Ian Lurie has a great list of things you shouldn’t do in Internet marketing. It’s worth bookmarking.
Ian tells you not to:
And much more.
Link.
Want to broadcast your own call-in talk radio show? No problem. Thanks to BlogTalkRadio you can. Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz reports the site is drawing 2.4 million visitors a month, and giving lots of folks like us a new voice.
Most shows are hosted from home by bloggers who need no special equipment and pay no fee. The only requirement is that they put a link to the program on their Web site. On BlogTalkRadio’s site, visitors can search for programs by name or category.
The process is nearly idiot-proof. The host logs on to a Web page with a password, types in when he wants the show to air, and then — using a garden-variety phone — calls a special number. The computer screen lists the phone numbers of guests or listeners calling in, and the host can put as many as six on the air at once by clicking a mouse. Listeners can download a podcast version later.
Is thoughtsignals radio in the future? Maybe (after grad school) — stay tuned.
(Hat tip to my colleague Kathryn who first brought this to my attention.)
Cnet has an interesting interview with John Battelle, founder of the blog network Federated Media and an expert on Google, online publishing and other things. He says what I’ve been thinking for years, and what makes the Internet so interesting to me as a writer:
I believe even more than ever in the value and quality of content. What I think has changed is that the creation of content, and I’m using content very broadly here to include services as well as traditional approaches to content…but I think the creation of content has decoupled in the last five years. Decoupled from the media business–I mean Viacom, Time Inc, CNET, Wired, Condé Nast–and that decoupling means that talented producers of content, for the first time have access to distribution, tools of production, and the ability to actually execute and produce their own content without having to attach themselves to traditional media businesses.
Link.
Where’s the boundary between you and machine, between the gray matter in your skull and the digital technology that governs the Internet and so much else in modern life? It may be harder to find than you think.
What is spreading through the Web is not exactly artificial intelligence. For all the research that has gone into cognitive and computer science, the brain’s most formidable algorithms — those used to recognize images or sounds or understand language — have eluded simulation. The alternative has been to incorporate people, with their special skills, as components of the Net.
Link.
A Swedish computer security researcher has discovered that users of the TOR Internet service (which makes your Internet traffic more or less anonymous) apparently thought it also encrypted their computer traffic and made it secure — which it doesn’t.
Wired News reports:
A little over a week ago, Swedish computer security consultant Dan Egerstad posted the user names and passwords for 100 e-mail accounts used by the victims, but didn’t say how he obtained them. He revealed Friday that he intercepted the information by hosting five Tor exit nodes placed in different locations on the internet as a research project.
Egerstad was able to get email accounts and passwords and read emails sent by the worthies at the Iranian embassy, among other groups. Even though Egerstad is in Sweden and there were no U.S. government agencies whose Internet traffic he intercepted, the Web host that hosts his blog apparently got a take-down notice from some unnamed U.S. law enforcement agency. I wonder if Egerstad has revealed a U.S. intelligence gathering mechanism.
There’s another lesson in this, of course: This computer security stuff shouldn’t be taken lightly, and there’s a big dangerous world out there. Use good passwords. And use ‘https’ when you’re doing anything online that involves passwords or email you want to keep confidential.
Advertising Age’s Bob Garfield is writing a book online titled “Listen.”
Because it turns out that all those guys with the PowerPoint presentations you’ve been sitting through for the past three years – you know, the ones insisting “The consumer is in control” – are absolutely right. The consumer (and voter and citizen) is in control: of what and when she watches, of what and when she reads, of whether to pay any attention to you whatsover or to make your life a living hell. This might be an excellent time, therefore, to listen to what she has to say. And it sure wouldn’t hurt to make her your friend.
Introduction to the project here, first installment, and second installment.
Warren Ellis has a short, but insightful, set of points on what he’s calling ‘burst culture.’ None of this, as he points out, is new. But many, many people in traditional print media still don’t get it. It’s all basic economics: low barriers to entry, easy monetization, etc.
I love print. I love magazines that commit and pay for long articles and long fiction. The web rewards neither approach. It’s a packeted medium, a surf medium. Short bursts are the way to go. The web isn’t a replacement medium — it’s *another” medium. That said, if your concept of a magazine is something designed in one-page bursts, or three pages that only carry 500 words due to the mass of images, then, really, you’re not doing anything the web can’t do better, are you?
Despite the success of magazines like the New Yorker in the last few years notwithstanding, many print publishers seem to believe the future is in imitating the kind of content the Web does best. Maybe we should be rethinking that approach.
Link.
How to make money from online real estate. Here’s a follow-up to yesterday’s post on domain name king Kevin Ham. Another domain name buy-up company, NameMedia, also has plans to turn some of its domain names into actual online media companies of some sort.
NameMedia recently finished building technology where visitors to niche sites — say, one on 1957 Mustangs — will be presented with links to other sites with similar images. The links will be between sites within the NameMedia network, but Mr. Conlin said that an unnamed Internet photo-sharing service with more than five million monthly users would soon join.
Link.
I would like to think I would have been smart enough to do something like this. As the Dire Straits song goes, it’s almost “money for nothing.” Kevin Ham has made a fortune, and seems intent on building a bigger business yet, based on Internet domain names.
Trained as a family doctor, he put off medicine after discovering the riches of the Web. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue. (Like all his financial details, Ham would neither confirm nor deny this figure.)
The Business 2.0 article includes a sidebar with tips for folks that still want to get in on the domain biz themselves.
Link.
Just kidding. I’d love to have your ads (maybe, we can talk).
But for advertisers wary of placing ads in places where the content may be unpredictable and perhaps inappropriate, Feedburner has introduced AdClimate. The tool enables advertisers to identify key words that are problematic and keep their ads off posts that contain those key words.
By way of example, let’s say you have an aversion to the word, “wingnut” and the thought of your ad for pinenuts showing up in a publisher’s blog post about the history of wingnuts would be totally unacceptable (hey - who are we to judge?) AdClimate to the rescue. In addition to screening a multi-language default list of inappropriate language, advertisers can submit their own list of keywords next to which they don’t want their ad to appear - wingnuts and all.
Do other online ad providers, like Google, do this? I don’t know. I bet this will be popular, though.
Link.