Wired Magazine’s Jargon Watch picked up on our very own Online Analysts as an upcoming term, which is fitting as many of them are, in fact, trend setters. While Social Network Fatigue can be a problem in the position, it’s nothing that Slow Travel can’t fix, especially when it’s to meet an Ecosexual. I have now used all of the Jargon Watch terms in a sentence, which is oddly fulfilling.

We’ve released a new buzz report on product placement that was picked by The Hollywood Reporter. The main focus was on differing perceptions of product placement by platform. The report:

43 sites were researched with a focus on the top Film/Entertainment, Television, Gaming and Major Portal communities. Going back 3 months, 862 discussions directly related to consumer opinions about product placement were uncovered.

Surprisingly, 595 discussions reflected either acceptance or indifference to product placement, the remaining 267 discussions represented negative views. The majority of discussions centered on the use of product placement in film and television with only a small percentage of gamers discussing the topic. Overall, gamers were the most negative in tone to in-game product placement where the tactic is on the rise because they’ve had less time to become accustomed to the practice. However, the largest volume of negative discussion was focused on TV, which oddly enough is the one platform that consumers can get for free. The numbers breakdown as follows:

Online consumers appear to be savvy when it comes to product placement and are willing to accept it if it does not detract from the entertainment experience. Employing subtlety and humor are more effective than blatantly plastering products everywhere.

Sites sampled included:

TV – (TV.com, TWOP)

http://forums.tv.com (TV.com)

www.televisionwithoutpity.com

Gaming – (Gamespot, TeamXbox)

www.gamespot.com

www.teamxbox.com

Film/Entertainment – (IGN, IMDb)

www.ign.com

www.imdb.com

Mainstream – (Google Groups, Delphi Forums)

http://groups.google.com

www.delphiforums.com

Been a while since the last post, but wanted to provide a little more detail on a report we pulled together that was picked up by USA Today : Gamers: Wii has PS3 beat

Here’s how we pulled together the report- we monitored over 100,000 conversations on our top 100 gaming sites, and we found just over 10,000 that were relevant to the launch. The way we broke it down was to categorize the conversations as positive, neutral, or negative, which is determined by our analysts who specialize in gaming. The breakdown:

PS3:

• 7062 conversations
• 1945 Positive (27%)
• 2650 Negative (38%)
• 2467 Neutral (35%)

Wii:

• 3520 conversations
• 1711 Positive (49%)
• 638 Negative (18%)
• 1171 Neutral (33%)

A couple of things stand out to me- first, the difference in volume between the two consoles is almost 2-to-1, and might be indicative of the fact that negative threads, as a whole, generate more volume, or if the larger PS2 installed base lent itself to a larger fanboy population (probably both). Another thing that stood out is that almost all of the excerpted quotes in our report and in other media involve Wal*Mart as the setting for every story- maybe people had a hard time finding them because they all went to the same place. -Sam Huxley

While I don’t really tend to cover current events, the blogging (and the Flickring, and the YouTube activities, etc) going on about the Thailand coup is fascinating. Of course, this post sums up the activity better than I ever could.

…36 hours. In fact, due to a computer glitch yesterday in acessing the blog, this might actually no longer be news. According to the New York Times, the study, which was done by a physicist at the University of Notre Dame, the time frame was actually much longer than they initiatially thought (2-4 hours).  The study also provided an interesting looking into the readership habits of news - that users read in “bursts” vs. continually. I’d like to see a similiar study done again that also factors in:

- The use of RSS: Does it change readership? I know that at one point, individuals I’ve talked to (myself included) would continuously check their RSS feeds and then after a few weeks/months of use, they’d begin a process similiar to the ‘burst’ process.

-  Mobile technology & its effect on the news cycle. My geuss is that the more mobiel we get, the shorter lifespan a news story will have.