Facebook Releases P2P Advertising Platform

Facebook publicly released their new ad platform, based on the concept of fan-sumers – facebook users promote the brand (or their usage, purchases, satisfaction, etc , with the brand’s products) to each other.

This is the outline of the new platform: 1. Users endorse products or brands, 2. brand messaging (like an ad) gets included in the users’ feeds, and 3. friends can click to the brand’s facebook profile. It also includes analytics so the brand can see whats going on.

A good review:

http://tinyurl.com/344jed

(skip to the facebook section – the myspace section briefly discusses the new Myspace ad platform which is a more generic play around matching ads contextually with users profiles)

TechCrunch Live-blogged the announcement here (and there are many embedded links of interest as well):

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/06/liveblogging-facebook-advertising-announcement/

Searchles - Video Feed Widget

Testing out a widget from the community news/video aggregator site Searchles.com - with an embedded video player that handles a video playlist. I think the best feature here is the ability to edit the items in the playlist, turning the whole thing into something of a video feed widget. For example - copy this embed code snippet and paste it into your site or blog - boom, you're hosting the same video playlist.

<embed src="http://tv.searchles.com/misc/video_player/main.swf" flashvars="xmlfile=http://www.searchles.com/channels/get_xml/1290" quality="high" bgcolor="#869ca7" width="'450'" height="'366'" name="main" align="middle" play="true" loop="false" quality="high" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed>

Now the cool part - next time BarelyPolitical.com debuts a political music video (Romney Girls, any day now?) I update the playlist and you're the first blog on the block with the latest from the folks who brought you "Crush On Obama."

APEC Presents: Aussie TV Comedy Group "The Chaser"

Comedians are now jumping onto the bandwagon of hilarity that was formerly the province of top Western government officials (Bush referring to APEC as OPEC, calling the Australians Austrians, and almost walking off the stage, literally). This year an Aussie comedy group got through two checkpoints dressed as Osama Bin Laden, bearing ID cards clearly labelled with the word "JOKE" - catapulting them from "a bunch of comedians known only to their Australian viewers and the many politicians they've left red-faced (link)" to a comedy stunt team known around the world.

"A prank by a TV comedy crew has turned into an international incident and it could end up making a laughing stock of the entire [APEC] security machine," was part of the ABC News commentary, just one of the innumerable broadcasts relaying the stunt over the last several days on all manner of media. "$160 million was spent to keep dignitaries safe, and a convoy of actors got within yards of President Bush's hotel."

The story was the fourth-most read article on the BBC website, which carried the headline, "Sydney 'ring of steel' breached."

and this additional high security comedy: Too funny...

The Other Debate '08: Crush On Obama vs "Obama Girl vs Giuliani Girl"

The release is off to a good start - 9AM EST and already over 200 views according to YouTube.

I have to agree with "friendlier" though - a little less old school R&B and something more web/music 2.0 would have been cool. But the video is funny and really good natured. Folks are going to like it. I guess time will tell: the original Crush On Obama is standing at over 2.3 million views right now - let's see if Debate '08 can catch up!

Follow Up

Tuesday July 24 - One week later - here's what we got: The new one received plenty of attention, getting mentions all over the media and viral spheres. Heck, even Frank Rich over at the NY Times lyric-checked it in his regular thrash-the-administration Sunday column.

In one week, it was viewed about 758 thousand times, while the original Crush On Obama received an additional 400 thousand views - combined the videos were viewed almost 3.5 million times.

Obama Girl vs Giuliani Girl in DEBATE '08

After a long wait, the movie release date has arrived. No, not Harry Potter - it's Debate '08, another music video from Barelypolitical.com. Following up the Obama Girl video Crush On Obama, the team at Barelypolitical today released the music video pre-billed as Obama Girl vs Giuliani Girl. Stay tuned, there's more to come...

I Found My Run Mapper - Cool!

Thanks to Ross at Byte.org, I found the right web application to work out great routes for the rest of the running season. Guess they thought of everything, including community and viral spread of course. If you walk, run, bike, or all three (among other modes), you may really enjoy it.

Fastfood and Adsense Irony

Well, here it is, the study we've all contemplated authoring - juxtaposing fastfood ad-agency images vs. the actual product - with the added irony of contextual text ads automatically selected by Google at the top of the page. Proof that Adwords text ads do indeed have a branding effect? Link to the study here.

Cookie-based Data Likely Overstating Uniques by 150% : Comscore

Comscore released a new cookie study that is pretty strong evidence of the further erosion of the ability to use cookies to track anything unique. President/CEO Dr. Magid Abraham says that with 7% of computers accounting for 35% of all cookies "just one set of 'eyeballs' at the site may be counted as 10 or more unique visitors over the course of a month. The result is a highly inflated estimate of unique visitors for sites that rely on cookies to count their audience." This also goes for adserver counts of unique users that were served an ad. One more observation worth noting is that 3rd party cookies are deleted at no higher rate than 1st party cookies - contrary to a prevailing rule of thumb that holds that users who utilize security programs to keep their PCs clean are more likely to find 3rd party cookies invasive and choose to delete them, as opposed to 1st party cookies set directly by a friendly web site. Bottom line, if the methodology was correct, Comscore shows that many web site and ad server logs can exaggerate the audience by a factor as high as 2.5, or an overstatement of 150 percent.

So Much For BuzzMetrics

Rafat Ali accuses Nielsen's new BuzzMetrics research product of being just so much "hooey" - and provides compelling proof. Buzzmetrics is the “advanced text-mining algorithms"-based “filtered blog buzz” research" developed to measure buzz in the blogosphere, to monitor consumer-generated media, and to provide backup for social media consulting. I'll let you know if Nielsen responds - wonder if they bother to measure their own blog buzz? From Rafat's post on the subject: "We’re among the top 25 blogs discussing “Sanjaya”, according to Nielsen BuzzMetrics, the “global measurement standard in consumer-generated media”. Well. Funny they mention that, because we haven’t ever written about Sanjaya. American Idol, yes, Sanjaya, zilch. We’re #21 on the list, above Gizmodo (another site I can guarantee never wrote about Sanj). " He goes on: "So let’s stop with this PR glibness, and let’s start developing better ways to measure this." Link to the post on paidContent.org

Blog Ads Blog Readers Love

B.L. Ochman has a unique skill set. She creates ad campaigns that are so irresistible the target audience has no choice but to participate. This time its women living life in the fast lane, juggling work and family, on behalf of Author Karen Quinn's Wife In The Fast Lane book promotion. Cool thing is, her blog ads promote her online one-liner contest, but her blog ads have developed a following of their own.

And now for the punchline: "The one-liner entries describing women's life in the fast lane experiences fuel the ads on 20 blogs, where click thru rates as high as 1.7% are driving traffic to the contest." Yee Ha