Installing tEarn on WordPress 1.x/2.x

Note: The following instructions are not for use with blogs hosted at WordPress.com or any WordPress MU–powered installation.

tEarn's exitmercial services are delivered at your site via the tEarn script. Once you’ve installed tEarn code on your site, you can control the tEarn service from your tEarn Control Panel. The code connects tEarn and your WordPress, so adding exitmercials to your blog couldn’t be easier!

To add tEarn to a WordPress-powered blog, you’ll need to insert a small piece of code in your templates. Fortunately, this is easy — follow these steps.

1. Create an account at tEarn for your blog and copy your tEarn code.

   Sign in to your WordPress Admin dashboard.

2. Click the Presentation tab, then the Theme Editor sub-tab. You should see a dropdown menu of installed themes and a list of template files associated with the currently selected theme to the right of the editor. The remainder of this example assumes use of the WordPress Default theme.

   

3. Click Main Index Template in the list of template files. Its contents load in the editor. (For WordPress 1.5: “Main Template”)

4. Paste the code you copied in step 1 in the body of the template. We recommend the line following the BODY tag. It can also be inserted before the closing BODY tag.

5. Click Update File » to save your changes. 

The tEarn tag has no visible parts on your page. Click on links that exit your blog to test. Use your tEarn Control Panel to monitor results. 

Effective, Inexpensive Video for Communicating Change

Did You Know? 2.0

Henry Blodget 

Some eye-opening data points from Did You Know 2.0, by shifthappens.

Via Barry Ritholtz

AdNet Weekend

Yahoo Ad Network Offers 'deceptive' Ads PC World - Oct 31, 2008 Deceptive advertising may be illegal in the US, but Yahoo's ad network appears to offer it to publishers on a menu of choices when they're deciding what ads ... ComScore Extends Its Reach on Web Adweek comScore, Inc: comScore Introduces aEUR~Extended Web' Reporting ...Trading Markets (press release) comScore extends Media Metrix service for advertisers Utalkmarketing ClickZ News  YHOO - SCOR - OTC:CMTX

AdManage Opens New Sales Office and Sponsors ad:tech NY MarketWatch - Oct 31, 2008 We encourage all those going to the show to visit our exhibit at ad:tech for more details." AdManage is an ad network that syndicates XML search feeds for ...

Ringleader Digital Selected to Power Ads for go2 Media's Mobile ... MarketWatch - Oct 28, 2008 As the next-generation mobile advertising network, Ringleader Digital brings the onlineadvertising experience to mobile--fulfilling the potential and ... LIN TV Selects Critical Media's Syndicaster for Real-Time ... MarketWatch TVL

ExpertHub Re-Launches Technology Platform and Advertising Network ... MarketWatch - Oct 28, 2008 Lawyers benefit through our advertising network by being able to connect with consumers across thousands of websites, instead of just one or two. ...

Presidential Candidates Fail to Focus on Hispanic Media, Despite ... MarketWatch - Oct 31, 2008 Launched in 2003 and acquired by PR Newswire ( www.prnewswire.com) in 2008, HDN is the nation's first and largest Internet advertising network of US ... Presidential Candidates Fail to Focus on Hispanic Media, Despite ...PR Newswire (press release)  LON:UBM

Ringleader Digital Provides mobile Ad Server for go2 Media TMCnet - Oct 31, 2008 And Ringleader Digital claims that it has designed a robust mobile web ad server and ad network, delivering more ad formats to WAP-enabled handsets than any ... Millennial Media Sets the Bar for Enhanced Mobile Brand-Impact ... MarketWatch all 16 news articles »

Mac Advertising Network Launches Free Advertising for the Mac Faithful prMac (press release), TX - Oct 30, 2008 [prMac.com] Biddeford, Maine - Jon Brown Designs today announces the launch of MacAdvertising Network, a free banner and textual ad network for the Mac ...

