Sam Harrelson

Learning, Teaching and the New Web

Last week, my grad school alma mater Yale opened its doors to the web and followed the path of Stanford and M.I.T. by putting popular courses up for anyone to enjoy and learn from.

Here’s a great story from the NY Times about an amazing Physics teacher at M.I.T. who is using this newfound access to people outside the ivory towers to share his love for physics:

Professor Lewin’s videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond who stuff his e-mail in-box with praise.

“Through your inspiring video lectures i have managed to see just how BEAUTIFUL Physics is, both astounding and simple,” a 17-year-old from India e-mailed recently.

NY Times: At 71, Physics Professor is a Web Star

TweeterBoard is Bad and Stunts Growth of Conversations (as Do All “Lists”)

My pal Marshall Kirkpatrick made a post on Read/WriteWeb concerning the fascinating new TweeterBoard site:

On Tweeterboard you’ll find not only a list of the top 100 most influential users on Twitter – you can also look up any of almost 2000 users and see who they are conversing with and get some idea how much influence they carry in the Twitter ecosystem. Only a small portion of Twitter users are being tracked so far – but if indexing can be automated (!) then this could become a very important service.

Tweetboard is fascinating but it’s inherently bad for the type of organic and fluid conversation that happens on Twitter everyday.

If Twitter is going to make it to the mainstream and really start pushing the envelope of personal content production by non-tech gods and goddesses, we’ve got to get over the silly notion of “rank” and “importance” that these types of things measure.

Why?

Because sites like Technorati and Techmeme (though utilitarian for some) have stunted (or at least perverted) the blogosphere by introducing concepts of ranking and opened the floodgates to spammer-and-gamer SEO’s and affiliates (those are adjectives for some, not for all) and created a class system of blogging that is not easily overcomed.

Let’s level the playing field with Twitter and not repeat the same mistakes that caused for the creation of A Lists, B Lists and Z Lists. Otherwise, Twitter and micro-blogging in general will suffer.

[Update] After I posted this, fellow Twitter user Mike Krigsman (someone I follow) and ZD Net blogger posted this:

@samharrelson Absolutely agree core value of Twitter is leveling the field. Diminishment of that attribute will limit it’s value. Think Digg

Exactly.

Shopping.com or Shogging.com?

Interesting post (and discussion in the comments) from ComparisonEngine on Pepperjam’s shogging.com site:

In a search for Ugg boots, I found the following ad:

I thought I was clicking on a Shopping.com ad. Instead, I arrived at Shogging.com, which is owned by the Pepperjam Network.

Kris Jones has also posted about Brian’s ComparisonEngine post on the PepperJam blog . Should be fun to see how the comments and conversation play out and what people think of the PPC marketing strategy behind this (and to see how many affiliates or agencies are doing similar things).

Google Goes Useful: Easily Check Flight Status

While seemingly mundane, this is killer for those of us with an already large part of our digital life wrapped up in the Google cloud. Sure there are sites that already do this, but Google has earned my trust for essential info like a flight status:

For the latest information on a flight’s status, simply search for an airline and flight number, and the first result will tell you whether your flight is on time or delayed as well as the estimated departure and arrival times.

Better Flight Stats Results from Google

Thanks, Anna

Chris Brogan wished his wife a happy birthday in a beautiful post on his blog today.

Following in his footsteps, I just wanted to give a quick “Thank you and I love you” to my wife. It has certainly been one heck of a year, but she impresses me more and more everyday with her skills as a physician, friend, wife and (now) mother…

Here’s to the next 50 holiday seasons!

Sitemap Videos for Google Indexing

Google continues its foray into video with the announcement of sitemaps for video:

In our effort to help users search all the world’s public videos, the Google Video team joined the Sitemaps folks to introduce Video Sitemaps—an extension of the Sitemap Protocol that helps make your videos more searchable via Google Video Search. By submitting this video-specific Sitemap in addition to your standard Sitemap, you can specify all the video files on your site, along with relevant metadata.

Here’s an example (emphasis mine):

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
     xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.0">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
   <video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
   <video:player_loc allow_embed="yes">http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
   <video:title>My funny video</video:title>
   <video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
</video:video>
</url>

<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_other_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
   <video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/videos/video1.mpg</video:content_loc>
   <video:description>A really awesome video</video:description>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>

This will facilitate Google’s indexing of video based around relevant data. Of course, this also helps Google to properly categorize videos in order to display relevant contextual ads via AdSense.

