Ideas, notes, and various jottings
One of the biggest books in marketing at the moment is Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”, which looks at how the Internet is creating demand for niche products, and allowing companies to supply these niche markets, which not too long ago were uneconomic to service.
We’re living in a fascinating time where older products and services might have a much-extended life cycle.
Steve Rubel posted an interesting note about how economist Nouriel Roubinni’s blog about the US economy was picked up by the media.
It’s very interesting to see that more and more the blogosphere is a furtile hunting ground for journalists looking for news.
According to a report in Ad Age, MySpace is considering the launch a print magazine, which would profile standout MySpace members and their interests.
Image is a mockup from Ad Age
At the moment the company is still evaluating business models. It is said to be speaking to the publisher of the extremely cool Nylon magazine about a licensing deal.
If you’ve done a web search recently you may have noticed the explosion of spam blog sites or “Splogs”. These sites are basically designed to attract the attention of search engines, which they do by displaying inane text with key words, or by stealing content from legitimate web sites. They make money by displaying money from well known ad networks.
An interesting article by Heather Hopkins of Hitwise UK analyzes the traffic to three well-known blogs, and comes to the conclusion that a blog’s popularity comes down to content (subject matter and quality), rather than the attention it may have received by the mainstream media.
Socialmeter.com is a interesting site that scans popular social networking services to gauge a given URL’s popularity.
At the moment it scans Del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Google, Jots, Linkroll, Netscape, Reddit, Shadows, Spurl, Technorati, and Yahoo My Web. While is a useful tool, it’s not the be all and end all of popularity measurement, as a lot of traffic is bound to come to your site from outside of these services. Nevertheless, it is a useful tool, particularly, I think, for identifying any gaps in your the promotion of your blog.
Why does one blogger become a millionaire, while another equally worthy blogger toils for years for little or no reward?
Of course there may be a number of factors at play, but an interesting article Blogs to Riches by Clive Thompson for the New York metro looks at this very issue from the perspective of why some blogs are so much more popular than others.
If you have an interest in social networking AND an interest in business or marketing, I suggest you take a look at Cliff Kurtzman’s excellent article Marketing to the MySpace Generation (and the Economics of Social Networking) on www.marketingprofs.com.
The article examines the business model underpinning social networking sites like MySpace, and also looks at what new social networking sites need to do in order to succeed.
Whether you’re blogging for fun, or for profit, it’s important to be able to do so efficiently. Every precious minute spent mucking around with spell checks, or uploading images to FTP servers, is a minute that you could actually spend writing. Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer, currently in Beta and available for download, makes the whole process that much easier.
Everyone seems to launching social networking sites at the moment - and it’s not just Microsoft with its Live Spaces site. It’s getting to the stage where if you were backing one of these new sites you must be getting worried that the social networking arena is getting a little crowded.
Here’s a run down of a few other sites that have made announcements in this past week.