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New York Press - GINA PACE - Feeding Frenzy

Link: New York Press - GINA PACE - Feeding Frenzy.

FriendFeed! GINA PACE takes us inside the latest social networking sensation.

I can crawl inside Mark Krynsky’s head. I can see what music he’s listening to, what he’s reading and watching, who his friends are, where he’s at, what he’s doing. I’ve never met Mark, but I know he listens to U2 and Red Hot Chili Peppers. He recently rented Pirates of the Caribbean. He likes microbrewed beer. The other day, he started his morning with work meetings. And all the information is on one screen.

Krynsky, who lives near Los Angeles, is an early adopter of “lifestreaming,” which is a record of everything he does online, all in real time. “The cool thing about lifestreaming is you get to gaze into people to learn a lot that you might not otherwise know about them,” Krynsky told me. “You get an idea about what’s going with their lives in a way that you don’t have to interact, but you build all this knowledge and information.”

Krynsky typifies the people who have pioneered lifestreaming. He’s a project manager who focuses on website development and has the technical skills to design a custom lifestream that grabs data from the sites he uses. But the future of lifestreaming will be much broader-reaching. In the last year, more than 30 companies that are “social aggregators” have sprung up to make it easier for regular computer users. The sites take everything you are doing on the Internet and combine them in one place. The result tells you everything your friends are doing.
Yes. Everything.

An extreme example of lifestreaming popped up last year when Justin Kan attached a webcam to his hat and decided that he would wear the camera at all times, with streaming live video and audio, attracting the attention of news outlets like the Today Show and NPR. The experiment morphed into Justin.tv, which is a network of streaming video channels (many of which are lifecasts); it also allows chat at the same time.

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But the company that’s drawing the most attention in this arena is FriendFeed. It launched to the public in late February and was founded by four former Google employees who were instrumental in the creation of Google Maps and Gmail, generally recognized as two applications that have changed the way many people use the Internet.

VideoEgg Unveils Brand Response Advertising Model

SAN FRANCISCO, BUSINESS WIRE -- VideoEgg Inc., the leading video advertising network for online communities, is launching the AdFrames(SM) Brand Response Network, an innovative program that provides advertisers a more measurable way to reach highly engaged consumers using video and rich media.

To date, advertisers buy online inventory based on impression, spending a set amount per thousand delivered views, what's known as CPM. While CPM provides reach and potential, it lacks accountability and forces a high level of risk onto advertisers to determine ad effectiveness. AdFrames allows advertisers to negotiate a price for engagement, a more valuable indicator of consumer interest, and an approach that will help reframe the focus of the industry from quantity to quality.

"Advertisers need to move beyond the metrics of eyeballs and evolve from 'how many' to 'how good,'" said Troy Young, CMO of VideoEgg, the company that pioneered the video ad overlay. "AdFrames leverages our keen understanding of how to drive engagement with innovative ad units and takes risk away from the advertiser. It offers advertisers a predictable approach to distributing highly targeted video and rich media content."

Read more: VideoEgg Unveils Brand Response Advertising Model

Before Our Very Eyes: What's Google Up To?

by Aaron Goldman , Wednesday, February 20, 2008

LOST IN THE SHUFFLE OF a heavy news week that included Yahoo spurning Microsoft's advances was this eye-popping bit of tid -- Google is now running video ads on SERPs.

The New York Times broke the story, reporting that "on Thursday, Google started testing video ads on some pages of search results." The article includes excerpts from an interview with Marissa Mayer in which she discloses the move and provides the rationale behind it.

As I pontificated when I penned the column When Will We See Display Ads on Search Results Pages? back in October, the Google PR spin here is rooted in user-centricity. Mayer is quoted as saying, "If you search for golf clubs, you get ads for golf clubs, not a banner ad about Pepsi that you may drink on the golf course."  It's reminiscent of the proclamation Mayer made last year that "ads are answers too."

Also true to my prediction was Google acknowledging that Universal Search was a gateway-drug of sorts (my words, not theirs) to get users hooked on non-textual search results...

Read more: Before Our Very Eyes: What’s Google Up To?

Why Marketers Are Not Investing Online

by Steve Latham, Wednesday, Feb 13, 2008 9:08 AM ET , Online Media Daily, Media Post

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME you made a considered purchase (airline, hotel, rental car, jewelry, clothing, electronics, gifts, automobile, etc.) without doing online research before you bought? Even if you prefer to buy offline, would you make a big purchase without pre-shopping on the Web? While some still like to do things the old-fashioned way, the vast majority of consumers rely on the Web to do research and price comparisons before they make a purchase. Every marketing, advertising and communications professional is aware of how the Web has changed our daily lives. Media Consumption has changed dramatically over the past 10 years, with the Web now a close second behind TV in terms of daily media consumption. A recent study published by IBM showed that people spend almost as much time online as they do watching TV.

Credit Suisse reported that only TV accounted for a higher share of daily media consumption (measured by time) than the Web. But if you think about the quality of that consumption (passive TV viewing vs. active online engagement) it's not hard to argue that Interactive may be the single most important medium for reaching and engaging consumers. By 2011, online consumption will surpass TV as the number one medium worldwide.

Read More: Why Marketers Are Not Investing Online

Microsoft Shows Off Web Ad Prototypes

By JESSICA MINTZ AP Technology Writer
REDMOND, Wash. Feb 5, 2008 (AP)

Microsoft Corp.'s online advertising researchers will spend this year teaching computers to be smart about sticking ads into video clips, and to be even smarter about targeting ads to specific Web surfers.

