Choose RSS Spam!

Micro Persuasion doesn’t know how new this is, nor do I. But it is absolutely fascinating. One advantage of RSS was the avoidance of spam, because RSS feeders „pull“ the info when you want it to, and in addition, you can look at the preview without any graphics, ie ads. And now USAToday.com offers classified advertising feeds. So you can choose (!) to have advertising via your RSS tool.
Incredible. I wonder how many people opt in for that!

Advertising in online games increases sense of realism?

A news clip from clickz:Game Developer Signs a ‚Massive‘ Ad Deal. Not new, this concept, but seemingly a trend developing strongly. Online games with live ads on billboards within the gaming environment are shown to non-subscribers only. A research has apparently shown, that gamers like the ads (as long as they don’t interrupt), because they increase the sense of realism in the game. Funny, isn’t it? One of the only instances I ever heard of, where advertising provides an added value other than, may be, product information or entertainment through the ad itself.

The idle potential of the blogosphere

Everyone surfing blogdex or other sites of this nature will already have experienced it: you find an interesting topic, but when you land on the blog itself, it’s in a language you don’t know. So you can’t digest the info, you won’t link to it and the information is hence not transported further down the network of blogs. This is the one reason I write this blog in English, which is, like it or not, the common language of the web. And I am lucky enough to be able to read both German and English blogs. But when I zap through blogspot blogs, very often I land on, for example, spanish blogs, which I only understand 50% of the times or other languages, which I don’t understand at all.
Alwayson has an article on MT (Machine Translation):The Blogosphere: Lost in Translation?. MT is still far from perfect and provides more added value to your surfing, if you’re searching for humour and entertainment rather than real translation… But watch the companies that work on it. Should they at some point deliver better results, then it will be the next big thing in the blogosphere and help to connect the sofar through the language barrier disjointed parts of the web.

Cupid’s Catapult – simple and viral?

A small and simple game for Hilton Worldwide Resorts: Cupid’s Catapult. You have to catapult yourself into the arms of your lover. You can enter a prizedraw to win a romantic holiday…
The nice feature: you can challenge your friends – not only by sending them an invite per email, but also by setting up your own exclusive league in which you only compete against each other.
But will this little extra feature be enough to make it a viral success? Don’t know. The game itself isn’t really that fascinating. After a few rounds I was tired of it already…

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