This will be the fifth year (or sixth?) of our parties at SXSW, again with the great PBS folks and other friends. This year we’re moving to an awesome bigger venue, The Parish. As always, the party will be Sunday night.
Location: 214 East 6th Street
Time: 9pm to 1am.
The headliner, Trombone Shorty, is AWESOME. Don’t believe me? Try this:
If you’re at SXSW be sure to stop by and see us. This year Donald, Henry, Katie, Rachel, Robert and Zsolt will be there. And we’ll have some teeshirts.
Books are everything social media is not: composed and consumed in solitude, written and read at leisure, conceived and bought as blocks. Yet readers and writers are increasingly connecting to each other with tweets, apps, and book-based social networks.
Join four authors as they discuss how social media is transforming the experience of writing, reading and promoting books — and what the changes may mean for authors, readers and publishers.
Panelists:
Steven B. Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From (@stevenbjohnson) Maud Newton, book pundit and nascent novelist (@maudnewton) Lenore Skenazi, author of Free Range Kids (@freerangekids) Clive Thompson, New York Times Magazine writer and Wired columnist with book in progress (@pomeranian99) Henry Copeland, moderator, Blogads.com (@hc)
Amid tales of genius and triumph during #SMWNYC, the #SUXORZ11 panel will be the Greek chorus. We’ll dissect the twelve worst social media campaigns of 2010, and then throw them to our drunken audience for comments and voting. It’s like what we’ve done in pastyears at SXSW… with the lubrication of complimentary beer and wine. Who will be crowned this year’s SUXORZ champion?
Panelists:
Jessica Amason, Mother NY, ThisIsWhyYoureFat (@jessamanson) Brian Clark, GMDstudios (@gmdclark) Brian Morrissey, Ad Week (@bmorrissey) BL Ochman, Proof Digital Media (@whatsnext) Henry Copeland, Blogads.com (@hc) moderator
The hashtag for this event will be #suxorz11. To get in the spirit, feel free to submit SUXORZ candidates to http://on.fb.me/suxorz. Register here.
The video intro to Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad publicationThe Daily is crazily underwhelming.
Some folks seem excited by the price — 99 cents per week or $39.99 per year — arguing that this is far cheaper than a newspaper.
It’s also far more expensive than all the other news sources on the web. Not only does it not do anything particularly new (and therefore justifying some extra effort/expense) but it doesn’t do a lot of things that make the web so amazing — comments, socializing, and hyperlinks to a nearly infinite tree of additional information.
This morning I watched a fun video about snowboarding the slopes and alleys of Montmartre, the big hump of land on the north side of central Paris. The video is called “Montmartre.First Historical Snowboard Ride.” Dropped on Youtube on 12/09/10, the video already has 413k views.
When I got to the video’s end, Youtube recommended another video, “Snowboard Freeride à Montmartre Paris.” Posted a year ago (12.19.09), that video had only 24k views.
Clearly the “First Historical” video wasn’t first. That set me to thinking, why is the second video’s pull so much bigger than the first?
Some of this difference may lie in luck, the mother of all viral success. But you usually have to be good before you’re lucky. And this year’s video succeeds not only because of the juxtaposition of snowboarding and the city of love, but because it’s a great video. Watch the videos, then read my hypotheses below.
Here’s what I think. Last year’s video (top) failed/fails to hit it big for a bunch of reasons: it’s tightly focused on snowboarding. The music is targeted to thrash-loving snowboarders. The title is in French. The humans aren’t visible as distinct individuals. The same scenery is rehashed multiple times. There’s no development of character or location.
Even though this year’s video (bottom) is 50% longer (a viral no-no, right?), it has a lot more going for it. The biggest advantage are the video’s human characters and its implicit narrative. There’s the faux documentary title frame with a date and “first descent.” Even if you don’t speak French, you can tell that this is the tale of a couple of guys going out for an adventure. “Hey, a tram, that’s almost as good as a ski lift!” There’s lots of good-natured banter and chuckling. Some change-ups in camera perspectives. Varied scenery, including swoops among startled pedestrians and parked cars. And the whimsical music appeals to a far wider audience.
In short: narratives rule, even when they’re implicit or conveyed in words the audience doesn’t fully understand.
Now advertisers and fans of a particular blog can give a Facebook “like” to the ad order page for individual blogs. For example, here’s the order page for GalaDarling.
Advertisers can now insert Youtube or Vimeo videos directly into their Blogads and Adverposts.
You can see an example of a video blogad in the adstrip on the left. And if you’re on the front page of the blog, you can also see video in the Adverpost right below the first post.
To submit a video blogad, just click “video” on step 5 of the upload process on any upload form.
We’ve known for a long time that blog readers prefer to click on ads that contain interesting content rather than just raw promotions, so this seems like a logical next step.
We’re introducing two new ad units — one is a large adverpost with 400X400 image plus up to 1000 characters of text and links and the second is 200 X400 pixels plus 500 characters of text. Here’s a 90 second video intro:
When we started Blogads back in 2002, industry players thought we were crazy. Who would advertise on blogs, the online equivalent of a 16-year-old’s diary?
We added insult to injury by conjuring up a new ad unit, the blogad, a small blog-post-like combination of image and text that would run in a narrow column beside blog posts.
Well, media mavens have long since realized that blogs are huge, often bigger than newspapers in traffic and impact. AND advertisers increasingly are realizing that standard IAB units are, too often, invisible cliches.
Advertising RFPs constantly implore publishers to “think outside the box.” Well, if you want to think outside the box, you need to at least escape the 728×90 pixel box everybody else is storing their brains in. So here’s a new box.
The second blog post in the Wonkette screenshot below this paragraph illustrates the smaller “classic” adverpost, which combines an image that’s 200×400 with up to 500 characters of text. (In the real version, the text is regular HTML, ready for copy/paste or lots of clickable links.)
Hence the two new units. The adverpost is a concept honed over the years on Steve Hall’s Adrants. We hope that by making adverposts available to advertisers on hundreds of blogs, the ad unit evolve further and help advertisers better connect with influential blog communities.
Long-time blog advertiser PETA is helping us kick the Adverpost offering on a few blogs. (We’re also adding some IAB units so that advertisers who want to buy those units on our 3500 blogs can more easily do so.)
Amid a Gobi-sized desert of generic media mediocrity, blogs offer both readers and advertisers something special: a gathering of humans. For advertisers looking to tell a story and connect with influential people — as opposed to just getting clicks from random consumers — there’s nothing better.
We’re hosting two panels next week during 
