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Google's great OneBox feature now returns sports scores for NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB and MLS teams. All you need to do is search for the name of the team and you get back the latest scores and links to the team site. According to the Google Friends newsletter, the search engine will be "expanding this to other leagues and sports teams around the world."
Google Reader added some additional per feed statistics that help you measure where your attention goes. If you click on details for each feed Google tells you the number of subscribers, posts per week and the update time. These were there before. However, they now also offer a chart that shows you how many items you read per feed. (via Hutch Carpenter on Friendfeed)
The web is a magnificent communication platform. It's efficient, effective and scalable. However, now that the social web is here, it's become even more. The web is now a platform for global collaboration between brands and their stakeholders.
Over the last several months I have been working closely with a great team of folks at PepsiCo. You might know PepsiCo as just Pepsi, but they're so much more. Their businesses include megabrands like Gatorade, Frito Lay, Quaker Oats, Tropicana and of course all of the refreshments that fall under the iconic Pepsi umbrella.
Pepsi is eager and ready to change. They rolled out a whole new brand identity recently and now are eager to engage in online communities. (The changes are the first part of a multi-year transformation to reconnect with consumers/youth/pop culture.)
However, in the spirit of collaboration, they recognize it's not solely up to them on how best to engage. With this in mind, the Pepsi team I am working with has opened up a room on Friendfeed - their first embassy inside a major social network designed from the ground up for two-way dialogue and collaboration. I have to admit that I was not planning to participate "on stage." However, my clients felt that in the spirit of openness I should be there and that agency partners increasingly need to come out from behind the scenes when it comes to programs like these.
It is our hope that you will join the conversation and help Pepsi learn how you want them to participate as they venture forward at full speed. I will be there to help facilitate as a representative of the Edelman Digital team that is working closely with PepsiCo. I have embedded a real-time view of the room below (note this might not show up if you are viewing this in an RSS reader). We look forward to your feedback.
Mahalo, a hybrid web directory/zeitgeist/search engine with wiki capabilities, has quietly added a Loyalty Program that tracks the number of pages people view and rewards the most loyal visitors with prizes. The site, which was founded by Jason Calacanis, has been in the news lately because it laid off 10% of its staff.
According to a special page on the site, Mahalo won't track specific pages people view. Mahalo - presumably via a cookie - tracks the number of pages you've viewed and lists the figure right below the search box in the upper right corner of the homepage. Further, there is a clear opt-out. There's no word yet on how often it will offer prizes or just what those might be.
The move is not entirely novel. Microsoft Live Search has a similar program with Live Search Cashback (Microsoft is an Edelman client).
Over the last year or so I have become addicted to data visualization and mashup tools. Every day it seems like there's a new one to explore. My current favorite remains PageAddict. Using the Firefox plug-in I have been able to reduce my time on social networks and increase my use of productivity apps. Now I have a new one that's equally revealing.
Twitter Charts is a Yahoo Pipes/Google Charts mashup that takes a user's tweets and plots them on timeline by day of the week and by hour. It's a great way to see just how active a user is on Twitter and when. In addition, it also gives you a sense for how engaged an individual user is in the conversation by revealing the portion of tweets that are replies.
To give you a sense for the differences between Twitter users below are two graphs. The first plots my tweets. The second graphs my friend Robert Scoble's tweets. As you can see there's quite a difference in how we use Twitter. Additional information on Twitter Charts can be found here. (Via Twitterholics)
Steve Jobs for Fortune Magazine by Tsevis
Though he's got plenty of flaws, Steve Jobs is one of my heroes. How could you not admire someone who beat cancer, helped spawn the personal computer revolution, reinvent mobile phones, not to mention nursed Apple back to health?
With the iPhone red hot, Mac sales flush and corporate earnings strong, Apple is riding high right now. In this recessionary climate, there are lessons each of us can take away from Steve's svengali-like reign at Apple. If you're committed to succeeding, it doesn't matter if you're a start-up CEO or a PR account executive, here are three tips to help you ride the recession the Steve Jobs way.
These are just three of the lessons I think all of us can take away from Steve Jobs.
Blogs.com reports on a survey of blogging journalists...
Blogging journalists get "story leads from comments on the blog or through private communication initiated via the blog," have "a clearer perception of audience needs and interests as a result of comments and visitor statistics" and find that "the previous process of 'moving on' to the next big story and forgetting about the old one no longer applies" since blogging allows for updates and corrections.
In the last week or so I talked about three trends: 1) social media is speeding up, 2) that the attention crash (and not just the financial crash) is being felt by more of us and 3) that the newsfeed - more so than RSS - is the future of syndicated content.
This last emerging trend is important and it's connected to the other two. Newsfeeds can solve the attention crash. Further, they are built for speed.
