Open The Dialogue

• Congrats to Google finally doing something with Jot, which they’ve renamed and repurposed as Google Sites, though the Jot.com site is still there and asking people to sign up for reminders of its relaunch. At 16 months they beat the “three years” I had in the pool. (CT)
• I had a really cool post all drafted on the problematic TV debut of quarterlife after its initial debut as an online series but then found Steve Bryant wrote the exact same thing. Not the first time that’s happened. (CT)
• Yes, let’s all be shocked that Facebook is encouraging magazine publishers to use it as a platform and not build their own social networks. (CT)
• Terry Heaton points out that the outsourcing of commenting through Favor.it does little but take away one thing some sites had to cling to when it came to attracting actual site hits. (CT)
• An interesting look at BlueShirtNation, a social network for Best Buy employees that exists outside the corporate chain of command. (CT)

A tipster informed me that PRNewswire is using Vibrant Media’s in-text advertising to market itself. Now I haven’t spoken with PRN just yet, but thought it worthwhile to bring this up nonetheless as it’s one of those mediums that people always have an opinion on.

Needless to say, as you can see in this article in last week’s Tennessean, the term “news release” has a double-underline, in green, that when moused-over, brings up the ad shown in the grab above. I haven’t seen anything competitive from Business Wire just yet, and I don’t know if we will or not, as the wires have tended to have different tacks when it comes to this sort of thing.

I bring this up for a couple of reasons – one, I thought it notable that PRN had joined the fray, and two, I’m curious if some of the thoughts that I had back in 2004 still made sense to people, or if they had “grown” into accepting Vibrant Media’s inline ads. Sure, there are plenty of companies that have bought in, and I’m sure – and have heard – that Vibrant Media’s results are very positive, on the whole. But click-throughs, money changing hands, and positive user experiences are completely different things, aren’t they? Or maybe I’m still stuck on the other side of the coin here as a heavy Web user, and one who’d been working in this space well before any of these technologies were put into play.

• If you’re a self-publishing author through Lulu, you can now pay a little bit more and have your work professionally produced and placed in Borders retail locations, part of Borders larger recent endeavors to embrace digital media. (CT)
• Peter Himler has a good recap, along with commentary I agree with, about a recent dust-up between a writer for Gawker and Richard Edelman over a post that originated with an anonymous tipster. (CT)
• Jeremiah reminds us that even the appearance of a negative comment on a corporate blog is just another opportunity for engagement and conversation, something that is important to remember since the fear of negative comments is among the bigger reasons some shy away from that tactic. (CT)
• I’m increasingly interested in this idea of the “semantic web” and Read/Write Web has a good beginning list of things to know about what that’s going to entail as technology and structural foundations evolve. (CT)
• In the absence of a Locke-themed Valentine’s Day card on the “Lost” official site, fans simply created their own, something that may be the most perfect condensing of the concept of Web 2.0 into one simple example ever. (CT)
• Rebecca Lieb at ClickZ is absolutely right, that the blog someone has setup to chronicle their disappointment over treatment by Best Buy when the store lost her in-for-repair laptop will certainly outlast the resulting lawsuit itself in terms of search engine relevance. (CT)
• Stop the presses! You can now fully delete your Facebook profile if you so choose without submitting all sorts of random requests to have the company do it for you. (CT)
• There’s a new anthology-type book that brings together a handful of posts from a few different bloggers and yet is titled “Ultimate.” Umkay. (CT)
• Mike Arrington has a post up about who the major players are in the personalized homepage “wars.” The substance of his post is much less interesting to me than the fact that so many services are now catering to those looking for a personalized homepage. The “you’ll take what we give you and like it” attitude is so far gone that portal operators and others have been forced to, at least to some extent, tamp down their own self-interests and meet the needs of the user, something that can’t have been easy for anyone. (CT)
• While it’s great that Josh Marshall is getting mainstream media props for TalkingPointsMemo.com, it’s more than a little insulting that the headline writer felt it necessary to point out that he was not, in fact, wearing pajamas. (CT)
• Writers at the Honolulu Advertiser who have their own blogs stopped publishing to those blogs as part of a protest over contract negotiations with the paper. (CT)

I haven’t written as much about ooVoo as I might have wanted to or as much as I intended to. Circumstances dictated that I was only able to do one of the two “ooVoo Day” sessions I had scheduled for last week and I’m not sure what I’ll be able to pull off this coming week considering I have some traveling coming up.

