A month in a post

Posted on December 12, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized | | Written by Gary Reid

Once upon a time I had time to write at least once every day, alas that just isn’t the case, it’s not that I don’t have anything to say, it’s that I only have one pair of hands.

Earlier this week we quietly launched Locationate in stealth mode/beta. Getting it launched has been a mammoth task here at Reid Towers. It’s certainly the biggest project we’ve ever undertaken and hopefully beta will go well and let the planned media launch in Jan go ahead.

As i’ve missed a months worth of news I thought I would see what’s been going on.

Well, not a lot! In the last month there’s only been 7 posts on Blognation UK, moving across the pond I noticed the Big A has closed Edgeio down! In itself no big deal, hundreds of SME’s fail every day, but they did manage to blow $5 million, that’s right $5 million in just 14 months, and they still didn’t get a classifieds site to work. But maybe that’s more to do with their goals, as Mike A commented

Edgeio wasnâ€™t meant to be a success

Well, they achieved that, but I’m guessing that doesn’t make a good pitch for $5 million does it? My tip for any budding entrepreneur - at least aim for your project to be a success, aiming to fail is far too easy.

Richard MacManus reports on the new version of OpenID and says

The new version improves security

Ouch, does that mean it wasn’t very secure before? Richard’s Read/Write Web has also become a blog network, with various blogs now sharing the crowd.

My predictions for 2008

The tech blogs are going to struggle sustaining their business models. An easy call to make, just check the alexa graph for any of them, a nice big plateau, reminds me of the life cycle bell curve - late majority.
Advertising will become a much more widely acceptable business model as more sites start to track income per unique, of course that means more free stuff, whoopee!
Marketers will start talking about ‘crowd marketing’ where you create strategies that attract a crowd rather than trying to contextualize to individual needs. What you say to a crowd is very different to what you say to an individual, those that get crowd marketing right will see individuals within the crowd contextualizing the message to others who join the crowd. BTW these won’t be evangelists or mavens, but just folk in the crowd, like when you see a crowd and you walk up to the edge and ask the first person you see ‘what’s going on’ - he tells you but he’s not selling it to you.
It will rain in Glasgow!

I guarantee at least one of those 4 will be right.

Sigmund Freud’s crowd behavior theory…

people who are in a crowd act differently towards people than those who are thinking individually. The minds of the group would merge together to form a way of thinking. Each member’s enthusiasm would be increased as a result, and one becomes less aware of the true nature of one’s actions