very own top-blog lists in twelve different languages. Their blog search is delivering really good results, so it seems that the near future might look rather bleak for Technorati – and the best part is that my main blog datenschmutz ranks #44 in the German-language list!
The overall winner of the new rating is – what a surprise – Technorati. And this is what Michael, or in this case Robin, thinks about the new charts:
Twingly, the social blog search engine that prides itself in being completely spam-free, has launched BlogRank as a way to identify the 100 most important blogs in 12 different languages based on a proprietary ranking system. It
Main bloggerilla topic of the week: the new WordPress aka 2.7. Matt and his team change a lot in the backend – it's like Obama said: “Change, we can do it!” What O did not mention though was the fact that change makes most folks rather uncomfortable. In that respect, it's more like TLC sang-rapped: “Don't go chasin' waterfalls / listen to the rivers and the lakes that you're used to.” In other words, I've heard a lot of user complaining about a so-called uglification of the CMS. My five cents: so far I've only updated half of my blogs, and I really dig the new look and all the new features.
A lot of hard programming work has gone into this release: every backend-screen is customizable, so it should be easier than ever to fit WP to your needs. Furthermore, this updating-round is the last manual one: from 2.7 or “Coltrane”, WP updates do happen on the fly without any ftp-uploads (just like the current plug-in update function). This new release is so full of features that you might want to take a look at the official WordPress Blog. This screencast sums up all the new blogging-goodness:
I really dig this guy, not just because he's funny and a good writer – I also learned a great deal from him. And I can only fully endorse this quote from an article about blogging and not selling out:
I get probably 10-20 solicitations a day to write about someone
“I got one line on the Sopranos…that makes me more gangster than you!” So Leon take that freaking break. And can anybody please tell why it's exactly two? This man did thorough research for his one-line appearance, and then he turned his hard work into one of the funniest videos I've seen in a long time:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCx8xjHMt_M[/youtube] Read more
It's been a week full of surprises: Pownce closed pretty unexpectedly, while Twitter is still growing at an amazing rate. And a new trend finally has been turned into an API, or rather two APIs: Google as well as Facebook try to decentralize social networking and at the same time establish their own platforms as the central social hub. I am really looking forward to buddypress – in my opinion, “hosted” services are fine as additional traffic streams, but no online professional should put his main assets into third-party hands.
Last week, Google started the public beta phase for its new service friend connect: Basically, we're talking about a social API here: there's a unified login via Big G and Open ID. The implementation is simple, there's a couple of ready-made widgets, but actually it's all about the community now, who is expected to build their own apps. Is this going to be a threat for Facebook? The future will show.
The new service is FB's version of a portable single-sign on. While OpenID is great in theory, I totally agree with Dan:
Truth be told, I
“The answer is the same as always: the system!” Furthermore there is, as we all know, no right life in the wrong one. So actually it's not a big surprise that Kiki and Bubu, monochroms ever-motivated fighters against capitalism, crave some Christmas carol spirit:
[youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBP5OPLzlq8[/youtube]
Read more
Microblogging-platform Pownce announced its shutdown on 15th of December yesterday. The company was bought by Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type and TypePad. The team will continue to work for Six Apart on new projects – seems the company saw no light at the end of the infamous twitter-tunnel: while Pownce hat a couple of unique features to offer, the community never reached the critical size that turns microblogging-fun into a profitable business.
Pro-users who had to pay 20$ per year for premium features will be notified via e-mail, a new export features enables powncers to export their blog for future re-import into TypePad and/or WordPress, check the official pownce blog for details. My personal grief is strictly limited, as I wasn't a regular user. Why would I? Contrary to blip.fm I didn't see much value in maintaining a second microblogging account; Twitter is already consuming enough of my time. And I was not the only one to abandon ship:
I