Volkswagon has been at the forefront of automotive technology for years. Most recently it was the introduction of the fastest production car of all time Bugatti Veyron. Now they have the beginnings of a flying concept car. Not in the sense that it flys through the air like an airplane/car. But that it used electro magnets placed in the road to hover through the streets of a city in China.

The concept car has a cool feature that need to be pointed out. It has a collision detection system in place to keep people safe when they aren’t paying attention or if they are slow to respond. I imagine the technology is related to the collision system that Mercedes uses wich basically uses small cameras and sophisticated software to detect threats and help you drive safer.

This is a very early concept and obviously not real, but what it does show is the potential of the new world that is coming quick. The attention to detail is kind of neat in the video, from the simple thing of the aluminum can being pushed out of the way. Even though aluminum isn’t magnetic I still think it is kinda cool.

We can all thank a service from Lego, called ‘Lego CUUSOO‘, where people can share set concepts and rally to have them become a reality. The Lego Minecraft set garnered so much support, over 10,000 signatures, they officially announced the start of product development.

When you sit and ponder upon this concept, it leaves your mind swirling. For people that play Minecraft, will they buy enough Lego’s to see their virtual creations become reality? As big as Minecraft worlds can get, it seems improbable. However, I bet we’ll see a YouTube creation video soon after the set release.

Enjoy these concept photos, and get to thinking about how you’ll split your time between Minecraft and Minecraft Lego’s.

"There is no news. Or at least there is no longer a traditional, established and establishment definition of what is news.

Instead we have information. Some of it moving very fast, so it looks like news."

This is partly the result of technology, in that more and more people are connected to sources of information than they used to be, even if those sources of information are friends or family on the other end of a cellphone or an MSN conversation, or a news feed. But all those connections have also expanded the definition of news:

"True, if someone hits a tall building with an airliner, that’s news to all of us. The U.S. invades or leaves Iraq; that’s news. But the rest of the time, news is a slippery beast that means different things to different people."

And as newspapers and media websites everywhere are discovering, the news — the stuff people are really interested in — isn’t always what we put on the front page, or even the second or third page. Sometimes it’s the quirky or human-interest stories that really grab people. And yet, we routinely denigrate those types of stories.

"What we’re seeing with the Internet is not a revolution against the values of old media; a revolution against the notion that it’s only us who can dictate what is news."

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Read the whole column here.

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This report was coupled with another blogger who claimed something similar happened on Sunday afternoon. Christer Edwards, the author of the blog, then went on an elegant tear about how his torrent difficulties were another step toward the dreaded "tiered Internet":

The way I see it this is the first step toward a Tiered Internet, whether or not any such thing is approved in Legislation or by the consumers. Comcast doesn’t care. They are simply cutting off access to part of the Internet, plain and simple.

I would not be surprised at all to soon hear that Comcast will allow bittorrent traffic, for an additional fee. If you *really* want to use that protocol you can pay us more, but otherwise we don’t deem it as part of “normal internet usage”. Once that starts what is to stop the avalanche that will happen next?

“You want access to YouTube? It really uses a lot of bandwidth and we weren’t expecting most people to use more than casual browsing and email. That’ll be $5/mo additional.”

Indeed, and that is what AT&T has made clear they want in the past, while denying there was any problem at the same time.

Speaking of denial, a Comcast representative denied that his company was filtering or shaping traffic on his network, an assertion that lit another fire under TorrentFreak’s Ernesto, who begs to differ, with a little technical support from a commentator at Silicon Alley:

With Wireshark in the background run your BitTorrent application. Wait until completed and watch Wireshark, notice when it finishes seeding Comcast servers send out a reset command every second to your computer noted by the highlighted red line in Wireshark. It is 8:30 pm Monday pst and Comcast is still resting my BitTorrent connections. Maybe the PR guy didn’t get the email from the VP of Networking.

TorrentFreak also has video.

While Comcast’s PR guy (Charlie Douglas) is talking to the VP of Networking, he should also look for ways to distance the company from AT&T rock band censorship and their latest packet-sniffing developments as well.

He should also talk Christer Edwards into not switching to a slower DSL connection, as that furthers arguments that there is a competition crisis in the broadband space.

