News hit this Monday that Powered has acquired three social media agencies: crayon, Drillteam and StepChange. I just had a skype video conversation with Aaron Strout and Joseph Jaffe to learn more, here's my take. You can read crayon founder Joseph's take and Aaron Strout the CMO of Powered and a quick mention in NYT.

A Solution Set of Services Bolsters a Marketing Platform
I've heard of crayon, and have many conversations and even podcasts with founder Joseph Jaffe, I've also spent time with the Powered executive team last year. Stepchange is a 13 person team out of Portland focused on Facebook Apps and mobile, and Drillteam, from NY, has been around for 10 years and focuses on experitntial and advocacy marketing, such as connecting events to online like street teams, guerrilla, and ambassador programs. Powered isn't just a community platform, I learned they have other marketing features that really intent to provide a suite of offerings.

Natural Evolution Of A Growing Market:

• Consolidation happens in downturned markets. As the recession starts to show signs of it lifting, now's a great time for companies to come together and create a greater value. We saw this type of acquisition behavior from agencies during the first boom, and we should expect similar patterns here.
• Acquisition provides key services software platforms can't fill. It makes sense for Powered platform to partner up with a service(s) teams that have already been successful for some time, this improves the time to market to deployment. In addition to coming with a book of business, they can quickly deploy the Powered platform, expanding the software footprint. Joseph Jaffe has strong thought leadership, an existing marketing brand, and reach needed to the group.
• Yet, brings risk for Powered and new partners. First of all, there are some big names coming together, the real stress will be can these cultures, and their strong willed leaders, be able to jive together. Secondly, it'll be interseting to see if Crayon and services teams forces stragies on their clients that involve the Powered platform. I asked if there are any layoffs coming from consolidation, they haven't made any plans, but when you have 4 companies coming together expect redundancy.

Impacts To Customers, Partners and Competitors:

• Social Agencies should rekindle and bolster relationships. This impacts other social agencies like Stage Two Consulting, Social Media Group, AdHoc, Ant's Eye View, ForumOne, Community Roundtable, Shift Communications, Dachis, FutureWorks, New Marketing Labs, who may be at medium and small tier, they should quickly partner up with other firms to increase their value.
• Customers of crayon, Drillteam, and Stepchange should request agnostic recommendations. Any client of these three agencies should make sure that the strategy they are being offered includes other vendors and platforms not just the Powered platform and Facebook platform. Remember, first find out where your customers are online before choosing the tools to use.
• This is competition for larger agencies yet savvy agencies will partner. This is a threat to large agencies like Organic, Razorfish, Ogilvy, and Edelman. Yet the smart agencies won't get defensive, they should partner with this team, and figure out what offerings they can offer that they don't have in their portfolio.

Congrats to the Powered, crayon, Drilldteam and Stepchange team for this merger, I'm excited to see the industry emerge from small disparate startups to a larger entity going forward.

A few weeks ago the FTC updated their advertising guidelines for endorsements and testimonials to include blogs and other new media publishing methods. In the time between this update and today, DigComm (short for the Digital Communications Group), a company that builds digital communications tools for PR and social media agencies, has released CMP.ly.

CMP.ly is a simple solution for what could become a confusing and complicated landscape of sorting out what types of disclosures are needed different circumstances. CMP.ly makes this easy by allowing bloggers, SMS, tweets and podcasts simply link to a standard human readable disclosure.

The six standardized disclosures include:

CMP.ly/0 No connection, unpaid, my own opinions
CMP.ly/1 Based upon a review copy
CMP.ly/2 Given a sample by vendor/agency/brand
CMP.ly/3 Paid post cash payment or other compensation
CMP.ly/4 Employee/shareholder/business relationship
CMP.ly/5 Custom Disclosure

And for my disclosure I am a co-founder of CMP.ly. I have worked very hard on this project with a great friend, Tom Chernaik. I believe that this is an important tool for any publisher to remain transparent as the old guard is now prepared to regulate this medium starting December 1, 2009.

What is most important for us is that a site like CMP.ly is coming from people within the independent publisher community. It is our belief it can be used as a platform to prove that we're not new media, but the media.

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

Post from: TechStartups.com

I'm a huge believer in focusing on a single area of practice. I'm convinced that being focused, early, was the principal factor in my initial success.

We all need to be known, liked and trusted. Narrowing the focus of your practice will rocket you forward on the known front. It sure did for me.

Last week I was a guest on the premiere episode of The Un-Billable Hour with Rodney Dowell. We started talking about the reluctance of new lawyers to focus on a niche. They get nervous about turning away business, any kind of business, and they take cases that fall outside of their chosen area of focus.

Why do they do it? The money, of course.

I understand being scared about income. It's tough out there and it's incredibly tempting to take work outside of your niche when you're having a slow month.

But, it's important to let it go. It's important to stay focused and build your practice by doing the work in the niche you've selected.

Why?

A bunch of things happen when you stay focused -

First, you have free time to dig deeper into your area of focus. You can spend more time on the matters you have and keep learning. When you learn more you (1) can charge more, (2) you become more efficient, (3) you can delve more deeply into sophisticated issues and cases within your niche by earning the opportunity to take on higher value projects.

Second, you keep building your reputation in the niche. The client's you're working with are spreading the word. You've got time to meet with referral sources. Everyone comes to know you as the go to person for your area of practice.

Third, you get the opportunity, with every case, to meet people that might refer to your practice. Even if you're taking the cases at a lower fee than you'd like, you'll be meeting judges, lawyers, clerks, experts and others that will refer business to you. They'll know what kind of law you practice and they'll likely remember you.

Finally, every time you turn away business you create a grateful person in your marketplace. Here's what I mean. Let's say someone calls you and asks you to handle a traffic ticket case. You respond by telling the caller that you aren't really expert in that area of law, that you appreciate the call, but that your practice is limited to family law. You, of course, refer them to someone that can help.

The caller now gets that you're the family law expert. They appreciate that you weren't willing to take their money to do something you aren't qualified to do. They appreciate your help in finding the right lawyer. They tell their friends about you because you did something remarkable you put their interests above your own. You also generate goodwill with the attorney you referred the traffic ticket to. Win-win-win.

Bottom line turn down the money. That's how you make more money over the long haul.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Why Turning Away Clients Gets You More Clients

By Jim Hietala

Spending the early part of this week in The Open Group Security Forum meetings, I have been struck by the commonality of governance, risk, compliance, and audit issues between physical IT infrastructure today, and virtual and cloud environments in the (very) near future. Issues such as:

• Moving away from manual compliance processes, toward automated test, measurement, and reporting on compliance status for large IT infrastructure. When you are talking about physical infrastructure, manual compliance is difficult, expensive in labor cost, and sub-optimal given that many organizations choose to sample just a few representative systems for compliance, rather than actually testing the entire environment. When you are talking about virtual environments and cloud services, manual compliance processes just won't work, automation will be key.
• Incompatible log formats output by physical devices continues to be a problem for the industry that manifests itself in problems for security information and event management systems, log management systems, and auditors. Ditto for virtual and cloud environments, at much larger scale.
• Managing security configurations across physical versus virtual and cloud environments provides similar challenges. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Emerging-standards work from the Security Forum, which was originally conceived as solutions for some of these issues in traditional IT environments (in house, physical servers), will have important applications in cloud and virtualization scenarios. In fact, with the scale and agility provided by these environments, it is hard to think about adequately addressing audit and compliance concerns without standards that provide for scalable automation.

The Automated Compliance Expert Markup Language standards initiative will address issues of security configuration and compliance alerting and reporting across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. The revised XDAS standard from The Open Group will address audit incompatibility issues. Both of these standards efforts are work-in-progress at the present time, and our standards process is truly and open one. If your organization is a customer organization grappling with these issues, or a vendor whose product might benefit from implementing these standards, we invite you to learn more.

This BriefingsDirect guest post comes courtesy of Jim Hietala, vice president of security, The Open Group. You can reach him here.

Sponsor

The application aggregates live streaming and recorded radio broadcasts from across the US, displays their current and planned content schedules and now offers a search function that stretches across all those different types of content: live streams, podcasts and text show descriptions. It's a free app and the the organization that makes it hosts almost nothing on its own servers. The end result is a remarkable user experience that ought to be an inspiration for old media of every kind. It isn't perfect, but it's getting better fast.

The app was made by a non-profit organization called Public Radio Exchange (PRX). PRX was founded and is run by Jake Shapiro, a man who used to be an associate director at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Shapiro used to produce an NPR radio show with Christopher Lyndon and before that he was one of the first tinkerers with web distribution of music for his band Two Ton Shoe.

Two Ton Shoe didn't find a lot of success in the United States, but thanks to the long tail of the web Shapiro says they somehow found a big fan base in Korea. The band toured there and Korean bands have covered some of their songs. "I'm a Korean rock star," Shapiro says, "and I believe there's a 'Korea' out there for everybody."

About a year ago Shapiro says he called around all the major players in public radio and argued that they had a unique opportunity in the iPhone platform if they could collaborate and create a really strong offering. An organization called American Public Media decided to contribute the work they had done so far on their own iPhone app to Shapiro's project and NPR and Public Radio International agreed to lend their support to what would become the Public Radio Tuner, today renamed the Public Radio Player.

Funding Local Radio on the iPhone

Public Radio Player could facilitate that long tail experience for obscure local public radio content by making it far more available on the iPhone. But PaidContent's Rafat Ali worries that by freeing radio listeners all the more from their local radio station, the Player could sever the loyalty and fund raising connections that keep public radio alive.

To that concern Shapiro has two interesting responses. First, he says that survey data shows most users prefer listening to their local stations on the app, along with a variety of favorites from elsewhere.

Even more interesting is the project's collaboration with Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls. Searls is at Harvard's Berkman Center now, developing a framework for what's being called Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) - a customer-based response to the business paradigm of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The VRM project and Shapiro's PRX are developing ways for Public Radio Player users to track what they listen to on the player and make financial contributions to the radio stations they've consumed from the most.

