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Archive for the 'advertising' Category

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Barcamp Brussels: May 2006

Published on March 19, 2006 in Belgium, Web2.0, advertising, internet and webdev. 7 Comments Tags: , .

Barcamp Brussel
Last year we organised a fairly successfull blogger’s dinner in Brussels, and now we’re gonna try something different:
next May we will have a Barcamp Brussels event.

WHAT IS A BARCAMP?

Barcamp NY
(photo by miss_rogue)

Barcamp was first organised in LA by Chris Messina and some buddies.

BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.

It is not your regular conference:

  • No spectators, only participants: Attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one. All presentions are scheduled the day they happen. Prepare in advance, but come early to get a slot on the wall.
  • No fixed agenda: talks, demos and topics are proposed by the attendees when they arrive on a central whiteboard.

Continue reading ‘Barcamp Brussels: May 2006′

Edgeio: edge aggregator

Published on February 27, 2006 in Web2.0 and advertising. 3 Comments

Michael Arrington has just launched his new baby: Edgeio, a classifieds aggregator. Edgeio will spider and index anyone’s feed and aggregate the posts tagged with “listing”. It then clusters the other tags in order to attach the post to the right classifieds category. The revolutionary thing here is that Edgeio does not require you to post your offer on their own site, they go and take it from yours. Edgeio clearly states that they start with classifieds as an example, a proof of concept for a concept that is much broader than that (that sounds like an echo from the Google Base launch).
As I understand it from their specs, they use the standard RSS <category>listing</category> categories from the RSS spec, no microformats (see further).

Pioneer?

The pioneers of this type of aggregation are Technorati (specifically Tantek Çelik): they have been using the rel=tag microformat <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/music" rel="tag">music</a> (instructions for laymen and experts) since the beginning of 2005.
The people at Technorati also have created “Most Popular” pages based on the same principle:

  • Popular News: “The news stories people are talking about right now, ordered by new links to news sites in the last 48 hours.”
  • Popular Movies: “The movies people are talking about right now, ordered by new links to the Internet Movie Database in the last 48 hours.”
  • Popular Books: “The books people are talking about right now, ordered by new links to Amazon in the last 48 hours.”
  • Popular Blogs: “The biggest blogs in the blogosphere, as measured by unique links in the last six months.“

The basic concept is: find a link type that identifies a topic/resource (e.g. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388795/ for the movie “Brokeback Mountain”) and aggregate all blog posts that have such a link. Whereas for books it makes sense to use Amazon as principal link source for books, it is more difficult to find a good one for music CDs (Amazon? iTunes? CDNow? CDBaby?), TV shows, political candidates, theatre plays, …

Competition?

  • I think Technorati, if it wanted to, could create a Edgeio-like spin-off in under a week. One small difference is that Technorati spiders sites (all HTML), not just feeds (post contents + metadata).
  • Google Blog Search certainly has the horsepower, but little experience in microformats. Then again, they have the worlds’ biggest war chest, they could buy talent and resources. And the PageRank reputation ranking could come in handy.
  • The ’smaller’ blog search players: Feedster, Ask/Bloglines, IceRocket, … already have the content, but would still have to develop the service.
  • Feedburner could move in that direction too, but then only for their own burned feeds. Or they could sell a service to companies like Edgeio to bulk download changed feeds from all Feedburner feeds in one go.

Edge aggregator

The direction Edgeio and/or Technorati could evolve to, is a “generic edge aggregator”. In the end we don’t want 5000 different services all scraping our blog feeds for each little niche application. The ideal would be a handful of aggregators that provide APIs to data and aggregation services, either paid, or monetized through contextual advertising. Image a hypothetical ‘edge aggregation’ provider “GoogRatiO“.

  • GoogRatiO spiders and indexes ALL feeds of all blogs. Oh heck, it even keeps a cached copy of each post.
  • GoogRatiO allows anyone to set up a new project on a URL myproject.googratio.com. In the project settings, you can specify which URLs should be tracked, the importance of recency, frequency and reputation, and it would automatically show a hitparade of the top 10/50/100. E.g. the dance music site Juno could set up juno.googratio.com that tracks all http://www.juno.co.uk/artists/…/ links in blog posts of the last month and shows an hourly updated Buzz chart of the top 20. GoogRatiO places contextual advertising on each page.
  • GoogRatiO has an API that allows a third party to use its database. It includes functions like Get_all_posts_for_URL_base("http://juno.co.uk/artists") and Get_aggregated_buzz_for_URL_base("..."). Below 1000 requests/day GoogRatiO is free. Above that: subscriber fee.
  • GoogRatiO also calculates a ‘reputation’ for each blog feed. This is needed to deal with splogs and other scam artists. So each link does not weigh the same. Compare it to Technorati’s “blog authority” or Google’s “PageRank”. For a company like Juno, a link from the Rollingstone blog is worth more than one from a Blogspot site a 14-year old fan just set up.
  • GoogRatiO will links blogs to actual sales (with money being paid and all). So it could come up with some inventive ways of redistributing affiliate fees

Imagine the ease with which applications like “Most Popular Youtube video“, “Most popular De Standaard newspaper article”, … could be created. The Long Tail at work!

