Where are the most concentrated areas of digitally-savvy consumers in the US (that is, owning PDAs, DVRs, MP3 players and HDTVs, and using VoIP, blogs, mobile video, e-mail and text messaging)?

San Francisco, right?

No, no… Boston?

Ehm… anywhere with ridiculous real estate prices and office buildings overflowing with iPhones and geeky pretension?

Nope. According to a recent study by Scarborough Research: Austin.
(My social media guru/pal Paul would be so proud.)

Rounding out the top ten… Las Vegas, Sacramento, San Diego, Washington, Seattle, Phoenix, Chicago, New York and San Francisco.

According to the AdAge analysis of the study, the standard “digitally savvy” profile highlights male, 25-34, self-employed, affluent, physically active, sports fans, heavy international travelers.

With those traits catalogued, the top ten starts to make a bit more sense; but even when you take into account that they’re measuring concentration, not raw numbers, I’m still surprised that San Fran is so low… and that Boston didn’t even make the cut.

Wonder if they conducted the survey during SXSW…

[tags]The Web Outside, AdAge, Scarborough Research, Digitally Savvy Survey, Consumer Studies, Technology, Behavioral Study[tags]

Jeremiah Owyang (or should I say @jowyang) tweeted a link this afternoon that caught my eye: Facebook users flashmob and destroy award winning garden. Who should pay damages?
(As an aside, “tweeted a link” has fabulous possibilities as a euphemism.)

A quick recap: a Facebook campaign riled up 300+ social networkers to stage a real-life water fight in Millenium Square Garden in Leeds (which, if we’re going to get specific, had won flower show awards and was a symbol of the city’s relationship with Nelson Mandela)… completely busting it up with their water guns and buckets.

A web-based flashmob destroys a real world garden… Just in a metaphorical sense, how awesome is that as narrative frame? In addition to the fact that I was antsy to come up with some clever (okay… lame) title riffing off “The Mob of Eden” or “Social Serpents” or somesuch, the good v. evil/online v. offline conflicts prove powerful in a gosh-that’s-almost-too-easy-to-dichotomize kind of way.

I keep talking about online and offline worlds merging in more and more obvious ways, and I couldn’t ask for a more primal example.

Just as Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths serves as the defining narrative of the hypertext movement, this event hereby becomes the chief contender for the official tale of The Web Outside.

(Thanks for the link, Jeremiah.)

Photo Credit: Daily Mail (UK)

[tags]The Web Outside, Flashmob, Facebook, The Garden of Forking Paths, Jeremiah Owyang, @jowyang, Millenium Square Garden, Leeds[/tags]

If you don’t allow consumers to control their media experience, they’ll find a way…

With you, without you, or all over your storefront in aerosol…

Thanks to Jimeral for the image, and to Trebor Scholtz for leading me to it.

[tags]The Web Outside, graffiti, P2P, Blockbuster, social media, participatory media, audience behavior[/tags]

I met Mack Collier back in the early days of blogging… eeeeeh, a hundred or so years back. He commented often on my blog, as I did on his, and eventually he brought me on board Beyond Madison Avenue, a popular Advertising and Marketing blog he edited at the time. He made virtual introductions left and right, coached me through my first podcast, and gave me a real-time intro to exactly how this whole blog community thing worked. In one incident – the thought of which I still wince at – I wrote a post that Mack found circumstantially irreverent… and he called me on it. I thought I was being cheeky; Mack saw a careless use of language. No doubt, Mack was right. Tail between my legs, I learned that the blogosphere is, well… big… and diverse… and that if your word choice is flimsy and slipshod, your audience will treat your content likewise. (Seriously… thanks, Mack.)

Skip forward a few years, and Mack has become a thought-leader in the social media world, juggling speaking engagements, multiple blogs, and consulting work for companies as large as Dell and Microsoft. This success is in no small part due to Mack taking real investment in his online community, treating his “blog contacts” as true friends and telling it how it is. His goal is to be part of a thriving blogosphere – period.

Before I continue… No, it’s not Mack’s birthday (at least I don’t think it is).

I bring him up because his post on Marketing Profs earlier this week brought up a question that I think Mack could not be more perfectly suited to answer:

Has social media also changed the way you interact with others?

Mack explains that he’s inherently an intervert but that social media has made an extrovert of him:

When I am on Twitter, I look for items in my feed reader that I can link to my followers. When I meet people at conferences, I want to evangelize my favorite blogging friends to them. As I make more connections, I want to tell more people about social media, because I want to see them make these connections as well.

