RSS
 

Archive for August, 2005

MSN PPC to Become MSN Keywords, Yahoo Gives Us Audio

04 Aug 2005

The Wall Street Journal says Microsoft will announce next week that an invitation-only test of MSN Keywords will begin in October with 500 advertisers and search-engine marketing specialists. — According to The New York Times, Yahoo claims to have indexed 50 million music, voice and other audio files, thus being able to offer its users a decent Audio Search.

From the Wall Street Journal, about MSN Keywords :

“Microsoft next week will announce plans to begin U.S. testing of MSN Keywords, its own system for placing ads on its MSN Internet search site. The system, which Microsoft began testing last month in France and Singapore, will debut in the U.S. in test form in October, according to Joe Doran, senior director, MSN.”

“The service will move MSN closer to how Google handles advertising, by using live auctions of keywords. MSN Keywords is one tool of a broader set of new advertising services called adCenter that Microsoft is building on MSN. Microsoft executives say they hope the tools will allow companies to tailor advertisements by giving them more detailed information on Web users than is currently available.”

via [SE Roundtable] read it on the [WSJ]

Over to Yahoo! and their Audio Search :

[...]“According to The New York Times, Yahoo claims to have indexed 50 million music, voice and other audio files. [...] The service will also display links to the online sites where users can pay to download a song. [...]

You can refine your searches by music, podcasts or other audio, by song, artist or album, by format (RAM, MP3, MIDI, WMA or AAC) by duration (more or less than a minute), by web & audio services or audio services only, and by major releases or to include alternates, imports, EPs, etc.. Smartly, the podcast results have links to the RSS feeds.”

Check out the [Audio.Search.Yahoo]

via [InsideGoogle] read it at the [NYT] (free reg)

 
No Comments

Posted in Corporate News, Search, Technology

 

People Steal

04 Aug 2005

‘Experience The Message’ talks about a unique project, created by the dynamic duo at TBWA/Vancouver — copy writer Michael Milardo and art director Bart Batchelor, for their client Black Tower Home Security. BTHS has ordered an interactive billboard and it was up to thieves to reveal the hidden message. This is as interactive as it gets.

Created for client Black Tower Home Security, the billboard was debuted covered with a bunch of stuff — mirrors, slippers, pillows and picture frames — that were easily removed by passersby (the billboard was uniquely low to the street).

Steal

After less than 48 hours, enough people stole the stuff to reveal the message hidden underneath: “People steal.” With an execution this good, it’s a matter of time before media creatives will be stealing this idea instead.

Read [Eperience The Message] via [AdLand]

 
No Comments

Posted in Advertising, Campaigns, Interactive

 

DarkNet : Power to the Peers

04 Aug 2005

A test version of the ‘darknet’ software was made available on a Freenet Project website early Wednesday and a refined edition could soon (late 2005) be ready ‘for general consumption,’ Ian Clarke of Freenet told AFP. Freenet’s user-cloaking software was tested by about 2,000 members of Orkut, an online social network created by Internet search giant Google, with ‘very positive results,’ Clarke said.

Other Slices from [Yahoo!News]:

Darknet software has so far been treated as a tolerable bane by copyright defenders because programs have been difficult to use and limited to sharing between groups of no more than five or 10 computer users.

“We’ve devised a way you can have a darknet with potentially millions of users,” Clarke said. “We hope we will have something suitable for launch this side of Christmas.”

Clarke said that Freenet is altruistically advancing technology and defending democratic ideals of unrestrained communication.

“Our goal has never been to encourage copyright infringement, however, you cannot have freedom of communication and protect copyright laws,” he continued. “The two are mutually exclusive.”

Dear Music Industry :

“If you are selling water in the desert and one day it starts to rain, what do you do?” he asked rhetorically. “Go to the government and get them to ban rain, or do you sell something else?”

From the [FreeNetProject]

“I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she’s too young to have logged on yet. Here’s what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say ‘Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?’”
–Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation

[Team Cymru Darknet Project] [Darknet Home]

 
No Comments

Posted in Social Networks, Technology, Tools

 

Open Network Television, Exchanging Digital Content

04 Aug 2005

ON-TV, short for Open Network Television launched the I/ON Internet Video Console, which fuses together leading technologies into one simple media player, connecting you directly to the video you want. I/ON allows you to watch the web – accessing rich media content directly, on-demand. Avoid the ads, pop-ups, and spyware that come with watching video in a browser… and watch the web, unbothered.

“The Internet is filled with innovations, artistic expressions and independently created entertainment. Our goal is to make that digital content easy to find, view, share and manage. ONTV builds conduits between you and others, to enable the exchange of thoughts, ideas, and emotions, embodied within digital content.”

ONTV.

Download [I/ON for Mac or Windows ] – [ONTV] via [BoingBoing]

 
No Comments

Posted in Social Networks, Technology, Tools

 

Windows RSS Publisher’s Guide, Part 1

03 Aug 2005

From the Longhorn Team RSS Blog : “Today is the first installment of the Windows RSS “Publisher’s Guide”. Over the development of the RSS features in Windows Vista, we’ll post regular features on what RSS feed publishers need to do to properly integrate with IE. In general, these will be simply be to do what most people in the community already expect (this post is a great example of that), so there will be few surprises. However, we think that being explicit about exactly what we support never hurt anyone. This way, the community can tell us if we’re doing something wrong, or we can explain why we chose one particular direction over another. Hopefully, this particular topic won’t be controversial.”

Here’s some good PR many of us surfers have been waiting for. A lot of questions have been popping up over the web with issues about compatibility, random aggregatoring and other plugs or options. This is the place to turn to for info about compatibility, for questions, for answers.

