Earlier, I posted a video asking which format you prefer our YouTube videos to be recorded in. Going a step further, I can't help but wonder what it is that will make the community one big happy bundle of joy. What do you want to see? What directions do envision our community taking?

For instance, if I post an article or video related to Apple, the Windows fans go ballistic. Likewise, whenever I posted something Windows-related, the Mac fanboys blow a gasket. It's like there's no happy medium these days. I cannot possibly make everyone happy all at once. I'm not even going to try!

However, I DO strongly believe that what we're doing is about the community, not just for the community. So I want to know what YOU think. What do you want to see more of in the coming months? What things can you live without? Leave a follow-up comment here, or drop me an email with your thoughts.

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• Even Barbie is a Geek!

Don't forget to stop by our software center to see what new deals we have for you today!

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ViralHeat, a social media analytics firm, hopes to fill the space left empty by other, far more expensive services.

Sponsor

The Basics

ViralHeat has been around for just over six months, providing a low-price but full-featured social media analysis for the budget minded. We had a chance to chat with CEO Raj Kadam and founder Vishal Sankhla today before the relaunch, which is unveiling support for Facebook monitoring, a new user interface and API support.

The fully Web-based app gives full analytics by monitoring an array of blogs, over 200 video sites, Twitter and now Facebook for mentions of your brand, which is set up as a profile. Each profile exists as a simple logic search, wherein you can keep track of your brand by searching for phrases, domains and hashtags, all in the syntax we've become accustomed to from using from sites like Google.

Champagne Tastes on a Beer Budget?

While ViralHeat compares itself on price to services like Radian6, there is a primary difference between the two services. ViralHeat offers a full set of analytics features, from standard mention monitoring to sentiment analysis using a natural language algorithm, but this is where it stays. It does not venture over to the content creation side, where we find the more expensive and extensive services like Radian6. Other services might offer workflow management, scheduled content delivery and other conversational tools, but this would be overkill for the users we imagine at this app's usability sweetspot.

We see that as an additional merit: ViralHeat has both the price point and the feature set fit for the company that wants to get on top of its image and perception on the social Web but can't afford to bring a social media expert on board - and on salary. The learning curve is suitable for the DIY set and the analytics it provides are self explanatory, not riddled with indecipherable, industry jargon.

For those of you that like the pricing but want to do a little more with the data, the service also allows you to export data into Excel format and access your data using the API.

The Price is Right

Speaking of pricing, this is a point that really brings it home for ViralHeat. With today's relaunch of the site, ViralHeat offers a three tiered pricing system, starting with a basic package for $9.99, a professional package for $29.99 and a business package for $89.99. The Basic package offers standard mentions analysis for 5 profiles, while the other packages offer sentiment analysis and API access for 20 and 40 profiles, respectively.

If we haven't drilled it in enough quite yet, here's the bottom line: ViralHeat looks like a solid social media analysis tool that is priced and designed for the more casual user, while offering simple features like export and API interaction that keep it flexible enough for the more serious user.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit group dedicated to defending the freedoms of individuals in the digital age, thinks the U.S. government may be violating the privacy of individuals who post content to Facebook and Twitter.

The organization has filed suit in San Francisco's U.S. District Court, Northern District, against the Department of Defense, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in order to get information concerning the government's use of social-networking websites for investigative and data gathering purposes to help inform Congress and the public about the effect of such uses and purposes on citizens' privacy rights and associated legal protections.

According to the complaint, EFF is aware that the government is using content posted to social media sites in their investigations. After their initial requests for more information and documentation on the specific policies around these activities went unanswered, the EFF began seeking a court order to force the government's hand in full disclosure.

One of the incidents cited in the complaint was the widely publicized FBI search of an activist's home, which came after the man in question used radio scanners to post the movements of police on Twitter during the G-20 Summit.

From the complaint:

Although the Federal Government clearly uses social-networking websites to collect information, often for laudable reasons, it has not clarified the scope of its use of social-networking websites or disclosed what restrictions and oversight is in place to prevent abuse.

While it should come as no surprise that the government would be monitoring social media sites for information (earlier in the year the White House sought to hire a social media archivist, while the CIA invested in a social media monitoring firm), it does seem that the EFF has a valid complaint, and that the public should know the scope of the government's monitoring activities.

The full 8-page complaint is embedded below. We're curious to see how this all plays out, so we'll keep you posted on new developments.

[via Bloomberg]

Tags: EFF, lawsuit, social media monitoring, trending, Trending Stories, US Government

What I am about to say is because I have been a long time member of the eBay affiliate program, now called eBay Partner Network. It is also of value to anyone that is starting or currently responsible for managing an affiliate program for a company.

My affinity for their brand is the result of being a partner for over three years, my wife being a seller on eBay for nearly ten years, API ease of use and the ability to earn revenue consistently for three years as part of the partner network.

But try as they might, eBay has not driven me away from the partner network . . . yet. They transitioned the program from Commission Junction to an internal program two years ago. The metrics and other monitoring tools suffered as eBay had to get their affiliate legs underneath them. No longer could an affiliate view the extensive reports for click monitoring, referrals, purchases, week to week comps, etc.

Then eBay transformed the program most recently from their CPA (where a partner was paid if their link resulted in a sale) program to a CPC program. This isn't your average CPC program with prices set per click it is based on an algorithm that calculates the quality of the clicks from a given link on a 24 hour basis and assigns them a monetary value.

With this most recent transition to CPC and a program controlled by an algorithm (see: bot) eBay developed a Transparency Team. This team has the task of reaching out to partners that have links that aren't performing in a manner that matches the eBay partner agreement (see: fraudulent).

This is a great idea in theory. However, this team wouldn't need to exist if the eBay partner network returned to the same type of reports that Commission Junction used. Instead, when reinventing the wheel, eBay eliminated any useful monitoring for partners. Thus making participating in their program as opaque as it can be. Metrics that provide a payout, ranking or trip the algorithm to send an automated email stating that a partner is somehow engaged in fraudulent activity are nonexistent.

Ebay has removed any substantive accounting for themselves in the process of monitoring or payouts, the crux of a developer or user becoming an affiliate. Hiding reports from users that are accustomed to them as part of other vendor programs.

The problem is a that is a basic customer service issue that has not been addressed by eBay. Reporting, prompt replies and useful feedback data would allow partners to build better programs that meet eBay's standards and can be crafted to drive more quality traffic to eBay.

This example says it all:

Two months ago I was contacted by the eBay Partner Network Transparency Team (see: bot generated email) stating that in their quest to be transparent I should do the same and that I was failing as a large percentage of my links weren't sending referrer data. Meaning that they don't have a record from these links of the website where the link was displayed and clicked on.

Fair enough to ask me about the links. Not fair or right, accusing someone of not being transparent when all of the click data is hidden away. Not fair is waiting two months to reply back with meaningless data stating that eBay is right. See below:

Ebay sure is right that I have a high non-referrer rate and that bots are removed. I guess I should stop questioning their authority . . . sure. I'd do that if I knew what the criteria were or what bots are being removed. Because for nearly two years they didn't remove a single bot from click data.

I've requested more data from the Transparency Team like IP addresses and user-agents of those clicks. Since I can't track the click that is actually going to eBay without breaking the user-agreement with eBay I will be at their mercy to figure out if the clicks are coming from mobile devices or and some proxy bot that has a lust for finding its way to eBay auctions. Maybe the bot master was blocked by eBay for not being transparent enough when scraping their auctions.

Ebay, this isn't how to be transparent or run a valued affiliate program. If my experience hadn't begun with your program on Commission Junction I wouldn't have such high hopes for how the current partner network could operate. As an affiliate, I want to make money, but I also want eBay to succeed.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Ebay Partner Network and Transparency is a post from: TechStartups.com

Five years ago I wrote my first Content Management System from ground the ground up. After forty-five days of coding day and night I diagnosed myself with coder's elbow'. The main symptom being a sharp and agonizing pain in on the inner elbow the ulna meets the humerus.

It was in the middle of one of these painful episodes that I was working on the database and the trying to figure out how I was going to transfer that content to the display layer that my a-ha moment occurred. I wasn't building a content management system to circumvent the issues and limitations I was having with WordPress, I was creating a distribution tool.

Once I had the content in the database the display layer could be anything that I chose it to be. It could be sent anywhere that I choose. The greatest of all these bursting thoughts was that it could go places that I didn't even intend it to. The content would have a life of its own. No more was I restricted by developing a site architecture and held to the constructs of a storyboard with A to B to C or D back to A.

With my coder's elbow I went on another week long journey through RSS to make sure that the content would be in the right namespaces, that it could be personalized with unique URL elements, creating search and keyword feeds, developing feeds that could use Basic Auth to restrict usage and the holy grail of individual content metrics. Imagine throbbing pain in both of my elbows now as these feeds overtook my life.

What came from this platform was a CMS that I began licensing for professional development, blogging, podcasting and for real-time metrics (back in 2005). I literally began my first business with it and continued to use it and variants of it for startups and media companies like MTV.

One thing remained constant in all of these scenarios syndication. Along with that syndication came the monitoring and proof that the programs and companies were getting the most value from the digital projects they had entrusted to me.

I decided to write this post and explain my process after I found a series of posts by Daniel Jacobson (@daniel_jacobson) from NPR. He was one of the individuals responsible for developing their robust, media rich API. It's not an API that I have discussed here at Tech Startups because I don't use it for any projects. I did test it when it launched and found it to be a great way to traverse NPR's archives and deliver legacy content as if it were created that day. Daniel Jacobson gets it.

So to spare yourself a case coder's elbow that could ruin your tennis game, you should start with Daniel's COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere post. This will put you in the right frame of mind to follow with . . . wait I'll list them in order.

COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere
Content Modularity: More Than Just Data Normalization
Content Portability: Building an API is Not Enough

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

The NPR Model Is Correct is a post from: TechStartups.com

Google News has launched Custom Sections for users to create their own personalized news groupings. This is a big step forward for Google News. They are inching ever closer to a content shopping cart.

