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The Facebook Etiquette

Markus — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:46:11 +0000

Due to a project we’re doing at the office, we’ve been talking about net etiquette, or netiquette as some smart-asses so funnily join it. I remember that we were actually educated about the topic when I was in school in the mid-nineties and people took the web quite somberly and seriously. Since the coming of MySpace and web 2.0, seems like the web is finally a big enough place to not care as much for netiquette – and naturally that’s thanks to moderators as people have to self-moderate their output if they want to be published.

Still, Neatorama brought this up in my feeds and I liked it. Apart from it being totally correct, it also is damn funny and excellently executed:

4th of 5 Reasons why printed media will evolve

Markus — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:30:35 +0000

Note: This is the fourth part of my week-long series of posting 5 reasons why I think the printed media will have to evolve and what I think it should evolve to. The steps will be posted daily starting with this on a Monday, and ending on this week’s Friday.

If you missed the first part “Time is of the essence”, you can find it here.

The second part “Advertising dollars are being spent elsewhere” is here.

The third, expected part “Ecology and global warming” is here.

4. Less news for more money

Now that we’ve settled the whole ecology stuff, we can get back to the fact on how the web will force evolution towards the printed media. Facebook just gained its 200 millionth user and if the idiom about the monkeys and the typewriters is in any level accurate, the service alone should produce a good novel every day. Now, multiply that with every website in the world and quickly you have the source where all news comes from.

Surprisingly many of those are empty, hmm.

This leads us to the next issue, amount of content. With papers there’s always the paradox of having enough content to make printing feasible. With that kind of approach added to the requests of advertisers to have different things for different people we end up receiving our daily newspaper turned into an ad collection with random articles here and there. I’ve noticed that browsing through the evening newspaper in our office doesn’t take long and even if I try to read every single interesting bit there, I’ll finish the task rapidly. Not to mention the fact of how many news I don’t want to read because they do not hold any informational value to me.

Magazines however have usually more, they are more timeless. As I mentioned in the first part of this series, the newspapers totally lose the fight with time against the web – and thanks to the web, even television is faster than the newspapers. To fight against this self-created paradox, newspapers have their own websites (that all seem to have the same news from Associated Press) proving their print version even more futile.

But magazines, they usually have articles and some real journalism there, they are kind of like blogs – they have exclusive things, such as opinions, points of views and relevance. Something the newspapers cannot do in this age of “who’s first?” – but even magazines can’t compete with the richness of the web. You can have points of view from all continents, opinions from different backgrounds and pretty much all the information is available online that you see relevant. The best part however is the social part, people are commenting and criticizing the articles, long or short, but the comments usually always are longer than the news itself.

The best part in all this, is the fact that in time, I have gathered a large collection of sites and feeds that I constantly follow and they are waiting for me every morning being fresh, ecological and totally relevant. Even my morning comics arrive to brighten my mornings. Unlike the newspaper that is huge in size and 80% of the information in it are completely not interesting to me. When we think of the cost of subscribing to a newspaper versus the price of an internet connection (even if we’d think that this would be the only reason for me to buy a web connection and didn’t have it at work, cafes or anywhere else) the price would still be pretty much the same – for less news.

So, how can the printed media do something to make the situation better? The same way web sites eventually create traffic – do some journalism, drill deeper to the content, make something exclusive and try to offer a relevant experience. Most newspapers have huge media corporations as owners and they have hundreds of writers – why I can’t I subscribe a more personalized newspaper with the journalists I want to hear from? Could I just buy articles from one journalist?

Currently it feels like most newspapers just copy (and translate) news from the web and each other (after copying it from the web) and I’d really not want to pay for that what I’ve already read online. Sure it’ll function now, but it’s a bit like starting an inbred family.

Won’t work in the long run.

Check out tomorrow’s and the last post of this series, “The penetration of the internet”.

The Genius behind MacHeist

Markus — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:32:29 +0000

MacHeist 3 just ended yesterday with over $500k donated

MacHeist is something I’ve been a part of since the beginning and finally they are getting the big press they should have been receiving since the first MacHeist. Of course they’ve been around in the media, but with the coming of Twitter and the final breakthrough of Facebook has fastened the media circle around them. I personally got 12 people to buy the MacHeist software bundle plus myself. I got myself a good deal I’m glad to promote and we also donated money to charity. Everybody wins.

Wired wrote a long article (long only in web terms) about the team and genius behind MacHeist, I suggest you go and read it if you’re at all interested in business models, web or software sales in a different way. I am.

MacHeist’s League of Extraordinary Dropouts Reinvents Software Sales

2nd of 5 Reasons why printed media will evolve

Markus — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:30:35 +0000

Note: This is the second part of my week-long series of posting 5 reasons why I think the printed media will have to evolve and what I think it should evolve to. The steps will be posted daily starting with this on a Monday, and ending on this week’s Friday.

