Internet, informação e negócios

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Internet, informação e negócios

Postby Danilo » 28 Jan 2006, 15:24

Empresas de todo o mundo descobrem o poder dos blogs.
Eles podem ser uma oportunidade ou uma grande ameaça.


( matéria completa em portalexame.abril.com.br )

Bem-vindo ao mundo da empresa nua. Nunca os consumidores puderam se expressar com tanta liberdade e com tamanho alcance. Isso dá a eles um poder inédito, que representa, ao mesmo tempo, oportunidades e enormes ameaças aos negócios. Reclamações que antes se dissolviam no ar hoje ficam registradas na internet, ao alcance de uma pesquisa no Google. O cliente que iria a uma loja conhecer seu produto agora está online. Ele ainda entra no site da sua empresa em busca das informações oficiais. Mas não pára por aí. Visita fóruns de discussão, blogs e redes de relacionamento, como o Orkut, à procura de uma segunda, uma terceira, uma quarta opinião, provavelmente digitando a palavra "odeio" antes da sua marca. "As instituições, entre elas as empresas, perderam o privilégio da informação", diz Ronald Mincheff, presidente da filial brasileira da Edelman, uma das maiores agências de relações públicas do mundo. "A opinião de uma pessoa comum, sem os filtros dos meios de comunicação tradicionais, ganha cada vez mais credibilidade." Um estudo feito pela Edelman em setembro do ano passado mostra que mais da metade dos blogs mais influentes do planeta publica pelo menos um comentário semanal sobre empresas, seus funcionários ou produtos.
(...)
Há inúmeras maneiras de falar na internet, mas nenhuma é tão poderosa e tão revolucionária como o blog. Em pouco mais de três anos, a tecnologia passou de um hábito adolescente para um fenômeno mundial. Em menos de 10 minutos e sem gastar nada, qualquer pessoa pode criar um blog e começar a falar para todo o planeta. É por isso que os números não param de crescer. Existem 34 milhões de blogs no mundo. Todos os dias, 70 000 novos diários online são criados e, a cada minuto, 500 deles são atualizados. Mães falam do bebê recém-nascido, estudantes reclamam dos professores, aspirantes a escritor publicam poesias, prostitutas relatam sua rotina e, por que não?, presidentes de empresas falam de negócios. Jonathan Schwartz, presidente da fabricante de computadores Sun, mantém um blog há um ano e meio. "Como o e-mail, o blog não vai ser uma questão de escolha. Todos os líderes serão obrigados a ter um", disse Schwartz a EXAME. "Acredito que em dez anos os presidentes vão se comunicar diretamente com clientes, funcionários e parceiros. Porque, se você não participar da conversa, outros falarão no seu lugar."
(...)
O risco de mentir no próprio blog é grande, mas não supera o de ignorar o que se fala na internet a respeito de sua empresa. A americana Kryptonite, fabricante de cadeados, aprendeu a lição. Um blogueiro descobriu que com qualquer caneta Bic era possível abrir uma popular trava para bicicletas. A notícia se espalhou como fogo em mato seco pela rede. Cinco dias depois, estava na grande imprensa. Quando a Kryptonite assumiu a falha, dez dias depois, o estrago já estava feito. O recall do produto defeituoso custou 10 milhões de dólares, soma considerável diante de uma receita de 25 milhões. Uma alternativa para manter-se informado é consultar sites especialistas em vasculhar esse tipo de conteúdo. O principal deles, chamado Technorati, acompanha 26 milhões de blogs e oferece resultados muito mais atualizados que os mecanismos de busca tradicionais.

Outra opção é contratar o serviço de terceiros. A brasileira e-Life criou um programa que monitora blogs e o Orkut, site de relacionamentos que virou febre no Brasil. "Os serviços de atendimento não poderão mais ser passivos", diz Alessandro Barbosa Lima, da e-Life. "Agora, terão de chegar a todos os recôncavos dos blogs e do Orkut." A e-Life tem entre seus clientes a operadora de cartões de crédito Visa e a imobiliária Tecnisa. Um dos passatempos favoritos dos cadastrados no Orkut é criar comunidades dos mais variados temas, incluindo as do estilo "eu amo" ou "eu odeio". Quem se dá ao trabalho de falar de sua empresa é um consumidor que provavelmente tem influência sobre dezenas de outros. Em alguns casos, a reputação é tamanha que os blogueiros se tornam celebridades. Nos Estados Unidos, são principalmente aqueles que escrevem sobre política e tecnologia. Aqui no Brasil, os humoristas saíram na frente. O melhor exemplo é o publicitário carioca Antonio Pedro Tabet, ou Kibe Loco. Seu blog recebe 100 000 visitas diárias. Graças ao blog, Tabet já recebeu três convites para candidatar-se a deputado federal na próxima eleição -- recusados -- e um para trabalhar no programa de Luciano Huck, na Rede Globo -- aceito.
(...)
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Postby mends » 30 Jan 2006, 11:23

eu olho um monte de blogs, o do Jr. e vários de investimento e economia - americanos.

agora: sempre desconfie da palavra "revolução" em artigo de revista. Em revista de negócio então, 95% de chance de ser BS.

