Anyone
visiting the Amazon website last week would have been struck by a
letter on the home page from Jeff Bezos informing UK shoppers that they
could now purchase Amazon’s e-reader, the Kindle, for shipping to the
UK.

Cue a flurry of commentary about the death of books and the demise of culture.

Inevitably
we are moving towards a world of digital content. Blu-Ray may well be
the last ever ‘physical’ entertainment media format. But as we move
away from information being stored on physical formats
(CDs/DVDs/paper/books) to data stored in the internet how, in the
future, are we going to look back and understand the state of knowledge
at a particular time in history?

The written word, stored on
parchment and paper and filling libraries and archives has always
provided historians with an evolving and largely permanent record of
human history. Digital content, in contrast, is more fluid and more
concerned with the state of information at the present time. New
content trumps old content. Older information on the web is largely
constrained to out of date blogs and websites rather than a systematic
approach to archiving.

To put this into context the journal Science has found that 13% of Internet references in scholarly articles were inactive after only 27 months.

However, since 1996 a non-profit organisation called the Internet Archive has
been archiving digital content with the goal of building an ‘internet
library’. It has archived over 150 billion web pages and hundreds of
thousands of moving images, live music files, audio and document texts. Its “Way Back Machine” is a useful tool that provides a snapshot of selected major sites over the years. Here is Apple.com back in in 1997.

The
Internet Archive has also partnered with eleven National Libraries
(Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Italy, Norway,
Sweden, The British Library & The US Library of Congress) to create
the The International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC). The
mission of the IIPC is to acquire, preserve and make accessible
knowledge and information from the Internet for future generations.

However,
no single project can ever hope to archive the entire web. The approach
to preserving digital content may not be of major concern today because
the web is simply too new. However as the internet becomes the de facto
reference point for all human knowledge: it will become of critical
importance.

Here’s eModeration’s round-up of what struck us most over the past week or so.  Compiled by our research consultant, Kate Williams.  She’s @emodkate if you want to tag along on Twitter.

THE HEADLINES…

After six long months, YouTube has finally inked a landmark deal
to take Channel 4 content shortly after broadcast. Top pop TV, for
example Skins and Peep Show, will now be available free of charge – and
C4 has managed to cling to ad sales around the content.

More than 10 million UK adults have never used the Internet,
according to a new report for Martha Lane Fox, the government’s Digital
Inclusion Champion. 17 per cent of the population have never been
online – and 4 million of those are already socially excluded. 

“Internet? What the Divvil’s that?”, barked the Duke of Edinburgh,
who acknowledged this week that he was baffled by technology in general
and remote controls in particular, generally lying on the floor to
operate the set instead.

And a rough old week for T–mobile, and anyone else with their their data in the clouds. The company faces sky-high legal bills
after two separate class actions were filed in response to the
‘catastrophic’ loss of data faced by users of their Sidekick
smartphones. The outage appears to have been caused by a server malfunction at Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, who now claim that ‘the majority’ of the lost data is recoverable.

THE LOWDOWN…

Gordon Brown faced the Wrath of Mum this week in a live web-chat on parenting site Mumsnet. Mumsnet members, who have a rep for being both straight-talking and politically-savvy, expressed their disappointment rather sharply – but the PM managed to avoid a stinging slap to the back of his knees.

Swing it, Daddio! The Conservatives, meanwhile, are hanging with Der Youth, having commissioned a 40-second ad on music-streaming service Spotify.
Don’t tell, but had I been picking the Tory best-placed to connect with
the young, I might have pretended not to see doughty Eric Pickles’ hand
go up.

In a Backslash Backlash, the Father of the World Wide Web™ Sir Tim Berners-Lee has admitted that, had he his time again, he would go //-free.

Hoorah! those Facebook Fails just keep on coming. Maxi Sopo, a 26-year-old suspected of bank fraud, wanted all his friends to know what a grand old time
he was having lying low in sunny Mexico. Unluckily, he’d already made
the schoolboy error of adding a law-enforcement official to his list of
friends.

Finland has declared fast Internet access a legal right. From July, Finnish telecom companies will be obliged to provide the nation’s 5.3 million citizens with at least 1 Mbps,
with even faster speeds in the pipeline. “We think it’s something you
cannot live without in modern society. Like banking services or water
or electricity, you need Internet connection,” said an official.

