First, read Ian Schafer's excellent article over on Ad Age about this subject. Done? OK, now here's some more detail on the operational implications of this new device on publisher and advertisers.

No Flash = Less Money

Suppose you're a publisher with an active business selling premium ads on your site. Probably 90% of these ads are Flash. The iPad is a big hit and maybe your site is lucky enough to get promoted on the homepage or highlighted in a cool Apple TV ad. And maybe 5% of the traffic to your site starts to come from the iPad. What's the implication on ad revenue?

If you were smart, you proactively targeted iPad-specific ads to the traffic to this device. This assumes your ad server allows this, which is unlikely in the short-term, but let's be optimistic. Since there are very few iPad-specific ads and advertisers don't like to be "burned out" with users through repetition of impressions, the likely outcome is that a) the iPad campaigns you sold under-delivered due to frequency constraints; and b) most of the iPad impressions went unfilled by paying campaigns. Net result: You lost money when consumers moved viewing from a traditional device to the iPad.

If you weren't as smart, you did nothing special for the iPad. The result is that all those premium Flash campaigns that were supposed to run on your traditional website now ran on the iPad. Luckily, no one is dumb enough to allow a broken-plugin image to show in an ad slot, so instead of showing Flash in all those avails you showed "backup images" that are bundled with most Flash creative. You seem to have delivered to advertiser insertion orders, and everything is fine. Except, that results for the advertisers sucked, and (according to IAB guidelines) rich media vendors will start showing the number of impressions that were shown as backup images in their reporting. The net result is that your site will under-perform against sites without as much iPad traffic, resulting in less revenue.

Let's Create an HTML5 Ad!

OK, no problem. We just need to stop using Flash to create ads (since it is proprietary and only works on desktops and is yucky overall) and switch to HTML5. Sure, sounds great.

So I'm a year out of my MFA program and I'm really, really trying hard to understand what the "timeline" is in Flash and how to do a "tween" and maybe next year I'm planning on figuring out how to use alpha channels. And did I mention I am seriously hung over from yesterday's happy hour and under deadline to deliver creative for my client's major launch? So you actually need me to write two completely different versions of my creatives, one for Flash and one for HTML5? Did I mention that based on the different sizes and publisher specs on the media plan that there are already 23 versions of the creative? So now I need to do 46 versions? And WTF is HTML5? How am I supposed to debug that? I'm just a designer, not a web developer!

It's Results that Matter!

Look, in the end the advertisers and their agencies are going to do what is needed to follow the customers. If there's a little learning curve for the creatives and media buyers to adapt to the iPad's success, well that's what it takes to get measurable results! You can measure the results using cookies, can't you? It is pretty much table stakes in online advertising to use third-party cookies to measure how many users exposed to an ad buy or otherwise transact with your website, and since iPad is based around Safari that's a no-brainer. No? No brainer? I didn't know that Safari turns off third-party cookies by default! Across all Apple products? Really!? You can't be serious?! So, in addition to creating brand new creative units (at huge incremental expense), I'm also going to have no way to measure reach and frequency or conversion results? Awesome!

But, It's the Future!

Enough sarcasm. The reality is that online publishers and advertisers are going to have to deal with the coming cambrian explosion of reading devices. This isn't going to be easy and may throw into doubt many of the underlying operational assumptions of the online advertising business. Maybe the iPad will force these changes to the fore. I don't know. But I do know, that the changes required to support advertising in this new medium will be so substantial that they will have a negative, rather than positive, short-term effect on ad revenue and ad effectiveness.

My God, another year flown by. This blog has been...not exactly defunct but...let's just say I'm not updating as often as I'd like. The action's on twitter baby, have you heard of it?

I've posted exactly three times since I posted my 2009 predictions, a sorry state for someone who calls himself a blogger. I'm not going to do 2010 predictions, but I will do three New Years resolutions:

1. Blog more often.
2. Drink more water.
3. Drink it from the tap, not the bottle.

For the sake of intellectual honesty I will rate my 2009 predictions. Here's the history:

Year	Results
2009	3-5-2 (.375)
2008	3-2-5 (let's call it .600)
2007	Too vague to score

And here's the 2009 play-by-play:

1. The Year Video Gets Organized

Half credit: There's been a lot of settling down and organizing in the video world, but VAST still needs a lot more adoption to be viable, and there's still a ton of operational friction in the marketplace.

2. Mobile (Applications) is Where the Action Is

True. Mobile Applications have finally broken open the medium to brand-friendly ad innovation. Don't believe me? Try to hire an app developer and see where the demand is. Here's Ad Age's take.

3. Video On Demand to the Set-Top Gets Big

False. Although many households are enjoying the benefits of going around their cable companies, the number remains very, very small (I haven't seen a figure). There's no doubt in my mind that IP-based on demand is the future of living room viewing, but the incumbent cable companies, armed with money and regulation, will fight every step of the way.

4. Apple TV Gets Serious

False. Still a hobby.

5. Ask.com Makes Moves

False. Unless you consider a red-state strategy as a "move"*. Always foolish to make a prediction that is dependent on Barry Diller.

6. Twitter's Revenue Model isn't Advertising

True. Twitter is apparently profitable, based on selling data to MS and GOOG.

7. Twitter Portalizes in Advance of Advertising

False.

8. Internet Advertising is the Only Growth Story in 2009

Half credit. Although Internet advertising did far better than any other medium, it still declined 4.6% according to eMarketer.

9. "MSN" Retired

False. Unfortunately this meaningless empty brand continues to Live. I mean live. I mean bing.

10. Widgets Still Don't Make Ad Money

True. Most widget companies have abandoned in-widget ads. I think most of them are actually abandoning the concept of "widgets" entirely. Now they're just asking you hundreds of fun questions on Facebook and selling your data. Cool?

* - I know a funny off-the-record story on this subject if you buy me a beer.

The IAB today announced the approval and publication of VAST 2.0, the new version of the Video Ad Serving Template meant to create standards and liquidity for video ad serving. VAST 2.0 is a big step forward from 1.0 in terms of clarity of implementation and purpose and fixes many issues that people were having implementing the first version.

I was heavily involved in the drafting of VAST so I thought I would comment on some of the changes and the rationale. But let me be clear, this document was drafted by a large group of technology vendors and publishers and was a great group effort among people who normally consider themselves rivals or competitors.

Why VAST?

Let's start at the beginning. Banner ads are generally served by snippets of HTML that write out either script or Iframes containing script. One script can write out another script, and so on and so on, with the end result being an image or Flash file to show on the page. Although technically unsophisticated, this chaining of scripts works fine for the most part, and allows any numbers of vendors to work together fairly simply by exchanging tags and cutting-and-pasting those tags into each others' servers. To engineers from outside the advertising industry this sounds like a cluster, but to us, it's home.

This system breaks down radically inside a Flash or Silverlight video player. These environments expect well-formatted XML describing the ads to be shown and have custom layers of code to interpret and display the ads described in the XML. Every video player is different, and most players have been built to work with one ad serving system. For example, Yahoo's video player is built to work with Yahoo's ad server.

As a result of this proliferation of XML customizations, there is very little interoperability in the video world. If you wanted to start a new video ad network, you would need to write and document code for playing your ads, send that code to publishers, have those publishers rewrite their video players around your code (unlikely!), and then service the publishers when something went wrong. As an advertiser, you would be unable to run video ads across publishers since every tag would have to be customized for every publisher on your media plan.

VAST is supposed to solve this problem by having a common reference XML and XSD that every video player can support. It requires work from the publishers and players, but only once, not every time they want to support another tag.

Getting to 2.0

OK, the intro is running long. Time to get to the meat.

The IAB published VAST 1.0 in the Summer of 2008. Quite a few publishers and technology vendors built support for VAST, but feedback came in that there were some confusing issues with the 1.0 specification, especially for complex multi-unit video formats. For example, there were multiple ways to execute an ad that contained a pre-roll video followed by an overlay from the same advertiser. There was also some cruft in the specification that didn't really make sense to the engineers building out support.

The VAST working group at the IAB went through many of the issues being described and made a hard decision. VAST 2.0 would not be backwards compatible with VAST 1.0. We made this decision based on the fact that a) notwithstanding the number of companies that built support so far, very few VAST ads are actually running to date; b) the changes were really necessary; c) the effort to upgrade from 1.0 to 2.0 was not deemed that significant.

The group started developing 2.0 this Summer, thinking it would be published within a month or so, then more and more issues kept arising and roughly four months later, we've got something out the door. From conversations I've had with many leading publishers and tech vendors I'd expect the first VAST 2.0 ads to run in Q1 2010, with a very quick ramp-up in industry volume thereafter.

VAST 1.0 vs 2.0

I want to quickly summarize the differences between VAST 1.0 and 2.0 in this post. The IAB has published both a clean and a redlined doc explaining the differences in detail, and I will try to write a couple of more articles on this subject as well to clarify the thinking.

Creatives: The biggest source of confusion with VAST 1.0 was what to do with multi-part creatives. The standard could technically be used with two-part creatives, but any more than two would break the schema or make implementation ambiguous. In VAST 2.0 we introduced the element that wraps any number of Linear, Non-Linear, or Companions in a sequence so that you can more easily represent complex ad types from a single advertiser.

Tracking Multiple Elements: Along with the support for multiple Creatives, we identified the need to track these separately. It was vitally important for the standard to not create ambiguity around the importance of tracking a single impression for each VAST Ad, since impressions are the "currency" of online advertising and are used for billing and forecasting in most advertising billing systems. However, there are many parties in the video space creating hybrid pricing models where tracking videos, overlays, and companions separately is a part of doing business. To accomplish this we added a new tracking element for "creativeView" that can be used as a pseudo-impression for each Creative within a VAST Ad.

Companions: There was a good deal of consternation and confusion among engineers trying to implement VAST 1.0 companions. In 1.0 the companions each had a resourceType which could be Iframe, HTML, Script, etc. then the companion itself could be a URL or HTML. So what are you supposed to do with an Iframe of type HTML? How is that different from an Iframe of type URL? These complexities have been smoothed out and now resources are broken down into iframeResource, scriptResource , etc.

Non-Video Video Ads: What if you want to serve an image into the "video" part of an ad? In VAST 1.0 there were at least two ways to do it, none of them satisfying. In VAST 2.0 we clearly allow image or SWF MIME-types in the Linear portion of the response, and the apiFramework option can be used to execute interactive non-video linear ads.

Next Steps

Hopefully VAST 2.0 will be compatible with the business needs of the vast (hah) majority of entities currently doing business in the video ads arena. The next step is to get moving on implementation. There will be bumps in the road towards industry-wide adoption and interoperability, but this is clearly to be expected given the complexity of the business needs. But I'm confident that in 2010 we'll see a majority of video ads served using VAST and that the resulting reduced cost and increased liquidity will help video advertising achieve it's full potential.

Feel free to reach out on twitter or by email if you have questions or comments about VAST 2.0.

Here's a fun email from my engineering group. I've anonymized the product names and done light editing to protect the guilty...

On the Configuration page, there's a field called Time Interval, with the options Daily, Weekly, and Monthly. After much research, I have been unable to discover any functionality affected by this field. As such, it should be removed.

