‘Cross The Breeze

I stumbled upon this fascinating research done by Microsoft Research about a year ago (disclaimer: I work for Microsoft) after Mashable picked it up this weekend.

“We present a study of anonymized data capturing a month of high-level communication activities within the whole of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging system. We examine characteristics and patterns that emerge from the collective dynamics of large numbers of people, rather than the actions and characteristics of individuals. The dataset contains summary properties of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people.”

“All our data was anonymized; we had no access to personally identifiable information. Also, we had no access to text of the messages exchanged or any other information that could be used to uniquely identify users.”

And while these are only MSN/Live Messenger users during a period in time in 2006, and miss data from the competitive services, it still gives a pretty solid idea of the ‘inside’ of the social aspect of an IM network. Here are some of the key findings.

When you compare the world population to the Messenger population you will see that ages 18-30 are over represented, and ages 10-14 and 30-34 are fairly comparative to the world population. This tells me that IM is indeed linked mostly to youth, but definitely not youth alone.

This here is another interesting finding:

“We investigate on a planetary-scale the oft-cited report that people are separated by “six degrees of separation” and find that the average path length among Messenger users is 6.6. We also find that people tend to communicate more with each other when they have similar age, language, and location, and that cross-gender conversations are both more frequent and of longer duration than conversations with the same gender.”

The full report can be downloaded here.

I’m not such a big fan of predictions like we see them all over on the web at the start of the New Year. There are a few good ones like those of John Batelle for instance, but other than that many predictions sound more like acknowledgement of something that’s already happening today or a wish-list for something we would like to see happen.

One good example is mobile for instance. It’s going to be the year of mobile since 2005 I think and as I said before, 2008 is not going to be the year of mobile either. Or talk about video, I had a discussion with someone recently about online video after a statement that 2008 would be the year online video will get big. That’s just not true, 2007 was that year already. As a counter argument I did say I believe 2008 will be the year in which online video will become more useful, of better quality, with better metrics, better advertising, … you name it.

And that’s what is happening today indeed. Yesterday Read/Write Web reported on the launch of Dailymotion HD upload & playback, including automatic bandwidth detection which allows easy switching to lower quality versions. Check out the HD example in their post. Now I can see how HD quality might not be on top of everybody’s wish-list for online video, but I do believe it’s a must have for future development of online video.

About a week ago, MIT AdverLab reported on a new innovative technology related to video advertising. The technology developed in Microsoft’s AdCenter Labs included tools for content analysis and speech recognition for advanced contextual advertising. (again disclaimer: Microsoft is my employer). Definitely take a look at the video below to get an idea of what they exactly mean with that:

Now as I am in advertising, I’m interested in this but not only for advertising purposes. If you watched the video you will understand that there are also opportunities for websites for instance to relate archived content to in-video content (think news sites) or how the technology can create automatic chapters in a video for more useful video browsing for instance. There are quite a few exciting technology usages you can think of with this new development.

A last improvement will be about making video more searchable. The technology mentioned before will definitely be able to help in that area, but quite a few startups are working in that area as well. A few weeks ago at the LIFT Venture Night we saw Viewdle showing off their approach on this, including face recogniation etc. Neat stuff as well.

Content analysis, speech recognition, chaptering, contextual advertising and content (based on the video - not on title or tags), HD, … Yes, online video is big already, 2008 will be the year in which it will get better.

I initially got onto the Dopplr Alpha in April last year thanks to Loic Le Meur. He seemed quite enthusiast about it and as I’m a bit of a traveler myself, so enough reason to test it out. I’ve liked it ever since. I’ve you’re a bit of a traveler yourself and still not on Dopplr than get on it fast ;) No need to explain I think, it’s pretty straightforward.

To celebrate one year of Dopplr, the team created this Raumzeitgeist 2007 round-up. This kind of ’space time spirit’ as they call it, shows where and how long people traveled based on the trips they shared.

There’s quite some fun data in the posts, but it were the visualisations like the one above that got to me. Make sure you check both posts, as there is more of the same in there. You can now even get this one as a poster and I must say it sure looks good on the Dopplr office wall. I’m thinking about getting my own here as well.

