Daily reading 10/17/2007

MediaPost Publications – Big Weeklies Sputter, Smaller Pubs Soar – 09/04/2007

Daily reading 10/16/2007

MediaPost Publications – Unisfair: Virtual Events Generate Leads – 09/12/2007  Annotated

a majority of attendees were more likely to interact with an exhibitor, speaker, or other attendee while online than in person–as the social pressures that can accompany live events are absent. It’s these factors that are bringing both event hosts and sponsors from outside the media industry–what Best calls “enterprise companies” to the virtual event space.

Daily reading 10/12/2007

Nielsen: Word-of-Mouth Most Valuable Ad Platform – MediaPost Publications, 10/03/2007  Annotated

Seventy-eight percent of consumers say they trust other consumers’ recommendations over all advertising/marketing avenues. Next in the trust line: Ads in newspapers, at a 63% score. Consumers’ opinions from online blogs came in third at 61%. Brand Web sites were at 60%.

Of the 13 different ad platforms Nielsen surveyed, new digital platforms–including some of that group’s biggest categories–took the last three spots. Search engine ads only generated a 34% trusting score; online banner ads were at 26%; and–dead last–was text ads on mobile phones.

Traditional media, on the whole, did much better than new digital platforms. Television and magazine were in the middle of the pack, each with a 56% score; Radio was at 54%; and brand sponsorships, at 49%.

TechCrunch And Huffington: Who Will Buy The Big Blogs?

Daily reading 10/11/2007

MySpace Platform To Launch Next Week

Daily reading 10/10/2007

Google Buys Phone Software Firm – New York Times

Blue Ridge Business Journal  Annotated

“Honestly,” says Holloway, “in marketing and public relations education, we need to teach our students to send a great promotional text message.

“We are moving quickly to a world in which we all are media content creators and information providers.”

MediaPost Publications – Welcome to the Neighborhood – 10/09/2007  Annotated

Fatdoor uses Microsoft Virtual Earth to map neighborhoods, letting residents position icons over photos of their houses and streets. They can create profiles, rate restaurants, post images, leave messages for other neighbors – and the more they participate, the more points they earn, building their credibility. Even before residents join, the local sites are prepopulated with information already available on the Web.

Google’s Orkut: A World of Ambition  Annotated

Orkut recently pushed past the News Corp. (NWS) subsidiary in the Asia Pacific region. Orkut’s following in that market, which includes China and Japan, has nearly tripled, to roughly 11 million visitors a month, over the past year, according to the consultancy comScore (SCOR). MySpace, by contrast, has been drawing between 9 million and 10 million visitors in recent months.

Meanwhile, Orkut’s usage in Latin America has continued to climb: In August, it received 12.4 million unique visitors from that region, double the Latin American traffic of MySpace and Facebook combined.

MySpace is crowded; Amanda Beard is a ‘GoDaddy Girl’ – USATODAY.com  Annotated

f you looked at the press 18 months ago, you couldn’t pick up an article or watch a TV show without hearing about MySpace founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe as the media darlings.

Now, Facebook is the next media darling, and in between there was YouTube. They are highly differentiated products. We are seeing growth in both.

Miller’s Brew Blog covers the competition

I came across the Miller Brew Blog for the first time today, although it’s been up since early this year. While my first reaction was that it’s a lot of dry press releases and reprints from Miller’s corporate magazine (and a lot of it reads that way), the about page revealed that it’s written by a veteran advertising reporter and is intended to be a roundup of news and commentary about the brewing industry.

On that point, the Brew Blog succeeds. A lot of the content is about Miller’s competition and the changes going on in the overall industry. There’s a lot about arch-rival Annheuser-Busch, for example. What’s missing is commentary. While the blog succeeds in talking openly about issues that aren’t usually discussed in corporate communications, it fails to deliver much spirit, attitude or even a distinctive personality.

