Great article over on ZDNet about the cost of “Social Freeloaders” - the majority of Social Network/Social Bookmarketing/Web 2.0 users who are contributing to a site, but are watching/reading/listening to others contributions.
Great read over at Business 2.0 about the upcoming US launch of Korean Social Network Cyworld. According to the article, Cyworld is incredibly attractive to teens and young adults in Korea alike (90% of all Koreans in their 20s are Cyworld members), and they are hoping to make a similiar splash in the US. While the US version isn’t live yet, a quick look at the original gives hints as to what it might look like. I think the concept is interesting - take a look at the articles description of the store - and has great potential.
10 Reasons why YouTube imitiators will fail (JaffeJuice)
Is Apple going to annouce iTunes movie rentals? (Slashdot)
Teens think email is passe (Micro Persuasion)
It a stat-a-riffic week, I suppose. BuzzMachine pointed out the new Neilsen Study relating to podcasts. BuzzMachine included some highlights, such as 9.2 million users have downloaded a podcast recently, along with 5.6 million downloading a video podcast.
Netscape to Top Digg Users: Want $1000 a month? (TechCrunch)
What can I you do with a wiki? (Experience Curve)
ArsTechnica takes a look at the newest Pew study on Bloggers - who they (Pew) call the “Internet’s New Storytellers.” The study is great and deserves a read, but here’s a few stats that I like:
Lots of other stuff in there, but those are just a few highlights.
GMA ran a piece today about billboards in and around L.A. creating quite a stir recently. They discussed viral marketing or “viral advertising” and touched on both the on and offline versions of the genre.
…36 hours. In fact, due to a computer glitch yesterday in acessing the blog, this might actually no longer be news. According to the New York Times, the study, which was done by a physicist at the University of Notre Dame, the time frame was actually much longer than they initiatially thought (2-4 hours). The study also provided an interesting looking into the readership habits of news - that users read in “bursts” vs. continually. I’d like to see a similiar study done again that also factors in:
- The use of RSS: Does it change readership? I know that at one point, individuals I’ve talked to (myself included) would continuously check their RSS feeds and then after a few weeks/months of use, they’d begin a process similiar to the ‘burst’ process.
- Mobile technology & its effect on the news cycle. My geuss is that the more mobiel we get, the shorter lifespan a news story will have.
Wired News and Wired Magazine: Together Again (BoingBoing)
MySpace: More popular than Google (Seach Engine Watch)
Google Audio - Revolutionary Radio Advertising? (Micro Persuasion)
Mercury News has a great article today about the different possibilities YouTube could use for making money, along with some current strategies, some possibilities and the ever popular debate as to whether or not the traffic will keep on coming - ads or no.
Rocketboom relaunched today with its new host, Joanne Colan. Lots of comments of this (along with some choice sarcasm over at Digg) and for the time being, I’m going to let it rest, cut her a break and wait a few weeks to see how “Rocketboom 2.0″ pans out.
ARGN reports that another member of the ABC family - ABC Family (Channel) is launching an Alternate Reality Game on July 23rd for its new show, Fallen. This comes on the heels of another ABC show with an ARG - The Lost Experience - which we here at New Media Sense have been following on and off. It’s nice to see more ARGs occuring within the TV world, as television as an episodic medium really lends itself nicely to the use of ARGs.
NY Times YouTube link of French World Cup “Head Butting” Video may indicate YouTube has arrived in the mainstream….and while we’re at it - 1.2 million views in 24 hours? Nice! (Marketing Vox)
Teens Favorite Site: Not what you may think! (eMarketer)
And, finally, the new host of Rocketboom (ValleyWag)
Digg annouced that it has taken the new categories off of beta, and users can now look at stories in the previously beta’d categories without having to register. To date, I’ve been relatively impressed with the additional stories that Digg users have included in the new categories - granted, not all of them are winners, and some of the newer categories (like World and Business) seem to be less beefy than others (like Entertainment), but all in all, its a handy tool to have.
MSN, Yahoo! and potentially AOL have launched (or are in the process of launching) some new online programming - MSN recently launched “Fan Club” - an online reality show focusing on a minor league team, while Yahoo! launched “The 9,” a Rocketboom-feel type show that runs down user voted sites and video clips each morning. The 9 is kind of neat, in that the video blog (sponsored by Pepsi) has a list of the links in each show - and when you click on each number, it takes you directly to that portion of the video, just in case you don’t want to wait for it. (Handy!). More neat will be to see how they fare against the competition (like Rocketboom, should it ever re-launch). And finally, Searchviews (which hosted the story we linked to above) notes that AOL might be working on something with Dan Rather - but very few details seem to be available.
After I read the full article in Red Herring, the patent seems much less..dire than it appeared in the original BoingBoing post where I found it. Rather than patenting the concept of Social Networking it patents a very specific type of Social Network - one which limits becoming someone’s “friend” by a number of degrees - but it does still open up some questions about what they plan to do in regards to some of the other Social Networks with a similiar set up (i.e., Linked In) out there.
LeeAnn Prescott over at Hitwise takes an interesting look at stats that give a “reality check” to recent speculation that Digg’s traffic and new content areas could make it as big as the NYTimes. I like her approach, which doesn’t just look at traffic or pageviews, but also demographics (for instance, the fact that “6% of Digg’s users were in the 18-24 age bracket, while only 9.5% of NY Times users were in that age group“), and where their traffic comes from.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Digg and think they have a great thing going, but I do think we’re looking at two different sets of users, vs. news consumers (and trackers) as a whole.
 |  |
 |  |
ATOM/RSS/XML