Think Simple

Found a blog link that reminds me any amount of analytical thinking bullshit doesn't really explain things as clearly as this...

http://indexed.blogspot.com/index.html

Blogvertising- End of blog purity ?

Well i guess it had to come some day or the other...We have all been sharing all sites we love or things which interests us on the web through our blogs. Ted Murphy the founder CEO of Payperpost has through his site launched a barge of bloggers onto the web who will now be advertising for companies registered on the website to promote their products.

HP and Fox are few of the high profile companies enrolled. HP is gonna use this method to make its latest camera model popular. One thing though,HP has required all those posts made to be shown as sponsored posts if the bloggers post is accepted by the website. So has Fox confirmed this disclosure.

Another website ReviewMe has gone a step further and tried to include only those blogs that have some amount of traffic by checking for blog quality too.This then takes care of those just out to make a quick buck.

So what does it mean to the pristinity of blogs? Well i think people will still avoid those blogs which are being reviewed by those out to make a buck and read only the true bloggers reviews. For eg: David Ponce ,one of the bloggers at ReviewMe is also an editor of a techblog OhGizmo.com on one of his blogs reviewed data recovery software Handy Recover and started with saying that he was being compensated for taking his time to review this item and ended his review by saying that this software was anything but Handy.

So i guess people will still continue to read bloggers who are true to themselves so whats the problem if they make a bit of dough while they are at it.....

Web 2.0 @ work!!

Well i have been looking up Web 2.0 for some time now and i thought its about time i posted something about it. We all know the now very famous and popular sites like Wiki,del.ici.ous,last.fm etc but id like to talk about a couple of other relatively lesser known cousins. Cause this is where the future of the real e-commerce lies according to me.

For all of the late nineties talk abt e-commerce becoming the new face of business we didn't actually see a more than a mere speck of the it. I believe it was the way businesses were designed that led to the initial failure of e-commerce. Websites merely aped the offline method of doing business instead of creating new business models. This became all the more obvious in the dot com bust.

But now with people realsing that there needs to be a completely different way of doing business on the net, the Web 2.0 model has come into being and more and more businesses are trying to take advantage of it.

The first business id like to talk about is the way clothes are being sold today. They are a few prominent businesses like Spreadshirt and Cafepress which are doing really well for themselves and giving the so called branded clothing a run for their money. Basically on these 2 sites everyone can be a designer of their own clothing and whats more set up a free shop online without having to worry about the usual hassles of maintaining inventories, distribution channels or advertising expenses. From a top designer to a kid wanting his name on his t-shirt everyone is accomodated and thus taking care of the Long tail of designing. You can set up shop and get paid for every shirt you sell. Spread shirts made it to the no: 5 Spot on BusinessWeek's Europe's Hot Growth Companies list and has sales of about $ 10.3 million at last count.

An even more interesting site i found was Kiva. It seems to be the future in investment banking. Rather than entrepreneurs having to get angel investors or venture capitalists for seed funding they can approach potentially every single person on the planet for funding.

Kiva offers funding to entreprenuers in the backward economies of Africa for starting their own small businesses. Its like microfinance but instead of a bank giving them the money its people like you and me. If you believe in some business then you can lend some money and earn interest on it. The repayment period is generally short and so is the seed money with the minimum amount coming out to be only $ 25.

This idea can be extrapolated to funding entrepreneurs all across the globe on a much larger scale. Convincing a few seed funders for a couple of millions is much tougher than convincing a million for a few dollars if your idea is sound. I think someone would already have begun thinking about such a business model or is already having one. It seems the next natural step. Anyways my point is ,on the face of it these business models seems so damn simple that we might be forgiven to feel like kicking our butts for not coming up with the idea ourselves. Thats the beauty of Web 2.0. Im sure this revolution of e-commerce is here to stay...

Wikipedia 2.0 ??

