Journalism and Marketing Tools: Focus on Twitter

Hey Rizzn-ites,

This is a broad topic, really. Someone brought it to my attention this evening that I do an awful lot of evangelizing for Twitter amongst my friends and associates, and I haven't really explained it very well to my inner circle.

Essentially, twitter is what is called "Status Micro-blogging." Don't worry. The term didn't make much sense to me either. I remember being in an airport or somewhere and reading a Wired review of the service, and then getting home, and every single feed on my list was talking about how great Twitter was, and how much of a huge hit it was at the SXSW conference, and it's the next big thing.

For someone who's such an avid user of technology, I must admit that whenever I hear that something is the 'next big thing', I get a little queasy in my tummy, and have an immediate desire to distance myself from said technology. Usually, I've learned, it's best to ignore this instinct. The same feeling I had about podcasting, I had about twitter. To me, it seemed destined to fail, especially since it revolved, at least in part, in sending tons of SMS messages to people's mobiles. In a world where text messages can add literally pounds to your phone bill, set aside dollars, I can only imagine how poorly the service is going to do.

As with podcasting, however, I was sorely mistaken in my initial reaction.

I'll describe Twitter from my perspective, which is that of an independent content producer, and how you can do the same as I.

Robert Scoble often describes his usage of Twitter as 'constant chat room.' This isn't far off the mark. What twitter does, is take your friends (who can almost effortlessly create an account), and make it so that any time they send a message to Twitter, it appears in your favorite chatting mechanism, be it IM or SMS on your phone.

Now you've got the overview, let's graduate you to power user.

At first, it's not going to seem like much, especially if you don't spend a lot of time on IM. My best suggestion to you, is if you're not there already, always keep a GMail window open. It's hands down (in my opinion) one of the best email utilities out there, and it allows you easy, unobtrusive access to GTalk. Add twitter functionality to GTalk through the twitter settings interface, and you're hooked up.

There's a couple things you'll want to do right off the bat. First of all, go to your favorite bloggers or new media producers in your niche. For me, it's obviously technology, so I'll use that as an example. I went to the bigger names in tech, like Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, CC Chapman and Steve Rubel, and then added them to my twitter friends. Don't worry if some of them don't add you back (Scoble will, but he'll add just about anyone, so don't think you're all that special!).

Things will start moving a bit faster now. At this point, you'll want to turn off the DING every time there's a new message.

What are you looking for with this? This puts you a step closer to getting your finger on the pulse of your niche. Depending on what that is can mean either connecting with folks who are movers and shakers, or it can mean having that scoop ten minutes sooner than the next blog, which can make or break you on traffic.

You'll also start to notice conversations breaking out on twitter, signified by tweets with @username. If it interests you, you may want to follow that person (you can do this easily now, from within GTalk by typing "follow [username]". Chances are that for every two or three you do that with, you'll gain a follower yourself. Now you're building a platform from which to speak to larger and larger groups.

Before we move on to what you can do with your platform, let's get into the "track" feature. By simply typing "track [keyword]" into twitter, now you'll be alerted anytime anyone on twitter talks about a given keyword. It's a good idea to go ahead and track your all variations of your user name, company name, and given name. Chances are, at some point, someone will talk about you, and you always wanna know when that happens, right?

It's not just for ego-searches, though. I like to be up on all the gPhone news, so I track gPhone. I've found a few juicy rumors to track down that way using this feature. Marshall Kirkpatrick claimed last week that Twitter is responsible for 5 of the last 11 leads he used for ReadWriteWeb.com stories.

The other stuff you'll find is that it's a great platform for broadcasting your message, be it blog or podcast. RSS is your friend, as you know. That's why I suggest you stick your RSS feeds into RSS2Twitter. It reformats your links so that they fit into the character restrictions, and puts a short description of the items in your feed as they pop up.

You'll find, as you grow your Twitter network, that this will be one of the more valuable tools in your box.

It's late. I'm leaving things out, undoubtably, but this gives you a starting point. EMail me with questions (and I know you will!).

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The Techmeme 100: No Reason to Game

Hey Rizzn-ites,

Better late than never, I s'pose. I'm finally chiming in on the TechMeme 100 conversation. What finally was my impetus was this article over at the UK Guardian. Bobbie Johnson over there seems to be of the opinion that the TechMeme 100 is a small sandbox being fought over by a few folks for a tiny bit of traffic. According to Bobbie, the Drudge Report, those cheeky beggars at Digg, Google News, Reddit, the Huffington Post, StumbleUpon, Slashdot, BoingBoing and a number of loony New World Order conspiracist sites all send more traffic than TechMeme.

