Thinking Outside The Box Mind Map by creativeinspiration

I didn’t know who Peter Schiff was and I don’t particularly like predictions when it comes to economy but I found the following video very valuable. Peter Schiff predicts correctly almost every single issue in the current financial crisis from 2006 and everyone else around him is laughing at him.

I am not emphasising the economic prediction here. I’d like to underline the fact that it’s really difficult to say out loud what you know or what you think you know when it doesn’t make sense to any one else. Nobody  believes (wants to believe) what this guy is saying true and everybody is strongly opposing to him.

Think about similar cases in your life. How many times do you hear someone saying something so different from the conventional wisdom or something that does make no sense to you at all? What do you think in such a case? Do you think “This guys is a nutjob”? May be he is right. May be he knows something that you don’t know and may be what he is saying does not make sense to you because your brain cannot bend like that just yet.

I think this is how we are wired. When we hear something new and unconventional we mentally look around and try to find a confirmation that it may be true. We try to make sense out of it. When it doesn’t immediately make any sense, we usually think the new information is not correct. The degree to which we oppose to the new piece of information is proportional to how unconventional and diverge it’s from the norm. I think this is where open mindedness comes in.

A lot of us are claiming to have an “open mind”, but do we really? A lot of us are claiming that we can think “outside the box”, but can we really?

Watch the video below and think about how you react to new information in your lives:

(via Signal and Noise)

The Keynesian revolution against laissez-faire was costing the corporate sector dearly.

If you’d like to join here are the rules:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56. Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Voting Machines Elect One Of Their Own As President

I think this move strengthens the fact that there is a growing market in Turkey. Earlier we had heard that Myspace was getting ready into the Turkish social networking scene. Looks like there is going to be a nice competition of global players in Turkey pretty soon. On the other hand, it is also obvious that Turkish users are valued way cheaper at 15 euros/member.

Gnome-Do works very well as well. It has the default keyboard short cut super (windows key)+spacebar and has a lot of features. Although it is a mono application, it works pretty well and I think it is a keeper.

Below is a video that shows it in action. Check out the Download page for the repositories.

I think they shot a very creative video which is inline with the purpose of their existence. I can’t imagine any Turkish government department shooting such a promotional video even if they were working on new media. I think this is way cool for a government organization.

Social web as it stands today is both useful for sharing information, media or any content and it is fun. We mostly enjoy being part of it because we see some value in it. The catch with the social web is that it is more useful as you put more effort in it. What would you say if I told you that you may be able to sell and buy such effort sometime in the future?

Immaterial Labor

In the past few weeks, I have been thinking about the value of this effort a lot because of a project called Meta-Markets which is in private alpha. It is a very interesting project because it deals with the value our social labor. Meta-Markets is the brain child of Burak Arikan who describes it as:

“Meta-Markets is an online stock market for trading socially networked creative products such as YouTube videos, Delicious bookmarks, blogs, or social network profiles. In NYSE or NASDAQ people trade shares of companies. In Meta-Markets people trade shares of bookmarks, profiles, videos, or blogs. Just like companies, socially networked products have ever growing values. When product owners issue their shares in Meta-Markets, they raise capital – today play capital, but tomorrow real capital. With Meta-Markets we aim to help people to retain the value of their immaterial labor in social web services.”

Meta-markets denotes the product of our online labor for creating and sharing in a social web service as “socially networked creative products”. In Meta-Markets, in the quest of retaining our immaterial labor, currently you can offer to the public, via an IPO, shares of your blog’s Feedburner feed, your Facebook profile, your Flickr photos, a del.icio.us link which is first bookmarked by you. In the future, you will also be able to offer YouTube videos and Digg stories. By IPO, you offer a certain percentage of your shares (up to 50%) to the market via a Dutch style auction. This way, you bring online assets to the exchange market and raise capital to invest in shares for other social commodities created and offered by other market players.

The currency in Meta-Markets is a Burak ( ? ). Investors are given a seed fund of 75? at the beginning for immediate investment. This probably reminds everyone the Linden dollars in Second Life but currently there is no real exchange rate from Burak to US Dollar. However, I know that the ultimate goal of the project is to make it possible to convert immaterial labor to real money.

Value of a Socially Networked Product

At the core of the Meta-Markets is measuring the value of a socially networked product. Meta-markets measures this value by quantifying the product’s social impact in its respective network. For example, during an active flow of eventstreaming, many people rush to share media on social web services about an event and bring lots of traffic and views to their respective networks and create a value. Meta-markets aims to measure that value and make it possible for it to change hands in a market environment.

The figure shows my Facebook profile which I opened to public. I had chosen to offer just 10% of my shares to the public. Meta-Markets calculated a fair value for my stock based on the number of my Facebook friends which gives shareholders an idea about the value of this stock. As of this writing, the stock goes for 2.00? a share and someone is selling 61 shares for 2.20? and stock’s market cap is 200? . There is a neat graph which shows the behavior of the stock over time. On the right are the investors who hold shares of this stock. It is also possible to write comments to the stocks. This is especially good as it makes it possible to introduce your stock and explain why people should invest in it. In addition, comments add a social aspect to the system as well. I know that there is a desire to make Meta-Markets a more social place.

Closing Thoughts

As I already noted, in the valuation of stocks, Meta-Markets uses RSS subscribers for feeds, profile views for Flickr streams, number of friends for Facebook, and bookmark count of del.icio.us links. This reminds me of the discussions of metrics like page views used for web statistics. These quantities definitely tell something about the value but are they enough for labor value determination? Immediately after I started playing with Meta-Markets, this was the question I asked myself repeatedly.

