Twitter for Emergencies

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Twitter is receiving an awful lot of attention at the moment in both print and broadcast media. The terrorist attacks on Mumbai in November was covered widely, as was the online campaign backing up the Israeli attack on Gaza; even well known technology advocate (ha..) Ryan Tubridy decided to dedicate a few minutes on his early morning radio show – which caused blog and twitter debate.

Individual firsts have also been recorded – first twitterers to be report from an air crash, escape from a burning house – and of course DM fails are always just a few keystrokes away.

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Don’t Stop me now – I’m having such a good time…

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Ah yes. Most mortals will agree that the NRA radio and TV campaign for the M50 becoming barrier free was irritating. I’m not sure what got to me most – the cover version of the Queen hit from the 1970’s, or the pseudo “where oh where is shadow” sharp-and-pointy-type-characters from the Bear in the Blue House.

I’m such a snark really. Read more

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

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Listened to a podcast featuring Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine on the IT
Conversations network last night while out walking.

His talk centred around his motivation and proposed proposed model for giving away his next book for free.

This was a pretty painless 30 minutes for a quick whip around of the notions of free that we are all familiar with, but have not maybe considered for our own businesses.

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Are viral internet marketing campaigns just pot luck?

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This paragraph, deep down in a Fast Company article questioning the fundamental reasonings behind The Tipping Point summed up the argument nicely :

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That’s because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. “And nobody,” Watts says wryly, “will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire.”

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Notes from Web2Expo Conference

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The following notes were taken from talks I attended this morning. The content has also syndicated to Web2Ireland.

Business Models for Web 2.0 Companies

Christian Leybold of BV Capital provided a good overview of business models (all advertising) and statistics – sites used as examples during the presentation are BV investment companies)

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Workshop Day at Web2Expo Berlin

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Have spent the morning and early afternoon so far – flitting between the various workshops. Stowe Boyd unsurprisingly – had a full house for his pitch – likewise, Kathy Sierra’s session on creating passionate users.

Have met up with some of the Irish contingent – Brian O’Malley and Jonathan from EI, Benjamin Mosse of AP in New York and James Galvin.

Wifi access has only now started to cope with demand – my attempts to microblog to Twitter or Jaiku via my Nokia 770 might have been successful early on as I managed to corral one of the hens teeth-like IP addresses – but I was then cruelly thwarted by problems with actually using “Post” on Jaiku, or actually even logging using Twitter.