Quick round-up of a few more online apps that I’ve been using recently, for anyone that’s interested.

Remember the milk
Basic but really powerful task / to-do list manager. I’ve been using it for a while but I only recently integrated it with Twitter so I can now send and receive tasks and task updates via SMS. Handy.

Instapaper
Lightweight bookmarking app. Has a text only feature as well, which is useful for printouts without a ton of ads.

Flektor
Bought by MySpace / News Corp. within weeks of its launch, I expect to see some of the seriously powerful features appearing on MySpace monstrosites sites very soon.

Buzzword
Adobe online word processor. Flash interface makes it much more pleasant to use than Google Docs, but it does all the same stuff really. Open beta. 

America, behold your Internet. Keep it full of paper and toner, because your economy depends upon it!

Tons and tons of ‘em.

Recently, beleaguered music companies discovered that what Steve Jobs has been doing to them for the last few years is what they’d been doing to consumers for many years previous to that and guess what? It hurts!

Then over the weekend at Midem, Qtrax boldly ventured forth with its ad-supported free download business model- ‘From today, feel free to download another 25 million songs - legally’

Sadly no deals had been finalised. As Bart the Amnaoiseach would say, it was all ’smokes and daggers’. You couldn’t make up such ineptness - according to themselves, Qtrax have been working on this for 4 years.

Kudos to the Qtrax PR people for getting the (wrong) word out there, but surely they realised who they were trying to play hardball with? When I initially scanned the Times article I was surprised that the big four music companies were actually doing something to try and loosen Apple’s firm grasp on their online revenues.

However it seems that isn’t the case. We can look forward to more attempted litigation aimed at filesharers in jurisdictions outside the US. We can also look forward to a continued stream of focus-group identified pre-chewed ‘music’ which we didn’t ask for. I’m looking at you, Louis Walsh,

a man who still equates artistic worth with financial success as that allows him to cast himself as a sort of modern-day Phil Spector, instead of someone who makes his living selling children’s music to slow adults.

Thank you Graham Linehan

The £500K (Sterling) launch party, the hype, the advertising-supported business model, it’s all sounding awfully familiar. I’m also taken with the eagerness of understaffed weekend newsrooms to reprint press releases. Some things never change.

Of course, it could be a fiendishly clever reverse-hype anti-marketing campaign. Mention of Qtrax will waft around the web for a while, then just when the buzz is dying down the CEOs of Warners, Sony, EMI and BMG will appear on the (obviously inferior) screens of non-Apple MP3 players. Dressed as the Fab Four, they’ll tell us that it was all just a clever jape, and if you point your browser to Ptrax.com you can download up to at least 300 free songs. Yay!

If you’re still interested, have a look at Qtrax. Will they still be around at the end of the year?

Edit: Excellent piece in the Guardian.

Two Tits And A Vote officially launched today. Its an advocacy group for improved women’s health services, and the initial campaign is for better access to breast care facilities for women. Since the strength of any advocacy group is in it’s numbers, this campaign needs you, but with a twist. You don’t have to spend time holding placards, chanting slogans or doing any marching. Well, you may have to march to a post-box, but that’s about it.

Since we’re all cash-rich and time-poor, the site lets you

1. Sign a petition online. Doesn’t take long at all, you don’t even have to locate a working pen. Since this is a serious issue, no Mickey Mouse / Wolfe Tones signatures please.

2. Write a letter to the Minister for Health and Children highlighting this issue. This doesn’t take long either, since you can grab a ready-made letter that you just have to print out, sign and post. You will need to locate a functioning pen, envelope and stamp for this. If you’re feeling especially ranty you can download a Word version to ‘customise’ yourself. Then, if you’re particularly proud of some of your invective and would like to share it with more people than just Mary Harney and you ask nicely, I’m sure Sabrina will be happy to oblige you with your own little corner of the Internet. It mightn’t quite have the prestige of the Irish Times letters page, but it’s better than nothing.

3. Send a postcard to Mary Harney. You don’t need a pen or a stamp for this either, and it costs much less than an orange-mocha-frappucino. The postcard looks so good you’ll want to get one for yourself as well.