All rather galling for Sweden, who actually broke their bit of the Internet last week. The .se domain was out for a whole hour on Monday, before they fixed it up with a rubber-band and some blu-tak, and managed to jump-start the motor.

I Tweet Dead People. Yes, it’s come to this – the first social media séance, or “Twéance” [baboom-tish], will take place on October 30th, when UK psychic Jancye Wallace will attempt to contact Dead Slebs via Twitter.

No need, I feel for ornamentation – this story speaks perfectly well for itself. The Glo Bible has high-resolution photos, virtual tours, interactive timelines
and a slick, youthful publicity campaign featuring a soft-rock
soundtrack – and is available in the UK for a very reasonable £59.99.

I’mma let you decide whether t’laugh or cry / When Miley Cyrus raps her Twitter goodbye.

And in spookily-related news, Hollywood execs are cracking down on movie-industry celebs who leak info through their Twitter and Facebook accounts. No idea why.Finland has declared fast Internet access a legal right.
From July, Finnish telecom companies will be obliged to provide the
nation’s 5.3 million citizens with at least 1 Mbps, with even faster
speeds in the pipeline. “We think it’s something you cannot live
without in modern society. Like banking services or water or
electricity, you need Internet connection,” said an official. 

The IAB (that’s the US Interactive Advertising Bureau) got a bit shirty
this week in response to Federal Trade Commission’s new guidelines on
bloggers and brands. The new rules, it claims, stifle free speech by
restricting online communication – “the cheapest, most widely
accessible communications medium ever invented” – more harshly than
they regulate trad forms of media.

Social news site Digg says their new ad format,
which allows users to vote ads up or down just as they would other site
content, has surpassed expectations. Those ads with the most Diggs are
super-exposed, whilst the least popular eventually drop off the edge of
the world.

ON FACEBOOK…

Hoorah!
those Facebook Fails just keep on coming. Maxi Sopo, a 26-year-old
suspected of bank fraud, wanted all his friends to know what a grand old time
he was having lying low in sunny Mexico. Unluckily, he’d already made
the schoolboy error of adding a law-enforcement official to his list of
friends.

Threadsy, a site which aggregates users Facebook, Twitter and email, is developing an app which would allows its users to ‘abhor’ an item
in their Facebook feed. Harrumph. As my dear grandmama used to say, if
you ain’t got nothing nice to say, shut up and browse elsewhere …

Other than that, it’s all about the numbers this week for Facebook. In the UK, The ‘Book is cookin’ – it claims one in every seven page views, up 86.1%. And although Google grabbed the official ‘most visited’ title, Facebook was the clear moral victor, with each of their users racking up a higher number of pages per visit.

US stats are also looking good for the social giant. According to Experian, Facebook and MySpace are making like elevators,
with the former’s share of social traffic zooming from 19.9% to 58.6%
over the last year, while the latter’s plummets from 66.8% to 30.3% – a
stomach-lurching 55% plunge towards oblivion.

ON TWITTER…

The People’s Medium?
Twice this week, Twitter users have wielded national influence. First
against Trafigura, who had attempted to place a watertight legal gag
around the Guardian newspaper, banning them from reporting details of
the oil company‘s alleged waste-dumping in the Ivory Coast. But with #trafigura
topping trending topics, the company’s legal reps Carter-Ruck
retreated, leaving the Guardian (and indeed anyone else) free to
publish.

Then, following expressions of outrage from
Tweetmeisters Derren Brown and Stephen Fry, Twitter users jammed the
Press Complaints Commission’s website with a flood of protests
at the Daily Mail’s Jan Moir. In her daily column she’d written that
gay singer Stephen Gately’s death was “not, by any yardstick, a natural
one”. Mass accusations of homophobia forced the Mail to edit
the piece, while several top brands, including Nestle and M&S,
asked for their ads to be withdrawn.

Having recently launched its translation programme, Twitter closed a deal with India’s largest mobile operator,
potentially adding 110m users – many of whom will only ever experience
a web connection via their phones – to its stats.  And Twitter finally
added limited reporting features last week: now users can designate certain accounts as Spam, alerting a “Trust and Safety” team to investigate further.

BRANDS GET SOCIAL…

Last week, some big brand marketers urged their compadres to loosen their white-knuckle grip
on the wheel, and embrace the impact that user generated content is
having on brand reputations.

