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Tuesday, September 20
Blogs: A Better Form of Community
by
fred
on Tue 20 Sep 2005 11:10 AM PDT
Blog advertising allows advertisers to tap into communities, mainly because blogs do community better than it's ever been done before. Blogs have seemingly solved many of the problems associated with online communites. Many blogs require registration to post comments or to interact with the other members on the site. Comments are more easily moderated than on many message boards; I suspect that the reason why bloggers seem to be more diligent about moderating, dissuading trolls and generally keeping the community in good shape is that it requires a level of commitment to submit the commentary that seeds discussions. No one wants to spend hours posting original content and links, only to have a spammer load up the site with comment spam and kill any ensuing discussion. That's one of the reasons why I think blog communities are nicer and more conducive to discussion and the community spirit. So what could be the next blog advertising USP? I'd argue that blogs do community better than anything that came before them. And I think that's worth something on today's media landscape.
Sunday, September 18
Taking the lead
by
fred
on Sun 18 Sep 2005 03:09 PM PDT
Why don't we take the time to master the skills we want to be proficient at.
Tuesday, August 23
Word Of Blog - Advetsing for non-profits
by
fred
on Tue 23 Aug 2005 09:44 PM PDT
If you have a non profit you want to promote, go to Word Of Blog and post an advertisement for it along with a URL where you want to ad to link to. Word of Blog will host your ad, make it available to bloggers to post on their blogs, and track the blogs that post it and the click thrus they generate.
Term sheet info from Brad Feld
by
fred
on Tue 23 Aug 2005 09:29 PM PDT
Jason and I hope you enjoyed reading our term sheet series at least as much as we enjoyed writing it. While we won’t be competing with our friend Jack Bauer for any drama awards (I tried to make it 24 posts, but could only get to 20, although there are 24 sections), we’ve tried to take a balanced and pragmatic approach to explaining the mysterious “VC term sheet.” Remember – we’re not lawyers (ok – Jason is) and this isn’t legal advice so you should not rely on it for anything, yada yada standard disclaimers follow. In other words, use at your own risk. For ease of reference, following are the various sections (linked to their corresponding post) that we covered. Price Liquidation Preference Board of Directors Protective Provisions Anti-Dilution Pay-to-Play Dividends Redemption Rights Conversion Conditions Precedent to Financing Vesting Information Rights Registration Rights Right of First Refusal Voting Rights Employee Pool Restriction on Sales Proprietary Information and Inventions Agreement Co-Sale Agreement Founders Activities Initial Public Offering Shares Purchase No Shop Agreement (also Unilateral or Serial Monogamy) Indemnification Assignment If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for things we missed, email me anytime. We have had numerous requests for republishing this content – if you are interested, please contact me. We’re usually happy to oblige – we just want to make sure we know about it. Until next season …
Thursday, August 4
Technorati's State of the Blogosphere Report
by
fred
on Thu 04 Aug 2005 04:01 PM PDT
Dave Sifry , the CEO of Technorati , has published his latest State of the Blogosphere in two posts: Part 1: Blog Growth and Part 2: Posting Volume that looks at the growth of the Blogosphere over the past six months. Some fun facts (as of July 30, 2005) follow: - Technorati tracks 14.2m blogs and 1.3m links, about double what it tracked six months ago
- Technorati tracks 80,000 newly created blogs each day (a blog every second)
- Technorati tracks 900,000 blog posts each day (10.4 posts a second)
- 55% of the blogs Technorati tracks has a post in the past three months.
- 18% of the blogs Technorati tracks has a post in the past week.
- The weekend posting average is 5% to 10% less then the daily posting average.
Dave has more coming this week (Part 3, coming tomorrow, includes the growth of tagging).
Monday, July 18
Blog software comparison chart
by
fred
on Mon 18 Jul 2005 09:16 AM PDT
If you are comparison shopping for the best blog software out there. The link below gives lays out all the features.
Thursday, July 14
The Web bears the stongest inflluence on consumers
by
fred
on Thu 14 Jul 2005 11:18 PM PDT
The Web bears more influence over consumer purchases than TV and print ads, according to DoubleClick's third Tourchpoints study. Out of 10 product and service categories, those with the highest online purchase influence also had the highest ad dollars committed to the channel. DoubleClick surveyed Greenfield Online's opt-in panel of 2,110 U.S. adults about their purchases within 10 categories over the previous six months. DoubleClick and ROI Research analyzed results focusing on three phases of the purchase process: initial awareness, information gathering, and purchase decision. Company Web sites rank among the top-four touchpoints for further learning toward an eventual purchase in eight of 10 product and service categories. Travel, credit card and banking categories score the highest influence for further learning on company Web sites.
