I was cheering on hi5.com for quite some time now. They were the underdogs to Facebook and Myspace, but have a very strong presence in Thailand. I liked their colorful interface and a lot of the features and tools they employed, which made it easy to interact with others and find new friends.

But now, they’ve destroyed their website by loading it with popup ads and self-running video ads. 2 minutes on the site feels like sitting through an infomercial for 30 minutes.

Their traffic has fallen from 8 to 6 million visitors daily, and I expect this number will continue to decline as long as they continue pushing ads in their members faces. Bye Bye, it was nice knowing you.

They’re coming! Perhaps around mid 2010, domain name URL’s written in non-English language will become available for the internet. So a new gold rush is set to begin.

The Internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of international domain names — or addresses — that can be written in languages other than English, an official said Monday.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN — the non-profit group that oversees domain names — is holding a meeting this week in Seoul. Domain names are the monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and Twitter post, such as “.com” and other suffixes.

One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN’s board at this week’s gathering is whether to allow for the first time entire Internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters. That could potentially open up the Web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic — in which Russian is written.

“This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters, calling it a “fantastically complicated technical feature.” He said he expects the board to grant approval on Friday, the conference’s final day.

This is going to be a big change, and we will keep on top of it and report about it on this blog. Here is the full article on the matter.

Dave Lakhani has an interesting post on the future of marketing and mass communication in which he coorelates it with singularity.

So as I studied The Singularity it occurred to me that the answer to how do you get your message to the masses and have it be heard most likely won’t be answered by us, it is much more likely to be answered by the individuals collectively that we hope to communicate to. In fact, it is my belief that another form of singularity will occur, in which potential customers will become evermore sophisticated in their ability to filter and consolidate information. As they become more sophisticated, they create individual influence streams from which they get all of their information, information that is highly personalized and highly selected. Rather than trying to increase the number of people they follow they become increasingly selective about who they receive information from ultimately reducing the noise while becoming much more connected to the channel through which they receive information. RSS was the first glimpse and promise of the idea that you could consolidate the information that you wanted into one single feed. In social media FriendFeed is trying to do that. And overall web wide Twine is also trying to do it. But for most consumers they don’t go far enough.

Inc. Magazine outlines the best industries for entrepreneurs to start a new business right now. They are as follows:

• Iphone Apps
• Healthcare Technologies
• Beer, Wine Liquor Wholesale
• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Home Health Care
• Yoga Products and Services
• Technical and Trade Schools
• Fast Casual Dining
• Green Consulting
• Niche Consulting
• Education Technology
• Temporary Staffing
• Government Services
• Accounting Services
• Repair Services
• Self Improvement
• Energy

Wired Magazine’s editor in chief Chris Anderson, wrote a new book entitled “The Future of a radical Price“, where he outlines the future of media content concerning pricing. And he does so with a suprisingly counterintuitive prediction.
 
It begins with this video, Disruption By Design. Aside from a disruption caused by shoddy cameramanship, (the person shooting this video needs to be fired immediately, seriously), he basically outlines a picture that disruptions are here to stay, they are our future whether we like them or not. So the only way to prepare for the disruptions, is to become the disruptive force, be the driver of disruptive change by creating disriptive technologies.
 
Chris goes on to state that small groups and individuals tend to be quicker at adapting to disruptions and creating new disruptive technologies than large corporations or governments. One can then conclude that the future to successful enterprises will be in their ability to shrink themselves down to the smallest group possible in order to handle disruptions while retaining their overall connectivity with the larger group.
 
I think this is already evident in the form of spinoff’s, incubators, idea labs and skunk works projects. This is a trend that will continue, and how comanies organize themsleves to deal with and respond to disruptions will be a large determing factor to their success.
 
In Chris’s new book “The Future of a Radical Price”, he outlines the biggest disruptive force to hit the media. And in fact, this disruption is already here and being dealt with by anyone doing business online. Even Rupert Murdoch gave his opinion on free versus paid media content. 
 
The premise outlined in Chris’s book states that as products go digital, their marginal costs goes to zero. “This is the law of gravity online” he says. “Everything that becomes digital will become free. There will be a free version, either you will be competing with free or giving it away for free and selling something else. If it is not zero today, it will be zero tomorrow.”
 
Pretty harsh disruptive force indeed. So how will businesses make money online with digital content? Chris outlines 4 methods:

1. The best model is a mix of free and paid.
2. You can’t charge for an exclusive that will be repeated elsewhere.
3. Don’t charge for the most popular content on your site.
4. Content behind a pay wall should appeal to niches, the narrower the niche the better

These last 2 points come as a suprise, and almost counterintuitive to what most web enpreneures believe. What Chris is in fact saying is, don’t charge for all your most popular media content, that which is driving your traffic. That will drive your ad revenue.
 
The content you need to charge for, is the long tail niche content, the hard to find and obtain content. While it’s true that fewer people will be interested in that content, they will however be more willing to pay for it.
 
Anderson’s last book was “the Long Tail”, where he predicted that in media, “The head of the curve will be free and the tail of the curve will be paid.”

According to Rupert Murdoch, in one year’s time, the economy will rebound and allow for the charging of news delivery online; at least, his own brands such as Fox News, The Times, The Sun, etc…
 
Billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch gave a strange response when asked about plans for mainstream news websites to charge for content, declaring, “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”

He was making reference to the fact that corporate media websites cannot continue to survive under their current failing business model.

The establishment media is dying and advertising revenue has plummeted as people turn to blogs and the alternative media for their news in an environment of corporate lies and spin.

This has forced sectors of the corporate media to charge the dwindling number of loyal readers they have left for news content, a practice which is set to become widespread according to Murdoch. This will only send more people over to the alternative media as the old organs of de facto state-controlled propaganda wither and die.

“There are encouraging signs in some of our businesses that the days of precipitous declines are done, and things are beginning to look healthier.”
 
“[Wall Stree Journal is experiencing] booming subscription revenues.”

“That it is possible to charge for content on the Web [based on data from our Wall Street Journal Subscriptions Revenue] is obvious.”

The establishment media is dying and advertising revenue has plummeted as people turn to blogs and the alternative media for their news in an environment of corporate lies and spin.

This has forced sectors of the corporate media to charge the dwindling number of loyal readers they have left for news content, a practice which is set to become widespread according to Murdoch. This will only send more people over to the alternative media as the old organs of de facto state-controlled propaganda wither and die.
 
Source