Today we’re celebrating BlogDay 2007, and in honor honour of PodCamp UK, I thought I’d highlight the blogs of PodCamp UK’s organizers organisers and sponsors.
So, in no particular order:
If you’re in the UK and are free 1 September and 2 September, stop on by PodCamp UK and celebrate the day after Blog Day 2007!
Tags: blogday blogday2007
This is the New Media Fishbowl. A commenter on Mitch Joel’s blog pointed out a Facebook Application that could draw a hyperbolic map of your friends in your network and how they were related. I was stunned to see a true, graphical, and clear representation of the New Media fishbowl, the echo chamber, whatever you want to call it.
The inner ring of hyperconnection is the fishbowl. It’s new media. Everyone in the outer ring? Financial Aid Podcast community members for the most part. These are all the people that the folks in the fishbowl are NOT connecting to – and there’s a lot of them. Most are college students.
Believe it or not, I’m happy with how my map looks, because the outer ring signifies that I’m trying to reach outside the fishbowl.
What does your map look like?
iPhone. Bacn. Chocolate Rain. LOLcats. Copybot. Bum Rush the Charts. Lonelygirl15. What do all these have to do with each other?
They’re all “viral” memes – high speed, high attention, sticky microcontent that spread like wildfire in various online communities. Just a mere mention of them on a blog can, if caught early enough, drive a tremendous amount of traffic to a blog, podcast, or web site, simply by virtue of obtaining good placement in early search results.
Right now, it’s kind of a free-for-all in online memes. Things appear and disappear like so many flashes in the pan, but if you can time the meme market just right, you can ride the waves of attention like a surfer, as Justin Kownacki pointed out about the city of Pittsburgh and its two recent hits.
How, though, do you make use of this? Enter a career of the near future: meme jumper. Working in concert with a Community Developer, a meme jumper is the person who coordinates tying content and products into relevant memes and promotions.
Case study: Virtual Thirst, the Coke campaign conducted by Crayon New Marketing. As a contributor to Matthew Ebel‘s Second Life live album, it was no mistake that it was named Virtual Hot Wings and tied into the Virtual Thirst promotion. At the same time, we tried to add as much value as possible to Virtual Thirst by offering a tangible good to an intangible campaign.
How to be a meme jumper? Connect. Connect, connect, connect. Use tools like Twitter for near-real-time monitoring of what’s getting people’s attention. Use Yahoo Pipes to aggregate a list of URLs from the Twitterstream into a format that can be parsed, then look for the most common URLs in a 24 hour period. Technorati and Google Blog Search will keep you on top of blogged items, but check them frequently. Find a meme to latch on to that’s appropriate, then tailor your content to match the meme as best as possible, adding value to it and propagating it.
What’s the goal of a meme jumper? Build lots of short bursts of high intensity traffic to a web site to garner attention and eyeballs. It’s then up to the Community Developer and other marketing staff to convert those eyeballs into subscribers, reader, and customers.
A meme jumper is different than a brand hijacker. The latter just plugs into as many buzzwords as possible with standard link baiting strategies without adding any additional value. It’s less symbiotic and more parasitic.
How do you apply for such a job? It’s all about the track record. Start with small organizations and volunteer work – find charities to plug into that desperately need the help, and make them powerful presences online for fundraising drives. Once you’ve done a few, take your show on the road.
Based on what’s in the book of Genesis from the Abrahamic bibles, God created everything in six days.
Day 1. Universe.
Day 2. Earth and water.
Day 3. Land and shrubbery.
Day 4. Seasons, day, and night.
Day 5. Critters.
Day 6. Mankind.
Day 7. Break.
If you assume that God’s calendar works differently than humans, and that the universe, based on the best research available, is between 12 and 16 billion years old, here’s a rough timeline:
Day 1. Universe. 12 billion years ago.
Day 2. Earth and water. 1.3 billion years ago. (Rodinia)
Day 3. Land and shrubbery. 500 million years ago.
Day 4. Seasons, day, and night. We’ll chalk this one up to error as pre-biblical folks weren’t exactly strong at astronomy 5,000 years ago.
Day 5. Critters. 300 million years ago.