But then again, Bobbie may not understand the concept of niche news. He is from the UK Guardian, after all. Most of those MSM types have a hard time understanding the intertubes and all that.

Winer, Scoble, Arrington and others all weighed in on the TechMeme 100, all with very interesting points (and all of them made the TechMeme front page, too). I'll be real honest, though, I'm pretty sure I've only been on TechMeme once or twice as a primary headline. One such time was back in July, on the 13th to be exact, in regards to my $10 DSL saga. It was very widely reported after being listed in Engadget. Here's the breakdown of the traffic spike on the 13th as my Google Analytics log displays (which, keep in mind, is a bit lower than most other stats engines in terms of what it records); all numbers in unique visitors:

1. Engadget.com - 3,853
2. DSL Reports - 949
3. Direct or Entered "rizzn.com" in Google - 691
4. Other Google traffic - 244
5. news.google.com - 194
6. stumbleupon - 96
7. Houston Chronicle - 60
8. TechMeme - 57
9. Wifi Net News - 50
10. Digg - 34

The numbers speak for themselves. Of course, actually being on the TechMeme 100 means you're getting significant attention already, but in terms of that incredible influx of traffic you think it might bring in, I wouldn't really look to gaming TechMeme 100 for that.

Just my two cents to the mid-level bloggers out there like me. In terms of us tech bloggers, look at TechMeme for what it is - a status symbol (and perhaps, if you make repeat appearances there, a brand recognition tool), but not really the place to get that Digg-like avalanche of traffic.

/rizzn

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Video Syndication Done Right: PNME Edition

I've been pondering what I think is the most important thing to come out of the Podcast and New Media Expo last weekend. Unfortunately I missed the Kent Nichols keynote, but I did catch the Louderback and Wallstrip keynotes. They were very informative, and it was very heartening to hear that the A-Listers and those that have sold their podcast for literally millions have gone through a lot of the same things us strugglers and stragglers have gone through... building an audience one member at a time, ad representation issues and such.

There were a few meetings and announcements that, I think, I are going to shape the future of podcasting and new media for a while to come.

First of all, Wizzard Media announced an important partnership, which we discussed yesterday on the show (Episode 143). As soon as the T's are dotted and the I's are crossed, downloads from the Wizzard network are going to be certified by Nielson. Yeah, the folks that do the TV ratings and stuff. What does this mean? Well, I may be overestimating the importance of this, but an old media institution attaching themselves to new media in this way, I think, is a very important step in upgrading the marketability and credibility of the medium of podcasting as a whole. I wouldn't be surprised to see podcasters represented at the next NABC.

But am I not supposed to be Podango propaganda boy? What's going on with them? A whole lot, actually. Thanks to a close working relationship with Podango, I can say I know of a whole lot of stuff coming down the pike - quite exciting stuff - that they're working on. But what they've announced at the PNME this weekend is exciting stuff as well. Not only did they talk a lot about the Gigavox Audio Lite acquisition, but working with Kiptronic on certifying and monetizing video downloads. Kiptronic has a strong relationship with Wizzard Media by way of the LibSyn acquisition. The certifications of Wizzard downloads, I'm fairly certain, will extend to Kiptronic statistics since they're on a working relationship and theoretically have an understanding on what constitutes a download and all that (there's more confusion on that concept than you'd think could be possible in the industry at large).

Then, there's UStream. UStream didn't have any mind-blowing announcements, but there were several relationships forged by Brad and the UStream folks (and Mason) that I think have some serious implications for the future. What UStream did accomplish at the PNME was raising awareness about their platform with the general pod-o-sphere and another company that I think is important in terms of actually accomplishing something in the development of video content.

TubeMogul was another offering that I think warrants a great deal of attention as well. TubeMogul had been reviewed elsewhere on the web before, but I never got around to checking them out. They are a service that (for free!) takes your video shot for YouTube or Revver (or pick your favorite video platform flavor) and uploads it to about 20 different video sharing sites. Remember when I was talking about this essential piece of promoting a video last week? I'll say it again - it's important, especially for the less well known video producers.

Keeping in mind that article, and all the ways that I detail are important to get your name and content out there, what's the next logical proposal for these three companies, all of whom connected with one another at PNME, to do?

They need to hook together their backends/APIs.

Here's the flow, how I see it:
You're broadcasting your show live via UStream, interacting with your audience, doing your thing, whatever it may be. You hit the record on server button at the start of your podcast.

That FLV is then tagged, described, and titled after the broadcast via current UStream process of things. You then have two additional buttons available to you after you hit the submit button:

1. Publish to your podcast feed. This converts the file properly, and sends it over to your feed at Podango with all the proper metadata and is then optimised in the various ways that Podango optimises a video file:
• Monetized by Kiptronic technology
• Formatted for the various types of technologies that read a video file (iPod, set-top box, computer).
• SEO'ed with the Podango transcription service
• In so automatically submitting, taking literally hours off of render times at the local machine.
  
