Lucky me, Google was apparantly in the middle of a 'dance' when I changed blog hosting plans. As a result, I went from ~800 indexed pages to less than 200 (with another couple hundred indexed under my IP address -- joy).
Enter the Google Sitemap announcement a few weeks back; a convenient method to clue Google in on all of my site pages at once. Only one thing... I don't have time right now to blog, let alone set-up scripts or templates to auto-generate the XML they want.
So I went looking for web apps that would build one for me... and found quite a few. Unfortunately, only one (that I found) allowed more than 500 pages to be indexed, and that one didn't crawl below the path specified (very odd). So... I decided to drop one developer (Greg Tarrant of TarrantIT.com) a note, and he was kind enough to give me a hidden switch to generate a map with up to 1000 pages.
Greg hasn't released the 1K page version publicly for performance reasons, but honestly, his Google Sitemap Generator (which took < 2 minutes to dispatch and crawl 994 pages, and another 1.5 minutes to generate XML that Google accepted on its first try) was more than sufficient for my needs. Greg, thanks a ton!
Regular readers might remember that I was graciously included in the launch of Feedster's Media Network offering back in late April. At the time, I mentioned that I was experimenting with a variety of RSS ad providers, that I would run Feedster's ads on my blog until their RSS solution was ready, and that I'd report back on my results/findings.
Well, after roughly two months of poorly targeted contextual ads, I have a whopping $1.87 "pending" in my Feedster/Adbrite account. (It's pending because $1.87 isn't nearly enough to trigger a payout.) During the period, there were 14,253 impressions and 24 clicks, for a CTR of 0.00168 (or roughly a sixth of one percent), an effective (i.e., my share) CPC of $0.078, and an effective CPM of $0.13. I received zero offers to run ads directly on my site for the automatically computed price of $11.88/day or $285.00/mth; two notes on that... 1) who would given the published CTR of the house ads, and 2) I did zero to promote this myself, relying on the "your ad here" link to do its thing.
So, experiment over, and I'm moving on. Next up is Google Adsense (for the blog). It will sit in the same location as the Feedster/AdBrite ads, and will be Google's standard skyscraper form-factor. Details when I hit a comparable number of impressions (which may be a bit, as my Google traffic has fallen off significantly since the last dance).
On the RSS Ads front... still waitng for something compelling enough to turn you all into a bunch of guiena pigs... perhaps new options will be available after Gnomedex? ;-)
About a month ago, Bambi Francisco caught people's attention when she clued in to the possibility of Google becoming an online advertising exchange. As noted in her own piece, this isn't exactly original thinking:
"The idea of an exchange "has been kicking around since '95, but no one has ever been able to grab hold because publishers wanted to have control," said Rich LeFurgy, partner at WaldenVC and founding chairman of Interactive Advertising Bureau. "
Around the same time, PubSub's PR efforts were hitting on all cylinders, with write-ups on their 'traditional' and 'new' positioning by John Battelle, Charlene Li and Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek's Blogspotting.
PubSub's traditional positioning has always been... unique. It's a different beast than Feedster, Blogpulse and Technorati, as it discards the corpus and instead focuses on literal clipping alerts on a go-forward basis. (To be fair to the other services mentioned, all are capable of replicating PubSub's alert functionality through their own RSS persisted searches, at least at current usage volumes.) PubSub dubs its service "future search", which is much sexier than calling it a "clipping" or "matching engine".
In any event... PubSub's most recent efforts have been in helping to bootstrap structured blogging. Because of the potential for disruption (which I've written about, and been flattered to be interviewed about before), it's worth tying this all up once more:
1. Bambi focused on an online advertising exchange, primarily (IMO) by thinking about the opportunity from the current AdWords/AdSense capability perspective. It's critically important to understand that once we've abstracted to the point of an "offer" (via sufficiently structured/formatted content via structured blogging et al), and hence have the notion of an "offer exchange" making matches between decentralized market pariticpants... that paid listings = sponsored listings = classified listings = advertisements = offers.