Dois problemas com vááários blogs: evasão de privacidade (evasão, não invasão), e muito falatório pra pouca ação.
"I used to be on an endless run.
Believe in miracles 'cause I'm one.
I have been blessed with the power to survive.
After all these years I'm still alive."

Joey Ramone, em uma das minhas músicas favoritas ("I Believe in Miracles")
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Postby mends » 30 Jan 2006, 11:26

sobre o Orkut:

Escuta aqui

Álvaro Pereira Júnior

Orkut só serve para falar
Cada vez que acontece alguma coisa importante no Brasil e isso leva à criação de mais uma comunidade no Orkut, me dá uma tristeza dos diabos. Há poucos dias tivemos a lambança dos ingressos do U2, e não deu outra: surgiram dezenas de comunidades descendo a lenha nos organizadores.
Não que os organizadores não mereçam, não é isso. É que uma comunidade dessas não serve para nada, só para as pessoas falarem, falarem... O Orkut, fenômeno social avassalador no Brasil, presta para que a nova geração, aquela da internet, da superdose de informação, enverede pelo mesmo caminho de seus bisavós. Como se faz no Brasil há 500 anos, a molecada do Orkut troca a prática pelo discurso.
Como já escrevi há semanas, o Orkut só conta no Brasil. Fora daqui, a comunidade virtual que bomba chama-se myspace.com. Ela não é só papo-furado. Serve para muita coisa, principalmente para músicos novos que precisam de divulgação.
Leitores de "Escuta Aqui" que também são músicos e entraram no myspace.com contam histórias de sucesso. Um deles diz que teve de parar de adicionar amigos e chegou a tirar do ar suas músicas mais legais, porque "aparece tanta gente propondo parcerias que acaba gerando a maior confusão".
Outro relata: "Coloquei a minha bandinha ali sem grandes pretensões, e a coisa meio que vem saindo do controle, pro bem e pro mal. Quanta diferença da jequice dos sites de música locais e do fofoqueiro Orkut".
Enquanto isso, no Orkut, o povo fala, fala, fala...
"I used to be on an endless run.
Believe in miracles 'cause I'm one.
I have been blessed with the power to survive.
After all these years I'm still alive."

Joey Ramone, em uma das minhas músicas favoritas ("I Believe in Miracles")
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Postby junior » 30 Jan 2006, 13:46

eu olho um monte de blogs, o do Jr. e vários de investimento e economia - americanos.


Obrigado pela audiência :cool: , embora o blog esteja a passos de tartaruga ultimamente...

agora: sempre desconfie da palavra "revolução" em artigo de revista. Em revista de negócio então, 95% de chance de ser BS.

Dois problemas com vááários blogs: evasão de privacidade (evasão, não invasão), e muito falatório pra pouca ação.


Concordo! A idéia, pelo menos na minha cabeça, de um blog, é que ele sirva para algo, seja para que as pessoas fiquem sabendo de coisas que elas jamais leriam/encontrariam normalmente, e em geral de alguma fonte confiável... Leria fácil um blog de economia do Mends (fica a sugestao - nao sei pq os ~ nao vao parar em cima das palavras hoje...), mas nao um de engenharia meu, por ex :).

Pessoalmente (olhando para a "câmera da verdade" do Danilo :lol: ), o que me motivou essencialmente foi: (i) tentar falar de um modo nao-cientifico, ou o menos científica possível, sobre as coisas que eu faço, para "treinar" essa habilidade, assim como a de escrever... (ii) mostrar o dia-a-dia de alguém que (supostamente) faz ciência, e mostrar que nao há nada de mágico nem de nerd.. (iii) Colocar coisas aleatórias que chamam minha atençao, mas que nem sempre estao disponíveis...

Claro que no fim das contas muitas coisas que nao tem nada a ver com nenhum dos 3 propósitos acima também entram, mas tento, sempre que possível, "manter o foco" .

Agora... Daí a dizer que blogs sao revoluçao, etc, etc... Mmmm... soa matéria fácil e espaço de sobra na revista...
"Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt." - Lev Landau
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Postby junior » 30 Jan 2006, 13:52

Só uma coisa com relaçao a privacidade: Essa sem dúvida tem que ser mantida, ninguém (normal, I mean) quer saber se vc teve dor de barriga hoje ou nao... Também é obvio que se alguma m... grande acontece, vc nao vai sair escrevendo, pois supostamente o negócio vai ser lido, e algum respeito ainda tem que ser mantido :) , além do fato que (suponho) nao interessa a ninguem... Blogs babacas a "la adolescência" ou no estilo "eu odeio a organizaçao do show do U2" sem dúvida sao apenas bits desnecessários no mundo virtual...
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Postby mends » 30 Jan 2006, 16:08

falando de internet e negócios...

Sem querer me gabar e já me gabando: há uns dois meses, houve o IPO do UOL. Pra quem não sabe, IPO é a sigla em inglês de Initial Public Offering, a primeira oferta de ações de uma empresa em Bolsa. Com uma merrequinha suada pra aplicar, fui estudar um pouco a empresa. Confesso que já não a via com bons olhos, pois uma análise rápida, de padaria, mostra que é um negócio que não tem nenhuma vantagem competitiva sustentável no longo prazo, e tem um modelo de negócio confuso – tente responder rápido: como o UOL ganha dinheiro? Assinatura? Marketing? Como expandir a receita no longo prazo?

