The epicenter of tonight’s New Year’s Eve celebration is, of course, Times Square in New York City. Get the official countdown to 2008, explore the history of New Year’s Eve in Times Square and more over at the official Web site of the Times Square Alliance.
And if you’re driving: Be safe.
Of course, the logical follow-up to yesterday’s post is to look ahead to predictions of what’ll happen in 2008. So let’s see what eMarketer, BL Ochman, Customer World, ReadWriteWeb, Global Watchtower, CMS Watch, Business Week and this cynical take from ClickZ have to say. Or just go to Mashable again.
Marketing predictions are notoriously difficult to make. It’s often more about spotting qualitative trends (football games will be more exciting in 2007) than predicting quantitative developments (the Colts will win the Super Bowl by 12 points).
Still, that doesn’t stop most of us from making predictions the way we make resolutions. This time of year, it’s almost as much fun to look back and see how last year’s predictions fared as it is disappointing to realize we’re making the same resolutions all over again.
So click away and have fun peering into the 2007 crystal balls of Foghound, On: Digital + Marketing, CRM Mastery, ClickZ, Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog, ANA Marketing Musingsand Lightspeed Venture Partners. Or start over at at Mashable and get a whole slew in one swell foop.
“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”
—Henry David Thoreau
An informal LOHAD poll of Internet power users suggests to me that barely half of the people who more or less live online are using iGoogle. Among casual users, it’s undoubtedly far less.
I expect that to change in the coming year as people really get their hands dirty with iGoogle.
At first, iGoogle seems sorta like AOL’s home page — pick a visual theme and a general subject matter like business or entertainment and be done with it. But play with it for a while and the real power and utility of iGoogle reveals itself very quickly.
The core of iGoogle are the widgets you can drag and drop to create your customized home page. Mine includes a window into my Gmail, Google Reader and Google Docs, plus local weather and top news stories.
But iGoogle ups the ante with the ability to create tabs, so in no time you can have multiple customized thematic Google pages at your disposal.
Over in my “News” tab I have headlines from a half-dozen news sources plus business and financial headlines. I created my “Marketing” tab by allowing Google to pre-populate the page with widgets, and for the most part it did a great job, including Seth’s Blog and eMarketer, among others. I really like the “tech blogs” widget from LabPixies that gives an efficient look at headlines from Engadget, TechCrunch, Gizmodo and Slashdot. My “Fun Stuff” tab includes headlines from The Onion, the New York Times crossword puzzle, “This Day in History,” how stuff works and sudoku puzzles.
More than just fun and games, though, iGoogle is a great tool for helping me manage the information tsunami that comes my way daily. Play with it for a little while and I bet you find it at least as useful as it is entertaining, too.
Yep, useful. Which is why I suspect that long after the crosswords and sudoku puzzles are solved and gone, iGoogle will still be front and center in my browser.
