Invitation to Join the tEarn Beta2 Exitmercial Network

Invitation to Join the tEarn Beta2 Exitmercial Network

tEarn, (i.e. target, Earn) a technology company pioneering a new approach to brand advertising, unveils its beta advertising community offering. 

Success of the tEarn community promises:

1. 50 to 100 times higher eCPMs for publishers and bloggers 
2. lower CPC and multi-fold ROI improvements for buyers

Over 50 significant, out-of-the-box innovations enable this new marketplace. Some of these changes include:

• AdPacks of full page, multimedia exitmercial advertising
• Relevance methods that monitor a publication's social graph 
• Targeting organized into thousands of dynamic microchannels
• 3Dstats for monitoring ROI significance
• Complete user privacy
  

tEarn has completed beta1 test with publishers and is open for limited testing by the next 100 publishers. Beta2 ads are demo, unpaid ads designed for browser, multimedia, and user testing. Beta2 publishers gain a listing and link on our pioneer page; and 3Dstats view of your web traffic. Sign-up, tag your site, and help us monitor and debug the early statistics. Thank you for tolerating the dust during the construction phase. 

Learn more at ady.tearn.com.

• eCPM is effective Cost Per Mille or Thousand pages
• CPC is Cost Per Click
• ROI is Return on Investment
• AdPacks, 3Dstats are the trademarks of tEarn, Inc. Exitmercial is not trademarked.

Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn | Guy Kawasaki

« Grameen Foundation does LinkedIn for Good | Main | Antarctica 2007: Swimming with the Penguins! »

Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn | Guy Kawasaki

Mario Sundar Jul 25, 2007

When Guy Kawasaki blogged about the Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn, LinkedIn had 8.5 million users in 130 industries. Since then we've grown to over 12 million users covering 147 industries, but many of Guy's suggestions on using LinkedIn (see below), still remain a great way for professionals to strengthen their online brand reputation and leverage their professional network. Happy Reading!

1. Increase your visibility.

   By adding connections, you increase the likelihood that people will see your profile first when they’re searching for someone to hire or do business with. In addition to appearing at the top of search results (which is a major plus if you’re one of the 52,000 product managers on LinkedIn), people would much rather work with people who their friends know and trust.

2. Improve your connectability.

   Most new users put only their current company in their profile. By doing so, they severely limit their ability to connect with people. You should fill out your profile like it’s an executive bio, so include past companies, education, affiliations, and activities.

   You can also include a link to your profile as part of an email signature. The added benefit is that the link enables people to see all your credentials, which would be awkward if not downright strange, as an attachment.

3. Improve your Google PageRank.

   LinkedIn allows you to make your profile information available for search engines to index. Since LinkedIn profiles receive a fairly high PageRank in Google, this is a good way to influence what people see when they search for you.

   To do this, create a public profile and select “Full View.” Also, instead of using the default URL, customize your public profile’s URL to be your actual name. To strengthen the visibility of this page in search engines, use this link in various places on the web> For example, when you comment in a blog, include a link to your profile in your signature.

Us Losing Thousands Of Subscribers Over Palin Cover

Us Losing Thousands Of Subscribers Over Palin Cover

Maybe it should have been obvious that the celebrity weeklies were going to politicize as soon as Hillary Clinton and her supporters showed strong resistance, during the primary season, to acquiescing to Barack Obama, thus highlighting the importance of women voters in 2008. But the heightened political importance of the magazines, whose readers are overwhelmingly female, wasn't in anyone's face until this week, when Us Weekly made waves with its controversial "Babies, Lies & Scandal"Sarah Palin cover. The issue, unflattering to Palin, has so far resulted in 5,000-10,000 cancelled subscriptions, MSNBC.com's gossip column is reporting. More ominously, Us advertisers are starting to feel pressure, and MSNBC reports there is worry about cancelled ads:

 "(Us publisher) Jann Wenner supports Obama, Wenner media decided to follow the buzz around Palin before her speech, and now subscribers feel like a vote has been cast on their behalf," says another magazine editor. “It’s going to be tough to bounce back from this one. Especially if the advertisers get involved. If they get nervous, that can hurt all of us.”

It's easy to imagine the other shoe dropping in this publishing psychodrama: Wenner rival Kent Brownridge, newly installed at Us competitor and celebrity-servile OK!, makes a play for access to Palin, a (sigh) rising political star whoseRepublican convention speech drew 37 million TV viewers, nearly as many as tuned in to watch Barack Obama. If that happens — Presto! You've got MSNBC (Us) and Fox News (OK!) recreated among the celebrity weeklies....