As content becomes detached from its publishers and syndicated around the internet it takes on a life of its own. This is especially true for publishers that have their content scraped by Google News. The advent of Custom Sections for personalized news groupings stems from this flow of disparate content.

By allowing users to filter their content at a new level, be it still a pretty high level, Google News is positioning itself as a defacto standard for personal aggregation sans feeds. However, once a Custom Section has been created Google does give access to an Atom feed in the address bar of a browser through auto-discovery. Here is an example feed.

Custom Sections allow users to title the section, choose search terms (keywords), choose a location domestic or foriegn and the ability publish the section to everyone.

A great addition to this list would be publisher, or in Google's nomenclature, author. Filtering news by selection of authors would make this a more valuable tool.

There is one major problem with Custom Sections that Google needs to solve metrics.

Publisher should be allowed to have access to metrics for their content in Google News and across all Google platforms.

Publishers should be able to know what groups, keywords, amount clicks they receiving and the additional syndication of their content in feeds from Google.

If Google really wanted to get publishers . . . sorry, authors, on board with these new tools they could share a bit of the that monitoring love.

Authors could create better content, find verticals they are strong in that had escaped them and share sections with their readers.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Custom Sections in Google News is a post from: TechStartups.com

Startups are often in a position of being bootstrapped or strapped for cash when it comes to what is considered outside the core product roadmap.

Often in that category is the marketing of the product site online. The crew at Sitening as an ever maturing offering with Raven SEO Tools that won't hurt a startup budget and could prove a big return on a $79 monthly investment.

Raven SEO Tools is an internet marketing tool set. Designed to be a powerful tool for those in the know and accessible to newbies to manage site marketing, research SEO, monitor linking campaigns, reporting and integration with the Google Analytics API.

If there is one thing that Raven could do to improve upon this application it would be spin off components of the functionality into separate interfaces or other product offerings. Raven doesn't suffer from bloat, but it does put a lot of options for monitoring and reporting in front of a user.

Raven's interface is like opening a tool box to find the shiniest most sophisticated wrenches when you would settle for a rusty vice grip. After some time you can get to the rusty vice grip but you have to know where to find it.

The team at Sitening has begun to address with the addition of a Wizard for entering in a new site for monitoring and some social components. The social monitoring is a must for today's market in monitoring tools and a welcome addition for a startup to gauge the pulse of concerned users.

Beyond the Wizard integration there is something very interesting that Raven has that no other monitoring application I've reviewed has a content manager. Raven has a built in mini-CMS consisting of the essentials, title, keywords and body with a TinyMCE WYSIWYG wrapper that currently will connect with a WordPress blog.

The ability to blog from within a robust set of tools when a users mind is full of ideas, keywords, strategy and tactics is a powerful addition. It turns Raven into a hybrid monitoring SaaS that has the ability to help make your startup budget go further.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Make Your Site Fly With Raven SEO Tools is a post from: TechStartups.com

I am a fan and practitioner of the simple.

In my quest to keep it simple I've found the following 5 ways to KISS:

(I will avoid cliche where possible)

1. Don't reinvent the wheel - find technologies or examples that you can use outright or as inspiration for your needs. Apply this to development, design, implementation or monitoring.

2. Distill design palettes choose two complimentary colors for layouts and utilize a background color as a third. Use negative space like it's on sale at Home Depot by the bucket.

3. Distill site structure one page sites like http://www.zachklein.com do the job just fine.

4. Make dynamic seamless if you need a database to display items or for search use an insert only policy for content by utilizing filters (see #1) before adding content.

5. Accept complexity and automate strip it down, hide it and automate it by attending to items 1-4.

Simple doesn't mean easy. It means trial and error as you work towards an ideal combination of features and usability.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

5 Ways to KISS is a post from: TechStartups.com

Remember our post about five people that were changing journalism? I do.

And with the very fresh release of Linked Open Data by the New York Times, we begin the next phase of the semantic web today.

The New York Times is in the initial phase of opening up their news vocabularies to the public. Throw in a dash of linked data and some serious structure in RDF and the push begins to become the brand associated with the prevailing taxonomy.

It is important that attention is paid to this release because it is the first salvo of its kind by a new organization that is making a play to maintain it relevance and revenue stream. Next versions of the web will be built on structured and linked data and the ability to make it portable.

The cyclical pattern that content will travel in the future between devices for consumption, the sharing of and the monitoring of will rely on the ability to speak a common language around the language. Ya feel me? I'm sure you do.

The internet needed its own language, terms and definitions wrapped around it simply to be explained. The data that travels on it is in the same need now. The talk of filters and too much content is dominant on today's web and tomorrow's web is lacking codification. Enter the New York Times and a new phase of startups that will shape this new lexicon and how those words link together.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

New York Times Brings Us Linked Open Data is a post from: TechStartups.com

This is my attempt to give a small bit of advice when tracking dynamic files with MySQL. Most CMS's and blogging platforms have built in tracking that is not dependent on reading server logs.

Which means they either need to write to a flat file or to a database. And if it is the latter there are some things to keep in mind.

Amount of Data to Be Stored

This is the single most important question to answer. It is the one that leads you to the magic buzzword, 'scale'. Most databases are designed to hold millions of records but the problem comes when writing thousands of records at the same time statistics are being run, etc. The answer to this question should reflect site traffic and anticipated usage.

Remember, if this is an open system and you allowing bots to traverse your content, especially with feeds, that you should take your number and multiply it by 10. You will be amazed at the amount of bot traffic on your feeds.

File Monitoring

Next, setup a portion of the script itself or another script on a cron that monitors the files that you need tracked. You're probably most familiar with this concept from IP or application monitoring. Think of this as the same, simply micro, down to the file.

Obviously, the most vital files should be monitored more often. Vital meaning the most trafficked files, syndicated data or files that power content for partners or your own onsite widgets. Set this monitor up to email yourself or bust out your cURL skills and send yourself a DM with the Twitter API.

Placement of Tracking Code In File

This doesn't need much of an explanation. Put your tracking code before you execute the core function of the file. That way if your tracking code is failing, it will do so before creating output to your users.

Corrupt Data

Once monitoring has been setup you can nip corrupt data in the bud. The key is to act quickly after you receive a monitoring alert that one of your scripts is having an issue with a DB query, insert or update. Most likely the issue will be an insert with some sort of corrupt data or duplicate auto increment id if their are thousands of inserts coming in and the table has failed.

Write that optimization command or fire up your GUI and make that table normal.

MySQL is pretty forgiving when it comes to inserting thousands of records a day into one table. Keep in mind that first question of scale though and when designing your file tracking DB think about efficiency.

This should lead you to optimize queries, write some code to perform statistic functions in your file language away from the database, spread the tracking data across a few tables and an efficient replication method. Because you never know when that next traffic burst will happen.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Tracking Dynamic Files With MySQL is a post from: TechStartups.com

In case you haven't noticed or cared, traditional agencies, the PR and Marketing types, have been contracting for the last few years. This year has been especially difficult for them with the rise of Social Media agencies. These upstarts are winning business and receiving opportunities that aren't even being pitched to their larger counterparts. This can be fixed . . . but there isn't much time.

What is a Social Media agency?

For those unaware of what a Social Media agency is it is an agency stocked with hardscrabble internet veterans and young talent steeped in the traditions of the tubes. I kid the youngsters, but they are, at this point truly digital natives. They grew up on the internet, were texting years before smart phone popularity and have been enculturated digital simply by being born. Often these agencies are small and their leadership, the aforementioned veterans, participated in the bubble of 2000 and have found a new source of revenue social media.

It didn't have to be this way

Traditional agencies should have seen this coming. This was a trend that they started over the last few years as their clients wanted to experiment with the precursors to social media, blogging and podcasting. During this time they would often offer small budgets to independent producers or find an overworked employee inhouse that knew something about the technologies. The deliverables were forced and atrocious (think astroturfing), poor strategy (if any) for syndication/consumption and zero metrics to show a client return on investment.

What was really happening was the large agencies were incubating social media agencies in the very earliest of stages. Even the social media agencies didn't know what they were yet. What they did know was that what they were producing wasn't working for the end client. And if this new stream of money was to continue coming in they would have to educate their handlers at the traditional agencies and develop their own tools to show ROI.

While budgets for blogging and podcasting began to dwindle, traditional agencies looked at them as passing trends. What they were missing is that the people they had been funding were now off creating tools like FiltrBox, Radian6 and putting their business strategies in place to harness the power of social media. They were going to fill the gap.

Not only have the new companies and agencies filled the gap, they are now taking away opportunities from traditional agencies. All the while, traditional agencies continue to lose money and talent. Much of that talent loss is due to layoffs. Agencies haven't figured out how to begin winning RFP's back and are letting the very people they need the most go. And when they go, they're shuffling off to boutiques and social media agencies to restart their careers with a fresh memory of the bureaucracy that didn't recognize their talent.

Saving themselves

Agencies have to stop thinking that they need more business development. They need solutions.

No amount of biz dev is going to save you when you have nothing to sell. It might work one time. But the client will realize it when they ask what they measurements for ROI are. No more biz dev or placement talk.

What kind of solutions do agencies need? The kind that evolve out of a strategy for engagement. The kind that evolve from a desire to meet the new requirements to participate in social media like listening. They need tools that show competency in measuring the strategy and tactics of a digital campaign.

The key to their continued existence is to prove they are needed. By creating solutions inhouse like monitoring software and metrics analysis hey will be able to monitor new trends and hopefully find themselves riding high for the next wave of competitors.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Post from: TechStartups.com

I've reviewed quite a few job descriptions and talked to a few folks in the field, and can boil down the job reqs to three major skills, they are:

The Three Essential Qualities of Corporate Social Media Positions
There's often a list of skills, backgrounds, education, and sometimes Twitter follower requirements listed but It boils down to three qualities:

1) Fulfill Meaningful Business Objectives
Here's where companies are having problems finding qualified folks. The social media early adopter types tend not to be able to see beyond the shiny technologies and understand the business objectives. I can quickly find out who these folks are as they focus on the greatest latest tool. What's a trick for landing a corporate job in social? Be able to have a 5 minute conversation with an executive about connecting with customers without ever mentioning twitter, facebook, or a blog. Secondly, these individuals will be able to use brand monitoring tools, have analytical abilities, and be able to benchmark their efforts that tie back to business metrics not social media metrics.