My post on Forrester's RSS study generated quite a bit of commentary. I believe in the data. RSS has peaked. Yes, there are lots of people who use iGoogle who don't need to know what RSS is and start pages are growing. However, I believe that social network newsfeeds will become more a more prominent delivery channel over time.
Newsfeeds elegantly combine peers and pros, algorithms and networks. They know no bounaries. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb agrees. This is why social networks will become the primary theater for PR in five years time.
Here's a great example of where this is going. If you haven't seen it, BreakingNewsOn is a great resource on Twitter. It's always the first to break big stories. It was useful on Twitter, but now it's even better because they're on Friendfeed and I can see what other people think through likes and comments.
As I write this, minutes ago a campus shooting has unfolded at Western Kentucky University. Note how the commentary is aggregating around the post and in the screen grab below. That's the future of news. It's real-time, collaborative and in this case it's in my Friendfeed stream.
What's interesting here is that the freshest story isn't always at the top. In fact, it's often the one that generated the most recent activity from the community (comments/likes in this case). That's an entirely different model than one that any news site uses. They organize around importance. Blogs, on the other hand, go in reverse chronological order. This is different.
The newsfeed metaphor synergizes commentary, activity, relevance and timleiness and that's why it's the beginning of a new era in news.
Forrester Research today published a new report on the state of RSS. In short, while there are bright spots, it does not paint the picture of a technology that's going mainstream anytime soon.
On a positive note, the resarch entitled What's Holding RSS Back?, says that nearly half of marketers have moved to add feeds to their web sites. Further, RSS adoption among consumers is at 11% up from just 2% of users three years ago. RSS feeds usage is more dominant among men.
Here's the kicker, though. That might be all she wrote for RSS' growth track.
According to the research, of the 89% of those who don't use feeds only 17% say they're interested in using them. In fact Forrester spends much of the report helping marketers better explain the benefits of RSS to their customers. "Unless marketers make a move to hook them — and try to convert their apathetic counterparts — RSS will never be more than a niche technology," the analysts (who include Jeremiah Owyang) wrote.
Lord knows, as someone who spends three hours a day in Google Reader, I am a giant evangelist for RSS. But I am also a realist. Feeds are way way too geeky for most and the benefit does not outweigh the learning curve. So I think RSS has peaked.
Still, while feed adoption may have crested the idea of online opt-in communications is just getting going. The Facebook newsfeed, Twitter and Friendfeed are perfect examples of opt-in vehichles that bring content you care about to you. In each case, you're total in control. You can unsubscribe from individuals or groups and tailor the stream so that what you want finds you.
RSS is only one form of opt-in communications. The potential is bigger when you look more broadly to social networking. This larger promise still holds and as the technologies become more invisible the newsfeed could even one day subsume RSS.
Three major web site redesigns in the last several weeks - Facebook, iGoogle and Yahoo - have sparked outrage from a small but influential group of users. ReadWriteWeb breaks each of these down. As I read their account it occurred to me that a dramatic shift has occurred. Companies don't really own their web sites anymore. We do.
Time Magazine with its Person of the Year cover story decried 2006 as the year of You, the empowered consumer. At the time they wrote...
And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.
But just two years later, something exceptional has happened. We now "own" the web even more than we did back then when all we simply did was create viable homegrown alternatives to big media sites.
Nowadays, if there's an online experience we dislike, we either demand that it be changed, use Greasemonkey to fix things ourselves or just vote with our feet. That's a major shift from the level of empowerment that we thought was remarkable even just two years ago.
Since the dawn of the decade there have been several major breakdown in systems that we thought were a sure thing. First it was our national security (September 11), then major companies failed (Enron/Worldcom) and finally, more recently, our financial system tanked (Lehman Brothers). The result is our trust in institutions continues to erode. These events might seem detached from a silly web site design, but they're not. Each encouraged people to take greater control of all aspects their lives - and to live to the fullest, even online.
No matter the site, a lot of time and effort goes into building a solid user experience. There's always a chance you're going to alienate 50% of your audience when you go through the process. But in this age - more than ever - the best approach is to redesign web sites collaboratively with consumers and all out in the open so that we really feel like the changes are ours not just yours.
That's preciely what Dell did starting late last year - and it proved smart. Others should take note.
I have written before about how to use Friendfeed's powerful imaginary friends feature as an aggregator. Now that they have real-time updating and lists, you can actually combine these to build a handy desktop news ticker.
First, create a bunch of imaginary friends for the different news sources you want to follow. Assign each to a relevant Twitter profile. For example, I have three imaginary friends: The New York Times (Twitter), Techmeme Firehose (on Twitter) and Breaking News (on Twitter).
Next, add these to a special Friendfeed list. I rolled them up in a list called News.
Now click on the real-time link on this list page, open the mini window and bingo. You can also bookmark it so that it runs in your Firefox sidebar. Here's the result.
