Toluu

Online Media Cultist

Web producer. Writer. Online Media Cultist.

Twitter-based ad networks: a different perspectiveDecember 1

An ongoing conversation about the viability and credibility of Twitter-based ad network Magpie led Brandon J. Mendolson to come up with a nifty idea: republish our perspectives on the issue (I don’t have a problem with it as I see “sponsored tweets” as being a close cousin to sponsored blog posts, as I get into here, and Brandon is firmly against) on our respective blogs. Therefore, I present to you Brandon’s take on the issue in full, and as you’ll see he really has at it! And catch Brandon regularly at his Graduate Student Survival Blog - eb

Sponsor Tweets: Your Unwelcome Twitter Uncle
By: Brandon J. Mendelson

Before media ownership limits were reduced, print newspapers were plentiful and profitable. The loss of competition and cost cutting to please shareholders caused newspapers to grow stagnant and lose readership. As print readership declined, so did advertising dollars.

Blogs allowed individuals to report news, provide commentary, and serve as a community resource. As they grew in readership, advertisers focused their financial resources on blogs over papers. Will those advertising dollars find themselves budgeted for Twitter? No.

Twitter is blowing up as a source for headlines, not content. Blogs that regurgitate news have been replaced. Why bother reading a blog th

Are sponsored microblog “tweets” any different than sponsored blog posts?November 25

Just a few short years ago, the idea that blogging could be a full time job seemed farfetched. Yet today there are a number who manage to do this, though the hours required are infamously brutal and the work required great. These days it makes sense to blog for profit in pajamas, since you’re going to be up most of the night anyway!

But what about microblogging? You could make the argument that paid microbloggers already exist in the form of social media workers who make their wage by blogging, microblogging, and engaging far and interwebs wide on the behalf of their organizations.

Let’s set aside this growing industry and look instead at those manic Twitter fiends, those FriendFeed addicts, those Pownce, uh, pouncers and whether it’s possible to microblog one’s passions and beliefs and expertise into some kind of tangible financial sum.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot lately and have come to the conclusion that while it is possible, the idea is still so new that it will take people some time to get used to it.

When Magpie, an “ad network for Twitter” launched recently, I was very curious to see how people would react. The deal with Magpie, as the site explains, is:

1. Advertisers create campaigns providing a message and some keywords.
2. Matching twitterers are selected, costs are calculated based on # of followers and hotness of the topi

The Butterfly Effect and social mediaNovember 18

Beyond being an online media cultist, I’m also a devout TV geek. So therefore I’m of course obsessed with Dexter, Showtime’s wonderful, whimsical, and occasionally haunting tale of a “good serial killer.”

Every episode has a theme, and this week the Butterfly Effect was thrown around, which is described as “the idea that a butterfly’s wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay.” While that’s a little dramatic, it led me to think about cause-and-effect with relation to social media.

I’ve been thinking about and writing to an extent about such topics as Blogging 2.0, distributed conversations, smart people networks (think Twitter, FriendFeed), and the trend toward a blogging/microblogging balance, and all of those things involve an ebb and flow of conversation, each point of which can kick off in any number of directions… or perhaps not at all.

Today, for example, I noticed a statement that Robert Scoble made on FriendFeed that I actually picked up on over on Twitter. It’s received a great many comments and likes on FF already:

“I invested a lot of time this year i

“There’s a complete disconnect between the two worlds”November 13

Felicia Day is a talented actress, writer, and producer, and gets it to boot:

Felicia Day, the creator of The Guild and star of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, talked today about how different the world of Hollywood and the web are. Speaking at the NewTeeVee Live conference she said there’s a complete disconnect between the two worlds and told aspiring webisode creators to make sure they understand the difference between the two mediums. For her, the web is about showing real life for real people, rather than the artifice and perfection shown by Hollywood.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog got a huge boost in buzz and interest because it was created by Joss Whedon (disclaimer: I’m an unabashed Whedon Worshipper) and starred Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Day. But it also got it, playing extremely comfortably within the online “webisodic” medium.

Beyond being a darkly comic sci-fi musical (how’s that for starters, by the way?), the content played with technology extremely comfortably and well. Dr. Horrible, played by Harris, videoblogging within the realm of the story about his evil intentions, announced that he was going to rob a bank. Cut to a later scene, and he’s shown battered and bruised because, well, the cops watched his videoblog on the Internet and therefore were waiting at the bank well ahead of time. A comic stretch to be sure, but it worked.

The business side of Dr. Horrible was also handled extremely well. It was released for free for a brief period of time, before going on sale exclusively at iTunes for a reasonable fee. (You can now also watch it for free on Hulu and on the official site.) As noted below, by Internet standards it was a huge hit.

And, for its efforts, Dr. Horrible was awarded as part of Time’s best inventions of 2008 under the heading of The Direct-to-Web Supervillain Musical:

It’s hard to imagine a studio green-lighting an idea as weird and ostensibly uncommercial as a 43-min., three-part online supervillain musical. But in a medium that rewards the unconventional — the Web — Dr. Horrible was a hit. After its July debut, the series reached No. 1 on iTunes’ video chart, with 2.2 million downloads a week.

Here’s a taste of Dr. Horrible if you’re not familiar:

Blogging 2.0 and the microblogging/social media revolutionNovember 12

Here’s my new thinking: probably the best and most successful bloggers will also tend to be the best blogger/microblogger hybrids, and vice versa.

Now let me explain.

Over the summer I wrote several pieces about this emerging idea called Blogging 2.0. My sense at the time was that successful bloggers (more on how to define this below) would need to continue to churn out valuable content, network effectively in their space, get linked by high quality websites, and so forth, but would also need to engage in the emerging social media space, on red hot communications platforms such as Twitter, FriendFeed, and Disqus.

In Blogging 2.0: from surviving to thriving, I wrote:

My sense is that there’s a galaxy of well intentioned and ambitious bloggers out there who are and will be trying to figure out how to find their way in this new and strange era of distributed conversations (i.e. you spend the time, brain power, expertise, and hard work to create and share a new idea on your blog and it ends up being discussed in any number of other places).

…successful Bloggers 2.0 need to dive headlong into the places where eyeballs are and conversations are being held. The idea is to make friends, share ideas, and above all else promote one’s personal brand with the hope that people will eventually find their way back to your blog. It’s �