2) Bridge Both Internal Stakeholders and Customers
This quality requires the professional to be able to relate to internal teams that may not understand the social culture, be empathetic, be able to communicate and train them, and be able to put it into action. Secondly, they often need to understand the culture of the community which they serve, communicate with them in a trusted manner, and engage in meaningful dialog.

3) Show Credibility With The Technology
The biggest struggle with hiring teams is that the demand and excitement for social and the recession has spurred a great number of social media experts and consultants. We already know that usage and experience don't equate to social media expertise, yet hiring teams continue to look for credibility by the individuals current use with the tools. What they don't tell you is this: are you capable of learning new technologies, evaluating, and then applying for business needs. Don't misread this, it's not in your favor if you were a late adopter, or don't know the nuances of the technology, but it's secondary to being able impact the company.

My hope is that boiling down these three essential qualities it'll help both hiring managers and applicants be able to sort themselves out. But let's open it up to you, are you a hiring manager or a candidate? What's missing?

Update: David Armano shows what not to look for.

Stanford-Clark has set up various systems for real-time monitoring of the Internet of Things, many of them using Twitter (he calls the resulting tweets "tweetjects"). One example got a bit of mainstream media coverage lately: a house that uses Twitter to monitor its energy consumption.

Sponsor

As Rory Cellan-Jones from the BBC reported recently, Stanford-Clark has installed sensors on a number of household objects - such as electricity meters and windows. From this he can monitor lighting, heating, temperature, phone and water usage. Stanford-Clark is able to turn his fountain, lights and heaters on and off by flicking switches on a web page or from a live dashboard application on his mobile phone.

He's also now hooked up his house sensors to a Twitter account: andy_house (it's a private account, so requires Andy's approval before you can follow it). Here's a BBC tv report about the house and other similar projects involving sensors and Twitter:

As well as his own house, Stanford-Clark has also set up Twitter accounts for his local ferry and bus - for example so they can tweet their real-time locations.

What Use is a Tweeting House?

Stanford-Clark told me that as well as providing useful data about what his house is doing - for example how warm is the lounge, or has he left a door open - the system can also apply intelligence to his house. For example it can cross-reference house data against AMEE (an open platform for measuring energy consumption), in order to infer the real-time carbon footprint for his house.

These experiments are just the start of what's possible by hooking sensors up to real-time messaging systems like Twitter. However there's a lot of infrastructure work that needs to be done first. Stanford-Clark told me that to get at this type of data for many everyday things, governments, city councils and companies will need to instrument public things with sensors - e.g. gas pipelines, buses, trains, ferries.

The problem for most organizations, including government, is that they aren't necessarily sure what uses there are right now for sensors. For example power companies may not see the economic value of replacing meter readers with automatic sensors. Stanford-Clark's response is that "a lot of other apps will spring out of the woodwork," when sensors are added and hooked into messaging software.

Stanford-Clark and IBM have identified 3 main things that are required for this trend to play out fully, conveniently summed up as "the three 'I's": Instrumented, Interconnected, and Intelligent. In my next post, I'll explore this more - plus some of IBM's other projects in this area.

AdvertisingAge got more details from the company about its research, which pegs the total free media coverage given to Twitter the past month to be worth $48 million. As AdAge points out, that's about half of what Microsoft plans to spend marketing Bing.

Online, Twitter received 2.73 billion impressions, undoubtedly some of them thanks to TechCrunch. Television contributed to 57% of the PR value, newspapers 37% and magazines 5%, according to VMS. As the monitoring company's CEO Peter Wengryn explains, the total coverage may be much higher than what the firm could possibly monitor, since it doesn't take into account mentions in smaller newspapers in the United States and media coverage in the rest of the world.

Either way, it's a LOT of coverage, acknowledges Gary Getto, VP-integrated media intelligence at VMS:

This is huge. It's very, very high. In fact, we looked at online coverage of Twitter vs. Google. Twitter is running significantly higher than Google and I didn't think anything was more popular than Google.

How long will Twitter continue to be the social media darling in the media? Long enough to eventually reach 1 billion users and become the pulse of the planet?

And more importantly, when will it start turning the mountains of attention, traffic and users it is getting into cold, hard cash?

(Image via MaximumPC)

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Familiar with the concept of hardware keylogging? A hardware keylogger is a perfect solution for monitoring user activity, at very low risk of disclosure. A hardware keylogger is a purely electronic device, so no access to the operating system is required, no traces are left, and software has no possibility of detecting such a device. However, the hardware keylogger concept inherits one weakness: physical access to the keylogger is required for retrieving captured data. This problem has finally found it's solution: a Wireless Keylogger.

KeeLog has already released one open source PS/2 hardware keylogger design to the public. Now, we are doing it again with the DIY Wireless Keylogger. This design is fully free for private and commercial use...

Familiar with the concept of hardware keylogging? A hardware keylogger is a perfect solution for monitoring user activity, at very low risk of disclosure. A hardware keylogger is a purely electronic device, so no access to the operating system is required, no traces are left, and software has no possibility of detecting such a device. However, the hardware keylogger concept inherits one weakness: physical access to the keylogger is required for retrieving captured data. This problem has finally found it's solution: a Wireless Keylogger.

KeeLog has already released one open source PS/2 hardware keylogger design to the public. Now, we are doing it again with the DIY Wireless Keylogger. This design is fully free for private and commercial use...

A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find -- grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.

Robotic Technology Inc.'s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot -- that's right, "EATR" -- "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable," reads the company's Web site.

That "biomass" and "other organically-based energy sources" wouldn't necessarily be limited to plant material -- animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they'd be plentiful in a war zone.

You know, my editors frown on me for swearing, for good reason, but in this case: SERIOUSLY, PENTAGON, WHAT THE FUCK?!?

I am having a really hard time trying to figure out what the military purpose of a robot that eats dead bodies is. Maybe the idea is these robots will make it difficult for independent observers to quantify casualties? Maybe President Sarah Palin will nominate one to the Supreme Court? The article states that EATR is a "platform" that things could be "built upon" -- like an "ambulance" or a "mobile gunship." But it seems to me that the ambulances and gunships we have now are perfectly okay, and, at any rate, DON'T MAKE MY SOUL HURT.

Speaking of:

The advantages to the military are that the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced.

So then: some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. But it looks like it's going to end in a hail of white-hot terror at the hands of marauding, corpse-eating Roombas.

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Solid Host, NL v. NameCheap, Inc., 2:08-cv-05414-MMM-E (C.D. Cal. May 19, 2009)

Facts

This case involves an alleged domain name theft. Solid Host is a web host and initial owner of the domain name solidhost.com, which it registered through eNom in 2004. Solid Host claims that in 2008, a security breach at eNom allowed an unknown interloper (Doe) to steal the domain name and move the registration to NameCheap. Doe also acquired NameCheap's "WhoisGuard" service, a domain name proxy service that masked Doe's contact information in the Whois database. Solid Host contacted Doe and sought the domain name; Doe asked for $12,000, and Solid Host took a pass. Instead, Solid Host demanded that NameCheap hand back the domain name and identify Doe, but Doe claimed that he had bought the domain name legitimately. NameCheap, apparently feeling like the cheese in a sandwich, demurred to Solid Host's requests. Solid Host then got a TRO ordering NameCheap to transfer the name and reveal Doe's identity, both of which occurred. For unclear reasons, Solid Host hasn't amended the complaint to name the Doe, but it is proceeding against NameCheap on various claims, including an Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) claim.

The Opinion

Who is the Registrant?

My understanding of domain name proxy services is that the service acts as the legal registrant, thus supplying its contact information, but it registers the domain name for the benefit of its customer, making the customer the beneficial registrant. An analogy: a bank may take legal title of a property as part of securing a loan on the property, but the borrower retains beneficial title to the property.

So, for purposes of the ACPA, is the proxy service the registrant of the domain name? ICANN's agreement with registrars seemingly contemplates this characterization in Section 3.7.7.3 of its Registrar Agreement, which says A Registered Name Holder licensing use of a Registered Name according to this provision shall accept liability for harm caused by wrongful use of the Registered Name, unless it promptly discloses the identity of the licensee to a party providing the Registered Name Holder reasonable evidence of actionable harm. However, it's not clear to me that a proxy service licenses the domain name, especially if you accept my lender-borrower analogy above. Alternatively, if the proxy service is the agent of the customer, the licensing analogy also breaks down.

Whether the proxy service is the registrant matters a great deal to the legal outcome, and unfortunately, the court's analysis of this important question was cursory, muddled, and possibly internally inconsistent.

In this case, the court's inquiry is made more difficult by the fact that NameCheap acted as both the registrar and the proxy service provider. As a registrar, an ACPA claim against NameCheap should be squarely preempted by the domain name registry/registrar safe harbor enacted as part of the ACPA (15 U.S.C. 1114(2)(D)). For example, 1114(2)(D)(iii) says:

A domain name registrar, a domain name registry, or other domain name registration authority shall not be liable for damages under this section for the registration or maintenance of a domain name for another absent a showing of bad faith intent to profit from such registration or maintenance of the domain name

(This provision only moots damages, not an injunction, but since Solid Host has the domain name back in its possession, damages seem like the only remaining issue).

The court concludes that NameCheap is not eligible for the domain name registrar safe harbor because NameCheap is the domain name registrant. It says, "NameCheap is, by virtue of the anonymity service it provides, the registrant of a domain name that allegedly infringes Sold [sic] Host's trademark." Thus, NameCheap is ineligible for the registrar safe harbor, which applies only when the registrar acts as a registrar.

