Rss @ MindSay

That actually looks a lot better elsewhere than my other RSS feeds. They look like this on Facebook Notes (compare the two entries):

This post is to see if that image above will show up in the feeds.

So, that Security Level info, will go on the bottom of the public entries. And I just might add Andreux's current music thing, like I do on my Friends-Only entries.


:: Security Level: Low (Public / Everybody)  
:: Current Music: Porno for Pyros - Pets
:: Current Mood: Bored

I'm sure a few of you noticed that in the beginning of every entry that I post, I always add the "Security Level" info of an entry. I'm slowly learning that when I do that, the RSS feed is extremely shortened to the point where you will only see the "Security Level" info, and that's it.  I noticed this on Facebook and Google Reader.

It's a good thing, in many ways, if I want to draw people to actually visit this blog instead of reading my public posts elsewhere.  Unfortunately, I don't really care.

So this entry is just a test to see what would happen if I placed that "Security Level" information at the end of the entry.

The rest of the other security levels will still have them on the top right corner of those entries (right underneath the date). Those entries don't show up in RSS Readers anyway. 

So here goes:




Update:
Ok, I think here's what I'm probably going to do. I'm probably going to remove that part that says "Security Level: Low (Public / Everybody)" from all public entries.  Either that, or I'll start posting them on the bottom right or left of the public entries.  Any suggestions?


I'm probaby going to put that thing here, next to the vote button.


 Security Level: Low (Public / Everybody) 

My good friend Mindy (Hi Mindy!) and I were talking about the fact that she hardly ever reads my blog. She wants too, but she never knows the link and she uses too many computers, so she never has it bookmarked. I told her I would send her the link again and she said she'd bookmark it on all of her computers.

 

Then, she said to me, "I wish there was a way I could know when it was updated, so I don't have to check it every day."

 

That made me think about RSS. It was something I was vaguely familiar with, but have never tried. I wasn't entirely sure it would work for what Mindy wanted, so I checked with my favorite resource....a librarian. I contacted my good buddy Meg, a fellow librarian and technology guru. (Stop by and visit her new site....it's awesome!)

 

She explained to me what RSS is and how it works. Essentially, it is a single stopping point where you can put all your links to updatable information (news sites, blogs, wikis, etc.) and the feeder will go out and visit each site you add and then lets you know when the site is updated.

 

So I contacted Mindy (busy girl that she is) and shared this with her. She now has an account with Google Reader (or try Bloglines) and she has added my blog.

 

It will be nice to have her stopping by. So thanks to Meg for the tech assistance and welcome to Mindy who will now be a regular reader, which increases my circulation. Win-win.

How the two classes represented in Web 2.0 websites determines the websites' business model.

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[+] Class barrier in the brick-and-mortar world

 

As the core of Web 2.0 is community, which is a topic related to sociology, we may need to talk about the concept of upper-class and lower-class societies. It is an important concept because how the two classes are reflected in Web 2.0 websites would determine how websites should shape their business models.

 

The two classes mentioned above can be associated with "white-collar" and "blue-collar" classes according to the nature of work, or "non youth (particularly those at work)" and "youth (those at school)" with respect to age.

 

Please pardon me if such definition appears a bit too rough. I do not intend to work out an exact definition, as it does not make much sense here. The distinction mentioned above may be imperfect but is easy to understand and practical for observation.

 

In the real world, the blue-collar and the white-collar classes do not usually mingle with each other. They do not belong to each other's social networks. In particular, young people are often seen as a special group. They do not care about mortgage or car loans as adults do, and they have their unique consumption behaviors.

 

Social classes determine our social networks, because our daily life decides the topics we would be interested in, and these topics are critical in our social network. The patterns are attached to us and have direct influence on what class of people we would share sympathetic responses with on Web 2.0 websites.