Here's the story in greater detail:

The field exists in [our older product], so we just copied it to [our brand spanking new] product. The going theory was that this field affects the default view for reports. I checked with the engineering lead, and the results of this field are captured in the time_slot_n column of the config database table.

We then confirmed that reporting doesn't read from this table. I also checked with members of the reporting and aggregations teams to see whether they used the data for anything. Aggregation found it commented out of the code, and reporting never heard of it. We then checked with the database team, and the best we could work out was that this once had something to do with [incredibly old ad network from first dot-com boom] (as I understand it, a product from the olden days, when banner ads were delivered by horse-drawn buggies).

No one is quite willing to say that the Time Interval option absolutely, positively does nothing. But no one seems to be able to work out any actual functionality. As such, I think we can safely remove it.

I think followed up with the sender, who works in the documentation, to find out what the documentation (written by the prior documenter) actually says about this feature. The contextual help continues on this pattern of clarity with something like:

Time Interval: Choose your time interval from the dropdown menu.

Happy New Year! As you stumble around the house on this cold January 1st, grab some coffee and wish me better results on my predictions for 2009 than last year. Here's my top 10:

1. The Year Video Gets Organized

Back in the dark years of 2003 and 2004 the media attention around the Internet advertising business was mostly focused on how bad everything was. Declining revenue, Punch the Monkey ads and worse, Bankruptcies, stock prices, etc. But underneath the meteor-charred skies the mammals were emerging. Those were the years when much of the current online ecosystem matured, including Ad Exchanges, Rich Media, the first video ads, etc.

In 2009 the news about In-Stream video will likely be similarly glum. We're going to hear a lot about the difficulties of monetizing video, about high profile flame-outs in the space, consumer resistance to pre-roll, etc. But in the background some important fundamentals will be established: a) The VAST ad serving standard (which I was involved in drafting) will be adopted by leading publishers and technology vendors; b) The video ad formats will stabilize to a simple choice between pre-rolls and overlays; c) Advertisers will be able to buy video advertising at scale through more efficient processes and standards.

2. Mobile (Applications) is Where the Action Is

Another year of disappointment for mobile ads. Perhaps, perhaps not. For the first time mobile application development and distribution has moved beyond the realm of alchemy and into the mainstream developer community. Between the Apple and Android platforms hundreds of new software companies are being nurtured and millions of installations are taking place. It is only natural that the business model for these applications will span both paid and free models, and that advertising will have a place. While a lot of attention will be paid to local advertising using the built-in geo features of the phones, my guess is that there will be a bigger opportunity for video and immersive brand advertising, taking advantage of the rich displays. Compared to the tiny text and graphical banners of WAP advertising, application ads will be something to get marketers excited about.

3. Video On Demand to the Set-Top Gets Big

Content aggregators like Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu are furiously closing deals with set-top boxes including TiVo, Roxi, etc. 2009 will be the year this becomes a real trend with significantly more consumer interest than the traditional "VOD" services from cable providers. Expect to see at least one set-top on-demand ad network ("STODAN"?) as well.

4. Apple TV Gets Serious

Second year in a row this is on the list. Apple likes to be a late-comer to the market to fix everyone else's mistakes. 2009 seems late enough for the living room.

5. Ask.com Makes Moves

Last year I predicted that Ask would move up in share to 5%. It didn't. In fact, it seems to have become a mere arbitrage engine. But all arbitrage opportunities eventually close and the people running Ask are smart enough to know that. I'd guess it looks at acquisitions in 2009 to bulk up share and relevancy.

6. Twitter's Revenue Model isn't Advertising

Twitter launches its first serious attempt at revenue and it is definitively not banner ads and sponsored search on your Twitter.com page. My guess is a branded destination pages for companies looking to improve their social presence.

7. Twitter Portalizes in Advance of Advertising

Contradicting myself -- Twitter publishes "portal" pages on specific meta-topics to drive additional web and mobile traffic. These pages will eventually find themselves supported by advertising.

8. Internet Advertising is the Only Growth Story in 2009

Everyone's anticipating a major slowdown in advertising in 2009. The open question is whether online will buck the trend based on taking share from other media. I'll be quantitative and say that online grows (>0%) while every other major media shrinks (<0%) in 2009.

9. "MSN" Retired

With the powerful brains behind Windows Live Hotmail.Net start moving Microsoft search over to the new Kumo brand someone is bound to notice that most of the traffic goes to lonely old MSN.com*. Sometime in 2009 the sunsetting of this say little portal will begin.

* - Of course the only reason the site gets any traffic at all is because of default browser settings.

10. Widgets Still Don't Make Ad Money

Not sure how we're going to verify this prediction at the end of the year, but trust me -- selling ad space within a little square of someone else's website is not a good business model.

I like to consider myself pretty knowledgeable on matters of Internet advertising. For the past two years I've attempted to prove this fact to posterity by publishing annual predictions (like pretty much every other blogger in the universe).

My 2007 predictions came in a little flat, but look a lot better today (Yahoo in play, web 2.0 sites in the DeadPool).

The 2008 predictions are coming in at 3-5-2; three hits, five misses, and two ties. Not terrible for predicting the future. Here's the rundown.

1. Overpriced widget acquisition

Half credit. There wasn't a crazy acquisition but there was some crazy funding and valuation. $50 million for Slide -- an ad network whose palette of pixels in which they are allowed to show ads is a small segment of other people's inventory (whose inventory, in any case, retails for sub-$0.25 CPMs) without any context -- is clearly overpriced.

2. HD Video Comes to YouTube and Other Video Sites

Yes.

3. Apple TV Reinvention

No. I thought this was the no-brainer on the list, but Apple seems to have forgotten about the product. Probably should be on the 2009 predictions as a carry-over.

4. Twitter and the Phone Company

No. The idea was that Twitter could be bundled with texting services from the mobile phone companies, thus generating revenue. I still think this is a good idea.

5. Google Gets to 75% Search Share, Ask Gets to 5%

No. Google's at 62 and Ask is at 4 according to the latest figures. Note, now that I work at Google I will not be making predictions of this kind and cannot comment on the accuracy, appropriateness, or strategies relating to so-called "share", whatever that is.

6. Internet Advertising Continues Crazy Growth

Yes. I said:

If there's no recession I'll put US growth over 30%. If there is a recession, make it 10%.

The Q3 numbers are in at 11%, no matter how weak Q4 is we should come in over 10% for the year.

7. Yahoo Stock is up 20% by End of Year

Shit. You guys know what I meant was "during the year" right?

8. Shake Out in the Online Music Businesses

Half. While there weren't a lot of headline-generating flameouts, Napster was sold for only $54 million, and Pandora had recent layoffs,

9. Facebook Advertising is a Loser on Site...

Yes. This was a gimme from the start. If it's not obvious, here's a link.

10 ...and a Controversy Off Site

No. Surprisingly (to me) Facebook didn't announce any kind of crazy privacy-busting behavioral advertising scheme. There's always 2009...

I'm usually the last person to know about anything, so imagine my surprise this morning when I stumbled upon a well-executed and exciting viral marketing campaign for the new HBO Vampire series, True Blood.

I was walking down Allen street when I saw a poster for what looked like a deep red colored malt beverage. Everything was there from the silhouettes of attractive people to the warning to "drink responsibly", but the product advertised appeared to be...blood.

Went to the advertised website. Awesome parody of an alcoholic promo site. The "Type Finder" is hysterical.

Saw a link to the blog at bloodcopy.com. A bunch of YouTube videos about vampire-related political stuff. Cool.

Click to YouTube itself and link to the user BloodCopyCom and check out his videos. A lot more vampire politics and intrigue. Apparently the vampires are considering coming out of the closet! Oh my.

Finally, don't forget the Revenant Ones where vampires hang out their dirty laundry (Tide even gets out Blood stains!). Side note: Wikipedia defines revenant as "a visible ghost or animated corpse that was believed to return from the grave to terrorize the living"; ooh spooky.

Anyway, the series is created by Alan Ball, executive producer of Six Feet Under, so it definitely gets my attention.

And, as expected, the innovative marketing campaign is by Campfire Deep Focus (while the media is by Deep Focus, pretty much the best agency around for social marketing).

Google explains how third party ad serving works. Pretty good stuff from the home of text links!

2007 was the first year I tried my hand at industry punditry, and results were... mixed. This year, I'm writing on a keyboard that my 21-month-old decided didn't really need 'shift' or 'enter' keys, so please forgive me some erroneous lowercase words or run-on sentences.

Instead of broad trend predictions, I'm going to be specific about specific companies. I have no inside knowledge of any of this, pure speculation.

1. Overpriced widget acquisition

2008 might be jumping the gun on this one, but I'd say either Slide or RockYou gets bought by a big media company for an eye-popping valuation. Potential buyers: Viacom, Yahoo. Potential price: $100. These companies have some value in terms of pure media sales, but also they have the consumer mojo to continue extending their reach with new products, new distribution tactics, etc. Heck, the price might be $200.

2. HD Video Comes to YouTube and Other Video Sites

Whether this comes true or not is hard to judge since there's no common definition of "HD". Suffice it to say that Adobe's adoption of H.264 video in the MovieStar Flash release along with continued declines in CDN pricing will push the quality way, way up on video sites. I'd expect YouTube to start with special sponsored areas with HD content, followed by general availability for the cat-falling-off-the-cliff genre.

3. Apple TV Reinvention

Given the upcoming MacWorld in January this is really a short-term prediction. TV is too big of an opportunity to lose hold of. The recent rumors of a movie rental service through iTunes fits right in with a new AppleTV product with either a built-in tuner, cable card, DVR, or something to break through the set-top box morass.

4. Twitter and the Phone Company

This is a little out of left field, but I expect Twitter to make a major deal with one of the major mobile carriers worldwide to integrate into the phone address book and interface. Think "VTwitter with Unlimited Text, a great way to keep in touch with your friends and family" for just $9.95 per month. Alternatively, AT&T buys them flat out.

5. Google Gets to 75% Search Share, Ask Gets to 5%

Google is close to 70% but there's really no one in their way. Yahoo and MSN/Microsoft/Live (whatever the f-- they call it) are beyond lame. The death spiral of diminished share=diminished revenue=diminished resources has begun. Microsoft can keep chugging without returns but their inability to create consumer products (other than XBox, which was created essentially outside of MS) means money will be going down a rat-hole. Meanwhile, I have a hunch that Ask.com is getting a little momentum and sharpening its differentiation. Just a hunch.

6. Internet Advertising Continues Crazy Growth

I can't find precise numbers on the consensus for 2008 Internet advertising revenue, but it's going to be gangbusters. Newspapers are still getting far too large a share of the pie for their old crusty readership, and the writer's strike isn't exactly going to help TV hold onto it's premium rates. Even a recession is likely to help Internet advertising vis-a-vie other media given ROI impact even if the overall impact is slower growth. If there's no recession I'll put US growth over 30%. If there is a recession, make it 10%.

