I just happened to glance down at my Search status toolbar in the status window of Firefox, and noticed that Techmeme’s Google Toolbar PageRank had been reduced to 4
Techmeme has very clear advertising with sponsored posts
For the last few weeks Blogcatalog have been driving full steam with new features, and today announce a partnership with SezWho, the comment and reputation ranking platform.
I have been slacking a little over the last month on the updates, so time to play catch up.
First of all some big news, Blogcatalog has now surpassed MyBlogLog in traffic levels, if you believe Alexa data. They are in exactly the same niche, and share plenty of users, so whilst I don’t trust Alexa data extensively, this is a significant achievement considering it wasn’t long ago when people had trouble differentiating the two services.
Lee Odden was kind enough to invite me to the Fast Company beta, I assume he just imported his contacts from LinkedIn or Gmail (I hope he didn't use Gmail because of security risks) so I have had a snoop around, added a profile and this blog to their list of feeds.
From what I can tell they have been live for over 1 month now, it is possible I received invites before and didn't respond to them, along with the other 20+ invites I seem to receive to every new social networking platform.
I thought it would be worth writing
I had intended my next post to be a small tribute to the great articles that have been selected as finalists for this year's Semmys, with links to all the finalists and a subtle link through to the SEO category where one of my articles was selected as a finalist.
But that would be gaming the system based upon whatever level of popularity I have achieved within the Online Marketing community and it seems that popularity of whatever kind isn't necessarily a good thing, because the masses or individuals start accusing you of gaming the system for your own
It looks like Bidvertiser have worked fast to address the problems many bloggers noted about their new feed advertising solution a short while ago and have come up with a way so that you can now use Bidvertiser using your existing feeds, and still use Feedburner as before, so that it doesn't affect your stats, and most importantly your feed readers.
From the Bidvertiser Blog
To address this, we have now launched 3 unique solutions:
1. WordPress Plugin to allow you to seamlessly embed the BidVertiser Ads in your feeds. You can download the plugin from your publisher account.
2. Solution for FeedBurner
I have been quite vocal in my encouraging Aweber to add some more control to the way they handle RSS to Email, and I am glad to say they have now added some very flexible date and time based controls.
This means that they totally blow Feedburner Email subscription away as far as features are concerned.
Apart from one important aspect.
In the announcement Justin Premick mentioned
This is just one of a number of enhancements we'll be making to the Blog Broadcast tool. Stay tuned…
I probed a little deeper and we can expect
OpenAds, formerly phpAdsNew is an Open Source advertising management script, or at least it was. For a good overview I recommend Tims excellent introduction to OpenAds.
But that has changed somewhat overnight
OpenAds are adding a free hosted version of their sofware, though it is currently in closed beta.
Even with the improvements they made with version 2.4, and certainly those changes were critical for this move to make it more resource efficient, they are going to need some hefty infrastructure in place to serve all the ad units for multiple sites.
So that is one area the new series b funding by new investor Accel Partners will be used.
The big questions are who they are going to decide to go up against, and how are they going to generate revenue?
PepperJam have just launched a new affiliate network, and these are my notes whilst signing up. It is going to be a little bit rough, but there is hopefully a lot of value.
The Semmys has just been officially announced, and is a new award site for the best Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing posts of the year, and is the brainchild of Matt at Small Business SEM.
The nominees this year are highly controversial, because they are inspired or originated from Matt’s own reading list, and are the posts which he highlighted in his monthly roundup posts as being the most important for his clients and subscribers to read if they missed them.
