Sydney Morning Herald: Zooming in under the radar: advertising you don't see until it's too late

The advertising industry is warming to the challenge of selling products to a new generation of savvy consumers who are less drawn to conventional advertising. [...]

Advertising and marketing agencies are producing TV shows, making films, publishing books, writing pop songs and organising events. Mitsubishi, Sanity Music, Lion Nathan and Unilever are part of the push into TV production.

This trend has gained so much momentum that a leading Canadian Ad Agency last week launched a spin off "branded entertainment" agency:

Chokolat, a new agency designed to create TV shows as vehicles for promoting products, was launched yesterday. Paul Lavoie, president of parent Taxi, says viewers are concerned about two things: entertainment and information. "We have to feed them high-quality entertainment and find a way to include a message from a marketer."

[MarketingFix]

They're just getting started. Photos of people doing dorky things. What else is there? [Scripting News]

Extensive online archive of scanned-in newspaper clippings, photos, and pics of road signs. Includes wacky but real classified ads such as:

RAT Terrier Pups, born w/college education

and

BEAUTIFUL antique armchair. Over 200 years old. Made from "macaroni" noodles. Arms, legs and seat not available.

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

Wired News has posted coverage of the release of my novel:

Doctorow's fans aren't surprised to find his book online for free. The plots of his most recent short story, "0wnz0red," involves digital rights management, or how files are protected from sharing and copying.

Moreover, Doctorow is known outside science fiction circles for his prolific, passionate posts about digital rights issues on the BoingBoing weblog and other forums, as well as his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"I don't believe that I am giving up book royalties," Doctorow said about persuading his publisher, Tor Books, to make Down and Out available digitally for free under the new Creative Commons licensing system.

"(Downloads) crossed the 10,000-download threshold at 8 a.m. this morning," Doctorow said Thursday, "which exceeds the initial print run for the book."

Doctorow said he thinks the marketing buzz from those downloads will be worth more than any lost book sales. "I think that the Internet's marvelous ability to spread information to places where it finds a receptive home is the best thing that could happen to a new writer like me."

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

I Wish, You Wish Nifty site that scours wishlists (Amazon and others) of bloggers and puts them all in one convenient place, sorted by either birthday or alphabetically. [MetaFilter]

So I got my blogpost perl script working so that I can use it as part of the system that accepts an email from the hiptop and posts it to my main blog and also hiptop nation.

There's actually several parts of the system:

procmail accepts the email and calls the other scripts

blogpost.pl posts to my moveable type blog using XMLRPC, according to the blogpostrc configuration specified in the procmailrc recipe (or the default in $HOME)

munge_hiptop_nation_post.pl does some tweaking to the message body and subject to prepare it for forwarding off to hiptop nation. This piece is hella buggy :) ...I'll get around to cleaning it up someday.... [Smart Mobs]

So there's a new web database that matches your web site to a set of latitude/longnitude coordinates: GeoURL.org. I've... [AkuAku'ing in San Francisco]

Wired News says Cory Doctorow "walks the walk" with the Creative Commons licensing of his Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. An excerpt from the story:

"I don't believe that I am giving up book royalties," Doctorow said about persuading his publisher, Tor Books, to make Down and Out available digitally for free under the new Creative Commons licensing system.

"(Downloads) crossed the 10,000-download threshold at 8 a.m. this morning," Doctorow said Thursday, "which exceeds the initial print run for the book."

Doctorow said he thinks the marketing buzz from those downloads will be worth more than any lost book sales. "I think that the Internet's marvelous ability to spread information to places where it finds a receptive home is the best thing that could happen to a new writer like me."

Down and Out may be watched closely as a test of whether the Creative Commons license actually helps or hurts writers, but Tor senior editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden said the value of free online publishing has already been demonstrated.

As test balloons go, we could do much worse than Down and Out. And anyone who reads it will be equally confident of its trajectory.

[Creative Commons: weblog]

Mark Kraft: "As some of you are no doubt aware, China has blocked access to all Blogspot weblogs. Users can post, but they can't see whether what they've written has gone through. Likewise, others from China can't read their weblogs."

Peking Duck: "Yes, it appears the Chinese government has imposed a permanent nationwide ban on all blogspot.com sites."

Open Flows: "After talking to other blogspot users all over China it seems that the ban is present throughout the entire country."

BWG: "Bloggers from inside China are upset about that."

Russell Beattie: "Cisco made a shitload of money selling their firewalls to China."

Shelley Powers: "The use of proxies is a known workaround for censorship."

Ben Edelman, at Berkman: "I've actually known about this for a couple days, and this isn't the first time China has blocked blogspot, according to my records. In fact, this isn't really all that unusual -- it's the kind of block China often imposes from time to time, just like when they blocked all domains virtual-hosted by Dotster and Enom. Since China's blocks are almost always implemented by IP address, it's highly likely that whoever imposed the block didn't (and indeed still doesn't) understand the far-reaching effects of doing so."

NY Times: "Some 10,000 people took the streets in the eastern city of Hefei this week in what appears to have been the largest student demonstration since the Tiananmen Square human rights protests of 1989. But the students had a much narrower agenda: traffic safety."

[Scripting News]

BUILDING ON THE success of Weblogs for personal Web publishing, enterprises are starting to tap into blogs to streamline specific business processes such as intelligence gathering or to augment traditional content-and knowledge-management technologies. [InfoWorld]

"Send mail from your hiptop to hiplog@hiplog.com. That's it! You're blogging!" [Scripting News]

MSN Advantage Marketing: Interactive Marketing Best Practices Executive Briefing
ExecutiveSummary.com: Rick to Speak in 10 Cities for MSN 'I-Marketing Best Practices' Tour...

Okay, this could be seen as a grossly self-indulgent plug or a highly on-target opportunity significant value for readers, you decide. You may remember reading here before about MSN and the IAB teaming up on a big I-Marketing Best Practices project (it also got an Ad Age write up). Well, it's about to go live in just over a week, both with a set of free online resources and a 10-city half-day (morning) seminar series that costs nothing to attend! Speakers from MSN, Unicast, EyeBlaster, PointRoll, comScore and Dynamic Logic, plus consultant Joseph Jaffe and yours truly. Station stops starting January 21 in NYC and continuting through Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas and Atlanta (and perhaps Denver?) into mid-February. See dates and other details at the links above.

[MarketingFix]