 | | Click on graphic to view chart |
Web marketing programs demonstrate the most influence on consumers' buying decisions in seven of 10 categories. Travel sites rank 46 percent over other media; auto buyers cite Web sites in 27 percent of instances; as do 22 percent of telecom buyers, and 21 percent of credit cards and bank account openers. Categories that scored higher influence on the Web also have a higher commitment of online ad spending. "If consumers are exposed to more advertising, more of them are going to cite Internet advertising as an awareness factor," Rick Bruner, director of research at DoubleClick, told ClickZ Stats. "I will concede that the Internet is more likely to work more for certain products than others." Prescription drugs don't follow the advertising rule; 75 percent of respondents cite their doctor as the greatest influence in their purchase decision. "There's an indirect effect that Internet advertising can have there," says Bruner. Brick-and-mortar locations rate high on purchase influence for home improvement products (56 percent); consumer electronics (39 percent); and personal and home care products (36 percent).  Recommendations from friends was cited in the research as the single-greatest form of purchase influence. Word-of-mouth has the greatest influence in telecommunications. The experience of ownership is a primary element in making word-of-mouth endorsements an effective tool.
Source: Ad Dollars Increase Purchase Influence Online
Tuesday, July 5
Michael and Samantha
by
fred
on Tue 05 Jul 2005 04:52 PM PDT
I recorded Michael and Samantha's last performance. Check it out here.
Saturday, June 25
Costs for being public went up 33% in 2004
by
fred
on Sat 25 Jun 2005 10:53 AM PDT
The average cost of being public in 2004 increased 33% over 2003 for a company with annual revenue under $1 bln, Foley & Lardner LLP says. Audit fees accounted for the largest out-of-pocket costs increases, with average audit fees for public companies with less than $1 bln of annual revenues increasing 96% to $1 mln in 2004 from $532,000 in fiscal 2003.
Wednesday, June 22
Blogs Growing Into The Ultimate Focus Group .
by
fred
on Wed 22 Jun 2005 11:49 PM PDT
Blogs Growing Into The Ultimate Focus Group (AdWeek.com) In promoting a new calling plan this spring, U.S. Cellular wanted to reach college-age consumers and speak to them on their own terms. While normally that might mean convening focus groups, commissioning surveys and poring over market-research reports, the Chicago company's youth-focused ad agency, G Whiz, decided instead to listen to what their potential customers were saying on their blogs. 
Through Umbria Communications, a market-research firm in Boulder, Colo., G Whiz was able to eavesdrop on blog conversations. Umbria used linguistic analysis to ferret out U.S. Cellular's target group and collect cell-related blog postings. "We were more of a fly on the wall," said Bethany Harris, svp and director of client services at G Whiz in New York, a WPP Group shop.
Journalists Read Blogs on a Regular Basis
by
fred
on Wed 22 Jun 2005 10:03 AM PDT
Via IT Facts : A Euro RSCG Columbia study says that more than 51% of journalists use blogs regularly . 28% rely on blogs to help in their reporting duties. Journalists mostly used blogs for finding story ideas (53%), researching and referencing facts (43%) and finding sources (36%). 33% said they used blogs to uncover breaking news or scandals. Only 1% of journalists, however, found blogs credible. The facts are of course interesting but the last statement is almost comical. Thank goodness we have journalists to give us the real facts! It's too bad that they could not be content to simply highlight the enormously valuable role that journalists play in filtering the hugh voulume of information found in blogs and give us the relevant pieces. 
Technorati Tags : blogs, journalists
Tuesday, June 21
A Nice Description of RSS
by
fred
on Tue 21 Jun 2005 06:44 PM PDT
The reason we give RSS feeds so much of our face-time is because they give us exactly what we need to know from the voices we want to hear from as soon as it happens. Source link: The Importance of RSS
Monday, June 20
Important Commentary on Advertising and Blogs
by
fred
on Mon 20 Jun 2005 08:59 AM PDT
I've been on the phone with a number of senior executives at major online agencies in the past few weeks, and all have agreed with this premise: great commercial publications are robust conversations between three parties: the publisher/author, the audience, and the marketer. Great publications attract marketing that not only respects that conversation, but also adds to it (within the accepted boundaries of what constitutes advertising, of course). That means that in an ideal world, marketers seek out good publications, just as publishers seek out advertisers who understand and honor the conversation a publication creates.
Sunday, June 19
Alternative Advertising Programs to Google AdSense
by
fred
on Sun 19 Jun 2005 05:15 PM PDT
Here's a good list of alternative advertising programs to Google adsense. The list of almost 20 alternatives does a good job of comparing and contrasting each of them.
