DISQUS

Chris a nice thoughtful piece here with the key mantra for marketing: Disclosure aka Transparency. However it is interesting that you use the term "sponsored" about Federated Media's "Conversational Marketing".

Although I'd agree that approach is best categorized as "sponsored" surely John B would not agree? Isn't his argument more along the lines of creating what he thinks is a big happy family of sponsors/bloggers/information consumers who dialog about things, thus making disclosure less important?

Interesting, surprising departure from your usual enthusiasm for users. Pissing off current users is a high stakes gamble with Twitter now a real force in social networking. As Twitter or Twitter mashups add FB functionality the game will change.

There is room for several social environments and I'm sure FB will survive but it seems to me Twitter is the application to watch right now - businesses almost immediately see the value of a Twitter presence where they are still struggling to gain profitable footholds in FB and typically appear to be losing money with FB ads.

Excellent - looking forward to this!

This is a naive post Louis, perhaps reflecting your own reliance on advertising revenues?

..... means I will see fewer banner ads for dancing monkeys and silhouettes offering me low mortgages...

right, you'll see bouncing monkeys juggling cell phones - only the poor schmucks who were surfing for interest rate info will see the "low interest" mortgage ads from both legitimate and dubious lending sources.

I am a beneficiary of the system and a believer in the need for internet advertising but I'm waiting to see what sprouts out before complementing these profiling decisions. I'm getting tired of Google explaining how virtuous the advertising cycle that makes Google billions is for everybody else.

Google does far too little quality control on their ad base. "e.g. try a search for "free ringtones" and look at the laundry list of misleading advertisements, scammy companies, and bs.

Online advertising could easily be cleaned up but it would take revenue cuts that are unacceptable to publishers. Therefore buyers should not rejoice at more targeted advertisments, rather they should continue to be skeptical of naive and foolish claims that their interests will align perfectly with publishers and with Google. They probably *never* will.

On the up side you, I, and Google are going to make more money from this change. Thanks Google!

Relax Holden - you are way ahead of the curve taking on a blog and tech news, so just write when you feel inspired, angered, or interested in something.

As you already noted Blogging's a great way to learn fast, so you've been a great success with that. If you find you are worrying a lot about comments or subscribers then take a break for a week.

Twitter is great, but I'm wondering if they are already in the same boat as Facebook and YouTube where monetizing is much harder than they expected even as our expectation of service and stability keeps increasing. Also concerned that Twitter is starting to feel the weight of abusers who are using the system to promote questionable biz schemes, tho hopefully the community can police this stuff as needed.

Matt is a very cool character - he quietly built and manages one of the world's largest info networks and gives almost all of it away. Happy Birthday WordPress and best of luck as we all blog on..

The Gaza war on Twitter has been an example of how important social media has become as a propaganda and PR tool, and also how it connects people. So far I'm not convinced that helps resolve things but more direct communication is generally a postiive thing.

Good job - I think TechCrunch was way too pessimistic though I do like that I now have an excuse to watch this from the HP lounge, comfortably sipping a beer and munching some food rather than live like last year for Gates.

Loving how this is playing out, which I think shows the power of online communities in terms of questionable marketing. This company risked pissing people off to gain more users. The Twitter crowd appears to be policing itself to the extent we may be able to avoid the spam that has made email such a problem. I would encourage Twitter to begin a program to verify identity in such a way that people can't launch new campaigns under different names.

Robert I appreciate the fact you are arguing against something that would benefit you far more than others. However my beef with Loic is the idea that popularity or even authority *in any form* is something we should work hard to protect and promote. Call me a digital anarchist, but I'm tired of TechCrunch's often regurgitated news stream. I find that increasingly I want to know what Peoria is thinking as much as what Mountain View thinks. Even though Peoria is rarely as interesting or well articulated or technologically sophisticated, it's far more *representative* and if I'm looking for business ideas or social trends...I'd like to know that.

Robert as usual nice points that prove once again you are *the man* in social networking. The transparency of the social space is a large part of the appeal and there's little need at Twitter for "privacy" - that is missing the point. Do we ever need privacy? Sure, but we have many private venues already - the important changes are in the social space.

no historic proven causality or even correlation between downturns in the financial indexes and problems in the real economy.

I think you meant something else. Your statement is preposterous. Of course there is both correlation and causation. Obviously there are other factors at work on the indexes as well - is that what you meant?

Fred not all bloggers are on the doom and gloom bandwagon

Steven it's not "doom and gloom" to simply suggest the obvious - the party is over and folks should expect to work harder, spend less, and stop living so large on paper wealth that, like Elvis, has left the building(s).

It's just the revenge of the spawn of Darwinian capitalism rearing their ugly two headedness!

Given that average VC returns (Fred excluded) have gone from poor to what may become catastrophic, I hardly think it's fair to say VCs fanned all that many flames. On average the VC startup economy appears to benefit startups far more than investors. Perception is the opposite simply because people do not review the failures - only the giant successes.

People are looking hard for scapegoats and unless you watch FOX (where the scapegoats are the poor crack addled inner city folks who FOX suggests were buying 2 homes each), expect the more successful capitalists to be under fire for some time. Some with justification, others not so much.

Sure some suck but many of these are impressive. I give TechCrunch 10x the points of Demo for streaming the conference and their far better screening process ...

Excellent point about water crisis.... but I think you do care and I think most of us do - it's just that we are skeptical we can make changes happen. Luckily, thanks to the internet, there are a lot of projects like KIVA.org where you can actually see the changes you make.

Rather than the old vague "goodie two shoes" approaches we need more projects where we actually see and measure an ROI on our charity investment. People are generous when they know it really matters, so it's up to all of us to find ways to effectively bring the needed global infrastructure improvements at reasonable, measurable cost.

Hurray .... another race to the bottom with an insignificant but sensational story! Tech blogz rulez!

Yes - interesting even if it fails. This is the first I'd heard about the concept but I find it very appealing. Currently posts are often elevated in status and read based on the popularity and ranking of the blog, not the post. This is not in the true spirit of new media where the quality of the content, as determined by readers (rather than aggregators or search engines), should be the key metric. Let's hope Salon has fired at least a few good shots in that direction.

Nice and interesting post Robert, though I agree with Owen that "non-passionate" may confuse issues surrounding mainstream vs small audiences. You have written a lot about engagement and clearly this is a key concept as we move forward. Where facebook offers advertisers a lot of almost worthless views while highly targeted sites may be much more effective by a factor of 10 or even 100 times.

Adding my .02: I do not think should be about *people*, rather about *ideas*. I think we need more sites like TechMeme that focus attention on the conversation and then surface many conversations about the topic. Yet even TechMeme fails to surface most of the good commentary, which is buried by the "OK" posts by the big guns in blogging that get most of the links. Solution? After a brief innoculation period to eliminate spam, elevate the relative importance of new blogs until they have some traction - ie consider flipping the "old blogger wins" on it's head in blog search routines.
Downplay the value of links and look for better content ratings systems that use community input more effectively. Former is risky but worth a shote, latter is happening, but slowly.

Robert you are one of the great blogging ambassadors, and this post proves it. No need to apologize - just keep on trucking my good man!

The Google post bugged me for a few reasons. I really think they are pretending to be transparent when in fact they are very secretive about ranking even though that hurts a lot of mom and pop websites (as well as large ones).

As anybody with even basic SEO knowledge knows, the key challenges to a site ranking properly hae little to do with Amit's three points. Fairly new websites that are fantastically informative generally rank very poorly, violating principles 1 and 2. The generaly reason is that Google is worried spam sites - which tend to be newer - will flood the results if time and lack of incoming links are not taken into account.

Google feels the lack of transparency and ranking quirkiness is needed to avoid online chaos. I don't agree. If Google really wants to protect their virtual monopoly on search they would join Web 2.0 sensibilities and follow a more transparent path, clearly identifying with hundreds of examples what they think are best practices sites and deceptive practices. Most importantly they'd talk about the gray areas in acceptable linking practices - an item that frustrates the efforts of most legitimate webmasters even if they don't know it.

Joe Hunkins's last blog post..Google Ranking Needs a Spanking

Robert I started reading thinking you were talking about Google's Lively, out today and I'm guessing soon to be the virtual world most people use. Vivaty is going to be the victim of very unfortunate timing - they won't have a chance to establish a foothold.

Thx Robert - several really interesting data points in this discussion although I think you and Mike are such atypical users of both services I wonder if your experiences can be extended to "normal" users.