A leitura do prospecto só confirmou minhas suspeitas: quando alguém cita como vantagem competitiva ser “o maior portal em língua portuguesa”, é dose pra Leão...só nesse primeiro corte, a empresa já não serve pra investir no longo prazo. Passemos então ao teste da especulação: números ruins. Muita dívida, geração de caixa com pouco crescimento, lembrando que não havia estratégia clara de geração de caixa. Em avaliação de empresas, cash is king...lucro é uma opinião, caixa é um fato.

Aí entra a vantagem de ter educação formal pra coisas práticas, do dia a dia: um IPO sempre, sempre vem subprecificado (Finanças II). O mercado exige um desconto pra ficar com o papel porque a assimetria de informação entre o underwriter – o banco que coordena a emissão, calcula o preço, oferta os papéis etc – e o mercado é imensa: o underwriter tem todos os números, acesso ao management, tudo o que o mercado consegue com mais dificuldade. Pra ficar com o “mico”, eu quero um prêmio...

Mas aí, oh vergonha, pensei em lucrar um pouquinho com a falta de educação financeira dos conterrâneos banânicos, e joguei da seguinte forma: vem com uns 20% abaixo do par (o preço “justo”), sobe pra caramba nos três primeiros dias, o UOL publica algo do tipo “o maior sucesso da Bolsa”, a dona Maria lê, e, como o UOL é o portal preferido dela e “tá subindo”, ela vai lá comprar um pouco de UOL. E quem pegou no split, na reserva do IPO, e entende um mínimo de Finanças e Negócios, vendeu pra Dona Maria, embolsou de 25% a 35% de lucro e assite, hoje, à Merrill Lynch soltar um relatório de VENDA, a ação despencar 15% num só dia, com previsão de 22% pros próximos, ao se ter como proxy a estimativa de preço da ML.

Meu lado “empreendedor” e “bonzinho” pensa em montar um site de educação financeira. Meu lado malvado me diz: fica quieto, paga as contas, junta um dinheirinho e, quando puder, “engane” uma “velhinha”...

Pra quem quiser ARRISCAR na mesma “estratégia”, abra uma conta em uma corretora e jogue milzinho no IPO da Abril, ainda esse ano. A dona Maria, leitora de Veja, vai comprar correndo na segunda feira, mas provavelmente você já ficou com umas merrequinhas na quinta prévia e vai poder vender pra ela, de bom grado.
"I used to be on an endless run.
Believe in miracles 'cause I'm one.
I have been blessed with the power to survive.
After all these years I'm still alive."

Joey Ramone, em uma das minhas músicas favoritas ("I Believe in Miracles")
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Postby junior » 30 Jan 2006, 19:20

Por falar em blogs: esse post é um ensaio para um blog, não é não ;) ?
"Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt." - Lev Landau
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Postby Danilo » 30 Jan 2006, 19:21

Concordo! A idéia, pelo menos na minha cabeça, de um blog, é que ele sirva para algo, seja para que as pessoas fiquem sabendo de coisas que elas jamais leriam/encontrariam normalmente, e em geral de alguma fonte confiável... Leria fácil um blog de economia do Mends (fica a sugestao), mas nao um de engenharia meu, por ex :).


Acho que fóruns como o da Saidera, e mais uns outros pelos quais já passei são melhores que os blogs, pois tem pelo menos sempre um beltrano discordando ou complementando a informação colocada por sicrano. Ou seja, dentro desse fórum já temos um blog de economia do Mends!

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Postby Wagner » 30 Jan 2006, 20:22

segundo este vídeo abaixo, o blog vai ser um forte concorrente da proópria mídia tradicional. Divirtam-se...

http://www.epic2014.com
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Postby mends » 31 Jan 2006, 15:36

este blog deve ser interessante:

Blogging From Death Row


Vernon Lee Evans is sitting in a cell on death row for 20 years. In his blog meetvernon.blogspot.com he answers questions about life on the "Green Mile". Because he does not have an Internet connection, his blog is maintained by Virginia Simmons. She collects questions, sends them to Vernon and publishes his answers on his blog.
Vernon was convicted of killing David Scott Piechowicz and Susan Kennedy. It was a heinous crime but he maintains his innocence, he says he did not pull the trigger.


He is set to be executed during the week of February 6, 2006, meaning that his correspondece will soon come to an end.
"I used to be on an endless run.
Believe in miracles 'cause I'm one.
I have been blessed with the power to survive.
After all these years I'm still alive."

Joey Ramone, em uma das minhas músicas favoritas ("I Believe in Miracles")
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Postby mends » 01 Feb 2006, 10:27

do NEW YORK TIMES:

Microsoft Amends Its Policy for Shutting Down Blogs
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
Microsoft unveiled new company guidelines yesterday intended to spell out how it will deal with government censorship demands, in China and anywhere it does business, and limit the impact of its compliance.