Friday, June 10
The expanding RSS universe
by
fred
on Fri 10 Jun 2005 11:52 PM PDT
http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/2005/06/07/the_expanding_rss_universe.html At some point, the numbers become so big that it's hard to know what to make of them, but we have a new data point from Bloglines about the size of the RSS world and the growth in publishing that supports it. The Ask Jeeves-owned service is announcing tomorrow that it has 500 million blog and news feed articles stored in its database. From the news release: 
"Bloglines' milestone reflects the meteoric rise in popularity of blogs as a new communication channel, the development of RSS-type technologies for content syndication, and the creation of user-friendly newsreaders to simplify the process of subscribing to blogs and news feeds of interest. Between January and June of this year, the size of the Bloglines index doubled. And each day Bloglines adds 2 million to 2.7 million new blog and news feed articles to the database, drawn from a diverse range of sources in many languages--from blogs about knitting to major online newspaper feeds." On the one hand, it's not surprising. Mainstream publishers and Web site owners are embracing RSS at a furious pace -- far more quickly than Web-user demand would seem to merit. But it's easy to forget that it was a just a year or so ago that we were arguing over feed formats and wondering if RSS was going to break under its own weight. PS: Speaking of RSS, we need a little help re-formatting one of our RSS feeds. If there's a feed-savvy reader out there who can help, please shoot Michael an email at mbazeley@mercurynews.com. Thanks.
Thursday, June 9
On Blogcrafting and Qumana
by
fred
on Thu 09 Jun 2005 04:02 PM PDT
Each of us goes through a process of receiving and taking in information, digesting it and adding it together with other pieces of what we know, think, believe or wonder, and then we look for ways to transmit it out … to a colleague or a friend or a group or a network … via conversation or publishing something or leaving messages and other pointers to useful or potentially interesting information. We all do it. And to do it, we all locate, gather, store and remix all sorts of information. And each of us do this in our own highly personalized way, which interacts a lot with how we think and how we feel our way through the information using a mouse, a keyboard and a screen Each of us have our own customized version of locating information, copying it and pasting it somewhere, adding it to places where we packrat the information we are going to use (bookmarks, del.icio.us links or Furl links). And, if we’re advanced users we may use some form of personal content management application and develop a personal knowledge work architecture and strategic business process. But we don’t yet have an universally applicable, but extremely easy-to-use application that allows us to reshape our information processing habits into a smooth, flexible and versatile process. The pencil and the ballpoint are such tools, but for an earlier, not-digital-and-electronic environment. The pen, and eventually the ball-point pen, allowed great masses of people to start writing more and more easily, turning the process of expressing one’s thoughts, analyses, opinions and such into relatively trivial work (in the sense of taking ideas and information and turning them into material that was shareable, transmittable to other people for their consumption and use). New tools and services are necessary to help people become more effective at functioning in the permanent white water of change and the ferocious, always-on flows of fresh information that characterize our information-saturated, increasingly Web-related lives. The world of blogs is beginning to bring such tools and the issues of widespread usability – let’s call it blogcrafting - into the realm of individual authors, writers and knowledge workers. Consider Qumana, for example … we want to turn the information that we take into new material that reflects what we think and/or believe,. More often than not that involves gathering some pertinent information (via search or surfing or receiving incoming material that we have judged pertinent, and then applying uir thinking to that material We re-mix .. or re-construct … information which we then pass on to our networks of collagues, customers or friends. We do this with pen and paper when we’re in the cognitively more familiar environment we grew up with, and by sending them a brief note, our words with a link or a pointer to some additional information. Qumana is a remixer .. a simple and easy-to-use application for assembling and reconstructing your thoughts as you are working in the ongoing flow of fresh information. It’s design incorporates the drag n’ drop gesture, which cognitive scientists have concluded is a close mimicking of the body’s way of noticing and selecting something out of that ongoing flow of information. From drag n’ drop to re-mixing and re-constructing … the content gathered by a user can be moved around, the author’s own words can be added, and additional content can be added or deleted with a click. The user can also add keyword-based tags, either to support RSS feed and blog post aggregation or to initiate the use of granular keyword-driven advertising of any sort .. both functions which will find increasing usefulness where articles and other pieces of information are routinely posted to networks and become the newest bucket of bytes added to a never-ending, always churning flow of fresh information. To become effective in these conditions of ongoing flow, a combination of easy and simple tools and the willingness to break old and perhaps laborious working habits …. Copy this, go back to find that URL, which window was I in ?, open the blog’s editor, paste what I copied, switch windows, now where was I ?, oh yeah, I want that too, copy, backtrack to the blog editor window, paste … all set, now write a couple of paragraphs …. Hey, can I move that picture to the other side … and so on. Using Lektora and Qumana together offers a user an extremely streamlined and efficient process for staying focused and productive in the non-stop flow of information. There’s a logical and smooth progression from input (both defined, customized input and the more unpredictable input derived from searching and surfing) through processing (the thinking and crafting of ideas and expression involved in creating and remixing content into a final blog post) to the publishing of the output .. to a blog post, as an email or saved to create a document of some sort.