4. Sign up for the newsletter. You’ll only receive mail when there is a new campaign that needs your help.

5. Help promote the site. Sabrina has chicklets, sidebar images and the one above to be used on your site. (Pro tip - 1. Use these images on your website and cram the alt tags with the word ‘tits’. 2. ? 3. Profit. )

If you’ve done all of this and still have time on your hands, go and digg the story.

If you don’t know what those last few lines mean, it’s ok. You obviously just haven’t spent enough time on the mostly-satano-porn Internets. Sixty to seventy per-cent of the Internet may be pornography, but an undertaking like this will hopefully illustrate that successful grassroots campaigns can be organised and conducted online.

More: Avoiding Life :

Should I be worried that I know 90% of what Loren Feldman is talking about here?

Speaking of Facebook, via BrightSpark, Jim Meskauskas on Facebook in 2008

Toilet paper, after all, is also rather popular. Certainly everyone I know uses it. But I have yet to see ads on it.

He’s right, y’know. There’s a whole new rash of irrational exuberance about the revolutionary advertising prospects for Facebook and friends. It all sounds similar to the initial buzz around online advertising (long before AdWords) and the silly money charged for CPM banners. Prices justified because of the millions of eyeballs a big site could deliver. Then it became apparent that direct mail response rates were superb compared to the majority of banner click-through rates.

Valuations of social networking sites are based on subscriber numbers and the potential to generate revenue per subscriber. Highly-targetted advertising and affiliate sales seem to be the only plausible means to this end. Subscription numbers are this year’s eyeballs.

There are differences of course, such as the attempt to badge Facebook and others as platforms, rather than mere websites. That argument only goes so far, since Facebook’s current perceived advantage rests on the fact that it is a walled garden for user data (as evidenced by the Scoble debacle, which had nothing to do with privacy laws). The Beacon mis-step was anything but. If your competitive advantage vanishes when the walls come down, you’d better cash in whilst the walls are still up.

Ask mobile operators about that (see Vodafone Live!, Orange and how difficult operators and handset manufacturers made it for the average user to find their way out onto the wilds of the mobile Internet). The mobile operators still have control of the pipes, or enough of the pipes to charge for access. Facebook doesn’t have that luxury.

There seems to be a tendency to forget that, whether one approves or not, what media does is deliver audiences to advertisers. This is why Google creates lots of applications. It builds an audience. If the application can also gather consumer information all the better. A premium price can be charged to the advertiser based on the probability that the user may be somewhat disposed to view the ad. Simple as that.

I’ll be moving these ’serious’ posts to their own location soon

I happened upon these gems whilst having a quick whizz around a few Irish blogs. Everyone’s all a-flutter about the Irish Blog Awards, ya see. For next year, I’d like to propose a few more categories.

Best link-baiting? But now that I’ve linked to the post, what does that make me? A post-modern SEO expert? Very meta, anyway.

Best troll (it kicks off with comment #18 from ‘Anonymous’)?

Best ‘old media’ commentary on new media? Couple of candidates here - Morning Ireland gets to grips with social networking. Starring the one and only John Waters, who has access to much classified information about the Internet that the rest of us mortals aren’t privy to. I’m crying as I write this, etc.

Best description of Brendan O’Connor? Fat Mammycat, Twenty Major.

NB: reposted under different title due to Wordpress and Opera having a little tiff. Sorry.

What are the chances?

I’m flattered …

It’s been years since I first stumbled across this, but it did bring back some fond memories. Worryingly, it’s still terrifyingly accurate. How many of these are real, and how many are generated?

mesh next-generation channels
productize magnetic portals
recontextualize cross-platform communities
productize cutting-edge synergies
deliver granular platforms
aggregate bleeding-edge metrics
incentivize dynamic ROI
redefine viral mindshare

By the way, I am not an Andrew Lloyd Webber fan. The damn song just happened to snag in my head as I was writing this.

From seanbonner, via Sabrina, the CD Cover Meme.

Image credit: CarloCh

Probably should have spent more than 10 minutes on it, since it was a pretty good random combination …

More: Flickr pool