Spanning the Blogosphere: I'm not too fond of the phrase "Live Web." First, I'm not convinced that the so-called static web era was all that staticâ€"links were live, after all, and pages were updated regularly, and message boards and other sorts of multiway communication platforms existed. Second, even as multifaceted as it has becomeâ€"with widgets and clients offering all sorts of live interactionâ€"Web-based information is just one source of information flowing into the message stream in which we all swim, a message stream that includes e-mail, IM, voicemail, text messaging and more, an environment not tied to http or the browser.
But for Dave Sifry, whose business, Technorati, is Web based, "Live Web" is the phrase of choice although he is still titling his quarterly report "The State of the Blogosphere." There are some fascinating nuggets: There's the enormous growth of blogging in the Middle East, particularly in Iran, as illustrated by the fact that Farsi has now become the 10th most common blogging language. There's the growth of tagging as bloggers' ontological system of choice (although still only 35% of blog posts tracked by Technorati include tags). And blog spam is seasonal, peaking during the Christmas buying season.
Two other things worth noting. There is at least one sign that blogging may have peaked. Technorati tracked an average of 1.3 million daily posts in October and 1.5 million this month. That's slower growth in per day posting than the survey has found in the past, but not a slide in the number of posts per day as Steve Rubel suggests. It IS a slide, however, in the percentage of blogs that account for daily postings. Using Sifry's numbers (which sometimes seem to be moving targets) it seems like the rate of daily posts per blog was 2.3% in October and 2.1% in April.Â
Also, Sifry continues to highlight a distinction between blogs and so-called "mainstream media" that I think is no longer useful. Blogs ARE mainstream media, at least users experience them alongside traditional media and draw less and less of a distinction (as Sifry notes). No consumer surfing for information about Zune players would consider Engaget and ZDNet to be in different information categories. The blogging world has to get the chip off its shoulder about "mainstream media." Bloggers try so hard to say they're different it sounds like they have an inferiority complex.
Selling in Second Life: GigaOm has an absolutely fascinating piece, written by Wagner James Au, about the failures of traditional marketers to make hay in Second Life. The piece jumps off from a small scale survey (200 repondants) by Komjuniti, a SL brand consultancy. There's not much news in the survey (when asked people feel marketing is intrusive and uninteresting, I mean, duh!), But James Au's suggestions to marketers using SL are fascinating. To wit: Because teleportation is the primary mode of transport, forget billboards, no one sees 'em; just like in RL, events, giveaways, and the like are necessary to draw people to your location; and finally, join the fantasy:
To play in Second Life, corporations must first come to a humbling realization: in the context of the fantastic, their brands as they exist in the real world are boring, banal, and unimaginative. Car companies are trying to compete with college kids who turn a virtual automotive showroom into a 24/7 hiphop dance party, and create lovingly designed muscle cars that fly, and auction off for $2000 in real dollars at charity auctions.
....as the Komjuniti study suggests, they can keep building sterile shopping malls, and continue wondering why Residents prefer nude dance parties, giant frogs singing alt-folk rock, and samurai death matches- and often, all three at the same time.
Valuing Facebook: There's a suspicious meme making the rounds started yesterday by Mark May, an investment analyst at Needham & Co (is Facebook beating the bushes for buyers?). In a report May argued that Yahoo made a terrible error in December abandoning attempts to acquire Facebook to the tune of $1.5 billion, because now Facebook is worth many times that number. At Barron's Online Eric Savitz picked up the ball and ran with it, quoting May: Facebook is no doubt one of the most important Internet companies to have been created in the last five years.
No doubt. But is it worth more than $1.5 billion? Not according to Douglas McIntyre at 24/7 Wall St:
Comscore says that Facebook as 16.7 million unique visitors a month. Even better, the site has 24 visits per unique visitor, putting it just behind Yahoo! among all web properties.
...The New York Times digital properties have a unique monthly audience of almost 40 million. The market cap of the entire New York Times Company (NYT) is only $3.4 billion. It even includes those worthless big newspapers.
Maybe Facebook is worth $1 billion, maybe less. But more? No way.
But McIntyre is still basing the entirety of his valuation on pageviews. Meanwhile at ZDNet, Larry Dignan got his dander up about arm chair CEOs piling on Yahoo:
Now time for a reality check.
If News Corp. still can't figure out how to monetize MySpace (it's getting there) how can Facebook be profitable enough to justify a big valuation? My hindsight indicates that Facebook should have taken Yahoo's dough and ran. It's one thing to build an audience it's quite another to make money from it.
Facebook is the "in" thing for now. Let's follow May's logic and assume Yahoo did pull the trigger on a Facebook purchase (of course we'd all pick that apart too.) Guess what would happen when Yahoo bought Facebook? It would be an "out" thing. Consumers are a fickle bunch and will leave in a second. Suddenly that valuation doesn't look so hot.
Is social media really all that? I know it's heresy to think that social media may not be the second coming of the Web boom, but there are a few areas of concern. Perhaps Mozilla's social media meets browser effort hurts traffic at MySpace and Facebook. Perhaps someone cooks up a technology that allows you to take your profile-and all of your friends-somewhere else easily. Bottom line: We don't know how much money social media can make.
I'm with Larry on all but his last point. Social Media really IS all that.
Â
Link Love:
MySpace Music Players: MySpace Speaks
Google MyMaps Smashes Mash-ups
Reko Launches - More Social Networking in Firefox
link to original post