Shapiro says that part of the project faces a major roadblock from Apple. Though Apple introduced in-application payments last month, the feature is only available to paid apps (Public Radio Player is free) and charitable contributions through the iPhone are strictly prohibited. They can't even be talked about, Shapiro says, because Apple doesn't want to deal with the possibility of charity scams, there's tax complications, the platform's standard 30% fee for payments isn't tenable in a non-profit context and Apple has no financial incentive to solve this sticky complex of problems.

For now the app is funded by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That funding is up for renewal this summer. Shapiro says that a second round of funding would be used to create "showcase apps that would break new ground and create new technology." He says the company is particularly interested in technologies that represent a hybrid of digital and broadcast. "With radio," he says, "there is still a tremendous amount of reach that you don't want to give up on when you move into the digital space."

Fixing the App

That hybrid paradigm is very well represented by the new version of the Public Radio Player. The previous version, called Public Radio Tuner, was one of the most popular free apps in the iPhone store but it didn't really work that well. Radio streams got dropped a lot. That's no longer a big problem with version 2.0.

The new version of the app tackles the problem of dropped streams by making the buffering settings much more sophisticated. Remember, the App doesn't host any of the audio, it just points to the live streams or podcasts stored on public radio stations' own servers. Project manager Matt MacDonald says the app now determines what kind of bandwidth the receiving phone has, then buffers the inbound stream accordingly before serving it up to listeners. The end result is a radically more usable radio app on wifi, 3G or Edge connections.

It's still not perfect; this like every app is at the mercy of AT&T's wireless network, but dropped streams appear to be much, much less frequent than they used to be. The interface sometimes hangs when loading menus, but Shapiro says that with the new release today bug fixes are a top priority and though crash reports are appearing infrequently, they are being closely watched. "Just shake the phone," he jokes. "Then it will work better."

More Than One Kind of Content

The new app brings a whole lot more radio to your iPhone. In addition to pointing to hundreds of radio streams, PRX has co-ordinated a number of different sources to pull show schedules down to be stored locally on your phone. "Scheduling data has been a big effort," Shapiro says. "It never existed in one place and is still a moving target."

A company called Public Interactive (recently acquired by NPR from Public Radio International) has a metadata tool that originally captured music playlists but now publishes radio show schedules as well. NPR and many radio stations also display schedules on their own websites. PRX aggregates all that data, stores it on your phone, syncs it with the radio stream links and then checks for changes each time you launch the Public Radio Player app.

Having the particular show that's playing displayed along with a station name makes a very big difference in the user experience.

The 2.0 version of the app also includes support for "on demand" or podcast listening. Hundreds of podcasts are navigable by featured shows, category or alphabetically. Podcasts are integrated into some of the show schedules as well. When listening to a streaming station, you can view the rest of the day's schedule and see what other shows will be broadcast later. Then you can choose to listen to previous recorded editions of those shows. It's a pretty seamless experience.

Search is No Small Matter

The new search functionality integrates all of the above, letting you search for keywords or topics and finding both recorded and currently live shows that match your search. MacDonald says the company used an open source program called ThinkingSphynx on the back end, worked closely with the NPR API team and is still working on teaching local radio stations about the importance of standards-based content titling. Listening to streams and podcasts on iTunes or an iPod may not have been so difficult with incomplete file names, but show a radio station how broken its content looks in a dynamic iPhone directory and the message comes through loud and clear.

There have been other efforts to index all the public radio streams online; Public Radio Fan is the most notable and is more international, but is less sophisticated and is based on the desktop and browser. (After listening to some international broadcasts via Public Radio Fan it's hard not to be a little disappointed with even Public Radio Player's extensive but exclusively US menu.)

As a media technology, Public Radio Player offers a unique blend of content aggregation, focus on both real time and recorded content and extensive data integration on the back end. All on the iPhone. Its design and performance continue to improve. It's a very impressive offering in terms of content delivery; if it can find a way to use the new platform it's on to transcend the public radio paradigm of on-air pledge drives, that would really be remarkable, wouldn't it?

Jake Shapiro says that offering Public Radio Player on other platforms, including a web interface, is a logical next step. You can follow the project's progress on the Public Radio Player blog and download the application here.

Probably not.

But you can mock up basic cloud services, such as those for a shopping cart application, on your PC so you can see how the Web app you are working on will interact when it eventually reaches out and touches the real cloud, says says Chris Kraus, product manager for iTKO, the testing software vendor, which offers tooling for recording or mocking cloud services.

He sees growing interest among customers for the personal cloud concept, allowing developers to code and test Web applications that will eventually interact with services in the cloud. Cloud services on a PC provide two major advantages for developers during coding and testing, he says. [Disclosure: iTKO is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts].

First, the developer working on a cloud application is free to work anywhere, anytime regardless of whether the real cloud services are available or accessible. If a cloud service for a shopping cart is down for some reason, developers are not impacted since their version of the service is on their laptop. They can also code when they are on a plane, or in another environment with no access to the cloud.

Second, although this is probably first in the minds of budget conscious IT managers, the developer is not running up charges for accessing the cloud services, Kraus says.

If the services are hosted on a cloud from a third party and I have to maintain physical

What developers could use is a Personal Cloud that would allow them to configure their local environment in multiple ways and take it with them wherever they go

connectivity, I have to pay to do that, he said. If I have a personal cloud on my desktop, I can take development offline, interact with those services, make sure my HTML is tight, and do all the stuff that is important to me. Then I point it to the real cloud and actually get the development up.

Mike Gualtieri, senior analyst at Forrester Research, also sees value in the personal cloud concept.

In a recent post on his blog, Developers Need A Personal Cloud, the analyst also sees the value, in terms of portability.

What developers could use is a Personal Cloud that would allow them to configure their local environment in multiple ways and take it with them wherever they go, he writes. I know this sounds like virtualization and it is to some extent, but extend PC virtualization with cloud concepts and you get the Personal Cloud.

One commenter on Gualtieri's blog suggests this concept might be dubbed local virtualization.

I had an intriguing chat with HP's Jeff Meyers and iTKO chief scientist and co-founder John Michelsen last month at HP's Software Universe conference. The confluence of SaaS and cloud with application development and the test phase is changing rapidly, we observed.

Compressing the test phase into the development and production becomes more feasible. And as virtualization becomes more common, building an application or service in its own runtime stack bubble from inception to sunset starts to make sense. OSGi fits into the vision nicely.

And while we're combining all the elements of an application and platform from cradle to grave, why not tune the whole package before, during and after development too then load the entire package as a portable cloud-supported production unit?

Now, that's a personal cloud (I prefer cloud service nodule), but with high service performance output, and far less time in cost in the total lifecycle. Higher overall quality too. What do you think?

BriefingsDirect contributor Rich Seeley provided research and editorial assistance on this post. He can be reached at RichSeeley@aol.com.

Luckily, I found it first try. I decided to try out Linc Fessenden's bashpodder. It's a 50 line bash script that takes a simple text file of feed URLs and fetches them. No muss, no fuss, no BS. RSS feeds in, podcasts out. I like that. There are now many variations as hackers have fiddled with the functionality, but I'm running the core vanilla mainline version. This one collects together shows into a date based directory. Because of the way it is using wget to fetch the actual files, in most cases it preserves the timestamp of the server version of the file. This actually helps me out a lot in my attempts to listen to shows in chronological order. I did make my own little hack to it, changing where it does the logging of a show URL to the history. The original script does it unconditionally, I have it check the exit code of wget and only put it in the history if that was successful. This way, a failed download will retry later.

Switching from one podcatcher to another is always a bit dicey at first. Since some of these feeds do the insane thing of keeping hundreds of episodes in them, if you aren't careful bashpodder will fetch every one of those and fill up your hard drive. Here's how I handled the transition. It was a bit labor intensive and required me watching it, but after the first run everything was perfect. The thing to be aware of is that there are two files podcast.log and temp.log. The first is the permanent list of fetched files, the second is a working copy and at the end of the run the two are combined, duplicates filtered and the whole thing resaved to podcast.log. As files are fetched, it checks to see if an URL is in podcast.log and if it is, bashpodder skips it.

I ran the script from my MacBook in a terminal window. I ran it via:

sh -x bashpodder.shell

so that it was outputting all of its variables as it worked. When it would get to a new feed, it would splat out the list of file URLs that were parsed out of the RSS feed. I'd copy the files from the list I didn't want downloaded and just put them directly into podcast.log via a file editor. You can be somewhat sloppy with this. When in doubt I let it fetch the file and I'd delete it later. If the URL goes into podcast.log more than once, no problem. It will get taken care of later. This required me riding the script for 45 minutes or so, but I mostly got the old shows into podcast.log manually. After the first run succeeded, I ran the script one more time. It fetched a few at the edges that I missed but then was completely caught up. I deleted files that I knew I had already listened to and away I went.

Now when I run it, I get only the new files. They go into that day's directory, they sort themselves out somewhat by timestamp. I set up a cronjob to run this at 5 AM and now I'm in business. All the scripts that I use to put the files on my Insignia MP3 player work fine with the new directory structure and I'm back in business. Thanks Linc. This workflow is better than what I had, I no longer have Juice bogging down my machine and eating a lot of memory to do this simple task, and the whole thing runs in a simple bash process that I'm comfortable modifying if I want to. Right on.

Recently Stefan Andreasen, founder and CTO of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Kapow, demonstrated his company's value around managing data services quickly, without hand coding. At the Web 2.0 Expo in April, he demonstrated a, iPhone mashup application created using Kapow tools and IBM Rational EGL as an example of the conference's Power of Less theme.

