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An excellent article from RWW

Are you the only person at work who likes to read blogs? Is it your job to sell things to people who would probably throw you out of their offices if you said the word “twitter?” Are you trying to reach audiences who’ve never visited a social networking website because they’ve heard those sites are used by no one but virus peddlers, sex fiends and 14 year old losers?

Sometimes it feels like social media is just not relevant to the people you’re trying to reach. That’s a common dilemma, but we believe it doesn’t have to be that way. In this post we discuss five strategies for using social media to reach people who don’t use social media, and we’ve listed specific tools you can use to do it.

1) Develop Relationships with People Who Bridge The Gap Inside Other Organizations

Tools to use for these tactics: For general participation and visibility among the social media users that do exist in your area of interest, check out Twellow.com for a directory of Twitter users by industry, do some searches on FriendFeed.com and find out what the top blogs in your area of interest are using the methods described in our post “Six Ways to Find Top Blogs in Any Niche.” Just participating with like minded people in this space will move you up on their list for biz dev and marketing.

If you’re not familiar with RSS feeds, start with this introduction: RSS in Plain English. FeedRinse.com is one of the easiest to use feed filtering services. Feed filtering is also available inside Zaptxt.com, one of our favorite RSS to IM/Email alert systems. See also Pingie, a new alert service we’ve been using and Alerts.com, an even newer one we wrote about this week.

2) Use Web 2.0 Tools to Learn About Real Life Public Events

Tools to use for this tactic: An RSS reader, be it Google Reader, iGoogle, MyYahoo or another - there are lots of options. If events listings aren’t being published by RSS, here’s what you can do. Find pages where they are listed, scrape a feed using Dapper.net (see how to do this) then filter the feed for keywords related to your industry if need be using a tool like FeedRinse.com or Pipes.Yahoo.com if you feel brave. (Want a 5 minute screencast intro to the basics of using Yahoo Pipes? Well there you go.)

3) Make Your Blog an Email Newsletter and Promote it Elsewhere

Feedburner, Google’s RSS publishing service, makes it easy to offer any RSS feed, including the one your blog should publish automatically, as an email newsletter. There are lots of companies that buy AdSense links on Google for links to their websites and blogs for key search terms. Your marketing department may write guest editorials in traditional press already and any other traditional marketing campaign can lead people to an “email newsletter” page - really your blog with email subscription.

If your target audience doesn’t read blogs or participate in social networks, they probably do like email. This is an easy thing to do and can prove quite effective for non-technical audiences if framed in a non-threatening way.

4) Look Harder, Your Audience Probably is Using Social Media That You Aren’t Aware Of

There were 5 billion videos watched on YouTube just by people in the US in July. There are people in your industry using LInkedIn, we guarantee it. Where are people talking about you or your industry online? Check out Kingsley Joseph’s Social Media Firehose to find examples (click the “list” button to see a list view of links).

A couple of other places to look include Ask.com’s blogsearch, sort by popularity, and the social bookmarking site Delicious, where you can search for and subscribe to the most popular or most recent bookmarked links by keyword. You’ll want to use the site in different ways depending on your field. http://delicious.com/popular/chiropractic may not unearth a lot of resources, but http://delicious.com/tag/chiropractic+blog looks pretty interesting, for example.

5) Use the Internet to Make Yourself Smarter In Real Life

The best way to use social media to reach people who don’t use social media is probably just to use social media to kick more ass. You may be the only person in a meeting that reads blogs (unlikely, really) but that doesn’t have to be what people notice; the fact that you know more, sooner, about your shared interests (as a result of reading blogs) well will be a big help.

Easier said than done? Check out sites like Del.icio.us, Technorati and StumbleUpon to find the top blogs in any niche or the best content on any topic.

We also recommend taking those top sources you identify and turning them into a Google Custom Search Engine, which is remarkably easy for even the least technical people to do. Search against those top sources as reference and you’ll unearth all kinds of useful knowledge from the archives of your industries online experts.

Build your reading list with the tools described in those posts above and you’ll be using social media to advance your career and connect more effectively with more non-users of social media.

… sits Pixlr, although you won’t find it on your hard drive. Pixlr is an online image editing tool launched this week which already boasts some impressive features.

You can upload image files and manipulate them - resizing, colour adjustment, filter and layer tools are all present. There is already a call for an API, which the creator Ola Sevandersson and his team of Swedes has promised ‘is coming’.

The Pixlr website claims “Pixlr is built for non-professionals, the users that have basic editing needs. It’s not for large RAW images or for printing. It is merely a tool for editing web images to be posted on blogs, news-sites, social networks like Facebook, Bebo, image sites like Flikr, Photobucket etc.”

Social Media in Plain English

Papervision3D - what comes next? Well, this could be it…

I have my doubts as to whether the next video is for real. If it is, then we’re looking at the future of the 3D web.

For years the big problem with Flash-based websites is that they could not be properly indexed by search engines. Flash websites have been favored by marketers and advertisers for a long time, because of the ability to create rich, interactive Web experiences. However for most other businesses, particularly those with a lot of information on their website (let’s face it, that’s everyone except marketers and advertisers), Flash has been nearly an automatic ‘no’ for website development. That may be about to change.

Adobe announced today that it is teaming up with major search engines - notably Google and Yahoo - to “dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs).” In a press statement, Adobe said that it is “providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.”

Adobe claims that it will provide more relevant search results and rankings for RIA content. In a separate blog post, Google announced that it has launched a “Flash indexing algorithm”, which will result in better search results.

Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com

An article on todays bbc news site promises an interesting future for real time gaming:

“It’s clear that the next trend in gaming is going to be bringing real objects into the virtual world; playing not against other gamers but people doing the real thing,” said Andy Lurling, founder of iOpener Media.

