WildBlueSkies - Trends and strategies in Digital Media » Digital culture

And Now, An Exclusive Shopping Network

dhirender — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 18:07:03 +0000

After invitation only social networks, its the turn of invitation-only shopping communities, where an invite from a current member is needed to get access. As GigaOm notes, the team at Ideeli have already raised $3.8 million in funding.
Maintaining exclusivity in membership would attract designer labels which would not like to be seen in just any place over the web, but would still want the ecommerce potential of the internet.
The website offers luxury goods such as clutches and bags from high end designers at discounts of between 50-to-90 percent. Ideeli sends out the members an email every week letting them know what products are going to go on sale in the coming week.
Then, every day a single such product (or brand) goes on sale, and the date and time of the sale is kept a secret. The members of Ideeli are sent an SMS alert or an email when the products go on sale, making this a mix of Web, mobile community and commerce.
Paid members get a one hour head start over the free members.
As the Internet develops, surprisingly, or perhaps not, pockets of exclusivity seem to be gaining emphasis.

A Rival To Wikipedia?

dhirender — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 10:08:43 +0000

Seems Google is creating its own version of online user-based knowledge sharing, which by all indications appears to be Wiki-based with better community features, and quite similar to Wikipedia and About. Here is an indicative sample of a page. As the Google Blog puts it:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.
At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.

However, since one of the objectives here is also to highlight authors, this is one of the distinctions from Wikipedia, where anonymity is one of the most endearing features, and probably one of the features that encourages the community.
Now to see how the Netizens take to it. Would you?

Breaking Up Was Never This Easy

dhirender — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:33:24 +0000

According to a recent survey by moneysupermarket.com, 15% of the 2,194 people questioned claimed to have been dumped by text or email, and about 1% would not mind using a social networking site to dump their partner.
Thankfully, a quarter of those in the most tech-savvy 18 to 24-year-old age group still prefer writing a letter, contrasted with the 4% who take the easy way out, and just stop all communications with their lovers.
One of the most high-profile victims of dumping by text was Kevin Federline, who is supposed to have received the message about Britney Spears filing for divorce while being filmed for a television show.
Sure technology is becoming an integral part of our lives, but what about the good old fashioned way of talking it through?
[Source]

Kylie Goes Social With KylieKonnect – Why?

dhirender — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 09:42:58 +0000

With the launch of KylieKonnect.com, which incidentally coincided with the digital release of her single “2 Hearts,” Kylie probably became the first artist to launch an artist-based social networking platform, which combines mobile phone and web capabilities.
The site which at last count had drawn more than 10,000 users, allows members to create a profile, write blogs, upload photos, download content and connect with other fans all over the world by mobile phone or Web browser. Kylie herself also maintains her own Kylie Konnect profile where fans can access regularly updated news items, blog posts and a photo gallery.
Wouldn’t it have been better to tap existing social networks, and create a niche corner in that social network itself which would also give visibility to a larger audience instead of setting up a separate social network itself?

The Web As Your Personal TV Recorder

dhirender — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 13:59:55 +0000

Horowitz Associates’ recently released report, Broadband Content and Services 2007, has some pretty interesting trends for online video. According to the report:

61% high speed Internet users watch/download online video content at least once a week and 86% do so on a monthly basis compared to 45% and 71%, respectively, in the 2006 study – nothing surprising, given the recent hoopla about online video.
News and user-generated, non-professional content are the most often viewed genres, followed by movie previews/trailers, music videos, and previews/segments of TV shows.
Weekly viewing of full episodes of television shows doubled from last year, with 16% of high speed Internet users watching TV online on a weekly basis. However, and here comes the interesting part – 70% of Internet users who watch TV online say do so because they missed the episode on TV, while18% of these respondents say they watch TV shows online to watch them a second time (after having watched them on TV), or that they watch TV shows online just when they happen to find them or when someone else tells them about them (20%).
Just about 13% Internet users who watch TV shows online say they watch them directly online, and not on regular TV.

Does this mean that the Internet is moving towards replacing your TiVo, or personal recorders?

Web Beats Magazines In Grabbing Men’s Eyeballs

dhirender — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 07:25:45 +0000

Leading European publishers are coming to terms with what teenage boys and men have known for years -the Web beats magazines in grabbing their eyeballs.
Magazine publishers such as London-based media group Emap, Germany’s Axel Springer and France’s Lagardere have seen a split growing in their magazine assets – those for women are surging while men’s magazines drop. London-based Emap said that while underlying revenue in its consumer magazines division fell 6 percent in the first-half, this masked a strong performance by its women’s weekly titles such as Grazia, Heat and Closer which grew 6 percent. Emap blamed a 14 percent slump in its portfolio of monthly magazines on weakness in men’s titles. Emap in fact has invested in India based Next-Gen publishing with a focus towards the online media.
Publishers like Lagardere are hoping to buck the trend by shifting their investment plans towards investing in places like China and Russia where magazine growth rates can be 30 percent, simultaneously looking at Internet options.
Over time, as the web garners more sections of the population (women, children, etc.), we will not surprisingly see a shift towards interactive media.
[Via]

The New New Social Network – Email?

dhirender — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 12:48:17 +0000

Given that a study claims that there are about 1.2 billion email users and 1.8 billion active email accounts worldwide, this should not come as a surprise. Startups Xobni and Xoopit are already working on it, and as this article claims, Google and Yahoo! hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks. Email systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people, ad as this article on GigaOm says pretty much all the contact details that would help to integrate web and mobile.
Yahoo!’s proposed Inbox 2.0 for instance, has several features. First, the e-mail service is made more personal because it displays messages more prominently from people who are more important to you. Yahoo is testing a method that can automatically determine the strength of your relationship to someone by how often you exchange e-mail and instant messages with him or her, while Yahoo Mail could also be extended to display other information about your friends as well. This can be a link to a profile page, and also what Yahoo calls “vitality” –- updated information much like the news feed on Facebook. There could also be simple features that are common on social networks, like displaying a list of friends whose birthdays are coming up, etc.
Both Google and Yahoo have pretty much all these functionalities – add in the email, chat, messaging, etc. features that also exist and it pretty much has everything you need. Couple it with the number of people who regularly visit their web-based inboxes, and they could just about turn the talk about email dying into an opportunity

What’s The Answer To Shortening Attention Spans Online?

dhirender — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 06:55:08 +0000

A survey by Burst Media found that Internet users usually combine surfing the Internet with other activities such as watching television, working, talking on the phone, playing games or listening to the radio.
Eighty-two percent of respondents merged another activity with their web browsing, and 23 percent managed to juggle four or more activites while online.
The answer? Use coordinated messages across a number of different platforms, suggests Jarvis Coffin, CEO and co-founder of Burst Media.
“This is particularly true between television and the Internet – it’s a tactic that has been used by many marketers to great success, and is a cost-effective way to reach target audiences,” he said.
For the research, Burst Media conducted an online study of 2,700 web users 18 and older regarding the activities they engage in while online. [Via]