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Archive for the ‘Gab Gab Gab’ Category

More Net Neutrality videos

Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 26th, 2007
Tagged as: Asides, Gab Gab Gab, Problems

More on the Net Neutrality debate.

Keep your eye on this.

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Net Neutrality - coming to a server near you.

Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 26th, 2007
Tagged as: Asides, Gab Gab Gab, Problems, Social Media, You Tube

I had no idea this was on the cards.

Just as I started to believe in the power of the many, it looks like some of the few have very different plans for the future of the Internet.

Spread the word.

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The unstoppable power of online communities

Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 26th, 2007
Tagged as: Gab Gab Gab, Internet Marketing, Long Tail, Social Media

My last post spoke about not going back.

I wrote it very late at night (for me anyway) and it was a groggy description of where my world was heading.

Two days and as many nights have passed and if anything the weight of change described in that post is even heavier today. An old saying goes: When the student is ready, the teacher will come. I like to think of it as the moment your mind is open, clarity comes.

I am beginning to see the power of long tail communities.

I’m not speaking of empty forums set up to discuss the pro’s and con’s of a single idea but communities where the collective knowledge, emotions and feelings of millions of users is shared. In his book “The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand“, Chris Anderson described it as probabilistic statistics - a matter of likelihood rather than certainty - but there is something about using the combined knowledge of an open community as the lowest common denominator in the definition of a particular principle that defies the imagination.

Wikipedia is of course the flag bearer for this medium, but there is an increasing amount of interest in this means. Take Imagine, a site that infuses the mechanism for people to self-organize get togethers such as the one’s introduced by Meetup.com with the passion of idealistic activists around the world.

Imagine’s vision is deceptively simple:

We want to live in a world where all people can live free and dignified lives, where any person who wants to help another can do so, and where no opportunities for action and collaboration are missed or wasted.

The strength of purpose of this kind of initiative is phenominal, with thousands of people worldwide dreaming, planning, doing what they want for their own communities, shifting power from institutions to people at the edges.

Or even the Personal Democracy Forum 2007 coming soon to New York, starring some of the online world’s biggest movers and shakers that aims to address:

• How is voter-generated content changing election campaigns?
• Why should advocacy groups adapt to the connected age?
• What new technology tools and practices are on the horizon?
• How are new technologies democratizing the political process?
• Which political leaders “get it”?

OK, political motivations aside, what do communities like this offer for business and marketers in particular. The possibilities are endless, once the insights and mindsets of your target audience has been fully understood. Once you accept that the many can be smarter than the few (The Wisdom of Crowds), developing a campaign becomes a process of striking the right chord in the right places.

Look at what happened over on Dell’s Ideastorm site, which uses a combination of blog user interaction with a Digg-style voting mechanism to give public weight to the unthinkable.

Going back to Wikipedia, and to one of my projects in particular, what would happen if you focused the probabilistic systems used to build an unstoppable collection of online reference material on a “massive-scale” towards instruction? Could the web be left in charge of its own education? Could its millions of users teach themselves?

Like the guys at TTeach, I believe they could and am working on a means to prove it.

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No going back now

Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 23rd, 2007
Tagged as: Apple, Asides, B5Media, Copywriting, Gab Gab Gab, Internet Marketing, Jeremy Wright, Problems, SEM, SEO, Search Engine Marketing

It’s a fascinating moment for me.

On the one hand I’ve got a great job. Copywriting - and in particular freelance copywriting - has given me both the insight and education that lets me put my thoughts and feelings into words as well as the time, freedom and inclination to explore the outer reaches of web life.

At ‘work’ I have been busy drafting the story behind a few upcoming product launches with various success. I have been studying various ways of approaching the thorny subject of internal communication and recruitment. On top of all this, I have also been looking into creating the master content of a series of web strategies so that the text is both easy to translate and effective across 7 key European markets.

Not a dull moment then.

But just like anyone with time management problems, I have also been distracted by what has in the past been called “blind ambition” but now goes by the name of a “challenge”.

You see ever since I stumbled across the letters, S, E and O, I have been drawn to their power - the fact that words, chosen carefully, could actually change the geography and relevancy of search engine results.

Then there was what you could actually do once you had uncovered this secret. White Hat is my natural colour of choice, of course, but nevertheless these three letters have unquestionably permitted some fortunate few to exploit a system to the detriment of the many.

These letters also have a more sinister side: they alienate you from the “real” world around you. I recently brought to my multi-billion dollar client’s attention that there was precious little activity on their site from any of the search engines. I even went as far as to recommend reformulating their web strategies not only to generate new traffic streams from natural search engine results but also to build enough reputation throughout the entire site to change the formula used by my client when linking to its resellers.