7. Yahoo Stock is up 20% by End of Year

Not sure what's going to happen to this lumbering giant, but I'm pretty sure something is. The fundamentals are just too good and the people are too smart to let it all slip away. I'd expect new management, a tie-up with eBay, Microsoft, AOL, or someone (anyone) to juice up the stock price.

8. Shake Out in the Online Music Businesses

There are too many companies that aren't Apple competing for consumer attention, and consumers generally don't care about any of them. Between Pandora and iMeem in the free-streaming-music-but-don't-call-it-radio market, and Napster vs Rhapsody in the jukebox-in-the-sky market, something is going to give. The question is whether anyone will notice.

9. Facebook Advertising is a Loser on Site...

I guess the revolution will have to wait. Facebook's deal with Microsoft is for the crappiest, remnant, below-the-fold, left-side of the page, crap inventory you could never pawn off on the dumbest media planner in the world, even after plying her with $15 apple martinis. Beacon is a cute idea, poorly executed. Net-net, there's no revenue to be had on Facebook at this time, other than by Scrabulous and other widget providers. Expect either a) some page redesigns to show more ads; or b) a resistance to such ads resulting in lots of "How will Facebook ever make money" articles.

10 ...and a Controversy Off Site

Given it's lack of advertising revenues and it's huge database of consumer information, some bright 21-year-old bulb will go off and they'll decide to start selling this data (in a privacy-protected way, of course) to those who actually have valuable advertising inventory. How much more could you sell your crappy ad network's banners for if you could find out the interests of the user? This will, of course, set of a massive shit-storm, congressional hearings, etc. With any other company (MS, Google, Yahoo), I'd assume the company was smart enough to understand the implications and move with caution. But with Facebook I'd expect nothing of the sort.

Last year around this time I decided to throw my hat in the ring and, like every other blogger in the universe, give my 2007 predictions for the online marketing business. How did I do?

Looking back, most of my predictions were worded in hard-to-verify prose, so many are going to be judgment calls. Where there's a clear prediction I tended to be...unsupported by the facts at hand. I don't retreat from these predictions, just from the timing. Given another 12-24 months I'd say most of these are gimmes. Love to hear your thoughts.

AdSense for Video, plus Competitors
Although AdSense for video launched, the crux of this prediction was that there would be a lot of consolidation around the video content managers and ad networks. That didn't really happen. The consolidation was more focused on the consumer plays, with NBBC folded into Hulu and Brightcove giving up its consumer ambitions.

Open Source Video Platforms will Emerge
There are some projects going on, but nothing broke through.

Apollo is a Big Deal
The momentum is in the right direction, but taking a little longer than expected. I'd double-down on this bet if I could get another six months to let it ride.

AOL/MSN/Yahoo will be in Play
Interesting blind spot I had in retrospect. There was huge consolidation in the business, but it was in the ad serving and technology side (e.g. Google-DoubleClick and MS-Aquantive) rather than in the portal side.

Lots of 2.0 Sites will Enter the DeadPool
This was a gimme and especially hard to measure since companies are always going out of business. If I had to be honest I'd say that I was expected a bit more dead than evidenced by the ebay auctions. Facebook came in with a hell of a life preserver midway through the year, taking customer acquisition costs entirely off the excel, but still someone's got to pay the Amazon bills.

Social Media Moves to Core, Powering Niches
Another vague prediction that sort of came true. Services like Ning will have more profound impact on individuals than Facebook ever will, but give it another 12 months before it becomes obvious.

Emergence of Online Media Agents
This didn't happen. Or if it did, no one told me. There would definitely have been a NYTimes article if something this upper-crusty and trendy happened, and I've got the Saturday/Sunday subscription.

Media Roll-Ups Won't Work
Sad to say, I don't know if this happened or not. Wow, I'm out of the loop.

3D Environments Won't Hit Mainstream
I'd call this a win, though predicting that something won't happen is much higher probability than a positive prediction. Everyone did realize that SecondLife was a marketing ghetto, which is a positive.

Mobile Applications as Advertising Vehicles
Definitely didn't happen this year. Once again I'd double down if given a chance, but I need 12-24 months on this one. Too much to do in the mobile arena before anyone breaks out.

That's it. Look forward to 2008 predictions later this week.

Blast from the past. Back in the day, the Silicon Alley Reporter posted the always-controversial "Silicon Alley100" issue, featuring a host of important Internet folks in the city, along with a bunch of people who could most accurately be called party buddies of Jason Calacanis.

There's a new Silicon Alley 100, this time through an online poll at BricaBox. For some reason this is fun.

Along with the usual bloggers and VCs, I found my business school friend Jason Rapp from IAC, David Rosenblatt from DoubleClick, Ian Schafer from Deep Focus and lots of other folks I've known for some time. My listing has three votes as of this writing, but one of them came from me so doesn't really count.

I'll be criss-crossing The Continent over the next two weeks, experiencing the dollar's decline first hand.

If you'll be in any of the following places drop me a line and I'll buy you a stein/pint/vino.

My schedule:

• Sept 24-25: OMD Dusseldorf
• Sept 26: Ad Tech London
• Sept 27-28: Video On Net Rome. I will be speaking and on a round table. Says my marketing manager: "You can do Italian, right."
• Oct 1-3: London, hanging around the TangoZebra offices
• Oct 4: Streaming Media Europe (London). I will be doing the keynote on the morning of the 4th. Click through to see my goofy pic on the homepage of the conference

Feel free to reach out!

Oh boy. This can't be good for the old career. My face (and voice, and goofy grin) are now featured in banner ads for DoubleClick. It could be worse...rejected ideas for this campaign included:

• Punch the Product Manager


• Product Manager dances with Aliens


• Product Manager's body divided into fifty states


• Your Product Manager is NOT optimized!


• Click Here for your FREE Product Manager


• You may have already won a Product Manager!

Any other suggestions, feel free to use the comments.

Valleywag points us to this video demo of a cutting edge digital artist tool. Adobe has no chance.

I gave in and joined FaceBook last week, then spent the last half hour tweaking out my profile page. Two points come to mind:

1. Everything they say is true about how powerful and cool the framework is. By enabling developers to create tools within a giant social network they've essentially cornered the market for user interest. Why would someone join a social network that didn't have that built in developer marketplace with all of the widgets and customization? And how much work will it be for a new social network to attract all those developers without the reach FaceBook brings to the table?

2. Every ad I saw in a half hour of browsing was either remnant untargeted crap, or an Ad Council public service banner.

Saw this ad over at YouTube while surfing on my home Mac. I love how the ad properly detects I'm on a mac and correctly indicates in the tortured logic of markeing that my "PC [sic] is NOT ready to turn into a Super TV in 2 minutes". Yet it still let's me choose "Next".

I'm fully expecting to see similar double-negative come-ons. "Your Mac's registry settings do not need to be cleaned." "Your Mac may not be insecure." "Are you tired of not getting spam?"

My video interview is now featured on the new DoubleClick homepage. I talk about video advertising, rich media, podcasting -- you know, the usual stuff.

If you've got a cameraphone (and live in Japan) you can take a picture of this barcode below (actually a "QR" code) and aripaparo.com will open on your mobile browser. Very cool. Create your own.

TechCrunch points out that only 207,000 users in the US. But the Germans dig it.

I've added Twitter to my sidebar so you, dear reader, can see what I'm up to on a really much more frequent basis. You can even subscribe to a feed of what I'm up to. Is this narcisism or voyuerism? Are either of those spelled right?

Silicon Alley old-timer, Bolt.com was sold for $30 million in stock. Congrats to Aaron Cohen, the CEO. I had run into Aaron at iMedia last week and though he barely recognized me (we went to bschool together), he still merits a congratulation for tenacity and stick-toitiveness in making Bolt a success.

I'm heading down to iMedia tomorrow. My presentation is right before the SuperBowl party, so I'm not sure anyone will be paying much attention.

Then etail in Palm Springs.

If you're at either event and read this blog, make sure to say "hi."

If you write a blog, presumably you have something to say. And if you have something to say on the web, you really ought to organize it into an easy-to-parse list. And if you have a list of things to say, you probably should tie it to a logical timeframe.

Therefore, I am compelled to provide my top ten predictions for 2007.

1. AdSense for Video, plus Competitors

This one doesn't make me a rocket scientist, but it's pretty important anyway. Google, BrightCove, and all the others are building publishing solutions integrated with advertising networks. This model is very different from the web, where the ad networks plug-and-play with any content management system. Imagine if you needed Google to host your website in order to run AdSense.

In the video world, the value chain of hosting, developing a player environment, content management, and ad insertion is not standardized and can be complex and costly. Moving forward, either these technical problems will be solved (see below) or the video ecosystem will move to a small number of vertically-integrated players, obviously led by Google.

2. Open Source Video Platforms will Emerge

The video platform war is over, Adobe won. But the Flash platform is not a player environment, it is up to each programmer to develop their own player, playlist, and business rules.

Although many companies are offering products in the presentation layer (see prediction above), there are just too many smart people trying to solve what is really a very straight-forward technical problem for the situation to remain as is. I expect a high quality open-source Flash project to emerge and to be quickly adopted by long-tail and non ad-supported publishers.

3. Apollo is a Big Deal

When developers can easily develop powerful desktop applications leveraging the graphical sophistication of Flash and a huge installed base, that's a big deal.

If it lives up to its promises (and few 1.0s from Adobe usually do), the Apollo project will become the platform for small applications, web-enabled widgets, and potentially powerful apps which take the best aspects of browser-based AJAX and combine them with the speed of local storage and memory.

By the end of the year, Apollo will be on par with Yahoo widgets and Firefox extensions as a platform of choice for extending media presence.

4. AOL/MSN/Yahoo will be in Play

Another not-so-bold prediction. There's a simple truth to industry: As a segment matures, the "Rule of 2 or 3" applies. No more than 2 or 3 large competitors will generally emerge in an oligopoly. Ford, GM, Chrysler. McD's, BK, Hardee's. Coke, Pepsi. Why does this happen? I can't remember, I read it in a Harvard Business School case study years ago.

Anyway, while Google runs away with the search business, the three remaining players are fighting over display advertising. But like Detroit when the Japanese started stealing share, the Big 3 are under attack from Google, Fox, Viacom, and others. To maintain their position, and the disproportionate share of revenue they enjoy, consolidation is the obvious next step.

I'm not going to go out on a limb and predict which combinations will happen.

5. Lots of 2.0 Sites will Enter the DeadPool

I'm really not pushing the envelope now...

There's just no need for 10 different video sharing sites. The benefit to the user of one or two unique features is totally overwhelmed by the network effect of the YouTube audience and community.

Any site which relies on a social aspect needs to consider whether users really want to hang out in a second- or third-tier community (whether this community is bookmarking, chating, photo sharing, or whatever). Where you hang out online matters as much as where you hang out offline.

6. Social Media Moves to Core, Powering Niches

While there will be many losers in the 2.0 social media explosion, the core of what it means to tag, communicate, blog, etc will be incorporated into every meaningful online community, making those sites and media properties significantly more valuable.

Expect the second and third tier of media properties to grow in revenue and market presence and for the M&A activity among this group to continue.

