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San Francisco and Vancouver (Nov. 29, 2006) -- Qumana Software Inc today announced availability of the Q-Ads tools (http://tools.typepad.com/get/qads) and the popular Qumana offline blog editor (http://tools.typepad.com/get/qumana) for users of the TypePad blogging platform. Users of Six Apart's popular hosted blogging service can now quickly and easily insert keyword-based ads directly into their blog posts, whether they use the Qumana editor or not.

"Qumana is thrilled to be offering the industry's easiest ad insertion tool to this important blogging community," said Fred Fabro, CEO of Qumana. "Q-Ads puts TypePad bloggers at the center of the explosive growth taking place in online advertising," said Fabro.

"TypePad bloggers deserve creative and powerful ways to earn money from their blogs. Qumana offers bloggers a unique approach, and we're happy to introduce their tools to our customers." said Michael Sippey, VP & GM of TypePad at Six Apart.

"With Q-Ads TypePad bloggers can choose which keywords best represent the editorial message of the blog post and then with one click pull an ad from our network that best relates to that content," added Fabro. "The result is a matching of TypePad bloggers' content to an ad message, which can give the ad message greater relevance to blog readers. Greater relevance means higher click-throughs and happier advertisers," said Fabro.

Qumana's Q-Ads tool is a browser extension that works as an Internet Explorer plugin or Firefox extension that enables users to "pull and place" text-based advertising based on the keywords they enter. The Q-Ads Tool works with all major blogging platforms, including TypePad. There is also a Q-Ads plug-in for Windows LiveWriter.

Qumana also offers Typepad users the leading off-line blog editor in the blogosphere. Qumana allows bloggers to create media-rich blog posts in a familiar WYSIWYG interface and with simple button clicks insert the keyword-based ads, Technorati tags, and multimedia (e.g. YouTube videos) through the innovative Insert HTML button.

The insert ad interface is designed to allow users to enter the keyword of their choice and then customize the size and colour of the ad before inserting it into their post.


About Qumana
Qumana Software Inc. is an advertising and web services company that provides content providers and personal publishers with market-leading methods for delivering and adding advertising to online content. Qumana's mission is to make blogging easier and more profitable for bloggers globally. Qumana is run by Internet industry veterans, hardcore bloggers, software purists, and world-class designers committed to keeping things simple. For more information, visit http://www.qumana.com/

About Six Apart, Ltd.
Six Apart Ltd. provides award-winning blogging software and services that change the way millions of individuals, organizations, and corporations connect and communicate across the world every day. Founded in 2002 by husband and wife team Ben Trott and Mena G. Trott, Six Apart has grown into a global company with its headquarters in San Francisco, CA, and offices in Europe and Japan. The company continues to lead in the blogging and social media industry with the Movable Type publishing platform, the TypePad hosted blogging service LiveJournal, an online community organized around personal journals, and Vox, a free personal blogging service for friends and family. For more information, visit http://www.sixapart.com/



For more info: Fred Fabro - CEO and President, Qumana Software Inc.
e: fred AT qumana.com   Tel: 604.837.0400

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For the last 8 weeks or so we've known about and have been searching ways to resolve the problems which showed up the most recent Mac version of Qumana, with OS X 10.4.7+ ...

I think we are just about there in terms of being able to offer users a new release for the Mac that operates pretty effectively ... so far I have found just one instance of quirkiness (a previous post that did not fully refresh) on one of the various blogs I maintain for testing purposes.

Thus far I have tested posting to Wordpress, Typepad and Blogware platforms ... mixed results.  Typepad fine, Blogware fine, and I knew Wordpress would not publish the Q-Ads I inserted ... but I was not prepared for it to ignore the YouTube html.

So, with a bit of fair weather following the pretty substantial snowfall here in Vancouver, we should be able to post a link to the new version of Qumana for Mac within the next 24 hours.

We will also update the download link on the Qumana website.

UPDATE:  THERE IS A NEW DOWNLOAD LINK AVAILABLE FOR THE MAC OS X VERSION

UPDATE #2:  We are tracking down the issues reported in our comments section.  It seems that a crucial step in the uploading of the new version to the Qumana web site was not carried out yesterday due to power outages off the coast of British Columbia (the joys of a decentralised organization ;-)

We have people working on the problem(s).

UPDATE #3:  We think that all that remains to do is refresh the server upon which the Qumana site is hosted ... unfortunately the person who can do that is located on an island 30 kilometres to the west of Vancouver, and it seems the power is still off over there.

More news re: the live updated Mac OS version as we get it.

UPDATE #4:  It should be correct now ... the download will appear on your Desktop, and then just drop it into Applications.

It's probably a good thing to do to uninstall any previous application of Qumana, just for the hell of it.

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We are happy to announce that we are releasing two new tools to make it even easier for you to pick and place Q-Ads ads into your websites and blog posts.

A new version of the Q-Ads tool for Firefox (including 2.0) and Internet Explorer will allow you to insert ads while still using your familiar web-based post editor, but now it can do more—now you can insert YouTube and other video clips too! Just like the award-winning Qumana editor we have integrated an Insert HTML function into the Q-Ads tool that lets you insert videos (and other HTML code) right into your posts. This will let YouTube users put their own videos into their own blogs and publish an advertisement along with the video clip.

Because of the security limitations within many web-based blog editors YouTube insertion may not work for all users. Each blog platform handles this kind of code differently, and so we can't guarantee this function will work for all blog platforms.

Second, we added new ad category and keyword pick lists to the Q-ads tool. We combed through over 10,000 keywords in popular categories like Computers, Real Estate, and Home/Garden to give you 10 top-performing keywords in each category. We will refresh this list periodically to make sure you still have the best keywords available to you at all times. Don't like one of the suggestions? No problem, just choose Custom Keyword and enter your own.

This is also useful for content providers who may want to partner with Qumana to offer these capabilities to their users. We can tailor and mirror categories that are important and relevant to their audiences, so as to provide them with customized advertising inventory that means something to their audiences or users. The content providers can offer their users free easy-to-use content and advertising publishing tools along with the ability to access quality advertising and make money.

Lastly, we are officially releasing a Q-Ads plugin for Microsoft's Live Writer offline blog editor. While we think Qumana is the best editor out there (and if you are looking for a powerful blog editor that has all the functions and more of the Q-Ads tool, Qumana is for you), some of you might like Live Writer. We don't take this personally, so we are giving LW users Q-Ads too! The Q-Ads plugin for Live Writer contains the same ad insert as the Q-Ads tool (with category pick lists and ad
customization) and the easy Insert Video (and other HTML code) functions too!

All of these are available for download now from the Qumana website.

Another sign o' the times, via the NY Times ...  this news nicely reinforces the trend we reported on last month in our post No Surprise ...

Help speed up the changes to the publishing and news and advertising industries .. sign up for a Q-Ads account, download the free ad insertion tool, and help accelerate the changes that are underway. 

Help make it easier for the little guy or gal to advertise post by post, right where your readers are paying attention.

176 Newspapers to Form a Partnership With Yahoo

MIGUEL HELFT and STEVE LOHR
November 20, 2006

A consortium of seven newspaper chains representing 176 daily papers across the country is announcing a broad partnership with Yahoo to share content, advertising and technology, another sign that the wary newspaper business is increasingly willing to shake hands with the technology companies they once saw as a threat.

In the first phase of the deal, the newspaper companies will begin posting their employment classified ads on Yahoo’s classified jobs site, HotJobs, and start using HotJobs technology to run their own online career ads.

But the long-term goal of the alliance with Yahoo, according to one senior executive at a participating newspaper company, is to be able to have the content of these newspapers tagged and optimized for searching and indexing by Yahoo.

In that way, local news — one of the pillars of the newspaper business — would become part of a large information network that would increase usefulness for readers and value to advertisers.

