Media08 Australia: Social Networks Asia

I gave up on live blogging Media08 yesterday, when both iPod Touch and Asus EEE let me down in the afternoon. Actually I let myself down a bit, battery life being what it is, they really have to be super fully charged to be used for more than 4 hours.

By the way, guys, there was wireless connetivity at Media08. But it was b0rked and up-and-down like a bride’s nightie. Someone should tell our telcos that maybe we should look at our broadband/wireless infrastructure? Just a suggestion… Heh.

Anyway one of my absolutely favourite parts was the Asian segment. I had a chat with Nick Hodge at a Microsoft Christmas dinner thingie that Australia needs to send a social network strategist (me! oh me! pick me!) into Asia to suss out what works, what doesn’t, what’s new in social media. After all, they are about 15 years ahead of us. The avatar to mobile and monetizing user generated content through a virtual currency/pixel products is fascinating.

Jonathan Haagen, Social Media Analyst, The Economist gave an absolutely gob-smackingly brilliant talk about localising communities for cultural preference, and showed that Asians think that there is nothing in the community when they come to a Western community landing page, because of our love of minimal design and Web 2.0 goodness. Students of mine will know what he’s talking about – how do you articulate the Purpose for joining the community within the alloted minute or two you have to grab the Visitors attention and ensure they don’t wander off? Later, how do you move them across to signing up to become a Member?

So when I came across this snippet in this morning’s Hitwise eNewsletter I thought I’d show you what he was talking about.

Hitwise Hong Kong reports that for the week ending 1 March 2008, www.fatemaster.tw, a website with information about interpreting dreams, has in two short weeks, taken the number 2 position in the Lifestyle – Fortune and Luck online industry. The website captured 10.2% of visits, while leader Yahoo! Hong Kong Astrology captured 22.21% of visits to the industry. Now you know.

Here’s the Taiwanese site for dream interpretation: Fatemaster, Taiwan

Now there’s no point me showing you the Yahoo! one because we already know that Yahoo! follows the ‘page full of links’ model that is more indicative of Asia than the West. But here’s the number one return on Google search for “dream interpretation”.

DreamMoods

See the difference?

A couple of years ago, Maxine Sherrin and I had a similar discussion connected to the newly released Perfect Website Formula.

Pwebsite = { ((14.14* EaseNav) + (13.56*Speed) + (13.11*CleanDes) + (10.89*Func) + (10.89*Up)) – ((12.63*Pops) + (10.32*Ads) +(5.21*MultiM)) } / 6.26

Thank God they explain it:

The Formula explained
Pwebsite = the degree of perfection of the website

EaseNav = ease of navigation
Speed = the speed at which pages load
CleanDes = clean and simple design
Func = functionality -‘ does what it says on the tin’
Up = the site is always alive

And:
Pops = the site tries to give you pop-ups
Ads = excessive advertising
MultiM = Flash and other multimedia

I hate Flash too!

Maxine liked Traditional Google search page, whereas I like the iGoogle page.

….versus Google Personalised.
Our discussion at the time was plain vs personalised but I think plain vs link-rich works too.

XMediaLab did a great job of organising and running the Media08 event. The venue was shocking – there’s so much better and probably cheaper, try the Powerhouse Museum next time – but the structure and the speakers was of the highest calibre. I hadn’t heard of XMediaLab before but I think they are similar to AFTRS LAMP which I mentored at last week. I’m sorry we had to bail out of dinner (Kaila and I got an ad hoc invite) at the last minute, but at least we got to ride in the short bus with Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWebbles and Kay Gruenwoldt (Nokia), Benjamin Joffe, and the rest of the XMediaLab team but it was a long long day. In fact a long week – 3 days of conferences is too much in one week. But, still to go, ad:tech next week – I’m on in the early afternoon, first day I think. Come throw rocks… *ducks* … at Arthur Artinian, Tenille Wong and Gary Hayes. Not at me. We’re talking about Brand and Virtual Worlds.