Business plugs into web 2.0

Not just marketing hype, poll claims

A recent spat between a startup CEO and a conference organizer came about when the CEO said he was going to go to a trip, apparently "lied" and got caught by his own tool which is similar to twitter in updating your status.

The CEO of the Next Web event wrote in his blog:

Ok, Reboot seems to rock after some dinner, beer and wine. Great. The amazing thing is not that Felix would rather go to Reboot. I respect that. The amazing thing is that someone would lie about the health of his children to be able to drink beer at another conference and then assume that no one would find out.

Seems pretty stupid to argue about, and Felix later on goes to say that he didn’t think it was a big deal, his Kid was sick and that the e-mail was of a day earlier.

I must say I´m really confused by the commotion. My kid was sick on Tursday and it wasn´t entirely clear wether I could attend thenextweb the next day. In addition did we have some issues with the new Plazer (http://blog.plazes.com/?p=157#comments) and Stefan, my co-founder was coming to Reboot on Friday. So for professional and personal issues I decided to cancel since I wasn´t sure at that point that I could make it. Boris forgot to mention the last part of my email:

“And to be fair to you guys I rather cancel now than trying until the last minute and then not being able to come afterall.”

More details on Techcrunch.

Comments were raging and flying, and of course all sorts of conspiracy theories, but in the end who won and who lost?

Plazes CEO Felix got some loss of credibility, albeit maybe there was some marketing benefit for people learning about how he got "busted by using his own tool".

A good story was made that got attention to Reboot, Next Web and Techcrunch achieved countless newsbites and stories, and thousands more are amused by the story.

Isn’t that news sensationalism, no different than what bloggers accuse reporters of skewing facts to suit their needs? Isn’t this, in the end, a private and personal affair between two individuals?

The difference here is that a blogger is not bound by an oath, or by a job, he can be fired for transgressing or going too far, but if you’re a blogger/owner you can play entirely by your own rules, your own loss being your credibility.

In the end, he/she is still looking for a story that will be read and discussed to make his/her site popular, so ultimately a blogger and a journalist are not that different in their goals, and if this true, we need to be wary of the "masses of blogs" just how we have become wary of what we read in the newspaper. It’s mroe about managing the information flow of individual agendas rather than "group agendas" but it’s still the same. Just because a thousand blogs say it’s so, doesn’t mean it is, it could be manipulated just as much as traditional media.

An absolutely fantastic blog to read on creating passionate users is this one. It’s explains very well what the new Web is all about and how to drive your user community.

Some excellent graphs and pictures I enclose here, but read the blog to get more “colour” from the expert herself.

The above epitomizes the view points of “old media” vs. “new media”. The problem is that “old media” prefers to do things the way they always have done it and they want to essentially control user behaviour.

The above makes incredible sense, especially when you see success stories like Wikipedia and indeed, the more freedom you give to people, the more likely they will “donate” their brain power to your cause, rather than just use you as a tool.

Hong Kong has just passed a new anti-spam bill, conspicuosly absent are the telesales, the ones that call your mobile phone no matter when you’re in Hong Kong or when you’re travelling and incurring long distance charges because "tens of thousands of sales agents jobs are at stake" and "400,000 people relied on phone contact to promote products".

This is rather convenient, so an incredible number of people actually WANT tele sales spam and there are tens of thousands of sales agents who phone you all the time? Last I heard cold calling telesales were done out of low cost tele marketing centers in China and Macau, so the only jobs at stake are the company owners who are peddling you products, and I rarely ever receive a call from Joe Chang’s restaurant, it’s usually PCCW has a new product, Hutchinson has a new service, Smartone wants you to switch to them….i.e. not exactly "poor" companies.

I find it really difficult to believe that there are 400,000 people in Hong Kong who really WANT to be phone spammed so they can be sold rubbish they didn’t ask for. Isn’t this the age of self determination and isn’t "new marketing" all about giving to the people what they want, when they want it? Mass Tele Sales is the oldest form of intrusive marketing and is at the same category as pop-ups and interstitials and excessive UCE (i.e. spam).

Google’s CEO has mentioned in an interview today in the FT that it is Google’s ambitions to have as much personal information so that one day when it holds so much personal information that it could tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.

So we can stop thinking about what we do in our life and have Google tell us instead what we should be doing.

