Yahoo! Japan and instant cup noodle manufacturer Maruchan teamed up for a second time to offer users of Japan’s most popular browser a chance to help create a new ramen flavor. Under the campaign slogan, “Let’s use everyone’s voice to make a new cup noodle!” Yahoo gave the public three weeks to cast their votes online via the promotional page ramen.yahoo.jp.

This new flavor will be produced by Maruchan and in stores nationwide on February 16th. The popular general interest weekly magazine, Tokyo One Week, is also teaming up to publish exclusive content about the creation of the product.

Last year’s “Scorching Garlic Rich Tonkatsu” obviously proved a hit because Maruchan will also be re-releasing this flavor along with the new one. Having both flavors side by side on the shelves until March 24th will allow the “cup ramen battle” to continue, pitting this year’s top flavor against last year’s. The final winner will be announced at the end of March.

When social networking community Mixi teamed up with both cup noodle maker Acebook and beverage manufacturer Calpis a few months ago we talked about how crowdsourcing FMGCs was pretty much as win-win as you could get. With internet users turned consumers—many of whom are passionate about particular goods (like ramen)—feeling involved in the creation process, loyalty for both camps is only likely to go up.

Recently, satellite photos available on Google Earth showed a curious  new target built in a large area for testing Chinese bombs (smart and dumb) and missiles. This was the Shuangchengzi complex of air force bases and training and testing areas in central China. One of the testing areas now had a mock up of the well known Taiwanese Ching Chuan air base. If China were to ever attack Taiwan, they would want to knock Ching Chuan out of action early on. But the bomb craters on the Ching Chuan mockup show very poor accuracy.

It’s not known if this simply reflects the need for more pilot training, or that the Chinese are trying to lull the Taiwanese into a false sense of security.

Meanwhile, Google Earth (earth.google.com) has revolutionized military intelligence, and the way news on military affairs is developed and spread. Case in point is the transformation of the Chinese armed forces, and the activities of the North Korean military. Both China and North Korea have long been very secretive about military affairs. But the appearance of Google Earth (originally as Earth View) five years ago, changed everything. By putting so much satellite photography at the disposal of so many people, in such an easy- to- use fashion, unexpected discoveries were made.

People soon discovered that if they had a high-speed Internet connection, they could use Google Earth to find satellite photos of all sorts of interesting stuff. This was especially true of the “Forbidden Kingdoms” (China, Russia North Korea, and a few other). While the CIA and the military has had access to satellite photos of these countries since the 1960s, little of it was shown to the public. Now that so many people can examine these, lower resolution, civilian  satellite images, many have gone over vast stretches of the Forbidden Kingdoms, and found things that were newsworthy, and never reported before. Things like new military bases, test sites for new weapons, and the new weapons themselves.

Technically, the countries in question can request that Google not show these classified military facilities. But in making that request, they point where the classified operation is. So far, a lot of this stuff is just there to find. And users find it. This is called crowdsourcing (where large numbers of people accomplish impressive feats of research or analysis because they can quickly mobilize and get to the task via the Internet.) The U.S. military will not say that they appreciate the work done via crowd sourcing, but individual analysts and intelligence officials have made it known, unofficially, that crowdsourcing is another useful tool that unexpectedly came their way via the Internet.

The Internet has revolutionized the ease with which companies do business, and how they stay connected to other businesses and their clients. Customers are more connected than ever before, which empowers them in a way that didn’t previously exist before the invention of the Internet, creating a shift in the traditional balance of power.

There are many new marketing strategies and techniques that have been adapted to Internet businesses, or have been created as a result of the Internet. Collaboration marketing is one of the most important of these Internet marketing techniques. The traditional type of collaboration marketing refers to collaborating with other similar businesses to widen the net of the marketing capacity for your company by sharing the burden of marketing with other marketers.

Marketing is still about creating value for the customer and capturing value from your businesses marketing activities. However: the Internet is a great vehicle for new ways of marketing your business you can raise awareness for your products and services that simply wasn’t possible twenty years ago. The age of Internet marketing is more customer driven than marketing has ever been before.

What is Customer Driven Marketing?

Customer driven marketing is the process by which smart business owners allow the customer to weigh in and drive a portion of your marketing strategy. This still falls under the realm of collaboration marketing, but it is known as customer driven marketing.

The essence of marketing remains the same it is the process of creating value through exchanges, but the nature of these exchanges has changed dramatically. This shift requires businesses to think differently about how they interact with customers. It has been described as a shift from information asymmetry to information democracy customers have more power and can use this power to shape industry.

Part of this shift towards customer driven marketing is the transfer from transactional exchanges to relational exchanges. Instead of maximizing profit from each transaction, relationship marketing (of which customer driven collaboration marketing is a sub-set) focuses on maximizing profits over several years to a lifetime of a customer’s commitment to your business.

Traditional types of marketing techniques operate under the assumption that businesses create and maintain client relationships and that customers play a passive role. Now, customers play a more active role in the managing of business relationships, and thus value in marketing is no longer something that is created by companies and delivered to customers but rather, customers have become co-creators of marketing value by beginning to participate directly in the marketing process and shaping how companies approach their marketing agendas.

