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Advertising Exchange: Ad Exchanges Open Up Your Ad Inventory To Real-Time Bidding - Best Ad Exchanges Reviewed

When ad networks alone are not enough to sell all of your ad inventory, ad exchanges step in to help you maximize the money you make. Put simply, ad exchanges work on the same idea as stock markets. They allow buyers to bid on your inventory, and the demand for your inventory determines the price at which you can sell it. Photo credit: Travel Aficionado edited by Andre Deutmeyer Making a living as an independent web publisher means that you have to do one thing very well: monetizing your content. Google AdSense is where most publishers start because it is easy to set up. But how do you do ensure that you are getting top dollar for your ad inventory? Joining a vertical ad network to sell your inventory is a good idea. But the problem with ad networks is that even if they are good, you will have a hard time selling 100% of your ad inventory all the time, and there is no easy way to know if you are getting the most you can out of your available ad inventory. Ad networks play an important role in bringing you and similar web publishers together with online advertisers. But because ad networks are typically disconnected from the rest of the market (i.e. any given network only works with a small percentage of the available advertisers and publishers, rather than the whole market), they can limit profitability because they offer limited supply and demand. For publishers who link or daisy chain ad networks together, manually prioritizing ad inventory to networks can be a hassle. And there is no way to guarantee that your set up is making you the most money. This is where the ad exchange steps in. In the exchange, all market players - advertisers, publishers, and networks - are interconnected on a common platform. If your ad spot can't be sold at a premium price set by you, it is auctioned off in the exchange. You set the minimum bid price and then simple supply and demand economics take over. All advertisers have access to and compete for your ad spots in real-time. The advertiser with the highest bid purchases any given ad spot and the process begins anew as your ad inventory opens up. Currently, ad exchanges seem to be relegated to the remnant ad market (the leftover ad inventory spaces available on your site). But the real potential for online ad exchanges lies in not just maximizing the return on your remnant ad inventory, but in opening up your entire ad inventory to real-time bidding. If you have ever considered using an ad exchange... or even if you have never considered using an ad exchange and you have no idea where to start and what to look for, then there is no better place to start than here. In this article I have brought together some of the largest ad exchanges - AdBrite, ContextWeb's ADSDAQ, Yahoo's RightMedia Exchange, and Google's DoubleClick Advertising Exchange - with some of the newest entrants into the ad exchange space - TRAFFIQ and Turn - for a comparison of their unique traits and characteristics. If you are looking for ways to improve the monetization of your existing site and are caressing the idea of opening up your ad inventory placement opportunities to real-time bidding then you may find some useful information in this guide.. Here all the details:

Ad Exchanges Reviewed

The ad exchanges reviewed below were selected because they allow independent publishers to submit their ad inventory directly to the exchanges.

• AdBrite

  AdBrite ad exchange aggregates more than 45,000 publishers including big names like LinkedIn and the Drudge Report as well as thousands of long tail small niche publishers with over 7000 advertisers including big brands like Verizon and the US Navy. Additionally, AdBrite teams up with over 20 of the leading ad networks, thus helping to ensure a dynamic marketplace for ad trading. Every ad that is served is served on a eCPM (effective CPM) basis. So it doesn’t matter whether or not the ad being served is a CPM, CPC, or CPA ad, each is converted to eCPM to determine which ad will be the most profitable for you. Each time there is a page view, AdBrite calculates the demographics and geo-location of the user, the contextual meaning of the page and other factors, and runs an auction for all interested advertisers. The AdBrite ad exchange service can be integrated with other ad management platforms. And AdBrite serves both your standard graphical display ads and rich media ads; text ads like Google AdSense; as well as interactive interstitial ads (full page ads). Publishers have complete control over the ads to be displayed. You can review and if necessary remove any ad before or after it appears on your site. Furthermore to maximize revenue you can set your own reserve price. For example, if you believe that you could make a minimum of $2 CPM for a specific ad spot, you would set your reserve price at $2. If AdBrite can’t beat the reserve price, your backup network (Google AdSense or another of your choice) will fill the ad spot. Additionally you can control the look and feel of ads so that the ads best fit your site design. Unique Feature: With one snippet of AdBrite HTML code, each publisher has the choice of displaying banner ads, rich media ads, text ads, inline ads (double-underlined words that display a relevant ad when the mouse hovers over it) or full-page interstitial ads. Additionally, AdBrite InVideo enables ads in videos, and BritePic enables advertising on still images. All AdBrite features can be accessed by anyone, instantly, using a self-service interface at http://www.adbrite.com/.





• ADSDAQ

  Since its inception in early 2005, the ADSDAQ (think NASDAQ for ads) ad exchange was built by offering a CPM AskPrice to publishers. ADSDAQ offers a self-service desk for publishers, which allows smaller, long-tail publishers to take advantage of market dynamics to sell off their ad inventory. The ad exchange brings together more than 7,000 publishers, including 100 of the comScore 250 websites, including Fox News, Accuweather, and Belo Interactive Media and many smaller niche sites with interactive ad agencies, including Digitas and Modem Media (Publicis), Agency.com (Omnicom), and more than 350 advertisers run on the ADSDAQ exchange, including some of the biggest brands in automotive, pharmaceuticals, travel, consumer electronics, insurance and financial services. ADSDAQ only sells graphical display ads. ADSDAQ support standard IAB sizes and runs standard graphical and various rich media formats. If ADSDAQ is unable to clear inventory at the publisher AskPrice, ADSDAQ enables each one to specify backup networks such as BURST, Tribal Fusion, Google AdSense and many others to sell your remnant inventory. However, ADSDAQ touts itself as an ad exchange for premium ad inventory, not remnant. Since the publishers will set their CPM AskPrice, the ADSDAQ exchange is a first stop for inventory prior to a publisher's ad network remnant alternatives. Unique Feature: One of the things that make ADSDAQ unique is that it has focused on direct relationships with ad agencies, advertisers and publishers rather than working with existing ad networks like the other ad exchanges do. Contact one of the ADSDAQ representatives for more information at http://exchange.contextweb.com/sellingdesk/





• DoubleClick Advertising Exchange

  Bought by Google in 2007, the DoubleClick ad exchange brings together some of the largest publishers on the web with advertising from top firms representing a broad range of established Fortune 500 companies and newer, upstart brands. Additonally, DoubleClick works with ad networks to ensure a dynamic market driven trading environment for all. Although, the DoubleClick ad exchange tends to focus on large scale publishers, smaller niche publishers can also use the marketplace to sell their inventory. For publishers, DoubleClick Advertising Exchange attempts to generate maximum possible revenue for every single ad impression. The system enables sellers to dynamically allocate inventory to the highest-paying sales channel, rendering obsolete the arbitrary "premium" vs. "non-premium" (or "remnant") inventory distinctions. Publishers will always get the highest paying ad in the market. DoubleClick Advertising Exchange now supports the buying and selling of all standard types of online display advertising. However, the exchange was built to support a range of inventory, including graphical, video, and even in-game ads. The advertising exchange is tightly integrated with DoubleClick's existing DART ad management platform, enabling yield maximization across sales channels for sellers, as well as shared creatives, advertisers, Spotlight Tags and audience targeting for buyers. Dynamic allocation: For publishers, DoubleClick Advertising Exchange automatically determines how to generate the highest return for every impression by dynamically allocating to the highest paying sales channel. Publishers benefit from complete control over to whom impressions are sold, what ads are run and at what price. DoubleClick Advertising Exchange provides a single billing and payment point for all transactions, so you receive a single aggregate payment for all ads served, regardless of the number of buyers. DoubleClick ad exchange does not integrate with other ad management platforms easily, but if you use DoubleClick's ad management platforms and DART then the integration is seamless. In order to sign up for DoubleClick, you must contact a representative at http://doubleclick.com





