Andrew W.K. wins again

If you can watch this without laughing then you have more self control then I do. Those who have met Andrew shouldn’t be too surprised.

See the original post at Fail Blog.

Facebook is the most valuable source of traffic

Between search engines and social media, there are a lot of different ways that people can get to your website. But which of these sources provides loyal users that come back to your site multiple times?

That’s the subject of a new study by ad network Chitika, who analyzed the browsing habits of 33 million unique users over the course of September.

According to their findings, Facebook provides the most loyal visitors, with 20% of those that originate from the social network in turn visiting the site they landed upon four or more times in a week. Among other social media sites, Digg traffic produced loyal users 16% of the time, while Twitter traffic was only good for 11% loyalty.
In the realm of search engines, Yahoo provides the most loyal visitors at 15%, followed by Google and Bing with around 12% each.

The finding that social sites provide stickier traffic isn’t surprising, but what implications do the loyalty rankings for Facebook, Digg, and Twitter have, if any? Perhaps that in the long-run, encouraging your visitors to share on Facebook might have the most value, even if it doesn’t provide the most short-term traffic.

That said, it’s easy enough to provide sharing options for a multitude of social media sites (case in point, this post!), so you can probably file this under the “nice to know” category of statistics and use your own analytics to gauge what is and isn’t working.

See the original article at Mashable.

5 reasons 3-D video will come to our living rooms

Let’s face it, there are some skeptics out there when it comes to 3-D.  Some point to competing standards, others to the kitsch factor, and almost all point to the glasses. But not everyone’s a hater. In fact, Sony and Panasonic see the technology as a savior for their living room business. So will 3-D make it in the home?  Chances are it will, and here are five reasons why:

1. 3-D will become a standard feature. TV makers will put a premium price on anything 3-D in the next few years (much as they did with HD), as Alfred Poor points out in his new 3DTV report at GigaOM Pro (subscription required); but over time, the technology will become just another standard feature. Chances are in five years we’ll see $799 50-inch 3-D TVs from Vizio at Costco.

2. Invasion of the 3-D movie theaters. 3-D movies are bringing in higher per-screen revenues than their 2-D counterparts, and by the end of this year there should be 7,000 3-D screens worldwide. Hollywood has caught 3-D fever, and it’s logical to think the big focus on 3-D in the theater will migrate over time to the living room.

3. Those crazy gamers. Gamers have been enjoying crude 3-D effects since Wolfenstein 3-D, and more and more are being pulled into a new dimension with the latest 3-D technology.  Sony has stated that existing game catalogs will be 3-D upgradeable through software, which could build the library of content quickly and justify the cost of accessories such as glasses.

4. Cheap glasses. While active shutter glasses would set you back at least 50 bones today, prices will fall through the floor once they’re manufactured at scale.  Think four-packs at Wal-Mart for $25 in about five years.

5. Kids. 3-D’s secret weapon, really. I have to wonder how many 3-D skeptics are child-less. Just as tens of millions of parents came down with Wii tennis elbow in recent years, so will they be donning 3-D glasses in the future.

3-D in the home will continue to be a source of both skepticism and excitement in the coming years. But make no mistake, as both the DVD and HDTV gravy trains continue to slow to a crawl, TV makers and Hollywood are seeing an extra dimension.

See the original article at GigaOm.

Trend Tracker sees emerging Twitter trends

Finding the hot conversation keeps getting easier, but predicting what the next big trend will be continues to be a crapshoot. Palm and Federated Media have teamed up to create a new tool called Trend Tracker that does its best to figure out, what in fact the next top trend will be by analyzing items that are gathering buzz.

The system is a mix of tools that can help spot popular URLs and trending topics before they hit it big. But it’s more about organizing that data in a simple-to-parse format.

Included are the current top 30 trending topics on Twitter, which can be stacked up against each other to see what’s pulling in the highest percentage of tweets. Each trend is represented over a 24-hour time line, where you can see how each particular trend has gone up or down in popularity.

But 24 hours doesn’t tell the full story, which is why the tool will soon expand to keep an archive that covers the last 10 or 30 days.

Along with the top 30 trends, Trend Tracker includes a “Pre Trend Watch” which tracks five up-and-coming trends that are about to break into the top 10 based on their velocity–the speed in which tweets on that particular topic are gaining in popularity. These are also marked in the trend archive with a little blue flag.

When I was looking at the tool last week, one of the most interesting things this picked up on was the cyclical nature of trending. Words like “sleep” and “night” picked up speed and prominence depending on the time of day. Using Trend Tracker’s frequency graph, you’re able to look at the last 24 hours, and see what time of day they began to rise or fall in use–that’s not something you can see through Twitter proper.

To add to that, there’s also a map layer that shows you an animated view of where tweets in any particular trend originated. Again, in the case of “sleep” and “night” you could play back an entire day of activity and see a huge cluster of when the word or phrase gained its prominence.

For most people I’m guessing Trend Tracker will be something they play with a few times and forget, but there’s some real value here over Twitter’s own trend highlighting offerings. If you want to see when and where something originated, as well as how popular it was at any given time of day, this offers both sets of data and in a very easy to use format; you don’t even need to do any detective work in Twitter’s search engine to find that out.

See the original article at CNET News.

Voyeurism in the Twitter age

Often when people tweet or post a Facebook status update from the road they accompany it with a picture or two.  These photos can range form the mundane to the fascinating with a bit of everything in between. While you may not be viewing the status updates yourself, the pictures are usually posted to a publically available service like Twitpic, yFrog, TwitrPix and others.

A site called PicFog grabs the links to these photos in real-time and presents them in a constantly updated webpage (see the photo). If you want to kill a few minutes just open up the site and let photos scroll by. Each photos has additional information associated with it, and clicking on the photo opens up a larger photo.

It’s all public although it tends to be a little creepy sometimes. That said, it’s definitely worth a look for a few minutes of mindless entertainment.