Been a while since the last post, but wanted to provide a little more detail on a report we pulled together that was picked up by USA Today : Gamers: Wii has PS3 beat

Here’s how we pulled together the report- we monitored over 100,000 conversations on our top 100 gaming sites, and we found just over 10,000 that were relevant to the launch. The way we broke it down was to categorize the conversations as positive, neutral, or negative, which is determined by our analysts who specialize in gaming. The breakdown:

PS3:

• 7062 conversations
• 1945 Positive (27%)
• 2650 Negative (38%)
• 2467 Neutral (35%)

Wii:

• 3520 conversations
• 1711 Positive (49%)
• 638 Negative (18%)
• 1171 Neutral (33%)

A couple of things stand out to me- first, the difference in volume between the two consoles is almost 2-to-1, and might be indicative of the fact that negative threads, as a whole, generate more volume, or if the larger PS2 installed base lent itself to a larger fanboy population (probably both). Another thing that stood out is that almost all of the excerpted quotes in our report and in other media involve Wal*Mart as the setting for every story- maybe people had a hard time finding them because they all went to the same place. -Sam Huxley

While I don’t really tend to cover current events, the blogging (and the Flickring, and the YouTube activities, etc) going on about the Thailand coup is fascinating. Of course, this post sums up the activity better than I ever could.

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.

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.

GoogleSystem was pointed to a new type feature in some AdSense ads - a little picture on top of the ads. Evidently, this is part of a test to draw eyeballs to the text ads. After first the picture (bigger here) didn’t make much sense (ok, it still doesn’t) but according to Google System, webmasters are allowed to put pictures above the text ads. Seems like AdSense is all about experimentation these days.

Google makes a play for Flickr (Paul Stamatiou)

A look at a pay-to-play ARGN model (ARGN)

Bill Gates steps down from Microsoft day-to-day (CNET)