Good article on e-newsletters vs. blogging. Today's interesting email fact (not in the article) was the typical person spends about 5 seconds on a typical marketing email in their inbox before moving on.

Here's an odd way of phrasing things in USA Today. There's a story about A-Rod, and the effects his contract has had. Referencing his $252 million contract, they say

"Three years later another elite shortstop in his prime with an MVP award commanded less than one-third of that amount on the free-agent market."

So far, so good. Several paragraphs down they then say:

"As an example of the drastic change in baseball's economy that followed, Miguel Tejada signed a six-year, $72 million deal — or three and a half times less than Rodriguez — "

I'm reasonably certain that 3.5 times less would be something like negative 500 million, not 72 million. :)

I took down the Chitika ads. They seem to do much better on very narrowly targeted pages.
Some interesting details on Google's Click to Call program.

JenSense blogs on a change in Google's advertising program. This lets you separate out bidding between search and context sensitivie ads. Given the recent deluge of "made for AdSense" blogs, I'll be very curious to see how bidding plays out over the next few months.

Russell Beattie has a fun post on the possibilities of spectacting on massively multiplayer games.

I really like the the idea of "Podcasts to Text".

It's always fun when you find a link to your site that you didn't know existed. I had met David Shaw at an event a few weeks ago, and just saw the writeup yesteday.

Silent Business Bloggers:

Reading Steve's recent post, has me thinking.
Am I a silent business blogger?
I work for Time Warner Cable. Many people who might stumble across my blog would fall into two categories:
People who like technology, and know it well
More of the mainstream, middle adopters of new technology.
There are a lot of things for each group going on, if you're in a Time Warner Cable market.

There's DVRs, which let you stop and rewind live TV. And, actually tape the things you want to tape. In spite of the fact many of us have had Tivo's for a couple of years, it's still a transformational experience when someone's using one. Somewhere in Time Warner Cable are details about what's coming next, or the great features on existing boxes. PVRwire does it externally.

If you're a techy, you'd be curious to know about Start Over.


There are some pretty cool program guides online:


We're not blogging about them. Plenty of people blog about Time Warner Cable:


Given we have constraints about what we can put out in the public eye, what do the readers of this post think would be helpful? What would you like to hear from a cable company?

What Henry Blodget thinks Microsoft should do re: AOL.
On another note, if you want to give Verizon money for their long distance service, it's entirely possible to spend 45 minutes on hold before talking to an actual human.

Verizon EVDO

BoingBoing: Verizon's EVDO service: hilariously restrictive use policy. From what I've seen, it's a great service in freeing you from coffe-shop Wifi dependance on the road, but the article is fun reading :)

Yesterday at AdTech I attended two panels of note; one on Search Engine Marketing for Small Businesses and one on "Managing the Deluge: Effective Email Inbox Organization".
Most of Search Engine Marketing was focused on the fact that small businesses should be doing it. Probably the top recommendation was that natural seach optimization was free ROI, if you did it yourself. Something like 50% of the small businesses were spending 5K/year, and it was pointed out that they would really need to be working on their own, as it wouldn't be cost effective for the agencies to work with them.
The Email workshop was fascinating. Put on by People on the Go, it had some great techniques on using flags, views, and search folders to manage email. I think it was the speedy version of their 90 minute seminars. I'm definitely considering taking one of these, after seeing the quick version :)

I'm here at AdTech this week. I'd recommend their excellent blog for detailed coverage. I saw two sessions that stuck out today:
The Do It Yourself Ad Panel, featuring Henry Copeland of Blogads.com and Phil Kaplan of AdBrite. And PETA. PETA has 30K MySpace friends, and some cutting edge tactics, re: monitoring and driving traffic. Both Phil and Henry highlighted the importance of targeting, the relative inexpensiveness of DIY, and the upcoming (hopefully) surge in traffic and $ spend in these areas.
Creating and Distributing a Corporate Blog...featured Mike McGuire, Research Director, Gartner - online music
Stowe Boyd - Corante
Pauline Ores, Web Marketing Strategist, IBM
Michael Terpin, CEO, Terpin Communications Group. I thought Michael Terpin did a really nice job on key elements, and had a great presentation...probably put himself in the running for anyone looking to hire help with blogging. I was stunned that out of a room of 100 people, the number of people raising their hands to "how many read a blog regularly", "how many use an RSS reader?", and "how many have their own blog?" was about 10 for each question.
Other interesting stats, IBM has 330K employees, and 40% work from home. The seven deadly sins of corporate blogging: brochureware, dead air, generic content, no authentic voice, isolation from community, bludgeoning defensiveness, overly protecive corporate rules...
That's the quick update.

LinkedIn online demonstration. I've been trying out TurboDemo. It appears to have been created in Europe, I'm especially fond of the message "Your demo was created with success." The online LinkedIn demo goes about two and a half minutes. TurboDemo has a nice interface, you can easily control where the mouse goes (although I'm not sure how to have it move concurrently with audio, yet), and it's pretty slick in how it generates the files. Looks like a keeper for putting together online presentations.

Network Solutions hijacked my domain name! A few days ago, I got a voicemail from Darian telling me that my domain name was going to expire shortly. While my initial thought was that he had been browsing the WHOIS database, I soon went to my homepage and found out that my normal blog had been replace by a Network Solutions page. The basic message was that the domain name was pending deletion, and that I could bid for the domain name when it completely expired, or, if I happened to be the owner, I could pay to renew it.
Apparently, when I registered the name several years ago, I had registered it through Network Solutions, even though I host at catalog.com. Who I highly recommend by the way. It took a few calls to establish this, and eventually I just put in my credit card to renew the domain name. Network Solutions spent the entire purchasing process trying to upsell me along the way. Would I like to register for many years to come? Would I like hosting? Would I like privacy? Etc... For the most part, it was fairly efficient.
Of course, this sudden website change was the only notification I had. Now, I'm sure Network Solutions has my email and phone, they got them when I registered, and I do seem to get spam from people who've mined their database. It would be a whole lot more customer friendly if they emailed, rather than, essentially, hijacking my website.