Marketspace Advisor

Memeorandum: Does a Diggbot Trump Manual Digg-ing?

From Nick Carr’s Rough Type blog: this review of Memeorandum.  Very relevant for online publishers looking for ways to embrace the blogosphere and build valuable services over it (like Edgeio, which we commented on earlier this week.)  Carr’s critique is partially fair; what he fails to point out is that the manual approach only counts what the crowd has voted for – and the sample is skewed because it only represents people who’re using voting software like Digg.  For proof of this sample bias, check out the top tags on Del.icio.us.  Automated tracking approaches like this are still skewed by people engaged in this new media, but can we presume that these are also the folks whom advertisers will be trying to reach? (Note: the comments on Carr's post also provide a thoughtful critique...)

Web 2.5 Application Ideas

I just posted over on my personal blog about some ideas that the Edgeio launch suggested.  The core that drove the ideas:  if a "listing" tag can be used to define structured data for commerce that can be aggregated, parsed, and usefully presented by services like Edgeio, what other tags could define other forms of structured data that could also be usefully exchanged this way?  My post suggested "events" as one such possibility.  Others?

Edgeio Launches: Who Needs eBay and Craigslist?

Edgeio, http://edgeio.com, launched last week.  Edgeio allows blog publishers to use their own sites as ecommerce storefronts, and uses tags and RSS to aggregate blog publishers' listings.  On the buyer side, it provides a purpose-built interface for browsing these listings to find what you need.  I think this is a good example of a "Web 2.5" application in some respects, in that it follows some of the principles of Structured Collaboration (see http://www.octavianworld.org/octavianworld/2005/12/what_can_web_15.html).

Edgeio was covered in Business week's blogs earlier in February:

http://blogs.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2006/02/edgeio_edges_ou.html

Nik Cubrilovic's post in TechCrunch (a great resource) was also excellent, and the comments provide invaluable market feedback for the Edgeio team (rendering a lot of what I might have had to say superfluous).

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/02/27/edgeio-launches/

Finally, Nick Carr's post on Rough Type, skeptical but partially right on:

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/03/getting_it.php

What he misses, for my taste, is that these services are not intended to grow to the sky.  They are experiments that ultimately make sense only in the context of a larger partner that builds or buys them.

Parsing Terry Semel

I just finished listening to this IT Conversations podcast of an interview with Yahoo's Terry Semel from the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference last year:

http://www.itconversations.com/audio/download/ITConversations-844.mp3

Semel was knocked by the digerati as too old-school to help Yahoo compete effectively with Google.  He does apply a "the-way-you-win-is-to-have-both-great-content-and-distribution" framework to Yahoo's strategy, but what this interview reveals is an appreciation of the equal importance of technology in the mix (for aggregating and syndicating that content), and an open-minded aggressiveness about balancing deals to scoop up others'  innovations with Yahoo's own home-grown stuff.  Also interesting to hear him comment on Google, its evolution from a search tool to a portal, and how that compares with what Yahoo has done so far.

More on Yahoo:  this podcast of Paul Levine's (GM of Yahoo Local) talk at Where 2.0 on the "architecture of participation" (a term he borrows from Tim O'Reilly):

http://www.itconversations.com/audio/download/ITConversations-807.mp3

If you're not familiar with Web 2.0 stuff like map APIs and tagging, this might be useful to help familiarize you with these services as Yahoo implements them.  If you are, this will be less interesting and feel more like an ad for Yahoo's experiments.

(Remember to point your podcatcher to Marketspace Advisor's feed if you're interested in subscribing to other podcasts we distribute from here.)

From Kiosks to Self Service

The Self-Service and Kiosk Show a few weeks ago highlighted some key advances in the kiosk industry that have taken place over the past few years. When I attended the show in 2004 it was called the Kiosk Show (sans Self Service) and the most anyone had to say about user experience involved the color and placement of the buttons on the screen. Having been a user experience professional before the domain existed, I felt like I had entered a time warp. This year was different. I was pleasantly surprised by some of the progress that has been made and want to share with you some of the highlights from the show and a personal kiosk experience.

The Physical Hyperlink Gets Real?

When I see an idea a couple of times in a day, I begin to think maybe I should pay closer attention.

A while back I learned about ElleGirl's Mobot pilot, in which registered readers snap pictures of ads with their cell phones and send the pictures to ElleGirl in exchange for coupons or a chance to win a prize.