7. Emergence of Online Media Agents

Perez Hilton showed us that all it takes is good writing and a catchy subject to create a new media star. The traditional route to monetization of traffic has been to outsource the ad sales to a company like Federated Media, or Blue Lithium. While this is effective at selling standard ad units, it generally does not cover sponsorship opportunities or non-traditional ad units, and it lacks the liquidity necessary to optimize yield.

I expect a new breed of intermediary to emerge, the online agent. Just as Hollywood stars trust a business representative to maximize their career trajectory and revenue potential, smart, tech-savvy businesses will emerge to weigh and optimize the earnings from one-person media phenomena.

8. Media Roll-Ups Won't Work

While several groups are currently raising money to roll-up smaller Internet media companies, they won't end up much better than Zap.com back in the day.

Problems with Internet roll-ups:

• There aren't that many targets in the sweet spot with real revenue potential but prior to hitting it big or a buy out.


• Competition for these properties is fierce, driving up prices and reducing return.


• Many independents don't want to be bought out.


• Media synergies don't generally exist other than ad sales, which are easily outsourced.


• Arbitrage opportunities close as soon as they are recognized. If I'm writing about the opportunity, consider it recognized.

9. 3D Environments Won't Hit Mainstream

Second Life is the PointCast of the second bubble. When it implodes (so obvious as to not merit a prediction) everyone will assume that 3D environments do not have a future outside of gaming. 2007 will be a retrenchment year for mainstream 3D environments, with innovation taking a break for a while.

10. Mobile Applications as Advertising Vehicles

While Verizon putting ads on WAP pages makes headlines, the really exciting advertising opportunities will be based on downloadable mobile applications. WAP pages seem like the obvious place for ads (hey, its like HTML!), but the lack of context, small size images, small Flash penetration, and slow speed will limit the ultimate advertising value to media companies for the foreseable future.

Applications, on the other hand, allow caching of larger creative, inclusion of video advertising, interstitial style ads, and other creative formats. That said, there are huge barriers to getting those applications on the phone limiting reach.

What do you do if you're a large online service that thousands of businesses rely upon to run their businesses and you start experiencing occasional service interruptions? You give your clients more accountability and visibility by launching trust.salesforce.com.

In an interview with Simpy founder Otis Gospodnetic one salient fact is left undisclosed.

Otis explains how he came up with Simpy:

It sounds like a cliche, but I started Simpy out of a personal need. I’ve always been interested in information gathering, analysis, extraction, and retrieval. I (and everyone else with a web browser) had this nice collection of bookmarks inside the browser, but no ability to find anything in that potentially rich collection of information.

Before founding the Simpy Otis worked as an engineer at Blink.com (now BlinkPro.com), the bookmarking service I own and have written about previously.

Otis, let's get a beer and compare bookmark notes sometime.

I've changed the RSS and Atom feeds for aripaparo.com to show the full article postings. I'm not sure why I had it set for excerpts in the first place. I always find it very annoying when I have to click-thru to get full articles -- I guess I haven't learned anything about getting it right after all.

Congratulations to Josh on the del.ico.us acquisition. Yahoo will make a great partner for the bookmarking service.

Now a little part of me is cringing as I write this. Having founded a bookmarking company in 1999 with pretty much the exact same vision as the new crop of services, I’ve got to feel, well, a little stupid. (or angry, or depressed, or whatever). Maybe writing about it will make me feel better and maybe even help me make a point or two about product development.

When we founded Blink.com (no link love, it’s a crappy search site now) the founders and I imagined a self-reinforcing product cycle:

1. Consumers needed portable bookmarks so they wouldn’t lose them, would be able to access them from any computer, and could share them with friends or coworkers;

2. As part of the process of bookmarking sites and organizing them into "folders" users would be indicating a measure of quality and connectedness among the URLs;

3. Profit!

OK, step 3 was a little more complicated. But the essence was that we would use the personal-backup product attributes to create a public search engine and "discovery engine" (I believe the marketing folks wanted to use that phrase!) based on user bookmarks.

This really shouldn’t sound too different from what del.ico.us was able to do, and we had something like $13 million to play with to make it happen. Not to mention that there were others with the same idea. Remember Backflip? So (besides the money), why did we fail and del.ico.us and the other Web 2.0 companies succeed?

I don’t think it was that we were "too early" or that we got killed when the bubble burst. I believe it all came down to product design, and to some very slight differences in approach.

To start, we launched Blink with a bevy of marketing dollars and a message very much focused on the individual storage benefits. We were very successful at attracting users (at its height Blink has 1.5 million members, del.ico.us currently has 300,000) and getting them to import their bookmarks into our system.

Mistake: Defaults Matter

Members were given the ability to make their folders "public", which would then allow those folders to be seen on a member page (here’s mine). Folders were private by default, so users had to choose to make folders public one at a time. This severely limited the proportion of our bookmarks that were made public. In retrospect I think we didn’t fully buy in to our vision of a shared bookmark database, and as a result we designed the product with an over-emphasis on the private bookmarking aspect, instead of the public. We were also sure that users would have vast troves of porn bookmarks.

Mistake: Folders Suck

Our first iteration on using bookmarks to create a shared information library was an extension of the "public folder" concept. We believed that users would not only make their folders public, but also would categorize those folders into a directory structure. We called this the "Public Library" and created a Yahoo-like node structure on which users could post. This could have made sense since categorizing folders would be less work than categorizing individual bookmarks – after all, the folders were already "categories" of a sort.

There were several severe problems with this folder-based approach. First, people are very bad and inconsistent at organizing things. One day etrade.com will go into the "finance" folder and another day it will go into the "favorite links" folder. We were taking this fundamental flaw and squaring it – asking users to use graph their existing categorization onto a second arbitrary structure within the public library. Does my "finance" folder go into the "Business" directory or the "Personal" directory?

Then there was the issue of how deep to go when categorizing folders. If I’ve got a folder of "online brokerages" do I put it in the directory at the level of "Finance" since my folder is in a sense a sub-category of finance, or do I put it within the pre-existing "Finance -> Brokerage" directory? Users were confused, and with good reason.

Mistake: Make it Instantly Useful

Even with the severe ontological problems presented by our flawed public folder concept, we still had thousands of new folder postings per week. Users liked the concept of sharing bookmarks and were anxious to give it a try. But how useful was all the data being posted?

Once again, the folder concept doomed us. We only displayed what was posted on the site, which were folders. So if you were to search or navigate to the "Finance" section of our directory you would see…folders…hundreds of them. All of which had been given the helpful name "Finance" by their owners. Or maybe the more helpful "Financial sites" or "Finance bookmarks" or "Finance and banking". You get the point.

Why didn’t we just list out the top 10 bookmarks within each category? Well by building a folder based system we had made the job of calculating the union of all this data an order of magnitude more complex. The query to find the top sites that existed in hundreds of folders would have brought down our (poorly designed) database in a heartbeat. Eventually we did build something like this, but by that time it was too late.

Mistake: Don’t Let Technology Decide

We understood that actively searching for new bookmarks would be a fairly rare activity among our users. We needed to build a way to let them discover new sites relating to their own interests in a more passive way.

The engineering team went to work, building a complex algorithm for evaluating the groupings of sites within folders (damn folders!) and finding other sites that had been grouped similarly. It was pretty sophisticated stuff. Sophisticated enough that it couldn’t run in real-time and often had a several day processing backlog to overcome.

We added a "find similar" button to the Blink interface, and the results were often quite good. The problem was that we were once again asking the user to go out and do things. The vision was that the similar sites would just be there, the same way Amazon presents you with the related products. But the servers couldn’t handle it. They could barely handle it when the users actually clicked to see results, let alone on every pageview.

I suggested a compromise. Instead of the algorithm, how about just using the text of the folder name as the key. Show the top 10 sites in all folders with the same name, across all users. I was basically suggesting a rudimentary tagging system, using folder names as tags. I was voted down – too simplistic, too hacky. And anyway we had this sophisticated algorithm, which might work one day …

The Bottom Line: Getting It Right

This post wasn’t meant as a defense of Blink or my own decisions while I was there. My intent was to show that product design matters. We had more money, more users, a five year head start, and some really, really smart people working on bookmarking in 1999. The bottom line is that we simply didn’t get it right. Some simple innovations like using tags instead of folders, making public the default, building better discovery features, etc made the difference between being an also-ran and a hot acquisition target.

From Seth Godin: Presentation Zen, everything you need to know about effective presentations. My next one is going to be 1 giant word per slide.

In case the $4 billion stock sale wasn't sign enough that Google had jumped the shark, try Time Warner channel 103, which appears to be a 24-hour Google channel. It's actually Al Gore's "Current" channel (didn't realize that ever launched), but as of today the channel guide is listing Google Current as the only thing playing 24/7. The most obvious time filler is a woman who reads the latest from Google News on the air, which is only slightly less useful than "In The Papers" on NY1.

Update: They just had a "blog" segment and gave props to OverheardinNY.com.

I happened to see a poster in Union Square this afternoon with a strange image of some dogs hunting down a bird, the phrase "Let's Hug It Our Bitch" and the enigmatic URL lhiob.com. Great marketing, since anyone who watches Entourage instantly got the association.

BTW, Ari is the best character, ever.

Fred speculates that Google Image ads suck.

I wrote a piece at iMedia defending the use of in-banner video advertisements as an exciting way to reach a broad audience.

Well, Jesse doesn't agree at all.

Luckily, many, many clients do.

Kottke is linking to a rant at Jacobian.org taking a somewhat hysterical and paranoid view on the Google Video Terms of Service ("TOS"). I feel compelled to reply to this inaccurate reading.

After the jump are the excerpts from the TOS, Jacobian's interpretation, and the reality.

Google TOS:

By accepting this Agreement and uploading Your Authorized Content to Google, you are directing and authorizing Google to, and granting Google a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive right and license to, host, cache, route, transmit, store, copy, distribute, perform, display, reformat, excerpt, analyze, and create algorithms based on the Authorized Content.

Jacobian:

In other words, “we can do anything we want with your content.”

Reality:

The whole point of the Google Video service is to let users upload videos for free. In order to display these videos, Google needs these unlimited rights. Imagine if they didn't have these rights -- you could upload your video, then sue Google for copyright infringement when they shared your content.

Note, the words "non-exclusive" in the terms. This means that you're not giving up anything by uploading video to Google; all you're doing is giving them the right to host your files.

Google TOS:

Google reserves the right to display advertisements in connection with any display of Your Authorized Content.

Jacobian:

In other words, “we can make money from advertising your content.”

Reality:

Duh! You don't get free worldwide hosting for nothing.

Google TOS:

You may use the Uploader for the sole purpose of providing Your Authorized Content to Google. […] You may not use the Uploader for any other reason, including but not limited to […] (ii) modifying, adapting, translating, or reverse engineering any portion of the Uploader; […]

Jacobian:

In other words, “If you create your own version of a video upload that runs on Linux or Mac, we’ll sue you.”

Reality:

No, that's not what it says. What it says is that you cannot use Google's software for any other purpose. They invested in developing this software and they want you to use it on Google alone. This is eminently reasonable.

