DMEC

I love experiments with online advertising. This is the first time I’ve seen an ad inserted into a RSS feed. I approve of paidContent clearly labeling the advertisement as such. I’m curious to see if others follow suit, or if readers will reject ads being placed where they expect news stories. For example, the sponsored entries in GMail’s WebClips drive me batty. I find it ironic coming from the same company that receives praise for clearly delineating ads in their search results. Of course, I think much more effort goes into their Reader service. With WebClips’ limitation of 40 subscriptions, it’s hardly a serious service. Maybe that’s why Gmail’s still in beta…

In case you haven’t seen the ads overlaying YouTube videos, check it.

Send me an offer if you want to place a sponsored post in our RSS feed…

UPDATE: apparently the entry I’d posted originally is no longer up (?). Here’s another example I found online: http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/sponsor-post-funmobile

I caught the second half of this month’s BayCHI program and saw the presentation by John Buckman (of Magnatune and BookMooch). John led an entertaining interaction reviewing the evolution of applications he’s designed and built.

I was previously aware of the interesting approach MagnaTune takes toward selling music, but I left very excited about BookMooch, a service for trading in books you don’t want anymore, in return for credit that can be used to get books you do want. I have a ton of books stacked up that aren’t worth my time to sell. I’ve long-intended to give them away to friends, but that’s time-consuming as well. Trading them in for books I haven’t read seems even better. Has anyone else tried BookMooch?

Services like BookMooch, LaLa’s CD-trading service, and Netflix (essentially the world’s largest DVD library) take advantage of inefficiencies in other markets, impact demand for both physical goods like books and CDs and digital goods like e-books and mp3s, and provide customers alternatives to limitations on their media experience effected by DRM.

I wish I could figure out some sensible way to work John into the >play conference, as I thought his presentation style was fun and engaging (I’m guessing the audience members who kept interrupting him agree). Maybe we could talk him into scheduling a visit with us in Berkeley during the school year (please let me know if you would enjoy talking with him).

P.S. The anal-retentive side of me loves how he thinks about all sorts of little things, like using http://bookmooch.com by default instead of http://www.bookmooch.com. It’s never been clear to me why so many sites include the “www.”

At the end of my last post, I expressed concern about linking to a NY Times article using a link that would expire.  In my Mixing and Remixing class today, Professor Yee told us about a way to get a permalink for NY Times articles.  I think it’s an interesting example of a news organization adapting to the effect personal publishing tools like web blogs are having on the industry.  This story also has the interesting twist of an improvement to the service being added from outside of the NY Times organization, an example of our mash-up culture.  It seems the Times agreed to make links permanently available to bloggers and then another individual has built an easier way to access those links.

So, to generate a permalink, I entered the original link into the form at: http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink .  The link generator returns a link that will work beyond expiration of the original link.  If you’re interested, you can read more about the history of the permalinks online: http://www.scripting.com/davenet/2003/06/06/newYorkTimesArchiveAndWebl.html
I’m excited such a thing exists.  It seems that right now NY Times content is being hosted on other sites and showing up high on the list of search results for that article.  Wouldn’t the Times prefer to direct this traffic to its site?  I realize it would cannibalize sales of archived articles, but how many people are paying $4.95 for access to an old article?  Not me.  I might pay a quarter, but don’t they want to provide access to create additional ad inventory?  Maybe they’ll get around to that type of thinking.  Maybe the prevalence of these permalinks will overtake the original links in search results, recovering the traffic currently being lost to other sites hosting their content.