It was responding to criticism that followed its decision to shut down five weeks ago, at the Chinese government's request, the online journal of a popular blogger in Beijing who used the Microsoft network.

Among the changes outlined by the company's general counsel, Bradford L. Smith, at its Government Leaders Forum in Lisbon yesterday were a commitment to block content — typically blog or personal Web site content — on its MSN Spaces service only when served with "legally binding notice from the government indicating that the material violates local laws, or if the content violates MSN's terms of use."

The company is also developing technology that would block content within the country making the request, while preserving the ability of the rest of the world to view it. Microsoft also said it would develop a system of "transparent user notification," so that users whose blogs have been shut by government order will be notified by message when they try to access their sites, rather than face an inexplicably dead link.

The new policies would not have prevented the censoring of the Chinese blogger, Zhao Jing, who also works as a research assistant in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times.

But Mr. Smith said that issue and other recent events had led the company to take "a thoughtful step back."

"We have now, I think, a principled grounding for us to work with MSN Spaces and blogs," Mr. Smith said in a phone call from Lisbon. He added that given the field of other Internet technologies expanding into the global marketplace, "we may need to complement those principles with specific additions for those particular technologies."

"This is not a single-country or a single-company issue," Mr. Smith said.

The Microsoft announcement comes just a week after Google said that it would enter the Chinese market with an altered version of its search engine that filters words and subjects deemed inappropriate by government censors. And there has been growing concern in the last year over how far American technology companies appear willing to bend to demands by the Chinese government to gain access to its booming market.

The Congressional Human Rights Caucus, co-chaired by Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California, and Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican of Virginia, will hold a hearing on the issue this afternoon. Representatives from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Cisco all declined invitations to attend.

The House subcommittee on Global Human Rights has also scheduled a hearing for Feb. 15, and has invited all four companies to testify.

The committee, unlike the caucus, has subpoena power. "It's certainly an option," said Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for Representative Chris Smith, Republican from New Jersey and the chairman of the subcommittee. "At this point it's not part of the discussions."

None of the four companies has yet agreed to give official testimony before the committee, Mr. Dayspring said.

On his MSN Spaces blog, Mr. Zhao, the blogger whose site was taken down late last year, had made comments about a recent newspaper strike that the Chinese government deemed inappropriate. Chinese authorities called an MSN Spaces affiliate in Shanghai, and after a short consultation with executives in Seattle, Mr. Zhao's site went dark across the globe.

Mr. Smith said that the legal process was valid and would be followed similarly under the new guidelines. But, he said, using technology the company has been working on "over the last several weeks," Web surfers seeking to read blogs on MSN Spaces servers — which are located in the United States — will be granted or denied access based on their geographic location.

Had this system been in place after the government's takedown request last December, surfers in China would not have been able to view Mr. Zhao's blog, but it would have remained viewable in other countries. Mr. Zhao, however, would no longer have access to or be able to update the site.

He would see only a message that his site had been terminated by government request.

"One of the things we've looked at is, How far does a government's jurisdiction reach?" Mr. Smith said. "In most countries, a government has jurisdiction over the flow of information to its users, but no country has legal jurisdiction over the flow of information to users over the rest of the world."

The guidelines were praised at the Lisbon conference by Mary Robinson, the former United Nations high commissioner for human rights, who said they were "deeply significant."

But Julien Pain, head of the Internet desk at Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based press freedom group that has been monitoring Internet censorship and the imprisonment of bloggers in China called the development an "illusory victory."

"There's a good side and a bad side," Mr. Pain said. "It's clear that they've begun thinking about their ethical responsibility. But it also shows that they accept censorship, and that they believe in this new form of the Internet, in which the rights of users will vary according to their geographic origin."

This, he said, "is in direct contradiction with the original idea of what the Internet was supposed to be — something with no barriers, no boundaries."
"I used to be on an endless run.
Believe in miracles 'cause I'm one.
I have been blessed with the power to survive.
After all these years I'm still alive."

Joey Ramone, em uma das minhas músicas favoritas ("I Believe in Miracles")
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Postby mends » 09 Feb 2006, 15:56

DA ECONOMIST

The blog in the corporate machine

Feb 9th 2006 | CHICAGO
From The Economist print edition


Bloggers can be vicious, but they can also help companies avert disaster


THEY have always had their critics, but corporations are having an especially hard time making friends of late. Scandals at Enron and WorldCom destroyed thousands of employees' livelihoods, raised hackles about bosses' pay and cast doubt on the reliability of companies' accounts; labour groups and environmental activists are finding new ways to co-ordinate their attacks on business; and big companies such as McDonald's and Wal-Mart have found themselves the targets of scathing films. But those are just the enemies that companies can see. Even more troubling for many managers is dealing with their critics online—because, in the ether, they have little idea who the attackers are.

The spread of “social media” across the internet—such as online discussion groups, e-mailing lists and blogs—has brought forth a new breed of brand assassin, who can materialise from nowhere and savage a firm's reputation. Often the assault is warranted; sometimes it is not. But accuracy is not necessarily the issue. One of the main reasons that executives find bloggers so very challenging is because, unlike other “stakeholders”, they rarely belong to well-organised groups. That makes them harder to identify, appease and control.


