Financial sites slow to RSS

More marketing money for blogs, RSS
Devoting marketing resources to blogs, RSS and social networks is most popular among consumer products and media/communications companies, and the least attractive to financial services firms

Buying the Elvis Estate

Elvis is the highest-earning dead celebrity for the fifth consecutive year according to Forbes. The Elvis estate brought in about $40 million last year.

Elvis has left the building.

Robert Sillerman, a billionaire media entrepreneur who owns American Idol — the hugely successful equivalent of Pop Idol in Britain — paid $114 million (£65 million) last year for an 85 per cent stake in Elvis Presley Enterprises, which is run by the Presley family. He got control of Graceland, the King’s home in Memphis, Tennessee, and control of his name and likeness, but not his music.

Blogosphere 60 Times Larger Than Three Years Ago

Via Joe Katzman who notes Marketing Vox

"The blogosphere is doubling in size every six months and is now 60 times larger than it was three years ago, according to the latest quarterly installment of David Sifry's "State of the Blogosphere" report. He writes that Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs."

The Internet and Life Decisions

Internet plays bigger role in life decisions says poll.

Nearly half of U.S. users of the Internet went online for help with major life decisions such as finding a college for their child or looking for a new place to live, according to a survey released on Wednesday.

Some 45 percent of Internet users, or an estimated 60 million Americans, said the Internet helped them make big decisions or face a major moment in their life during the previous two years, the survey found. That was up from 40 percent of Internet users who answered the same survey questions in 2002.

Pew Internet and American Life poll

60 million Americans, say that the internet helped them make big decisions or negotiate their way through major episodes in their lives.

54% in the number of adults who said the internet played a major role as they helped another person cope with a major illness.
And the number of those who said the internet played a major role as they coped themselves with a major illness increased 40%.
50% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they pursued more training for their careers.
45% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they made major investment or financial decisions.
43% in the number who said the internet played a major role when they looked for a new place to live.
42% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they decided about a school or a college for themselves or their children.
23% in the number who said the internet played a major role when they bought a car.
14% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they switched jobs.

Businesses Can't Shut Out Their Customers Anymore

More and more businesses are paying attention to what blogs say.
They can't shut out their audience any more.

Business bites the blogging bullet

more and more firms are paying greater attention to what blogs are saying about them - and even trying to meet the bloggers halfway.
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Companies have been used to a level of control, and it's been very much a one-way street," says Matthew Yeomans of Custom Communication, an agency which seeks to help businesses navigate their way around the burgeoning blogosphere.

"For years, they've shut out their audience and hidden behind the world of PR. That's all blown out of the water now. They can't do that any more."
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It can be an amazing piece of market research that you can get for free," he says.

"The more enlightened companies are not trying to control this conversation, because they realise they can't. The web is out there for anyone to see. But the best companies are seeing that as an opportunity, not a threat."

SpotScout

Coming soon to Boston and New York is Spotscout, "parking the mobile generation"

Using your computer or your cellphone, Spotscout will help you find parking wherever you go. Whether in a garage or in a private parking space, the service lets you negotiate your parking ahead of time.

Spotscout has its own blog,

From the Wall St Journal in "Your Space is Waiting"

Taking a cue from Web-based reservation systems used by restaurants, airlines and movie theaters, more companies and cities are offering services that let people reserve parking spaces online or by cellphone.

Studies apparently show that 30% f traffic comes from drivers circling around, looking for curbside parking.

Anthropologist to the Wealthy

Larry Samuel is an anthropologist of the very wealthy who has classified American millionaires into five archetypes, each with its own passion points and style of consumption.

They're are the thrilliionaires, the coolinaires, the realionaires, the wellionaires and the willionaires. Daniel Gross decodes the cute terms for you over at Slate.

Samuels' clever terms, including the Trend Commandments, market his services as a hip consultant and his firm Culture Planning to those who sell to the very rich.

Online Immortality

From Springwise's trendspotters, comes online immortality.

Life caching has just extended itself to eternity, overriding electronic space issues, hard drive failures and other technical glitches. For a one-time fee of USD 300/EUR 250, Eternity4all allows users to build a personal space using ten photographs, three one-minute movies and three texts, with the option to update as and when desired. Once a user makes his or her personal space public, it's published and saved on the company’s system for eternity.

Founded in March 2006 by Bert van Dam, Eternity4all aims to immortalize a user's uniqueness for the world, for his descendants and for himself. As Dam puts it, “The most beautiful aspect of Eternity4all is the process of telling your personal story and the awareness created while doing so.”

Ten pictures and three movies may seem too little for the average consumer to spend USD 300 on, but the whole idea behind this venture seems to extend beyond chronicling personal lives. Eternity4all will work as a time-capsule of sorts, encouraging consumers to choose what they would like to preserve for eternity. Considering how closely personal stories are tied to one's mother tongue and/or culture, local versions of this concept should work well. For a number of industries, partnering with Eternity4all could also tie in nicely with existing offerings; how about insurance companies offering customers a free slice of online immortality with every new life insurance policy?

Smith College Doesn't Get It

Last summer, I wrote a long letter to the editor and the associate editors of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly urging them to consider blogs as a way of promoting community among their alumnae. I didn't even get the courtesy of an acknowledgment which I thought was quite rude.

They did decide to commission an article about blogs and that's where Trish Grier came in. She was given my name as an alumna who blogs, someone to interview.

i spent some time talking with Trish about blogs in general, my blogs in particular and I urged her to come to Blogher which she did. I even reviewed her part about me for accuracy before she submitted it.

So you can imagine my dismay when what appeared in the magazine was riddled with so many inaccuracies. Somewhere between Trish and the editors, something happened which only demonstrates how little Smith College understands blogs and how poorly they fact-check what they do print.

1. While they list the blogs I write and contribute to, they didn't list the urls except for one. Bad form. Even online, the link is to the wrong url.

2. They say I have community boards, articles and resources. Well I don't. I have a blog. I have a blogroll. I have comments. I link to articles. That's what blogs do.

3. My site(s) are not a comprehensive resource. it's just me. I put together the links over a year ago and they all need some updating.

4. My product is only now in prototype, it was not done in 2003 when I started writing Legacy Matters. I had the concept and a plan that included blogs, but no software was developed.

5. I didn't begin posting regularly on Legacy Matters until 2004 and I started Business of Life a month later. I now have about 5000-8000 readers a day from around the globe.

6. I don't use my corporate site Estate Legacy Vaults to promote my software because it's not done yet. I will though. What I do write about is the legacy market and the potential market for my product among women and boomers.

You would have thought that the person who changed what had been written would have looked at the blogs or called me.

Not their fault, but my book has been retitled to Legacy Matters.
Not their fault either, but I'm changing the name of the software to iSol - Integral System for Organizing Life and Legacy.

Which is why I no longer write about either until book and software coalesce into a permanent form. Things change too quickly.