The web is a great equalizer

After calling Britney Spears a backstreet floozie last week, web searches and posts for Camille Paglia have skyrocketed. Bloggers have been especially active in documenting what has been described as the virtual altercation between the pop star and the feminist. Celebrity Dream Network, a celebrity gossip blog that unashamedly "puts words in the mouths of the stars" quoted Britney as having said:

“I’m a 25-year old dropout mother of 2 from the friggin’ Bayou, who is currently leading the whole planet around by its nose with my vagina. If you can’t see the delicious, pro-feminist irony in that, you’re just out of touch. I got a billion uniques today, bitch! WTF did you do?” -- from Camille Paglia gets Owned

Cindy Margolis, DRM and the Playboy Empire

Once touted as the most downloaded woman on the Internet, Cindy Margolis is making her nude debut in the December, 2006 issue of Playboy Magazine. At the not-so-tender age of 40, Cindy is undoubtedly beyond the physical prime that once accounted for her online popularity. Yet, as many aging actresses and imminently forgotten female celebs have done before her, she’s decided to pose nude in what must be the hopes of a last hoorah. Playboy has an incomparable track record of wooing female celebs onto its pages. Part of the allure for prospective celeb centerfolds must be that Playboy promises to make them look good, sometimes better than they ever looked before, even if it takes a little airbrushing and mood lighting to achieve the desired effect. As fans we are generally happy to have whatever glimpse of them we can get. For the female celeb, especially if there is already a large amount of extant photography (as in Cindy’s case), the Playboy images may become the definitive images of their career — displacing less flattering or controversial images from the public attention. It is naive of Playboy, however, and a tragic shortsale of the potential benefit to the model, to try to preserve these images exclusively in the medium of print. It is impossible to prevent their digitization and rampant dissemination upon the Internet. It is also far beyond the capacity of even the most well-funded and determined of companies to police the unauthorized duplication and use of images upon the Web — especially when they have been so widely distributed in print... more about Cindy Margolis in Playboy

cindy margolis

The Truth about Blogs

THEORY: I think it's entirely possible for bloggers to take control of the global flow of information. We would do this, essentially, by cutting out the middleman. From a network topology standpoint, Mass Publishers are information bottlenecks. What we'll do is we'll allow the Internet to operate as it was designed to do in the case of "damaged areas" permitting of no flow. We will circumvent them.

This incredible opportunity exists today for the efforts of companies like Google. What Google and others have done is turned the conventional broadcast (one-to-many) information distribution scheme inside out. The blogosphere provides for the inclusion of all voices, but it does not aggregate them at any central point. It is the opposite of a bottleneck. The blogosphere is a near-perfect democracy. It not only shows us concensus, it permits for that concensus to change (very quickly!), in response to new information. Even beyond the trust issues, one of the problems with the information output of Mass Publishers is it is rather static, once created. Mass Publishers output new information at a regular and frequent rate, but the bulk of "current" information is always in a tiny minority, against the total information footprint of the Publisher's archive. The only thing that keeps that quite small number of pages at the forefront of visibility on the Web is their Trustrank. In many cases, this trust is deserved. But in many other cases, what keeps us typing in those URLs and giving links to Mass Publishers is the expectation that their information is credible. This needn't be so. Who says there is any reason to trust the New York Times or the CBS Evening News? Remember that we are, all of us, as a culture, still under the influence of the Mass Messages that pervade the other mediums. We're all still making judgements about brands and companies based on their marketing... truth

the truth

Cogito ergo Blog

NEWSFLASH: The blogosphere is PEOPLE. It comprises millions of individual *voices*, and NOT "web sites" in the traditional sense. To blog is, foremost, to speak, and all of the rights, privileges, responsibilities and opportunities attendant to speech are attendant to blogging. The First Amendment establishes and protects the basic right. But, it is old-fashioned *social* principles that determine whether a blog is successful. Do people like what you have to say? Is it interesting? Does it provoke thought? Do you create value for the people who listen to you?