Google TOS:

In the event We decide in our sole discretion to charge for video playback of any of Your Authorized Content, We will pay to You seventy percent (70%) of the gross revenues, if any, recognized by Google and attributable to such video playback of Your Authorized Content based upon the price you designate. If We incur extraordinary costs and expenses in hosting, indexing and displaying Your Authorized Content relative to its designated price, then We may retain a greater percentage of the revenues in order to defray these costs. If You have not designated a price for Your Authorized Content and We incur extraordinary costs and expenses in hosting, indexing and displaying Your Authorized Content, we may charge a fee in order to defray these costs.

Jacobian:

In other words, “you get 70% of revenues, unless we decide it cost us too much, then you get less. By the way, we decide what ‘too much’, and ‘less’ means. Oh, and if your free video is popular, we’ll bill you for the bandwidth.”

Reality:

While I agree that there's a lot of wiggle room here, you've got to hand it to Google for developing a free service like this in advance of a specific revenue model. The fact that they are outlining rights for the user is actually a proactive step. They could very well have not included any provisions for a pay service, then slapped it up at a later date through a TOS revision.

Google TOS:

14. Privacy and Information Rights. […] In addition, You agree that Google may transfer and disclose this information, including personally identifiable information, to third parties for the purpose of approving and enabling your participation in the Program, including to third parties that reside in jurisdictions with less restrictive data laws than Your own.

Jacobian:

In other words, “we’re going to sell your name and email address to spammers.”

Reality:

No. That's not what it says. "For the purpose of approving and enabling your participation in the program." That means that if Google sets up a revenue sharing arrangement with a subscription service like RealOne, they may have to share your info with the partner in order to share revenue back to you.

Citysearch redesigns its interface every three months or so, and every time it makes the site much, much worse. The latest redesign essentially doesn't work on Safari (see screen grab to left). This is a mixed blessing, since it forces me to stop using this astoundingly bad product, whereas on my PC at work I still tolerate their design choices.

Step 1 for creating an email marketing list: Offer something in your email newsletter that people would actually want to read. Too bad most markers don't seem to get this.

Holy crap! Aripaparo.com is the number one hit for the phrase "product development and internet marketing" on Google. Sure, that's my branding and all, but I didn't expect it to actually, you know, work! The magic of blogs and a good <title> tags.

This has got to be a first. NetZero, the cheap, crappy dial-up service, is running direct parodies of commercials currently being run by AOL, the expensive, crappy dial-up service.

Their ad agency has side-by-side comparisons of the ads.

Wow, lots of bookmark news! Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water.

First, A9, Amazon's search engine now includes an integrated bookmark function. Then Looksmart acquired Furl.net, one of the new generation of bookmark/screen capture tools.

I'm more interested in A9 since they've obviously put a lot of thought into this problem. The real advantage to A9 is the personalization, which is built on Amazon's cookies. By using the reach of Amazon's customer lists A9 gets over the burden of requiring users to register, and makes it much easier to get started. On the other hand, I'm currently logged-in to someone else's account. If you're "Askclint-at-yahoo.com" you may want your cookie back. Good to see you're interested in motorcycles and buffalo soldiers.

If the posting has been a little thin here (and on ENY) it's because I've rejoined the working world, having just completed my first week in my new job. I've accepted an exciting position as Product Manager for DoubleClick's Motif rich media product, a tool which simplifies the creation, deployment, and tracking of Flash-based advertising.

As a result, I will have less time to meet any of you for drinks, but am much more likely to pick up the check.

I'm off this weekend to San Fran to serve my country as an official blogger at Ad:Tech. The live blog is the brainchild of the nice people at MarketingVOX and I'm happy to be a part of it.

Say "Hi" if you're going to be there, I'll be the guy in the corner typing furiously.

As a bad, amateur, untrained, unprofessional -- did I mention bad? -- programmer, the only way I can possibly complete some of my ambitious projects is through aggressive use of Google. I use the search engine the way professionals use O'Reilly books, as my first and last reference.

Say I'm coding a PHP page and I get an error like...

PHP Warning: Function registration failed - duplicate name - mysql_connect in Unknown on line 0

...rather than trying to understand what's happening, I just copy-and-paste that message into Google, and more often than not it pops-out the correct explanation for what went wrong. I know this is a hacky, unprofessional, and possibly repulsive work habit, but then again I already acknowledged that I'm a bad, bad, bad programmer.

The flip side to this is that whenever I actually solve a unique problem (it does happen!), my first instinct is to post the results on the web so they will be available on Google for all the other poor shmoes out there.

For example, when I customized the MovableType "add entry" screen for a client I posted an article about it, and now the article is the number one hit on Google for the phrase "add entry screen movable type."

Which is a long way of introducing an article someone else wrote on the exact same subject, but with more insight. Writing for Google from Daring Fireball.

Peter Kaminski points out the previously unnoticed fact that the amount Google is raising in their IPO is a multiple of e (you remember e, right? The irrational number? Hello!? 10th grade? Wake up people!).

I'm fairly new to FreshDirect, the fresh grocery delivery service here in New York which everyone raves about. They only recently started delivering to the Lower East Side and my kitchen's been under renovation, etc.

If you're not familiar with FreshDirect (e.g. living under a rock, residing outside of the NY area), it is a growing, profitable, Internet-based food delivery service. You may be thinking "Oh, like WebVan." Quite understandable, but incorrect. FreshDirect's mantra is that they're not from the Internet world, they're from the grocery world. They understand meat, fish, and produce and just happen to use an amazing website and a fleet of trucks to deliver the product.

I was a little skeptical about this hands-on grocer approach at first, but yesterday I became convinced. Here's my story...

Order #1: The first time I placed an order everything was great. The produce was ripe, the meat fresh, the deli sliced thin. Everything except the eggs, one of which arrived broken. OK, I thought. Shit happens.

Order #2: A week later I placed another order, with another dozen eggs included (wife loves a good omelette). This time, two broken eggs. As I was cleaning up the goop-clotted styrofoam container I broke another one, leaving me with a pathetic 75% egg yield. I was pissed. I resolved to complain at my earliest convenience.

Order #3: Well, you know how things go. A week went by and I didn't get around to complaining to anyone (except the wife). I just stewed in the injustice of it all. My family had been deprived of the equivalent of a single omelette and no justice had been served. Then I placed another order, including another dozen eggs. As I write this I am contemplating what sort of person I am to do this. Choose one: a) masochist; b) idiot; c) forgiving soul; d) geek who would prefer broken eggs ordered on the Internet to whole eggs carried from the store. So the eggs showed up, and low-and-behold there was a little slip of foam carefully placed underneath the package to absorb shocks. I examined the dozen and found no breakage.

So what does this story tell us, and why is it on this blog which is ostensibly about marketing and product development. Well, clearly FreshDirect had learned from its mistakes and improved their processes. Good for them. Many standard issue business maxims could now be applied -- "easier to keep an existing customer than get a new one"; "happy customers tell 2 people, upset customers tell 10 people" etc. But the story doesn't end there...

Epilogue: Being who I am, I still wanted to contact FreshDirect and tell them that my previous orders had broken eggs and they better watch it if they wanted to keep me as a customer. A day or two went by and, of course, I didn't get around to it. So I was walking down the street yesterday when my cell rang. Here's the conversation:

Me: Hello

FD: Mr. Paparo?

Me: Yeah.

FD: This is FreshDirect. How are you?

Me (suspiciously, given that I usually don't get calls from grocers OR Internet services): OK, I guess.

FD: You received a delivery on this past Sunday, did you not?

Me: Um, yeah (I was convinced the next thing he was going to say was something like "Have you and your family been feeling well since then").

FD: Did you receive a dozen eggs in that shipment?

Me (now, totally creeped out): Yeah.

FD: Well, we just wanted to make sure that none of those eggs were broken. It's important to us that the groceries you ordered arrive properly.

Me: Uhhh. Yeah, they were great.

FD: OK, great. Is there anything else we can do for you?

[closing pleasantries]

I'm still a little freaked out that FreshDirect essentially called me to see if my complaint was fixed before I had complained. Of course this was probably a coincidence caused by many more vocal people who had actually complained, but still.

So what do they get out of this extra effort? Well, my undying loyalty. This posting telling everyone I know about how great they are. And me telling everyone at a cocktail party last night about this incredible customer service. And they tell two friends, and so on and so on.

So don't be surprised when you get a call from your grocer, they have your best interests at heart.

I came across a site dedicated to group support for WebTV users. They seem very angry! An excerpt:

We are current and former WebTV* Users who are sick of being treated like second class citizens here on the Internet and decided to DO something about it instead of continually being forced to move from one 'homepager' to another like a bunch of nomads or gypsies.

Everyone I've ever met with WebTV was someone's grandparent. They always seem shocked (shocked!) that their platform of choice might not be exactly cutting-edge or univerally supported.

It's good to see they're still around. Probably only a couple of years before the hipsters start collecting the machines for kitsch value.

I wonder if companies other than
BlinkPro get customer service emails like this:

Hi, besides my usual complaints (cannot see the folder that a search item resides in, can't search for phrase vs. individual words, can't + or - words, etc., etc.), I am finding that the "next" link does not currently work in Firefox (Mozilla 0.8). It works fine in IE, darn it. Also, search is timing out on my recent attempts (but partially b/c I have a LOT of bookmarks). Fix the next button, improve speed later.

Anyway, loyal user, etc, you know me by now. Hi, Ari, like your blog, post more.

Best,

Michael
[email ommitted]

Golly, I'm starting to feel really bad about my search function sucking. Aaron, are you reading this?

Here's a great way to get attendees to your tech show -- 3 day open bar. The Gnomdex website doesn't seem to say anything about the speakers, agenda, reason for going, etc, but they sure do promote that open bar.

Special points go to the FAQ:

Q. Do people really read FAQs?
A. No

Q. How is the open bar cost feasible?
A. It just is. Drink up!

Q. I think your site is too black.
A. That wasn't a question.

Originally on MarketingWonk

Chalk this post up to paranoia if you'd like. Either that or a keen sense of the inherent evil in human nature and the expression of that evil in diabolical marketing schemes meant to abuse a poor blogger like myself.

If you're a blogger, you know what "comment spam" is. For the rest of you, comment spam is basically when some crappy spam company puts fake comments on your blog postings in order to increase their Google PageRank listings (which are based on the number of links to your site). Although my blogs are hardly world-class Kottke-esque affairs, I get my share of comment spam. I use the excellent MT-Blacklist utility to keep this crud at bay, and can easily delete any posts for penis-pills.com or the like as they come in. Recently, though, the spammers have gotten a little tricky. Here're the details...

The comment started off pretty innocent, looking like one of the many clueless newbie comments that any message board experiences:

I am new to the internet and I am web surfing and I did a search in the search engines on "real estate company blog" and I found your web blog. I am a Halifax Real Estate Agent in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and I heard blogs were specialized discussions on topics, thus my interest in searching for a real estate blog on the WWW. I just wanted to see how the rest of the world thinks and see what trends and technology are happening in the real estate market. I also am interested in a blog for myself, that is if I can understand the technology of operating a blog and from what I see here I am somewhat hesitant right now even though it was interesting reading.