But when I did use it it seemed like a very nice software-based video chat tool. The software worked well, without many problems and without any interference in the actual chat experience, which is the key thing. I haven’t tried it on my Mac but will probably have the opportunity to do just that while on the road this week.

As I often do with such tools that I try out I try to spend time thinking about how they might be used for clients. It eluded me for a while but then it hit me.

Often we’re asked to arrange interviews with “key” bloggers in a niche area of coverage or physical location. That’s sometimes hard to do in a way that really fosters a conversation or connection between the interviewer and the interviewee.

But ooVoo could be just that facilitator. If we were able to hook up a client with five or six bloggers for an hour-long virtual roundtable we could almost recreate the idea of the deskside briefing that is pervasive in the traditional press relations media plan for new media execution. The ability to record and grab pictures of the session in progress add instant multimedia assets to whatever the writer then puts up about the interview session.

I think ooVoo is on the right track with what they’re doing. There are some upgrades and additional features that need to be added or issues that need to be resolved (from what I’ve heard and read support for the Mac is iffy at best) but I like what they’re trying to do. And if there’s some way we can be using it to further the conversation between our clients and the media, be it social or traditional, then it can truly be a valuable tool in our belt.

• Apparently, Google has seen “50 times the search volume” vs. any other handset from iPhone users, according to a report in Financial Times, as pointed to by Macworld UK’s Jonny Evans. (TB)
• What was that about having to go with a major player for an ad network again? Maybe not, say newspapers. (TB)
• Read/WriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick published some points to ponder on finding “top blogs” in any given area, something that those of us in the PR space are called on for more than regularly. It’s not “the solution” just yet, but another step in the progression of keeping tabs on what might be useful to do our jobs better. (TB)
• Nick Bradbury posted details on timeouts and timeliness when it comes to NewsGator pulling feeds, in case you were wondering about that sort of thing. (TB)
• And, because it’s Friday and it’s like that, SHIFT’s Todd Defren embedded one of my favorite videos online showing how he’s going to be feeling when he comes back from vacation. (TB)
• One last item I found of interest. Swirlee on Twitter linked to this post on random($foo) about capping out on favorited videos on YouTube. Who knew? (TB)

• Seana Mulcahy is wondering whether she’s lost control of her personal contacts now that so many people are including social network, blog and other links in their communications with her. (CT)
• CNN is finally launching iReport, their video site dedicated to reporting done by non-professional reporters, who can post whatever they find to be newsworthy without the intrusion of pesky editors. (CT)
• I completely agree with Max Kalehoff’s comment on this Blogspotting post about how the bigger-name bloggers are increasingly hard to get hold of by their readers. (CT)
• Harvard is considering making some of the scholarly works produced by its faculty free for everyone to read online instead of narrowing the audience by sticking with journals and such. Their decision could start a trend and is being watched more than a little closely. (CT)
• Our long national nightmare is over. There is now a “Post to MySpace” button you can add to your blog. (CT)
• John Cass points out Countrywide is now blogging on credit. (CT)

I’m sorry, but if Facebook really wants to “improve the user experience” then they’ll go the full nine yards and give those users a handy, easy to use “Delete” button they can use to erase their profile from the social network.

The ability to opt-out is one of those basic user rights I believe need to be part of any and all sites, platforms and services. That’s simply good customer service. There’s nothing to be gained by keeping a user penned in, not letting them leave and only honking them off. The only thing that results from that sort of policy is a useless number that, unfortunately, advertisers and analysts will be all too eager to buy into.

