B.L. Ochmann has forecast some developments in the blogging arena.

At leat two of them are pertinent for users of Qumana, and those who may have heard of Qumana and Q-Ads but have yet to try the tools and service, or are wondering about why and how to integrate them into their work flows.

3. Blog advertising will become the hot ad medium of the year and ad agencies will screw up big-time as they learn the ropes.

Savvy advertisers have already learned that it is possible to have outrageously high click through and conversion rates through obscenely cheap and highly targeted blog advertising.

Bloggers won’t tolerate invasive, annoying, flashing, heavy-handed ads, and agencies will stumble as they try to understand the type of advertising that can beat any traditional medium, hands down, when properly executed. I have consistently achieved click thru rates as high as .857%, and averaging .268% with niche-focused blog ads.

People who read blogs are looking for specialized, high-touch information from experts in particular areas. The right ads directed to those niche audiences can work wonders.

4. Widgets in new Mac and PC operating systems will introduce millions to truly customizing their online experience.

The age of invasive advertising is over and companies will have an enormous branding experience if they provide/sponsor the information people need and want to see every day in widgets.

Essentially, widgets are a way to provide RSS feeds in a frame the user loads onto the page or site of their choice. They allow people to use stupidly named RSS feeds without understanding that they are transferring code.

By lightly branding widgets, companies that provide information consumers want to keep on their desktop or home page have the enormous opportunity to have their brand name in front of customers every day in a positive, almost subliminal way.

Tags: Qumana, Q-Ads, B.L. Ochmann, online advertising, blog advertising, marketing widgets

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Thanks to John Battelle's Searchblog (which in turn thanks Ross Stapleton-Gray) for highlighting this, an academic grant from the National Science Foundation aimed at improving the ways click fraud is dealt with.

Detecting click fraud collaboratively and in real time should be quite a feat.  I suppose it would mean much less relative arbitrary auditing, and probably much more transparency about why any given click would be approved or not.

 If it succeeds, it should make quite a difference.

Govt Study Funds Click Fraud Detection

Just in case the Googles of the world ain't paying attention:

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will provide a commercial solution to click fraud identification and prevention. The current existing solutions can not detect the so-called software click. This STTR project proposes a real time collaborative click fraud detection and prevention system to detect these software clicks. The approach draws on data mining techniques for fraud identification using detailed user activities. An accurate and efficient classification method based on association rule mining and data stream mining will be formulated to identify the click frauds.

The system will protect Pay-Per-Click advertisers from click fraud and improve their return on investment. The new data mining techniques discovered during the course of this research will be applied in multiple fields related to online business marketing, user analysis and other fraud identification processes.

Tags: click fraud, online advertising, Q-Ads, Federated Media, National Science Foundation, John Battelle, Ross Stapleton-Gray

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Big wine for a big idea ... what is it with geeks and booze?  The Bloglines team is going to give away giant bottle of wine.  Now if I have a big idea ... I ain't sharin' it with them!  QReader is going to get it!

Analytics across the board that will let you mash up information to know if a post it popular in a particular area.  Eh, not a big idea.

Now a big idea ... automatic synthesis of content into something digestible.  Giving context.  Now, I'm wondering is FeedRinse will do this? But ... it would be something I would use.

Bloglines as social networks ... nope.

Ratings of content, eh.

The winner was ... content synthesis!  I guess that's a hint.

Tags: Gnomedex, Gnomedex6, feed readers

Via a Globe and Mail update ...

eBay Canada offer member blogs


eBay Canada has introduced eBay Member Blogs to build up an eBay community. The blogs add to the company's member forums, about me pages and eBay reviews and guides.

With the Member Blogs feature, eBay users can create and publish journal-like entries within their own dedicated space and share personal experiences or discuss their categories.

Tags: eBay, blogging, social advertising, network effect

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... perhaps the deep currents towards organizational democracy will continue ?  Or maybe not ?

Via CNET News ...

Corporate America wakes up to Web 2.0
By Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com


Big companies have for years installed industrial-strength content management systems in the hope of sparking collaboration among workers. There was just one problem: People didn't use them.

Now, tools that people are familiar with on the consumer Web, such as blogs and wikis, are staking out ground inside businesses, often led by the end users themselves.

Industry observers say these popular Web 2.0 technologies are an effective way to collaborate at work; they are simple and easy to use, making them very appealing to end users.

"The key part of Web 2.0 is that there is something about these new tools that enable new practices of collaboration," said John Seely Brown, a consultant and former chief scientist of Xerox, who spoke at the Collaborative Technology Conference in Boston last week. "Web 2.0 is a profoundly participatory medium."

