International media pwned by student's fake Wikipedia quote. FAIL.

This is startling proof of how increasingly dependent traditional media outlets are on the internet, and how they are doing this without the proper checks and balances. An Irish student recently made up a fake quote in the Wikipedia entry of musician Maurice Jarre a few hours after his death. Although the quote was spotted and removed by the Wikipedia community within a few hours, dozens of media outlets had gotten the news and used it on their articles.

So far only The Guardian admitted their mistake.

While the internet makes things faster for everyone, that doesn't mean everything available is reliable. People - especially the media! - have to be vigilant.

FAIL.


The whole article is here.

I love to Singa - early Simon Cowell

Any person who loves cartoons should remember this lovable cartoon "I love to Sing-a" featuring a cute large-eyed Owl family.

According to youtube user bugzappers2112, "I Love to Singa depicts the story of a young owlet who wants to sing jazz, instead of the classical music that his German parents wish him to perform. The plot is a light-hearted tribute to that of Al Jolson's film The Jazz Singer.

The young owl, voiced by Tommy Bond, best known as "Butch" of the Our Gang (Little Rascals) films, is unjustly kicked out of his family's house by his disciplinarian violinist father (voiced by Billy Bletcher) after he is caught singing jazz instead of Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes to his mother (voiced by Martha Wentworth)'s reed (pump) organ accompaniment. (However she is not depicted as operating the pump pedals.) While wandering, he comes across a radio amateur contest, hosted by "Jack Bunny" (a pun on Jack Benny), and billing himself as "Owl Jolson", wins the contest, but not before his father has finally seen his son's potential and allowed him to freely sing jazz."


If you watch the video (embedded below) the judge "Jacky Bunny" reminds me of Simon Cowell.
I remember how I used to watch this when my age was still of 1 digit. I love how good old stuff get spread virally over the internet!

Can we predict user-submitted content popularity?

According to a paper published by the HP Social Computing Lab, it seems that there is.

The paper points to the possibility that the popularity of user contributed content can be predicted very soon after the submission has been made, by measuring the popularity at an early time. Three models for predicting popularity were shared in the report.

Disclaimer: The Labs' data sources were Youtube and Digg. Also, the paper didn't touch on the semantics of why user-generated content becomes popular.

The paper is available here. This is very math-heavy, so be warned :)

On Twitter snowstorm maps and creating unique digital experiences

For me, effective digital marketing is all about creating a service (a site, an application, whatever you want to call it) that addresses a unique need for a set of users. It has to be unique so that it stands out among many other competing brands' efforts. And it has to offer a unique service so that consumers will like the utility and aid brand recall.

One particular example that showcases a unique service - although it's not done in a digital marketing sense - is #uksnow at http://benmarsh.co.uk/snow/

We all know that the UK has been suffering severe snowstorms this year. In fact, it is the worst in 18 years. Twitter users in the UK have been tweeting about this weather so Ben thought of combining Google Maps with Twitter posts to create a Twittermap of the UK snowstorms!

It's a simple idea: Ask people to hashtag their Tweets with #uksnow, put in their geo information, and add a twitpic if possible. Voila! Those tweets feed into the Google map. These realtime tweets allow users to see how the weather is at several parts in the UK. Even a million-dollar telescope can't do that because of severe cloud conditions. That's a unique service :)

Here're the exact instructions on the site:

Tweet the first half of your postcode, and rate the amount of snow that is falling out of ten (0/10 for nothing, 5/10 for steady snow and 10/10 for arctic blizzard conditions) >> "#uksnow [FIRST-HALF-OF-POSTCODE] [SNOW-SCORE]/10", ie: "#uksnow NG9 3/10".

Add your twitpic url to the end of your tweet to show it on the map >> "#uksnow [FIRST-HALF-OF-POSTCODE] [SNOW-SCORE]/10 [TWITPIC-URL]", ie: "#uksnow NG9 3/10 http://twitpic.com/aaaaa".

Doom is now a Flash game on Kongregate.com

To all classic game lovers, I found something over at Kongregate which you might like: Doom 1 is now a Flash game!


Gaming is a good way of reaching young people (both male and female) because it is highly engaging and in this short attention span world, engagement is precious. :) Flash games are the most common, because they are easy to develop and post in sites. Flash games also boast high quality graphics and gameplay.

Males love action-oriented games, while females enjoy more casual, laid-back games.

I would love to see Starcraft in a Flash game too!

ABS purchases 5% stake in Multiply.com for $5M USD

ABS CBN announced last Nov 17 that they are purchasing a 5% stake in Multiply.com for $5 million dollars, valuing the entire company at 100 million dollars.

Multiply is a popular social networking site in the Philippines and according to Alexa, is the 6th most popular website in the country, next only to Yahoo, Friendster, Youtube, Google.com.ph and Google. Multiply has an estimated 3 million Filipino users.

From the official announcement over at http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/ ABS stated that Multiply and ABS complement each other.

"Multiply is a natural fit for ABS-CBN. It is the social network that is most consistent to our business model because they have focused on photo, video and blog features compared to the other social networks such as Friendster and Facebook, which focus on connecting friends and running applications. This puts together content and communities around the content, whether it is ABS-CBN-branded or user-generated," he told abs-cbnNEWS.com.

With regard to long term plans for the partnership, it will be monetized via advertising (which are happening now) and creating a mobile version of the site.

I think that Multiply.com is a viable medium for advertising for the Philippine market, but these brands should establish an emotional relationship with, and be of real value to, their consumers. (Compare to P&G's Ted McConnell's statement on Facebook, where he says P&G probably shouldn't advertise on Facebook.) If you know of one, let me know. Majority of commercial entities in Multiply are online stores, selling stuff like clothes and shoes.

wePC: Crowdsourcing the next Asus PC, powered by Intel

I would definitely score this initiative a 10 out of 10 for innovation and risk-taking.

Asus and Intel are going to you - yes, the users - for the design of an ASUS computer, with Intel chips powering it.

The gist of wePC is a user idea section where everybody can suggest what their ideal PC should have, then people can rate and comment on it.

As Chasnote mentioned, traffic has spiked for wepc, intel, and asus because of this.

Pepsi 'kada can: Be on the next Pepsi can

kada-can or kadacan is derived from two words: Kada from Barkada (meaning a group of close friends in English) while can stands for "Pepsi can." You guessed it right: Pepsi is holding a big user-generated content contest where the winners will adorn the next Pepsi can.


The mechanic is that a barkada needs to go to Pepsi Kada can booths, and bring an unopened Pepsi product to have their pictures taken for free inside the booth. They can also upload their pictures via Pepsi's website.

People can vote via text messaging or via the website. Then the really cool thing is: Barkadas with the most votes will be on the next Pepsi can! There are also other prizes for People's choice and other winners.

I see two interesting things related to this:
1. A few months ago, Pepsi also ran a mobile campaign where every hour, a lucky person can win an iPod by texting in the code found in every Pepsi can to a mobile shortcode.
2. Lucky Me is also having a "be on our next product" contest via its "Lid the way" contest.

It seems to me that Pepsi is focused on digital marketing initiatives. They have also won some awards in last year's IMMAP (Internet and Mobile Marketing Association of the Philippines). I present an analysis about this in my next entry.