Newspaper Ad Revenues Gaining Downhill Speed (Even Online Is Declining)

Negative Momentum: Newspaper Ad Revenues Gaining Downhill Speed (Even Online Is Declining)

from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld

Can it get any worse for the newspaper industry? The steep decline in print advertising just keeps getting steeper and, for the first time, even online ad sales have gone down. Total print ads in the U.S. were down 16 percent in the second quarter to $8.8 billion. That makes nine consecutive quarters in which “print revenues have declined at an almost continuously accelerating rate,” notes Alan Mutter at Reflections of a Newsosaur. He put together the chart at left, which starkly illustrates the newspaper industry’s death dive.

The newspaper industry took in $1.7 billion less in print ads during the second quarter than the year before For the first half of the year, the industry is down $3.1 billion. At this rate, there won’t be an industry left by the end of next year. Of course, revenues have to stabilize at a lower level before that happens. Don’t they? Rght now, we’re at 1995 revenue levels.

Don’t look to online ad sales to save the industry. Online ads came to only $777 million in the second quarter, which was down 2.4 percent from the year before. That’s marks the first decline ever in digital revenues. The practice if bundling print and online ad sales isn’t helping in this case, either. Advertisers trained to buy bundled ads are more likely to drop the entire bundle when making budget cuts.

The New York Sun may shut down

The New York Sun, printed since 2002 as a "conservative-leaning alternative" to The New York Times (NYT), announces that it may stop being published by the end of this month if it doesn't receive adequate funding, reports the European Journalism Centre (EJC).

Newspaper Roundup: McClatchy; Tribune Company; Chicago Tribune

by David Kaplan

-- McClatchy: North Carolina papers The News & Observer of Raleigh, and The Charlotte Observerare asking hundreds of staffers to accept buyouts. The News & Observer hopes at least 320 workers, or 40 percent of its workforce, will accept the offer. The Observer is offering buyouts to most of its 810 full-timers, though it expects a low acceptance rate. It plans to cut about 75 positions by Oct. 3. Before these announcements, the papers' parent, The McClatchy Company (NYSE: MNI) said it was freezing wages for at least one year. (AP)

-- Tribune: Citing a need to improve its search optimization and putting more "intriguing" content on its sites, Tribune Interactive has reorganized its staff, putting five execs in new posts, including Rob Barrett, who moves from SVP/GM of Tribune Interactive at LAT to EVP/programming for the unit, and Julie Anderson, formerly VP/interactive at the Orlando Sentinel and will serve as VP/content integration for TI. (Release)

-- Chicago Tribune: Newspapers are desperate to attract younger readers, but the Chicago daily is aiming really young with a new weekly print and website written by and for teens. Dubbed TheMash, the paper will go out to 100,000 teens and will be managed by Trib staffers. (E&P)

Does Windows Still Matter? Is any Browser the New Window?

September 4, 2008,  12:14 pm

Does Windows Still Matter?

By JOE NOCERA

“Chrome is not going to replace Windows. A computer requires an operating system such as Windows, Apple’s OS X or Linux to make the machine work. It does, however, have the potential to do what Mr. Gates feared: make the choice of operating system less important.”

So writes John Gapper, the fine columnist for The Financial Times in today’s paper. Chrome, of course, is Google’s new browser, which is pretty explicitly designed to be a Windows killer. As Mr. Gapper notes, that precise fear — that an Internet browser could become such a powerful platform for applications software that it would effectively take over the function of the operating system — is what caused Microsoft to start the browser wars in the 1990s, effectively putting Netscape out of business.

But it seems to me that even without the browser-as-platform, Windows is already dying a death by a thousand cuts. Yes, Microsoft still makes billions by selling pre-installed Windows via computer manufacturers. But ever-so-gradually, the Internet is upending its business model just as surely as it has upended models for the music, television and newspaper businesses. It is also true, as Mr. Gapper notes, that Bill Gates saw this coming many years ago — and sounded the alarm in a famous memo to Microsoft’s executives. But in the subsequent decade-plus, the company has been unable to keep it from happening.

Think about it: do you really care anymore which operating system you use? I don’t. ...