• Downloaded by your audience!
2. Publish to TubeMogul. This sends the FLV file over to TubeMogul, when then takes all the relevant metadata you entered at UStream, and submits it to over 20 video hosting services. This allows you to:
• Further monetize your content via Revver downloads.
• Further monetize your content via YouTube downloads.
• Carpetbomb the video viewing world with your content.
• Eliminate a day or two of downloading, converting, and uploading your content every where.
3. Podango to Tubemogul. This is also something I see as beneficial and imperative. Not everyone that creates video content (in fact most people fall into this category) can do so live, so having a hook from the Podango backend directly into TubeMogul is similarly beneficial.

Will this be an easy project? Probably not. As of this time, only Podango has an open API to work with the platform, but all three companies are well aware of one another, I've spoken to two of the three companies about the idea in both public and private (and they have caught the flame of my vision on this, I think), and I'm about to open dialog in the third point of the triangle today.

Will this be available next week? Most certainly not. Will it be available in the very near future? I think almost certainly so. I'm currently lobbying to make it happen as best I can with everyone involved (taking into account that all three companies are startups with at least somewhat limited budgets).

The net result will be almost completely full featured set of tools and monetization avenue that will put the indy broadcaster nearly on par with the big boys. It will then be up to you folks to make the good content.

/rizzn

Questions? Comments? Wanna throw some VC at this idea? Use the comment form below or email me.

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Video Syndication Done Right

Hey Rizzn-ites,

I've really been doing some thinking on what it takes to publicize a video venture properly. We talk a lot about the monetization aspects of video on the internet, but what we forget, or at least I do as a veteran, is that more integral than coming up with monetization is how to most efficiently market, publicize, and get those sweet sweet video views that will make that CPM based advertising possible.

As I look around at the myriad of video offerings and ventures out there, no one really focuses on that aspect of things, although a handful of content producers seem to have an inkling of how it works.

What?!
I have an advantage in the business of content production that most others don't seem to have - not many people know who I am.

Let me explain.

I'm not Leo Laporte, I'm not a Robert Scoble. Heck, I'm not even a Sean Kennedy. I don't have a huge built in fan-base that goes back a decade. I can't really even count on my friends and family to view my material simply because most of my friends and family aren't politically involved nerds, which is what the bulk of what my content revolves around.

Therefore, I've been forced to come up with inventive and even hacked together ways to drum up an audience in everything I've done in media production ever since I started at age 15 or so. What has this taught me in broad terms? You can't rely on a single medium for building an audience. It absolutely must be a broad effort across a variety of mediums.

We're focusing on video content, but let's look to the audio podcast I produce and host for a minute as an example.

As we talked about yesterday with Lee Gibbons, the me-too gotta try it days of podcasting are over. Back when podcasting started, I hosted a show called the Mark and Darrell show. The driving philosophy behind the entertainment value of the show was somewhere between Seinfeld and Andy Kaufman (a show essentially about nothing, that as long as we found it funny ourselves, we didn't care if it made anyone else laugh). If that doesn't make you wonder why anyone would listen to the show, I should mention that the most popular segment of the show was something called "Competitive Paint Drying."

My point being, not necessarily my best work. We streamed the show on RantRadio at the time, to about 20-70 listeners on the stream a week (some times spiking into the low hundreds). When podcasting came into existence, it wound up almost immediately attracting around 700 downloads an episode (running five episodes a week) without even having been listed in iTunes.

These days are gone.

If you start an even well produced podcast but do little to promote it other than put out the podcast and post the show notes, you'll be on a long uphill battle to attain listener-ship.

Get to the Point, Mark
How does this apply to properly promoting a video? Well, in the effort to create a highly listened to podcast in this age of rising levels of white noise in the New Media, I've done a number of things to raise the profile of the RizWords podcast (ignoring the basics of content production like quality, format, consistency... I'm going to assume you're an advanced producer):

