Online Identity

Proving internet identity has been an issue ever since our technology has become all about social experience.

How do you prove who you are online?

In real life we have a number of identifiers, pieces of ID, even our visual looks that identify who we are. Online, we have usernames and passwords. Type those into a website and the website lets you assert that you are the same person when you were there before. It's assuming you are the same person. Or when you are purchasing something online, you get an email to verify that indeed that is you who has made an online purchase. Again, so far that has been the way websites were able to verify your identity.

AOL has announced that it now has experimental OpenID server support. This means that every AOL user has an OpenID identifier. An OpenID is a framework for user-centric online identity. Basically, you are given an URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), which is similar to a website URL and you as an individual can identify yourself on the web the same way that websites do it - through a server.

First you need to claim a URL. Since everyone seems to use the same username and password, the username becomes your URL and the password protects and stores all your credentials.

AOL is not the only company who has been playing around with this technology. Sxip Identity, a Vancouver-based web 2.0 company has been trying to solve internet identity. In an interview with Sxip founder & CEO, Dick Hardt, I found out that Sxip along with British Columbia government are trying to use identity to enable citizens to an easier way of identifying themselves - to create those credentials.

The technology is there, can you imagine how it will change the way we socialize and do business online?

Will this be an end to forgotten passwords and online identity thefts?

Digital love

In spirit of Valentine's Day, I figured I better write about electronic love.

With the prominence of social life going public on the internet, it's no surprise that people turn to find love online. You hear of various dating services such as date.ca or Lavalife with positive results. The numbers point that 40 per cent of people tabbed into online dating. With promises that websites have got your perfect mate, who could resist? After all you aren't having any luck finding him/her yourself. Has dating become so impersonal? Has it turned into skimming of profiles for the one that sounds just right? Has the internet cut out the "bad" date experience?

The internet has done a lot of things for our social lives. It eliminated a lot of middlemen.

In an article, An e-card for Valentine's Day? Honestly, you shouldn't have in today's Globe and Mail, argues that the internet makes things accessible to us, but Valentine's day cards is something consumers would like to purchase in store rather than online.

Two leading North American greeting card companies, Hallmark Cards Inc. and American Greetings Corp., are not worried. Just because people want to buy an actual card for their loved ones, they won't go to their websites to purchase an e-greeting. They still get a lot of business, just not as much on Valentine's Day.

So maybe we haven't become totally an impersonal generation. There might be some romance left in us.

Hallmark gives its cards away for free online, with a marketing campaign that will boost physical card sales. American Greeting has a paid subscription of $20 a year for an unlimited number of cards and estimates it will send out seven to eight million e-cards today.

The U.S. Greetings Cards Association estimates that Americans will send out 14 million e-cards today compared to 190 million paper cards. Unfortunately, there are no numbers for Canada.

So far, e-cards have had a positive impact on the card business, but if you forgot to buy your loved one a card today, better not send one through email, she/he might not like that.

Blogging as a Small Business

In an article Going pro in the Economist, the writer makes an argument that more people are quitting their day jobs and blogging as a living.

Blogging has become a new trend and I wanted to find out how many blogs are actually out there and can people really support themselves from posting daily?

We can break up blogs into two categories: the personal, daily recollections of an individuals life and the second being mainstream media developing niche topics to attract a younger audience to their product.

Is there a chance for a third category now? Blogging as a business?

The article uses Heather Armstrong's blog called Dooce, which chronicles her life from her pregnancy, to becoming a mom and suffering from postpartum depression. She quit her job and now blogs every day. Her site brings in about one million visitors per month.

How can a blog attract such a huge number of visitors?

The reason why blogging can work as a small business is because there is an emerging market that would support it.

In a traditional marketing sense, attracting audience to a product, for example a magazine or newspaper, was in the hundreds. You needed an advertising campaign, an ad agency that would execute the idea and hope you covered all your basis and got the audience you wanted. In the case of a blog, the cost of building a readership for a blog is practically nothing.

But, it's not easy to build an audience. It doesn't happen over night. Technorati, tracked over 34.5 million weblogs with 75,000 new blogs being created every day. That's a lot to choose from.

Technorati does help in exposing your blog with ping configuration. So, that's the first step. Making sure your blog comes up in web searches.

What about advertising? You can't exactly sell advertising on your blogs. Google's AdSense, which places text advertisements on blogs help generate a few cents per mouse click. That might bring in spare change.

Then you update daily, grow your audience and when your business gets large enough, hire a staff. Or how about signing up with Weblogs, Inc., and letting them connect you with the advertising and the audience.

If all fails, you can always search The Problogger Job Board and work for a company that needs people with opinions.

Competition for iTunes?

Amazon Unbox, an internet video on demand service is teaming up with TiVo to blur the lines between watching TV and watching web videos. The deal will be announced tomorrow.

Amazon and TiVo are joining forces to bring movies and television shows from the TV to the internet in online video format and then into consumers' living rooms.

Confused yet?

Not only do you need an Amazon account, but also a TiVo device in order to view the downloaded program.

The program called: Amazon Unbox on TiVo is the latest step in trying to raise profile of both Amazon's Unbox, which has been getting lukewarm reception and TiVo, which has been competing with other DVR's entering the market.

The main argument is that Amazon will give customers options to watch the content they download whenever they want. But, that's what DVR's already do. Record the program and watch it whenever you want.

And you need to be a subscriber. Customers can purchase TV episodes for $1.99 (US) and movies for $9.99 to $14.99 or rent them for $1.99.

Another attempt at trying to battle the pirating of media?

The criticism of Amazon Unbox is that the videos will only run on applications supported by Windows Media. How is Amazon going to raise its presence when it can't reach all of its market?

This brings me to iTunes. Is Amazon even a possible threat to iTunes?

On January 9th, iTunes announced that "two billion songs, 50 million television episodes and over 1.3 million feature-length films have been purchased and downloaded from the iTunes® Store." This makes iTunes the most popular store for movies and music.

And the bonus is that Apple doesn't alienate its customers. Whether you are using a PC or a MAC, the media is compatible with your software.

Amazon has a lot of catching up to do if it's going to try to gain a portion of this market or iTunes customers. Their project is already poorly received and adding TiVo - an American company - is limiting another portion of their audience - those north of the boarder. Maybe it's time to rethink Amazon's strategy in bringing together the television and the computer screen.

Other competitors?
MSN video
Cinema Now

Social Media is Now Mainstream Media

The rise of social networking websites has been pushing everything else off the main stage. I'm referring to blogs, wiki's, RSS feeds and websites such as YouTube, MySpace, Flickr and now Facebook. These user controlled tools and websites are proliferating the Internet and the way an individual uses the Internet.

Traditional media has been playing a catch up game. They too want a piece of the puzzle. News has shifted from institutional control to consumer control. What we want and when we want it. No one is telling us what to read. We pick what we read.

But what really tells us that social media is changing how we communicate?

Mainstream media is changing how it provides the news to its audience. According to Google Trends, podcast is a highly popular search term. Newspapers and magazines are turning to blogs to reach a new audience. And YouTube is the number one social video sharing website on the internet with 65,000 videos uploaded every day.

This makes me wonder, what else can mainstream media do to grab the attention of the social networking audience?

Get in on the fun!

Canada's Sunsilk branch hired a group of actresses to create a video where a bride turns to bridezila over a bad hair-do. The video Bride Has Massive Hair Wig Out was developed to generate millions of dollars in free publicity for the brand.

Why fool the audience? Is Sunsilk trying to cash in on the highly populated network? Do they actually think this will make you go out and buy their product?

I stumbled on a website, The Consumerist: Shoppers Bite Back, where three companies have been nominated for Best Flog 2006.

The contenders: Wal-Mart for an employee praising her boss.
McDonald's: Promoting the Monopoly game with a video (flog) and another flog written by a Monopoly winner praising how her life changed.
Sony: A flog all about wanting PS3 for Christmas.

And the winner is Sony, who takes the golden poo (yes, an actual poo).

When will marketing firms realize that trying to reach this younger "techy" generation in a "unique" way is not going to work especially if you are found out. It's not cool trying to pretend you are 20-something. Consumers are going to "bite" back and not buy into your marketing scheme. Time to find another means of getting your product exposed. Leave the social networking world alone.