ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

Just heard about this conference in LA run by ImprintLife.com that is focused on trends in pop culture, art, blogs, and clothing. This looks like a breath of fresh air from the suffocating hot air that web2.0 has been producing recently and is going to focus on some fun stuff. I’m currently trying to get involved in the blog culture panel which is moderated by Josh Spear who is an avid blogger on trends and cool hunting.

LiveRail is a video advertising network that eschews the usual pre-roll and post-roll model to put the user in control, ad boxes are shown next to the video so the viewer can choose to click on the boxes to play the ad, see the example below.

I think this is a very good value proposition for advertisers as they only pay when there ad rolls. Personally i’m a huge fan of opt in advertising, I experience this when I’m fast forwarding on my tivo and sometimes back up to watch an ad i like. Geico cavemen anybody “it’s mother, i’ll put her on speaker”.

Currently it’s in an invite only beta, you can read a much more in depth analysis from Read/Write Web here.

Project Wonderful brings an innovative transparent auction model to banner advertising which works brilliantly for niche blogs and communities.

There are very few advertising options out there for niche focused blogs, community sites, etc. Most advertising options rely on a large predictable audience to compensate for the generally low relevance of the advertisements. This is diametrically opposed to what blogs produce which is a relatively small audience with a focus on a particular topic, with variable and unpredictable traffic patterns (like when you get on boingboing or the front page of digg).

Project Wonderful’s model is based on “Cost Per Day” where advertisers bid on spots on the web site, if their bid is the highest for a particular day, their ad shows up and they are billed for that day. Advertisers get to choose the shape, configuration, number of ads, starting bid, and then they can choose their approval options for the ads.

I set up 6 125×125 spots on my T-Shirt blog two days ago, and started the bidding at 50 cents a spot which would garner me $30 for the month, not a lot but I wanted to make sure the spots got filled quickly and trusted the market would do it’s work. The next day all the spots were filled (10 bids in total) and the price was now at $1 per day.

One of the really good things for advertisers and the publisher is Project Wonderful keeps historical stats on traffic, bid price and referrers over the previous month. Take a look at my T-shirt bidding page to get an idea.

Talk about Web2.0 mellodrama, Lonelygirl15 sacrificed in some weird cult ceremony, and apparently there are a lot more Lonelygirls out there that the cult is after, clearly Lonelygirl15 has outgrown the budget and they need some fresh blood. Interestingly the series finally was exclusively on myspace TV.

And fake steve jobs turns out to be a great strategy to sell books! Turns out it was Forbes editor Daniel Lyons.

Both contrived, fake, entertaining, watchable…. at least initially.

Reading the Wired “Slap in the Facebook: It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up” combined with my experience on various social networks makes me wonder if any of them can really be sustainable in the long run. Aren’t they just short cuts to the connectivity that the internet should allow given the right infrastructure and tools. Facebook has been called the “roach motel” of social networks, in other words it’s easy to get your information in there, but impossible to get it out, wasn’t that the AOL strategy?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently and I think the long term sustainability of a social network can easily be judged by asking the question “if everyone left tomorrow what value would remain?”. Asking that question of Flickr, youtube or Yelp yields a very different answer than facebook, myspace, or friendster.

I’m beginning think in the end it is how social networks engage their community in value creating activities that will determine their long term success. If your only value is the aggregation of eyeballs then you will get run over by the next wave just like AOL.

On a related note a look at Rohit’s latest post on “What Most Social Networks Do That People Hate …

Ad Age has published the “power 150″, or the 150 “top” marketing, advertising and PR blogs. ExperienceCurve made the list at 140, so it’ll be interesting to see what the effects are.

The one thing that I hope comes out of people doing lists like these is encourage someone to start putting some tools out there that can help with the measurement and discovery of topical blogs. I personally wish that Technorati would pick up the ball here, they should have been the first to identify that there are different kinds of blogs and measurement in particular verticals would be extremely valuable.

(see also Peter Kims list of the top 20 marketer blogs, I do much better there

Kris over at ‘Cross The Breeze has some further critique of technorati’s apparent lack of innovation (ironically I had to dig through technorati to find that post of Kris’s because he had linked to me

If you are working on launching a product/service to get into the web2.0/social media space and you’re looking at digg, tech-crunch, techmeme, technorati, and even myspace and facebook etc. as successful models, you might miss your target market. Those are tools for geeks (and kids), and geeks are not by any stretch of the imagination the mass market. (I still think facebook is hard to use and i’ve only been working on the web since 1996)

Someone pointed out the other day a social networking site for grandparents (launching in the fall) the other day and made a “social networks have jumped the shark” kind of comment. I totally disagreed, you capture the 50+ market on a social network there is gold in them thar hills, at least a lot more disposable income than most people on myspace. Also launched recently Minti.com - a social network for parents to share tips, advice, network etc. now parenting is a hobby that some people spend a shit load on.

(I just heard about minti from a video scoble had put on Kyte.tv, which is sort of like youtube but much more orientated to creation and distribution of video on mobile)

Ok, same thing goes for advertising, I just went to minti and saw an ad for “crutial memory” (that’s RAM for the computer not some kind of baby einstein video), are they kidding, that’s some advertising pissing in the wind right there.