Friday, July 31, 2009

Fight For Your Animal Rights!

Seriously, I love animals and I especially love when the media covers ridiculous animal stories. I'm amazed by Mr. Clucky, the famous South Beach rooster who has just been ordered to leave the town. This poor little guy was rescued by local Mark Buckley and then went on to become an icon of South Beach street life. Now Mr.Clucky is getting kicked out of his home because he is classified as "poultry". Mr. Clucky is not poultry, poultry does not ride around on the handlebars of a bicycle!

This court footage is insanity, Mr Clucky's owner tries to claim Mr. Clucky as his witness, the judge is clearly not going to be having that!


Mr. Clucky's has his own business card!



Mr. Clucky's everyday routine, what a life!


I live for this kind of story, a bicycle riding rooster with his own business cards in court fighting for his right to stay in Miami! You can't make this stuff up. The judge ruled against Mr. Clucky and said he had to leave the town. Last I saw Mr. Clucky's owner will try to go back to court and fight for the rooster. If they don't win you might soon be getting a new animal celebrity in your home town.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Sorry Bing

I'm sorry Bing, yesterday I kind of bashed you saying you were nothing more than "Google with a his res image in the background". And I was wrong about how your are marketing yourself, you are claiming to be a "decision engine" which I think is a good concept.

This morning I went to go look up some information on the government trade in program CARS, so I fired up the Google (my home page) and searched away. In one of those "ah ha" moments I realized that for more than any other reason I go to Google out of habit. If there is information on the internet that Google does not pick up (or isn't in the first five search results) I'm never going to see it, and that's not good!

As I'm writing this post I'm on Bing searching for information on CARS and I'm really enjoying some of Bing's features. Check out the search history on the left side of the page which shows I searched for the terms honda fit and cash for clunkers .


Bin'g search history feature is convenient and it was effortless to discover. Google's search history is the weird thing that populates words when you type something in the search bar. It's much easier to just click your previous searches and get the results, no typing involved.

I was really feeling bad about my comments regarding Bing's homepage and I wanted to show something I left out of my previous post. The image in the background on Bing changes (at least every day) and when you move your cursor over certain parts of the image you get little windows which display facts related to the picture and there are links to learn more about the facts.


This little window has a fact about the defeat of Napolean in 1815 and has a link to videos about the battle of Waterloo. At first I thought this was really cheesy and didn't click the link, but the more I scrolled over this the more I realized that I totally wanted to watch a video about an epic historic battle. This feature did not dissapoint, there were tons of interesting videos and articles, and it was a nice way to break up the boring internet search. I can almost see myself getting excited for what tomorrow's picture might be and what I can learn from it. I'm going to give Bing a second chance, I might even make it my home page for a while and hopefully find some new things that Google doesn't offer.

Again I am sorry Bing, I was wrong, you are different from Google and whether you succed or not I should give you credit for trying to do something different.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Bing to take on Google?

It has been unofficially announced that Microsoft and Yahoo are joining forces in online search and advertising to try and compete with Google. The AllThingsDigital blog and Advertising Age broke this story on Tuesday and there is expected to be an official announcement within 24 hours. It looks like Microsoft's new search engine Bing be powering the Yahoo search engine.

I have used Bing a couple of times since it was released and kind of like it. It's intuitive in the way it offers you related topics to what you search for. I think that Bing has a chance to be successful.................until Google Wave comes along, and then you can forget about anyone using anything besides Google.

Bing's slogan is "Bing and Decide", which implies that Bing will offer tools to help you make decisions while searching online. I agree with Microsoft that thie best part about Bing is the travel and local information it provides, the problem is that this information is not located on the homepage and people might be gone to Google before they even find it. The search engine is not star of Bing, so why even try and take on Google search? Microsoft should be pushing Bing as a decision engine, not a search engine.

Take a look at these screen shots of the Bing homepage and then what I call the "decision page".

Bing's current homepage


Bing "descision page"


Let's face it, the current Bing homepage is Google with a Hi-Res image in the background instead of a whimsicle cartoon. But the Bing "decision page" is it's own unique portal to information about Travel, Shopping, Health and Local information. This has everyything from "How many calories do you burn reading this" to traffic updates on your freeways. The best part is you can still search the web from the "decision page". Bing needs to scrap the homepage and market the product as a Descision Engine..........really they should take on that phrase and not even mess with trying to out search enginge Google.

I hope I'm wrong about Bing because competition is good, but once Google Wave comes along there won't be any reason to go anywhere besides Google when you want to do an online search or communicate with others. Social sites like Twitter will still be fine but trying to present yourself as a rival search engine to Google is going to be hard. Really though I am pulling for sites like Bing to at least present a reason to go somewhere besides Google, untill then we will all still be Googling for a long time.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Log into Yahoo to log into Facebook?

Yahoo now has a new homepage which features a navigation bar on the left hand side where you can add website applications. The new layout is nice and clean, and is great improvement from the previous version of Yahoo.