"In only the last few years, blogs have fundamentally transformed the nature of “webmastering”. It’s not just that making and updating sites is easier today than ever before because of blogs. What blogs have done that is so very special and important is they have made it possible for regular folks to command the attention of tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people everyday. Before the advent of blogging, to get a lot of traffic, you either had to buy it, win it from the search engines with SEO “tricks” or participate in complex link trading schemes with other webmasters. To be successful by any of these methods, you had to have significant money, experience or both. But today blogs offer an alternative method for the acquisition of enormous amounts of traffic… that is, essentially, FREE and REALLY EASY... more

In the context of porn blogs, all of this is true. But, sadly, I see very few porn blogs that make use of the blog medium's special powers. This can only be because most porn blogs are operated by adult webmasters, who may be genius in traditional webcraft, but are not known for their social acumen... more

Google Schmidt Misquoted on Click Fraud

Sometimes, no matter what you say, folks will insist on hearing what they want. In what can only be described as a fundamental lapse of journalistic integrity, ZDNET ran a piece asserting Google CEO Eric Schmidt had suggested the best response to the problem of click fraud was "Let it happen..."

The truth: "Eric was asked about click fraud: "Recently there’s been some talk about click fraud being a potential threat to the entire advertising business model. I was just wondering what your thoughts on that were and if there’s an economic solution to it more than just technical solutions."

Eric made clear from the very beginning that he wasn't describing our approach to click fraud and was answering hypothetically. He introduced his answer by saying: "Let’s imagine for purposes of argument that click fraud were not policed by Google and it were rampant ..."

The "let it happen" excerpt followed, in which he discusses the economic forces that can retard click fraud: "Eventually the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks. In other words, the value of the ad declines. So, over some amount of time, the system is, in fact, self-correcting. In fact, there is a perfect economic solution, which is to let it happen."

But he made clear that we don't take that approach, by adding that click fraud is "a bad thing and because we don’t like it, and because it does, at least for the short-term, creates some problems before the advertiser sees it, we go ahead and try to detect it and eliminate it." He also said, "In Google's case, we worry about this a lot and we have a number of technical engineers who think that this is great fun to try to go ahead of this and get ahead of it... more

TERRORISM: US Air Force Studies Blogs

It's a sign of the times. It's also a clear indication of the great importance blogging has attained within the scope of all information, that the USAF Office of Scientific Research today announced a $450,000, 3-year study titled "Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information"

Dr. Brian E. Ulicny, senior scientist was quoted:

“It can be challenging for information analysts to tell what’s important in blogs unless you analyze patterns...

“We are developing an automated tool to tell analysts what bloggers are most interested in at a point in time...

“Relevance involves developing a point of focus and information related to a particular focus. Credibility is the amount of trust you have in an information source...

“Blog entries have a different structure. They are typically short and are about something external to the blog posting itself , such as a news event. It’s not uncommon for a blogger to simply state, ‘I can’t believe this happened,’ and then link to a news story...

"There might not be much of interest in the blog posting, yet the fact that the blogger called attention to this story can be significant to understanding what matters...

"A good example is the recent furor in the Muslim world over the publication of cartoons of Mohammad in a Danish newspaper. The original publication wasn’t much noticed in the West, but bloggers discussed this event that possibly contributed to riots worldwide...

“The fact that the web is a vast source of information is sometimes overlooked by military analysts. Our research goal is to provide the warfighter with a kind of information radar to better understand the information battlespace... more

Google GBUY

The Wall Street Journal confirmed today, that Google's entry into the online payments arena. Called Google GBuy, the new service allows consumers to make online transactions without a credit card. The announcement has been expected for months. Online payments competitor, PayPal, has launched PayPal Mobile, and is planning other new initiatives in an effort to deter Google's entry into the lucrative space. Paypal has over 100 million account holders. Unlike PayPal, however, Google GBuy will be closely tied to their keyword advertising business. Excerpt from the WSJ:

