Yahoo! News: Manager's Journal: Selling The Internet

In an piece republished on Yahoo from todays' Wall Street Journal, Christopher Schroeder, CEO and publisher of Washingtonpost.com and Newsweek.MSNBC.com Interactive, sheds a little insight on what he thinks we'll see in 2003 in the online advertising market in this article:

Hal Riney, one of the greatest advertising mavens of our time, said not long ago that the "magic of traditional advertising is no longer magic." Mr. Riney should know -- he created the television ads that helped elect Ronald Reagan president and made Bartles & Jaymes household names. He told Advertising Age magazine that the Internet "offers a better and far more extensive resource for information than the...30 second commercial."

At the moment, with so many dot-coms gone bust and the broader economy in a slump, now seems an odd time to be pledging alleigance to the edgy medium of Internet advertising. Television remains powerful, allowing us to be passive spectators in history and reliable receptacles for product information. But the more quickly the news moves these days, the more people turn to the Internet for breaking stories and in moments of anxiety.

While he focuses on online profitability for publishers, the last paragraph points to "a milestone in the development of a real and sustainable online news and information business" that could be proven out this year, if we continue to see the internet truly become the first place people go for their news and information.

Is 2003 really going to be the return of the internet to media buying plans? I think so - we're all just a little smarter than a few years ago.

[MarketingFix]

Get an input string and the reverse it [New Web Services from SalCentral]

The small but hot ECOA space gets a new competitor. [internetnews.com: Internet Advertising Report]

Man, this is disappointing. Every US resident who bought a CD in the US between 1995 and 2000 is entitled to up to $20 from the music cartel as part of a court-mandated settlement over the labels' illegal price-fixing, which is one way that the music industry has ripped off the public.

All you need to do is sign up at this site, and the RIAA will mail you a check. If so many people sign up that the settlement ends up getting spread too thin, the RIAA will mail charitable organizations the checks instead. You can't lose!

Unless you don't sign up. Despite notices of the settlement in TV Guide and throughout blogistan, the cash remains unclaimed. What are you waiting for? Claim it! Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

Reuters: Yahoo Passed 2002 Paid Subscribers Goal - CEO
WSJ.com: Yahoo Sees Surge in Usage, Led by Its Active Members (paid subscription required)

The Journal reports:

Internet giant Yahoo Inc. said its usage and number of users rose "dramatically" in 2002, with the fastest growth seen among those users apt to spend the most money on Yahoo services....

At the end of the third quarter, Yahoo had attracted 201 million "unique users," or individual visitors, to its site, up 14% from the third quarter of 2001, according to the company. But the growth was much faster among users that Yahoo is more likely to turn into paying customers; users who have registered with Yahoo and use its site regularly rose 37% to 93 million. Yahoo said it had 1.55 million paying customers at the end of September, nearly seven times the previous year's level.

[MarketingFix]

Yahoo! News: Manager's Journal: Selling The Internet

Christopher Schroeder, CEO and publisher of Washingtonpost.com and Newsweek.MSNBC.com Interactive, sheds a little insight on what he thinks we'll see in 2003 in the online advertising market in this article. While he focuses on online profitability for publishers, the last paragraph points to a 'a milestone in the development of a real and sustainable online news and information business' that could be proven out this year, if we continue to see the internet truly become the first place people go for their news and information.

Is 2003 really going to be the return of the internet to media buying plans? I think so - we're all just a little smarter than a few years ago.

The entire article is republished under the "More..." link, just in case Yahoo! expires it in their index.

[MarketingFix]

What is your spam-factor? Test you newsletter content with Lyris' new spam content checking system.

Read what Ezine-Tips has to say about Lyris' ContentChecker.

Yahoo! News: Manager's Journal: Selling The Internet

Christopher Schroeder, CEO and publisher of Washingtonpost.com and Newsweek.MSNBC.com Interactive, sheds a little insight on what he thinks we'll see in 2003 in the online advertising market in this article. While he focuses on online profitability for publishers, the last paragraph points to a 'a milestone in the development of a real and sustainable online news and information business' that could be proven out this year, if we continue to see the internet truly become the first place people go for their news and information.

