Just downloaded and installed Flock. This post is to brandUNITY blog using Flock blog editor while facebook is open. brandUNITY blog on http://brandUNITY.com/blogs

eMarketer reports that 25-26% of internet users have a blog they update at least once a month and the number will continue to rise. That’s close to 30 million blogs on the internet updated monthly. An estimated at 96.6 million Internet users read a blog at least once a month.

In other numbers, more women than men are internet users by about 7 million and online usage patterns vary significantly by gender. Men are more prone to using mobile devises, spend more time on busy sites, and make more use of search engines.

Take away –  if the audience is women, make the internet experience less busy and cluttered than that targeted to males. For males, added more reading content, more diversions with advertising, and make provisions for mobile.

http://bit.ly/Y18iT

http://bit.ly/bTWBJ

Among the fastest growing companies durng this economy are social media app developers. The question is, will people playing Mob Wars on Facebook pay real money to get a virtual pistol or bag of cash, winning favors with the Godfather?

Facebook has grown to 200 and 250 million monthly users and earned $300 million during 2008. It has raised more the $400 million in funding and its largest investor is Microsoft at $240 million in 2007 for a 1.6% stake in the company.

Revenue streams come from advertisers. Developer revenues come from advertisers who pay them to create apps that will engage social media users with free games and utilities expressly to increase brand awareness.

One example cited by Money.CNN.com is Vancouver, WA based Papa Murphy’s. A Papa Murphy widget on Facebook gave free pizzas to anyone becoming a “fan”  on the Papa Murphy Facebook page. Users clicked-thru using the widget to the Papa Murphy’s website to get their free pizza coupon.

VentureBeat: MORE>>

Money.CNN.com: MORE>>

Twitter’s ability to distribute information in real-time is what fuels its potential to change the way we communicate. It is particularly effective at communicating immediate occurrences from a vast number of sources. Posted information could include situations that have local, regional, or worldwide impact.

Twitscoop is a third-party app, built by lollicode that collects twits in realtime, ranks them in frequency and by topic to reveal top discussion trends in the moment, and displays them in a word cloud. Software like this, collecting and organizing the realtime information that twitter yields, is a technology trend that is changing the internet and how we use it.

TechCrunch: MORE>>Technorati

We have to agree with the TechCrunch post about the importance of Twitter to the web - posted today by MG Seiger:

“Simply put, we (TechCrunch) write about Twitter so often because right now, it matters. From news organizations to movie stars, from earthquakes to fires, from Facebook to Google — everyone seems to be talking about, to or with Twitter. In an era of mass communication, it is the latest medium. And it’s fundamentally changing the ways in which people interact with others using the web. What you may view as a stupidly simple service with no real point, I view as one of the few inspirational products in bleak times.”

Full post MG Sieger, TechCrunch: MORE

brandUNITY just released this great YouTube video on website search: http://bit.ly/unxyZ.

BreakingNews, on Twitter, posted the Bank of America Ken Lewis ouster just now with reference to Associated Press.

Checking Google Search via “Ken Lewis”,  the story is first found on the Reuters site as an article written by Jonathan Stempel.The 4-hour annual B of A meeting was this afternoon, the post hit Twitter minutes ago at 2:57 pm Pacific or nearly 5:57 pm Eastern.

Searching Google for “Ken Lewis Associated Press” returns a top link to the Wall Street Journal, posted at 12:30 pm Eastern, five hours ago, but the article does not mention the Lewis ouster. The annual meeting would have been starting at that point. Next link on the Google search results are to AP articles posted on Google Hosted News, 34 minutes ago by AP journalists by Augstums and Weiss, with ousted information.

Depends on where you’re looking, but @BreakingNews on Twitter is pretty fast. Reuters dates it 5:55 EDT: http://www.reuters.com

http://www.google.com/hostednews

Technorati Tags:
Bank of America Ouster, Ken Lewis Ouster, Twitter Speed, Twitter Adoption rate, Getting News Fast

April 20, 2009 - The 2008 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report showed that digital video advertising more than doubled in just one year-totaling $734 million for the year.