Anyway, if you are on Dopplr and we’re not connected yet - you can find me here: http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/crossthebreeze

A good friend of mine, Matth, just sent me this video over IM. It’s about a guy who did some cool development for the Wii:

“Using the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), you can accurately track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen. This effectively transforms your display into a portal to a virtual environment. The display properly reacts to head and body movement as if it were a real window creating a realistic illusion of depth and space. By Johnny Chung Lee, Carnegie Mellon University. For more information and software visit http://johnnylee.net“

But you know what, just watch the video instead ;)

Imagine how this could be used in gaming, I really hope some game developers do answers Johnny Lee’s request and use this. This is the consumer 2.0 - taking the product further…

I’ve touched on this before (related to Advertising) and since I’m color-blind myself I hold a strong interest in the topic. Most important fact to repeat out of that earlier post: 8% of all Caucasian males suffer a color vision deficiency. And that might be more than you would expect.

With this in mind I said that it’s not that silly to have your ads tested to see if someone who’s color-blind can see/read everything alright. Same counts for websites obviously, but the most time I personally have problems with it is with presentations.

We all know that every single minute there’s probably someone in the world working on the most horrendous powerpoint/keynote presentation but apart from ugly presentations, some people use texts on backgrounds in a way that I can’t read the slides anymore. And guess what, If you have a reasonable audience, I probably wasn’t alone.

Last week AdLab did a post about this topic again and posted these 2 color wheels. The first one is the color-wheel as seen by a red-insensitive protopane, the second color wheel is a regular one.

So here’s the normal one:

Now it’s very hard for me to say if the first wheel actually represents what I see, since I obviously see both color wheels different then you, but it should give you a good idea. Also read Paul Martin’s post on color-blindness where you can see a whole lot more of comparison images.

This morning Gavin Heaton shared a little neat online tool with us on Twitter, called TouchGraph. In a blog post Gavin wonders if this is the tool that’ll allow you to calculate someone’s sphere of influence, which reminded me of this graph made by David Armano.

The whole thinking around influence interests me probably more than anything else, so I had to check it out. Here’s the graph for this blog:

First thought, it looks like a pretty neat application and I haven’t done testing it to be sure what exactly the benefits might be. It doesn’t look like the graphs your sphere of influence though. It sort of maps all kinds of links it can find for this url (it can do keywords as well by the way). On a personal level you see links to LinkedIn, my Blogger account, my other blog, … and as far as Kinepolis (which was my old employer). On a ‘content’ level you see links to a cluster around Sonic Youth, which is probably because the name of this blog refers to a Sonic Youth song. And then there are some more random links really only relate to some of the wordings on this blog.

So for now, a lot of random links mapped around a url or keyword if you ask me, but nevertheless pretty interesting to check out a bit more.

I’m pretty sure that before the week is over, this other blog of mine will have passed this one in traffic. The graph you see here is from the last 15 or so weeks, and shows this blog in blue and I Blog Mustang in red. I would never have thought this would happen, believe me.

The Mustang blog is more of a fun side project, on which I post only once a week maybe and with long periodes of no updates at all. But it’s been growing steady almost since day one. There are also a few curious differences between the 2 blogs. See the dip in the blue line for instance? That was a 2 week no-blogging holiday, which clearly impacts this blog but doesn’t change a thing on the other.

Some differences are maybe a bit more obvious, looking at browsers and operating systems for instance. On this blog 57% use IE and 33% use FF versus 73% for IE and 20% for FF on the Mustang blog. And I see 6% using a OSX on the Mustang blog versus 12% here. Windows Vista is around 10% on both.

Last but not least, although traffic is quite similar now, Technorati authority is way different. This blog has around 246 as I write this and the other one’s authority has a mere 10. It’s fine though, I do tend to believe I know something about marketing but I can assure you I know nothing about cars :)

Clearly a different audience on both, still I’m surprised of the growth over the last few weeks. Hopefully that 3rd little project will do the same (or even better). But more on that later.

