Social media platforms & web publishing services

Ever since the start of the credit crunch I was wondering how Zopa, the social lending service that connects lenders and borrowers are doing.

Apparently they are doing well.

Giles Andrews, managing director of Zopa, told the FT recently in an article Innovative lending increases, that he has seen activity increase by 100 per cent month for month on last …

It’s been a few months since Automattic announced that they will release a set of plugins (BuddyPress) that will transform Wordpress MU into an open source social networking engine.

Completion of the first public iteration of the plugins is set for the end of the year.

Now the first mock-ups of the Wordpress MU Buddypress enabled Home page have appeared. And it …

Two weeks ago the UK Media Guardian had a little inset in their paper on the state of advertising. To sum up, advertising as we know is in massive flux, if not in crisis. I will write about this crisis next.

But this week Techcrunch talked about the imminent launch of Brand Jury. A website that hopes to solve some of the problems video advertisers currently face with the acendency of the internet, and audience control …

I just received this email.

To coincide with asking radio stations to think about playing Reckoner we are breaking up the tune into pieces for you to remix. After the insane response we got from the Nude remix stems and the site that was dedicated to your remixes…

Unique visitors: 6,193,776, Page Views: 29,090,134, Hits: 58,340,512, Bandwidth: 10.666 Terabytes, Number of mixes: 2,252, Number of votes: 461,090, Number …

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Trouble trouble trouble….

Recently, Rhythm New Media – a company with a truly cutting edge video on mobile tech solution – and that sold the first dynamically targeted video (post and pre-roll) ads, shocked when they announced that they were pulling out of the UK. (Disclosure, I used to work for Rhythm)

Remarkable since they already had deals with 3, T-mobile, and others in the pipeline and more remarkable considering how strong and mature the UK advertising market is.

If Rhythm could …

Yesterday I wrote about the likely slow demise of the so-called mobile internet and mobile operator portals (if they don’t shape up). But what does this portend for mobile advertising?

Just this week the Media Guardian in the UK made the case for mobile advertising in article titled Pocket-sized powerhouse. They trot out familiar pro mobile as ad platform arguments:

Unlike the TV or the PC its always switched on.
You always have it …

With the launch of the first phone (The G1) sporting Google’s Android mobile operating system, it’s worth asking a few wider questions about the internet and its convergence with mobile phones.

Analysts have already hailed the iPhone and the G1 as paradigm shifters. In a post titled Touching The Android: It’s No iPhone, But It’s Close Techcrunch said:

“But remember, in the end this is not really about Android versus the iPhone. It’s about Web phones …

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When Time magazine reported that more people visit Facebook than porn sites a lot of people sat up and took notice. (It was actually for the segment 18 – 24, older folks still have a greater penchant for flesh than …

You bought YouTube for two billion bucks
You bought YouTube the search still sucks!

Have a look at this rather funny rap battle between the search and portal behemoths. Funny because some of those rap lines are on the button. YouTube’s search does indeed suck.

This is a great example of social media in the form of a viral video and how it can impact a brand. How does a company respond …

In BusinessWeek ’s annual ranking of the 100 Best Global Brands, several are keeping their U.S. marketing budgets steady, as a percentage of revenue. Among them are American Express (AXP) (No. 15) and Diageo (DGE) (owner of Smirnoff, No. 89). Others are going further. Louis Vuitton (No. 16), Kellogg’s (K) (No. 39), Accenture (ACN) (No. 47), and Kleenex (No. 74) …

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