P&G: Always Success on Habbo

New Media Age (paper issue) reports on how Procter & Gamble successfuly sponsored a virtual competition Big-Brother style for its Always brand on Habbo hotel leading to 13,000 teenagers responding. P&G is now conducting focus groups to assess change in perception towards the brand. I am a strong believer in immersive branding (in game or online community environments) and I hope that the focus group's results will be made public.

PS: I am back from my short-break. Cornwall has outstanding beaches and sceneries, certainly the nicest I have seen in the UK so far. I found Penzance rather dull but highly recommend the coast road going to St-Ives.

I am on holidays...

... which means no posts for the moment. I am going down to Penzance, testing my poor driving ability to the limit. I will be back next week.

Forrester On Podcasting In Europe

New Media Age (paper version) carries an article from Forrester Research about Podcasting.
It contains interesting stats:

- 28% of 16 to 24 years old in Europe have a MP3 player,
- 20% of Europeans downloaded software or audio content last year,
- Apple says that 5M consumers subscribed to its podcasting service within 3 weeks of its launch on iTunes.

Forrester predicts that the next big thing will be videocasting thanks to MMS phones.

Blogging closer to Tim Berners-Lee's web vision

The BBC website carries an interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee where he reckons that blogging is closer to his original idea of a read/write medium.

"The idea was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about. "

The interviews has a few cheap shots (the obsession with online porn) and at time it looks like Mark Lawson is interviewing the father of the A-Bomb. Good read from one of the true visionary of our time otherwise.

H&K launch employee blogging community

We just released an online self-assessment tool to help our colleagues worldwide decide whether a blog would be the best way to express themselves. The idea is to increase awareness about blogging internally, encourage our colleagues to blog and ensure that we cut a good compromise between quantity and quality of our company blog output.

Take the test and find out whether you should blog or not:

http://blogs.hillandknowlton.com/join/

We kept it light in tone. Depending on your score, you will be offered some advice to get started on our new blogging community or more training on blogging (that is if you are an H&K employee of course).

French Town Rennes Offers Free Phones, Free Blogs

The city of Rennes, France lends free 3G mobile phones and invites its inhabitants to write about their life in 43 landmark areas through a free collective blog.

Blogs And RSS Not As Popular As Everyone Thinks

According to a Forrester Research study, only 6% of Americans read blogs and only 2% use RSS. The report recommends to leverage early adopters (i.e. bloggers and blog readers) for viral activities. Find influencers and use them to spread the word. Sounds very much like PR.

Another item mentioned on Forrester's summary page I picked up was that "Households with a laptop and home network watch three fewer hours of TV per week and read the paper an hour less per week than offline households do."

Factiva launches blog monitoring service

See article on Revolution. Given Factiva's reach in the corporate world, it is definitely an acknowledgement of blogs' growing influence. Alan Scott, chief marketing officer of Factiva, said: "There are millions of blogs and message boards worldwide and any one of them can affect your organisation or brand." The article reports that Factiva will monitor 4 millions of the most active blogs and message boards.

UK MSM embrace citizen journalists

The BBC reports on how the traditional media establishment is embracing citizen journalists, with the media treatment of the London bombings beeing the centre piece of the article. It raises valid questions (but doesn't answer them): "(...) about privacy - if you're a victim do you want your picture plastered over the front pages? authenticity - how can you tell the images are genuine? and possible interference in the course of justice ". Conclusion? the mobile phone genie won't return to its bottle.

Yahoo takes on Google with blog ads network

Yahoo will display contextual ads on websites and blogs and the model will be pay-per-click (like Google). Yahoo's service will differ from Google in that it will add human editorial judgment to the selection of ads for content pages while Google is fully automated. See story on CNET.

One in every 200 web visits are to blogs

According to a research from Hitwise. It represents a 130% increase over the last year. See article on Revolution.

Email Is For Old People

A Pew Internet and American Life Project study found US teenagers prefer instant messaging rather than e-mail to stay in touch with each other. 75% of US teens have used IM.

This survey echoes a post from engadget (dated 29 Nov. 2004) commenting that "over two-thirds of students there rarely or never use email" and young people "think of email as something overly formal that you use only for business purposes or to communicate with your less tech savvy parents or grandparents who are still stuck in the Nineties".

Meegos rule!

Measuring blogs popularity: Yahoo v. Technorati v. Google

I picked up from Steve Rubel that Yahoo was preparing a "Technorati Killer". Steve is referencing another blog confirming that rumour.

While looking for more information about that, I came across that stunning post from Tristan Louis, a French expat to the US who is studying how Technorati ranks blogs. He evaluated a selection of blogs and looked at their number of links (now recognised as indicator of a blog popularity) in Google, Technorati and Yahoo. He then benchmarked the results against one another: Technorati v. Google , Technorati V. Yahoo and Google v. Yahoo (scroll down on that page).

The conclusions so far: Technorati is getting a fourth of links Google can locate. Yahoo does a better job at indexing the blogosphere than Google. "Smaller blogs seem to have a better chance of being recognised by Yahoo! than they do of being recognized by Google".

Tristan is looking at benchmarking all of that with MSN now...

Forbes lists best blogs

As the blogosphere matures, I think that it will consolidate (the 80/20 rules when it comes to traffic and popularity). Forbes magazine released its "Best blogs hall of fame". Many familiar names here.

Hat tip to El Blogador who sent me this link.

Cats can't taste sweets, vampires threaten impregnation

My friend Richard recently launched the work avoidance blog, originally a newsletter. It is a selection of weird and funny stories, tech and geek news (all interchangeable).

Godin On Publishing

Many bloggers are aspiring journalists and many journalists are aspiring authors.... I am stretching it a little here… but if you fancy yourself as the next Dan Brown of the e-book world, best selling author and master self-publicist Seth Godin gives some practical advices worth reading before you leave your day job.

"Open source" radio uses blogs

Marketing Vox carries this story about a radio station using a blog to co-create its programs.

Listeners can talk to the producers, input on programs, suggest a show, comment live, ect.. See how this works and look at their blog.

You can hear it stream here or subscribe to their podcast.

Brilliant.

ET Blog Home

Mindcomet offer to broadcast your blog musing to space via a commercial satellite. Register for free at Bloginspace.

The site comes with a handy disclaimer:

"Bloggers who use this site are urged to keep their blogs devoid of any language, comments or content that might offend, taunt or provoke alien life forms in any way. Let's not start an intergalactic war :) "

See original article on Vnunet.

Vores Ø: First Open Source Beer

Students from the IT University of Copenhagen have created the first open source beer. Christened "Vores Øl", meaning "Our Beer", it is available for everyone to brew and profit from thanks to a recipe published online under the Creative Commons License.

Original idea to apply the open source model beyond the tech industry. Vores Øl may be remembered as the Linux of the beer market. Cheers.

Is France ready for a new revolution?

Apologies but this is not related to blogs or online PR at all. It is Bastille Day and the Guardian is probing why France is in no mood to celebrate.

I could not help myself post this article as a reference for all my friends who don't understand why I, like many young French people left the country and why an increasing number of us has no intention to come back.