Tags: social software, work design, collaboration, participation

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... to recognize that social software is used to communicate and build information between people ... even people at work.

Via ZDNet ...

RSS: The new intranet protocol?


In a story he headlined Web 2.0 sews grassroots collaboration, CNET News.com's Martin LaMonica wrote:

Like others, Seely Brown expects to see a wide range of techniques common on consumer Web applications–including blogs, collaborative Web page editing through wikis, tagging and RSS (Really Simple Syndication)-based subscriptions–to bleed into mainstream business applications….new Web standard products could push people to stop using e-mail to share documents and instead collaborate through shared workspaces like wikis….The onus is back on the incumbent providers, especially IBM and Microsoft, to (react). This stuff is beyond good enough, and it's easy to work with," [said Burton Group analyst Peter O'Kelly].

LaMonica's story goes on to say that Microsoft is responding by building wiki functionality into a forthcoming version of its Sharepoint collaboration technology. LaMonica also picked up on this zinger:

"This way of capturing collaborative wisdom, collective knowledge is a different take on knowledge management, which was fundamentally flawed" [said IBM Lotus Division general manager Michael Rhodin].

Tags: collaboration, building knowledge, social software, knowledge management

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Via Publishing 2.0 ...  MySpace shielding advertisers from users ?

The rest of the article is not particularly kind to News Corps' emerging strategy for MySpace.

So much for the 2.0 glories of social networking! This is such a sham, and users will see right through it.

Still, it isn’t clear how much attention MySpace users will pay to these advertiser-friendly areas. Many users spend most of their time on their own pages and those of their friends.

This lays bare the emptiness of all the MySpace hype. For USERS, who are the ones who matter in the business equation, it’s all about THEIR content. They don’t really care about wall garden content. That’s not why they use MySpace!
I love this phrase from the article: “the profile pages created by MySpace’s nearly 85 million users — the popular but controversial part of the site” — hello!

That profile pages ARE the site! People don’t got to MySpace to see MySpace. They go to MySpace to see each other.

Tags: social networking, MySpace, advertising, walled gardens, users

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Stowe picks up on a new cut at advertising for *social media platforms* from the global advertising giant JWT (click through to their news section to see the major emphasis it is bringing to this experimentation).

Here's the JWT press release announcing what they are calling an "exclusive partnership" with The Huffington Post.

JWT: Social Advertising

JWT has developed a bunch of what they are calling Social Ads over that The Huffington Post. Basically these ads feel like YouTube videos, kind of grudgy but artsy. The social element is the handy buttons that allow you to send them (via email or AOL IM) to a friend

This builds on the notion outlined in a recent post of ways to spread the word that are taking a tangential direction from online advertising's fascination with search engine marketing.

See JWT's video example over at Stowe's blog post.

Tags: Stwoe Boyd, social advertising, horizontal word of mouth

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Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 has a new article up, titled "Increasing Advertising’s Low Return on Consumer Attention".

On the face of it, the value proposition of search advertising makes perfect sense — ads are chosen based on key word relevance — a consumer is searching for something, and search advertising delivers ads with produce/service offerings related to that search.

But despite this huge innovation, search advertising still provides a relatively low return on consumer attention — in ad brokering systems like Google AdWords, which are based on auctions, relevance is often in conflict with revenue per click. AdWords must balance the likelihood of a click — and its correlation with relevance — against the amount of revenue Google receives for that click. And advertisers who win the key word game can direct consumers to sites that may not be fully relevant to the actual intent of their searches.

Let’s look at a specific example ...

He then takes us through an example using his own searching-and-shopping behaviour, and points to a problem that is likely to endure until there are ways found to pull the reader ... the person who clicks on the advertising ... into the value equation.

But here’s the bigger problem: In my search for the video camera that I will ultimately purchase, money will change hands between advertisers and intermediaries as my attention — and my intention to buy — is “monetized.” But not a dime of that ad money will make it into my pocket.

It’s MY attention, MY intention, and MY purchase — Google and other intermediaries will make all the money, and I won’t see a dime.

In driving towards a conclusion, Scott uses the example of Jellyfish ( a service he previously highlighted which promises to "change the way you shop online, creating a more transparent and valuable shopping environment that benefits both online shoppers and successful retailers alike.").

It looks like Jellyfish launched this past weekend.

Scott's conclusion ?  He mentions the ongoing work of the Attention Trust with respect to "return on attention", and then states:

What we need to really change the attention game — and to dramatically increase advertising’s return on consumer attention — is a way for AVERAGE PEOPLE to increase their skin in the game “seamlessly and without you even thinking about it.”