2. As I wrote back in October of last year on the future of classified listings, decentralization of the marketplace is approaching: "Most importantly, IMO, the days of classified listing aggregation (e.g., Monster.com, Apartments.com, etc) are marked. Rather, an open offer exchange, fed by XML (i.e., RSS) formatted listings and needs, will route the right listings to the right people, based on all of the aforementioned parameters."
When you think about it from the perspective of "offers" vs. "advertisements", the need for traditional (exclusive distribution) publishers that LeFurgy mentions evaporates. In its place, we're left with the need for:
1. Sufficiently structured/formatted content. Plenty of work happening here...
2. The Exchange mechanism. PubSub and possibly its named competitors herein...
3. Payment. PayPal and perhaps soon, Google Wallet...
In addition to Dick's talk tomorrow, I'll be attending all of the "Track II" sessions of tomorrow's Supernova workshops, focused on decentralized commerce/marketplaces. I'll blog what I can when I can...
"And so, my request of Scoble, Winer, Anker, Lessig and the other blog-powers-that-be is this: let's get this right in the next iteration of RSS, Atom et al. Let's have a way for people to explicitly indicate codified licensing/permissions in their Feeds, for both their posts and for any enclosures. This is key to efforts like JD Lassica & Marc Canter's ourmedia.org project, and will likely only increase in importance as more and more "professional" use of blogs occurs."
Various people, confused about what RSS is (hint: it's just a file format, it doesn't have anything to do with copyright/fair-use law) commented on the post, as did Dick Costolo of Feedburner (who noted his service's ability to splice in machine-readable Creative Commons codes).
But while I see value in continuing to push for an automated means of encapsulating permissions for blogs, podcasts, etc, I'm not so naive as to know that such a solution will only keep the honest at bay. Those intent on stealing will ignore such devices and rationalize their behavior. Most interestingly then, from a social perspective, is what happens with piracy as more and more of us create and publish our own content; will those who complain about their content being used unlawfully rally behind the efforts (if not the specific tactics) of folks like the RIAA... or will they be hypocrites, protecting their content while stealing that of others? Interesting times, indeed...
Mike Torres of the MSN Spaces team was kind enough to respond to my post entitled, MSN Spaces, Meet XBOX 360. Mike asks, "What do you folks think about what Tony is saying here?"
Mike got a couple of thoughtful (and positive) responses on his blog... but like most of us, lacks the 'Scoble-sized readership' necessary to solicit a statistically significant response. :) Mike, FWIW, a few thoughtful people commented on my post via their own blogs, including:
Nathan Weinberg of BlogNewsChannel, who writes, "Sounds like a plan. Of course, Halo 2 outputs your stats as XML, which you can easily plug into your blog (you can see it in Major Nelson’s sidebar). I think everybody would love it if Microsoft put some of Tony’s ideas to use (and it would make the 360 more popular)."; and
Martin Visser of Visions of the Future, who writes, "This will be great! ... I also think that the combination of blogging, gaming, presence, IM and sharing photo's/video's will be a great feature!"
But (much) more importantly, Mike (finally [grin]) gave a clear answer on Microsoft's intentions around whether MSN Spaces would be part of a closed or open micro-content stack, stating:
"One thing I would like to correct though: we are not trying to be a walled garden of just MSN content. We had to make some hard cuts in our first couple of releases that "power-users" like me weren't thrilled about... But now we have an incredible infrastructure and deep domain knowledge, so the sky is the limit with where we take this platform. "
Mike, I'm sincerely thrilled to hear this (both that you guys are going to be more open in the future -- hopefully we'll hear the same from Yahoo! soon -- and that you're planning to bring more innovation to this space now that you've got your core infrastructure in place). Don't forget me when you're building out that beta list, eh? ;-)
Innovation is a "side-show" when it comes to Local Search. After all, Local Search is a "pitched battle", where success will be determined primarily by focusing on channel development and simplifying the offering to merchants.
Justin is, of course, completely right. And, completely wrong.
