Much will be said over the next week or so about the passing of two iconic celebrities Thursday, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, whose work will forever be associated with particular moments in our cultural history.  I was a teenager at the height of Farah Fawcett’s launch and was well aware of the impact of her world-famous poster on all my male teenage friends.  I also danced to many of MJ’s top 10 singles and watched his life choices play out over the national stage.

Today, the social Web, as we saw happen with Iran, impacts the movement of information about these two well known celebrities.  Beyond Twitter and some blog entries, many sites have moved toward the artful use of visualization software to capture the impact and tremendous activity of newsworthy information.  A day like today is when their stories play out. Read More »

Recently, I began to notice that Facebook’s friend suggestions were increasingly accurate, and increasingly far-fetched.

At first, it seemed innocent enough. My husband’s aunt appeared on my “Suggestions/Add as a Friend” sidebar. While I like Patty and was happy to friend her, I thought it was strange given 1) I’ve never uploaded my email list to Facebook, or given it permission to do so, 2) I’m not connected to any of my husband’s family or friends on any social network, and my husband has refused to join any social network except for one, and there he uses a fake identity and is not connected to anyone remotely connected to his aunt 3) My privacy settings are tight and in theory, I can’t be found if you’re not my friend.

At first I thought, well, we do share the same last name, so I figured perhaps Facebook was suggesting her for that reason. Over the next few days though, I began to mull this logic. Facebook had never suggested a friend based on last name before, and how would Facebook know which person with that last name to suggest? And what about people with the last name “Smith” – that wouldn’t be very effective.

Then, it happened again. This time, Facebook suggested my mother’s former boss. Read More »

A new report by Initiative finds that shifts in the economic climate have created permanent shifts in consumer behavior. The report “Game Changer” provides marketers with insight on how brands can take advantage of changing values in their products and messaging.  Some of the key findings included:

-Massive decline in trust of “establishment”  (Further proof of what we’ve known for awhile, that consumers are trusting each other and online communities more than ever)

-Qualities such as “reliable,” “open” and “honest” are now valued more than “well-known” or “established”

-The Internet has become an “essential form of technology” for 75 percent of consumers surveyed, with mobile in second at 56 percent (interesting here was the 40 percent who said they are most likely to maintain spending on the Internet compared with other forms of technology and communication)  Read More »

The Internet is on its way to settling down.  Don’t misunderstand me – as far as the interwebs are concerned, 401 still means “unauthorized access” and has nothing to do with retirement (yes, that’s a geek joke).  Instead, it means that the Internet is giving up on the chaos of its youth and settling into a respectable and tactful adulthood. At the root of the issue lies the concept of online identity.

For the past decade, our collective online experiences have been modeled after a Matrix-esque experience.  We select usernames, which become our “residual self-image.”  Behind these fairly anonymous handles humanity as a whole has been able to momentarily devolve into caustic, self-righteous, judgmental twelve-year-olds (not me, of course).  Not that this was necessarily a bad thing – it just was.  But the status quo is changing. So what’s the agent of change? Read More »

When Iran had their most recent popular revolution in 1979, people around the world had no 24 hour news source to convey what was happening. CNN would be launched the following year by Ted Turner so coverage was limited to shows like ABC’s Nightline (which was created in response to the hostage crisis which grew out of the uprising) and the regularly scheduled network new programs, as well as the daily newspapers like The New York Times and newsweeklies like Time magazine. The Internet? A gleam in Al Gore’s eye.

Now there are the stirrings of what might turn out to be another popular revolution inside Iran and newsjunkies have skipped a whole generation ahead, past the 24-hour news channels which mostly filled their weekend schedules with less-expensive canned programming, and have gone straight to Twitter and the Huffington Post.

Read full article on Searchviews.

There were a few big announcements regarding the iPhone and iPod Touch at WWDC this week.  The biggest announcement was actually just a price drop: With the iPhone 3G at only $99, it hits the magical price point that’s going to move a lot of phones.  Though admittedly, there is still a large issue in the monthly costs to AT&T, as a plan with unlimited data and text is going to be more per month than the phone costs.

Apple’s newly announced numbers show a continued acceleration in the popularity of the AppStore.  While 40 million iPhones or iPod Touch devices worldwide reflects a steady progression, the announcement of 50,000 apps in the AppStore is a sharp increase over past numbers.  With over one billion apps downloaded since the AppStore’s inception, that’s an average of 20,000 downloads per application. Read More »

If I had a nickel for everytime someone asked me What is hot right now? I’d be twittering off my yacht in the Côte d’Azur.

In a recent meeting with some of my fellow digerati we were pitching ideas to get a client excited about  what new’s in the media landscape and all of them declared, Twitter is dead…it’s over. But I think there’s plenty of life left in our friend Twitter.

We are at an interesting crossroads with Twitter, Facebook and a lot of other overly hyped platforms. In many cases, it’s not about the solution itself but about how people are leveraging the data and behavior surrounding that platform and hence, their API’s (application programming interfaces – see my recent article on using APIs for content delivery). Read More »

Social media has infiltrated the hemispheres of today’s society by embedding itself into the framework of business interactions, personal relationships, mobile distractions, television and other elements that shape our culture. While some situations and technologies adapt quickly to the transparency and hyper-connectedness of social media, other avenues take time to get used to the idea. One such avenue is books.

The publishing industry in general is threatened by the disruptive advancements that social media generates because it changes the structure of writing from a speech to a discussion.  But, this doesn’t have to be a negative attribute – this could be what actually saves the publishing industry from a meager future on the new media sidelines.

Read More »

PSP Go video demo

Here are continued impressions from E3.  They are, as promised, thoughts on Sony offerings and the larger gaming trends.

Sony: I got a “hands-on” with the new PSP Go.  I think this device is less a competitor to the Nintendo DSi, and much more of a competitor to the iPod Touch.  The device centers on the concept of digital distribution for games and video – no more UMD disks.  Getting rid of a disk drive has certainly made the device more portable, but it still doesn’t seem as pocket friendly as the iPod.  The ability to leverage a control pad is great, as are the tie-ins between the PS3 and the PSP devices, but I see the device as primarily appealing to the existing PSP owners, much as the DSi has been an upgrade to the Nintendo DS. Read More »

E3 2009 is my fifth E3, though I managed to miss the recent “awkward years.”  While the rumor was that this E3 would return to prior glory, I’ve been a bit disappointed – the show is much more guarded than in years past.  The press conferences on Monday and Tuesday had some neat surprises, but few of those surprises managed to make it out to the show floor. Read More »