Archive for November, 2007

Snooping for information – is hiding info a marketing trick?

Sunday, November 18th, 2007

It has been very difficult to find any exact information on the release date of Simon Lynge’s debut album “A Beautiful Way to Drown”. I recently saw Danish/Greenlandic singersong writer Simon Lynge at a live gig at CafeKino here in Copenhagen and wanted to hear more.

Karl Long had an interesting post on a hidden Guinness ad which users competed to find. Finding information on Lynge’s forthcoming debut has been almost as much of a hunt as finding the Guinness advert, although I am not sure this has been quite intentional :-)

At the recent gig, I purchased a CD from Simon in the break and was keen to buy his new album when this was due to be released. On the cover notes further information is simonlynge.com Jumping at the chance to find out more, I keyed in the URL but to my surprise this space has been taken over by domain squatters.

However, I quickly find the artists new homepage and his MySpace profile via Google.

On the artist’s homepage the only information, I find is that a debut album is indeed on its way, but no release date or information on how to buy the album.

On Lynge’s Myspace profile there is no immediate information either.

Finally, returning to the original URL from the CD cover and digging in the archives of the internet I managed to make some progress.

On an old version of Simon Lynge’s original web page I finally managed to find his email address and he quite promptly responded to my query.

Simon Lynge has now also posted further information about the release on his MySpace blog:
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=24104256&blogID=329579964

Simon, I am still looking forward to buying your album on Wednesday.

Different types of social networkers

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

After having used social networking sites for almost two years, it has struck me how different the types of connections that you encounter in social networking are. I think the following 6 desciptions cover the main types of contacts that I have.

Proactive
Usually they invite you before you get a chance to invite them! Enthusiastic about social networking and sometimes even open networking. However, you can be quite sure that you get an invite if you know one of these people. Some proactive users may also

Collectors
These users do everything to get as many friends, buddies connections – the more the better. Collectors may be just as proactive as the proactive user but will typically lose interest in connections once the connection has been established. These are very useful as facilitators of connections, although many of the connections they can deliver may not be of a high quality standard.

Responsive
Users who accept your invitations but rely on others to invite them rather being proactive in setting up a network.

Reluctant
People who only accept an invitation after receiving one or more reminders – either through the networking tool or after being prompted by people in real life.

Unresponsive
People who you find on social networks but who never responds to invitations even when they are sent reminders. They have probably signed up at some point by mistake or they are no longer interested.

Non-existent
People who are not on any social networks.

You may say that all this is good but what is the value of this information. Soon I will explore whether we can measure the overall quality of our network by assigning values to these 6 categories.

Danish party leaders and social networking tools

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

Two thirds of the way into the campaign of the 2007 general election I have decided to check out if any party leaders have decided to set up a profile on LinkedIn, MySpace or Facebook.

Villy Søvndal decided to set up a Facebook profile on 4 November and has already managed to get 290 Facebook friends within 3 days. Surprisingly this is only a few less than Margrethe Vesterager with 327 friends who has been on Facebook for slightly longer. Both are still a long way behind  the main contesters Helle Thorning-Schmidt (2505 friends) and Anders Fogh Rasmussen (2607 friends). It would be interesting to see if the number of Facebook friends in any way will reflect the number share of seats the parties will get in the new parliament.

Catch up : Google’s Open Social

Sunday, November 4th, 2007

This week saw the launch of Google’s Open Social – a new open standard for social networks which be used on a variety of platforms from LinkedIn over Orkut to MySpace. Most of the blogs I read regularly are enthusiastic about this development:
O’Reilly Radar
Marc Andreesen
Jeff Jarvis
The Guardian
Karl Long

Now the question is of course whether Facebook has already got a size where they can stick to their own platform and take on the competition or whether platforms using the new Open Social standard will win in the long run.

Some other useful links:
http://blog.linkedin.com/
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/