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Blogger Goes On The Blink
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Earlier this week, Twitter suffered an outage, and we weren’t too kind about the whole thing.  Fair’s fair, though, and it’s now our duty to report that when Blogger went down yesterday, Twitter may have played an instrumental part in getting it back up.

NASA To Recruit Via Online Gaming
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NASA is shopping around for companies to help them develop a massively multiplayer online game for use as a recruiting tool. Now it’s certain Google and NASA are spending too much time together.

adExcellence Accreditation from Microsoft Announced in UK
The moderator at WebmasterWorld, Receptional has said in a WebmasterWorld thread that he got an invitation from Microsoft, asking him for participate in the adExcellence accreditation program in the United Kingdom.

PR Trying to Head in the Area of Social Media?

In doing a little PR for Ignite, I typically use free, basic services like PR.com and PRLeap. For the most part, these are pretty decent for getting a traditional release “out there” easily and affordably. It has also led to Google News inclusion, which has led to boosted SEO of our site.

CPM Rate Contraction on the Way?
Carl Fremont of Digitas thinks their might be online CPM rate contraction in 2008.

Online Advertising To Reach $50 Billion
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The U.S. online advertising market will reach $50.3 billion in revenue by 2011, more than doubling 2007′s revenue according to a new report by the Yankee Group, "The Cowboys Dance On and On: 2007 Online Advertising Forecast."

CNN Picks Up iReport.com
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Perhaps we’re just happy it’s Friday, but this sounds like good news all around: CNN has bought the domain iReport.com for $750,000.

InSTEDD Uses Social Media to Warn of Emergencies

Admit it: when you saw “InSTEDD,” you thought, “Great, another ‘kr8tiv’ spelling for a Web 2.0 flop-to-be.” How’s this for a mission statement:

We want everyone to benefit from the tools and technologies we know can save lives.

Like what? Ultrasounds? EKGs?

No, Facebook. Duh.

Metering Returns To The Internet
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As one major broadband provider prepares to test a pay by usage Internet scheme, we are reminded of the old days of online access.

Ad CPM Will Suffer In 2008

Carl Fremont of Digitas thinks economic woes will have an impact on an online ad market where many key verticals have yet to see significant spending.

MyBlogLog Looks for Higher Level of “Truthiness”
Today, MyBlogLog added a new feature to the online blog communities… to put it simply, a validation process to verify that you are the owner of the website and have authority over the community.

MyBlogLog

Zuckerberg to Keynote SXSW Interactive Festival

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg will keynote the fifteenth annual SXSW Interactive Festival, also known as South by Southwest.

Mark Zuckerberg Facebook   Facebook

Absolute and Relative URLs

I have this ongoing discussion with the development team of one of my clients. They insist on using relative URLs on their numerous development servers. Naturally, I tell them that those can lead to trouble when the pages go live and, of course, they do.

What is the difference between an absolute URL and a relative URL? For newbies out there, a relative URL points to links on a server in a local manner like this – a href="contact.html" – where you just point to the page link like you are right there working on the server.

Embrace All Methods of Learning About Customers

Glenn Gow brought to my attention a post he wrote a few weeks back that should get us all thinking.

In it, he summarizes a recent MITSloan Management Review piece that upbraids most marketers for doing the easiest kind of market research: Listening to our existing customers.

How to Make Money off of Accidental Rankings

Since Google largely tends to favor ranking informational websites over commercial websites, some authoritative blogs tend to rank for valuable queries based on posts they make in passing.

Even if you had no intent to monetize a post, it just became easier to monetize accidental rankings. If you use analytics to track your stats and notice that you start ranking for some good keywords you can use Triggit to embed links to merchant products directly in the text of your blog post.

Watch The Vote: Truveo Adds Campaign Videos

Video search site Truveo opened a new page, featuring Presidential candidate campaign videos from the official sites as well as unofficial ones created by supporters.

BBC Squeezes Joost CTO
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Dirk-Willem van Gulik departs video service startup Joost for the warm embrace of Auntie Beeb as BBC Future Media & Technology Chief Technical Architect.

Facebook’s Scrabulous Isn’t Fabulous To Toy Makers
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Another day, another Facebook controversy. At this point, as long as Facebook’s not directly responsible or in legal harm’s way, it’s just good publicity. Hasbro and Mattel have a beef with a Facebook application called Scrabulous, an online application knockoff of the classic game Scrabble.

And they want it taken down.

Of course, Facebookers are plenty upset about that, and are rallying behind the game.

Google Launches Checkout For Political Contributions

Somewhere out there, at least one of Ron Paul’s followers is unhappy.  Why, you ask?  Because the presidential candidate has enjoyed an amazing amount of support from certain corners of the Web, and a certain search giant has only now launched something called Google Checkout for Political Contributions.

YouTube Talks About Kenyan Violence

We’ve often teased YouTube; at times, it seems like the site’s only purpose is to showcase musical losers and kicks to the crotch.  The crisis in Kenya has caused people to use YouTube for some much more serious reasons, though, and the site’s leaders have acknowledged its role.YouTube Talks About Kenyan Violence

When Squatters Attack
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Richard MacManus, founder and editor of the blog ReadWriteWeb, had a disturbing correspondence with a (seemingly) Russian "brand squatter," a person MacManus describes as one trying to piggyback on his blog brand name for financial game.

Truveo Launches Election Video Site

Video search engine Truveo has launched a presidential video election page focused on the 2008 race.

The site features election related videos from television networks, user generated video sites and the campaigns themselves. The site includes pages of the candidates in the Democratic and Republican primary races. Candidates featured include Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama on the Democratic side and Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Mitt Romney on the Republican side.