Google Latitude: location-sharing is here. Think. Again. And Again.

Watch these videos... and think.

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More ways of following me (should you care to) - ambient awareness vs ADD;)

Image by gleonhard via Flickr

RSS and APIs have brought us some pretty amazing new ways of following people we like, and thereby help generate what some people have called 'ambient awareness' of what our network 'friends' are doing. If this should be chalked up under 'yet another Attention-Deficit-Disorder-Generator' or not... you decide; but here are some cool ways of following me:

• My friendfeed RSS feed (Friendfeed aggregates most of my social network outout in one place) - you can read this feed even if you are not signed up for Friendfeed, I think
• RSS feed from the Twitter search "Gerd Leonhard"
• My Twitter timeline feed

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Advertising 2.0: Free Content in Return for Attention (and Ads = Content, too)

Well, this is of course hardly new, as such, just more pronounced. The Future of Advertising will see advertisers (and brands, directly) providing free music, films, TV-shows, games and other premium content in return for targeted and focused attention to what was formerly known as Ads; or rather other types of content - as I sometimes call it, advercontent or contvertising - that promotes products and services - but limited to what we have ASK to see.

This means I will be trading some of my personal user data, my click-streams and digital breadcrumbs in return for getting free content. Think ad-supported music (yes... soon!) and films. This will feel like free to the users and will offer huge value to the advertisers (provided of course that the match is 99%!)
Read more here: www.mediafuturist.com/advertising/index.html   If you like my images check out my other stuff on Flickr.

Update: Just ran across this very much related cartoon on Flickr

Everyone suddenly wants to be your friend (emarketer on social network spam issues)

A good read on the privacy and spam debate on social networks just came in via EMarketer, here.

I think Privacy and 'Digital Obesity' (i.e. eating too much information all the time, and suffering from Continuous Partial Attention) are the 2 top issues that are impacting the pace of development of the Social Web, and the related sectors such as advertising.

Whoever can solve the challenge of skillfully getting solid, real, personal, meaningful and 100% opted-in information from people so that they will want to look at targeted Content-Ads (as I like to say... Contvertising, see my related posts here) without the users becoming totally transparent has the keys to a Trillion dollar market.

Also, imho, it's good to keep this in mind: the potential perils of an open network - of ‘Too Much Freedom’ - will always pale beside those of a closed, controlled and authoritarian Network (*read this somewhere and just remembered it - need to find the source;).