Zitat des Tages von John Battelle:
Bill Gates has become the patron saint of philanthropy and the poster child of rebirth, and from what I can tell, rightly so.
When good media takes a bounded form, and comes once in a period of time, it begs to be consumed as a whole - it creates an engaging experience. We don't dip in and out of an episode of 'Game of Thrones,' after all - we take it in as a whole. Why have we abandoned this concept when it comes to publications, simply because they exist online?
Every good story needs a hero. Back when I wrote 'The Search,' that hero was Google - the book wasn't about Google alone, but Google's narrative worked to drive the entire story.
The experience that a publication creates for its audience is the very essence of that publication's brand - and without deep engagement, that publication's brand will be weak. A good publication is a convener and an arbiter - it expresses a core narrative that becomes a badge of sorts for its readership.
The home phone is relatively cheap, incredibly reliable, and - if you buy the right phone - will work for years without replacement. Oh, and far as I can tell, a home phone won't give you brain cancer. In a perfect world, the hard line should have become a platform for building out an entire app ecosystem for the home. And yet... it didn't.
Search is now more than a web destination and a few words plugged into a box. Search is a mode, a method of interaction with the physical and virtual worlds. What is Siri but search? What are apps like Yelp or Foursquare, but structured search machines? Search has become embedded into everything and has reached well beyond its web-based roots.
Google+ was, to my mind, all about creating a first-party data connection between Google most important services - search, mail, YouTube, Android/Play, and apps.
Google is a global Rorschach test. We see in it what we want to see. Google has built an infrastructure that makes a lot of dreams closer to reality.
Building out a professional profile on LinkedIn certainly makes sense, and bolstering that CV with intelligent pieces of writing is also a great idea. But if you're going to take the time to create content, you should also take the time to create a home for that content that is yours and yours alone.
Where one industry stumbles, another rises up.
The only thing Google has failed to do, so far, is fail.
If we as a society do not understand 'the cloud,' in all its aspects - what data it holds, how it works, what the bargains are we make as we engage with it, we'll all be the poorer for it, I believe.
Boxes and rectangles on the side or top of a website simply do not deliver against brand advertising goals. Like it or not, boxes and rectangles have for the most part become the province of direct response advertising, or brand advertising that pays, on average, as if it's driven by direct response metrics.
As our society tips toward one based on data, our collective decisions around how that data can be used will determine what kind of a culture we live in.
When you bring the scale and precision of data-driven platforms to the brilliance of great media executions, magic will happen. Delivering on that vision for the Independent Web is the mission of Federated Media Publishing.
Google likely never cared if Google+ 'won' as a competitor to Facebook (though if it did, that would have been a nice bonus). All that mattered, in the end, was whether Plus became the connective tissue between all of Google's formerly scattered services. And in a few short years, it's fair to say it has.
When documents were analog, they were protected by government laws against unreasonable search and seizure. When they live in the cloud... the ground is shifting.
WordPress makes it drop-dead easy to start a site. Take my advice and go do it.
I sense that the sea of smart phones lit up at concerts is a temporary phenomenon. The integration of technology, sharing, and social into our physical world, on the other hand, well, that ain't going away.
Step one of Street View was to get the pictures in place - in a few short years, we've gotten used to the idea that nearly any place on earth can now be visited as a set of images on Google.
It's not easy being number two. As a marketer, you have limited choices - you can pretend you're not defined by the market leader, or, you can embrace your position and go directly after your nemesis.
The largest issue with search is that we learned about it when the web was young, when the universe was 'complete' - the entire web was searchable! Now our digital lives are utterly fractured - in apps, in walled gardens like Facebook, across clunky interfaces like those in automobiles or Comcast cable boxes.
As the border between physical and digital gets more permeable, a new kind of literacy emerges. And that literacy is built on a foundation of code - whether it's the codes of letters and words, or the code of bits and algorithms.
I've always liked the fact that anyone with a great idea, access to the Internet, and an unrelenting will can spark a world-beating company simply by standing up code on the Internet and/or leveraging the information and relationship network that is the web. That's how Facebook started, after all.
Founded by an ex-Apple employee, Nest devices do for thermostats and smoke alarms what the Mac did for PCs - Google Buys Nest made them relevant and far more valuable.
Just as like the music industry still wishes for the days when it controlled its own production and distribution, the media and marketing world still yearns for the silver bullet of the thirty-second spot on 'Seinfeld,' even as it knows those days are over.
It seems there is no area in our culture that is not touched, changed, even swallowed by the Internet. It's both medium and message, mass and personal, social and solitary.
'Dependent web' platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Google and Yahoo are where people go to discover and share new content. Independent sites are the millions of blogs, community and service sites where passionate individuals 'hang out' with like-minded folks. This is where shared content is often created.
Only a consistent, ongoing, deep experience can make a lasting media brand: one that has a commitment from a core community and the respect of a larger reading public.
Facebook's data trove is enviable, and its moves into nearly every aspect of our lives - from payment to media, will create even more of it. The company also has created a huge base of developers for its platform, but the ecosystem is incomplete compared to vertically integrated OSes like iOS, Mac or Windows.
Just like the VCR opened the film and TV industries to unimaginable new revenue streams, search, RSS and the Internet will do the same for marketers and media companies.
It's become something of a ritual - every year, Google publishes its year-end summary of what the world wants, and every year I complain about how shallow it is, given what Google really knows about what the world is up to.
I left 'Wired' before it was sold to Conde Nast and Lycos, so I didn't experience that transition.
As you grow older, you learn a few things. One of them is to actually take the time you've allotted for vacation.
If you're a publisher and you forbid deep linking into your site, or have a paid wall or registration requirement, then you're making it hard to 'point to' your content. When no one points to your content, your content is harder to find because search uses links as a proxy for popularity.
Obama will win the 2012 election, thanks in part to the tech community rallying behind him due to issues like SOPA, visas, and free speech.