• Right Media Exchange

  Right Media Exchange is considered to be the founding father of the ad exchanges. Launched in 2005 and bought by Yahoo in 2007, Right Media Exchange works with top-tier publishers like Tickle, Looksmart, Fox, Yahoo! (obviously), and thousands of smaller, niche publishers on their direct media exchange platform. On the advertising side of this equation, Right Media works with the top 10 ad agencies in the US, as well as a range of ad networks including Revenue Science and Adtegrity. Right Media facilitates transactions for all rich media, graphical, and text based IAB-approved ad units. Right Media provides an extensive set of classification and protection mechanisms for both buyers and sellers in the exchange. Ads and sites can be filtered using approximately 160 different attributes. Furthermore, before any ad is served it is scrutinized by an automated (creative tester) and human review process to stop potentially harmful creative from flowing through the exchange and ending up on your site. Like most of the ad exchanges featured here, Right Media makes its money by taking a cut of each transaction from ad networks and publishers. Unique Feature: Right Media offers APIs to outside developers. The APIs allow businesses to seamlessly plug into and develop technology for the exchange so that a tremendous amount of new services and value can be brought to the exchange community by third party developers. To sign up for the Right Media Exchange, go to https://direct.rightmedia.com/tour/index3.php





• TRAFFIQ

  TRAFFIQ is one of the newest entrants into the ad exchange space, but has already been selected for the Silicon Alley Insider 25 list honoring the world's most valuable digital startups. TRAFFIQ is a self-serve platform designed to help publishers of all sizes sell their inventory to advertisers. Since launching in August 2007, TRAFFIQ has brought together 1,500 brand name and quality niche publishers with more than 400 leading agencies and advertisers. TRAFFIQ partners include most of Fortune 1000 advertisers, mid-size advertisers, and premium and niche publishers, including: Federated Media, Healthcentral.com, Sky Sports, PerezHilton, and more. Using TRAFFIQ publishers can setup storefronts, segment, bundle, and list their inventory according to highly targeted premium and niche attributes. TRAFFIQ also offers full-path conversion tracking and reporting which allows publishers to completely capture of the full path of user engagement allowing publishers to gain a deeper understanding of the role of their inventory relative to other touch points, and price their inventory accordingly. Because TRAFFIQ allows publishers a lot of flexibility to describe their audience, advertisers can more easily match their preferences with your ad inventory. Advertisers are happy because they can easily launch highly targeted advertising campaigns ensuring that the ads are placed on a pre-approved list of sites and publishers. Publishers benefit because they get highly relevant ads. Like DoubleClick, TRAFFIQ handles all reconciliation and billing, so that publishers receive one check with all their ad revenue, rather than having to receive a separate check from each advertiser. And like the other ad exchanges reviewed here, there is no upfront cost to join TRAFFIQ, instead sellers pay a fixed percent commission on ads sold. Unique Feature: Using the publisher storefront, TRAFFIQ can serve as a rudimentary futures markets, letting publishers sell ad space several months in advance. To find out more about TRAFFIQ check out https://itx.traffiq.com/register/default.aspx





• Turn

  The Turn Smart Market is the other new entrant into the ad exchange space. Turn targets mid-size to larger publishers typically generating at least 100,000 ad impression per month. But any publisher can technically become a participant in the market, regardless of size, if the site is well built and serves a targetable niche. The Turn web-based publisher console gives you control over which advertisers, ad types, and ads are delivered to your website. Turn provides a single billing and payment point for all transactions, so you receive a single aggregate payment for all ads served within 30 days of the last day of the month in which ads were served. The Turn Smart Market is a “revenue ranked” auction, in which the ad with the highest predicted eCPM (effective CPM) wins the auction. As such the ad exchange can basically any type of ad, regardless of pricing structute (CPM, CPC, and CPA pricing). For every ad served, Turn automatically calculates the eCPM real-time, ranks every eligible ad, and the one with the highest eCPM wins the auction. To find out more information about Turn, visit http://www.turn.com/corp/publishers/publishers-overview.jsp

N.B.: One ad exchange that I would have liked to include in this guide is Microsoft's AdECN. Although Microsoft’s AdECN is one of the largest ad exchanges, AdECN Exchange offers membership only to advertising networks, advertiser and publisher brokers, and agencies. According to their website, in order to remain "neutral and not compete with its members, AdECN does not work directly with advertisers or publishers". Because AdECN does not allow publishers to join the ad exchange directly, AdECN was not reviewed here.

Would you like to suggest other ad exchange solutions? Would you like to share your own experiences with any of the ad exchanges reviewed? Please leave a comment below.

Originally written by Andre Deutmeyer for MasterNewMedia and first published on January 5th 2009 as Advertising Exchange: Ad Exchanges Open Up Your Ad Inventory To Real-Time Bidding - Best Ad Exchanges Reviewed

Online Collaboration Tools - New Technologies And Web Services - Sharewood Guide Jan 04 09

Coordinating assignments and collaborating effectively on your projects can be a huge pain without the right tool. You need to have an efficient way to communicate, share notes, share documents, share files, and more in order to work together effectively and maximize productivity. Photo credit: Irochka edited by Andre Deutmeyer Here for you today I have selected a set of interesting new tools that bring all those features together into one easy to use interface as well as a new innovative independent platform for teaching and learning. In today's issue of the Sharewood Guide, I have brought together eight new hot online collaboration tools. From new Skype alternatives to file sharing services, the online collaboration tools showcased here today were selected with one thing in mind: to make your job easier by facilitating communication and information exchange between you and your team. This is my list of selected online collaboration tools for this week:

• WizIQ - independent online learning and teaching platform integrates audio and video
• Collanos - provides a free project management platform for you and your team
• Broadchoice - enterprise level project management platform that offers a free 30 day trial
• eLecture - allows you to broadcast your own interactive lectures on the net
• VoxOx - like Skype but with text messaging to mobile phones and social network integration
• Vyke - VOIP provider with a focus on free mobile VOIP
• Stinto - allows you to create private and temporary chat rooms
• Limewire - the newest release allows you to set up private p2p networks

Here all the details:

1. WizIQ

   WiZiQ is a web-based platform for anyone who wants to teach or learn live, independently of schools, universities, exams or certification degrees. Teachers and students use WiZiQ for its state-of-the-art virtual classroom, to create and share online educational content and tests, and to connect with persons having similar subject interests. In the Wiziq virtual classroom you can interact online using PowerPoint presentations and documents as well as text chat and full audio and video sharing. Not only. All sessions on WiZiQ are automatically recorded so that you can revisit and even search for a certain topic anytime at your convenience. Last but not least WiZiQ lets you easily share your teaching contents online so that it can be easily embedded on sites and blogs. http://www.wiziq.com



2. Collanos Collanos is a new online collaboration tool targeting non-enterprise organizations that provides users with and single, consolidated workspace that allows you to integrate and share any of your project related content with your team members. From simple documents to images, music, and even video, any type of media can be shared through the Collanos workspace. To facilitate collaboration between team members, Collanos allows you to send instant messages to others and create alerts so that you know when updates have been made to different parts of the project. Collanos does not yet have built in voice communication, but they are planning to add voice chat functionality in the future. Collanos is built on a a peer-to-peer solution that allows you to work on your computer both online and offline. If you have no choice but to work offline, there is no need to worry. Once you get online, your workspaces synchronize automatically with your team members. Best of all Collanos Workplace is completely free to download and use. http://www.collanos.com/



3. Broadchoice Broadchoice Workspace is an online collaboration tool that provides fast, easy messaging and file sharing between members of your team to help you stay in sync in real time. To collaborate with a group of people, you can create a space and publish content into that space. Spaces serve as your online communication and collaboration area, and a different space can be created for each of the projects you are working on. Through Spaces you can track your different projects, sales opportunities, or even create your own community. Spaces have access controls that allow content owners to publish securely to a private group or open it up to other users within the organization. If your organization uses Salesforce, Broadchoice Workspace integrates seamlessly with your Salesforce contacts so that you can quickly and easily open new channels of communication and collaboration with them. Additionally, Broadchoice Workspace is mobile, although at the moment it only works with the iPhone. If you want to try Broadchoice Workspace out, it is free for the first 30-days, after that you have to sign up for one of their subscription plans, unless you qualify as a non-profit, in which case it is free for you even after the initial 30 day trial. http://www.broadchoice.com/



4. eLecture eLecture provides a virtual classroom software product which allows you to conducte live interactive lectures over the internet, with students/participants attending the lectures virtually. eLecture allows broadcasting of near real time audio and video from the lecturer's camera as well as screen capture of the lecturer's desktop. Students/participants can submit feedback, post questions and receive answers via eLecture's built in text chat. Lecturers can limit the number of participants and number of questions each participant can ask. eLecture also has built in multi-lingual support for English, Spanish, Italian, French, Russian, German, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese. If you are looking for a solution for corporate training or distance education, then eLecture is worth checking out. Unfortunately eLecture is a Windows application for the time being. Before you go download eLecture, realize first that it comes in two parts. If you want to broadcast your lecture, you need to download the Electure Server and install the program onto your server. Once installed, you can begin broadcasting your lecture. But in order for participants to view your lecture, they must download Electure Console. http://www.umediaserver.net/electure/



5. VoxOx The best definition of VoxOx that I have seen is "Skype on steroids" because that is exactly what VoxOx is. Like Skpe, VoxOx offers free VOIP services to its members when you are calling computer to computer. When calling from computer to land / mobile phone then you will have to dish out some cash but not much. Also similar to Skype, VoxOx allows you to instant message and share files with people that you are talking to. Where VoxOx differentiates itself from Skype is its integration of social networks like Facebook and MySpace into its communication platform so that you can instant message friends on those networks without having to enter those networks directly. VoxOx also provides you with the ability to send and receive text messages from VoxOx to and from a mobile phone. VoxOx is free so check it out. http://www.voxox.com/



6. Vyke Vyke is not technically an online collaboration service as much as it is an online communication service. Like Skype, Vyke is in the business of providing VOIP services to its members. But what separates Vyke from Skype is their focus. Unlike Skype which focuses primarily on PC to PC VOIP, Vyke does not serve the PC to PC market. Rather they are focused on providing mobile to mobile, mobile to PC, and PC to mobile VOIP and text messaging services. Vyke is free to download, and you only pay if you use Vyke to call to fixed line phones from your mobile or PC device. http://www.vyke.com/



7. Stinto Stinto is a new collaboration service that allows you to create your own temporary chat room instantly. After you have created the chat room, your friends and colleagues can join and you can begin plotting and scheming to your heart's content. Once you have finished making your plans for world domination, your chat room is deleted automatically after a set period of inactivity, thus erasing all trace of your evil plans. If world domination doesn't float your boat, you can also participate in more innocuos activities like conferences with business partners, planning for the evening with friends, and gamer meetings. http://www.stinto.net/



8. Limewire 5 Limewire is a P2P file sharing service that has been around for a long time. Normally an established service like Limewire would not be covered here, but Limewire is alpha testing their newest version... Limewire 5. And one of the features that is being included in this newest update is the ability to set up private torrent networks. Which means that only your friends and others that you invite will beable to access this network and download the torrents that are being offered there. This feature allows you to very quickly share files - large and small - with team members, friends, and family without having to worry about strangers getting their grubby hands on your data, home movies, etc. http://limewire.com/

Would you like to suggest other online collaboration solutions? Would you like to share your own experiences with any of the solutions reviewed? Please leave a comment below.

Originally written by Andre Deutmeyer for MasterNewMedia and first published on January 4th 2009 as Online Collaboration Tools - New Technologies And Web Services - Sharewood Guide Jan 04 09

Media Literacy: Making Sense Of New Technologies And Media by George Siemens - Jan 3 09

In this first 2009 issue of Media Literacy digest George Siemens focuses on cloud computing, connections in social networks, changes in education, and on a cool resource for education technology-related conferences. Photo credit: Cyprien Lomas And to make 2009 an opportunity for personal change and innovation, George Siemens has decided to experiment a new way of dealing with his everyday tech life by embracing the cloud computing lifestyle. What does that mean? Cloud computing is a way of referring to using software and data that do not reside locally on your computer, but which reside on public commercial services accessible from anywhere you have an Internet connection. So, no need to be confined to your own machine to access your data, you just can use any computer connected to the Internet et voilà, you're set. The jump to cloud computing is often much smaller than one would think as many have already adopted web-based software and tools which are now integral part of their workflow. Take Gmail, Flickr or YouTube; both the software and the data in these cases are all in the cloud. And if you are not quite ready yet for the dive into the cloud, you can still go home with some cool new tools to try out immediately. Dr. Siemens features in fact to a brand new software list by Jane Hart with the likely-to-be top tools you may want to consider for adoption in 2009. To dive in, is the only wise step if you want to make you greater sense of the disruptive changes that our society is facing. Here all the details:

eLearning Resources and News

learning, networks, knowledge, technology, trends by George Siemens

Year of the Cloud

Cloud computing has been a common, but somewhat subdued, topic on technology sites. The cloud metaphor is appealing, though what it exactly means is still somewhat unsettled. In a technological sense, cloud computing refers to a service-view of computing, where technical details are largely hidden from end users. Which means, it is driven by financial considerations, as companies can extend their infrastructure without heavy investments in personnel or technology. I’m more interested in the impact of cloud computing. How will my communication and information processing habits change when I don’t need to confine myself to a particular computer? What types of software do I need when I don’t want to be tied to a particular laptop? So, I’ve decided to embrace the cloud. On my University of Manitoba blog, I’ll be posting my experience to move to device neutral computing… where I have access to what I need as long as I have an internet connection. First post - Year of the Cloud: "My goal: to be device neutral by the end of 2009. Any data accessible in any device from anywhere."

What Will Change Everything?

Every year, The Edge asks prominent individuals a big question. This year, with the humble introduction of "New tools equal new perceptions. Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves" (sounds like McLuhan’s "We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us"), The Edge asks: What will change everything? Responses cover enormous territory, including the mind, human nature, technology, biology, and more. A bit of skepticism is found as well - nothing will change everything. Edtech folks will find a bit of hope in At Last: Technology will change education It’s not light reading, but well worth the time.

Top 10 Future Tools

Jane Hart has served the elearning field well this year, taking a Techcrunch role for learning technologies. In her recent post, she turns her attention from looking at the most popular tools today and focuses on what she feels will be the top tools of 2009. Most of the tools listed assume traditional desktop / laptop access to the internet. I think 2009 will be a year where mobile applications continue their enormous growth. In the last several months, I have shifted significantly from my laptop to my mobile (for maps, gmail, twitter, Facebook, news, tracking financial markets).

This Thing Called Depth

End of the year / start of the new year reflections always seem to centre on meaning and depth. We desire to eliminate meaningless and shallow pursuits in favor of more substantial ones. John Connell asks how to best move to greater depth:

"Do we need the bloggers’ equivalent of the Slow Movement? Authentic blogging? Critical blogging? Reflective blogging? Blogging09?"

Will Richardson picks up on a similar theme:

"I did some counting yesterday. Totalled up all of the blog posts and comments on those posts for the last three years, and found a pretty interesting relationship. Seems the less I write, the more people comment."

A healthy sign of maturity for any field is the recognition, partly reflected in Perry’s scheme of intellectual and ethical development, that a larger reality exists outside of the field where we personally spend most of our time. New literacies do not necessarily replace what was important previously. Previously important literacies are at least partly subsumed in new literacies. The maturation of blogging is partly found in main stream media adopting blogs. The other critical ingredient in maturing the field will be found in bloggers participating in previous publication forums (journals, books, etc.).

Twitter, Networks, and “Following” People

The popularity of Facebook, Twitter, and other social software has resulted in a popularization of network terminology. How networks work and how information flows is understood experientially by anyone who has used the software. As a result, the networking concepts long explored by sociologists and mathematicians are now being explored by Twitter users: How am I connected to others? Who do I need to connect to? What is the balance between having only a few vs. many connections? Valdis Krebs offers his position on finding the right mix between diversity and depth:

"Strategically I am building a small, yet efficient, group that reaches out into the many diverse information pools I am interested in. I know I am finding good people to follow on Twitter by the number of great exchanges that emerge on many topics. Think before you follow, use your time and ties wisely!"

NY Times and Visualizations

We have hit our scale limit in managing information. We need new processes to make sense of abundance. One approach is found in the use of social networks for filtering important ideas and concepts. A technical approach is found in data visualization. Bill Ives links to the NY Times Visualization Lab. The site is based on IBM’s Many Eyes, and allows visitors to create and share visualizations. Visualization will become more prominent, as will our need for literacy with reading and creating different representations of data.

Educational Technology Conferences

Clayton R. Wright compiles the most comprehensive list of educational technology conferences. With his permission, I have posted his list for ed tech conferences from Jan-Aug 2009 (.doc). Great resource!

Originally written by George Siemens for elearnspace and first published on January 2nd 2009 in his newsletter eLearning Resources and News.

About the author To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book "Knowing Knowledge".

Photo credits: Year of the Cloud - piksel What Will Change Everything? - maria gritsai Top 10 Future Tools - Kirsty Pargeter This Thing Called Depth - Erik Reis Twitter, Networks, and “Following” People - ndnl NY Times and Visualizations - The New York Times Educational Technology Conferences - Clayton R. Wright

New Media Predictions 2009: What Online Independent Publishers Should Expect From The Future - Part 2

Here is Part 2 of my New Media Trends and Predictions for 2009. In this report I look at major trends while I try to anticipate key changes and the type of innovation taking place around the world of new media communication and professional web publishing. While yesterday I have covered web and video publishing, content creation, newsmastering, online advertising, internet marketing, in Part 2 my focus is on social media tools, technologies and trends, X-events, online collaboration, P2P and Open Source, learning and education. I have also reserved a little section to share some of my personal and editorial plans for 2009 as some of you have been asking me about them. I hope you will enjoy what I am seeing. Here all the details:

2009 Media Predictions - Part 2

(Part 1) by Robin Good

Social Media and Social Media Marketing

In 2009 social media will keep thriving. Innovation will come in the form of further opening up of the existing major social destinations to gather and aggregate any and every aspect of your digital presence. The Open Stack, OpenSocial, OpenID, and a few other tech acronyms characterize within social media a strong trend toward adopting and using open standards. For example, OpenID is a profile identifying web address that can be used to login to any site that supports it. OpenSocial instead solves the need to utilize any application on any site on the Web, while keeping the same people relationships and profile data you already own elsewhere. For some indication of where this is heading you may want to look into the Open Social session moderated that Marc Canter that took place at the recent LeWeb08 in Paris. My take on this front is that what you will see happening is the de-centralization of most social destinations. The new open social applications and features you will see in 2009 will allow you to make them local to your own site and community, while remaining internetworked with all social profiles on the many social networks out there.

"Even if Facebook is currently the shiny place, if developers can write and application once and put it loads of places, Facebook will be marginalised."

(Source: LeWeb08 The Social Stack - Computer Weekly) Instead of having to go to Facebook or Linkedin to talk to your network of contacts and communities of interest, you will be able to bring all of this on your own site and blog.

Ning

To those pointing to Ning as the already existing example of such an approach, I reply that while certainly a useful community building tool, Ning still lacks the features and traits that would make my ideal community platform. Despite all of the reasonable excitement around it for being the first distributed community building platform, I find its content organization, navigation and content accessibility very poor, as much as its search function, discussion capabilities and blog functionality. Ning insists on being a hosted solution and unlike WordPress, it doesn't get the support of a large community of developers in getting new features and extensions to its users. I need something much better than that. And in 2009 you will see exactly this. Google itself, with the recent launch of its FriendConnect social application may be the one introducing some very innovative services and features in the next few months. The MyBlogLog-like interface you can already activate on your site, may likely be the gateway to a new way to participate and join in with people of your similar interests through grassroots, web site-bound but also highly portable, distributed and de-centralized communities.

Twitter

Twitter is one of the powerhouses of such profound new changes in the way we will use social media, and if you are serious about leveraging the opportunities that the social network can open up for you, if you haven't yet, you will need to start using it and discover its huge potential. Make no mistake though, like many have done. Social media does NOT mean that all conversations now need to be in the open and that you need to tell everyone what you are up to drink at your next stop in your nightly wonderings. That is one way to use it, but not the only one. Twitter and other similar emerging social communication and conversational tools provide the opportunity to create trusted networks that can enable the fastest and most effective way to share interesting news and stories, light years ahead of any other traditional news service. I myself have a problem with the shallow conversations. I steer away from them as much in real life as in the virtual one. They consume me lots of time and often I find them inconsequential, preposterous and characteristic of the lazy man's approach to getting noticed in public. On the other hand I am thankful to these tools when they help me be in touch and virtually side-by-side with my real friends and contacts, the ones I really care about. I like to know what some of them are up to, I enjoy reading a bit of their private life and I run to check the references and article suggestions they put out. I am not there for the conversation per se or for having a conversation with anyone who jumps at me with a questions. I am there mostly to learn and pick up rare gems, tech gossip, insider buzz and tips from all of my networks. I am there to help out those asking questions I am passionate about and to reach out for ideas and suggestions from people who think differently than I do. Problem is people have taken this social media game as a competition for who has the most followers and in the rush many have not really made sense of what they are using this tool for. My take is that, depending on who you follow, going to 200-300 people you follow is the present limit, especially if you want to be able to really follow what these individuals have to say. If you look at my Twitter channel you will see that I have about ten times more people than follow me than the people I have chosen to follow. This is only because, differently than what I do on Facebook for example, where I like to be open and friendly with anyone who wants to do so, I select very carefully who I chose to follow. I frankly don't buy into this idea that if you follow me I have to follow you back, and therefore I make no difference whether you have got 6500 followers or 24. What I look at is what kind of things and information you are sharing with me and how valuable for me these are. The more useful and interesting stuff you have to share the more likely it is that I will follow you. And, given the above, if you are small and unknown with very few followers, it is even more likely that I will follow you as I don't like to get tips and breaking news from the same circle of insiders, who just pass around the same stories over and over again. So 2009 will be definitely be a year of maturation for both Twitter as a service as well as for its users who will grow a lot in understanding its best uses and applications. In this direction, in 2009 you will see some truly amazing services built on top of Twitter which will help you manage more effectively the stream of twits coming from your different networks and relationships.

Social Media Marketing

The big discovery in 2009 for many companies will be that you cannot really engineer social media use inside an organization. You can facilitate it, support it, make it emerge, but you fundamentally need to let your own most passionate people find their own best ways to make use of this new conversational tools. Private social networks, vertical communities, decentralized and portal social media solutions are the keywords for 2009. You will see a lot of new names in this space. Better metrics. Everyone is talking about them, and there is indeed a wealth of valuable information to extract from the metadata available around your social activity. It is not so much how many followers, friends or contacts you have, but what these people do with the news and stories you share with them. Do they follow your tips and click on them? Do they pass those items on to their trusted friends? or... what kind of people are those following your friends? Who do they influence? What types of information topics characterizes your listeners? And your sources? How good are you at breaking news early for your network of followers? Finding the best questions and creating tools that enable you to see the big picture under this social media universe could prove extremely valuable in understanding influencers and opinion leaders beyond mere popularity numbers.

Social Shopping

2009 marks the first large scale entry of the social shopping metaphor into the mainstream online eCommerce. Beyond what Amazon and eBay have long shown to be the value of recommendations and customer feedback, we are now moving into a year in which you will start benefiting more directly from the advice and recommendations of your own very network. If until today you have relied on the opinions of some unknown guy posting in a forum or commenting under a blog post, in 2009, you will start to see that your own network of contacts can actually help you find a trusted solution to your plumbing needs as well as recommending you the next camcorder you may want to buy, with much greater effectiveness and reliability than any other traditional approach. Two are the key things happening here:

1. New services and eCommerce features will further facilitate your ability to rate, provide feedback, review and recommend any product or service you purchase online.
2. The integration of your social network and presence with many of the online eCommerce destinations will allow you to get advice and recommendations from the people you know and trust rather than from just another user.

"Although customer reviews are nothing new on popular eCommerce sites like eBay and Amazon, in most cases, consumers use the critiques from people they don't know. Now with connective technologies like Facebook Connect, Google FriendConnect, and OpenID, consumers will now be able to see reviews, experiences, and critiques from people they actually know and trust. As a result, expect to see eCommerce widgets and applications appear in popular social networks, as well as when visiting existing eCommerce sites the ability to login with your Facebook or Google identity. As an example, next time I'm shopping for a laptop, not only will I see reviews from editors and consumers, I will now know which one of my friends uses an Apple computer, and what they think of it." (Source: Jeremyah Oywang)

Social Reputation

Of all things social, social reputation is going to be the one having the most impact on your personal life and on your opportunities to access new project and work offers. In very simple words, what it is going to happen, is a strong shift from personal credentials based on certifications and tests to the emergence of personal reputation profiles built around the spontaneous comments, evaluations and reference comments of your previous team-mates, co-workers, customers and employers. I see individual persons going around unchecked and deeply lying about their experiences, references and career, to get where they would like to be. How can you still trust a CV or resume and not find out directly by those who met and worked with that person who that person really is. How can you trust that someone mischivious, lazy or outright dishonest will list such personal traits in his CV presentation and why would you trust unchecked credentials when you have the opportunity to spend a little time to find out the truth? Habit... and misunderstanding that the world is rapidly becoming a different place when it comes to evaluating people. Just like for technology products and services, you don't go to check the official marketing leaflet of a new camcorder to find out whether it is the one you are looking for. You research, compare models and you ask lots of questions to your friends and competent contacts. You search on Google for your camcorder model and see what others have been saying about it. You go to your friend at the corner electronics store and you ask him what his experience and advice is based on his customers feedback and store sales. That's how you chose and select people. Why shouldn't it be the same for such critical choices as selecting your partner or new executive marketing manager? This is why getting your hands dirty now with social media, living the idiosyncracies of this new universe, and exposing yourself to the many conversations that the Web provides is a good path to prepare yourself for the future. As your certificates and diplomas will lose more and more of their value what will count most is what people out there think of you and what they are willing to say about you when asked to. This is why is increasingly less important to have a degree or master in a discipline, and it is much more important WHO you have been working, interacting and exposing yourself to and WHAT kinds of things you have produced that others can see. If you say you have been here and there, have done this and that, but then the digital tracks say something different, you suddenly become a self-referential puppet that can survive and get work only within protected circles of friends and allies. Until today, if you lied, misrepresented or concealed something about your past experiences and credentials, it would be only you and someone else to be sharing that information. Now if you do this in public, by replying to public questions in videos and interviews by hiding or misrepresenting facts to your advantage, not only you run a much bigger risk of losing your credibility but this possible discovery, will not remain a private matter that you can easily forget about. To gain solid social reputation you need to transparent and accessible. The more you hide or cover up who you really are, to defend or protect your ideal projected persona (who you think you would like to be) the more this will show true, and while your friends and close mates may keep smiling at you, the opportunities to become a respected reference and a trusted source to those beyond it will likely dwindle. For companies, 2009 will mean the year in which they can start to have a meaningful social media presence. For the most part, companies who have embraced social media so far have done so in a very conservative and somewhat incorrect way. They have landed into social media land bringing in their traditional approaches and behaviours to communications, PR and marketing, which is exactly the opposite of what you want to do to be effective inside social media. The wrong strategy approach to use in such situations is the one of placing your best PR and marketing people on these tasks, while who should really ride this opportunity are your best and most passionate workers in the operating lines. These are the people that your customers and suppliers want to see and become friends to.

Online Identity and Your Distributed Social Profile

The emergence of a centralized Personal Social Identity Profile. 2009 should also rescue us from the bad situation we have fallen in when it comes to our profiles on social networks and the need to maintain and create separate ones for each new place you sign-up to, with the same frustrating issue affecting also our network of contacts which we have to slowly rebuild across each and every new social community we enter. What you are likely going to see happen this year is the advent of a new tools and features which will allow you to create a centralized and very comprehensive social profile of yourself and of your network contacts and which will then allow you to share and submit selected parts of it to each of the new web communities and social services you will later join. This will save you a ton of time and frustration, while reducing friction in adopting or testing out new services and tools.

X-Events

In 2009 you will see some of my original ideas BOUT X-Events become reality. In 2008 already a handful of companies has started to challenge the X-event puzzle by developing tools and projects around the fundamental idea of creating resources to facilitate the creation and realization of events that went beyond their physical occurrence. X-events are strongly tied to social media development and the ability of individuals to meet and exchange openly across multiple and diverse communities and social networks. X-events (extended events) can provide an ideal platform to extend the relationship building process that live events are built for as well as to fuel a much larger and lasting conversations. Bantora, is one such company, which working and extending the original X-events paradigm is trying to build the first true X-Event platform. The trend toward extended type of events will give way also to a new approach to virtual conferences: the distributed event. Who said that to have a powerful and memorable event we all need to go to one site or location and do everything there? Can't it be that the event organizers launch a theme, or a set of topics, and then aggregate and list distributed events taking place at this or that site or blog as components of the actual event? Say for example that an organization has organized an event that you are very interested in, but it is on the other side of the world and you have not been invited to speak. Organizers could set up an extended event section where they list and aggregate distributed events and presentations complementing the event, that either take place on a platform provided to all those uninvited presents who want to contribute their ideas, or which take place directly on the site and presentation locations chosen by the presenter. Such setup would allow for much greater participation and contributions from any people, while clearly requiring a small dedicated team to manage and organize the output generated by the extended event.

Open Source

It is the first time I am including "open source" as a relevant new media theme to be included in these new media trends and predictions. From WordPress to BlogBridge, open source tools and applications are increasingly part of my work life and I am increasingly strong supporter of their benefits and advantages over traditional commercial applications. A full professional web publisher toolkit could be made entirely of open source tools like these:

• CMS - WordPress, MovableType, Drupal, Joomla, Moodle
• Audio production - Audacity
• Multimedia playback - VLC, Miro
• Recording, conversion and streaming solution for audio and video - FFmpeg
• RSS Aggregation and NewsMastering - Blogbridge
• File Sharing - Limewire and Shareaza
• Video Sharing - Ourmedia - Internet Archive
• Screencasting - CamStudio
• Image editing - Gimp
• Multimedia presentations - Impress
• Instant Messaging - Audium, GAIM, Miranda
• Online Collaboration (real-time) - DimDim
• Operating System - VirtualBox (makes you run a Windows PC inside your Mac)

and the list could go on. If you believe that Free Software and Open Source ideas can help you create better foundations for the future, adopting, contributing to and promoting the use of such technologies can give some tangible force to your ideals. While this isn't a prediction at all, I expect to see a growing trend of open-source supporters become more vocal in evangelizing the true benefits of their tools, rather than isolating and separating themselves from the open conversation. Just like for the Linux world, I see a need for less self-referential preaching and for a more humble, open and friendly attitude toward popularizing all of the benefits of this great co-operative approach to life and work.

