Business is social again

I’ve been musing on this topic today after chatting to David Ibsen yesterday about all things social media. It struck me that the melding of business and personal enabled by social media harks back to a previous age when business was really social. Wining and dining clients and customers seemed to be de rigueur in the Mad Men era, but then business got more, well, businesslike in following decades. Now, again, the personal is almost inseparable from the professional and is all part of the way business gets done. The only difference is that the socializing happens online.

Slow news day?

Turns out that “Slow news day?” is one of the most frequent comments on TechCrunch.  Click here for TC’s amusing list of “Ten Comments You Think Are Cool And Insightful But Aren’t.”  Note to the haters: be more original!

Mail Goggles? Is it April Fool’s Day already?

We all know how attractive beer can make things look.  Google today announced a solution to the online equivalent of drunk dialing (inebriated emailing?) – Mail Goggles for Gmail.  It stops you drunkenly emailing your ex-girlfriend/boyfriend or boss by forcing you to perform ‘complicated’ maths calculations before you hit send.  On Google’s example, that meant getting five sums like 11 x 2 and 37 + 19 correct in 60 seconds, although you can set the difficulty level so that eggheads can’t cheat the system.  It works by default late at night on weekends, but you can also change that.  More views on it are here and here.  I’d love to know how many people will actually use this, or is it just a great PR idea from Google?

Technorati Tags: Google

Rumors weren’t the only thing flying at Microsoft today

Will Microsoft buy all or part of Yahoo? Or perhaps Facebook? Or both. That’s all very well, but the big news of the day is Steve Ballmer’s egging at a Hungarian University – see the video here, courtesy of cnet – by a protester unimpressed with Microsoft’s corporate policies.

What is it about Microsoft executives that makes people want to throw things at them? Remember this?

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Ballmer

Google domains – sublime and ridiculous

Royal Pingdom did some digging and came up with a list of domain names owned by Google. They range from the amusing (googlepoo.com) to the paranoid (googlesucks.com) to the bizarre (bayareaburritos.com). Too bad there’s already one gossip site out there whose domain name I bet Google wishes it had snagged…

Technorati Tags: Google

Goodbye shredder, hello 41pounds.org

This could just be the most useful – and environmentally-friendly – service I’ve come across in a long time: 41pounds.org claims to stop 80-95% of junk mail and unwanted catologs per household. 41 pounds? Yeah, that’s the weight each individual receives in junk mail per year.

Technorati Tags: Earth Day, 41 pounds.org, junk mail

The making of the iPhone

When you have 10 minutes to spare, check out the fascinating account by Fred Vogelstein in Wired of how the Apple iPhone came into being – and how it changed the dynamics of the wireless business.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone

Just as well I’m not in it for the money…

Alex Iskold of Read/WriteWeb makes a great case for why “there’s no money in the long tail of the blogosphere.” Or, indeed, in the long tail of anything. The crux of his argument: “You can make money on the long tail but not in the long tail. ” It’s an important distinction. Too many people blithely cite the Long Tail as the reason their low-volume, low-margin business will be successful.

Iskold demonstrates his point with the example of Google, which of course profits handsomely from AdSense, purely because of the huge volume:

“AdSense works for Google because the odds are in its favor – it is aggregating small amounts of traffic across the entire web. The math works for them because it is based on the massive scale of the web. It similarly works reasonably well for the sites with large amounts of traffic, but it fails for smaller publishers who have low visitor counts.”

So, all you aspiring pro-bloggers out there, don’t give up the day job!

Technorati Tags: Long Tail, blogging

Advice from the top: Warner chief says fighting with your customers is not a good idea

PC Pro reported today on a rare sighting of (an unprompted) corporate mea culpa and a fairly common volte-face. Speaking at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress in Macau, Edgar Bronfman, chairman and CEO of Warner Music Group, admitted that the music industry screwed up on digital downloads and cautioned the mobile industry not to make the same mistake.

Quotes PC Pro:

“We used to fool ourselves,’ he said. “We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.”

Of course, one quick admission of guilt is not going to fix things overnight, and as the article points out, Warner is still only toying with DRM-free music. It’s going to be a long time before the music industry snuggles its way back into consumers’ affections.

Technorati Tags: Warner, music industry

Bubblicious

How do you when you’re in a bubble? Perhaps when one of the industry’s key proponents says we are. In a blog entitled “The Web 2.0 World is Skunk Drunk on Its Own Kool-Aid,” Steve Rubel (Edelman PR exec and Micropersuasion blogger) opines that things have gone too far: “Many people I know, love and respect are heralding every new site as like it’s Jes.usR.com. No one’s casting a cynical eye anymore. No one’s looking at valuations and reality – or at least very few people are.” He bemoans that the thirst for changing the world and creating value has gone and now it’s just about “chasing the almighty dollar.” Lots of his readers agree with him.

In a similar vein, John Heilemann of New York Magazine takes a New Yorker’s look at Silicon Valley and its bubble here. His conclusion: “Well, maybe it is a bubble. But out in Silicon Valley, they don’t think of that as a bad thing at all.”

Technorati Tags: Web2.0, bubble