Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Google news and the Time fifty coolest web sites
Good morning and welcome to Cybersurf – four minutes of the latest information on the internet. I am Steven Lang.
Yesterday, I attended a conference of the International Marketing Council of South Africa. The aim of the gathering was to develop marketing communication strategies for the country ahead of the Fifa World Cup soccer tournament.
The meeting itself was inspiring, but I still believe the slogan – South Africa “Alive with Possibility” is vague and tame - but if you would like to find out more about our preparations for marketing this country visit the International Marketing Council web site at imc.org.za – that is imc.org.za
It is a reasonable site that encourages feedback. They said they wanted new ideas – so please find a better pay-off line than “Alive with Possibility” and send it to them.
(T) More news from Google is that they appear to have updated quite a few South African photos on Google Earth – the pictures are still quite old – probably from NASA’s deep archive – but hey, now I can see what my house looks like from way up there.
Secondly, Google has just released an online version of spreadsheets – you can find it by going along to spreadsheets.google.com – very easy spreadsheets.google.com
And you will be able to work on a spreadsheet with someone in another place or you can make the spreadsheet available to a whole team.
And still with Google – on their web site they are now advertising job vacancies in South Africa – it looks like they’ll be opening a local office soon.
Now I’ve kept the cool bit for last. Time magazine has released its latest version of the fifty coolest web sites of the past twelve months and the list reveals an interesting shift in the way people are using the web. And perhaps more important just who is using the web and what for.
The complete list for 2006 which you can find at time dot com – does not rank the sites in any particular order – nor does it appear to define specific criteria for what is cool. It does however, split the fifty sites up into seven different categories with interesting titles such as “travel and Real Estate” or “staying connected” and “time wasters”.
The time waster category for your information has sites dedicated to juicy gossip, computer games and other guilty pleasures – that description was, by the way, taken straight from the Time web site.
The big winners in this year’s list are the sites dedicated to sharing video clips, and personal information on the web. It seems to be all about creating the online community – but it’s not really the online community that most businesses want to us to have – rather its just teens and twenty-somethings sharing their personal experiences with others.
For example, Youtube dot com has lots of different sections, but what it is really about is sharing video clips online. I think most of the contributors take funny videos at home and then put them on you tube dot com to share with friends and family.
It is sort what www.flickr.com does for still images.
A big online community is the myspace.com site with a pay-off line that says – myspace.com a place for friends. It has blogs, chatrooms, games, music videos and the list goes on.
We don’t have time to go into any more sites so if you would like to catch-up on any of the addresses you might have missed, click along to the Cybersurf blog which you will find at Cybersurf.blogspot.com one more time Cybersurf.blogspot.com
Thanks for listening and please tune in again next Wednesday same time same place for more on the best of the web.
Yesterday, I attended a conference of the International Marketing Council of South Africa. The aim of the gathering was to develop marketing communication strategies for the country ahead of the Fifa World Cup soccer tournament.
The meeting itself was inspiring, but I still believe the slogan – South Africa “Alive with Possibility” is vague and tame - but if you would like to find out more about our preparations for marketing this country visit the International Marketing Council web site at imc.org.za – that is imc.org.za
It is a reasonable site that encourages feedback. They said they wanted new ideas – so please find a better pay-off line than “Alive with Possibility” and send it to them.
(T) More news from Google is that they appear to have updated quite a few South African photos on Google Earth – the pictures are still quite old – probably from NASA’s deep archive – but hey, now I can see what my house looks like from way up there.
Secondly, Google has just released an online version of spreadsheets – you can find it by going along to spreadsheets.google.com – very easy spreadsheets.google.com
And you will be able to work on a spreadsheet with someone in another place or you can make the spreadsheet available to a whole team.
And still with Google – on their web site they are now advertising job vacancies in South Africa – it looks like they’ll be opening a local office soon.
Now I’ve kept the cool bit for last. Time magazine has released its latest version of the fifty coolest web sites of the past twelve months and the list reveals an interesting shift in the way people are using the web. And perhaps more important just who is using the web and what for.
The complete list for 2006 which you can find at time dot com – does not rank the sites in any particular order – nor does it appear to define specific criteria for what is cool. It does however, split the fifty sites up into seven different categories with interesting titles such as “travel and Real Estate” or “staying connected” and “time wasters”.
The time waster category for your information has sites dedicated to juicy gossip, computer games and other guilty pleasures – that description was, by the way, taken straight from the Time web site.
The big winners in this year’s list are the sites dedicated to sharing video clips, and personal information on the web. It seems to be all about creating the online community – but it’s not really the online community that most businesses want to us to have – rather its just teens and twenty-somethings sharing their personal experiences with others.
For example, Youtube dot com has lots of different sections, but what it is really about is sharing video clips online. I think most of the contributors take funny videos at home and then put them on you tube dot com to share with friends and family.
It is sort what www.flickr.com does for still images.
A big online community is the myspace.com site with a pay-off line that says – myspace.com a place for friends. It has blogs, chatrooms, games, music videos and the list goes on.
We don’t have time to go into any more sites so if you would like to catch-up on any of the addresses you might have missed, click along to the Cybersurf blog which you will find at Cybersurf.blogspot.com one more time Cybersurf.blogspot.com
Thanks for listening and please tune in again next Wednesday same time same place for more on the best of the web.