Traditionally, it would have taken at least three months and significant IT resources to create and integrate a web data source and serve it to a mobile device, Andreasen explained prior to the demo, but today, through rapid application development technology from Kapow Technologies and IBM, two developers spent a total of three hours creating a dynamic personalized web application for the iPhone.

Kapow boasts that the Web Data Server 7.0 is the industry's only platform that can access, enrich and serve web data with complete assurance 100 percent of data, 100 percent of the time.

The value is more than for convenience. More than ever, web-based content plays an essential role in many business processes and analytical presentations. Doing operational and business ecology business intelligence (BI) requires fast and easy integration of web-based content and data assets.

With Kapow's patented visual development and Web data automation platform customers can gain data access to any intranet or extranet business application, as well as any website or application on the web, the company says. This cuts out manual approaches, now quite common.

Rapid data access is vital for today's agile application development, like mobile, WOA and other types of agile business applications, Andreasen says. Regardless of whether

. . . today, through rapid application development technology from Kapow Technologies and IBM, two developers spent a total of three hours creating a dynamic personalized Web application for the iPhone.

or not developers have programmatic access via an application programming interface (API), Kapow provides easy access to enterprise and public web data, then extracts and transforms it into a standard web service or data feed, he explains.

A key element in the data server are the Kapow robots that the company says use standard web protocols and security mechanisms to automate the navigation and interaction with any web application or website, providing secure and reliable access to the underlying data and business logic.

Offering an example of an application built with its technologies, the company points to a hypothetical sales app providing a full 360-degree view of prospects and customers by automatically extracting data from internal customer relationship management (CRM) systems, subscription data feeds such as Edgar Online, corporate sites, blogs and social media sites including LinkedIn, Technorati and Facebook.

New features in the Kapow Web Data Server 7.0 version include:

• 100 Percent Browser Engine Compliance, which handles complex web data sources, including JavaScript and AJAX intensive Websites.
• Intuitive point-and-click integrated development environment (IDE) for surgical data extraction accuracy with no coding.
• Scalability improvements offering real-time performance optimization and the ability to download large file downloads directly to disk for enterprise scale projects
• Browser-Based Scheduler, which provides automation of data refresh and synchronization schedules.
• Authentication for RoboServer, which provides seamless integration with existing enterprise security and authentication systems.

Availability and Pricing

Further information and pricing is availabile at http://kapowtech.com/index.php/products/overview.

BriefingsDirect contributor Rich Seeley provided research and editorial assistance on this post. He can be reached at RichSeeley@aol.com.

The paper was published and distributed in Chicago and raised quite a bit of breathless prose from folks like the NYT and BusinessWeek. As far as I know we appeared in the magazine/paper once or twice, which was nice to know.

Why did the Printed Blog die? Well, Karp wasn't able to get funding and the idea was, in a word, ludicrous - it was akin to pressing MP3 podcasts onto vinyl for those who still used a Technics turntable. The goal was noble - to introduce a non-online audience (Who? The old? Terminal Luddites?) to great online content - but this may have been swell back in 2004 when blogs were still fresh on the mass cerebellum. With the rise of the mobile web it's easier than ever to surf over to a few great sites on your cellphone, thereby supplanting the need for a piece of paper with those selfsame blog posts printed on it.

The former print journalist in me still craves what TPB was doing and as a blogger I looked wistfully at the Printed Blog, wondering if it would survive and thrive. Todays blog post is tomorrow's, well, nothing but at least you could have used a printed blog post to line your birdcage. It gave permanence to an evanescent medium, which was great. Sadly, the money was also evanescent.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

FP&A is part of HP's expanding IT Financial Management (ITFM) portfolio designed to help chief information officers (CIOs) and IT managers create comprehensive financial transparency, optimize costs deeply but prudently, and newly demonstrate the business value of IT services.

In a related announcement here at the HP Software Universe conference this week, HP unveiled enhancements to its project and portfolio management (PPM) solution for planning and organizing IT investments.

HP also opened its related Tech Forum conference here this week. For the second year in a row, BriefingsDirect will cover the HP Software Universe 2009 conference through a series of podcasts, blogs, transcripts and Twitter entries. [Disclosure: HP is sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Follow the HP Software Universe 2009 conference on Twitter by searching on #HPSU09.

HP Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Center 8.0 arrives as a key component in ITFM, providing integrated capabilities for IT portfolio investment management, global resource efficiencies and IT financial transparency.

PPM popularity is on the rise as organizations align planned business investments with IT project portfolios, said Daniel Stang, principal research analyst at Gartner, in a release.

Analysts in addition to myself are hearing consistently from IT executives that cost-optimization, cost-containment, and cost-reduction initiatives are the top priorities being driven from the business side onto IT.

The business leaders are demanding a clear understanding of all IT costs and benefits as the global recession lingers, if no longer still steeply deepening. HP's enhanced IT planning and analysis solutions are designed to help IT executives reduce costs without jeopardizing IT's ability to support future growth when it's called for.

The recession therefore accelerates the need to reduce total IT cost through identification and elimination of wasteful operations and practices. But at the same time, IT departments need to better define and implement streamlined processes for operations and to show the near and far business value of any new projects.

As part of the opening keynote address here today, Andy Isherwood, Vice President and General Manager of HP Software and Solutions, said the recession compels better management of IT. CIOs need to reduce costs, yes, but they should do so without jeopardizing future growth.

Consolidating IT cut costs and saves energy by focusing on the operational inefficiencies up front. It's about getting down and dirty, not pie in the sky solutions, said Isherwood.

Along with consolidation, IT leaders can increasingly automate and virtualize infrastructure and data centers. Combined with greater financial management, IT performance analytics, and IT resources optimization, enterprises can cut their IT operations bills while setting the stage for the new phases of advancement.

And those new benefits, said Isherwood, include using flexible sourcing, from on-house premises data centers to outsourcers like HP's EDS, as well as clouds, both on or via off premises partners like Amazon Web Services. As Ann Livermore of HP said yesterday: Everything as a service.

HP is already preparing to better manage and govern the cloud transitions with its Cloud Assure, which joins IT financial management, IT performance analytics, resource management as next major focuses for the HP Software and Solutions group.

To sum up, Isherwood said that HP's major solutions drives are around IT Management Software, Information Management Software, BI Solutions, and Communications and Media Solutions.

HP expects that after a 12-month period of operational optimization initiatives that CIOs will also seek more transformative IT functional delivery improvements, including such next-generation data center bulwarks as consolidation, automation, and virtualization.

Today's pressing IT management and architecture decisions, then, need to gain from better financial management tools, proffer IT performance analytics, and exploit IT resources optimization techniques for both near- and long-term benefits.

These financial performance indicator insights and disciplines for IT will also place CIOs in a better position to look at and pursue future flexible and cost-reducing sourcing options. Those are sure to include modernizing in-house legacy deployments, outsourcing to providers such as HP's EDS, and exploring a variety of burgeoning third-party cloud offerings (on premises, off premises, or managed hybrids).

Knowing the true costs and benefits of complex and often sprawling IT portfolios quickly helps improve the financial performance, while setting up the ability to meaningfully compare and contrast current with future IT deployment scenarios. Who knows if cloud computing will save money if we don't know the true costs of all-on-premises approaches?

Gaining real-time visibility into dynamic IT cost structures provides a powerful tool for reducing cost, while also maintaining and improving overall performance. Holistic visibility across an entire IT portfolio also develops the visual analytics that can help better probe for cost improvements and uncover waste.

This is where the HP planning, analysis and financial management solution comes to the rescue in terms of value, optimization priorities, and future planning comparisons.

The HP Financial Planning and Analysis product announced here today is designed to help organizations understand costs from a service-based perspective. It provides a common extract transform load (ETL) capability that can pull information from data sources, including HP PPM and asset management products as well as non-HP data sources.

Cost Explorer, a key component of FP&A, provides business intelligence (BI) capability for visualizing data that is applied to IT costs. Users are able to see data displays color-coded to help identify different dimensions and variants in costs.

HP FP&A can be run as a stand-alone or in conjunction with other HP software products such as HP Project Portfolio Management Center, HP Asset Manager and HP Configuration Management System as well as the newly enhanced version of HP Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Center 8.0.

Along with the software products, HP is also offering consulting services based on best practices, including:

• Strategy and Advisory Services to help synthesize organizational requirements, data, process and technical gaps for developing detailed implementation roadmaps.

• Implementation Services to provide BI services for strategic decision making including forecasting budgetary needs, quantifying the value of IT services delivered to the business, improving cost efficiency, and aligning IT resources with business needs.

• Process Consulting and Solution Implementation Services based on the HP Service Management Reference Model help in deploying HP ITFM and HP PPM to get improved business results.

• Best practices for Configuration Management Systems help accelerate deployment and provide a use model for customers to identify IT assets and relate them to the costs of the services delivered to the business.

Key enhancements to HP PPM Center 8.0 include:

• IT portfolio investment management for improved alignment between IT and business with cash flow analysis that supports business reviews with actionable, real-time information.

• HP PPM Center Mobility Access for governing IT expenditures through secure and automated checkpoints from mobile devices, which send email notifications and workflow actions to cell phones and PDAs.

• Global resource efficiencies for managing human resources with reports and notifications in the recipient's language.

• Additional IT financial transparency and controls for decision support with a comprehensive financial summary that aggregates IT investment data and related analyses.

• HP Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB) integration with HP PPM Center 8.0 provides advanced search capabilities for business and technical users.

• HP Service Manager integration offers a single IT services access point, so users can access services by creating an HP PPM Center proposal from an HP Service Manager catalog item via Web services.

What's more, HP PPM is now available in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-delivered solution that offers accelerated deployment. Expect a lot more from me on this subject, via podcasts and interviews with the key leaders.

HP is also offering new Software Professional Services for HP PPM 8.0, including:

• Solution Consulting Services for PPM 8.0 providing design and implementation consulting to help customers reduce IT costs by automating enterprise-wide portfolio management via services.

• Fast Track Deployment and Upgrades to help speed deployment of the new software.

• Process Consulting Services to help customer make use of best practices guides for industry standards. HP delivers standardized processes based on HP and industry best practices such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3, COBIT and ISO

BriefingsDirect contributor Rich Seeley provided research and editorial assistance on this post. He can be reached at RichSeeley@aol.com.

Tonight I managed to get out for my first decent run since racing in the Cabot Trail Relay a few weeks ago. While out pounding the trails for what felt like forever, I was able to catch up on some of my podcast listening. I highly recommend you check out two of the episodes I listened to, from two of my favourite podcasters.

TVO Search Engine

If you're not a regular listener, you may not know that Jesse Brown's excellent podcast recently moved homes - from CBC (their loss) to TVO (their gain). Michael Geist has done a wonderful job recently of drawing attention to plagiarism and bias in a report by the Conference Board of Canada claiming that Canada is a hot-spot for internet piracy (the report has now been recalled by the organization). In his second Search Engine episode in his new TVO home, Jesse interviews Anne Golden, CEO of the Conference Board. It's awkward, it's uncomfortable, and it's fantastic journalism from someone that doesn't let people get away with a template messaged response to questions. Make sure you check it out.

CBC Spark

Nora Young's Spark podcast has long been a favourite of mine. While it has a similar tech focus to other podcasts to which I subscribe, Spark tends to cover stories I might otherwise overlook. In Spark episode 80, Nora interviews Andrea Reimer from Vancouver City Council about Vancouver's plan to open up municipal data (in the same manner also announced by David Miller for the City of Toronto at this year's Mesh Conference). I found the interview immensely refreshing. Coming from a government background, I know that there's often a fear within government of what people will do with information. This often leads to the minimum information necessary being shared with the public. Reimer's take, in contrast to that:

we shouldn't, as policy makers, fear the public knowing what we know when we're making decisions, and in fact by knowing it perhaps we could inform ourselves better maybe they'll think of new creative or throw in more information that we didn't have

I found myself nodding and smiling throughout the interview. Well worth a listen, for a refreshing take on how governments can go about sharing information with the people who are funding its collection. What other podcast episodes have caught your eye (or ear) recently?

(Here's an even larger version if you'd like.)

In the spirit of one of the above, here's the podcasts I currently subscribe to - and occasionally listen too! ;>

It's obviously not a good thing. But what was surprising is that within 45 minutes, the other people on the team adopted the bad apple behavior. They started acting like the bad apple. Turns out it's contagious.

This got me thinking about team dynamics, and the criteria we use when we build teams, interview people for a job, etc. When it comes to looking at the personality traits, and how well a person can fit within a team, it occurs to me that it's crucial to avoid someone with those bad apple traits, because it will spread to the rest of the team.

Thinking back to teams that I've been on, I know this is true. I've seen it happen. And I'm really grateful that the team I'm on now at work, Intel Software Network, doesn't have any Bad Apples to bring us down. I've marveled at how great the team dynamic is in this group since I joined almost two years ago, but only now do I realize that the lack of Bad Apples is one of the (probably big) reasons.

So keep Bad Apples away from your teams! It's hard to make a person change behavior, and if you can avoid it, it's probably better to not get into that situation in the first place.

Interestingly, the researcher on This American Life said they discovered an antidote to Bad Apple behavior - someone who exhibits strong leadership by asking a LOT of questions, of everybody. In fact, that person in the study was the child of a career diplomat. So if you do get stuck with a Bad Apple on your team, there may still be hope.

Embed RSS Feeds in Web Pages

Go to this page, replace the feed URL with your own feed, use the default color scheme or change it to something else and then click Get Code. You'll get a JavaScript snippet that can be easily placed in the sidebar of your blog.

If you like to embed feeds from multiple sources, merge all of them into one using Yahoo Pipes and then pass the combined feed to the Google Gadget. You can also use RSS widgets like WidgetBox or YourMinis that are done in Flash and not JavaScript.

Embed MP3 music and other Audio

If you like to embed audio files like songs, podcasts or interviews in your web pages, use Yahoo! Media Player - its a free Flash music player that automatically detects all links to MP3 files in the current web page and turns them into a music player. Another alternative is the Google MP3 Player.

To embed other audio formats like 3GP, Midi, Real or Windows Media, it may be a good idea to convert these files into MP3 using Zamzar so that they play on almost any web browser.

Embed Flickr Photos and Slideshows

To embed an individual Flickr photograph in your blog, click the "Share This" link (available next to the photo title) and choose embed it. Flickr requires that the embedded image should link back to Flickr and this built-in embed option automatically takes care of that requirement. (see example)

To embed a Flickr photo slideshow in your web page, open any Slideshow in a new page (see example) and choose "Customize HTML" from the embed option (see example). Here you can specify a custom size for your Flash slideshow so that it fits just right into your web page.

Embed High Quality or HD YouTube Videos

To embed a high resolution version of YouTube clip in your web pages, first make sure that Watch in High Quality or Watch in HD link exists next to the YouTube player as most videos are only available in standard format.

Next copy the YouTube embed code and append &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 (for high quality) or &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 (for 720p High Definition) to the URL value of the movie parameter (both instances).

Embed Picasa Web Albums

When you open a photo album inside Picasa, click the link in the right sidebar that says "Link to this album" and choose "Embed Slideshow". You can use the same approach to embed individual photographs that are available inside Picasa.

Embed Events from Google Calendar

Click the drop-down arrow next to any Google Calendar and select Calendar settings. Open the Google Embeddable Calendar Helper program by clicking the customize button and choose elements that you want to display or hide in the calendar.

Embed Very Large Photographs

To embed really large images in your blog, you may either use Deep Zoom or the Google Maps viewer. These programs break your photographs in small tiles and you can even pan / zoom across these images very similar to the default interface of Google Maps.

Embed Charts and Graphs in Web Pages

My personal favorite is Zoho Sheet any chart created inside Zoho Sheet can be published as an external image without exposing the full spreadsheet. If you are interested in creating charts with low volume of data, use Google Charts.

Embed GIF Animations and Screencasts

GIF animations (see example) are a perfect way to embed short screencasts in web pages as they require no plugins and auto-play inside feed readers. You should upload GIF files to your Flickr account as it preserve all the frames while lot of other image hosting website will drop anything after the first frame.

Embed Word Documents

Upload your document to Scribd and they'll give you the embed code in Flash. Scribd supports both doc and the new Office 2007 docx format in addition to Open Office documents. Even Barack Obama is using Scribd to upload his public documents and upcoming plan.

Embed PowerPoint Presentations

While the popular choice is Slideshare, you should also consider using Issuu (best web application) for presentations that are either large or formatted in the form of magazines or catalogues (see example). The only downside is that Issuu accepts PDFs so you need to convert the presentation before uploading onto Issuu.

Embed Spreadsheet Data

Both Zoho Sheet and Google Docs allow you to publish a range of cells from a spreadsheet into a web page but the embedding process in Zoho is less complicated - select a range and choose "Publish" from the contextual menu to embed that range into your web page.

Embed Adobe PDF Files

To embed PDFs in a web page, you can either use Issuu (for magazine style PDFs) or Scribd for PDFs has either have lot of text or have a top-to-bottom reading layout similar to Word documents.

Embed Flash (SWF) or Flash Video (FLV)

The best option to embed Flash content is via swfobject. It improves the overall user experience by providing alternatives in case Flash is missing and your Flash content also becomes more searchable. This tutorial has all the files and other details to help you get started with SwfObject 2.

Embed LinkedIn Profile

If you wish to display your LinkedIn profile in the sidebar of your blog, try LinkInABox. People (site visitors) can read a summary of your LinkedIn profile without leaving the site.

Embed Google Maps in Web Pages

Embedding a Google Map in your website is now almost as easy as adding an image just open the Static Maps wizard, search for location that you want to embed and specify the dimensions of your map. They'll provide a simple URL that actually points to a static image of that map.

Embed Another Webpage in your Blog

If you like to embed another website into your web page, your best bet is an IFRAME tag also known as an Inline Frame. Just set the SRC value to the address of the web page that you want to embed into your current HTML document. You could try IFRAMEs for inserting live search results from Google into your web page without having to worry about APIs.

Embed Windows Media or QuickTime movies

While it is possible to embed mov or wmv videos in web pages directly using the OBJECT tag, I recommend that you put these videos onto blip.tv and then embed them in web pages as Flash video. That's because your visitors can then play the video without extra plugins and two, they always have the option to download the video in the original format from blip.tv servers.

Embed Other Fonts in Web Pages

Most web pages use universal fonts like Arial, Times New Roman or Verdana since they are installed on most computers and hence your web pages will render correctly. If you want to try something different and render pages in fonts like Microsoft Calibri or Adobe Garamond Pro that are only available on some machines, all you need is sIFR it lets you use almost any font for your web pages using JavaScript + Flash and is perfect for writing newspaper style headlines.

Embed your Lifestream in a Web Page

You have a presence on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, Facebook, Amazon and a dozen other online places. It can get really tough for friends to track you at so many places so what you should do is create an account at FriendFeed, import all the different services that you use and then use the FriendFeed Badge to embed your lifestream activity on your main site.

Related tutorial: How to Embed Video in PowerPoint

How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website - Digital Inspiration

This is a first for video podcasts. We've been running advertisements in iTunes since last year but this is the first time we're able to serve them dynamically and offer third-party tracking.

The importance of third-party tracking cannot be overstated. Until now there's been no reliable way for advertisers to measure the success of their advertisements in podcasts. The best metric available has been downloads. The problem is that not everyone who downloads a video podcast watches it, and not everyone who watches it sticks around long enough to see the advertisements. This has meant that advertisers have been leery of spending money on podcasts. Advertisers need a way to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of their buys.