Shouldn’t they’ve changed their name to the Vista Team RSS Blog? I was just thinking…

GoTo the [Longhorn Team RSS Blog] and participate in the development of a better IE.

Found it at the [BlogNewsChannel].

 
No Comments

Posted in Blogs, Technology, Tools

 

Yahoo! Publisher Network Beta & Broadcast Samples

03 Aug 2005

Yahoo announced on Monday plans to offer video clips from CNN and ABC on portions of its Web site. Starting in September, the free video clips will be included on Yahoo’s front page, within news stories and in special sections. Yahoo! also has launched a beta network in the U.S. for small- and medium-sized publishers and also has released the APIs for the portal’s shopping database.

About the clips :

“I doubt the average consumer is going to watch CNN online,” said Jupiter Research analyst Todd Chanko. “Although anything [Yahoo] can do to aggregate eyeballs is a good thing.”

“While Google requires a special Web browser plug-in to view video on its site, Yahoo’s video places no such demands on its users”, said Yahoo spokesperson Brian Nelson.

Although the video playback for users is free, the service will be supported by advertising. “I wouldn’t be surprised” if a Yahoo-branded video player were to appear, said Yankee Group analyst Su Lee Walker, who noted that Yahoo already has inked deals with CBS, MTV, Discovery and others.

A full article about the Video Samples is available at [Yahoo!News]

About the ad network :

“The Yahoo! Publisher Network self-serve beta will also offer phone and email customer service and in the coming weeks, will feature ad targeting capabilities to publishers. And that’s just the beginning. Down the road look for more opportunities through the self-serve platform [...]. – So says Yahoo!s Search Blog.

Nathan has made a compilation of the news, over at [InsideGoogle], so tune in here for more.

About Shopping API’s :

Yahoo! also released application-programming interfaces for developers who want to search the portal’s shopping database and display prices and other information for products on their web sites.

Besides search, the APIs can be used for merchant/price comparisons. The technology includes sample code and documentation, and covers millions of products and thousands of merchants in Yahoo’s shopping database.

Read more about this chez [Yahoo!] or get the APIs at the [Developer Network]

 
No Comments

Posted in Corporate News, Search

 

The Wonderful PR of Talkr Service

03 Aug 2005

A few days ago Nathan pointed me to Talkr, a service that indexes your RSS, and then puts a voice to the words you’ve written. I subscribed immediately, found the mp3 links to go nowhere, but the feed got listed. I’ve sent a mail to the support address from Talkr, and boy are they friendly ! Turns out the CEO himself (Chris Brooks) replies to all the support emails personally and he even apologized for going on vacation for a week. Hah ! Cool. Anyway, he promised to look into it right away, and the same day (monday) everything got fixed.

He sent me a mail with the details of the error :

[...] “Here’s what caused the problem you ran into — our text to speech server ran into a glitch while I was out of the office, and it began creating zero-length audio files. We are recreating about 25,000 files, and should finish that process in the next couple of hours.

My guess is that any older posts should already be available as mp3s, and that posts from yesterday and today will be available within the next 6 to 12 hours.

Again, my apologies for the inconvenience. If for some reason you’re still experiencing a problem after 6 to 12 hours, please let me know, and I’ll make sure to track it down.

Thanks,
Chris”

See, now that’s PR ! A human face, put on a company. Interaction. Service. Awesome !
I think I’m going to switch to a semi-full feed, where I’m going to add more text to the rss for articles of a certain respectable length I’ve written myself. Not for copy-pasted material. I think that’d be wrong. So. In the future, some parts of my feed will be larger, to have an audio sample of it so Nathan can listen to it when he goes out for a walk.

So, the link to the podcasts is a feed and it’s a [Talkr RSS].
[Get started with Talkr and let your blog do the talking].
Check out some [Free Audio Feeds] at Talkr’s.
See who’s listed, alphabetically [Start with 'C', guess why] ;)

 
No Comments

Posted in Blogging, Marketing, Tools

 

Advertisement in Videogames Taken to The Next Level

03 Aug 2005

Advertising in videogames, dominated in the past by static ads such as billboards and signposts, is beginning to look more like TV commercials. So said The Wall Street Journal on July 25th. Apparently, Massive Inc., a New York company that distributes ads in videogames, has been testing an ad with full motion and sound in a science-fiction game called Anarchy Online. Massive rolled out the full-motion ad capability to advertisers generally that same day.

The Problem :

“The technique was a big step forward for videogame advertising, which previously was restricted to ads inserted into games while the games were made. Because games can take up to a couple of years to be designed, this required advertisers to put their ads into games well before the games’ release.”

The Solution :

“The game-insertion technology opened the door for a broader array of marketers to promote their products on videogames. These ads are particularly suitable for Hollywood studios wanting to promote movies a week before their release date or retailers promoting holiday sales, Massive Chief Executive Mitchell Davis says. He says Massive has sold space to 35 advertisers, including Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures.”

The Future :

“Massive says its technology works for both online games and consoles, but it hasn’t yet negotiated a deal allowing for ad-insertion in console games. Mr. Davis says he hopes to strike a console game deal soon. Edward Williams, managing director at Harris Nesbitt Equity Research in New York, says the videogame ads won’t take off until console games are included.

One problem with the full-motion ads is that gamers can easily avoid watching them. The full-motion ads start playing when a player moves near the ad spot on the screen — and stop playing when the player moves away. As a result, gamers may see only a few seconds of the 15-second ads. Massive says it won’t charge advertisers unless the full ad has been viewed.”

The Full Article by Christopher Lawton on [The WSJ Online] via [AdLand].

 
No Comments

Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Trends

 
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »