I read two blog posts this morning that seemed to be crying-out to be connected together. So all credit to their authors, and a tiny bit to me for the meeting.
The first was by Jamie Madigan, who writes the terrific Psychology of Video Games blog, looking into the reasons people do (or don’t) behave badly in multiplayer videogames. People discover …read the rest of this article

While the UK slept last night, it appears there was some sort of sporting tournament across the Atlantic and that the world’s most-used search provider advertised its search capabilities and new(ish) browser. It’s quite a nice advert, telling a (cliched) story in an original manner with a clean style.

The excitement over Google advertising Chrome and Search during the Super Bowl …read the rest of this article

On most news organisations’ websites, you’ll find a widget called ‘most read’, ‘most shared’ or ‘most commented’, possibly all three. The Guardian’s Zeitgeist experiment suggests an interesting alternative.
Typically, the content found in the most-X sections provides a salutary – if depressing – reminder of humanity’s baseness and stupidity. What tends to get flagged is not ‘Picasso retrospective opens at the …read the rest of this article

The FT reports that The Economist plans to make headroads into social networks:
The Economist newspaper plans to acquire 500,000 fans on Facebook and 750,000 followers on Twitter within six months, in another sign that traditional publishers are looking to social media as a substantial source of web traffic and new readers.
via FT.com / UK – Economist eyes social network cash …read the rest of this article

AdWeek covers a story that most people working in the digital sector will already have had some intuition of:
Forrester Research conducted a “state of interactive agencies” survey of about 100 global interactive marketers. It found just 23 percent believed their “traditional brand agency” is capable of planning and managing interactive marketing activities. About 46 percent did not believe them capable, …read the rest of this article

I’ve been writing recently about living in a post-digital world. Not that computers have gone away in any sense, but rather that the digital world now penetrates ‘normal life’ to such an extent that to make a distinction between digital and other media seems archaic. Anyway, cleverer people than me have been having similar thoughts.
Post Digital Marketing 2009

View more documents …read the rest of this article

I have five free tickets for the NMK Behavioural Targeting event, next Tuesday evening. We’ll be looking at the likes of Phorm, Specific Media and so forth and the opportunities they hold for advertisers and publishers, and also the threat to privacy that they may or may not represent.
Leave a comment to get one of the free tickets. First come; …read the rest of this article

1. Send it to everyone you know.
2. Make a Google Maps mash-up out of the data.
Much of socialmedialand was rubbing its hands with glee this morning at the news that the British National Party’s membership list had been leaked on the Internet and was freely available for anyone to download. A lot of people were fairly unsympathetic, to say the …read the rest of this article