I should mention that Volomedia has a system that can do semi-dynamic insertion (insertion is done at download time) of advertisements in downloaded QuickTime. Volomedia's system can also track impressions and clicks, but only when viewers have installed their Volocast plug-in. Kiptronic can also do semi-dynamic insertion but only offers tracking of downloads, not impressions. Our implementation does not require the viewer to install any software other than iTunes or QuickTime Player, and even works in non-iTunes podcatchers like the excellent Miro.

Our system is already in production running a Puma sponsorship on Golf Girl TV (link goes to iTunes so you can see the ad in action!) and a Skype campaign on Back on Topps. The system supports prerolls, postrolls, midrolls and overlays. All ads can be clicked and clicks are tracked using DoubleClick within iTunes or QuickTime Player. Clickability is not (yet) available on devices like the iPhone because of limitations of those platforms.

We're not running any third-party ad networks in QuickTime because they don't support the environment yet, so the ads we're running in QuickTime are limited to those that we sell ourselves or that content creators sell. If you opt into run of network advertising on blip (click on Advertising from your Dashboard) we'll serve ads into your QuickTime videos as they're available. If you have your own sales force and would like to traffic your own campaigns in your QuickTime downloads you can e-mail support AT blip DOT teevee and let us know. We'd be more than happy to traffic your campaign for you (a self-service interface is coming soon!).

I can imagine that you may have some questions about this announcement. John Furrier (the former CEO of PodTech) did too. He wrote up a blog post on the subject. He seemed a little confused about what exactly we were announcing and why it was innovative. I figure that you may have many of the same questions as John, so here are some excerpts from my discussion with John in the comments on his post:

John Furrier:

thanks for commenting. are you turning on ads for all your videos or just select groups? what kind of metrics are you reporting? Views, clicks, and plays? do you guys do dynamic insertion?

Mike Hudack:

Absolutely. Any show on blip can opt into advertising from their Dashboard (http://blip.tv/prefs/). Shows that opt in receive a blend of ads from our direct sales force plus various ad networks (Google, ScanScout, YuMe, Adap.TV, VideoEgg, et cetera) for views in Flash. We have some daisy chaining and yield optimization technology that chooses the highest paying ad for any individual play.

In QuickTime we're limited to ads that we sell and ads that our content creators sell. This is because none of the ad networks that we work with can serve into QT right now. So shows that opt in will receive some ads in their QuickTime views, but we're not yet filling 100% of the inventory. Any of our 37,000 show creators can sell into their QuickTime inventory, though, and we'll traffic their ads for them.

In Flash we're reporting video views, advertisement impressions, advertisement clicks and engagement. The engagement is shown on a timeline it shows how many people viewed each second of video. This is particularly useful for brand integration and product placement (we can see exactly how many people saw the brand integration or product placement and how many times).

In QuickTime we're reporting video downloads, advertisement impressions and advertisement clicks.

In both Flash and QuickTime the metrics come from third parties (DoubleClick for ad impressions and clicks, Illumenix for engagement).

I think that the most important thing here is that, with both QuickTime and Flash, we're measuring impressions according to the IAB standard the client requests the ad, and the impression is recorded only at that time. We need no software on the client to do this. Just regular iTunes or regular QuickTime. There's no need to download anything, and the viewer doesn't have to be incented to allow measurement to take place it just works.

John Furrier:

Mike thanks for replying this is great content and thanks for basically agreeing to do an asynchronous interview Q&A here on my blog.

A few questions:
1. An you sent me a pointer or particular publisher video playing in iTunes that you can measure

2. Can you measure while iTunes is in a disconnected state? If not, then is this just streaming iTunes, and who watches video this way? Perhaps you means QT player and not iTunes?

3. Can you deal with .m4v and .mp4 files?

4. you mentioned above we're measuring impressions according to the IAB standard the client requests the ad, and the impression is recorded only at that time. - are you saying that you record an ad impression even it they don't watch it if it sits in the library of the users itunes. I'm asking to be specific between requested download, partial download, fully download, and actually watched

Mike Hudack:

You can find links to particular campaigns running in iTunes on the NewTeeVee story that you already linked to. Both are verified using DART.

We've found that between 50 and 75% (I know it's a wide delta, it varies from show to show) of iTunes views happen in iTunes while connected. Apparently *lots* of people watch video this way. For what it's worth, I do too. I subscribe to podcasts in iTunes and then watch them fullscreen on both my laptop at home and on my Mac desktop in the office. I find it to be a generally better experience for watching shows I like, rather than happening upon embeds on the Web.

Our implementation is also compatible with the standalone QuickTime player and with any software that uses the QuickTime player software (Democracy Player for example).

In terms of what file formats we work with, we deliver the videos and advertisements in a QuickTime container that's fully compatible with the entire range of Apple portable devices and with the AppleTV. We have about 37,000 active shows using blip today (they release about three new episodes a month each) and so as you can imagine we have to deal with a very wide variety of incoming video formats. Before we deliver videos we're trafficking against to iTunes we transcode them to the universally compatible QuickTime format and then modify the container to insert the pointers to DART.

In terms of recording impressions, I'm actually saying exactly the opposite. Current iTunes advertising implementations (Kiptronic, Volomedia unless you download their iTunes plugins) record impressions as soon as the video is downloaded. This is a flawed practice because not everyone who downloads the video watches it (at least not while the campaign's running and the ad is still relevant!), and not everyone who views a video actually sees all the ads. What we do is measure an impression *only when the ad is actually viewed*. This is what the IAB standards require. As far as we know no other implementation that doesn't require a download by the viewer (and I'd be curious to know what the install base is for these measurement plug-ins is) does this none of them comply with the IAB standards, and as a result they (unfortunately) overcount impressions.

It's important to note, again, that for the purposes of advertisements we're *not* counting downloads. And certainly not partial downloads. We do record those metrics, but for content creators, not to give to advertisers to measure the success of their campaigns. We are counting *impressions* - people actually seeing the advertisement. I can't stress this enough.

The RSS user help page has some good information on how and where to get feeds from guardian.co.uk, but two significant new features are worth noting.

First, every feed across the site includes the full content for each article. We've also embedded related links pointing people to more information on the web site. This way people can get the guardian.co.uk experience in whatever context is most useful to them.

We've applied the new full content feeds across the entire web site, but there are some exceptions:

1) We don't always include cartoons, images and some of the other in-article elements that appear with articles on guardian.co.uk
2) If we have any doubts about our rights to publish the full text of an article in this context, we just show a summary and a link to the main guardian.co.uk site where you can read the full version.

Second, advertising will soon appear within each full content feed item. Ads won't appear in the items which we display only as summaries.

To find the feeds you want simply look for the Webfeed icon on the page containing the content in question. Or you can simply add /rss to the end of the URL you see in the location bar in the browser. Here are some examples.

"Latest" feeds are available by...

Subject. For example, mobile phones: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/mobilephones/rss

Section. For example, film: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/rss; and UK News: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/rss

Blog. For example, the PDA blog: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/rss

Type of content. For example,
Audio: http://www.guardian.co.uk/audio/rss
Gallery: http://www.guardian.co.uk/inpictures/rss
Cartoon: http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoon/rss
etc

Contributor name. For example, Charlie Brooker: http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/charliebrooker/rss

Tone. For example,
Matchreports: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tone/matchreports/rss
Comment: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tone/comment/rss
Obituaries: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tone/obituaries/rss
Blogposts: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tone/blog/rss
etc

Newspaper publication
The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/rss
The Observer: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/rss

Newspaper section, such as G2, Sport, Main section, etc. For example,
G2 of The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/g2/rss
etc

Podcasts. For example,
Media Talk: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/series/mediatalk/rss
Sounds Jewish: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/series/soundsjewish/rss
etc

You can also combine dimensions by using a + sign:

Music album reviews: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/music+tone/albumreview/rss

Labour party and Climate Change: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/labour+environment/climatechange/rss

Marina Hyde's articles about politics: http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/marinahyde+politics/politics/rss

Now, we don't expect you to hack the URLs to get to these combination feeds -- but if you are interested there is a little more information here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/insideguardian/2008/apr/11/lateeastereggs

Elsewhere - we also offer feeds of
Customised jobs searches: http://jobs.guardian.co.uk/searchjobsrss?keyword=designer
Jobs by sector, area: http://jobs.guardian.co.uk/searchjobs/?keyword=designer&industry=101&location=549

We also offer some feeds presented as an "ordered list" of items. For example,
Top stories, ordered by editorial priority: http://www.guardian.co.uk/rss
Most viewed across guardian.co.uk, ordered by most popular first: http://www.guardian.co.uk/mostviewed/rss
...and by section: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/mostviewed/rss
Most clipped overall: http://www.guardian.co.uk/mostclipped/rss
Most clipped by section: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/mostclipped/rss

For those of you looking at source code, you will notice we include Dublin core metadata on:

Contributor (author name)
Page type (e.g. audio, video, article, image gallery cartoon etc)
Keywords for the content item, using the RSS 2.0 categories tag

Hopefully, you'll find this more portable access to The Guardian useful. As always, we're wide open to suggestions.

Sponsor

Dynamic, Social Content

With the new SmartSpace service from GoDaddy, anyone can create a personal web site which aggregates your activity from across the social web, combine that with other sources of news and information, and then create a personalized start page containing everything of interest to them. The service can also be used as a blogging platform with social elements like chat already built in. The idea is that you can use the SmartSpace platform to create the kind of site that's right for you, whether that's a social network of sorts, a traditional web site with social elements, a place to host your podcasts, or whatever else you want.

SmartSpace is designed to be easy to use, even for non-technical users. With a click of a button, you can grab content from sites like flickr, YouTube, Google News, Facebook, MySpace, or any other web site that offers an RSS feed.

You can even customize this content to your own personal preferences. For example, if you only want to see Flickr photos of lolcats, you can just type in "lolcat" in the tag field provided. Alternatively, you could select the RSS feed of a particular person's photos.