UK Agencies Declare Specific Media the Leader in Customer Service MarketWatch - Oct 29, 2008 LONDON, Oct 29, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Specific Media, the leading independent onlineadvertising network, has been voted as having the best overall ... PubMatic Expands Advisory Board and Management Team MarketWatch

Mall Advertising Test Shows 38 Percent Sales Lift for Marketers ... MarketWatch - Oct 29, 2008 Adspace Networks, Inc. www.adspacenetworks.com owns and operates the Adspace Digital Mall Network, the largest in-mall digital video advertising network in ...

The Ad Network Shakeout Has Started New York Times, United States - Oct 28, 2008 By OM MALIK, GigaOm The advertising network business is going to go through a gut wrenching shakeout which is just about getting started. ...

Social Media Weekend

Canada.com

Social networking sites good for business: study CTV.ca, Canada - Oct 31, 2008 The same with Bebo, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any of your online social network profiles. Because if you believe what a British think-tank has to say about ... Social networking good for business VNUNet.com Businesses urged to reconsider social networking bans Techworld.com Employers should embrace social websites according to report Geek.com Reuters UK - Telegraph.co.uk all 98 news articles »

mediaFORGE Helps Retailers Engage Consumers on Social Networks and... MarketWatch - Oct 31, 2008 For many retailers, traffic is trending downward for their destination sites, while activity is significantly growing on social networks and vertical sites ...

This Essential Harnessing the Power and Potential of Social ... MarketWatch - Oct 31, 2008 However, in order to harness the opportunities social networks present, you must first gain a deeper knowledge of social networks, including an ...

AFP

Walled Garden No More, AOL Adds Social Networks to Homepage Wired News - Oct 30, 2008 By Chris Snyder October 30, 2008 | 8:27:10 AMCategories: AOL, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter AOL has added access to several social networks and an RSS reader ... The new AOL.com gets all social and stuff CNET News AOL Opens Up Site To Social Networks MediaPost Publications AOL.com rolls out homepage redesign AFP CaymanMama.com (press release) - Mashable all 35 news articles »

AOL Launches Access to Social Networks from New AOL.com MarketWatch - Oct 30, 2008 The new social networking feature allows consumers to post status updates to multiplesocial networks at once, and provides profile activity information, ...

CNET News

Security Bites 120: When social networks host malware CNET News, CA - Oct 31, 2008 ... on emerging security threats sponsored by the Georgia Tech Information Security Center about the increasing risks of malware on social networks, ...

CIO	Are We Working 9 to 5? Gen Y, Social Networks, and Accountability CIO, MA - 8 hours ago As a CISO, I am trying to make the case for social networking sites like Facebook and much more in governments world-wide. I do think they can add value. ...

Entrepreneurs Need Social Networking MSNBC - Oct 29, 2008 Dan Schawbel, a leading expert in social networking and a Gen-Y branding expert, explains what business owners need to know about the trend. ... Social Network Users Aren't Scared of Ads, Says Razorfish Report Wired News all 3 news articles »

Oosah launches widget production for popular social networks CNET News, CA - Oct 30, 2008 ... rich-media widgets with images, videos, and status updates from popular social networking platforms, Twitter, YouTube, Craigslist, MySpace and Flickr. ...

Online Golf Game Combines The Power Of Social Networks With Cash ... BunkerShot.com, TX - 12 hours ago ... allowing players to post game highlights to their profile page, or to any external web site, blog or social network site, such as MySpace and Facebook. ...

State-by-State Polls Compared to Economic Indicators

Ed: WSJ reports cross-sectional analysis correlating election polls with jobless rates, income growth, and housing prices. This again illustrates the temporal lag between current election preferences and Q2 pain from two of the economic stats - data inefficiencies that lead to wrong conclusions.

Even though income growth lags - cost of gasoline, food, and services will be declining soon. Real purchasing power improves.

View	Watch the Grocery Prices - Economic Recovery in Place?

Housing reflects real property. International bailouts and once consumer confidence recovers- these factors lead to improved value for real property like housing, gold, and capital assets. 

Chicken little pundits report past events. Savvy investors look to the future.

Unfortunately, it's too late for McCain.

