DISQUS

Sounds very interesting - haven't followed Dan specifically, but I'm always interested in hearing more about personal branding best practices.

I'm particularly interested in hearing from folks who have some close knowlege of how South Korea and Japan got to where they are, and what role government investment and oversight played.

The US really needs to duplicate their success here, IMO.

@alex:
Under the current configuration, GrandCentral is about as close as it can be to unified messaging. One assumes that once it's introduced to the non-beta fold of Google, it will be truly unified into Google/GTalk.

I had noticed that in the last three months, the ability to invite friends to use the service had been disable, hidden, or otherwise removed. I figured one of two things was on the horizon - death or open. Glad it's the latter.

@Rex - Have you seen Techmeme today? it's all over the place. There's almost nothing else being talked about aside from it.

@Brandon - I'd say that twitter is a conversation, though it's not a universal tool for conversation. That is to say it's a useful generic tool for broad and short conversations - there are better tools for different styles of conversation.

MySpace still has a mountain of momentum, even though they've been recently surpassed by Facebook. They need to do something to rejuvinate the base. They attempted to do that with games and apps, but I think that was only a stoploss maneuvre.

They need this as a shot in the arm. I can think of a lot of folks that'd give up their regular mail accounts for a MySpace based mail system.

I absolutely loved the Pointcast concept and implementation. Nothing has really risen to fill the ranks since then - not even close.

Thanks! Excited to be here.

An interesting example of these principals in action: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/marketing-pilgri...

@Bob - It's interesting that you mention discussion lists. For a long time, I've maintained a "super secret" (as I call it) discussion list that parallells my blog. I actually added a community of bloggers to it, so that their posts auto post to the group. The discussions that take place there in response are almost 100% of the time more intimate as well as in depth, with multi-page responses.

Comments on those same posts are typically only a few sentences.

Perhaps there ought to be some thought given here at the Angle on how to encourage more in-depth discussion in the web format - or perhaps there ought to be a companion email discussion group?

Good thoughts!

I love mixergy, too. I apologize about the scheduling mishap today. It's been completely non-stop for me the last couple weeks.

We'll get the interview!

I think this would be an issue - if we were talking about a desktop user. I sincerely doubt most of my album downloading is going to take place on my phone.

How does the Office Evil Network audience compare to Rev3? :)

The failure points you mention there are not monopolized by the blogosphere.

Fox News.

Need I say more?

If you need more proof, check out the stellar accuracy records of the LA Times, NY Post, and Air America (just to pick some random organizations out of a hat).

I didn't say blogs will replace newspapers.

I did say that online news organizations and blogs have a much more efficient business model, and heritage media would do well to emulate that or be phased out.

Sorry dude. Like totally sorry. Fully man. Fully.

It's interesting you say that, since both ads from BK and these MS ads were done by the same company.

Microsoft is one of the few companies to be in the position to put out an ad and not need a clear call to action. Look at the GE advertisements for their GreenTech. You know, the ones that have that little CGI frog jumping from the airplane to the nuclear power plant and all that - Are they trying to sell airplane engines? Nuke plants?

No, it's called branding. MS took this one step further and said "why can't we just put out an ad that's entertaining?"

You should petition Adam O to do some stories on that - I think he's running a fantasy football round this year.

Well, to go by Surowieki's guidelines, the crowd (in this case) was too homogeneous. Everyone who panned the ads did so from an Apple laptop.

Benedikt, I don't think I could point to more than anecdotal evidence, offhand at least - http://mashable.com/2008/09/10/internet-politics/ contains a few examples.

Based on the sum of my experience in this digital world (which is just about as valid as the next online addict), whenever you get a group of folks together that think alike, there's a lot of intellectual bullying that can take place. I don't know for sure if the prediliction to that on Twitter and FriendFeed is a virtue of early adoption by the Valley (and thus primarily Democrat) crowd, or if it takes place on a broad array of issues.

It is my experience that when it comes to most issues of a non-emotional nature (what sort of business plan best suits Web 2.0, what the best monetization strategy is for a podcast, etc), folks of all political stripe are pretty openminded and are able to debate without devolving to personal attacks. Even on a wide variety of political topics (in a non-election year), you can get a good fact based debate going.

Once emotion enters the equation (on issues of race, gender, sexual preference, reproductive rights, or even puppetry), all bets come off, and seperating fact from opinion in a crowd wisdom fueled system becomes impossible.

In terms of FriendFeed, I don't know if it was designed to be an example of WoC in action, but blogging itself is an oft-cited example of it in action, and I assumed that by virtue of that so was micro-blogging.

I wouldn't call Digg a failure by any means - except if you're telling me it's a success story of Wisdom of Crowds in the context of New Media.

New Media is defined, at least in part, by the fact that there's a discussion instead of a one way broadcast. Digg as a discussion platform has made positive moves in recent months, but still represents one of the more unpleasant place on the internet to have a discussion. The unpleasentness arises from the fact that usually conservative viewpoints are shouted down, buried or otherwise not heard. In that, I think it fails at the WoC test.

I chose Malkin for two reasons...

1) it's the earliest example, chronologically, of YouTube's censorship in this genre.

2) i've watched the video, and there's nothing offensive or nut-jobby about it.

I'm only passingly familiar with the examples you cite, and I'll likely use them in the future after I familiarize myself more with the facts.

You yourself contradict your very standards here in the same comment. On the one hand, Michelle Malkin is an example of illegal speech to you, while terrorist organizations are fair game to remain online.

Most of the terrorist organizations in question brand their videos, and will generally call for "Death to Americans" or some other sort of jihad-ish call for death in all of them (if it isn't a video, itself, of them killing Americans).

In one of the previous posts I did on this topic, I actually posted videos of them killing Americans - though I haven't had checked to see if they've since been pulled, I think this is an area where common sense can be a determining factor. While I may share O'reilly's belief that much of what comes from the Daily Kos is repugnant, they to date haven't killed anyone in a terrorist attack. All the terror groups Lieberman calls out have.

Richard: I have to wonder if you're not a holdover from the Alex Jones article I published a while back. Jones fans are the only ones around here that bandy the word "fascist" around as if they know what it means.