According to a report by the Madison State Journal, the program will put 600 tablets into the hands of students this spring, with a further 800 coming in the fall. Bill Smojver, director of technical services for the school district, pointed out that iPads beat computers in portability, user-friendliness, and price. He called the transition to tablets a major transition point for digital learning. The program will initially focus on replacing paper workbooks, though deputy superintendent Sue Abplanalp said that the transition to e-textbooks was one the district would consider down the line.

The program comes before the Madison school board for approval today. Assuming it passes the iPads will be in 20 elementary schools, 10 middle schools, and 3 high schools by the middle of March.

In a development that is sure to peg your irony meter, the money for these iPads – which the disctrict is getting for $479 each – is actually coming from Microsoft. Wisconsin (along with several other states) sued Microsoft on behalf of consumers, claiming that the software giant overcharged for its software. While the company managed to win dismissals in several of the cases, they wound up settling with several states. In 2009 they settled with Wisconsin for $80 million. The money for Madison’s iPads comes from a $3.4 million chunk set aside for schools.

The Courier Mail in Australia is reporting that new research from Southern Cross University has found strong benefits for the use of Twitter in the classroom by shy students who might not be comfortable raising their hands.

Southern Cross business lecturer Jeremy Novak and Central Queensland University’s Dr. Michael Cowling studied Twitter use among university students as a way to ask questions during class.

The Twitter method received positive feedback especially from international students. The research team is convinced that Twitter could be used by high schools and even primary schools.

“Twitter is another exciting teaching aide that is highly under-utilised by lecturers and teachers in the education sector,” Novak said. “Hopefully it would lead to fewer passengers in the classroom and allow those students who are less likely to engage with teachers, for social or cultural reasons, to participate.”

Under the study, university students were given the ability to send anonymous tweets to their teacher asking for better explanations or more detailed answers during lectures.

Novak did acknowledge that there would be some obstacles in getting Twitter use approved for the classroom. I know that in my university classes, students would abuse this to send texts and update Facebook during class. Novak agrees and while students would already do this, making Twitter acceptable would make it harder for teachers to point out those who were genuinely using it to learn and those who are just using it to socialize.

The researchers also fear for teachers who have less experience with social networking than their students. The generation gap may be too wide in some cases.

“Teachers would have to be savvy with the technology, but if those things were overcome there is no reason this could not be used to augment teaching methods,” Novak said. “We don’t see Twitter replacing actual class participation or interaction, but it could be a very valuable tool to add to the teacher’s toolbox.”

I for one welcome a new way to interact in class besides raising hands. I suffered from a speech impediment growing up and the stigma made me interact less during university classes. Tweeting to the teacher during class would be a revolutionary way for students who suffer from similar problems to interact with the material during class.

Probably thinking he was reporting a misbehaving student, Greenbaum contacted the school and explained the situation. Six hours later, the school called back: they’d found the commenter—an employee. After they confronted him, the employee resigned.

Most of us probably have an intrinsic notion that the anonymous commenter and Greenbaum both acted inappropriately (although there was no way for Greenbaum to know he was turning in an employee and not a student)—but perhaps the more important question is whether they were acting legally.

Greenbaum, a Post-Dispatch employee, should be bound by the paper’s online privacy policy, which states:

We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information.

However, at the beginning of the policy, they stipulate that “Your IP address does not contain personally identifiable information, nor does it identify you personally.” So is that individual user information? Sounds like it’s not.

And the Post-Dispatch’s ToS is an exercise in CYA (they define “submission” to include comments):

• You automatically waive any claim that any use of such content violates any of your rights, including privacy rights, publicity rights, moral rights or any other right, including the right to approve the way we use such content.
• You are responsible for the content of all Submissions and acknowledge that third parties may hold you responsible for content related claims including libel, invasion of privacy, misappropriation of likeness and disclosure of confidential information.
• You shall indemnify, defend and hold us, our parent company and our affiliated entities (including our officers, directors, owners, agents and employees) harmless from all liability and costs incurred by those indemnified in connection with any claim arising out of any breach by you of the above representations and warranties and for any claims related to the content or your Submissions.

And, naturally, the ToS stipulates that using the site to “upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available content that is harmful to minors in any way, or that is harassing, harmful, threatening, abusive, vulgar, obscene, defamatory, libelous, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable” violates the ToS, too.

