Archive for July, 2008
New Action Indistr Lets You Choose The Price For Buying Music
Posted on Jul 31, 2008 09:51:37 PM
Admin wrote:
Indistr is taking the Amie St approach to digital music’s long tail. In an effort to create a true market where supply and demand meet in an ideal environment, Indistr’s newest feature is hoping to provide the perfect price point for online music sales. The new feature lets the buyers name their own price for the content they sell through Indistr’s site.
Taking a cue from Radiohead’s successful venture of putting out the virtual tip jar, fans get to put out bids for how much an album should cost. The minimum bid is $1.00, and the bids cannot exceed $20.00. Once you enter your bid for the price you’re willing to pay for an artist’s album, Indistr will then tell you how much of that will go directly to the artist. So far, this new feature is only being applied to entire albums, and it’s an opt-in feature available to artists that would like to make particular albums available for sale in this manner.
The transparency involved with this format is particularly appealing, because it enables the consumer to make a pretty educated decision on how their actions affect an artist, as well as the Indistr service itself. Combine this new feature with Indistr’s existing tailored options for artists who want to sell their content directly to fans, and you’ve got a good system with a great deal of potential. How long until the major record labels adopt such a model?
New Network Providers Get A Piece Of Ad Income
Posted on Jul 31, 2008 04:26:11 AM
Today, Selling Internet access has been a decent business, but selling Web advertising is an even better one.
(Link)
New Updated Open Web Awards: Nominations For Best Large Social Networks
Posted on Jul 30, 2008 04:36:20 AM
Today,
The Open Web Awards are off and running, and over the next few days we will be opening up nominations in 13 categories. The first of those categories is “Mainstream and Large Social Networks†– the sites we’ve all heard of, frequent, and have multi-millions of users.
In last year’s social networking awards, Pete wrote “… we think that Facebook will continue to grow strongly in 2007.†That has certainly been the case, as the network has exploded in popularity since opening up to everyone that wants to join and launching a developer platform. However, recent concerns over its new advertising system and privacy issues have critics questioning the long-term prospects of the site. Meanwhile, MySpace remains #1 in terms of traffic, with other network such as Bebo, Hi5, and LinkedIn all sporting impressive growth in the past year.
With that, we open up the category for nominations. To nominate a social network, leave a comment with the word “NOMINATE†in it. Nominations will remain open until 11:59pm PST on December 4th (next Tuesday). At that point, we will tally up the nominations and enter the second stage of the competition – voting.
Once again, a thank you to our sponsors:
Cohn and Wolfe - Our PR partner and co-producer.
Quintura - Quintura makes you control your web search. You will find what you want as quickly as possible.
RetailMeNot - The RetailMeNot.com community saves you money by sharing 50,000+ coupon codes for 10,000+ stores.
Streakr - Discover more of the web you love together with Streakr.com
New Action Essential Info For The Future Of Your Library
Posted on Jul 29, 2008 07:00:46 AM
Today, ”As a long-time cataloger, I truly feel the pain that technical services personnel have known for a long time: the era of the library OPAC is over.” — Brad Eden, from the “Introduction” of “Information Organization Future for Libraries” (Library Technology Reports 43:6)Since the advent of the Internet—as library technologists and librarians are well aware—the relationship between the user and his or her library has changed.In a world of quick-and-easy search engines and of online social networks, information retrieval and aggregation are no longer the purview of the library institution alone. “[N]ow that I am a library administrator dealing with staffing and budget issues on a daily basis,” states Dr. Brad Eden, in the “Introduction” to the sixth issue of Library Technology Reports in 2007, “it has become quite clear that the way libraries do business just isn’t working.”Eden, who early in his library career worked as a cataloger, is now the Associate University Librarian for Technical Services and Scholarly Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “We have gone from a monopoly, which could impose whatever rules and software and search strategies that we wanted on our users, to a bit player in market overflowing with technological gadgets, tools, and algorithms that capture the attention of the public and leave libraries with but a slim slice of the information pie, all in the space of approximately 15 years,” he notes.Thus, Eden tackles the important topic of “Information Organization Future for Libraries” in this final issue of Library Technology Reports in volume 43. …
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Action Web 2.0 Marketplace Listings For December 21st, 2007
Posted on Jul 28, 2008 08:01:18 PM
Today,
The Web 2.0 Marketplace is a place to list Web 2.0 and “New Media” websites for sale, job offers, consulting services, Facebook development services and more.
