This isn’t a shock warning about the Christmas menu, it’s all about how you interpret the law. On the 24^th of November the European Union approved a directive (PDF link) that, if interpreted in its most literal sense could have a radical impact on the digital industry in Europe. For those not aware of the announcement it relates to the EU requirement for users to give their consent (having been provided with clear and comprehensive information) prior to any information being stored on their machine… which basically means cookie data. In other words, if an advertiser or website is to place a cookie on a user’s machine the user must explicitly agree to it.

The IAB UK have commented on this change in the wording for the Directive and feel that the Directive “offers enhanced user privacy without jeopardising the effective functioning of the internet”. This is based on the IAB’s interpretation that the Directive intends to suggest that it is sufficient to take a user’s default browser settings as consent. This interpretation is of course an optimistic view of the Directive from a body whose role it is to represent the Interactive community.

So, what happens if users must give their consent first? Imagine the home page of any portal and just think how many different cookies are served. Analytics, individual ad-servers for each of the ad units, the portals own cookie logic. That’s a lot of consent to be gain….

There still appears to be ambiguity in the wording of the Directive as well. One section talks about browser security & privacy settings being sufficient to meet the new legal requirements whilst further into the lengthy document, it re-confirms the need for prior consent. Clearly lawyers will be getting rich over the numerous legal battles that will unfold over the coming months and years….but that is unlikely to be the first time that’s happened.

So, we first have the potential impact to the user experience or the clear alternative which is to move away from the extensive use of cookies within advertising. The area that could become hit worst is of course the display media world given that there is still a significant reliance on post-view tracking to support campaigns. The alternatives…well there are still some. For any pure direct response advertising the reliance on same session conversion tracking would be a natural solution and many of the major FMCG advertisers are already tracking offline sales against online adspend using non-cookie based methods.

Such a change would of course be a backwards step given that engagement reporting over the whole advertising journey is currently key to understanding performance. Perhaps a change in the law will create an even greater need for advertisers and agencies to push the boundaries of how advertising is conceived so that the focus is more on interaction rather a direct action.

Creating a conversation rather than simply shouting is going to be even more important than it is today. Don’t let this law stop you leaving out the cookies & milk though.

Update: If you want more information on this legislation and its implications then LBi’s John Williams has written a detailed post on his own blog here and a follow-up specifically discussing the implications for online businesses and users here.

 Welcome to eModeration’s round-up of all that is intriguing,
alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams
(@emodkate).

Next update is on Monday, when we’ll
cast a beady eye over Facebook, Twitter, and much more – see you
then!

THE HEADLINES
…

Blimey – the average American consumes a supersized
portion of 34 gigabytes of content a day, according to a University of
California study. Americans spend 11.8 hours on various media – often using multiple screens
simultaneously – and are served a hefty dollop of 100,000 words every 24
hours.

No surprise, then, that IT experts and environmentalists are
increasingly concerned about the rocketing
energy spend (and resulting carbon emissions) produced by the explosion of
social networking, streaming video, and other band-width heavy applications.
Google has made and met its commitment to designing reduced energy consumption
into its data centres – but much more needs to be done by the myriad media and
info enterprises who inhabit the datasphere, experts say.

Elsewhere, much
of this week’s news was Google-shaped: the search giant bestrode the headlines,
as their deal with Facebook and Myspace completed a real-time
search triumvirate (Twitter signed a while back). 40% of Googlers are
looking for the latest news about a given search term – the deal means they’ll
receive results from all the big social media sites as well as the usual list of
results, effectively turning Google into a breaking news service. How time does
fly – it seems only a few short months ago that Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, was
languidly up-summing Twitter et al as “poor man’s email systems”.

On the
thorny subject of online news, Google this week hinted that they’d found a
“potential solution” to the ongoing questions over how news media should support
themselves. Their ‘Living
Stories’ tool claims to organise news as it develops within each story,
summarizing and contextualizing it on one page, and highlighting new content to
avoid repetition.

Google hopes to make the tools available to news
organizations for their own use – but didn’t expand further on how this would
satisfy Rupert Murdoch, whose vocal campaign against Google’s ‘theft’ of his
news is creating its own headlines on a daily basis. Mr Murdoch, in any case,
seems intransigent in the matter of paid content – News Corp this week hooked up
with a consortium
of magazine publishers to launch a joint online storefront for their
titles.

Finally, Google launched Google Goggles – say it slooowly – a
visual search tool which lets you search from your mobile by snapping a
photo of … well, anything on this list: landmarks, logos, artwork, products,
businesses, contact info, books, barcodes and plain text. The very cool tool
(not to be confused with Google Mail Goggles, an equally cool tool which
prevents drunken e-mailing) will revolutionise information-gathering on the
go.

You’ll notice, however, that Google doesn’t offer people on its list
of searchables – following privacy concerns, Google has decided to blur
out individual faces, so you can’t now get the skinny on someone by secretly
snapping them.

Facebook, on the other hand, was causing Privacy
advocates to suck
their teeth this week when it emerged that the default setting of its
Transition Tool – which asks members to review their privacy settings — is to
make users’ updates entirely public. Campaigners fear “a major shift in privacy
level for most of Facebook’s users, whether intentionally or
inadvertently.”

Good luck with that one, chaps – it appears you may be
swimming against the tide. A new study finds that Facebook users will gaily add
total strangers as friends – releasing all their personal info in the
process. According to CNET, 46 percent of users “blindly accepted” invitations
from fake accounts, which had been set up by security firm Sophos for the
study.

Got no Twitter love? List of followers languishing in the
doldrums? Could be you’re using the wrong words. Social Media Today have done a little poking around
with their text mining tools, and discovered that upbeat, ‘social’ words
correlate to high follower counts, while negative or sweary words are associated
with low popularity. “Thank you” seems to be a winner, as do ‘online’, ‘send’,
‘list’, ‘web’, ‘media’, and ‘join’. Meanwhile words associated with a very low
following are : ‘sleep’, ‘hate’, ‘damn’, ‘feeling’, ‘homework’, ‘class’,
‘boring’, ‘stuck’. The only possible conclusion: if you’re stuck at home feeling
hatey about doing boring homework for that damn class tomorrow – keep it to
yourself.

