Theodore Geisel is one of the most influential post-war American writers.
He is the nuance…
Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!
It’s hard to miss this on the web toda — China has more Internet users than America.
AP reports:
The research firm BDA China Ltd. says China’s online population should keep growing by 18 percent annually, reaching 490 million by 2012 — a number larger than the entire U.S. population.
And continues with interesting business context:
Total revenues for China’s Internet companies soared to 40.5 billion yuan ($5.9 billion) in 2007, up 48.6 percent from the previous year, the research firm Analysys International reported this week. It said revenues should keep growing at an annual rate of at least 30 percent in coming years, reaching 137.5 billion yuan by 2010.
By contrast, U.S. online advertising revenues alone in 2007 were $21.2 billion (145.2 billion yuan), according to a report by consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers for the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
What’s the nuance?
As a base to the acid of web 2.0 tools, their blogs, tweets (twits?), Duncan Work’s blog — 100 Trillion Connections — is an interesting balance.
Recently, Duncan posted some of his thoughts on the connection between the important work being done in mapping the human brain, and it’s implications for the social brain.
His conclusion?
… mapping bigger-scale social structures and processes will be much more challenging and will require both better data (including dynamic data) and better techniques. Large scale real-time participation by individuals and groups in online social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, etc., can someday help us do a better analysis of large-scale social intelligence — if the data can be truly open for analysis, while also insuring users’ privacy.
Spent Monday afternoon at the New Media Summit, hosted by Metzger and Associates.
The audience was largely PR and communications professionals — people whose bosses, clients and clients’ clients are frequently turning towards to answer the ever-maddening questions about how to deploy new technologies, what social networking, mobile applications and new media in general is all about.
It’s a big change from the GoogleIO I attended six weeks ago, which was the uber-geek center of the universe, where the discussion was more technical, on the far side of the cutting edge.
Highlights of today’s discussion were Twitter, mobile applications and general new media trends. Here’s a good wrap up from the Metzger blog.
What’s the nuance?
Getty Images, “the man” of the photo world, just launched a service called Moodstream.
Basically, it creates a slideshow of their images based on your input across five ranges of moods. Complete with music, it provides something that might be nice background at parties, or could double as a screen-saver replacement.
I got the tip on this one from my good friend, photojournalist and veteran internet newsman Hart Van Denberg at Hart Up North.
What’s the nuance?
I’m not sure there is any… maybe it’s just a pointless deployment of technology. It is interesting to wonder about who got to choose whether a photo is happy or sad.
It’s a never-ending sport. With some drastic implications.
There’s ample evidence that the social networks are nothing more that the dot.com bubble revisited. At the same time, big time players are putting heavy bets down that there’s a pot of gold out there somewhere. So what are social networks really worth?
MIT’s Technology Review, in my opinion, the ‘Economist’ of tech media, i.e, the ones who have the best writers, do the best research and present it most professionally, has a series of articles this month as part of their Web 2.0 bubble cover feature. The more relevant article investigates the valuations and advertising assumption, reviewing major financial disappointments at MySpace and Facebook, highlighting ad CPMs in the pennies, and raising the question of whether advertising has any chance of producing meaningful revenue for social networks. (as I’ve written before, the answer is NO.)
TechCrunch, one of the influential blogs in the web 2.0 / mashup / social media space did a decent job of analyzing social network valuations based on a detailed assessment of advertising revenue, and the value of recent investments (LinkedIn, Facebook) and purchases of large social networks (Bebo, by AOL).
Silicon Alley Insider analyzes the Tech Crunch analysis, adding their own enhancements to the model. Separately, they’ve also got running values of the top 25 private companies — including many social networks — in their SAI 25.
What’s the nuance?
I’ve had a 20-year love-hate relationship with McKinsey. When I was in my late teens, before I knew much about business, I thought I really wanted to do this kind of high-level consulting. Then I developed a heavy aversion to strategic corporate thinking, especially corporate consultants. But there are still really smart people there, and they sometimes (often?) produce some good stuff.
Here’s an excerpt from an email I got from them today, which exemplifies the upside: