So I am not the only one who found the Ricky Gervais podcast funny. Reuters is reporting:
Reuters.com
LONDON (Reuters) – Ricky Gervais, creator and star of the hit BBC
comedy "The Office," has topped the charts in the United States and
Britain with his podcast, a booming new format that lets users download
audio or video programming.
The Gotham Gal (aka my wife Joanne) has posted her top ten books of 2005 (plus one of course).
Her taste in books is great and so if you love to read, I suggest you take a peek.
As she was wandering around our library compiling the list last night I said to her, "wouldn’t it be better if Amazon could just show you your book purchase history for 2005 and you could rate and rank them directly from there and construct your list automatically?". She said, "what a good idea".
I spent some time on Amazon this morning looking for that feature. Surely they’ve thought of that. But I couldn’t find it. Strange.
On a similar vein, Tom Watson has posted the best books he read this year many of which were not written this year. It seems that Tom was thinking alot about history and war this year. I wonder why? I wish our President would read all of these books. Maybe that would give him pause, something he seems to lack.
In a continuing attempt to convince Joshua to remake the daily blog thing in a more usable form, I am continuing to post my own manually constructed daily blog thing post.
Josh’s band, The Four Fellas, have learned a new song, Twist and Shout.
Josh wanted to download it to iTunes so he can listen to it in his room and play along with it on his drum kit. So he went to the iTunes store and searched for it.
He couldn’t find The Beatles version. He couldn’t find the original from the Isely Brothers.
He said, "Dad, why I can’t find the song?". I said, "because it isn’t on iTunes". He said, "why Dad?".
I shook my head and said, "because they are stupid". He said, "The Beatles are stupid?". I said, "yes, and everyone else in the music business who doesn’t put their music on iTunes."
I said it the other day and I’ll say it again. If the music industry wants to make online music work, they had better put the music up online and make it available everywhere that legal music downloads are offered. No exclusives. Because otherwise they are just forcing me to teach my kid about Limewire and I’d really rather not do that.
In my blog post yesterday about 27,000 readers, I said:
I am now tracking my audience and looking at their behaviors on my blog
and elsewhere on the web. It’s fascinating data and I will share it
with all of you as soon as I figure out what it means myself.
Peter Caputa commented:
Is Tacoda using that data to better target ads based on your visitor’s behavior? You may want to share that with your visitors.
And my Uncle Tom sent me a private email (that is now going public because the question is so on point) saying:
in your blog today, you state :
i am now tracking my audience and…..
LOOKING AT THEIR BEHAVIORS on my blog…
AND ELSEWHERE ON THE WEB.what does that mean exactly? you track me after i leave your blog?
In this post, I intend to address Peter’s question, Tom’s question, and explain why I am doing this.
First, TACODA is an advertising network which means they sell advertising to marketers who wish to reach beyond a single web site. They do this by aggregating many web sites into a network and selling the network instead of the web site. This model has been around as long as the Internet has been around.
But TACODA is something more, its a behavioral advertising network which means that the publishers who join the network cooperate with each other in sharing behavioral information about their audience so that readers can see more relevant advertisements. It allows marketers to advertise to people instead of pages.
An example I like to use is the following. A reader goes to Technorati to look at blog posts on new cell phones. Technorati runs a TACODA "data tag" and marks that reader (anonymously) as a person interested in personal electronics and cell phones.
That person goes to CBS Sportsline to read some sports news and TACODA serves them an ad for a cool new Nokia phone. That reader otherwise would have gotten some untargeted useless ad that they don’t care about. Now they get highly relevant advertising that they may very well care about.
So that’s what TACODA does. Now on to Peter and Tom’s questions.
Peter’s Question: Yes, TACODA is using the data I capture on my audience to target advertising to all of you when you are on other websites. Hopefully that means you will get advertising that you will find to be more interesting and more relevant to your interests. Also, eventually I will make money for contributing this data to TACODA. Like Google Adsense, I will contribute all of this money to charity.
Tom’s Question: I am not tracking my audience after you all leave my blog. I am tracking my audience when you are on my blog and contributing that data to TACODA. Thousands of other publishers are doing the same thing. They are all running a TACODA "data tag" on their web pages and reporting anonymous behaviors to TACODA who aggregates them into a behavioral database. These behaviors are all tracked against a cookie but no personally identifiable information (PII) is ever collected in the TACODA database. So they may know that your computer has been to Technorati, but they don’t know who you are, where you live, your phone number etc. And this data is not shared with anyone. It stays in the TACODA database, private and secure. Here is TACODA’s privacy policy for those who want to read it.
So why am I doing this? First and foremost because I am interested in learning more about my audience. I want to know how many of them there are (27,000 in the month of November). I want to know what else they are interested in other than my blog. And I may want to serve ads to them that are more relevant in the future and TACODA gives me the ability to do that. And finally, I am an investor in TACODA and I like to understand our companies’ products and services as deeply as possible and there is no better way than to become a supplier and a customer.
Here are some stats on what my readers are interested in when they are not on my blog. I get much more detail than this, but I wanted to put something up here that would be easy to digest (click on the image to see it in a size that you can actually read).
Advertisers get similar stats when their ads run on the TACODA network. The reports tell them exactly what kind of audience saw their ad campaign.
Finally, what if you want to "opt out" of the TACODA ad network and only see ads that are irrelevant to you? First, you can delete your cookies on a regular basis. Many people do this. I don’t recommend it, but some do. The better approach is to opt out of the TACODA network. You can opt out of TACODA and several other targeted ad networks here.
So that is why there is a TACODA data tag on my blog. If you are interested in putting a TACODA data tag on your website or blog or contributing inventory to the TACODA network (currently you need to have an ad server to do that), send me an email and I’ll forward it on to TACODA.
