Gauravonomics Blog

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If you are looking out for the next potential Internet phenomenon, head to Save An Alien.

The Israeli Facebook-only startup asks you to adopt an alien before a meteor strikes an alien planet in six months and kills the entire population of 10 million unique aliens (via TechCrunch).

I have already saved my alien (Dugkat is green, wears a black tie and has a really ugly family he wants me to help save); have you saved yours yet?

Quick Summary: Read about how marketers in India are under-utilizing the power of digital media by relying on interruption marketing rather than permission marketing.

In the last few weeks, I have had some interesting debates with friends who work in the digital media space (online/ mobile/ DTH). While the specifics of the discussions have varied, the underlying theme has been the same.

My friend X wants me to include online/ mobile/ DTH in my regular media plan. X makes a pretty 100 page presentation to me on the different types of ads I can show on online/ mobile/ DTH. X points out that online/ mobile/ DTH is more measurable than TV/ press/ radio/ outdoors on which I spend a few crores without even thinking about it. X then very tentatively presents the budget slide and suggests that since I’m anyway spending a few crores on TV/ press/ radio/ outdoors, I shouldn’t hesitate in spending a few lakhs on online/ mobile/ DTH. At this point, I totally shock X by telling her that my budget for online/ mobile/ DTH is unlimited, but I’m not interested in doing any of the activities she has suggested to me.

David Weinberger, author of ‘Everything Is Miscellaneous’, interviews BoingBoing co-editor and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow on why metadata is often just metacrap and why ‘decay’ is such a popular Flickr tag -

David: Even just elevating something as being worthy of being categorized, at least at the same level, is itself often a political act.

Cory: Yes, absolutely. What we call things is pretty important.

Cory: And then, the social incentive to tag out like others do also seems to drive people to convergence, then you have effective tag-based collaboration–I’m thinking, for example, of Flickr tags. My favorite one is the “decay” tag, where you have pictures of things that are decaying, whether it’s old, beautiful, sagging barns, or the rich texture of rust, or at leaf that’s gone to crumble, or even that stuff that’s become a science experiment in the back of the fridge.

David: Which has become, completely unpredictably, one of the most popular tags at Flickr. I mean who would have guessed that decay…?

Cory: Yes, it’s really shocking. And of course, there is a certain amount of social capital that accrues to people who now explicitly tag with “decay” in order to show up in that stream.

Google’s Personalized Homepage is now iGoogle!

Looks like Eric Schmidt is spending too much time with Steve Jobs as a director on the Apple Board.

iPod > iTune > iPhone > iGoogle! Heh!

New York Times has reported that Yahoo is planning to buy Right Media, which owns an online advertising marketplace, for $680 mn -

Google and Yahoo each dominate one segment of the online advertising market. Google is best at selling text ads that appear alongside search results and on other websites. Yahoo, which has lagged Google in search, is a leader in selling graphical ads, mostly on its own sites.

With Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick and Yahoo’s acquisition of Right Media, both Google and Yahoo have moved beyond their traditional strengths and are now pitched squarely against each other in the battle to dominate online advertising.

New York Times wonders if the Tom Sawyer model for Web 2.0 content creation -

Tom Sawyer got it right. Why paint a fence when you can get your friends to do it for you for free? He would have been the perfect new-media mogul. Spending time and money creating content on the Internet is so hopelessly dated, so dotcom, so very, very 1.0. The secret of today’s successful Web 2.0 companies: build a place that attracts people by encouraging them to create the content — thereby drawing even more people in to create even more stuff.

- is sustainable. It isn’t.

Online video site Magnify already shares ad revenues with users, YouTube is planning to, and everybody else is likely to follow. Web 2.0 businesses looking for free user-generated content will soon see users migrating to their competitors who have implemented a revenue sharing model.

According to the the Forrester Research Social Technographics report, social technology, or web 2.0, behaviors can be categorized into a ladder with six levels of participation (via ZDNet) -

- Creators (13%): Publish web pages or blogs, upload videos to video sharing sites.
- Critics (19%): Comment on blogs, post ratings and reviews.
- Collectors (15%): Use RSS, tag Web pages.
- Joiners (19%): Use social networking sites.
- Spectators (23%): Read blogs, watch peer-generated video, listen to podcasts.
- Inactives (52%): None of these activities.

The percentages don’t add up to 100% because, apart from the inactives, the other five levels of participation overlap with each other.

Forrester recommends that instead of looking at Web 2.0 as a list of technologies to be deployed on an ad hoc basis, marketers should first analyze where their customers are on the Social Technographics ladder and then create a Web 2.0 strategy to transition them to the next step.

Here are my top of the mind thoughts on the Social Technographics report -

Compete has just released its online video market share data for Mar ‘07 and it seems that Google-YouTube has lost market share from 55% in Feb ‘07 to 46.9% in Mar ‘07.

If the data is correct, this is a significant development.

I have asked Compete for a clarification, so watch out for an update.

While Dave Sifry’ ‘State of the Live Web’ report gives a positive spin on blogging growth, the numbers look different if you dig deeper.

According to BusinessWeek, while the total number of blogs ever tracked by Technorati has grown to 70 million from 57 million on Oct ‘06, the number of active blogs updated in the last three months has plateaued at 15.5 million. Therefore, the percentage of active blogs has come down from 27% in Oct ‘06 to 21% in Mar ‘07. What’s more, while the number of new posts per day increased from about 1.3 million to about 1.5 million, the number of English language posts per day dropped to 495,000 in Mar ‘07 from 507,000 in Oct ‘06.

BusinessWeek quotes Gartner -

Given the trend in the average life span of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, there are already more than 200 million ex-bloggers. Consequently, the peak number of bloggers will be around 100 million at some point in the first half of 2007.

- and insists that the number of bloggers is peaking and even argues that it might be a good thing for bloggers -

AOL has launched a new-look India portal and Michael Arrington thinks that it looks like a Yahoo clone.

It doesn’t look all that Yahoo-like to me, but probably Michael has a better eye for such things. What do you think?

Update: Oops! Michael was referring to the new design AOL is beta testing, and it does look a lot like Yahoo.