P2P Peer to Peer

2009 will be the year in which new P2P tools and applications will be released. P2P will keep growing and getting more traction and adoption. From file sharing, to content distribution P2P technologies offer a wealth of benefits and opportunities that have not yet been understood and used by those commercial entities who would most benefit from them. Peer to peer technologies are also a natural extension of social collaborative networks and of the need to de-centralize from big corporate hands the monopoly of publishing and sharing information. I also predict that new attempts at creating parallel P2P internets, or alternative support networks that would connect individuals even if and when the established Internet would not be in the position to respond as needed. There are already working examples of such parallel networks in existence and there are bright individuals studying and working on ways to make this possible.

Online Collaboration

Online collaboration technologies from web conferencing to persistent collaborative spaces have yet a long way to go to reach some kind of maturity and 2009 will offer once again an opportunity for new ones to jump in and for many of the established players to deeply innovate and improve on their existing good work. The classic, all-round web conferencing platforms have been given lots of way to new, smaller, faster and easier to use collaboration tools. The past trend has been from large and complex to small, modular and easy to use solutions. Prices for big, top brand web conferencing and collaboration services have been dropping all along, and, from what I see, will need to drop some more to be able to compete with this growing group of smaller and highly performing collaboration tools. If you have no idea of who I am talking about give a look to the over 200 collaboration tools that have been mapped by over 150 participants at my live session at LearningTrends 2008. I am not expecting to see a decrease in the number of tools listed in that collaboration map 12 months from now. You are indeed going to see more and better conferencing, collaboration and live presentation tools come to market, as there is a growing demand for such tools, and existing solutions are often still too clunky, unreliable or difficult to be used by non-technical people. Innovation and new collaboration tools you will see in 2009 will include:

• One-click screen-sharing with people in your social network
• One-click voice chatting with anyone in your social network
• Powerful dedicated online web seminar services
• Free multi-party videoconferencing
• New very innovative presentation tools
• Audio-casting technology allowing anyone to hold an online audio conference (Skypecasts has closed and existing solutions are somewhat clunky and not so reliable)
• Visual presentation and whiteboarding tools
• Integration of mind-mapping as standard tools inside typical whiteboards
• Recording and sharing / republishing features of your collaboration sessions
• Much greater usability and very cool and easy to use interfaces

The ideal collaboration architecture is modular and highly flexible. You subscribe to a service and activate the collaboration features you need on-demand. Such architecture is embedded and contextual to the production and office tools you use daily, much like Google will be doing in 2009 thanks to its integrated web-based approach. The winning business model is free basic services, with premium paid accounts getting advanced, business-oriented features. Period. Free trials are a thing of the past. Instead now collaboration providers will move to proactively reward customers who will invite and extend the customer base by providing them with free or extended account plans. This also is a winning strategy. Technology-wise Adobe Flash is going to be the fundamental technology behind many of these new tools. Whether you like it or not Flash is now the best portable multimedia publishing technology out there, supporting text, audio, video and interactive collaboration right from within its basic engine. Its upcoming and announced capabilities in managing different bandwidth streams requests intelligently as well as its promising auto text transcription abilities may prove to provide huge benefits for anyone using them.

The Ongoing Virtual Conference Project

In 2009 an ongoing virtual conference venue will open in hundreds of speakers and topics will be explored both live and in a recorded format. This will be kind of a YouTube of live powerful presentations, and while anyone can sign-up to present in the available slots, it is the public who decides who is featured and who should get the most promotion and visibility. This non-stop conferencing stage will likely offer multiple thematic channels, and the opportunity for anyone with good ideas and an ability for presenting them to do so in front of a potentially unlimited audience. Just like on YouTube. Adobe or Microsoft could be ideal sponsors of such an idea but it may be that a small company with a quicker ability to move could steal this opportunity from the one of these big names. Better yet an academic institution could have its way in organizing this idea, with the sponsorship of one of those big names providing the basic platform and with the public goal of creating a unique venue for cultivating knowledge, culture and ideas of all kinds. I am confident also that in 2009 online collaborative approaches and new tools will keep showing up also in other important areas of the media universe such as music production and performance, live video / television production and film-making, news reporting, news investigation, news production and newsroom teamwork.

Education and Learning

As I have written elsewhere, 2009 will see the raise of independent professional educator. This is the individual, who without the requirement of having an official certification, is willing to share his know-how or skills with others according to the terms and conditions sHe establishes. There have been many people doing this on the Web already, either moved by genuine educational motives, by marketing approaches or by the desire to simply share what they had just discovered for themselves. What changes now is a rapidly increasing awareness that those capable of doing this, whatever the real of their knowledge is, will become increasingly useful and in-demand by others. So, it is not so much what you know, but how much of what you know can you actually share and teach to others effectively? Knowing things per se, having lots of information in your head without having the ability to put it into useful practice is going to have less and less value in most professional endeavours. What will be increasingly valued instead will be your ability to search and find resources, tools and relevant information on any topic just-in-time, when you will need it. New tools and services to support such emerging new role are going to appear in 2009. Good initial examples of these are new web services like Wiziq and BuddySchool which provide anyone with a platform for sharing, presenting and teaching to others with their preferred method and approach.

Certifications and Tests

Certification and tests are going to lose value progressively. What will increasingly count is what you have done and what other people say of you in one way or another. What university you have attended and what score you have graduated with are becoming increasingly irrelevant, as the ability to be able to confront brand new problems and issues, being able to collaborate efficiently with peers, having the skill to communicate clearly and effectively your ideas have become much more important assets than the number of years you have spent studying. Who you know, who you have worked with, and who is willing to recommend and reference your skills are the strategic assets you should start cultivating more in 2009. Test and certifications measure your ability to answer pre-determined questions and to see whether you have properly memorized information about something. Tests are very bad at measuring how well you will perform in a real-life situation and this is why i think they are a fundamentally bad strategy to build our future. By training our kids not to learn how to manage complexity and issues but to guess well in advance of time what the questions at the exam are going to be we dumb down all of their creative possibilities and we certify well ahead of time their inability to be able to cope with the world of complexity and fast change we live in.

What I Will Do in 2009

For one, I have decided that in 2009 I will want to make greater sense of where things are going by video interviewing those that see a bit ahead of everyone else - lots of video interviews and analysis of how others are doing things is going to be a central theme of MasterNewMedia in 2009. Be your own boss and how others have been successful at achieving it is going to be the underlying theme driving this extended video series. As already announced in the first part of this report I am launching a new MasterNewMedia design right this month (a small preview was showcased yesterday as well) while still engineering the best way to bring Robin Good's international community of followers and fans to life. Unhappy with existing traditional forum solutions and with the first community building tools available now. I am pretty sure though that soon enough I will be provided with the technology I need to realize this ideal. As I see it this would be a mashup between what I can do via blog comments, a forum, a community platform like Ning, a localized Seesmic, a community oriented version of Twitter, all packaged as a portable, distributed Facebook-like service to create a rich, and well organized community space that can exist both on my site as well as any other place where I or others will want to replicate it. On the video front I am going again to bring a live video show to everyone, and focusing on web publishing as my key focus area. In the last year I haven't been able to do as much as I had desired on this front due to many technical connectivity issues at my studio location here in Rome. I need a fast and reliable connection no matter what it costs, and I need someone that is properly skilled to reconfigure and upgrade my small studio network so that there are no bottlenecks or data loss. My bet is that we kill the bull right away and that this will give me some too long awaiting opportunities for sharing and helping other online publishers out. In 2009 I will also experiment with the launch of some information products and learning services again connected to my professional web publishing focus and I will keep myself on the lookout for new candidates to my new media publisher internship program (for more info see here). I guess there would be a lot more to talk and say about what is coming next... but for the time being I leave it here. Your feedback, comments, tips and suggestions are always welcome.
Originally written by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on January 1st, 2009 as "New Media Trends And Predictions 2009: What Independent Web Publishers Should Expect - Part 2".