When a company is dealing directly with a labour union or an environmental outfit, its top brass often take the easy route, by co-opting the leaders or paying some sort of Danegeld. Until a couple of decades ago, that meant doling out generous union contracts and sticking shareholders, taxpayers or consumers with the bill. More recently, the fashion has been for “corporate social responsibility”. This might involve spending money on a pressure group's pet project; or recruiting prominent activists to a joint committee, dedicated to doing good works.

In the blogosphere, however, a corporation's next big critic could be anyone. He might be an angry customer or a disgruntled employee—though that sort of tie to the company is not essential; nor does he need lots of industry experience or lengthy credentials to be a threat. All a blogger really needs to devastate a company is a bit of information and plausibility, a complaint that catches the imagination and a knack for making others care about his gripe.

Mike Kaltschnee's site, HackingNetflix.com, became a force to be reckoned with for Netflix, a video-rental outfit that delivers to people's homes. When Netflix said it was not interested in Mr Kaltschnee passing on questions from consumers, he posted the exchange online, hurting the firm's reputation among loyal customers. The company now treats him much more respectfully and his site has gained a large following.

Increasingly, companies are learning that the best defence against these attacks is to take blogs seriously and fix rapidly whatever problems they turn up.

One firm that could have saved itself a lot of trouble is Diebold, an Ohio-based firm that makes automated cash machines. After America's presidential election in 2000, which featured a vote-counting fiasco in Florida, the firm decided to expand a part of its business that made electronic voting machines by acquiring Global Election Systems (GES) in early 2002. The deal turned into a disaster when computer scientists and voting-rights groups educated the public about problems with machines such as those made by GES. The critics complained that GES's voting devices could not leave an audit trail because, among other flaws, they did not print paper ballots. By 2004 the mainstream print and broadcast media were also hammering away on this issue, leading several states, including Ohio, to reject GES's machines.

Evolve24, a consultancy which analyses corporate reputations and watches online trends closely, has used its blog-sniffing software to find out what was available on the internet before Diebold bought GES. It discovered that not only were a couple of voting-rights activists calling attention to the machines' drawbacks on their blogs well before the acquisition, but also that research papers highlighting the problems were available on technical websites. Diebold did traditional forms of due diligence before buying GES, such as verifying its financial health. But by ignoring the blogosphere, it failed to spot some crucial risks.

Although its response was much quicker than Diebold's, Kryptonite, a firm that makes high-priced bicycle locks, also learned the hard way how important blogs can be. In September 2004 word spread quickly through the blogosphere that U-shaped locks by Kryptonite and other firms could be picked, quickly and easily, using only the plastic casing of a Bic pen. Then somebody made a video showing how to do it, and posted it on the Engadget blog site, one of the most popular on the internet. After Kryptonite discovered the problem, it came up with a plan to take care of its customers and improve its locks. But Donna Tocci, Kryptonite's media chief, says that she now checks 30-40 blogs every day.

Not all company interactions with bloggers involve damaging criticism. Sometimes a careful look at what is happening online can help managers to avoid over-reacting. After the invasion of Iraq, when American consumers turned against all things French, a big French drinks company noticed that its brand names were popping up on boycott lists. But an analysis by BuzzMetrics, which specialises in scrutinising blogs and other online forums for corporate marketers, revealed that those who were pushing hard for a boycott tended to be “Budweiser drinkers”, who would not have been natural customers for the firm's wines and spirits anyway.


A hair of the blog
Many big companies have been looking eagerly for ways to tailor their advertising to specific groups of consumers. They have found that web logs and internet discussion groups, which bring together people of similar interests, can help them turn hot links into cold cash. But besides trying to get out their message, companies are also learning that blogs can provide early warning signs of potential problems.

They are increasingly turning to firms that can help them sort through the blogorrhea to find what they need. There is a lot to sift, considering that some 27m blogs are online. Last month, responding to growing interest in their services, BuzzMetrics agreed to merge with Intelliseek, another firm that specialises in analysing blogs for business. BuzzMetrics has ties to Nielsen, a media-research firm; Intelliseek has a clutch of former executives from Procter & Gamble, a consumer-goods giant.

Max Kalehoff, vice-president of marketing at BuzzMetrics, says that many of the firm's clients want it to analyse blogs so as to gauge the seriousness of bad news. Drugs firms, for example, want to know what questions are on patients' minds when they hear about problems with a medication. Car companies are looking for better ways to spot defects and work out what to do about them.

Steve Rubel, of CooperKatz, a public-relations firm, reckons that companies should also have a ready-made plan for influencing bloggers if a crisis does occur. Mr Rubel runs the firm's Micro Persuasion practice, which helps companies improve their marketing by using blogs and other conversational media. He recommends setting up a “lockbox blog” that is hidden behind an internet firewall, but can be made visible to the public at short notice. Any websites or video clips that companies might want to direct the public to in an emergency, for example, could be prepared in advance. Then, he likes to tell clients: “in case of emergency, break glass and blog.”
"I used to be on an endless run.
Believe in miracles 'cause I'm one.
I have been blessed with the power to survive.
After all these years I'm still alive."

