slamboard

The music industry has changed a lot as the information age has come to fruition. 25 years ago, this Florida band would not be have music available to everybody on the planet free of charge on Myspace. 25 years ago, you probably would not hear about a band like Megaphone outside of their local market. I say ‘probably’ because there was always that faint hope of getting a major record deal and cashing in/selling out. The silver lining in today’s music industry is the death of the power ballad. Band’s like Megaphone are not being pressured by suits to record a sappy song that makes them feel like cutting off their own air supply. Rock on, dudes.

You can, at your own discretion, buy Megaphone music online.

I used to work for a Fair Trade Coffee company. I think labeling is vitally important to that business because they had to effectively differentiate the product from all the conventional coffee on the shelf. Since part of the branding was environmental responsibility, packaging decisions had to preclude any of the wasteful, gimmicky stuff. When I worked there, they were opting for unlabeled bags from a large domestic manufacturer. They then had a local printer mass produce self adhesive labels in huge quantity and they contracted a workshop that employs mentally disabled people to put labels on bags on a weekly as needed basis.

Labelworldusa.com can make your Wine Label or other label in large quantity. If it makes more sense for you to print your own, they have solutions of various capacities for that as well. They have design services and they know about branding.

I like the idea of insert labels made with FDA approved food safe inks. They allow for more flexibility with your food packaging decisions.

The seven figure sales at Kimkins.com were due in no small part to the favorable coverage in Woman’s World Magazine. This publication has huge circulation, and the print versions will often sit in waiting rooms and salons enjoying months or years of repeated perusal. People seeking to expose the Kimkins fraud did not get very far in trying to convince Woman’s World to make any kind of reversal or apology. We personally received no answers to our questions last year and instead got a cease and desist order. In response to the letter, I made changes to the cover image that I was using to make it arguably transformative. There was no follow up from the magazine. I didn’t send any further correspondence to them. Many, many interested people did.

After a long wait, the magazine has finally apologized in detail, on their website. A print apology is also forthcoming. I thank them for it.

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.

Hi, thank you for coming here to read my blog. I appreciate every reader. I enjoy your feedback and I like to think that I am writing something that you will enjoy. I do not, at this time (January 15th, 2008), make any money as a direct consequence to your welcomed visit.

If I had Net Audio Ads on my blog, you would hear a 5 second audio advertisement from someone who had bid for placement in the network in much the same way that advertisers bid for Google ads. NetAudioAds™ Pay-Per-Play advertising has been up and running for a while and the HUGE difference with these ads is that a webmaster or blogger gets paid for everyone who visits.

I listened to the sales pitch for the affiliate program. This program is FREE, but they are only accepting signups until February 1st.

I am tempted… and I am going to think long and hard about the concept. I suggest that anyone reading this who has a blog or website check it out as well. If you start a discussion about it, I predict that someone will suggest that the ads will reduce your return readership. I remember a lot of complaining about Adsense ads in the beginning, too. There were lots of webmasters who rode their high horses around for years about it. I think the VAST majority of internet users accept them as a normal and ubiquitous part of the landscape now. Just like with TV and radio ads, some people take notice of them and some people ignore them. It is kind of sad that so many of us bloggers include contextual ads on our sites when they only generate pennies for most of us. I like the idea of being paid when an audio ad is played on my site regardless of whether or not the reader is listening. I am still apprehensive about the possibility of offending my readers. I know that I don’t like it when I accidentally run the cursor across those stupid smileys that scream Oh My GOD, No WAY?!?!?

If you have the same sort of opinions on this, you should go in as far as the long sales letter because there is a link to some actual ad clips there. They are actually pretty easy on the ears. Obviously, I was expecting to hear them, but I think they are carefully designed to be a moderate intrusion.

I went to a diet site that I was thinking about possibly reviewing and I found myself slightly offended by the degree to which the web designer had attempted to make the Google Ads look like content. I don’t want to be accused of hypocrisy, I have ads by Google on this blog. They are placed on the page in a very conventional way. I have seen a discussion in the blogosphere in which someone said that a page looks naked to them without these standard, unobtrusive contextual ads.

Anyway, I don’t put ads inside the body of my blog posts, even though that is an accepted practice. The website that I am criticizing has a landing page in which the title indicates that a list is to follow. The title even has a colon at the end. Immediately below the title are a series of ads. When the content starts below the ads, they are almost identical in size and format to the ads. It seems deceptive and dishonest to me.

Below the jump on this page is a long form sales pitch for the Magnetic Diet, which seems to be a scam.

This needs to be seen.

I am posting this because of it’s implications about how big business is in control of how news is reported. I don’t want to be alarmist about the story that FOX killed at the behest of Monsanto. I have a degree in agriculture and I was part of a big discussion about the use of hormone injections in the dairy industry in one of my classes. My professor was very much in favor of the practice. This was during the period of time in which it was unclear which way the Canadian government agency was going to swing on this issue. The use of low levels of antibiotics in feed for animals that are raised for meat production is, in my mind, a much greater human risk and it is a practice that is widespread.

Canada prohibits the use of rbST because of its adverse health effects on cows, not humans.

Do you have a message that you would like to have printed on a tiny piece of paper and dropped onto the heads of drunken New Yorkers? Act fast this page that allows you to submit a New Years Message to be delivered in this unique fashion has a fast approaching deadline.

I was a bit dismayed when I saw a blogger telling a bald faced lie on the official Google blog. If you read the official Google blog and you truly believe that NORAD tracks Santa with Google, I have some news for you. There is no Santa Claus. Your parent or legal guardian wrote that letter from Santa apologizing for not being able to get a Wii

A drawn out writers strike may become a catalyst for the implosion of American network television. Television is driven by advertisement and it is filled with as much advertisement as people can stomach. Once viewers tune out the ad money will dry up followed by a accelerated deterioration in program quality. I think this will happen. I also think that much like what happened with AM radio, television will not disappear. What will happen is that it will become something else. I don’t watch television and I haven’t for about 3 years. There are a few guilty pleasures that I view on YouTube now and then but I am mostly unaware of what is on television now.