Technorati Tags : Qumana, Blogcrafting, blogs, RSS
Monday, June 6
VCs looking at and investing in blogs
by
fred
on Mon 06 Jun 2005 10:59 PM PDT
If you invest in social media, unless you actually are an active blogger, use all the tools, interact with the community, you won't really "get it". And guess who social media entrepreneurs are getting financing from: Brad Freld/Mobius -> Technorati, Newsgator, Feedburner; David Hornik/August Capital -> Technorati, 6AP; Steve Jurvetson/DFJ -> Technorati, SocialText; Fred Wilson/Union Square -> del.icio.us. Not to mention Esther Dyson, Joi Ito,... Of course there are, and will be, exceptions, but the most visible companies in the space have followed that rule to date.
Sunday, May 29
New VC Bloggers - Price, Beisel, O'Donnell
by
fred
on Sun 29 May 2005 03:51 PM PDT
New VC Bloggers - Price, Beisel, O'Donnell http://feeds.feedburner.com/FeldThoughts?m=404For those of you that like to read about entrepreneurship and venture capital from a VC?s perspective, three younger VC?s have recently started blogging. Will Price: Will is a Senior Vice President at Pequot Ventures. Last month I led a financing for Klocwork which Pequot had originally spun out of Nortel and have been working with Will and Karen White on the company. Will and I have plenty of two degree of separation action ? he used to work with Seth Levine (who works for me at Mobius) at Morgan Stanley and my first company (Feld Technologies) was bought by Will?s boss at Pequot, Jerry Poch (Jerry and I have had a few monster hits together - including Service Metrics ? along with some crummy failures ? can anyone say Guggenheim.com (Rex - stop snickering)). David Beisel: David is an associate at Masthead Venture Partners. They led the recent round in NewsGator. David has been working with me, Seth, and Rich Levandov on the company. Charlie O?Donnell: Charlie is an analyst for Union Square Ventures. While I haven?t yet worked with Charlie, I?d met him a few times when he was at GM Asset Management (they are one of our LPs) and I?ve worked closely with Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures on a number of companies, including Return Path. You?ll definitely get a different perspective on the venture capital business through the eyes of this younger crowd (god ? it?s scary that I?m now part of the ?older crowd?.) Welcome guys. 
The Value of Variety
by
fred
on Sun 29 May 2005 11:06 AM PDT
Online shoppers are not just buying the same stuff for less money. They are buying different stuff. And they are much more likely to be getting exactly what they want than are off-line shoppers. Wal-Mart has low prices, but Walmart.com carries six times as many items as the largest Wal-Mart store, the article says. ''Amazon's slogan is world's biggest selection, not world's cheapest prices,'' said Professor Brynjolfsson, who has done pioneering research on information technology and productivity. You are not only more likely to find what you are looking for online. You are more likely to discover something you like that you did not already know about, Professor Brynjolfsson said. Partly through links and referrals, the Internet increases sales of obscure products. In 1997 and 1998, in the early days of Internet commerce, The MIT Press reported 12 percent annual increases in sales of backlist books, thanks to Internet retailers. People are really happy to find obscure books, and would be willing to pay far more for them. Economists have examined this and have estimated just how much better off consumers are because of the variety available online. They looked specifically at ''obscure titles,'' books that rank below the top 100,000 in Amazon.com sales and probably would not be carried in a traditional bookstore. (The typical Barnes & Noble or Borders superstore carries about 100,000 titles, while large independent bookstores stock about 40,000.) Using Amazon rankings and publisher data on 324 titles, the researchers determined that nearly half the book sales at Amazon, 46 percent in 2000, were of obscure titles. And those benefits add up to big money -- around $1 billion in 2000. By comparison, Amazon's lower prices saved consumers about $100 million that year. The same thing is almost certainly going on for goods like music CD's and DVD's. More speculatively, he suggests, we can imagine something similar happening with job services like Monster or even online dating markets. This study was done at this time last year before weblogs really came into the mainstream. What can said about blogs and variety?
Wednesday, May 25
A new advertising agency organized to use blogs has opened
by
fred
on Wed 25 May 2005 11:35 PM PDT
A new agency has opened its doors in D.C. to offer online creative and media services around public policy issues. Next Generation Advertising's head is Richard Pollock, a former EVP for Shandwick Public Affairs and producer for ABC's "Good Morning America". Next Generation Advertising launches with a focus on rich media, in particular video. Executives declined to name specific clients, but said the firm's current work includes video campaigns on environmental issues and foreign policy. Pollock is pitching Next Generation as a way for policy organizations to employ video without the constraints of the :30 spot, or the bloated budgets of broadcast advertising. The agency's media services include advertising on blogs via the BlogAds network. Eyeblaster provides rich media ad creation and trafficking. "The whole notion of viral campaigns, of using blogs and bloggers to talk about your issues... all of those strategies are what we want to get people to appreciate," Pollock said.
