I have been using Google Trends for some time now – for work and sometimes just for fun! Trust me it can be fun and educational. You can tell a lot about what is going on in people’s minds and you can even break it down by geographies.
Consider the word ‘terrorism’ for instance. Trends shows that steadily people’s preoccupation with it seems to have declined over the years. Search volume is much higher in India than in the USA.
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2 minute read | 270 words
Aimed at stylish women, Daily Candy is being bought by Comcast Corp for an estimated $125 million. According to Philly.com Daily Candy “delivers more than 2.5 million e-mail subscriptions through local editions in 12 key U.S. cities, including Philadelphia and New York”.
Is $50 per “loyal subscriber” a good price?
“We’re trying to build a large presence online as more and more of our customers look to the Web for entertainment and content.
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1 minute read | 111 words
Most major social networking sites require their users to be at least 13 years old. Anyone who has kids knows that the kids are all over Facebook, MySpace and Orkut. Of course the kids fake it, because they want the ‘social networking’, but don’t have anywhere else to go. And we know that they are at a place they shouldn’t be, and most of us can offer no alternatives…
To create a safe social networking platform for kids eight to 13 requires some doing.
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1 minute read | 164 words
It’s part of my job as the editor of an industry-specific magazine to visit corporate websites in search of company information, contacts, and images. Some companies are large multinational conglomerates with head offices in Europe or the USA; others are much smaller entrepreneurial efforts trying to leverage visibility for their company through the web.
All, without exception, fail to cater to that harried journalist rushing to meet deadlines, and in search of a company logo, or image that can go with a story or feature.
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2 minute read | 363 words
I just noticed (accidentally) that I am ‘connected to’ Barack Obama, US Senator and Presidential Candidate through three different people. Talk of six-degrees of separation! In the world networked through LinkedIn, Plaxo and others, my guess is that it may not be six any more.
BTW: If you haven’t been to Plaxo recently you should check out their new interface and tools.
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1 minute read | 62 words
I came very close to participating in a scam executed by an India ‘social networking’ site. Unwittingly, of course! It started when I received a mail from a site called yaari.com:
‘xyd wants you to join Yaari!… Is xyz your friend?… Please respond or xyz might think you said no’
Normally I completely ignore such messages, but this time I did not. Why? Firstly, I was curious (media has been giving some play to this site), and the curiosity was heightened by the fact that the company is named as Yaari LLC, and provides an Atlanta address on the invite.
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3 minute read | 489 words
The Picture Archive Council of America (PACA), has created a powerpoint presentation that dispels many a myth and sheds light on what copyright protects and for how long, what is fair use, what is an infringement and what is not.
Some of the _ popular copyright myths _ it highlights include:
If an image is on the internet/Google it is in the public domain. If there is no copyright notice on the image, I don’t need permission.
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1 minute read | 210 words
Yossi Vardi commenting on Social Software suggests that ‘there are 3-4 major forces on the Internet:
• self expression
• communication
• sharing
• collaboration
You’d notice that money is not one of them. It is interesting when you consider that ‘that Google Answers, which paid people to answer other people’s questions, is out of business, but Yahoo Answers, which pays only in non-monetary points, had millions of users…’ Read the article here
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1 minute read | 73 words
“There’s a chance to invest right now in China, India, Russia and Brazil, which will pay off big over the next five years… These economies are going to boom, and ads there are going to go directly to mobile and directly to the Internet.” Says David W. Kenny, the chairman and chief executive of Digitas.
He also believes that “It is only a matter of time until nearly all advertisements around the world are digital.
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2 minute read | 297 words
Interesting times these! While the New York Times is poised to stop charging online users, Google is going to start charging.
New York Times started charging for access in 2005 and has in 2007 decided to abandon the approach. Google started offering free email, albeit restricted to 1 gigabyte (GB) storage, in 2004 and has in 2007 decided to start charging for storage over 2.8 gigabytes (GB) .
New York Post Story:
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2 minute read | 226 words
Business week article on the market place for ideas: “…Colgate-Palmolive… needed a more efficient method for getting its toothpaste into the tube—a seemingly straightforward problem. When its internal R&D team came up empty-handed, the company posted the specs on InnoCentive, one of many new marketplaces that link problems with problem-solvers. A Canadian engineer named Ed Melcarek proposed putting a positive charge on fluoride powder, then grounding the tube. It was an effective application of elementary physics, but not one that Colgate-Palmolive’s team of chemists had ever contemplated.
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1 minute read | 141 words
There’s a raging debate out west about giving parents access to community sites frequently visited by kids, sites like myspace.com which has been described by some US attorneys as “a towering danger to kids.” As expected, commnunity sites are giving in, albeit reluctantly, allowing parents to have a limited view of who their kids are talking to online. Ars Technica has the story: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070117-8647.html
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1 minute read | 64 words
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