This is chilling and frightening, perhaps we don’t know ourselves well enough but should Google really be in the business of telling us what we should be doing or not? Personal preferences can give you suggestions, but to tell you what to do is the same as Google become your personal Boss! Once Google is in the business of ordering you around, you’re talking about a whole new level of global domination! The "new web" today is a lifestyle indeed, but ultimately it is a tool for the benefit of the individual, and the trends are very much about empowering the individual and isn’t that why Google became so popular and powerful? Because it provided tools to bring power into the individuals hands? Why would it want to take away that power by telling us what to do instead, that’s like Media 1.0 all over again!

Using a good blog editor makes life a lot easier when you blog, in particular as you blog several blogs at the same time (say 5-6 blogs or so) on various different platforms.

Editor choices are plenty….there are no "best editors" although a poll by Lifehacker suggests that Performancing (also known as Scribefire) is the most popular one so far followed closely by WBloggar. What makes these editors so cool in some cases is the ability to add plugins inside your post without dealing with all this HTML messiness, this is particularly true for Wordpress. Some of them support picture editing, cropping and importing as well, spell checks and so on and so forth. Best of all, almost all of them will do the pinging for you when you post, so saves you time to go visit pingomatic or similar.

Here are some download links for good Blog Editors

Windows Live Writer, if you like editing Microsoft Word style, this one is for you. It has interesting plug-ins but I haven’t had the time to check it out. It’s also nice because it lets you custom edit tags….

http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

Qumana, simple fast and easy. For major editing needs it may not be suitable, but it’s pretty decent nevertheless.

http://www.qumana.com

Scribefire, this one used to be called performancing and is a firefox plugin, very popular but in comparision relatively simple.

http://www.scribefire.com/

Zoundry, don’t know it, looks decent enough.

http://www.zoundry.com/

Ecto is shareware, and developed in Japan.

http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/

WBloggar

http://wbloggar.com/

Blogdesk

http://www.blogdesk.org/

Open Source Semagic

http://semagic.sourceforge.net/

and BlogJecosts money is available at http://www.codingrobots.com/blogjet/ and Rocket Post also costs 12 dollars available at http://www.anconia.com/rocketpost/ and although FLOCK offers blog editing as well, it’s really basic, so I don’t recommend it.

Just because it costs money, doesn’t make it the best however…so if you have time I suggest you start trying these tools for yourself. I currently use Qumana although it’s somewhat basic, but they all do the job. I’m going to update my findings here as time goes on…but feel free to let me know what you think! Oh yeah, all of the above should work fine with Sanriotown!

Tags: blogs, editing, blog tools

The image above is not Disneyland, it is infact the Shijingshan Amusement Park, a theme park that is infact owned by the Government in China. A video of the theme park is below.



And here are some of the excerpts of the videos showing a fake Doraemon and Hello Kitty, and you can so tell they are fake, the costumes are so bad, it’s not even funny, images courtesy of Japan Probe.

The case was widely reported and ultimately the Amusement Park has started to knock down some of the more obvious rip offs after Disney filed an official complaint but it demonstrates a case in point, China is not truly ready for copyright. In the various articles people interviewed saw nothing wrong with it, infact, if anything they should it was wrong for only Disney or Sanrio to own the rights.

A quote by one of the people interviewed on selling fake DVD’s as reported by the AFP.

Lei Danni, who runs a small shop selling fake DVD and compact discs, brushes off accusations by American companies that his business hurts sales of legitimately produced software. “We aren’t stealing from anyone. Most of my customers say they wouldn’t buy the real thing anyway because its too expensive. So there is no connection.”

What China doesn’t realize is that by allowing this type of piracy to run largely unchecked, it hurts the creative industry and incentive for people in China to develop the kind of IPR that is easily copied, such as character design and other creative designs. How will China produce the next Gucci, Disney or Pixar when IP theft is so commonplace?

There are a couple of good places to look for search engine optimization to make sure your site is getting the attention it deserves.

Wikipedia has a good primer here and  Google directly answers how SEO can benefit you using Google, which for most company websites is all that really matters.

This also is important for your blog, you can add your URL and create sitemaps to help Google better optimize the search experience on the site.

SAN FRANCISCO, April 1 - Microsoft Corp. said today it has agreed to acquire Tokyo based Sanrio Co., Ltd. (President & CEO: Shintaro Tsuji) including all rights to the famous Sanrio branded character Hello Kitty(R).

…In the late 1990s, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates offered Shintaro Tsuji $5.6 billion for the rights to Hello Kitty.

of course it’s an April Fools Joke from here..

Sanriotown recently launched a bunch of new blog templates. They look nice but I would suggest that they should also make some templates that have a left to right vs. a right to left type of view, it’s not a bad start but we want more!

I’m surprised there’s no super pink template out there yet!