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Feeds from American Airlines.
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Outstanding guide for using RSS feeds for holiday shopping.
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"As the news networks come to grips with the digital revolution, ABC News is merging the old and new world every day with an original newscast whose primary audience have video iPods."
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Nice use of a blog, RSS and a widget to promote the revival of Chorus Line.
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"Put the power of Windows Live Search on your very own website-without learning any actual code. "
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October 2006
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
The Ultimate Mobile Portal
Over the last few months I have been traveling a ton. So I have been using my smart phone to access the Web probably at least a third as often as I do via my computer. This has prompted me to seek out and bookmark as many mobile-friendly Web sites as I can find. Today I unearthed perhaps the most essential one out there - it's from Mobileplay.
Bitty Browser and Mobileplay have created a special portal that links to the most most popular mobile-friendly Web destinations. This includes news and sports sites as well as stripped-down versions of several Gawker media blogs like Gizmodo and Valleywag.
Visit this link on your cell phone and bookmark it. (PS - there's also a mobile-friendly version of my blog, which you can find here.)
Monday, October 30, 2006
Get a Mapkit Widget for Your Blog and Earn Moolah
Platial.com tomorrow is rolling out MapKits - special map widgets for blogs. The program is similar to Frappr and other geo-tagging services - with one key exception. Platial will share revenue with its affiliates in the near future. The service supports any platform that allows for Javascript widgets, including all of the big blog hosts.
Tags: geotagging, maps
Pew: Health Searchers Don't Check Their Sources
The Pew Internet and American Life project has released a fascinating study that looks at how people search for health information online. First, unsurprisingly, eight out of every ten Internet users in the US go online for health information. However, they're not looking closely at what they find.
What's notable here is that 75% percent of those who search for health information do not check the source or the date of the information they find. Given how well blogs, message boards, social networks and Wikipedia rank in search results, it's highly likely that individuals are being swayed by what's published in these sources - even if its inaccurate. One third of patients talked to their doctor about what they did find online.
Last week I spoke to Susannah Fox, Associate Director, at Pew, to get a better understanding for the study. Her are excerpts from our email interview.
MP: What was the biggest surprise to you in your findings?
SF:The biggest surprise for me was the decreasing percentage of health seekers (internet users who look for health information online) to check the source and date of the medical advice - health
information they find. Expert organizations like the Medical Library Association, URAC, Consumer WebWatch, and the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services have been trying to publicize the importance of checking these quality indicators, but it seems clear that most internet users are not getting the message.
But that goes along with the other surprise -- the internet is a place where people find reassurance about their health care decisions. I had not expected to find that three-quarters of health seekers felt that way after their last search, which suggests that they believe that what they are finding online is high-quality. And more than half of health seekers say their last online health information session gave them
confidence to raise new questions or concerns about a health issue with their doctor. So much health care decision-making happens outside the doctor's office, and apparently a lot of it is happening near a
computer.
MP: How often do you think patients are running into peer-created content such as blogs, message boards, etc. when conducting their searches?
SF: Your second question is a really interesting one. We found in this survey that most people are starting at a search engine, but we don't know what their search terms are and we don't know where they end up. We also don't know how many people run across health information as they go about their daily routines online -- checking in on their favorite blogs might get them thinking about skin cancer (see Dooce.com last summer). The Pew Internet Project has been tracking the rise of blogs and social networks online and we have done some research about peer-support groups online, but I'm very interested in exploring these areas in more detail.
MP: Are patients generally better informed or less informed by what they find? What is the perception vs. the reality?
SF: Our study does not address the third question about whether health seekers are actually better informed (or if they just feel better informed) but there is a growing body of research that is looking at this issue.
Clearly, people are turning to search for health information, ignoring the source and then going online to find peers for further reassurance. This represents a huge fundamental shift in healthcare. No longer do the health professionals hold all the cards. The patient is empowered with information that may very often be inaccurate, and they are basing at least some of their decisions on it.
This should hopefully encourage more healthcare companies to join the conversation. While they are severely hampered by the challenges of regulation, healthcare providers and pharmas can and should play a role in helping individuals find quality information from their peers and other sources. It's already happening and perhaps to their detriment since a lot of it is inaccurate information.
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Sunday Sports Finds
Here's a couple of finds for you sports fans out there.
First, the NBA, which kicks off its season this week, has an awesome set of RSS feeds. However, my favorite is this one - scores. Duh! So simple. Yet it's the only scores feed I have ever seen.
Second, speaking of scores, if you search for a team name on Google Mobile (not just US teams) they will give you the latest score - for example, Manchester United or the Indianapolis Colts.
By the way, when is Google going to launch a sports site? It seems like gaping hole in their growing armada.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Should Conferences Ban Blogging?
Photo by penmachine
Dave Armano is watching an interesting thread started by Greg Verdino. Apparently blogging was banned at this week's Nielsen BuzzMetric client-only conference on consumer generated media.
Greg says: "So how can you host an event about consumer generated media and not let your consumers, um, generate media?"
Now contrast this with Forrester's Consumer Forum. Forrester had a group blog up and running written by attendees.
