Due to a number of factors my blog post frequency (and quality) has drastically deteriorated over the past few months, but that’s okay. I hope to improve it as things settle down, but I haven’t had the time to dig in and do any high quality posts. In an effort to just let everyone know what’s going on at the moment I’m going to try and increase the frequency by at least doing brief updates on what’s going on around me and the business topics I blog about.
Let’s get it started:
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Lo and behold, screenshots of Microsoft’s upcoming web analytics application Gatineau are surfacing on the web along with an interview with Microsoft’s Ian Thomas about the application.
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On a visit to Yahoo!’s Burbank offices for a presentation and some planning meetings I got the opportunity to go to the NHL playoff game between the Detroit Red Wings and the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. I’d never been to a hockey
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I posted a liveblogging entry over on the Right Media Blog about the Traditional Media 2.0 session. The session was kind of all over the place with what was discussed, but check it out if you’re curious.
My first session here at Web 2.0 Expo is “Starting Up 2.0: Strategies for Pitching, Financing & Growing Your Web 2.0 Startup” with Jeff Clavier of SoftTechVC and Rob Hayes of First Round Capital.
Rob started up by asking how many people in the room had started a company in the last 5 years, and about 80% of people raised their hands. He then asked how many people would be starting one soon, and I think teh other 20% raised their hands.
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Not the best game in the world, but a win is a win. Winthrop is up next.
It’s been a while since I posted about the Oregon Ducks. To celebrate their successful completion of the regular basketball season at 23-7, I snapped a camera phone shot of some soda boxes at the new Ray’s grocery store in Eugene.
As a side note, this new grocery store actually has a rentable conference space for group or office gatherings. I instantly had a thought that I could make like Michael Scott and rent out the space for an off site “field trip” for my team at Right Media. “Who wants to take a trip to Ray’s!”
In case you’re wondering, those are Squirt cases intermingled with Sprite cases.
On March 10th in Austin I’ll be on the Online Publishers and Ad Networks panel at SXSW.
The panel will be moderated by publisher Jonathan Weber of NewWest.net, and will have me representing Right Media and the ad exchange market, Cody Simms of the Yahoo Publisher Network representing the contextual network market, Larry Allen of Tacoda covering behavioral targeting and ad networks, and Justin Ward from Feedburner covering RSS advertising.
Hopefully it will be educational and worthwhile, I know I’m looking forward to it. I’ve never been to SXSW, so I’m anxious to check out many of the other sessions and speakers as well.
As you can see in the Feedburner chicklet to the right, this blog has now cracked the 1000 subscriber mark. A big help was the 300 subscriber jump that occurred when Google Reader and Google Personalized Home Page numbers were added to Feedburner’s count.
Either way, I’m happy to achieve the somewhat meaningless mark, but what’s more interesting is that the way publishing has changed as I’m pretty sure now that those RSS subscribers probably provide more attention and readership on this blog than actual on page viewing. Obviously this means RSS tools and advertising should just continue to grow in the future, even though there has been a lot of hype about RSS for years now, we’re still ahead of the mass user adoption curve.
Interesting news on the ad optimization front as Fox Interactive acquired ad optimization company Strategic Data Corp. I admittedly don’t know much about Strategic Data Corp. but I aim to find out more. From all the articles it appears that they plan on building in their optimization technologies to help monetize Fox’s massive amount of advertising across their network of sites including MySpace.
One thing I should note though, in the Techcrunch article Marshall Kirkpatrick writes:
For a related example of a large content network taking control of an outside ad optimization service, see our coverage of the Yahoo! deal with Right Media in October.
Just to clarify, Yahoo! didn’t “take control” of Right Media, they purchased a non-controlling minority stake of 20%. It’s important to note the difference as Yahoo! behaves as a client of the exchange and has no control or special rights in the buying and selling of advertising on the Right Media Exchange.