I have to admit, I often find myself in marvel of the way that advertising works – especially online advertising. We’ve become so accustomed to where the things are hidden we don’t even see them. I’ve noted this many times as I explained to others how dire I think the situation is for our potential customers. It’s nice to have some research to back it up:

An eye-tracking study conducted by the Nielsen/Norman Group finds Internet users avoid viewing banner ads. Text advertising is read more often than display ads, according to the research.Banner blindness means Internet users focus on the content on a page and ignore the advertisements. This is especially true for bright, flashing ads, and other units that are not relevant to what the user is interested in reading, the researchers found

Research: Internet Users Plagued by ‘Banner Blindness’

technorati tags:bannerads, advertising, research, internet

Jeremy Ballenger raises some interesting questions about x:posted, and more precisely, about the methods and tactics that should be used in raising the Intention Economy barn.

…seems a little like consignment sales, sell-side driven to provide a service to buyers. Intention (going by Doc’s idea) is more like buyers yelling ‘I want to buy X‘ and sellers falling over themselves to get to you. X:posted is a central respository or market for sellers – buyers visit and sample the wares. In other words, you still have to go to them. Similar sites are eLance and Guru.I might have misinterpreted Doc’s original idea, but to me something like x:posted or Shel’s approach is close, but not quite there. A functioning intention economy, and for the moment we are restricted to discussing web-enabled commerce, seems to essentially be a search problem. On reflection, my earlier thoughts on this were a little off in describing buyer searches. I think it might actually work the other way, through seller search, buyer filters and maybe even the intelligent use of something like tags.

think mojo

I think he’s right, based on what’s presented in this post. I think we’ve come a long way in terms of the definition of what we’re building and the direction in which we’re moving towards with Social Roots – definitely the thesis is much deeper.

However, Jeremy goes on to add some more fuel to the mixture.

With the increasing use of tags, blog uptake and developments in search technology, this is an example that may have some legs. Ideally, an independent operation would develop the vendor search technology under open source (GNU), alongside parallel development of a plugin for bloggers providing ‘intention tags’. I’ve got nothing against Google (aside from the whole censorship-in-China-thing), but a benefit of the intention economy should be lower transaction costs.

think mojo

The remainder begins an open consideration of providing more and more value to third parties. I think we’ve seen this problem many times over. For example, one point he seems to lay out is that independent parties can come along, spider the web, and essentially sell leads against it. That’s probably great news – for all the usual players. The incentive to search, parse, and store data on resources that makes you know money is considerable and eventually – no one’s indexing people looking for Irish Wool, just home refinance.

As for the disparity in costs for these systems, as noted “The more
cash you have, the better search technology you can afford.” the
reality is that that’s a two-way street. You’ll also need bath tubs
full of cash to index the world to find the valuable intentions.

At the same time, we have another pit to overcome – incentive. This problem correlates nicely to the barriers being faced by the Structured Blogging / Microformats groups. Why exactly do I bother to markup this data? Why do I add work to my workflow? Is there an inventive for me other than being a better citizen? Once that’s proven, there’s more traction in all directions.

We’ve had to spend considerable time as we’ve built Social Roots to understand how to create enough value for the user without having cold, hard cash. It’s very difficult and we don’t know if it will work. Chicken and egg indeed.

I recommed everyone join in on this conversation. There’s quite a lot at stake here.

technorati tags:structured+blogging, microformats, economy, intention+economy, doc+searls, marketplaces, socialroots

Last night, I attended the 1-year anniversary party for microformats. Luckily, I got to catch up with a few people I hadn’t seen in a while, especially Rohit (I love that guy). Anthony rolled down with me and came through in a pinch to lead the music for the first hour and a half – serious thanks to him for setting the tone.

Today – why not yesterday? – Yahoo! has announced that they are now even more broadly supporting microformats throughout the Yahoo! Local site.

Starting today, we’re happy to announce Yahoo! Local fully supports the hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews. There are a few reasons behind this change, which for now, will be transparent to almost everyone.

Yahoo! Local & Maps Blog » Blog Archive » We Now Support Microformats

Admittedly, microformats are still pretty geeky in nature and we haven’t really seen serious movement in collecting them and leveraging them (for good and evil undoubtedly), but it will happen. SocialRoots will have microformats everywhere we can put them – I can promise that much right now and make good on it in a few days ;)

technorati tags:microformats, yahoo, hCard, hReview, hCal

There is a really interesting piece done today in the Washington Post that talks about the increasing encroachment of the Internet on Mainstream Media (MSM). There are a number of interesting passages that I’ve pulled out as they speak to the trends and the business realities.

There is a love-hate relationship, probably skewing more towards hate, with MSM and the rest of us. There’s countless greanades lobbed over the fences – we complain they’re useless, they complain we’re not journalists and the other raft of issues that continue to force misaligned visions and the subsequent opportunities.

Mainstream news organizations, shaken by the erosion of their viewers, readers and advertisers, and only hesitantly embracing the new media, still have significant strengths in the digital journalism world. Though their economic situation is serious, and perhaps critical, it’s not over yet. What is over is the era of the well-staffed, single-medium newsroom with once-a-day or even once- an-hour deadlines.

