jmproffitt

One of the most popular ideas amongst social marketers is the idea that we will listen to commercial endorsements from our friends because we trust them. Thus, by putting brands into our friends’ mouths, we will somehow trust those brands more by extension. Not for the first time, the marketers have got it backwards. The reason we trust our friends so strongly is precisely because we know that their opinions are not commercially motivated. The moment that ceases to be the case – or we even suspect that it has ceased to be the case – the bond of trust between friends is destroyed. The cocktail party is ruined, society crumbles, the apes take over the world.

Hat tip to @redrummy, who pointed me to this post. Most of the article (and most of Paul Carr's writing) is overwrought to what he believes is a comical degree. It's not. But this little nugget nails it.

The news of Google buying AdMob had some people scratching their heads today. But scratch no more: Silicon Alley Insider posted this informative little chart showing AdMob's mobile ad sales skyrocketing in a down market.

People: Ads are moving online, and that includes mobile devices like the iPod Touch and the iPhone, not to mention the new Android phones from Google and partners.

If Google can capture both AdMob as a core mobile ad sales service *AND* a huge share of the mobile phone / mobile computer market (hello, Chrome OS!), they can dominate this space just as they dominate online search advertising.

Both employers and employees may be surprised to find that employee created blog posts, YouTube, LinkedIn profiles, Facebook profiles, and even tweets [belong] to companies. Yes, even those personal pictures you took last Friday with your loved ones could belong to your employer. Why is this? Employees sign employment contracts that may indicate that all intellectual property created during employment may be owned by the company...

C'mon... These kinds of policies regarding work time and work equipment aren't new. That's why you're supposed to READ the policies before you sign on the dotted line.

A picture's worth a million jobs, I'm sure.

There is a fundamental mismatch between what enterprise IT is good at and what is happening on the Internet. For investment projects, IT organizations typically spend six to eight years from initial conceptualization through selling, planning, testing and implementation of the first release.  Project cycles, life spans and frequencies of Internet-related developments (and consumer-related product or service introductions) are radically different.

Gartner is (characteristically) playing up technology discontinuities as if they're new things; as if they're supposed to be surprising or demoralizing. Please.

I remember the days when the PC (and Mac) arrived in corporations alongside green screen terminals. I remember when laser printers and inkjets arrived. These were tremendously disruptive to the "Data Processing" departments and leaders. It put power in the hands of the users instead of keeping it under centralized control.

When PDAs were on the rise -- with Pocket PC and Palm devices flourishing -- it was a huge mess, especially in the medical sector, as security of data became a major issue and the devices were often bought by employees and not companies. Same thing today with iPhones, Gmail, social media, etc.

So yeah, there are changes afoot, many of them huge, but it's not something new. IT departments are the new DP departments. It's natural to cycle from disruption to stability to disruption and back again.

And by the way, why the hell is Gartner listing software as a service and cloud computing separately? Yes, there can be differences, but really you're talking about utility computing. They're effectively the same for most businesses, especially since most do *not* run "clouds" or SaaS internally.

I don't know who's more lame in this situation -- Gartner for pointing it out (someone's apparently new to business technology) or ZDnet (for reporting it so breathlessly).

Hat tip to @akmayhem for pointing me to this article.

To share a group of items, all you have to do is put them all into a folder and share the folder. As you'd expect, if you add an item to a shared folder, it will automatically be shared and if you add someone to an existing shared folder, they will instantly get access to all of the folder's content.

Google Docs is already an awesome online document sharing tool. But the addition of Shared Folders makes a great tool indispensable. Now instead of sharing doc by doc by doc, you just share a whole folder of whatever you like.

Perfect for projects with related documents and groups that span 2 or more organizations.

Microsoft keeps improving their Office Live service, too, but Google's got them beat on ease-of-use (though Google could still stand some sizable improvements).

Say what you will about cloud computing, but this kind of incremental development is what makes the cloud so compelling.

But on the third anniversary of its $1.65 billion deal to sell itself to Google, YouTube is saying, in a sense, you may be underestimating us. The company released more precise viewing figures than it had in the past, saying it serves more than 1 billion videos a day, or roughly 30 billion in a month.

Broadcast TV: meet your maker. Or unmaker, I suppose.

The iPhone is the hot pink line on this graph. Yellow is the Nokia N95. Then a couple BlackBerry models and another Nokia.