In addition to this dynamic content form across the social web, GoDaddy also makes available various pre-selected news feeds which you can add if desired. This content is categorized by subject, and is similar to the types of selections that many of today's personalized homepages offer.

Chat & Email

The Chat application lets you have online text conversations right on the site. With the included administrative controls, you can launch a room, invite users, ban users, and participate in both public and private chat sessions. Again, there's nothing technical involved in adding this to your page - the app is already set up and ready to use. All you have to do is make a few choices about how it's displayed and whether it's loaded by default when you log in.

Also, because SocialSpace users have purchased a domain name via GoDaddy, there's an option to set up email addresses using that name. The interface for doing so is much easier to manage than GoDaddy's usual UI for creating email addresses (an ugly and geeky interface). Here, you're basically able to push a button and set up multiple email addresses associated with your domain. The inboxes for these can then be added as widgets to your homepage.

Photo Albums

If you don't keep your images online with a web service like Flickr, you also have the option to make your SmartSpace an online photo album using the SmartSpace photo application. With this, you can upload photos from your computer and then share those photos both publicly and privately in albums that are added to your page.

Web Site and Blogs

For text-based content, you can choose to either add a web site or blog to your homepage. With these options, you can select from a number of pre-built templates to configure the site. Although not as robust a platform as WordPress, the blog will probably work fine for casual users who want to take advantage of the other elements of the SmartSpace service.

Just Another Personalized Homepage Or A New Type Of Social Network?

SocialSpace could be linked to some patent filings the company filed earlier this year which describe a web portal that functions as a social network aggregator. According to those filings, the aggregation could be done using login systems like OpenID. Although there's no mention of OpenID integration in the SmartSpace support documents yet, we hope that integration is something they plan to add in the future.

Still, even without OpenID, what GoDaddy has launched today is a viable competitor to the other personalized homepages out there like iGoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes, etc. But GoDaddy's SocialSpace goes beyond what those sites offer in a number of ways. Although widgetized content like photos and RSS feeds can be added to nearly any start page today, GoDaddy actually lets you own a domain name, set up a blog or website and then easily, instantly turn it into a personalized social network that aggregates content from the social web and includes chat functionality for instant interactions with your friends.

Will SocialSpace kill MySpace and Facebook? That's highly doubtful, but it could be a nice aggregator for those looking to establish a web presence with minimal work. And because it's from GoDaddy, a household name thanks to their high profile TV commercials and ad campaigns, this move also represents what may be the final leap where "social media" fully crosses over to the mainstream use and acceptance.

More Info

Prices for SmartSpace start at $4.99/month for 2 months. From there, the prices are as follows: 12 mo: $4.74/month, 24 mo: $4.49/month, or 36 mo: $4.24/month. You can watch a short introductory video here. Discuss

Kodak has introduced Theatre HD Player, a WiFi-enabled black box that connects to your HDTV, displays images and other multimedia content, and links directly to Kodak Gallery, the company's online photo-sharing service.

This isn't an Apple TV-killer, but it's another sign that companies are waking up to Internet TV.

Features:

• View your pictures and video on your HDTV
• Access photos from your PC, camera, and online photo sharing sites
• Wirelessly send and receive pictures with Kodak's Picture Mail feature
• Create slideshows to your favorite songs
• Access Internet Radio, podcasts and other web content on your HDTV

The Theatre HD Player will retail for $299.99 and is scheduled to launch in September.

Jon Dahl of Slantwise Design presented at Minnebar on "Consulting for fun and profit"

Dahl provided a Jeopardy style list of topics to choose from. The thoughts below come from a combination of Dahl and audience participation.

Hiring

Pitfalls to avoid with hiring employees. Should you fire friends? The audience differed on the value of this. Don't hurt your business by hiring someone just because they're a friend, but do hire those who are truly valuable.

90% of working with people is chemistry. But it's hard to know whether someone will have the right chemistry based on interviews. Try to find people with complimentary skills. Don't mistake the effectiveness of your personal relationship for a relationship that would work in a business setting.

You may like the people you work with but not hang out with them. That's fine.

We have found all of our developers through Craigslist and the community (events like Minnebar).

Finding Customers

Look for small projects first. Easier to complete some projects and build a portfolio.

Consider partnering with other small firms to build relationships.

Have a blog. Prove that you're well-spoken, smart, and thing about interesting things.

Have your principles do sales. Customers want to talk to the people who are ultimately responsible for the success of the project on your end.

Placement agencies can help to find projects.

Rates & Prices

"Everyone does work hourly, but it doesn't make sense to me." explained an audience member. Reusable work seems to make more sense to sell on a project basis.

User-interactivity: Better off billing hourly since people generally don't know what they want when they're starting.

If you're "a person on the team" consulting, hourly works well.

Fixed bids seem to work better with government and large companies who are used to bidding. But be sure to contractually lock down the deliverables.

Fixed bid requires a closer eye on the scope / more project management.

Hybrid: Do an hourly project to determine requirements. Then put together an estimate for a fixed-bid project.

Scope Creep

What to do? Get new customers if you're doing fixed-bid work. For hourly, keep billing them.

Determine the customer's budget when determining an appropriate scope/bid.

Don't change features during each iteration. Write down and hold features until the next round.

Fire them.

Raise prices until they fire you.

Do a bad job until they fire you?

You can fire customers, and you can find new work. However, even difficult customers can be dealt with if you work with them.

Tools and Work Environment

Coffee

Good Accountant

Good Lawyer - Dahl uses NewCouncil.com

IRC or Campfire - Especially great when working contractors.

Basecamp for Development - Audience member: "Where programming project go to die."

Bug Tracker

Location: Spare bedroom? Basement? Office? Whatever works for you and your team. Some developers can't stand an office setting. Others work much better face to face.

"If you really need to know something from a client, pick up a phone."

Consulting vs Products

"I find myself wanting to work on my own projects, but need to focus on paying the bills [through consulting]." Audience member.

Product development is really alluring. Tough to balance with consulting.

Find some efficiencies through reuse of code (almost a product) with similar clients.

Cash Flow

"Consulting makes me bipolar." Audience member.

Checks don't come in on a steady basis.

Figure out your baseline expense and cover that. Then aim for a huge padding above that.

Selection is important. Find clients who pay and pay on time.

Get some money up front. Discounts for early payment is mixed.

Winning Contracts

Clients are most concerned about whether they can trust you.

Improving Customers

Bill appropriate prices for your value.

Building a Reputation

Do good work.

Have a blog.

Be known in the developer community.

Establish a niche. (Ex. Ruby on Rails)

Size

How big do you want to be?

Each person makes the team different and dynamics more difficult.

Quality vs Profits

Important question. You can't compromise.

To be an excellent firm, you have to do excellent work.

Lee and crew have done it again with their latest video, Podcasting in Plain English.

Stop what you're doing and watch it now.

Then share it with anyone to whom you've ever tried or wanted to explain what podcasting is. Rinse and repeat for any of the awesome videos at Common Craft.

If you want to receive the occasional video and audio podcasts that I do here on TinyScreenfuls, then make sure you're subscribed to the TinyPodcast feed. I first started podcasting in 2005, but it's become kind of sporadic lately. I've got big plans for the show, and my show on Intel Software Network, called Bit Stories, this year! Subscribe now if you're interested, and automatically get the shows as they appear.

Thank you, Lee and Common Craft, for providing such a useful resource for us!

We believe their state-of-the-art geo-targeting capabilities will allow us to raise awareness of our products and services to highly-targeted audiences around the world through an innovative new media, said Tasneem Domingo, Marketing Manager, PlayUKinternet.

Many of the Google Sky features found within Google Earth are also available on the browser version. You can:

• Search
• Browse
• Change the video between infrared, microwave, ultraviolet, or x-ray
• Telescope galleries from Hubble and others
• Up-to-date planet positions and constellations
• Lots of custom KML content
• And the podcasts gallery

Click to continue reading...

We published an in-depth Apple TV review and walkthrough yesterday, and gave Apple TV 2 a B. We like the new movie features, but the podcast support is confusing and makes it hard to find and watch video podcasts.
We may tough to please, though, because many podcasters are giving the device unqualified praise:

• Indiefeed publisher and ADM head Chris MacDonald says Apple TV may very well revolutionize the way we consume (and track!!) downloadable RSS media.
• ScreenCastsOnline's Don McAllister calls Apple TV 2 a game changer. Apple TV Take 2 removes the need for the convoluted and confusing subscription mechanism for accessing podcast content. Apple TV Take 2 transforms podcasting into an on demand streaming content delivery service in one fell swoop. If you thought Podcasts were cool before, Apple TV Take 2 has just raised the bar and could be a major turning point for independent content producers.
• Podcasting pioneer and author Paul Colligan calls Apple TV 2 a game changer, too. With this gorgeous box, I can watch whatever Podcast I want (as long as it is in the iTunes directory) and the word subscription isn't anywhere to be found. Apple TV is now a video on demand service where you simply pick your favorite Podcasts and play and/or download them on demand.
• Geek Brief's Cali Lewis calls Apple TV a gift to podcasters and our viewers and listeners. With this update, Apple accomplished something they'll probably never promote. They created the closest thing I've seen to a grandmother computer.

Have you tried out the new Apple TV? What do you think of it?

As always, I'll try to give the Podcasting / New Media angle on my initial thoughts re this reboot.

The "promise" of Apple TV (Take 2) is an interesting one - we don't need to hook this thing up to a computer to get some real power. What we have now is a machine that connects to the Internet without a computer somewhere acting as our person inbetween. I like the theory - how well does it work?

First thing of note - Subscriptions in YouTube. This could and will be amazingly powerful if we get enough of these boxes (or any box that allows for YouTube subscriptions) in front of people.

Second thing of note - Entering in anything (logins/passwords) via the remote is really annoying. I can only imagine entering a Podcast RSS URL (haven't done it yet).

