Here’s a little fun tool from Waggeneredstrom, a worldwide communications firm. They’ve utilized Twitter’s API to analyze “twendz” on Twitter: essentially, rating positive and negative feedback using key words scattered in tweets. This technology works by running every word they see related to the particular brand or product in question with their “positive/negative” ranking database. For example, “suck” and “poor” and “horrible” would be negative words – in a massive database of ranked words.

What happens next has phenomenal online “environmental assessment” implications. Each “keyword” you search, if popular enough, will have around 70 tweets that will be analyzed by this service at any given moment. It will gauge the positive or negative sentiments surrounding your brand or product at any given time.

It still has its flaws – for example, keywords like “Rogers” can me mixed with people like Ted Rogers – a lot of keywords can be mistaken for another thing. There is a lot of potential with other tools like this though – Twitter – as I’ve mentioned before – is now truly becoming the real true realtime search engine for anything (public opinion, and, even health trends).

Link: Twendz

Google is taking over the world – as in, they are now prowling through your search behavior and serving ads based on what you’ve seen and what you’ve searched. Creepy, yes, effective, yes (has some caveats though, for multiple users accounts) – taking over the world, yes.

Obviously, this is significant to internet marketers because now ads are served in an even more targeted manner. My problem with this, however, is that as much as we think that targeting ads more specifically and more intelligently is the way to go – it’s the nature and look of the ads that are desensitizing people to even pay attention to them in the first place. Google needs to work on refreshing the look of their ads to make them look more purposeful and useful – we know how design can be manipulative – design can play on the shallow-nature of the average schizophrenic internet surfer – and turn these ads into an item of interest once again.

Link: Google: Interest Based Advertising

Our addiction to real-time, concise, brief, and ADHD-enhanced media is causing blogs to lose their authority in the “statusphere”. According to Brian Solis at TechCrunch, with over 133 million blogs today, their value is dwindling.

Although I disagree that we should ignore blogs or even start phasing them out – they are the true content creators. Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, and other social tools only share original content. In Groundswell’s Social Technographics: we see the importance of content creators. Blogs are the perfect platform to ensure brevity, completeness, and true online media coverage and content creation.

A brilliant takeaway idea for this would be a micro-feed specialized replacement for Technorati: a specialized search engine and ranking system for real-time, micro-sharing services. I think this is an idea that Twitter should definitely experiment with.

Twitter’s search engine, purchased from Summize a few months ago, effectively cements Twitter’s enormous potential as being the first true real-time search engine. Ranking trackbacks, re-tweets, and other connections in and out from tweets would be a great way to link buzz-generating resources connecting in and out of Twitter’s sharing platform. Twitter is, essentially, a sharing platform as well.

Link: TechCrunch: Are Blogs Losing Status?

Quick! Everyone! Go to www.skittles.com. What do you see?

Everyone in the Twittosphere, the blogosphere, or whateversphere, is talking about this right now. It’s official: Skittles’ marketing team got lazy and decided that it would be a fun gimmick to make itself vulnerable to the social definition of their product.

Just kidding. I think this is half-brilliant and half-lazy at the same time. Making themselves vulnerable to the social definition of their product is a sign of acceptance, acknowledgment, respect, and transparency: many welcome traits that the online community will view as a bolstering element to the Skittles’ public image.

This idea caused quite a splash, and I’m sure there will be many copycats, but let’s just keep this an experiment, shall we? Sometimes I actually want to read marketing speak. It helps calm my nerves from buyer’s remorse.

Quick note: This idea was inspired by Modernista!. A all-round pretty cool agency.

Also on a fun note: Skittles’ webpage title now includes: Interweb the Rainbow. Funny.

Here’s an interesting article by Allan Mutter that advocates for paid content with major “legit” media producers. His main concern revolves around reducing the stigma of “free” around the web’s quality content and charging to help keep “legit” alive. Chris Anderson (from Wired) may disagree though – as much as I believe that legitimate content is important to preserve on the internet, there are alternative sources of income that have “costed” the customer or the consumer at least something (i.e. advertisements and “free” subscriptions). By foregoing your contact details, interest habits, and behaviors, companies can convert your involvement into a more valuable advertisement target – which will increase the advertising potential and revenue of any site with many users.

Charging for content may be a very selfish way to go about preserving the media industry – but it may compromise the very fiber of the internet and all the standards that it has grown and been built upon. The question is – will you charge, if others start charging?

Link: Why The Media Must Charge for Web Content