Quote of the Day (9): Blogs Influence Consumer Purchases More than Social Networks

The number of those who read blogs at least once a month has grown 300% in the past four years, and what they read strongly influences their purchase decisions, playing a key role in ushering them to the point of actual purchase, according to a BuzzLogic-sponsored study, reports Retailer Daily.

jupiter-buzzlogic-half-online-population-reads-blogs-october-2008.jpg

“Harnessing the Power of Blogs,” a research study of more than 2,000 online consumers in the US, was conducted by JupiterResearch, a Forrester research company.

Blogs Influence Consumer Purchases More than Social Networks

Backpackers Make Great Sperm Donors || Jaunted


Apparently since the laws changed and children conceived from donated sperm can look up Daddy once they turn 18, locals have gone off the idea. Backpackers figure they won’t be so easy to find in 18 years’ time.

One third of sperm donors in Britain are now from abroad, including Australians, South Africans and Colombians. These sperm-donating travelers won’t get rich overnight but $750 for delivering 20, well, loads, is a much better deal than working late nights serving drunks at the pub.

Backpackers Make Great Sperm Donors || Jaunted

Storytlr: The Ultimate Mashup Tool for your (Travel) Stories?

A Dutchman and a Belgian started Storytlr

The storytlr initiative

Storytlr is not a startup, just a fun project that we are building during our free time. We are a two people team, based in Belgium & The Netherlands: eschnou is our PHP Wizard and alardw the CSS Ninja.

A few months ago we saw this video from Loic Lemeur who was asking about a way to help him build ‘the centralized me’. We liked the idea because it sounded like reinventing the good old ‘personal page’, realizing that a blog can only capture one angle of what we did online. More over, we felt that this page had to be personal, and not yet another profile page locked in a social network, and plastered with company branding. Storytlr brings you just that, a platform to build the centralized you, and it is really about you, not about us.

Loic also gave us another idea in this post, where he explains that he ‘lost’ all his youtube videos ! We felt the same when we realized that our Twitter archives were not available due to Twitter downtimes. This brought us to the conclusion that we needed to ‘own’ our data. We needed a way to easily archive our online data and even back it up. In Storytlr, you own your data, you can download all of it whenever you want. Of course, it would be even be better if Storytlr was an open source platform so all this data is where you want it to be. This is also part of the plans.

Finally we realized that our flow of Twitter messages, Flickr photos, Qik videos were in fact telling a story, the story of our daily lives, and that sometimes we wanted to repackage this story in a nice format (beyond a photo album) to share it with friends. So we decided to make it really easy to mashup all these activities into a compelling story that is easy to share.

I’m off testing it at Happy Hotelier|Storytlr

They are getting kudos by Mashable.

Update
Unfortunately they ceased their service as of February 28, 2010
Now it is a Apache licensed open source project.

Street Art (10): Pimp my Drainpipe

I was reviewing something else, but couldn’t leave this street art topic out: Pimp my Drainpipe.

The above modified pipes can be found in seattle and were created by Buster Simpson as part of the ‘growing vine street’ project.

This installation can be found in the Kunsthof Passage, Dresden, Germany

So simple and so poetic!

More examples?

Via Deputy Dog | pimp my drainpipe

Added:
As per the comment of Joshua Smit (Thank You!):

Update April 2010:

As per the comment of Lefrancophone (thanks!):

Travel Blog Camp 2008 (#tbc08 02): Photos

I’ve edited and uploaded my photos to Flickr. All in all I’m not very satisfied with the quality. I’ve certainly not shot enough (quality) as Heather from Heather on her travels suggested “to start a Travel Blogger’s society page”. Alas the light circumstances were far from ideal.. The first lesson for the next Travel Blog Camp: more light please – or should I bring more professional lighting?

The first photo is of Karen Bryan’s presentation.

The second photo is of Darren Cronian, who organized the event.

This is Matthew Cashmore of Lonely Planet, one of few who apparently tried multitasking by both listening intensely and Twittering away at the same time. I don’t know who the lady to the left of Mathew is….(added: Thanks to Matthews comment on Flickr (see below) the lady in question is his beloved Mrs Cashmore. Hi Catherine!)

From left to right standing: Unkown, Anthony and Tamara from Mr & Mrs Smith, Detlef Meyer of German Roundtrip and Kevin May of Travolution.

I’ve added here some photos from those I know.

I would like to ask my readers to comment on Flickr and give names and details to the faces, because here is lesson number two for the next edition:

  1. What happened with the name tags?
  2. At least it would be helpful if there is a list with thumbnail photos and names and web presences of those who attended, but Darren informed me that such could be a violation of UK privacy legislation… Can’t we ask the participants to waive this?
  3. Isn’t that what networking is about: Knowing who is who?