But, having rejected the domain name registrar safe harbor because NameCheap was the domain name registrant, the court then inconsistently says that NameCheap is not the registrant for purposes of the prima facie ACPA claim. Instead, for ACPA purposes the court treats Doe as the registrant, leaving NameCheap exposed to a possible secondary ACPA liability claim. (The court acknowledges that NameCheap would defeat a direct ACPA claim because NameCheap did not have any bad faith intent to profit from the domain name. Offering the proxy service wasn't enough to qualify as a bad faith intent to profit).

Wait a minutehow can NameCheap simultaneously be both the registrant (no safe harbor) but not the registrant (thus, subjected to a secondary claim)? The court does not acknowledge or explain this apparent inconsistency.

Contributory Cybersquatting

Courts have rarely discussed a contributory ACPA claim. The only one cited by the court was a 2001 case (the Ford Motors vs. Greatdomains.com case) and I can't think of any others. Perhaps this isn't surprising because (1) as the Greatdomains.com case indicated, a contributory ACPA claim is available "in only exceptional circumstances," and (2) registrars are the most likely targets of a contributory ACPA claim, and the domain name registrar safe harbor effectively eliminates their contributory ACPA liability.

Adopting the analysis in the Greatdomains.com case, this court equates contributory ACPA liabilty with the Ninth Circuit's 1999 Lockheed standard for online contributory trademark infringement (as opposed to ACPA liability), which requires that "a plaintiff must prove that the defendant had knowledge and [d]irect control and monitoring of the instrumentality used by the third party to infringe the plaintiff's mark.'"

So how did NameCheap have the requisite control over Doe's instrumentalities? Good question. The court tosses out this gem: NameCheap was "the cyber-landlord of the internet real estate stolen by Doe." WHAT??? The court continues:

NameCheap's anonymity service was central to Doe's cybersquatting scheme. If NameCheap had returned the domain name to Solid Host, Doe's illegal activity would have ceased.

The second sentence is true with respect to NameCheap, but it is also true of every registrar for every domain name they register--and we know from the 1999 Lockheed case that registrars lack control over the instrumentalities of their registrants. So the proxy service seems to make a legal difference, but how does the proxy service evidence NameCheap's greater control over the registrant's instrumentalities? I think something is amiss here.

To complete the prima facie contributory ACPA claim, in addition to control, Solid Host must show that NameCheap has the requisite knowledge of Doe's ACPA violation. The court sets a high scienter bar--mere notice from an aggrieved party isn't enough--but the court conclusorily says that the complaint alleged enough knowledge to survive the motion to dismiss.

Why This is a Troubling Ruling

As I trust is clear, I think the court's analysis is questionable at best. I'm also troubled about the normative implications. Most obviously, this case could portend the deminse of domain name proxy services. Read literally, every proxy service is exposed to potential contributory ACPA liability for every domain name it services. I can't imagine proxy service providers will be excited about that liability exposure, and some may choose to exit the business.

If proxy services evaporate, domain name registrants will have a tougher time maintaining their privacy. This could affect at least two groups. First, businesses seeking to register domain names for unlaunched new brands often want to procure the new brand's domain names without publicly announcing their intentions through the Whois database. (Of course, some businesses register such domain name through agents or shell companies, but at a much greater expense than a proxy service). Second, gripers, whistleblowers, critics and others may want to use proxy services to make it harder for their targets to unmask their identities. This ruling jeopardizes the potential privacy options available to both groups.

I'm also troubled by this ruling's narrow reading of the domain name registrar safe harbors. There haven't been many cases interpreting those safe harbors, and this case might influence other courts to read them narrowly.

A Mini-Trend of Lawsuits Against Registrars

I've noticed a small but troubling increase in lawsuits against domain name registrars in the past few months. In addition to this case, see the Vulcan Golf v. Google lawsuit (which named some registrars as defendants), OnlineNIC cases, Philbrick v. eNom and uBid v. GoDaddy. Personally, I believe this litigation trend mirrors the expansion of new and legally untested non-registration services offered by registrars. I explored this issue with Elliot Noss of Tucows in the most recent installment of TWiL (worth listening to, IMO). Discussing the uBid lawsuit, Elliott explained how registrars monetize dropped domain names before being returned to the available pool of unregistered domain names. The delay is putatively for the benefit of customers who mistakenly let a registration lapse; but this also has the happy (?) by-product of letting registrars create new ad inventory that they are monetizing.

In the past, a lot of the legal attention regarding domain names has focused on trademark owners vs. registrants. From my perspective, those lawsuits are becoming pass. The real litigation growth industry appears to be trademark owner vs. registrar lawsuits over new registrar service offerings that trademark owners don't like. Rulings like this one, with a broad reading of contributory ACPA liability and a narrow reading of the domain name registrar safe harbor, raise the specter that registrars may find more legal trouble than they anticipated.

Louis Vuitton Malletier, S.A. v. Akanoc Solutions, Inc., C 07-03952 JW (N.D. Cal. Dec. 23, 2008)

This is one of countless anti-counterfeiting actions by luxury brands against allegedly infringing websitesbut the twist is that the brand owner is going after the sites' web host. In Tiffany v. eBay, the big brand got very little traction against eBay based on eBay hosting auctions for allegedly infringing goods. This case doesn't turn out as well for the web host. The court, without citing Tiffany, leaves open the possibility that the web host could be liable for its customers' infringing activities. Why the difference?

Contributory Copyright Infringement

The court starts with contributory copyright infringement. The court doesn't clearly specify the direct copyright infringement taking place. It discusses evidence that the defendant's customers are selling counterfeit goods, but it doesn't connect the dots to show that the counterfeit goods are actually protected by copyright law. (It's not automatic that counterfeit goods infringe copyright).

Also, the DMCA online safe harbors are not mentioned, which makes sense if the copyright-infringing behavior is the actual sale of the counterfeit goods instead of publishing information about those goods. However, as we saw in the Tiffany case, the web host cannot determine if the goods being sold are actually counterfeit. Nevertheless, the court says a jury could find the web host had actual knowledge of the infringement due to a series of defendant emails and demands from the plaintiff. From my review, it appeared that the referenced emails involve the web host relaying the plaintiff's takedown notices to the hosted customers, so I'm not sure how these emails could evidence knowledge of the counterfeiting.

With respect to material contribution, the court references the confusing language from Perfect 10 v. Amazon and the archaic Napster precedent to say that failure to take simple measures to stop infringement can qualify as a material contribution (a standard referenced in Amazon), and the web host here could easily disable the IP address of the putatively infringing website. As a result, its failure to take such simple steps could constitute material contribution.

All told, the contributory copyright infringement analysis in this case is heavily plaintiff-favorable. It appears that the plaintiff's prima facie showing is (1) allegedly counterfeit goods being sold outside the host's purview (the direct infringement), (2) demand letters plus emails from the host to customers relaying takedown notices (knowledge), and (3) the host's ability to turn off accounts or disable IP addresses (material contribution). This is a disconcerting standard, because just about every web host could satisfy this test.

Contributory Trademark Infringement

The court references the contributory trademark infringement standard from the Ninth Circuit's 1999 Lockheed v. Network Solutions case, requiring knowledge of the infringement plus [d]irect control and monitoring of the instrumentality used by the third party to infringe the plaintiff's mark. In practice, it appears the court equates the contributory trademark and contributory copyright analysis. The court does so expressly for the knowledge prong, where the judge simply references its prior copyright discussion.

As for the host's control, the court analogizes the host to an offline swap meet (just like Tiffany did), shoots down some of the defendant's arguments and then says that, per Fonovisa, the defendant cannot remain willfully blind to infringement on its servers. This sounds a lot more like a contributory copyright infringement analysis than the Lockheed direct control and monitoring requirement.

I was disappointed that the court (like so many others) does not address the web host's eligibility for the printer/publisher defense. This might very well be apropos to web hosts.

Other Claims

The court dismisses the vicarious copyright infringement claim because there was no evidence that the web host's profits varied with the infringing activity. The court also dismisses the vicarious trademark infringement because the web host lacked the requisite agency relationship with its customers (why do apparently smart IP lawyers routinely allege vicarious trademark infringement when there is no agency???).

Implications

I think the contributory trademark infringement ruling is entirely consistent with the obvious hole left open by the Lockheed case, which excused a domain name registrar for selling allegedly infringing domain names but implied that web hosts might be treated differently. More surprising, perhaps, is that in the decade since the Lockheed case, we've had almost no cases mapping out the boundaries of web host liability for contributory trademark infringement. It's remained one of those known Cyberlaw frontiers. While it's nice to get a case addressing that frontier, I wish it were more favorable to web hosts.

So, last week, I had the pleasure of being stabbed, scanned, physically simulated, and synthetically defocused. Clearly, I must have been at SIGGRAPH 2008, the world's biggest computer graphics conference. While it usually conflicts with Black Hat, this year I actually got to stop by, though a bit of a cold kept me from enjoying as much of it as I'd have liked. Still, I did get to walk the exhibition floor, and the papers (and videos) are all online, so I do get to write this (blissfully DNS and security unrelated) report.

SIGGRAPH brings in tech demos from around the world every year, and this year was no exception. Various forms of haptic simulation (remember force feedback?) were on display. Thus far, the best haptic simulation I'd experienced was a robot arm that could "feel" like it was actually 3 pounds or 30 pounds. This year had a couple of really awesome entrants. By far the best was Butterfly Haptics' Maglev system, which somehow managed to create a small vertical "puck" inside a bowl that would react, instantaneously, to arbitrary magnetic forces and barriers. They actually had two of these puck-bowls side by side, hooked up to an OpenGL physics simulation. The two pucks, in your hand, became rigid platforms in something of a polygon playground. Anything you bumped into, you could feel, anything you lifted, would have weight. Believe it or not, it actually worked, far better than it had any right to. Most impressively, if you pushed your in-world platforms against eachother, you directly felt the force from each hand on the other, as if there was a real-world rod connecting the two. Lighten up a bit on the right hand, and the left wouldn't get pushed quite so hard. Everything else was impressive but this was the first haptic simulation I've ever seen that tricked my senses into perceiving a physical relationship in the real world. Cool!