 

To put it simply, is there any social networking website similar to MySpace that can attract people of every class in the society? Moreover, since the ultimate goal of Web 2.0 is to build up the connections among people, then is it possible to break the class barrier in the real world so that exchanges between different classes can become possible in virtual world?

 

[+] Virtual communities are where people with similar attributes get together and share feelings

 

A magazine editor, a 35 female with a son, has just started to Blog on a social networking website. It is not easy for her to find people on SNS website at her age. She feels uncomfortable about the photos of young and beautiful people appearing on the homepage of the site.

 

She is not sure who are reading her baby-nursing diary. Are the visitors really interested or they just drop in by chance? Once she got a request to add her to the Friend List, and she found out it was sent by an 18 year-old guy. She has no idea what to talk about with him.

 

I believe that many people have similar experience of bumping into some gathering place of a unique group or class of people without staying for too long. Web 2.0 communities have their own characteristics. As I said many years ago: communities are where people with similar attributes get together and share feelings.

 

Despite that there are few exchanges between upper and lower classes, still they belong to the same society. The challenge for Web 2.0 operators is to first attract different classes of people and then distinguish them through proper guidance, so that they can form their respective communities they should belong to.

 

However it is so difficult that many Web 2.0 operators consciously or subconsciously choose to focus on a specific class in their operation. This has great impact on the websites' style and business model. I illustrate the characteristics of the two classes of netizens below:

 

 

For example, social networking websites like Linkist are targeted at white-collar class. Such websites do not attempt to charge their users as they are reluctant to pay, even though they are better off. Affordability is one thing, and the willingness to pay is another. Fortunately, advertisers are interested in this group of users.

 

[+] Impact of social classes on business model

 

I suppose you, my dear reader, access the Internet from home or office rather than from an Internet cafe, and live in some big city like Beijing or Taipei. You actually have no idea about how people away from big cities get onto the Internet.

 

People of different social classes are used to their specific ways of thinking. Therefore we can find a certain niche market for a certain class. If you look into Alexa's website traffic ranking in Taiwan, you'll find ek21.com outdoing many well-known websites.

 

This website provides the so-called Avatar services, including chat-rooms, voice chatting, personal web-pages, personal web space and icons and so on, which are all potentially profitable services. If you look closer, you will find out that active users on this website are mostly those you don't usually associate with, such as waiters, drivers, part-timers, and people living outside metropolitan cities.

 

Before the emergence of Web 2.0 website startups, ek21.com has been making money for years by charging users. Of course most of its users do not pay, but still it has enough paying users to sustain itself very well.

 

Hard to imagine, isn't it? Because you are a white-collar worker unwilling to pay, it is difficult for you to understand the behaviors of the lower-class people. These people spend money out of impulse. As long as your offering is attractive and does not cost much, you can siphon money from their pockets. However, advertisers are not interested in these people.

 

The population of the lower-class society is huge, and it is even more so in China. There are some very profitable Internet companies thrive on providing service to the lower-class people, such as qq.com. This company has more than 400 million accounts, and their major revenue source is user charges.

 

[+] Consumption behaviors of the lower class

 

If your Web 2.0 website is targeted at lower-class (ex. students or younger people), but you are putting efforts on advertising sales, then I have to tell you that you have missed an important revenue stream: user charges.

 

What services can you charge users for? Look at qq.com and ek21.com, and you'll find easy answers. The point is to sell virtual items rather than sell real world products electronically. The latter is against the nature of Web 2.0. In Web 2.0, it is interpersonal interaction that can help you make money.

 

If you want to know more about the other class, try online games. A few years ago, through playing a then very popular online game "legend," I got to know truck drivers, beetle nut girls, housewives and gangsters - people I would never have the chance to know otherwise.

 

Many of these people do not have an email account; they access the Internet at an Internet cafe, have few ideas about what Google is, and never use MSN. Their favorite online activities are playing games and chatting. This is a blue-collar market, which is beyond your imagination.

