Behind this name of official web2.0 bubbler™ hides a pretty cool service, allowing you and your team to monitor online competition. After a brief setup (that basically consists in entering the URLs of competing services) the system creates a handy dashboard where you can access most of the public information about your competitors (blog posts, alexa rank).

Nothing magic, but centralizing all that information in one place is pretty useful, and the “clippings” allow you to let anybody contribute small pieces of information gathered around the web to the project. Give access to your team, anytime they find something regarding a competitor they can add it to competitio.us. Nice.

Competitious also gives one intriguing information: the number of people also considering a certain company as a competitor…

The Economist on Amazon’s strategy:

WHAT kind of company is Amazon.com? It is usually described as an internet retailer. But it has fingers in many other pies, too. (…) When Mr Bezos talks about these services his firm no longer sounds like a retailer at all.
(…)

There is A9, its search engine, and Unbox, a video-download service. It operates online stores for other firms, such as Target. It was a pioneer in developing “collaborative filtering” software to make recommendations to shoppers. And last week Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, was out stumping for three of its “utility computing” offerings: Simple Storage Service (S3), which provides cheap access to online storage; Elastic Compute Cloud, which lets programmers rent computing capacity on Amazon’s systems; and Mechanical Turk, which connects firms with people who perform small tasks that are difficult to
automate. (…) In order to cope with the Christmas rush, Amazon has far more computing capacity than it needs for most of the year. As much as 90% of it is idle at times. Renting out pieces of that network to other businesses, such as SmugMug, an online photo site that uses the S3 service, is a way to get extra return

Amazon’s strategy seems to move from a retailer to a technology and logistics firm. What’s the underlying ideas behind that?

Seth explique comment les pratiques de nommage de nos chères sociétés ont évolué:

A long time ago, the goal of a name was to capture the essence of your positioning. […] International Business Machines and Shredded Wheat were good efforts at this approach.

It quickly became clear, though, that descriptive names were too generic, so the goal was to coin a defensible word that could acquire secondary meaning and that you could own for the ages. That’s why “Jet Blue” is a much better name than “Southwest” and why “Starbucks” is so much better than “Dunkin Donuts”.

Lien

Comme d’habitude, l’article se termine par quelques conseils simples et efficaces pour trouver le nom qu’il faut.

Seth explains the evolution of company naming:

A long time ago, the goal of a name was to capture the essence of your positioning. […] International Business Machines and Shredded Wheat were good efforts at this approach.

It quickly became clear, though, that descriptive names were too generic, so the goal was to coin a defensible word that could acquire secondary meaning and that you could own for the ages. That’s why “Jet Blue” is a much better name than “Southwest” and why “Starbucks” is so much better than “Dunkin Donuts”.

Link

As usual with Seth, you get some good and simple advices at the end of the article.

Deux nouveaux rapports viennent apporter quelques bonnes nouvelles pour les bloggeurs de tout bord.

Le site MarketWatch rapporte tout d’abord que 10% des consommateurs lisent désormais les blogs (5% en 2004) et 6% utilisent les flux RSS (2% en 2004).

C’est ensuite la BBC qui a enquêté sur le niveau de confiance auprès des lecteurs. Bonne surprise: plus de trois quarts des personnes sondées affirment avoir consulté des blogs avant d’acheter. Les gens trouvent les blogs plus dignes de confiance parce qu’ils sont écrits par de vraies personnes et basées sur des expériences réelles.

Les choses avancent, et maintenant qu’on arrive enfin � des résultats tangibles (les clients qui lisent les blogs avant d’acheter) il faut s’attendre � ce que la ruée des blogs commerciaux commence. Est-ce vraiment une bonne nouvelle?

(via MicroPersuasion et PointBlog)

Two different reports are coming up with reassuring figures on blog readership.

First it seems more people are reading blogs, with the people of MarketWatch finding that 10% of consumers read blogs (5% in 2004) and 6% use RSS (2% in 2004).

Second the trust in blogs is going up with the BBC reporting that more than three-quarters of those questioned in a survey said they had consulted blogs before shopping. Respondents said they trusted blogs because they were written by real people and based on actual experiences.

Things are getting better, and now that we are starting to talk about real value (consumers reading blogs before buying anything) the corporate blog frenzy will begin.

(via MicroPersuasion and PointBlog)

C’est le programme de la dernière colonne de Gerry McGovern. Il évoque quelque chose de tellement important pour tous ceux qui font du web: savoir parler le langage des managers pour les convaincre que ces projets amènent de la valeur � l’entreprise.

Gerry McGovern: Proving to senior management your website delivers value

It’s time for public websites and intranets to show clearly how they are delivering value. The first step in doing this is to understand how senior management thinks about value.

(via l’incroyable newsletter des gens d’InfoDesign qui, chaque semaine, m’envoient une quantité de liens plus intéressants les uns que les autres. A lire également: what to do if you can’t avoid registration forms, un article sur les règles � appliquer quand il s’agit d’enregistrer les clients d’un site sans qu’ils partent en courant)

This is such an important topic for all the web people out there. Not applicable to all organizations (I used to work for many that do not have shareholders for example) but he is making a good point: to sell a project on management you need to speak their language. And it’s up to you to convince them, not the other way around (unfortunately).

Gerry McGovern: Proving to senior management your website delivers value

It’s time for public websites and intranets to show clearly how they are delivering value. The first step in doing this is to understand how senior management thinks about value.

(via the amazing people of InfoDesign who are also pointing to this very interesting article on what to do if you can’t avoid registration forms)

Quand David Weinberger commence � réfléchir � l’avenir des radios � l’époque d’Internet et des podcasts, ça donne une belle leçon qui s’applique � quasiment toutes les entreprises. En gros il affirme qu’une stratégie qui marche, c’est de créer un lien de confiance avec ses clients, puis de s’effacer.

It seems to be a lesson of the Net that you build trust with your users/readers/listeners by getting out of their way. I only wish I knew what I was talking about.

Link

Si vous ne l’avez pas encore fait abonnez-vous au blog de David (flux rss). Pour ceux qui ne le connaissent pas encore vous pouvez vous rendre sur mon résumé de sa présentation � reboot (par ici). C’est un des grands personnages de la révolution actuelle.

David Weinberger rocks. The latest comes when he starts thinking on the impact of the Internet and podcasting on radio stations. Build trust, get out of the way. A few words to summarize what millions of organizations – not only radios – are now about to struggle with. That’s a big shift ahead of us.

It seems to be a lesson of the Net that you build trust with your users/readers/listeners by getting out of their way. I only wish I knew what I was talking about.

Link

Subscribe to David’s blog here, and check my reboot summary to have a sneak peak at the guy.