Amazon Adds Universal Wish List

Amazon.com's Wish List feature has been around a long time - over 10 years in fact. However, recently the e-commerce site expanded it with a new feature called The Universal Wish List.

Using a simple bookmarklet (drag this to your bookmarks) you can now add any item to your list from anywhere on the web. As you can see from the image above, I was able to use the tool to add a Brett Favre jersey from NewYorkJets.com to my wish list. Once it was there, the new item basically acts like a bookmark, taking me back to the original site where I found the product.

Wish lists are one of the earliest forms of online social expression. You can add Amazon's wish list to your site as a widget or even your Facebook or Friendfeed profile. A list of products that people have added to their wish list can be found over on Friendfeed.

Now that Amazon has expanded this longtime feature of the site, I expect we'll see a certain type of user keeping their lists there - which if anything gives Amazon more data into insights into how people shop. In addition, it's conceivable that this could become a social commerce feature over time given Amazon's popular Associates program.

How Newspapers Can Turn Problems Into Profit

A few weeks ago I wrote about the perfect storm facing print media. Robert Scoble started a similar thread on Friendfeed over the weekend. This week in my AdAge column I look at the same trends, but this time through the lens of potential solutions to the problems.

Newspaper publishers are facing a perfect storm thanks to three megatrends: rising inflation, America's growing green conscience and disruptive technology. To succeed in this era of great change, they need to think about how to make lemonade out of these perceived lemons. Unfortunately, so far, they haven't. Here's my advice.

RISING INFLATION: As gas prices rise sharply, so do distribution costs. To compensate, many newspapers have announced they are significantly increasing their hard-copy newsstand prices. However, that's a 20th-century reaction to what is a complex, 21st-century problem.

What they should be doing instead is using this as an opportunity to put a hard date on when they will abandon print altogether, close down plants and migrate completely to a digital paradigm. They need to have faith that their brands and quality editorial product will encourage readers who haven't already migrated to do so.

GREEN CONSCIOUSNESS: Americans are increasingly becoming very aware of their environmental impact and what they can do to mitigate it. Millions are taking the simple step of cutting print subscriptions in favor of (slowly) going completely digital. Is this a threat to newspapers? Of course, but it's also an opportunity.

Advertising -- particularly outdoor and print -- also creates tremendous waste. Newspapers can take the lead in going green and in the process create new avenues for advertisers to play up their related social-responsibility programs online. It's a win all around.

DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY: Last but not least we have the growing popularity of speedy 3G-enabled smartphones and devices such as Amazon's Kindle e-book reader. Newspapers have invested heavily here, creating smartphone apps and pushing content for Kindles. But they don't go far enough.

Newspapers have made it hard for readers to get what they want without jumping through hoops. For example, they syndicate story summaries in their RSS feeds (even to paid subscribers). This forces readers to visit the website for the full content, and when they do, they have to trip over interruptive ads and interstitials.

Make it easy for loyalists to get what they want, when they want it, and they will remain just that -- loyal.

MarketingAge Profile

Marketing Age magazine, which is published in Ireland, ran a profile of me in their July/August issue where I talk about my role within Edelman Digital, how I use RSS to keep in the know and trends in social networking - including Friendfeed. The article is not online. However, If you're interested, they have graciously given me permission to share it here. The full PDF is here or you can simply click through each of the images below, which are up on Flickr.

Could Wireless Radios Become the Next Tobacco?

It's hard to remember, but there was a time back in the 1950s and 60s when cigarettes were truly glamorous. No one really considered the potential health ramifications. The images below of James Dean and Frank Sinatra are iconic representations of an era that is now long gone. Since then, of course, people stared to die from diseases that smoking contributed to and we learned a lot about its health impact, including that of second-hand smoke.

 

Now flash forward to today. Our latest addiction? Wireless technology. It's everywhere. And, according to all known accounts, it's completely harmless. However if you look at the photos below (Lindsay Lohan and Harrison Ford), given the above context, is it conceivable things could change in a decade or two and that we might view these images differently?

If there's anyone who is an early candidate to get whatever wireless-induced disease may one day be in our future (if at all), it's me. I have had a cell phone since 1994. Today, the iPhone 3G I carry in my pocket, which rarely leaves my side, has any one or more of the following radios on at a given time: 2G wireless, 3G wireless, wifi, bluetooth and GPS. That's a lot of signals.

Last week Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, warned people to limit cell phone use because of the possible risk of cancer. This is causing some parents to consider postponing when their children can have cell phones. This is probably just temporary panic fire. Still, the admonition certainly got me and others thinking.

Branko Miletic in Australia is following a similar thread, asking "Are Mobile Phones The New Cigarettes?" The answer today is a resounding "no." But I wonder what we'll say in 20 or 25 years.

I have no plans to stop using wireless technology. It's way way too integrated in my life. In fact, my iPhone is fast becoming my primary device. The rise of cloud computing will only accelerate the trend. But I do sometimes wonder about the fact that we don't know what we don't know. How about you?

Google News Separates Blogs from News

Google News has started to separate blogs and news links, according to the Google Operating System...

"When you view a cluster in Google News, there's a new option to filter sources: you can restrict news articles to blogs and to local news sites that are relevant to your query. The filters are a good way to find opinionated articles and more up-to-date information from local sites."

I never understood why they have a separate search engine for blogs. Further, this just blurs the line. Take a look at this cluster of blog links on Obama, which includes a lot of traditional media blogs. All of this is becoming a giant cake mix as the Google Web index gets faster. It's not so easy anymore to keep the pigs and cows contained.

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