Luckily,
a slew of brands launched social media campaigns this week, and heading
the pack is First Direct, with a campaign that aims at total transparency.
They’ve opened a real-time site which aggregates all comments (whether
positive or negative), highlights trending keywords, and even provides
graphs so that users can analyse the stats.

Lufthansa has
created a cunning Twitter/Facebook app to support its ‘passion for
precision’ slogan. The app sends status updates from travellers’
Twitter or Facebook accounts at take-off and landing, to promote the
airline’s excellent on-time record.

You tweetin’ to me?
Sony’s Crackle.com partnered with YouTube for a full-length screening
of the cult classic Taxi Driver, which includes the audience’s
real-time Twitter updates.

Audi is launching a branded virtual world and game on Sony PlayStation Home later this year – serendipitously supporting this report,
which points out that German car brands dominate the social media
landscape, while Japanese and U.S. luxury car brands have much to learn.

MySpace is offering their users the chance to see their inner thoughts writ large
on more than 300 digital screens, in a team-up with outdoor-media owner
Titan. The 3-week campaign is called “Step Up to the Mic”, and will
allow users to upload both images and messages to sites in the US, UK
and Ireland.

MTV Europe’s Music Awards have partnered with
teen-world Habbo Hotel to create a virtual ‘awards ceremony’ space. The branded area, where users can hang out backstage and compete for
virtual awards, is already claiming 14m unique visitors per month.

Sony Ericsson’s virtual space-hopper flash mob has
attracted more than 27,000 users to a dedicated microsite, where they
can customise their own virtual hopper, right down to the height of its
bounce.

SOCIAL STATS AND FACTS…

A sheaf of UK stats to shuffle through this week. Nearly twice as many
UK internet users have a social networking profile than did two years
ago – with three-quarters keeping their profiles private, compared to
48% back then. And 41% of web users look at a SocNet site daily, up
from 30% in two years ago, according to Experian Hitwise.

Virgin
finds that 29% of us feel liberated when we lose our mobile/internet
signal in a social environment – but more than a third of us feel highly stressed.   UK ad spend dropped again – but the good news is, the downward trend might be bottoming out. Bellwether reports the lowest fall in 6 quarters, while online ad spend actually rose for the first time since 2008.

VIRTUAL AND GAMES…

With a reported 11m Facebook members playing FarmVille
daily, social gaming goes from strength to strength. And FarmVille’s
maker Zynga is on the lookout
for its next cash cow which, it turns out, might actually be a fish.
According to Trademork, the developer registered ‘FishVille’ last week.
I’m sure it will grow on us.

Speaking of fish (as we were), games giant Electronic Arts has shed a reported $250m on social-gaming company Playfish.
Playfish have amply demonstrated that the social games-virtual goods
combo is a strong one, with their 2009 revenue expected to hit $75m.

eModeration is a community management and moderation agency, and we do these blogs ‘cos we’re very interested in all things social media.  If you like what you read and want some more, just pop over to our other blog.

Take a look at this chart, it shows the Twitter life span of the
tube story that ran on Friday and is a lesson for any customer facing
organisation.  When something breaks online you literally have 3-4
hours to get a handle on things.

As has now been widely reported, on Thursday blogger Jonathan MacDonald filmed a London Underground staff member
verbally abusing an elderly passenger after he got caught in the doors
of a train.   By Friday morning it was on Twitter, we were indeed
tweeting about it ourselves in our office around 10-ish.   By the time I left
work in the afternoon the story was staring at me from the front page
of the Evening Standard, complete with calls by London Mayor Boris Johnson for an investigation.

The FT piece says that you have 48 hours to restore your credibility as
after that people won’t visit your website to get your point of view.
  

Maybe so, but in terms of getting a  handle on the story I’d say you
have four – if that.   If something goes viral in the morning and if
you aren’t proactive by lunch, you’ve pretty much lost
control of what’s going on and you’re just left to firefight.

Well, it looks like they’re going to give it a go. With display ad revenues not enough to make substantial, or indeed any, profit, according to a survey from the Association of Online Publishers, around 70% of online publishers in the newspaper, magazine or TV industries will pay for content online.

I believe that a lot of them will be heading for a fall. There are simply too many of these mass media dinosaurs providing content that is too similar and usually available for free somewhere else. But admittedly, there are some big brands here with sometimes over 200 years of audience building, so surely that will count for something?