Day 6. Mankind. 2 million years ago (homo erectus)
Day 7. Break.
Based on the giant times between periods – 200 million years or more – it’s funny to think that we might still be on Day 7, meaning God’s still out having coffee or whatever it is deities do during their off hours, and probably will be for at least another 180 million years…
Do prayers get an out of the office autoreply? It certainly would explain why a lot of people’s prayers are not answered but occasionally some are. Maybe God checks his messages infrequently when he’s on vacation.
In an interesting conversational thread on Twitter, the topic of power, motivation, and energy came up, as it often does, and Laura Fitton wrote: “always wondered what powers the mighty cspenn. Star Wars music?”
Well, music in general. There are some pieces that I find personally motivating, and it’s something that I emphasize everyone should have at hand, on an iPod or CD or computer or whatever it takes. Set aside a personal power playlist for each of the kinds of motivation you need – whether it’s getting your day started, powering through a task, or setting your mind and spirit for the journey home.
Some of my personal favorite selections, not from any one particular mood:
What’s on YOUR list of powerful music to immediately change your mindset?
A funny thing happens when there’s excess liquidity in a financial market, as has been the cases in the past 6 years due to housing. First, a quick primer. Liquidity is any asset that can be converted to cash quickly and with minimal loss of value. A blue chip stock – like Coca Cola – is a good example of a liquid asset. Barring a complete collapse of the stock market, you can sell your Coca Cola stock relatively quickly with minimal friction. If you had a doctor’s bill you had to pay, you could sell your Coke stock today and have cash to pay with tomorrow.
An illiquid asset is something like a house – you can’t really trade it quickly or easily. It’d take weeks, if not months, to sell that house and get the proceeds to pay off a doctor’s bill.
Excess liquidity is when there are too many dollars chasing too few goods or services. A nation’s central bank can print more money, and when they do, those dollars have to go somewhere. The same is true on Wall Street for investors. A sudden influx of money means they have all this extra money to play with and nowhere to invest it. This creates great investment opportunities, but it also creates a bubble that will eventually burst.
Enter new media. Investors looking for the Next Big Thing have been dumping tons of money into new media companies. Podshow, for example, received 8.8 million in round 1 of its financing and15 million in round 2. Plenty of other companies and web properties have been funded partly through all the play money generated by the excess liquidity on the market.
The market, however, is being called. People are cashing out and it’s causing both a liquidity squeeze and a credit crunch – loans at absurdly low interest rates aren’t available any more, investors aren’t buying portfolios where the value is just a guess, and available cash to play with is going away fast.
What does this mean for you? If you’re working at or running any kind of new media or Web 2.0 company – or a company that relies on them for cash flow – it’s time to bootstrap. Forget VC money, forget private equity, dismiss thoughts of being bought out and everyone getting a fat chunk of investor proceeds, and get down to business. Get cash positive, nuke your debt, and build the business. Not only does your survival depend on it, but so does new media’s.
If you’re a member or a part of a new media company, for example a podcaster at a podcasting network (pick any one), you’d better have a Plan B. Make sure you have archived copies of all your shows on a few data DVDs or an external hard drive. Back up your blog, show notes, and site. Make sure you have copies of everything, including emails, because Plan B assumes that one day, you’ll go to upload your show or edit your blog and there will be a big 404 there – and nothing else.
I’m not saying it’s going to happen like that, but for a couple hours’ work, it doesn’t hurt to plan for it. Anything less than that and you’ll feel smugly overprepared.
What are YOUR plans for Bubble 2.0’s bursting?
With the recent events surrounding imported products from China, such as cough syrup, stationery, childrens’ toys tainted with lead or coma-inducing drugs, mislabeled fish, fish treated with malachite and other cancer-causing drugs, tainted beef, bad radial tires, leukemia drugs, toxic pet food, breakaway hammocks, electrocuting palm tree decor, Craftsman electric saws with flying blades, and deadly toothpaste, it’s no wonder that people are a little leery of Chinese imports. Over lunch, a coworker and I were discussing why the Made in the USA folks aren’t capitalizing on this chain of events to promote US-made goods, and the reason may be…
… well, nothing’s made here any more, not in significant quantities and not with sourced materials. Even the Made in the USA trade group and NAFTA have rather relaxed guidelines about what Made in the USA must mean:
“Made in the USA” products need a content consisting of 51% or more of domestically produced or manufactured parts, labor and or value-added content or any combination thereof.