Well there seems to be a new wiki about to come into this world....Its christened Citizendium. Currently they are under construction and about to start more like a mirror of Wikipedia and then maybe look to improve on the articles on Wiki....It seems one of the original authors of Wiki has undertaken this work...He believes that Wikipedia was only half of the original idea of both Nupedia and Wikipedia,where Nupedia was more of a closed academic project and Wiki was the free wheeling side project...
He wants to bring abt a lot of changes in Wikipedia ,basically errors he thinks exist in Wiki.
Honestly as of now i don't see the utility of the project as they are not improving on the concept of Wiki at all and may just succeed in diverting a small amount of traffic from Wiki....I believe right now the creator just wants to have a wiki which has full control of which was not so when he was working on Wiki...Let see the concept take off publicly and then i guess more comments will be in order....As of now I'd call it only a Wiki 1.1 in progress, if so at all and not a Wiki 2.0

Watch out Amazon...Zinio is here!!!

In this new era of doing business the entire way of producing,selling and buying products is undergoing drastic changes. We also see that in value chains, how Amazon has replaced the earlier brick and mortar book stores. Everything is under a state of flux and even this new value chain that Amazon has made is under improvement.It would now be possible for the publisher to delete all the middlemen altogether between him and the customer(basically that means
bye bye Amazon too).

One of the major troubles with Amazon is that a person can't get his book instantaneously even though he pays for it upfront. However strongly we argue in class we all know that we as customers are never happy to pay for something which we will get in the future.Well someone has just taken care of that major headache for us and how?? By changing the very way we read
books and mag zines.E-books have been available for some time now in the markets ..But it never feels like ur turning a page and reading...So we have a cure for both...We have a digital way of buying books online and read them exactly in the way we read a magazine,Looking at and spreading the centrefold model poster included!!! This is the Zinio way...

Zinio a Digital Magazine reader with a difference.You can purchase any of the publication magazines which are tied up with Zinio online and as soon as you pay u can download the magazine to your comp to read it at your pleasure like a normal magazine. What's even better is that because its digital the costs are drastically lower to the publishers who are selling the same
editions in hardcover magazines and this lowered cost is transferred to the customers.
You can download the Zinio reader software for free here http://www.zinio.com/GetReader?pm=yes and there are a lot of magazines to choose from (Including the favorites for adolescent teenagers(wink)...) More seriously you get a lot of free publications which gives a lot of useful info.Pretty soon im sure all magazine will be available like this.

Currently i guess it allows only magazines but i guess books are the next logical step. Looks wise the graphics are cool and its pretty simple to use.Another negative factor is the lack of feel factor which is true with every digital format.But it is available for download in Tablet PC format too...and many readers of Tablet PC e-books say that they feel good when they read
their books on Tablet PCs, as it feels like they are holding a book.So i guess that might be true for magazines too. So all those readers who just want to read their magazines and don;t feel like waiting for Amazon's ultra slow 3 day delivery period(Comeon in this age 3 days is too slow man),heres your alternative....

Google buys out You Tube!!!

Well finally all the rumour mongers have been satisfied after Google has signed the deal to buy out YouTube for ,hold your breath......a whopping $ 1.65 billion...Yeah you heard that right.Now you can go and knock your head out for not coming up with the idea of free video sharing on the net...


If you are beginning to wonder why would Google do with YouTube inspite of having Google videos of its own,well the answer's pretty simple. Internet is gonna be the next television and those who control the Internet control the future's complete media source....YouTube is going to be one of the best places for advertisements in the future (hmm..why in the future,it could very well become right now).According to StarNewsOnline....

"The success of the YouTube acquisition will probably lie in embedding video advertising into the clips that millions of people watch everyday from their computers. So far, YouTubes management has been reluctant to include advertising within clips, for fear of alienating users.

Yesterday, however, Mr. Hurley, one of YouTubes founders, appeared more open to experimenting, saying that he was even considering testing whats known as a pre-roll a 15-second ad before a clip something he had long derided as potentially ruining the user experience.

While more marketers have been eager to advertise against online video, some big consumer companies have been reluctant to fully embrace advertising against user-generated content because it is difficult to differentiate good content from offensive material. YouTube has created an assortment of tools for users and content creators to police its site.

