Why do you make unsubscribing from your mail lists so hard?

Oh, I know....Your marketing people want to say We have 2 million subscribers...Welll a cheer part of them are prisoners. And chances are: they hate your brand more and more every time they try to leave your newsletter and can't.
Have interesting info people are looking forward to read and they'll willingly subscribe to your newsletter. And please, if they change their heart and decide to become out of space explorers... let them unsubscribe!

Web 2.0: a simple definition

I just came across this definition of Web 2.0 that I think my mother could understand for its simplicity and clarity. It says it all:

Web 1.0 = me
Web 2.0 = me + you

Web 1.0 = read
Web 2.0 = read + write

Web 1.0 = connecting ideas
Web 2.0 = connecting ideas + connecting people

Web 1.0 = search
Web 2.0 = recommendations of friends/others

Web 1.0 = find
Web 2.0 = share

Web 1.0 = techies rule
Web 2.0 = everybody rules

Source: Blog eduspaces

And I can't resist posting again the best YouTube Video explaining the web 2.0: The Machine is Using/Us by Professor Wesh, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.

Google Search now includes real time results from Twitter

It's been a long time waiting but here it is at last: Google has a new dynamic results category: tweets. It now includes in its search results a window where tweets tagged with your search keywords scroll in real time.
So Google did it again! True to their (public) mission statement, they now also organize real time content. This was the missing piece in their mission of organizing information. An increasing number of internet users were getting used to go to Twitter to get the latest news on a given subject. Now Google takes again the upper hand by aggregating all media forms in their search results.

They haven't included it yet in their search category menu though and it is still unclear how these results are ranked in the display order on the result page. Sponsored results are on top as usual but I have seen the tweets displayed at different levels in the results.

To be thorough, Yahoo! also includes Twitter results but they are not in real time: tweets seem to be batched.

and Bing doesn't index tweets yet.

Now the next logical question is: who is going to archive tweets? After all Twitter is a snapshot of the world collective thinking. Aren't snapshots worth collecting to remember what was on our minds at a given point in time?

Start-up of the week: Save the planet, get cash or support charities…online

I wanted to present a French start up with a great business concept: a win win for the consumer, the planet and hopefully themselves. It's such a simple idea that you wonder why it hasn't been done years ago. And maybe is it the criteria for success: i.e. it makes you realize that you had a need that nobody fulfilled.

The pitch:
Who doesn't have old cell phones that they don't know what to do with? Mobilorama has the answer: go to their site, get a quote for your cell and choose to either get the cash or give the money to a charity (they chose Medecins du Monde), and either way contribute to saving the planet by recycling your cell.

Another case of the web solving a market inefficiency!

Source: www.mobilorama.com

What? A Search Engine that computes results on the fly?

Innovator Stephen Wolfram channels science for his latest computational invention, Wolfram Alpha. His work stems from the realization that there is "too much" information available today, in different forms, to make it fully usable by us, poor human beings. Basically we rely on lists of results already written and calculated for other purposes, ranked according to many factors, including how many other users find these results useful.

But wouldn't it be nice to actually use these data to obtain the exact results we are looking for? So the concept is to resolve how we communicate with computers to do research and also to let them actually compute data on the fly to bring us results that have never been computed before. In other words, to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone.

Hmm, bringing intelligence to search results. Using computers to actually compute and not only bring us the yellow pages. Now that is promising!

Source: Forbes.com Video Network - Thought Leaders

Technology impaired by bad weather?

A few years ago, when I was working for a large company, i remember the head of HR being adamant about internet not working so well when it was raining. I used to laugh at her. Come on, technology stands on its own. Rain or shine.
Yet, I may be changing my mind in light of the latest Eurostar misaps. My gf takes the Eurostar every weekend to come to Paris so I am acutely aware of the train problems. And today it stayed stuck in the tunnel for 2 hours... while it was snowing outside. A few months ago trains were stuck all night in the tunnel while we had a cold wave in Paris. Etc. So you tell me... cold weather stops high tech trains?

Public Open Data arrive in Europe…. at least in London

A number of cities in the US have their own datastores, such as DataSF for San Francisco and the Chicago data store. The idea has rapidly gained traction since the introduction of Google Maps in 2005, which allowed people to attach sets of data with geographical information to a map in real time.