And he should also get all the PR reps from the other broadband companies together (shouldn’t be hard, there’s only a handful of them) so they can get their technical staffs on the same page as the spin-staffs.

After all, too much proof of concept stuff out there means a straight path to some nasty legislation they won’t like, so they need to be on their best behavior.

Master of the ..

The problem starts with that word master. In this context, it usually means someone who looks after the well-being of some resource. Indeed it’s often applied to someone who looks after something with a cultural content. Just think Concertmaster, Master of the Queen’s Music or Master of the Royal Mint. It’s also often a word that dates back to a former time. How could it possibly have come to be used to apply to such modern innovations as websites?

It is of course a word that is often used in gaming. Perhaps that’s the explanation. Geeks are often heavily into gaming. Just think Gamemaster or Dungeon Master. Since geeks are often also the persons looking after websites, then perhaps webmaster is a very comforting descriptor. It may have been an easy word to accept in the first instant, but it can lead to all sorts of problems.

Big companies

The problems are most often seen in big companies. Websites are complex and can often run into problems, some of them being difficult to correct. Given this, many companies decide that the website is best handled within the IT group. The marketing group, with enough of its own problems, is often happy to leave this potential tar baby to another group. Since the IT group usually does not understand marketing and the marketing group does not understand the working concepts of the IT group, this is a recipe for disaster. Over the years, I have spoken to many situated either side of this divide, who are constantly frustrated by the working difficulties of this arrangement.

Marketing and Sales

The webmaster dysfunction pales into insignificance in some companies, given the dysfunction they have between the marketing and sales groups. Sometimes the two groups have somewhat independent existences. The company operates in a similar way to the way wars used to be waged. The artillery (marketing) shell the territory to be taken. Afterwards the infantry (sales) go in and secure the territory street by street. That is no longer the way wars are waged nor is it the way that marketing and sales should be cooperating. Strong team action is needed between marketing and sales to ensure the most effective sales operation.

The website should not be seen as a fine piece of art that has been created to support the marketing and selling activity. The webmaster concept might support this inappropriate view. A selling effective website is an integral part of the marketing/sales activity. Like any other part of the marketing/selling activity, there should be objectives and metrics to establish performance. Activities should be modified in the light of results. The Google Webmaster Central website can provide some useful data in this approach, but other parts of the marketing/sales group will have their own selling activities and their own metrics to add to the review process.

What’s a better job title?

To emphasize this marketing/selling role for the website, some title such as Internet Marketing Manager is much more appropriate. The exact title will depend on the size of the organization. Whatever the title, the responsibility for a selling-effective website must clearly rest within the marketing group. Some activities may be subcontracted to the IT group. But the buck stops with the marketing group.

Related: What’s in a name – Web mastery?

Granted, the test drive was useless from any sort of practical perspective.  “[A] write-up of time spent behind the wheel of a car designed entirely for show and never for go will help you in no way to make a purchasing decision,” notes Wert.

But the experience still sounds like a blast, and, unlike what occurred with an old Microsoft-Edelman scandal, all the parties were clear from the start that this was just a temporary loan.

Ideally, someone could mesh that experience with Wert’s – pass out real Ferraris, instead of an Acer Ferrari 1000 notebook, or the keys to a half-baked concept.  But beggars – and bloggers – can’t be choosers, so . . . on with the Camaro convertible.

There were some strict ground rules on Wert’s test drive – no accelerating past “roughly 25-30 mph (I say roughly because there’s no working instrumentation,” for one.  Also, “The seats aren’t the real ones, so you’ve no idea what the sight lines are going to be like in the real thing.”

Then – and I can’t help but laugh at this – Wert writes, “[T]he heat from the engine was causing the paneling on the concept to warp a bit – taking some of that design balance and turning it into an amusement park hall of mirrors.”

Still, as a car enthusiast, I can imagine few bigger rewards for one’s work.  Bloggers everywhere should take heart.

SES: Search Supports Sitemaps Autodiscovery

It’s called autodiscovery, and those search engines, along with IBM, have embraced the sitemaps concept wholeheartedly. Webmasters can now place the location of their sitemaps inside a robots.txt file, where crawlers will find it proactively.

