1. Date site marketing – comedy blog on ways to meet the opposite sex.
2. A Facebook app that keeps reminding your friends its your birthday until they post a greeting!
3. A Facebook app which allows you to praise your favourite McDonald’s employee and reward them. (just tweeted this idea today)
4. A pub app which shows where to go if you want a quiet place to sit and sip your pint.
5. A job finder community site where you can upload your CV for members to comment on and help improve it.

1. Forget the notion that you need to do deep original research.

2. Buy the top ten books for your chosen subject.

3. Post a job to a freelance forum/mechanical turk with the job of someone else turning the books into a set of notes, combining common themes easily.

4. Read through the notes and turn them into text, so avoiding the charge of plagiarism. I did it all the time when a student at Cambridge University.

5. The originality simply comes from how you write the text, re-assemble the facts, and point out connections. You have to do this anyway to create a book from scratch.

6. Complete the writing, send to editor. Publish. Done.

My Obamicon

So I then think of how to take my gym gear with me on the short cycle trip to Vauxhall, and think about the extra bulk. Then I remember I need to take my laptop with me as I have it from the weekend. Plus I need to take an extra lock for the bike, and its better to put that in the bag too. And so it seems like it’s not a good idea to go to the gym after all. I can go for a run tonight instead. And go to the gym tomorrow.

And so that’s how I decided whether to go to the gym tonight, or not..

A great example for charities on why social media is both scary (you can lose control of the message) but also powerful (losing control is OK), from an example of a Greenpeace campaign over naming a whale. ‘Mr Splashy Pants’ was the name over 70% of people online wanted, but it wasn’t what the charity wanted people to choose. Who won the day? Please see below…

PS: The Chancellor said there were no simple solutions. Wrong, there are no easy solutions. Simple is part of complex. There therefore logically must be simple solutions.

Today’s Daily Telegraph carries the following story online: “Russia accuses Poland of starting Second World War‎ -
Russia has accused Poland of provoking the outbreak of the Second World War by refusing to accede to the “very modest” demands of Nazi Germany.”

I had just downloaded the Telegraph’s mobile G1 Android version on to my mobile, and so was amazed to see the author had in such a sensitive piece got the date of the start of WWII, with Germany invading Poland, on 1 September 2009. As a former local NCTJ journalist I of course rang the paper but was told by a very well spoken lady that the relevant department was closed.

Anyhow no doubt you, like me, won’t believe your eyes when you see it so here’s the extract from the screenshot to prove I’m not kidding:

PS: The DT’s Andy King emailed me back this morning (Friday 5th), after I alerted them to the error last night via email form, to say the error had been corrected, and to thank me for taking the time and trouble to highlight this matter. Cheers! I’d just like to thank the Telegraph for being the first newspaper to be a Google Android content provider.

What’s amusing about this is that the page link to more information about ‘customizing’ your url is: http://www.linkedin.com/myprofile?editwp=&locale=en_US&trk=mypro_getvanity. So I guess it’s not customization but vanity at play here? Do tell LinkedIn, which is it?

And on the subject of vanity urls: RT @soltran: Vanity URLs coming to Facebook soon! Get ready for the landrush! http://bit.ly/1aUhfa

But of course there’s always the option of using a service which gives you one url for all these various services too, I believe the jargon is ‘identity management platform’. For example check out chi.mp!:

Chi.mp gives you your own domain and Web site – your social hub. With chi.mp, you can bring together the many pieces of your digital life – your content, your contacts – to create “Centralized You”. And you control “who sees what”.

Amusing too when one considers last year’s April Fool that Google had bought Facebook; which I found out about just this week as someone who will remain nameless who works in e-commerce told me this merger as a stone cold fact. I really hope he was joking. Anyhow, piece below:

RBC Capital Markets analyst Ross Sandler issued a 15-page note analyzing the different reasons Facebook poses a threat to Google this morning.

Henry Blodget over at SAI has all the pertinent slides (as usual), and here are the highlights:

1) Sandler says by RBC projections Facebook could surpass Google in worldwide uniques by 2011-2012:

2) Sandler says Facebook is driving 19% of Google uniques, up from 9% a year ago. (Personally I’m a little confused by what exactly he means by “drive” here, because the data for all entry sources adds up to much more than 100% so I don’t think it’s accurate to call this pure referral traffic. Intuitively this claim doesn’t make sense personally as well.)

3) The report says Facebook and Google are “complimentary” for now, but Facebook is increasingly becoming the “starting point” on the internet for its users:

Google and Facebook are two of the fastest growing and largest companies on the internet, and thus far, Facebook’s ascendancy has likely helped Google gain share. 45% of monthly unique users go directly to Facebook (as a starting page), up from 39% a year ago. At the same time, Google is now driving 64% of Facebook’s uniques, up from 51% a year ago. Google.com, on the other hand, has a consistent 66% of its uniques as a starting page, same as a year ago. Google’s uniques via Facebook are growing at 188% y/y, and  now represent 19% of Google’s traffic (up from 9% 12-months ago)…

Facebook is actually positive and complementary for Google thus far, but that could change if Facebook’s rapid growth trajectory continues on its current path, or if/when social media can find a business model and attract ad dollars from other online media. At the very least, we think Facebook as the “starting point” for more and more users on the Internet could create some multiple compression for Google over time, if the momentum continues.

It’s interesting to see analysts starting to talk more publicly about Facebook these days. The company is very clearly on the radar of the research community on Wall Street.

PS: So interesting to hear today’s rumour that Google maybe buying Twitter who have a hold on real time search, after Facebook failed to buy Twitter last year:

Michael Arrington, the author of TechCrunch, claims to have spoken to two sources close to the matter, suggesting that negotiations are in the late stages. He believes Google would have to pay well above the $250 million (£170 million) valuation of Twitter suggested by a recent round of venture capital funding.

Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founders, were involved in negotiations to sell their micro-blogging service to Facebook last year, but the deal broke down. Sources have said that it would have cost Facebook $500 million in stock.

Full story on The Register.