And how were Anon’s actions illegal? Well, setting aside possible obscenity charges (while legally problematic, “obscenity” is not protected under the First Amendment), the school probably also has policies—policies that dictate the use of school resources. Most likely, this comment was made on school time, from a school computer, using the school’s Internet connection. Somehow, I can’t imagine there’s a provision in the policy that allows for use of school resources for posting vulgar comments online. By violating these policies, the employee could face discipline or even termination.

What do you think? Would these policies hold up in court?

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Here is a recap of the SES Chicago posts in case you missed any:

• Meet the Web Analytics Players
• Igniting Viral Campaigns
• Keynote Speech – Rodney Dangerfield School of Search Marketing
• Keynote – Seth Godin & 14 Trends to Avoid a Meatball Sundae
• Big Site, Big Search
• Actionable Social Media
• Usability and SEO
• Are You Ignoring the Power of Images?
• Snowy & Festive at SES Chicago
• SEO and Development – Get It Together
• Personalization, User Data & Search
• Podcast and Audio Search
• Strolling the Exhibit Floor at SES Chicago
• Images and Search Engines
• Managing PPC For Multiple Clients
• So You Want to Be A Search Marketer?
• Landing Page Optimization Clinic
• Kevin Ryan Unplugged
• Do Your Keywords Account for Local Vernacular?

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Through the training program, participants can hone their adCenter knowledge for improving their campaigns. Those who wish to do so may take the adExcellence accreditation exam; US residents who have had an adCenter account for 30 days or longer are eligible to take the exam, which costs $50.

Materials in the adExcellence training program appear as Flash content. They cover six categories:

Introduction to Microsoft adCenter
Getting Started
Targeting
Tracking Ad Performance
Optimizing Ad Performance
adCenter Budgeting and Billing

Currently the course materials only appear in US English, but Microsoft plans to keep updating adExcellence with new materials and support for more regions of the world.

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Download As A Podcast

These successful Dugg stories or videos, etc. are what I want to discuss with you today. Were it not for Liz Strauss, I would not have had the inspiration to write this (she’s a real expert on this topic), so thanks to Liz for spurring me on here.

Now, I’m not going to tell you how to trick Digg users into digging your crappy content. If your content is crappy you stand little chance of getting dugg, I mean unless you have some hot pics of a geek girl in various stages of undress, lying in front of an extreme network connection or other appropriately IT-geek-fantasy pics. It’s either quality content or nudy pics… There is no way to win at Digg without either.

Must Have Great Content

This goes along with the ‘don’t have crappy content’ point, but it’s even more important. Don’t market ANYTHING EVER that isn’t absolutely fabulous. First, it’s a waste of time. Second, and more important, it can ruin your name. And, I don’t just mean your brand, which is extremely important, but even worse it can ruin the chances that anyone is ever again willing to look at your site, even after your content improves. What I mean by this is that if I see a link to your site and click it, if it’s bad, I note this fact. Now, if I later see your link, no matter what others are saying about how awesome it is, I remember that I’ve already seen it and it is not worthy of my time, so I’m not going to click through. Don’t ruin your chances of world domination by marketing unworthy content.

Now, what do I mean by ‘Great Content’? Well, here are some examples.

• The Web Entrepreneur’s Customer Service Toolbox: 100 Hacks and Resources
• The Top Ten Free Website Tools and Services
• 20/20 Stupid In America
• Flesh Mob At Abercrombie And Fitch

Note with each of these examples, you have something that is must see. In the case of the articles (not the video), you have something that’s so long and so useful that it’s too much to take in at one sitting. You are compelled to bookmark it, because it’s that good (and that long). Just reading some of these is a chore, because they take so much scholarly attention, but the content is so valuable to Digg readers, that they’ll bookmark it and Digg it. In the case of the video, it’s so good you want to pass it along to others. Viral marketing at it’s finest, for 20/20 at least…

Who Are You Looking To Impress?

Note that I specifically said ‘valuable to Digg readers’. Knowing your audience is vital here. Now’s the time to do some research. Not only are you specifically studying Digg readers overall, but you need to take time to study the Top Diggers. This used to be easier when there was a leaderboard, but a quick/easy way to find theme now is to study the homepage for a few days. Click on each homepage submitter’s name and check out their percentage of successful digs that made it Home.

