BtoB’s 2006 Interactive Marketing Guide just came to my office today. (Yes, Virginia, people do still read print magazines.) Of course the Online Publishers section caught my eye and I immediately checked the chart of online publishers on page 33 to see how Penton was represented. Only two Penton titles made the chart, Windows IT Pro and IndustryWeek, but the traffic shown for these two sites wasn’t even in the ballpark. BtoB reported Windows IT Pro as having 166,000 unique visitors in March 2006, but Windows actually had nearly 2.8 million unique visitors in March according to...

You may have noticed that my last few posts have gone missing. I installed a fresh copy of vBulletin (forum software) on my site last night and it completely wiped out my site’s database — including my blog. While installing vBulletin, the program said it detected an old installation of the VB database and gave me the option to delete the old data and start over with a new copy. I wanted to start fresh, so I clicked the option to delete the old data. A clever alert came up: WARNING WILL ROBINSON … WARNING! You’d think I would have taken a hint here. But...

Back in February I had the pleasure to attend the DeSilva + Phillips 2006 Media Dealmakers Summit in New York. This was a very interesting summit attended by a true who’s who of executives in the business media world. I was honored to be on a panel with Colin Crawford, SVP of Online for IDG and Mitch Rouda, President of eMedia for Hanley Wood talking about vertical search. These guys really know what they’re doing and I had a blast being on the panel with these two and answering the questions thrown at us by Jeff Dearth, the panel’s moderator. (Jeff, you also did a great job...

Last night during the Oscars, I saw a commercial from VW that literally made me laugh out loud while sitting on my couch. BTW, my wife is a huge Reese Witherspoon fan so it was a good Oscar experience all around. Volkswagan ran the third installment of their ”Un-pimp Your Ride” campaign. What was brilliant about this commercial is not only that it made me laugh, but also it was effective:They did an excellent job at making me remember it was VW behind the commercial. Not all funny commercials do such a good job of this. It has virally spread across the Internet...

I’ve heard about Rollyo for the past few months and decided to finally take it for a spin myself. I’m already addicted and a huge Rollyo fan. Wilth Rollyo, individuals can “roll” their own personalized vertical searches by specifying up to 25 web site per search. Within just a couple minutes, I had an account created and launched my first “searchroll”, the eMedia Web. With the eMedia Web, you can now search all major online media / publishing web sites at one time. I have integrated it into the sidebar of my blog site or you can go directly to the eMedia Web...

I saw an interesting email today sent to a publisher from that publisher’s ISP. The ISP said it received a “valid claim” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that materials on the publisher’s web site may violate copyright interests. Apparently the ISP was contacted by attorneys from a major film/TV company that had identified an article on that site as the location of the infraction. While the attorneys did not identify what the offending material was, the article did mention in passing the name of a subsidiary of the film/TV company along with...