 

Similarly in China, young people, students, laborers and residents in towns and small cities consist of the biggest group of users in the market. These people log on the Internet at the Internet cafes where they can play games or chat at just RMB 1 per hour.

 

In small cities where there is little entertainment, online games and chatting can serve as some kind of affordable leisure activities. Any Web 2.0 website which can seize the mass lower-class population is sure to succeed. Even though these people do not make much money, they tend to spend money out of impulses and they are quick payers.

 

[+] Break the class barrier

 

Web 2.0 entrepreneurs are often constrained by the barrier of their class background. When developing online communities, very often they can only base on the life style of the class they are familiar with. Most people cannot do business targeted at a different class of people who live a different life.

 

Yet, many Web 2.0 entrepreneurs confined themselves within an even smaller circle. I once told a startup entrepreneur that it did no good to maintain the elite atmosphere in his website. My suggestion to him was to develop a product that is aimed to be very popular in the market but disgusted by famous Bloggers.

 

In the US where there are over 100 million online users, it takes as few as 100 recommendations to digg a bookmark onto the front-page of the famous social bookmark website del.icio.us. This is pseudo democracy, which is an exclusive game within a bunch of elites.

 

Things like RSS, Tag, Trackback, Wiki, Widget are nonsense created by elites in the upper-class society. When I first saw Web 2.0 technical documents, I thought these things should all go to the trashcan because they were too perplexing for the public.

 

They may not be the root cause for class barriers in the virtual society, but they are surely responsible for making them more difficult to cross. They keep the elites within a wall from the general public, which may lead to restrictions on business.

 

These techniques are still too primitive to be generally accepted by either upper or lower class societies. To make Web 2.0 more accessible, we may need to hide these things or package them in a more friendly way. ( 2007/05/27 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to China Internet/Telecom )

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Prev : Web 2.0 Think Again (1) It's All about Relationships
Next : Web 2.0 Think Again (3) A Reason to "accost" Someone Online

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- Today in History

Web 2.0 Think Again (2) Upper-class Society and Lower-class Society - 2007/05/27

Web 2.0 Think Again (1) It's All about Relationships - 2007/05/20

Brief Study at Portable Multimedia Player (PMP) - 2005/05/29

I see the light of hope: this could be used to have people subscribe to newsletter.

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[+] Another way to replace email marketing

 

When email becomes a very unreliable communication tool, is there any effective way to distribute information besides RSS? Look into your daily life, are there any other common communication tools?

 

You may immediately think of Instant Messenger (IM). Yes, in this prospering Internet age, everyone has at least one IM open on his desktop. In some sense, the use of IM even has replaced email.

 

Just think, if you can inform your clients via MSN Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger as soon as your website has new products or new services to be released. It could be much more efficient than email or RSS.

 

For emails and RSS, they have to wait for people to receive them. However, if you send information through IM, a message box will pop up directly on the user's desktop. Normally, people will take a glance at the IM message that pops up while leaving email unread for a while.

 

In August 2006, when I was thinking hard about the alternative solution to the newsletter marketing, MSN Messenger came up to his mind very soon. Almost every white collar was using it, and the user group was pretty much the same with that of Digital Wall. I then started to look for a feasible plan.

 

[+] The possibility to use MSN Bot

 

The most awkward way is to register an MSN Messenger account and ask the newsletter subscriber to add this account into his MSN Messenger contact list. Each time the website is updated, messages with the URL of new articles will be sent to those readers.

 

But that will bring about several problems: 1) Obviously, the messenger contact list is going to be extremely long. I have over 140,000 readers. But what is the maximum number of contacts Microsoft allows? It is not possible there is no such a limit, isn't it? 2) It's never going to happen to send IM messages to readers manually! How much time will that costs! 3) If I send out thousands of notification messages to subscribers within a certain period of time, how could it be possible that Microsoft's servers would not block me as a spam message publisher?