Joey Ramone, em uma das minhas músicas favoritas ("I Believe in Miracles")
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Postby mends » 27 Apr 2006, 18:23

The party, the people and the power of cyber-talk

Apr 27th 2006 | BEIJING
From The Economist print edition


At present the party has the upper hand. It is starting to sweat, though


“DO YOU know how serious a mistake you've made?” Yan Yuanzhang recalls an official asking him not long ago. Mr Yan had been summoned to Beijing's Internet Propaganda Management Office to talk about his websites. They were causing, he was told, the Communist Party to lose face. They were providing material that foreign media could use to attack China. They were illegal and must be closed down within 24 hours.

“Farewell, worker comrades,” wrote Mr Yan in notices posted that day on his China-based websites, China Workers Net and Communist Net. Visitors could hear a lugubrious rendition of the communist anthem, the Internationale, through their computer speakers as they read. “Whether there is any hope of starting again, heaven knows.” He says now that he will relaunch one of the two sites on May 1st, this time on a server in Taiwan.

It is remarkable that the websites lasted as long as they did. Mr Yan, who is not a party member, launched them on May 1st last year to mark Labour Day. The aim, he says, was to provide platforms for a “leftist” critique of China's embrace of “Dickensian capitalism”. They did not, as he tried to explain to the city government, attack the party itself or its leaders. But they did provide something the party abhors: uncensored news about worker unrest. In September he launched a bulletin board on which visitors could directly post their comments. Messages complained about corruption, the privatisation of state-owned enterprises and the hardships of unemployed workers.

As Mr Yan talks, he gets a text message on his mobile phone. It is from Tan Jiaming, a university student in southern China who has been running a website of similar outlook, Revolutionary Marxism. It too, the message says, has been closed. The student had posted a notice entitled “Strongly Protest the Snuffing Out of the China Workers Website by the Beijing Authorities”. He was summoned to hear a dozen officials threaten him with expulsion from his university for backing Mr Yan.


Six years ago Bill Clinton described China's efforts to restrict the internet as “sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall”. But as China's web-filtering technology has grown more sophisticated, and the ranks of its internet police have swelled, some have begun to wonder. A report in 2003 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace suggested that, despite the difficulties the internet posed to authoritarian regimes, it could also be used to fortify them. China, the authors concluded, had been “largely successful at guiding use” of the internet. At a congressional hearing in February on American companies involved in internet business in China, a Republican congressman, Christopher Smith, said the internet there had become “a malicious tool, a cyber sledgehammer of repression”.

Some of the companies testifying at the hearing—Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!—deserved a grilling. Why, for instance, had Microsoft, at the request of Chinese officials, removed a popular site in December from its Chinese version of MSN Spaces, a service for personal diaries and blogs? Yahoo! too had questions to answer about reports that information it provided to the police about its e-mail services had helped put dissidents behind bars. More recently Reporters Without Borders, a human-rights group, said that a Hong Kong unit of Yahoo! had given the police a Chinese user's draft e-mails. These were then used as evidence at his trial for subversion, for which he received a four-year jail sentence. Yahoo! has condemned efforts to suppress freedom of speech, but says it must obey Chinese law.

For foreign companies, the internet business in China is certainly a moral minefield. But the internet should not be dismissed as merely an instrument of control for the Communist Party. In the past three years, China has seen far more extensive use of the internet and the rapid development of groups that share views online that are by no means always the same as the party's. The numbers of internet-connected computers have more than doubled since the end of 2002, to 45.6m, and internet-users have risen by 75%, to 111m. China now has more internet-users than any country but America, and over half of them have broadband (up from 6.6% at the end of 2002). Users of instant computer-to-computer messaging systems have more than doubled, to 87m. Blogs—online personal diaries, scarcely heard of three years ago—now number more than 30m. And search engines receive over 360m requests a day.

The spread of mobile telephony has been no less spectacular. At the end of last year China had 393m mobile-phone accounts, nearly 200m more than at the end of 2002 and more than any other country. If, as many believe, China's first third-generation mobile-network licence is to be awarded in the coming year, internet access at broadband speeds will become available on mobile handsets. And, crucially, many people in towns can now afford all this technology. China's economy in the past three years has been growing at around 10% a year, enriching a growing middle class that increasingly sees the internet as an aid to information-gathering, communication and entertainment. Even many students can afford laptops. In big cities, they congregate in cafés that offer free wireless access.

Moreover, the technological transformation is spreading far into the hinterland. Almost every county now has broadband. Internet cafés with high-speed connections are ubiquitous and cheap even in remote towns. Fixed-line internet access is still uncommon in rural homes. But in many parts of the countryside, it is possible to surf the internet at landline modem speeds using a mobile handset (though few peasants can afford to). With the government's encouragement, state-owned companies have poured quantities of money into the building of a telecoms infrastructure worthy of the rich world.


Keeping the genie half in the bottle
The government has also spent freely to keep its liberating side-effects under control. The committed few who are brave or foolhardy enough to use the internet to challenge the authorities now face a police force of some 30,000 online monitors, say foreign human-rights groups. They also say that China has jailed over 50 people for expressing views online or in text messages. Worried about the forces unleashed by rapid economic and social change, China's leaders have stepped up their efforts in recent months to control not only the internet but other media too. A handful of outspoken newspapers have been closed and their editors sacked.

