Online vendettas, Yelp style. And mob think gets personal.

Virtual currencies congealing?

The history of the corporation.

How good are you at rumor centrality?

“Skill must be culled from a string of mistakes. Lots of them.”

Kilgard speculates that the expanding cortical map is like a search committee. It’s generating a huge range of candidate solutions to a problem the brain has been tasked with, but doesn’t yet know how to solve. (How do I discriminate these tones? How do I get the ball in the basket? How do I solve that tricky calculus problem?) Once a good solution is found, the search committee is disbanded. Efficient changes that impart skill are retained, and the non-meaningful changes are winnowed away as the map shrinks.

Tweetable Ads

We added tweetability to our ads in January. With the click of a button, advertisers can add a “tweet this” button that automatically suggests a twitter update, complete with URL and hashtag. This feature is already one of our most popular, and you can see how successful it’s been for two of our advertisers: PETA and Simon & Schuster. Even President Obama used it to kick off his 2012 campaign!

Live Preview

This simple but useful update lets an advertiser see a live preview of her ad as she builds it in our DIY system. Before the updates, the preview was displayed on a separate page. Now our advertisers can save time and make changes on the fly, rather than clicking back and forth between pages.

Video Ads

It takes a lot of work to create a great video, so getting quality views should be the easy part. With our new video ads feature, an advertiser can add his own Youtube or Vimeo masterpiece to an ad by dropping the URL into our DIY form. That’s it. No rich media fees. No extra production costs.

Multi-Column Ads

We’ve always encouraged publishers to customize their Blogads ad zone to fit the unique look and feel of their blogs. Now we’ve made our as zones even more customizable. For the blogger who wants to fill the space in her wide sidebar, or place a row of Blogads between posts, we’ve added the mult-column function to all Blogads. Now our bloggers can display up to six columns of ads to any of their adzones.

New Homepage Design

In January we radically simplified our home page design. This allows advertisers and bloggers to find the information they need with minimal clicking. With a front-and-center video player, we can highlight new features as they roll out. The design also makes our community features more prominent, with links to blog posts, tweets, and Facebook page in the footer. We liked the new header and footer so much that we’ve added it to the blog, too. Just scroll up and down to check them out.

Other New Blogads.com Layout

In addition to the home page, we’ve also rebooted our “Why Buy” page for advertisers and “Sell Ads” page for publishers. The clean new layout of these page brings the most important information above the fold, highlighting out unique features and success stories from past advertisers and bloggers we’ve worked with.

We’re always working to improve the Blogads experience for bloggers and advertisers alike. Is there a new feature you’d love to see? Let us know!

Last week, Ben Malbon, the Director of Strategy at Google Creative Lab, wondered aloud if C-level Innovation Officers were necessary for creative agencies:

But do we really need them? If so, why? And what do they see as their value to creative businesses?

He asked four prominent “new mutation[s] of communications professional” to tell him, in Tweet-friendly brevity, what it is they do.

Rishadt Tobbacowla (Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer)

Help drive future competitive advantage. Seek fresh insightful connections.

100 retweets later, the post had dozens of comments, both for and against the CIO position. A common theme in the comments was that we ideally shouldn’t need CIOs. Tim Brunelle commented:

To my mind, Innovation as a title is akin to “Digital [name your discipline].” We’re in an era overrun with both digital and innovation, which ought to mean *everyone* works in digital and innovation, to some degree. Right?

Malbon, inspired and enlightened by feedback, followed up his post with “Ten Things I’ve Found To Be True about ‘Chief Innovation Officers’ In Agencies.”

3. If Everyone’s Responsible, No One is Responsible: Yes, in a perfect world everyone in an agency would be responsible for both constant internal change and fighting for breakthrough work. In practice, everyone can’t be. So someone probably needs to be, even if they are merely the lightning conductor of action for a far wider group (if everyone in your company is, congratulations, you can stop reading now).

I put together a Twitter map using Twiangulate to see who follows whom in this tight circle of elite innovators. Of the 5 CIOs named by Malbon - David Armano, Edward Boches, Saneel Radia, Faris Yakob, and Rishadt Tobbacowla – each are followed by 3 of the other 4, except for Faris Yakob, who is followd by everyone.

So whether or not the Chief Innovators are important to agencies, at least they matter to each other. And when “Everyone is Responsible” for innovation, the CIO is most responsible.

Other people people playing in the same sandbox include: Karen Strauss (Ketchum), Dan Burrier (Ogilvy), Matt Freeman (McCann), Geoff Melick (GA), and Nina Sloan (BNO – technically, Chief Ideation Officer).

From Social Media Week 2011.

SOCIAL READING
0:16 – Clive describes the primal “social book”
1:37 – Will Maud respond to comments within the text of her book?
2:35 – Steven reacts to Kindle’s “Popular Highlights”
4:51 – Clive watches the “margins of the unpopular”
6:19 – Steven describes Findings.com, his new social reading project

SOCIAL WRITING
8:38 – Clive discusses blogging and the writing process
9:26 – Lenore uses her blog for source material
10:14 – Steven maintains a private relationship with the reader

INTERACTING
11:08 – Maud creates new connections on Twitter
12:27 – Steven on responding to criticism online
13:15 – Can Lenore turn comments into a book?

THE FUTURE
13:50 – Clive: we can’t imagine books ten years from now

When you add up performance across all the brand metrics studied, simple Flash ads provide less brand impact than any other format – even GIFs and JPEGs. It turns out all those advertisers who served simple Flash ads through DoubleClick last year could’ve saved themselves some time and hassle by simply producing animated GIFs. 

Taking this a step further, don’t forget, we’ve found animation usually reduces clicks.

Readers will tweet their best dating advice to @uglytruthmovie. Their tweets will be featured on PerezHilton.com, where readers will rate the dating tips. The top 10 tips will be featured on the site this Friday. Perez is doing sponsored tweets (clearly marked) to promote the contest.

Perez began tweeting in early January 2009 and is currently the 20th most-followed Twitterer, with 1.2 million followers. Perez is the fourth most retweeted person on Twitter.