What do I know about business and corporate blogging in Estonia?

The good, the bad and the ugly: Meelis Mandel, Editor in Chief, Äripäev Meelis chooses some Estonian business blogs and says what's good or bad about them in his opinion.

Hello folks! We’ve less than one hundred kilometers in distance between Tallinn and Helsinki. The birds can travel this distance very easy but how well do we know the blogosphere and business practices in our neighboring countries?

It very quickly occurs to me that that the Finnish bay is much thicker borderline than we tend to think. Estonian businesses is a big question mark for me. Tourism is one of the areas where people know a few brands. The same goes for liquor, beer and some household products.

It seems like we still live a very separated lives within our national economies. How could that be changed with Web 2.0, social media, blogs and microblogs? We’ve the tools but there has to be some common areas of interest before we start to connect. 

What comes after Social Media?

SILICON VALLEY – Year 2003 things were heating up again in the valley after the dot com crisis and 2001 WTC twin tower catastrophe.

Web 2.0 and social media made Internet services fashionable again, pulling back entrepreneurs who thrived or merely survived in the first rounds of activities on the Internet that began two decades ago.

New companies emerged from nowhere. Blogs became popular. We got wiki and microblogs. Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Skype and a myriad of other social media services emerged.

Google and Apple are now the most glowing examples of post-dot-com-crisis. Both companies have positioned themselves for future growth. But they are also becoming competitors.

Millions of people around the world learned to use Facebook and Twitter. Nokia is still the world’s biggest mobile phones producer and supplier but it’s not the leader in usability. Google launched Buzz this year.

It’s interesting to see how fast the competitors are countering the successful launching of iPad. Nobody has been able to deliver a iPhone killer? Is it going to take three to five years before we see the first iPad killers as well?

Fastest Growing Demographic on Facebook: Women Over 55

Learned about this today.

Fastest Growing Demographic on Facebook: Women Over 55: "We have the latest demographic data on US Facebook user as of February 1, 2009. Before jumping into the details below, here are the highlights.

Key Highlights

• Facebook reporting nearly 45.3 million active US users in the last 30 days
• Facebook growing in every age/gender demographic. Fastest growing segment: Women over 55, up 175.3% in the last 120 days.
• Facebook growing faster with women than men in almost every age group. Women comprise 56.2% of Facebook’s audience, up from 54.3% late last year.
• 45% of Facebook’s US audience is now 26 years old or older.

Facebook US Audience Growth by Age and Gender

Facebook’s US audience has continued to grow in recent months, fueled by expansion primarily in users 26 and older. Facebook has been growing particularly rapidly amongst people over 45 in the US, as the charts show below: over 165% amongst both men and women 45-54 over the last 4 months.

While the fastest growing age group by total users is still 26-34, the number of women over 55 on Facebook grew by an astounding 175.3% since the end of September. Their male counterparts, however, weren’t able to keep up - growing by only 137.8%. The number of women over 55 on Facebook almost..."

Read more on the site.

The Most Public Index, Silicon Valley | The News is NowPublic.com

The Most Public Index, Silicon Valley | The News is NowPublic.com: "today there are almost innumerable ways for one’s voice to be heard. The goal of the MostPublic Index is to measure—on a completely transparent, metric-driven basis—who is most effectively broadcasting their own personal brand online and who are the emerging players.”

NowPublic’s formula gauges influence and “publicness” across four categories, including:

o Online Visibility
o Presence on User-Generated Content and Social Networking Sites
o Interactivity and Accessibility
o The “R” Factor: Presence on Microblogging Platforms (Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.)

NowPublic examined statistics in each of these categories from Alexa, Compete, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Quantcast, Technorati, YouTube, and various other blogs and sites, to create a list of Silicon Valley’s leading influencers. It then narrowed the list to 50 by analyzing and documenting individuals’ presence and popularity in each of these channels, applying a weighted scoring system, determined by the strength of specific traits held in each online community."

Helge: I know some of these people over Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites. I don't write this for name dropping purposes. I like to follow the blog covering this kind of topics.

Jack Of All Blogs

Jack Of All Blogs: "I never thought it were possible, but there actually is something positive about Facebook! It’s perfect for catbloggers. Take people such as Calacanis and Scoble, those who pee their pants and then blog about it.

• Helge: Those two are visible.

We also call them A-Listers. Advantage Numero Uno of Facebook it that it offers anything every catblogger might desire to whore out itself. The blogging narcist. The eternal entertainer. Entertainer for people who don’t care about any value. Value other than Geek Big Brother. The positive thing about Facebook lays in it’s platform alikeness: everything all together. It’s microblogging3.

