June 3rd, 2009 / No Comments » / by oddbits
Ashton Kutcher has a page on iGoogle. So do Ryan Seacrest, Tina Sharkey, Vint Cerf, Wyclef Jean, and, of course, Al Gore. But.. do we care?
Today, Google announced the iGoogle Showcase (http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/help/ig/showcase/). Users familiar with iGoogle know it’s a free service allowing one to share content on a personal home page, which can be shared with Google’s millions of users. In creating its Showcase, Google reached out to entertainment celebrities, political figures, academics, and other thought leaders and asked them to share content on their personal homepages.
According to Google, “Users can now either add their favorite celebrity’s entire iGoogle page or look through the collection and choose different gadgets and themes from many celebrity pages. iGoogle lets users personalize their homepage the way they want it with the things that are important to them.”
A list of participating celebrities is available on the iGoogle Showcase main site at (http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/help/ig/showcase/).
A blog post of the announcement is posted by Google here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/tour-homepages-of-your-favorite.html with an accompaning YouTube video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAEXRq9wlhY
Personally, while I’d love to get my hands (ears) on an early release of the next Wyclef Jean download, I couldn’t really care less about which sites he likes to surf on the web. How do you feel? Comment with your opinion.
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Posted in: News
Tags: 2009, Celebrity, Google, iGoogle, Twitter, YouTube
June 2nd, 2009 / No Comments » / by oddbits
Today, San Francisco based BuzzLogic launched its Conversational Advertising Dashboard - an easy to use tool designed to make media buying simple across a complex social media landscape. With ad budgets shrinking and the demand for quick, provable results higher than ever, advertisers are under the gun to get the most bang for their meager budgets. Add to this, the reality that both agencies and corporate marketing departments are laying off staff, and you have fewer resources working in pressure-cooker environments to produce quality ad content for a marketplace -microblogs, forums, and other venues where real time conversations happen- that is still not well understood.
As any account manager will tell you, the first question at the end of a campaign is not, “What did people think of the ad?”, it’s “Did the ad meet its target?”. And then the follow up questions…how many people clicked on it? …where did those clicks come from? …what were those people discussing? us? our competition? …did they already know our products? …and so on.
In other words, “Did the ad perform well, and can you prove it?”
BuzzLogic’s Conversational Advertising Dashboard for brands and agencies allows you to answer these questions with provable data that is not only easy to gather, but highly transparent and measurable for the client. This sort of data gathering and targeting is BuzzLogic’s specialty and part of what makes them successful with clients ranging from 360i to OmnicomMediaGroup, both of whom participated in, along with other customers, in an early beta of the dashboard. The platform is available in wide beta as of today.
According to the company, “BuzzLogic’s Conversational Advertising Dashboard gives advertising buyers and planners the tools they need to more effectively target and communicate messages to customer audiences and influence purchase decisions. Visual and metrics-driven insights provide full campaign transparency, showing which publishers are running the ads and the exact content in which the ads are placed. The tool also enables marketers to quickly scan historical posts by publisher and assess conversational tones. Additionally, a conversation social graph illustrates the sites that are contributing to and extending the conversational thread out to further engaged audiences. As a result, advertising messages and creative can be tailored to reflect the specific content of targeted conversations, driving more relevant, effective campaigns and, ultimately, deeper audience engagement and better ROI.”
“Brands want to be where customers are most engaged online and increasingly that’s within conversational media,” said John Donahue, global director of business intelligence analytics, OmnicomMediaGroup. “But, before advertisers can realize the promise of this platform, we need the insight, transparency and control that has been lacking thus far. BuzzLogic’s Conversational Advertising Dashboard is the only tool I’ve seen that makes it easy to understand online conversations as they relate to advertising performance, enabling us to increase the efficacy of campaigns and justify the spend.”
Courtney Hughes, VP Strategic Sales, BuzzLogic took me through a demonstration, based on real customer data, and all I can say is I wish I had a tool like this back in my agency days!