I like cliches that are visual. It’s why I am a fan of open the kimono, which according to an asian woman entrepreneur who was in my office last week is offensive. I apologize for offending anyone who took offense and will be more careful with my use of that one in the future. That said, I still like it.
Visual cliches are great because they pack some extra punch.
One cliche that I use a bit is The Strawman Proposal. I don’t even know what the origin of the "strawman" term is but to me it means something that you can take apart without consequence. The image for me is a strawman that you can kick around, pull apart, etc without harming anyone. I know its kind of brutal, but that’s the visual that comes to mind.
A Strawman Proposal is very useful in all sorts of business exercises – budgeting, dealmaking, strategic planning, etc. It is hard to have a really meaty conversation about something without having a reference point. So A Strawman Proposal serves as that reference point. It is not meant to be a "draft" of the final proposal. It’s meant to be something that "can be kicked around, pulled apart, etc". So its more important that A Strawman Proposal address all the key issues in some way than anything else.
The cool thing (and the reason the word gets used so much) is that you can tell everyone upfront that the proposal is just A Strawman. That tells everyone not to waste a lot of time and energy on the specifics of the proposal. So poeple don’t start negotiating when The Strawman arrives (in theory). They should just start thinking.
It’s a great business trick and a great cliche. The next time you are doing some important business in a large group, start with A Strawman Proposal. And let me know how it goes.
There’s always a first. Today I got a business plan delivered by a singing delivery man.
Charlie caught it on video and blogged it.
It’s a busy day in the web services world.
Two new OPEN web services were introduced today and I believe that both are game changing.
I just blogged about Alexa and that is certainly a big deal.
But the announcement that gets my juices really flowing is Feedburner’s announcement of FeedFlare.
FeedFlare, at its most fundamental level, is a "data tag" in your RSS feed.
To understand what I mean, let me take you back to my four rules for the future of media:
1 – Microchunk it – Reduce the content to its simplest form.
2 – Free it – Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it.
3 – Syndicate it – Let anyone take it and run with it.
4 – Monetize it – Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk.
Item 4 is key here. Many content creators will not free and syndicate their content unless they can track it and monetize it.
RSS hasn’t been very good at either of these. But Feedburner and others are working at changing that.
There have been numerous attempts to monetize feeds by putting ads in them. But guess what? Not many people click on them.
And it’s tough to get advertisers to put CPM (brand) ads in feeds because there is no way to track and measure them. And no way to target them. So brand advertisers won’t even consider RSS seriously until the tracking piece is solved.
Enter FeedFlare.
FeedFlare is a footer at the bottom of every post in the RSS feed.
It looks like this in a feed (go to the bottom of the post).
Instead of just putting some useless tag in the feed, Feedburner did something much better. They put some really useful services, like email this post, post to delicious, number of links to this post, popular tags for this post, etc.
And this is all open, so anyone can create new services for FeedFlare. Hopefully there will be tons of them to choose from.
The key thing is that all this meta data that is getting created via FeedFlare is available via an API. That will power the tracking and targeting stuff that needs to get built so that advertising in feeds can be as powerful (or maybe way more powerful) than it is on the web today.
I have been telling all my friends in the TV/film business that they need to be syndicating their content, getting it out there, putting ads in it, and expanding their reach beyond the closed worlds of cable television and DVD.
They don’t see the tools in place yet to support that model.
Well FeedFlare is a good start. It’s not the total solution, but since its OPEN, it’s something that can be built on top of. And it’s pointing us all in the right direction.
And that’s exciting. So excting that FeedFlare is in my Feedburner feed already. I hope you like it and use it.
I’ve been meaning to blog about Alexa for months.
As I have been tracking my clickstream with the AttentionTrust Firefox extension, I have come to realize that I use Alexa about as much as I use Google.
And as I thought about it, I realized that Alexa has become a critical tool for me as I try to understand what’s really happening on the Internet.
Whenever someone tells me about a web service, one of the first things I do is run an Alexa search on it, find out its traffic, what kind of people use it, etc.
Now I realize that Alexa’s utility to me is way larger than its utility to my daughter who generally doesn’t think of these services as an investment. But I have continued to be amazed by the value that a free service like Alexa was providing to me and many others.
Well I never got around to blogging about Alexa, and now the secret is out.
Because Amazon (which owns Alexa) did something today with Alexa that is potentially game changing.
Alexa is making its index (and the infrastructure behind its index) available to anyone who wants to build a web service on top of it. The most obvious application is search and that is where all the heat is in the blog world today.
Arrington comes up with the quote of the day (as usual):
hopefully it will nudge some of the search players into realizing that
they can be much more powerful by turning themselves into platforms
rather than destinations
I go back to Mark Pincus‘ rant on Google and GoogleBase where he said:
my take is google has chosen between two paths. one which i thought
they were on was to be a platform to enable great things on the web.
google could have powered everything with its search engine, ad
infrastructure, massive crawling and computing power. it could have
been a democratizing force, enabling small services to flourish in
being found and in serving them a platform on which to innovate.
The leaders always try to grab and consolidate market power. The laggards are then forced to open things up. Amazon is doing that today with it’s hidden jewel Alexa and I for one am thrilled to see it.
I read about this new podcast on Nivi’s blog.
I have never heard of Ricky Gervais before. I suppose that makes me a luddite.
But this guy and his buddies are hysterical. I put on my iPod, headed to work, and laughed all the way up Fifth Avenue.
I have always loved British humor. And this is really good british humor.
Here is a link to the podcast web page.
And if you want to put it into iTunes, enter this into the subscribe to podcast field.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/podcasts/rickygervais/mp4.xml
I like this better than Howard and I don’t need to subscribe to Sirius either.