State-by-State Polls Compared to Economic Indicators

from WSJ.com: Real Time Economics

Tip O’Neill once declared that “all politics is local.” The economy has become the central issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, but not all states are feeling the downturn equally. The following chart illustrates the economic differences among the states and how it might be affecting voters’ preferences.

The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows voters’ top concern in the coming election is the economy, and 49% of respondents said Sen. Barack Obama would do a better job fixing the economy, compared to 28% who said Sen. John McCain would do better.

The chart, which uses polling data from political Web site Real Clear Politics, tracks three key indicators of voter sentiment about the economy. One is the unemployment rate in the individual states for September, the most recent month for which data are available. Job losses on a national scale have been escalating this year, with the unemployment rate for the nation reaching 6.1%. However, on a state level the rate varies from a low of 3.2% in South Dakota to a high of 8.8% in Rhode Island.

Personal income can also affect voter psychology. The numbers in the chart represent the income growth from the second quarter of 2007 to the second quarter of 2008, the most recent period for which data are available. During that the consumer price index across the nation was running at about 5%. To keep pace with inflation, income has to rise at the same rate.

The decline in home prices also has been a top issue on voters’ minds. The data in the chart are from the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight house price index for the second quarter, the most recent period for which data are available. The Ofheo index (renamed the Federal Housing Finance Agency house price index) only tracks mortgages backed by Fannie Mae andFreddie Mac. Some economists prefer the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index, which shows a steeper decline in prices from 2007 to 2008, but that measure doesn’t break down its data by state. The most recent data from Case-Shiller can be found here.

Sen. Obama enjoys a lead in all but two of the states that have seen a decline in house prices according to Ofheo index, including four states that went to President Bush in the 2004 election. The two states in which Sen. McCain leads in polling? His home state of Arizona and Alaska, the home state of his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin. –Phil Izzo

Election and Economy

State	2008 Polls	2004 Result	Home-Price Change	Unemployment Rate	Change in personal income
Alabama	McCain +23.3	Bush +25.7	3.13	5.3	6.10
Alaska	McCain +15.3	Bush +25.6	-0.18	6.8	5.08
Arizona	McCain +04.4	Bush +10.5	-9.18	5.9	4.62
Arkansas	McCain +12.0	Bush +09.7	1.04	4.9	6.34
California	Obama +24.0	Kerry +09.9	-15.8	7.7	4.29
Colorado	Obama +06.6	Bush +04.7	1.82	5.2	5.89
Connecticut	Obama +19.3	Kerry +10.3	-1.44	6.1	3.76
Delaware	Obama +21.0	Kerry +07.6	-1.25	4.8	4.36
Florida	Obama +03.5	Bush +05.0	-12.41	6.6	4.28
Georgia	McCain +04.0	Bush +16.6	1.11	6.5	5.30
Hawaii	Obama +41	Kerry +08.8	-2.88	4.5	5.71
Idaho	McCain +39	Bush +38.1	1.18	5	3.98
Illinois	Obama +23.5	Kerry +10.4	-0.37	6.9	5.23
Indiana	McCain +01.7	Bush +20.7	1.77	6.2	4.72
Iowa	Obama +11.0	Bush +0.7	1.83	4.2	5.75
Kansas	McCain +21	Bush +26	1.26	4.8	5.01
Kentucky	McCain +13.7	Bush +19.9	3.05	7.1	5.01
Louisiana	McCain +16	Bush +14.5	2.68	5.2	3.79
Maine	Obama +16.2	Kerry +09.0	2.2	5.6	4.69
Maryland	Obama +23	Kerry +13	-4.02	4.6	4.31
Massachusetts	Obama +21.3	Kerry +25.1	-2.92	5.3	5.49
Michigan	Obama +14.7	Kerry +03.4	-4.66	8.7	3.45
Minnesota	Obama +13.0	Kerry +03.5	-2.22	5.9	4.77
Mississippi	McCain +10.4	Bush +19.6	3.02	7.8	5.39
Missouri	McCain +0.4	Bush +07.2	0.89	6.4	5.50
Montana	McCain +03.8	Bush +20.5	3.38	4.6	6.20
Nebraska	McCain +18.7	Bush +33.2	1.42	3.5	4.56
Nevada	Obama +07.0	Bush +02.6	-14.12	7.3	5.88
New Hampshire	Obama +11.8	Kerry +01.3	-2.11	4.1	3.71
New Jersey	Obama +15.3	Kerry +06.7	-2.92	5.8	4.80
New Mexico	Obama +07.3	Bush +0.7	1.69	4	7.46
New York	Obama +29.7	Kerry +18.3	-0.81	5.8	6.27
North Carolina	Obama +02.6	Bush +12.4	3.59	7	5.46
North Dakota	McCain +14	Bush +28	3.56	3.6	13.62
Ohio	Obama +05.8	Bush +02.1	-0.28	7.2	4.16
Oklahoma	McCain +29	Bush +32	4.93	3.8	7.23
Oregon	Obama +15.2	Kerry +04.2	-0.53	6.4	5.12
Pennsylvania	Obama +09.3	Kerry +02.5	1.36	5.7	4.89
Rhode Island	Obama +22.7	Kerry +20.8	-4.85	8.8	4.15
South Carolina	McCain +10.0	Bush +17.1	3.28	7.3	5.94
South Dakota	McCain +17	Bush +21.5	3.77	3.2	7.87
Tennessee	McCain +14.0	Bush +14.3	2.66	7.2	5.63
Texas	McCain +13.0	Bush +22.9	3.55	5.1	7.94
Utah	McCain +32	Bush +45.5	1.87	3.5	4.44
Vermont	Obama +24	Kerry +20.1	1.6	5.2	4.67
Virginia	Obama +06.5	Bush +08.2	-2.6	4.3	4.75
Washington	Obama +17.0	Kerry +08.2	0.56	5.8	5.71
West Virginia	McCain +08.0	Bush +12.9	3.44	4.5	5.92
Wisconsin	Obama +11.7	Kerry +0.4	1.04	5	4.09
Wyoming	McCain +19	Bush +40	4.36	3.3	7.98

Source: Real Clear Politics, Federal Housing Finance Agency, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis

Notes: Home price data based on change from second quarter 2007 to second quarter 2008; Unemployment rate as of September 2008; Personal income data based on change from second quarter 2007 to second quarter 2008

Six Apart: Blogging was Born During a Recession - Interview with CEO Chris Alden

Six Apart: Blogging was Born During a Recession - Interview with CEO Chris Alden

"Blogging grew out of recession and blogging will do well during a recession," says Chris Alden, CEO and Chairman of Six Apart, the software company best known for its Movable Type blogging application.

Movable Type celebrates its seventh year in October 2008, created by co-founder Mena Trott, an unemployed dotcomer. The application has come a long way from its humble roots as a way for laid-off developers to write about their day. Movable Type software is now used by many mainstream media publications and also by newstream media such as Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, Kottke.org (and Silicon Valley Watcher).

While Wordpress, the competing blogging platform, has taken over the "one man and his blog" market, Six Apart has moved firmly into the commercial world, providing a simple way for any organization to quickly set up a web site with many community features built-in...

Federal Court Kills Patents on Business Methods

Ed: The tEarn patent-pending is not a business process, but transformation of devices in a network.

By BRAD STONE

The decade of patents on business methods looks to be ending.

Ten years ago, in a case called State Street Bank vs. Signature Financial Group, a federal circuit court found that novel methods for doing business on computers were patentable. That opened the gates to a flood of “business method patents” of features like Amazon.com’s “1-Click” checkout and Priceline.com’s “name your own price” tools, which involve less technological ingenuity than ethereal inventiveness and legal muscle.

This year, the State Street ruling was challenged by a closely observed case that is generally known as re Bilski. On Thursday, the dozen judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled 9 to 3 to reverse the State Street ruling and end the era of business method patents.