A viral ad for eco-cleaner company Method has been pulled,
following complaints that it appeared to condone sexual assault. The
ad is a spoof on the idea of ‘talking bubbles’ – the kind you might see in a
traditional bathroom-cleaner ad – but in this case the tone turns sinister, as
the bubbles begin catcalling while the householder is forced to take a
shower.

THE LOWDOWN …

“God
bless Tiger”, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz exclaimed
with refreshing honesty this week. You just can’t beat a good Sleb Scandal
for drumming up traffic – which is why Yahoo is down on its knees thanking Tiger
Woods with all its heart: the traffic coming in for Woods-related content has
“made” Yahoo’s quarter.

Poor old Kerry McCarthy MP, Labour’s “new media
campaigns spokeswoman”, who struggled manfully last week under a deluge
of surreal tweets, after comedian Ross Noble urged his Twitter followers to
bombard her with silly questions. Most were indeed surreal (“If the Treaty of
Lisbon were a cheese, what sort of cheese would it be?”) but the overall verdict
was a resounding thumbs up for @KerryMP, for taking it all in excellent humour.
Challenged to start a Mexican wave in parliament, for example, she responded:
“We do it on the Labour benches when Nick Clegg is speaking. You just don’t see
it happening.”

David Letterman – the famously Twitter-averse talk show
host – this week caved in to popular demand and reluctantly entered the
wonderful world of 140-character bulletins. Using a ‘Twitter machine’ (which
looked remarkably like a laptop) and exuding concentration, he carefully crafted
his first tweet: “Do you smell veal and peppers?”. Watch the segment on YouTube
here.

Two
post-grads at a Japanese university have developed a microwave
which streams random YouTube videos to an integrated screen, while you wait
for your ready-meal to be zapped – positing a world in which media is a constant
in every corner of our lives. Damn, those two minutes spent staring into the
gamma rays every night were kind of relaxing, in a hypnotic, brain-frying
way.

Oh dear me. There are ‘low sales figures’, then there are
“bafflingly low sales figures” – and then, quite a long way beyond that, there
are iPhone’s Chinese
sales figures. The handset, which is the darling of the West, has been
available for a month now in China. They’ve sold precisely five.

Sexual
health brand Durex is launching an online community for people to ‘celebrate
healthy sex lives’. So
far, so Scandiwegian – we are all grown-ups here, after all. I confess,
though, that the details are making my palms clammy: the site is called Ora!,
with material by a company called Sticky Content …

IN OTHER NEWS …

Talking of branded communities,
a recent study has shown that
many major brands need to pull their community-strategy socks up sharpish. Only
36% of their communities had high levels of activity, and most brands tended to
separate their communities from the rest of their social media initiatives –
only 32% of the 135 communities were integrated with social networks. What’s
more, few brands had sufficient systems in place for making use of the insights
they gained from communities. Must try harder, I’d say.

To make matters
worse, a separate
study finds that brands are failing, and rather spectacularly, to take
advantage of Twitter’s benefits. Nigh on three-quarters of the 500 Superbrands
analysed by New Media Age had no presence whatsoever on the microblogging
site.

Seems that teenagers are not, after all, the slaves
to social media of popular imagination. At least in Europe, TV is still the
main time-suck for teens, averaging out at 10.3 hours per week. Only 40% of them
regularly use social networks, at an average of 9.1 hours.

First Google,
now Yahoo, is embracing online
ad transparency. It’s launching an Ad Interest Manager tool which allows
users to opt-in to interest-based ads, and to control their level of
exposure.

Facebook and other networking sites are considering
panic buttons to let children alert administrators if they’re exposed to
inappropriate material. The button forms part of a new children’s safety
initiative, drawn up by Prof. Tanya Byron, and unveiled by Gordon Brown this
week. As part of the same ‘Click Clever, Click Safe’ initiative, lessons
in internet safety will become compulsory for English primary schoolchildren
from 2011. It’s hoped the slogan ‘Zip it, Block it, Flag it’ will become a
‘Green Cross Code’ for the age of new media.

Over in the States,
meanwhile, LG has launched a
novel public service ad which warns teens: Don’t Text Pics of Your Junk.
Their Give it a Ponder
campaign attempts to persuade teens to think before they text – in an cheeky,
though unquestionably discombobulating, manner. Worth a look.

Groans all
round in the gaming industry: Alistair Darling did not, after all, offer
tax breaks for British developers in his pre-budget report, to the chagrin
of those who’ve been pointing out that they bring more to the British economy
than the subsidised film industry; and that British talent is increasingly being
lost to (subsidised) competitor nations like Canada and South Korea.

It’s
the time of year for predictions, and eMarketer’s thoughts about what 2010 might
hold in store are well worth casting your eye
over: amongst other nuggets, they predict that social search will yield new
opportunities and formats for advertisers – but will also raise the hackles of
privacy campaigners.

That’s all folks!

The Bristol Creative Director’s Network met again a few days ago to welcome the Creative Director of St Luke’s, Al Young to a fine eating establishment in the heart of Clifton. A founding member of the famous advertising agency and twice voted one of the UK’s ‘hottest’ Creative Directors by Campaign, Al certainly lived up to all our expectations. Over what was a very early Christmas dinner, Al shared some of his knowledge on how to get the most out of a creative team. Coincidentally, this was all in the week that Claire Beale wrote about ‘nuturing creative teams’ in her leader column.

There was a great body of creatives from Bristol in attendance all from large network agencies, smaller independents and animation studios – including Aardman of course. Many top lips were also sporting wild Mexican ‘taches, thanks to what was the end of ‘Movember’. It felt like we were on the set of ‘Blazing Saddles’.

Aside from many funny anecdotes from his days in advertising, Al threw some interesting thoughts around the table, kicking off with a scene from The Wire which explained how as a leader, ‘it’s either about you or the work’. The important message out of this was how a creative team will naturally follow a CD’s behaviour so setting a great example, never taking all the credit and remaining positive is always crucial.

Each point that Al made was discussed at length between courses – I say that as somehow we did manage to fit in time to eat and drink too! From the importance of spending time (‘up to 7 hours initially’) with an account director and planner to understand the brief correctly in the first instance to hiring people from all different walks of life (‘never hire your own image’) and dealing with difficult clients (‘it’s far better to stick with it and finding a solution to the problem’).

These evenings are a great reminder how important it is to share experiences with like minded people. As Steve Jones, the Sex Pistols guitarist once said, ‘Punk is a state of mind, not a way of dress’ and the same could be said of being a creative. Thanks Al for a very enlightening and entertaining evening.

jon@3sixty.co.uk

 Welcome to eModeration’s round-up of all that is intriguing,
alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams
(@emodkate).

Next update: Friday. See you
then!

ON FACEBOOK
…

At the same time that Mark Zuckerberg announced a
change to Facebook’s privacy
options last week, he also let slip that that Facebook had tipped
350 million on the user scale.

Crikey. In August 2008 – that’s a
mere 15 months ago – the ‘Book had 100 million users. That’s some rapid weight
gain, sister (and in fact means that Facebook ranks just behind China and India
in the ‘if-a-social-network-were-a-country’ game that I like to play with my
little darlings on cold winter’s evenings like these).

The ‘Inside
Facebook’ guys looked, well, inside Facebook this week, and in an
all-round-enlightening analysis revealed that content-sharing
has taken a massive leap, from 1 billion items per week, to 2 billion in
September – and now 3.5 billion per week as of right now. But despite overall
growth, status updates appear to be slowing down – it’s not clear whether or not
this is due to Facebook’s recent redesign, or the cause of it.

The
changeover – which split the feed into ‘News’, a rundown of the ‘most
interesting’ stories of the day, and ‘Live’, which shows what’s going on at the
time the user is logged in – is still inspiring
disgruntlement. The ‘CHANGE FACEBOOK BACK TO NORMAL!!’ Facebook Group is now
up to 1.2 million members.

They sound like quite a shouty lot, don’t
they? Bagsy not me to tell them that there are more Facebook homepage changes
on the way. Seems as though search might be the focus in this redesign – Mashable’s
analysis breaks explains all.

Unsurprisingly, Facebook is not short
of secret admirers – both Yahoo and Myspace have been trying to grab a little
reflected glory this week, with the former announcing major Facebook
integration, and the latter appearing to head the same way – beginning with
allowing its users to use
Facebook Connect to log in.

Ah, Synchronicity: hot on the heels of
the news that 77% of Facebook Fan Pages have fewer
than a 100 fans, comes word from a company called Viralee. It’s the first to
come out of the shadows and publicly announce that it’s selling Facebook Fans
for 10
cents a pop – and has sold over a million in the last week alone, as brands
rush to boost their stats.

Which will all be as chaff in the wind to this
lot: Yes it’s the cream of the crop, the tip of the top … The Big
Money Facebook 50 lists the brands who are currently getting the best out of
Facebook. The scores are a combo of fan numbers, page growth, fan engagement and
creativity.

Psst! If your brand isn’t quite there yet, you might like to
peruse these handy guides:

Inside Facebook: Top
9 Facebook Page Management Tools
Techipedia: How to Create the Perfect
Facebook Fan Page
and iMediaConnection’s Upcoming Facebook Changes: 7 Things Brands Need To
Know

ON TWITTER
…

Not a great beginning for the week: Twitter Lists (the
shiny new and much-touted feature for organizing your Twitter feed) were taken
out of action last week, as Twitter scrambled to work out what, precisely,
was causing the site to crash. As VentureBeat succinctly put it: $155 million in
venture capital later, and the site still goes down?

Then, following the
announcement that Facebook had passed the 350m milestone, a UK Facebook exec pointed
out witheringly that there are fewer active users on the whole of Twitter
than there are on Facebook app Farmville. Ouch.

Hmm. It’s true there’s no
denying that the
stats are sliding for the microblogging site – new Nielsen data finds that
Twitter traffic dropped a galumphing 27.8% in October, and comScore reveals that
uniques are down by 8.1%.

But Twitter may not yet be quaking in their
birdy-boots: the figures don’t include those who’ve migrated to mobile-friendly
third party apps: 43% of total users, according
to Crowd Science.

And of course Twitter can also console itself with
the fact that, according to The Global Language Monitor, it is the most
popular word in the whole English language – is that even
possible?

Finally – and I’m unsure whether this is a great leap forward
towards a seamless human/tech interface, or an indication of just how close we
are to atomisation, alienation, and despair – allow me to introduce Twoddler, ‘The
Baby Toy That Twitters’. 


ON GOOGLE
…

Earlier this week, Google appeared to cave in to News
Corp’s demands that it stop providing access to paywalled websites. But
Rupert Murdoch appeared to have gone a step too far when he accused them of
content ‘theft’
across the board. “It’s wrong to paint us as stealing content. We are like a
virtual newsagent,” a mildly-peeved director of Google UK Matt Brittin told a
Commons Select Committee.

ON YOUTUBE
…

In what sounds suspiciously like one of those nails in
trad TV’s coffin that people are always on about these days, rumours are flying
that YouTube might be about to offer streaming TV shows just one day after they
first air – and for an eminently
affordable $1.99.

Meanwhile, over in the UK, Five has inked a deal to
hand over more than 3,000
hours of programming to YouTube, who will stream them on-demand and free of
charge. The deal includes Neighbours, Home And Away, The Hotel Inspector and The
Gadget Show – some of Five’s most popular content.

And the video-sharing
site is sharpening its offer to marketers, too – now advertisers can control
where their ads appear, right down to choosing the individual video (useful
if you know your target audience is also passionate about, say, Susan Boyle
pre-makeover). If that’s a little too specific, keywords, demographics, and
interest-based categories are also available.

BRANDS GET SOCIAL …

The Alternative Queen’s
Speech: children’s charity Barnado’s is to broadcast a ‘Teens’
Speech’ on Christmas Day – exclusively on MySpace (disclosure: moderated by
eModeration). The user-generated stream features young people talking about the
issues which matter to them most. Barnardo’s will also encourage viewers to
lobby their MPs, asking for vulnerable children to be remembered in each party’s
election manifesto.