Edgeio Buzz Timeline

As a professional reporter on Web 2.0 projects, Mike knows exactly how to plan the buzz for his new project:
Edgeio Buzz

  • 2005-10-07: Teaser: “Edgeio will give you the ability to do new and (we think) really exciting things with your blog” – Techcrunch
  • 2006-02-02: SDForum announcement “All Your Classifieds Belong To Us” – Jeff Clavier
  • 2006-02-09: “Teare spilled a lot of beans tonight at an SDForum online-classifieds event at the GooglePlex” – BusinessWeek, Dave Winer, Scobleizer
  • 2006-02-11: “We will be focusing on classified listings of any type to start” – 1st post on Edgeio blog
  • 2006-02-12: “Mike Arrington called me today and gave me a demo ” – Mashable (Feb 12)
  • 2006-02-18: “I was given a personal tour” @ TechCrunch NakedConversations Party – Dan Farber @ ZDnet (Feb 18)
  • 2006-02-20: Buzz acceleration – Buzzmachine, SiliconBeat, A VC
  • 2006-02-27: Official launch: Techcrunch, helped by Om Malik, Read/Write Web, WeBreakStuff

(There are obviously clear advantages in finding seed investors/business consultants/software developers/media buddies that are also A-list bloggers.)

This is certainly a project to follow!
PS: thanks to Bart and Francois for bringing Edgeio to my attention.

Technorati: – – – – – – –

Adsense in all media: TV, cinema, sport, traffic

Published on November 2, 2005 in Google, Web2.0 and advertising. 6 Comments

The other day I was talking with Francois on Google’s tests with providing ads in printed media, i.e. buying up ad space up front and deciding just before the actual printing what ads should go on which page. Adsense for print media, as it were.

In Google: Thinking about the future of TV ads , Garett Rogers tries to imagine what Google Adsense for TV could be like.

Imagine the possibilities… You are watching Google Satellite TV through your “internet ready” Google DVR:
1) You receive a new Gmail and it pops up automatically on your TV (if you choose to see new messages of course).
2) A ticker at the top of the screen shows recent news that interests you… or better yet, it shows new items from my Google Reader!
3) A more personalized TV experience which will serve up relevant commercials on commercial breaks based on your interests.
(also see the NYT article)

But those are just 2 examples of where Larry and Sergey are heading. Let’s see where Google could go when it decides to attack ALL media channels with contextual advertising:

TODAY

  • Adsense on google.com: they started by putting advertising next to search results (on their own pages)
  • Adsense for Content allowed any webmaster to give Google a certain spot (‘real estate’) on their site where ads could be placed
  • Adsense for Gmail puts ads within email messages (on their own pages)
  • Adsense for Search allows for rebranded search within a domain and the possibility to disallow ads from competitors (on their own pages)