Customer driven collaboration marketing requires you to think about collaborating with customers and making customers an integral part of your company’s marketing activities by building relationships with clients and customers where their opinions and feedback are gathered and reviewed to devise a an effective plan for marketing your business.

Crowdfunding is a neat derivative of microfinancing, which offers financial services to poor or low-income people.

Generally speaking, microfinance advocates believe that by getting financial services into the hands of the impoverished, you can help them to do some amazing things that can actually break the poverty cycle altogether.

Traditional banks can’t handle microfinancing because their overhead required to underwrite a loan precludes those loans from being too small. The same is true of many other financial service offerings. No bank is going to spend the time to underwrite a $50 loan and chase after small bank accounts that might never have more than $100. They just are not built for that.

However, a new breed of microfinancing institutions has evolved and they’ve been set up in a way that they can make microloans and offer microcredits to folks that previously had no access to such services.

Similarly, crowdfunding is circumventing traditional funding mechanisms like bank loans or venture capital. In essence, it says let’s see if we can get a ton of people to chip in a very small amount of money that in aggregate can help somebody to do something.

What’s changed since our last review? Ask500People is introducing demographic polling: poll for results by gender, age, location, team, education. That is huge, and definitely something you can’t do with a casual poll on Twitter. Knowing this level of details for an answer to your question is valuable information, and seeing it visually represented is even better.

The company will also be adding the ability to follow polls via a “favorite” system. This is handy if you want to track results over time. Coupled with the demographics and the new embed functionality, Ask500People should pick up a real presence in the online polling sector. Up until now, the fact that competitors like Twiigs and others have had embed capability from the start has put Ask500People at a disadvantage for getting noticed and used.

Other new features include the ability to vote on comments in a way similar to Reddit (arrows that give you an up or down option), and a way to vote on the poll questions as well. Ask500People has also improved the site navigation and given you a way to search past polls as well as integrating with Gnipcentral for volume control. You can also see the more popular question via RSS now, and follow Ask500People on Twitter (@ask500).

If you are a developer, you can now get access to the Ask500People API to develop your own use for Ask500People in the way that best suits you or your company. Last, but not least, the folks behind Ask500People are also giving away rocket logo stickers. If you are a laptop sticker junkie, you can request yours via an email to Ryan Oazawa. I know I will be using Ask500People a bit more now that they have added demographics and embedding. That makes it much more useful for me than it was before.

News bookmarking and citizen journalism site NowPublic has relaunched its website and added a few new features. With this rebirth, NowPublic is hoping to set the new standard for citizen journalism. How’s that? With a trust and credibility system. Upon launch, NowPublic did a few things that traditional media hadn’t yet done–allow more open discussions around the traditional media news (i.e. Associated Press feeds coming through NowPublic). With an increased ability to create transparency with crowdsourcing and news-sharing, NowPublic needs to further tweak its system by layering in a bit more control and filtering, if you will, of all that transparent interaction on the site.

In order to do so, NowPublic has instituted a member ranking system that lets users collect points via site participation. The more a user contributes to the global NowPublic news community, whether it be through comments, uploads and other submissions, the higher a user can be ranked. There is a bit of number crunching that goes along with point collection so some quality contribution is imposed into a weighted ranking scale.

Simply being active on the site isn’t really enough to determine a user’s credibility, however, so it’s good to see that NowPublic is also incorporating user feedback regarding other contributers to this weighted scale.

And as many other sites have noticed, aggregating user activity from across other sites is a good draw for users. The result is a growing number of Web areas that offer redistribution platforms for Twitter updates. NowPublic is taking this route as well, presenting users with the ability to include their Flickr, YouTube and Twitter streams, along with their site news. This appears to be a bit of an extension from the integrated YouTube submission NowPublic added last year, from which NowPublic received good feedback.

This ties in somewhat with the new custom news dashboard NowPublic is including in this major site update. Users can customize these new dashboards by adding aggregate images, videos, etc. from feeds, among other things, as a startpage service for individual users to take advantage of.

While I don’t think NowPublic’s weighted ranking system is going to completely change the game for trust and credibility in citizen journalism, I do recognize that the ability to determine who the most trusted users are in any online community is something that nearly all user-generated networks need to (and are) looking into, whether it be the introduction or the improvement of ranking systems.

Web 2.0 is pretty cool - so cool in fact that it’s got its own buzzwords and lingo that not everybody knows. Everybody has a lot to gain from participation in this new cultural phenomenon, though, so there’s no reason why everyone shouldn’t know the background on the lingo. We did a little research just to cover our own bases! We thought we’d share it with you.

Think you know where catchwords like FTW and Fail! came from? Think you know who came up with the phrase Web 2.0? Do you know what the first Rickrolled link claimed to be? We did some hunting around to find out - below are our best ideas for the history of these and other popular terms around the web these days.

