Archive for March, 2008
Brand New Update Is Payperpost Shifting Towards Legitimacy?
Posted on Mar 24, 2008 12:29:09 PM
Admin wrote:
SocialSpark seems to signal a shift towards what Google considers legitimacy, so should Google offer amnesty for those involved with IZEA’s Pay-Per-Post program? This is the question Andy Beard puts forth today in his second look at the SocialSpark network.
He actually took the time to speak with Ted from IZEA, clarifying some matters and new policies. For instance, he found that the policy of full disclosure is going to be maintained, as well as the addition of “nofollow” rules to links back on blogs reviewing IZEA advertisers. Additionally, the option of “positive review required” will no longer be there for those choosing to advertise through the Pay-Per-Post.
All of this begs the question: What’s so bad about the IZEA blogger review offerings? What differentiates it from the solicited reviews from the A-Listers in the blogosphere? The fact that the blogger may be getting a nominal fee to pay attention to that company? The fact that the link to the company is done in text as opposed a 125×125 advertising graphic link?
Now that the SEO benefits for advertisers are disappearing, IZEA seems to be moving towards a true buzz-marketing focus, the same type of techniques that big companies like Apple and Sidekick used to build initial interest in their mobile devices (albeit their buzz marketing was in the form of glitterati endorsements).
Yet still, Google continues to hand out PageRank penalties to those it finds in the IZEA marketplace listings (even to those who have never posted an IZEA sponsored post).
Andy asks: might it be time for Google to re-examine the practices of IZEA? I concur.
Server Facebook Social Ads Debut: The Power Of Conversational Marketing Accelerates Pressure On Publishers
Posted on Mar 23, 2008 09:15:42 PM
Admin wrote: (NOTE: See the ShoreViews Video on this topic below in this post.)At the recent Future of Business Media conference one of the key trends outlined by the speakers was that B2B media knows that social media is an important trend but that they are very reluctant to engage with social media tools. Most mainstream consumer publishers are about as far along, if truth be told, but it’s of crucial importance that they wake up and see the opportunities in social media before others begin to skim off the best revenue opportunities.One of the best examples of that can be seen in the recent launch of Facebook’s advertising features, which are unlike most other tools used for marketers trying to reach audiences. Instead of just throwing up banner ads or typical CPM-oriented ad networks, Facebook is leveraging the power of their own social network to make companies, products and brands a real part of the Facebook community on a peer basis. The new Facebook marketing capabilities consist of two key components: SocialAds, which enables advertisers to get messages into the feed of Facebook activity appearing on member home pages, and Facebook pages for companies and products.The SocialAds implementation on one level is not too different from any other ad feed that might appear in a weblog’s RSS feed but with much more powerful capabilities based on member profiles and activity. An advertiser can target members on Facebook based on their personal profiles, including interests that match up with keywords, targeting both very small communities and very large communities based on those parameters. While keyword selections are fixed, as opposed to being able to define one’s own, this still allows a fairly fine degree of targteting.But the kicker in SocialAds is in the ability to link an ad to a member’s reported activities on Facebook. …
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New Source Facebook Gets New Investors: Samwer Brothers For European Expansion
Posted on Mar 23, 2008 11:26:12 AM
Today,
Facebook’s getting some new investors. The Samwer brothers, Marc, Oliver, and Alexander, have reportedly taken a stake in the social networking site, according to Reuters. While the size of the stake has not been revealed, it has been disclosed that the Samwer brothers will now be Facebook’s strategic partners in Europe. It’s also been disclosed that the Samwer brothers have offered up less than the $240 million that Microsoft paid for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, but don’t let that fool you. The Samwer brothers’ investment amount was still sizable, however much it was.
