Profy

As a blogger you never know what subject this or that company decides to study to get some coverage from media people - and often the topics are very intriguing to make sure they will catch attention. Today my attention has been grabbed by results of a study promising to reveal the laws of online attraction.

The study promises to finally explain people what they should not do on online dating sites if they are serious about finding a partner for their real lives. The study was carried out by a UK-only dating site singles365 (the link won't open unless you are in the UK yourself) and included interrogation of over 2 thousand singles in the country to see what they think about proper online dating behavior and the factors that will most probably turn them off in potential partners.

The online attraction laws seem to be very simple here - much simpler than when it comes to real-life dating...

Now that we know that Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States, I think everyone is making their guesses on what we should expect him to do in every field of the politics and economy. And while it is quite easy to promise whatever you want during a presidential race, the presidency itself is usually a little different thing where multiple factors will influence the politics - and those factors will hardly be limited to the President's good will and understanding of what is right. Often the platform does not translate 100% into the real actions...

For some reason Twitter has chosen Japan as the country where the team experiments with the latest features of the microblogging tool. The reason is that in Japan Twitter is a joint venture between Twitter itself and Digital Garage - hence the startup can behave differently in the country with experiments that are not seen elsewhere on Twitter.

Japanese users were the first to see Twitter's attempts in monetization when Twitter started to show them some ads. Now the same country is used to experiment with a long-awaited functionality of groups...

I am not in the US myself now and am not a citizen so I am not voting today but this presidential campaign in the US seems to be the most important political event recently everywhere as it is well known that the US president plays an important role in how the overall international politics are in the next few years. Besides, the world financial crisis has originated in the US and it is quite obvious that comprehensive actions of the US administration will be needed for the entire world economy to cope with the crisis.

And of course it is absolutely impossible to avoid the US election whatever you do online...

There was an interesting discussion yesterday about the prospects of online advertising on All Things Digital by Peter Kafka. He was talking about analysts and industry players projecting the future of online advertising in the current economic crisis. There were a few forecasts mentioned that he used to jump to rather pessimistic conclusions.

First of all, it was J.P. Morgan internet analyst Imran Khan reducing his projections for online advertising growth in 2009 - from 19% in the September projection to 13% this time...

Normally I tend not to notice spammers on Twitter. Of course I get some following notifications from accounts obviously belonging to spammers and have self-promotion is the only reason for their Twitter presence but normally it is not difficult to ignore such accounts. But lately I have noticed a trend that is disturbing - the fact that there are way too many spammers trying to cash in on the economic turmoil and some of the cases are definitely interesting enough not to ignore them completely...

In the February of last year Facebook launched its marketplace for virtual gifts where anyone could purchase a gift for $1 or several at a time with a small discount and send such gifts to friends on Facebook. This has been fun but there were obvious limitations given the fixed $1 price and free gifts options available only.

Late last week Facebook switched to micropayments and opened the marketplace to gifts priced under the standard $1 amount by switching gifts prices from dollars to credits...

I think the trend is already here: comments on blog posts are getting more and more attention these days everywhere. First of all, it is visible that bloggers have started to quote comments on their own and others' blogs quite often - using them for ideas and even quoting some commentators as sources of additional knowledge and information.

I guess the reason is quite simple here: bloggers have begun to realize that comments can serve as a vital part of the conversation taking place on their blogs. Besides, the term user-generated content can now mean everything all the users create online - including blog comments...

A pretty interesting piece of news from comScore has just landed in my inbox. Today the web measuring company released the data on the top online properties in the UK in September and the results are partly predictable and partly rather unexpected.

The predictable part is about financial websites growing rapidly due to the world economic crisis. This is true everywhere and this is exactly why money-related websites seem to be flourishing these days. Besides, UK citizens seemed to be interested in the presidential campaign in the US and increased visits to various political news websites as well...