Technorati Tags: mustang, blogs, traffic, blogging, audience, brower, firefox, internet explorer, osx, vista, windows

I wrote about this new marketing hotlist before, but now after the alpha, beta and gamma versions the final list is here. This list was created to highlight popular blogs from client-side marketing professionals and I’m happy to be on the list.

Peter Kim, the analyst at Forrester Research in Boston that created the list, calculated som form of rank based on a combined set of metrics:

• Authority: 20% Technorati Authority + 20% Google PageRank
• Attention: 10% Alexa traffic
• Influence: 50% Feed subscribers

Since feed subscribers is the most difficult to track, Peter uses Feedburner stats when available and Bloglines for others. In the case of Bloglines he makes the assumption that these only account for 20% of the actual amount of subscribers. This assumption is based on cases where both numbers were available so that makes sense to me.

Here’s the list, which will be updated every month from now on, now we just need a blog badge for this ;)

1. ExperienceCurve :: 74
2. Strategic Public Relations :: 70
3. Listen Up! :: 59
4. BeRelevant! :: 53
5. Conversation Agent :: 51
6. Todd And - The Power To Connect :: 48
7. Flooring The Consumer :: 42
8. Decker Marketing :: 41
9. The Lonely Marketer :: 41
10. Marketing Nirvana :: 40
11. Consumer Generated Media :: 38
12. Churbuck.com :: 38
13. The Digital Mindset Blog :: 36
14. Bernaisesource :: 35
15. Biznology :: 34
16. Cross The Breeze :: 33
17. AttentionMax :: 33
18. Masiguy :: 32
19. Community Group Therapy :: 31
20. Buzz Marketing For Technology :: 31

Technorati Tags: hotlist, marketing, m20, authority, influence, attention, peterkim, forrester

Am I the only one to find this ironic? Marketing Pilgrim brings good content most of the time and they’re in my RSS reader for quite a while. But when I opened one of their last posts on eyetracking in my browser, I couldn’t help wondering how serious they take their own content. The eyetracking study they talk about shows clear results (and so did other eyetracking studies in the past) about banner advertising on websites, but look at Marketing Pilgrim’s own sidebar. One third of the screen filled with ugly banner ads… that nobody looks at. Why tell other people smoking is dangerous when you’re a smoker yourself?

When I was going through my feeds today I discovered a new service called aideRSS and given my +300 subscriptions I’m always interested to find out better ways to manage these. It seemed like that is exactly what aideRSS is able to do so I checked it out immediately this morning. First thought: brilliant.

There are some feeds in my reader that definitely could be skimmed down to the most interesting posts, like the del.icio.us/popular feed (image above) for instance so I gave that a try. After uploading a feed you can select to see all posts or only the good post, great posts or best posts. This is based on the PostRank feature that is propriatory to aideRSS and unfortunately the help page about that is offline for the moment as I’m curious to find out more about how they calculate that.

You can upload your whole OPML into the service, you can subscribe to a filtered feed (like all best posts from a feed) in the integrated feedreader or in your own. There are sharing widgets etc etc. And as you can see in the screenshot above, you get immediate info from del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, … on the interaction for that post. This is something that I suggested to Technorati a few weeks ago so I obviously like that as well.

Best of all? It’s pretty amazingly fast (especially when they have a blog on record yet). And it’s there that I see the only problem for now as well, each time I did get an error it had something to do with uploading a feed that wasn’t in the system already. Hopefully they’ll fix that soon. And as said the PostRank information page gives an error as does the aideRSS blog for the moment.

Overall I think aideRSS still needs work but it offers a pretty good and fast solution with very good navigation so definitely worth a try. Sometimes it crashes when trying to add a new blog and I get the feeling there’s work to do on the PostRank score as well looking at some of the differences between blogs on that topic. I also think they have an opportunity to do some of the stuff we saw on http://share.opml.org. Anyway good stuff you guys, I would give that feedback on your forum as well if it weren’t down for the moment ;)

[Via Blogologie]