Is 2003 really going to be the return of the internet to media buying plans? I think so - we're all just a little smarter than a few years ago.

The entire article is republished under the "More..." link, just in case Yahoo! expires it in their index.

[MarketingFix]

ClickZ: Branding Your E-Mails, Part 1

Email letterhead. We've heard this story before but it bears repeating and Martin Lindstrom does so in today's ClickZ. His point being that one of the first things a company does when it opens its doors is design letterhead yet no company seems to develop email letterhead. And with more communication taking place via email, it seems like a valid point to make.

There are some very simple technology solutions out there that will allow you to create a simple HTML letterhead template that has a back up version for those who do not receive HTML. It seems so easy. Why don't we do it?

[MarketingFix]

atnewyork: Report: Spam Cost Corporate America $9B Last Year

In a study just released by Ferris Research of SanFrancisco, spam is said to have cost U.S. corporations $8.9 billion in 2002. This contrasts a recent report by Pew Internet which stated spam was not a big issue for business productivity.

The study found that spam to corporate accounts made up 15 to 20 percent of all email. Marten Nelson, a research analyst at Ferris states:

...the average corporate e-mail user receives between three and four spam messages a day, wasting an average of 4.5 seconds on each message. Over time, he said these figures add up to considerable lost productivity, particularly when accidentally deleted e-mails are taken into account.

Another study by Brightmail puts spam at 40% of all email by 2003 and Harris found in a study that most people want a legal remedy to the problem.

[MarketingFix]

The IAB's Greg Stuart has occasionally been a lightning rod for critics who believe coercing online advertisers to adopt standards is akin to herding cats. But Stuart has remained undeterred, and his tenacity may be vindicated as 2003 begins on an optimistic note. [ChannelSeven.com]

Evidence is pointing towards the fact that weblogs is where key knowledge is being built. Because of the wealth of knowledge contained in "blogs" I now perform searches quite differently. First, I search specifically only in "weblogs" using the Google tool I put on this site. Then, after I have gleaned the wisdom from weblog pages, I use what I have learnt from weblogs to shape a set of words (often up to six or seven words) so that I get highly useful search results from Google.

It is also surprising to see how many times the first three to five results in Google are actually weblogs -- often some I did not come across in my earlier and less specific weblogs searches. Usually, by using this method of first going to weblogs to refine my ideas and then to Google with a more specific search, I will get a list of no more than 35 to 40 sites to visit, all of extremely high relevance to what I am needing.

Our Google Masters have recognized that weblogs have good quality, fresh material. My site at Google Village gets crawled by GoogleBot every second day. Google indicates that they collect "Google also unveiled several new enhancements that make available the latest news, refreshed daily web content. . ." The emphasis of this Bot is to search weblogs that are updated on a daily basis. GoogleBot that comes around every second day or so, collects specifically from weblogs. [See what the forums where the Google Tech Guys hand around are saying about this. Specifically FreshBot comes almost exclusively to weblogs.]

Even publishers are recognizing the value of many thousands of people journaling or blogging each day. Publishers are now scanning weblogs to see what they can find to publish. [See: Blog Novelist Gets Contract]. I have had publishers discussing various matters with me, including seeking as to whether I would expand on a particular article I wrote.

There is a danger of, what I call, falling into a hole. If a blogger simply focuses on what other people are saying and simply point to other links, eventually there is little to link to as it has been all linked into itself. Rather, as the novelist does above who wrote original material and serialized it online, I like to think of blogging being a cross between my editorial and saying something useful beyond what other people have said -- essentially carrying the conversation on to another point or another level.

Now if everyone carries the conversation on from where the other person left it off, and/or if there are genuine linkages between ideas that did not really exist before, or we are now making existing links stronger, there is a genuine development of real knowledge in this setting. Learning how to carry a conversation, in my weblogs, and refer to other, so that the conversation carries on from where it is now, and from where I am now, is part of what I call the Skills of Technacy.