New Media Trends And Predictions 2009: What Independent Web Publishers Should Expect - Part 1

Here my new media predictions for 2009: what to expect when it comes to new media, professional web publishing and learning, collaboration and social media? Find out everything I see coming across these key areas in this two-part report opening today. Photo credit: Giancarlo Mazzaro - 7th Floor I have prepared this report, which gets published every year end (here my 2008 new media predictions Part1 and Part 2), by focusing on what I think you, my reader, are most interested in knowing: what a professional new media publisher needs to know. The contents and topic areas I have decided to include are particularly interesting to those who are involved in media, communication, marketing or education and it is directed primarily at non-technical individuals who are passionate about communicating effectively with new media and who want to know ahead of time what awaits them next. My look at future trends on these fronts is a personal one. I don't claim to be an expert in these fields, but I spend loads of time experimenting and working in them, and therefore I develop my own opinions about what is going to be happening next. These below are the new media areas I will analyze for my 2009 predictions which I have divided into two parts. Part 1, the one you are reading now, which is devoted to online publishing, marketing and advertising, video and net television, digital imaging, visual communication and site design, and Part 2, tomorrow, dedicated instead to social networks and social media, identity, future events strategy, learning, education, online collaboration.: Here all the details... and have a great 2009!

2009 Media Predictions - Part 1

If you are an online web publisher, a pro, or a would-be one, what I am covering here below are the areas that I believe you should pay most attention to in the upcoming 12 months. I expect again all of these areas to show lots of activity, announcements and the release of new tools. Since there are over twenty web publishing publishing-related areas I personally follow, I am structuring these 2009 trends and predictions reports in two parts. The first part today covers essentially web and video publishing, visual communication and site design, marketing and advertising trends, while Part 2, to be published tomorrow, January 1st, will cover social networks and social media, the future of events, learning, education, online collaboration. As in most of the areas I analyze here, while I am not an insider in any, my position of online publisher and external observer allows me at times to notice things that may not be so obvious and evident to those working in my same direction. These are the ones that I feel are going to be most interesting for online web publishers in 2009:

Online Advertising

1) Average online ad prices will be falling. Here's why:

"The Internet advertising market, like all markets, responds to changes in supply and demand. In the current recession, demand for advertising is likely to decrease. At the same time, supply of online inventory, page views, is continuing to increase. Social networks and other social media sites in particular are creating masses of new inventory. As a result, the price of online advertising will continue to fall in 2009."

2) Advertising markets are expanding

"The US market represents about half of all online advertising, which is partly what makes monetizing international traffic so difficult. Building up direct ad sales teams (and networks) internationally will partially help to bridge the gap, but this will not be enough. ....in Asia direct monetization models (i.e. selling things directly to users) have proven to be a better business model than advertising. U.S. companies will need to understand and embrace the direct monetization models that have worked well overseas, principally mobile monetization, premium subscriptions models and digital goods models based on selling greater functionality, scarcity or status." (Source: Consumer Internet Predictions 2009 - by Lightspeed Venture Partners)

Check out also this recent video in which Google's Vint Cerf explains how informational advertising meets the social network in 2009: When writing about online advertising future it is a little harder for me to separate what I would want to see from what it's going to take place. As many others, I personally feel that traditional advertising is losing more and more ground in terms of effectiveness and that the winning new front is the one of highly targeted, contextual advertising both via established media venues, but more and more via smaller and highly targeted content outlets (blogs) and via communities, forums and social media venues. If online advertising prices keep going down like they have in the last few months, a few good things are likely going to happen: 1) Those that will keep spending will try to target their marketing messages in the most effective way possible. 2) Banner-like CPM advertising will be increasingly ineffective and albeit inexpensive it will not provide tangible benefits to neither advertisers nor publishers.

Monetization via Google AdSense

I know you will think I am crazy, but I really think that in 2009, AdSense will become a superperforming money making machine for a good number of online web publishers. Thanks to the long-awaited marriage between AdSense and Analytics now web publishers can dip into the hard data they were looking for to understand what their readers click that makes them money. This is pretty revolutionary from my personal viewpoint and I would expect that for those who have enough skill or resources to study and analyze in depth the wealth of this data there will be an ocean of opportunities to improve their AdSense-based revenue stream. Under these circumstances, the use of heavy A/B testing to find best placement and ad style as well as the optimization of targeted ad placement opportunities for advertisers interested in specific pages or sections of your site are likely the two most valuable strategic actions you can plan on taking during the coming year.

Search-SEO

What to expect? The world of search is under heavy transformation and 2009 will positively be bringing new surprises, features and new search tools. What appears as irreversible is the fact that search engines, Google first, are going to increasingly value your choices and clicks as a reference value to serve relevant results for your queries. After links and PageRank, your actual attention and behaviour patterns are going to increasingly influence the results that Google and others are going to serve you. This is especially true for Google, who, by monitoring via Analytics, Adsense and AdWords can now see your site behaviour from all of the most critical viewpoints, and is therefore in the ideal position to decide whether and when your content is relevant as a reading and / or advertising destination. What SEO strategies to put in place for 2009? Video and conversational media marketing, via forums and social communities will be among the most effective ways to keep your content visible inside major search engine result pages. That is: if you want to populate search results for your specific niche your presence must be solid and well spread across diverse media outlets. Adding therefore the likes of Twitter, Friendfeed or of a dedicated Facebook group or Knol page are going to be fundamental requirements for all professional web publishers. The rest, what you should know already quite well, remains all valid and useful: titling, linking, quality content, avoiding bad practices and so on. The new interesting thing about link juice and PageRank, is that now you can be a lot more efficient about where and how you hand out PageRank to others even if, like me, you like to heavily promote other sites and news and offer plenty of reference links inside your articles. By utilizing tools like Apture, you can now provide valuable links and multimedia references, that keep your reader on your site and do not dilute your link juice across too many different sites. This by itself, especially if the Apture model catches on and other competitors move into this area, is a major shift for SEO and for delivery additional value while improving SEO benefits to any site.

Ad Management and Optimization

Ad optimization and ad management platforms will increase in number and featrures offered. This is a fast growing area for online independent publishers and the need to manage and coordinate in an easy and efficient way all of your advertising inventory, from AdSense to your personal direct advertisers is increasingly felt. 2009 may actually see the crowning of OpenX as one of the best solutions in this area for independent web publishers, with many other contenders, including YieldBuild, Pubmatic, Rubicon Project as well as Google own not so easy to use powerful Ad Manager fighting for a piece of this pie.

Internet Marketing

Internet marketing tactics get wide adoption. 2009, at least in my eyes, may be the year in which businesses of all kinds, not just how-to-make-money-on-the-internet guys, will start leveraging many online marketing tactics and strategies while extracting the best parts of these and making them less extreme and artificially hyped. As a matter of fact, sales letters, squeeze pages, scarcity triggers, identification and social proof are all great marketing components that deserve to be popularized and put to use by a much larger number of online businesses. The key difference we will see is how effective these marketing techniques can be even when used in a more sober, credible and professional looking fashion, and how much more they can outperform their traditional counterparts when mixed in with the right doses of common sense web 2.0 and social media marketing savvy.

New Advertising Agencies?

