slamboard

So some recently created YouTube videos now have a banner ad that is translucent and comes up across the bottom 15-20% of the video after it begins to play. I saw the same thing on a Revver video, except theirs has a close button, and a text link going out to the advertiser. The Revver video also had a screen with three contextual ads at the end of the video.

Here is an embed of the video that I viewed on Revver this morning. The first ad is actually determined in part by my location on the planet.

I am curious as to whether YouTube will be adding advertising to older videos that may have been embedded by bloggers before this advertising model was initiated.

Back to Revver, I remembered that I had actually uploaded a video to Revver some time ago, I checked and it does have ads at the end now. I am not sure how the revenue sharing works for this. I will update this post if I see any money in the future

Edit: While checking my Revver account to see if i had ever made any money, I noted that I had dozens of messages on my dashboard. One of them was an announcement of the new advertising features. It was sent to me back in October of 2007, so this post is not news to anyone who was paying attention.

I was just checking out a global internship placement agency. I was surprised to see that they have an office on Second Life. Students and companies can sit down for a free consultation in that virtual environment during their regular business hours. I personally wouldn’t feel like I was really doing business in that kind of environment. When I did some research, I found that it really does seem like more of a gimmick than a real business tool. One business even had some over the top stereotypical receptionists.

Second Life has opened an office (IRL) in China. I can’t see Second Life being very successful in that totalitarian state.

I have been critical of scientology in the past on this blog and elsewhere. The organization that sometimes calls itself a religion and sometimes doesn’t is presently under attack by a disorganized group of people who revel in the power of the mob without apology or reflection. The fact that they are focused on a big, bad target at the moment does not make them the good guys. They have been known to wreak havoc on an individual’s online activities and personal privacy for the simple reason that the individual was enjoying what the group perceived as unwarranted celebrity. Another group of people who get attacked are randomly chosen from a list of hacked passwords for MySpace and other social websites.

I am in no way optimistic about their attack on scientology because I know that the group has a very short collective attention span. The only meme that doesn’t get old is complaining about old memes.

I am not an expert in the field of email marketing. In fact, I don’t think I have ever done anything that could even be loosely defined as email marketing. I guess I should have assumed that its continued prevalence was an accurate indication of its continued importance. Effective email marketing has nothing to do with spam. If you think about how you interact with spam, you can pretty much conclude that it is ineffective.

Don’t be fooled by the unassuming name,software projects is in the business of taking startup companies and getting them to #1 on Google. Well, that’s a bit of an oversimplification but I got it straight from one of their testimonials.

Something that they are really proud of is their Email Marketing API. I think that many of us have lost sight of the fact that email is still on of the most effective marketing tools on the Internet. That is understandable given the fact that our inboxes are overflowing with junk from people that are doing it WRONG. One great thing about email marketing is the very MEASURABLE return on investment. You have to also consider the fact that you don’t have to invest much capital into an email campaign compared to some other sales generating efforts.

Software Projects has an API that allows you to effectively manage bounces and unsubscribes. It also helps you to manage groups and the e-mail addresses that are contained within them. You can easily trigger mass e-mails and retrieve reporting data. Generating leads and retaining customers are typical business goals that can be achieved with effective email marketing.

The best way to avoid ending up in the spam box is to not be spam. Welcome to oversimplification number two

Actually, simplification seems to be one of the main goals of Software Projects. They have integrated 81 different services into one management tool for internet marketers. They have a free trial for their services.

I want to compare and contrast two very different instances of crowdsourcing for you. One is the exposure of the Kimkins fraud. The other is the Anonymous attack on the church of scientology that is being talked about in the papers today.

I am 99.9% certain that there is no overlap in the participants. Anonymous is a shadowy collective that is mostly comprised of technically savvy teenage misanthropes. They are, by their own headcount, legion. I brought up their recent activities to a young man in their demographic this morning and he advised me that they are just looking for attention. He was surprised when I told him that papers of record were discussing their attack on scientology. According to him, the media are giving them what they want.

There has been an element of anonymity in the Kimkins controversy, but some of the most active and effective people are not anonymous. I think the rascally teens that comprise Anonymous might be a bit impressed if they found out about the incredible crowdsourcing effort that found all those Russian Bride Pictures.

Both groups incorporate humor into their activities, although they have serious goals. Sometimes Anonymous behaves badly. Jeannie Baitinger referred to the anti-kimkins people as terrorists on more than one occasion, one of which was on national television.

I have been on the periphery of something that was attacked by Anonymous before and I realized that while they have strength in numbers, their Achilles heel is their inability to have a sustained interest in any one target. In fact, I think they abandon their efforts as soon as the attention that the crave begins to wane. If the people who put in the effort to expose the Kimkins fraud had the same attitude, big things might not have happened.

I have been critical of scientology on a regular basis and I have very little sympathy for their plight now that hundreds of thousands of hackers are trying to bring them down. I won’t shy away from being critical of Anonymous either. They have many interests and activities that are beyond the pale with regard to societal norms. For the most part, Kimkins detractors are the kind of people who represent societal norms.