That saves some effort where webmasters had to submit sitemaps manually as they made changes to their site architectures. Ask.com recently added submission support for sitemaps, and their Infrastructure Product Manager, Vivek Pathak, will talk more about the subject as part of a morning session during today’s SES New York conference proceedings.

Ahead of that session, Pathak discussed sitemaps at Ask’s blog:

Comprehensiveness and freshness are key initiatives for every search engine, and with autodiscovery of sitemaps, everyone wins:

• Webmasters save time with the ability to universally submit their content to the search engines and benefit from reduced unnecessary traffic by the crawlers
• The search engines get information with regards to pages to index as well as metadata with clues about which pages are newly updated and which pages are identified as the most important
• Searchers benefit from improved search experience with better comprehensiveness and freshness

Of course, neither autodiscovery nor manual submission guarantee pages will be added to the index. The pages must meet our quality criteria for inclusion in the index. And use of these submission methods does not influence ranking.

Sitemaps as a protocol gained a boost when Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo supported it openly in November 2006 at Sitemaps.org. Its utility gained approval and usage from a number of webmasters, and this latest development should enhance that appeal.

At the session, Google’s Vanessa Fox noted Sitemaps.org will be available in many international languages.

Like many who are a bit too engaged in the Internet sphere, I use a lot of different Google services, and have more than one Google account (two primary ones, used on purpose for different purposes). A lot of my decision-making occurred before there were in fact “Google Accounts.” Pretty much, the decision was to have two different GMail accounts, one because I loved GMail for its speed, searchability, storage, and organizational aplomb. The other Gmail account, for spam and email from the retailers I buy from. Simple enough. This latter also got associated with “me” in certain online forums, and certain people email me there, so I like to keep watch on it.

Now, I use a ton of other Google services, too, all with logins attached. And at some point I managed to set up at least three or four additional Google accounts, for professional reasons.

Some of the great services I use are:

Google Groups – I moderate SEM 2.0 and have set up informal ones for friends & clients & colleagues here and there. To post, you need to be logged into the *correct* Google account. As an admin for several groups, I have to help people come to grips with that fact – in addition to just figuring out how to read my own screen on any given day. Sometimes, colleagues have been confused, thinking that anyone can see certain posts that are very private in nature – because they forget that what they see on their screen is not generic – it’s only showing to them because they’re logged into the private group. The confusion that reigns in other people’s workflow overflows into mine, to the point where I need to start one or two Basecamp accounts to segregate out project management properly. Which causes workflow issues of its own, but in the end I prefer it.

Google Chat – very useful. Lots of people use IM, me, no exception. This fires up on bootup, so here’s the thing: nowadays that pretty much determines what Google account I’m logged into unless the system is told otherwise. Actually, that’s a huge %$!&)(*!% pain, because it also decides that I want to be notified of all new emails, but does so in relation to a Gmail account I only use for spam and retail. Any of the other Google services I use at any given time of the day – might be associated with the “wrong” account, depending on which one I want. Plus, Chat seems to often require resetting to get rid of certain defaults that crop up from time to time.

Blogger – as you can see – I use Blogger. Uses a Google account. Gotta switch if I’m in the wrong one.

Search – if I’m logged in, it makes sure my searches are recorded! Good! I think. Unless, not good.

I’m sure there are a few other things I’m forgetting.

When it comes time to do my job, though, things get significantly hairier. I’ve complained about this before.

*Google AdWords* accounts are associated with Google Accounts now. So, all my clients have their own Google Accounts, that they were forced at some point to establish rather than just a standalone login for their advertising business relationship with Google. *Why?* Should this not have been a separate deal? So anyway: I access my client accounts through my THIRD Google Account, which is a master account I use that relates to my admin login for the My Client Center master account that helps me manage all client accounts, with client permission, from a single interface. (Two of the accounts in my MCC are in fact my own, and are associated with my first, and second, Google accounts, respectively.) Having that *third* Google Account makes it even more annoying to be doing the other things I need – checking my favorite email address (at Account 2), and IM’ing (from Account 1). I might add that I have about three computers that I might have this stuff set up on in different locations (desktop, desktop, laptop), so that adds additional issues no doubt.

