Video Blog: Favorite Video Sharing Sites written at September 5th, 2008 | Posted by William Smith

What better way to walk through some of our favorite video sharing sites but to post a video blog? In this vlog I will cover Vimeo, Viddler and Flickr. Each site has cool features that you may not know about. You Tube is the most popular, but give these a try - you may be surprised!

Share with us your favorite sites for sharing video!

Video Blog: Favorite Video Sharing Sites from off madison ave on Vimeo.

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My favorite social sites for… Social Bookmarking written at September 3rd, 2008 | Posted by Eric Reid

My favorite development is personal online publishing has been in storing bookmarks. I know I’m a simpleton, but I cannot remember the addresses of places I visit all of the time, or the phone numbers of dear friends, or the e-mail addresses of people who aren’t dear enough to call or anything, but…

Suffice it to say, I need services like these in a bad way. And I cannot always trust the bookmarks on the browser I am using, since I could be at home, or at work, or at my parents’ or my sister’s or my girlfriend’s place. I need bookmarks to be stored online, so no matter where I go, I can find my things.

My Bookmarks was an early success, as was del.icio.us. A lot of people think My Bookmarks got buried by del.icio.us because del.icio.us was easier to share favorite places with. In truth, I think My Bookmarks was killed by Yahoo! and Google personal pages. Both services allow you to create a bookmark section of your own page, usually of places you don’t want to share.

In fact, del.icio.us was the site that figured out the importance of getting users to add tagging to content – a technique that would be copied by nearly every other social media application afterwards. (In fact, a couple of years ago, before everyone was bandying about this term, “social media,” I was still calling it all, “social bookmarking.” Memories. Like the corners of my mind.)

My own favorite site, however, is StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon allows you to pick favorites and share them with others, but you have the added option of “stumbling” – or randomly going to a page one of the other users has made a favorite, and is relevant to the user’s own interests. It is also a brilliant system for getting other users who have similar interests to visit your site. If what you have on display is of high quality, that quick, heavy burst of traffic can work wonders.

Of course, when I’m not trying to promote something or learn what everyone else is doing, I still use my Google Bookmarks. Mostly because every machine I use seems to have the Google Toolbar on it anyway, so it becomes very easy to save and access stuff.

There are a lot of bookmarking sites these days, however, and so many of them are similar, it’s difficult to understand why you might want to use one or the other.

A lot of people may say that Digg and Reddit and Propeller are social bookmarking sites as well, which is sort of true, in that you are saving bookmarks to content that interests you. I prefer to think of these as social news sites, however, since they tend to revolve around current events. There aren’t a lot of people “Digging” the page to get a U.S. passport, after all. However, on delicious.com (they changed the name. Grr.) there are 533 other users who saved this page to their collections.

But if you’re looking for more sites to check out, you can always go to Wikipedia to find a pretty happening list of them.

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More viral goodness: Entourage Season 5 written at September 3rd, 2008 | Posted by William Smith

The posting of viral videos to promote products online is becoming more of the norm and honestly, I think that’s a good thing. And marketers are only getting more creative with how they spread them!

Take for example Entourage’s upcoming 5th season (can’t wait!)

In a mindbender, HBO is promoting the Viking Quest video game, a real playable web game based a fictional television series referenced in numerous episodes of Entourage, which is of course, a show about a fictional movie star and his “hanger on” friends, which consequently are real life movie stars.

Whew!

So how does this all come together?

Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon) posts a web cam video on Facebook complaining about being screwed out of royalties on the new Viking Quest Game and DVD Boxset. He asks his fans to demand justice, just as Torvald, the fictional character he played in the show, would do.

This video leads to a web site for the game, which in turn leads you to the Entourage Season 5 site.

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AdWords Quality Score Pictures Revealed written at September 3rd, 2008 | Posted by Ellen Stevens

The first sightings of how the new quality scores will be displayed in AdWords accounts have been recorded by The PPC Book. Like so many others, I have not seen any updates to our client’s accounts, but I will definitely be keeping my eye out for these changes in the coming weeks. Here’s a screenshot courtesy of PPC Book:

While I do not believe this will radically change how campaigns perform, it is nice to see that Google is finally providing a numerical value for keyword quality scores and suggestions for improvements.

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