I got a big bunch of nods, a number of smiles and quite a few “wow we had no idea”s but never heard from them again about it. Meanwhile my client continues to pour truckloads of money into individual projects which, because they are disjointed from the overall core principles and are void of any shared values, detract from the performance of the site as a whole.

Ugh!

Either SEO (and SEM for that matter) is still in its infancy outside the US or I’m starting to be earn a reputation as a lunatic.

Best thing is to start my own business and boy do I have a few ideas knocking around. Thing is even then when I talk to friends and neighbours about them, even some who have offered to invest, the “big picture”always remains a few feet out of reach, as if what I see happening across the world in blogs, media companies and other online industries is merely a figment of my imagination, or just part of a game I’m playing all by myself.

‘Slow world’ meets the ‘fast world’, as an Italian web specialist once said, is when those living in a world fed by mainstream media have to deal with the lightning fast reactions of those of us who have chosen a more democratic, if slightly more volatile, path online. It’s never a pretty site and we (fasties) always come out worse off.

The question of whether to continue or go back is a rhetorical one. However the answer opens up a whole new debate: Then what?

I have ordered the near future into challenges I have to face:

1. I want and need to master the art of RSS as I believe RSS technology is what’s needed to create the world’s most advanced e-learning platform.
2. I believe that niche communities and experience aggregators are the key to entrepreneurial success in a Web 2.0 world. Jeremy’s “No Money in Web Advertising” articles have been instrumental in this decision.
3. I believe strongly in a healthy relationship between paid content and free services. E-learning, for example, is an ideal platform to experiment with both.

Each of the above is a open project I’d like to see up and running by the end of the year and if there are any talented writers, teachers or programmers reading this, I could probably bring that forward quite some way.

Want to know why I got buzzed today. Because I read this, then watched it here.

Oh and Jeremy, if you’re reading, I’ll be in touch soon - or you will…

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The way things work

Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 21st, 2007
Tagged as: B5Media, Gab Gab Gab, Internet Marketing, Jeremy Liew, Jeremy Wright, Problems

Jeremy Wright’s response to allegations that there’s no money in advertising is seriously worthy of note for anyone planning on setting up an online media company (like me).

If for nothing else, it was a real eye-opener for relative newcomers, again like me, on the mechanisms used to generate income from similar projects.

Remember I’m the creative one. I’ve got the idea in my head and am working on ways to implement it, yet people with hands-on knowledge of revenue streams are way ahead of me in this field.

What was particularly interesting for me was the part where Jeremy wrote:

They (Jeremy Liew’s figures) don’t hold true if:

1. You do more than 25M AdSense impressions per month (you get a better cut, exclusive deals, etc).
2. You work with a boutique ad network (like Federated Media).
3. Are able to get some remnant inventory providers (which can go from 0.50-2$/unit CPM, giving you an RPM of 1-4$ with just 2 units per page).
4. You do any non-performance/metric advertising (like sponsorships).
5. You do text links.
6. You have any internal sales team at all (which’ll sell those 1$ units for 2-5$, giving you an RPM of 4-10$ on even the most generic traffic).

He went even further:

1. For generic traffic, expect a 3-5RPM. To get to 50M$/year in revenue would thus require 800 million pages per month.
2. For demographically specific stuff, expect an RPM of 12-15. You’d need about 300M pages per month.
3. Huge in-demand areas like cars and sports can net you an RPM of 40-50. You’d thus need about 100 million pages per month.

Now that’s not to say these numbers are easy. But a media company that balances the above 3 properly, does sponsorships, syndication deals, content licensing, text links, feed ads, etc could potentially achieve 50M$/year in revenue on about 200 million pages per month.

The mechanisms at work here make fascinating reading. Sponsorships, syndication deals, content licensing, text links and feed ads are all relatively new business areas for me, but seeing as the project I’m toying with would be used extensively by universities and international business groups, it should be one of the first things I look at.

But it isn’t. I’m the creative one, remember? I just put two and two together and came up with over a million subscribers.

Maybe I should just give Jeremy a call…

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Lost?

Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 20th, 2007
Tagged as: Asides, Gab Gab Gab, Virtual Worlds

I was cruising around MySpace earlier on today and came across a link to a game called LOST.

It’s not the game I like (haven’t played, might not even get round to it), it’s the way it’s being promoted virally.

From the game’s own site:

Welcome to Lost. This game is a student project that aims to show how 7 million people connect and break the record for the most number of players ever.

You can join the game if you find an invitation. An invitation is an internet address that looks like this: www.lost.eu/example - but instead of the word ‘example’ there are some random numbers and letters.

There are invitations everywhere - on the internet and in the real world.

It’ll be interesting to see how fast Lost reaches its own particular Tipping Point.

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