Mack’s Social Graph flows seamlessly from the physical and digital worlds, which isn’t an easy balancing act. While I think Mack underestimates his talent as a community builder, he certainly proves how robust and rewarding a digital community can become when we treat our online friends with the same respect and attention as we do those IRL.

As online media and out-of-home locations continue to merge, we’ll look towards community mavens like Mack to define a new set of healthy emerging behaviors.

[tags]The Web Outside, Mack Collier, The Viral Garden, Marketing Profs, community, social media, emerging behaviors, digital media, old vs. new media[/tags]

[Flickr CC Photo Src]

Clay Shirky, socioeconomic pundit of the web world, recently posted a great piece on the marked one-way shift to participatory media (or rather, the growing expectation thereof).

Shirky examines what he terms “cognitive surplus,” chronicling America’s most popular modes of distraction across time: from gin to television to blogs and social networks.

Distraction is a funny word, though…. evoking positive thoughts of pleasure and leisure, yet clearly linked to darker shades of laziness and mania. That said, Shirky does a commendable job of keeping its syntax convincingly neutral. Distraction mechanisms, at the hands of media professionals in particular, are things to be studied, embraced, and actively shaped in close regard to the current cultural episteme. It is in this light that his closing anecdote becomes subtly powerful:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

It’s also become my motto, when people ask me what we’re doing–and when I say “we” I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse. We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.

[tags]The Web Outside, Clay Shirky, participatory media, distractions, television, new media, cognitive surplus[/tags]

I’m a total sucker for social marketing campaigns that actually seem to accomplish what they set out to do…

Today, I’m a major worshipping sucker for Domino’s BFD site (ahem… Big Fantastic Deal).

Sure, lots of food delivery services allow you to order food via text or IM, but Domino’s gets the social aspect spot-on. Users go to the site, pick out their crust, amount of sauce, toppings, and so on… and then their personalized pie is added to a huge catalog of existing user-created “recipes.” The pizzas are named by the users, creating a fun and cheeky list ranging from the “Get’er Done” (perfectly paired with PBR) to the “Rick and Ronda Half Nelson” (clearly built upon a marriage of a pepperoni lover and a veggie) to the “This Little Piggy” (fairly self-explanatory).

The site is well-executed, doesn’t take itself too seriously, and builds up a storehouse of UGC without pushing customers to use it.

Now please excuse me while I order a deep dish with spinach and green peppers…
I call it “The Pizza Outside.” See?… a sucker.

Now you do it.

[tags]The Web Outside, Domino’s, pizza, social marketing, viral marketing, online marketing, BFD, Big Fantastic Deal[/tags]

Just yesterday, I was reading through old news articles about the very public (and very brazen) departure of Dodgeball co-founder Dennis Crowley from his post-acquisition position as Product Manager at Google. When I first read about his move back in April, I didn’t see too much resonance beyond the story as it stood. A frustrated, inherently self-reliant employee felt like he was being held captive under the grubby thumb of a tech Colossus…
Seems straightforward enough: the habits of a down n’ dirty startup entrepreneur are hard nuts to crack. (And, with due respect to all parties, Crowley’s nuts seem particularly intractable.)

So why did I find myself following up on Crowley and the big fat bird he threw at The Goog? Let’s call it an “informed accident.” I was checking out the new projects at Area/Code, seeing what was up on their end of the location-based tech spectrum, and stumbled upon Crowley’s name (he’s climbed aboard as the third partner). Sure, sure… he’s clearly kept his focus on in-location mobile projects, this time in an even quirkier playplace than his Dodgeballian roots. Still, nothing surprising here.

That is, until this morning. The first thing I do upon waking up, even before chugging coffee and lacing up my running shoes, is give my RSS feeds a quick scan. The headline that first caught my eye today was from Read/WriteWeb: MingleNow to Close 7 January: Forced by Yahoo?

Ahem.

A web giant acquires a location-based mobile start-up, and soon thereafter stops allocating engineering resources to building out the service, and it dies a slow and/or quick-n-nasty death.

Yes, yes, I’ve heard this story before. Crowley has too.

According to Fortune, Google and Yahoo have each acquired 40 or so small businesses over the past decade, and very few instantly (or, for that matter, ever) become queen bee apps like Flickr (Yahoo) or YouTube (Goog). Fair enough– but is it purely coincidental that the same fate would strike two very similar (at least conceptually) location-based mobile social networking services?