Goretex, the outdoorsy all-weather
brand, launched a new online community this week, called
MyExperienceMore.com. The site offers hardy types a forum to communicate with
one another, sharing their outdoor experiences via photos, videos and message
boards.

Youth clothing brand Boy
Meets Girl has teamed with virtual world Fashion Fantasy Game, offering
members a free, virtual Boy Meets Girl “Coco Hoodie” to wear. The offer
coincides with the mail-out of Bloomingdale’s holiday catalogue, which features
the real-life version for $78.

Last week Fox teamed up with MTV.com and
Facebook to bring a live webcast roundtable discussion of James
Cameron’s Avatar – featuring the director and stars – with fans submitting
their own questions via the official Avatar Facebook Page.

Britvic’s
spring water brand Drench revealed its hamster
jazz viral online, before its official TV launch on Saturday. The
hamster-dudes were apparently chosen after a nationwide search.

Sony
Ericsson has launched the next phase of its “Spark Something” space-hopper
campaign – users ‘inflate’ real-life space hoppers via Twitter, and watch
the event unfold via a live video feed.


Ikea scored dix
points with their Facebook photos of their new Malmo showroom – fans were
then encouraged to go into the photos and tag products with their own names, for
a chance at winning the item.

Clothing brand Esprit has launched an interactive
installation in its flagship Regent Street store. A fairy godmother calls to
customers from a mirror, which takes a photograph of the customer and
superimposes it on a mannequin. Customers can then dress themselves in various
virtual outfits and send images to Facebook and to a mobile campaign
site.

Toys R Us whipped up Black
Friday Frenzy by giving its Facebook fans a full preview of discounts, and
exclusive access to “Mystery Deals” – making it the fastest growing brand on the
social network.

And here’s Mashable’s look at how 5
other brands approached Black Friday (the traditional kick-off for
holiday-season spending in the States) on Facebook – including Best Buy and
Sears.

ON MOBILE …

London
Mayor Boris Johnson wants mobile companies to come up with platforms to let
Olympic visitors to watch
3D video clips of the Games on their handsets. The blonde bombshell also
wants micropayments via handsets – handy for paying for snacks and merchandise –
to be ready in time for the Olympics.



SOCIAL
STATS …

Mobile and the internet are now essentials
not extras, as far as we Brits are concerned. We spend nearly 3 days online
per month, with another 7 hours spent on mobiles, and many of us would struggle
to organise life without them, according to moneysupermarket.com.

Women
like their networks to be truly social – Facebook,
Twitter, MySpace and Bebo have a user base that’s 50%+ female. Whereas men like
to save, organize and collect – networks like Reddit and Digg attract more male
users.

UNDER THE GAVEL
…

Facebook’s Beacon nightmare grinds to a bitter close:
there’s a settlement
on the table to the class-action suit, which was brought by users outraged
at misuse of their personal data. But claimants will not be receiving personal
compensation – Facebook will instead use $9.5 million to establish a non-profit
organization to fund online privacy-related projects.

Talking of legal
minefields – here’s a very generous
white paper from law firm Reed Smith which takes brands through the possible
pitfalls of using social networks – including those that might arise when
running competitions, providing customer services, and making use of
user-generated content.

A British man has been cautioned after he hacked
the login details for users of RuneScape, and then stole
their virtual characters and goods. The crime is on the rise globally –
according to the Telegraph, a Chinese player of the online game Legends of Mir 3
was killed four years ago, after he sold a dragon sabre which didn’t belong to
him.

VIRTUAL AND GAMES
…

Moshi Monsters, the free-to-play online pet-monster game
has passed the golden 10 million registered player milestone, owners Mind
Candy announced last week. CEO Michael Smith is thinking about intriguing
new formats – including a print-on-demand service which would turn kids’
monsters into plush toys or trading cards – which in turn would connect back
into the game.

And if that’s got you thinking, you’ll want to know more
about virtual worlds for Kids, Tweens and Teens. Luckily Kzero have just
produced this illuminating paper which breaks down three good reasons why branded worlds are set to be
major growth areas in 2010.

Taking as their starting point teen virtual
world IMVU’s $2m monthly sales, Kzero have also put some thought into the
subject of virtual goods. With
estimates putting Facebook’s virtual goods earnings at $40m, it’s worth a read.

Facebook, by the way, is currently weighing up how to monetize the vast
rivers of virtual currency sloshing
around third-party apps. They already have their own official currency –
credits – but developers aren’t required to use them – yet.

50%
of US women play online games – though they don’t self-identify as gamers –
and 41% of them have bought virtual currency, with most avoiding offers for
points. Keeping it in the family, nearly 60
million of their kids are gamers – with kids as young as 2 included in the
stats. 12 to 14s rack up the most time online – an average of 10.6 hours weekly
– which drops off between 15 and 17, the point at which stiffer competition for
time and pocket-money kicks in.

FishVille continues its
piscine journey to the top of the charts, with upwards of 20 million monthly
active users and weekly growth of 4.68 million. It’s now the 8th largest app on
Facebook – snapping at the heels of CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium, which led the
way in fish-based entertainment.

And flushed with success, Zynga have launched
PetVille (if a theme ain’t broke…). So just what is it with social gaming?
Here, PaidContent examine the reasons for the genre’s vertical
trajectory over the last year – and for the relative success of startups
over established developers. They cite three key factors: development,
distribution and discovery.

That’s all
folks!

News Corporation is reported to be joining with Time Inc, Hearst, Conde Nast and Meredith to launch a paid content venture that will launch a digital storefront for a wide range of magazines and newspaper content.

According to various reports including The Sunday Times, the venture will initially be led by Time Inc executive Vice President John Squires. It follows a report that such a venture was being planned last month by The New York Times.

An official announcement is expected from the five tomorrow. One publishing executive told Ad Age: “It’s an agreement to agree on future developments.”

The group is reported to be seeking a permanent CEO and will focus on developing common standards for digital editions in a concerted effort to make money from online content.

The publishers are thought to be strongly considering developing their own e-reading platform to combat Amazon and its Kindle, which takes 70% of revenues and retains most of the reader data. This has angered publishers who want control of the data so they can form closer relationships with their readers.

