Getting Granular: The DigitalGrit Blog

Nickelodeon Creates Virtual World for Kids

No sooner does Disney announce it's plans for a pre-pubescent MySpace, than Nickelodeon creates a virtual universe for adolescent avatars. The ad-supported Nicktropolis launches tomorrow:

Children will be able to create their own personalized 3D rooms on the site, which launches on Tuesday, and move through Nicktropolis by taking on a self-designed 3D avatar similar to those on popular virtual world Second Life.

The site will feature gaming, online video, popular Nickelodeon brands and other elements to help children interact with each other or Nickelodeon characters in real time.

Now we're NEVER gonna get the kids off the couch...!

Google Allegedly in Virtual World Space, Building SecondLife Competitor

MarketingVox reports on rumours that Google is working on its own version of SecondLife. From the sound of things, they've been lining up teams in the worlds of "metaverses," 3-D model creation, and online gaming to rollout a virtual world with "speculation being that Google will use real-world data gathered from their existing enterprises to craft an alternate reality platform online."

Do you think it will run 3-D AdWords?

YouTube Plans to Share Ad Revenue with Uploaders

Chad Hurley at the World Economic Forum:

"In terms of paying users revenue against the content that they are uploading, we definitely are going to be moving in that direction," Hurley said in video recorded in Davos, by a YouTube user and posted on the site.

"We feel we are at a scale now that we will be able to do that and still have a true community around video."

From Reuters via Yahoo! News

I was concered about the precedent this would set in user-generated media...but goes to show how much of a novice I am on the user side. According to GearLive, YouTube's already lost contributers to Revver and MetaCafe, which are already paying for content.

Anyway, if anyone's going to figure out a reasonable way to pay content providers...well, I think Google might have some exeperience there.

While we're on branding...Coca Cola or Google?

Just posted about Madison Avenue leveraging online for brand-building. Here's an article on how online brands are gaining greater popularity.

While Coke has long been considered the greatest brand every, a recent poll (of Geeks?) put Google in the top spot. (Coke came in at number 9. It was beaten by, among others, MySpace and Ikea.)

Google retained its title as the world's most influential brand, and video-sharing site YouTube and online encyclopedia Wikipedia were catapulted into the top five at the No. 3 and 4 spots, according to the annual survey by online branding magazine brandchannel.com.

While brandchannel's survey is not uncontroversial as it asks 3,625 branding professionals and students [like I said, Geeks.] "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?," rather than measuring economic impact, the evidence of the result is everywhere...

Yes, I supposed Coke hasn't had the privilege of becoming a verb. (Nor has Google earned a spot at the deli counter.) And the fact is, you'll interact with your can of Coke for about 10 minutes, whereas you'll be on Google or MySpace all day long.

See the results at BrandChannel.

Google Wants Brands; Brands Don't Seem to Want Google (or at least, their agencies don't...)

In a nutshell, it's not that they don't WANT to work with Google, it's that Google doesn't necessarily play well with others technologically:

Read more from the ClickZ article.

Marketers complain that Google won't allow them to deliver ads using third party management firms such as DoubleClick and Atlas. These platforms and others like them have helped consolidate serving and reporting for display campaigns that can run on hundreds of individual sites....

As a result, he said, using Google for brand campaigns results is a waste of time and energy. "Google has built this closed loop world, which I think is only a short term prospect for them," he said. "They need to open it up."

Brand agencies haven't really warmed up to the idea of including Google in their campaigns at this point, and this technology issue is delaying the process. Google released a statement saying that while they allow third-party tracking, they don't offer third-party serving "at this time."

Sounds like they're ready to relinquish a little bit of control to gain a little bit of the Madison Avenue pie. As ClickZ points out, they've spent a good part of the last 12 months grooming themselves for this market -- including the lease of their posh Manhattan space -- so they're going to need to kow-tow to the agencies a bit if they're going to ultimately snag the branding business.

Did you know? Google Content Site Exclusion is now unlimited

One of our BRILLIANT, dedicated Account Managers sent this via email to the team today:

Did you know?

When using the Google Content Network, you have the ability to exclude sites from appearing on sites or sections of sites that are unrelated to your product.

There used to be a limit on the number of sites (10), that you could exclude your ads from appearing on.  A recent change was made and you can now exclude an unlimited number of sites.

