entrepreneurship, innovation, business information and stuff
Here is yet another example of ‘civilians’ lack of understanding of the role of Intellectual Property.
Apparently Facebook users are up in arms about the loss of Srabulous from their screens. However they don’t seem to realise that Hasbro, who own the rights to the game in the US and Canada, and Mattel who own the rights elsewhere in the world, would be unhappy about someone moving into their lucrative territory.
Matt Raymond at the Library of Congress has been posting excited posts on his blog about the impact of placing 3,100 images from their collection on Flickr. Below is a summary of the activity within two days of their page going live.
• 392,000 views on the photostream
• 650,000 views of photos
• Adding in set and collection page views, there were about 1.1 million total views on our account
• All 3,100+ photos have been viewed
• 420 of the photos have comments
• 1,200 of the photos have been favorited
The British Library also has an amazing collection of images, so it would be great to see some of these appearing on Flickr as well.
Panaramio must represent one of the ultimate Google Earth mashups. How often when using Google Earth to ‘visit’ a place have you wanted to see what it looks like on the ground or even inside the buildings there?
For example if you zoom in on our new neighbour the Eurostar station at St Pancras all you see from above is the beautiful shed roof designed by William Barlow. However if you look at the Panaramio page you can look inside the building through photos taken by contributors to the service.
On Saturday I was fortunate enough to be able to attend what is considered to be the local derby of Arsenal vs. Tottenham Hotspur at the shiny new Emirates Stadium. After a slow start it turned into a very entertaining match for the 60,000 fans of both teams. Just after half time Arsenal scored the first goal of the match and the whole stadium erupted, to the extent that I could feel the stand shaking beneath my feet. Such a visceral experience came as a surprise.
On the way home through the new St Pancras station I was musing on the continued popularity of live entertainments, both sporting and music, when my thoughts were rudely interrupted. It was the screeching sound of Punch emanating from a Victorian style booth, surrounded by an entranced crowd of children and parents.
Here was another example of old technology (according to Wikipedia, Punch and Judy date back to the 16 century) still being popular with today’s generation of internet and video consumers.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILKiSXUYq9o]
One of my favorite presentations at the Online Information 2007 Conference was Real Web 2.0 Benefits by Richard Wallis Technology Evangelist at Talis.
He started with the most simple and yet comprehensive definition of Web 2.0 shown below.
In case you hadn’t worked it out from his slide, the answer is Web 2.0 applications are identifiable due to their ’round corners’.
He also ran through quite a few live internet demonstrations which is always a brave thing to do in front of the critical Online audience.
Finally he showed what has to be my current favourite library related video on YouTube. It shows a mediaeval monk getting assistance from his ‘help desk’ to overcome the challenges presented by the brand new technology of the book from his trusted scroll.
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ]
I am just starting to catch up from the week that was Online Information 2007 and will be creating a few blogs from my notes.
First of all was the keynote speech ‘Web 2.0 in action:free culture and community on the move’, from Jimmy Wales of the Wiki Foundation on Tuesday 4 December
Wikipedia is a registered charity which cost $1 million in 2007 and forecasted to cost $2-3 million in 2008 which is amazing considering it is now the 8th most popular website in the world. Even in Iran it is the 14 most popular.
It has expanded to over two million articles in English, but has over six million in total. It has 14,000 articles in Hindi. But when you consider that there are 280 million Hindi speakers, it still has a long way to go.
Jimmy said that Wikipedia will remain true to encyclopaedia base and not include articles which you would not expect to find in a general purpose publication.
Minority interests are covered through the development of Wikis such as the Muppet Wiki with 15,000 articles and Wookieepedia (yes, Star Wars is the topic here).
For me the big story is the development of Search Wiki – an open source search engine will all decisions in the public domain. Fast Company Magazine in the U.S. described it as “Google’s worst nightmare”
I have been a fan of charity shop giving (in particular Oxfam) for many years. However they understandably can’t take many items. So what do you do?
You join the Freecycle Network which currently consists of 4,134 groups with 3,927,000 members across the globe. It is a grassroots and entirely non-profit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. Due to the local nature of the exchange it also helps reduce your carbon footprint.
Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer to keep out spammers, and I have found a group for my local town. In the last two years I have ‘Freecycled’ three bicycles, two dead computer printers and a sofa-bed. Plus I acquired two boxes of unwanted candles.
If you want your bicycles to go to a really good home I suggest using Re-cycle.
Entrepreneurship includes all classes, creeds and ages but one of the biggest growth areas are what have been dubbed ‘Grey entrepreneurs‘.
One might naively assume that these would consist of retired business professionals. But a group of Swiss grannies would prove you wrong according to the latest issue of Springwise.
Netgranny is a collective of 15 grannies who knit socks on demand and sell them online. Customers can choose their favourite granny from a gallery of ‘Grosis’, which includes information on why the women knit (‘not for money, just to pass the time’) or about their professional credentials (‘at age 6, I taught my 4 year-old sister to knit’).
Customers can pick the colour of their socks, or opt for a surprise design. After placing an order, their personal sock-knitting granny will take approximately two weeks to knit the pair of socks.
As you can see below, the grannies vary from the funky, to the cuddly, to the slightly scary.
I can’t understand why this has taken so long because it is such an obvious use of the interactive power of the Internet.
For years we have had shopping comparison sites such as Kelkoo and PriceRunner, but the consumer rating sites such as Ciao! and reviewcentre have been blighted by a lack of opinions. But now there is a new kid on the block in the shape of Wize.com. It is still in beta and is rather U.S. biased but the sheer number of opinions puts it head and shoulders above the competition.
For instance the Toshiba Satellite A135 PC Notebook has 39 reviews, and the Apple Nano has over 3,000 reviews.
Hey! Nielsen is a new free service from the well known market and audience measurement provider Neilson Company.
They are asking registered users to give their opinions on TV, movies, music, personalities and the Internet.
Assuming the site is successful and once it has been running for a while it could be a good source of what’s hot and what’s not in terms of entertainment. It is a classic case of a win win, with Neilsen acquiring useful market research for free, but also making the results available for free.
For instance you can already chart the rapid demise of Britney Spears standing amongst her fanbase by looking at chart of her rating over time.
Britney – who’s popularity is now in free-fall.
It is interesting they haven’t included blogs which are already well covered by Technorati.