Number 3 - The movie rental process is incredible. Nice and clean. Gorgeous. I will be renting movies this way.

Number 4 - Podcasts. Wow. Yes, you can subscribe, etc., but there is also a play on demand kind of option in here. You pick what you want to watch and can either watch or subscribe as you wish. Nice.

Your Podcast Perspective is this this changes EVERYTHING. I'll be writing more here as soon as I soak it all in.

Color me very impressed.

Sponsored By: I'm The Media - The FREE Social Network For Media Makers

The Wall Street Journal Digital Network announced today a free, downloadable application for Windows Mobile phones that provides users access to WSJ.com, MarketWatch.com and Barrons.com.

The service was developed with help from Action Engine Corporation, a mobile application platform provider. While on-the-go, users will be able to read financial news, mange their personal stock portfolio, track the market, watch videos and listen to streaming podcasts.

We recognize that today's busy professionals need continuous access to top business and financial news, and we can now ensure they have it anytime, anywhere, said Matt Goldberg, vice president of franchise development and partnerships for Dow Jones & Company. By offering this mobile application that consumers can download directly onto their phones, anyone not just Wall Street Journal subscribers can receive instant access to news, stocks, videos and information across our suite of news sites.

The Wall Street Journal Digital Network mobile application offers an exciting development in usability for delivering information to the wireless device, said Scott G. Silk, president and Chief Executive Officer of Action Engine. By offering three of the most well-respected news properties in a single, multimedia-enabled service, we are showcasing the innovation that ensures anytime access for news-hungry consumers.

For a list of supported mobile devices, or to download The Wall Street Journal Digital Network mobile application, please visit: www.wsj.com/mobiledownload.

Answer: We earlier recommended the Google MP3 Player for embedding MP3 songs and audio podcasts in web pages but for some reason, the Google Flash player has stopped working on external websites other than listening to voicemail messages on Gmail.com.

So here we explore some new Flash MP3 players from Google and Yahoo! that are again light-weight, easy to implement and extremely efficient.

1. Google Reader MP3 Player

Google Reader has an inbuilt MP3 player that is pretty much the same as Gmail player but it also works on non-Google websites. This player has volume controls, no Google branding and it auto-detects the duration of the music file so your readers know how long the song will last. Here's a live example followed by the HTML embed code:

To use this MP3 player on your website or blog, copy-paste the following code and replace the MP3_FILE_URL with the link to your MP3 file.

2. Yahoo! MP3 Player

If you think normal is boring, check this out. Yahoo! offer a code generator (Easy Listener) to help you create a Flash based MP3 player that matches your website color theme and layout. See example:

Though this Easy Listener MP3 player requires you to pass the address of the web page that contains the MP3 file(s), you can directly pass the MP3 link and it will work just fine. Supports auto play and you can decide where the meta data associated with the MP3 file should be displayed.

3. Yahoo! Media Player

If you maintain an MP3 blog or run a podcast and regularly link to MP3 files, it makes little sense to embed a separate Flash player with every MP3 file. I would therefore recommend using the Yahoo! Media Player that auto-detects links to MP3 files in your web pages and creates an embedded player for each link.

All you have to do is insert the following link in your blog template and all MP3 hyperlinks will be converted into inline MP3 players. This also has the shuffle feature and visitors can easily skip to any song in the playlist. Excellent stuff.

4. Odeo MP3 Player

Odeo offers a pretty impressive MP3 player (see example) that works perfect in web pages as well as RSS readers but a small issue is that Odeo Player requires you to type the exact duration of the song in the embed code. You can skip this step but then the progress bar won't reflect the true status when you play the song. And there are no volume controls.

To use Odeo MP3 player in your website, add the following code replacing MP3_FILE_URL and DURATION with relevant values.

Summary: With so many choices, how do you pick the right MP3 player for your website ?

As a minimalist, I prefer the Google Reader MP3 player since it offers volume control and minimal branding. But if you are regularly linking to MP3 files, this will prove cumbersome and I suggest integrated the Yahoo! Media Player on your website.

Related: How to Trim MP3 Songs

How to Embed MP3 Audio Files In Web Pages With Google or Yahoo! Flash Player - Digital Inspiration

Why will serial media fade? Because consumers are changing from listeners to adept conversers. The Web has acclimated them to ultimate control (I'll go when and where I want to) and to participation. Ever wonder why TV watchers flip so much? Because they are looking for what they want, not what CBS wants to show them. Their attention span is short, and their appetite for choice is too high to bear passivity.

This trend will put increasing pressure on the serialists like XM/Sirius, NBC, Fox, Clear Channel, The New York Times, and Time Warner to accelerate their transformation.

Similarly, I listened to an episode of Cliff Ravenscraft's Podcast Answer Man show on which he discussed the Heil PR 40 microphone and his production process in general. Cliff is obviously proud of all his production as he talked it up hard about he goes to extra effort to make it professional sounding. There was an interesting point where he turned off all his compression and post-processing to do a direct comparison of several microphones. The second he turned off the compression, it sounded better and more engaging to me. A highly compressed human voice sounds phony, and when he was demonstrating just the Heil minus his effects I thought it sounded more real. With all the processing, the whole thing sounds like a used car commercial. I have tried other of Cliff's shows and I find that I can't listen to the phony sounding voices for long enough to stay interested. By putting in this extra layer, he actually subtracts value for me as a listener.

These are real world examples of what I have been discussing - how the pressure to make money leads to pressure to be more professional, which may not be in the best interest of your art. I have an entire mediascape full of professional, none of which interests me much. The radio is an unlistenable wasteland (commercial and increasing NPR as well) and on the 200 channels of my digital cable system, I'm lucky to find a single program that I want to watch at 8 PM. I'm interested in podcasts because it allows real people to communicate to me as a real person on topics that might not support a commercial broadcast property, minus the layer of artifice and phoniness. When podcasters build that back in, they cease to compete in their own game and start to play that of the incumbent media, one they can't win. Keep your real voice and talk to me. I'm listening.

Similarly, I listened to an episode of Cliff Ravenscraft's Podcast Answer Man show on which he discussed the Heil PR 40 microphone and his production process in general. Cliff is obviously proud of all his production as he talked it up hard about he goes to extra effort to make it professional sounding. There was an interesting point where he turned off all his compression and post-processing to do a direct comparison of several microphones. The second he turned off the compression, it sounded better and more engaging to me. A highly compressed human voice sounds phony, and when he was demonstrating just the Heil minus his effects I thought it sounded more real. With all the processing, the whole thing sounds like a used car commercial. I have tried other of Cliff's shows and I find that I can't listen to the phony sounding voices for long enough to stay interested. By putting in this extra layer, he actually subtracts value for me as a listener.

These are real world examples of what I have been discussing - how the pressure to make money leads to pressure to be more professional, which may not be in the best interest of your art. I have an entire mediascape full of professional, none of which interests me much. The radio is an unlistenable wasteland (commercial and increasing NPR as well) and on the 200 channels of my digital cable system, I'm lucky to find a single program that I want to watch at 8 PM. I'm interested in podcasts because it allows real people to communicate to me as a real person on topics that might not support a commercial broadcast property, minus the layer of artifice and phoniness. When podcasters build that back in, they cease to compete in their own game and start to play that of the incumbent media, one they can't win. Keep your real voice and talk to me. I'm listening.

Whole Foods has been doing this for about a year with both audio and video podcasts, all of which are produced using in-house talent. Scott Simons, Regional Marketing Director, hosts the Secret Ingredient show. There has been discussion on the Yahoo Videoblogging List about this show and the opportunities to also integrate both freelance produced content as well as user-generated content. Word on the street is that Whole Food is not interested, preferring to control the show in-house. It's a full service blog-based site, with comments accepted and RSS. Visitors can manually download the flash version of the episode, though that is not playable on most MP3 devices.

(more)

But how do you do that online? How do people really see your Web site?

Seeing your own Web site with fresh eyes can be a big challenge when you're staring at the same pages day after day. Eye-tracker technology can help.

Smith School eye tracker (Credit: John Consoli)

Eye-trackers allow people to study consumer behavior by analyzing head and eye movements to identify areas on a Web page where visitors focus their attention. The findings can help determine the effectiveness of Web-site design, banner ads and other visuals.

Click here to see a video of the results of an eye-tracker study that Cherry Kwunyeun, a student entrepreneur at the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, used to redesign her handbag company's Web site www.blumpari.com (still in the works).

Ms. Kwunyeun used the eye-tracker to learn which handbag designs, page layouts and Web-site templates people preferred. She also plans to use it to forecast for inventory production.

Here's what the eye-tracker helped Ms. Kwunyeun learn about designing a visually friendly and information-ready Web site:

Readers, how did you decide on a look and feel for your online store? What changes have you made to your site that have drawn more traffic? What online stores do you like best?

I mention this for two reasons.

First, I hope that you will click over and listen to the latest episode of the NCN Podcast.

Second, I wanted to be able to tell you a little bit more about podcasts in general.

What is a podcast?

A podcast is an online audio or video file, organized by release date, available for download, streaming, and subscribing.

Most podcasts are released as mp3 files - audio files that you can download to your computer.

How do I listen to a podcast?

First, you can simply stream the podcast, straight from the podcast web page, to your computer. Just click on the podcast file, and it should open in your browser or your media player. Some podcasts, like mine, have a handy built-in player. Simply click the play button and you can listen.

Second, you can download the podcast, straight to your computer, so that you can listen to it at a later date. Just right-click on the podcast file and select save link as or save file as. The file will download to your computer's hard drive. Once the download is complete, click the file and you can listen to the podcast.

Third, you can subscribe to podcast feed. This way, whenever a new podcast episode is released, it will automatically be downloaded to your computer.

How do I subscribe to a podcast?

You will need a program like iTunes.

Download and install Itunes.

