Internet Banner Ads Look to Get More Interesting (and Thus Less Easy to Ignore) – New York Times
Worth keeping an eye on. Contextual comparison shopping banners.
Matt McAlister :: Goodbye IDG, Hello Yahoo!
Matt McAlister :: Goodbye IDG, Hello Yahoo!
"I’ve had the good fortune of working with a bunch of really smart people over the last several years at Macworld, The Industry Standard and InfoWorld. Now I have the good fortune of joining a new team of really smart people at Yahoo. IDG is a great place to work, and I’m sad to be leaving. But I’m also thrilled to be joining the Yahoo team and getting deeper into RSS and open media. Fun times ahead."
Spam Zeitgeist
I use a spam blocking service called Messagefire that sends me a daily report of stuff it’s snagged. I skim it every morning to find any misdirected good mail. Two themes seem pretty hot in the subject line. First is the "jack rabbit vibrator" (I don’t want to know). Today sent a winner, "Hot Latina Wearing Diapers."
My heart be still.
iPod Your BMW
This is my next mission. To get rid of the transmitter link to the FM radio and integrate the iPod into my X3.
Elementary Principles of Web Design
"Principle 13: Omit Unnecessary Stuff
"Vigorous Web Design is concise. A page should contain no unnecessary stuff, a nav bar no unnecessary choices, for the same reason a sentence should have no unnecessary words and a machine no unnecessary parts."
With apologies to William Strunk and E.B. White.
One of the producers just came in with a redesign proposal for one of our sites. We went over the page, mostly deleting, deleting, deleting, when I recalled some stuff I scraped this morning from Amazon.
Look at the progression of the famous Amazon horizontal nav, the tabs that launched a thousand imitators.
1999
2001
Today, less is more
AdTension | Doc Searls’ IT Garage
AdTension | Doc Searls’ IT Garage
"There are some other cases of value-increasing advertising. For trade and fashion magazines, the advertising often serves as a form of editorial."
What I said in the previous post — the prevalent pageview model is further toast if Adblocking takes off. And it will. Look at the conniptions caused by DVR technology so people like me can blast over the commercials. I’ve seen surveys of site readers where as many as 75% claim to be deploying ad blockers — no popup blockers — but ad blockers.
Doc is right — it’s the old Cluetrain Manifesto central tenet of the conversation with the audience, not treating them like anonymous eyeballs.
Death of the Page View Model
Marketers See Opportunity as a Web Tool Gains Users – New York Times
While the silent avalanche of online sweeping over print that has overtaken many MSM publishers in the past two years continues, another equally dramatic shift is hanging over online itself, threatening a publishing model that has sustained the business for the last decade.
I speak of the pageview, that holy measurement that combined with unique visitors represents the canon of reach and popularity among publishers and marketers.
In the vaunted world of Web 2.0, the pageview is dead, done in first by the search driven behavior of users who avoid branded-browsing (typing in URLs and flocking to known sites) and do rifle-shots based on keyword and keyphrase-driven "need" sessions; and now by the "Tivofication" of the online experience thanks to RSS.
Matt McAlister, the online GM at InfoWorld, has sounded the alarm that old online models of building audience and attempting to build pages viewed per sesssion from 2 to 3, to beyond is at risk thanks to the user-aggregated time shifting brought on by RSS and podcasting.
While RSS advertising is at its infancy — think of the days when HotWired started serving 468×60 banners in ’95 — publishers need to start freaking out now, not later, and give up any shred of hubris that they will be able to build audiences within their sites.
The implications of this sift from building pages to building streams is huge, and will have a big ripple-down effect on infrastructure from content management to measurement.
The fact that InfoWorld is now pushing all of its content down the RSS pipe is an indication of McAlister’s conviction that the avalanche is ready to start rolling.
Kinsley on Lydon’s OpenSource
First a plug for Christopher Lydon’s new hour of talk radio on Public Radio International (PRI), OpenSource. Lydon is a fixture in Boston public broadcasting, a true Yankee voice in the clenched jaw tradition of George Plimpton and William F. Buckley, who took to blogging and early experiments in podcasting thanks to Dave Winer during Winer’s Berkman fellowship at Harvard.
Lydon has relaunched his show with a focus on the Internet and all things web in the evenings on the local NPR affilates (WGBH). MP3s of the shows are archived on Lydon’s blog.
Last night (6.29), Lydon interviewed Michael Kinsley of Slate and Crossfire fame, now editorial page editor of the LA Times, on the infamous recent "failed" experiment in participatory journalism by permitting readers to edit an editorial via a Wiki-interface. The net result was a total trashing of the system by porno-vandals, so Kinsley pulled the plug and those "in-the-know" chuckled up their sleeves.
I thought it was a good experiment, a perfect example of the perils of open postings in an unmoderated world, and the need for a good collaborative community to coalesce and self-police itself.
Anyway, the best line of the night, was the last line of the night when Lydon asked Kinsley what he had learned from a decade of online journalism. Kinsley’s response: "What the heck. Let’s try it."