January is traditionally a time when there is a huge increase in the number of people searching for online weight loss strategies. If you are looking for a good place to start your search for a diet, you might consider looking at www.weight-loss-diet-help.com. This site features reviews and coupons for Nutrisystem, Weight Watchers, South Beach Diet, Jillian Michaels, eDiets.com, Medifast and Diet To Go.

If you want to have any hope of living up to your weight loss resolution, you need to find a diet that fits well with your lifestyle. If you are already big on convenience foods, you might prefer a diet like Nutrisystem that allows you to order a bunch of portion controlled calorie reduced meals online. Weight Watchers also sells convenient meals. I don’t know which ones taste better. I do know that there is a 25% off Weight Watchers Online coupon offer that expires at the end of this month. There are some freebies related to Nutrisystem that you can get through Weight Loss Diet Help.

I have never dieted with weight loss in mind. I was almost sort of eating Atkins when Catherine was following it. The occasional muffin eaten at work kinda disqualifies me (ok, I ate lots of carbs outside the house). She is a great cook and enjoys putting together a great meal, so a diet like Atkins that doesn’t restrict you to specially packaged diet meals was a much better fit. The doctor’s book was the only purchase made from Atkins.

I try to do a reasonable amount of social networking in the blogosphere. This, obviously, involves reading what other bloggers post. Some bloggers make frequent posts of 500 words or less… sometimes much less. Occasionally, I find blogs with very long posts of 1500 to 2500 words. I have to be really engaged by the subject matter to read that many words. If it is a subject of which I have a strong opinion, I sometimes resort to skimming with the intention of finding a point on which to comment.

I think I will start drafting a very long blog post now, just to see if the practice is worthwhile. I am not going to write a really long blog post about really long blog posts, that would be silly.

Right now, there is a window of opportunity to become an early adopter and also an affiliate for Net Audio Ads. After February 1st you will not be able to get in on the top tier of this revenue generating idea. When you get free affiliate status you stand to get a cut of the ad revenue from the people that you refer and also the people that they refer. I am going to briefly introduce the concept of these audio ads and how they can generate income. The company has a very long sales letter that you can opt in to receive. I recently saw a blog post of moderate length discussing the effectiveness of long versus short sales letters and I was surprised to learn that the long ones actually work better.

Anyway, the most basic thing I can say to fellow bloggers and webmasters is that these 5 second audio ads earn you money from every single visitor. Most of us have a blog or site with Google ads and we know how paltry the revenue can be sometimes. I place my Google ads on my page in a way that is transparent and unobtrusive. My regular readers probably only notice them when my content has triggered some laughably off base ‘contextual’ advertising. I removed a post reviewing some kind of colon cleanser when I did some extra research on the company and found out that it’s owner was a favorite subject of the quackwatch guy. Even though I removed the post, my sidebar was covered in colon cleanser Google ads for weeks. I wanted to see if anybody had a product that would cleanse my blog of these ads. I listened to the sample audio ads and I was impressed by the quality and tone. I don’t think they would offend my readers. Worries about putting of readers are the main disincentives that bloggers have when it comes to advertising. These audio ads are going to be contextual as well. I hope they attract advertisers that have excellent products and entertaining slogans. I hope the colon cleanser people stick to text ads.

I remember back when I was a little kid hearing Rod Roddy mentioning something about California Emissions when he was gushing about A NEW CAR!!! on The Price is Right. I was living up in rural Canada where people where still tearing the catalytic converters off of their pickup trucks and I was mystified by the importance of these things. California is a big state with a huge economy and its progressive legislation usually reaches beyond its own borders.

The EPA recently refused to allow California to enact new laws regulating CO2 emissions from automobiles. The most recent news related to the fight between the agency charged with protecting the environment and the state of California involves EPA infighting. The word is that staff felt compelled to tell the EPA Administrator that the decision will likely be reversed by a federal judge.

I knew before I even looked it up that this administrator had been given his job by the GWB administration. I was surprised to see that he was a 27 year veteran of the EPA. Before that he worked as the Director of Operations at Hazelton Laboratories Corporation, a lab that has more recently been accused of rampant primate abuse. I don’t know if they were smashing monkey heads under his watch.

I think that SweetIM would really appeal to my kids. They are constantly nagging me to upgrade my MSN messenger so that the crazy smileys that they send will work. I am a bit of a Luddite when it comes to messenging. Well, that’s not exactly true, I was a relatively early adopter. I remember being very amused when someone in my house added Monty Python sound effects to their ICQ back last century. It got old eventually.

I am just not that easily impressed by flashy extras. When I use it, it is not an outlet for self expression that requires me to have animated farting Englishman at the ready. I just want to send messages. They actually made a rule against MSN at my last Joe job.

If tricked out messenging is your thing, you should have a look at SweetIM. Their stuff works with MSN, AIM & Yahoo Messengers, Yahoo email, Gmail, Hotmail, Blogs, Forums, and Social Networks. And as you can see in my screenshot, they are like the last advancement in humorous self expression before the inevitable launch of IM base smell’o'vision.

Basically, when you install their software, it allows you to add Emoticons, other graphics and even sounds to your chats.