Discovery in Your Comments

Disqus keeps improving both as a commenting and discussion platform but especially as an advertising platform.

Disqus gets in right in a critical way. They aren’t selling their advertising strategy to only publishers or only advertisers. They also aren’t leaving out users.

Just as we talk of Discovery as a combination of three things (paid search, SEO and social media marketing), Disqus is using the term “Discovery” as the linchpin for their strategy towards both publishers and advertisers (and especially users).

From TheNextWeb:

In addition, it keeps on improving its algorithm to increase the targeting of the content it recommends. Relevance is key here; it means that publishers can boost page views and drive traffic to advertisers without annoying their readers. This is the challenge of Disqus’ model, but also its power, as it focuses on three parties at once: publishers, advertisers and users.

We’ll be experimenting with Disqus’ model in a few weeks with a new client and can’t wait to see the results. We’ll def report back when we have some hard data.

In the meantime, go explore how comments, discussion and user interaction can also mean a better experience for your business for you and the people you’re trying to have discover you.

Willie and Trigger

It’s amazing to think that one instrument has pretty much provided the soundtrack of my life:

Trigger: Texas Monthly December 2012: “Without Willie, there would be no Trigger. And it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that without Trigger, there would be no Willie. Willie likes to say that his guitar will probably wear out just about the same time he does. But instead of slowing down, as most people do when they approach their ninth decade, Willie keeps doing the things he’s been doing for years, and so does Trigger. The pair did more than 150 shows this year, and they’ll likely do about that many in 2013. They’ll make some more albums and write some more songs. They’ll play as if they’re going to play forever.”

Fantastic article on my favorite musician and favorite instrument.

Back to Field Notes

I’m insanely excited to be using Field Notes again.

I switch back and forth between Moleskines and Field Notes notebooks, but I’ve definitely missed the feel and experience of a good ad useful notebook lately since being away from Field Notes.

Sure, there are digital ways to capture todos and tasks and thoughts and notes, but ever since my time in the basement of an art gallery, I’ve realized the need for a good notebook.

Feels like an old friend is back.

Indiana Jones, UChicago and an Amazing Tale of Misplaced Mail

So insanely awesome (and yes, I will DRIVE up to Chicago for the Indiana Jones exhibit):

UChicago College Admissions, Mischief Managed For those of you who have…: “According to Paul, this package was en route from him in Guam to his intended recipient IN ITALY (registered mail confirmation attached) when it must have fallen out of the package in Hawaii.”

Social TV Rating from Nielsen and Twitter

Fascinating on many levels but especially the notion of analytics and real-time engagement (something performance marketers have acknowledged for a while but larger brands are slowly realizing):

Nielsen and Twitter Establish Social TV Rating: “Nielsen, a leading global provider of information and insights into what consumers watch and buy, and Twitter today announced an exclusive multi-year agreement to create the ‘Nielsen Twitter TV Rating’ for the US market. Under this agreement, Nielsen and Twitter will deliver a syndicated-standard metric around the reach of the TV conversation on Twitter, slated for commercial availability at the start of the fall 2013 TV season.”

Yahoo’s “New” Ad Format

I’ve got a long long history dealing with co-registrations and lead generation going back to the halcyon days before 2003 when email marketing was all the rage (still should be) and FreeSlide was just a twinkle in our performance marketing eyes.

I’m not a defender of the admittedly very tacky and mostly illegal tactics that many “marketers” employed to get iPod-wanting visitors with a zip code and an email address zipping down registration paths towards free Gevalia coffee pots or Netflix DVD’s, but the registration path become an essential part of performance marketing during this “wild west” (as we called it) period.

So, it’s interesting to see Yahoo roll out a new Cost Per Lead (CPL in the industry lingo) ad format in its search results that looks strikingly familiar…

Yahoo Intros Cost-Per-Lead Search Ads, First New Format Under Marissa Mayer: “The new ad format, which can collect information like demographics, email addresses or phone numbers, is called Cost Per Lead for Search. It’s clearly marked as ‘Ad from’ with the advertiser’s name following.”

Reminiscing About What the Web Was

From 2008:

The vanishing personal site – Jeffrey Zeldman: “Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments.”

From this week in 2012:

The Web We Lost – Anil Dash: “The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we’ve lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.”

We’ve lost a great deal indeed.

Lots to ponder between these last four years and these two complimentary bookends on the handing over of our namespaces and personal sites to venture capital funds, eager stock buyers and corporate silos.

And yes, I miss Technorati as well.

The Hobbit’s Bad Review

One of the best reviews I’ve read in a long while…

‘The Hobbit – An Unexpected Journey,’ by Peter Jackson – NYTimes.com: “Over all, though, the shiny hyper-reality robs Middle-earth of some of its misty, archaic atmosphere, turning it into a gaudy high-definition tourist attraction. But of course it will soon be overrun with eager travelers, many of whom are likely to find the journey less of an adventure than they had expected.”

Maybe we should stick with this one:

The Hobbit : The Original Unedited 1977 Animated Classic