After selling the German Internet auction site Alando.de to eBay for $50 million in shares, the brothers have made names for themselves and have become even more involved with startups since. They set up the ringtone company Jamba, which was sold to Verisign for $273 million in shares and cash back in 2004, and have also invested in the German Twitter clone, Frazr, and a handful of other startups. It’s important to note that the Samwer brothers also invested in the Facebook clone StudiVZ, which was sold about a year ago for $112 million, so it’s very evident that the brothers not only recognize the importance of impactful social networking tools, but also see a great deal of potential in Facebook.
As the Samwer brothers are becoming the strategic partners for Facebook in Europe means that Facebook is getting even more serious about its European expansion. With the Samwer brothers having a large, vested interest in the success of Facebook’s growth across Europe, this seems like a pretty good fit considering the interests for all parties involved.
New Updates More Teens Are Creating Web Content - More Girls Too
Posted on Mar 22, 2008 05:15:25 PM
Today, I am reposting this Pew summary. Read the whole report for more.More teens are creating and sharing material on the internet “WASHINGTON — Content creation by teenagers continues to grow, with 64% of online teenagers ages 12 to 17 engaging in at least one type of content creation, up from 57% of online teens in 2004. Fueled by new technologies, websites, and social network domains such as Facebook and MySpace, large numbers of teens share and create materials online: 39% of online teens share their own artistic creations online such as artwork, photos stories, or videos 33% of online teens create or work on webpages or blogs for others, including friends, groups they belong to or school assignments 28% of online teens have created their own blog, up from 19% in 2004, and almost completely driven by the popularity of blogging among girls 27% of online teens maintain their own webpage 26% of online teens remix content they find online into their own creations Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation. Some 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys, and 54% of wired girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys. Boys, however, do dominate one area â?” posting of video content online â?” online teen boys are nearly twice as likely as online girls (19% vs. 10%) to have posted a video online somewhere where someone else could see it. These findings are highlighted in a new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, “Teens and Social Media.” The report is based on a national phone survey of 935 youth ages 12-17 in November 2006. The margin of error for the survey is 4 percentage points. The survey found that content creation is not just about sharing creative output; it is also about participating in conversations fueled by that content. …
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New Article Nba Highlights On Joost Won’t Attract New Users
Posted on Mar 21, 2008 08:16:03 PM
Admin wrote:
Even though Joost has been deemed an over-discussed phenomenon by Mashable standards, it has actually been a while since we had any major Joost updates. That being said, you may be happy to know that Joost now has a National Basketball Association channel that will offer highlights from past and present games. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
The NBA joins Major League Baseball and Indy Car Series with its new Joost channel. But are game highlights enough for the free Internet television service that’s been hailed the poster child for new age media distribution? ESPN has already determined that it will be offering up free game content online, as it seeks to remain the dominant force in sports news and information. With this level of expectation being displayed on ESPN’s own websites, have the standards been raised for other services like Joost? Granted, highlights and games are different aspects of a sports fan’s experience, and if the NBA provides more extensive highlights than what’s shown on ESPN’s websites and television channels, then there is a nice appeal for basketball fans, especially if they’re already Joost users.
We’ve seen a lot of distribution partnerships occur as a result of the viral nature of online media distribution, the easy and replicated way in which media can be shared across the web, and the hope to avoid constant copyright issues by simply joining forces with other content creators and distributors to keep everyone’s assets protected. I expect we’ll be seeing a lot more of these types of partnerships, and perhaps Disney will be even more willing to offer up some more exclusive content to be distributed through other means. If any Internet television service seems worthy of this type of distribution, it would very well be Joost.
[via Reuters]
New Actions Hitachi Presents Smaller Robot, But Glitches Persist
Posted on Mar 20, 2008 09:30:40 PM
Admin wrote: The new toddler-like robot rolled around and waved in a demonstration, only to crash into a desk - highlighting the hurdles robots must overcome to become real-life partners.
