The I in CSI stands for Ikea

The purveyor of Swedish meatballs and home furnishings seems to think that nothing says comfy sleeping like a nice body outline. The Hulda Dans* quilt was apparently inspired by CSI and the other shows in the death porn genre. The heart monitor pillow covers are a nice touch. On the plus side: The victims were holding hands when they were killed.

*Has anyone started using the Ikea catalog as a source for Web 2.0 company names? There’s Polarvide, Granat, Klippan, Morrum, Glansa, Aneboda — and that’s just in the first few pages.

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Gooruze is a site and a test-case for online marketers

Gooruze is a site that wants to be the Facebook/LinkedIn for online marketers. (Gawd, is there anything more tired than the description “is the the MySpace/Facebook/LinkedIn for…”?) So it has come up with the requisite weird site name sent out invites to the online marketing types and given us a space where we can post our profiles and our work.

It seems fine, if a bit generic and I have joined. That’s just a professional obligation — I have signed up for a bazillion of these sites but I actually have found little reason to participate in most of them. (BTW, I have to include a piece of code for it to track my blog on the site, so here’s the code: ConvonHoffman.gooruze.com. Hope they’re happy.)

However, it begs the question: Why should I use it? It’s just started up so I’ll give it some time to get up and running but so far I don’t see any real value being added by the people running the site. Right now there’s a news feed from stories suggested by members — but it’s not as comprehensive a feed as I would find at Mashable or TechCrunch or a number of other sites. There’s a lot of posts from members that unfortunately read like basic marketing communications — informative but basic and lacking any attitude or style or anything else that might make me want to read further.

So why go there? Can they build a community simply by saying they are the place for this community to be? Because right now that’s all I’m seeing. As with many social/professional networking sites it feels like they expect me to do all the work and that’s not going to cut it anymore. The site’s name is an ugly play on the word gurus, but as of yet it feels like I’m supposed to provide the swami myself.

Like I said, it’s an interesting test case. We’ll see.

Parse that mission statement

Further proof that mission statements are over-emphasized. Can you ID the following Web 2.0 company? It is successful despite a mission statement that says:

“We provide innovative experiences to end-users and their administrators because we see existing tools are fundamentally broken. We also believe in compatibility with existing infrastructure and applications (both open source and proprietary).”

“We see existing tools are fundamentally broken”? Is there a language in which this makes sense?

What makes this company even funnier is that nowhere on its site is there a simple declarative sentence saying what it is they do. I’ve parsed the jargon and I think I might know what they do but it is indeed a guess.

BTW, no one guessed why yesterday’s symbol was important (except the one person who actually knew).

Is Web 2.0 satire even possible?

 (Cross-posted from my other blog: Business & Networking)

The following was actually not generated by one of those DIY Web 2.0 sites listed yesterday:

BAAGZ, from the French Web and enterprise search company Exalead , is a new search and collaboration system, still in beta, that applies Web 2.0 features to social networking. While the idea of using search topics and vetted results as nodes around which dynamic topical networks could form is interesting, the current early beta implementation gives just a hint of what may be possible.

There’s a site that trying to be a parody of MySpace & co. called FriendSpaceBook. The site invites you to make parody profiles of friends and/or celebrities. This suggests that the creators haven’t spent enough time reading actual profiles on these sites. I think a similar fate awaits The Facebook Book, a dead-tree attempt to satirize all of this that will be published by Harry Abrams just in time to be remaindered.

When the reality is already this silly all you have to do is report.