At February's congressional hearing, representatives of America's internet companies argued that their presence was helping to promote access to information by encouraging the internet's development in China. Jack Krumholtz of Microsoft said the Chinese people would be the principal losers if his company's internet services ceased in China. They would be denied, he said, “an important avenue of communication and expression”. That was an exaggeration. Foreign companies help to spur competition. But it is Chinese companies—some of them listed on American stock exchanges—that in many respects, and often unwittingly, are transforming China faster.

Google's decision to set up a self-censored version of its search engine in China this year aroused a storm of criticism in America. But iResearch, a Shanghai-based market-analysis firm, says China's Baidu enjoys more than 56% of the search market; Google follows with less than a third, having been the leader three years ago. Popular features of Baidu's engine are its ability to link searches to related chat forums, and hunt for MP3 music files, most of them pirated.

Baidu's searches are not nearly as comprehensive as Google's. But self-censorship, both by Baidu and by Google in its new China-based engine, still allows information through that the party dislikes. For instance, news about the congressional hearing—ignored by China's print media—can be found on both. Entering the Chinese-character equivalents of the words “Congress America internet freedom” into Baidu produces three prominent results relating to the hearing. All are blogs. Two even contain advertisements with links to pornographic websites.

Google's engine in China produces more relevant results. But many are blocked by a firewall, the barrier between the internet in China and the rest of the world that filters out banned sites and those containing prohibited keywords. Curiously, it is the Chinese search engine with a more rigorous filtering system than Google's that provides the readiest access to uncensored information about the congressional hearing. For those who know English, the House of Representatives' website offers copies of evidence and a webcast of the entire proceedings. These are not blocked.

The firewall is porous. Imaginative users can find ways of searching for sensitive topics such as news about Falun Gong, a banned spiritual movement. In Google, entering the words “Falun Gong” will cause the entire results page to be blocked, but “FLG movement” will not. Many Chinese internet-users are well practised in configuring their internet browsers to route page requests through unblocked proxy servers outside China. These help bypass the firewall.


Blog-standard evasion
Blogs make the censors' work all the more difficult. China's fast-growing legions of bloggers know they must avoid taboo keywords, including those programmed into the Chinese version of MSN Spaces. If you enter any of those, the postings will not be shown or your attempt to set up a blog will be denied. But, as China's internet companies engage in fierce competition to draw blog traffic to their portals, few checks seem to be made about who is writing them. A blog can easily and quickly be set up on a Chinese portal, and no one asks for verifiable personal information. Bloggers often display postings that would make party censors shudder. Mr Tan, the student who used to run the Revolutionary Marxism website, has a blog on MSN Spaces that keeps up his campaign for workers' rights despite the demise of his own site and continued harassment by officials.

Human intervention is no less fallible than the firewall. In the middle of the huge open-plan newsroom of Sina Corporation in north-western Beijing, a score of censors sit in front of their screens. They are young employees whose job is to examine thousands of blogs and comments posted by internet-users on Sina's news items. It is a round-the-clock task, designed to find anything that could have got through the filters and might still offend the authorities.

Direct attacks on the party, its leaders or on the political system rarely get through (or at least, not for long). But that still allows room for far more vigorous debate on a range of social and economic issues than China has enjoyed before under Communist rule. According to Qian Hualin of the government-affiliated China Internet Network Information Centre, Chinese service-providers report that some 70% of their bandwidth is taken up with pirated music and films. That still leaves lots of room for discourse.

Even the party itself pays attention to the deluge of public comment. Eager to acquire some legitimacy, but anxious to avoid democracy, it is trying its hand at populism. The prime minister, Wen Jiabao, said last month that the government should listen “extensively” to views expressed on the internet. With few other ways of assessing the public mood, the internet is indeed a barometer, even though surveys suggest that users are hardly representative of the general population, being mainly young, better educated and male.

In 2003 many internet-users expressed outrage on bulletin boards over the beating to death in jail of just such a young, well-educated man who had been arrested for failing to carry the right identity documents. This led to the scrapping of a decades-old law giving the police sweeping powers to detain anyone suspected of staying without a permit in a place other than his registered home town. Later that year the commuting of a death sentence of a gang boss prompted a similar online furore. The Supreme Court retried the case and ordered his execution.


The knitting of a network
Guo Liang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences describes 2003 as a “milestone” in the development of the internet in China. During the outbreak early in the year of SARS, an often fatal respiratory disease, many people stayed at home and made extensive use of the internet to gather information and keep in touch. The government's efforts to block news of the outbreak collapsed as word spread by e-mail, computer and text message. By late 2004 home installation of broadband began to take off, and with it the growth of blogging, instant messaging and internet-based phone and video calls.

The party worries about any unregulated networking among ordinary people. It severely limits the activities of non-governmental organisations, even straightforwardly charitable ones. It ruthlessly suppresses organised dissent. But China's love affair with the mobile phone, text and instant messaging has helped people to form networks on a scale and with a speed that is beyond the party's ability to control. Windows Messenger, Microsoft's instant-messaging system, is one popular tool. But by far the biggest share of this market is enjoyed by a Chinese company, Tencent. Its messaging service, QQ, generates revenue by linking a free online system with mobile phones, for which users must pay.