Test Post
by
fred
on Wed 25 May 2005 03:23 PM PDT
EDMONTON (CP) - Corinne Gustavson's family gasped and wept with relief as a man who snatched the six-year-old from her own backyard almost 13 years ago was found guilty Wednesday of first-degree murder. Jurors who deliberated for about 11 hours also found Clifford Sleigh guilty of aggravated sexual assault in the September 1992 death of the little girl everyone affectionately knew as Punky. First-degree murder carries an automatic sentence of life in prison.
Thursday, May 19
Blogs and MSM really go hand in hand
by
fred
on Thu 19 May 2005 08:40 AM PDT
Below is a nice comment that descirbes the relationship between Mainstream Media and blogs. It is foolish to think that blogs will replace the MSM. Blogs are part of the Long Tail, added information that provides commentary, validation and perspective. The MSM provide the basic story and if you want more information, you go to blogs. Quote: We're not adding something new. We're just expanding something very old. We are taking the debate beyond the barber shops and bars and union halls. We are making it possible for people in California to carry on the debates they've always had with their friends and neighbors with people in Alabama, Newfoundland, and Minsk. You'd think that old media types like Cohen would understand this and appreciate it. This is what we were all taught in civics class is the job of a free press---to inform the people so that they can debate issues and make intelligent choices about how to govern themselves.
Friday, May 13
Keyword Search Prices Surge
by
fred
on Fri 13 May 2005 09:30 AM PDT
In a sign that Google (YHOO:Nasdaq - news - research) and Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq - news - research) have gotten off to a strong start in the search business, the prices that advertisers paid for keywords used in Internet searches rose 11% in April from March, the biggest month-over-month gain since last October. The figures -- compiled by Fathom Online, which tracked 500 terms in eight categories -- show that average prices paid on search keywords rose to $1.95 in April from $1.75 in March. That's more than double the 5.4% average monthly growth rate that keyword prices have seen since the company began tracking the data last September.
Friday, May 6
Young adults want the news but go to the Web
by
fred
on Fri 06 May 2005 04:01 PM PDT
A new generation of technology-savvy young people are getting their news in ways that threaten the very viability of newspapers and other traditional news media, according to a study commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The survey of 18-to-34-year-old finds, for instance, that just 19% read a newspaper daily, 17% read it once a month or less -- and 12% said they "never" read a paper to get their news. By contrast, 44% of the young people visited a Web news portal every day, and 37% watch local TV news daily. There's a little bit of good news for newspapers in the report, which has not yet been officially released but is available on Carnegie's Web site. For one thing, more than half of the respondents told the survey they trust newspapers "a lot." But stop the presses: The 25-to-34-year-olds in the surveyed group said the Internet is as trustworthy as newspapers. And more than half of the heaviest newspaper users among young adults predicted that in the next three years they will be accessing the Web more for news. The report states that the common industry explanation that young people aren't reading newspapers because they're not that interested in the news itself is wrong. The survey, conducted in May 2004 by Frank N. Magid Associates, shows 18-to-34-year-olds want news, but most of them don't see a need to get it from a newspaper. As an industry, newspapers in particular are doing a poor job of responding to the new market pressures, said a former Washington Post reporter: "Here's this huge revenue opportunity that has moved to Yahoo. Yahoo is having these amazing [financial] quarters. And the newspaper industry response to that is to trim the staff of their online news sites because they want to keep their bottom line.
Google Targets Ads by Site, Sells by CPM
by
fred
on Fri 06 May 2005 03:45 PM PDT
The company expects to roll out site targeting to all advertisers within a few weeks. The move, apparently designed to attract more branding-oriented advertisers, is likely to send shockwaves through the industry, as advertisers have long sought such a feature. In the past, media sellers have typically said site targeting would add too much complexity and would be technically difficult to implement.
Is online advertising moving to CPM model?
by
fred
on Fri 06 May 2005 12:29 PM PDT
Dave Morgan is IMO one of the most knowledgeable wrtiers on the topic of online advertising and he is predicting some big changes. Please read. There's been no shortage of extraordinary industry news over the past two weeks. Not only did Google and Yahoo! report enormous quarterly earnings to kick off the year, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported 2004 online ad spending was even bigger than it'd originally projected. AD:TECH San Francisco, something of an industry bellwether, was jammed with over 6,500 people and will move to the Moscone Center next year -- a far cry from the table-top displays at the first AD:TECH back in the late '90s. In traditional media, the week was full of announcements and pronouncements about the health of the newspaper industry. The Audit Bureau of Circulations released its semi-annual circulation figures... and they were bad. Across the board, and with very few exceptions, newspaper publishers experienced the largest drops in reported circulation in 10 years. The decline appears to be accelerating. The biggest news (in my mind) was Google's launch of site-based targeting in its ad network. The new offering permits advertisers to deliver graphical ads targeted to particular pages on specific sites. Most important, the ads will be sold on a CPM (define) basis, so advertisers pay not for clicks or conversions but for presenting ads to online audiences.