Respectfully yours
James B. ,
[Link omitted]
Halifax Real Estate Agent

Clicking through to the link provided I found a very simple webpage for the same real estate agent with the following info:

Hello there, my name is James B. and I live in Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia, Canada. I am a Halifax Real Estate Agent, which is an awesome job as I get to meet alot of nice people selling their homes. There are a vast variety of houses for sale here in Halifax and it keeps this real estate agent very busy. When I amnot selling real estate in Halifax I like to golf and play baseball hockey and tennis. I will be adding pictures of the different houses I have sold as well as pictures of my  family and friends and other interesting information about myself.

Like any good stooge, I was seduced by the details offered, with the "golf and play baseball hockey and tennis" and was starting to believe this was real. But I'm from New York, so it takes more than a couple of misspellings to get my confidence. I noticed that the page I'm visiting is on the dubious-sounding server "a-purfectdream-expression.com" so I decide to check out the root url.

A-purfectdream-expressions show up as a greeting cards site with this description:

This is our New Free Online Greeting Card Sending System where you can Create your Free Online Greeting Card BEFORE YOUR EYES using one of 12 Java Effects Applets with each and every picture. It is you that makes A Purfectdream Expression Greeting Cards something we all can be proud of and enjoy. This is just a start to our entry page for our greeting card website with lots of new exciting things coming very soon, so please come back often and enjoy.

Not exactly confidence-inspiring. By now I'm sure this is a scam, but I can't really figure out the angle. Is this porn? Viagra?

Then I notice an "Enter" button at the bottom of the page. Finally, the smoking gun! I click on the link, giving some monkey in russia a 10 cent commission, only to find...an online casino! Wow, I almost thought this was going to lead to something exciting, like WMDs or imported prescription drugs. No, just run of the mill spam.

I found this particularly useful guide to conducting usability testing. Even includes step-by-step instructions and sample forms.

My posting for the Big List of Blog Search Engines has received such an overwhelming response that now I feel responsible for keeping it up to date. In particular many of you emailed me about International blog search engines. It didn't seem like a good idea to combine the two lists, so herewith is the Big List of International Blog Search Engines. Please use the comments to let me know about others.

Canada
Name: BlogsCanada
URL: http://www.blogscanada.ca/directory/
Description: Blog Directory
Add your blog here: http://www.blogscanada.ca/directory/AddLink2.asp

Germany
Name: B|Logs
URL: http://www.weblogverzeichnis.de/
Description: Directory of weblogs maintained by German authors

Add your blog here: http://www.weblogverzeichnis.de/anmeldung.php

Name: RSS Verzeichnis
URL: http://www.rss-verzeichnis.de/
Description: RSS Search Engine
Add your blog here: http://www.rss-verzeichnis.de/anmelden.php

Name: Blogbot.de
URL: http://www.blogbot.de/
Description: Pinging service
Add your blog here: http://www.blogbot.de/bots/asmodeus.htm

Name: Blogg.de
URL: http://www.blogg.de/
Description: Pinging service
Add your blog here: http://www.blogg.de/ping.php
Note: Also XML-RPC Interface

Name: (We)Blogcheckup
URL: http://weblogcheckup.de/carmina/

Description: Pinging service
Add your blog here: http://weblogcheckup.de/carmina/index.php?aktion=registrieren

The Netherlands
Name: Izigo.NL
URL: http://www.izigo.nl/
Description: Blog search engine
Add your blog here: http://www.izigo.nl/cgi-bin/pseek/addurl.cgi?cid=88

UK
Name: UKBlogs Aggregator
URL: http://aggregator.weblogs.co.uk/
Description: Aggregator of blog postings
Add your blog here: This appears to be a ping-ing service like weblogs.com.

Spain
Name: Weblogabout
URL: http://www.weblogabout.com/
Add your blog here: http://www.weblogabout.com/add.html
Note: requires XML feed

Europe
Name: Plazoo
URL: http://www.plazoo.com/
Add your blog here: http://www.plazoo.com/en/addrss.asp

Asia
Name: Best Blogs in Asia
URL: http://www.misohoni.com/bba/
Add your blog here: None

Updates
1/9 - German blog ping pages, Dutch page added.

My new theory on blogging is that whenever I can't find a particular piece of information on Google I should just create it myself. What's the point of all this easy-to-use publishing technology if you don't publish stuff, right?

Well, I recently created a new blog, MyLabIsOnFire.com and wanted to find a quick checklist of all the blog and rss search engines so I could submit the site and reap the tons of free traffic which would inevitably result. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a really comprehensive source. The best I found was this page which a) I found somewhat confusing; and b) did not address the ability to submit your blog to the engines. Update: It's really not that confusing.

Thus, the Big List of Blog Search Engines.

Following are all the blog search engines, directories, and web-based RSS aggregators I could find, along with brief instructions on getting your site listed. I'm sure I missed something so use the 'comments' for any updates.

New: Big List of International Blog Search Engines

In alphabetic order:

Name: 2RSS
URL: http://www.2rss.com/
Description:RSS Feed Directory
Add your blog here: On front page
Note: Requires RSS Feed

Name: Bligz
URL: http://www.blizg.com/
Description:Focus on "Metadata"
Add your blog here: On front page
Note: Two step-process where you have to "Ping" site once listed

Name: Blogarama
URL: http://www.blogarama.com/
Description:Small search engine
Add your blog here: http://www.blogarama.com/index.php?show=add

Name: Blogdex
URL: http://www.blogdex.net/
Description: Hot topics listing and search engine
Add your blog here: http://blogdex.net/add.asp
Note: Requires email confirmation

Name: Blogdigger
URL: http://www.blogdigger.com/
Description: Small search engine
Add your blog here: http://www.blogdigger.com/addFeedForm.jsp
Note: Need RSS feed

Name: Bloghop
URL: http://www.bloghop.com/search.htm
Description: Small search engine
Add your blog here: http://www.bloghop.com/addblog.htm

Name: Bloglines
URL: http://www.bloglines.com/
Description: Search and aggregate RSS feeds
Add your blog here: No submission process, users add feeds they wish to track

Name: Blogmatrix
URL: http://www.blogmatrix.com/
Description: Blog tool provider, offers search as well
Add your blog here: http://www.blogmatrix.com/join

Name: Blogrunner
URL: http://www.blogrunner.com/
Description: Hot topics listing and search engine
Add your blog here: http://www.blogrunner.com/docs/partners-register.html
Note: Some sore of revenue share program going on

Name: Blogsearchengine
URL: http://www.blogsearchengine.com/
Description: Blog search engine
Add your blog here: http://www.blogsearchengine.com/add_link.html

Name: Blogstreet
URL: http://www.blogstreet.com/search.html
Description: Metasearch
Add your blog here: http://www.blogstreet.com/bin/add.cgi

Name: Blogtastic
URL: http://www.blogstreet.com/search.html
Description: Metasearch
Add your blog here: http://www.blogstreet.com/bin/add.cgi

Name: Blogvision
URL: http://www.blogvision.com/
Description: Small search engine
Add your blog here: Doesn't appear to be any way to add a site

Name: Blogwise
URL: http://www.blogwise.com/
Description: Categorized Blog search
Add your blog here: http://www.blogwise.com/submit

Name: Bloogz
URL: http://www.bloogz.com/
Description: Blog search engine
Add your blog here: http://www.bloogz.com/man_en/add_your_url.php

UPDATED! Name: Boogieplay
URL: http://www.boogieplay.com/
Description: Blog search engine with audio and video content
Add your blog here: Doesn't appear to be any way to add a blog.

Name: Daypop
URL: http://www.daypop.com/
Description: News oriented search
Add your blog here: http://www.daypop.com/info/submit.htm
Note: Requires your site to be "frequently updated"

Name: Eatonweb
URL: http://portal.eatonweb.com/
Description: Blog search engine
Add your blog here: http://portal.eatonweb.com/add.php

Name: Fastbuzz
URL: http://www.fastbuzz.com/
Description: Search and aggregate RSS feeds
Add your blog here: http://www.fastbuzz.com/channels/insert_public.jsp

Name: Feedster
URL: http://www.feedster.com/
Description: Blog search engine using RSS feeds
Add your blog here: http://www.feedster.com/add.php
Note: Need RSS feed

Name: Get Linked
URL: http://fried-spaghetti.com/links/
Description: Small search engine
Add your blog here: http://fried-spaghetti.com/cgi-bin/links/add.cgi

Name: Globeofblogs
URL: http://www.globeofblogs.com/
Description: Blog search engine
Add your blog here: Click "Register" in upper-right corner of front page
Note: Strange site, requires extensive classification of blogs

Name: LocalFeeds.com/GeoURL
URL: http://www.localfeeds.com/ , http://www.geourl.org/
Description: Blogs and headlines by geographic region. GeoURL is by lat/longitude while LocalFeeds is by ZIP or country.
Add your blog here: http://www.geourl.org/add.html (for both)
Note: Complex instructions, you must edit your blog's meta tags prior to submission.

NEW! Name: Memigo
URL: http://www.memigo.com/
Description: Customized news portal
Add your blog here: http://www.memigo.com/feed

Name: NewsIsFree
URL: http://www.newsisfree.com/
Description: Search for RSS feeds
Add your blog here: http://www.newsisfree.com/contact.php

Name: Pepys
URL: http://pepys.akacooties.com/
Description: Geographically categorized blogs
Add your blog here: http://pepys.akacooties.com/cgi-bin/links2/add.cgi

Name: Popdex
URL: http://www.popdex.com/
Description: Hot topics listing and search engine
Add your blog here: http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
Note: "Fast Track" if you link to Popdex

Name: RDF Ticker
URL: http://www.anse.de/rdfticker/findchannels.php
Description: Search and aggregate RSS feeds
Add your blog here: http://www.anse.de/rdfticker/addchannel.php

Name: Read A Blog
URL: http://www.readablog.com/
Description: Blog Search Engine
Add your blog here: http://www.readablog.com/AddFeed.aspx

Name: Rootblog
URL: http://www.rootblog.com/
Description: RSS Aggregator
Add your blog here: http://http://www.rootblog.com/Ping/
Note: Can also be pinged automatically with every post.

Name: RSSFeedsDirectory
URL: http://rss-feeds-directory.com/directory/
Description: RSS Directory
Add your blog here: Not clear

Name: Search4Blogs
URL: http://www.search4blogs.com/
Description: Blog Directory
Add your blog here: WIthin each category
Note: A lot of adult blogs.

Name: Search4RSS
URL: http://www.search4rss.com/
Description: RSS Search Engine
Add your blog here: Not available, must be added by site owners.

Name: Sindic8
URL: http://www.syndic8.com/
Description: Search and aggregate RSS feeds
Add your blog here: http://www.syndic8.com/suggest.php?Mode=data
Note: Need RSS feed

Name: Technorati
URL: http://www.technorati.com/
Description: Index of links between millions of blogs
Add your blog here: http://www.technorati.com/ping.html

Note: Programmatic interface available as well.

NEW! Name: Waypath
URL: http://www.waypath.com/
Description: Keyword searches and "find similar" searches
Add your blog here: Automatically adds blogs through a spidering process.