“Now the industry has religion about the Internet, based on what has happened to the business in recent years,” said the executive, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak for his company. “So there is a lot more genuine enthusiasm today.”

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A little more than a week ago Dave Sifry posted Technorati's most recent snapshot of the (continuing) growth and maturation of the blogosphere, including a number of analyses about how blogs continue to penetrate the media scene, the frequency of posting, where posts come from, and how Technorati is mitigating the scourge of splogs (or more accurately, taking steps to not count them).

Here's the concluding summary:

In Summary:

1. Technorati is now tracking more than 57 Million blogs.
2. Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates.
3. Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days.
4. About 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, again down slightly quarter-over-quarter but probably due in part to spam fighting efforts.
5. About 4% of new splogs get past Technorati's filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
6. There is a strong correlation between the aging and post frequency of blogs and their authority and Technorati ranking.
7. The globalization of the blogosphere continues. Our data appears to show both English and Spanish languages are a more universal blog language than the other two most dominant language, Japanese and Chinese, which seem to be more regionally localized.
8. Coincident with a rise in blog posts about escalating Middle East tensions throughout the summer and fall, Farsi has moved into the top 10 languages of the blogosphere, indicating that blogging continues to play a critical role in debates about the important issues of our times.

The last two points are of significant interest, and here's a pie chart that gives us a sense of the spreading globalization of blogging:

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I remember two or three years ago having conversations with colleagues about the eventual penetration of social software and web services into the work-o-sphere of organizations ... I called it something vague, like "blog-like derivatives".

Here, via Rob Patterson's link to an announcement by SocialText's Ross Mayfield, is an early example of the types of "solutions" that are now available to organizations.

As I and others have noted before, it's very likely that the use of such configurations will lead to interesting changes to the design of work, and lead to a greater need for organizational development initiatives ... coaching, moderation, workshops addressing corporate blogging (external and internal) and the use of wikis, etc.  Ley's call it eOD for now.

Today we announced SuiteTwo, The Enterprise 2.0 Suite powered by Intel. Intel is distributing the Best of Breed wiki (Socialtext), blog (Six Apart), Feed Aggregation (Newsgator) and Feed Publishing (SimpleFeed), supported by Spikesource, through its channels including Dell, NEC, Ingram, Novell and Red Hat.

This fulfills Andrew McAfee's vision of Enterprise 2.0. In a box. Made simple for Small-to-Mid-sized Enterprises. Extensible because we've all supported open APIs. Enterprise 2.0 is freeform social software adapted for organizations. SuiteTwo is the first offering to realize the SLATES paradigm:

SLATES = Search | Links | Authorship | Tags | Extensions | Signals

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Via Internetnews.com

Please remember that sociology will always trump technology ... I suppose what that means is that if 50% of organizations will be using wikis by 2009, a lot more organizational culture change and work re-definition is coming.

Why Wikis Are Conquering The Enterprise
By Michael Hickins

There used to be just one wiki known to all: Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that embraced user-generated content and its rejection of hierarchy.

Chief among the principles of Wikipedia is that everyone can be an expert.

In its simplest form, a wiki is a Web page that can be edited or created through a browser and linked to other Web pages.

Unlikely as it may seem, wikis are now being adopted by enterprises large and small more quickly than celebrities adopt African orphans.

So much so that Gartner analyst Kathy Harris predicted that by 2009, 50 percent of U.S. companies will be using wikis.

That helps explain why vendors large and small are lining up to provide enterprises with enterprise-ready wiki solutions.

Large outfits, such as IBM (Quote) and Microsoft (Quote) , are wrapping wiki functionality into their real-time collaboration tools, respectively Lotus Sametime and Sharepoint Server.

Smaller vendors like Jotspot, Socialtext, CustomerVision and Klir Technologies are among the vendors offering stand-alone wiki solutions.

Rather than being driven by senior management, however, adoption is coming mainly from project managers and department-level executives.

"In almost every big corporation, some group is already using a wiki," said Andrew McAfee, associate professor of technology and operations management at the Harvard Business School.