We've been thinking about the same thing for a while ... here are a couple of previous posts on the issue we've called  "The New Attention-Driven Advertising".

Tags: attention, intention, paying readers, online advertising, increasing click-throughs

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What seems like a long time ago, though it was only a couple of years, Jon Husband and Fred Fabro asked me to try a little knowledge management app that had been adapted to publish to blogs.  That app is now called Qumana.  It's very different than the app then.  Frankly you wouldn't recognize it.

While working on Qumana we had an idea, what if you could put an ad in your post?  What if you could earn money from the content you write?

Now what we'd like to know is, why don't you put ads in your posts?  What can we do to make Q Ads work for you?

What is interesting to you?  What would make it valuable to you?  Tell us, we'd really like to know.  We didn't come up with this idea for nothing, we came up with idea for you.  We really, truly believe that bloggers should be able to easily make a little coin from your content.

So ... let the commentary begin.

Tags: Qumana, Qumana Ads, Q Ads, blog-vertising

... will be led by John Palfrey of the Harvard Berkman Center.

It will be interesting to follow, online, what the results and outcomes of this session may be.  I suspect that the session will add some additional oomph to the ongoing conversation to which John refers ... "'how do you monetize the long tail?"

If you are a blogger, how do you go about making some money from your work? One obvious answer is the classic approach of throwing BlogAds or Google ads or whathaveyou ads on your blog. That works for some people, but it generates more than beer money only for a select few at the left-hand side of that famous power law distribution.

Some, like Mike Arrington at TechCrunch, have added premium sponsorships to the mix; then again, Mike’s plainly in the select few. Others contend that a blog is itself an advertisement. You don’t make money on the blog itself, but rather you make money on other things (as in the artist who gives away his or her content on a p2p service and makes money on other things to pay the rent).

I trust that we’ll kick around these ideas, but also get into some new possibilities: shouldn’t really simple syndication allow for some new thinking around getting people to pay for the content you create? And are there ways for bloggers themselves to get on the bandwagon of making some of the money that the venture guys are planning to make? How could that work, exactly? Put another away: lots of people have spent lots of digital ink (sound and images too) on the general problem of “how do you monetize the long tail?”

In classic Bloggercon/unconference style, though, this is just a starting point. The beauty and the thrill is in where the conversation may go.

Tags: blogging, content, monetization, online advertising

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As we all know, advertisements can be very useful at times  ... and they have come to be accepted as part of the landscape that allows much software or web services to be free or extremely inexpensive.

But, as the final quote (below)  from this recent news story from Search Engine Journal suggests, there are limits.  It looks like AOL is discovering those limits.

AOL Inserts Ads Inside Email


First, a bit of background from InfoWorld (AOL Subscribers Up In Arms Over Email Ads):

“For the first time in its history, AOL is displaying ads along with e-mail messages to its paying subscribers, to increase the delivery mechanisms of its online ad inventory, an AOL spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday.
This practice is common in free Webmail services but generally not in fee-based e-mail accounts, where the absence of ads is normally considered a perk of being a paying subscriber.”

[Snip ... ]

TechDirt said (AOL Keeps Working Overtime To Drive Away Subscribers):

“Obviously, there are plenty of email services that are ad-supported, but this is for paying AOL customers, who for years have been able to read email without ads getting in the way. And, of course, these aren’t just any ads, but (of course) intrusive ads that users complain are distracting. Considering that plenty of people seem to have kept their AOL subscriptions going for many years just to keep their email address, pissing off a bunch of those people doesn’t seem like the smartest strategic move.”

Search Engine Journal quote:

"I agree - pissing people off is NOT a prudent business plan, although it seems to have become an important part of AOL’s major strategy over the years. I am assuming that most Search Engine Journal readers don’t have AOL as their gateway to the Internets, but many of us might have relatives (hi Mom!) who have relied on AOL for access. Inserting annoying ads between email messages is not a good way to make friends and influence people."

Tags: unusual business strategies, non-customer-centric, pissing off customers

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I think that this is fair game, and I'm guessing that I won't be set upon by Google, since the subject matter of this post is addressed in an interesting article already in the public domain by Robert X. Cringely of I, Cringely.

Google's AdSense works using a context-matching algorithm .. and, as Cringely notes in his article, Google's offering often tend towards an "almighty algorithm" mentality.

Google is secretive. This started as a deliberate marketing mystique, but endures today more as a really annoying company habit. Google folks don't understand why the rest of us have a problem with this, but then Google folks aren't like you and me. The result of this secrecy and Google's "almighty algorithm" mentality is that the company makes changes -- and mistakes -- without informing its customers or even doing all that much to correct the problems. It's all just beta code, after all. But the business part is real, as is the money that some people have lost because of Google's poor communication skills combined, frankly, with poor follow-through.