NEW! Name: Zopto
URL: http://www.zopto.com/
Description: Index of links between millions of blogs
Add your blog here: No submission process, Zopto indexes all pings to blo.gs into a search engine.

Updates:

1/1/04 - Technorati does have a submit page

1/2/04 - Added GeoURL/LocalFeeds

1/6/04 - Added Zopto, Memigo, Rootblog and separate international list.
1/9/04 - Added Boogieblog
1/22/04 - Added 2RSS

You know what's cool? Doing a search on Google for a pretty random topic and having something you wrote show up as the top result. With your name and stuff. Like you're famous.

The always-accurate ADBUMb newsletter is reporting that the always-modest AG Elliot Spitzer is going after spammers, including my buddies at the always-entertaining Synergy6 using the new CAN-SPAM law.

The politically motivated prosecution of spammers isn't particularly interesting. The interesting part is in the details. Spitzer is accusing the companies of deceptive practices, including false headers, proxies, etc. The defense is that "it wasn't us, it was our affiliates doing all this nasty stuff."

This dynamic has been part of the spam debate all along -- if I get a spam about Viagra, why isn't Pfizer responsible? The fact is that enforcement along these chains of distributed marketing relationships is time consuming and difficult and there have been few consequences to allowing affiliate networks to run wild. If you think it's impossible to reign in the affiliates, consider how rarely (if ever) you get spam with Amazon affiliate links. Amazon keeps tight control on it's entire distribution chain in order to preserve their brand. They also probably spend more on affiliate management than all other eCommerce companies combined.

The Spitzer action illustrates that the CAN-SPAM act could actually accomplish something. Sure, its ineffective on stopping spammers at the source, but it could have the effect of forcing marketers to take much tighter control over their marketing partners or risk paying the price.

A very informative article over at MediaPost deconstructs what happens when you sign up for an online sweepstakes site. I briefly worked for one of the companies described (I won't say which) and can verify that many of the so-called "legitimate" email marketers resell your address so many times as to make your inbox entirely useless. Luckily, Mr. Bush has just signed the CAN-SPAM which essentially legalizes spam by pre-empting state laws. Outlaws...legalizes...who can expect such fine distinctions from the President in these Orwellian times.

The last vestige of the dot-com I founded has finally died. I think I'm relieved. But what Anittah do with all her points!?

The Internet's most hated company has changed its name. Can I still fill-in forms with Claria?

This comes on the heels of a series of lawsuits against anyone who calls the company's products spyware.

I guess this strategy makes sense, I mean if a good corporate citizen like Philip Morris could get away with it. Oh wait...

For a while I've been in the embarrassing situation of not having business cards. Those who know me personally will probably gasp at this thought -- for me it's like being without pants. So I did the logical thing and put an ad out on Craigs List. I didn't want people to waste their time so I clearly stated in the title of the ad "Graphic Design - Small Project."

Three days in and I've received 75 responses (and counting) for designers, many of whom were essentially begging to charge me only $200 for a logo, business cards, and a website. This is no way to make a living, people!

What makes Craigslist -- and life -- fun, though, is the variety. While many of the emails read like Nigerian Spammers looking for a new career ("Please, I am new in the country and I have written good website for Brazil") there were also many truly talented individuals with substantial design careers.

Having just visited 75 portfolio sites I have some points to make:

1. I am not impressed by Flash. Maybe some people are, but I am not. If I want a website designed I am more impressed by a portfolio in HTML than in flash. Which brings me to...

2. I am not impressed by confusing navigation. Splash pages which show me some whiz-bank Flash then make me figure out that "now's the time to click to see the real content" are annoying and waste my time. Give me a navbar please.

3. It is difficult to read when your entire site is in a miniscule font. I am not elderly, yet I have a hard time reading 6 point fonts. Especially considering...

4. It is difficult to read a dark color font on a slightly less dark colored background. Repeat after me: "White background good, gray background bad."

5. When viewing a portfolio which includes websites, thumbnails are not sufficient, please link out to the actual site. If the site does not exist, please explain this and link to a screenshot.

6. Portfolio examples are great, but if you don't explain the thinking behind each example including why you were involved, what you did, how your design made a difference, I will just see a lot of art, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

7. I am not impressed by student or spec work. I guess you have to start somewhere.

That's all for now. I need to get back to work reviewing resumes.

MarketingWonk is pointing out a study showing that taglines are useless. Interesting to see validated what many marketing consultants see every day -- namely, poorly conceived taglines-by-committee which don't speak directly to the brand.

In particular there seems to be an epidemic of vague branding such as Circuit City's "We're with you." What could that tagline possibly convey about an electronics retailer? How are they With Us exactly? Sounds like an HMO's tagline. How can that vague phrase possibly differentiate the brand from its competitiors? Frankly, Circuit City would be better off wth an old-school, benefits-first tagline like "The cheapest place for electronics" but something that straightforward would never get through the MBAs, who would immediately deem such directness as limiting and lacking vision. Yes, but it would get shoppers in the door.

With the news that Yahoo! is blocking Trillian and considering a clone there will undoubtedly be further cries from the digerati about 'network effects', the 'power of free', etc. bemoaning the short-sightedness of the major IM providers for preventing interoperability.

First, note that the point of IM is business, not communications. Communications is the product, which must both satisfy the consumers and support the business case. As of today, there has been little business sense in the IM world, with free clients and free service chasing hundreds of millions of users in exchange for some very weak advertising placements. The unprofitable IM situation is a colonial skirmish in the global portal war, with AOL, Yahoo, and MSN pushing their IM clients as relationship builders rather than profit centers. Now if the whole point of offering AIM is to maintain the AOL-branded relationship with the customer, please remind me exactly why it would be smart for them to open up their networks to other brands? After all, if the medium allows communication across multiple brands what is going to keep the AIM user from switching to MSN or Trillian?

Fine. As long as IM is a relationship builder for the portals it doesn't make sense to offer interoperability. But why can't they make money from IM other than dinky advertisements? The common reasoning is the same as holds for free email; if one player started charging for IM the others could hold out as a free option and take all the market share. So the only way to charge for IM is for everyone to charge at the same time. And, thanks to Uncle Sam competitors can't exactly coordinate their pricing, if you know what I mean.

The classic solution to the prisoners dilemma is to find a way to communicate to your other prisoners. In the IM market, interoperability is the key to allowing the major players to essentially (though not illegally) collude on pricing to turn this money-losing service into a major profit center.

Here's how it could work. AOL, as the largest player, would announce three changes to the marketplace:

1. It would offer full AIM interoperability to any other service in exchange for a set of standard connection fees based on the number of connections to the AIM service. The fees would have a steep volume discount, making it much more beneficial on a per-user basis for Yahoo! and MSN than to Joes' IM service.

2. AOL would be willing to pay these same rates to the other major players for their interoperability.

3. As of a specific date in the future AIM would be available as a subscription service for non-AOL users. AOL subscribers could still get AIM free.

The effect of this announcement would be to create a payment system for IM which would push the other two major players into moving to a paid system as well. After all, if you're Yahoo! would you rather hold out and try to get more free IM users, without any interoperability; or join the bandwagon and create a new profitable subscription service.

This move for interoperability fees would also greatly benefit the three portal players because the business IM companies would be providing a net inflow of capital into the 'free' marketplace.

Finally, the beauty of the pre-announcement plan is that AOL could always back out of charging before going live. This pattern of announce-retreat has been used in the airline world for price raises for years.

Thoughts?

The logic of this makes perfect sense.

Premise 1: Every year dozens of people are stupid enough to fall for the "Nigerian" spam email;

Premise 2: There are probably more people who believe in aliens and time travel than there are people who know where Nigeria is;

Conclusion: The time travel spam scam.

Herewith, the full text:

I'm a time traveler stuck here in 2003. Upon arriving here my dimensional warp generator stopped working. I trusted a company here by the name of LLC Lasers to repair my Generation 3 52 4350A watch unit, and they fled on me. I am going to need a new DWG unit, prefereably the rechargeable AMD wrist watch model with the GRC79 induction motor, four I80200 warp stabilizers, 512GB of SRAM and the menu driven GUI with front panel XID display.

I will take whatever model you have in stock, as long as its received certification for being safe on carbon based life forms.

In terms of payment:
I dont have any Galactic Credits left. Payment can be made in platinum gold or 2003 currency upon safe delivery of unit.

Please transport unit in either a brown paper bag or box to below coordinates on Monday July 28th at (exactly 3:00pm) Eastern Standard Time on the dot. A few minutes prior will be ok, but it cannot be after. If you miss this timeframe please email me.

Latitude N 42.48018 & Longitude W 071.15503 and the Elevation is 96.
WARNING: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO TRANSPORT ITEM BY REGULAR MEANS OF TELEPORTATION. THEY ARE MONITORING AND WILL REDIRECT THE SIGNAL!! I DO NOT CARE HOW YOU HAVE TO GET IT HERE, JUST DO IT IN A WAY THAT NO SPYING EYES WILL POSSIBLY BE ABLE TO REDIRECT THE TRANSFERENCE. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU BE ABLE TO MONITOR THE TRANSFER.

Although those coordinates are a secure guarded area, these channels through email are never secure. Unfortunately it is the only form of communication I have right now.

After unit has been sent please email me at: [email removed]
with payment instructions. Do not reply directly back to this email.

Thank You

Like any good scam the email gives extra details (I80200 warp stabilizers) to make the story more believable. I also appreciate the special instructions to avoid sending the funds by "regular teleportaion" since, left to their own devices, most respondents would effectuate the transfer using whatever tinfoil-and-rabbit-ears contraption they've hung out the window of their motor home.

Things are getting a little strange here in the message boards on AriPaparo.com. In case you never noticed - there are message boards.

Anyway, I posted an innocent article a couple of months ago wondering why Kobe Bryant was promoting Nutella and suddenly people are posting in the vain hope that they've discovered a direct line to the Lakers' superstar. Maybe I can convince them to send me some hazelnut spead while they're at it.

Reading MarketingFix this morning I followed a link to the Blogads service, then another to a criticism of Google AdSense. It's interesting that these appeared on the same day since the two services are trying to serve the same market, but using totally different approaches.

BlogAds, which I'll admit I was unfamiliar with before this morning, is taking an old-fashioned "media buying" approach to selling ads on blogs. They understand that advertisers, especially those looking to build brand awareness, do not see media placement as a commodity. The accepted paradigm of buying "traffic" or clicks is ill-suited to many advertisers, for whom the quality of the publisher site is an important factor in the media buying process. To accommodate this buying behavior BlogAds allows the media buyer to browse the exact sites and the exact descriptions used to frame the advertisements before placing any orders. For example, the order page for AmishTechSupport looks like this:

AmishTechSupport
And now a few words from our cherished sponsors...
amish.blogmosis.com/
Category: blogging, commentary, death, humor, Judaism, life, news, politics.

Offering media buyers this much detail and this granular a buying process is the polar opposite of Google's AdSense program where the media placement is entirely algorithmic and buyers have no ability to really understand the context and branding of the ads being purchased. In the Google system it is the economy of scale in media buying which is the powerful selling point. But, as many observers have pointed out, the media buyers will only accept this economy of scale if the click-through rate and click-to-buy ratios remain healthy.