• Helge: Microblogging is an efficient way to say the essential with 140 characters.
  

Scoblers and Calacanis’es can import all their stuff at Facebook, without needing any other platforms, profiles anymore: blog feeds, tweets, contact details, facebook messaging can replace their email, aso. But more even, Facebook offers them picture and video upload. A blogging platform with notes and the twitter clone ‘Status updates’. Anything a blogger needs? Facebook has, Facebook is the microblogger’s myspace. Perfect for kicking out your thoughts at anytime and apps allow you to spice them up. Facebook is a dream for the Scobles among you!"

• Helge: I agree. That's the way it works.

Feld Thoughts - Fascinated with Facebook

Facebook has been around for a while. Started to use it this summer. The hype got me to become a member. I find the application interesting. It integreates all the stuff I have on the Internet. Scooped a few friends.

I've also used LinkedIn and Xing. Xing was very popular and had some purpose for me a year ago, but I don't use it much at present. Maybe I should go back and start over and ask people to come to Facebook as well and then I can compare.

scobleslinkblog Fascinated with Facebook - http://urltea.com/15cf 20 minutes ago from web.
Helge: I got this information from Scoble Twitter.


Feld Thoughts - Fascinated with Facebook: Are you fascinated with Facebook? If so, it’s worth following the blog of the J-Squared guys. They are now actively blogging their Facebook lessons with posts including:

• Facebook, Rails and Scaling
• What Facebook Users Want
• How People Use Facebook
• Facebook Users Worth $0.30? Hm. More Please.

J-Squared is one of the TechStars teams. Their first Facebook app – Sticky Notes – is already over 1.2 million users, app #34, and continuing to grow at a rapid pace every day. They’ve got another cool one in the works, have turned on the revenue spigot, and are watching the dollars fly into their bank account. Fascinating stuff.

The Social - CNET News.com

About caroliiine

• Name: Caroline McCarthy
• Bio: I write/blog/vlog for CNET, and I eat a lot of pizza.
• Location: New York, NY
• Web: http://news.com.com/...
• Joined: Mar 07 2007

Helge: Caroline McCarthy is blogging for CNET and I follow her on the Twitter. She writes about Facebook.

The Social - CNET News.com: "Facebook, meanwhile, continued its streak of being completely unable to stay out of the news. The site experienced an odd little outage on Tuesday, which had plenty of people recalling MySpace's chaotic summer meltdown last year and even speculating that perhaps the Mark Zuckerberg-created (well, according to most people) social networking service had been hacked. Turns out it was a boring little proxy error. How dull!

Helge: Being in the news is important for all the social medias while it takes millions of participants to keep them on the highest hype-wave. Facebook has certainly made that this summer.

Then there was that whole 'Lunch 2.0' thing at Facebook's offices this week, which was really more of a happy hour than a lunch, and which Robert Scoble considered to be 'one of those parties that in about five years we'll all be looking back on as a major inflection point in the valley.' Um, hype much? The word on the street at Non-Lunch 2.0, at least for Scoble, was that web-based organization service Plaxo is very close to launching a social networking site that may or may not rival Facebook by being 'open and controllable.'

Helge: Plaxo, I've never tested. I started with Xing and also have that other one but Facebook does the job better for me.

We'll see Plaxo's 'Pulse' on Monday. In the meantime, everybody's already chattering about the prospects of an 'open social network,' as opposed to Facebook's 'locked' model, from Fred Wilson wishing he could export more Facebook content to outside services to Pete Cashmore speculating that 'identity aggregation without lock-in' might help deflate the shiny mylar Facebook balloon. Jason Calacanis, on the other hand, "

Helge: Facebooks open model, Plaxo...

Facebook Fatigue; 700MHz Fallout; Conspiracy Politics

iNotebook.mobi » Rojo: Facebook Fatigue; 700MHz Fallout; Conspiracy Politics: "Facebook fatigue is setting in.

Jason Calacanis declared social network exhaustion but summoned the energy to write a thousand words describing his feelings. Without a trace of irony, Om Malik provided tips on better Facebook use, while Scobleizer crowed about how Calacanis’s retirement meant fewer competitors for him. Oh, the popular kids can’t handle all the activity, blogs Web Worker Daily, while allfacebook is sure Calacanis cries himself to sleep from all the invite pressure. On the other hand, Rob Hyndman sympathizes with Calacanis as a doer, not a talker, while WinExtra flies above the fray, treating Facebook as a flavor of the month, just like Twitter and Pownce."

Facebook Value

This summer has been lots of Social Media for me. I'm co-writing an Enterprise 2.0 ebook and my theme is Virtual Organizations 1970 - 2010.

