All posts in Internet

The Booming WordPress Ecosystem

by Mearo on April 18, 2011 in Internet, Marketing, Wordpress with No comments
Wordpress

As you might have noticed this blog is powered by WordPress. As too are many other tech blogs, namely, Techcrunch, Mashable and Smashing Magazine. In fact, it is estimated that WordPress powers 8% of the worlds websites including many Fortune 500 companies such as Honda, Ford, WSJ, Nokia, and Samsung.

So just what is WordPress anyway? Wordpress is essentially web software that you can use to create a website or a blog using PHP & MySQL without actually knowing any PHP or MySQL! It is both simple to use and free, or open source. Crucially, it is built and developed by hundreds of volunteers. These factors combined have seen WordPress become the most popular hosted blogging and CMS platform in the world, a position which was cemented in 2010 when Microsoft began to switch it’s 30m Windows Live blogs over to WordPress. All pretty impressive you might say, so how did WordPress come to be such a powerhouse. Predictably, it was founded by a guy called Matt Mullenweg back in 2003, at the tender age of just 19. Since then, Mullenweg has been named as the 16th most important person on the web, led several rounds of VC funding, and now presides over Automattic, the premium hosting arm of WordPress.com, a profitable company of some 40 people. I won’t go into too much detail on his bio, I’ll leave that to the ever capable Wikipedia. Continue reading →

Micropayments – A New Revenue Model?

by Mearo on May 19, 2009 in Internet with 1 Comment
Square Mobile Payment

So what exactly are micropayments then?  As ever Wikipedia is bang on the money.  “Micropayments are means for transferring very small amounts of money i.e. 1/1000th of a dollar.  They are typically payments that are too small to be affordably processed by credit card or other electronic transaction processing mechanisms”.

So why am I writing about micropayments then?  Well would you be reading this article if it cost you £0.10 for the privilege.  Probably not, but I won’t hold that against you.  Micropayments are getting a fair bit of coverage at the moment for a number of reasons.  The main one is that we are in a global recession, marketing budgets are in free-fall and as such quality content providers (especially journalism – great article by Freakonomics, and news) are seeing their ad revenues drying up.  This brings us back to the debate over the free vs subscription model for online news providers which was reignited by Rupert Murdoch and the WSJ recently. Continue reading →

The Battle For The Single Web Identity

by Mearo on March 27, 2009 in Internet, Social Media with 1 Comment
Login

I don’t know about you but my web experience is becoming a myriad of logins, usernames and passwords.  Some tools like iGoogle, and Netvibes bring everything into one place but ultimately that’s not solving the problem.  Microsoft identified this problem years ago and went about creating a service called “Passport”.  Although 90% of us have one of these Passport accounts (via Hotmail) it hasn’t been adopted by any other publishers.  Next up was Open ID.  To quote Wikipedia “OpenID is an open, decentralized standard for user authentication and access control, allowing users to log onto many services with the same digital identity”. What Open ID is not is a single password / username.  It’s much more technical than that and it scares a lot of people off.  Don’t by mean means write this one off though.  So who else is throwing their hat into the ring?  Well suprise suprise there’s Google and Facebook.  Where have we heard that one before! Continue reading →

Social Media Monitoring

by Mearo on February 22, 2009 in Featured, Internet, Social Media with No comments
Radian 6

The best analogy I have heard for social media, from the guys at Ryan MacMillan, is to imagine you are at a dinner party and you don’t know anyone.  You look across the crowd and there are several, possibly hundreds of people out there and many different conversations going on. Some may even be about you.  What right do you have to go up and join in any given conversation?  The answer is, you don’t have any right at all.  What say this time you bring something of value like a couple of glasses of champagne and introduce yourself.  Well, the glasses will most probably be gratefully received and you may exchange a few words and then leave.  Alternatively you may strike up a conversation and stay. Either way, you have brought value to the conversation and you have not outstayed your welcome.  Too often I hear people tell us if a conversation is going on online about our brand we need to take part.  I disagree, I think we should know about that conversation but only choose to enter if we have a role to play or we can add value. Continue reading →

Show Me The Money! How To Monetise Twitter

by Mearo on February 19, 2009 in Advertising, Featured, Internet, Marketing, Social Media, Twitter with No comments
Twitter

Twitter is the now quite rightfully the new kid on the block and why not?  It’s about time we had a new poster child for the so-called social web.  Like many startups it has a lot of users, is growing rapidly, and has a lot of VC funding.  What’s more it’s also has a distinct lack of a business model.  So that’s all the boxes checked then!

It was big news in the online world last week when a comment by one of the founders Biz Stone, to Marketing Magazine, in the UK, caused a lot of people to start speculating that Twitter would be charging users to have commercial account.  To be fair Biz moved quickly to confirm that Twitter will never charge users or companies for an account.  So just how are they planning to monetise all that traffic then? Continue reading →

The Real-Time Web

by Mearo on February 9, 2009 in Internet, Social Media, Twitter with 1 Comment
Hudson River

If a huge news story breaks, where are you going to go first? Switch on the TV, try BBC News, CNN, maybe. But what if you are at work…….? Ok, let’s say a plane crashes into New York’s Hudson River? Like many the first port of call for such an event is the web. Now we all know that 90% of people are probably going to start at Google. The problem is Google has on average a 1-72hr spidering lag depending on the site in question and it’s links / authority. So, if Google hasn’t got anything, what next, Google News, BBC, CNN online versions. Fair enough, there might be a holding page with minimal details. Now consider this, if you had navigated to search.twitter.com on 15th January 2009, you would have seen this picture come up. Continue reading →

Location Based Services

by Mearo on February 9, 2009 in Featured, Internet, Location, Mobile, Social Media with No comments
Location Based Services

Location based services are for me going to be one of the next big things in the digital space. The only thing is I’m not sure when! I’ve been following the area closely since I heard about Loopt 9 months ago. In the online advertising business we always say in January “this is going to be the year for Mobile”, and it never is. These two fields are inextricably linked and as soon as the latter gets critical mass then so will the former.

So what is a location based service. It is a service (i.e. social networking) accessible through mobile devices that utilises the ability to geographically triangulate the device location anywhere in the globe, i.e. on your Facebook news feed, imagine seeing, “Joe Bloggs is in Leicester Square, London”. Social Networking is going to be the thing that drives this. Kids at school, people lost at festivals, mates in the vicinity, the possibilities are endless. But the possibilities also extend in so many commercial ways that brands with retail presences must be liking their lips at the very thought. Then there’s this idea of social graffiti, i.e. leaving geo-tags on restaurants, shops, etc, that your friends can see, share and comment on. Imagine I want to go to a local restaurant, call it up on Google Maps, and I see a menu from the restaurant, and comments left from 3 of my friends who have been there. We all know that recommendations are that much more influential if they are from your friends. Applications like Brightkite are already doing this in a simplistic way, check out the video below. Continue reading →