Conversational Advertising Dashboard features include:
- Transparency: Visual and metrics-driven insights provide full campaign transparency, showing which publishers are running the ads and the exact content of conversations in where ads are being placed.
- Social Intelligence: Conversation social graph provides a roadmap to understand the topics being discussed, the size of the conversation, and the publishers connecting around certain topics.
- Performance Insights: Performance data available on a per-conversation basis, allowing advertisers to determine creative performance.
- Campaign Control: Advertisers have complete control around where ads are placed, and can easily select sites for review and potential removal from campaigns.
- Deeper Metrics: In addition to traditional campaign reporting on impressions and clicks, the Dashboard provides metrics within each conversation being targeted, including the IAB social media metrics, measuring conversation size, site relevance, author credibility and content freshness.
To use an example, let’s say your company has ads running on a particular blog and during the time your ad is running, the blog conversations are centered primarily around your company. You might find that those ads have a low click through rate because participants in that blog’s conversations are already expert on your company’s offerings and/or are existing customers. So, while at first blush, a you might think of pulling your ad from that site, the agency could argue that this captive audience of existing users might be a perfect target for up-sell ads or new beta announcements, etc. Clients might also see other surprising results, such as very high click through rates for their ads on sites where their competitors are the subject of discussion, as we saw in the demonstration I was given.
At the end of the day, anything that allows one to prove the value of their service whilst providing a real path to increased sales, especially in something as murky as online advertising -in the even more murky social conversational landscape- is worth its weight in virtual gold in my book. Very impressive.
Learn more: http://www.buzzlogic.com
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Posted in: News
Tags: 2009, beta, BuzzLogic, In Beta, social network
April 3rd, 2009 / No Comments » / by oddbits
This is very cool and something we’re likely to see more of. High tech publication, The Register, has recently started offering a series of free webcasts on its website, theregister.co.uk. While webcasts are nothing new, tech sites post things like gadget reviews all the time, what sets this series apart is the content.
Yesterday, The Register had this post,
This is the first in a series of webcasts featuring interesting (or deadly dull) conversations about industry news and trends. These webcasts are hosted by Dan Olds, the principal analyst for Gabriel Consulting Group, a boutique IT industry analyst firm located in the US. Dan is a reasonably smart guy, has been around the industry for quite a while, and, more importantly, seems to have a viewpoint and attitude that fits in well around here.
These webcasts will come in two flavours: the first is a chat session with an industry expert about some interesting topic or trend. In other webcasts, we will spotlight an IT vendor and give their products and strategies a good looking over. These webcasts will be different from the normal run of the mill vendor infomercial. We’re looking to do a webcast that has a lot more meat (at least 30 per cent more) and asks meaningful questions – the types of questions (hopefully) that you yourself would ask…only we won’t use as many obscenities.
The program below is a “Analyst Roundtable” chat with Jonathan Eunice from technology analyst firm Illuminata.
In this 30-minute webcast, Dan and Jonathan discuss Cloud computing - past, present and future. So give it a listen (and check out the slides too) and let us know what you think….
Now, what some readers might not know, but high-tech folks will pick up on immediately, is that sessions with IT analysts can cost thousands of dollars a pop. Even a webcast, delivered to your company can easily run over a thousand dollars, so The Register is definitely breaking new ground offering the content for free. One wonders if this is going to be a new trend as the media compete for readers in a competitive, hard it, economy.
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Posted in: News
Tags: 2009, analyst, economy, Industry News, Media, register
January 4th, 2009 / No Comments » / by oddbits
Twitter users are receiving direct messages (DMs) saying, “hey! check out this funny blog about you…” along with a link to blogspot.com. This simply a ploy to get information -in this case your Twitter user name and password. There is no funny blog about you.
Twitter users who receive the messages, either on their Twitter page or on their mobile device, are directed to click on the bogus link and when they do, they see a screen that looks like the Twitter site, but is actually a fake (see screen shot below -courtesy of The Twitter Blog). The phishing site url is twitter.access-logins.com (Note that the domain name before .com is access-logins and not twitter).
