One More Nail In the Coffin, Financial Times Switches to Blog Format
Peep it here.
If I owned a Marketing Research Group, I might be a little concerned right now. Ask500people.com is a new site allowing users to pose questions to a global community. It's currently only in the beta stage, and is still fairly limited in that you can only receive simple yes or no responses; essentially making it more like a polling tool. But it works in real time and is pretty damn cool. DISCLAIMER: Currently, the majority of questions being polled appear fairly pedantic.
But imagine the potential if you could upload custom content and develop targeted inquiries based on participant profiles. ie. A movie studio could upload the trailer for an unreleased film, and get feedback from users who have indicated that they are "movie buffs". Or Kraft Foods could upload potential Macaroni box package designs and ask mom's which one's they'd be more likely to buy. Could be cool.
CloudTag is just such a great word. I forget when it first was that I glanced at the Fuzzy Puzzle categories cloudtag and realized that it was a fairly accurate representation of the crap that I'm into. This makes perfect sense of course, but I'd never really given it too much conscious thought. Admittedly, I was surprised that "Music" or "Writing" weren't larger categories, but other than that, it's pretty much all there.
I began thinking of the cloudtag as a kind of self portrait composed of relevant words, and I also began paying more attention to cloudtags in general. While I understand that there is a logic (TAG) behind the technology used to assemble cloudtags ... the nature of the way a cloud tag forms is fairly organic (CLOUD); and this is what often makes them so interesting, beautiful and relevant. This is a cloudtag from today's NY Times.
I love art books, but unfortunately you can't by 'em online. Why you ask? Because when choosing an art book, you want to spend some time with it, flipping around and enjoying all the pretty pitchers before you drop all that hard-earned scratch; and alas this is not an option on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. (Amazon provides page views via the Look Inside feature, but it's very limited)
Looky Book is a great new site devoted to children's books. The site allows users to virtually "flip" through the pages of each volume, and it provides a surprisingly satisfying experience. I'd love to see this functionality blown out to fine art books, comics,and graphic novels. Via Drawn