The Web 2.0 social media evolution is much stronger in US than in Europe. Linux and IRC were invented by Finns, Linux Thorwalds and IRC by someone from Oulu.

Why does it take longer for us in Europe to grasp the advantages and benefits of Social Media? Loic LeMeur wrote in his twitter/blog some time ago that the language landscape isn't as monolithic as in US.

European online web 2.0 entrepreneurs are still rare. Skype was invented in Europe but we didn't know what to do with it. Key technologies for the Apple iPod are from Germany, but European biz's didn't know how to make Mp3 to a business.

Nokia is great on the global market but its market share of the US mobile market is only 10 % and global market share is 39 %.

New things this summer for me:

1. Twitter
2. Facebook
3. Jaiku

Just to mention a few...

Between the lines writes, "This is the summer of Facebook. The social network went from relative obscurity outside of college campuses to the next big thing, with a multi-billion dollar valuation and more than double number of users. Some of my fellow travelers are questioning the (personal) role of social networks or suffering Facebook fatigue. Jason Calacanis characterizes Facebook as bankrupt..."

Okay Robert … time to put the kool-aid down | WinExtra

Okay Robert … time to put the kool-aid down | WinExtra: "What started as what I think was an honest post; contrary to Rex Hammock who thinks it was more calculated or Fred Wilson a VC with a vested interest in anything Web 2.0 who calls the post linkbait, Jason Calacanis declared Facebook bankruptcy.

Helge: I'm new on Facebook and still looking for what it can be used for.

The exchange that followed this original post though is far more indicative of the bubble that Web 2.0 has created. It shows that while Web 2.0 professes openness people will climb into a walled garden as long as it has the presumption of being cool.

And leading the charge into this month’s coolness is our own Robert Scoble who is likening the networking within Facebook to his rolodex of the 70’s and 80’s. For him Facebook is the new business card and the new media distribution network that is being driven by the “best names in tech“. I wonder though if these are the same cool folks that he said in a comment to one of my posts that had moved to Pownce because it was cool."

Helge: The business card... Need to think about it. Have to do some work in the garden.

Rex Hammock’s weblog » Blog Archive » Happy Birthday, Doc

The blogging culture isn't very old. I did start early. Blogging is still a minority hobby in Finland and those who use Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook and other Web 2.0 and social media tools is even smaller. The short form SMS twitters and jaikus are a great way to communicate with the world. Podcasts are very useful but take more time to produce.


rexblog.com: Rex Hammock’s weblog » Blog Archive » Happy Birthday, Doc: "The first time I ever heard the word, “weblog,” it was from Doc Searls. And the first time I ever heard the word, “podcast” it was from Doc Searls (on September 28, 2004 — I blogged about it the next day).

I am a big fan of Doc’s and the things he says. Heck, I’ve listened to and internalized so much of what he’s said, I’m sure a lot of what I write here is merely channeling Docisms.

Doc also taught me to look out of the window when I fly. Because he takes incredible photographs out of the windows of airplanes, I look forward to his travels because — in “where’s Waldo fashion” — I can’t wait to see what geologic formation or natural phenomena he’ll record: I can recall photos of mud-slides, forest fires and, just recently, an awesome display of the Aurora Borealis.

I think Doc Searls sees lots of things the rest of us don’t because he looks while others don’t think to. His depth of curiosity is, fortunately, balanced by his gift for analysis and the ability to write in such a way as to convey perceptive — sometimes even radical — ideas in a provocative (but respectful and professional), non-technical and entertaining fashion"

Australian Telco Erects Internal Ban On Facebook

Australian Telco Erects Internal Ban On Facebook: "A communications giant by the name of Telstra, based in Australia, has put in place an internal ban on Facebook. That’s right. 49,000 people whose task it is to keep fellow Aussies online and exchanging packets and dialogue and whatnot have been told they absolutely cannot under any circumstances do the same during their daily/nightly shifts. I think that calls for a chuckle or two, don’t you?

Just to muse a bit, what are the chances this clampdown has happened because no corporate underlings want to befriend the CEO and others at the top floor on the social network? High, you say? Me thinks so, too.

This development from down under actually raises an interesting point. How much time and potential productivity is wasted or simply not realized because lemmings people with Net-connected computer terminals in front of their faces for a good part – or perhaps all - of their workday enjoy logging onto MySpace, Facebook, and Hi5 just too damn much? Think they add up to significant losses? I’ll venture to guess that they indeed do."


Helge: The productivity issue, security risks, old, traditional, command and control tryes to get back to yesterday. The world is however changing towards open co-creation. It's a new world order. Let's face it: facebook is here to stay.