Ok so here is my problem with the new website, for some reason I am really creeped out that when you scroll over the Facebook icon it gives you the option to log into Facebook. Once you are logged in you can updated your Facebook status right from the Yahoo application. Is it me or does this seem like a stunt to try and get people to go to Yahoo when they want to go to Facebook?
From what I can find from a quick search Yahoo is owned by shareholders of the company and Facebook is privately owned. So does Facebook see this as free advertising? Is Facebook involved in this somehow? Unless Facebook developed this application I think this is a step toward Monopolization on Yahoo‘s part (not too say Google is any better).

This is different than downloading an application for you iphone because you own your iphone, once you have the app you can use it as you please. To access this new feature of Yahoo you need to have an active account that you are logged in on. My fear (and what I’m sure is Yahoo’s goal) is that people will eventually stop going to their favorite websites and use Yahoo as a portal to access them. This would mean much more exposure for Yahoo and less other websites.

I need to keep an eye on this issue because something about Yahoo even being able to host these other site applications just doesn’t seem right, particularly from a legal standpoint. For now that’s all I got, hopefully more information about this will come up soon.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Blowin up on Youtbe

Lately I have been asking myself the why certain Youtube videos "blow up" and become wildly successful. I think I discovered the answer to my own question while typing this post. Lets talk about Kevin and Jill Heinz's program tossing, aisle rolling, bride rocking wedding entrance which has been seen by households around the world. You know what video I'm talking about, you've seen it, I don't need to post it.

So what is it that made this video so successfully and blow up all over the media world? The sweet Chris Brown music? No. The awesome dance moves? No (there's thousands of better dance videos on youtube). Was it those guys throwing the programs up in the air? No. (programs take a long time to make!) Maybe the sunglasses, No. (Who doesn't have a pair of stupid sunglasses? So what made this video such a huge hit?

Like Susan Boyle before them, the Heinz's wedding video is so popular because it broke the mold on what is socially exeptable. Your wedding day is a once in a lifetime event, your not supposed to run down the aisle like a fool dancing to R&B music (not to say it hasn't been done before the existence of Youtube). The Heinz's didn't care about wedding tradition, and lets face it we all loved watching them do their dance down the aisle. It's the same reason why Susan Boyle was such a hit, the world had never seen anything liker her before! There have been countless numbers of tall, beatiful, young women who have gone completely unoticed in singing competitions, but the entire world was captivated by an older Scottish women who looks nothing like your average pop superstar.

So keeping with the tradition of the Heinzs and Susan Boyles of the Youtube world I would like to share my favorite video of someone doing something I have never seen before. This Youtube video was posted around the time of the first installment of the new Transformers movie. This video hasn't exactly "blown up" and become an internet sensation but it's one of my personal favorites. Enjoy this video of Soundwave trying to function as Transformer in a world of humans.



Friday, July 24, 2009

New Media, New Opportunities

I am actively searching for a job right now and today I came across an opening for a "Social Media Specialist"at CREE.
I have never heard of this position before but the name alone got me very excited. I am amazed by social media and the impact it has on all of us, check out this job description taken directly from CREE's career site.


Summary:
Do you Tweet and FB? Can you text faster than you type? Are you LinkedIn while you YIM? Are you ROTFL that Cree has a job where you can do all that? Cree is looking for a social media maven to join our Corporate Marketing team. You'll help us refine the strategy to reach our customers through all available online channels. You’ll also help produce content for various websites and microsites; drive new channels of communications and keep our online presence up-to-date. And last, but certainly not least, you’ll assist in online PR activities.

How amazing is this! Not only do you get to Tweet and "FB" (you know what it stands for) at work, but you get paid to do it. The term "keep our online presence up to date" basically means logining into the companies Twitter and FB accounts and doing a whole lot of social networking. You might be reading this and wondering how you never heard of this position before, I know I was.

Now that I have looked at this job opening a couple of times I'm actually surprised there aren't more positions like this. Twitter and FB have become batelfields for media companies, with everything from dating websites to job search websites competing for space and trying to keep their company on the most current pages.

So what does it mean that there are positions made specifically for things like Tweeting? It means that companies have to adapt to the changes media brings and they will have to hire people to help them adapt. This is good news for people who are ahead of the curve when it comes to online media, looks like all that Tweeting might pay off for someone.

Doin the wave

Not a sports game wave, or a surfing wave, but a social media wave!


This google Wave preview video released last month has done a good job promoting the product and creating hype. I mean here I am, and average guy on a google blog writing about a google product before its even released. How's that for free marketing?

To me the most outstanding and scrary feature about Wave is how it updates in real time. I'm blown away at the idea of having a wave open, typing in the wave and having other members of the wave seeing my message as I type it. I'm also really impressed that you can drag and drop pictures right onto the Wave and they show up for everyone in the Wave. The cool thing though about Wave is we are all so familiar now with social media sites and applications that it probably won't take too long to learn to use Wave.

I'm not sure yet if I'm excited for google Wave or not. I kind of like my simple emails, and I enjoy logging in to sites like Facebook to see what people have been up to since the last time I checked in. Unlike Twitter, where I was completley reluctant to start Tweeting, I am going to try and "hop on the Wave" as soon as it comes out. I'm sure as soon as google Wave is released we will all be "Waving", "Riding the Wave", "Cowabungaing"?

Whatever we end up calling it when we use google Wave it will be fun, open up new possibilities for communition, and I will see you there.