YouTube said it had struck accords to license content from two of the four major music conglomerates the Universal Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment and the CBS television network in exchange for a percentage of YouTubes advertising revenue.

YouTube is also expected to use new technology to identify copyrighted material that users have uploaded to the site without permission, and to share ad revenue with media companies that own the video or music content. (YouTube made a similar pact with the Warner Music Group last month, and had a previous advertising deal with NBC in June).

The deals reflect how media companies are rethinking the distribution of their entertainment content online.

The deal with Universal, the worlds biggest music corporation, drew particular attention because the company had said it was contemplating a lawsuit against YouTube over copyright issues.

Phil Leigh, the president of Inside Digital Media, said the new arrangements represented a strong endorsement that the major media companies are going to see YouTube as a legitimate business partner.

Mr. Leigh said that also suggested a rethinking of the approach the companies took to Napster. It shows that very important, erstwhile reluctant media companies have got religion, he said.

The YouTube alliances also came the same day that Google announced separate deals to license music videos from Sony BMG and Warner.

Under the terms of the deal, YouTube, which has about 60 employees, will retain much of its identity and will keep its name and its office in San Bruno, more than 25 miles from Googles headquarters in Mountain View. "

The move goes well with Google's philosophy to lead the change rather than following others.But will the user experience of viewing ads before they view the videos gonna shift the user base to some other free video sharing website.It remains to be seen.

Will this move catapult mainstream advertising from the tele to the Internet??? Or is Google killing a golden egg by swallowing it too early before its maturity??As usual Lord Time will have the answer.

I leave you with the YouTube founders own video on the site.

Google,from Hero to Big Brother???

Google's very reason on such wild fire widespread popularity is that it didn't give two hoots about advertisers.Their first preference has always been to provide the cleanest ,fastest,most relevant information to its users from day one and all its activities has been centered around it. IT follows the Do No Evil philosophy which basically is meant to safe gaurd the interests of theusers....
For a long time they didn't want to put advertisements intheir search engine but ofcourse they couldn't continue operations without making money so the started the Sponsored Links. Their basic premise has been to be the best source of information for users around the world. Thus they started Google News.When they felt consumers wanted info on the best possible deals around the world they started Froogle.Recently they started Google Scholar for all the academicians .Now they have an ambitious project to make available online all the information in all the books in all the libraries in the world.Im sure they will be successful in that too. Google slowly is getting into an all encompassing software for anything related to information.Be it search,storage,action,analysis or processing....Everything u need will be provided by Google.

Now comes a passing thought.Stop and think for a second if thats a good thing or a bad thing. Google has now data on everyones preferences of shopping through Froogle,The news we listen to through News, The information people store through the Google Spreadsheets, The associatons and networks ofpeople through Orkut, access to personal and professional emails thru GMail,your personal thoughts through Blogger,find your house through Google Maps.Soon they will be offering services of free delivery of our most commonly ordered goods to our door steps. There is something eerie and scary about someone having access to all the information aboutyou,your movements,your thoughts.WE are now believing Google information blindly.We do not stop to verify it at all. Will this philosophy of Do No Evil Last for ever....All this information can be deadly dangerous in the wrong hands. Larry and Sergey are young now,but imagine a day 25 years from now when Google has become synonmous with its name is into a googol number of things and Larry and Sergey have to pass the mantle to someone else. What will happen then??? Its a public company and being a public company makes it accountable to its shareholders and shareholders want money and i find that heavily contradictory to the Do No Evil philosophy....What if Google is taken over by the governement of worse used by the government without the knowledge of the people.??Aren't we back in Geroge Orwell's book 1984......I shudder still with such a thought and can't stop to think about the famous quotes in 1984

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

Is it possible that a Co that started with the premise of Information is Strength will end up saying those last lines??? I don'tknow but its just a thought....Would the Google Life end up in Google heaven or Google hell????Think abt it

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