Browsing Scott Schaeffer's Pondering Primate (all things mobile) (via Martina's Adverblog), I read about NewMedia's patent on barcode recognition via cellphone camera.  You're in the store, see a product you think you might like, snap a photo of the barcode, send it in (presumably to some service you pre-register for) and get information about the product, maybe suggestions for complementary products, comparisons to other products, and perhaps coupons and other incentives.

(Now put the two together: cross-promote a subscription to a cooking magazine when the cell phone user snaps a picture, say, of balsamic vinegar.  Or, if that's a stretch, maybe cross-promote a "micro-license" to relevant recipes, the same way we buy ringtones today?)

Extensions:  real-time video is now here (though it's early) for mobile devices.  I posted yesterday on the new ESPN Mobile service, and noted the UK launch of Virgin Mobile's new BT Movio-based service.  Maybe the 30-second TV spot gets reincarnated, not once but twice: first, from the TV to the PDA, and second, from upstream in the awareness-raising end of the buying process to the consideration stage when someone's trying to figure out if a product might be right for him, and snaps the cell phone photo to find out.

Personally though, I won't be impressed until my cell phone has a built-in Cyranose...

(Postscript: ElleGirl Gets Wired campaign results are in.  each participant entered 22 times in the month; participation increased 228% from the first ten days of the month to the last ten days; 96% of survey respondents said they were likely or extremely likely to participate in the future; purchase intent was 14% among promotion participants, recall rates were 15% higher, and advertiser favorability ratings were 18% higher.  Source -- Insight Express survey reported in"A Real Call To Teen Action: Teen Mags Grab Readers By The Phone", by Allison Enright, Marketing News, February 1, 2006.)

Democratic House Hunting

In his book The Future of Work, Tom Malone posits that the steady reduction in the cost of communication has enabled dramatic shifts in both society (from kingdoms to democracies) and business (from vertically integrated, hierarchically managed firms to decentralized companies self-managed by independent worker/owners).  Malone’s best example of this transformation is eBay, where reduced telecommunication costs enable 400,000 independent sellers to communicate quickly, easily and across geographical boundaries. eBay's model provides sellers with the scale of a traditional centralized corporation but with the freedom (over product, pricing and marketing decisions) of a mom-and-pop business.

Several new websites represent the further democratization of business. For many years the process of buying a home was fraught with virtual “kingdoms” – real estate agencies like Prudential and Coldwell Banker and banking institutions like CountryWide – who charged usurious fees, drove up transaction costs, and kept me paying rent. But two new sites, Zillow.com and Prosper.com may signal a Malone-like shift in residential real estate from kingdoms to something more democratic. Zillow.com aggregates tax records, sales history and actual prices of ‘comparable’ properties to provide incredibly detailed, and unbiased, valuation information – exactly the kind of information you used to go to an agent for – for free. And Prosper.com matches prospective borrowers with prospective lenders who set their own interest rates; while both borrowers and lenders benefit, banks must forfeit their traditional 8-10% spread. Both sites have received a lot of attention from investors and the media, but will consumers follow? I know I will – after all, my lease is up in a couple months.

Re-integrating The Mobile Experience

As Michael Fedor's recent post suggested, the technical reach of what's possible with the latest generation of mobile devices seriously exceeds the usability grasp of the folks orchestrating the customer experience on them. 

In today's "Personal Technology" column in the Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg describes ESPN's new mobile video service.  Taking a page from Apple's playbook, ESPN has boldly bundled content, network (acting as an MVNO by licensing Sprint's EVDO network) and device (tailoring the service for consumption on a specific Sanyo model it co-brands with its own name). 

At the same time, ESPN has restricted the sites you can reach from the phone's browser -- like si.com -- apparently claiming that it's doing so to protect the user from incompatible downloads.  Here, ESPN seems to have skipped Apple's iPod page in which it says that you can download mp3's, as well as songs in its proprietary format. 

ESPN's overall effort seems like a good move given how poorly integrated virtually all high-end mobile devices are, but the restrictions suggest an internal struggle that clouds the power of its vision and compromises Apple-like usability.  Walt's review was ultimately negative.  Maybe I'm missing something? 

Good Kirk, Bad Kirk

Jeffrey in CIO.com on "Why CIOs and CMOs Need Each Other" (http://www.cio.com/weighin/column.html?CID=17734)

(In case you don't get the title of this post...)

We Come Not To Praise The Blackberry...

... but to bury it. 

(I'm surprised there's no action on this over at Intrade)