I don't know whether 2009 will be the year that this happens, but I know it is about time that it does. Independent web publishers need a new kind of small advertising agency that leverages groups of high quality, tight focus, strong community building blogs to sell highly targeted advertising opportunities to small and medium sized advertisers that match their ideal audiences. Outside of a very few and rare exceptions I am increasingly amazed at the size of the untapped market for direct advertisers that high quality small sites and independent blogs are leaving on the table for lack of resources and time. We have web-based self-service advertising outlets, we have auction-style ad clearinghouses, we have AdSense-AdWords and its many counterparts, but we do not have a group of small advertising agencies willing to sell marketing, branding and sponsorhsip to specific sectors. The Google competition is too strong and it is very hard to go and convince traditional advertisers of the benefits of new media marketing. Then it may very well be that this is the wrong way to look at things and that the future is all about small publishers rolling up their sleeves and setting up their own personal ad management system and small direct marketing team. Given the economic times, this may the very best way to go for independent publishers in the next 12 months, next to their already established revenue channels.

Professional Web Publishing

2009 will see the establishment of automatic web site builders that go, in terms of usability, features and cost of maintenance well beyond blogs and personal publishing tools we have seen so far. There have been a number that have already surfaced in 2008 but given the premises I think we are going to see a lot more interesting ones coming out this year. Most of the existing solutions are fully hosted services and based on the past approach to publishing, this would normally appear as something reserved only for the novice and beginners. But as we move more and more to a cloud-based access to all of our services and data it makes sense that we may be looking at a lot more hosted professional solutions, than do away with the classical equation, professional site requires dedicated server and publishing software running on it. 2009 may likely bring the confirmation signs that this is indeed the road we are headed to. At LeWeb08 I was truly impressed with the work of Czech automatic site builder webnode.com, one of the winners of the startup competition, and I can't wait to experiment using it as an affiliate partner in 2009 to give voice and a publishing platform to those people in my community network who are not geeks.

Content Creation

Content creation and syndication tools will keep increasing in variety and use and adding content of whatever kind to your blog page will become as easy as clicking and dragging stuff over your desired page destination. Automatic website builders will give a hard time to WordPress and other traditional blog publishing platforms. A serious quality service that will provide automatic WordPress site installation and customization will become available. This is the single most frequent request that would be pro web publishers have. Who can install and customize me my WordPress site. New tools that will pull in different types of content from multiple sources, allowing you to create related stuff boxes or complementary info sections, will become more sophisticated and will allow even small individual bloggers to add lots of quality content to their articles. External content gets to be visited in place. That's right, differently than what it used to be until now, you are not going to be sending as much people around the web by providing great links to content destinations not on your own pages, as new technologies provide increasingly the ability for that external content and resources to be displayed right within your content pages via pop-up windows and other effective on-the-page visual solutions. (for some great examples please see MasterNewMedia review of Apture) They key point to pay attention to on this front, is that the new content creation, aggregation and referencing tools that will have the most appeal will be the ones which will allow for the editor to play a strategic role in selecting, sorting, and cleverly juxtaposing and grouping content units contextually and according to the editorial focus of their site. Therefore I am calling 2009 the year that will see the birth of content creation and publishing tools that will be at the intersection of where Apture, Splashcast, Iterasi and Mixwit/Muxtape are and have been. It is not just the ability to aggregate, find and republish that interests online media publishers but specifically the ability to add editorial value to existing content out there, by acting as curators, compilation masters, news djs or content mash-uppers, something that has been too often dismissed in the past as having no value. The opposite is becoming true. To create extreme value you need not create new content. Greatest value sits in having the ability to find great, unknown, disconnected, content pearls and to bring together in editorially effective ways. Beyond the sheer quantity of content published, differences between popular independent sites and traditional media web outlets will sharply decrease, with each side increasingly borrowing ideas and solutions from the other part. As a matter of fact I dare to say that some of the most successful blogs and independent sites will be those that will most effectively mix-in big online media solutions into their approach, while traditional media web sites who will integrate typical blog and social media solutions may also see a greater appreciation by those already fluent in the digital universe.

News Aggregation and Newsmastering

I was extremely happy to attend the Gillmor Gang session at LeWeb08, as it was rich of insightful exchanges. Among these, Gabe Rivera, the wizard of Oz behind technology news aggregator Techmeme, stated something I have been vouching for much before Techmeme even existed: newsmastering, that is the work of aggregating and republishing selected news according to a specific theme / focus or topic must be the fruit of human editor. Yes, you can definitely take advantage of automated news aggregation and filtering technologies but the last vote on which stories should go up on your newsradar should be reserved only to the newsmaster. Yes, crowdsourcing and bottom up network votes and suggestion can further help uncover gems, but to me, nothing beats the result one skilled one human editor can produce, when not delegating to algorithms or followers their ability to choose what is really worth looking at. Here is Gabe Rivera from LeWeb08 stating exactly this when asked if the perfect algorithm for a news aggregation service could ever be found.
NewsMastering: Gabe Rivera On Why A Human Editor Is Better from RobinGood on Vimeo. Morale of the story: the art of newsmastering has yet to catch on with greater strength and 2009 will keep seeing growth of evangelism, tools and adoption of this content filtering and republication approach. By all means this will become integral part of news making for both mainstream media and small independent publishers everywhere. Extend now the same concept to any other digital media format beyond news: video, social bookmarking, clippings, audio, presentations, social conversations and so on. The more content gets to be produced in any of these formats the larger the need for someone to search, aggregate and select the most relevant items. Obviously this can be done in an infinite number of ways depending on what is the community focus you are doing this for and the editorial style you want to maintain. The role of the DD digital distiller, or CC content curator is a natural conseuqence of the above, and while these terms may not be the best ones to capture the idea they are for me now the simplest way to describe this new emergent media producer role. There have been a few services bringing forward this idea (Splashcast.net and Magnify.net for video, Mixwit / Muxtape - now dead - for music) but they have either not yet provided users with the right tools and approach or have been crunched by legal pressures from traditional media who are yet coming to grasps with such unstoppable free flow of content. Without a shadow of doubt these early services show tremendous potential both in creating strong spontaneous communities of passionate fans as well as in generating loads of truly valuable content. This is why content licensing schemes limiting such approaches should rapidly fall and let more innovative monetization opportunities to fluorish "around" the content and not by selling it directly.

• WordPress

  For everyone else with some geekiness inside her DNA, WordPress remains the reference platform especially for those who want to start their own blogs while feeling free to experiment and change with literally thousands of different design templates (themes) and plugins available. WordPress, which is an open-source product, has also on its side a powerful distributed community of fans and supporters who openly share great little tools and contribute to improve and refine the existing infrastructure. What may fall into place for the multitude of those who would want to use WordPress but are too busy or too little tech savvy to spend time installing and configuring, is the launch of a few services / tools that will provide seamless WordPress installation on your server, either by doing manually for you, or by offering pre-configured and easily upgradeable solutions. I, for one, would have a ton of customers to refer to it.



• Live Blogging

  Live Blogging will increasingly be a growing trend of independent news publishing and 2009 will see further synergies between real-time reporting tools, such as real-time blogging, chat-IRC-IM, live mobile video streaming, multi-cam reporting, audio streaming, twittering and other social media. Providing a dashboard of such tools to leverage the potential reporting fire-power of a small team of distributed reporters at an event is the next frontier to be challenged by players in this field.

Web Video - Online Video Publishing

More web publishers will start using video in 2009. Driving forces behind this are going to lower prices for high-quality camcorders which have become very simple to operate and much better video sharing services accomodating all kinds of original video formats, resolutions and even HD video at no cost to the video publisher. At the end of the equation, there is more video content available on the Internet and therefore a greater need for effective video search engines as well as sites or blogs that make sense of all of these content by letting the most interesting content emerge through various means and approaches. Expect 2009 to see the announcement