"Here is how the service will work: Consumers who search for items like "shoes" or "strollers" on Google’s search site will see text ads with a symbol or icon designating advertisers that accept GBuy payments. Shoppers normally would have clicked on an ad and been linked to that merchant’s Web site. Now, while they will still be linked to the merchant’s site, they will go through a different checkout process integrated with Google if they choose GBuy for their transaction. Details of the service could still change before Google’s official GBuy announcement…Google plans to charge merchants a 2.2% commission on a sale, plus 30 cents per transaction using its payment service, according to people briefed on Google’s pricing. That is higher than Pay-Pal’s lowest published rate of a 1.9% commission plus 30 cents per transaction."

GBuy, which will begin on June 28, will handle purchases between shoppers and merchants, RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan wrote today in a note to investors. Participating sellers will be listed as ``trusted GBuy merchant'' in Google search results, he said. Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt has confirmed that Mountain View, California-based Google is working on a payment system to make it easier for users to buy products online. The move counters an initiative by EBay, the world's largest Internet auctioneer, which last month formed an alliance with Yahoo! Inc. for Internet advertising and online payments... more

google | gbuy

The Future of Money

Money and economics have influenced every aspect of our lives, since long before the advent of the Web. In the beginning, electronic commerce enjoyed the pre-existing electronic infrastructure of the credit card networks. It was a great fit. Some XX billion dollars changed hands that way in 2005 on planet Earth.

To pay for something online with a credit (or ATM) card has become synonymous with electronic commerce... more

VISA | online payments

Google Adwords for Print: WOW

Google gets the media + advertising equation in ALL its forms. This has allowed them to see opportunities others miss and import all the best paradigms (like the bid system) into models nobody has before. I like when the horse I've picked advances by yet another full length... more

Google Publication Ads Beta | Google Adwords | Adwords

DOT XXX MUST DIE

While the DOTXXX top-level domain has been presented as an “at will” alternative for adult publishers, its existence simply poses too great a threat that it will be used as a tool of *censorship*. Though DOTXXX supporters have produced a list of “benefits” the TLD would offer adult publishers who embrace it, these benefits are nullified by the danger (the reasonable likelihood) that it will be used by the Censorial Agenda exerting influence in Washington.

The pressure to censor (eliminate) adult entertainment originates from a number of groups, lobbies and individuals (both inside and outside government) who have a long and well-documented history of condemning adult entertainment as an unequivocal evil. Their arguments are based in religious ideology, and lack the impartial rationality needed to pursue the best solution for all concerned... more

icann | domains

A Novel Blog, Literally!

A novel blog is a novel written using a blog. For the most part, these are simple, unimaginative copy and paste jobs that do little to exploit the blogform's content management powers. Ferus Rex is an exception, and a truly original blog. I have never seen anything quite like it. The author has adapted a novel he wrote (but never published) more than 10 years ago, long before anyone had ever heard of a Weblog. He has adapted the novel to the blogform, and created something that is more than a novel, more than a blog, that offers an innovative way for readers to engage the text. Though the novel offers a traditional narrative structure, there is more than one way to get from A to B. It reminds me of Janet Murray's seminal work on multi-forma narrative: "Hamlet on the Holodeck". I think she would be happy to discover Jack Mardack's "Ferus Rex".

I am bringing Ferus Rex to the blog-form as an experiment. I am curious how the blog-form might be used as a vehicle for novel-length works of fiction. The blog-form allows for many exciting things with text. But the blog also brings with it a number of eccentricities and challenges. One such that I can think of immediately is the fact that I shall have to begin at the end of the book, rather than at the beginning. This is necessary so that readers be able to start at the “front”, where one usually finds the most recent, or “last” post. If I started my blog posts at the beginning of the book, the novel would be backwards. Weird, huh. Well, let’s see how this goes… more

novel blog

All your Celebs are belong to us

CELEB SITE STATS

On a popular webmaster BBS today, I posted a poll. I asked my friends and colleagues to guess how many celebrity related queries The Search Engine gets per day. Of course, that's a really tough number to arrive at. But a guess is a guess, so my guess is 40 million.