Qumana enables you, the publisher, to have closer control over what advertising is used by choosing the keywords you think relate best to the blog post in front of you and using those keywords to pull and place adverts .. and if you don't like the advert that is offered, you can delete it and try for another, or use another keyword.  Your brain is effectively the algorithm ... while selecting and placing adverts is not quite as automated as Google AdSense, it is only a type-keyword-and-one-click operation.

As the inventory of advertising offered by Q-Ads improves, so too will your ability to develop an advertising strategy based on the content of your blog posts.  Tris Hussey of the Qumana team coined a term for this .. we call it a post-centric advertising strategy.

If you ever have a desire to "own your content", or don't necessarily want to share every ounce of your publishing output with Google, you might want to give Q-Ads a try.

Tags: Google, AdSense, algorithms, online advertising, Qumana Ads

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I often find myself wondering what will be next .. and then next .. and then next .. in the endless stream of applications that help us manipulate, manage and sometimes mangle the process of writing and publishing to the Web.

At Qumana we have been conscious for a long time that every individual has her or his own working style (have you ever watched over your friend's, or your sister's, or your dad's shoulder whilst they are doing something on the computer, or on the web ?  I'll bet you're just like me, and everyone else I have ever seen ... you just instinctively want to reach out ands steer, because they aren't doing it the way you do) ... ;-)

The Web is now a major part of hundreds of millions of peoples' lives.  Personal publishing of some form or another, whether it's called blogging or something else, won't be going away any time soon.

On the Web, info flows in to your conscious awareness all the time .. continuously.  Whether it's via an RSS aggregator, or through some search activity, or just by browsing and link-hopping.  You're always watching, reading .. using your cognitive capabilities and style to *interact* with the flows of information passing in front of your eyes.

Ours (and many other peoples') quest is to design, make and offer applications that give you maximum time for reading and thinking whilst you are at the center of this continuous flow of information.  Ideally, we would get most operations - most anything you want to do, other than  typing itself - down to one click, but it's not likely that we'll get every operation down to that level of simplicity.  But many, if not most will be.

In the blogging / personal; publishing environment, we want to make publishing all sorts of other digital content (think podcasts, self-created mp3's, photo slide shows, video clips) as easy as publishing text, links and images are now.  We want to make Qumana, and Qumana integrated with Lektora, formidably simple *information pivots* which will allow you, the personal publisher, read, think, write and express yourself as clearly and elegantly as possible ... whilst still offering you significant flexibility, versatility and power to address the wide range of individual's personal publishing habits.

We want to help you become more effective in the ongoing, never-ending, flow of information.  We will welcome any and all feedback that helps make this quest a reality, for you and all your fellow personal publishers.

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I caught a post by Stowe about some "web 2.0 angst", and it got me to thinking about this whole idea of naming the state of internet affairs. This concern about what to call it, where is it going, etc. Frankly, it's just a name. Someone (whoever it is probably is pretty sorry now) came up with this descriptor to separate the current Internet boom from the one of the late 90s. Probably to answer an investor or someone similar asking "So, how is this different than the 90s?" "Well it's a new way of looking at it ... it's like Web 2.0."

Stowe has this closer to his article:

I see Web 2.0 as the gateway to another era, not the era itself. Like Moses, who led his people to the Promised Land, but could not cross the River Jordan, Web 2.0 is going to take us out of the desert into something better, which we have no name for yet: but there is milk and honey on the other side.

The way I see it we gave this rebirth a name because we had to, but really the core fundamentals of the Net haven't changed. The protocals that run the whole shebang haven't changed much (if at all). Websites, while cooler looking and with a few more bells and whistles, are still places to go get information. Yep, blogs and RSS are giving personal publishing a rebirth. RSS certainly has made pulling gobs and gobs of information easier. What is different, then?

Well technologies and users have matured and become more savvy. Lots more people have high-speed, always-on access to the Internet (this is a huge reason for the success, IMHO). Mostly, we've finally figured out the business models that actually work. Products and services people are actually willing to pay for and at the right price point. Advertisers (as I discussed in an Investors blog post) are putting more money into the system and we can provide better data out.

So I don't get tied up in names or terms for the current state of affairs. I'm not waiting for "nerdvana", and I'm not going to wondering when Web 2.5 or 3.0 is going to come. Technologies are steadily improving. More people are coming online and staying online. The Internet has become integral to the way many people live their lives (like me, with multiple computers and a BlackBerry strapped to my hip). And in the end ... that's the real revolution.

Tags: Web 2.0, Web 2.5, Web 3.0