The number of active users in any given period is always more interesting and accurate than a generic “membership” number. Heck, I’m a member of Facebook but haven’t done much of anything with my profile in about two weeks. So I’m essentially useless if an advertiser has bought an ad based on membership numbers in that time.

Much better to let people leave when they want. Or at least make “deactivation” of an account mean something, with friend requests and other communications from the site actually ceasing. All of that, even the time someone opts to take off from actively participating on the site, is part of the user experience and policies need to be in place to optimize that.

“Just over half” of B2B marketers have left their estimated budgets for 2008 alone despite fears of a recession in the U.S. economy. About 30 percent have trimmed what they were expected to spend, with most (45 percent) of those making cuts saying print budgets were getting hit the heaviest.

Conversely, the 12 percent that were increasing their budgets said almost half the newly allocated money, 48 percent, would go to online efforts.

So B2B marketers are following roughly the same outline established by other marketers in finding more value online in 2008 than they do in print. They’re likely driven there by the lower prices (something that’s going to change with time) and the stronger, more direct call to action they can include in their messaging.

Interesting piece from Mediaweek on the continued resistance of the big media companies to dropping their resistance to YouTube. Companies like Viacom and others still linger behind their entrenched position that YouTube is a bad actor and that it’s going to violate some part of their core business to allow film clips to appear there.

Ad buyer hesitation I can see to some extent. If your creative process hasn’t undergone the necessary evolution to grow beyond pre-roll 30-second spots then YouTube’s policy against such ads is going to be as confusing to you as a “courtroom” or “cell phone” are going to be to Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. “No pre-roll” ads is just going to give them a headache, so best just to go elsewhere and leave well enough alone.

But media producers should, as I’ve continually said, be looking for just about any piece of online real estate that might be available to use as a distribution platform. Here are their two options:

#1 – Insist that everyone consume content on your terms, a policy that limits audience exposure because of technology, time, established behavior or other factors.

OR

#2 – Allow your content to grow online like a sea monkey through viewer forwarding, embedding and a variety of other tools. I’m not talking about outright piracy of the entire film. That’s wrong. I’m talking about someone pulling their favorite four-minute scene from a movie and use it in a blog post.

I would rather my content get seen – as long as it’s not in the context of theft of the whole thing and with appropriate attribution – than effectively hide it to anyone I didn’t deem cool enough. But I’m kooky like that.

At some point Viacom and others are going to have to look beyond their noses and embrace YouTube and other players, even if it means slackening the control they try to maintain.

I’m really hoping they don’t clamp down on YouTube versions of the Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull trailer that’s set to debut on Thursday. That would be a tremendous mistake since that’s likely to be so popular it could even give Dramatic Chipmunk a run for its money. Saying people can’t share the video in that manner is going to cut off a powerful, passionate chunk of the word of mouth that’s going to be generated about the trailer and the movie as a whole.

If online buzz is supposed to be this Holy Grail of marketing then media companies need to facilitate and not interrupt that buzz when it happens, even if it falls outside their comfort zone.

Because I like to extrapolate (it’s my second favorite thing to do after insinuating) from one vertical to another, this AdAge story on what women want out of the Internet certainly got my interest. It’s certainly filled with some interesting information on current trends of female behavior online and how traditional behaviors might be shifting or changing, all presented via graphics that, if they were static and not interactive, would not be out of place in People Magazine or Entertainment Weekly.

Aside from that, this sort of story could be written on just about any given demographic any given week. That’s how fast things are changing. That’s why blogs and the industry watchers and players who pound them out are so valuable to marketers. If you’re going to try to reach people where they are, then it makes sense to know where that is, no?

The audience, now more than ever, is a constantly moving target. If one tool stops meeting their needs they’ll move on. And the early adopters are never going to sit still long enough for you to get a bead on them.

So while trade mags like AdAge and others serve a great role in terms of providing context and in-depth reporting, for insights on consumer trends I’ll take blogs any day of the week. That’s especially true since those blogs are often written by people who are trying to dissect and analyze the data for themselves, making their perspective all the more relevant to the reader that’s trying to do the same thing.