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New Scripting Ibm’s 6th Iforum - Enterprise 3.d: Living And Working In Virtual Worlds By Roo Reynolds - Metaverse Evangelist
Posted on Mar 20, 2008 12:55:53 AM
Today, Carrying on further with some more reviews from some of the most interesting presentations at the recent IBM iForum event in Zürich that I attended a few days back, it is now time to move into the next one. This time around with Roo Reynolds. Again. But not to worry, it is not a repeat session from the one I blogged about earlier on over at IBM’s 6th iForum - 2010 CIO Outlook by Roo Reynolds - Metaverse Evangelist where Roo was actually covering for another IBM fellow colleague. Instead, in this particular presentation you get to see Roo at his best, talking about what he does on a daily basis as part of his super cool job title of Metaverse Evangelist. And he has made the job, once again, so easy, that we have got available both the slide deck and the audio.Yes, that is right. The presentation materials are already available in Slideshare (Link here. Will embed the slides towards the end of the blog post for those folks interested in watching it through), along with the audio, and I can only say that you are off to about 30 minutes of pure delight finding out a whole lot more about how Enterprise 2.0 is shaping up some of the various different activities that large corporations, including IBM, are getting involved with in order to help improve and boost how knowledge workers get to share their knowledge and collaborate with others in order to help drive innovation further into the next level. While going through the slides, and trying to keep this blog post short, pay special attention to the first few slides which are actually screen shots taking from various virtual worlds, not just Second Life, where you would be able to listen to Roo’s speech detailing what his experiences have been like thus far. Then from there onwards another really interesting slide is #15 that shows the different relationships amongst knowledge workers using traditional tools like IM and e-mail vs. social networking and social networks. …
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Brand New Source Quitting Facebook Gets Easier
Posted on Mar 19, 2008 02:16:04 AM
Admin wrote: Aiming to address the privacy concerns of disenchanted users, Facebook.com said Tuesday that it was trying to make it easier for people to delete their accounts permanently from the social networking site.
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New Google Answers To Bring Back Human Powered Search
Posted on Mar 18, 2008 04:56:21 AM
Today,
When Google closed their Answers service last year, I can truly say I was sad to see the system go. Whenever I was working on the research phase of a new project, of which I had quite a few odd ones that year, I’d generally turn to Google Answers to get an expert opinion. Where else can you go to find solid information and rock-bottom pricing on, say, how to launch a satellite over Northern Africa? That question actually came up two summers ago, for one of my clients. We found that getting venture capital to launch a geo-synchronous satellite based wireless network would be more feasible than finding venture capital to create a tower-based WAN network in the war-torn Sudanese area.
Part of the draw to that system was not only that you could get folks that were really good at utilizing the search engine to find what they needed to know, but industry experts who actually worked in the respective fields they represented, and had anecdotal experience. The draw of money made them take the work seriously, especially since the quality of information was graded after the fact. I almost always felt the need to “tip” the researcher after the information was provided, it was of such good quality.
Yahoo has since dominated the space, with what I see as an inferior product (although most would disagree). Google has been rumored to be relaunching the service for quite some time, and even went so far as to create a Russian version of the service this summer.
Now, it is being reported that an American comeback of the service is in the works. The details are sketchy as to where the source of the new-found rumors are coming from, but details about the Russian and Chinese version of answers say that experts are no longer paid for their opinions, which in my mind takes away significantly from the authenticity and value of the service. In a day and age where services like Mahalo and Wikipedia are succeeding because of the human component of question answering (and some or all of those human components are receiving some sort of compensation), for Google to flout that makes for somewhat of a head-scratcher.
Brand New Software All News All The Time: Newsnow Adds Social Networking, Web 2.0, Seo, And Other Categories To Beta Release
Posted on Mar 17, 2008 12:10:07 PM
Today, A service we talk about quite a bit on ResourceShelf (it’s a long time fave), NewsNow, has added several new categories to their beta release. ALL pages auto-refresh every five minutes as new content is found. 1) Search Engine Optimization2) Social Networking3) Web 2.04) BloggingThe “Search Engine” category remains available. NewsNow aggregates content from nearly 31,000 news sources and blogs. (Source: ResourceShelf)
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