One reason is that wikis hold the promise of helping companies stimulate more innovation by their employees.

That's important: 80 percent of CEOs see collaboration as being critical to growth, according to a survey conducted by IBM last March.

Jeff Nolan, the former head of venture capital at enterprise software vendor SAP (Quote), agreed that enterprises are struggling to find ways to stimulate innovation.

"Large enterprises are at the barrier of how they can create new ideas," he told internetnews.com.

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http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1004262
This morning eMarketer asked the question that is on a lot of advertisers and site owners minds—once people get to MySpace or YouTube, do they go anywhere else?  The answer is a definative, yes.  Using data gathered in conjunction with Hitwise, eMarketer found that MySpace, YouTube, and users of other social networking sites do click on the links to other websites and advertisements.  Here is a quote from the article regarding MySpace itself:

MySpace also is a driver of traffic to other types of sites. Hitwise reports that "the share of upstream traffic from MySpace for the Telecommunications category was 89% greater in September 2006 than it was in March 2006. In the same 6-month period, the share of upstream traffic from MySpace grew by 83% for the Shopping and Classifieds category, 77% for the Banks and Financial Institutions category, and 71% for the Travel category."

In other words, MySpace is referring an increasing amount of traffic to those site categories, either by organic links (such as links within user profiles) or advertising links.

That's a pretty powerful statement.  While we know that social media/networking communities can be very insular, they are also places where people go to find cool, new stuff.  So in other words:

All these sites represent advertising possibilities for those seeking to reach the MySpace or YouTube audience, Hitwise said.

If that doesn't speak to the bottom line, I don't know what does.

Tags: MySpace, YouTube, social media, social networking

Lycos is a long-time partner with Qumana in their blogging efforts.  We've known this awesome new video service has been coming for months, but we've been keeping mum about it.

Regardless, we are stoked for Lycos.  Yes, we've seen early parts of this.  Yes, we think it's cool.  And, yes, Qumana is going to be a part of it.

I can't wait to start checking it out!

Tags: Lycos Cinema, Qumana, social media

We recently switched advertising suppliers and upgraded the technical capabilities for delivering and placing ads.

This is good news for current Q-Ads users, who should see a noticeable difference in the service, and for potential Q-Ads users who are seeking an effective and viable alternative that will help them connect with readers through advertising that can be placed within blog post content.

At the same time, we have been creating a suite of easy-to-use, one-or-two-click applications that will help personal publishers everywhere expand their advertising options.  Look for these services to improve as we plug in additional inventory categories and integrate functionality even further.

Q-Ads tool suite

With the end goal being to make the process of inserting ads as easy as possible, Qumana has created two core tools to allow users to insert Q-Ads ads into their Internet properties.

1. Qumana editor

The flagship tool is the Qumana editor, the leading off-line blog editor in the Blogosphere.  Qumana allows bloggers to create media-rich blog posts in a familiar WYSIWYG interface and with simple button clicks insert the keyword-based ads, Technorati tags, and multimedia (e.g. YouTube videos) through the innovative Insert HTML button.

The insert ad interface is designed to allow users to enter the keyword of their choice and then customize the size and colour of the ad before inserting it into their post.

2. Q-Ads Tool for Firefox and IE6

Understanding that some bloggers prefer working within the familiar web-based environment of their blogging platform, Qumana developed the Q-Ads Tool.  The Q-Ads Tool takes two of the best features of the Qumana editor, Inserting Ads and Inserting Video, at put them into a browser plugin.

When creating a blog post, users need only to click the Q button on their browser’s toolbar and choose either the Insert Ad or Insert Video tabs.  The Insert Ad tab goes beyond the capabilities of Qumana by suggesting common and high-paying keywords grouped by category in addition to a user’s own custom keywords.  Ads can still be customized with the Q-Ads Tool and frequently used settings saved for fast and easy reuse.