Sunday, April 24
Expensive Clutter: The Next Inventory Problem
by
fred
on Sun 24 Apr 2005 11:56 AM PDT
This article can be found online at the following location: Online advertising is facing a significant inventory problem this year and next. Online ad budgets are growing faster than online audiences. This means the most trusted, most trafficked sites are selling out their most valuable inventory. Pamela Parker wrote a great column on the issue last week. The numbers don't lie. Among the industry analysts Pamela quoted in her column was Piper Jaffrey's Safa Rashtchy. Rashtchy noted U.S. consumer Internet activity (proprietary usage index based on Nielsen//NetRatings panel data) was down almost 3 percent last month. Meanwhile he and every other analyst covering this industry are predicting U.S. online ad expenditures will grow at least 25 percent this year.
Sunday, April 17
Blog RSS Promotion with RSS Submit Version 1.10
by
fred
on Sun 17 Apr 2005 11:07 AM PDT
Below is a nice piece on using RSS submission tools to push you feeds out there faster by T. L. Pakii Pierce. Source link: http://blogforfunandprofit.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2005/4/15/586322.html
One of the coolest tools just got better folks! Back in February I wrote a review of RSS Submit. RSS Submit is a RSS submission tools that automates RSS feed submission to top RSS directories and search engines. It also allows you to automanually submit to important RSS feed directories that require you to manually submit your RSS feed. Submitting your RSS feed to RSS directories is a fundamental task of RSS marketing and promotion.
Steve Rubel Has A Few Important Items About Blogs to Report
by
fred
on Sun 17 Apr 2005 11:01 AM PDT
Some interesting news items reported by Steve Rubel in the last few days in his Micro Persuasion blog. - Feedster and The Boston Globe have partnered to launch a new site that aggregates what bloggers are saying about the Boston Red Sox
- More U.S. Adults Are Reading Political Blogs April 15, 2005 InformationWeek: More than 2 out of 5 online U.S. adults have read a political blog, with more than a quarter reading them once a month or more.
- Yahoo has launched a brand new news site that you can use to read any RSS feed. Once again, Yahoo shows they get RSS.
- Corporate Blogging is rising according to theInvestor's Business Daily: Blogs are moving beyond personal musings and taking on a new role: corporate communications. A growing number of businesses are using the blog format to promote products, interact with customers and shareholders, conduct market research and distribute company announcements.
Economics of News (Not Newspapers)
by
fred
on Sun 17 Apr 2005 10:47 AM PDT
Via Dan Gilmore's blog on Grassroots journalism. At the "Changing Economics of News gathering in Berkeley, we're getting down to some fairly core issues. Rather than try to summarize what's happening, I'll just note key observations by panel members:
Are we returning to the economics of the 19th Century, when circulation (as opposed to advertising) provided the bulk of the revenues? Perhaps, says Albert Scardino of the Guardian.
News is becoming a service, not a product, says GBN's Katherine Fulton. Maybe we're heading for a world where great journalism needs patrons as opposed to traditional customers.
Craig Newmark says, "The effects we're having on the classified (advertising) market are pretty overstated." But he says the news business has lost trust. He's cautious about predictions, having predicted "lunar colonies."
Brad DeLong asks: Why is Bloomberg (which hired the Washington Post's excellent Federal Reserve reporter) more interested in covering the Fed correctly than the Post?
The New York Times' John Markoff says a discussion like this in five years will derive from near-universal access to high-speed data connections -- that the medium will determine a lot of the economics.
Sandy Close of Pacific News Service notes the explosion of ethnic media, a "hunger to be visible" in a world where mass media have failed to reflect society's realities. Small businesses are the advertising base.
Zephyr Teachout says we must create an architecture for civic involvement, including journalism -- but we need to combine real world activity with online work.
Reaching the new America is an enormous opportunity for emergent media, says Sandy Close. She urges multi-lingual jobs classifieds for craigslist, as an example of what's needed.
Fulton: We are at absolute takeoff point with "motion media" online, a shift in power to different kinds of institutions and citizens. The old institutions (and people) have a preservation mindset, while "the real game is innovation, not preservation" -- and will take place outside the current power structure. Is the Associated Press of the future a bottom-up phenomenon?