The news follows Hearst recently saying its Skiff subsidiary (formerly known as FirstPaper) will introduce an e-reader next year and Time Inc showing an online demonstration of a digital edition of Sports Illustrated last week.

Conde Nast and News Corp have both also been looking various digital editions. These include Conde Nast developing a version of Wired suitable for e-reading and tablet computer devices.

News Corp has previously said it is interested in developing an e-reader of its own.

More and more data on the internet is being published in reusable and
remotely queryable formats. Some of us may be familiar with XML which
is way of structuring data so it can be interpreted by a variety of
different applications and devices – for example RSS feeds are
specified using XML

To make this really clear – here is an example:

We
all have a common understanding of the concept of “a book”. We
understand that are several elements to a book: it has an author, a
publisher, a title and so on. So we have a common shared frame of
reference for how we define a book.

However to a computer the
concept of ‘a book’ is meaningless. What structured data formats such
as XML do is to allow for the creation of common definitions so that,
say, within the publishing industry information can be specified in the
same way and shared easily between companies. So in the XML world a
book can actually be defined as having a title, author, ISBN number,
publisher etc. so that different computer systems and applications all
‘understand’ the definition of a book – and can then manipulate that
data with a common frame of reference.

What this then means is
that intelligent agents or spiders (essentially programs that crawl the
web) can scan different websites, gather data and make valid
comparisons. This is how price comparison sites such as Kelkoo and
Confused.com work.

The next evolution of this is called the
Semantic Web. “Semantics” is about the meanings of things and the
Semantic web is described as a state of the internet where computers
can not only recognise and compare structured data – but be able to
actually understand how different pieces of information relate to each
other.

“The Semantic Web describes the relationships between
things (like A is a part of B and Y is a member of Z)…and the
properties of things (like size, weight, age and price)” (source
w3schools.com)

This moves us towards the vision of the web
originally envisaged by its creator Tim Berners-Lee as a universal
medium for data, information and knowledge exchange.

Back in 1999 he said:

And
even though a statement made a decade ago appears prehistoric by
today’s fast moving standards, elements of this vision are taking shape.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
is the organisation responsible for setting technical standards on the
web. They are examining a series of standards designed to make data as
openly accessible and linkable as possible and in which automated
software can store, exchange, and use machine-readable information
distributed throughout the Web. As a result, this will enable users to
deal with the information with greater efficiency and certainty.

One
element of these standards is called RDF (Resource Description
Framework) and putting information into RDF files makes it possible for
intelligent agents and spiders to search, discover, pick-up, collect,
analyse and process information from all over the internet. In essence
the Semantic Web uses RDF to describe the content and resources on the
internet.

And as all data on the internet becomes part of this
standard format, it transforms the web from a random collection of
pages into one huge database with each piece of data connected to each
other in a way that computers can understand.

So what does that mean for marketers?

Put simply, it means that the internet is going to get organised.

As
search engines start to recognise semantically tagged data in their
pages that they crawl, structured data as per the RDF formats will
present far more compelling summaries of those pages in their search
results.

It’s basically like current search engine marketing –
but on steroids. In fact this aspect is often referred to as Search
Engine Optimisation Plus (SEO+). Search is seen as the killer
application for the Semantic Web that will finally drive its growth.

So
at the most fundamental it means that marketers will need to start
managing brands in the Semantic layer that the consumer cannot see as
actively as they manage their brands in the layers consumers can see –
that’s websites, online advertising etc.

Scott Brinker on the Chief Marketing Technologist Blog suggests that:

And having data in a more
accessible format will mean that organisations will look to build rich
data applications over the top of this data.

One example given
by Tim Berners-Lee is of being able to combine your calendar and bank
statements. If both of these talked the same language then a user would
be able to drag their digital bank statements onto their calendar and a
series of dots would appear showing the user when they spent their
money. Now imagine that you still can’t remember where a particular
transaction happened – then you could drag your photo album on top of
your calendar and be reminded that you used your credit card at the
same time you were taking pictures of your kids at a theme park.

And
if we look at comparison or price aggregation sites, with the semantic
web consumers will increasingly be able to make more accurate and
reliable comparisons not just for more complex & configurable
products such as cars, holidays etc, but also services such as
builders, accountants and solicitors because the information on those
products and services can be far richer and more structured.

Let’s
take another example of a consumer searching for a ‘holiday’ in the
future. The Semantic Web will allow people to use these ‘information
agents’ and set them tasks such as “go and find me a holiday” that’s:
• In Greece
• By a beach
• But also has some historical interest
• That fits my calendar
• And fits within my budget

The intelligent agent is then left to instantly
research the request, asking additional questions where necessary. An
early example of this is www.tripit.com. With Tripit a user can simply
forward their travel confirmation emails and the site and their Tripit “Itinerator”
takes over and combines all the related travel bookings (from flights,
car hire and hotels) into a single master itinerary. It then searches
the Web to add related information such as daily weather, local maps,
driving directions (for example to get from the airport to the hotel),
city guides and so on. You can then access your itinerary from a mobile
device or synchronise it with your PC calendar and share itineraries
within group bookings to make sure there are no date issues or overlaps.

This
will also be important to B2B marketers where our consumer habits of
online research have been transported into the workplace and where
businesses will need to create and manage their semantic data with
increasing numbers of potential customers using search engines to
research and shortlist suppliers.

Another example of the “Semantic Web” is something called ‘Friend of a Friend’ (FOAF). And this is interesting because of its impact on the future of social networking.

FOAF
allows people to describe themselves using an RDF format. You can
describe personal details, hobbies, relations to other people &
things. But what’s fascinating about FOAF is that there is no one
central database or repository of information. Your profile does not
exist only in Facebook, or Bebo or Myspace. It’s a piece of data
searchable by any computer. Computers may then use these FOAF profiles
to find and relate people to one another.

It’s the 21st Century equivalent of ’6-Degrees of Separation’.

For a few weeks now, News International have been causing a huge stink in the industry with Rupert Murdoch accusing search engines of stealing his content and threatening to stop his websites from being indexed (something he could do any time he wanted).