• Autoplaying the podcast on the blog: This flew in the face of well established rules of aesthetics, and I'm sure a lot of you reading this now are fairly annoyed by the fact that you have to hunt for the pause button every time you pull up one of my blog posts. I've been running very detailed analytics on the blog for years, and the bounce rate has only shifted unfavorably by 2% since I've started doing this. Those that don't bounce, however, tend to stick around for an extra couple minutes on average. So what's my tradeoff for all the extra listens? Weeding out a few finicky visitors, and Tom Merritt telling me I should change it to not autoplay on an episode of Buzz Out Loud.
• Posting my player widget everywhere: and I mean EVERYWHERE! It's on my MySpace profile, it's on my Facebook profile. It's on my blog. It's on the show notes. It's on my friend's blogs. It's everywhere. WebbAlert does this as well. The trick is just finding a way to incentivize this widely for broad groups to do the same.
• Blogging and Link-Blogging to raise profile: The type of podcast we are is one that conveys information. It's not enough to be a good voice with quality content. You've got to provide tools. Look at what the A-List bloggers do. They don't just throw up the latest widgets-du-jour on their blog (at least most of them don't). They throw up job listing widgets, ways to get to popular content, link blogs, aggregators, things that their niche audience are going to find entertaining or utilitarian. If you can invade as many aspects of your audiences entertainment or information gathering regimen as possible, you'll be a whole lot more sticky.
  

I'm still not getting the connection to video, Mark...
Pay attention, this is where I bring it around town.

How can you put out a video? How many ways are there to distribute it? Like about a thousand, right? You can embed it (with about 200 different ways of monetizing it players, or popular social platforms, or what have you). You can embed as flash. You can embed as .MOV. You can embed as a result of a live broadcast you did with UStream, Kyte or Stickam or something. You can embed using the Facebook video embed tool. Or you could just podcast it. You can tailor your podcast for AppleTV. Or TiVo. Or Comcast PVRs. Or video iPods. Or a Zune.

Point being, there's a lot of ways.

Which way is best? What's the best distribution method for an independent video producer to reach the broadest audience?

The answer is that there isn't a best medium. The rise of video online has created so many damn outlets to release to, releasing to one and hoping that one goes viral or gets a lot of subscribers is naive.

The first thing I tell all online video clients is that you really need to pay for my marketing services, or be prepared to devote a large portion of your time to an unexpected part of the content development cycle: PR and Marketing. I'm going to give away the farm here and tell you what that entails, and if you read all the way to the conclusion, I'll tell you why I'm saying all this publicly.

• Which embedded video site do you need to publish to? All of them! This is a massive undertaking. There are around 17 kajillion video clip sites like YouTube out there right now. Aside from monetization issues, and which service is going to provide you the best bang for your CPM buck, there are essentially two different classes of services. Uploading exclusively to one or the other comes with its own issues.
  
  If you upload to a small site, you're playing in a fishbowl. Presumably if you're an advanced producer, your content is going to be king of the small pond, but at the end of the day, it's still a small pond.
  
  On the other hand, if you upload to a YouTube, Metacafe or other such site, regardless of your content quality, if you don't have a dedicated team of monkeys waiting to comment on and watch your video constantly until it hits one of the top lists, you're going to be lost in the ocean of white noise until your lucky break.
  
  The answer? Upload to all of them. This also is a form of copy protection. A common process for less than scrupulous marketers is to take your content from one site, slap their URL on it, and upload it to all the rest of the sites. Translation? You're losing visitors and repeat viewers.
• What about the podcasting thing? If I'm uploading as an embedded video, what do I need the podcast for? Absolutely, you need a podcast. Not "could use" a podcast. Need it. Why? Well, aside from the plethora of reasons why podcasts are a preferred delivery method that you can find anywhere else, lets look at some numbers.
  
  You've heard of AskANinja. Looking at the YouTube numbers for a second, viewership numbers range from 200,000 views up to 3.5 million views. Those numbers vary widely, and its quite easy to say what else does Mr. Ninja need but YouTube? How would you like 115,820 (numbers pulled today from PodFeet's ranking page) more guaranteed views for every episode. Views you can measure down to the zip code, monetize, and provide demographics for? What are those numbers alone worth at industry standard CPMs? Between $6,900 and $27,797, depending on numbers of ads, CPM rate, customer responsiveness, and show length (and that's gravy money on top of whatever your ad arrangements are with your embedded video providers).
  
  Think you can produce a video podcast on that budget?
• Okay, Mr. Genius, what else do I need to do? There are a number of other distribution channels available to the independent podcaster. Its a relatively simple process to submit content to TiVo and Comcast PVR set-top boxes, last time I checked (the information I found for it was on the PodcastAlley forums several months ago - and since then I've seen several well known podcasts make it into the DVRs). If you've got quality content, and a solid ad agent, its a whole new world of monetizable ad inventory for you.
  
