I had the honor of being on the “smaller publishers” panel discussing social networking at the ABM Spring Meeting in Naples, FL earlier this week. It was a great session with excellent questions and a great group of panelists. One of my fellow panelists was Steve MacMinn, CTO of Globalspec, an internet-based information company focused on engineering and industrial markets. Back in April 2005, they launched their version of a social network called CR4 (which stands for Conference Room 4, BTW). I enjoyed being on the panel with Steve as it was very obvious he knew what he was doing and had...

(NOTE TO SELF: This is a terrible headline for SEO purposes, but I don’t care) I cannot tell you how tired I am about hearing “Web 2.0 this” and “Web 2.0 that.” I don’t want to get into a diatribe on this post about what Web 2.0 is … you can read it directly from one of the guys who originally coined the term, Tim O’Reilly. The point I do want to make is that Web 2.0 is just the latest buzzword to come along that technology providers, publishers, marketers, and event producers use to make themselves sound like they are on the cutting...

There’s an interesting debate going on in my last blog entry about Ziff’s use of IntelliTXT over whether in-article hyperlink ads are ethical or not. I’m surprised that I haven’t heard much about it, but Google also quietly launched their own version of IntelliTXT in late March as part of their new pay-per-action beta test for AdWords. Here’s a quote straight from the official “Inside AdWords” blog at Google on March 20, 2007 (emphasis mine). “You can create text ads, image ads, or our new text link ad format in your pay-per-action campaign. Text...

I have the utmost respect for Paul Conley and think he is one of the true class acts in media. It is well-known, however, that he and I disagree on the use of in-text ads … particularly Vibrant Media’s IntelliTXT product. Paul believes that there is no place for these kinds of ads on any reputable web site and his latest post takes Ziff to task because they reinstated in-text ads. He calls for the ABM and ASBPE to cut ties with Ziff and for the editors to, in essence, go on strike in protest. To be sure, Paul has a couple good points. First, it really is ridiculous that Ziff would...

At Penton, I used to moderate an emedia discussion forum on our intranet, “The Loop.” I loved the idea sharing, problem solving, and community that we developed out there. Not only was it incredibly useful, but it was a lot of fun as well. So I’ve decided to launch an emedia discussion forum right here, on eMedia Strategist. I created this forum to help publishers and event producers build their online communities and business. Whether you are in business development, publishing management, sales, editorial production, or technology, this is a place to connect with your peers...

Another post live from the Minday summit. In a session about growing your online audience and Jamie Pallot with CondeNet just dropped a term that is gaining new momentum with online audience development: SMO. What is SMO? Social Media Optimization … getting your content integrated into blogs, forums, social bookmarking sites, video sites (like YouTube), and other social media outlets. So we finally have a good term and another discipline that your audience development team needs to add to their arsenal. First was SEO and SEM, and now SMO.