.ME of course

Another series of wide.ly marketed .me-branded products: "It wasn't me". Few highlighted items of this week:

• Shaggy - It Wasn't Me (music video)
• Charlie and Lola: Whoops! But It Wasn't Me (book for kids)
• "It Wasn't Me" t-shirts: Man and Dog from Zazzle.com
• It wasn't me article from The Economist
• Just search Google for images on: http://images.google.com/images?start=0&q=it+wasn't+me
• ...

Shame http://it.wasnt.me/ is taken and is currently down. Would be a nice jingle indeed. Then also http://it.isnt.me/ etc ...

Posted on October 24th, 2009 • Category: .ME, Examples • Comments (1)

As .MEs are very popular in .DE and the last free .DEs are about to go on the auctions, for those of you interested, here goes a bit of today's SEDO (Search Engine for Domain Offers) spam:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sedo
Date: 2009/10/19
Subject: Breaking News: Bid Now on 1, 2 and 3-Character .de Domains!

This just in: Sedo is hosting a Pre-Auction for 1, 2, and 3-character .de domains from now until Thursday, Oct. 22nd at 5PM BST. Pre-bidding is available for all letter and number combinations, or approximately 19,000 newly available domains in the market!

To help you acquire the new .de domain of your choice, our Pre-Auction gives you the exclusive advantage to bid before DENIC, the official German .de registrar, opens the registration period to the public on Friday 23rd at 9 AM CET (Central European Time).

When the registration period opens, Sedo’s trusted registrar partners will be able to place bids on your behalf, as long as you have won the domain in our Pre-Auction. If we’re unable to register the domain right away, our brokerage team will use your winning bid to try to buy the domain back from the registrant.

New .de Domains Criteria:

• One, two, and three-character domains (letter and number combinations) can now be registered
• German license plate letter combinations are now available for TLD registration
• A domain may be comprised of the digits 0-9, hyphens, the letters A-Z of the Latin alphabet and the other letters listed in the currently valid annex to the Domain Guidelines
• The domain cannot begin or end with a hyphen, nor have hyphens for its third and fourth characters
• Domains must be at least one character in length

These .de domains are your chance to quickly become a top competitor in your industry, so don’t miss out!

Best regards,
Your Sedo Team

New Penderel House, 7th Floor
283-288 High Holborn
London, WC1V 7HP, United Kingdom

By adding our email address info@news.sedo.com to your address book, you will not miss out on any important information or notifications from Sedo in the future.

Having some ~19,000 names on the table, SEDO stands an enormous job to sell them all. The best bet is that they will not sell even half of them. Let's be honest, how many buyers are out there willing to buy 0357.de?

Posted on October 19th, 2009 • Tags: SEDO • Category: .DE, Domainers, News • Comments (5)

Until this weekend Google Mail was ignoring .me domains leaving them as plain text, so one needed to make links out of them manually. But now it is all done automatically for you:

Plain text as typed in Gmail (click on the image to zoom in)

To see it yourself, just type e-mail text as usual and either save it as a draft and open to see all .me links converted into URLs or simply send it.

.ME links recognised in Gmail (click on the image to zoom in)

Voila! Enjoy!

Posted on October 17th, 2009 • Tags: Google • Category: .ME, Examples, News • Comments (2)

Discussed in the earlier post back in 2008, the best of the financial jingles: Insure.Me + Mortgage4.Me + ReMortgage.Me may go in one advertising package:

Featured: Insure.Me + Mortgage4.Me + ReMortgage.Me

For more enquiries please contact Brands-and-Jingles agency via http://remortgage.me/insure.me/

Posted on October 16th, 2009 • Category: .ME, Branding, Examples, Marketing • Comments (2)

Walking down the City and working in the London office in the new t-shirt:

I.work.for.me t-shirt from Domen

Domen guys should really enable this URL and start selling their trendy apparel. Well, once the summer is back to Europe - it will sure.ly be a hit.

Special thanks to Sanja Lazovic of course. Cheers!

Posted on October 10th, 2009 • Category: .ME, Registry (.ME) • Comments Off on I.work.for.me

Will they pick up? Some will eventual.ly:

Posted on October 6th, 2009 • Category: .newTLDs • Comments (1)

In their recent paper, Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams, Mor Naaman et al of Rutgers University, School of Communication and Information, examined the characteristics of social activity and patterns of communication on Twitter, a prominent example of the emerging class of communication systems, which they called “social awareness streams.” The authors used system data and message content from 350+ Twitter users, applying human coding and quantitative analysis to provide a deeper understanding of the activity of individuals on the Twitter network. In particular, they developed a content-based categorization of the type of messages posted by Twitter users, based on which we examine users’ activity. Their analysis shows two common types of user behaviour in terms of the content of the posted messages, and exposes differences between users in respect to these activities.

Interesting conclusions indeed.

We have performed an analysis of the content of messages posted by individuals on Twitter, a popular social awareness stream service, representing a new and understudied communication technology. Our analysis  extends the network-based observations of Java et al, showing that Twitter users represent two different types of "content camps": a majority of users focus on the "self", while a smaller set of users are driven more by sharing information. Note that although the Meformers’ self focus might be characterized by some as self-indulgent, these messages may play an important role in helping users maintain relationships with strong and weak ties. Our findings suggest that the users in the “information sharing” group tend to be more conversational, posting mentions and  replies to other users, and are more embedded in social interaction on Twitter, having more social contacts. We note that the direction of the causal relationship between information sharing behaviour and extended social activity is not clear. One hypothesis is that informers prove more “interesting” and therefore attract followers; an alternative explanation is that informers seek readers and attention for their content and therefore make more use of Twitter’s social functions; or that an increased amount of followers encourages user to post additional (informative) content. A longitudinal study may help us address these alternatives.

Finally, we did not address in this work the relationship between social network structure and social influence to the type of content posted by users. It is certainly possible that users are subject to social learning, and are influenced by the activity of others they observe on the service. We assume that theories such as social presence and social capital can help inform a theoretical understanding of the type and characteristics of content published in the service. We intend to explore these associations in future work.

Yes, as our previous researched showed, Twitter is all about "me" indeed.

The PDF version of the report can be downloaded here.

Posted on September 30th, 2009 • Tags: twitter • Category: .ME, Analysis • Comments (3)

Watching Dr House? - Sure.ly. But have you heard of "Lie To Me" by GlobalTV?

The average person tells three lies in ten minutes of conversation. As the foremost deception expert in the country, Dr. Cal Lightman (Tim Roth) knows when someone is lying.

Home page {click on the image to zoom in}

Now Season 2: Lie To Me is the compelling drama series inspired by the scientific discoveries of Dr. Paul Ekman, a real-life specialist who can read clues embedded in the human face, body and voice to expose the truth and lies in criminal investigations...

Posted on September 26th, 2009 • Category: .ME, .TV, Examples • Comments (1)

Never driven a Fiat, so never heard of this one. And yet, a trademarked Blue&Me^TM information system (infosystem) from the Italian car-maker, the father of Ferrari.

Blue&Me {click on the image to zoom in}

More information on:

• Official Fiat website
• Wikipedia

Posted on September 24th, 2009 • Category: .ME, Branding, Examples • Comments (2)