The Praized Blog

Monday is Canada Day. I will not be blogging that day as I will be enjoying the (hopefully) nice summer weather. have a great weekend!

(photo by David Wilmot)

Even with all the FOG (Fear Of Google) out there, most people in the directory industry will agree that the biggest competitor to directory advertising is word-of-mouth. eMarketer gives us some new data points around the topic. They also published a new report that you can buy here.

More and more, consumers are relying on advice from friends, family and even strangers to make purchase decisions, select physicians, choose travel destinations and pick politicians to vote for. And many of them are giving — and getting — that advice online. By eMarketer’s latest estimates, over 25 million US adults regularly share advice on products or services online.

Adult Internet users surveyed by DoubleClick chose recommendations from friends as the one type of promotion they consider most worthwhile.

What it means: I am a big believer in the ability of the Web to capture (and monetize) a large portion of these word-of-mouth referrals. I agree that friends and family are a major source of referrals but I think we forget that communities/groups/associations are also a trusted source for recommendations. And we’re seeing more and more of these communities online. Influencers can be found in blogs, niche verticals and social network groups (ex: Facebook groups) as well and you trust these people sometimes as much (if not more) than your friends.

(via Hitwise)

YouTube’s growth has not begun to slow yet this year. Hitwise traffic data shows that the market share of US visits to YouTube has increased by 70% when comparing January 2007 to May 2007 (this only includes site visits, not streams or streams from views on embedded videos). In comparison, the market share of visits to a custom category of 64 other video sites increased by only 8% in that period. As of May 2007, YouTube’s market share was 50% greater than those 64 sites combined. Here is a ranking of the top 10 sites in that custom category for May 2007:

What it means: YouTube still completely dominates the video market online. As video sites are quite bandwidth intensive and the video ad business model is not quite “ready for prime time” yet, we’ll start seeing some attrition in the marketplace in the next few months within the 64 video sites counted by Hitwise. Expect verticalization and B2B-ization of some of these players. Some of them might close as they run out of VC money.

“We have been testing the iPhone for two weeks, in multiple usage scenarios, in cities across the country. Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer.”

Walt Mossberg reviewing the iPhone in the Wall Street Journal.

Jason Fry from the Wall Street Journal writes about one of my favorite topics : “Will the kids who grew up with the Net (After Netters) become more like their elders (Before Netters) as they take on full-time jobs, relationships, children and the other stuff of adult life? Having once craved attention, will they now shun it? Or will they continue to live their lives in public, chronicling their ups and downs in ways their elders will find befuddling and disturbing?”

The origin of his article is a story that claims that “a quarter of human-resources decision makers had rejected job candidates because of personal information found online. ” Fry thinks that teenagers will continue to live their lives in public. He illustrates his thoughts with an example of what’s going to happen in the future: “Today, it’s pretty obvious that having the HR guy at your prospective employer find photos of college beer bongs isn’t a good idea. But that guy running HR isn’t going to be in his job forever. Before too long he’ll give way to an After Netter with an old MySpace page of her own out there for anyone to find. Will she conclude drunken snapshots are a sign of bad judgment and hire someone else? I very much doubt it. ”

And talking about your online persona, he adds: “What do you do when you realize how public your online life is? You could retreat into anonymity and try to ensure you leave no trace online (…). You could try to scrub your online image, getting rid of the things you’d rather not have people see and/or taking steps to elevate what you do want people to see in search results. But that generally doesn’t work. ”

“Or you could say “So what?” and accept that every aspect of your online life is out there for people to find and judge as they will. (…) That’s the strategy the After Net kids have pursued — not consciously, but because it’s the only world they’ve ever known. Will it cost some of them jobs? Undoubtedly — but not for much longer. Because it’s their world view that will win the day as they assume the positions of authority vacated by people my age. The ones who’ll struggle? Here’s betting it’ll be Before Netters like me, with our weirdly sterile Google lives that begin in middle age and our old-fashioned skittishness about online embarrassment and criticism.”

What it means: Not sure I completely agree with Jason Fry. I agree that we’ll see a generation who’s more comfortable with the multiplication of their online personas but I think they’ll be more logical about what’s out there. Anything that’s too fringe will have to be erased. We’ll see the rise of a new job: the Web Cleaner (a la Winston Wolfe in Pulp Fiction), who will go in, erase some stuff and create for you a new, more professional online persona. The explosive growth of Facebook, a site that’s more “serious” than MySpace, could also signal the maturing of the net native crowd.