Daily Archives: 13/08/2007

iVillage and NBC – a question of architecture

Everyone wants to be able to grab a bit of the web action these days, and who can blame them for trying? Efforts are not always successful as happened with NBC 600 million dollar purchase of iVillage last year (“Making a Clean Start In a House of Mixed Media” New York Times). Some of NBC’s efforts to drive people to the site even ended up lowering the amount of traffic. “iVillage Live” was a show that invited viewers to chat online about the topics being discussed on television. It resulted in a month to month decrease of visitors to the site. NBC will not be deterred and is revamping and re-launching iVillage live in the near future. Continue reading

What is SOA?

We new marketing wonks need to get nerdier. I am pretty geeky and spend most of my times doing web 2.0 and technology consulting to Fortune 500 companies, so I really come from someplace outside the School of Communications. Here’s an important new term, if you’re not yet familiar:

“SOA is an architectural style whose goal is to achieve loose coupling among interacting software agents. A service is a unit of work done by a service provider to achieve desired end results for a service consumer. Both provider and consumer are roles played by software agents on behalf of their owners.” Via Web Services at XML.COM and Marketing Conversation

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On Virtual Relationships and True Love

I have already written that Online Communities are Real Communities of Real People. I also believe that the love we develop for people in our second life is as true as the love we feel for the people in our first.

“Nearly 40% of men and 53% of women who play online games said their virtual friends were equal to or better than their real-life friends, according to a survey of 30,000 gamers conducted by Nick Yee, a recent Ph.D. graduate from Stanford University. More than a quarter of gamers said the emotional highlight of the past week occurred in a computer world, according to the survey, which was published in 2006 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press’s journal Presence.” Via the Wall Street Journal

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Facebook takes a step in the right direction

The Financial Times is reporting that Facebook has now made adjustment in their ad delivery system that allows advertisers the ability to avoid appearing on certain sites they deem potentially offenseive.

This change took place after several advertisers found that they had ads place on the page for the British National Party, a right-wing political group.