Google Sponsors the Obama Presidency

Presidential Communication Will Be Google-Branded.

Presidential Communication Will Be Google-Branded.

President-elect Barack Obama has announced that he will be using YouTube to send out his fireside chats every week. The hype-driven media once again lost the plot and failed to realize that he is endorsing a specific brand and promoting it every week to the American people by featuring YouTube as his main provider. Every week, millions of americans and billions of non-americans will see the YouTube logo next to our president.

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I'm Live Blogging This.

Just like Shoemoney, I too love free shit. Unfortunately, I’m not cool enough to have people send them to me, but I do love free tshirts.

Here is our fake t-shirt of the week. That’s not me, nor is it a real t-shirt. It’s a bit timely since the recent Live Blogging controversy on Sphinn.

If you want your fake t-shirt featured here, just let me know.

One of my pet peeves is live blogging.  Live blogging, of course, is when a blogger tries to write about an event as it happens.   It’s useless.  No one wants to read inaccurate, unedited reporting.   Maybe I’m just bitter that I’m at home this week, and not at Pubcon, and maybe I just can’t comprehend stream of consciousness writing, but I’ve never read a live blog that was at all useful.

For those of you living in a closet, I’m talking about people who try to keep up with a live speaker, or race to have the first post on breaking news.  They just write as it happens.  Have you ever tried it? It’s hard.  And no one is good at it.  There are lots of conference write-ups that are useful, and the authors above are great when they take the time to think about the post, and write clearly and concisely.

I read live bloggers regularly when they aren’t live blogging. I love their writing. I love their insight. I just can’t stand it when they try to be some sort of court stenographer.

Live blogging is shoddy journalism.

It’s a selfish disregard for reporting integrity.

Please stop.

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Will Google Launch a Flash Competitor?  I say yes.  Steve Gillmor seems to agree.

Will Google Launch a Flash and Silverlight Competitor?

In an extremely insightful post on it here, Gillmor guesses that Google has just made the first step towards creating a Flash and Silverlight competitor (Gillmor focuses only on Silverlight seemingly because so many in the valley love to hate Microsoft).

Back a few months ago, I thought it was an absolutely brilliant move when Microsoft struck a deal to only allow folks to watch the olympics if they installed silverlight.   Second, perhaps, to just making it part of the operating system, but we know where that gets you.  Now Google is requiring Gmail users to install their own common runtime (Gillmor presumes) in order to use thier new video calling feature they launched in direct competition to sites like Skype, TokBox, and free video chat service SnapYap.  They could have written this in Flash, but I’m sure their licensing fees to Adobe would be massive, and  Google probably took less in capex to develop their own code, they have the distribution channel, plus they can deploy a much richer experience.

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Getting a PR0 is Not Fun and It's Bad Business

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Be suspicious. Be very suspicious. Particularly if it comes with no caveats and is marketed to the general population.

SEO Companies:
Techniques that can negatively affect your client if not done properly should never be on your rate card.

Glam Ad Network show signs of going out of business.

Fearful of collapsing debtors, Glam has passed on their misjudgment on to their innocent network members.   In a letter to their publishers, Glam spells out how due to economic troubles they are extending the length of time to make their payouts.

So… The publisher pre-pays Glam with ad inventory, Glam sells it to someone who they feel probably won’t pay, then Glam stiffs the publisher? Nice.

If you have ads up from glam, I’d suggest you pull them.  This is not a good sign. Better yet, make Glam pre-pay.

This has to be one of the worst decisions an ad network can make.  They should have tightened up terms on the advertiser side or get them to prepay.  Changing payout terms mid-stream is a bad way to go.  What’s worse is they are putting you on the hook for advertisers who don’t pay.

How’s that 10 cents on the dollar sound?

A tip for you: Google Adsense

httpwebwitch (Ian Ring) on Validating Your Site for w3c Compliance

No.

Next question?

Webmaster World post thanks to Ian Ring aka httpwebwitch

EstDomains Loses Registrar Accredidation

ICANN just revoked the registrar accredidation of EstDomains. Apparently the President was convicted of credit card fraud, money laundering, and document forgery.

EstDomains has a reseller program, and even if you didn’t register with them directly, you’d better check to make sure they aren’t your actual registrar.

Protect your assets and choose your Domain Registrar carefully.

Bankruptcy May Turn Your Dollars into Dimes

I was just over at WebmasterWorld reading a thread discussing a WSJ article on how small ad networks are being threatened by the current economic downturn. There has been an explosion in small ad networks in the last few years, and some of them bound to be punished by the coming contraction, and we all know that recession and bankruptcies are coming.

More than 300 online-ad networks have cropped up over the past couple of years, making the business of brokering ads on the Web one of the most popular — and crowded — niches on the Internet.

Two such networks, Adzilla and JellyCloud, closed their doors this month, and more are certain to follow. Other more established networks such as Burst Media are publicly seeking buyers.

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I am ceaselessly impressed with the marketing skill of both sides in this election. The movie above is produced by MoveOn.org, a political action committee. Democrat or Republican, I think we can all take a lesson from these guys. The viral video, aside from being hilarious, is customizable so that it prompts people to send it again and again to people they know. You can customize it for your friends’ names.

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