As I see it, in Meta-Markets this quantification works as an attention mechanism. A potential investor may look at a new Feedburner feed IPO, see a good number of subscribers and would most probably check the blog to see the quality of the content before making a buy decision. The quality is not in the equation for fair value computation but it is in the mind of the investor and hidden from the market. I think this is a challenge for Meta-Markets. However, in this case, in tackling this challange, Meta-Markets is dependent on APIs of social web services. The solution to this problem depends partly on how much information a social web service is willing to share through the APIs and partly to the ways Meta-Markets will interpret and combine all available data. My guess is that there is going to be a bigger interest on valuation of our social labor and a bigger push for social web services to provide more data through their APIs.

On the surface, it is easy to describe Meta-Markets as an online stock market simulation game. It is definitely an addictive one at that. However, it is also an experiment with real potential. It is obvious that social web services, especially ad supported networks like Facebook rely on our labor in the network. The value of such a company is indeed partly measured by the number of people putting effort in it. Facebook knows this value and most probably has the means to know this value and capitalize on it. However, we poor social web workers can only gain immaterial returns on our investment. As the social web services improve and become even more popular and depend on our labor even more, we will be more willing to know the real value of our immaterial labor. This is what Meta-Markets is trying to figure out.

What makes this tour an experiment is that in addition to this traditional reporting, Hammersley will also be posting news to his blog, pictures to Flickr, videos to YouTube and he will be microblogging on Twitter. Moreover, he will be sharing his bookmarks on del.icio.us and networking on Facebook.

I find this news very interesting and noteworthy not only because this is going to take place in Turkey during the general elections but also because this is a great demonstration of how traditional media can embrace the external tools of the web.

Richard Sambrook, director of BBC Global News, says:

This is an experiment to look at how a series of international reports can be spread through social media sites and hopefully reach new audiences.
…
The interesting thing that we?re doing is that the majority of the content that we?re going to be producing online is going to be hosted externally on different external sites. We?re using services which are already very popular. ?By using external tools we?re able to do very interesting things very quickly without resorting to any enormously long development time. It?s about being part of the web, rather than on the web.

I think the above quote coming from a traditional media director is very insightful and very true. This shows that BBC is understanding the value of external tools and really embracing their 15 web principles. As the Press Gazette article points at, this experiment is very much guided by the 5th principle: ?Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don?t restrict your creativity to your own site.?

I will definitely follow Hammersley in his journey and will be following his reports and look forward to socialize with him on Facebook. If you are interested here is how you can follow this social media experiment:

Ben Hammersley’s blog
Ben Hammersley’s Twitter
Ben Hammersley’s Flickr Photo Stream
Ben Hammersley’s del.ico.us bookmarks
Ben Hammersley’s YouTube videos

bbc, social media, ben hammersley, turkey elections

[tags]video, art[/tags]

Below is the first episode. I am totally hooked and want to see if “I” will get used to his life being broadcasted. I think the way the producers incorporate user feedback into the show is brilliant. Make sure to check it out.

[tags]youtube, internet video, iChannel[/tags]

Apogee Search is a Search Engine Marketing firm founded in 2001 by McKinsey & Co. alumni. The main focus area of the firm is affiliate marketing and pay-per-call. The main goal of Apogee is to direct targeted visitors to B2B and B2C websites.

Services:

So, what services does Apogee provide? In layman’s terms, the goal is to bring people who do a search on a search engine to a website where what they are looking for is potentially sold. The buzzword complete description of that is “qualified leads from ready to buy customers”. For that to happen, from what I understand, you get in touch with a representative who analysis your website for search engine marketing. The search engine marketing analysis service is supposed to be free. If you accept, Apogee positions itself as a partner to you and “help you get the most from your marketing dollar and quickly raise your search marketing revenues to the next level”.

I can hear you being confused about my tone about the service here. It is not that I don’t see any value in such services. I am sure search engine marketing is a big part of the traffic to a commerce site and being discovered among many similar websites is very important. So, I think that such a service should be valuable for a website who wants to attract potential customers.

Apogee seems to provide six different services:

1. Paid Search Advertising: Pay-per-click campaigns. Mainly translates into Google Adwords.
2. Natural Search Engine Optimization: Plain SEO.
3. Pay Per Call Management: This service kind of turns customer clicks to voice meaning customers are directed to seller’s phones and they pay as they are called.
4. Affiliate Marketing: Seems like Apogee brings affiliate partner sites together with their client to increase their revenues.
5. Search Engine Marketing Training: This is interesting since they claim to give hands-on instructions about SEM best practices.
6. Search Engine Marketing Analysis: As I mentioned, this is a free service where the client’s website is analyzed for search engine performance.

Website:

Apogee Search website contains some information about search engine marketing among all those buzzword compliant advertisement clich?s.

One thing that I really liked about the website after my inspections is that they provide many documents that could help the customer answer some questions about SEO and SEM. They also provide an article called “Avoid Search Engine Marketing Malpractice” to warn clients for not falling into such a malpractice. Another interesting article that attracts attention is the “PPC: Do You Want to Play Inside or Outside?” which discusses outsourcing pay-per-click campaigns.

Their current blog also gives a positive image to them.

Conclusion:

I tried to review the Apogee Search Engine Marketing firm. Although I have not tried their services and I am not a potential client for them at this point, I tried to write up an objective review trying to understand if they would be a useful partner. It is difficult to make that assessment without trying but the fact that they provide many downloadable resources to help the client understand the concepts of the partnership made me feel they are worth a look if you are looking for such a service.

[tags]sponsored review[/tags]