‘Cross The Breeze

Drew sent out this email today pointing out the the current status of The Age of Conversation:

“A little over 3 months ago, we launched Age of Conversation with our fingers crossed. We came screaming out of the gate. 103 authors, most of whom have never looked each other in the eyes. From 10 different countries. Working together for a common vision — to publish a book they could be proud of and raise money for the world’s children.

So, how are we doing so far? In the 90+ days since our launch, together we have raised $10,380.81! (That’s 1,351 books). That’s the good news. The bad news is that 98% of those sales took place in the first 60 days. “

You haven’t bought it yet you say? What are you waiting for? You don’t like charity? You don’t believe in ‘the conversation’? (which is even a bigger reason why you should get it really!) Or maybe you did get it already, but did you think about buying it for your clients? Or your team? Everyone at the agency?

Anyway, there are far more reasons to buy this than not to. So don’t hesitate and follow this link right now so you can have it shipped to you today.

• Hulu Integrating with MSN, AOL
  “Hulu has partnered with MSN and AOL to provide video on a subdomain of each site. MSN TV will be showing some of Hulu’s content, including full-length television shows and movie clips. Hulu’s content is well-integrated with the rest of MSN TV’s con
  (tags: hulu msn tv aol integration msnvideo beta)
• Automattic Spurns $200 Million Acquisition Offer
  “Automattic, the company that created the WordPress.com blogging platform and oversees the WordPress.org open source project, has rejected a $200 million acquisition offer, says multiple sources. Half the price was to be paid in cash, half in stock in the
  (tags: mullenweg news opensource techcrunch wordpress automattic)
• Adrants » ‘Hulu’ May Be the Last Sound Joost Ever Hears
  “With virtually no load or lag time whatsoever, today we blew two hours of our workday watching Sideways online. We didn’t need to pay for, illegally download, or sacrifice precious computer space for it. And while the occasional :15 or :30 ad cuts throug
  (tags: hulu joost adrants review beta newscorp nbcuniversal)

I’m not a big fan in general of comparative advertising because I find that brands should focus on their own strengths and not on other brand’s weakness or whatever. But sometimes it’s done in such a fine way that I do like it, like in this example for Fedex for instance. I thought that was really original and good.

[Via Buzzing Bees]

Just about a year ago I wrote a post about the Samsung Blackjack. I saw it first up on Crunchgear and it looked “like the perfect answer to what I want” as I mentioned back then. A couple of months later I received one at MIX07 in Vegas and I’ve been using the Blackjack until about a month ago. I think it’s the best phone I ever had, but there were a few good reasons for switching to something else again. The Blackjack was an unlocked Cingular mobile, and although it was a 3G phone it didn’t work on the European 3G networks. It also didn’t have WIFI and it’s a Windows Mobile 5 phone whereas I need WM6 for some of the demos I do on mobile. That said, I miss the darn phone.

Today I run around with a HTC TyTNII, which is a pretty powerful mobile phone… but it’s a brick. And battery life is pathetic. Especially that last point is a bit of a dilemma. The phone has great capabilities to get work done while on the road (and I’m on the road quite a lot) so doing email, reading RSS feeds, surfing the web, checking word and powerpoint docs, … the TyTNII is quite good at it…. for a few hours. If you use your phone actively for all this it doesn’t survive the day. And that’s bad. During the weekends I mostly use my Nokia N95. I got lucky to get one from Nokia so I could use it to demo the Windows Live for Nokia and I’m especially astonished by the photo/video quality of the phone. I’m having way too much fun filming the kids having fun during the weekend. I could use it for work as well as I can use it with Exchange but I don’t like the whole emailing feature on the Nokia.

And then I saw this, the Samsung i780 or the next generation Blackjack. And I want it. It’s like my original Blackjack with all the functions I had to miss and adding even some more. So Samsung, you can send one my way right now ;)

One thing you can learn from the latest HTC models though, they do a very good job on the home screen (quite a bit better than what is shown here).

Technorati Tags: samsung, blackjack, mobile, nokia, htc, n95

• Dell: A Social Media Rags-to-Riches Story - The Viral Garden
  “Dell provides possibly the best case study of how a company has successfully integrated social media into its marketing communications, and culture. What makes the ‘Dell story’ so compelling isn’t how the company is utilizing social media now, but rather
  (tags: dell socialmedia case jeffjarvis hell bloggers marketing)
• The Kaiser and a Blue Monster « | The Kaiser | dissoziative fugue
  End of last week Marcus Brown (fellow AOC author) did an interview with me over Messenger about Microsft, advertising, … Check it out and feel free to chime in.
  (tags: microsoft interview bluemonster messenger advertising)

Some people probably will never learn. During every single presentation I’ve done about social media and how to engage in that space during the last year at least, I talked about Honesty ROI. Remember the ethics code WOMMA built regarding social media? The reason for that is that it’s a very easy to understand and simple to remember guide for any kind of engagement in social media. And probably for any type of conversation. Who cannot remember this?