Brand New Internet Datenschutz Und -sicherheit In Sozialen Netzen
Posted on Jul 28, 2008 06:54:20 AM
Admin wrote: Friends kündigte einen OCLC-Report an, der inzwischen erschienen ist: Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked WorldThe practice of using a social network to establish and enhance relationships based on some common ground—shared interests, related skills, or a common geographic location—is as old as human societies, but social networking has flourished due to the ease of connecting on the Web. This OCLC membership report explores this web of social participation and cooperation on the Internet and how it may impact the library’s role, including: * The use of social networking, social media, commercial and library services on the Web * How and what users and librarians share on the Web and their attitudes toward related privacy issues * Opinions on privacy online * Libraries’ current and future roles in social networkingThe report is based on a survey (by Harris Interactive on behalf of OCLC) of the general public from six countries—Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States—and of library directors from the U.S. The research provides insights into the values and social-networking habits of library users.Hier geht es zum Volltext (PDF).Share This (Source: Infobib)
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New Article Live Ad By Honda Designed To Keep Viewers Tuned In
Posted on Jul 27, 2008 03:35:29 PM
Admin wrote: By turning ads into events - like the team of skydivers Honda employed to spell out the brand’s name at 14,000 feet- advertisers hope to counteract the use of digital video recorders, which easily allow viewers to skip commercials.
(Link)
New Script Collective Media Raises Funding For Online Ad Network
Posted on Jul 27, 2008 05:51:30 AM
Admin wrote:
Collective Media, an online advertising network, has raised a Series A round from Greycroft Partners and iNovia Capital. The company focuses on behavioral targeting (aka – delivering ads based on user habits versus contextual), delivering primarily branded advertisements. The company claims its network reaches more than 120 million unique users per month.
Collective Media says the funding will be used to continue to enhance its platform and increasing the size of its sales force. The company might also be well suited to use some of the funding on acquiring collectivemedia.com, which is currently a spam link site. Their current homepage is at collective-media.com.
The amount of the funding round was not disclosed.
Brand New Internet Nature Gave Inventor A Blueprint, But Not Success
Posted on Jul 26, 2008 06:05:03 AM
Today, Jay Harman, an Australian naturalist whose discoveries promised great increases in efficiency for a number of technologies, found companies showed little interest in redesigning their products.
(Link)
Networking Blogpulse: Metrics Based On Conversation
Posted on Jul 25, 2008 07:27:45 AM
Today,
Yesterday, I was late to the party with the Shyftr bitchmeme. Today I’m going to continue that train of thought by being about a day late to the party talking about BlogPulse. They recently came to the attention of Louis Gray when he was featured prominently on the Nielsen blog search engine yesterday (and today too) as being a ‘top blog post’ with his post Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners’ Ire?.
I think part of the reason that BlogPulse hasn’t gotten much press over the years (and it has been years, since they’ve been around since 2005) is that they’re still not competitive on the comprehensiveness of their blog indexing as compared to Technorati and Google Blog Search. What they do have an angle on is a different way of measuring reach and value for a blog, and it’s very much in the vein of what I was attempting to describe yesterday:
The pageview is dying as a monetizable metric. For us big blogs like Mashable, it works, because we have scads of it. Unfortunately, the smaller blogs and communities have issues getting any return on their work, even though they have high levels of engagement, participation, and value contributed. Rather than rolling them all up into some sort of CNet competitor, blogs should shift their focus on monetizing their work in a way that’s more valuable - capitalizing their expertise and community engagement.
In that respect, these sites that shard off the community can actually serve to increase that blogs revenue, if they return instead of the conversation, the metrics on that conversation. While the actual address where that conversation takes place may shift around on the Internet, the derivative ideas from that conversation remain more or less branded by the originator.
And from what it looks like to me, BlogPulse, similar to Technorati, seems to be progressing down that same path of measurement more by engagement and conversation as opposed to simple pageview metrics (ala Quantcast, Compete and Alexa).
The difference as to why this matters is that this is Nielsen, here, instead of a Web 2.0 startup. They’ve, for the last several years, been very much on the fore of trying to measure online text and downloadable media. They’ve struck partnerships with Wizzard Media to certify all their podcast downloads. They’ve joined the Association for Downloadable Media to find more lasting metrics that truly value an online video and audio piece for what it is. They’re heavily involved with measuring traffic with the Netratings program. Point is, they’re busy about finding the right way to measure our stuff.
To be real clear, here, they don’t go as far with BlogPulse as I describe in my piece, nor as far as most of the Rat Pack described in our ideal situation on this weekend’s show. The BlogPulse system functions by measuring amount of links into an article, not quite as simplistic as Technorati’s linking algorithm, but essentially the same thing. It doesn’t account for volume of comments, and it doesn’t go so far as to take into account things we talked about on the show, like measuring Shyftr comments, Readburner comments, Twitter comments and FriendFeed comments.
Nor would I expect it to. This meme is barely a few days old. My point is that Nielsen, in it’s dealings with blogosphere rankings and measurement, has decided to look more into the realm of discussion than pageviews as the important metric to watch. I think this says that my idea (which may or may not be all that original) has some legs and is worth exploring further.
I got a number of interesting responses off yesterday’s piece on this topic, but no one has seemed to really come up with the silver bullet yet. I’m wondering if I’m phrasing my question the right way. What I’m trying to find here, first of all, is the cornerstone of what a superior method of valuing a blog would be than simply by the pageview; something that gives a fair shake to the mid-size blogs (in terms of traffic) as well as the giants. Once we get that fleshed out a bit, then we can talk about the best way to measure that and then monetize it.
You, dear readers, have had a day or so to noodle what I asked you yesterday. Any brainstorms on that yet?
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