Also fun: This hack with ultrasonic transmitters by Takayuki Iwamoto et al, which was actually able to create free-standing regions of turbulence in air via ultrasonic interference. It really just feels like a bit of vibrating wind (just?), but it's one step closer to that holy grail of display technology, Princess Leia.

Best cheap trick award goes to the Superimposing Dynamic Range guys. There's just an absurd amount of work going into High Dynamic Range image capture and display, which can handle the full range of light intensities the human eye is able to process. People have also been having lots of fun projecting images, using a camera to see what was projected, and then altering the projection based on that. These guys went ahead and, instead of mixing a projector with a camera, they mixed it with a printer. Paper is very reflective, but printer toner is very much not, so they created a shared display out of a laser printout and its actively displayed image. I saw the effects on an X-Ray - pretty convincing, I have to say. Don't expect animation anytime soon though (Side note: I did ask them about e-paper. They tried it - said it was OK, but not that much contrast.)

Always cool: Seeing your favorite talks productized. One of my favorite talks in previous years was out of Stanford - Synthetic Aperture Confocal Imaging. Unifying the output of dozens of cheap little Quickcams, these guys actually pulled together everything from Matrix-style bullet time to the ability to refocus images - to the point of being able to see "around" occluding objects. So of course Point Grey Research, makers of all sorts of awesome camera equipment, had to put together a 55 array of cameras and hook 'em up over PCI express. Oh, and implement the Synthetic Aperture refocusing code, in realtime, demo'd at their booth, controlled with a Wii controller. Completely awesome.

Of course, some of the coolest stuff at SIGGRAPH is reserved for full conference attendees, in the papers section. One nice thing they do at SIGGRAPH however is ask everyone to create five minute videos of their research. This makes a lot of sense when what everyone's researching is, almost by definition, visually compelling. So, every year, I make my way to Ke-Sen Huang's collection of SIGGRAPH papers and take a look at the latest coming out of SIGGRAPH. Now, I have my own biases: I've never been much of a 3D modeler, but I started out doing a decent amount of work in Photoshop. So I've got a real thing for image based rendering, or graphics technologies that process pixels rather than triangles. Luckily, SIGGRAPH had a lot for me this year.

First off, the approach from Photosynth continues to yield Awesome. Dubbed "Photo Tourism" by Noah Snavely et al, this is the concept that we can take individual images from many, many different cameras, unify them into a single three dimensional space, and allow seamless exploration. After having far too much fun with a simple search for "Notre Dame" in Flickr last year, this year they add full support for panning and rotating around an object of interest. Beautiful work - I can't wait to see this UI applied to the various street-level photo datasets captured via spherical cameras.

Speaking of cameras, now that the high end of photography is almost universally digital, people are starting to do some really strange things to camera equipment. Chia-Kai Liang et al's Programmable Aperture Photography allows for complex apertures to be synthesized above and beyond just an open and shut circle, and Ramesh Raskar et al's Glare Aware Photography evaded the megapixel race by filtering light by incident angle - a useful thing to do if you're looking to filter glare that's coming from inside your lens.

Another approach is also doing well: Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir's work on Seam Carving. Most people probably don't remember, but when movies first started getting converted for home use, there was a fairly huge debate over what to do about the fact that movies are much wider (85% wider) than they are tall. None of the three solutions - Letterboxing (black bars on the top and bottom, to make everything fit), Pan and Scan (picking the "most interesting" square of video from the rectangular frame), or "Anamorphic" (just stretch everything) - made everyone happy, but Letterboxing eventually won. I wonder what would have happened if this approach was around. Basically, Avidan and Shamir find the "least energetic" line of pixels to either add or remove. Last year, they did this to photos. This year, they come out with Improved Seam Carving for Video Retargeting. The results are spookily awesome.

Speaking of spooky: Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness. Sure, everything you see is photoshopped, but it's pretty astonishing to see this automated. I wonder if this is going to follow the same path as Seam Carving, i.e. photo today, video tomorrow.

Indeed, there's something of a theme going on here, with video becoming inexorably easier and easier to manipulate in a photorealistic manner. One of my favorite new tricks out of SIGGRAPH this year goes by the name of Unwrap Mosaics. The work of Microsoft's Pushmeet Kohli, this is nothing less than the beginning of Photoshop's applicability to video - and not just simple scenes, but real, dynamic, even three dimensional motion. Stunning work here.

It's not all about pixels though. A really fun paper called Automated Generation of Interactive 3D Exploded View Diagrams showed up this year, and it's all about allowing complex models of real world objects to be comprehended in their full context. It's almost more UI than graphics - but whatever it is, it's quite cool. I especially liked the moment they're like - heh, lets see if this works on a medical model! Yup, works there too.

As mentioned earlier, the SIGGRAPH floor was full of various devices that could assemble a 3D model (or at least a point cloud) of any small object they might get pointed at. (For the record, my left hand looks great in silver triangles.) Invariably, these devices work like a sort of hyperactive barcode scanner, monitoring how long it takes for the red beam to return to a photodiode. But here's an interesting question: How do you scan something that's semi-transparent? Suddenly you can't really trust all those reflections, can you? Clearly, the answer is to submerge your object in fluorescent liquid and scan it with a laser tuned to a frequency that'll make its surroundings glow. Clearly. Flurorescent Immersion Range Scanning, by Matthias Hullin and crew from UBC, is quite a stunt.

So you might have heard that video cards can do more than just push pretty pictures. Now that Moore's Law is dead (how long have we been stuck with 2Ghz processors?), improvements in computational performance have had to come from fundamentally redesigning how we process data. GPU's have been one of a couple of players (along with massive multicore x86 and FPGA's) in this redesign. Achieving greater than 50x speed improvements over traditional CPU's on non-graphics tasks like, say, cracking MD5 passwords, they're doing OK in this particular race. Right now, the great limiter remains the difficulty programming the GPU's - and, every month, something new comes to make this easier. This year, we get Qiming Hiu et al's BSGP: Bulk-Synchronous GPU Programming. Note the pride they have with their X3D parser - it's not just about trivial algorithms anymore. (Of course, now I wonder when hacking GPU parsers will be a Black Hat talk. Short answer: Probably not very long.)

Finally, for sheer brainmelt, Towards Passive 6D Reflectance Field Displays by Martin Fuchs et al is just weird. They've made a display that's view dependent - OK, well, lenticular displays will show you different things from different angles. Yeah, but this display is also illumination dependent - meaning, it shows you different things based on lighting. There's no electronics in this material, but it'll always show you the right image with the right lighting to match the environment. Weird.

All in all, a wonderfully inspiring SIGGRAPH. After being so immersed in breaking things, it's always fun to play with awesome things being built.

New Version Of NewsGators Widget Platform Makes It Even Easier for Brand & Media Companies to Build, Deploy, & Track Widgets

Denver, Colo. June 19, 2008 NewsGator Technologies Inc. today announced the general availability of Editors Desk 2.1, a new version of the companys widget platform that makes it even easier for brand and media companies to build, deploy, and track widgets.

Updates to NewsGators widget platform include a dramatically redesigned user interface, sophisticated new templates, and an easier, more streamlined workflow for widget creation. Editors Desk 2.1 boasts exciting new features including a widget search tool for simple creation of subject-specific content widgets, a duplicating clone capability that allows users to easily create similar widgets, and feed monitoring that provides instant feedback on widget performance and feed errors.

Media and brand companies are embracing widget strategies at a breakneck pace because syndicating content with widgets works, said Jeff Nolan, vice president, NewsGator Software-as-a-Service. By simplifying the creation, deployment, and management of widgets, Editors Desk 2.1 enables companies to quickly and easily realize positive business results from extended brand reach to increased website monetization.

NewsGators widget platform is part of NewsGator Software-as-a-Service, which encompasses the companys syndication and data services offerings and helps media companies, content publishers and advertisers engage audiences through the use of social media and Web 2.0 technologies. NewsGator's Web 2.0 syndication products, including personalized RSS readers, Widget Framework, Community Publisher and Widget Ads, give companies the tools they need to enable their audiences to create, subscribe and interact with the most relevant content while staying within the company's brand. NewsGators widget and data services are in use by some of the world's largest media companies and brands, including CNN, Media General, National Geographic, Newsweek, CBS News, Reuters, USA Today and Discovery Communications. For more information, visit www.NewsGatorWidgets.com.

About NewsGator Technologies, Inc.
NewsGator Technologies helps enterprises and media companies leverage social computing solutions to deliver real business value. The companys enterprise social networking and widget services are in use by hundreds of the worlds most recognized brands, including Bank of America, Biogen Idec, CBS, CNN, Discovery, National Geographic, Procter & Gamble and USA Today. NewsGator Social Sites and Enterprise Server give enterprises better ways to collaborate, share content, expand employee knowledge and improve productivity. NewsGator Widget Services enable media and brand companies to better engage their audiences and extend the value of their brands through viral syndication of content. NewsGator also offers free, award-winning RSS aggregators for the Web, desktop, mobile devices and e-mail clients. For more information, visit www.newsgator.com

Contact Information
Laura Farrelly
NewsGator
303-552-2046
lauraf(at)newsgator(dot)com

Jennifer Gazin or Zoe Vandeveer
LaunchSquad
415.625.8555
newsgator(at)launchsquad(dot)com

• Blogging - keep a company blog updated with latest news and status updates
• Get Satisfaction - a place for your customers to express their opinion and help you identify bugs. A Suggestion Box 2.0
• Easy access to contact information - let customers know that they can always call, email or mail in their issues, never hide your number
• Respond to complains quickly - never go silent.
• Never deny the obvious - its much better PR to admit your mistakes than to actively deny they exist.
  

Read on as I touch on some of the points above.