• Honesty of Relationship: You say who you’re speaking for
• Honesty of Opinion: You say what you believe
• Honesty of Identity: You never obscure your identity

Honesty ROI. If you care to understand this, you’re off to a good start. If traditional marketing media were to write about one thing related to new media, social media (and I know most of them don’t care too much) then it should be about this Honesty ROI. It’ll help the clueless.

Reason for the repetition on honesty is this post I read today at Media Culpa: “Swedish Minister fakes online chat“

“Maud Olofsson, the Swedish Minister for Enterprise and Energy, was scheduled to chat with readers at Aftonbladet.se yesterday. The problem was that she was in an interview with the local daily Västerbottens-Kuriren at that time. So instead of calling the thing off, her press secretary Lisa Wärn chatted in Olofsson’s name without revealing that readers weren’t atually chatting with the Minister.”

Some people will never learn, and this goes far beyond social media if you ask me.

Technorati Tags: womma, honestyroi, socialmedia, sweden, aftonbladet

The Blue Monster Show: now this might become interesting. I’ve got as much information as you about what this is going to look like (that is after watching this video) and probably nobody really knows. To some point, that is part of what made the Blue Monster so interesting to me so far, the fact that you never really know where it is going. Apart from the fact that it is a good conversation starter for better conversations about Microsoft and where the company is going.

Here’s the video announcement of Loic Le Meur and Hugh MacLeod on Seesmic, since that’s where you should be able to find the “Blue Monster Show”. As Hugh states, the Blue Monster isn’t really owned by anyone, which is good. I know that many benefit from it, and that’s maybe even better.

And Loic, if you read this, thanks again for the Seesmic invitation but I haven’t had time to record anything on it yet… but I’ll get to it ;)

Technorati Tags: gapingvoid, bluemonster, seesmic, socialobject, stormhoek

After 2 years of blogging I finally added a blogroll to my blog. If I remember well I probably did so in the beginning as well but then too many feeds got into my feedreader that I decided to take the blogroll away. After some conversation with Valeria Maltoni about the use of the blogroll and also after some feedback from people like Sarah Blow recently I figured I had to put the blogroll back into the navigation.

The biggest difference with my first trail is that I don’t want my blogroll to reflect all the feeds in my reader anymore but only the ones that I like the most. So check out the my ‘favorites’ in the navigation. And if you want to check out all the feeds in my reader then go to ‘share your opml‘. Enjoy.

• Microsoft opens widget marketplace for Vista and Windows Live
  “Microsoft opened a new online marketplace last night to sell a new class of desktop and web applications directly to consumers. “
  (tags: microsoft windowslive marketplace gallery apps zune widget gadget)

• gapingvoid: “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”: more thoughts on social objects
  More from Hugh on ’social objects’
  (tags: business gapingvoid internet marketing social socialobjects web)
• Top 10 Most Brilliant Gadgets of 2007 - Microsoft Surface, Apple iPhone, Nintendo Wii Fit and More - Breakthrough Awards - Popular Mechanics
  Top 10 most brilliant gadgets of 2007 on Popular Mechanics featuring the Microsoft Surface on 1.
  (tags: microsoft surface popular mechanics hotlist gadget 2007)
• Three Reasons Microsoft Underpaid For Facebook on Epicenter
  “It’s official — the truth is less profitable than fiction. Facebook has secured the cornerstone of its $15 billion valuation with today’s Microsoft alliance. But at $240 million, that’s only a 1.6% slice of a much larger pie.”
  (tags: facebook microsoft investment future internet stake shareholder)
• Windows Live Spaces at a crossroads: will the US catch up to the world? - OurView: The Opinion Blog
  “Mary Jo Foley wrote recently on Microsoft’s seeming reluctance to promote Spaces within the US, and indeed if you read the press in the US or follow the blogs, Windows Live Spaces is not much more than an also ran. From looking at these numbers, though,
  (tags: blogs global live microsoft socialnetworks statistics stats windowslive spaces)
• OfficeRocker! : Google don’t use their own stuff - so why should you?
  “This amused me today from a friend of mine who noticed this. A job application on the Google website for the “Executive Assistant to the Executive Director, Google.org - San Francisco”"
  (tags: fun google office microsoft skills)
• » Microsoft Has Blowout Quarter, Stock Up Over $30 Billion » InsideMicrosoft-part of the Blog News Channel
  “Microsoft has released its quarterly earnings report, and how good was it? The stock is up $30 billion!”
  (tags: microsoft earnings financial results stock quarter)