Microsoft showed off a handful of early-stage advertising projects at its headquarters Tuesday that may or may not turn up as part of Microsoft's Web advertising platform.

The demonstrations come just days after Microsoft's $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo Inc., which, if successful, will boost the software maker's Web traffic and online ad revenue.

With its 2006 acquisition of aQuantive, the software maker gained a broader network of Web sites on which to sell ads, and tools to help marketers buy them.

A few of Microsoft's projects were aimed at helping advertisers get better at reaching their ideal customers online, particularly using search keywords.

The company showed a dashboard advertisers could use to forecast the success of certain keyword advertising campaigns and a system it says will make it easier for advertisers think about key ideas, rather than hundreds of individual keywords.

But most of the adCenter Labs prototypes had little to do with search.

"Search itself gets a lot of attention because of Google," said Tarek Najm, a technical fellow at Microsoft. "Advertising in search, as a result, gets a lot of attention."

Najm said spending on search keyword ads will be dwarfed by what marketers spend on other types of online advertising...

Read More: Microsoft Shows Off Web Ad Prototypes 

For the young, this is a web campaign

The internet is now the top source for news
       
By Heidi Dawley, Media Life
Jan 15, 2008      

Young people are increasingly turning to the internet for their campaign news.

That's not a surprise. What is a surprise is just how much.

The number of 18- to 29-year-olds who turn to the web for news of the presidential campaigns has more than doubled as the campaigns have ramped up, according to a quadrennial survey from Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Some 42 percent of this age group said that they regularly learn about the campaign from the internet, up from 20 percent. That topped cable news, the No. 2 source at 35 percent, and local television news with 25 percent.

Read more: For the young, this is a web campaign

Borrell: Local Newspapers Struggling Online

by Erik Sass, Thursday, Dec 20, 2007 8:46 AM ET

A NEW REPORT FROM BORRELL Associates, a consulting and analysis firm that studies the newspaper business, shows local newspapers losing local ad revenue to online-only competitors on the Web, despite attempts to build their audience and offer more sophisticated advertising programs. According to Borrell, online-only Web players attracted 43.7% of the total $2.7 billion spent on local online ads in 2007. This growth is coming at the expense of local newspaper Web sites, which got just 33.4% of the ad spend--down significantly in percentage terms from 2004, when they grabbed 44.1%.

To assure themselves of a steady stream of local online revenue, many local paper Web sites have partnered with online companies that operate newspaper networks, including Yahoo's newspaper consortium. But these deals cut both ways...

Read more: Borrell: Local Newspapers Struggling Online 

CNN, Yahoo!, MSNBC Lead Online News

Link: CNN, Yahoo!, MSNBC Lead Online News.
CNN, Yahoo!, MSNBC Lead Online News
December 18, 2007
By Alex Woodson

Yahoo! placed between leader CNN and No. 3 MSNBC in the online news wars.

NEW YORK The title of most-visited online news site continues to be hotly contested, with CNN, Yahoo! News and MSNBC all vying for the throne.

Last month, the CNN Digital Network had the largest unique audience in its 11-year history, according to Nielsen Online. The Time Warner-owned news source received nearly 33 million unique visitors, beating out Yahoo! News and the MSNBC Digital Network, which had about 31 million and 30 million visitors, respectively.

Facebook beams in, but Google still dominates

By Jeff Jarvis (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-12-19 07:24

Never mind websites. Forget page views. They're so 2006. This was the year of Facebook. The social site, started in 2004 to organize college communities, was finally opened to the rest of us, and in the spring it was discovered en masse by media wonks (like me), who forced acquaintances into joining, using the evangelistic fervor of recent cult converts.

Then, in May, Facebook opened up to developers, who now were able to add applications to the service; already they've built 5,000. And in October, Microsoft beat Google to invest in the company at a valuation of $15 billion.

Worth it? I'd say yes. Facebook has 50 million active users (each worth $300, according to Microsoft, as opposed to $500 a year for a newspaper reader, according to Deutsche Bank). They are joined by 200,000 more daily, all of whom spend an average of 20 minutes every day inside.

But far more valuable than that is the realization of Facebook as a platform, on top of which we users organize our communities, and on top of which those developers are building venture-backed companies. Facebook analytics firm Adanomics tracks the supposed value of these applications, pegging the most popular, Top Friends, with 20 million installations, at $28m.

Facebook is answering the question every company should be asking: what would Google do? Google built a platform that enables others to build businesses; now so has Facebook. Indeed, 23-year-old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's ambition is to build the Google of people.

Yahoo would have been wise to have asked that question - WWGD? - years ago...

Read more: Facebook beams in, but Google still dominates 

LinkedIn Opens 'Back End' To BusinessWeek, Other Web Publishers

by Erik Sass, Thursday, Dec 13, 2007 7:00 AM ET
MediaPost.com

LINKEDIN, A SOCIAL NETWORK TARGETING business professionals, is living up to its name. It's opening its "back end" to Web publishers that want to bring the network's functions to their sites. The first publisher to get the LinkedIn invitation, BusinessWeek, wants to use its networking function to make BW's Web site a place where business types can connect and maybe even make deals--in other words, a place to do business, rather than just read about it. In one feature, LinkedIn will create links in the text of BusinessWeek editorial content for the proper names of businesses and people. By mousing over the links, the reader can determine how they are connected to the individual or entity in question, including how many of their own contacts are connected.

Read more: LinkedIn Opens 'Back End' To BusinessWeek, Other Web Publishers