Atlanta Media Bloggers

"10 Commandments of Web 2.0" cracks me up...

Found it on the AU Blog, and wanted to point up my favorite bits.

Link: The 10 Commandments of Web 2.0.

The 10 Commandments of Web 2.0

1. I am the Lord thy Google, which have brought thee out of the land of Web 1.0, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other search engines before me.

[...]

2. Thou shalt not take the name of Apple in vain.

The music of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the RIAA and the tyranny of MSN. Blessed is he, who in the name of iTunes and 99 cents, shepherds the weak through the valley of “The Darkness,” for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of “Lost” children. And I will Digg down thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my Macbook. And you will know my name is Steve Jobs when I lay my DRM vengeance upon thee.

3. Thou shalt not make copies of any Flickr image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth without first checking the creative commons license. Thou shalt not download it thyself and serve them from your server.

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4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Get the hell out of the house Sunday. Seriously. The world will not end if you don’t blog for 1 day out of the week. Go take a walk in the park or streak a football game. It will give you something to blog about on Monday.

5. Honor thy fathr and thy mothr: thy website names may not be long.

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6. Thou shalt not kill your comments.

Only Seth Godin and Satan have blogs without comments. If you’re going to have a blog, let people interact with it.

7. Thou shalt not commit adultery (if you have an AOL account.)

The AOL data leak showed us all the dangers of search histories and large companies releasing large amount of semi-personally identifiable information. If you’re going to get some cookie, delete your cookies. And if you can, cancel your AOL account.

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9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against Wikipedia.

I’m looking at you Steven Colbert. We can’t have just anyone modifying the sum of all human knowledge at will. Not unless we live in Washington and/or our last names start with O’Reilly.

10. Thou shalt not bookmark thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not bookmark thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.

It’s called tagging now and you should covet it like crazy. And you must put it in a cloud – it’s most angelic.

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Should interactive media be doing a better job of managing expectations?

First, this article just struck me as counter-intuitive, because all the numbers have been running high precisely in the opposite direction.

Then, I wondered if it is linked to the expectations game, the land-rush mentality that turned the Internet into Oklahoma in the late 1990s, with ripe money poised at the border, wanting to be a Sooner.

The money rushes in, the money rushes out, all because interactive media won't immediately transform itself into a push-button marketing free cash bonanza? Like with old media companies, will a slower than 28% growth spawn a shareholder exodus?

That sounds too easy, tho, given the massive Ford cutbacks announced recently.

And why is there a decline in financial advert money? Mortgage market slump? Too soon, or is it? Why would one of the most profitable industries in U.S history (credit industry) back off? I know there's a mortgage adjustment going on, but could there be a trimming back on consumer credit too? Larger economic trends that capital gains and investment machinations of the super-rich can't disguise?

Hey, don't ask me. I'm not a broker. I just know Yahoo! has had an aggressive and intensely creative year, and it surprised me more often than once in the past year, with interesting content and interactivity plays. Generally, I'd consider that a good thing. I dunno. Maybe Yahoo! was sucking in some more traditional old media investors, and they got cold feet quick.

Link: Yahoo Says Ad Growth Is Slowing; Stock Dives - New York Times.

Yahoo Says Ad Growth Is Slowing; Stock Dives

By SAUL HANSELL

Published: September 19, 2006

Shares of  Yahoo fell more than 11 percent today after the company disclosed that it had sold less advertising in the last few weeks than it expected, largely because of a slowdown in automobile and financial advertising.

Speaking to a conference held in New York by  Goldman Sachs, Terry S. Semel, Yahoo’s chief executive, said that while advertising continued to grow from these industries, “they’re not growing as quickly as we might have hoped at this point in time.”

Yahoo said that it would still meet its financial targets for the third quarter, but that its profit and revenue will be toward the bottom of the range it had estimated.

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The bottom of that range represents a 20 percent growth in revenue and a 16 percent growth on operating cash flow.

That would represent a further slowing of Yahoo’s growth. In the second quarter its revenue grew by 28 percent. And that result was lower than analysts expected, causing the company’s shares to slide. Over the summer, Yahoo’s stock had regained all of that loss until today’s disclosure.

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Still, Wall Street analysts said it appeared that Yahoo’s problems were  not widespread in the industry.

“Not everything is hunky-dory in Yahoo land,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. “Yahoo’s audience is not growing as fast as it once did.” Mr. Rohan added that Yahoo appeared to have unusual turnover among its executives and that this might have hurt its ability to sell advertising.

Susan Decker, Yahoo’s chief financial officer, told the investors that the advertising slowdown affected both text-based search advertising and graphical display advertising, an area in which Yahoo is the leader.

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Colbert's New Word: Wikiality

Heh. As of August 1, 2006 at 9:34pm, "wikiality" receives NO Google hits. It receives 3 from Google news, including this article from CNET. I wonder how that will change over the next few weeks. Stephen Colbert featured it as his "Word" of the night on July 31, 2006.

I like this term, since we've needed something catchy to fully describe the organism that is humanity assembling information collectively. Wikipedia features a completely different way of assembling information than in the past.

Or...thinking aloud, IS it that different? Is Wikipedia merely a hyperversion of how "truth" or "knowledge" is constructed? I will obviously admit that experts with time and resources, coupled with fact-checking and peer review, assemble more reliable information than the masses collaborating together. Yet, I've noted in the past that Wikipedia fills a void for obscure topics. Whereas any encyclopedia would ignore cult TV shows and video games, Wikipedia covers them in such detail as to be relatively awe-inspiring. Its level of detail about the series of Final Fantasy games, for example, is stunning.

I think Wikipedia is merely a phenomenon - another addition to the way people create and share knowledge. But remember...it IS "wikiality" - not necessarily facts, truth or definitive information on a subject.