[The Technacy Log]

The 365-Days Project is wicked fun. In it, a blogger is digitizing a track from a truly impressive collection of novelty records, encoding it as an MP3, and posting a new song every day. I just downloaded "Red Shadow (The Economics Rock & Roll Band) - Understanding Marx," "Janeen Brady & The Brite Singers - I'm A Mormon," and "The Dondero High School Symphony Band & A Capella Choir - Fox On The Run/Sunshine Of Your Love." The commentary is fantastic, too:

Every Sunday I'll be posting some good ol' time religion! Here we have "I'm A Mormon." I found this record while living in Reno, Nevada in 1993 and over the years from excessive play (mostly for alcohol-induced friends) my copy is worn out (literally), but thanks to Brother Russell (of Melbaworld) I have a nice clean copy for you to download. I have a couple of friends (of the Mormon faith) who had this record while growing up (they also had the "Bounce Back" cassette, but that's for another Sunday!). The wacky thing about this song is not only the lyrics "I'm a Mormon, yes I am, so if you want to study a Mormon, I'm a living specimen" but it's set to a rousing marching beat. Don't be surprised if you end up walking down the street and slowly start to go insane humming it.

Link Discuss (via Dollarshort) [Boing Boing Blog]

Holiday sales online were better than expected, but all the free shipping promotions may have raised the bar for e-tailers, research firm finds. [internetnews.com: Top News]

Bruce Bartlett: (Washington Times) "One of the things I like most about blogs is that they provide links to articles, information and commentary that would not otherwise come to my attention." [Scripting News]

Innovative content licensing seems to be catching on -- even beyond the efforts of Creative Commons.

Prentince Hall PTR recently announced that they'll publish a series of technical books under open-content licenses. Read the Slashdot story.

Kudos to Bruce Perens for brokering the move, and to Prentice Hall for joining O'Reilly and Associaties in the elite club of enlightened commercial publishers.

(You'll recall that the O'Reilly folks recently adopted our Founder's Copyright, under which they'll release certain copyrights into the public domain after 14 years, with an option to renew for another 14 -- just as the Framers' of the U.S. Constitution would have had it.)

[Creative Commons: weblog]

The Nokia 7650 phone has an integrated VGA camera that allows users to take and send multimedia messages, incorporating color images, text and sound. The students shared messages with one another for four weeks and created a new mobile community based on instant multimedia messaging.

Contra CEO Antti Ohrling said: "As an ad agency, we were drawn by the idea that multimedia messaging could be used as a base for creating new, interactive communities. This project shows that when you combine talent with technology and innovation, the results are inspiring."

Designed to be an experiment in social interaction, the students found that whereas many forms of electronic communication tend to abbreviate and limit shared experiences, the imaging phones accomplished the opposite: "It expanded and enhanced our ability to express ourselves and share that. It puts the human back in e-form communications," said Harriet Banks. [Smart Mobs]

William Gibson -- long gun-shy of setting up any kind of personal Internet site -- has dived into the net with both feet forward, setting up a fantastic blog.

Google me and you can learn that I do it all on a manual typewriter, something that hasn't been true since 1985, but which makes such an easy hook for a lazy journalist that I expect to be reading it for the rest of my life. I only used a typewriter because that was what everyone used in 1977, and it was manual because that was what I happened to have been able to get, for free. I did avoid the Internet, but only until the advent of the Web turned it into such a magnificent opportunity to waste time that I could no longer resist. Today I probably spend as much time there as I do anywhere, although the really peculiar thing about me, demographically, is that I probably watch less than twelve hours of television in a given year, and have watched that little since age fifteen. (An individual who watches no television is still a scarcer beast than one who doesn't have an email address.) I have no idea how that happened. It wasn't a decision.

I do have an email address, yes, but, no, I won't give it to you. I am one and you are many, and even if you are, say, twenty-seven in grand global total, that's still too many. Because I need to have a life and waste time and write.

I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.

Link Discuss (Thanks Stefan!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Wondering Why Daypop Isn't Indexing Your Blog?

Apparently I never submitted my blog to DayPop.  DOH!  It's a homer moment.  What else can I say ? It's easy, fast and definitely worth submitting your blog if you haven't already.  [_Go_]

[The FuzzyBlog!]