And now a senior figure from one of his closest UK rivals has chosen to focus his vitriol on Search Engine Optimisation and in the process managed to insult not just a crucial and growing element of the digital marketing industry but also internet users that search. In other words, almost anyone who uses the web. It all goes to show what a young industry we are all still in and how far so many major players in the offline world have to go before they really ‘get digital’.

Matt Kelly, Associate Editor for Mirror Group Newspapers, died of irony this week when he intensified the recent war of words between traditionally print based media owners trying to make a buck from the web and the search community, by calling on the news business to rely less on traffic from search engines and more on its “unique heritage and values” i.e. journalism. Unfortunately what Matt doesn’t realise is that the real problem is his own content and a lack of understanding that have lead him to hire SEO agencies that give us all a bad name.

In a World Editors Forum keynote in Hyderabad, he said, “In our great frantic headlong rush to accumulate users at any cost, many of us were all too quick to sacrifice anything that stood in the way of search engine optimisation … so three months ago, we launched two new websites … built on very different platforms designed especially to show each off in their best light. And the hell with SEO. We’re chasing passion, here, not page impressions.”

Matt also spoke of his previous experience with SEO consultants when working on other MGN sites, “We followed the brochure word for word, and we employed the same merry-go-round of SEO consultants to help us build sites that would ping to the top of search engines for a world hungry for our content. If little things like character, brand … the ingrained values that made the print product a success, got in the way, well … the ends justified the means. Content wasn’t king. Traffic was. Whoever, from wherever, reading whatever. It didn’t matter as long as the audience grew.”

Excuse me? They told you that content wasn’t king? Wow. Which search agency did you hire, Matt? Does it get worse?

“But it gets worse … In treating SEO as the be-all and end-all of online publishing, we devalued our content in the mind of the users. What a word: ‘users.’ Not readers, or viewers. Certainly not customers, not unless we are being deeply ironic. For the fact is the word ‘user’ is, for the vast majority of people consuming our products online, entirely accurate. We’d never choose such a sterile word to describe the people who buy our newspapers. But online, ‘users’ is about right … This was the audience we’ve been chasing all that time. A swarm of locusts.”

Excellent PR skills there, Matt. The people that visit your site from search are “locusts”? You won’t use sterile terminology to describe the customers of your print products but you are happy to describe those who come from search to your digital products (remembering that 80% all of internet journeys start with a search, so that’s going to be a huge proportion) as insects that have been known to decimate people’s lives? Charmed I’m sure.

What Matt, Rupert Murdoch and their ilk all fail to grasp is that there is no such thing as a poor user, only poor content. Is it really Google’s fault it drives people to MGN’s sites in droves and those people don’t find enough content that they can’t find elsewhere on the web and which is probably better? Does he not realise that people who visit digital media are known as ‘users’ rather than ‘readers’ because websites should be interactive and therefore is something you use? ‘Readers’ is too passive a term to be accurate.

I honestly don’t know where to begin with all of this. At LBi we have already addressed the poor usability and evidently deliberate “anti-optimisation” of MGN’s 3am.co.uk (as have others) and as for the other site he references, MirrorFootball.co.uk? Well, as a football fan, there’s certainly nothing unique about MGN’s effort. At least nothing, including the archive footage, that I personally would pay for.

SEO is 90% common sense. And content is vital. This is how you get the authoritative links that will boost your ranking. Be informative, funny, interesting, different, entertaining, even- possibly- controversial. BE AUTHORITATIVE. Make your website something that people will want to go to in order to find stuff that interests and/or entertains them. Yes there are poor SEO consultants out there, like the ones Matt has evidently chosen to hire, who may turn your website into a dull experience with bland content and who persuades you to optimise against terms like “music news” (who searches for that?) but ethical SEO consultants know that a site that is good for users is good for search engines. The site should be easily navigable, (a good start is not have URLs that are just as much gobbledygook to humans as to search spiders) and have loads of content that shows the user and the search spider that this is the place to find and interact with whatever it is you are searching for.

Matt’s real problem is that newspapers are old media designed for a mass audience, clumsily trying to make it in a digital world which is designed for the niche. They won’t all disappear completely but many will and those that remain will change radically. The newspapers sites that make it will be, like any website, the ones that have something unique that users won’t find anywhere else. And if you have something really unique and niche enough that you can charge for it then, as Google’s Josh Cohen said this week, “I would argue that if you are putting up a paywall, getting traffic and being discovered is even more important because you have got a smaller set of users who are potentially willing to pay. Discovery is just as important”. Even a mixed strategy of paid and free content may be the compromise solution, but once again, that content had better be unique.

It’s going to be a long hard lesson for the old media dinosaurs and a lot of established media institutions will make more big mistakes in their digital strategy before they learn that the brave new world of the web means that they have to now play by some very different rules.

Welcome to eModeration’s weekly round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams (@emodkate).

This week: ‘cyberdisinhibition’; the Digital Economy Bill; and REO Speedwagon.

Check back on Monday, when we’ll be casting a beady eye over the goings-on at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and beyond – see you then.

THE HEADLINES …

Smell the distinctive aroma of burning rubber? Catch the sound of screeching tyres? Yes, it’s Google making a rather sharp U-turn, as it announces that it will, after all, allow publishers to restrict how many stories a reader can access per day.

The news came hot on the heels of the Fair Syndication Consortium’s announcement that over the last 30 days, Google was responsible for more than half of the ‘unlicensed copies’ of newspaper content on the web – and is bound to please Google-sceptic Rupert Murdoch, whose paywall plans, he recently admitted, were moving more slowly than anticipated.

Not everyone was thrilled, however: enter the redoubtable Arianna Huffington – whose Huffington Post was born as a response to the last great paywall experiment – to deride the idea of exclusivity as a “ridiculous notion”, and to accuse Mr Murdoch of “a fundamental lack of understanding of the web and how it works.”

The Digital Economy Bill is not, currently, Top of the Pops with… well, with anyone, it seems. Google, Facebook, Yahoo and eBay have made their feelings quite clear in a letter to Business Secretary Lord Mandelson, whose Clause 17 – introduced at the 11th hour – is rather murky on copyright and gives, according to the letter, “any future secretary of state unprecedented and sweeping powers to…increase monitoring of user data even where no illegal practice has taken place.”

Quick, someone call for Stephen Fry! Ah, you already did. Everyone’s favourite digital uncle has also been expressing his dislike of the bill, urging his followers to sign Talk Talk’s petition against the disconnection of illegal file sharers from the internet ‘without fair trial’.

Elsewhere there’s been a lot of grumbling about the mixed messages sent out by the Bill on the matter of open and closed wi-fi networks – with some observers claiming that the bill will kill any notion of a wi-fi Britain. It emerged last week that a pub-owner had been fined £8,000 after a customer downloaded copyright material over the venue’s open wi-fi network – and critics say that if the Digital Economy Bill becomes law, this will be an increasingly frequent occurrence.

The aforementioned Digital Economy Bill is not the only bee in Stephen Fry’s bonnet this week – business networking site Plaxo was on the receiving end of some sharp tweets, when he realized that ‘any casual passer-by‘ could access his mobile number and home address. Fry terminated his account with a ‘Grrrr’.

Don’t look now, Facebook, but the scandal of scammy ads in social gaming doesn’t seem to want to die. The social giant is now being pursued by the spectre of a class action suit, as third-party provider Zynga – the super-successful games developer, whose Fishville is currently king of the social games hill – is accused of signing users up for recurring payments without their consent.

3,500 convicted sex offenders have been locked out of Facebook and Myspace, after New York State set up a registry which requires them to declare their social networking details. According to a statement from the attorney general’s office, “The law sets mandatory restrictions on a sex offender’s access to the Internet where the offender’s victim was a minor, the Internet was used to commit the offense or they are among the highest-level offenders”.

THE LOWDOWN …

Good Heavens: REO Speedwagon! If you’re under 40, you will be blinking in incomprehension at the mention of this 80s power-ballad-belting band with big hair – but nevertheless, the soft-rocksters are launching a social game to promote their Christmas album. And in what must surely be the very definition of ‘the triumph of hope over experience’, the game costs $8 to play.

You wait all year for a piece of news involving 80s rock gods – and then two come along at once! Serial litigant Eric Estavillo – you may remember his attempt to sue Sony for limiting his right to a social life when they kicked him off Resistance: Fall of Man – has launched another, somewhat speculative suit against World of Warcraft, which he claims is (amongst other things) making him too sad. And amid a roster of prospective expert witnesses, we have Depeche Mode songwriter Martin Gore, whom Estavillo is calling entirely on the basis that “he himself has been known to be sad, lonely, and alienated, as can be seen in the songs he writes.”

This is sweet – well, kinda. Dana Hanna’s wedding video records the moment that he pauses, mid-ceremony, to update his Facebook relationship status to ‘married’ and send a tweet announcing that he and his beloved were now Man and Wife. A touching desire to shout his love from the rooftops – or a raging and potentially relationship-destroying addiction to social media? You Decide.

Stephen Fry might currently be blowing hot and cold on Twitter, but he should thank his luckies that his Followers don’t include members of the Original Young Gangsters – or indeed any of the New York gangs who have taken to taunting one another via Twitter. It seems they’ve been organizing their Harlem-based street – erm, activities through the micro-blogging service – now that’s a Twitter List you really don’t want to be on.

Ouch, and thrice ouch. Two senior managers at a US TV station have allegedly been suspended, after a live Twitter feed, juxtaposed next to photos of the stations star anchors, seemed to accuse the three presenters of a serious sexual assault. On a very, very big billboard.

The Medical Defence Union offers clear-cut advice to doctors who are considering social media: Don’t. They warn that even a polite refusal of a patient’s request for a date could cross the ethical line – not to mention the general risk to patient confidentiality and their professional reputation involved in using social networks.

Ahh! Even those of us who are not celebrating Christmas will have our cockles warmed by this Advent Calendar from 24ways. Each day a new techie-targeted treasure from the likes of Dan Rubin and Jeffrey Zeldman. Magical indeed.

IN OTHER NEWS …

If your brand’s Facebook Page leaves you feeling a little underpowered in the fan department – don’t despair, you are not alone. A new study finds that, of 600,000 Facebook fan pages, over a third had under a 100 fans, and over three-quarters had less than a thousand. Only an elite 4%, the study found, had more than the golden 10,000 – and 0.047% of pages had more than a million fans.

If more proof were needed that listening is no longer an optional extra, new research from LexisNexis finds that 60% of us have been turned off a purchase after reading negative comments online, half of us complain ourselves if we’re unhappy with a product or service – and two-thirds had not heard from the company itself after sharing bad feedback.

It seems that generally, we’re experiencing a wave of ‘cyberdisinhibition’ – a separate study confirms not only that many feel less inhibited in an anonymous online environment, but that 20% of us are more likely to ‘lash out’ at companies or brands when feeling aggrieved – a full 25% of men had done so.

‘Cyberdisinhibition’ is an excellent word, and one which seems accurately to describe the probable state of mind of Sarah Henderson, daughter of erstwhile General Motors chief Fritz Henderson, upon hearing that her father had been sacked by the US car giant. Her forthright expressions of dismay (involving lots of CAPS and lots of ***) were swiftly removed from GM’s Facebook page – but not before eagle-eyed industry blog Jalopnik had nabbed a screen shot.

Sponsored Celeb Tweets are generating big bucks – with the likes of Kim Kardashian earning up to $10,000 a month for a single tweet. Well-regarded bloggers are earning $3000 a month for multiple tweets – and now Amazon has announced that it will recompense lesser mortals if they refer buyers to the site via Twitter.

US retailers are grasping Twitter to their collective bosom in the run-up to the holiday season – combining previously separate outreach functions, including advertising, customer service, and news – into one catch-all medium. 59% of online retailers say they plan to use Twitter more heavily this Christmas.

The figures coincide with a strong start to the holidays for e-commerce: Black Friday – the traditional starting-gun for U.S. holiday shopping – saw an 11% rise online, against an underwhelming kick-off for retailers generally, while 75% of the UK’s online retailers reported increased figures compared on last year, and 85% expected more growth in 2010.