Maybe.

But I don’t think so.

So what keeps going wrong? Crowley points a quick finger at the Man: “The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn’t convince them that Dodgeball was worth engineering resources.”[cit.]

An anonymous commenter (#1) on R/WW this morning echoes Crowley’s point in regard to MingleNow/Yahoo scenario: “yes, Yahoo is forcing us to close. they don’t seem interesteed[sic] in maintaining our awesome site.”

Insider comments aside, I’m not convinced that allocating proper engineering resources would even begin to address the problem. This clearly seems to be a market-based problem just as much (if not more) than it is a technology problem.

When you tie in evidence from other similar services– the recent shutdown of Kakiloc comes to mind– it seems possible that the in-location, mobile-based social networking space requires much more (literal) legwork than most other subgroups of technology and/or social media companies. Perhaps the Biggies aren’t willing to put in the face time and on-site attention that a location-based SN service needs to be successful. It seems obvious, but a service that encourages “real-life, real-time” interaction will need to employ a “real-life, real-time” market roll-out. This proves no small feat for a self-contained, easily-navigitable startup; Forget about it within the corporate maze of a Google or a Yahoo.

****

[Ed.Note: While Yahoo doesn't directly control MingleNow, they acquired ad network Blue Lithium back in September, which owns MingleNow... So we're actually seeing more of an Evil Stepmother type effect here. Moreover, I write this post with the disclaimer that Yahoo's involvement with MingleNow's impending shutdown remains purely speculative. However, it should also be mentioned that the recent announcement on MingleNow's blog encourages users to post their pics to Flickr and their events to Upcoming (both, not incidentally, Yahoo properties). Just saying.]

[tags]The Web Outside, Read/WriteWeb, MingleNow, Google, Yahoo, Dodgeball, Kakiloc, Fortune, startups, MingleNow shutting down, Dennis Crowley[/tags]

Smashing Magazine tipped me off to some hot new User Experience technologies, some of which are absolutely too cool to pass by. In particular, I recommend checking out the video for Photosynth– the resolution on the images is absolutely insane, and their multidimensional navigation tools are incredible. It’s more than worth your seven minutes. Looks like they have some mapping apps up their sleeves as well. The demo received a standing ovation at TED2007, and I must say I almost stood up and cheered myself. (Okay, fine, I did.)

[tags]The Web Outside, Photsynth, TED, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Seadragon, Smashing Magazine[/tags]

Thanks to Read/WriteWeb for linking to Tim Berners-Lee’s post about the “Giant Global Graph,” a broader take on the trendy-yet-weighty “Social Graph” concept, and how it relates to OpenSocial. It’s great to see the “Father of the World Wide Web” talking about OpenSocial, as he’s tended to shy away from most Web 2.0 Topics Du Jour over the past few years. Perhaps the “GGG” will become the semantically-powered iteration of the “WWW.”

In a nutshell, Berners-Lee breaks down the evolution of computer networks into three stages:

1. The Net: connects computers

2. The Web: connects documents

3. The Graph: connects people and documents (thus forming relationships)

Berners-Lee goes on to cite the implications of the Social Graph on the Mobile Web, noting that the content itself will soon trump webpages as the primary module, thus making “the network and the devices tertiary.”

That said, I have an addition to his list:

4. The Web Outside: connects people, documents, and locations (thus forming relationships linked to –yet not contigent upon– real world nodes).

[tags]The Web Outside, Social Graph, Giant Global Graph, Tim Berners Lee, semantic web, Read/WriteWeb, OpenSocial, Brad Fitzpatrick[/tags]

Anyone willing to rival the iTunes/iPod model has my respect and admiration… okay, and skepticism. While the changes in DRM regulations can only help push forward the entire industry, any competitors are fighting against quite the behemoth (a very shiny silver and white behemoth, at that).

So who’s jumping into the ring?

Say hey to the new phone from AT&T and Samsung— powering Napster.

Yup, Napster.

Users can search through a music catalog of 5 million+ songs, preview song samples, and download their picks right to their phone. For every song downloaded, the user will also receive an email allowing him to pop a copy onto his computer for no extra charge.

Only prob? Well, other than the fact that it’s not iTunes… each song is $1.99. That’s twice the price of what iPodders are ponying up…

[tags]The Web Outside, Napster, Samsung, AT&T, DRM[/tags]