© NightRPStar


BusinessWeek ran a piece late last month on the link sharing site Digg, and how it has suddenly figured out how to make a profit.

Advertising pays for most things in media. Whether it's broadcast television, radio, cable or the Internet, most pay-for-content models have failed. It ends up being the audience and not the content that's for sale. Attract a big audience and you have something to peddle to advertisers. Just selling content, by itslef, works for music at Amazon and iTunes - but not for much else.

Digg has discovered something fascinating. I like to call it contextualization. Everybody's on to the advertising thing. It's no secret. Most Internet audiences realize they're doing you a favor by reading your stuff. They feel entitled to free content. BY reading it, they validate you. Those readers see ads, and they kind of resent them.

Digg found a way to may advertising look more like content. Readers see the ads and feel more comfortable with them. Click-thru rates are up, and Digg's making money.

So now the rest of the world is chasing its tail, trying to figure out how to contextulize their advertising and make it more comfortable.

© Ernst Vikne


I like newspapers. I used to write for one (okay, I used to write for a couple, actually). Newspapers are a nice way to keep track, keep in touch with places where I used to live. And since I've lived on four continents and in 14 time zones, I like newspapers...

I used to drive in to a library where I could look at a couple of international newspapers - The South China Morning Post, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Times of India. But it's harder to find the Augusta Chronicle in a library like that.

I was pleased to dsicover recently that its now pretty easy to get a newspaper subscription over the Internet. Lots of little community papers don't have online versions. And let's face it, the online version of most papers really isn't the same thing as the print edition.

Not everything that's important in life is on the Web, but that doesn't mean you can't get it over the web...

I've decided that Flickr is becoming a dangerous place. For whatever reason, I get offered more viruses and malware at Flickr than any other place at the moment. Late Thursday night (maybe early Friday morning) while looking for a photo on Flickr to use with a blog I screwed up and clicked the wrong thing. The next morning I got up and found my laptop hijacked by the a trojan called the Control Center Virus. Instead of Windows, I got a control panel that told me the two ro three dozen things wrong with my computer. Kinf of ruined the taste of my coffee.

Fortunately I have an abundance of computer resources in the house. I got on another laptop, figured out what I had, and found a nice guide to removing it at Im-Infected.

Friday evening at got to work on removing the virus. I burnt several CD's trying to boot from that drive. Nothing worked. I finally figured out that Ctrl-Alt-Del still got me the task manager and allowed me to run new tasks (like the rkill DOS application that closed the Control Center).

I loaded Malware Bytes and ran a full scan, which took a couple of hours. And, wallah, I had my laptop back. But I lost six or so hours of my life.

© USACE Europe District


Technology has changed almost every workplace in the last few decades. Think of the advances in medical technology, the changes in industrial safety, the increase automation in manufacturing. Now technology is changing sales, too.

It's called marketing automation software and it makes life as a salesperson simpler. Marketing automation software computerizing the repetitive, tedious tasks involved in generating leads and in lead scoring.

Leads generate sales, right? Automating the task of lead generation means you get to spend more or your time turning those leads into actual sales. It's common and affordable today, so why not get on board?

Marketing automation means you can dedicate your time to lead nurturing, focusing more of your energy on prospective clients and customers. That should mean your time and energy are spent on the most productive part of your job, and that you end up closing more sales and making more money.

You'll need that extra money - for a new BMW.

The Internet Time Blog has a great discussion of virtual worlds and education posted at the moment. As an educator, it seems obvious to me that technology (including access to virtual world) will eventually make the classroom of tomorrow almost unrecognizable in comparison to today's classrooms.

Jay Cross (the blog's author) has an excellent take on what makes virtual world's effective learning tools

Learning is social, and I think this has something to do with the power of watching your avatar experience something as opposed to simply imagining it in your mind.

The post is a review of a book by Karl Kapp and Tony O'Driscoll, Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension in Enterprise Learning and Collaboration. It's a book I'll have to find a copy of...