So while BlogAds will live or die based on the quality of their publisher partners, Google's AdSense will be judged by the quality of the results. Should be interesting to see where the money flows.

Last night I attended the EcommerceSIG's Intro to Business Blogs roundtable where represented were the authors of a number of my regular reads, including Anil Dash, Elizabeth Spiers from Gawker, Aaron Bailey from 601am, and Rick Bruner from MarketingFix.

The panel basically came concurred that there are three primary business applications for blogs:

Micro-publishing, as per Gawker, MarketingFix, or Gizmodo. The advantage of blogging is the very low fixed costs and the focused niche audiences. The disadvantage is the difficulty in selling ad space without a dedicated effort. Affiliate links generate the bulk of Gizmodo's revenue, but not every site is so commerce-oriented. Is it really possible that FlavorPill makes $40K per month in sponsorships?

Blogs as promotion of the core business. This technique is being used commonly by many consultants and freelancers who establish their expertise in a particular subject and thereby generate leads from their blog traffic. Larger companies are starting to use this technique to promote media properties such as the Barbie Blog or the Sesame Street Blog (URL Anyone?).

Communications both internally and externally. Consultant John Lawlor espoused that after years of frustrated attempts at imposing complicated knowledge management systems on employees from above, increasingly individual managers are implementing blogs behind corporate firewalls as easy collaboration tools. Jason Shellen from Blogger/Google shared this view and gave the example of Google's sales team blog. I wonder if anyone's working on a perma-url system for internal file servers?

In addition to the meat of the meeting, here are my personal observations (in always-fun bulleted form):

• I'm glad I didn't attend the Boston conference last week since there was a pretty wide consensus that is was very "philosophical" and there was a 2 day argument about what a blog is. Uggh.


• It was nice to hear that Tony Perkins' Always-On got slammed at the conference. I have written about this before and before that.


• Elizabeth Spiers was not very friendly. But I'll cut her some slack, she's become a mini-celebrity out of nowhere so I'm sure every ass in the tri-state area thinks they're her best buddy.


• Rick displayed a very swank "Gawker" trucker hat. Soon to be on eBay, I'm sure.


• Elizabeth told the audience her monthly salary, which I don't feel like posting. Let's just say it's modest.


• In typical blogger form, many of the panelists seemed just as interested in recording the event as in participating. The 6 panelists had at least 5 digital cameras on stage.


• Aaron Bailey was very nice, even complemented my redesign on EverythingNY (which admittedly still sucks).


• Didn't know 601am was so popular!


• Only three members of the audience had blogs currently; I was surprised that there were so many people who were interested enough in blogging to attend a conference but not enough to start one. It's basically free and takes less time to set one up than it took me to make it to midtown on the F train.

My final thought: It seems to me that the business applications of blogs are pretty obvious to anyone who has taken the time to create their own blog and become familiar with the blogosphere. The real knowledge gap is among people who still don't understand blogs at all, and are unfamiliar with the range of creative and technical possibilities that exist. Someone could probably make some money with a traveling "Introduction to Blogging" roadshow for the newbies -- I'm confident they'll figure out the business applications on their own.

Job listing seen on Craigslist: Producer, HotJobs.

Although I'm not a professional developer, I spend some of my time programming on a Linux box in my house, using the GNOME desktop environment. Every time I login I am once again amazed at how incredibly terrible the usability is; menu options are written in jargon, icons are meaningless, it's a breeze to change your keyboard (why?) but finding a file on your hard drive is baffling. Well, I stumbled across a formal usability study of GNOME which confirms all my thoughts. I'm sure people involved in open source development have known about this for some time, but for a simple user like myself it is gratifying to see that the community is thinking about these key problems. Usability needs to take a quantum leap forward before open source can come anywhere near the desktop for mainstream users.

Is it just me, or does it seem odd that basketball star Kobe Bryant is the official spokesperson for...wait for it...Nutella, the hazelnut spread from Italy. I think I remember hearing that he grew up in Italy so that makes a little sense. Turns out nutella is owned by Ferrero, the company that brings us tic tacs, the one and a half calorie breathmint with the cool Flash website. Check the site out, it may be the first time you've ever thought of a website as "refreshing." Mmm, mint.

Another article over at the New York Times about how the boneheads at AOL think they are HBO. I have to wonder whether a) they just hire dumb people over there b) they're so disconnected from the general Internet culture that they haven't learned its key business lessons; or c) they hire genuinely smart people who are then overwhelmed by the groupthink of a large media company.

In any case, the problem is this: We've been using the Internet as a mass medium since 1994 and no one in those nine years has created an entertainment content play with broad appeal and financial success. No one! Literally hundred of millions of dollars have gone down the tubes with the dream of an Internet content "hit" -- the Sopranos of the Internet, Internet soap operas, Internet television. All gone to shit. I could try to espouse why this is, but smarter people have done so elsewhere. If it was my money, I'd just look at the dismal track record and move on to another business plan.

Meanwhile, Internet services have been wildly, impossibly, astoundingly, successful. Email, search, illegal music downloads, all have reached hundreds of millions of consumers, many of whom are happy to pay for the products consumed.

So AOL, keep trying to come up with the "Online Sopranos," but don't come crying to me when it all goes to shit.

Techdirt is by far my favorite blog for technology news. The opinionated daily posts dispense with the alphabet soup of acronyms (CRM, ERP) common on News.com or ZDNet, and just gets to the point of which companies are doing what to whom and why it's (usually) stupid.

Anyway, they helpfully pointed out today how readers sometimes miss the point when posting to their discussion boards. Of course these people are AOLers, so a little stupidity is to be expected. Make sute to read down, it just keeps getting worse...

Longtime readers of this blog (who surely number less than five) will recall my distaste for the pretentious, California-VC-circa-1999-arrogant, johnny-come-lately-to-the-blog-world, Always On network. Among my complaints:

• Use of ridiculously large fonts


• Pop-ups which don't go away


• Promotional emails which don't have links


• Use of the word "blog" to refer to individual postings in a blog (i.e. "Read our newest blog on Apple")


• Clueless articles

Add to that list of sins a clueless approach to PR and you have a complete picture.

I love business articles that actually *explain* things, as opposed to merely repeating surface observations reported a million times. Business 2.0, a magazine which is having a bit of a renaissance since going under, has a great explanation article, and on a topic which I've wondered about numerous times. It explains how Matt Drudge makes money. Now, whenever his site isn't updated for a while I'll just assume he's at the pool in his condo. Tough life.

Last week I signed up at AlwaysOn, "The Insiders Network," a super-blog created by one of the founders of Red Herring. It's too early for me to judge whether the content of this site is going to worthwhile, so instead I'll pick on some of the more superficial ways in which they are annoying me.

First, it is supposed to be an 'insider's network' but they let anyone join. I'm not an insider, yet I have joined.

Next, I get an email this morning from the founder announcing his take on the demise of Red Herring. Fine. How about including a URL in the email? Oh, I'm supposed to remember that the site's URL is www.alwayson-network.com? Luckily I had my bookmarks handy.

When I get to the site they hit me with a "join now" pop-up, even though I've already joined. It's called a cookie guys, learn to use it. The pop-up is wrong in many ways, mostly because it re-appears after every click on the site. Only by logging-in or clicking the incredibly small "Not Today, Thank You" link can I make it go away.

Finally I note their backhanded threat/offer to "Join Today, While It's Still Free." How about this for a business model - if I pay for a subscription you give me a URL I can actually remember.

The NY Times is reporting (in its typical round-about "many are asking questions" sort of way) that there was little strategic thought behind Google's acquisition of Pyra. The purchase seems to have motivated by the data, a strategy I discounted in my first post on the subject. If all Google gets is first crack at linking data, they really should have bought an online bookmarking company a long time ago.

There's been lots of speculation over the impending Google IPO. Impending might be a strong word since the company has been pretty quiet about it. This article at RedHerring talks about the pros and cons of a public offering, with a slight negative conclusion.

While everyone else is talking about whether Google can pull off a successful IPO in this market, what I find interesting is the question of what would happen to the company if it were to go public. Google has been able to make the "right" decisions time and again through the past several years, even when they went against conventional wisdom. How do you think Wall Street would have reacted to the following moves:

• Launching a search engine in 2000


• Designing a home page without ads


• Introducing text-only ad formats


• Buying Deja.com, a failing dot-com with little revenue

A publicly-traded Google would have enormous pressure to meet quarterly growth targets and per-share profitability. These goals will always take away from the longer-term goals of developing long-term relationships with consumers and building innovative products. Sure, some companies have been able to keep the balance between short- and long-term priorities straight for years, but the managers at these companies know they're always one bad quarter away from hard choices.

Interesting that my first post is about blogging, but it's that self-referential spirit that's kept the subculture going, right? Last year's most powerful brand, Google, just got into the publishing business with an acquisition of Pyra, creator of the blogger blog system. Whew, that was a lot of links.

As with any acquisition, only time will tell whether this makes any sense. My gut reaction is negative, mainly because I don't see where the value is going to be created. In an acquisition there is a presumption that the combination of firms creates some value which wasn't there when separate. So where is the value going to come from here?

Unlike the Deja acquisition a couple of years ago, there is no inherent value in the content they are acquiring. Deja was on the verge of collapse at the time, having put all of it's post-bubble resources into a comparison shopping service that never got any traction. If google hadn't purchased them, the newsgroup archives Deja had compiled could have been lost, or at the very least would have been very expensive to reproduce. It's instructive that Google never added Deja's support of newsgroup posting, but rather just exploited the unique content. Pyra's content is not unique and is currently incorporated into Google's offerings through the standard search services. So there's no value there.

A second obvious area where this acquisition could add value is on the advertising side. Bloggers could incorporate Google AdWords into their content, thus making both parties money. But there are far easier ways to go about this than acquiring the company! A simple distribution deal could suffice to lock up the blogger community.

Some commentators on this deal have talked about the advantage for Google of having a business which charges for software. I think this one might have some legs. For the past year or so Google's been selling its "search in a box" to corporations as an intranet tool. Corporate blogging is definitely a trend on its way up, so maybe this is part of the thinking. Once again, I'd have to wonder if there wasn't an easier way to get into this market. Could there be a need for additional revenue as they ramp up to a rumored IPO?

Finally, there's a potentially subtle rationale that the MBA-types would call "strategic positioning." Here's the logic: (1) Google dominates the ecosystem of HTML-based content, AKA webpages; (2) Pyra and the bloggers are pushing the envelope on the very definition of a webpage, incorporating the latest technologies (RSS, XHTML, etc) and creating strange new things (can't think of a better word) like GoogleFight; (3) these technologies could either be beneficial or harmful to Google's core search business. On the benefitical side, a semantic web could allow people to use Google for much more interactive activities like shopping, advanced research, etc., on the negative side, syndication and other technologies could feasibly allow people to find information without using traditional search services; (4) therefore, Google needs to have a hand in the publishing side in order to protect its interests on the search side. Not sure if I buy it, but its certainly an area worthy of further speculation.