Some minor issues

Last post almost a year ago. Last decent post over a year ago.
I guess .. we’re closed.

But not without saying a proper goodbye, eulogy and explanation.

Every goodbye post should start with "I started blogging in .." and so should this one. I started blogging in 2005, except I never stopped. I switched.

Never been a fast blogger on this particular blog. There’s a couple of reasons for that. First, I wanted to have a certain added value. That mainly means it took quite some time to write a proper post, and proper posts is all I wanted. Finding time was a challenge sometimes, and when I found some the relevance was gone. Or something else got priority. Second, although I started blogging in Dutch, I switched to English, amongst others to participate in some international projects. Although I believe I’m more or less fluent in English, it’s less automatic than writing in your mother tongue. Finally, there’s technology. I once loved WordPress, but it never made things easy for me. Blogging in WordPress takes effort, as I learned later.

So that’s 3 reasons that slowed me down. I killed them and started a new project may last year: more.minorissues.be. It’s going like a bomb!

How exactly did I kill these hurdles?

• I started blogging in Dutch, speaks for itself
• I switched platforms. I’m now using Tumblr like crazy! I discovered Tumblr when setting up a small project, a movieblog called in search of magnolia, and fell in love with the platform instantly. There’s no pain whatsoever, blogging is easy. It made me start more posts, and caused less frustrations while going. If only for look and feel: if I look back at this blog I see clutter. Tumblr is just so nice.
• Again, Tumblr helped me to blog more frequent because it encourage you to just post stuff. For example, if you want to blog a nice image you just do so. No title required or whatsoever. Obviously you can comment on it, but you don’t have to. Same goes for video, audio, text, .. Tumblr is all about sharing, so I started it as an extension to my twitter stream: giving things that deserve some stickyness a proper place. To find them back later, to offer a place for discussion, ..

It works for me. I’m now a far more active (and in my mind: better) blogger than I ever was. I try to bring a decent mixture of fast posts , and slow posts that still take me some time to finish. Still focussing on advertising and technology. Actually, trying to have a focus on digital strategy, and take it from there.

Yeah, I loved and still love blogging, but this blog is coming to an end. I decided to not pull the plug, because I do believe it does have some interesting content in the archives. As a matter of fact here are some personal highlights:

• Nespress is the new Gilette (2009)
• Honoring the original VW Beetle ads (2009)
• Thinking about a Twitter businessmodel (2009)
• Getting Alex Bogusky on twitter (2009)
• Mailing Steve Balmer (2008)
• New Marketing FAQ (2007)

Blogging in Dutch, I believe I’ve written some of my best stuff (very subjective I know, imHo) on more.minorissues.be. Here are some posts I believe are worth reading. All in Dutch:

• Over de nieuwe Bonux spotjes
• Introductie Digitale Marketing
• Waarom TV reclame goed werkt
• Context = Noodzaak
• Crossmedia met Jeroen Meus
• Open brief aan de politiek
• Facebook pagina, hebbeeeuuhhh
• Van Thillo – snippets
• De vijver en de verandering in de media in Belgi?
• Blow-up campagnes
• De Ronde
• Je zal maar een sociaal netwerk hebben (analyse over hyves, netlog .. vs Facebook)
• Content Marketing (met Jeroen Meus)
• Jan Callebaut
• Delhaize is zijn positionering kwijt (vind ik nog steeds, maar ze spelen het tegenwoordig iets minder hard)

Anyway, for the non Dutch speaking people: thanks for reading. Hope we’ll meet again one day. Those that speak Dutch: fee free to follow me on my new blog, or follow me on twitter.

This is it! Love,
Steven

I don’t have an iPad, but I’d like to see how my site would look on one. I can do this now on iPadDollar, check it out here. Sure, it’s an ordinary preview of a screenshot, but I have to admit it has a different appeal. I like the “hide flashcontent” button

BTW: I started blogging in Dutch as well, on http://moreminorissues.tumblr.com – more lightweight, faster, shorter .. minorissues.be, the site you’re on now, will stay my marketing blog were in general I’ll take some more time to dig deeper and give the subject some more thought. In general I said The thing is, since I want to do it properly, this blog sometimes doesn’t move at all.

We just released our Nascom x-mas card.

Check it out, I think it’s big fun and quite original.

Can you spot me and my colleagues?

If you know of other fun digital x-mas cards, let me know!

(BTW: if you have a reddit account, support the card right here – well appreciated!)

Mapping massive amounts of information into understandable structures, that’s what information architects do. There is a Japanese firm that does this very well: iA. They just released the 4th version of their Web Trend Map, and it’s (again) a pleasure to look at!

