Meeker: Latest Deck of Internet Trends/Data

via paul.kedrosky.com

Posted via web from LaurenProctor's Thinking Posterous

Brand Rankings of Luxury and Social Media Competence

I may work for LuxuryLab and therefore hold some bias, but this unprecedented study and subsequent ranking of 109 brands and their digital competency (especially related to the luxury industry) is worth checking out.

Download it here (after spending lots of time on our website where you can stay abreast of luxury news).

Still think I'm biased and trying to coerce you into yet another reading assignment you don't have time for? Then listen to AdAge, Jeremiah Owyang (overall guru, author of Groundswell and partner at Altimeter Group), or Hwanjin 'David' Choi, a Seoul, Korea based Tweeter who said something I don't understand about the Digital IQ Index but marks the first person I know of to spread the research internationally. (Serves me right, for my ignorant American bilingual nature. If his Tweet was negative, at least he was gracious enough to add the link.)

Whatever the case, check it out. If you do anything related to branding or online media it's truly worth your while.

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Awesome New Music Find: UK based master of fun, Jamie T.

Visual Statistics, Brand Perception, and Other Cool Stuff From The Shortlist

Yet another best of the web from a person who spends more time on the web than I care to admit.

Cool: The mural at Barter Books, featuring a whole lot of great artists in one portrait of revelry.

Surprising: eBay, WebMD and Facebook all made the top ten of most trusted companies in the United States according to a study by the Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe.

Feeding my love for well presented data. Steve Rubel recently compiled a list of great internet statistics in beautiful data. My favorites are below but you can see his entire list here.



A song I've got on repeat from a band I adore: The Maccabees - "Love You Better"

Realizing Our Potential and Other First Impressions From Would Be Internet Powerhouses

Remember when Facebook first started? The homepage looked like the picture on the left and if you didn't type "the" before "facebook.com" you'd find yourself lost in cyberspace.

Why was the transition so seamless? When did we stop typing "the" and did anyone notice?




Or how about four short years ago when YouTube looked like this? We've come a long way. (If you're interested in seeing the way 20 other sites looked when they launched check out this great Telegraph collection here.)

Perhaps more important than memories of MS-DOS, floppy disks, and external hard drives though, is the fact that it's easy to forget the power we hold. It wasn't all that long ago when people never traveled much more than a few miles from where they were born. Letters were delivered via horseback and now we can send our words circling around the world with a few keystrokes.

It's miraculous and about as easy to forget as the days when we used to type "thefacebook.com."

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Founded in 1986 but still current in a retro sort of way, Shudder to Think plays rock that walks the fence between gritty and surprisingly gentle.

Is Cyber Warfare Effective?

Cyber warfare. It's one of the only social media related news I heard about after reports started coming out offering reasons why Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal were experiencing so many problems. It was DDoS (Denial of Service Attacks) related to the conflict between Russia and Georgia, and the attackers wanted to stifle the voice of a guy with a handle of Cyxymu.

In turn, people suddenly started talking about ways to back up your social media profiles and Twitter accounts, and just about everything else on the elusive cloud where we're all starting to store more of our data. They also started talking about cyber warfare and how it might become a piece of the future. But before the lights went out on Twitter I had no idea Cyxymu even existed, and goodness knows I didn't know to he was someone whose voice was important enough to send internet usage for millions to a screeching halt.

Now my appetite for Cyxymu's words is insatiable and it makes me wonder. If an attempt to stifle a voice sends its decibels further than they would have reached before, can this so called cyber warfare really be effective?

Let's hope not.

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Now for some affable folk (although as a warning, some of his songs will hit you hard and leave you wallowing on the floor in sweet misery...okay that was major hyperbole). Check out Brooklyn's own Jonah Smith.

Nothing Is a Vault

I learned yesterday that Twitter keeps any single person's 3,200 most recent tweets and then poof, it's gone. I feel stupid for not knowing this and particularly distressed (in a not really distressed and I realize I'm being dramatic sort of way).

I suppose 3,200 is a lot, but to think that in an age when storage costs virtually nothing, Twitter isn't playing the Google card of unlimited storage? I thought we had finally found something that would put moments in a vault and help us remember the time when we picked out all the marshmallows in the Lucky Charms to see if there was enough in a box to fill an entire bowl, and then spent the rest of the night snacking on the sweetest part and wondering if we were Lucky, Charmed, or both.

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If you like Postal Service, Vampire Weekend, and/or Ra Ra Riot you've got to check Discovery.

Discovery - "I Want You Back" (Jackson 5)