We are moving to our new Auckland office today:

36 Williamson Avenue, Ponsonby, Auckland

This is an exciting move for us and we look forward to showing you all the new space soon.

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We are also opening a Wellington office this month! Details to follow shortly.

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the Uber:savvy event this morning to kick off the yMedia Challenge.

"the yMedia Challenge is a 2 week competition designed to connect media students with not-for-profit organisations."

I think my presentation went down okay, I got lots of questions at the end, but they did offer small bottles of 42 Below Vodka to anyone who asked one, so that might not be a fair reflection of interest from the audience!

I met some interesting people though:

Mike Brown who is the organiser of Webstock, easily the essential local event for the web community which is coming to Wellington in February. Very much looking forward to that one. Mike was the first speaker and did a fascinating intro into how people really drive web 2.0, not the technology.

Nigel Parker from Microsoft who gave an excellent overview of the emerging ways in which digital media can be consumed. This included demos of some of the latest Microsoft technologies including Siverlight, PhotoSynth and Microsoft Home Server. You can not understate the amount of investment Microsoft puts into research and development as well as the developer community.

I didn’t get a change to meet her personally, but Janet Mazenier, Programme Director, for the government’s Digital Strategy gave a speech. She admitted it was very hard to activate progress web projects, even within the organisation that is supposed to be leading the country. Three months to get a blog live. I can’t actually find the blog though. I think this organisation can make a real difference, if they can provide direction for government departments and state owned enterprises around blog policies. Tell the public sector that having a blog where people might make a comment that disagrees with your view is okay. This is still a democracy isn’t it?

It was well worth giving up a Saturday morning for this, everyone I met had something interesting to say and the organisers Pamela, Adele and Jade at yMedia are all exceptionally friendly people to deal with…plus they gave me Vodka as a thank you.

Technorati Tags: ymedia

All Blacks lose to France and drop out of the Rugby World Cup 2007 in the quarter-final. Ouch, isn’t that the worst result yet?

So how do New Zealand deal with losing what most consider to be “our cup”. They blame someone else. This is what New Zealand does best.

Don’t get me wrong, the referee did a terrible job in the first half, and that second French try was from a forward pass, but the All Blacks just didn’t step up. The French were dogged in defense but are an unremarkable team. These guys got whipped by Argentina remember!

Today it will be the referee, but in the coming weeks, the coaches will start to be brought into the blame game. The controversial rotation policy will be touted as a major strategic mistake, and some serious questions will be asked about the decision to leave Doug Howlett out of the game.

Blog Posts

• Referee win against the All Blacks
• All Blacks lose RWC to crap ref

Technorati Tags: all blacks, allblacks, rugbyworldcup, rugbyworldcup2007, rwc2007

Google Custom Search Engine allows anyone to create a search engine that searches only specific sites you choose and/or specific topics, languages…in short all of the things you can do with Google Advanced Search filters and operators.

What does this mean?

• Create a custom search engine for your website (or sites) that uses Google’s infrastructure but only searches what you want
• Pay for the Business Edition which starts at $100 USD per year for sites with less than 5,000 pages. This will allow you to present the search results page in your own site with no ads and no Google branding.
• Create a community vertical search engine that multiple people contribute to. You can open this up to anyone or restrict it to invited contributors

Here is a quick one I have put together:

Check out some more examples and related posts:

• Google Custom Search: Setting The Bar For Vertical Search Engines
• Google’s Custom Search Engines run amuck!

I have to ask, why would you try and build your own search engine ever again?

For an alternative and more community focused take on vertical search you should check out Swiki from the New Zealand search geniuses at Eurekster.

Technorati Tags: google, googlecse, swiki

Posted by mobile phone:
I’m in Wellington for the rest of this week. Everyone always complains about the wind and rain, but most times I am down here (like today), it is sunny and very pleasant.I like it here, it seems to be the law that there must be a cafe or coffee cart every 15 metres, all my meetings seem to take minutes to walk to and they have good natured taxi drivers and public transport (currently mo’blogging from the train).

I found this in a whiskey distillery in Scotland. I think it is from the Victorian era. Hilarious!

I have been in the UK for over 2 weeks now and am astounded at how much the issue of carbon footprint/credits/neutrality has just exploded since I was here last in January. It is everywhere. Maybe I’m overly sensitive as I’m far from carbon neutral at the moment with the amount of flying I am doing. I realised my luggage has Gold frequent flyer tags on them and I’m wondering if these are like fur coats? WIll I get protesters coming up to me in the street and throwing a cup of soot in my face to teach me a lesson for my garish display of carbon deficit?

I can’t help feeling an overwhelming sense of deja vu. In the late 80’s I was living in the UK and the issue of unleaded petrol swept the nation seemingly overnight. It was suddenly the very worst social faux pas you could do. People desperately converted their cars to accept unleaded or traded them in for new cars, hopefully with a catalytic convertor.

The problem I have is that scientists promised me global warming would be well in effect by now when I was at school. It is nearly July in the UK and it is freezing!