Blogging - The Ultimate Tool to Connect With Your Users

A blog serves a million functions for your company from keeping the customers updated with the latest and greatest happenings to custom feeds for journalists, to engaging the conversation with your users. First thing to remember is to always keep posting, because a "dead" blog is sometimes indicative of the company losing interest in updating the users. If you suffer from planned or unplanned outages of your service - never host your blog on the same server farm as your current website. A lot of times if the site is down, the blog is the first place people look for an update and if you host your blog on the same server as your site which happens to be down, your blog will be down as well.

To start a blog you can take a look at one of our tutorials in the Video Tutorials section. There are two types of blogging platforms out there: a hosted solution such as WordPress.com, Typepad or Blogger and host-it-yourself packages. If you would rather have complete control over your content and not rely on anyone else for that service, you should check out WordPress.org, Movable Type or even our own blogging platform, Post Zinger (which, by the way, is a clear winner in blogging/podcasting space). Some hosting providers such as BlueHost (disclosure: it's our affiliate link) allow you to very quickly install these platforms.

In case you are still not sold on having a blog, keep in mind that they all come with some type of RSS Feed which helps high traffic blog authors to keep tabs on you, and when they see a new interesting feature or a sour customer turned happy they will cover, it bringing the ever important positive coverage of your service. Your blog also allows you to keep the conversation on the site, where you can control it, and while deleting comments and doing weird things will quickly get you very bad rep, you at least have a chance to respond quickly to issues.

If you think you need to be a technical person, that's not true, there are a ton of tutorials out there and it's generally a very low barrier of entry to get started. Pretty much anyone can get their own blog in a matter of minutes and have it customized with your website's look and feel in a matter of days, if not hours. There are always people that can set it for you, adding the benefit of their knowledge in the area.

Got Satisfaction?

Get Satisfaction is an up and coming social media feedback site. A lot of start ups use it as a de facto destination for getting positive and negative feedback about their services. It can be used as a tool to report bugs, suggest new features or complain about your product's usability. It is extremely useful as a feedback tool because the people who write are usually very passionate about your products. I have seen people write great suggestions, awesome bug reports and generally very articulate reviews. It can backfire however - if the company isn't responsive or has terrible customer service through general channels, it will have issues appealing to the social crowd. Case in point: Comcast. They try, they really do, and in 4 years of having the service I personally had no issues, no problems with customer service, always responsive, always helpful. Their corporate image, however, has suffered, from the lies about filtering, to terrible overcharging and deceitful pricing models, they leave a foul taste in customers' mouths. Also, someone over there really needs to fix their dot com site, probably eliminate it all together.

Setting up Satisfaction is pretty straight forward, first you create a company if it does not yet exist, then you claim it through ether email or phone confirmation. It takes a few days but once you are up and running, it is very simple to manage your company and products, add additional reps and moderate the conversations.

Denial is Not An Answer - Do Not Try to Fool Customers

If you have a problem with your service - be it an unfairly treated customer, a site that is constantly down, or shipping delays on a product launch - acknowledge them, do not let complaining customers escalate it and attract negative attention. People enjoy ganging up businesses to stand up for the little guy, be it vocal (through Internet or otherwise) or action driven protest (by unsubscribing, switching services, bad mouthing, etc). Blogs like The Consumerist enjoy writing about these incidents and sometimes whole communities dedicated to complaining spring up in protest. Timing is also everything, and in 9 out of 10 times you will have to make a public response to a lot of these complains, so it's better to be proactive and responsive before you generate enough bad press to fill a wall. Responding quickly and honestly is the key. This is where Brand Monitoring comes into play, where you are able to notice these incidents quickly, before they manifest themselves into PR disasters. From Twitter to Google Blog Search, companies that pay attention are the ones that end up benefiting from "Happy Customer" stories and positive word of mouth marketing.

Finally, have an easy way to contact you company, a number on every page or at least a clear link to the contact page, responsive service centers and acknowledging emails will go a long way. Zappos has their customer number on every page, they respond to emails extremely quickly and show care and compassion - clearly the reason for being so successful in online shoe selling business.

Try some of these out or, if you already use these methods successfully, let us know in the comments how they are working out for you!

Users Make UGC, But Few Marketers Monitor It

A Jupiter Research report on this subject analyzes the risks of negative buzz. The report is entitled "When Good Social Marketing Goes Bad," but it should be noted that most people use the term "social marketing" to apply to campaigns that mean to bring about social change. The Jupiter report, however, uses the term more casually to mean any marketing campaign that relies on user-generated content of a viral nature.

What they discovered was that although marketers have been quick to embrace this new trend - 35% allow for user-generated content (UGC) on their own web site and 21% have a profile on a social network - they have not been as quick to monitor and combat the negative buzz that some of their consumers will create.

In fact, only 29% of marketers using these techniques are monitoring the online discussions about their products on an ongoing basis and a shocking 17% don't monitor online discussions at all. Also, despite the availability of professional "buzz monitoring" services like Nielsen BuzzMetrics or MotiveQuest, only 8% of marketers used these services in 2007.

Who's Talking Trash?

The Jupiter report was also able to build a profile of the typical creator of negative user-generated content. This person is usually a heavy user of social networks, predominantly male (60% are male) and into technology (40% are influential in this area and 23% are considered "early adopters"). They are also a potential valuable audience for marketers as 49% tend to act as brand advocates - which means they tend to be vocal influencers who spread the word online.

How to Fight the Negative Buzz

Before trying to combat the negative buzz, the first thought needs to be whether or not it's worth the effort. Often, marketers will attempt to offer these negative UGC creators special treatment or invite them to be beta testers in order to keep the feedback private and productive. However, these tactics are not always practical and they don't always work, either.

A marketer must be aware of how far and fast their company will go to fix a legitimate complaint and also how likely the complainer is to adjust their response. Keeping in mind that research shows that only 12% of online adults think UGC like those posted on social networks or message boards is "trustworthy," going to great lengths to quiet the naysayers is not always worth the effort.

Of course, sometimes it is worth the effort, which is why the most important thing for a marketer to determine is whether or not the negative content is created by someone who just wants to take a cheap shot at the company, or whether it actually offers genuine insight into a product or service's failure. If so, then addressing those persons that created the negative UGC makes sense. Then, it can actually be helpful to engage those people openly in the public forum to show the company is listening to valid complaints and responding. That is a difficult choice to make for a company, as it only takes one loud negative voice to affect an influence on the larger group of the company's customers. However, when done well, this type of response can be a benefit to all.

Conclusion

Lately we've seen a lot of companies attempting to combat negative online buzz in new ways - Comcast has been monitoring blogs and social networks for mentions of their company, Digg is now holding online townhalls, and many other companies are offering customer service via Twitter. We've also seen the potential volatile situation that can occur when one disgruntled customer's voice can attract the attention of the whole crowd, as in the situation with Ariel Waldman's complaint against Twitter. Even she admits on her blog that she never meant "...to bring a mob with pitchforks to Twitter's door," yet that is the power of even one complaint.

An old adage in advertising and marketing is that "a satisfied customer will, on average, tell five people, but a dissatisfied customer will tell everyone they know." For a company to be successful, especially now when the tools for communication are being intentionally placed in the customers' hands, it is more important than ever to know how to analyze, monitor, and respond to negative online buzz.

If you're looking for an excuse to implement or upgrade the newest 4.0 version of Dynamics CRM, I now have 60 reasons ready for you. This should be a must read for those evaluating Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for their business.

Just to list a few:

• Reporting Wizard that allows you to create and run custom reports in minutes; in fact, no report development experience is required. This includes offline and scheduled reporting.
• Easier-than-ever Workflow Wizard to streamline your business processes without custom programming.
• New Data Import Wizard to easily map and drop your new leads, contacts and other records into CRM.
• Internet Facing Deployment for accessing your CRM data securely, without the need for a VPN connection.
• Design, upload and share Mail-Merge Templates across your organization.
• Integration with Microsoft Office Communication Server to see who is online and communicate with them.
• Tighter integration with Microsoft Office software like Word and Excel, where you can import data dynamically from CRM and refresh as needed.
• Advanced Entity Relationship Modeling that allows you to tailor CRM to work the way you do.

If any of these features sound exciting to you, then feel free to download the full white paper below or go directly to the Microsoft Partner download site.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 - Top 60 New Features (PDF, 1.7 MB)

Review the table of contents after clicking the link below.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0: Top 60 New Features
Table of Contents

BUSINESS BENEFITS SUMMARY . 3
ENHANCE PRODUCTIVITY
1. Internet-Facing Deployment .4
2. Smart Search 4
3. Load Status Bar ..4
4. Most Recently Used Entities List 4
5. Tracking Breadcrumb 5
6. Web Mail Merge 5
7. Activity Synchronization 5
8. E-Mail Smart Matching ..5
9. E-Mail Promotion to Lead or Case .6
10. Presence Visibility 6
11. Campaign Automation ..6
12. Resource Center 6
STREAMLINE BUSINESS PROCESSES
13. Windows Workflow Foundation 7
14. Workflow Wizard ..7
15. Workflow Accessibility .7
16. Expanded Workflow Actions .7
17. Dynamic Data Access for Workflow Design ..8
18. Multi-Stage Workflows ..8
19. Choice of Design Environments 8
20. Advanced Workflow Expressions and Triggers ..8
REPORT WITH EASE
21. Scheduled Reporting 9
22. Reporting Wizard .9
23. Offline Reporting .9
24. Integrated Reporting Access Model .9
25. Advanced Find 10
26. Dynamic Data Connections in Microsoft Office Excel . 10
27. Activity Reporting 10
MANAGE DATA INTELLIGENTLY
28. Data Import Wizard ..11
29. Duplicate Detection ..11
30. Reusable Data Import Maps .11
31. Data Import Validation ..11
ALIGN BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY
32. Advanced Entity Relationship Modeling .. 12
33. Smart Navigation .12
34. Device Client Access License .12
35. Read-Only Client Access License ..12
SUPPORT GLOBAL BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS
36. Multi-Tenancy ..13
37. Multi-Language .13
38. Multi-Currency 13
39. Multiple E-Mail Platform Support ..13
EFFECTIVELY MANAGE CRM
40. System Job Monitor ..14
41. Monitoring and Diagnostics .14
42. Office Client Diagnostic Tools and Reports 14
43. Client Tracing and Troubleshooting File 14
IMPROVE MANAGEMENT EFFICIENCY
44. Migration of Customizations 15
45. Organization Import Wizard .15
46. Extended Portable Application Model 15
47. Bulk User Add ..15
DELIVER ON AVAILABILITY, PERFORMANCE, AND SCALABILITY REQUIREMENTS
48. Microsoft SQL Server Mirroring .16
49. Enhanced Performance ..16
50. Clustering and Load Balancing ..16
51. Component Scalability 16
QUICKLY DEVELOP, INNOVATE, AND DEPLOY
52. Metadata Application Programming Interface .. 17
53. Offline Customizations 17
54. Event Framework Plug-Ins ..17
ADDITIONAL FEATURES
55. Citrix Support ..18
56. Automatic Client Updates 18
57. Path-based URLs18
58. Pop-Up Blocker Detection ..18
59. New Accessibility Features ..18
60. Advanced Quote Printing 18
PRODUCT INFORMATION .19
FEATURES AND BENEFITS SUMMARY 20

Look out, Facebook slackers: Your information-technology department now has a way to ensure you're using Facebook for work, not play.