 
See full size on Flickr. This time they were smart enough not to host it on own servers

The map maps all kinds of firms, services, social networks, .. that live on the web in a subway like structure. You have different lines, representing different focus domains. These focus areas may overlap in specific fields. Add to that the stability and the use, combined with some trend setters, and you know how complex this information is.

Learn more about it on webtrendsmap.com or even order a print. I’m sure some services are missing, and that’s why it’s kind of pity there is no interactive version of this. I would love to search, sort, highlight, filter, ..

For instance, I can’t find Netlog on the map (quite huge in Europe) and I’m pretty sure it was there on the previous version .. However I do find Skyrock, which is quite big but only in France. So probably Netlog is there, but I just can’t find it .. Who helps me out?

To finalize a little video they made to promote the map.

Enjoy!

See it here:

Yes, this embed is the site. Just go to www.BooneOakley.com to see how serious they are. I mailed them to say I’m in love with this, curious to see if they’ll get back to me.

BTW: views are adding up swiftly. Great marketing, guys!

Very inspiring video!

Multitouch Barcelona is definately a company to keep an eye on!

Exactly this:

As long as I know Twitter (I joined the service over 2 years ago) people are talking about the business model behind it. Till this point, there is none!
Twitter is build with Venture Capital, $55M at the moment as you can see on their crunchbase profile.

So there is no business model yet. This means the service is not making money on its own, not as far as we know that it. At first, when twitter was largely unstable, users would like to pay for a stable version. But that passed by when Twitter grow more mature.

There’s 4 ways for Twitter to make money.

1th is by acquisition. If, let’s say, Google would buy the company, that’s all what it takes. This would be a company that typically is interested in the data, the relations, .. and thus can use Twitter as a research base. Google would definitely fit this description. They can learn from it. An other type of company could be on that has an idea to monetize it, but this is, in my mind, less likely. If Twitter turns into a money making machine, I see Obvious (the company behind Twitter) doing this themselves.

A second way would be by advertising. If banners, adwords, .. are placed on the site they would generate a decent amount of cache. There’s just that many users, so loads x small CPM is still good. However, a lot of users ever see the website since they’re using different clients (like twhirl, tweetdeck, ..) which is possible thanks to Twitters’s great API. Of course it would be possible to insert commercial tweets in the stream, but I think this might be something some people consider a bridge too far. For me personally, I guess I could live with it, but I prefer without.

The 3th way is just turn it into a commercial service. Let users pay for the use, or let them pay if they want to go over a certain threshold like following xx people or posting xx tweets per month. Let’s avoid this scenario shall we – But it IS a possibility.

The 4th way, and in my mind most possible way, is by adding commercial features. Sure, the small feature set definitely helped the service grow, but there are some things that would be interested and in my mind. I read this post the other day, and it started me thinking (that was about time ). Obviously it’s a fake post! Random followers, having celebs to follow you .. I’m sue people would pay for it, but it’s just not what Twitter has become and is love about.

What I do think is a great commercial feature is opening up the analytics of Twitter. It completely fits in the context of this time. Everybody is obsessed by numbers, and with reason. At this moment twitter is monitored by Google Analytics, and in GA it is pretty simple to log data on multiple accounts. So a model could be: you pay for example $5 each month, and you can add your own tracking ID so your stats become visible in your own GA account.

I would pay for that, and for me $5 each month would be acceptable. I used to pay for feedburner before it was acquired by Google as well.

If we consider a usebase of 8 million people (this is an estimate based on Compete, might be higher because of the API, might be lower, only twitter has the answer) and suppose only 5% of the users would pay for this, this would result in a turnover of 24 million dollar! Even if only 1%, so 80.000 users would pay for this, which seems likely to me, this would still generate about 5 million dollar a year. And then you can start tweaking the numbers based on research: what would be the perfect amount of money to ask for a user to generate the most income? You could even identify these users as “pro” users, if you see the status this brings on for example Flickr .. it might work.

I started a little poll to find out how people feel about this, feel free to participate (no registration whatsoever needed). If you think $5/month is too much let me know what you would pay for it.

I would like to turn this into a movement, so if you think this is a good idea embed the #5dollarGA hastag in your tweets. This is something Stenito came up with. Or just tweet a link to the poll or to this post.

Thanks! You can follow me on twitter under @minorissues.

This must’ve been the most impressive Surface demo I’ve seen so far!

By Razorfish.

Hat tip: @crossthebreeze

There’s a lot going on about Augmented Reality (AR) these days. And sure, there are some really cool things going on. Watch this or this and you’ll get what I mean.

But then I say this TED session that beats it all.

Presented by Pattie Maes, a fellow Belgian. On a roll!