The truth is that no one really knows but last week a paidContentUK/Harris Interactive poll showed that only 5% of people who read a news site at least once a month would pay for online access. Though if a free or discounted subscription to a printed paper were thrown in as well, that would rise to 48%. A huge leap. As a Guardian reader to has seen the price of the paper hit the £1 barrier for the first time, I find this idea is particularly appealing and as newspapers make far more money from advertising that cover price, it could be an option. Albeit surely quite a radical one.

In the Guardian last week Andrew Freeman, Harris’s senior technology, media and telecoms consultant, said that this model of combining charges together for printed and digital content is “an interesting possible picture of the future”: “The value of this type of reader, engaged with the content, and (because of the subscription structure) much more likely to be brand loyal, would be massively higher to advertisers. If newspapers can deliver this sort of model – combining the best of both media within a paid-for relationship, then the future will be more certain, but certainly different.”

Unfortunately the bad news is that “when asked the maximum amount they would be prepared to pay, respondents who read a free news site at least once a month gave us [the poll] the lowest possible amount in each category – annual subscriptions under £10, a day pass costing under £0.25 and per-article fees of between 1p and 2p”. I still believe that there are not enough newspapers readers that are loyal enough to a brand for all the current national brands to survive this change, and for those that survive this digital/print mixed subscription could be the way forward but these numbers don’t really seem strong enough to prop up the bank balance of national newspapers, especially when ad revenues will be affected by the fall in traffic that will surely come from putting up a paywall.

Moreover, yesterday in the Guardian, the same poll asks about how those payments would manifest themselves and it would seem that the preferred method of carrying out this revolution (and it really is no less than that) is by no means decided.

53% of consumers said that they would prefer a subscription of up to a year which will upset the champions of the latest media wunderkind- the micro payment. Paying a few pence per article is the method that many have put forward as something more appealing to consumer especially since Google revealed a fortnight ago that they would roll out their out system of micro payments, possibly as an extension of Google Checkout, in a document sent to the Newspaper Association of America in response to a request for paid-content proposals that the association sent to several technology companies.

Freeman says, “”There’s been a lot of buzz about micro-payment recently, and some prominent players, like Google, have moved into this field, but there are massive challenges: and not just technical ones. From a simple business point of view, micropayments are disproportionately expensive to administer until you have an enormous volume and value, it just won’t be worthwhile. If consumers are going to give up their preference for single-subscription payments they can more easily check and monitor, they will need to have real confidence and trust in the brands they use. Micropayments will probably benefit only the very largest of companies.”

Not good news for all but very few large scale media owners who want to make money from content. Long established institutions will fall before a system is settled upon, that much seems certain.

After a short Summer hiatus, the Digital blog from Bristol returns!

What better way to kick off our next installment of digital life from the ‘creative capital of SW England’ than to tell you about the launch of Bristol’s Creative Directors’ Network (CDN), set up by yours truly at 3Sixty and those creative types at Bristol Media (http://www.bristolmedia.co.uk/).

We launched the network specifically to fill a gap for Bristol’s senior designers and creative directors from across the city’s creative and media sectors. The idea is to encourage collaboration and give isolated figures (all Creative Directors, please stand up) the opportunity to share their experiences and sense check ideas and influences.

For the first event, London based creative (and ex-O&M Executive Creative Director), Patrick Collister came to the CDN to speak on the subject ‘What does it take to be a world class creative director?’ Around 30-40 members of the CDN heard Patrick deliver some wise words:

He said to be a great creative director you need 3 things:
3 bits of work – for authority.
A partner – not a boss.
Independence.

He said creative people are welcomed by organisations in times of dire need but are resented thereafter for threatening the status quo.
But then that’s a good thing.

He said the digital revolution provides creative people an opportunity to climb out of the ivory tower and start acquiring responsibilities for every stage of the creative process, not simply the end product.
Anyone need a ladder?

Finally, he said there is also an opportunity for creative people to go further upstream and talk to clients about their businesses from a commercial sense rather than just their communications.
This is a very good thing.
As we all know, great creative ideas are
at the heart of successful businesses.

The night was a great success and was good to spend time with like-minded ‘colleagues’. If you’re a creative director and thinking of visiting Bristol in the future, do get in touch – we’d love to seeyou at our next event..

Geeks (*clever people*) are always right when it comes to technology.  And increasingly I’m thinking they’re also right when it comes to social media.  