No more of this in the office

Facetime Communications, a Belmont, Calif., firm that makes software for monitoring employees' use of Web browsing, instant messaging, Skype and other online applications, on Monday announced a new feature in its Unified Security Gateway appliancehardware with software installed on it. The new feature will let companies allow workers to use Facebook and other social-networking Web sites but block them from using specific applications (translation: online services) within those sites.

In other words: Goodbye, Scrabulous. (For the uninitiated, Scrabulous is an online version of Scrabble that Facebook users can play within the Facebook site.)

Facetime Chief Executive Kailash Ambwani said the inspiration for the new feature came from chief information officers who said they had a problem: They didn't want people, say, playing Scrabulous on social-networking sites when they should be working, but they also couldn't block the sites because certain employees said they used them for workfor instance, human-resources types who wanted to screen job applicants using Facebook.

We don't know who is more impressive: the employees who persuaded their bosses that they use Facebook for workor Ambwani, for actually making the new product feature happen.

The classical gatekeeper role model must die!

Public Relations is still centered around the old gatekeeper role model because classic media works as a so called 'relevance filter' and like every filter can be manipulated in many ways. Offer free travel, transportation, invitations, etc. and you will most likely get friendly news coverage.

The blogosphere works totally different because of the viral character of hyperlinking information.

Let's see why the gatekeeping theory is old media news only...

Definition: Gatekeeper role model

In human communication, in particular, in journalism, gatekeeping is the process through which ideas and information are filtered for publication. The internal decision making process of relaying or withholding information from the media to the masses. The theory was first instituted by social psychologist Kurt Lewin in 1947 and is still one of the most important theories studied by students of mass communication and journalism. Gatekeeping occurs at all levels of the media structure - from a reporter deciding which sources are chosen to include in a story to editors deciding which stories are printed, or even covered.

Source: Wikipedia Gatekeeping (communication)

Gatekeeping is dead in the blogosphere

Pito Salas from the BlogBridge team posted a Blog article and points out what are the three most relevant questions in the PR industry regarding the blogosphere.

It???s been quite interesting to hear how the ???blogosphere??? is posing new challenges to Public Relations and Corporate Communications executives. Many of the tried and true ways of delivering a valuable service to clients don???t seem to be working anymore. In fact there are those out there that say that ???traditional PR is dying???.

He is saying that there are three main fears inside the PR industry:

1. What are the top blogs that are most relevant for client X?
2. Finding the coverage that matters and ignoring the noise.
3. What about metrics? What is the influence of this blogger, or the circulation of that one?

Read the full article. The trembling uncertainty within the PR industry is postulated here: Tracking the blogosphere (I shamelessly stole his great sub-title for my article title - Kudos)

Dear Public Relation folks

1. Blogs and/or the Internet have no gatekeeper function!
2. A blog with 10 readers can go viral with bad news in minutes and receive 1,000s of hits just because somebody complained about a product and the story hits a viral nerve.
3. Is reputation management still a PR task?

A really good PR representative must know when to start/stop to react in public or how to find a behind the scenes solution.

Setting up a working blog monitoring environment is time consuming and an art if you include a reputation management workflow.

Don???t ask for ???the relevance of a blog???! Monitor the search sources instead.

From my comment

• Willing to become part of the discussion? Head over or post your own article :)
• What are your experiences with the PR industry?
• Did some companies try to 'influence' you?

Offering a blog monitoring service is a nice business model now!

Check If Your Router's Supported

Upgrade Your Router to the Tomato Firmware

Now you'll need to log into your current router to upgrade. This process may vary slightly depending on what router you're using and the firmware it's running, but for the most part it's very simple. You can go through the old DD-WRT step-by-step here if you're using a Linksys router with the default firmware (just replace DD-WRT with Tomato and quit after step 2). Below I'll describe the simple update process from DD-WRT to Tomato (which is virtually the same as it would be for any other router with one small difference).

First, point your browser to 192.168.1.1/, the default admin page for your router. If your router has a username/password set, you'll need to enter it to continue. Next you need to navigate to the firmware upgrade section of your router's admin panel. In both DD-WRT and the default Linksys firmware, you'll click the Administration tab followed by the Firmware Upgrade tab. Now just click the Browse button and direct your router to the appropriate firmware file for your router in the folder you unzipped earlier.

See the README file included in the Tomato_1_13 folder to determine which version you'll need to choose at this point. If you're using the same WRT54GL router as I am, pick the file named WRT54G_WRT54GL.bin. Now just click the upgrade button and wait. Be sure not to turn off your router during this upgrade.

When it's finished, you're ready to start using Tomato. (Pretty simple, right?) Point your browser back to 192.168.1.1/ and log with "admin" (without quotes) as both your username and password. If you upgraded from DD-WRT, this may not be working for you. If the login isn't working off the bat, you've got one more thing to do: Perform a hard reset on your router. To do so, just find the little Reset button and the back of your router, then press and hold it for a few seconds. When your router comes back online, the "admin" username and password should work.

Boost Your Wi-Fi Signal

Tomato is a little low on documentation on this subject (okay, so it's low on documentation all-around), but the DD-WRT documentation suggests that an increase of up to 70mW would be "suitable for most users." A boost much above that could cause heat issues and considerably decrease the life of your router.

I can't attest to the certainty of damage beyond what the DD-WRT documentation says, but here is what I can tell you: I've been running my router with DD-WRT for over a year transmitting at 70mW, haven't seen any hiccups in performance and so far have seen no smoke. Even better, my Wi-Fi signal easily reaches to every corner of my apartment.

Track Your Bandwidth Usage, Set Quality of Service Rules, and More

A few weeks back I showed you how to set up Quality of Service rules on your DD-WRT router to ensure you don't drop Skype calls, lag on Xbox Live, and generally get your bandwidth when and where you need it. Tomato does all the same while providing even more granular control over how much bandwidth goes where... and, like the bandwidth reports, it graphs it all.

If you've assigned a domain name to your home server (like adam-lh.homeip.net), Tomato can send alerts to the service if you've got a dynamic IP address so that the domain will always point to your computereven if your external IP address changes.

For a few other worthwhile uses, check out these videos for setting up Tomato's Access Restriction rules (allows you to set up rules to block browsing of certain topics at certain times, for example), using the Bandwidth Monitor, and putting your router into Wireless Client mode.

As I said above, documentation on Tomato is slim, but this Tomato wiki is a good place to start if you want to figure out a feature.

So Which Is Better, Tomato or DD-WRT?

Adam Pash is a senior editor for Lifehacker who can't get enough of a good router. His special feature Hack Attack appears weekly on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

The Museum of Science and Industry announced today that a fully-functional, three-story "green" home will be built just east of the museum on its Jackson Park grounds in Hyde Park this spring. The foundation is currently being laid, and it will be open to the public from May 8, 2008 through January 4, 2009. The 2,500-square-foot home will exhibit some of the latest environmentally-friendly technologies and offer a primer on incorporating these innovations into our homes.

The MSI exhibit was given the catchy title of, "Smart Home: Green + Wired, Powered by ComEd and Warmed by Peoples Gas" because it's a collaboration between Wired magazine, ComEd and People's Gas, as well as some very cool landscape and design architects. The house will feature cutting-edge green technologies such as energy monitoring systems, gray water systems, a living roof, a solar electric generator, and on-demand water heaters, and it will be built with renewable and recyclable materials and non-toxic paints, according to designer Michelle Kaufmann's blog. In addition, the exhibit house will feature "truth windows" that give you a glimpse of the contents of floors and walls.

Body Worlds was O.K. (though it was way over-hyped), but this sounds like the coolest thing they've done at the 75-year-old MSI since that full-sized Boeing 727 was hauled in in 1992. --Mark Boyer

mkSolaire via michellekaufmann.com

Starting immediately, Flickr is looking to hire a Senior UI/Visual Designer for our San Francisco office.

To apply, please send an email to iwannaworkatflickr@yahoo.com with the job's title (Senior UI/Visual Designer) as the subject line. Include a cover letter and resume: bonus points if the resume can be included in the email or if it is online somewhere and you just send a link (we will accept attachments but we'll be really annoyed by them keep that in mind). Check out the details below.

We smile on those who already have deep experience with Flickr: include a link to your photos page if you have one. Be prepared to tell us why you want to work on Flickr specifically.

Note that we are comfortable shaping the roles to fit excellent candidates, so if you are not an exact match for the role described put [Similar to:] (with the square brackets) before the job title in the subject line and apply anyway.