First, The Bad News

That’s a hard conclusion for many in the news business to handle. Newspapers, the biggest and oldest segment of the mainstream media, are built on the work of creative, contentious and quick-witted people, but also of curmudgeons who resist change.Newsrooms shrunk by layoffs and battered by bloggers, are seeing their traditional audiences shrink. Daily newspapers lost 1.2 million readers in the six months that ended in March, down to 45.5 million. Online newspaper readership grew to 56 million.

As the Internet Grows Up, the News Industry Is Forever Changed

Interestingly enough, despite the talk of audiences, what they really mean is eyeballs – right? Is anyone really dealing with the relationship that’s held and the realities of maintaining that connection and loyalty over an extended period of time?

The news media’s advantage in advertising is that it’s a mass medium, but online users may gravitate to online-only sites for autos, real estate or jobs. Craigslist, Monster or eBay, among others, offer free listings or make comparison shopping much easier.The competition between old-media and new-media companies for advertising dollars is not a foregone conclusion. Craigslist.com is estimated to have cost the San Francisco Chronicle $50 million in lost classified revenue in 2004. But the biggest information provider in almost every market is the newspaper, and the second biggest is the newspaper’s Web site.Readers clearly are headed online, in some cases replacing both print and television with the Internet as their main source of news.

As the Internet Grows Up, the News Industry Is Forever Changed

We’re hearing the sound of metal crunching as the big machine slows down a halt. If we are intending to compete with MSM, doesn’t some part of how they survived impact our own survival? We want their audiences, their eyeballs but what do we intend to come of that?

Technology has driven behavioral changes, as reporters, producers, photographers and editors learn that interactivity in the form of e-mail, blogs, polls, hyperlinks, Videologs, podcasts and news delivered via cell phones can open their work up to a newer and bigger audience, for better or worse. It’s far easier for a reader to find a reporter now than it was in the past; it’s also easier for a story published overseas or in a local or regional outlet to have a bigger impact. No longer are readers or viewers bound by network broadcast schedules, the delivery of a newspaper or magazine or the top-of-the-hour radio headlines.What worries professional journalists above all else is whether what replaces the newsroom of today will support the journalism of tomorrow.

As the Internet Grows Up, the News Industry Is Forever Changed

A new age of technology – most of it free and widely available. Are we maximizing the benefits of our new, shiny tools or are we still applying the old physics?

My biggest concern with our continuous comparison to MSM is that it keeps us in the secondary position. The more we use the terms and metrics of their industry, the more leverage we ultimately create for them. MSM is filled with many bright, intelligence minds that have quite a bit to lose – never corner a wounded animal they say.

Said differently, are we really painting them into the corner or simply showing them where the corners are? I hope we can apply all our smarts to find the alternative pathways.

technorati tags:socialmedia, media, msm, advertising, readership, audiences

I received a link to this article this morning from a great friend and part-time advisor. It’s an article about how Sony Music has created a new service, called the MusicBox, that is actively encouraging bloggers to use their content as a source of inspiration.

But Sony will also actively encourage fan sites and bloggers–who are mostly used to receiving cease-and-desist letters from studios–to link to the material. Links for adding Musicbox content are displayed on the site. Individuals thus could create sites focused around certain artists by linking to video channels on the Musicbox site dedicated to them, or link to several channels which, in the aggregate, comprise the most mawkish artists (in the view of the blogger) that Sony has to offer.

…

[Jeremy Allaire says] “The media organizations are starting to embrace the idea that their library of assets can be exploited through thousands of touch points,” he said. “It is an opportunity to embrace that urge among consumers to post videos.”

Source: News.com, “Sony Music wants bloggers to promo videos, music“

Can anyone say crowdsourcing?

I can’t say much more about what we’re planning to do with this same industry – opting to build it instead of talk about it, but I’m really pleased to see them making this move at this point in time.

The BloggerCon IV schedule has been announced. There are some interesting topics listed, but one caught my eye: How to Make Money led by John Palfrey. He’s written his introductory post which is worth a read. In it he states:

If you are a blogger, how do you go about making some money from your work? One obvious answer is the classic approach of throwing BlogAds or Google ads or whathaveyou ads on your blog. That works for some people, but it generates more than beer money only for a select few at the left-hand side of that famous power law distribution.

…

I trust that we’ll kick around these ideas, but also get into some new possibilities: shouldn’t really simple syndication allow for some new thinking around getting people to pay for the content you create? And are there ways for bloggers themselves to get on the bandwagon of making some of the money that the venture guys are planning to make? How could that work, exactly? Put another away: lots of people have spent lots of digital ink (sound and images too) on the general problem of “how do you monetize the long tail?”

Source: John Palfrey, “The ‘How to Make Money” Session at Bloggercon”

Naturally, I’m planning to attend this session. If anyone’s tried to figure out how to make money from blogging it’s certainly me – I’m building an entire company that helps bloggers make money.

At the same time, though, I’m somewhat conflicted. I seem to recall some time ago, at a previous BloggerCon, that Dave Winer openly told someone (Chris Nolan I believe), that she didn’t want to make money from her blog, she wanted to make it from the various things that come from having a blog (consulting, gigs, jobs – hey, aren’t those all the same?).  But I could be wrong.

