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Weekly Blogistan Round-Up no. 47/2008

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Blogistan-PanoptikumThe last election parties have ended by now, the USA are looking forward to a new era of fairness and social improvement. Will the new president be able to live up to his promises in times of an economic crisis? Looks like Barrack Obama has got to deal with a difficult situation, as the crisis is now spreading from the finance sector to old economy and car manufacturers start facing serious troubles. Of course advertising budgets will be cut, which will eventually lead to more and more online-money being spent for performance based marketing. A rather bleak scenario for traditional advertiser, but definitely not the worst news for affiliates.

Going against Wikipedia: In Germany, left-wing politician Lutz Heilmann started a massive discussion among bloggers: the genius sued Wikipedia and had them remove the German article which contained among other biographical data on his history with the infamous Stasi. This is the perfect example of new media misunderstood: while Heilmann obviously tried to obfuscate facts, he provoked a flood of articles that give him a worse name than any Wikipedia page ever could have. The net is changing politics faster than anybody expected ten years ago…

Movement vs. Change: I love Seth Godins simple yet very illustrative examples of “the power of the net”. And I'm not a fan of Starbucks:

Simple example: the Starbucks in Larchmont, NY keeps their thermostat at 64 degrees. And the stores in Breckenridge, Colorado keep their doors wide open all winter. If you're raging mad about energy waste, you could say something. And nothing would happen. But if customers organized and ten people said something or a hundred people said something… boom, new rules. The system doesn't know what to do with a movement.

The ugliest thing of the week: it's a mixture between a car and motorcycle, and it combines the disadvantages of both concepts in perfection. I have no clue why Time Magazine has voted the Peravces Monotracer one of the best inventions of 2008. C'mon guys, you can't be serious – even the description sounds like a joke, but it's not:

You really need the mind of a Swiss engineer to come up with a vehicle that combines the lithe maneuverability of a motorcycle with the not-getting-rained-on-ability of a conventional automobile.

This week in Online Marketing: Google started rolling out a Digg-like feature where users can “like” or “dislike” search results. It seems they are currently running a few tests – I'm wondering if this social component will be used for the general index or for tailoring SERPs to the logged-in user's needs. And Twitter still is the new hot sh*t – even though the fail-whale returned today and SMS functionality is not avaible in most European countries, users still love their microblogging service #1. One of the reasons is the large number of mash-ups: the latest one even allows you to tweet from beyond: using twuffer.com, it's possbible to schedule tweets – so if you already know what you're going to do next week or next year, twuffer might be just for you. And if not you might still be able to use the service for marketing purposes :mrgreen:

Video of the week

How do you visualize a car that doesn't even exist yet? Infinity has invested a great deal of time and money to build a flexible and impressive 3D surroundig – this video explains the whole idea:

So much for this week – I wish you great Sunday, see you soon.

Weekly Blogistan Round-Up no. 45/2008

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Last week, photo number 3.000.000.000 was uploaded to Flickr. Yes, they do indeed have a collection of 3 trillion pictures (probably including the private ones) by now. Unfortunately, there are no additional stats or data online. What FlickR needs is a Stats Fiend as Seth puts it.

O'Bama did it

70-something days: that's the remaining time span for George Bush as leader of most superlativious nation in the world. And experts warn that the hardest-disliked president ever might do everything to leave behind a right-wing mess. Indeed, if Georgie wants to damage civil rights, he's gotta do it fast – the New York times issued a warning. I was really amazed by the latest episode of South Park: these guys tend to react pretty quickly, but this was just hilarious: Barrack and McCain working together to stage the greatest heist ever – I just love this kind of weird humor.

Wanna marry rich? Get a LinkedIn Account

Since otherland is still in the making, the rich folks are dwell at LinkedIn's [via TechCrunch]:

Nearly 60% of users have incomes of $93,000 or more. Executives with an average income of $104,000 make up 28% of the 2,000 random users polled for the study. Another 30% are self-identified “consultants” with an average income of $93,000.

That still doesn't make the network mechanics less annoying – but successful entrepreneurs kind of seem to enjoy the pleasure of connection requests.

The SEOsphere week

Twitter is raising a couple of eyebrows: the everlasting fight against spammers taking over has entered the next round, as Twitter announced that there's an internal blacklist: if your account is on the list, nobody can follow you – and it even might get deleted at some point. That's not the way SEOs like it, but whatcha gonna do? The gold rush is over, the master of the walled garden is just doing his duty.

And that's pretty much it for this week. Btw: the one-day delay was caused by my trip to Graz in Styria where Elevate Festival took place. DJ Spooky, Danton Eeprom and gazillions of other DJs rocked the floors. And Professor Lorenz, head of programming of Austrias public (and state-financed) television dropped a legendary line during the opening discussion: “I don't care about this shit-internet”, he said, and indeed he clearly did not intend to make a joke, as he is pretty sure that TV is the most influential media. I'm kinda glad that mighty Moe makes it so easy for average Joe! Thanks for watching reading, c u next week.

Weekly Blogistan Round-Up no. 44/2008

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Yup, I jump into your rss reader completely unexpected and start a ritual on my int'l blog that I've been diligently following on the German langue version datenschmutz for almost two years: from this very Sunday on I'll publish a weekley report on current events in the blogosphere. Of course there will be international and US news, but with a special focus on “good old Europa”, as information exchange between the two continents is not working as well as one might imagine in the era of communication worshippers. It's not a 1:1 translation of my German weekly-roundup, but the title will also include the word “Blogistan” (my kinda-Russion-sounding nom du guerre for la Blogosphere). So enjoy my first English weekly blogistan round-up, it reads a little something like this:

This week in goold old web 2.0 Europe…

Ernerst & Young teamed up with Burda Media to conduct a study [in German] on monetization/feasibility of web 2.0 services. In short, the conclusion offers nothing new: customers are not yet willing to pay recurring fees, traditional mdoels make more money than the social web and future ads will be a lot more personalized. Like I said: nothing new in here.

But this connects smoothly to the next news: Facebook might be needing money sooner than expected, as the social network is growing “too” fast while not even making enough money to cover it's monthly costs, left alone development. Good luck with that: may the hope for better times be with FB! In times like these investors favor short-term return strategies. But Dubai might offer a solution, and that's where CFO Gideon Yu travelled recently – probably not just to ride the camel.

In Other News

Consulting in times of crisis: Consulting Pulse interviewed marketing legend Seth Godin on the difficult topic of “consulting in times of crisis”. btw: you can't satisfy them all.

The MTV conspiracy: CrunchGear reports a strange case of civil un-disobedience: MTV is seriously bleeping out the names of filesharing networks when playing Weird Al Yankovich's “Copyright Song”. Hey, once you had an impact on pop culture – lighten up! Bittorrent, E-Mule, Kazaa… that was not so hard, ey?

Le video du week

Vote, vote, vote. Or don't vote? Or what the heck is Stevie Spielberg trying to tell the public in his new short movie? Work of a genius, check it out and watch till the end:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX40RsSLwF4[/youtube]

This week it was like that / and that's just the way it was. Thanks for your priceless attention, read me again on Monday.

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