For small to medium publishers, this could be a good chance to increase AdSense commissions if your videos are properly indexed early and often. As seen in the
example above, Google’s spiders will be looking for keyword descriptions.

You can get going with video sitemaps through the Google Webmaster Tools page.

AdMob and the Coming Mobile Marketing Revolution

AdMob is an advertising network aimed at the mobile market. They interact with publishers and advertisers much in the same way as a Commission Junction or Linkshare or ShareASale, but focus on mobile ads, creatives and deliveries.

They have just released their November stats (report available here):

It is our pleasure to send you our third monthly AdMob Mobile Metrics with November data. We have appreciated your feedback and continue to add to the report. This month we have added month-over-month change calculations to make it easier to observe trends in geographic regions, manufacturers and individual handset models.

Some observations from the November data:

AdMob Network impressions were up 4.5% November over October to 1,722,213,245. The growth was driven by Western Europe and North America.

Apple iPhone share continued to grow and we saw a strong first full month of iPhone traffic in the UK.

Nokia N Series devices showed strong growth in November.

The trends here are interesting to observe and digest considering the impact that mobile marketing is poised to make in the general marketing industry in 2008. Companies like AdMob are paving the way and will surely be either competitors or acquisitions of Google, Microsoft or Yahoo.

Digital River Shares Slip: Affiliate Future for Games?

Barron’s is reporting that Digital River, the parent company of affiliate network oneNetworkDirect, is seeing its stock price slide today in light of lower revenue from key client Symantec resulting in a lower valuation:

Zorovic says that he now expects the software-downloading service company’s revenue from key customer Symantec (SYMC) to be down 5% year-over-year in the current quarter, rather than flat as previously expected. “As Symantec continues to focus on its costs in 2008, we anticipate it continues on setting a high performance/price hurdle for Digital River, as it did with subscriptions in 2007,” he writes. Zorovic adds that he expects ongoing investment in R&D and sales and marketing as the company develops its games offerings. He now sees operating margins next year flat versus 2007, rather than the 240 basis point he had been projecting.

I’m eager to see how the gaming offerings mentioned play into oneNetworkDirect. That is a segment of consumer culture that affiliate marketing hasn’t particularly done well (or much) with in the past. Since gaming (both console and online) continue to explode in users and revenues every quarter, it’s time that a network figured out how to leverage the affiliate channel to promote games.

Why Social Media Marketing Matters

Peter Kim has a thought provoking post on a quote from Lester Wunderman:

“We are living in an age of repersonalization and individualization. People, products and services are all seeking an individual identity. Taste, desire, ambition and lifestyle have made shopping once again a form of personal expression. A computer can know and remember as much marketing detail about 200,000,000 consumers as did the owner of a crossroads general store about his handful of customers. It can know an select such personal details as who prefers strong coffee, imported beer, new fashions, bright colors. Who just bought a home, freezer, camera, automobile. Who had a new baby, is overweight, got married, owns a pet, likes romantic novels, serious reading, listens to Bach or the Beatles. New marketing forms which will link these facts to advertising and selling must evolve – where advertising and buying become a single action.”

Spot on.

Crazy thing is that the quote is from November … of 1967. That is real thought shaping.

Peter makes the point that the quote (which helped to spur the direct marketing industry) can be applied just as fittingly to social computing and media today. Perhaps if we all go back and re-read and re-digest (or grok for you Heinlein fans out there) Wunderman’s words, we can spur the evolution of the next form of marketing which is surely ready to birth.

Performics Offers Make Good for Downtime

Performics offers affiliates a make good for downtime earlier this month in an email to network members…

As you know from previous communications, DoubleClick Performics experienced a system outage on Saturday, December 8, 2007 due to an inadvertent complete loss of power in the DoubleClick Thornton, Colorado data center.

In light of the service disruption, DoubleClick Performics decided to do something special for its Affiliate Publishers and will pay a one-time bonus of 10% based on affiliate commissions generated on Saturday, December 15, 2007. Such bonus will be equal to 10% of the commissions earned during the entire day by an Affilate Publisher and will be reflected in the January payment statement.

We are hopeful you view this as a reflection of our commitment to your success, and the success of our Affiliate Marketing business.

We appreciate your valuable contribution.

The DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Team