Once the user name and password are entered, the phishing program is able to access the user’s account and send the same phony message to all of users on the victim’s friend list. In this way, the scheme is very similar to the Facebook wall post phishing scam that went around over Christmas. In that version, users were told their photos had been posted to sites with names including floatclick.com, bakespoil.com, and wagfloat.com.
Twitter users have been vocal in sharing information and warning others about the attack. Check out #phishing to read and join the latest discussion.
The same advice given for the Facebook scheme applies here,
Never click on any unknown link, even if sent from a friend.
Specifically, if you want to visit Twitter, do not click on a link to the site. Open a window or tab in your browser and type in the url.
Always double check the url on the top of the page you are browsing and make sure it is the real domain (for example, ebay.com and not your-ebay-account.com).
Click for details from the official Twitter blog
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Posted in: Crime / Scams, News
Tags: 2009, Crime / Scams, Facebook, Phishing, Scam, Scheme, Twitter
January 1st, 2009 / No Comments » / by oddbits
AOL Stalker - In 2006 AOL accidentally released private search data from its users setting off a wave of controversy around how search companies such as AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google store and use data. Today Microsoft keeps personally identifiable information (a user’s IP address) for 18 months. Yahoo destroys this information after 90 days and Google keeps an IP address for nine months. After that time some companies will delete the whole address while other companies will delete the last two digits only. Even this is a point of controversy as the preceding digits can still tell a lot about a users location much like the first few digits of a phone number such as the area code.
AOL stalker is a private website that was set up in 2006, when the AOL search data was leaked. That data did not come attached with names, however the user numbers are listed. The site allowed visitors to type in either a user number or search term and see the results which were at times funny, strange, or tragic -searches that describe pregnancies that may or may not have resulted in birth, cancer scares, and bizarre searches around murders and crime scenes.
Today users can see the 2006 results or up to the minute results that show IP addresses minus the last two digits.
Cracked.com - Cracked.com is one of those wonderful websites that serves absolutely no useful purpose but will keep you occupied for hours. Where else can you find artciles with titles like “9 Awesome Places to Have Sex (And the Horrific Consequences)”?
My recommendations for passing the time during a particularly boring workday:
25 Worst Rapper Names of All Time
7 Crappiest “Super Heroes” in Comic Book History
The 10 Creepiest Craigslist Sexual Encounters
5 Homeless Guys Who Accomplished Awesome Things
419eater.com - Unless you have managed to avoid getting an email account, you have likely received a message at one time that promised a large inheritance, said you won the lottery, or offered money for cashing checks. Perhaps you received a strange email that looked something like this:
I am Mrs. Rose Nkama. I was married to late Mr.Nkama,The CEO Veekrol Link Ltd London United Kingdom, a seasoned contractor in England.Before he died in the year 2006. We were married for eleven years without a child. He died after a brief illness. When my husband was alive,he deposited EUR 4.3 EURO with a security company…
Most of these scams fall under the broad umbrella known as advance-fee fraud or “419 scams” -so named because 419 is the code for fraud under Nigeran law and many of these scams once originated in Nigeria. Today they are in place all over the world including Russia, Vietnam, the UK, and the United States, and some of the first advance fee fraud scams started in Spain and were known as Spanish Prisoner scams.
419Eater is a site devoted to turning the table on the scam artists. Site members answer these emails and “bait” the scammers by pretending to be victims, often adopting funny character names such as “Luke Skywalker” or “Captain Morgan” with surprisingly funny results. It’s easy to loose hours of time reading this correspondence, browsing scam artist photos and watching videos.
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Posted in: Crime / Scams, News, Oddities
Tags: 419, AOL, Cracked, Crime / Scams, Entertainment, Funny, Google, Privacy, Scam, Search
First Twitter, now celebs flock to iGoogle, but do we care?
