While the perception of social media is still of a place where the kids are having all the fun, the big story is actually about what’s happening with the older generations. While the under 30 crowd has plateaued, the over 30s are going hog wild for this social networking thing. The percentage of 30-somethings engaged in social media has doubled since 2007 and nearly tripled among the 40+ and 50+ age groups. Ad Week has the scoop.
Worlds are colliding, George.
Ad Age editor bares his soul; tear trickles down my cheek as I type.
I have no idea what this means, but I love this kind of AI stuff. There’s a site called GenderAnalyzer where you can punch in your URL and it runs the site through its back-end number-crunching wizardry and then spits out a prediction as to whether the author is a male or female. They are 97% sure that our little blog here is written by a man. And I am 92.5% sure that somewhere between 40-50% of the time they would be right.
Weird news seems to have a habit of coming in bunches. Like our collective brainwaves end up buzzing about the same things all at once without our even knowing it.
Today’s odd topic appears to be, well, um… bras.
Ad Age brought us this nugget of social media/user-generated content about innovative and, dare I say, zany bra maker Uniglo.
And now, CNN, never one to be outdone, is on the trail (Wolf Blitzer is standing outside of a Victoria’s Secret in a suburban mall in Ohio, reporting to you live).
Awesome side-note: A Victoria’s Secret PR flak has given the world this gem of corporate spin:
“We do not put formaldehyde in our bras.”
(more…)
Awhile back, I wrote a post on online futures markets and how accurate they can be in predicting world events.
So, how did the political nerds/futures freaks do in predicting this election?
Let’s take a look at my personal favorite, The Iowa Electronic Markets. Their vote share market is set up as a zero sum game with $1.00 as the maximum value of any share. So, how that $1.00 is divided by the traders in the market ends up being a proxy for the popular vote split. Trading the day before Election Day ended with Obama shares selling at an average price of 53.6 cents and McCain at 46.5 cents.
While votes in some places are still being counted (mostly absentee and provisional ballots), the actual popular vote will end up being about 53% for Obama and 46% for McCain.
Um, not bad.
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