Topic: Marketing
How do you take advantage of the new Web 2.0 landscape to build your business? How can you make your customers your evangelists -- or better yet, how can you let your customers build your business altogether? What are the roles of new communication tools like blogs, RSS, and social networks? A panel of innovators in the blogging, photography, and retail businesses point the way. [Web 2.0 audio on IT Conversations]
Malcolm Gladwell, author, reporter and staff writer at The New Yorker, talks about his new book "Blink:Thin-Slicing, Snap Judgments and the Power of Thinking Without Thinking". He discusses how we interact with our environment and take instantaneous decisions based on a multitude of information sources, some of which may actually be driving us awry. He presents the central theme of his book in a very humorous and engaging style. [SXSW Interactive audio from IT Conversations]
Dr. Moira Gunn interviews James Stewart, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of "Den of Thieves." His latest endeavors have been a look inside the wonderful world of "Corporate Disney." [Tech Nation audio on IT Conversations]
Malcolm Gladwell is back on IT Conversations to discuss his new book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Dr. Moira Gunn asks him, "Do you really think there's a science of decision?" We have two kinds of thought, Malcolm says. The first is the rational, deliberate and conscious thought that we analyze and cherish. The other is the kind of thinking that occurs below the level of awareness, and it doesn't happen slowly and deliberately, but really quickly. We tend to dismiss the latter in our society, but in the past few years psychologists have referred to this as the product of the adaptive unconscious. It's a kind of a big computer that does all the background tasks. It's powerful and fast, but because it's not part of our consciousness, it's rather mysterious.
Join Moira for another great (audio) interview with an IT Conversations favorite.
James Currier, CEO of Tickle from the Web 2.0 Conference: Every great consumer business is built around the psychology and emotions of the individual. Come take a deep dive into consumer psychology and its implications for the future of online consumer services. (IT Conversations audio)
(The Gillmor Gang on IT Conversations) Adam Bosworth, now Google's VP of Engineering, joins The Gang this week to discuss his vision for the future of search architecture. "How do you handle data that's much less known up front and where the query is by relevance?" Adam asks. Most of today's databases are built on the relational model, but most of today's queries are not. Instead they're looking for keyword precision, location and semantic context -- not a textual or numeric match. The relational model is designed for use when both the data and the queries can be anticipated, but in today's world, neither are typically known in advance.
Adam suggests that the same divide-and-conquer architectures used to make web servers more scalable could be used in search. He envisions data routers that will know which back-end servers have which knowledge and will query servers asynchronously according to the liklihood of getting the best results.
The discussion then turns to the topic of attention and the technology and politics of knowing who's reading what on the Internet. XML-based RSS and Atom have created both the challenge and the opportunity.
IT Conversations audio from Pop!Tech 2004 (Human Nature): Author and New Yorker Magazine journalist Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point has been a tremendous bestseller for over three years and counting. In this presentation he explores why we can't trust people's opinions -- because we don't have the language to express our feelings. His examples include the story of New Coke and how Coke's market research misled them, and the development of Herman-Miller's Aeron chair, the best-selling chair in the history of office chairs, which succeeded in spite of research that suggested it would fail.
Audio from Gnomedex 4.0: The Future of Online Advertising. How to make money from blogs and more from a panel of experts: Dave McClure, Jeff Barr, Henry Copeland, Bill Flitter, Gokul Rajaram and Mark Pincus.
