Pod1 Blog

Ok, so as this was published on the 29th June 2008, it’s more like the next 4,846 days of the web, but it’s still a very good presentation (from TED)…don’t watch at your own peril:

Has the current Argentinian Coach Diego Maradona suddenly become publicity shy??

Who ate all the pies?

Maradona who has never been a stranger to controversy, most famously his ‘hand of God’ incident in the 1986 World Cup quarter final against England, has now decided along with a number of other Argentinian celebrities to remove all references to them from internet search results.

Both Yahoo and Google are locked in a legal battle with dozens of fashion models and other public figures like Maradona over whether the Internet companies should have to censor search results relating to those persons’ names.

Critics accuse the Argentinian courts of censorship, and claim that, without an EU or US-style law that holds publishers responsible for their content, a ‘legal vacuum’ will leave the Argentinian internet effectively unworkable.

Of course here in the UK we can still say what we want about the cheating, fat,….

Thanks to the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust challenge, Google has decided to walk away from its proposed advertising deal with Yahoo!. Google and Yahoo had expressed a willingness to work with regulators to prove that their deal to serve Google ads to under performing Yahoo! search terms does not constitute a monopoly.

Now The Justice Department has come back and threatened to sue Google should it form this kind of partnership with Yahoo! based on the fact that the government suspected that the deal would grant Google too much power over the search advertising and marketing industry, it stated that this would have a severe impact on the grounds of competition and fair pricing.

Yahoo! executives had been counting on the deal with Google to alleviate financial concerns and are now exploring any remaining options. Although Yahoo! turned down Microsoft’s $47.5 billion takeover offer earlier this year have been experiencing drastically reduced share prices. The engine’s executives are now saying it would be a wise move for Microsoft to make another offer.

There is also speculation that Microsoft may end up buying only the search portion of Yahoo! or that Yahoo! will acquire try to acquire the also-struggling AOL.

To date Yahoo! executives have yet to make any official statement about the company’s future plans.

I am spending more and more time on the style.com website of late.
This was the lastest piece to catch my eye ‘Model Challenge’:

Check this group out

Sign of things to come?

http://socialmediastatistics.wikidot.com

Here are some stats on Facebook:

8.4 million UK users of which:
o 3 million men
o 3.5 million women (the rest are unspecified)
o 1 million 13 – 18
o 3.8 million 18 – 24
o 2.8 million 24- 30
o 2.2 million 30 – 50
o 0.3 million 50 – 65

Families:
* 0.6 million women listed as married in the UK
* 0.4 million men listed as married in the UK

There are close to 4 billion photos on Facebook (taken from talk by Facebook – March 2008)

It’s estimated that 20% of Canada’s population is on Facebook. (Worldwide, Universal McCann, 2008)

Facebook hasn 22.5% weekly reach and the number one in many markets and surely will grow as it becomes internationalised. (Worldwide, Universal McCann, 2008)

14 million photos uploaded daily on Facebook (Worldwide, Universal McCann, 2008)

I has lots of others too – enjoy!

Came across this on YouTube Canada…not sure if i like it yet but probably quite effective. Give the video a few seconds before the ad appears. Guess this is how they get round people who watch the embedded YouTube videos and avoiding the sponsored ads:

“For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It’s time for us to take matters into our own hands.

“We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell. But being the extraordinarily nice chaps we are, we’ve figured a better way to get our own back: We’ve launched our own Monty Python channel on YouTube. “

“Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures” is a three-year collaborative project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Carried out by researchers at the University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, the digital youth project explores how kids use digital media in their everyday lives. Read more

A great night for some of our favourite clients who walked away with a number of gongs at The Drapers Awards 2008:

Matches: Designer Store of the Year
Fat Face: Best New Store
Net-a-Porter: Etailer of the Year
Matches: Independent Retailer of the Year

Congratulations to all the winners!