  This means making sure you have podcast feeds that are compatible with the multitude of different video receptacles out there. Without researching all of them, I can think of about five or six different formats off the top of my head
  
• This sounds like a lot of work. It is. No one said it was going to be easy to be a successful internet star.
• So what else do I have to do? It's going to help to have a blog. Let's dial it back a bit towards reality, because we're not all ninjas. A crucial piece to the puzzle in terms of creating, maintaining, and developing your presence is a blog, a twitter, and a couple social networking accounts. Want a perfect example of this? Look to Leo Laporte, Robert Scoble, Ken Rutkowski and the CNet crew (I'm thinking specifically of the Buzz Out Loud crew; Tom Merritt and Molly Wood).
  
  One of the advantages of all the recent Web 2.0 apps, as well as the strength of independent podcasting, is the feeling that you've got at least a shot of engaging in real dialog (some podcasters are more reachable than others) with the content producers.
  
  Twitter provides a way to engage in ad hoc chat conversations with your fans and peers. Facebook provides a platform to distribute exclusive or complementary content as well as create a sort of VIP community for your core audience. MySpace is a great platform (due to it's trailer park approach to web design) to add folks to your listening audience (it was, after all, built by spammers).
  
  The nexus for all things, though, has to be your blog. Your blog, if utilized properly, is going to be one of the main driving forces for creating your viewership, especially in your show's infancy. Each blog post serves as a press release, a connection to your audience and an a monetizable property in an of itself.

This covers the bases of what I think is a fairly well rounded support structure for pushing forward the popularity and viability of your video ventures (at least the general concepts of it).

Why am I talking about this? Well, I'm not trying to say I'm the smartest kid in the room or anything, but I see a whole lot of spectacular productions from a lot of really great online personalities, not to mention about five video-centric startups getting funded every twenty minutes, and very few if any seem to truly grasp the power and scope of what can truly make a successful video venture. None of the startups really seem geared in a multi-pronged way towards promoting quality content up through the ranks.

I mean, I love YouTube as much as the next guy, but I tired of watching folks getting kicked in the junk back when it was called America's Funniest Home Videos in the mid-90s, and the latest star(let?) to come out of YouTube's big skill is wig and makeup application, and screaming a has-been pop star's name repeatedly. Not exactly quality content, in my opinion.

I have seen a lot of good stuff with potential podfade because they couldn't make grab a sizable audience. A lot of that has to do with the fledgling status of video monetization, true, but a lot of it has to do with there not being mechanisms in place for quality content to rise above the noise floor.

I guess what I'm saying is I'd like to apply my abilities to more quality content producers. I'd like to see a niche of companies rise out of the newest crop of startups that try to incubate these talents in the aforementioned ways. I'd like to see industrious, quality content producers apply some of these principals themselves.

Because, dangit, if I have to watch that stupid cross-dressing Britney fan become the spokesperson for independent content creators, I swear, I'm gonna explode!

/rizzn

Thoughts? Questions? Wanna hire me? Wanna fund this idea? E-Mail me. Or better yet, e-mail this to your favorite unknown content producer.

We covered a lot of this topic at the beginning of Episode 138 of RizWords. Subscribe to listen.

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A Great Day, A Great Week.

I've been quite a busy little beaver here for the last few days. Lots of interesting projects are starting to stack up, and a lot of the hard work that Art and I have been putting into the podcast is starting to come to fruition in a big big way. This post is going to ramble, I'll warn you, but it's all interesting stuff, so stick around for it.

For a couple of weeks, Art and I have been amazed at the jump in traffic we've recieved, with each episode getting around 400-700 visits, with some episodes in the multiples of thousands. It seems that this traffic has not gone un-noticed by many. Yesterday, I just found out that we've made it to the number three slot on most downloaded podcasts over at TalkShoe.com. Don't believe me? Listen to this episode of TalkShoe Hosts Sharing Strategies, TalkShoe CEO Dave Nelson's weekly podcast. For the top 25, fast forward to about 6:23.. for our listing, go to about 8:00.

What are the podcasts surrounding us in the Top 5? Well, if you want to hear it from the horse's mouth, check out the above listed podcast, but I'll ennumerate them for you here for you lazy folks:

1. Lost Community podcast
2. gspn.tv community podcast
3. RizWords
4. Mac Tips Daily
5. Keith and The Girl

So, aside from the bragging, what else is new?

Well, two new interesting opportunities have arisen, and my (invaluable) podcast experience is coming to bear on them. First one is 5Tribe, the organisation I have been working with over the years, off and on. Their primary function is to help newspaper organisations remain profitable in today's continually flagging old media networks. They mostly do this through improving the site's visibility and upgrading of the online classifieds section. Most newspaper sites today don't even have online classifieds, and in terms of this, they are missing out on a large revenue stream, as newspapers are uniquely positioned to capitalize on their still valuable names and audience as well as the public's willingness to give them money to put bits of text on their site, despite there are hundreds of places to do this on the web for next to nothing.