In London, the datasets that will be available include attainment, pupil number and schools data; fire incidents, ambulance rates, crime rates; carbon emissions, floorspace, vacant commercial offices, industrial stock data, abandoned vehicles, recycling rates, waste data, waste re-use centres, fly tipping rates, alcohol indicators, abortion rates, hospital waiting lists and admissions, excess winter deaths - and many dozens more.

The London Datastore, as it is called, will be fully open from 29 January. It will be the first such "datastore" for a city in the UK. The government is working on a similar site, called data.gov.uk, which is also expected to be unveiled this month under the auspices of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. He has been working inside the civil service since summer 2009 to unlock and unify datasets collected inside government: when it launches, data.gov.uk is expected to carry hundreds of datasets for free reuse.

In a statement, Johnson, Mayor of London, said: "The superb new London 'Datastore' will unleash valuable facts and figures that been languishing for far too long in the deepest recesses of City Hall. I firmly believe that access to information should not just be the preserve of institutions and a limited elite. Data belongs to the people particularly that held by the public sector and getting hold of it should not involve a complex routine of jumping through a series of ever decreasing hoops.

"The US has led the way on this idea of setting their data free for anyone - students, campaigners, software developers – to use. Now it's time for Britain to get up to speed and I want London, as the greatest city in the UK, to be at the forefront of this revolution, that will not only increase democracy, but also provide a potential money-spinner for the city's hugely important software development sector."

Fund of up to £200,000 will help developers to create innovative use of 200 datasets in new free data initiative

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, will on Thursday launch a website hosting hundreds of sets of data - including previously unreleased information - about the capital, as part of a new scheme intended to encourage people to create "mashups" of data to boost the city's transparency and accountability.

Channel 4 will also be offering up to £200,000 through its 4ip fund to help develop the most innovative uses of the data.

To announce the site, Johnson will take part in a live linkup on Thursday to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with President Barack Obama's chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra, who has overseen the development of the US government's "data.gov" project, which aims to put all US government data onto the web for others to use.

The government took a significant step towards making such datasets easier to use with the announcement by Gordon Brown in November that Ordnance Survey mapping data from 1:10,000 would be free for all use, including commercial applications, from April.

Johnson has been a strong advocate of open data, having campaigned in 2008 on the promise that he would introduce crime maps, despite misgivings of some senior police officers. The Metropolitan Police did however quickly implement] crime mapping in London, following the lead that had already been set by a number of other police forces around the country.

Source: theguardian.co.uk

New Year … One Website Does Your Resolutions for You … Almost

Quick Pitch: Dorthy.com lets users create living pages about anything they want to achieve, and connect with others with similar goals.

Genius Idea: Making resolutions at the start of the new year is a practice that dates back long before our time. Of course in recent years numerous websites and applications have popped up to help us stay on track. You can count Dorthy’s new alpha service among that group. The site brings with it a convenient twist to make your goals and dreams all the more achievable.

Whatever your desired achievement, Dorthy does the dirty work for you. You specify something that you want to accomplish — like gaining muscle or losing 20 pounds — and Dorthy will automatically build a living page replete with resources to help you beat the odds and stay true to your resolutions. These pages are called dreampages and they’re composed of two key elements: dynamic video, photos, blog posts and news articles scraped from across the web, and your custom action plan of specific goals, notes, saved items and activity history.

Another interesting tidbit is that Dorthy claims to be user-action-oriented in serving up content, which means that your behaviors and interaction with content on your dreampages will influence future recommendations.

As with most sites these days, Dorthy incorporates a number of different ways to make your dreampages a socially shared experience. Should you keep your pages public, you can share content and on-site activity with Facebook and Twitter. You can also add comments and likes to content entities, which are pooled across the site for a broader look at user reactions to videos and blog posts around dreampage topics. Eventually Dorthy will also have a complimentary iPhone app to make keeping up with your action plan and discovering new tips even easier.

The tricky thing about establishing resolutions or setting your mind on a new goal is that no technology in the world will keep you on track if you’re not motivated enough to actually do the work required. If, however, you have the motivation and just need a nudge in the right direction, Dorthy could turn out to be extremely useful in 2010 and beyond.

Source: www.mashable.com