FTW

FTW is most commonly understood as standing for “For the Win!” The Urban Dictionary says it entered popular culture via the TV show Hollywood Squares. The show featured two contestants playing a trivia based tic-tac-toe game where the squares had celebrities siting in them who “helped” answer the questions.

The final question to complete the tic-tac-toe was asked “for the win…” The show ran from 1966 through 1981 but there were several attempts to revive it.

Fail!

Now a one word sentence primarily used to mock, sometimes with a touch of sympathy, the prominent use of the word “Fail” is said to derive from 1998 arcade game Blazing Star. According to an article from this Fall in Slate, “its staying power comes from its wonderfully terrible Japanese-to-English translations. If you beat a level, the screen flashes with the words: ‘You beat it! Your skill is great!’ If you lose, you are mocked: ‘You fail it! Your skill is not enough! See you next time! Bye bye!’”

See also the relatively new FailBlog.org, a daily collection of unintentionally funny images and videos with very simple captions.

Right: The cycles of history have a cruel sense of humor.

Rickroll

From the consistently obscene fringe message board 4chan to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade! Who would have ever thought a joke like this would go so far?

According to the Wikipedia entry on the phenomenon, the practice of telling someone you’re linking to one thing and then linking instead to the Rick Astley video Never Going to Give You Up was originally based on a practice known as Duckrolling. The link would claim to be to a news item or some other thing but would instead take visitors to a web page containing a photoshopped picture of a duck on wheels. Hey look, it’s a duck…with wheels.

The first Rickroll ever, Wikipedia dutifully reports, was a May 2007 link on 4chan that claimed to be to a mirror copy of the original trailer for the game Grand Theft Auto IV, which was otherwise unavailable.

4chan is also believed to be the origin of Lolcats.

Eating Our Own Dogfood

You often hear about technology companies “eating their own dogfood,” which means using their own software to get work done. According to the book Inside Out: Microsoft in Our Own Words, the phrase came from Microsoft’s Paul Maritz. Maritz had seen an Alpo dog food commercial where actor Lorne Greene told viewers that Alpo was so good he…fed it to his own dogs! Neither Greene nor Maritz apparently ate dogfood themselves, but Maritz did use the phrase in an email calling for Microsoft workers to use their own products more.

Dorky executives have felt like a little “edgy” using the phrase ever since.

Web 2.0

Many people think that Tim O’Reilly, book publisher and founder of the Web 2.0 Conference, coined the term Web 2.0. Last month O’Reilly mentioned in a PBS Science radio interview, though, that some one who worked for him actually came up with the phrase to articulate some concepts the O’Reilly himself had been discussing.

We did a little hunting around and got to what’s apparently the truth. More than 3 years ago Tim wrote an article titled What is Web 2.0:
Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software where he says that it was O’Reilly VP Dale Dougherty who came up with the moniker in early 2004. (Photo of Dougherty, left, by David A. Mellis) How many of you got that trivia question right? At the time Dougherty was the Editor and Publisher of O’Reilly’s Make magazine, so he was no stranger to invention.
So there you go. Now you don’t have to be a wall flower at parties any more, for fear of not knowing the history of these five terms. Or are the conclusions we’ve drawn here incorrect? If you’ve got reason to believe so…speak up now!

Next, I’m delighted to witness the rise of the Peer-To-Peer economy, and the death of the One-To-Many business model. Since time immemorial, information has flowed from one entity to everyone else, hence the one-to-many descriptor. The media industry one of the first victims i.e. newspaper publishers, tv, music and movie companies. As our ability to consume and create different kinds of media surges, old media struggles to stay significant and pay the bills. The same thunderbolt that impacted old media is poised to strike other industries even more disruptively.

Crisis reporting is one of those industries. Often an ultra-sensitive affair, it has had to deal with issues of politics, bureaucracy and authenticity mostly because policy making and crisis situations are joined by the hip. It has always been a one-to-many situation with government/corporate dominated (and manipulated) crisis reporting. Basically we have always had to believe what ‘they’ tell us about how it happened, how it is being handled and how it will be prevented in future. Things are beginning to change however with the proliferation of social media and specifically the rise of the bloggers.

Crowdsourcing means that crisis situations can be explored at comparatively little cost, by making information freely available from an untold numbers of sources. We would basically be freeing up information from the vaults of Non Governmental (and governmental) Organizations that have safeguarded information release for self-preservation. Behold the rise of Many-To-One and Many-To-Many paradigm shift in crisis reporting.

The posthaste delivery of crisis information as it happens is something we’ll begin to see in coming years. As all this data converges we’ll have the ability to visualize patterns that were previously indescernible. With this new power policy making will finally return to the people.

While all this seems a bit idealistic, I should point out that this model is not perfect. It should be understood that crowdsourcing is still vulnerable to data poisoning (as my friend Hash pointed out). This is when malevolence is injected into the system. P2P (Peer-To-Peer) systems have often overcome this using their vastness. Try and imagine misleading data engulfed by a sea of reliable information - ultimately the authenticity can be determined by the bigger picture.