Does that mean I should have set it up more intelligently? I doubt it, since the fact that I’d have access to a master AdWords account that was a Google Account too, to manage regular AdWords accounts that are Google accounts too, was unforeseeable when I set up the two GMail accounts and associated (without thinking) the Chat account with the first GMail account without really pondering it. We didn’t know Blogger would require a Google Account login. And so on.

All the consumer functionality stuff, I think – that’s my mistake in some way that I can’t properly appreciate now, so I should probably deal with it. I mean that’s my problem that I grew up in an era when you could have four Excite Mail accounts if that floated your boat, and it didn’t affect the entire day when you were logging in and out of them.

At the very least, though, I feel that Google blundered when it required serious business customers to associate their accounts with mass, all-purpose consumer accounts. Nearly all Google AdWords logins are organized around some individual corporate person’s email address. So to make sure others sharing that account login are not able to access that poor person’s email, chat, Blogger account, and search history, elaborate workarounds, requiring additional Google Accounts, cursing, duct tape, and magic, have been required. What a mistake.

Did I mention that you should use Basecamp for project management? Or anything but something invented, modified, or acquired by Google? Google, will you promise to just keep Jotspot separate? Please don’t make your customers associate it with a Google Account.

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Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a marketing consultancy which focuses on maximizing clients’ paid search marketing campaigns.

In 1999 Andrew co-founded Traffick.com, an acclaimed “guide to portals” which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.

The primary focus has always been on how companies make money… ie. how the company wins. But precious few companies contemplate how their business model can help others win too. I’m calling this “mindful business”… stopping auto-pilot for a moment to really think about the ecosystem in which you operate, and what you can do to improve it.

Brands win when they help others win.

A few examples:

• Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty addresses self-esteem and our society’s distortion of beauty. It’s a great example of a mindful marketing program that benefits everyone.
• Starbucks’ concept of social responsibility is embedded deep into its brand, including conservation, community volunteerism, commitment to coffee producers, the Starbucks Foundation (youth literacy), Ethos water, socially responsible investing, and more.
• Squidoo enables lensmasters to send their revenues directly to a charity of their choice (Squidoo will add your favorite charity if it’s not currently in their system.) Over half of Squidoo’s lensmasters participate in this program, and Squidoo itself donates 5% of net revenue to the charity pool.
• Intel’s World Ahead program is committing a $1 billion investment to extend broadband PC access to the world’s next billion users while training 10 million more teachers on the use of technology in education.
• Whole Foods helped establish national organic standards, supports the Marine Stewardship Council to ensure sustainable seafood, established the Animal Compassion Foundation, and helped organic farms in North America grow.
• From its earliest days, Patagonia has been committed to environmental activism. Their mission statement is to build the best product, do no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis. They have an impressive list of actions that their mission has inspired.

Many companies wanting to fill in the “social responsibility” checkbox will adopt a non-profit or encourage employees to volunteer. Not bad, but this type of add-on activity won’t gain traction. Mindful businesses tightly integrate a social perspective into their current business models. This is about being, not just doing. In the examples above, each company is mindful of their role within a larger ecosystem and seeks ways to leverage their role to strengthen the entire ecosystem. Their beliefs and actions attract like-minded, passionate customers and employees. Everybody wins.

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Jennifer Rice is the founder of Mantra Brand Communication. She has extensive experience in brand/marketing strategy, market/customer research, integrated marketing communications and channel support.

Jennifer also writes theWhat’s Your Brand Mantra? blog which offers musings on branding, marketing and the ecology of business.

The idea of page share is that a weighting measurement is put on the various real estate of a web page. That weighting is based on the location of the page and also it’s ability to get clicks and conversions. Greg theorizes it would then be easy to calculate how much ad units should sell for or what space is worth because if we know the total page’s CPM value, we could sell space on the page by multiplying the weighting by the total CPM value.

This concept would have worked nicely for me when I was selling a lot of direct advertising for one of my past sites. I often was arbitrarily picking prices for various ad units without really much reason behind it.

Definitely interesting though, at least as a way to simplify rate cards (although one might argue that more math isn’t always simplifying things!).

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Pat is the Director of Business Development at Right Media, the business unit owner for RMX Direct, and the author of the Conversion Rater blog.