Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Twitter vs. Digg

Twitter's come out of nowhere with crazy momentum. I ran a Blogpulse snapshot, and it's now catching up with Digg in the buzz world. Odd note: Digg seems to spike on Thursdays. Anyone know why?

Yahoo: Your New Hard Drive

Here's one of those landmarks in computing: Yahoo is removing storage limits for its email users. I might stick with my Yahoo account after all, especially as a backup online hard drive. Jeremiah's felt these winds shifting for awhile.

Here's what I'm wondering: how long before we stop getting bigger hard drives because we don't need them? We're clearly not there yet, as we've only just begun to download movies and video content, so we'll need those terabytes. But at some point, the cheap capacity should far outstrip our needs. Just look at iPods - people are just as quick to gloat about their 80GB video iPods as they are their 1GB Shuffle.

The End of Blogging as We Know It?

Blogging's always personal, even when it's professional. Sometimes it crosses the line though.

Blogger Kathy Sierra received death threats. Robert Scoble's wife was also a target of hate speech and he's taking the week off from blogging. It's one of those moments that gives everyone a minute to pause.

There's a lot of hype about blogging, especially when you talk to the gang out in Silicon Valley. Yet it's true how quickly you feel part of a community, build deeper connections, and get to know people. Even people like me who miss a few days here and there can get swept into it.

None of this is particularly new. People received death threats by snail mail and telephone, and on Bulletin Board Services in the early days of online communities. Yet we keep putting more of ourselves out there, so it hits harder.

I of course respect Robert's blog going dark for a few days, and Kathy's post was so painful I could hardly read it, let alone imagine living through it. Yet for the rest of us, we have to keep educating, connecting, sharing. You can't entirely retreat - no good will come of that. Instead of others taking a day or more off from blogging in solidarity with Kathy, a better lesson is to use the time to take up blogging, or do it more fervently, and aim to serve as some force for good, however small or large a force that is.

Kevin Federline... and the Future of Search?

Every single word is worth thirty grand
Or maybe more
- Kevin Federline, "Playing with Fire"

I think I know what Kevin means in those brilliant lyrics. He's promoting his search engine while lamenting escalating keyword prices. Wow.

What, you don't think you can learn search marketing wisdom from K-Fed? This week's column, in the extended entry, proves otherwise. The lyrics continue:

Don’t think they understand
How much cake the pancake man had

See, here, the cake is click fraud, and the pancake is the cost-per-action model Google's trying. Nevermind. Don't think too hard - the column's easier to parse than K-Fed's poetry. Enjoy.

 

The Hunt for Search Engine Innovation, Part 2

I'm a bit delayed in posting this, but here's my Search Insider column from last week, continued in the extended entry.

The Hunt for Search Engine Innovation, Part 2

GOOGLE SHOULDN'T REST on its laurels just yet. Last week, we blazed through Charles Knight's Top 100 Alternative Search Engines and found many areas where innovation was lacking. This week, we'll visit some of the high-impact innovation categories and engines.

Sorting the engines into categories isn't a perfect science, as many engines are hybrids. URL.com is a meta-search engine combined with user rankings, Ujiko combines a graphic display with user ratings, Exalead combines category filtering with image search, and Polymeta is a metasearch engine with filtering based on keywords and categories that also includes vertical and multimedia search. Don't try too hard to sort it all out; by and large the most impressive engines have a clearer value proposition. Let's see what they're made of.

Rocketboom in the Red

Frank Barnako at MarketWatch wrote one of those posts that kept grabbing me. Then I remembered I have a blog, so I can see if it strikes anyone else. Here's the excerpt:

Rocketboom is searching for a new way to put fuel in its tank.  Advertising is not doing it.  "It's frustrating that we haven’t worked it out by now," said the daily video blog's founder, Andrew Baron.

"Even though we have a relatively large audience, advertisers are just not happy to do 'small deals," he explained in an interview. Baron says there are 200,000 downloads of Rocketboom shows, seven days a week. "They say they want to blast their commercials to millions of people."  So, Rocketboom is again toying with the idea of charging for content.

Rocketboom is practically synonymous with video podcasts. Have they now jumped the shark?

Perhaps it just speaks to the challenges of going it alone. Yes, he reaches more people than some cable TV programs. But there's only one way to reach the Rocketboom audience, as opposed to, say, reaching a smattering of viewers across a TV network, or a highly targeted and loyal audience of blog readers via one of the major blog ad networks.

Even so, perhaps Mr. Baron's done the math and figures that's still not enough. To me, it underscores how if you have any overhead whatsoever, regardless of the oft-reported dearth of video ad inventory, it's a tough business to get rich in.

 

Real Estate Confidential on Fine Living

Here's a new real estate show to check out on Fine Living, Real Estate Confidential.

Twittermap: Mashup of the Day

Okay, I'm starting to get into this Twitter thing. Matt Dickman helped, having met him at CK's salon at Flute Friday night (he also showed me how to incorporate Google Analytics without veering off my safety blanket of the TypePad template, and I now know far more about my blog visitors than I need to).

Catching up on the news, Read/Write Web directed me to the TwitterMaps mashup. All you do is add a location tag to your Twitter message (e.g., L:90210) and you're included on the map of who's where. You can even differentiate between work and home locations, though all the other functionality's more than I need. It's a great local service to find other Twitterers (or is it Twitterites, or just Twits?) in your area.

From the Red-Eye to Reuters

I can't resist posting this one. Reuters interviewed me this week on widgets and the story just went on the site last night. You can watch it here.

A few notes:
1) They spelled my company's name wrong in my byline. So much for the branding. At least the reporter pronounced it right. 360i - four characters. Two are out of order in the clip.

2) The text next to the video spells the reporter's name wrong. She's Bobbi, not Bibbi. And she runs stories, oh, every day. Screwing up my company's understandable. But the reporter's name? Granted, by 5pm on a Friday, I'm just trying to get out of the office too.

3) My big TV appearance came a few hours after me getting off the red-eye after returning from OMMA Hollywood. If you're wondering why it looks like I hadn't gotten any real sleep in the previous 40 hours, well, I hadn't.

4) The background for Yahoo looks like the set of Blue's Clues. The Daily Show does better.

Enough nitpicking. Enjoy the clip.

Shiver Me Twitters

The new communication craze that has the blog world abuzz is Twitter, and I'm on there as dberkowitz. I'm frustrated that adding friends you know on there isn't as easy as it could be; it's easiest to go to my profile and add me directly.

If you're not already using it, it's a hybrid of blogging and instant messaging. You post something for all your friends to read, but more as a mass IM than a formal blog post. My main problem right now I'm facing at work is information overload, and this in many ways only adds to the problem, even if it brings me more quality info. I had a discussion about this with some coworkers and mentioned I can't turn off IM because I get great leads that way (along with the standard benefit of keeping in touch with people), but I do often get overwhelmed by it. There's no perfect solution; fortunately the calendar and number of hours per week are finite - though the hours of sleep are variable.