It also strikes me as odd that, considering there are people trying to develop solutions in this arena (many more than just me)  that their knowledge and a dialogue with those audiences might be extremely relevent.  Aren’t the folks that go to BloggerCon largely the people at the top of the game (present company excluded) or otherwise already monetizing in some way?

Just a bit confusing – but I’m glad to see it regardless.

We’re working to make some adjustments to the tagging system in Social Roots. The problem is that there are a number of different approaches to tagging as it stands. I’ll dump them into two categories:

• Delicious Model – this approach pretty much doesn’t allow spaces in tags but does allow you to combine tags and to have nice, usable URLs. This is the model we have used.
• Flickr Model – this approach allows for more “wordy” tags but also doesn’t really give the option to combine them.

Of course, now that we have been letting some people use the system, we’re seeing lots of interesting behavior in the tagging input that has happened. We find now that we’re want some guidance from the community as to what we should consider the right behavior.

• Tags will be converted to all lowercase
• Tags are delimited by spaces – commas are converted automatically to spaces
• Tags can contain any alphanumeric character and the hyphen, underscore, and colon
  Commas and plusses are converted to spaces automatically
• Tags are limited to 10 for a specific profile

Have you worked on a system like this? Do you have preferences for how it should work? Let us know.

After much consideration and elbow grease (ok it took me 2 hours to roll in the design through the entire blog), version 2 is now live for SocialTwister. If you’re viewing in a news reader, click on over and see for yourself.

Before talking about the site, I must thank a couple of folks in particular:

• Jimmie – I could never have gotten all that content over here without your help man. It was a seriously challenging 3-4-day long battle at the sea – but the wicked white whale has finally succumb
• David Bissett – you’re a champ when it comes to wrangling HTML in a pinch. I’ve yet to meet someone that gets it done in the time you have without complaint.
• Daniel Arsenault - the mastermind behind the Social Roots logo (as well as every other brand concept I’ve created in the last 4 years). This is definitely by far the best logo we’ve done and the sheer number of e-mails, IMs, and phone calls only confirms it.

So now onto the design. I hope you like it for many different reasons. First, it’s using the layout and design of our first application due on Saturday. Second, it’s showing off our new logo in probably the most visible spot yet – but there’s lots more coming. Lastly, it’s now on Wordpress which means comments are back, spam is virtually gone (cross fingers) and things just feel right.

On a personal note, I feel like a real weight is lifted with this new design. It’s much more open and really welcomes you as a visitor. I was telling Jimmie, it’s so nice to see it this way, I actually want to blog more now :)

Stowe raised a good point, which I don’t want to lose. Though this is branded for Social Roots, it is and will remain my own personal stomping ground. It will also double as the unofficial company blog – but it’s pretty much always been that.

Hope you enjoy it. Leave comments – how nice that you can do that again?

For a while, I almost thought I would have to abandon this blog – not for lack of caring, just an ever-increasing demand on my time and attention that has made it hard to post at the level and frequency I desire. I still feel stressed out beyond comprehension, my GTalk status currently reads “Freaking Out”.

A couple of weeks ago, though, there was an interesting set of posts about the concept of Crowdsourcing – which lead to an indirect mention of Social Roots by Donna Bogatin (see “Online trumps print debuts, or vice versa”).

I say indirect, since the post identifies SocialTwister, the blog, as the company. That got some gears going again in my head. I was in the process of planning the SocialRoots blog when it occurred to me that SocialTwister would make a fine place, and name, for the unofficial blog for the company. So I’ve decided to commit to that direction.

Over the last week or so, Jimmie, of Cornershots fame, my tireless best bud and system admin for all things Linux has been working to export the usable parts of what has become a spam cesspool. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is – we literally can’t export this blog.

So, today I am styling SocialTwister 2.0 – running on the very nice, very secure Wordpress platform. The new design reflects the design of the new Social Roots application which we’ll be releasing on, eek, Saturday.

Stay tuned.. I’ll let you know when it’s live.

In my constant battle with nomadic existence, I am preparing for my next trip to San Francisco. I’ve been home a whole two weeks now and it’s getting to be that time again :)

Actually, there’s quite a bit that needs to be done on the Left Coast. I’ll be sitting in the audience Friday, June 9th, on call, for Stowe’s Advisory Capital luncheon.

On Saturday and Sunday, I’ll be at my first VloggerCon. I’m looking forward to seeing old friends like the gang from blip, Bre, Eric (who I can try to bum some sweet apps for my new phone) and many more. That’s a special occassion also since we’ll be releasing the first of three main Social Roots applications.

The week following that, I’ll be working with Chris Heuer on getting the syncPEOPLE conference applications running for BrainJams and other unconferences everywhere.

I don’t have a return ticket at this point. I’m planning on being at BloggerConIII on the 23rd-24th as well. I very well might be out there the entire month – we’ll see ;)

I’m planning to catch up with lots of folks I’ve met in the last few months as well. Anyone down for another Happy Hour or a Happy Dinner?