I’m on the radio in Atlanta this Thursday

If you’re in the Atlanta area (or have access to a Web browser!), listen in on Business Radio 1160 this Thursday at 11 for my interview with Brent Leary and Michael Thomas, who are two fun guys. Or you can download the podcast version right now. Here’s the synopsis:

How You and Your Small Business Can Become a New Influencer – Paul talks with hosts Brent Leary and Michael Thomas about how he utilized his blog to enlist hundreds of collaborators to help him write his book, what it takes to be a new influencer and a few examples of how small businesses are using social media to positively influence their bottom lines.

Daily reading 10/05/2007

Tech giants poke around Facebook – USATODAY.com  Annotated

Social networks are used by two-thirds of the estimated 220 million online users in the USA, says Karsten Weide, an analyst at IDC. (IDC) An estimated 200,000 new folks sign up for Facebook each day.

Facebook’s influence runs deep because the Internet is at the same stage that the computer operating system was in the mid-1980s, says analyst Peck. The tech company that controls the mechanism for buying and selling ads online will hold remarkable sway over the Internet industry for years to come — just as Microsoft did through its Windows operating system.

BusinessWeek Launches Major Art, Editorial Redesign  Annotated

Throughout, the magazine features a cleaner, bolder look with department slugs and oversized page numbers that are designed to aid navigation. To elevate the profile of BusinessWeek’s long-form stories, Adler recently appointed Robert Hunter as assistant managing editor for features; with the redesign, features will open with dramatic spreads.

Berkeley launches YouTube channel

Daily reading 10/04/2007

Facebook: A social network evolves into a social utility — Our Latest Discovery

Demo stuff for IT organizations

Note: Video presentations of the products mentioned below, as well as most other presentations from Demo, are available here. Blogger won’t accept the embedded videos and I don’t have time to mess with it.

As an event that brims with streaming video and eye-catching GUIs, Demo has never been the ideal venue for IT infrastructure companies. Startups that make servers perform better, for example, or that improve bandwidth utilization have an impossible task matching the slickness of their consumer-oriented neighbors.

Nevertheless, I saw some noteworthy innovations at Demo that should interest corporate computing departments.

Fusion-io – For sheer “Wow!” factor, Fusion-io’s ioMemory and ioDrive were hard to beat. The company claims to have squeezed the capacity and power of a storage area network onto a single PCI-Express card. The product it plans to release at the end of this year packs 640GB of non-volatile storage into a card that fits in the palm of your hand. It uses the same memory technology that’s embedded in Apple’s iPod Nano. Some people believe that breed of flash memory will eventually replace disk drives altogether.

The performance claims by this company are astounding. Fusion-io says it can improve storage performance by up to 100 times with better reliability because the product has no moving parts. At an estimated cost of around $20,000, the product will no doubt be the most costly expansion card ever produced, but Fusion-io says it will be far cheaper than the storage area networks it replaces.

CEO Rick White says a fully loaded SAN costs about $80 per gigabyte, while his product will come in at about $30 per gigabyte. That’s because there is no need for the racks, power supplies, controllers, air conditioning supply and floor space that conventional SANs need. Multiple cards can be placed in the same box and RAID-style striping can be employed for data integrity and redundancy.

The show guide said Fusion-io’s products “may prove to be among the most important products ever to launch a Demo.” If the company’s claims are true, that’s probably not an overstatement.

Solid ICE – This on-demand virtual environment from Qumranet combines the best features of virtualization and thin-client terminal services. Users can have multiple virtual machines running on their desktop, all hosted and served from the data center. IT organizations can fluidly scale of the power and resources provided to each user, and desktops can be customized and saved for access from any location. Users can even install software into their virtual machines, as if they were local computers.

Talari Networks – One of the few areas of IT infrastructure that has yet to succumb to Moore’s Law is wide area network services. Enterprises continue to lease frame relay, multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) and other pricey dedicated network services from carriers because they’re afraid to take chances on the public Internet.

Talari claims to have come up with a way to adapt routing patterns to variations in the network and achieve frame relay-like reliability at a fraction of the cost. It layers in some secure data delivery and packet engineering to achieve reliability of more than 99.95%. Talari says is can deliver between 30 and 100 times the bandwidth per dollar and eliminate the need for frame relay or MPLS services in many cases.

The company’s web site is still two pages deep, so it may be awhile before its claims can be verified.