Category Archives: advertising

UnSpun: “Community Opinions … Ranked!”

I just discovered UnSpun, an Amazon project (still in Beta) which allows you to “Find the Best, Find the Worst, Vote Your Opinion, Create Your Own Lists”.

To put it simple, you can create a new list (i.e., best bra color… anyway, that one is already in the top ten at the moment :) ), and make people vote, or search for an existing list and rank other users’ opinions, or just add yours if it is not present in the list so far. You can use your existing Amazon account, if you have one.

Both fun and useful (I suspect the “Best Xmas present for girlfriend/wife” list to show up in the top 3 in a couple of months :P ).

Skebby.it: cheap texting (for us as well)

Believe it or not, the price of a single SMS text message here in Italy is 0.15 EUR (0.20 USD, more or less). Let’s get it a bit more impressive: a single character is a byte, a single text message is 160 characters long, so I get charged 0.20 USD to send you 160 bytes, which means transferring a megabyte of text would cost to the final Italian user 1325 USD. It looks like a lot of money, right?

Fortunately a lot of smart people live on this planet, and Davide Marrone – a 24-years-old computer science student @ University of Milan – developed Skebby, a java app to enable people texting via their mobile phones (through Skebby’s servers) at a much lower rates.

The free membership allows users to send a limited number of text message (exploiting free services) at a cost of 0.01 EUR.

The premium membership allows no-limit texting at rates depending on how many text messages you buy in advance, but you might get till a 50% 70% off the current price.

[UPDATE: You should also add the cost of connecting from your mobile to Skebby's servers. ]

I don’t remember but if I’m not wrong Skebby.it is still only in Italian (actually it was on the national TVs yesterday, so servers went down immediately, they’re moving on right now :D ). If so, I hope they’re going to get an English version as soon as possible.

Best commercial ever

Can’t stop laughing at this – unofficial of course – Microsoft Zune commercial. Yet sounds like somebody got fired for this. :(

IMHO it was a good chance to beat Apple’s iPod… :P Too bad it’s unreleased! :)

Read more:

MacSpoof: Ruby on Rails VS Java

Right from the Digg / Technology feed, an awesome parody of the popular Mac vs PC commercials: Ruby on Rails vs Java. :)

Absolutely funny :P .

About digg actual traffic volumes: in medio stat virtus?

Digg CEO Jay Adelson has been interviewed by Michele Steele @ Forbes Video Network, Techcrunch reports. You can find the video embedded here in this post @ Techcrunch. Discussion topics were, among other things, eventual Digg acquisitions (rumors about that in the past days) and it’s actual market value, standing to web traffic assessment.

Adelson claims a huge number of unique accesses per month (circa 20 million accesses), combining RSS readers data with web traffic ones. This seems a bit unfair: RSS reader-generated accesses cannot always be considered as “unique”, and feed monitoring tools (at least those I know) are quite immature, in my humblest opinion.

Anyway, third party estimates look quite poor too: who’s gonna believe digg is only 1.3 million accesses per month worth?

Wanna get dugg?

Once upon a time it was the slashdot effect to be responsible for traffic spikes in websites’ stats. Now all its about digg and Netscape.

A very good post by Neil Patel explains how to get more exposure and get “dugg” exploiting these two services. Very smart – and not so obvious – tips. Will give ‘em a try. ;)

Guy Kawasaki blogged about the topic too.

Yet, if you are thinking about getting thousands clicks on your ads from digg users, you might be wrong: digg users – among other things – don’t click ads! :P

Digg this!

Web 2.0 definitions: labelling the Web – semantic – evolution

Yes, the 2.0 logo generator again :)Digg this

Phil Wainewright @ ZDNet Blogs gives his own Web 2.0 definition in this post.

Actually I share this point of view:

“What I have noticed, though, is that I can be having conversations with people about Web 2.0 in which I realize that we’re each talking about completely different aspects of the phenomenon“.

Some definitions are particularly popular, first of all the – verbose – one by Tim O’Reilly (and its compact version), who was one of the first to use the term Web 2.0 ever.

Yet his “Web 2.0 is the network as platform“ perspective is absolutely true, interesting, but not far from what the Web in its original vision and version has always been. It’s always been about connecting people and exchanging information too, so according to Tim Berners-Lee “Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means”.

My approach to the definition of the phenomenon is twofold: on the first hand Web 2.0

Read More »

Google to boost mobile technology market in Japan

Mobile devices (no surprise at all, though) are attracting lots of big firms’ investments: among other things indeed just a couple of days ago analysts’ blogs were buzzing around the future Apple iPhone launch.

Now Google announces to be going to hire more engineers in Japan to develop next generation of mobile technologies in one of the most advanced and active country for the industry segment, Yahoo! News reports. Google is offering more services to the Japanese market too, as mobile search and advertising.

Pre-roll potential impact over YouTube’s revenue

Assuming you’re something close to an industry-aware reader, surely it’s not the first time you come through such an analysis. Yet, I won’t believe you are not going to be stunned by the potential YouTube revenue resulting from the scenario depicted by Fred Wilson @ A VC in this post.

However, I actually agree more with the author of this post @ thisisgoingtobebig.com. He does some interesting considerations about pre-roll, from a different perspective. I believe pre-roll, at least in their current form, wouldn’t have an all-positive impact on the number of YouTube hits too.

Anyway, if you want to, you can read more about the analyses here:

A del.icio.us growth

Since Yahoo! acquired del.icio.us social bookmarking website, the latter is experiencing a fast growth in traffic, new stats by Hitwise report. Yet, social bookmarking traffic still represents a small fraction of the whole web traffic, and much of the world is not using this kind of services.

Read more @ TechCrunch.