That’s all folks!

The New York Times is reported to be ready to dramatically cull its 70 strong roster of blogs, according to a report by the New York Observer.

The blogging axe will come as part of the paper’s move to cut 100 newsroom jobs. They follow comments by NY Times executive editor Bill Keller last month. He said that while many of the paper’s blogs served a valuable journalistic purpose, and attracted a lot of traffic to the site, less successful ones could be cut.

“If we find instances where a blog or a vertical is consuming considerable effort and expense with little reward, we’re prepared to do some pruning,” Keller said.

According to the Observer the masthead has a number of successful blogs “that are presumed to be safe”. These include Andrew Ross Sorkin’s DealBook, as well as Tara Parker-Pope’s health blog, Well. The paper also said that other high traffic blogs with strong advertising appeal including ArtsBeat, City Room, The Caucus, Bits and The Lede are also expected to be safe.

Other less popular blogs that fallout side of the top ten, and sit among a 60 strong pool, could be under threat such as Formula One, which is not a popular sport in the US and Laugh Lines, in which Week in Review editors highlight the best of web humour.

Jim Schachter, editor for digital initiatives at the NY Times, told The Observer that the paper was constantly looking constantly at its the blogs and that it had invested in “certain verticals based on some projections and assumptions on their commercial salience”. Among those that have proved promising he said were business, technology and health sections.

Asked if they could be cut down Schachter said: “Unquestionably.”

The same day that Friendster officially unveiled its site and logo relaunch, global sources report that the social network may have a new owner by the year’s end, and pinpoints Tencent as one of the shortlisted companies for the acquisition.

According to a Reuters report, Friendster’s CEO Richard Kimber says the company is in the process of negotiating with a handful of primarily Asian buyers. Chinese powerhouse Tencent has been named as one of Friendster’s top suitors. Report rules out Facebook as a bidding contender due to hurdles related to competition and intellectual property rights.

News of Friendster’s acquisition intentions first surfaced in July. At the time, a source at Friendster confirmed to Media that TechCrunch, which first reported the story, had seen “a very fact-based document” issued by Friendster and Morgan Stanley, which was enlisted to help with the process. That article noted that Friendster sought a buyer looking to gain quick access to the Asian social networking scene – a proposition that could be tempting for a company like Tencent, which has a dominant hold on the Chinese internet market but has little presence outside the mainland.

Approximately 90 per cent of Friendster’s user base is in Asia, and is a leading SNS in Southeast Asia, especially dominant in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. Its target user is between the ages of 16 and 24.

Because of its ongoing success in Asia, Friendster relocated its full operations to Southeast Asia earlier this year to better maintain its hold on the region. “Ninety per cent of our users are in Asia so this is really where we need to be and this is where the heart of the company is,” Friendster’s head of Asia Ian Stewart said in May, adding that Friendster had 45 million active users in Southeast Asia. “The way it’s mapped out, the brain of the company is in Singapore, our work is in Manila and our technical centre of excellence, with the servers and technological base, is in San Francisco.”

The company’s CEO Richard Kimber is based in Sydney.

In response to the news regarding Friendster’s sale, a source close to the company said a deal is “in the works” but added that reports regarding the specifics of the deal were erroneous. The source declined to note which parts of the news were inaccurate but said further announcements would be revealed in the coming weeks.

The news surfaced the same day that Friendster unveiled the relaunch of its website, logo and brand slogan.

The company’s overarching goal – which was originally voiced in May, when Friendster announced that its intention to become an “Asian site for Asian people” – was to shift from a singularly networking domain into an entertainment space. According to Stewart, the site has been redesigned because Friendster’s services have been modernised in the last few months and have more accurately become a domain catering to Southeast Asian users, and for this, a new look was in order.

“We’re still so keen to create a local feel and culture, and we’re achieving that through local partners ranging from telcos through to record labels and management companies and promoters and tickets venders,” Stewart said of the site’s goals. “We’re not looking to add hundreds of things but a handful of things that address trends in social media, such as gifting, gaming and entertainment. We’ve found suppliers and advertising partners and are working on the ground to maintain our position, and we’ve chosen a new design direction that we thought would make the most people happy, and we really believe we’ve done that.”

Among Friendster’s changes is the adoption of easier site navigation; entertainment and gaming features; services that allow users to better personalize their Friendster profiles, homepages and navigation; easier ways to share photos; and a new Friendster Gift Shop, which allows users to purchase gifts through micropayments via Friendster’s Virtual Wallet.

“Our new brand is just one of the ways we are communicating the evolution of our business as well as our commitment to our users – they’ve given us great feedback and we’ve listened,” said Kimber. “We understand our users and our major markets in Asia better than anyone. This is just the beginning of a series of new products and services catering to the needs of our users, and in a way unmatched by any other social network.”

Stewart added that Friendster conducted in-depth research on its audience’s preferences in order to revamp the site. To further create a fresher feel, Friendster changed its logo from its original, blue-smiley image to a green logo. “It was the users who told us the interpretation of the green smiley – it’s fresh and modern and a different coluor from others in the social networking space. It’s been received extremely well,” he said.

To build off of Friendster’s iconic smiley, the site also adopted the slogan “Connecting Smiles”.

According to a source close to Friendster, the site’s refurbishment was not fully intended to help the company catch a higher acquisition price, but was instead initiated to better modernise its operations in the face of rising competition.

Although Friendster is a leading player in the SNS landscape in Asia, the growing popularity of Facebook has put pressure on the site. In July, Alexa puts Facebook ahead of Friendster in terms of current usage in Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, while Hitwise figures for Singapore also showed Facebook to be more popular. ComScore data, meanwhile, suggested Facebook usage has tripled in the last year in Malaysia. It was only in the Philippines that Friendster maintained a clear lead.

Facebook additionally introduced its Lite version earlier this year, which acts as a simplified version of the site that will be more accessible on mobile phones and in markets where bandwidth is slow – an integral development to users in mobile-rich markets such as Indonesia.

Friendster claims more than 115 million registered users worldwide and serves 9 billion pages a month. Users spend approximately 110 minutes on the site per month and more than 100,000 users register for Friendster daily.