Well, that's the demand side, then. Now imagine that all that demand is inacessible to you because...

No, better yet, imagine that the US has been struck by an epidemic and...

"You are the President. You have to decide where you are going to draw the quarantine line. You have to decide who gets treated as a patient, and lives, and who gets a body-bag.

The situation with celebrity sites is exactly the same. This is a territory now filled with links to some of the most offensive domains on record, the spammers, the installers, etc. from back in the day.

So, not only is it an innately blurry territory, contentwise, but it also appears to be the in hands of proven betrayers of the public trust.

Hmmm. What would you do? Would you try to save the big circle, and carve-out just the little circle?

The Search Engine is, in this case, the President. He has no desire to give up the Southwest to the disease. But he must stop the spread. He only has so many resources available to divide between the dual efforts of containment and medical treatment. If you try to save the big circle, you may risk more of the country, because you know there will be a meaningful number of carriers who may travel outside the quarantine zone. It looks like the best solution might be to sacrifice the bigger circle and be sure to save the rest of the country. It doesn't hurt, either, to know that in just a few weeks the National Guard will be able to roll-in (with proper equipment, of course) and begin reclaiming National Assets.

Of course, it will take a little while for the infected to die. We may also expect that those within the quarantine zone will do all they can, for as long as they can, to survive. But these will be relegated to ever-smaller, very-well-contained slums in some of the bigger cities... more

Firefox versus IE: Webmasters Opine

Today, on a popular webmaster BBS I started a discussion on the merits of Mozilla Firefox versus Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Some compared the Firefox vs IE debate, and the whole Opensource visionquest, to the MAC/PC debate:

One fellow commented:

"This whole Firefox vs. IE crap reminds me of the PC vs. Mac shit. It's funny how everyone that used Macs praised them like they were the second coming of Christ and all of the newer operating systems for the Mac are pretty much the same as Windows with their little fucked up twist on things."

To which I responded:

"Small difference: If you were a Mac person back in the day, you were like a designer or some other quirky creative type and you suffered the high-priced software monopolies happily over Starbucks with your other Mac buddies. Collectively, you helped Apple hold on to a smidgen of the PC market.

If you are a Mozilla geek, you spend an hour writing some bullshit little whistle or bell for FF and Google will send you a million hits a day...more

What's the best browser? Firefox!

Blinded by the Money

The Online Adult Industry: Masters of Profit, but PR Neophytes

Given the current conditions, it blows my mind that there is anything but alarm and a frenzy of corrective marketing activity from the Adult industry.

When i think about how frail the chain of links really is -- each step (each click) brings the customer one step closer -- but, each transition (whether from site to site or medium to medium) is also a FAILURE OPPORTUNITY.

To better understand the special vulnerabilities and unique opportunities of 21st century marketing, it pays to reminisce a bit about the ways in which merchants in the pre-Internet world acquired their customers. Remember?

For most companies operating 15 years ago, marketing was a vast cost center of vast and nebulous effect. Obviously, that has changed -- but what has also changed, in just 15 years, is nothing less than the very essence of Marketing -- once upon a time, the "science" of Marketing, from its lowest copywriters to its most elite "thinkers", was entirely PREDICTIVE in nature -- meaning, simply, that, to market successfully, was to predict correctly.

In pre-internet marketing, all the research and the analytics, and all the theories that derived from them -- however fanciful and acronym-soaked -- stood vulnerable to one, very simple, very inescapable, seldom-articulated challenge -- "prove it -- !" -- and, short of paying someone to sit with Joe Consumer in his living room while your 15-second spot came on the air, and then to hang out with him long enough (maybe spend the night, maybe much, much, much longer) in order to observe any subsequent behavior relating to the advertised product -- short of THAT, marketing was never more than GUESSWORK. they could never, with anything less than extraordinary difficulty and expense, PROVE a direct correlation between a unique* "ad" and a sale.

*(unique -- as in THIS ad, appearing THERE, at THAT time.)

It sounds absurd to describe it that way now, in light of our recent "online enlightenment" -- but it was THIS that was always LACKING in marketing -- the fundamental verification of effect -- you could never REALLY KNOW why the customer came THAT day -- nor ever REALLY CONNECT that customer to a SPECIFIC marketing activity.

Even as a kid, i understood this was why the ads always IMPLORED me -- "...mention so and so when you come to the store..." -- and i assert that printed coupons were the first "cookies" ever conceived -- think about it -- the customer would tell the merchant all the things the customer had done to get to the store (the merchant could know all this from the unique distribution characteristics of the coupon), and then the merchant could MARRY all that sales channel data to the particulars of the purchase at the POS -- brilliant, and an early incidence of using the customer as the transfer vehicle for marketing meta-data.

For online marketers today -- verification of effect is the very FIRST thing we get -- before we know anything else, we know which ad and what was sold -- that's quite a LOT for a mareketer to know, isn't it -- ?()?

And nowhere has more money been made with that knowledge than right here in Adult -- (but when I say "money", I mean CONSUMER PURCHASE REVENUE, and not "CONSULTANCY FEES" paid by web-ignorant marketers to purported "experts of online marketing" in exchange for "customer acquisition services" -- I'm talking about -- "I made a guy buy this shit" money)

But what concerns me is the fact that our success (for having conquered the "prove it" challenge) is distracting us from a much bigger picture than that contained between a customer's mouse and our payment processor -- for all these billions we're making, there's STILL a whole lotta OFFLINE world -- with a whole LOTTA influence over our success -- and I AM NOT talking about legislative or regulatory events, which, if anything, DE-FOCUS us further from BIZ-AS-USUAL -- i'm talking about the basics -- PR -- branding, and the level of political sophistication required by ANY large industry, much less one with so many inherent political challenges.

I have to be honest with you, the more I see us rankle and cuss like a bunch of insecure, reactionary EXTREMISTS -- the more worried I get.

There is a time to stand straight-up and resist -- but there is also a time for patience and camouflage... The Hey-Dey of Pimp Lore and gangsta-fly is no doubt still a fervid nostalgia for many of you -- it musta been a blast -- I've seen the pictures -- -- but -- my colleagues and dear friends -- as I observe the landscape and notice the direction of the wind -- I'm afraid it looks like the Adult Biz has a bit of an image problem on its hands -- and worse than that, I see very few of us doing ANYTHING about it.

It's not the clothes, it's not the partying -- smart businessmen in other industries understand and appreciate that is a part of our marketing -- it's the impression among those influential personages, within both commerce and government, that we're just not SHREWD and SUBTLE enough to assist in a re-architecture of our industry that will address a few political necessities, but that will also -- and this is the important part -- preserve a very nice livelihood for ALL involved.

2hp

Adwords Tips

The number one mistake I find folks make when it comes to search engine traffic is a failure to understand how people actually conduct searches. Forget about the keywords you think you should have, or the ones your competitors are chasing. Put yourself, instead, in the mind of your Ideal Customer. What would he have typed in the search box?

Another thing is to look for non-ovbvious relevancy opportunities. Remember that all Google wants is for your ad to be "relevant", but more importantly, for the appropriateness of it being among a set of organic results to be validated by a good CTR.

Lastly, be creative with your creatives. Once you have identified some good query strings for your product, see who else is on those pages. Then, be different - :)

"The Google Network is growing by leaps and bounds, and benefits Adwords advertisers in the following ways:

1. It increases impression opportunities for Advertisers beyond Google search results pages.
2. Ads are displayed on destination Web sites, where prospective customers are closer to finding what they want and where they will spend more time, thus creating still more impression opportunities for advertisers.
3. Google Network sites provide a rich context for even finer, more specific targetting.
4. The wide topical and geographic reach of the Google Network gives Adwords advertisers access to markets and customers they might never otherwise have reached.
5. Adwords advertisers are able to connect with prospective customers even when they have not used Google search... more

adwords | adwords | adwords

What is Right of Opinion?