New York Times Agrees: Microsoft Windows Toast

The market trend that, slowly but surely, is eroding one of the greatest business monopolies of all time--Microsoft's Windows--is now visible enough that general business columnists in the mainstream media are writing about it. Consider the latest from Joe Nocera of the New York Times:

Google's Chrome Already Owns 1% Of Browser Market And 6% of SAI Readers

No Mac version yet and a public panning from WSJ oracle Walt Mossberg, but Google's (GOOG) Chrome already owns 1% of the Web browser market. Actually, 1.13% of the market as of 1 p.m EDT, according to Net Applications, which is tracking Chrome usage by the hour...

Palin ROCKED!

Ed: City urbanites (i.e. Hillary's army) are left to shake, twist, and spin as Palin switches the voting battle to the hearts and minds of small town communities. Stay tuned.

Sarah Palin's Campaign Debut Electrifies the GOP, Galvanizes The Twitterati

By Sarah Lai Stirland  September 03, 2008 | 2:41:47 AM

Sarah "Barracuda" Palin, a tough political charmer with a smile: "We tend to prefer candidates who don't talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco," she said Wednesday night during her acceptance speech for the position of vice presidential candidate at the 2008 Republican National Convention.
Photo: Tom LeGro

"Palin ROCKED!"

That succinct, two-word assessment that appeared on the micro-blogging service Twitter Wednesday night just about summarized many conservatives' relieved reactions after an inauspicious week for Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Seriously? [Comment]

from Gawker by Pareene

We are rarely, these days, surprised by much. Especially the behavior of the national political press. We devoted a couple paragraphs yesterday to predicting their reaction to Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's speech before the Republican National Convention last night, but this morning we are having a genuine crazy pills moment.

Palin Assails Critics and Electrifies Party

G.O.P. Officially Nominates McCain

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and MICHAEL COOPER

Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska sought to wrest back the narrative of her life as she introduced herself to a roaring crowd at the Republican National Convention.

•  Panorama: The Speech
•  Audio Slide Show: Photographer's Journal
•  Slide Show: Convention
• Post a Comment | Read (1133)

NEWS ANALYSIS

Easiest Task for Palin May Have Been Speech

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

Gov. Sarah Palin will now have to appeal to audiences that are not necessarily as primed to adore her.

• The Caucus: Biden's Reaction to Palin 8:28 AM ET

Choosing the Right Ad Network, Part 3 by Tessa Wegert

Tessa Wegert

Tessa Wegert is an interactive media strategist with Enlighten, one of the first full-service digital marketing strategy and services agencies, serving such brands as Bioré, Bratz, Food Network, illy, Hunter Douglas, Jergens, and Olympic Paints and Stains. An industry veteran, Tessa has worked in online media buying and planning, marketing, and online copywriting since 1999. She is an active freelance writer specializing in interactive marketing who has contributed to U.S. and Canadian publications, including "USA Weekend Magazine," "Marketing Magazine," "The Globe and Mail," and "The Montreal Gazette." She is frequently quoted as an industry expert and speaks regularly at industry conferences and events.

Recent articles by Tessa Wegert

Choosing the Right Ad Network, Part 3 - The process of choosing an ad network shouldn't be taken lightly. Some tips for choosing one. Last in a series. Sep 4, 2008

Choosing the Right Ad Network, Part 2 - Sizing up Tribal Fusion, ScanScout, NetShelter, Travel Ad Network, Glam Media, and Jumpstart Automotive Media. Second in a three-part series. Aug 28, 2008

Choosing the Right Ad Network - Sizing up Undertone Networks, Tremor Media, Burst Media, and AOL's Platform-A. First in a three-part series. Aug 21, 2008

How Media Partnerships Can Rock Your Brand - A Fortune 100 company demonstrates how to successfully create a brand association where there was none. Aug 14, 2008

6.6 Degrees of Online Marketing - If everyone is connected through the Web, how far can one of our marketing messages go? Aug 7, 2008

Video Strategies From the Pros - Best practices for managing and measuring online video advertising campaigns. Jul 31, 2008

The Allure of Online Video - Media buyers essentially have two options for clients' brands. First of a two-part series. Jul 24, 2008

Sitting Pretty: Finding Moms Online - If your target audience includes moms, check out these two properties. Jul 17, 2008

Social Media: A Buyer's Best Bet - Recession or not, social media makes sense as a part of virtually every online media strategy. Jul 10, 2008

The Ad Industry Boom: How Media Buyers Can Profit - This promises to be the busiest time digital advertising has seen yet. What we can do to ensure we all profit from this industry boom. Part two of two. Jul 3, 2008

Palin - Most Searched for Political Figure

Palin - Most Searched for Political Figure

from Hitwise Intelligence - Analyst Weblogs by Bill Tancer

From our ABCNews Blog:

John McCain's decision to add Sarah Palin to the Republican ticket has resulted in unprecedented media coverage for the first female Republican VP nominee, but just how interested is the American public in the governor from Alaska?