5Tribe has been expressing a willingness to move into the world of podcasting for quite a while now, but recently have expressed an urgency to move into this market quicker than they anticipated. We're connecting up next week to learn the nature of how they want to get into this world, but with their wide reach in the old media market, any moves they make have the potential to truly reverberate around teh whole new media universe.

In other new projects, Steve over at N-Ventive introduced me to a fellow by the name of Paul Darby, and as a result of conversations I've had with the man this week, we could be putting on what may amount to the largest online live video broadcast to ever hit the net. The fellow runs one of the largest affiliate marketing groups out there on the net, and had the inclination to create a marketing-centric video content network. The best records I've been able to find out on the net tell me that the largest live video broadcast was attended by about 19,000 viewers. Conservative estimates of what he's expecting to show up to the broadcast are at least half of that.

Over the next few days, I'll be doing more news releases on this and hopefully getting more information out there to the big name bloggers that this is something that's going to happen and make a big splash.

I'm looking at my watch right now and it's coming up on 8:00 PM... and I need to be heading home (even though there's lots more I wanna tell you about it). Before I go, I've got to share something with you that was sent to me this afternoon. I sent out a mass email to my contact list with the most recent pictures of Jacob Li that I posted here to the site. One of the guys who got this sent this back to me:

This is such strange timing, Mark. I just had a young man come to me and ask if he could date my daughter. The message here was, we are getting serious and it might turn into something like an engagement at some point. He's a good kid, as is she and of course I said yes. I then set down and open your email and see you as a young Father with a new wife and little baby. To you I'm just an old man, but to me I feel like my daughter was just a baby like yours a few months ago. Time moves on quicker with each passing month. The good news is that things usually get better long term, even with the ups and downs along the way. Enjoy this time of your life.

Enjoy your family right were they are today. It will be but a memory before you can blink.

Very poignant words. With that, I'm headed home for the weekend.

/rizzn

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RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech - EP40

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech
Episode 40 - download now - subscribe now

• A member of the TechPodcast Network @ techpodcast.com. If it's Tech, it's here.
  
• Remember, if you're listening on the podcast recording, you can call into the show live if you tune in through TalkShoe.com at 2:30 PM EST every weekday.
• If you like the podcast (and you haven't already given us a rating), head over and do so, and don't forget to sign up for the discussion list.
• Other Podcast Plugs:
  
• TalkGirls comes on Tuesday nights. Check out the TalkGirls Podcast ... it's good times!
• Cotolo Chronicles: Frank is a good friend of the show, and an associate of the late great Wolfman Jack. Check out his podcast.
• NewsReal: Good friend to Art and I - has one of the best hours of news podcast each week.
• You Are the Guest: Bill Grady turns the microphone on the internet's most interesting people.
  
• Sponsors:
  
• Try GoToMeeting for 45 days! Visit www.GoToMeeting.com/podcast to start your free trial today.
  
• AACS - Guaranteed improved credit - http://aacsnet.com/ - Mention RizWords and get $50 off your entry to the program.

James Smith, DC Manager at Layered Technologies joins me today as guest co-host in Art Lindsey's absence. Art is still out on medical leave. In other personal news, we have scheduled a c-section with my wife for Friday, and as such, I will likely put the show on hiatus starting 5/11/2007 for about a week. Stay tuned to Thursday's show for more information on that. James brings us this news item to kick off the show:

Google is at it again – New Data Center in Pryor, OK

Yes, the Internet Giant does not sleep. Google has announced that it will build a 600 (m) million dollar data center on 800 acres at Mid-America Industrial Park in Pryor, Oklahoma.

The center will provide support for Google's numerous Internet services and will hire about 100 people in the coming months.

Officials say employment will eventually reach about 200.
Google is planning to convert a warehouse to open next summer and later add a new building on the site.

James and I strive to point out the flaws in this study, and how popup marketing is different from spyware marketing:

Traffic Fraud Inflates Video Site Popularity
Dotnaught writes "A new study by spyware researcher Ben Edelman finds that spyware-driven traffic inflation is common, particularly at video sites. The study identifies Bolt.com, GrindTV.com, Broadcaster.com, Away.com, RooTV.com, and Diet.com as the beneficiaries of spyware-driven traffic. 'Our measurement systems are inaccurate for the amount of trust we'd like to put into them,' Edelman said. 'So that's the puzzle: How do you build an advertising economy when the number can't be trusted?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Outerspace and inter-planetary colonization has begun!:

Earth Bacteria May Hitch A Ride To The Stars
An anonymous reader writes "Space.com has an article on how old rocket stages are carrying bacteria from Earth to interstellar space. For example, four upper rocket stages were used to boost deep space probes Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 10 and New Horizons. The spacecraft were sterilized, but the rocket stages were not, and they now carry the bacteria of the engineers who handled them. If the rocket stages hit a habitable planet, and the bacteria survive the journey, they would be able to reproduce and colonize the planet ... not that there's a high liklihood of that. 'In 40,000 years, this wayward 185-pound (84 kilogram) lump of metal will pass by the star AC+79 3888 at a distance of 1.64 light-years. ... Given the sheer expanse of time that lies ahead of the four discarded rockets, at least one is likely to eventually encounter a planet. But even if that planet's environment is conducive to life, the long dormant bacteria will not just gently plop into some exotic ocean. No soft landing can be expected.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My son, Jacob Li Hopkins, is already ranked number 2 in Google:

Google A Curse To Those With Common Names
or people with embarrassing incidents in their past, Google can be a nightmare, as it's become the closest thing there is to an individual's "permanent record". But people whose pasts are fairly clean can have the opposite problem: their Google permanent record gets lost among everyone else who shares their name. This is particularly hard on the John Smiths of the world, who have to compete with thousands of others to receive a prominent listing on the search engine. This also effects people who change their name due to marriage, as a lifetime of electronic references aren't attached to their new name. Parents have even begun using Google before they name their baby, to make sure that the name they choose doesn't have too much online competition. If that practice were to become more widespread, it may force the Freakonomics guys to revisit their theories on baby naming, and the idea that parents intentionally latch onto popular names associated with elite classes. Instead, the moment a name starts to get even remotely popular (or crowded), parents will start searching for something new.

Of course it's irrational. We all know, there is no spoon:

EFF Files Suit Against 'Paranormalist' Uri Geller
Via The EFF.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit Tuesday against Uri Geller -- the "paranormalist" famous for seemingly bending spoons with his mind -- on behalf of a YouTube critic who was silenced by Geller's baseless copyright claims.

EFF's client, Brian Sapient, belongs to a group called the "Rational Response Squad," which is dedicated to debunking what it calls irrational beliefs. As part of their mission, Sapient and others post videos to YouTube that they say demonstrate this irrationality. One of the videos that Sapient uploaded came from a NOVA program called "Secrets of the Psychics," which challenges the performance techniques of Geller.

More here.

Good for Vonage?

AT&T Dumps VOIP Customers
Proudrooster writes "In the past two weeks AT&T has sent out disconnect letters to VOIP customers in big rude red letters, stating that VOIP service will be suspended in 30 days and permanently disconnected in 60 days. They cited E911 service as the reason. (It is peculiar that AT&T is unable overcome an E911 technical hurdle, since SBC/AT&T is also the local landline company in many areas where VOIP cancellation notices are being received.) Many AT&T VOIP customers have found that they are unable to transfer their phone numbers to a new provider. Further, AT&T is unwilling to set up a forwarding message directing callers to a new phone number for those who are unable to transfer their old numbers. In effect, AT&T has told many long-term VOIP subscribers: 'We are turning off your phone in 30 days, goodbye.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Like we said, you screwed up Obama. Now begins your backpedaling!:

Followup to the Obama Story from the UK Telegraph

Unlike at the 2004 election, each major candidate has an online presence on MySpace, YouTube or Facebook. Mr Obama, 45, has offered freshness and youthful appeal, and is often said to relate to the young better than his rivals.

But bloggers reacted negatively to his team’s move, saying they had betrayed the free-wheeling spirit of the internet.

Daily Kos, a leading grassroots blog for Democrat activists, said alienating “your biggest supporters is generally not a wise thing to do”.

Another blogger wrote on Atrios: “I really don’t understand the tendency to treat volunteers as disposable.”

Mr Obama’s advisors, issuing an explanation online, said: “We’re going to try new things and sometimes it’s going to work and sometimes it’s not going to work.”

James and I expound a bit more on the topic Derrick and I broached yesterday:

Leahy, Others Speak Out Against New ID Standards

Ellen Nakashima writes in The Washington Post:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), citing concerns about Americans' privacy, signaled yesterday that he will push to repeal a provision of a 2005 law aimed at creating new government standards for driver's licenses.

Leahy, who has co-sponsored bipartisan legislation to repeal the provision, spoke out as the debate intensified over the Real ID Act, which requires states to create new tamper-proof driver's licenses in line with rules recently issued by the Department of Homeland Security. States must begin to comply by May 2008 but can request more time. After 2013, people whose IDs do not meet those standards will not be allowed to board planes or enter federal buildings.

