Google User Experience Research

Crowdsourcing at its best - I love Google:

Read more at www.google.com/forms/us...

Notes on Techmeme's new sponsorship model - blog.memeorandum.com

A new model to provide advertising on a blog. Simple and brilliant. The concept is similar to adversing articles in magazines, with the advantage for the reader that it is clearly identified as sponsored content while being better integrated into the blog itself (you can hope for more relevant and more interesting content than just ad banners).

Very cool...

Read more at blog.memeorandum.com/06...

Mysterious Paypal Secure Storage

From Techcrunch at www.techcrunch.com/2006... Finally the service that I had been looking for: a place to store digital content. It may sound stupid, but one of the big questions I had was what happens when I die? I spend a lot of time online, and I have a lot of accounts in many places, and documents that I write for myself. I am sure a lot of people also have electronic documents that they care about, pictures or books they may have written but never published. And then nobody around them would really know they exist or how to access themClearly there is a need for an "electronic deposit box". I have seen MySpace setup some special places for their users who died, but this is really only the tip of the iceberg.With this new service from Paypal, we may finally have a solution for this problem. A secure place where we can save pieces of our digital personna for future. I hope now that they have also figured out a process for providing access to the Drop Box to family or whoever is named in a will. And maybe this is the next move for Paypal to provide a place to submit online wills that can be opened under specific circumstances. I am sure there is room for such a service as well...

Lunch over IP: Direct Economy

A very good summary of an article published by Xavier Comtesse - Read more here - original here if you can read French.

Xavier explains how the technologies available today allow the transfer of knowledge to customers, so that they can become more involved in the value chain, thus helping companies to become highly productive, as the only way to survive competition from low cost providers (which sometimes does not mean low value, there are a lot of good engineers in Eastern Europe, China or India).

Xavier Comtesse offers a great tool to help companies define their strategy and understand how to move forward and best use knowledge transfers to improve productivity. He also presents an example of how this can work in a presentation available here (in French as well), but the matrix is in english and give a good idea of what can be done).

Web 2.0

I was asked yesterday whether I think that Web2.0 is a bubble or not. And I think it is, but clearly nothing as bad as what happened in 2000.

There is a lot of hype, and there is a lot of unknown, but what cannot be ignored are the fundamental underlying trends that are shaping beyond the hype.

The buzz words are the growth of P2P, marketplace disruptions, swarm innovation, social webs, folksonomies, long tail economy, etc...

Many thought leaders have been preaching to the crowd already:

• Yochai Benkler describes in his book "The wealth of networks" how grassroot movements have been able to resist and fight against large corporations, for example on the voting machine issue. He demonstrates that the cloud is a very powerful and productive force.
  

• John Seely Brown talks about swarm innovation in ecosystems across Asia. In his book "The only sustainable edge", he describes how a network of independent subcontractors can produce faster better goods than a large corporation.
  

• Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore recently published a book called "Communities dominate brands", in which they show how the next generation is about more than just being connected, it is a Community generation. They show how start-ups with low budget can outperform large corporations by fostering a solid ecosystem around their business and by engaging their customers.
• Seth Godin talk about "The purple cow" and the need to move from push marketing to engagement marketing
  
• Chris Anderson exposes the power of the web to enable the long tail economy
• Thomas Malone predicts in his book "The future of work" that the technologies of cooperation available today will change the way we do business and manage organizations

• Michel Bauwens talks about Peer to Peer as the emergence of a new civilization

The online community is vibrant with creativity, and a lot of options/revenue models are being explored or are emerging:

• Virtual worlds are getting real (2nd life, everquest, etc...) with items sold on eBay and credit cards to cash money out at ATMs (gold farming)
• Online videos uploads and dowloads, IPTV and P2P are trying to offer an alternative to regular video content distribution. I have mentioned in my previous post that it is clearly a very good way to produce reality TV
• Social Networks are still the thing of the day, and to me another form (but only 2 dimensional) of virtual worlds
  

Meanwhile Interruption marketing is dying: for example I have read in "Communities Dominate Brands" that a study had shown that 71% of car buyers got influenced by word of mouth vs. 17% influenced by TV ads.

With all these changes come new challenges

• The explosion of services and communities results in content overload and creates the need for managing our attention and digital identities
• Ranking/ratings/reputation systems need to be enhanced and controlled, to prevent gaming, we need to understand whether trust can be transitive, and if so, in which circumstances. In this area, I like also like the concept of transparence: how much of your identity are you willing to divulge. I see it as a good indication of trustworthiness.
• Making sense through tags requires maintenance to aleviate overuse and obsolescence, and to better describe individuals semantic, context, and goals. How will we be able to manage all this content moving forward, at the global level and at the personal level (what happens to my content when I die for example)
  

The opportunity is for companies, large or small to make sense of what is happening. But overall, more than a technology evolution, web2.0 is really an expression of a sociological change that has been enabled by technology, and it goes far beyond just technology. Web2.0 is not about Ajax or the latest cool free service, it is not about cool phones or IPTV, it is about how people relate to each other, how they learn to trust each other, and how they learn to live and work with their neighbors.
And since we are talking humans and not technology, we'd better be ready for this changes to take a long time. The Internet bubble happened because people though the world would change in one day, the web2.0 bubble is another sign of impatience from the techies community and their investors, we should already be looking at web3.0 and beyond...

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Top social media users getting paid; is the balance shifting?

Here is something interesting: a few days after I was musing on the idea of YouTube videos being sold on DVD after a given video dialogue is completed, here comes the news that the amateur video from the popular lonelygirl15 were indeed shot by professional. If there is any doubt that we are experimenting with new ways of producing reality TV, this one is a good sign that we probably are...

Read more at www.techcrunch.com/2006...

Audience 2.0 Launch! — CooperationCommons

Something to look forward to: Issue one of Audience 2.0 will be released this week:

Read more at www.cooperationcommons....

How YouTube could increase revenues

I am looking at some videos on YouTube, and how they are linked to each other to create a complete dialog between a few individuals. The videos remind me very much of the reality TV shows that you can watch on MTV. And some of these discussions have gone long enough that you could make it into a season release on DVD.
I have not seen it yet, but I would think that there is potential for revenue in such a scheme. YouTube can print the DVDs and market them, and would share the revenue with the various participants in these discussions.
The whole thing reminds me of how Armistead Maupin book "Tales of The City" was originally released one chapter after the other as a chronicle in a Marin County newspaper. What I see on YouTube now seem very much like the same thing for videos stories. While the TV format was not really a good venue for this type of process, the web is perfect, and people are not expecting to get more than a few minutes of videos at a time, unless this is the video of a live event.
I am curious to see how long it will take before we see DVD releases of YouTube content...

Trustmojo » Facets of Facets, Tagclouds And Trust

I am happy to see that somebody liked my business card :-)

I have a tag cloud on the back, because I think that it is a good representation of who I am and what my interests are. Maybe this will inspire others....

Read more at trustmojo.com/2006/08/3...