Electing a US President (in Plain English)

Common Craft strikes again. Swing thought: planners' job is to make strategic complexity as simple and succint as these guys continually do.

Lifecycle of a Blog

Wired details the Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You

Tom Green Hosts Talk TV Show From His House

Tom Green has been getting all web 2.0 social media on us with a decent enough show that he broadcasts live nightly from his house. The Tom Green channel on the web displays his real home phone number for any and all to call and ask questions on air. Celeb guests like Perez Hilton, Tony Hawk, Dr Drew and Kenny+Speny come on over to Tom's house and bring items for later resale on eBay to raise funds to keep the show on the air. Viewers get to vote on what the funds are actually spent on (necessary vid equipment or a useless stuffed bear, for instance). Podcasts on iTunes, yep. Blog, yep. Mass calls to submit user-gen YouTube vids of you watching him.

All he needs now is a groundswell of viewers and paying advertisers and he has a disruptive model for the giants to be concerned about (or mimic).

Intuition for play and purpose

Luis Von Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University is putting the collective intelligence of internet users to good use, and he's doing it in a resonant way: games. Von Ahn devised two easy online games, The ESP Game and Phetch that put active users together in an internet version of charades. One person sees a photo and tries to give clues for the others to go out and find it.

Through these games, Von Ahn is giving people a fun way to solve a problem that cannot be solved by computers yet, called "human computation." The trick of these games is that descriptions for every image are logged--and stored as tags. The ESP site claims that every image on the web could be tagged in a matter of weeks should the game be played as much as other popular online games. And he very well could be on to something. During a speech at Google, Von Ahn pointed out the unharnessed potential of people playing games online....

Brave New Media: How Facebook Users Spend Their Time

Compete.com blog discusses "how Facebook users spend their time".

Not unsurprisingly, people spend most of their time browsing profiles, but using applications is getting up there in terms of number of users, and the time spent is almost as long.

And speaking of Facebook Apps...Compete data show that Facebook activity grew 32% from May to August, 2007, with more than a third of the growth coming from the new applications.


And furthermore...O'Reilly released a report The Facebook Application Platform and it has good and bad news. Good: there are nearly 5000 Facebook applications, and the top applications have tens of millions of installs and millions of active users. Bad news: 87% of the usage goes to only 84 applications! Only 45 applications have more than 100,000 active users. "This is a long tail marketplace with a vengeance -- but unfortunately, the economic models (for developers at least, though not for Facebook itself) all rely on getting into the very short head."

Here's the distribution of active users among the top 200 developers. (Some developers have multiple popular applications.) As you can see, the drop-off is extremely steep:


Doh! Tim O'Reilly says: "This doesn't mean that Facebook won't become an important platform for developers, just that a throwaway Facebook app is not the ticket to quick riches. Embracing the Facebook opportunity requires more than just optimism."

via O'Reilly Radar and Compete.com Blog

Live Web in Plain English (as Advertisement)

Common Craft strikes again, this time for the new Google Docs app - yet another smart play at making Google your dashboard for digital living (Facebook is aiming at becoming your dashboard for social life).



*Google Docs don't work for Safari...so, ya'll lemme know how it's workin'.

Short History of YouTube

Live Web In Plain English

The Common Craft Show is a series of short explanatory videos by Lee and Sachi LeFever. Their goal is to fight complexity with simple tools and plain language.

Mass Interactive:Trevor, the Mentos Intern

Check out Trevor, the Mentos Intern. He's livestreamed on the web. Give him work. Rate him. Make friends with him on Facebook.

Similar to Justin.tv, only with a purpose (so says Sarah). Either way, fun idea.

Blog DNA

WEB2DNA converts your website into a DNA graphic image. It was inspired by DNA 11 - a company that turns your real DNA into works of art, and, Marcel Salathe's Websites as Graphs - another system that visualizes your website structure.

State of the Blogosphere/Live Web:Maps

Nielsen's Matthew Hurts recently drafted a graphic map showing the blogosphere in links. This picture is based on an examination of six weeks of blogosphere data.

Each little white dot represents a blog. The bigger white dots represent blogs with more incoming and outgoing links, while the smaller dots are blogs with fewer links.

The green lines represent one-way links from one blog to another, and the blue lines show reciprocal links, or blogs that link back and forth to one another regularly.

-The biggest white dots are popular blogs like Boing Boing and the Daily Koz.
-That isolated streak of green in the upper right hand (by the number three) shows LiveJournal blogs. LiveJournal users tend to link heavily to other LiveJournal blogs, but don't communicate as frequently with the outside world.
-The blue spots show bloggers who frequently link back and forth, possibly writing responses on their own blogs to items they've read on other sites and vice versa.
-Number 5 shows the fringe community of bloggers who share pornographic images and write about adult industry news and gossip.
-Number 6 sports enthusiasts who are a bit more linked into the rest of the mainstream blogosphere than the pornography enthusiasts or LiveJournal bloggers. But it's still a distinct community with users communicating primarily amongst themselves.

Similarly, here is Brian Shaler's Map of the Digg Universe


And Opte Project's massive Map of the Internet and animation.