Monthly Archives: May 2008

Ad Repping

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Just a little bit of housekeeping and a cry for help to our readers…

I’ve been desperately (admittedly) looking for means of monetizing this site recently. This site is in the awkward in-between stage of hot property and an long tail property where it cannot be repped by larger ad repping sites like Federated Media because it’s not large enough, and simply cannot make enough money with Adsense or most of the “commodity” advertising properties.

Since leaving b5media, I’ve attempted to do my own ad repping but I’ll be honest – it’s not my thing. I don’t have a nose for advertising, nor the experience to do direct selling.

In the past week, I’ve applied to several agencies to gauge interest.

So I ask in all humility, and in the spirit of crowd-sourcing, how would you monetize this site if it were yours? What tips can you share with me? Introductions you might be able to make? While I would love to have this conversation in comments, I also recognize that some conversations might be better had in private. So please, email me at aaron@technosailor.com or one of the other methods listed here.

Twitter Pitching

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Yesterday, I released the WP-Twitterpitch plugin which has already gotten a few good writeups. The response is moderate. Some people don’t want pitches in their direct message box. Others think that TwitPitches should follow the Stowe Boyd model of public pitches. Still others could see the plugin being used as a contact form.

Sure. Yes, yes and yes. The application of the plugin is completely subjective so get creative with it! :)

As a sidenote, I’ve gotten a handful of “pitches” so far. Only one real pitch. Everyone else is kicking the tires – which is fun. I like getting anonymous tweets to my direct message box.

In the words of Instapundit… heh.

Examples of such entertainment include:

  • You should only post about Erin, Queen of Spain, forever. Why? Um…’cause she said so. I think I need this. stupid PR can pitch me here
  • Hey Aaron, great idea. Much better than the tons of spam we’re now gettting via the technosailor tips hotline. Congrats! Editorial Note: this person must be a technosailor.com writer getting general emails to the tips@technosailor.com – we like real tips, not spam, by the way.
  • Sorry, just testing your plugin.
  • So does this go direct to you as a dm or something? Cool.
  • Hello God! Editorial Note: this one is my favorite.

Good times. I imagine real pitching will happen over time and I’ll suffer the anonymous stuff for awhile. :-)

Google Cannot Fix Twitter

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Jeff Jarvis thinks that only Google can fix Twitter’s woes.

Google hasn’t fixed Blogger since acquiring it in 2003. In fact, it’s a spam sieve full of usability issues and lack of innovation. Meanwhile, Movable Type and WordPress keep plugging away at innovative approaches to blogging platforms.

They haven’t innovated on Jaiku since acquiring the Twitter competitor late last year. Jaiku-since-Google is largely a FAIL, though it might still be too early on this.

Feedburner has become thoroughly Googlefied, going from one of the easiest, brightest and best companies to work with to arguably the worst of all the Google properties. Responsiveness has dipped to near nothing. Innovation has ceased. And I knew it was going to happen, but was soundly told that I was smoking crack, or something to that effect.

Google is not a sexy company. At all. They know how to do innovative things that I liken to trinket teasers. Others might call it “Shiny toy syndrome”.

Microsoft is also, not an innovator, to be fair. Their Windows product is largely a conglomeration of technologies inspired or directly acquired from other companies. Their was a Novell Netware long before there was an Active Directory, for instance.

Not the point.

Jeff, besides the feel-good story that Google reuniting with Evan Williams, the creator of Blogger and now Twitter, what can you point to that aligns well for a Google acquisition of Twitter? There’s not a lot of evidence that Twitter will be better if acquired by Google. Sure, it’ll probably be more “up” than down, but really… Google?

WordPress Plugin: WP-Twitterpitch

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Obviously, there’s been a lot of talk about PR pitches gone bad. Stowe Boyd coined the word Twit Pitches last month. The concept is to force PR firms to use the economy of words (characters?) to pitch bloggers. It’s a reality in life, and I fight with my wife on this regularly, that no one cares about your “thing” as much as you do and so are less likely to want to give you the time to “pitch” the story or idea. You need to be quick, succinct and use compelling hooks.

Thus, the Twitter Pitch was born.

I’m releasing a new plugin that I hacked together over the weekend called WP-Twitterpitch that I’m also running here at Technosailor. Check out the navigation for a demo.

WP-TwitterPitch is all about getting the pitch delivered to you in the form you want to get it delivered – in other words in Twitter format. If you’re like me, then your Twitter direct message box is a lot like your email inbox. Personally, I don’t want to get pitches from PR companies in certain email inboxes. For whatever reason, I may not check them or they are personal, etc.

Twitter, however, provides the ultimate quick-messaging system. This plugin provides a template tag that you can drop anywhere in your theme. Clicking the link provides lightbox-like functionality for a “pitch form”. Using the form does not require a Twitter account (but does require that you have a secondary Twitter account you can use for this purpose, since you can’t send Direct Messages to yourself via Twitter). Note: Your WP-TwitterPitch Twitter account must follow the account that is being pitched and vica versa. This is a one-off action (hopefully, depending on Twitter) and only needs to be done when setting up WP-TwitterPitch.

Messages sent from the form are DMmed to the account getting the pitch and the form is limited to 140 characters or less. The beauty of linguistic efficiency.

Installation

  1. Upload the
    1
    wp-twitterpitch

    folder to the

    1
    /wp-content/plugins/

    directory

  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’menu in WordPress
  3. Edit Admin options to include Twitter ID to pitch, Twitter ID and Password to send Twitter pitches

    4. as, as well as a message to “pitchers” that will be displayed in the form after the pitch has been sent.

    Place wherever you want the link to appear

Direct Download Link

In Memoriam

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In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Photo credit enidance.

Photo by tomfs.

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Photo Credit by kimberly98.

Photo by panzerwaffen43.

Let’s bring them home.

The Art of the Mashup

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The other day, I was talking to the CTO of a company that is working to build a web technology solution for a problem that exists due to the arcane infrastructure and systems already in place in the niche target industry. He was mourning the fact that, after spending gobs of time wireframing and re-wireframing a solution, the parties who initially expressed interest in licensing the technology, had decided to walk away from the table for a variety of reasons.

The big conglomerate that had decided to walk had expressed concern over the fact that they already had systems for billing and other management aspects of their company and didn’t want to invest in something unknown and untried over their long-standing, yet antiquated, solution.

Over the course of an hour or so, and even since then, we looked over his wireframes determining what the company should look like in order to make some sales, if not all the sales he wanted. I realized that his product was designed in such a way that dependencies were created everywhere. If a customer wanted just this one portion that does employee management but not the other part that does billing, there was no productive way to do this so he could make a sale without making the big sale.

In the web world, we talk about mashups. Take a google map and mash it up with Twitter and you have Twittervision. Mashup Basecamp with FreshBooks and tie in Salesforce and you’ve got a complete back-office CRM-Billing system to build your company on top of.

The strength of mashups is the distributed nature of the work. I no longer have to store my own video files because YouTube will do it for me and give me a means to access it, thus eliminating the overhead and cost of doing business associated with that video. I no longer have to worry about the development time and money needed to distribute a widget containing my content to other websites because Clearspring does that work for me. The trick is in APIs which allow others to innovate on top of the technologies created by others.

My advice to this entrepreneur was to create APIs between his various modules and build out-of-the-box products that he could sell that utilize those APIs. In fact the APIs can be open and still be paid access, which provides another stream of revenue – especially when his clients have the money to pay top dollar for those APIs if they consider the alternative cost of throwing out entire chunks of their existing infrastructure and using an out of the box solution that may not meet their unique needs.