SOME RANDOM DUDE

Well, this is it, the big 50. The Weekly Links have been going on for close to a year now and it has become one of my favorites pieces of this blog. Even though I am on vacation, I thought I would take the time to drop the links for you - albeit a bit late.

Nevertheless, please enjoy the links while I enjoy my vacation.

Enjoy the links.

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I have been quite vocal on my lack of regard for online advertising and have even spent some time writing about how I think it could be improved. While it may not be in the online world, it is good to see some companies trying to improve the advertising we are exposed to. Our good friends at Google are interested in making TV advertising “useful” for its viewers. I assume this model will be loosely based on their highly successful Adsense program. After spending my youth watching TV and subsequently ridding my life of TV after living on my own, I can understand how some people think TV advertising could get a little smarter…

According to this article, Google is planning on making $11 billion in ad sales - not too shabby. It is not a secret that Adsense is a success from many different standpoints. I would definitely like to see online advertising go even further in its usefulness and site-by-site basis, but I recognize how large of a leap Adsense made to online advertising. Old media advertising could definitely use a shot in the arm at this point - and who better to go it than one of the best success-stories in new media. Still, it will be interesting if new media ideas still work in a different medium. Old media definitely will be eventually making the slow transition to new media - perhaps that evolution will take care of the problem on its own.

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As the Nine Inch Nails viral campaign continues, its brilliance is starting to show. Nevermind the released tracks or the storyline being concocted for this campaign - do not get me wrong, they are both amazing - but that is entirely beside the point of this article.

With a few small websites, a couple flash drives containing MP3 files, and a whole boat-load of creativity, this viral campaign has caught fire - with three articles hitting the front page of Digg and tons of buzz generated elsewhere (online and offline). The Year Zero viral campaign has definitely succeeded and continues to draw attention much longer than the usual “marketing spikes” do. From my view, this is a major score for the media 2.0 corner. With the media/advertising blitz of the Super Bowl still resonating I thought it would be interesting to see how the marketing campaigns of media 1.0’s Goliath compared to the Nine Inch Nails viral project.
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Fitting that the Daily Digg’s subject would be, well, Digg. There has been quite a bit of controversy over some of Digg’s methods of chosing top stories - this is another well-written description of the problems. In a nutshell, the top of the Digg food-chain essentially controls what gets to the front page - that is most likely why the same sites and the same subjects (Wii articles 24/7) are on the front page. This is obviously far from the Democratic approach that Digg boasts and smaller, less-known sites that do not have the right “friends” have a snowball’s chance in hell to make it to the front page. Sadly, the very strength of social news is completely lost in this model.

Delicious seems to be the clear next-in-line to dethrone Digg if things continue as is and people become fed up with the status-quo. Reddit is another challenger, but its traffic is significantly lower and the ability to down-vote storied opens up the door for rampant gaming - something which seems to be fairly common as discussed on Reddit.

Social media/news was supposed to be the solution to the top-down information approach of traditional media. Sadly, the “new media” seems to be taking quite a few lessons from the old school.

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