He's right in understanding the current mindset of SME's. As he correctly points out, most of these folks don't advertise, and those that do spend the bulk of their advertising dollars on print YP offerings. Print YP is a fairly straightforward buy; that is, its ~120 year existence means that everyone knows what it is, how it's used, and (likely) how it's priced. From the perspective of pushing an advertising offering at SME's, the YP model is a no-brainer.
But there is a pull aspect to advertising marketplaces as well; said another way, advertisers (eventually) follow their customers. Product and service innovation is key to this. Whether it's something as 'crazy' as 3D Mapping, as 'modest' as local reviews and referrals, or as 'disruptive' as making it all available while mobile, innovation is happening in Local offerings, which is both supporting and encouraging changing consumer needs/behaviors. This notion of innovation applies to advertising packaging and partnership formation too.
In the end, it's hard (and probably pointless) to argue against 'easy' or 'simple', especially when it comes to time-starved SMEs. But to completely divorce adoption from innovation ignores (and insults) the well understood past (when "no one" bought radio, TV, cable, YP or Internet advertising), the current (where lots of people are buying SEM ads that no one was buying 10 years ago, and newspapers are giving away classified listings that they were making a bundle from only too recently), and the future (where product, partnership, pricing and packaging innovation will create a value proposition whose push and pull will disrupt current assumptions and drive user and advertiser adoption). There's more than one way to get from here to there, and not all of it involves forcing a model that doesn't work; transitions are possible provided that value can be quantified and (easily) expressed.
Appearantly, I come across as a cheap huckster (emphasis mine):
"We're a small company that creates [REMOVED] plugins for all the popular [REMOVED]. You may have heard of [REMOVED], our most well-known [REMOVED], which has had 11+ million downloads since its initial release. We currently have a partnership with folks such as Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, and a couple others. Anyway, we have just released [REMOVED] and are very excited about it.
We'd like to issue you a free license for [REMOVED] (normally priced at $30). If you like it, all we ask in return is that you write a blurb to your users about it (which we think would be very relevant to them, given the content of your blog).
We have a free full-featured trial version of [REMOVED] available for download on our website, [REMOVED], so your users don't need to buy anything in order to check it out. Thanks for your time and I hope to hear back from you soon."
If you want to offer me free software, I'm fine with it. Just know that a) I'll decide if I want to write about it, b) I'll disclose that you gave me a freebie to incent me, and c) I'll write honestly about it. I kindly suggest that you change the terms of your offer when dealing with people who value their integrity beyond the reach of your marketing budget.
I'm filling out a survey on blogs being conducted by MIT's Media Lab as I write this... It's very interesting... in addition to asking me the basic demographic details, it asked for the URL to my blog... then scraped five links from it for me to classify (is it a link to another blog, my own blog, a newspaper story, etc...) and give deep details (do I know the blog author, have I ever met them, when was the last time I talked/IM'ed with them, etc).
Unfortunately, the survey creator thought a bit too narrowly, at least for the links they pulled off of my blog. One was to a MSFT Channel 9 video (on the new MSFT mapping solution) and another was a book title link to Amazon; neither are reasonably supported by the survey options given, and, really, seemingly distort the data set.
I've emailed Cameron Marlow to find out if they'll be publishing the raw data set (obviously this will be very interesting data); I'll update when I get a reply. If you didn't get an invite (don't feel bad, it appears to be pretty random) you can request one here.
Update: The end of the survey says... "Results for the study will be posted to this website (blogsurvey.media.mit.edu) as soon as the study ends and the results are compiled, probably sometime in mid-July."
Update 2: The MIT Weblog Survey results have been posted. Worth a review. Most striking to me? The most popular answer to "How much longer will you maintain your weblog?" was "Hard to tell". Hmm... Cameron, would still be nice to get the "raw" result data, so that we can do cross-tabs by age, gender, etc.
Analysis of online business and technology trends, including: Search and Directory, Digital Media, Social Networking, RSS, and E-commerce. Written by buzzhit!'sTony Gentile.
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