For the last few weeks, we’ve been reviewing a whole host of different social media monitoring services in the run up to the Monitoring Social Media event (November 17th) which I’m due to speak at and give some insights into the subject at (Buy tickets here @ special early bird discount here! PLUG OVER)

I won’t go into our full analysis of the highs and lows of social media monitoring services, however one of my colleagues (king of the rubber geeks) made the following comment off the back of us testing a whole bunch of social media monitoring services (who charge £££’s a month).

N.B. this is word-for-word taken from his email to me:

“Out of interest, this is what I do (written very verbosely). It took me under a minute to do this:

(e.g. to look for news about Apple the computer company)

Go to Google and make an advanced search:
http://www.google.co.uk/advanced_search

Enter :
* “apple”, “macintosh” and “mac” in the section “one or more of these words”
* “fruit raincoat jacket” in the “But don’t show pages that have…” section.

Copy the search that’s generated at the top (“apple OR iphone OR mac -fruit -raincoat -jacket”)

then go to:
http://www.google.com/alerts/

paste the search term into the “Search Terms” box, and select “feed” in the “Deliver To” section.

That generates a nice RSS feed that I can use with my RSS reader (e.g. Google Reader) that will be updated with any blogs, videos, images, websites, new articles etc posted.

(here’s a feed: http://www.google.com/alerts/feeds/09809255641325574415/3486854838285467889)

And if I want to see “buzz” over time I go to Google Insights for search
http://www.google.com/insights/search

and paste the same search term in…
e.g.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=apple%20OR%20macintosh%20OR%20mac%20-fruit%20-raincoat%20-jacket&cmpt=q

To see all the information in one dashboard, I add the google reader gadget to iGoogle ( http://www.google.com/ig ) so I see the alerts on my homepage, and also add the google search trends chart (each chart can be added as a separate gadget).
(obviously I could have configured the chart to compare apple to microsoft, or anything else like that)”

There you go.  Give it a go.  It’s the equivalent of £7000 a year’s worth of social media monitoring for free . . .
(I suggest you spend your savings on the upcoming Monitoring social media event! PLUG OVER (AGAIN!))

Today 8,000+ bloggers from 144 countries, reaching 11 million viewers, are joining together to chime in with posts about one single important global issue of climate change. Did you post yet? Visit the Blog Action Day website to find out more about this event.

I take climate change personally. 

I live here on earth, along with you and millions of others, and the damage our planet is facing because of manmade, careless actions infuriates me and makes me sad. Nature has given me some of the most memorable moments in my life. Today in London we have a beautiful day and I am enjoying seeing the sunlight light up the green leaves on the plants I have on my balcony. I’m enjoying looking at the green trees I can see scattered across parks in my neighborhood, and I’m looking forward to pulling away from the computer soon and going outside to enjoy this day before it slips away.

Will these simple pleasures I have from nature be no more in the face of climate change?

What personal moments spent with nature will only be left to memory, if every one of us does not do something right now to prevent climate change from happening?

Will the world leaders gathering at Copenhagen in December for the United Nations Climate Change Conference think enough about their own special personal memories of enjoying the natural environment, to make a true difference in how we tackle climate change issues?

Climate change is personal for me, and for you.

I’ve shared three very personal memories about experiences I’ve had in the natural environment on my blog for Blog Action Day 2009 and hope to read other blogs that tell stories about why they care about climate change.

Please post on your blog about your thoughts about climate change, and let’s see if collective blogging can make a difference on this issue.

Taking climate change personally,

-Lisa

I was at MIPCOM last week and talking to the great and good of the TV industry got me thinking will the internet replace TV or does TV just need to adapt.
For 50 years, the TV industry has delivered content and generated revenue effortlessly along the way. But technology is in danger of pulling its plug.

Can it alter its business model to chart a course into more profitable waters? Or is TV irreversibly sinking?

Advertising revenues are down and news that UK online advertising has overtaken TV doesn’t make the picture any brighter. And look at these facts and figures:
 
•    By 2010 Generation Y will outnumber Baby Boomers  
•    96% of generation Y in the first world have joined a social network
•    Years it took to reach 50 million users: Radio (38 years), TV (13 years), Internet (4 years), iPod (3 years).   
•    Facebook has added 100 million users in less than 9 months
•    The second largest search engine in the world, based on number of searches conducted, is YouTube
•    Only 14% of people trust advertisements
•    Only 18% of TV campaigns generate a positive ROI for advertisers

Okay, TV is facing some serious challenges, increased competition from online channels, new technologies, lifestyle changes – call them what you will – but cheer up, the business model might be on its last legs, but there’s life in the old dog yet…

The answer for TV – embrace the online culture.