Kim-Mai Cutler, editor of the campus Daily Californian, notes that the news aggregators and portals -- such as Yahoo News -- are the current winners. Raises the question of how journalism will be paid for...My take on the event: There are still many more questions than answers about future business models, but the writing is squarely on the wall. The industry that has provided high-quality journalism (amid the garbage) for all these years had better pay attention. 
Monday, April 11
Business Schools are Struggling: Will Some Go Broke
by
fred
on Mon 11 Apr 2005 03:39 PM PDT
Source link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/InfectiousGreed?m=748Being a business school used to be a cushy business, but no more: ...applications to BusinessWeek's Top 30 MBA programs have dropped almost 30% overall since 1998, with some schools seeing declines of 50% or more. And with the job market improving, more prospective applicants may find themselves with opportunities that will, if history is any indicator, pull them away from B-school. What's more, to cope with sliding interest, some schools have gone so far as to quietly reduce the number of students they enroll each year...Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business has cut its class size from 240 students to a target of 160. Vanderbilt University's Owen School of Management dropped from 220 to 180 students per class. Other schools have done the same. "We're seeing more of our peer schools competing with us for the same students," says James W. Bradford, dean at Vanderbilt. "Schools are setting new expectations based on what the market is." Even as they're downsizing their expectations, some schools that were historically highly selective, admitting fewer than 20% to 25% of applicants, gave a thumbs-up to 35% or more applicants for the class entering last fall. Vanderbilt, for one, admitted some 68% of its applicants in 2004 -- up 30 points in just four year.
Del.icio.us receives venture capital money
by
fred
on Mon 11 Apr 2005 09:26 AM PDT
Om Malik points out, that social bookmarking site del.icio.us has received venture capital money. Joshua Schachter, developer and maintainer of del.icio.us, gave details on the site’s mailing list. Among the investors are Union Square Ventures, Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, and a host of other high profile names in the Internet community. Om speculates that he might have received between $2 and $3 million. Congratulations!
Venture Capital
by
fred
on Mon 11 Apr 2005 09:22 AM PDT
"Ignition Partners typically invests in early-stage technology companies, incubating ideas internally or placing small bets on startups that have yet to release a product. But the Bellevue venture capital firm, which raised more than $300 million last fall and recently hired former Microsoft Chief Financial Officer John Connors, is looking to move upstream with its investing tactics."
Wednesday, April 6
Vancouver 2010 Olympics Vendor Approval
by
fred
on Wed 06 Apr 2005 02:48 PM PDT
Vancouver 2010 Olympics Vendor Approval http://www.bryght.com/node/242Cool! Between GoodBasic, Capulet Communications, Inside Blogging and Bryght (and our partners like Raincity Studios, VB Creative, Hop Studios, etc.) I am sure we will implement my 2010 Vancouver Olympics Online community blogging vision. H*ck, we already have the 2010 Vancouver Olympics Online Community. Just a small matter of programming to make it realize my vision. From Vancouver 2010 Olympics Vendor Approval.: QUOTE 
GoodBasic along with our partners at Bryght have received approval as vendor of weblog services to the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. It doesn't mean we got the contract, but we are allowed to bid. One step at a time, but an important first for us. Most of all, it's exciting to think that we could potentially be making weblogs for the BC Olympic Secretariat, Olympic atheletes, teams, coaches and Olympic fans!
Housing boom continues as building permits surge
by
fred
on Wed 06 Apr 2005 02:46 PM PDT
CBC) - The value of building permits issued in February surged to the third-highest value on record, Statistics Canada said Wednesday. The total value of permits climbed 13.5 per cent from the previous month to $5.1 billion. Residential permits jumped 11.8 per cent to $3.4 billion -- the fourth monthly gain in five months.
AdOnline Ad Revenues Up 32 Percent at New York Times Co.
by
fred
on Wed 06 Apr 2005 12:11 PM PDT
Advertising revenue for The New York Times' online unit increased 32.2 percent for December 2004 compared with December 2003, driven by strong growth in display advertising and all classified advertising categories. That robust online performance contrasts with the almost flat advertising revenue growth company-wide. Total advertising revenues across all of the Times' media holdings increased 2.2 percent to $187.2 million in December. For the year, the Times reported total advertising revenues up 3.5 percent with $2.19 billion.
