Once you've started wearing low-impact organic cotton clothing, gotten used to more concentrated detergent in a smaller bottle, and purchased carbon offsets for your trips to ultra-virtuous ecotourist hangouts, what's a green-conscious 2.0 type to do next?
Blackle helps by essentially shutting down pixels on your screen, so you use a lot less energy while Googling -- er, Blackling -- your next big green move.
Courtesy of Thrillist.
comScore released new numbers on mobile web usage in the UK and US. In the US 17% of the total 135 million web users also use the mobile web.
“Similar to the Internet 10-15 years ago, men under the age of 35 are the early adopters of new technology and more likely to use mobile devices to access the Mobile Web than women or men aged over 35, ” commented Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe.
“The Mobile Web is at an early state of development, but we expect Mobile Web usage to grow as phone performance improves, sites optimise their content for the small screen and operators fine tune their tariffs, enabling consumers to take full advantage of mobile phone capabilities, content and convenience,” Ivins continued.
In the US, AOL and The Weather Channel lead mobile sites. "The Weather Channel in the U.S. has a greater reach via the Mobile Web than it does via PC-based Internet, highlighting how the success of sites that provide content for people on the move by optimizing their content for the small screen."
UMass Dartmouth's Center for Marketing Research released a report (PDF) recently that details the opinions of Inc. 500 companies on Social Media. The conclusion: "The hype is real."
The report is based on interviews with 121 Inc. 500 companies who were asked detailed questions about their usage and measurement of social media. 42% claimed to be "very familiar" with social networking.
33% of responders said that their company uses forums as a marketing tool while only 17% used wikis and 11% used podcasting.
Looking forward, 26% saw social networks as very important to their marketing strategy with 40% saying it was somewhat important.
The study concludes, "from familiarity to usage to importance, social media is far more prevalent in the Inc. 500 than previous research would predict."
Everyone is busy trying to predict the online future for 2007, but it is always fun to look back over the past year and pull out some of our buzzwords that have made it to mainstream. Here are just a few.
Blog Juice - A measure of how popular a blog is based on different factors. Coined by Text Link Ads, the blog juice calculator measures blog juice by looking at Bloglines subscribers , Alexa ranking, Technorati ranking and incoming links. By increasing your popularity by linking, blog juice can be increased.
Clickprint - A users' pattern of web surfing behavior that can identify one user from another. The clickprint can be identified based on number of pageviews on a site, what day of the week and even what time a day a user is on a particular website. Studies have shown that after just seven web sessions a user can be identified by their Web surfing patterns. The question becomes are clickprints an invasion of privacy. The term was coined by two professors.
Flog - A blog that appears to be written by a person when it is actually used as a marketing tool by a company. There are so many examples over the past year. Wal-Mart tried in October of 2006 under the disguise of an All-American couple traveling across the country sleeping in Wal-Mart parking lots. In December 2006 Sony attempted to increase the sales of their PSP with the www.alliwantforxmasisapsp.com.
Wikiality - A reality where, if enough people agree with a notion, it becomes the truth. Basically, truth by consensus. It was first used by Stephen Colbert on the “The Colbert Report.” If enough people agree with a Wikipedia edit, than it becomes the truth. But if a consensus is reached about another edit that becomes this new edit becomes the truth. Therefore the truth is continually being edited as long as an consensus is being reached. All hail Wikiality!
GooTube - The new entity and web services created when Google bought YouTube in October of 2006 for $1.65 billion. Everyone in still waiting to see how this new merger will manifest itself in 2007.
Google Bomb - Yes, this one has been around for a while but the big Google Bomb stink took hold of the U.S. mainstream during the 2006 elections. It is a tactic meant to influence the ranking of a given page in Google search results. Over the past year, many left-leaning bloggers, led by MyDD.com, banded together to propel neutral or negative articles about many Republican House candidates to the top of Google searches for their names.
Reuters reports that a new study (PDF) on Second Life is available from EPN, a Dutch non-profit group that studies the effects of technology and communication.
The study found that “there is a strong correlation between well-being and success in Second Life and well-being and success in real life.”
The study has a number of informative graphics that range from motives for being in Second Life to gender, education and income.
Local search and ad dollars are running away from local media. Google would seem to be the logical benefactor of that shift. However, AskCity wants to change all of that. The LA Times states, "For now, Ask's main strategy is to gain market share by persuading its current users to do a few more searches each month. In October, 23% of U.S. Web searchers did at least one search with Ask, compared with 65% at Google and 53% at Yahoo, according to ComScore."
Om Malik interviewed AskCity CEO, Jim Lanzone recently.
"OM: So why should I care about this launch. I can find a lot of information from other sites.
JL: You should care because search engines are the #1 online most-used resource for local information, ahead of yellow pages and local newspaper sites, and local searches account for about 10% of all searches on major search engines. Yet local is the category with the lowest user satisfaction in search. So there is this gaping need for better local search. We think we’ve got it."
Local media companies are not ready to capitulate and are struggling to adopt new production methods like Mojos and new local product offerings like Metro New York.
The IAB released a report today showing internet advertising spending for the 3Q of 2006 will exceed 4 billion dollars.
From the press release:
"The consistent growth of online advertising is a clear indication that marketers continue to embrace the true power of interactive advertising," said Sheryl Draizen, SVP, General Manager, IAB. "Marketers are experiencing how this medium enhances their ability to target and engage the audience that matters to their brand and then measure its effectiveness in ways no other medium provides."
"Interactive advertising, with its eighth consecutive quarter of growth and the largest single quarter ever, is on pace for its biggest year. This growth follows the trend of where consumers are spending their media time and the unique ability of Interactive advertising to effectively target and monitor ad campaigns," said David Silverman, Partner, Assurance, PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The news broke Friday that IBM will invest $10 million in 2007 on Second Life projects. IBM Chairman and chief executive Sam Palmisano will address 7000 IBM employees in a town hall meeting tomorrow and then visit IBM's Second Life projects in-world.
IBM has been working in Second Life of over a year on its secret island and has 250 employees that regularly use Second Life to conduct meetings and seminars.
Irving Wladawsky-Beger, VP, Technical Strategy and Innovation at the IBM Corporation, stated Friday, "The essence of ecommerce today is built around the idea of catalogues.
That's very useful, it fits with the idea of web pages and catalogue
pages but most people don't think of shopping in terms of catalogues
and pages but in terms of stores that they go into."
Led by IBM Second Lifers, Roo Reynolds and Ian Hughes, IBM plans to develop a v-Business strategy that includes thinking about getting data in and out of Second Life.
Coming on the heels of the CNN/Fortune article titled, "No, Second Life is not over hyped," the IBM announcement lends credence to the fact that Second Life may be more than what it currently appears to be.
(Second Life photos by Michel Leblanc)
Innovation Lab's HOTLIST 2006 runs down the ten top trends in products and services.
Will Waugh at the ANA reveals some data about branded entertainment from a recent ANA publication, "Best Practices in Branded Entertainment: Case Studies and Accountability," by Richard C. Sutton with Barbara Zack. The big data points are, according to PQ Media, branded entertainment will a 7.5 billion dollar industry by 2010.
Will also points to an excerpt from the book listing the ten best practices of branded entertainment:
As viewers turn from TVs to the internet for more of their entertainment, brand sponsored content is going to be more and more important for reaching your target audience.
