As I catch up on a lot of what I missed in just a single week during my break for my wedding, I thought I’d round up some of the links that I took a little time to peruse, including a couple that came up since my return but weren’t covered in their own blog posts:
* Nielsen released a slew of lists for 2007 in a free PDF, including: top markets for adults who have read/contributed to a blog in the past month (Austin, Portland, and the San Francisco Bay Area top it off), top TV programs buzzed about online (My Name is Earl tops American Idol!), top box office (Spidey 3 narrowly tops Shreky 3), top played songs on the radio, top DVDs, top CPG products purchased by US homes (amazingly, 7% HAVEN’T purchased toilet paper), and many, many more
* Dope City is now on Facebook. When I was in high school and graphing calculators were the hottest school supply, there was a game called Dope Wars that was designed to run on those calculators. If you’re a buyer for a retailer, you’ll have a special advantage here as the goal is to buy drugs in different neighborhoods at low prices and then sell high. The best part is when you wind up shouting, “Yes! I just got a sweet deal on ecstasy!”
* Google sees if the grass is greener on the not so grassy Knol. As Mashable writes, “This thing is Wikipedia plus focus on the author. That’s
it.” I feel like this is one of those Google offerings in the same vein as Base and Checkout – huge potential, but not enough to stand out on their own.
* Hottest company at MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit last week? Microsoft. Read Lee Odden’s coverage of the new improvements with their ad platform. For those of you who upgraded to Office 2007, it might even make you thankful you spent some time slogging through figuring out the new interface.
* The news of JetBlue’s beta in-flight WiFi was a great sign of what’s to come. Only after reading a few briefs on that did I catch the picture of the plane on the Yahoo Anecdotal blog – not bad branding for Yahoo and Blackberry.
* Word of the Year: w00t (via LostRemote). It’s even geekier than Merriam-Webster’s 2004 word: blog. Definition: “expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word ‘yay”. The biggest loser this year: spelling bees, as participants will soon be asking judges, “Would you like me to spell that with just letters, or with an alphanumeric smorgasbord?”
* I got a kick out of the XKCD comic below, especially after hearing of a friend who was in an “It’s Complicated” relationship on Facebook and then got engaged.
* Wal-Mart’s blogging anew, and while I manage to lambaste them every time I give a presentation on social media, the Check Out blog, at first glance, doesn’t suck. Jeremiah Owyang interviews one of the bloggers. I went back to read some of the recent posts, and I think the biggest problem is that it’s too scattershot to develop an audience. One day it’s on gaming, the next day it’s on environmentally friendly products, and then there’s stuff about the Golden Globes… gaming, going green, Golden Globes – who’s going to wind up following such a grab bag?
* Yahoo Local adds new digg-type features for neighborhood suggestions, via Webware. This is something that has the potential to be really powerful, bringing people together to rally around small changes that can add up. The demo’s for Sacramento and I didn’t see it in my home city of New York, but I’ll have to check back.
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Show comments Hide commentsWelcome back, David!
Great links. And I loved the XKCD comic when I first saw it in my reader. It reminds me of a newly-minted word I read about this weekend. I’m reading the book, “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature” by Steven Pinker. It’s a wonderful treat for a language geek like myself. He writes about how difficult it’s been, after all these years, for our society to come up with a good name for a member of a hetro couple “living together.”
“This is my lover” is kind of “too much information,” and “This is my partner” is too cold. “This is my roommate” is accurate but not complete by a mile. Some clever person coined the term “um-friend” … as in, “This is my — um — friend.” If we all start using um-friend (and I think we should … it’s wonderful!) it has the potential to be 2008’s “w00t!”
First time i get to see your blog. Very impressive.
As to the JetBlue Wi-Fi, Scandinavian airlines was the first airline to offer this on all Long-haul flights. It was about 2.5 years ago. They invested $K’s installing it in their planes but Boeing eventually closed the service (They provided the data link)since it was losing money. It was an awesome service.
-Yoav