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Another sign that the end is truly near -- and that we all need protection. Durex, yup! you got it, the condom folks have decided to stretch their advertising into podcasts. This move will let them test the limits of the new medium as they try to connect with a younger audience. In fact it will allow Durex to imore freedom in its messaging than in other media monitored and controlled by FCC regulations.
Thanks to Adverblog for pointing the way to another sign that the end is truly near -- Centennial Wines and Liquors, a Dallas area liquor store is podcasting. Just what I really need a podcast to tell me about wine storage -- since that is mostly what I do with wine anyway.
Unless you are a musician and can create your own, music for intros and other interludes present a challenge for many podcasters. There is a solution! A growing number of sites are offering royalty free or podcast-legal music. Podcasting News reports a new source from the label Kahvi Collective with a nice RSS feed so that you don't miss any new additions. All of the music is distributed under a Creative Commons license. Another source is Magnatune which operates under Creative Commons license and offers a shareware type model for those wanting to use the music for commercial uses. Another source for free music loops is Partners in Rhyme. If it is sound effects that you want, try Sound Rangers. For just a few dollars a track you can always get your sound from Royalty Free Music. I'll be adding to this list as time goes on.
How exciting to note in Podcasting News that the analyst firm Jupiter Research has launched its own podcasts under the rubric of Jupiter Research Conversations. They are over 30 minutes in length. For my own opinion, the trailers are a bit long -- I guess I am eager to get to the conversation. I look forward to listening to them in the future.
This Spring has been a long Winter. It has been so cold and wet that well into May, I was still packing my survival suit along with my other gear for each Spring!! regatta. Well! Memorial Day weekend finally brought some sun and just enough rain to make us pull on the rain-fighting gear for a couple of races.
The NEIRA's are held on one of my favorite race courses -- beautiful Lake Quinsigamond. Few courses are as nice as Lake Q. The course is straight, the lake wide enough for 6 full racing lanes, and the local rowing community hosts so many fine regattas that the logistics work like a well-oiled machine. This is the home of safe, well-run regattas. No matter how lousy the weather -- and we've had some miserable days -- I always look forward to another day on Lake Q.
The Quinsigamond Rowing Association, host to many other championship regattas, only provides support services to the NEIRA. It is not involved in the actual operation of the NEIRA regatta. That is left to the schools in the NEIRA, an august group that includes Exeter, Andover, Miss Porters and others. As an official, the differences are evident. The most notable is how the officials are treated. We're usually part of the team (coaches, local organizing committee, fire and safety personnel, boat drivers, timers, and many others) who make the regattas happen. We all know and respect each other and are thankful for each's contribution.
USRA officials are volunteers. We buy lots of gas at over $2.00 per gallon to get to regattas at dawn, purchase odd equipment (power megaphones and waterproof stopwatches) that would have no other use in our lives, wear out a set of raingear almost every season. Freeze in the cold and burn in the sun, all so that others can enjoy victory (or defeat) in a sport we love.
In this equation, little things mean a lot. With NEIRA, we come in, do our task as officials, eat lunch in a hurry as the tables are being whisked out from under us -- to display trophies, conclude the day and leave. Something is missing here?
With speaking at and attending the DMA's Annual Catalog Conference, this has been an incredibly busy week. On Monday morning at the Search Marketing Basics session, I presented some of the fundamentals of search marketing best practices.
One of my many perverse occupational avocations is collecting examples of egregious spam. All too often marketers, who do not code sites themselves, do not have a working familiarity with many of the so-called tricks that are regretably still used by some search marketers. So I continue to add to and refresh my Spam Gallery. In it are examples of keyword stuffing and various other types of abuse.
One of the hallmarks of this show is that marketers get the opportunity to have paper catalogs and sites evaluated by the experts. The site clinics at this show reaffirmed for me that there are still lots of well-meaning, hardworking site owners who do not realize what search marketing peril their sites are in. During the site clinics, we saw many examples of less than best practices. Many thanks to those who were willing to subject themselves and their sites to this learning experience. Their courage will bring them and the other attendees big dividends.
Site clinics are always fun to do since they are opportunities to see a number of sites in a limited timeframe. I do hope to continue to do these in the future.
Amanda has been swamped with work and sent away by a frog -- told by the frog to go do something besides sit at her computer.
The real question is why is she taking orders from a frog, particuarly this one? Who knows? She'll be back, but it is a bit murky why and where she went.
Have been following with some interest the announcement that Google has released into beta AdSense advertising for RSS feeds. Google has been "testing" RSS advertising since April when these ads began to appear in several highprofile sites.
On further review as they say in football, this program is not quite ready for prime time, and Google doesn't seem to quite get the realities of the blog space. In there cheery sign-up notice Google advises that:
If you are a current AdSense publisher and your feed has more than 100 active subscribers, you may qualify for participation in AdSense for feeds (BETA).
So, I ask, how many blogs actually show that they have 100 active subscribers and how are these to be measured? Is Google simply going to take the site owner's word for it, hmmm.Subscriber activity is still poorly tracked and understood. The methods are still in their infancy.
For example, I receive Feedburner stats for this blog, but I'm more than sure that this is not measuring all of my RSS traffic. I'm not running any log analysis tools, since it is a hosted blog (hosted for convenience and out of a desire to try this platform).
Then, if one digs a little deeper into the program Google gives us all best practices for using these ads. These include:
All of these best practices seem to miss to me what the real point is -- most readers of RSS feeds, use a reader to get at content without the blinding array of ads that have proliferated. For my own part, I will clearly evaluate the value of any content that I must dig through advertising in the feed to get at. If I want advertising, I'll visit the site (and I often do clickthrough to sites), but slow adoption of this ad medium by publishers will be just fine by me.
The book, Business Blogs: A Practical Guide,is finally availalbe. This book written by Bill Ives and myself. This book has been quite an effort. We interviewed 70 bloggers. These generous individuals provided us excellent advice that other bloggers and would be bloggers can use.
On June 7, Business Blogs: A Practical Guide will serve as the focus of a day-long conversational learning session. Participants at this session offered through KM Cluster®, the leading worldwide action/research network for the knowledge economy will be able to understand what blogs, wikis and Enterprise RSS brings to business and assess the opportunities blogs present for their business.
We will discuss how to devise a business blog strategy, know how to start, how to get your blog noticed, and how to sustain an audience to meet their business objectives. I am looking forward to leading this session.