Several years ago when a few of FUSE were studying at Nottingham University we had the opportunity to work on a joint project which attempted to marry a basic GPS system with handheld PDA’s, creating a realtime mapping application which could be used for interactive tour guides through to digitally enhanced hide & seek games. We weren’t quite good enough at pulling computers apart, or should i say putting them back together correctly, to work on the latter, though we did develop a flash based interface which functioned as a digital guide for an architectural walking tour.

Satellite navigation systems have improved dramatically over the past few years, partially due to the US opening up part of its military satellite network (not for civilian goodwill you understand, but cold hard coorporate cash), and also due to the advancement of consumer products willing to use the technology - in car sat-nav systems for instance, and handheld GPS systems, one of which saved our bacon while up a cold cloudy mountain in Scotland recently - good work Rob!

But the above progress, dating back from the 1980’s and Reagan’s Star Wars effort, could look relatively snail paced compared to what is in store for the future, thanks to the development of Galileo - a brand new, and crucially civilian run, European Satellite Network:

The system is technically years ahead of the aging US satellites, allowing for faster and much more accurate data to be passed to the ground. No longer will the GPS reading be within a foot or a meter of its actual position - it will be as good as spot-on. And the loss of signal, often feared by those halfway up a munroe, will be a thing of the past.

What is unique here though is that the system is not run by the military. The existing satellite systems reserve their high-end functionality for military use, only dealing low bandwidths and services for commercial / consumer use. Galileo is commercially funded and run, offering a near full service to the commercial sector, if not the general public.

The possibilities for commercial use are endless, sparking a worldwide calls for ideas competition which has generated programs for “intelligent” fishing through to financial control systems in the timber industry. Add these to obvious enhancements to transport systems and a picture of a huge new european industry begins to appear.

Back to the fun bit though, as we here aren’t so interested in fishing..

Games games games!

From live Grand Prix racing through to exercise bikes partaking in the Tour de France, and rowing machines in the boat race, again the possibilities are endless. The new GPS receivers are chips, rather than units so can be placed virtually anywhere, and as they get smaller the technology gets better.

And if this new GPS technology is married with the Nintendo Wii and its future incarnations?

Sat afternoon has a new Grandstand, and its Real-Time-Tastic! A set against Federer? A round with Tiger? A home run in the big league?

Imagine playing Pro-Evo in realtime, ill drag the mighty Posh out of league 1 obscurity with one boot, whilst winning the World Cup for England with the other, all out of my satellite infested front room…

… ok so i got carried away, technology cant solve everything

The Microsoft Live Search team announced today that it had expanded the company’s Search and Give charitable searching program to more than 1 million eligible organizations. The program donates 1 cent for each search conducted by users to the school or charity of their choice up to 500 searches per month (or $60/year per person). Can Microsoft possibly make a dent in Google’s stranglehold on the search market by offering up charitable donations as an incentive to search? (read more here)

3D Web Method 1

Here at Fuse we are pretty used to creating 3D online experiences. The method we’ve used most often has been to create 3D animations using our 3D software (we love Cinema 4D) and then control these animations with Flash Actionscript - for example - Mr Complete:

Being able to interact with render-quality 3D animation is great, but it has its drawbacks - mainly that we, as the producers, determine the way the 3D space is navigated, or the way the 3D character moves. OK, we can create a series of movements that the user can choose between, but they are still predefined to a great extent. What if we could interact with the 3D in an unlimited way, where the scene is calculated as we interact with it rather than pre-rendered by the 3D software? Well, we’ve been doing that for a while too - read on…

3D Web Method 2

For a while now users have been able to interact with 3D scenes in realtime through the use of Java applets. These are little packages of code that need to be initialized by the user’s system (as well as be supported by it in the first place) before they can run. Our favourite software for this is Wirefusion, which we have used to create the likes of Sharpie Buddy:

We built a Flash interface with which a user could draw their design on a 2D page and then, with the click of the mouse, wrap it around a realtime 3D object, which they could then move and rotate to their hearts content. However, this method, as well as relying on Java being enabled on the user’s machine, also uses a fair bit of bandwidth just to load the application files. Really, what we’ve all been waiting for is realtime 3D functionality in the ubiquitous Flash…

3D Web Method 3

Give a big hand to Papervision3D - an open source 3D engine for the Flash platform. Papervision3D is written and maintained by a small core team, and contributed to by its ever-growing community, which Fuse is proud to be a part of.

It has been almost a year since it entered public Beta in July 2007 and has been improving rapidly ever since. It will be a while yet until it can recreate a realtime scene of the quality of Mr Complete but already it can handle reflections, shadows, bump mapping etc. In fact, we believe that it has enough of the core 3D classes now that it has really come of age. But it’s not just us - Audi, Sony, Absolut, Canon and Red Bull are a few of the brands that have adopted this new technology. Look out for a new Fuse website in the near future, and of course, in realtime 3D.

OK, so Google is king in the UK. Stats from Hitwise show that, based on UK Internet usage, ranked by volume of searches for the 4 weeks ending April 26, 2008 Google.co.uk had 74% of the market and google.com had 13.8%. That’s a whooping 87% in total.

They are a like Connor McCloud from the Clan McCloud in Highlander - they have beheaded everyone else. There can be only one.

But… why don’t you check out ‘clustering search engines’ - Google is prehistorically one dimensional. When you search on Google, you see the results as a list - a long, long, long list of webpages. But we all know that the Web is more like a spider’s web don’t we? It’s three-dimensional, with links between pages everywhere. The Clustering Search Engines are leading the way towards that reality, by making two-dimensional (X-Y) maps of the results. Want to see one? Check out Quintura.