In the ruling, the judges said that a proper test for determining patent eligibility is whether an invention is tied to a particular machine or whether it transforms a physical article. The decision will likely be appealed to the Supreme Court, but the larger question is whether the Supremes will hear Bilski or simply let business method patents die quietly. (There is some good analysis of the decision at Techdirt, Patently-O and Groklaw.)

The impact of the Bilksi decision will likely be felt most in technology circles, where business method patents have been used to build start-ups and conduct cross-licensing agreements, and by small “troll” firms to legally assault large tech companies.

The tech giants “will breathe a sigh of relief,” said Kevin G. Rivette, the former vice president for intellectual property strategy at IBM. The trolls will now have considerably weaker legal ammunition, he said.

However, start-ups might be disappointed to find that the patents in their portfolio are now worth considerably less than they thought. “A lot of the dot-coms relied on this kind of patenting and thought they could go out and get royalties on them when everything else failed,” Mr. Rivette said. “You are going to see lot of patents that were considered valuable dry up. That’s not a bad thing, but it will affect some balance sheets.”

CBS Earnings As Bad As Promised: Local Ads Kill TV, Online Ads Up 12% (CBS)

Nicholas Carlson | October 30, 2008 7:47 AM

CBS reported Q3 performance in line with it's October 10 earnings warning. (Join us for LIVE coverage beginning at 8:30 a.m. ET; refresh this page for the latest)

Interactive revenues remained a small fraction of the company's overall sales, increasing to $140.7 million from $35.9 million, due mainly to the CNET acquisition. Include CNET in last year's results and revenues grew 6% on a 12% gain in display advertising.

CBS television revenues were $2.1 billion, up 2% over the prior year. Poor ad revenues dragged on higher television license fees (thank you CSI: New York), home entertainment and affiliate revenues partially offset by lower advertising sales.

Radio revenues tanked, down 12% to $392.5 million from $445.7 million on divestitures and a weak ad market.

The company reiterated a cautious outlook amid a sharp downturn in local TV advertising which CBS expects to continue. CBS (CBS) said it expects full year operating income to decline mid-teens from the prior year.

CEO Les Moonves's canned statement: "We are focused on taking the actions necessary to place our Company on an even stronger financial footing, continuing to reduce costs across the board and exercising a very disciplined approach to investment in capital projects."...

Your Gmail Account is Now An OpenID, Huh?

Your Gmail Account is Now An OpenID

by Erick Schonfeld on October 29, 2008

You may not know it, but you probably have an OpenID. If you have a Yahoo account, you have an OpenID. If you have a Windows Live account, you will soon have an OpenID. And today, if you have a Google e-mail account, you can also start using your Gmail address as an OpenID.

By joining the OpenID movement, Google completes the trifecta and adds all of its Gmail users to the hundreds of millions of Yahoo and Windows Live accounts that can also be used as a single login for any Website that accepts OpenID. While Google is more than happy to become an issuer of OpenIDs, what is not so clear is whether it will accept other OpenIDs for people who want to sign up for Google services.

Google appears to be an OpenID “provider,” not a “relying party.” In other words, you cannot sign into Google with your Yahoo account. But this still helps the OpenID movement as a whole because it gives smaller sites more incentive to join as “relying parties.” Among the first sites to accept Gmail accounts for sign in are Zoho and Plaxo...

Ed: I don’t get OpenID. The RP still needs an account per user; and adds the burden to manage an alias list with multiple alias per user. The friction is higher for the user and developer. Why?

Most sites cache login information as cookies. As long as you visit once every 3 months. The login is there. Further, browsers track userid and password by site.

Is OpenID a solution in search of a problem?

Or is it a trojan horse to share information among websites. If it’s the latter, it invades personal privacy.

Can someone explain this to me?

How to Use the New Google Web Search RSS Feeds

How to Use the New Google Web Search RSS Feeds

Google's been the lone hold out among major search engines on RSS but the company quietly enabled feeds for web search results this week. The offering is pretty limited and frustrating, you have to go through Google Alerts to get an obscure RSS URL, but we offer a tutorial and some strategic advice in this post.