Luckily the airlines now have an answer for you. Along with the ability to check-in online, change your seat etc, you can now “Offset Your Carbon Emissions”. My carbon emissions, don’t try and make me your scapegoat? This is a screenshot from BA.com and the link to Offset your carbon emissions doesn’t actually work. Oh well, I’ll just need to live with my carbon deficit fueled guilt a little while longer.

Stu Parker has a lot more to say on the subject with his post “Want to save the planet? Buy a HUMMER.“.

Technorati Tags: carbon credits

Apple Unveils New Product-Unveiling Product

SAN FRANCISCO—Apple claims the iLaunch can garner the same amount of press attention as a major scientific discovery, high court ruling, celebrity meltdown, or natural disaster at 200 times the speed of a traditional media-fostered launch.

Thanks Andy for pointing me in the direction of this.

Andy Lark has just posted that Rupert Murdoch told the Digital Hollywood conference in New York last week about MySpace:

“It’s extraordinary, the advertising has gone from basically nothing to, on a net basis, $25 million a month and growing every month - almost 30 per cent every quarter,”

He added:

“Next year we’ll be kicking in with search revenue from Google so together with IGN, we’ll be getting close to a billion dollars of revenue.”

MySpace is huge, you have to be looking at this as a marketing option, especially if you are targeting the 15-25 demographic.

Technorati Tags: myspace

Here is my summary of Shawn Gold’s presentation at ad:tech Sydney today. Shawn is the Chief Marketing Officer for MySpace.com, the world’s biggest social network. How big you ask? Well;

• 0 - 150+ million registered users in less than 3 years.
• Number One in the US in terms of page impressions, downloads and average time spent (an indicator of how “sticky” the content is). Other sites have more unique visitors (those with much wider appeal such as CNN.com etc) but no one can match them in terms of actual content delivered.
• Number 5 in Australia of all websites, Number 1 based on the same metrics as in the US.
• 400 billion page views per month, over 100 billion ads served.
• Currently in 7 countries, with internationalised sites, and will be in 20 countries by year end 2007, including China.

What advertising options do they offer now to advertisers beyond just standard online ads?

• The movie industry were really the first to adopt MySpace seriously as an advertising option by setting up dedicated MySpace pages with video trailers and allow other users to comment on and become friends of the movie. A movie studio can spend between US$1 - 3 million in a period of a couple of weeks to promote a new release through targeted advertising on the network. They can get instant market feedback and research on a movie as soon as it is released via comments on their MySpace page.
• Bands and comedians have used MySpace to build and maintain a loyal fan base. It is becoming common for them to offer exclusive access to events to just their MySpace friends. The Beastie Boys recently did a show recently where only their MySpace friends could gain entry.
• MySpace creates originally branded video content that can then be promoted through the network.
• MySpace can promote original video content. Dove Skincare in Canada created a 1 minute video, did a very small TVC campaign and then pushed it entirely online, using MySpace and other tools. They got 20-30 million unique views for a fraction of the dollars it would have cost to get via traditional air time.
• They can offer highly targeted campaigns e.g. if you wanted to advertise to all hip hop DJ’s in the US market or just California, they can do this.
• If you have a MySpace page and have built up a significant number of friends, then MySpace can run demographic profiles on your friends, given you deep metrics on who is interested in your product/brand.

What’s next? Well like everyone, they are trying to figure out how to monetise consumer generated video content. I was interested to discover that MySpace delivers more video content than YouTube or Google Video. Videos with “hotspots” with hyperlinks, branded/”wrapped” video players and pre and post rolls are all being experimented with.

What are the key areas of focus for MySpace?

1. Self Expression Platform - Growing their toolkit of widgets and tools to allow more consumer generated content to be put up on MySpace. They really believe that this idea of self-expressionion, 21st century cyber-hippies if you will, are the key to their success. Other previous social networks, such as Friendster, which was the basis for their business model, failed because they were very restrictive on the content you could publish and in what format. For example they wouldn’t allow you to customise the look of your Friendster page.
2. Communications Platform - Various tools such as instant message, text, Voice over IP, video calling, to enable their users to communicate easily with one another.
3. Content Aggregation - They already have massive communities for movies, music and comedians, they intend to pool more content in specific communities such as fashion.
4. Marketer Platform - Tools for marketers and agencies to more easily advertise and run/analyse campaigns on their site. Importantly, all advertising and the type of advertising will always be elective to the user to avoid the impact being diluted over time.
5. Safety & Education - MySpace gets a bad rap from people about the dangers of meeting people online. Confidence in the site is critical to the site and they have a big team working on this area. Every photo (about 5 million per day!) and video(about 40,000 per day) posted to the site is looked at by a human being to screen out pornographic or hateful material.
6. Internationalization - Continuing to roll out MySpace to different countries in different languages with regional specialisations.

Here are some final soundbites:

Andy Worhol said “Everyone is famous for 15 minutes” well today “Everyone is famous for 15 people”

The arty kid in a small time who used to feel isolated because he coudn’t relate to the friends in his local school can now connect with thousands of like-minded people around the world. It’s a great time to be lonely on the Internet.

Technorati Tags: myspace