Navigate to a podcast page - like www.ncnpodcast.com - and look around for a feed button -

The feed button will look something like one of these -

or

If you click on the iTunes feed button, iTunes should open and begin to download the latest episode of the podcast.

If you right-click on the feed button, you can copy the feed url - (The feed url will usually have the word feed in it.)

Open iTunes, click the Advanced tab, and click Subscribe to podcast -

Paste the feed url into the Subscribe to podcast field and click OK.

Your download will begin.

Do I Need An iPod To Listen To The Podcast?

NO! You can play the file from your computer - and if it's a standard mp3 file, you can transfer it to ANY portable mp3 player or mp3-capable smart phone.

I Am Still Confused!?!

If you are still confused, feel free to leave a comment or a question. Don't be afraid of this new technology. My dad, who is a total tech-newbie, loves podcasts - especially mine.

If you are looking for even more podcasts, checkout Podcast Pickle - an awesome directory with thousands of podcasts.

Oh yeah - For those of you who are fans of my friend, Big Honkin', you might want to check out his new podcast - about the new Terminator series - SkyNext.

Now, head over to No Credit Needed Podcast and get to listening!

First, let's cover the history of this flare up. At PNME 2007 my buddy Michael Geoghegan presented his talk Selling the Unique Value of Your Content: Determining What Your Show is Worth and Convey It To Advertisers, Sponsors and Investors. That's a mouthful, and is what Leesa Barnes refers to as the Podcasting is Dead talk. I like Leesa and was interviewed by her for her book but I agree with MWG that you can't get think his talk says that if you've actually listened to it. I listened to it the other day, and basically it says If you want to make a living podcasting, you have to do a lot of boring business things. That should come as no surprise to anyone who isn't a complete gold miner, but to create a successful podcasting business you have to do the same sorts of things you'd have to do to create a successful burrito cart - invest in infrastructure and get your act together.

Leesa also says things like And I've finally figured out the #1 reason why most people claim podcasting is dead and I must share this epiphany. That's pretty weak, to use most people claim I can't say I've ever heard or read a credible person making that claim. It is by inspection obviously false if podcasting is defined as shows being produced. There are more now than ever. If you mean cynical opportunists aren't able to cash out quickly without putting much in then sure. We have people like Mark Rizzn' Hopkins who posted his disillusion with ad networks, which prompted a response from Podcasting News and a counterthrust by Hopkins. This brought on responses by Dave Winer about how he thinks you shoudn't burden a podcast with paying your bills and Kent Nichols about how to make Ask a Ninja a business they had to do business stuff. OK, end recap.

As I followed the links and trackbacks in this argument, my low moment was in the Podcasting News article. I just felt very tired when I read this:

Podcasters Need To Take Responsibility For Making Their Podcasts Marketable

This was in response to Hopkins' statement:

I set about creating some concepts for a couple of podcasts for Mashable, which frankly is the easy part. I spoke to Pete about them, and he gave them tentative approval, provided I could find sponsorship for the podcast at the onset. I gave everyone a call in the business I could think of to find a suitable sponsor.

My take is not wildly dissimilar from Dave Winer's at this point. Much like Hugh Macleod's Sex and Cash Theory says, I think it is a terrible thing to make your art bear the burden of supporting you financially prematurely. Like Dave I think that both sides of this argument are wrong. The idea of podcasters making their podcasts marketable makes me puke in my mouth a little. I think that is the exact opposite of what podcasters need to do. It's certainly not what I have done in my show from the start where my lack of a definable topic, format or schedule defies marketability. However, it has for every single one of my almost 220 episodes been exactly what I wanted to do every time. I've made money in sponsorships/advertising, but I've actually made more money by selling t-shirts and CDs. Get creative kids, there is more than one way to shake nickels from this medium.

Here's where my title comes in. Traditional media may pretend to serve the audience but really the audience is the product and the customer is the advertisers. They sell their audience to the sponsors. If you enjoy their program it is a means to an end, a way to keep you around long enough to sell your ears and/or eyeballs. What I've always enjoyed about podcasting is that the cost of production and distribution is so low (from cheap to nothing) that it is feasible to actually serve the audience primarily. This is the stuff of my PNME talks (2005 and 2006), that there is no reason to not just go for it. You can make a show as targeted to a niche audience as you can without concern for marketability, choosing to serve the listeners rather than the sponsors. The irony is that if you do this well enough, you can actually find sponsorship but of a very specific kind. Podcasting News seems to be thinking of marketability of a general type, being sponsored by Old Navy or the US Navy. That is service to the sponsors. The Mac Geek Gab is an example of a show that is of service to the audience. They have a specific type of demographic of technically minded Mac users, and as a result they have sponsors like Bare Bones software, not the kind of company that would advertise on TV or radio. This is the way it should go in new media. Create your show and be of great service to your audience. If you serve it well enough with a good enough show, you might actually find sponsorship that way but if you don't put the audience first, that gets less likely.

Podcasting is a medium where the pitch is irrelevant. Just do the damn show and publish it. It costs little or nothing to do that, just a little of your time. If you aren't willing to commit the time to do it then why should anyone care enough to commit money to you? There is no better pitch than a well produced show with an existing audience. That's what tweaked me about Hopkins' posts, the way he treats this medium with the power dynamic of a Hollywood studio or radio syndicate. It seems like 2/3 of the people in new media are trying to rebuild the same hierarchies the other 1/3 are trying to tear down. Don't ask for permission, don't pitch anyone. Find your passion, speak your mind, produce your show. Cynical shit might fly but that ain't how the smart money bets. Don't quit your day job and force your show to pay your mortgage. Do what matters to you and don't think about the money until you have to. Take advantage of the strengths of podcasting and be agile. You can't out-compete big media on breadth but you can on depth. Go deep, serve your audience better than the radio or TV ever could. If you do it well enough, money will find you. If your only motivation is making money, you will do a worse show and probably make less anyway. Serve the audience and not the sponsors. Why? Because you can.

Your Email Signature

Stick a link to your blog or podcast in your email signature. Here's a hint, though. If your email signature looks like the titles at the end of a movie (7-15 lines long), people are going to glaze over them, not pore through them in great detail. The second thing in my signature after my name is a simple text pointer to my website. Everything else, including my title and phone number, are downstream from that.

Subscription Tools

If you're not using FeedBurner, you're missing a ton of tools that help people get your media the way they want it. FeedBurner is a tool that enriches your RSS feed. But it does more than that. It adds ways for people to subscribe by email, ways for people to get your media on their reader of choice, and tons and tons of other add-on services like republishing widgets, and more. If you're not comfortable editing your blog's template and files, you might ask around for help (Twitter would surface a lot of willing helpers- or go to a PodCamp and someone would help), but swapping out the built-in RSS feeds on a website for FeedBurner's even-more-detailed feeds would be helpful.

Blog and Podcast Directories

There are tons of places where blogs and podcasts are listed. Rather than recreate the wheel, I googled for some directories list posts:

Blog directories

Podcast directories

I recommend subscribing to a bunch, though I've yet to receive a message or comment from someone saying, I found you on Super Blog Directory dot com! But hey, it doesn't hurt.

Oh! One point to make sure you've done it. CLAIM your blog/podcast with Technorati. It looks like you need to get an account, and then you can claim it here .

Comments are Your Friend

Reading big blogs and podcasts that you admire, and commenting appropriately is a great way to build some awareness of your blog or podcast. I've had lots of people surf over from a comment I've left on a big and amazing site, only to retain that person as someone who thinks what I'm blogging about is of interest to them. Never spam a blog. Never sound overly self-promotional. But if you add a conversation point or two that people resonate with, there are tons of folks (like me!) who will follow through, and consider adding your blog to the feed reader for a while.

Use Social Bookmarking Tools

Most blogs allow you to add on 3rd party applications, and one that I *highly* recommend is AddThis. If your blogging software supports AddThis, I'd say use it. (You might use a similar tool, and it's probably okay). Add This gives you 36 social bookmarking sites all in a teeny tiny button. Thus, if your audience uses a bookmarking tool on ANY of 36 sites, your post can be added to their information quite easily.

Some of these sites are GREAT traffic adders. The #3 referral mechanism to my site is StumbleUpon, so I can tell you for sure that these tools drive awareness.

Facebook

I was just about to scrap using Facebook entirely, but then Steve Rubel sent me a quick message telling me that he first discovered my blog through Facebook. The minute he said that, I realized that Facebook's big value to me would be to redistribute my blog so that even more people might discover it and come back to the mother ship.

I'm using an application called Flog Blog, and also Blog Friends to promote my own stuff. I also use Feed Heads and some other tools to discover other people's work. (Remember, this SHOULD be a two way street).

A Short Note on Digg

Not sure why, and not sure if it's just me, but Digg has never really done much for my blog. I've made the Digg front page a few times now, and the folks who usually come over from Digg don't stay, and often tell me what a piece of crap my site is. Not that I mind critics, but I also don't rush out to invite them in. Your mileage may vary.

Value Matters

At the end of the day, the reason why people will or won't subscribe to your media is that they find some value in it. In a few small cases, they might subscribe because they know you and just want to stay in touch. But for attracting people that aren't your friends or relatives, you need to offer something of value. I've had people ask me how to promote their blog, only to read nothing but random posts about why they liked last night's episode of Dancing with the Stars, a YouTube video of dogs singing, etc.

It's not that your blog HAS to be about any specific thing, but if you're looking for tons of traffic, the blog should have some value outside your own interests. If you want to stay blogging about whatever it is that appeals to you, that's perfectly cool, and I'm not saying don't. But if you want to take your media up to tons more folks, try to deliver something to others, and try to do it succinctly.

How Are YOU Promoting Your Media?

Guaranteed that I've missed some good ideas, and that you've got some great ones. What else are you doing to get your media out there and seen? How are you finding your audience? We'd love to hear your ideas. What's worked for you? What hasn't?

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

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