One billion consumers use social networks and the like. How can TV tap into the commercial potential of such vast numbers of people? The difficult part isn’t to create a presence; its knowing what presence should be created, where and for what purpose.

LISTEN CLOSELY
The truth is you’re involved in the social media space whether you choose to be or not. Listen in to the online buzz in sites like Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, Flickr, the various forums, communities and blogs. Social media search engines like whostalkin, Social Mention, Delver or tuSavvy are great to use alongside Google analytics to get a good overview of your social media profile and performance. But for a detailed assessment, get a social media reputation audit done by a professional – you’ll be able to use this score as a benchmark for improvement.

START TALKING TO PEOPLE
Word of mouth – one of the most powerful forms of marketing, and it works so well online. If you’ve got something great – everybody’s talking about it. If you don’t – everybody’s talking about it. Before getting involved in social media, think carefully about your approach. Be prepared to share information or even tell the behind the scenes stories.

START SHARING YOUR CONTENT
Social media channels have a rather large ‘Welcome’ mat don’t you know and getting involved in this space will have a positive effect offline too. CBS has attributed a 200,000 increase in viewers in one month to the strategic placement of sample content on YouTube.

USE VIDEO PLATFORMS (DON’T TRY TO COMPETE AGAINST THEM)
YouTube probably presents the biggest threat but also biggest opportunity for content owners. Did you know that currently an average of 20 hours of video is uploaded every minute? OK, some of it may be there illegally, or poor quality, but audiences flock in their droves. Google, YouTube’s owner, has very deep pockets, so while it continues to build its audience, the commercial pressure is off (for now). And legal wrangles over copyright issues are unlikely to derail them, a recent ruling in Universal Music Group’s copyright infringement lawsuit against Veoh Networks shows that social video sites may actually not be breaking any laws at all, at least not in the USA.   

Then there’s Monty Python who placed free clips on their YouTube channel with click-to-buy links underneath. It’s reported that even though the online content is free, Monty Python’s DVD sales skyrocketed 23,000% on Amazon and reached #2 on the Bestseller list.

DISCOVER NEW REVENUE STREAMS
Content has an intrinsic value. Viewers will subscribe to watch it (if it’s good enough), advertisers will pay to be labelled alongside it (for the right price), but the online model is still evolving.

But take Facebook – it has 300m users – audience figures are potentially not the problem – it’s all in the packaging. Subscriptions models using Facebook apps are a potential money-spinner for content owners. Users don’t want to pay multiple subscriptions to access content (hello, Hulu!) so multi-layered content for niche audiences just needs to find suitable homes.

CREATE ONLINE ONLY CONTENT
Broadcasters can show content on their websites, but this is only the starting point. Bebo has a track record for commissioning its own content (KateModern and Sofia’s Diary), funded by tactical sponsorships and product placement.

Joe Hughes,
Yomego – the social media agency.

 Welcome to our round-up of all that’s new, controversial or just plain weird on the social media scene in the last few days.

THE HEADLINES…

The
blogosphere was abuzz this week after the US Federal Trade Commission
ordered Celebs and Bloggers to ‘fess up if they’ve been paid to plug
- or face a whopping $11,000 fine. Commentators were universally aghast
- but it soon emerged that the FTC were less concerned with free cookie-cutters for mommy-bloggers, than with habitual dirty-dealers and paid user-reviews.

And, as a supremely Zen Louis Gray calmly pointed out, its unlikely to change the world: “good people will continue to be good, and bad people will continue to be bad.”

There
were high hopes last week that Google Wave would provide an
invigorating dip in the collaborative ocean – but by all accounts, an
encounter with Wave is as likely to leave you winded on the beach,
with your swimmies round your ankles. Not quite a wipeout – but not yet
the answer to our real-time prayers. As one commentator said: “This will not kill Twitter, Facebook, Ning or [insert social network here].”

(But if you’re still desperate to give it a go, please don’t ask this guy if he’s got a spare invite. He really hasn’t.)

Twitter struggled manfully with the news that the US president had been awarded the Nobel peace prize, as users went Obama-rama.
The microblogging service was simultaneously stretched by the shock
news that Miley Cyrus had deleted her account – a moment which neatly
illustrates Twitter’s encapsulation of the sublime, and the ridiculous.