Monday, April 4
Are These Traffic Numbers Are Real?
by
fred
on Mon 04 Apr 2005 01:28 PM PDT
Advertisers want predictability for their campaigns. This is one area where more information and accurate information needs to be passed back to the advertisers such that they have the confidence that their campaigns will be effective. Quote: That's because he and the company he works for see a potential gold mine in independently auditing the traffic for all the sites that are not Google, Yahoo or MSNBC -- the tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of commercial websites dedicated to niche subjects like business-to-business, chemical engineering, software development and online publishing. Since fans of these types of sites rarely make it to the mass portals, advertisers have been clamoring for ways to reach them. Of course, Yahoo is fine if you want to peddle mass consumer items like, say, camera phones, vacation getaways and the latest Hollywood offering. But if you want to sell a new type of chip, manufacture routers or market a B-to-B website, you need to go straight to the people most likely to buy your product. To figure out whether a certain site will give a sufficient return on advertising, however, requires accurate traffic forecasts, something that has been lacking. As regular readers of this column know, the two companies entrusted with determining who's hot and who's not in cyberspace are Nielsen/NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix. The problem is, they often end up with wildly inaccurate data. With perhaps $8 billion in yearly ad sales at stake, this means that many advertisers are just guessing which sites will offer a return on their investment
Friday, March 25
Venture capitalists sit on $53.6 billion
by
fred
on Fri 25 Mar 2005 10:49 PM PST
Venture capital firms have more than $53.6 billion in unspent funds sitting in the coffers, more than half of which is earmarked for new investments in early-stage companies, according to a report by Dow Jones VentureOne. The money represents roughly a third of the $185.4 billion in venture money raised via 1,129 investment funds since 1999, the San Francisco research company said. The study only included U.S.-based firms, accounting for management fees and other fund-related costs that might affect the net cash available to investors. VentureOne officials said the amount of unspent funds represents a positive sign for the economy, as investors eye emerging opportunities in new companies within the technology and life-science sectors.
An important thought to keep track of
by
fred
on Fri 25 Mar 2005 10:26 PM PST
Large corporations are simply too big to keep pace with innovation so they become venture capital firms, acquiring small innovative startups like Flickr.
About Fastclick - Ready for an IPO
by
fred
on Fri 25 Mar 2005 10:15 PM PST
Fastclick sells ads into 18 content channels including arts and humanities, autos, boats and planes, careers and education, family and living, money and finance, movies and television, sports and recreation as well as science, nature and technology. The pitches can be further refined into 201 sub-content channels.
The company offers three pricing choices: cost-per-action, where the advertiser pays a fee based on the number of user responses; cost-per-click where the advertiser pays a fee based on the number of clicks the ads generate and cost-per-thousand impressions where the advertiser pays a fee based on the number of times the ads are shown. Fastclick pays about 65% of the revenue generated to the Web site publishers.
Internet advertising represented about 3% of the advertising market in 2003, but Forrester Research expects the market to grow to $15.6 billion by 2008 from $7 billion in 2003, or a compound annual rate of about 17.5%. In the same period, the Internet search-engine advertising market is expected to grow to $5.6 billion from $1.9 billion, or a compound annual growth rate of about 24%. Internet usage and broadband access continue to grow, extending the reach of Internet advertising and permitting new and more sophisticated advertising.
Thursday, March 24
FVerity Reports Third-Quarter Fiscal 2005 Results
by
fred
on Thu 24 Mar 2005 02:31 PM PST
Financial Highlights: * Q3 Revenues: $33.9 million * Q3 Operating Income/(Loss) as a % of Total Revenues: (0.0%) GAAP; 8% Non-GAAP * Q3 Earnings Per Share: $0.01 GAAP; $0.06 Non-GAAP * Q3 End of Quarter Cash and Investments Balance: $202.2 million Strategic Highlights: * Acquired Dralasoft, an innovator in business process management technology * Formed partnership with Yahoo! and introduced Verity(R) Enterprise Web Search * Established Verity Italy to expand European capabilities * Honored by Basex as a 'leader in technology' for development of Verity(R) Collaborative Classifier * Named to 'top 100' lists by DM Review, EContent, KMWorld
Wednesday, March 23
Blogging and Venture Capital - A Summary of the Current Action
by
fred
on Wed 23 Mar 2005 10:38 AM PST
TheDeal.com has published a very good summary on what is happening on the financial side with social media like blogging and venture capital. Quote: What's new now is the emergence of a novel class of companies that can be grouped together and labeled as social media companies. They all employ new Web publishing and aggregation tools powered by Web services such as RSS, or real simple syndication; XML, or extensible markup language; and SOAP, or simple object access protocol, to create blogs, social networks or social software. And most of these startups' Web sites and services are open and transparent rather than proprietary and opaque like Internet marketplaces on eBay and Monster.com, neither of which shares its data.
Monday, March 21
The New Road to Riches
by
fred
on Mon 21 Mar 2005 08:58 AM PST
How to get ahead in the postbubble world: Build a company cheap. Flip It fast. Repeat.
Sunday, March 20
More fun with Alexa, this time from Rick Brune...
by
fred
on Sun 20 Mar 2005 11:51 PM PST
More fun with Alexa, this time from Rick Bruner. Collectively the blogs hosted on Blogspot (e.g. most Blogger blogs) get more visitors than NYTimes.com.  Via Steve Rubel at Micro Persuation.
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