On a personal note I have been editing developmental team comments on the final manuscript of Social Media Analytics since late last week and have committed to get this done by the weekend so most of my attention, writing wise, is going there.    The next step is to have the manuscript proof read and see it typeset, in Acrobat – and then I wait about two months and my book is on the shelves – hopefully yours.

Last week Gizmodo reported rumors that Skype was up for sale, Facebook and Google were vying to buy it but now we know the buyer turned out to be Microsoft and the buzz, according to Sysomos, is fairly positive according to Mark Evans.    I don’t think many people care who owns Skype, as long as it continues to work well – but I am wondering if real sentiment about an offering or merger can be gotten when most people don’t really care who owns Skype.  In other words – how to you get sentiment out of a situation where people don’t have strong feelings one way or the other?   I wonder if getting a sample of people who are clearly reactive or active about the subject of Skype is a better way to go .. and then try to figure out their sentiment.

Also interesting in exploring SocialCam to share videos off my iPhone which the application sounds like it can do.   In a unrelated discovery yesterday I found the latest updates to WordPress on my iPhone allow creating and uploading videos to blogs and I did that with an event I attended last night at the Lisa Salon in Dumbo. The only glitch is WordPress is hosting those videos, not YouTube – so it would be nice to have a way to take a video while in WordPress, upload it to YouTube then automatically embed it onto the blog post.  For all I know there is already something like that – or maybe SocialCam can do it.

Seth Godin wrote an intriquing post last week and I’m still trying to figure out what he’s saying.

…. Thus, two kinds of serious errors: believing in invisible things that aren’t true, or insisting that the truth might not be. They’re caused by fear, by deliberate misinformation and by being uninformed.

Compete and Kantor Media along with Common Truth launched a Two Screen View of Comsumer Behavior last week and I’m interested in finding out more about the offering – more from the perspective of someone who wants to write about it, here.

The partnership between Compete and Ground Truth will create the first and only cross-channel view of consumers’ behavior as they move between mobile and online platforms. The new multiplatform solution will measure two-screen browsing and application use, media effectiveness and response to online advertising. This will help advertisers identify and respond to mobile competitive opportunities and threats, drive brand loyalty, measure transactions and make better decisions about investing in digital strategies.

Publishers can now measure mobile properties alongside other digital and traditional media properties, accurately projecting ROI and more precisely valuing their media. Lastly, agencies can now quantify the role of mobile in the media mix alongside other channels to make more informed media buying decisions and design strategies to also leverage mobile for direct response.

Just a thought.

Also looking at new site called CheckinPlugin.com that allows us to check into a place we will be and announce it to all our friends (ahead of time) – looks interesting but can’t think right now of a place I’d check into ahead of time – but perhaps there is a good reason to alert friends of where you will be.   The now Defunct DodgeBall used to be good to tell people where someone was – but when you told your friends and they tried to intercept (say, on a night of Gallary hopping) by the time the message arrived and you could rush cross town, it was too late and the person already left.   I got frustrated with Dodgeball but was still signed up as late as 2009.

Joe Hall at MarketingPilgrim wrote about Cup of Joe: Social Media ROI? Think Again Genius! which reminds me of  the issues I deal with in my book, or as Joe says, why even try?

Calculating ROI for advertising is easy because it is based on definite variables that can be measured. How do you measure the emotion from a positive exchange with a favorite brand on Twitter? How do you calculate the feelings of community in some forums? You can’t, and you aren’t supposed to.

If your company or client requires social media ROI, then maybe social media isn’t right for you. Or maybe you just need to learn more about being social and come back to the media later.

And talking about books – interested do see how Bookish will do – told it will launch this summer.    An intersting post on the New Era Of Search Is About The Answers, Not Just The Links was in TechCrunch over the weekend.

Search is about to change quite radically. For more than a decade, search has been stagnant: the core product has not changed much. Users have changed radically.

Interesting observation – I agree

Finally – it’s intersting to see just how much Equity is Underwater , so much for “convential wisdom” of buying real estate in the last decade - Zillow on Negative Equity: 28.4% of all single-family homes with mortgages are “underwater - Perhaps the better answer was not owning anything …. and coming out ahead.

But that doesn’t apply to Google, who owns land  -Google To Build New Googleplex From Scratch maybe that will go with the “new search engine” they need to build, according to the TechCrunch post above.

But my favorite this week is Two Dogs dining in a busy restaurant.