See the Site Exclusion tool and remember to review a site carefully before deciding to exclude it from your campaign.

Thanks, Nicole (and Cate)!

Second Life: A Virtual World of Possibilities for Businesses

Our resident Second Life expert forwarded me this article from Fortune.

I've been exploring it myself a bit, interested in seeing what the marketing possiblities might be. (Branded T-shirts for avatars? A billboard on Duran Duran's island?) 

But reading this article made me realize how big you can go. IBM, for example, has virtual meetings in Second Life: They own several islands on the site, and over 3000 IBM staffers have avatars.

ABN Amro, the Dutch bank, has a branch in the virtual world.

Virtual real estate moguls have bought islands -- and have sub-divided the land and rented it out, parcel by parcel. Does anyone else smell a Trump opportunity here?

The most amazing learnings from the article? SecondLife, though it was exceedingly slow to take off, was deliberately left content-free. Even though it went for eons (in online time) with only about a thousand "citizens," creators and early investors were so encouraged and amazed by the creativty of those initial devotees, that they shied away from the obvious path of making it a gaming site. Instead, they invested in tools to foster that creativity and make the site a pioneer in CGM:

Impressed by this passion, Kapor wrote another seven-figure check, and Second Life relaunched in January 2004, this time with more focus on user creativity and in-world entrepreneurship. Linden (Labs) took the advice of Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford Law School guru on intellectual property, who recommended letting users own their own content. That, he argued, would encourage them to create more.

And so came the Second Life we all know and love. Although, according to the article, it's in desperate need of better back-end technology (nearly 20% of first-time users will not return after their first visit out of sheer frustration) the site's here to stay and challenge the barriers of the Web.

MySpace Parental Control: Why do you have ruin EVERYTHING, Mom??

As reported by Adotas and Newsweek, MySpace is planning to give parents some control over their kids' presence on the site.

Spurred by the rash of assualts on teenage girls by adults they met on MySpace (and the subsequent lawsuits filed by parents), the project is codenamed "Zephyr." Zephyr would allow parents to view certain aspects of their kids' profiles - like the age they claim to be - without giving them access to messages or other, more creative, profile features.

Zephyr gives parents some control over what they're kids are doing, yet sounds discreet enough that the young'uns wouldn't be psyched off the site.

Certain lawmakers don't feel it's enough, however. In addition for pushing the minimum age from 14 to 16, they're also pushing for age verification. Not sure how you'd do that without microchipping the kids, but hey -- go for it.

It sounds like the folks at MySpace are in it for real, too...I'm sure the lawsuits aren't much fun for them, but they're taking an appropriate amount of responsibility. And pushing off an appropriate amount on parents, while they're at it.

Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer for MySpace, responded in a prepared statement that the site "serves as an industry leader on Internet safety and we take proactive measures to protect our members." Nigam also asserts that Internet safety ultimately is "a shared responsibility." [Newsweek]

Can't help but wonder if the new Disney site will have Zephyr-like controls...I suspect that, having a more family-friendly reputation to uphold, their controls will be a little more intrusive.

Social Networking Predictions - Already coming true?

In my recent predictions post, I predicted the growth of niche social networks and made a comment about LinkedIn's stickiness (or lack thereof):

...I predict that a lot of those 30-somethings who don't fit into MySpace of FaceBook (and who can't find enough stickiness to hang out on LinkedIn) will find some more specialized communities to get involved in and voice their opinions. And I have a feeling net-entrepreneurs will be scrambling to create communities to meet the demand.

And holy cow, I was actually right! Less than a week later, Adotas reports that MomJunction, a social networking site for - you guessed it - moms, has raised $1.5 million. The company reports that the November-launched Beta was "phenomenal." And LinkedIn, which *had* to have been aware of its lack of exciting features, has just introduced LinkedIn Answers. Answers looks like a great start for LinkedIn...but I still think they should add a whitepaper sharing feature.

Feed this: Search Engine Land

The name may be a tad corny, but Search Engine Land gives a new forum to the great minds behind Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch. That's right...Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz are now living at SearchEngineLand.com.

And despite it's recent birth less than a month ago, this blog's got an archive a mile long. Add it to your feeds before you miss another day of key search engine marketing headlines.

We'd wish them luck...but somehow, we're pretty sure they're not going to need it.