Mass panic, after 30,000 email accounts were compromised in a phishing scam.
Up to 21 million users of Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail accounts were
warned they were at risk of fraud, after 10,000 passwords were grabbed
by a fake website which was designed to look identical to Hotmail’s.

If you have been scammed, don’t be glum – you’re in excellent company. The BBC reports that America’s top G-Man was himself nearly taken in by an email from his bank, which wasn’t.

It all neatly confirmed the findings of this poll
by moneysupermarket.com, which found that 13 per cent of us have had
their online accounts hacked. Worse, 1 in 12 of us have considered
hacking the account of a friend, colleague or loved one. For shame!

THE LOWDOWN…

70
per cent of employers will have codes of conduct for their employees’
virtual-world avatars by 2013, predicts IT research consultancy
Gartner. It urges companies to impose dress codes on employees’
avatars, to avoid alarming customers
(though if your client-facing staff want to wear bikinis to virtual
meetings, you might also want to rethink your recruitment strategy).

More news from the coalface: it seems that over half of employers now block staff access
to social sites. Only 10% of companies give employees a free rein, and
the rest impose some kind of limit, for example ‘work stuff only’.

Yikes. According to a new Ofcom survey, one in three British schoolchildren thinks search engines like Google rank sites by ‘how true they are’. Which is more disheartening to grownups, I wonder? That news, or the fact that Electronic Arts just hired a 12 year old to script their latest TV commercial? Hmm, tough call.

Two men have been arrested for allegedly using Twitter to help G20 protesters to evade police.
The pair were found in a motel, surrounded by contact-lists, a bank of
laptops, and emergency-frequency radio scanners. Anarchists, huh?
Always just that little bit more organized than you’d think.

FACEBOOK…

Facebook announced its own “Gross National Happiness”
indicator, which analyzes the peaks and troughs of national sentiment
via a mass survey of the emotional tone of their users updates. Key
insights so far: Holidays: good; Death of much-loved public figures:
bad.

Sadly, The ‘Book is not yet allowing continual access to
the results, denying brands a looksie at data which might be useful
when planning campaigns.

On the upside, brands were cheered by the news that Facebook provided the most loyal visitors
to third-party sites, with 20% of Facebook-originated visitors
returning three or four times in a week. This loyalty contrasted with a
lukewarm 16% from Digg, and a turncoat 11% from Twitter.

The
stats for social games on Facebook continue to accelerate – with
app-maker Zynga on track to make $200 million this year. Zynga already
broke records with FarmVille, and now its CafeWorld has gone stratospheric, with figures jumping from zero to 8.6 million in one wild week.

TWITTER…

Twitter co-founder Ev Williams displayed nerves of steel
this week when he declared that he felt no pressure to come up with a
revenue model for the yet-to-see-profit service. He wants to “create
something that you want to see in the world” rather than slavishly
following “some MBA brandishing a business plan”…

His glacial
sang froid was contextualized a few days later, as it emerged that
Twitter is already in talks with both Google and Microsoft to offer real-time tweets in search results. Which would quite probably provide a source of real and sustainable revenue.

Elsewhere on Twitter…

Twitter took two leaves out of Facebook’s, um, book this week. First, there was the launch of a third-party platform offering virtual gifts
– not in themselves new, but the first time that brands have got on
board. Developers AdNectar have already signed up Cadbury, Nestle and
Malibu Rum (my kinda party).

And hot on the heels of Facebook’s crowdsourced translation project, Twitter announced plans do the same, expanding language options from the current English and Japanese (who knew?), to French, Italian, German, and Spanish.

GOOGLE…

Busy-busy for the search giant this week: armed with the news that a full 90% of UK searches are Google-powered, and that Bing’s market share is shrivelling,
Google renewed its assault on the browser rivals IE and Firefox with
the launch of Chrome-for-dummies on YouTube. They hope to persuade the public – many of whom don’t fully understand what a browser actually is – to switch to their shiny new offering.

Google then stepped up to the smartphone plate, with a new Adsense feature which allows advertisers to create ads specifically optimized for ‘high-end smartphones’.

Hmm. It all points to a Cunning Plan to Rule the World,
as Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang point out. Instead of going
head-to-head with Facebook and other destination SocNets, Google is
gradually releasing social spores which will eventually connect to form
a layer of Google across the entire social media universe.

