Tag: #newideas

Hashtags to Cash Bags

The first I heard of this marketing method was with Squarespace. Now I had already heard of this hosting company because I listen to several of the TWiT (no relation to Twitter…besides, TWiT was first) podcasts and they are an advertiser there. But then I caught wind of a marketing campaign they were kicking off…using Twitter. See, in the world of tweets there are things known as hashtags. What you do is put a hash mark in front of some tag-like keyword in your tweet. This makes it easy to find tweets about a certain subject. It’s also where the trending topics list comes from. What Squarespace was doing is picking a random tweet with the hashtag and awarding that person with a $199 Apple gift certificate. This was billed as the iPhone giveaway. They did one a day for the 30 days of June. It seemed to work pretty well.

This month it’s Moonfruit. They’re another hosting company, this time in the UK. They are giving away 10 13″ Macbook Pros. All you have to do is tweet with the hashtag during the contest duration. They are also giving away a couple of iPod Touches to the most creative tweets. Just like that, they’re all over the trending topics and getting face time with millions of users. Seems to me like this is smart marketing…but only for a short time. I cannot imagine it will take long for this to get really old with Twitter users and it will fall by the wayside. But I have to say, it does show some creative marketing and a brilliant way to leverage a new internet trend to your marketing advantage.

I won’t say this marketing technique is already dying, but I will say it has an extremely limited shelf-life. Things on the internet move fast. Marketing strategists have to move faster to keep up. Why? Because not all of their ideas are going to work. So they have to have time to try again before the crowds pass them by. I don’t know who first thought up the hashtag guerilla campaign, but he deserves a nice trip somewhere tropical for being ahead of the curve.

Google Waves Goodbye To Old Messaging

If you look at the ways we communicate online, you’ll find they are nothing more than fresh paint on archaic methods…some of which date back to the days of six-shooters and stage coaches. All of the innovations thus far have been in the form of bolt-on extras. It’s kind of like duct taping an iPod to an 8-track player then splicing headphone cables to the speaker wires. You still have an 8-track player. Think about it, email is a mimic of snail mail and IM is just glorified telegraph communication.

But it looks like the guys and gals at Google have decided to step up and do something for online communication that nobody has successfully done thus far. They scrapped everything and designed a system from the ground up to leverage all the web and modern technology has to offer for communication into a single tool. This tool is Google Wave. If you visit the site you will be presented with a video of the tech demo that lasts nearly an hour and a half. It’s well worth the watch.

So what is Google Wave and what makes it so special? That’s not an easy thing to describe. It’s partly a framework, partly a protocol, partly an application, and all wrapped in yummy bacon. In the video, one of the designers of Google Wave mentions that email was actually invented over 40 years ago…long before the advent of the internet. So the driving force was if email were invented today, what would it be like? I have to say that in this regard it looks like they are succeeding amazingly. They touch on things far more in-depth than I will here, but I will hit the high points.

The gist of the application side of Wave is collaboration. Take email, IM, blogging, forums, Wikis, Twitter, Flickr/Picasa, YouTube, and basically any Web 2.0 site/application and stir. Bake in Google’s think-tank for two years and you get one heckuva slick piece of coding magic. You can write a Wave (which is the term used for any type of communication) and add people to it. We won’t call them recipients. They’re more like participants. They can then reply or add or edit or privately reply not just to the message, but to specific pieces of a message. In real-time. No more seeing Hoser is typing messages forcing you to wait eleventy hundred minutes for them to finish. You see what they are typing almost character for character which allows you to go ahead and start formulating or even typing in a response.

Then you can drag files (pictures, movies, whatever) directly into the Wave which shows up almost immediately in their Wave client if they are looking at the Wave at the time you do so. In the case of pictures, you get thumbnails pretty much instantaneously while the full pictures are still loading. This makes for some really interesting possibilities. Given that this is a Google project, you know that the search is really nice. No surprise there. The surprise is this: it runs completely in the browser. But this doesn’t scratch the surface of what it can do. Oh, did I mention this will be open-source?

Yes, Google has already announced this will be an open source system and they are encouraging developers to create their own Wave clients and even server implementations. There will be a series of APIs to allow anyone to create robots (snap-ins) to connect Wave to other services. They show a Twitter robot, a blog robot, and even a translator that does…get this…real-time language translation for conversations. They want to see what kinds of amazing things other people can come up with to extend Google Wave even further than they have imagined. Oh, did I mention that the real-time updates work even if you have your own Wave server implementation? Yep, you get the same sweetness between Wave servers so it could be as universal as email. That’s where the Wave protocol comes into play.

I really can’t go into much more about this or this post will take four years to read. Go watch the video. Seeing it work is far more impressive than any simple text post could hope to be. I’ve seen the future…and I’m wearing shades.

Macrocosm and Apperception

Why have we lost touch with nature? What about us as a race has driven us to create this artificial environment of concrete and steel that separates us from that which bore us forth? Why do we turn a blind eye to the beauty and magnificence of our Mother Earth?