Search-term volume is arguably the best way to measure curiosity about Sarah Palin (although it is more difficult to gauge the sentiment behind that curiosity). As the chart below indicates, Palin now claims the title of the most-searched-for political figure in the last three years.

As I pointed out in my TIME.com column this week, while there are search queries surrounding Palin's stance on the issues, one of the most common themes of searches for Palin are requests for pictures (more specifically, "hot" pictures of the nominee).

Can the iPhone Beat Symbian OS?

Can the iPhone Beat Symbian OS?

from TechCrunch by Don Reisinger

Symbian on Tuesday released its second quarter financial data. The Nokia-owned company said that it bested last year’s sales mark with 19.6 million units sold. That may seem high, but over the past six months, 159 different Symbian OS-based mobile devices hit store shelves, compared to just a handful from RIM and one from Apple.

The most glaring element of Symbian’s release was that it only grew 5 percent over the past year. Considering mobile phone sales grew 12 percent in the second quarter, according to Gartner, and considering Apple is selling 800,000 units each week, Symbian may be losing its grip on the market...

Google Chrome Should Force Some Soul Searching on Tabbed Browsing

Google Chrome Should Force Some Soul Searching on Tabbed Browsing

from ClickZ News Blog

While Google's entry into the browser wars has few, if any, direct implications for advertisers, indirect ones are easy to spot.

Take the elevation of tabbed browsing to the core of the user experience. While Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 both support simultaneous tabbed navigation, Google Chrome is built on it. Tabs have been elevated to the top of the interface, and Google has introduced separate processes for each tab, so one tab's glitch doesn't crash the whole browser -- as is the case with IE 7 and Firefox. Here's a screen grab from the comic book, created by the great Scott McCloud, that Google used to unveil Chrome:

Clearly Google believes the future of the Web lies in toggling -- between static pages and rich applications, between entertainment content and productive tasks. If it proves to be correct, and consumers increasingly channel their attention through numerous tabs residing shoulder to shoulder in the narrow confines of a browser, marketers will be forced to reconsider how they deliver -- and measure the impact of -- their display ads.

Among the questions such a presumed future raises: What is the impact of simultaneous browsing on metrics like page exposure time and ad exposure time? How does it affect the overall number of ads served to any given Web user, as well as the effectiveness of those ads?

Also, what are the best ad placements to leverage a tab-addicted society? For instance, some publishers claim users of IE7 and Firefox have exhibited higher click-through rates on horizontal banner ads at the top of Web pages. But the evidence is anecdotal. Very little research exists on the effect of tabbed or simultaneous browsing on digital ads.

That may change. JupiterResearch hasn't yet looked into the phenomenon, according analyst Emily Riley. However she indicated it hopes to do so in the future.

Until that happens, advertisers can only guess at the impact of tabbed browsing on their ads.

Ed: tEarn is gathering data on tabbed behavior. Early returns show most users still single task. Some users multi-task, and windows stay open for days.

Legacy of the first Harvard MBA in the White House.

President Bush was not able to attend the Repbulican Convention in person last night as he was on site for the ground breaking of his new library.  Here is a first look at the plans :

George W Bush Presidential Library is will include:

The Hurricane Katrina Room, which is still under construction.

The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you won't be able to remember anything.

The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you don't even have to show up.

The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they don't let you in.

The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they don't let you out.

The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room, which no one has been able to find.

The National Debt Room which is huge and has no ceiling.

The 'Tax Cut' Room with entry only to the wealthy.

The 'Economy Room' which is in the toilet..

The Iraq War Room. After you complete your first tour, they make you go
back for a second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth tour.

The Dick Cheney Room, in the famous undisclosed location, complete with
shotgun gallery.

The Environmental Conservation Room, still empty.

The Supremes Gift Shop, where you can buy an election.

The Airport Men's Room, where you can meet some of your favorite Republican
Senators.

The 'Decider Room' complete with dart board, magic 8-ball, Ouija board, dice,
coins, straws, and emergency backup plastic Jesus fact checker

The museum will have an electron microscope to help you locate the
President's accomplishments.

Admission: Republicans - free; Democrats -   $1,000 or 3 Euros