 

Many people may know that such kind of IM has robots, so does MSN Messenger, which is called 'MSN Bot'. MSN Bot is actually a program-controlled account. You may chat with it after you add such account into your own MSN Messenger contact list.

 

Some MSN Bots have rich functions. For example, if you ask it an English word, it will give the translation in other language. And some other MSN Bots can do map searching, etc.

 

Microsoft also encourages the development of Bot. If you are interested, you can take a look at this interesting MSN Bot developing contest:

 

https://www.robotinvaders.com/main/Default.aspx

 

I see the light of hope: this could be used to have people subscribe to newsletter.

 

[+] Limitations by using MSN Bot

 

Website operators can release MSN Messenger accounts which are actually MSN Bot programs. Subscribers then add that kind of account to their MSN Messengers. Message publishing is accomplished by sending messages to everyone's IM by the program.

 

However, that solution is not perfect. Microsoft still blocks large amount of message publishing. Sending messages separately in separate hours may be a way to get around. However, problems still exist when the number of readers is huge, because it might be a week later when the last reader receives the message.

 

It then comes to my mind that, would logon notification work instead of IM message publishing? As we all know that MSN Messenger will give out notification when contacts log on. Therefore, as long as operators set up logon and logoff time schedules for the MSN Bot, subscribers will be notified automatically.

 

The effect is much worse than sending messages directly. Since Microsoft still has maximum limit on the number of contacts, this method is not suitable for the case of large number of subscribers. If those limitations could not be solved, this method will be restricted.

 

It is still possible to get around the limitations posted on the amount of MSN message publishing and the number of contacts. In fact, Microsoft has special authorized enterprises across the globe. As long as operators pay them for sending large number of messages, those limitations could be overcome. However, small websites need cheaper solutions.

 

[+] The twilight for IM marketing

 

Either developing MSN Bot or paying for sending messages is beyond the capability of ordinary website operators. At least the cost is much higher than the relatively low-cost email marketing. However, the situation is changed with the advent of Microsoft Windows Live Alerts.

 

This service is for the content subscription service through Windows Live Messenger (the former MSN Messenger). For example, the user will be informed by the Messenger when MSNBC news is updated.

 

Windows Live Alerts：http://alerts.live.com

 

Subscribers can set up time slots to keep from beiing disturbed by messages during work. They can also set messages to be forwarded automatically to their email boxes when they're offline. Finally, the role of IM has been shifted from a communication tool to a content publishing tool.

 

If you are a content provider, you can apply to become a Microsoft content publisher in order to be assigned a unique subscription URL. By simply clicking the URL, users will get into the subscription process and receive messages from you.

 

The instructions for how to become a content publisher can be found at: http://signup.alerts.live.com

 

This service is still on test. Therefore, all applications are sent to the U.S. headquarters. Processing one application needs a little time. It's not known yet whether there is any limit for the number of subscribers allowed for individual content providers.

 

[+] The Fourth Generation of Internet marketing: Rights in the users' hands

 

We can imagine that content subscription through IM will increase rapidly. We are more excited to see that Internet companies have opened such platform for website or Blog operators. IM will become the channel for the new generation of content aggregation and publishing.

 

If you run an eCommerce site, as long as people are willing to subscribe to your Windows Live Alerts, why not sending out discount information through this channel? Of course, it will become more competitive because every website runner can send messages to Internet users through it.

 

Internet marketing has evolved to its fourth generation with RSS and IM subscription as the major tools. We should keep in mind that from the first to the fourth generation, the power of choice has been gradually transferred to Internet users' hands, and that is an everlasting marketing law in the Internet age. ( 2007/01/07 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to China Internet/Telecom )

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Prev : The Fourth Generation of Internet Marketing (2) RSS Tracking
Next : The Mist of 3G in China (1) 3G Makes No Profit

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- Today in History

Web 2.0 Finale (3) Finally blended in Web 1.0 - 2008/01/06

The Fourth Generation of Internet Marketing (3) IM Marketing - 2007/01/07