I do not have the answers to these questions. I do, however have some ideas as to what has happened. Over the centuries we have destroyed. We are a race that tears down that which we cannot ultimately control and replace it with our own creations. We inject control into that which surrounds us regardless of the carnage it takes to get there. Again, I blame Mother Culture for this conditioning…this idea that we must be in control of everything. We delude ourselves into thinking we have done that very thing when in fact what we have done is nothing more than feed an illusion.

Life isn’t about controlling what we see or touch. It is about controlling ourselves. It is about using that control we have over ourselves to adapt and cope with our environment. It is about making ourselves better. Mother Culture does not care for this line of thought because it would lessen her control over the Human Race. In her eyes we are mere automatons. This is something many embrace because it means they do not have to trouble themselves with things like original thought.

So much in nature can teach us more about who we are. Have you ever placed your hand on an old tree or an ancient stone and felt a wave of calm and patience? Have you ever watched a sunset in the mountains as the last rays reflect off a pool of water and understood the passage of time and seasons? Have you ever watched as the budding leaves of the forest turn brown and fall to the ground and contemplated how everything in life has its time? Have you ever watched squirrels gather up food for the winter and realized what it means to be prepared for what life will throw at you?

Nature is a wonderful teacher. She will gladly fill our minds with thoughts of life and love. She will nurture our souls and replenish our bodies. She will gently cradle us when we rest. We just have to be open to it. This is why I love to go camping. It is a time for me to get back in touch with nature. It is a chance to reestablish connections that have become weakened in the steel jungle of the cities. It is a time to be reborn into someone wiser and with better understanding. This does not mean that a weekend at the local park will turn you into a sage, but it will open your eyes if you are but willing.

The cities block our spirits from communing. Even the lights blot out the stars in the sky. Walking outside in your suburbian home and looking up will, of course, reveal a few of the brighter stars…but go out into the country far from the streetlights and billboards. You will find that the “sky full of stars” you see in the city is not even a drop in the bucket. There is so much more out there to be discovered. This is how Mother Culture treats all of nature. She will let you have a few samples of nature here and there, but never enough to make a real difference. For that you will have to leave the safe confines of your skyscrapers and SUVs. You will have to venture into the land that has not been razed by “civilization”. How many will dare to do that with a truly open mind? Not enough.

I wish everyone could walk into true nature and just lean back to take a nap on a tree or perhaps a hill to lie upon to gaze at the stars. With an open mind and a hungering soul one can slowly begin to feel the ebb and flow of energies in all nature has to offer. It is these energies that feed our spirits. It is these energies that teach us understanding for nature is in all things upon our fair world. We cannot let Mother Culture fool us into believing we will be better off by obliterating anything we cannot control. It is the lessons we glean from that which we cannot control that gives us the greatest understanding and knowledge.

Does Social Media Blend?

Dwight Silverman posted an interesting Tweet on the day of the iPhone release. He said:

I wish we could report more breaking stories the way we did the iPhone today, blending blogs, twitter, reporters, links. Soon, very soon…

…which brings up some interesting ideas. We have news aggregation sites like Digg and Slashdot. We have services like FriendFeed that aggregate information from multiple social media services. We have mashups like iGoogle. But has anyone yet put together a way to blend all of these wonderful things into a useful, intuitive interface for the creation and trafficking of breaking news stories?

Now I replied to that Tweet that we in the social media world are just getting through taking our baby steps. We haven’t quite got up to walking but we are getting there. The next phase is to make it truly mainstream. Many news sources already leverage services like Twitter to post links to new articles that appear on their site. But this is merely a scratch of the surface. Offerings like Twitter could easily be used to create “live” news articles.

Think about this: You have a new website with a system that will take an article’s owner (reporter) and allow this owner to let others expand their article with posts from Twitter/Pownce/Whatever in certain sections of the story. The article becomes a truly interactive experience that gives the reporter’s view and expands his or her words with the observations of others within the article itself. Now obviously you wouldn’t let just anyone put anything in there or you end up with John Gabriel’s GIFT(nsfw).

To avoid this you could have a system like OpenID and then the owner grants what level of access people have. Heck, this could be expanded to allow almost roundtable-like discussions. The point of this being that the next evolution of social media is the blending of more traditional news reporting with blogs and other social media services. The iPhone release could have had a parent article that featured the pic taken of Robert Scoble getting his phone with the side story from a blog about how he was allowed to cut in line (say…sent via Twitter DM to the article account) and the Twitter posts from the first guy stopped as the initial group went in to get their new shiny toys. Additional images from Flickr showcasing lines from stores in different areas could be linked in as well. This goes much further than simple comments at the end of an article. I speak of groups of web connected individuals actually building and expanding breaking news stories as they happen.

This is just one idea of what I’m sure is many that will make their way to the web soon. I’m also certain that there are far more qualified and imaginative people putting together new technologies and ideas. Some will fail but inevitably one or two of these new tools will gain some success in the next phase of the media evolution. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m looking forward to the next stage…so hurry up already and build us some tools to use.

UPDATE: It’s almost like Rule 34. I posted about it and find that STLToday.com already somewhat includes this. An example is this article about he InBev buyout of Anheuser-Busch. The first Related Link is a blog and Twitter feed basically of related stories. Found it because my little post on the deal got in there. Now we just need more articles to include this feature and more news sites to do it.