Web search RSS is useful for being alerted whenever search results for your keywords or link have changed; subscribing to least a few searches will let you know when Google users are seeing something new in the first few pages of search results for your company name, for example.

How to Get the Feeds

All the other major search engines make it really easy to grab a feed for any web search, but Google is probably concerned about spammers finding bizarre and unscrupulous uses for their feeds. We're all inconvenienced as a result.

To get a feed for a Google search you have to go to the web page for Google Alerts and set up an alert for your search. You can enter most queries here. including site: queries. (site:http://readwriteweb.com semantic for example.) You should select "web" instead of the default "comprehensive" if you're just interested in tracking web search results.

"Feed" isn't an option in the initial drop down menu of delivery options, you've got to select email first. After you've done that, look at your collection of alerts and click to edit the one you want by RSS. At this point "feed" is an option in the drop down menu. Select it and you'll be shown an RSS URL. Throw that puppy in your favorite feed reader and you're ready to rock and roll.

The feed will deliver any new links that show up in the top 20 search results for your query. That's pretty limited, but most people don't look beyond the first 20 results anyway. That means that this is good for high-level reputation tracking but not very good for discovery of new, more obscure pages of interest.

The RSS URLs that Google gives you are based on an arbitrary number and don't contain the text characters of your query. That means you can't build more feeds by simply editing the URLs, you have to go back in through Alerts and repeat the proccess for every feed of interest.

More Advanced Options

Here's how we're using the new Google search feeds. We've grabbed feed URLs for searches for A. our names, B. our company name, C. our company URL and (just for fun) one for each of those three items without the other two. For example: "Richard MacManus" -readwriteweb -http://readwriteweb.com.

That gave us a small pile of feeds, which we then ran through our favorite RSS splicing and deduplication service (we used Yahoo Pipes but if you're not comfortable with Pipes then Feed.informer.com is really easy to use). We spliced all these feeds together, filtered for duplicates and then threw the resulting feed into our highest priority feed reading system.

Now we can track our high level reputations constantly, without being paranoid about it. We might do this for concept searches as well so that if someone new starts ranking really high for topics we specialize in (semantic web, RSS) then we'll know about them and never look ignorant at parties.

If we were interested in getting an RSS feed for Google web search for discovery, more than just reputation tracking, we might do an "advanced search," increase the results displayed from 10 to 100 and then use Dapper.net to scrape a feed of results from that page.

All of this is more complicated than it ought to be, but once you set up even the most basic feed options then you don't have to think about it again. Though it isn't perfect, we do appreciate Google making these feeds available.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo Lead Global Initiave for Free Expression

Official Google Blog: New steps to protect free expression and privacy around the world

In a world where governments all too often censor what their citizens can see and do on the Internet, Google has from the start promoted global free expression and taken the lead in being transparent with our users. We've pressed governments around the world to stop limiting free speech and made it possible for dissidents, bloggers and others to have their voices heard.

As part of those ongoing efforts to promote free expression and protect our users' privacy, today we're announcing Google's participation as a founding company member of a new program called the Global Network Initiative.

Participants

The following organizations are participating in the Global Network Initiative. If you are interested in becoming a participant, please contact us.

• Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California
  
• Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
• Boston Common Asset Management
• Calvert Group
• Center for Democracy & Technology
• Committee to Protect Journalists
• Domini Social Investments LLC
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• F&C Asset Management
• Google Inc.
• Human Rights First
• Human Rights in China
• Human Rights Watch
• International Business Leaders Forum
• Internews
  
• KLD Research & Analytics, Inc.
  
• Microsoft Corp.
• Rebecca MacKinnon, Journalism and Media Studies Centre, University of Hong Kong
  
• Research Center for Information Law, University of St. Gallen
  
• Trillium Asset Management
• United Nations Special Representative to the Secretary-General on Business & Human Rights(observer status)
• University of California, Berkeley School of Information
• World Press Freedom Committee
• Yahoo! Inc.