BRANDS GET SOCIAL…

Coke
Zero wins double points this week with the release of its Facial
Profiler – upload a photo of yourself and their Facebook app will scan
the web for your digital doppelganger.

But a grim week for poor old T-mobile, as the hashtag #Tmobilesucks rocketed to the top of Twitter trending topics.

A client who (swearily) tweeted his frustration at Crucial Paradigm’s tardy customer service
was summarily sacked by the over-sensitive webhosting company.
Unfortunately their somewhat disproportionate response was spotted by
Laurel Papworth, whose post detailing the Fail has thus far been seen
by a stonking 24,872 people, and counting.

ITV’s X-factor (an eModeration client, we feel duty-bound to disclose) went socialtastic this week with the launch of a swathe of social media features, including a Facebook app for each contestant and a Twitter ribbon, which users can add to their profile to show their support.

Intel have launched a two-day interactive campaign which allows customers to talk live to Intel experts through banner ads on targeted websites.

And top marks to Estee Lauder, for ingeniously blending RL
with social media: they’ve been giving women free makeovers for their
profile pics – the resulting photographs have company logos in the
background.

SOCIAL STATS AND FACTS…

People who’ve seen a brand’s campaign on social media are 2.8 times more likely to search for that brand. What’s more, click through rates for this group are up by half.

Which might explain why 6 in 10 companies are planning a social media spend in the coming year – placing it second only to email in the Centre for Media Research’s study. Specifically, brands are investing heavily in online communities,
despite the recession: another survey of 400 companies, including
Fortune 100 enterprises, found that 94% were planning to continue their
community spend. Worryingly though, a dismal 70% of companies have failed to use feedback from social media to improve their products, according to a PRWeek survey.

What’s more…

In
a world where the visual volume dial is turned to ten, this data from
MTV seems to show that audiences were more likely to remember subtlety and soft sells.

And
the social web really is a woman’s world, according to this chart,
compiled by Information is Beautiful with data from Brian Solis.

MOBILE…

Damn
– the world just got fatter. Manually typing a search query via
keyboard used up – what, 5 calories? No longer, with the release of
Microsoft’s new app, which allows Bing users to speak a search query or text message.

It’s
not you, it’s them: if your iPhone-toting associates seem even less
focused on your pearls of wisdom than usual, could be they’re orc-battling under the table. TibaME, the MMO for mobiles from CipSoft, are releasing an iPhone app next year.

AND IN VIRTUAL WORLDS…

Counsellors are warning that addiction to online games
is on the up. They blame the rise on a combination of recession (more
downtime) and an increasing tendency for games to be visually
bewitching.

But, as Massively reports, the news is likely to fall on deaf ears
– “gamers will argue almost endlessly over which games are the best,
which ones were most important, what the proper way to play is… but
one thing we almost universally agree on is that we are not addicted.”

Yes, sorry – I did just do that.

So this week we have been playing with that over-hyped new toy from Google, Wave. If you aren’t familiar with it (and at the moment invites are like gold dust!) then it is basically a combination between email, IM and a wiki. You setup a ‘Wave’ and pick who is part of the Wave (from just yourself, up to everyone who uses the system) and then just typing… Content is updated in real time so if multiple users are looking at the same wave at the same time you can see the content being changed in front of your eyes – it’s a little unnerving knowing all those typos could be being watched! Text and gadgets can be added, meaning you could add videos etc, but the overall flow of Waves, at the moment at least, is fairly basic.

Innevitably people are already asking what, exactly, is the point of all this?

And I’m not going to pretend I have the answer… What I can say however is that whilst it doesn’t necessarily do anything wholely new, it does a unique combination of common things. By allowing users to edit text and documents together it provides a neat platform for collaboration, although in reality most businesses would be better off using Google Docs – and quite why more businesses don’t is beyond me (it’s free and very easy to share and collaborate over documents). But it also provides and easy way to keep a threaded conversation that remains persistent – useful for keeping track of projects for example.

Ultimately it’s still early days – it took years for people to stop looking down at Twitter (and many still do) so I wouldn’t expect everyone to jump on Wave just yet but it is encouraging to see Google finally bring something potentially revolutionary to the table, rather than simply gently evolving what others have done (see search, paid search, email and even the failed Knol.

So what do people think? Has anyone got on board yet?