I see both sides of this issue, but I agree wholeheartedly with Greg. On the one hand if you let bloggers write about a customer conference in detail, there's little need for anyone to pay to attend. However, on the flip side, if you allowing blogging and people take you up on the offer, it's highly likely that you will generate excitement that boosts customer attendance next year. This is especially true if the conference, um, is in part about blogging.
It is definitely far better to allow blogging at an event than to ban it. Look at Gnomedex. Attendance has skyrocketed at this event the last few years. One key reason was that it was heavily blogged.
Friday, October 27, 2006
MyESPN Will Change the Game for Start Pages
ESPN recently and quietly unveiled MyESPN, an Ajax-based start page that's largely on par with Google.com/ig, Windows Live, Netvibes and a host of others. ESPN joins the Wall Street Journal and New York Times in rolling out flexible start pages for members.
I have been playing with MyESPN for a few days now and I really like it a lot. It matches most of the core features that the other start pages have. The one key exception is that it does not include a system that's open to developers. This limits its functionality because you can't use any of the gadgets that have been created for other start page platforms (unless they are simply RSS feeds).
Still, the vast majority of the browsing public could care less about gadgets and gizmos - at least right now. They do care about getting an efficient quick glance at the content they care about. MyESPN does just that.
People also like to personalize their experience too. MyESPN not only lets you add your own feeds, as the screen shot below shows, but you can customize the theme to match your favorite team's colors. In my case, I pimped out my page New York Jets style.
I see a start page battle shaping up in the months ahead between the mainstream news outlets and the search portals. The stakes are high. These are going to be the places where people increasingly initiate their browsing. This means that the start page will become a critical funnel for advertising.
The portals will use the developer community as their primary weapon in courting the hearts and minds of consumers. They will create the platform and let developers do their thing. At their heart, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Netvibes are tech companies. So this plays to their strengths.
The big media, however, will counter by stacking their pages with proprietary content you can't get anywhere else. In addition, they will throw in exclusive thematic elements that will add a special touch to your page to make them even more compelling.
MyESPN is a great example of how the big media can adopt new technologies to fight the start page war. It's the only start page that I know of where I can watch ESPN Motion right alongside my favorite RSS feeds on a page that I customized with my favorite team's colors. For sports fans, it's a draw. And that's why I think ESPN is changing the game for start pages.
What's also noteworthy is that ESPN is the only start page that I have seen to carry advertising. It's running ads from Yahoo Search Marketing in the footer of the page, as this screen grab shows.
What's next? A lot. I bet the TV nets next will launch their own start pages, packed with special content that's tied to their programming franchises, such as exclusive video or unseen episodes.
Keep an eye on this space. There's a big battle brewing and the race is still wide open.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
First Look at .Mac Webmail
:: Update: This post has been revised (new text is underlined, edits are in strikeout) based on feedback from Paul Stamatiou.
Apple has officially launched a new Ajax webmail client for its .Mac members. It includes drag-and-drop functionality, a message pane, address book integration, message previews/flagging, keyboard shortcuts and more.
It's nice to see Apple start to use some of the same Web 2.0 technologies offer the same functionality that others like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have been using had for some time. The new .Mac webmail is a significant improvement over the prior version. The search feature in particular is slick. Still, it has some huge holes.
For starters, I see no way to mark a message as spam. And there's been a lot of spam lately in my infrequently used .Mac mail account. Second, when you reply to a message that's in HTML, you can only do so using plain text. Also, there's no RSS feed integration. Too bad. That's a lost opportunity.
I don't expect .Mac to challenge any of the big three webmail platforms anytime soon. In fact, I bet some of the big webmail platforms will add gobs of non-mail features like video subscriptions to become even more essential than they are now. (By the way the new Windows Live Mail and Yahoo Mail have a lot to give Gmail a run for their money.) The new .Mac mail is an improvement - but a disappointing evolutionary one for a company that has been so revolutionary.
Here's a look at some screen grabs I took...
Is Second Life Converting Visitors into Residents?
Hitwise has published some interesting data that reveals that share of US Internet searches for Second Life are up 73%. Visits to the SL site are rising too. On a year-over-year basis, visits to SecondLife.com were up 219% from the week ending 10/22/05 compared to the week ending 10/21/06. Hitwise also notes that the virtual world skews under 45.
But dig into the numbers a little more and it becomes clear that Second Life is a late bloomer. Traffic began to really rise only with all of the recent press coverage. And it's unclear if they are converting visitors into actual residents who participate.
I am a believer in Second Life. It is certainly a phenomenon that will grow and a great place to test out marketing campaigns - if the fit is right. However, I remain skeptical that Second Life will grow at the same pace that podcasting, blogs and other forms of social media did because of the hurdles involved. Not only are there download and processing requirements. But there is also a cost if you want to do more than just explore. This may keep SL from growing more.
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An AdAge Power 150 Blog 
Steve Rubel works at Edelman. Everything posted on this blog is his personal opinion and does not necessarily represent the views of his employer or its clients.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