The QQ service has helped Mr Yan retain some of his online network of contacts since the closure of China Workers Net and Communist Net. He replaced the two home pages with notices inviting anyone interested in staying in touch to join a QQ chat group called China Working Class Net. Members can hold discussions with dozens of people all at once. With webcams, some chatters can also see and hear each other. Some even go in for luoliao, naked chatting, which is causing the authorities and parents some concern. The government, however, seems to devote more resources to controlling politics on the internet than to controlling sex.

One frequently criticised aspect of China's internet development is that nationalist diatribes have a much better chance of getting past the censors than other political comment. But nationalism has also provided a convenient cover for experimenting with new forms of mobilisation. The power of instant messaging, for instance, became evident in April last year, when it was used to organise big anti-Japanese protests in several cities. In the build-up to the protests, Sina organised an online campaign aimed at demonstrating public opposition to Japan's bid for permanent membership of the UN Security Council. Some 20m people submitted their names. Since starting a similar campaign a few weeks ago, Sina's rival, Sohu, has gathered more than 15m names. “It shows the power” of the internet, says Charles Chao, Sina's boss.

The government keeps issuing new rules to keep users of both the internet and mobile phones in line. Last September news portals were banned from publishing anything that might incite protests; anything issued in the name of any “illegal civil organisation” was also forbidden. According to news reports, the government plans this year to issue rules to require people buying pre-paid mobile phone cards to submit proof of identity: over half of China's mobile-phone accounts are not registered in any name, making it easy for criminals—or dissidents—to use them without being identified by the police. “The internet in China is a wild place, it's crazy,” says Charles Zhang, head of Sohu. “I don't think it's monitored enough.”


Catch me if you can
But the market is likely to prevail over restrictions. Limiting phone-card sales to just a few shops with the ability to process registration requirements would be a blow to mobile-phone companies and huge numbers of private vendors who thrive on such business. It is hard to see how it could be enforced any more rigorously than, say, China's ban on the unauthorised reception of satellite signals. Illegal sales of satellite dishes and cable services offering uncensored foreign satellite channels are big underground businesses in urban China.

China's news portals, in their competition for traffic, will continue to test the limits of official tolerance. And in a competitive market few internet-café operators pay attention to government requirements that users' identities should be registered. An hour on a broadband connection in an internet café in a small town can cost as little as one yuan—about 13 cents.

Research by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences suggests the scale of the government's task. Over 20% of people surveyed in five Chinese cities last year said the internet had increased their contacts with others who shared their political interests—a far higher proportion than found in a similar survey conducted in America (8.1%) by collaborators in the investigation. Nearly half of the respondents said going online increased their contacts with people who shared their hobbies, compared with less than 20% in the United States (networked role-playing games, growing fast in popularity in China, may partly account for this). And nearly 63% agreed that the internet gave them greater opportunities to criticise the government.

“China is changing, it's improving,” says Jack Ma, head of Alibaba, which last year took over the running of Yahoo!'s Chinese operations—for, despite an early start in China, Yahoo! has been elbowed aside by domestic rivals. “Ten years ago, 20 years ago, in Chairman Mao's time, if we came here to talk about these things [government censorship],” he begins. Then he puts an imaginary pistol to his head and, with a grin, fires it. That, of course, was when power just grew out of the barrel of a gun. Now it also grows out of the infinite, albeit virtual, barrels of the internet.
"I used to be on an endless run.
Believe in miracles 'cause I'm one.
I have been blessed with the power to survive.
After all these years I'm still alive."

Joey Ramone, em uma das minhas músicas favoritas ("I Believe in Miracles")
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Orkut saindo de moda

Postby Danilo » 20 Jun 2006, 00:21

Ultimamente tenho achado o Orkut meio entediante. São sempre as mesmas discussões, spams aos montes, criaturas estranhas pedindo pra me 'add'... Tanto que semana passada fiz uma reengenharia no meu perfil: tirei o contato com 1/3 das pessoas, saí de dezenas de comunidades e apaguei várias coisas. E não é que tem mais gente enjoando do Orkut?

Brasileiros criam onda de "orkutcídios"
Entediados, viciados ou preocupados com a crescente violência na rede, membros destroem seus perfis no Orkut.
(super-resumido de http://www.link.estadao.com.br/index.cfm?id_conteudo=7716)

Muitos brasileiros, que hoje são a esmagadora maioria no serviço, vêm abandonando o Orkut numa prática que ganhou dos próprios usuários o apelido de "orkutcídio". Expostos em comunidades como Eu Penso no Orkutcídio, com mais de 1.600 filiados, os motivos são vários e, vão do tédio ao vício, passando pelas tradicionais crises de ciúmes e o medo de superexposição.
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Postby junior » 20 Jun 2006, 10:19

Brasileiros criam onda de "orkutcídios"

Quase um problema de saúde pública! Posso imaginar as entrevistas com psicólogos, bla, bla, bla... Definitivamente merece uma matéria no Estadão... :lol: :lol: :lol:
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