3D Weather Data Visualization in Second Life

Second Life Insider reports that this November, a weather visualization project is being rolled out in Second Life. The project “demonstrates Second Life as a powerful visualization tool for real-time data.”

That’s the beauty of virtual environments–they enable users to interact with data in multiple dimensions.

Now wouldn’t it be amazing to do data mining in such a fashion? I’d love to get my hands on the Amazon purchaser database and model out buyer personas.

-Roland

Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.

©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.

Article: Top Ten Grammar Errors that Haunt Web Pages

This is worth reading: Top Ten Grammar Errors that Haunt Web Pages

Use Yahoo Answers for fielding simple questions

Your a marketer, you need some quick opinions and you have no budget for formal market research. What can you do?

Yahoo! Answers is an easy solution to add to your personal marketing arsenal.

It is a community of registered Yahoo! users that participate in answering questions asked by other Yahoo! users.

Benefits:

• Fielding a question is quick and easy to do.
• You have a wide range of categories and sub-categories to submit your question to. (i.e. Beauty & Style, Business & Finance, Entertainment & Music, Health, Society & Culture, Technology , plus many more.)
• You get relatively instant feedback.
• It’s free.

Limitations:

• You have limited ability to target demographically or geographically. Although Yahoo! collects self-reported information (i.e. gender, age, location) from its registered users, we users can’t take advantage of that to target our question(s). Basically, you can select a category of interest and add some descriptive text (e.g. “Teens only please”).
• The answers you get are in no way statistically significant. But at least you get verbatim opinions, which do have value and provide unanticipated insight. Also, some people post answers solely because it helps them gain more personal points, not because they want to be helpful or enjoy expressing their opinion.
• You’ll get the majority of responses in the first 12-24 hours, then little else. Since so many people are submitting questions, yours will be push down fairly quickly.
• Most responders do follow your instructions, but be prepared for some nasty responses. There are a small group of people who are beligerant, but you have the ability to report them to the Yahoo! Answers administrators.

Of course, nothing is completely “free.” You have to invest a bit of time…

• You need to create a Yahoo! acount
• You have to participate by answering other questions to earn points. Those points allow you to post your own questions and have advanced functionality.

In summary, if you need to get some quick opinions from the community, or validate an assumption, try posting your question on Yahoo! Answers.

I hope you find this useful.
-Roland

Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.

©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.

Make your own Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders commercial

I created a commercial for CMT’s “Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders: Making the Commercial” promotion.

The commercials with the most views enter the final round where one lucky winner will fly to Dallas to meet the cheerleaders, PLUS have their commercial air on the CMT. Please vote for me, and make your own commercial, too!

The user interface is fairly simple. I was impressed that the creators provided 18 video clips, 8 voice overs tracks and 5 background music tracks. But many of those video clips were edited awkwardly. Each clip has multiple scenes. It would have been more useful if those individual scenes had been split up. (See, here’s the director in me coming out.)

I can understand that the CMT creators felt limiting the video, voice over and background music clips helps them stay in control of the user generated content. Presumably they were afraid of juvenille humor and abuse of the tool. But placing barriers does limit user creativity in the end.

Check it out for yourself! And vote for me. :p
-Roland

Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.

©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.

Laguna Beach episodes debute in Virtual World first

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the presence of brands in virtual worlds. The more I’ve dug into it, the more I’ve learned that savvy marketers are starting to use virtual worlds to debut their productions and products first, before introducing in the “real” world.

MediaPost.com reports today:

‘Laguna Beach’ Goes Online
MTV THIS WEEKEND WILL MAKE 10 episodes of “Laguna Beach” available online. MTV also will start debuting new episodes of the program on Virtual Laguna Beach–an online community site described by MTV as a “social networking virtual world”–two days before their air dates.

It’s interesting for marketers from several perspectives:

• Use the advance screening of episodes as an incentive to drive trial and use of Virtual Laguna Beach
• Use the virtual world to gauge reactions to the episodes, like a test audience, and possibly adjust before national broadcast
• Reach elusive teens and deliver video on demand content, where they want, when they want.

-Roland

Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.

©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.

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