In other statistics, researcher eMarketer had projected that 2008 would reach $1.4 billion spend on ads in online social networks. Actual results were $1.175 billion or a 33.8% increase over the previous year. Projections are more modest for 2009, at a 10% expected increase over 2008.

Businesses and marketers seem to be re-analyzing their advertising methods, changing the mix, trying a different set of channels in their campaign planning.

IAB: http://www.iab.net/dv09_recap

eMarketer: http://www.iab.net/insights_research/530422/1675

Exploring desktop twitter widgets here, since organizing information on Twitter is a bit limited. A new beta worth noting is Seesmic Desktop, with multiple columns, shortcuts for organizing topical posts and for building user lists. Documentations says you’ll be able to directly post web cams soon.  Can post images directly to twitpic with drag and drop.

Seesmic acquired Twhirl, another Twitter desktop widget, in March 08:

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/seesmic

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/twhirl

Newly posted whitepaper How To on blogging includes resource list and blogging demographics. If the goal is increased site traffic, improved response, and expanded web presence and following, then the benefits of adding an active blog with RSS feeds can’t be understated. By extending outward from your blog and website through your RSS feeds, your social network becomes the pathway to your target audience, reaching out and bringing back interest and relationships to your site and mission. Whitepaper>>

Linking automatically from RSS Feed generated from this blog to Twitter, via Twitterfeed.

Normally when we write for this brandUNITY blog, we scan our favorite news sites, looking for new tech topics to get excited about. But this afternoon, we began with Google Blog Search and Technorati which filter the most read blog posts to the top of their lists. Look what popped up, on a blog, before it got written up on the regular newspaper sites:

At the national Association of Broadcasters conference today, Adobe Systems announced a new version of Flash that will deliver HD video to televisions that are connected to the internet.

On PaidContent More: >>

Adobe Press Release:>>

Earlier this year, Yahoo created a “widget engine” for Samsung HDTVs, that allows users to navigate websites like Yahoo Flickr, Yahoo News, YouTube, Showtime, and more from a TV.

More from PaidContent: >>

Sun, Novell, Oracle were the illustrious YouTubes and Googles of the 1980s, pioneering computer networks, paving the way for the internet. Novell became a top leader in the emergence of local area networks with its netware thin ethernet LAN that could hook up every desktop computer relatively simply. While Oracle and Novell partnered to provide distributed databses, Apple struggled in the early 1990s and Sun became a star with its high-end, powerful desktop workstations that every digital engineer coveted.

That Oracle would now buy Sun, primarily to acquire its JAVA programming language, suggests how unpredictable the next era of mergers and accusations may be.

Oracle Acquires Sun >>

Interesting that YouTube announced today that it will be airing full-length videos, placing it in direct competition with Hulu.com, TheWB.com, CBS Interactive, Fancast.com, and Disney Online, among others showing full-feature movies online.

YouTube Movies >>

Recent studies show that Mozilla Firefox is continuing to gain popularity over other browsers. Internet Explorer 7.0 is currently used by over 65% of the market while Firefox captures only 20%.

IE 7.0, the web developers’ scourge, was released in 2006.Positive comments from reviewers noted its improvement over IE 6.0. Internet Explorer 7.0 came pre-installed on most PCs giving it a leg-up on market share. Its improved and embedded RSS Reader was reputed to be comparable in quality to the best available: Google Reader, Yahoo!, Newsgator.

Internet Explorer 7.0’s liberal interpretation of HTML standards left many webmaster’s in distress, however.

Last month, the much awaited IE 8.0 was released for free download. It resulted in a flood of complaints, most users suggesting it was not actually ready to come out of beta.  It does claim stricter adherence to HTML standards than in past versions, and gives you a “compatibility button” that you can click on when you have trouble viewing a website.

We’ll give it time to iron out its “issues” before commenting.

In January, Opera of Norway filed an anti-trust suite against Microsoft because IE is included in Windows. Google followed suit in Feburary.

Seattle Times Story