My review of Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams’ Wikinomics just ran in the July-August issue of Communication World, the magazine of the International Association of Business Communicators. The full issue requires a membership and subscription, but the review itself is available right here.
Entries categorized as ‘Bookmarking’
My review of Wikinomics
July 3, 2007 · No Comments
Categories: Blogging · Bookmarking · Miscellaneous · Publishing · Viral marketing · Web 2.0 · Wikipedia
Tagged: wikinomics
USA Today Web Redesign Attracts a Lot of Attention
March 4, 2007 · No Comments
Any social media news that’s making waves tends to dominate Techmeme, and today I was surprised to see how much attention USA Today’s Web design has garnered. Editor Ken Paulson explains their take, and while Steve Rubel and Michael Arrington both wrote extensive posts on the social media features they’ve rolled out, and there certainly are a number that will be useful to PR folks as well as readers.
The full list of new features is laid out here. USA Today certainly is ahead of its competition with this move, and I expect their advertisers will be pleased as well - this will drive many people to register for USA Today’s Web community, and it will be better able to prove its readers’ demographics as a result.
update (3/5/07): Don Dodge did an analysis of the comments that have been posted on USAToday.com. To say that readers don’t initially like the redesign is a bit of an understatement. I’m surprised.
Categories: Bookmarking · Publishing
WSJ profile of social media services and powerusers
February 10, 2007 · No Comments
Today’s Weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal offers what has to be the highest-profile coverage to date of the power of bookmarking services’ power users and the influence they have on consumers. These “Wizards of Buzz” include one 17-year-old high school student now being paid $1k per month by Netscape to do what he was doing for free on Digg. In includes profiles of power users on Newsvine, Reddit, Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Netscape, among others, and also provides a comprehensive overview of each of those services.
[Full disclosure: My employer represents StumbleUpon, but I do not work on their business, nor have I ever met one of their executives. To tell you the truth, I probably should use their service - but I don't.]
Authors Jamin Warren and John Jurgensen provide a good layman’s overview of the payola schemes that some (including the PR industry) have tried to employ to gain influence with these services and their users. The WSJ identified these users by analyzing over 25,000 submissions to these sites, using software from Dapper - I’m previously unfamiliar with Dapper but will have to check them out.
I’ve struggled to explain the power of social bookmarking sites to friends and colleagues in the past because I couldn’t steer them to any one resource. I agree with Mike Arrington that those unfamiliar “may be left somewhat confused by the whole crazy ecosystem” after reading the article, but I think he’s mistaken about the rest of us not learning anything we didn’t already know. For me, putting faces and backstories to Digg, etc. user names put a human face on this trend.
I’m also plannning on steering people to the accompanying WSJ podcast.
Speaking of bookmarking services…
Categories: Bookmarking · Podcast · Web 2.0