If you missed the first part “Time is of the essence”, you can find it here.

2. Advertising dollars are being spent elsewhere

The Daily WTF (brilliant blog, by the way) did an April fools skit on their site, stating that they’d received venture capital money and made millions upon millions of dollars. This was a load of bull, but their post had an interesting bit:

With Web 2.0, we saw the collapse of every major newspaper and magazine. These days, your local newsstand is just as likely to carry Nickel Naks and Whiz Bars as they are a paper periodical.

But content isn’t just going online, it’s growing online. Experts say that a million new blogs are created each day and, within a year, that number will grow to two million a day. With such a massive influx of content, no one will have time to read anything. That is, unless it’s 140 characters or less.

The last part hit me. “With such a massive influx of content, no one will have time to read anything. That is, unless it’s 140 characters or less.” Although that’s a joke about Twitter‘s 140 symbol post limit, it has a point. People have gone lazy. Not just because there’s so much content everywhere, but because it’s been made easy for us.

There are previously mentioned infographics and videos everywhere, most news items also tell the same thing in video so we don’t have to read anymore. The reason this series is split in five posts during five days is simply because of the reason, that after the first post I was past 600 words and I realized that no one would read it since it’s so long. So, because the web offers us such an easy way to consume data in pretty much any way we want, we spend a lot of time online.

This means, that the advertisers follow the users.

Bring on the economies of scale

Before, the printed media had all the information about the users, they had address and profiles. They were a machine, that was selling ads like mad, because they were pretty much the only media that was democratic in the sense that anyone with 5 dollars could buy an posting in the classifieds while the big daddies could spend millions in their massive campaigns. They reached hundreds of thousands of people or you could target in specific magazines that catered to a more limited audience.

You see where this is going? I thought you would.

Then came the web. It was crude at first, offering mainly information in the form of business cards online, but web 2.0 changed everything. People were participating and giving up their information in different medias. Suddenly we knew pretty much everything about our users. Google indexed our e-mails and Facebook even knew who our friends were. Now advertisers had the option of targeting millions of people globally that shared the same interests. Facebook has 175 million users, from which they know pretty much anything. So if I want to advertise my product to 28 year old men in Helsinki that have over 500 Facebook friends, I can do it.

You still can get results with pennies, because the web also brought measurable results. Now we have statistics and showing advertisements in the forms on banners that get paid by the number of views are becoming dinosaurs from the Web 1.0 era. now we pay when someone clicks our advertisement and finds themselves sucking in our wonderful products. The big daddies can cover millions of people with the same money they spent earlier to reach only hundreds of thousands. And the best thing about the web? There are no specific days you can advertise, no renewals, no hassle. You make a good “campaign” and it might live on for months or even years.

Thanks to the new wave in augmented reality (AR), print ads are seeing a renaissance – mainly thanks to the fact that they show content from the internet which could be viewed even without the magazines.

Still, the numbers show it and have shown it for a long time to my eyes. Online advertisement spending is growing day by day and all other numbers and medias will keep on falling, and I can’t see anything in the near future that could trump the power of the web. Which is why I find it ridiculous, that so many companies still plan their television and print campaigns first and then, and only then start thinking of what they should do online to support their print ads (and use the little that’s left of their money.)

Do you know any new, cool things done in other mediums than the web – that have provided measurable results?

Twitter Updates for 2009-03-30

Markus — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:00:00 +0000

Recessionomics: does downgrading to dial-up save money? – And wasn’t time money? http://is.gd/pyWS #
Tim Burton Talks Alice In Wonderland – Now there’s a match made in heaven. http://is.gd/pyXv #
New site lets you rate your friends, enemies—but why? http://is.gd/pyB4 #
Finally starting to get my blog back to shape! Check it out in http://www.varha.com! #
Study: action video games give eyesight a boost – Ars Technica – And hand-eye coordination – and … http://bit.ly/10I6Ie #
The Perfect MacBook Mini: Leak, Concept, or Fake, We Love It Anyway – http://bit.ly/3DeYmh #
CTIA: Skype for iPhone – It’s official \o/ http://bit.ly/fVka #
Lauren TV Commercial – CBP + Microsoft is at it again. I could do the same for Jaguar and Aston Martin. Any takers? http://bit.ly/190uxJ #
Obama gets tough with carmakers (BBC) – Finally. http://is.gd/pFa3 #
Can Anyone Be Your Facebook Friend? http://is.gd/pEZ1 #
I think 10 hours is enough for today, it’s time to go and build bathroom furniture! (btw. Check the blog http://www.varha.com) #
Coming Soon: The Hulufication of YouTube? http://is.gd/pG9P #
O hai – It’s the iRazr! Motorola Evoke QA4 gets official http://is.gd/pGRI #