The Web has transformed our lives in many evident ways, to be sure. But there are a number of important transformations underway that may not have been felt yet by most people.

Before we lived in a Networked World, the Realm of Daily Concern for the average person centered on home, office and town — geographic locality, in other words. But the advent of the Web has exploded that “realm” dramatically for many people...more

Rubbing the Purple Cow

I've spent some time socializing the importance of Trust (beyond Trustrank) in Google's global commerce strategy.

In this video of a presentation made last month by marketing guru Seth Godin on the Google campus, Godin illuminates the importance of getting people to advocate for your product or company... the importance of Trust...more

seth godin | google

No Sufficiently Countervailing Justification

Google users trust that when they enter a search query into a Google search box, not only will they receive back the most relevant results, but that Google will keep private whatever information users communicate absent a compelling reason. The Government's demand for disclosure of untold millions of search queries submitted by Google users and for production of a million Web page addresses or "URLs" randomly selected from Google's proprietary index would undermine that trust, unnecessarily burden Google, and do nothing to further the Government's case in the underlying action...more

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Intel is on Board with Cool

As far as I have read, learned discussions on the pairing of Intel and Apple have focused primarily on the implications to the PC manufacturing sector. I think they are missing a much bigger picture. Perhaps, sensing that Apple is about to participate in its second radical transformation of consumer technology, Intel is hedging a bet. Perhaps, the truth is even more dramatic than that. That Apple TV spot I just watched sure didn’t sound like it was produced by a concerned supplier to Microsoft...more

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Wordpress 2.0 Rocks

The WordPress community is very proud to present the next generation of WordPress to the world, our 2.0 “Duke” release, named in honor of jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington. We’ve been working long and hard to bring you this release, and I hope you enjoy using it as much as we’e enjoyed working on it. In this release we’ve focused a tremendous amount on what we believe to be the core of blogging — the writing interface. Before you upgrade from an earlier version, remember that this is a major release and thousands of lines of code have changed. Before upgrading it’s always good, just in case, to make a backup of your database and WordPress files. It only takes a few minutes and gives you a total safety net if for whatever reason things don’t work. It is also probably a good idea to turn off your plugins, and activate them one-by-one after you’ve upgraded.

Without further ado, you can DOWNLOAD WORDPRESS 2.0

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User Features

* Completely Redesigned Backend — The first thing you’ll notice when you login to your blog is the backend has been completely overhauled for both aesthetics and usability. This is the first iteration of exciting things to come from the Shuttle team of designers that has been volunteering their time, and look for even more aesthetic improvements in the future.

* Faster Administration — Call it AJAX, call it DHTML, call it Larry, but we’ve paid close attention to streamlining some of the most common tasks in managing your blog. For example if you’re writing a post and you can add categories on the fly, much like tagging in Flickr. Also instead of having two separate UIs for “simple” and “advanced” posting, we’ve combined them and let you customize the layout of the page on the fly by dragging and dropping the dialogs around. It saves where you put things so when you return it’s just like you left it. When you delete a comment or category it will fade out without a page load.

* WYSIWYG Editing — WP dev Andy Skelton and the TinyMCE team have done a tremendous amount of work to bring a smooth WYSIWYG editing experience to WordPress. As code purists, we are very picky about what kind of HTML is generated, and while it’s not perfect yet (for instance nested lists can cause trouble) for 95% of what you do post-to-post the WYSIWYG should save you time. And if it doesn’t, you can turn it off on your profile page. One note: Safari and older versions of Opera, both fantastic browsers, don’t yet support everything that’s needed to do WYSIWYG, but we fully expect new versions of those browsers will continue to improve their standards support, so it may just be a matter of time...more

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wordpress 2.0 | wordpress 2 | wordpress