Online Advertising Reaching the "Tipping Point"

Brian Morrissey at Ad Week reports that Web ad spending will increase to $55 billion worldwide within the next five years. They report that big advertisers like Absolut Vodka, General Motors and Ford earmark 20 percent of their marketing budgets to Internet marketing.

Latino Lingo - Growth of Online Marketing

Wilson posted a link to an interesting article called Surfing in two Worlds.
He states that marketing to Hispanics online is up 33% as compared to last year.

Proposed Extensions To RSS To Share Calendars And Other Things

I just read the latest post from Ray Ozzie at Microsoft. He and his group are proposing a new addition to the RSS protocol called SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions) to allow asynchronous sharing of data between multiple sources. What does this mean in ENGLISH???? -->

It means when this is implemented RSS can be extended to synchronize calendars, address lists, task lists, project plans or anything else that needs multiple source updates from ANY application that supports the standard. Microsoft is releasing this under the Creative Commons License, so it will be freely available to all. This is awesome! All the geeky details are here.

This is yet another example of how SUBSCRIBE is the next evolutionary step on the internet

My First Skype Call

Well the big news this week is that Skype has released version 2.0 beta that supports high definition streaming video.

I made my first Skype call today with a colleague in the UK. The quality was excellent! I was so impressed, I am talking about rolling this out to more employees at Mason. In the past, I tried the voice over IP options with Yahoo, MSN and AOL IM, but none were as clear and natural as Skype. I recommend checking it out especially since it's free!

Nice Introduction to RSS

RSS enables the next evolutionary step on the internet with the ability to consolidate information and subscribe. Wizard Creek Consulting has a great introduction and tutorial to bring you up to speed on Really Simple Syndication. Check it out here.

Spambots Gotcha Down?

Looking for a good way to stop spammers from harvesting email addresses off of your website?
Check out http://www.mways.co.uk/prog/hidemail.php. Here you can generate javascript to post that obscures your actual address, but still works when you click on it.

Here is what my address looks like as javascript ;-)

Spambots say --> Huhhhh?

But click here to see what it looks like on the web...

Naked Conversations: Starting with Scoble: Bumps & Brilliance

Shel writes about one year ago when Robert suggested the blog2book idea.
Hopefully they have started a trend! I think this process worked extremely well for Naked Conversations. Are there other books that could benefit from this approach? hmmm.... Let me know what you think.

Travelocity focuses on RSS technology

According to eyefortravel.com, Travelocity is enabling RSS feeds to notify subscribers when there is a lower fare. Here's another great example of an application of RSS. This shows further evolution of the next phase of the internet. When the web started catching on people surfed. As the number of websites continued to grow, people searched. We are starting to see the next phase where people will subscribe.

"Each day, Travelocity searches thousands of flights to identify low fares. Travelocity's new RSS feed will ensure that when Travelocity finds a low fare to a subscriber's favorite destination, an alert is communicated to that subscriber through their RSS news reader of choice (i.e., My Yahoo!, My MSN, NewsGator, Pluck, etc.). Subscribers simply create a personalized RSS feed by selecting their own customized list of preferred destinations or choosing from Travelocity's recommended destinations by trip type. As subscribers review their daily RSS reader, Travelocity's feed will provide customized travel information, news on discounted fares, and special offers. When they're ready to check availability for a flight, one click takes them directly to Travelocity."

Online Ad Revenue Up Nearly 34% For The Third Quarter

DM News reports that online advertising revenue jumped to 3.1 billion in the third quarter. They report that it is anticipated that online ad revenue for 2005 will jump more than 20 percent from last year's $9.6 billion and might cross a record $12 billion in sales for the year.

Google Suspends Analytics Sign-ups

PC Word reports that Google has suspended new sign ups to the free Analytics system. When new users visit analytics.google.com they get a message saying "Google Analytics has experienced extremely strong demand, and as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity."

Ray Ozzie Is Blogging (again)

I was reading Ray Ozzie's latest post. Now that he is Chief Technical Officer for Microsoft he has decided to fill us in from time to time about what he is up to. He hints that he may post some neat little tidbits next week.

I started reading his history and found it very interesting that he was hired back in the 1981 by Dan Bricklin at VisiCalc (the inventor of the first spreadsheet program and predecessor of Lotus 123). He was then Hired by Lotus and is the inventor of Lotus Notes.

Quite a impressive career to say the least. Microsoft purchased his company Groove Networks. It will be interstate to see how they integrate Groove's technology as they start to roll out more web based services.

I have added Ray's blog to my required reading list. More to come...

Cringley's Latest Theory on goggles Future Plans

This is a really interesting read (like always for Cringley). He discusses the idea of Google utilizing all the dark fiber they have purchased to make a distributed server farm to run all those cool applications they keep releasing and all the new ones coming up.

Worth a read, let me know what you think.

RC Bigelow Hires Mason

AdWeek reports on Mason PR acquiring RC Bigelow as a client. The tea segment is booming (from $2 billion in 1990 sales to $6 billion last year)!

Bigelow has purchased the last working tea plantation in the United States. Mason is helping to develop this as a destination for visitors to the Charleston area.

Looks like fun. Very cool!

5 Star Amazon Review of Naked Conversations

I just posted my 5 star review of Naked Conversations on Amazon. They say it will be posted in a day, but I don't see any other reviews posted yet, so they may be waiting until the book comes out in January...

Anyway, here is what I wrote:

This book is a wonderful exploration of the world of blogging. This isn't a book that tells you 'how to blog' but instead gives you concrete examples of 'why to blog'.

The authors talk about how blogs are a wonderful way to carry on a conversation with your customers and build relationships. They describe in detail how blogging can give you the opportunity to boost your credibility in a world that is becoming more and more cynical of traditional marketing and PR tactics.

The Mason Technologist - Top 20% According to PubSub

The latest PubSub reporting shows The Mason Technologist moving up from unranked in the beginning of October to now in the top 20%!