pic thx to Anthony Cain

The 2008 presidential campaign has had the largest online ad spend of all other U.S. presidential elections combined. With that said, we still have a long way to go to catch up with traditional media when it comes to total dollars spent.

As of September 2008, TNS Media Intelligence estimated that the candidates have spent an estimated $7 million in online advertising and estimated $300 million on TV since February of 2007. To put it in perspective, the 2008 Presidential election online ad spend was just over 2 percent of the traditional media spend for the same period of time, compared to an estimated 7 percent of total ad spending in the US. So on pure percentages, these presidential campaigns spent less per dollar than the average US spend.

More interesting than the unprecedented amount of dollars which are being spent, both on and offline, is [...] Continue Reading…

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This is a first in a series of guest posts by Yogini. Detailing how to use Social Media to raise awareness for charitable causes. In the coming posts I will go into much more specific detail on tips and techniques used to do this.

Over the last 15 months, I have been using the Internet, specifically Social Media to raise awareness for my missing friend, Lilly Aramburo. Lilly  is a 23 year old mother of a 2 Y/O child who was last seen on June 1,2007.  If you wish to know more about her case, please visit my blog Justice In Miami. I took on the role of advocate/spokesperson for her family. She was my friend and I felt like I needed to do something to help. It has become a full-time occupation which I have taken on with much enthusiasm. You see, the main stream media has not been cooperative [...] Continue Reading…

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On July 23, 2008 right after the f8 Developer Conference in San Francisco, Ca. Facebook opened up its Facebook Connect program. Initially it is launching with 24 Partners including Digg, Hulu, Six Apart, CBS, CNET, CollegeHumor, Disney/ABC, Seesmic and Vimeo. A notable statistic is that 33% of the initial partners are from the Online Video space.
According to Mark Zuckerberg, the 24 year old CEO and founder of Facebook, “Facebook Connect is the next evolution of the Facebook Platform — enabling you to integrate the power of Facebook into your own website“. In addition Dave Morin emphasized these 4 points on the Facebook Developer Blog describing Facebook Connect.

Trusted Authentication Users will be able to connect their Facebook account with any partner website using a trusted authentication method. Whether at login, or anywhere else a developer would like to add social context, the user will be able to authenticate and [...] Continue Reading…

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Yesterday friendfeed launched it’s ‘rooms’ feature. The “who’s who” of the Social Media crowd were there rubbing virtual elbows and commenting back and forth on each others “shares“. In fact, the first Social Media room was created by Muhammad Saleem within hours of the launch.

The rooms are very easy to set up. Just click the ‘rooms’ tab on the top right of the friendfeed page. A useful option is the ability to make the ‘room’ either private or public. I think it has great potential as a collaboration or Brainstorming tool. It’s also fairly easy to invite current friendfeed users, or contacts from other services. The Bookmarklet also makes it very easy to share valuable content within your groups or your main friendfeed.

The basic idea behind friendfeed ‘rooms’ is to set up ‘mini feeds’ of contextually relevant information which encourage interaction between the ‘room’ members. Allowing other like minded [...] Continue Reading…

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I have been using FireFox exclusively for 4+years. I love everything about FireFox, the add-on’s, the themes and definitely the versatility. A year ago, I started playing around with the new Mozilla based social browser called Flock. Several versions later, I think I’m ready to make the switch to full time use of Flock for all social media related web browsing. Here is why I think you should to.
1) Built in Media Sharing

Flock has built in support for Photobucket, Flickr, Facebook, Piczo, Picasa, YouTube and more.
That makes it really, really easy to share everything from pictures to videos to links to text. Just Drag and Drop from the Media Bar or right-click to send to email or to a blog.
You can even carry photos, videos and text, wherever you go online, right on the Media Bar or on the Web Clipboard. This feature alone saves me so [...] Continue Reading…

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Today as the Olympic Torch drama was unfolding in San Fransisco, CA  many of those who are passionate about Tibetan human rights issues, but not internet savvy, had to wait for reports on CNN, MSNBC or even worse the local news to be informed.

Others, with a bit more internet prowess, accessed the information via AP , Google News, You Tube or other forms of RSS feeds. But those of us active in the Twittersphere, were receiving updates in real time. Thanks to LaunghingSquid, we had not only Twitter updates, but also videos and pictures

It’s no wonder print is on that horrible decline. With information exchanging at this rabid pace, who the hell is willing to wait a whole day for news? I mean don’t get me wrong, I love to chill on Sundays with my coffee and my NYT. (Yes , I roll like that).

Check out some [...] Continue Reading…

I have to confess, I fiend for the Twit, I love Twitter, I can’t get enough of it!
That being the case, I have to ask myself ,what is that important on Twitter that I have to have it on a PermaTab on my Firefox browser?
It reminds me of watching MTV. I mean the old school MTV that actually played videos all day.There was something so hypnotic and addictive about sitting through those 25 shitty videos, to see that 1 kick ass Beastie Boys video. But even that got old really fast.

Twitter is the same to me, because half the stuff that is tweeted, I don’t really care about. Either, because it’s not relevant or because it is some abstract reference to an inside joke between friends that I just don’t get or care to get.
But this brings me to my point, We need to have a better way [...] Continue Reading…

A look at MSN Ad Center- Ad Intelligence Excel plug in.

Now that the MSN Ad Intelligence Excel Plug in has been out for about 3 months, and I’ve had a chance to use all of its features, attended a webinar and read all possible documentation on it; I decided to put together a quick start guide for those interested in adding a new and useful tool to their PPC bag of tricks. OR for those who have downloaded it already and are wondering “what the hell do all of those colorful little buttons do?”

This will be a 3 part series of posts. In the first, we will cover all of the buttons on the Excel toolbar and what they do. The second will discuss various uses for each of the buttons/features and a more detailed analysis of algorithms’ and techniques used by MSN to gather the data for this [...] Continue Reading…

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Slicing, Dicing and Splicing RSS like an Iron Chef

RSS is my friend, without it I could never stay current with the 200+ feeds I subscribe to. But besides just aggregating feeds from my favorite blogs, I have found several other cool uses for my RSS reader, which allow me to save both time and money.
The RSS reader is a great place to find new content. From ideas for linkbait to images for your blog post. With the right feeds and settings the possibilities are endless ,but in the meantime, here are a lucky 13 to keep you busy.
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Here is a RSS mashup on Yahoo Pipes that makes your boring old Digg RSS feed into a SUPER Digg rss feed. It adds category information, submitter information (with a link to the users page), Digg count, number of comments, etc..

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=_Dj0DgMi3BGIx3_Sp2IyXQ

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Here is a Yahoo Pipes mash up [...] Continue Reading…