The Insert Video tab makes putting a YouTube video (and others like Kaneva or Google Video) into a blog post as easy and copy, paste, click.  Users can copy the code provided by YouTube, paste it into the entry box on the Insert Video tab and click okay to have the video embedded into the post.  Frequent YouTube contributors can use the combination of Q-Ads and this Insert Video capability to monetize their video work.

The Q-Ads tool works with Firefox 1.5.x and IE6.x and is supported on the Typepad, MoveableType, Angelfire, Tripod, self-installed Wordpress, Blogger, and Blogware blogging platforms.

3. Q-Ads Tool for Live Writer

Microsoft’s Live Writer blog editing tool has validated blogging as a publishing phenomenon that is here to stay.  As with many Microsoft products, Live Writer allows developers to add onto and augment the product through a published API.  Qumana has developed a plugin for Live Writer that allows Live Writer users to use Q-Ads as well as Qumana editor and Q-Ads Tool users.

Leveraging the ability of Live Writer users, like Qumana users, who prefer to edit and post through a client application, the Q-Ads for Live Writer plugin uses the same interface and codeset as the Q-Ads Tools for browsers.  Same interface, same flexibilty, same ease of use.

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There's always, and I mean always, an ongoing parade of acronyms and hypothetical measures applied to the notions of productivity and growth; a search for measures of some sort that can harness and describe the human activities that make up what we call work and business.

In recent years there has been significant attention focused on concepts such as  Human Capital, Customer Capital and Social Capital, amongst others.

A recent conversation I had with a couple of colleagues about the valuations of Web 2.0 companies stimulated some semi-random thoughts on my part.  We were talking about how to value a company, and they focused on the standard measures of "X times revenue" and "numbers of users".  I added a bit into the conversation about the emerging trend of putting one's customers to work, as in "user-generated this" or user-created that", noting that while YouTube was acquired for an enormous sum, there were also reports of YouTube working quietly behind the scenes to limit its exposure to copyright infringement litigation.

My guess, along with some other people, is that Google acquired YouTube as a means of supplementing and adding to the capabilities of Google Video.  Yes, they "acquired" a user base in a sense, but these "users" are the kind that can flit from one site or service or blog to the next without so much as a "Thank you, ma'am".  What I think Google was thinking about was the ease-of-use of YouTube and the ways that using YouTube will increase the flow of information in the form of sharing and circulating video clips, which will allow them to further penetrate and surround users with other Google services, all of which serve to lead more human interaction ... more mashups, more creations of "small pieces, loosely joined", and eventually some sort of persistent positioning within the Long Tail of all content ... they are or will be seeking some Return on Human Interaction (ROHI) in markets made up of "small targets, loosely joined".

I expect that there will come to be metrics and ratios that seek to define and clarify what kinds of interaction(s) lead to what kinds of decisions ... early signals that presage this idea can be found with RootMarkets (mining and monetizing attention as derived from click streams), Radar Networks (Nova Spivack), IBM's WebFountain initiative, BuzzLogic (mapping influence derived from content and connections), and others.

An additional perspective can be found in this NY Times article titled "Entrepreneurs See A Web Guided By Common Sense".

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Via the NY Times

Blogs Take Lead in Reporting Polling Problems, With Supporting Evidence on YouTube
By TOM ZELLER Jr., November 8, 2006

Blogs of all political stripes spent most of yesterday detailing reports of voting machine malfunctions and ballot shortages, effectively becoming an online national clearinghouse of the polling problems that still face the election system.

And in a new twist this year, many bloggers buttressed their accounts of electoral shenanigans with links to videos posted on the video Web site YouTube

Read the full article here ...

That's an environment custom-made for inserting relevant ads wherever you want to IN the content.

Try out Q-Ads and get accustomed to it.  We think that the ease of use and pacing ads close to content is going to become one of the ways many publishers will address "small targets, loosely joined".

Blogs are where the content provided by mainstream media circulates; more and more that is the case.  Become a Q-Ads user and help us get more profile, more ad impressions and a wider range and depth of ad inventory, for your use.

Tags: online advertising

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