“Live linking” blogads and t-shirts

We’ve worked out remaining bugs in the live-linking blogads (see the top ad at left for PoliticalWire.com) and are ready for more beta users.

(Update: see top left ad on DailyPuppy.)

The text in these blogads updates automatically every fifteen minutes. Each headline is linked. The pipeline for this is the advertiser’s RSS feed.

To pull headlines into your next blogad text, put the letters “@RSS:http://etc…etc” in your text field for a standard ad and the rest is automatic.

What to call this new ad unit? Obviously, the word RSS is too obscure for most advertisers. So we’ll probably go with something like “live-linking” blogads or “headline feeds” or “auto-update blogads” or ??

If you are first to suggest the name we end up using, we’ll send you one of our new t-shirts. Speaking of which, please head over to Flickr and tell us which color combo you love or hate. (We’re going to print up more of last year’s popular brown/orange too.)

Update: Joseph Hughes experiments with the new ad.

John Aravosis does a brilliant write-up about the livelink ads. He tells advertisers, “this ad can be updated a practically infinite number of times throughout the day. You literally have your own mini-Web site incorporated in our Web site.”

Taegan Goddard directs his readers to the new unit.

More thoughts from Richard C and Pam Spaulding.