You are here: Home / Archives for Archive / Reviews

Google Buzz: Two Weeks In

February 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment

What Is It?

Buzz is Google’s status update and messaging service that is built into Gmail. It focuses on staying in touch with the people you email with frequently. As a result, you won’t have to rebuild your social network. Instead, you rely on your existing address book.

In addition, it has no limit on message length, allows threaded discussions, and supports rich media. By commenting on the statuses of others, people also subscribe to those threads via email.

Of course, such a service isn’t something new. However, Google has been able to launch Buzz with great success overnight because of the large installed base it had with Gmail. The numbers are quite staggering as well. Google said there were nine million messages in the first 56 hours and 200 mobile check-ins per minute, and this was even before most people had access to Buzz!

With Buzz, Google has combined both data (contacts) and behavior (social sharing).

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: , , , , , ,

TenPages.com Makes Book Publishing More Accessible But Buyer Beware

February 24, 2010 By 8 Comments

In this post, I’ll discuss TenPages, which I think is a great social platform but presents numerous caveats at the same time.

Description

Last week, Dutch startup TenPages launched. TenPages is a crowdfunding platform that aims to give (aspiring) authors the opportunity to have their book published. Authors can submit a 10-page manuscript that will be publicly listed on the website. To go from manuscript to publication, the author needs to gain the support from the public.

The public can support the author by buying shares of the book. There are 2,000 shares available at a price of €5 per share. All 2,000 shares need to be sold for the book to be published. Once the book is published and put on sale, shareholders also get a slice of the profit pie. Now, there are rules as to the minimum number of shareholders and the maximum amount of shares per person, but I’m not going to bore you with that.

Shareholder ROI Model

Instead, I want to take a look inside the business model. From a social perspective, it’s a great initiative. If a friend of mine submits a manuscript, I’d definitely be willing to help out by becoming a shareholder. However, from a financial perspective, the financial model is very unfavorable to shareholders.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: , , ,

Inside The Super Bowl Ads

February 9, 2010 By 6 Comments

Last Sunday was Super Sunday, normally a great day for advertisers to showcase their great ads. However, the ads were sub-par…again. Especially compared to the game, which was great.

But this post isn’t about the game. It’s about how the advertisers fared during the Super Bowl. Mullen and Radian6 collected and analyzed close to 100,000 tweets tagged #brandbowl to determine how brands and their Super Bowl ads were perceived on Twitter. The ranking of ads was based on a combination of volume (number of tweets) and sentiment (positive or negative). You can check out the results on the #brandbowl website.

Doritos won because of sheer volume and they did have a lot of ads! Numbers 2 and 3, Google and Focus on the Family, didn’t have as many ads so their ranking is impressive. Google’s ad was very clever and was one of favorites of the evening. The Focus on the Family one was amusing but mostly to Americans because of the involvement of former college football superstar Tim Tebow.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The Difference Is Linkability

September 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Earlier this year, I experimented with a series of articles for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes on certain keywords, including my own name. I have to say that this experiment was wildly successful with highlights being:

  • Ranking higher than a feature with a similar title on the New York Times website
  • Increasing traffic up to 30-fold with a 30 day run-up

The key part of this experiment was to create content that will receive a decent number of inbound links (other sites linking to my website/article) which leads to better search engine rankings.

I’ve buried the experiment now, but I’ll share some of my findings with you here.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: , , ,

Alternative Search Engines

April 9, 2009 By

When you ask people to name a search engine, Google is unquestionably top-of-mind. In fact, it’s even become a verb for most people. There are, however, many alternative search engines that are able to provide better search results in specific niches. Here’s a run-down of a few:

Knowledge/Information Search Engines:

Video Search Engines:

Audio Search Engines:

PDF Search Engines:

Social Search Engines:

Decision Search Engines:

Look and you shall find.

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: