Dylan Hunter

A cute look @ Kevin Rose promoing Digg 1.0 on The Screen Savers, located by Michael Arrington, (Mike, do you ever sleep? - and, like Philip, I totally concur - was a huge fan of the show before G4 took it over and got rid of Leo, Patrick and anyone else over 12).

Now, granted, Digg in ‘06 doesn’t really look all that different from how it looked in ‘04, (I mean, amazingly not different! ) but is definitely a good reminder for all of us to turn the cameras on right now, pop on YouTube, (and hence back to your own blog) to both help us see how far we’ve come, as well as to inspire the next generation of builders by how rough all of us once were.

Think how cool it’d be to see Woz and Steve Jobs demoing the first Apple, Ed Roberts the first Altair, Dan Bricklin the first version of Visicalc, Tim Paterson the first version of DOS, Jerry Yang the first Yahoo, or Larry & Sergei the first version of Backrub / Google!

Actually, what I find most interesting here is why MLB’s streams / streamer are so low in comparison to the others. Is it a format issue, (length of stream)? Integration / focus? Too tight a concentration on a single content type? Can’t be that it’s avail on TV, as that would affect Time Warner, as well. Well, since I’ve never gone to the MLB site, s’pose I’ll have to go check it out…

Was an excellent post on O’Reilly Radar by Nat Torkington reminding us in the course of designing social suggestion-based sites / software to not forget one of the most critical reasons for in the first place - serendipity / new discovery. Sometimes this is best accomplished by “more like this,”‘es and/or “people who viewed this purchased..” kinds of things, (i.e. narrowing / refinement goal-oriented) and sometimes best accomplished by purposely broadening / adjusting the scope to introduce some new variance and seeing where things progress from there.

Many years ago there was a little search startup called Direct Hit here in MA, (who earned $500M on a cheaper version of what I wanted to do, but that’s another story) who really was the first entity to hang their hat on social suggestion-based search results, knowing full well that most folks only look at results 1-3, and almost no one beyond 10, so that those results that it initially presented as 1-3 would almost always tend to stay there, whether they were the best results or not - i.e. for anyone who’s ever used Excel, an infinite circular error.

As we all took this kind of click-through analysis / adjustment functions in to become one of the ranking criteria we used, (and / or at least used to internally evaluate how good a job we were doing in delivering relevant results - with all of the appropriate mechanisms for negating bounce - i.e. clicking through on a link, saying “this isn’t what I wanted” and hopping back to the search page, etc) the import of regularly introducing different results into the mix to make sure we were actually doing a much better job of delighting folks became more and more clear then, and still holds true today.

But enough of me babbling, Nat does a superb job of describing, so go read it from him!

Source: comScore Media Metrix

Contrary to popular belief that gamers are primarily teenage boys, results of the study indicate that video games have much broader appeal. On average, gamers are 41 years of age with an average annual income of $55,000. Further, females account for 52 percent of the gaming audience. The average gamer has been online for nine years and 84 percent have broadband access at home.

….When asked about their primary reason for purchasing their last game, the two most prevalent responses among gamers centered on previous gaming experiences, regardless of gaming device used. More then one-quarter of those using each type of device stated that they purchased their last game because they had played it before and enjoyed the experience. Game sequels also drove gamers to purchase their last game. The next most popular responses included “I heard good things about it,” and “A friend recommended it,” indicating the importance of word-of-mouth recommendations in influencing purchase behavior.

….nearly four out of ten heavy games (37 percent) agreed that featuring actual products or companies in games make the games feel more realistic, while 27 percent of light/ medium gamers agreed. Moreover, half of heavy gamers believe that advergaming “is inevitable and will be in all or most games in the future,” compared to 42 percent of light/medium gamers.

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