The SEO Playbook
The SEO Playbook - Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice - Stuntdubl - Search Engine Marketing Consultant is a great article on the advanced basics of SEO architecture for you site. A must read and resource to keep on hand.
April 23, 2007
March 03, 2007
What makes a widget
Don Hinchcliffe the Enterprise Web 2.0 guru has a great article talking about the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) web phenom of Widgets, Badges and Gadgets. He has a great quote that matches why we are developing Netvocate
If you’re still playing the old single Web site game, aren’t using syndication strategically, and haven’t leveraged the entire Web as a platform for your content and services, changes are that you’re at a significant competitive disadvantage. Even the page views/advertising issues aren’t as big as expected. Widgets actually don’t take away from business models based on advertising, and in fact, can complement advertising viewership significantly.
March 02, 2007
M&M Maker
M&M just released a pretty fun little WOM brand site at http://www.becomeanmm.com/ where you can create your own M&M character. Pretty fun stuff and a good showcase of where brands are taking their message. Good article in USA Today
Check out my captain:
February 12, 2007
Box.net Widget
Box.net released a killer new widget today. I can't for some reason copy the code using firefox on my Mac, but I sent them an email to see what they have to say.
So why is this widget so cool? Well, it’s a music player. It’s a photo sharing tool. It’s a way to distribute large files. In other words, it’s just an incredibly useful tool with numerous applications.
Beyond its utility, there are a couple of other things to note.
I have not seen a widget that does a better job of enabling new sign-ups (and logins) through the body of the widget. To date, services that require registration have had a real hard time making effective use of widgets. Opening up a new browser window and forcing someone to join or sign in is just so ….. clunky. It sort of defeats the whole point of being a distributed service.
Box.net does an extremely elegant job of making new sign ups fast, easy, and painless – all within the body of the widget. Anybody who has been grappling with how to reconcile forced registrations with widgets should definitely take a few minutes to try out Box.net’s solution. You might learn something – I know that I did.
So what are the implications of this? Let’s say that I’m reading a blog and there’s a music track that I like being shared via a Box.net widget. Without ever leaving the blog, I can grab the music track, join Box.net, and set up my own Box.net widget pre-loaded with that music track. And of course, it doesn’t have to be a music track. It could be a photo, a presentation, a whitepaper. It’s easy to imagine Box.net enabling a rapid spread of files around the Web.
The other thing that I love about this widget is how it fits into Box.net’s business model. Box.net makes money by charging folks for file storage. They give you up to 1GB of file storage for free, and up to 5GB for $4.99 per month. What the widget does is to sign up people for the free trial version of the service, all within the user experience of the widget publisher site.
By providing a one click “Share in my Box” functionality, Box.net is effectively leveraging the content of the widget publisher to propagate its widgets - and more importantly, sell its file storage service. The beauty is that folks don’t even know they’re signing up for a free trial of a file storage service – they are just grabbing a piece of media that they like for their blog. It’s brilliant. From a business model perspective, it’s far more intuitive than say, YouTube’s widget strategy.
So while the debate continues about whether widgets can ever make money, Box.net has quietly built a widget that will drive qualified lead after qualified lead to their revenue engine. c
Web 2.0: Buzz-Monitoring and Tracking | Smashing Magazine
Web 2.0: Buzz-Monitoring and Tracking | Smashing Magazine is a pretty killer blog post on how to measure our blog or any site's buzz online. A definite must read for those that care.
Hype on Widgets?
Valleywag has a post talking about the hype around widgets. DJI also bags on the perilous business model of widgets. The commentary talks about how "digital bling" as widgets have been described are a distraction to blogs and slow down pageviews. And where's the business model?
I agree that many widgets are bling and that their value comes and goes with the whims of Myspace users. But I have been talking about these widgets as "dumb", they are only glorified banner ads with a feature to allow ease of copying. What is needed is a "smart" widget that takes on the qualities of a simple application. A small intelligent widget can be an amazing tool for advertisers, brand advocates, nonprofits, most anyone that wants user generated advocacy to carry them into the social media space. That is exactly what we are working on at Netvocate and I believe we are going to show that there is a huge business around "smart" widgets. We may even help educate other widgets to raise their status ;)Technorati Tags: widgets, predictions, netvocate
Bling for your Blog
The New York Times just posted a story about widgets... this really is going to be the year of the widgets.
Fractals of Change: Web 2.0 - Greater Initial Investments Required
Tom Evslin write today about why it takes Web 2.0 companies more money to get started than the $2000 for Digg or the small initial investments to launch facebook or YouTube. Fractals of Change: Web 2.0 %u2013 Greater Initial Investments Required
So, if you’re just now starting up, don’t get blinded by the successes of the first people to realize a platform could be built and operated on the cheap. You already missed that wave. Now, unless you are extraordinarily lucky or well-connected, you aren’t going to succeed in publicizing your new service and getting up to a critical mass of content or subscribers or both unless you raise or have enough money to create initial awareness or value. There is too much clutter from which you must emerge.
The Charles River Ventures Quickstart Calculator
The Charles River Ventures Quickstart Calculator: "
Reader Dave Lavinsky has created a nifty calculator for entrepreneurs wanting to know how their seed and subsequent rounds affect their ownership in a start-up.
He calculates the seed round on the ‘QuickStart’ formula popularized by Charles River Ventures, which we wrote about last week. CRV is writing small checks in return to start-ups in exchange for getting a discount on an investment in a company’s first round.
The calculator allows up to 5 rounds of financing and shows the equity that the management team, CRV (in this case), and other investors get. You can view the calculator here.
(Via VentureBeat.)