Flickr revolutionized photo sharing with its launch in 2004. Its innovative approach to how people store, share, sort and search for photos has attracted millions of users and influenced the way the current generation of web-based products and services are developed. Flickr's vision is to be the eyes of the world, enabling the sharing and discovery of what people see around the globe, from friends and family to group collaboration to breaking news. Flickr was acquired by Yahoo! in March 2005, and remains a separate brand.

The Flickr team is star-studded but prides itself on teamwork, technically capable but operates in a product- and user-driven paradigm and is profoundly driven to take Flickr as far beyond where we are now as the web in 2008 is beyond the web in 1995. We have a privileged position inside of Yahoo! and a mandate to change the world (and the company). This will be a job that you love and are proud of for your entire life.

Every week, millions of users visit Flickr.com and millions more access Flickr through API-based applications, photos posted to blogs and other third party sites and services. It's a complex and quickly growing application and ecosystem and design is at the heart of it.

We have a track record of innovation to build on and a strong desire to radically improve Flickr, both for new users and casual visitors as well as the power users who form the core of the community. There's a huge and tremendously long list of new features, programs and technologies set to come online this year. If you've ever wanted to have a big impact, this is it.

Some key attributes of successful candidates will be:

• Ability to quickly understand the constraints of a design problem and identify the tradeoffs; the ability to communicate those tradeoffs to fellow decision makers
• Strong empathic skills: you should be able to understand how and why an interface succeeds or fails and spot problems in layout, architecture, flow, copy or presentation before they go into production
• Strong visual design skills (layout, hierarchy, typography, color theory, patterns) and a fanatical attention to detail down to the pixel
• Understanding of and familiarity with system and page-level interactions
• Solid understanding of user-centered design principles with the ability to address complex design problems and provide sound design solutions
• Demonstrated experience and proven track record in application/software design
• A good all-rounder, informed by deep thought and consideration into the philosophical and practical considerations that make great design
• Ability to include stakeholders in project discussions and successfully incorporate/address their feedback
• BFA or MFA in Graphic Design, Digital Media Design or Visual Arts
• At least 5+ year's experience as key member of a design team participating in the complete product development lifecycle of a web product.
• At least 2+ years experience leading large design efforts and coordinating project teams of 3 or more members

Some key responsibilities of the position:

• Work with the design, business and community teams to create designs that address business, brand, market, and user requirements
• Participate and collaborate in concept development and design ideation
• Create page layouts/UIs, color palettes, typography, wireframes, system flows, iconography and user interface elements, while monitoring design consistency across all projects
• Work directly with Web Development and (Software) Engineering on design solutions that align with the design vision and user needs
• Work with the larger development team to address on-going design bugs
• Communicate your design thinking in a way that works for all the parties involved (engineers, product managers, partners,etc.) through appropriately detailed specifications and reviews
• Contribution to product design process and priority decisions
• Ensuring Flickr is both usable and powerful, simple when it needs to be, and delights its users with attention to detail and a prescient forethought to their needs
• Push the boundaries of what's possible on the web to create better experiences for users

Bonus:

• Academic background in human factors/ergonomics, cognitive science, psychology or HCI
• Strong interaction design skills: experience creating wireframes, site/system flows, site architecture diagrams, etc.
• Design experience in mobile or desktop software
• Experience creating or maintaining interface guidelines in a software ecosystem environment

Yahoo! is committed to equal opportunity. In that spirit, we welcome your interest in our employment opportunities.

I attended, briefly, Ad:Tech San Francisco earlier this year. By briefly I mean I managed to get to the exhibit hall a few hours before it closed on the very last day of the exhibition time, thus I raced through the show floor talking to a few select vendors but mostly soaking in who was there, what messages they were emphasizing, and getting a sense of the show and the current tech of the advertising industry. In San Francisco the vibe and emphasis was mostly on web advertising, primarily pay-per-click networks, and very much emphasizing raw volume and mass numbers (a billion impressions here, a billion impressions there).

In NYC I expect to hear about a wider perspective on the ad industry and the transition of even more advertising dollars to the web (and beyond the web to mobile and multiple-platform plays).

At the San Francisco show I mostly talked with exhibitors about a mobile web application, NELA (for "Never Eat Lunch Alone") which my partner and I developed. I also gathered information and knowledge for the ad network which we planned on building but at the time had not started focusing on. This week when I am not reporting on sessions, exhibits and hallway discussions for CenterNetworks, I will be talking with advertisers, media buyers, software publishers and others about Nearness Function.

So full disclosure, I have a stake in and strong opinions about the ad industry and the future direction of the industry. I will try to capture what takes place at the show, but I will also share my opinions and commentary. Here though a baseline of my perspective on where the ad industry is going - both on the web as it works today and into the future.

1. Brand advertising and marketing will dramatically increase on and via the web. Brands will move online as their demographic targets continue to spend more and more of their attention online. This includes, perhaps, substituting media-via-the-web for media from radio and TV. It also includes an ever growing range of entertainment and social options. In many cases this entertainment may originate via the Internet but may be "consumed" even while offline and increasingly via non-computer devices. For example much of my personal music and talk listening is no longer via radio but via downloaded podcasts. Most of the video I view - both short and long form also comes into my home via the Internet (purchased from iTunes, downloaded from other sites, viewed in site, etc). Increasing some of these entertainment options will be affiliated with brands.
2. Brand advertising had very different requirements and timeframes than most of the types of advertising currently shown on the web. Branding is about the associations and recognition of the brand within a target audience at some future point when they start a buying process. In many cases brands need to be established a long time ahead of purchases. In many cases, brand choices are long lasting and deeply important decisions in an individual's life. For example, the make and model of a car which will likely be part of a given owner's identity for many years (my parents being one extreme, they have had their current cars for over a decade, and have been driving the same brand for closer to two decades). Brand advertisements have to serve many different purposes - they have to establish a brand identity, they have to remind people about the brand as an option, and over time they have to help differentiate the brand in often crowded markets. The purchase cycle in a given industry will dictate, to a degree, the speed at which a brand identity might need to change - but many of the most valuable and useful to their owners brands have had relatively consistent branding for a very long time (Coke, Mercedes-Benz, etc). In the new, hyper global, always-on, Internet powered age, brands still have a great deal of power, impact and value - but also much adapt to a new media landscape, to new patterns of purchasing and use, and to new ways of communicating and interacting. Brands can see their value destroyed almost overnight if they are not careful online (Kryptonite locks for example) but likewise, the Internet can assist new brands in establishing themselves. (new brands of LCD screens, Scion cars, the US launch of the Mini, Lenovo, etc)
3. The current ad unit models of the web (mostly CPM - cost per impression, CPC - cost per click, and CPA - cost per action i.e. "lead generation") are not sufficient going forward. New models and along with them new metrics will start to show up and be experimented with. My personal bet is on a model that builds on other media models - a fee based on active attention over a period of time (i.e. your brand in front of X people, each for up to 30 minutes while they are actively using a given application etc)
4. Search advertising is not going away and will continue to have lots of innovation alongside of other experiments in the advertising space. Search is a great way to reach people in a specific frame of mind - but it does not meet the full range of commercial message needs.
5. While today the US is the dominant market for online advertising this will not always be the case. Already many online applications see well over 50% and in many cases as much as 3/4ths of their user base being outside of the US. Both global brands and local advertisers will increasingly see a great value and return in reaching this international audience. As a result the importance of working with a global, multilingual set of ads and advertisers will only increase over time.
6. While standards are very useful, especially when selling ads in bulk, there will also be a push and pull in the industry as ways to package and sell non-standard ads and advertising opportunities will grow in importance, especially as in many cases they may be highly effective ways to distribute and spread a given message.
7. Full disclosure cannot be over emphasized. However unfortunately many advertisers, ad networks, and publishers will continue to experiment with ways of distributing commercial messages without clear and full disclosure of what is paid for commercial messaging. "Pay-per-post" is perhaps the poster boy for this problem, but there will be countless others who try variations. The current movement to mass product placement (usually without much if any disclosure) on American TV shows will, inevitably make its way onto the web. My personal hope is that on the web great disclosure can and will be delivered to the actual viewers - and as a result they can make an even more informed decision about the impact they give to a given placement. However I may be fighting this battle for years and years to come. [while we do plan on exploring ways to help companies place non-standard commercial messages, we will only do so when there are clear and deeply embedded into the medium disclosures]
8. Targeting of advertising will be a rich source of innovation for the next few years. However this needs to be tempered when it comes to brand advertising vs. immediate action ad units. If advertisers and networks are not careful, certain types of targeting may bite back. My personal prediction is that some aspects of targeting based on social network data and many forms of targeting by tracking large portions of online behavior (ISP's monitoring clickstreams for example) may face some degree of consumer backlash as well as lead to some serious issues at some point in time. Anything from targeting which hits a bit too close to home to subpoenas being issued to an ad network for the clickstream of a given targeted individual. Perhaps in the US this might only have a civil impact - but already Yahoo! and Google have encountered deep issues around requests by governments such as China for information about users of their web services online activities - my prediction is that various ad networks which are tracking users and targeting their behavior over time may someday face related isues and requests.

Ad:Tech NYC should be a very exciting conference.

On Tuesday evening I will be, unless the conference has too many evening activities planned, organizing a dinner gathering for Korean Food in Koreantown. All readers of CenterNetworks are welcome to join me for dinner.

And if you are attending Ad:Tech NYC please feel free to stop me if you see me at the conference and introduce yourself. I hope to "never eat lunch alone" all throughout the conference - and that goes for breakfasts and coffee breaks as well. After Ad:Tech I will be in the NYC area until Tuesday Nov 13th and would welcome the opportunity to meet up with any readers then as well.

See you at the show!

Shannon Clark is a founding partner at Nearness Function, a new ad network for the publishers of dynamic content which will launch in a few months. He is the organizer of MeshForum - an annual conference on the study of networks and the one day MeshWalk series of walking conferences. He has been blogging for many years at Searching for the Moon where he covers technology, economics, food, and the life of an entrepreneur. His first server on the Internet was in 1991, he started his first company in 2000 after many years working as a technology consultant.