Weekly Blogistan Round-Up no. 23/2009
This weekly round-up comes with a built-in 24 hours of delay, as the author was extremely busy during the last weekend launching the Austrian Internet Council [site in German]. This was an amazing proof of the power of social media: within the short time span of 5 days we our project was the cover story on ORF FutureZone, Austria's biggest Tech News site. Crowdsourcing is great, but it can be quite time-consuming, especially when there's a lot of interest and involvement. So, without any further ado, let's jump right into this week's hot social media topics!
Ignore everybody!
breas! Hugh Macleod of Gapingvoid published his first book titled Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity
The first rule of business, is never sell something you love. Otherwise you may as well be selling your children.
The Real Pip-Boy Deal
The Pip Boy saved me various time – while I was strolling through the post-nuclear wastelands of Fallout 3. But the nifty little arm-computer might soon enter real life: Engadget shows pictures of an impressive flexible OLED-Display:
The 4-inch organic electroluminescent display sports up to 1.67 million colors, QVGA (320 x 240) 100ppi resolution, and can be bent to a curvature radius of about 2 inches. Hopefully, this doesn't become a must-have fashion accessory any time soon: while it's perfectly appropriate attire for post-apocalyptic wastelands, we don't know how well it'll fly at the sorts of high society social events we normally frequent.
Seesmic Desktop: no Air required
TechCrunch interviewed Seismic founder Loic LeMeur – and the most charming Leena Rao managed to make the man talk:
According to Le Meur, Seesmic will soon be offering a browser based client. This offering is actually appealing, considering that Adobe?s AIR platform has some strange UI bugs and quirks and tends to use a good amount of resources on computers. And Seesmic will also launch an iPhone app, which is currently under wraps along with the web-based product.
Jeremy's own Affiliate-Network
Jeremy Shoemaker has been writing about affiliate marketing for quite some time; but recently he launched his own affiliate-network and published a post about his experiences. I'm really curious about his plans:
Sure I hear you? your thinking “Why the hell would you pay people to sign up for a free course?” It's a great question and I think when the dust settles around the shoemoneyx.com program I will write all about it, why I did what, and what exact effect it had. I do have a method to my madness but it's not as many have guessed. We will see if it works but that is for another post
Twitter is becoming infrastructure
Regular Geek posted an interview view on twitter – his main point: Twitter is shifting from an online service to a basic infrastructure upon which early adopters are constructing an eco-system:
So, why is marketing and economy so important to Twitter becoming infrastructure? Without an economy building on top of Twitter data and functionality, Twitter would just be a toy. With people researching the data that is generated from Twitter, it becomes much more important. In order to monetize the system, they can sell the data, but monetization becomes much easier when you become ubiquitous.
Can't argue with that – with all the various mash-ups and the growing interest in real-time search, it seems that Twitter is here to stay. At least for now.
Bing beats Yahoo
Microsoft's new search engine hat a great start: TechCrunch reports that Bing overtook Yahoo – now the question is: will this trend last or will the wearer of the ancient headband #2 leap for a comeback?
The company?s analysis for Thursday finds that in the U.S. Bing overtook Yahoo to take second place on 16.28%, with Yahoo Search currently at 10.22%. For the sake of comparison: Google?s U.S. market share is pegged at 71.47%, and its worldwide share at a whopping 87.62% (vs. 5.62% for Bing and 5.13% for Yahoo).
Content ain't king
“The idea that ‘content is king' in blogging is total bullshit” says Viral Garden:
Every day I read hundreds of blog posts. And every day, I see dozens of truly GREAT posts that get no comments. Every day I see dozens of pretty good posts that get dozens of comments and have vibrant conversations.
The difference? Most of the bloggers that write those pretty good posts are also pretty good about leaving their blog and interacting with people on OTHER sites. They comment on their reader's blogs. They tweet their links on Twitter. They are ACTIVELY social with social media.
Interesting thesis… I'd say that both factors come into play. Social media spamming will just piss people off unless you got some stories that are actually worth watching your moves.
Pic of the week
I admit: I just couldn't decide between these two beautiful shots. A direct path was taken by eyesplash Mikul, it's a free-handed shot. The seconded picture portrays a female lying wolf in the zoo of Z?rich and was taken by Tambako the Jaguar:
Video of the week
Boats are only people – pretty unreliable ones, to be exact. These love boat passenger are in for a wet treat – feel the pain of these great sailors:
This is the end – of this week's round-up. Thanks for stopping by and offering me some of your Whuffies. Let's do it like this: I'll keep posting and you'll keep coming back and drop a dime from time to time :mrgreen:
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Nothing like listening to old-school dubstep mixes and surfing the net on a lazy Sunday afternoon – even though I have to admit that turning up the music is kind of my only option right now, since the new Samsung LCD screen I bought yesterday experiences some kind of identity crisis, confusing itself with some kind of alien sound-device by producing a constant annoying noise. But enough complaining, let's turn our heads and look back on the 
How you're doing? I hope you had a great start into the new year, and believe me: 2k9 is gonna be a wicked year for web 2.0 folks, and I mean “wicked” in the good, old-school jungle way. I do have the impression that the European commercial community is just waking up, and I'm seriously looking forward to bigger budgets being spent on web 2.0 advertising as this will boost the whole scene. My personal 1st of January had a very nice surprise in stall for me: datadirt received a Pagerank update and is now proudly sporting a 5.
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.