Thus, even if a toy was manufactured in the USA, if the leaded paint used on the toy was of Chinese origin, the product would still qualify for a Made in the USA label.
The unfortunate reality is that in the quest for the lowest possible prices at all costs, we’ve effectively outsourced virtually every part of the supply chain, and to countries (not just China) who have varying standards of quality and safety, not to mention labor laws. Unfortunately, buying American is harder than ever.
Don’t even think about American icon Hershey Chocolate for this holiday season. From Forbes.com:
In February, Hershey announced a major restructuring designed to cut costs and excess production capacity in the United States and Canada, while expanding in Mexico, China and India, where labor is cheaper and Hershey hopes to sell more candy.
Since then, Hershey has announced it will close six U.S. and Canadian plants and cut more than 3,000 workers in the two countries, including up to 900 at its hometown plants. It has plans to shift more production to contractors and a new plant it is building in Monterrey, Mexico.
On Thursday, it said production is underway in China through a joint venture with South Korea’s Lotte Confectionery Co. and its joint venture in India with Godrej Industries Ltd. is up and running.
Perhaps we’ll see a resurgence this holiday season of small craftsman goods – things made not only in the USA, but made by your own hands. It’s the only way to be sure of a product’s origins. Just make sure you make the components, too.
Blog Day: 5 blogs you probably don’t read, but should
John Wall, host of the M Show and co-host of the best marketing podcast ever made in a Dunkin Donuts, tagged me for Jeff Pulver’s blog day. Since it’s been weighing on my mind lately, here are 5 finance and economics blogs that you should read:
1. Calculated Risk. A blog talking about economics and what’s going on behind the scenes of the world’s economy.
2. Financial Armageddon. Naysayers and pessimism prevail, but if you aren’t reading, you aren’t getting the whole story behind derivatives and hedge funds. These guys pegged The Street for major upheaval way before CNBC.
3. Housing Panic. Keep up on the latest housing bubble news, snark included.
4. The Oil Drum. Thinking about oil? Worried about energy? Thinking about the future? Start here.
5. Freakonomics, the Blog. Economists outside economics makes for fun reading.
I’d also recommend strongly that you plug Bloomberg on the Economy into your MP3 player of choice as soon as possible. And if you can watch Jim Cramer, you should.
Five Bloggers to participate:
Jon Rudy
Donna Papacosta
Bryan Person
Julien Smith
Julia Roy
Tag: blogday2007
Jim Cramer’s not known for subtlety, but this was a whopper.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY5nfytTQT8[/youtube]
Podsafe Musicians – Mobilize Your Fan Reviews!
Are you a podsafe musician with rabid fans? Getting your fans to review your albums in iTunes is now more important than ever with the release of My iTunes from Apple. My iTunes is an Apple-branded widget that provides one click access to albums and reviews and can be put on social networks, web pages, and any place that accepts Flash embedded content. Here’s my reviews in iTunes so far:
My iTunes supports fan purchases, fan favorites, and fan reviews – and I would argue that fan reviews are probably going to be the strongest of the three in terms of converting visitors to buyers, so you may want to encourage your fans to review your albums and then put up the widgets on their sites.What does this mean for you? In addition to getting fans to review your albums, these widgets can potentially multiply the number of people who click on buy-ready links to your albums in iTunes, bringing extra buyers to the digital content. Because it’s Flash-based, there’s no search engine optimization benefit, but having a nice looking widget that’s ready to go and ties into the world’s largest online music store is a sure win for podsafe artists. Most importantly, because it’ll be displayed primarily by fans of your music (as opposed to you), there’s more credibility in recommendations from a third party, which goes a long way.
What To Do Next
If you’re not in iTunes, get there. Services like CD Baby and IODA Promonet will get you there, and while you’ll probably net between 59 and 79 cents on the dollar, it’s better than not getting those sales at all.