A similar Democrat-backed bill to repeal the provision is pending in the House. At least seven states have passed laws or resolutions opposing implementation of Real ID. Fourteen states have legislation pending. By yesterday, the DHS had received more than 12,000 public comments in response to the rules.

More here.

BlogSpam: Score One for the Good Guys

In the ongoing war between spammers and those who would have a useful internet, a blow was made against blogspam a couple months ago that is just now recieving some press.

Slashdot just noticed this article/study today, but it's been out since January. Essentially, Microsoft researchers have discovered tens of thousands of junk Web pages, created only to lure search-engine users to advertisements. Us regular internet users have known about these pages for ages, and have been plagued by their existence for far too long, but as it turns out the researchers noted that the vast bulk of the junk listings was created from just two Web hosting companies and that as many as 68 percent of the advertisements sampled were placed by just three advertising syndicators.'

My question is: how will this effect e-commerce on the internet? Theoretically, since it's been three months since the takedown of these sites, about a generation in terms of internet time, we should be feeling the positive or negative effects of these changes.

Theoretically, any decrease in the signal-to-noise ratio on the internet is a good thing, but in the end, all these sites ended up doing was promote legitimate businesses. Still, click thru ratios on these spam sites can't be particularly good, and therefore many a well-crafted pay-per-click campaign ended up buried due to being placed on these types of sites.

I can't be sure because I really don't have the time to research this at the moment, but the type of advertiser that Project Strider seems to have been going after would probably have been the kind that was born out of necessity due to AdSense's one affiliate per program rule. Again, this is all coming from slightly rusty memory, but I remember Perry Marshall sending out a notice a couple years ago mentioning that Google had made a change in their program that didn't allow multiple affiliates from the same program to compete against each other on the same keywords, and essentially the most successful campaign is the one that didn't get shut down (successful being the campaign with the highest CTR).

As the diagram shows, the type of advertisers that Project Strider was targeting were those that had unique domain names as doorways to common affiliate programs and PPC sites. Obviously the technique evolved to simply create lowbrow content trap sites, but I think the genesis of the site may have come from Google's original policy.

Regardless, what it means for the industry and for the end user... As for the end user, obviously it should mean improved user experience when it comes to searching the web. To be honest, marketing has moved so far forward that the sites I look to for information that much of what I want to find is hidden behind several pay-me for the info gates. For instance, if I'm looking for information on a particularly arcane programming roadblock, there are a number of forums out there that exist and seem to have my question answered on there, but require a subscription to see the response. To me this is just as annoying as seeing the same question without an answer parrotted on fifteen content-trap websites simply filled with links to other advertising sites.

As an internet marketing professional always looking for an easy buck, I think if nothing else it will force me to be more creative in my quest to create automated sources of content. I've been working on for several months a site that will surf RSS feeds and create articles distinctly different but on topic with what large crowds in the blogosphere are talking about. I simply don't have the resources and time to (or maybe it's just that I've some scruples that prevent me from) creating retarded content-trap sites like the report is talking about.

Bottom line: I'm not sure what it means, but I'm leaning towards 'its a good thing.' This isn't a common practice across a large cross-section of marketers, it's simply the actions of a few companies, and shouldn't have anything but positive effects for marketers, ecommerce sites, and users.

/rizzn

What is Marketing?

People often ask for an explanation of "Marketing." Well, here it is:

You're a woman and you see a handsome guy at a party. You go up to him and say, "I'm fantastic in bed." That's Direct Marketing.

You're at a party with a bunch of friends and see a handsome guy. One of your friends goes up to him and pointing at you says, "She's fantastic in bed." That's Advertising.

You are a woman and you see a handsome guy at a party. You go up to him and get his telephone number. The next day you call and say, "Hi, I'm fantastic in bed." That's Telemarketing.

You see a guy at a party, you straighten your dress. You walk up to him and pour him a drink. You say, "May I," and reach up to straighten his tie, brushing your breast lightly against his arm, and then say, "By the way, I'm fantastic in bed." That's Public Relations.

You're at a party and see a handsome guy. He walks up to you and says, "I hear you're fantastic in bed." That's Brand Recognition.

You're at a party and see a handsome guy. He fancies you, but you talk him into going home with your friend. That's a Sales Rep. Your friend can't satisfy him so he calls you. That's Tech Support.

You're on your way to a party when you realize that there could be handsome men in all these houses you're passing. So you climb onto the roof of one situated towards the center and shout at the top of your lungs, "I'm fantastic in bed!" That's Junk Mail.

You are at a party, this well-built man walks up to you and gropes your breast and grabs your ass. That's Arnold Schwarzenegger.

You like it, but 20 years later your attorney decides you were offended and files suit. That's America.

Now you know how "Marketing" works.