Take a look at this guy’s stats. He was a random click for me on the homepage. However, note how high his submit percentage is (45%). That’s sizeable. That means that roughly out of every 2 stories he submits, almost 1 makes it to the homepage.

Do your research. Make impressing these guys your aim. If these guys submit you, then you have a great chance of success. Your goal should be to get these guys to find your article, and it should be specifically to tailor it to what they are already submitting.

A Little Friendly Stalking Never Hurt Anybody

There are a few ways to go about this, but the easiest is to stalk these guys. Yes, I know that sounds horrible, but if it didn’t work, Netscape wouldn’t have offered to pay them to do what they do so well (which is, of course, the reason there is no longer a Top 100 list, but that’s another story altogether).

I’ve been on Digg for a relatively long time in web years (since early 2005) so I have built up relationships with some people that are helpful in this way. Please note that this is an example of how organic community involvement is vital to your success online, and by doing it the way I have done it (ie by actually taking part in the community) you gain validity. Doing it this way is better, as you will garner more success and still be able to sleep at night.

Off my soapbox and back to stalking school… For the stalking though, I’m not talking about creepy ‘I’m a crazy person’ stalking, but really just attempting to form a relationship with them.

First, it’s research time. Take a look at their last 20 Diggs. What are they submitting? Who are they normally reading? Do you see any patterns you can exploit?

Now, for the next action: Take part in those communities (blogs, forums, etc.) and identify who they are and make an honest attempt to gain credibility in that community. Later, take a second to reach out to them asking for nothing. That relationship just may turn into their becoming a reader of your site.

Shoot for making relationships with at least 10 or so top Diggers. I don’t consider this gaming the system, because you are just trying to get them to notice you, you aren’t at all spamming them or annoying them.

Again, you get one shot here, so don’t overstep and NEVER ask for them to Digg you. If your stuff is good enough, they’ll notice you. If not, then go back to the content-creating drawing board.

If it didn’t work ask yourself, “Is your content relevant to Digg readers”? Remember, they tend to like extreme science breakthroughs (medical, astronomy, physics, etc.), technology related content, Digg related content and sexy stuff. If your blog is not related to those topics at all, I wouldn’t waste my time and energy with Digg. It’s not worth the effort. Try broader sites like Netscape, or niche oriented ones like Lipstick. A quick Google Yahoo! search will garner you more social bookmarking sites than you can shake a stick at.

Monetize – What have you done for me lately?

You are probably thinking, ‘this is a lot of work’. Yes, it is a lot of work, but for some things it is worth the effort. You’ll need to calculate the ROI of each marketing campaign you run, and yes, this is just another marketing campaign. Your results, whether your aim is immediate money or long-term branding, are definitely measurable. If they are branding, it’s a bit harder, but just capturing the mentions, the comments, etc. in a spreadsheet will help you understand quickly if it was worth the effort.

Monetization tracking is even easier. I’ve never depended on Adsense on my sites for monetization, my money-maker has always been through direct consulting jobs. For my clients, however, the large majority have not been about ad clicks nor sales, but branding. They’d want a particular product to gain attention, a contest to gain traction or a specific area of their site to gain memberships and authoritative backlinks. Because we were careful to define exactly what we wanted, tracking the campaign was easy via tracking traffic, WOM buzz, sign-ups, sales, etc.

I promise not to bore you further with all this marketing talk, but I wanted to point out that the most important thing to remember when determining if all this is worth the effort is in defining exactly what you want to do from the beginning. With clear cut goals (ie I want to gain 5K views, 50 subscribers and earn $25 in advertising sales and I am willing to spend 4 hours on this effort), you can easily track your efforts and determine if this should get another try next month.

The Bottom Line

• Determine your goals
• Write or build to your audience
• Make it damn good
• Schmooze with the best

Odds are, you will not make hundreds of dollars on a Digg story, unless you know some hoodoo-voodoo that I don’t know (and some of you probably do). PPC monetization is rarely effective on Dugg stories. Digg is much more effective at making sure your content, product, video, etc. get attention, at Digg and around the blogosphere.

Good luck, and as always, I’m Duzins on Digg. Let’s be friends

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Of course, in terms of market share, there’s only so much to go around; Google’s and Ask’s pieces of the pie got bigger, while Yahoo and MSN/Live weren’t so lucky.  There were more searches made, however, and so this is the way in which every engine benefited.

“September 2007 turned out to be a record month for search,” reports Compete’s Jeremy Crane.  “Overall search volume in the US reached the highest level with nearly 7.8 billion search queries.”

Yahoo had a 0.4 percent month-over-month increase, which could be better, but the Sunnyvale-based company is in no position to complain.  MSN/Live experienced a 1.9 increase, and one has to wonder if the company expected more following its Live Search update.

The real leaps were made by Google and Ask.  The volume of searches performed through Google rose by 5.0 percent between August and September, and this corresponded to 249 million more queries.  Ask experienced an even bigger percentage increase (21.4 percent), so it deserves some applause, too.  (Actual query volume increased by just 49 million queries, hence the qualifier “some.”)

So what can we conclude?  This wouldn’t be a shocking revelation, but it looks like Google is popular with young people; so, perhaps, is Ask.  And even if the search data doesn’t illustrate this point, we know it’s true: Crane adds, “Children still mourn the arrival of September every year.”

The new media are rewarding more participatory, more sincere, and less directive marketing styles than the old broadcast media rewarded.

The transformation is unfolding on a model of consumer collaboration, in which consumers use digital media that lie beyond the control of marketers to communicate among one another, responding to marketing’s intrusions by disseminating counterargument, information sharing, rebuttal, parody, reproach and, though more rarely, fandom

Key concepts in the report include:

• Successful interactive marketing may be less a matter of domination and control, and more a matter of fitting in.
• There is a human need to assert and present to the world a self-serving identity and to manage one’s personal reputation.
• The form of interactivity most attractive to marketing is one that facilitates people’s ability to construct their identity and contribute to the making of meaning.

.We are certainly seeing an increased interest in social  media strategies.  The first action to take is to listen to the conversations online.  And you have to keep monitoring these conversations all the time.

So an online reputation monitoring tool like the new Brandseye from the UK, which can not only monitor what is being said about you and your competitors but can also evaluate the remarks and calculate a brand ‘score,’ is vital to the success of any social media marketing or PR strategy.

If you are interested in what it can do, drop me an email. sallyf at expansionplus dot com

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Yahoo’s search marketing blog noted the free webinar series they will start for the company’s advertising clients. This should be beneficial particularly for newer clients participating in Panama, Yahoo’s search marketing platform.

Yahoo plans to offer each webinar at least twice, based on the schedule they provided with the announcement. Topics include ‘Creating a New Campaign’, ‘Keyword Tips’, and ‘Bidding & Forecasting’.

A session on ‘Quality Index Score’ should be of particular value. Yahoo has been shifting to a higher emphasis on ad quality in determining when ads get placed contextually in someone’s search results.

Yahoo has tried following in Google’s footsteps by emphasizing ad quality. The company should benefit from communicating this better with its ad clients, with the webinar series a good place to start.

Highschoolplaybook.com will include school information, game schedules, statistics, individual athlete profiles and game day weather from Hearst-Argyle’s local TV stations.

The site will also offer social networking features including personal profile pages, team pages, school pages, cheerleader pages, SMS voting and other messaging that will allow communication between rival schools and fans.

"We’ve created a super-charged broadband platform with a stellar ‘user experience’ to give high school athletes a spotlight," said Terry Mackin, Hearst-Argyle Television Executive Vice President in charge of digital media.

"High School Playbook will become the local-community hub for 10men’s and women’s sports and promises to be a compelling Internet brand that will resonate with athletes and fans."

Video content will feature, game highlights, sideline interviews, bloopers, gameday reports, athlete profiles and battle of the bands performances by competing schools.

"Our professionally trained and equipped Sideline Reporters are a dynamic source
of video and text content, and will receive valuable experience at the same time," Mackin noted. "We’ll have more video, from more sources, than any other provider of high school sports content."

High School Playbook will be launched initially in seven of Hearst’s 26 markets that include: Orlando; Sacramento; Pittsburgh; Baltimore; Cincinnati; Greenville/Spartanburg, SC; and Greensboro/Winston-Salem, NC.