TOMORROW

  • Adsense for newspapers: as mentioned above, Google reserves X cm² in each edition of a newspaper, that it can fill with whatever ad seems the most appropriate. Contextual: based on content of the page, demographics of the newspaper audience, date/time of publication
  • Adsense for magazines: similar to the one above, but the life cycle of a magazine is different. A newspaper is ‘hot news’ for a day and then becomes irrelevant and gets thrown away. A magazine might linger on cofee tables and in waiting rooms for ages. Contextual: content of page, demographics of audience. Once magazines could be printed on-demand, or even better, read on a paper-like electronic screen, the ads could be even more targeted.
  • Adsense for books: imagine an effort like the Bookmobile on-demand printing of Brewster Kahle. But instead of it costing $1 to print, the book is now free, because Google can put an ad in it just before printing. Or even if a book is printed in thousands of copies, but digitally, Google could add a mix of different ads on each copy. Contextual: content of the book, demographics of the average audience or even this specific reader.
  • Adsense for TV: a TV channel, or an individual program even, rents some ‘real estate’ (time-delimited, e.g. the first 150 seconds; space-delimited, e.g. the lower 10% of the screen; or a combination of these) to Google. Contextual: based on program contents, audience demographics and time-of-day.
  • Adsense for radio: if it can be done on TV, it can be done on radio! Contextual: based on program contents, audience demographics and time-of-day
  • Adsense for Wifi: they’re gonna cover the world with free Wifi, you connect through their secure wireless proxy, but now they also know exactly where you are (in a 500m radius) – the wet dream of localised marketing. This could be Adsense for Content on speed. Contextual: content of visited page, user demographics (language), user location
  • Adsense for cinema: it would be bad news for the Screenvisions of this world, but imagine Google using the 10 minutes of trailers/ads before the main feature? Contextual: content of the movie, location of the cinema, demographics of the audience
  • Adsense for movies: why not take some ‘real estate’ in movies? Why not even customised product placement? Imagine the lead character driving by local stores, and Google can choose for each city/country what brands to feature there. Contextual: content of the movie, location of the cinema, demographics of the audience.
  • Adsense for video-on-demand: Google provides the bandwidth and in exchange can put some ads before/in each movie. Contextual: content of the movie, demographics of the user, usage profile (previous movies).
  • Adsense for ticketing: while we’re at it, why not print ads on the movie tickets the moment they are printed? And on concert tickets, that are bought sometimes months before the event and cherished for years afterwards? Contextual: type of event, demographics of the audience, time before the event (if the ticket is bought 2 days before the concert, you would want to put ‘act now!’ ads on it.)
  • Adsense for billboards: most of the boards in Europe are ’static’, i.e. printed in paper, but imagine the screen-based billboards like on Times Square and in Japan showing content that is picked out for that occasion. Contextual: location of the billboard, time of day, maybe some demographics This is basically what Clearchannel Outdoor already does to some degree, but it could just provide the real estate and let Google pick the advertisers. Main issue here would be: how do you measure effectiveness?
  • Adsense for phone/GSM: imagine Google buying a competitor of Skype and offering you full phone service for free – even international – provided you listen to a short ad just before your conversation. Contextual: demographics of caller and receiver, time of day. God forbid they base it on the content of the conversations you’ve had before…
  • Adsense for fax: free international faxing and/or fax-via-email, but with a Google cover page or Google ads in the footer. Contextual: demographics of sender and receiver, content of the page (some quick OCR, how hard can that be)
  • Adsense for road traffic: the LED screens on top of cabs, the back and sides of trucks, trams, buses, all connected through Google’s free Wifi and adapting their displayed ads on-the-fly. Contextual: location of display, time of day, type of support.
  • Adsense for sport: the shirts of football players and cycling athletes, a logo overlay on the center circle of the basketball field, or even replacing the ad panels around the field (so the same ad space is sold twice: once for the people attending, and once for the TV audience – no science fiction). Contextual: type of support (shirt, bath cap, speedo, …), location/type of event, time of day

Any Big Brother scenario I forgot?

Technorati: – – –

Flickr/Yahoo experimenting with new ad format

Published on August 29, 2005 in Google and advertising. 2 Comments



Flickr has been placing contextual advertising on their “tag” search pages (example: the “brussels” tag) for a while. They seemed to use a mixture of Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher text-based ads. For people who are not that familiar with contextual ad units: there are

  • image based ads, that consist entirely of 1 graphic
  • text-based ads: a title, a 5-10 word description and a link, for one specific product – offered by both Google and Yahoo. The ads should be more or less relevant to the content of the page or the site. You can have at the most 4 ads in 1 ad unit, either vertical (“skyscraper”) or horizontal (“banner”).
  • the more recent Google “link units”, a collection of one-line topic links that lead to a page fuyll of advertisements. The advantage: let’s say you do a post on digital photography: the contextual analysis picks up the “digital camera”, and might only have space for 1 ad, so shows you an ad for buying a camera on Amazon. But with the topical link units, it can first check whether you are looking to buy a camera, or already have one and are more interested in memory cards, online image hosting or printing services. So while taking up less space, they allow to filter out the interested prospects and direct them to more relevant ads.

But this weekend I saw a new kind of ad format popping up on the Flickr site: let’s call them “image-enhanced topical link units” from the Yahoo Publisher Network (the left image is a screenshot). It’s probably in a test phase, since you see a headphone picture for “web cameras”, a GSM for “cameras” and another mobile phone for “home theatre” systems, and the link between those is not that obvious. But the line of thinking is logical: use the images to catch people’s attention (worth a thousand words, aren’t they) and then use the topics to filter out the interested customers. Let’s see if Google follows.

Technorati: Google – – – – –