Experimenting with a few services on this blog

I have always tested a number of tools and services on this blog, to the point of sometimes making the page load time untolerably long (apologies for that - obviously not intended). One of the areas of experimentation is advertising, and you might have noticed sponsored links, banners, both on the blog and on the feed. My motivation is not to make money that way (I would not go very far with the amounts generated), but to figure out how mainstream consumer advertising programs "work" on social media content. The last one - that replaced AdSense - is , Amazon's new advertising program called Omacaze Links. Initial results aren’t too convincing yet – but we’ll see how that automatic contextual matching combined with behavioral targeting performs. To date, I have received the best results from the FeedBurner advertising network inserting ads in my feeds.

I have also added a pretty cool community building feature called MyBlogLog. My friend Brad Feld has been using the service for a long time, and like him I enjoyed analytics that MBL provide daily about your “clicks-out”. Then MyBlogLog has added this automatic creation of reader communities, which I find interesting – any user of MyBlogLog accessing my blog more than a few times is automatically added to my reader community. And it just takes a few minutes to configure the tool and add a piece of JavaScript to your template to get this list of faces having most recently accessed the blog. Last weeek, Eric Marcoullier, MBL’s founding CEO (who has since left the reins of the company to Scott Rafer), has enabled a cool hack: the addition of pictures from readers leaving comments. This feature is very familiar to Flickr or any service that requires a login to leave a comment - but MBL can add this feature to blog running on TypePad or Wordpress. Sort of adding a personal touch to faceless blogging… Note that images are added once the page is fully loaded and therefore it can take a bit of time. Check out MBL's blog here.

And this is post #500. I know that some blogs get there in a few weeks but it took me a couple of years.

Comments

[Scott Rafer]

Pssst, Jeff. I'm CEO.

[Scott Rafer]

And, more importantly, thanks for the kind remarks.

[Jeff Clavier]

Whoops. Sorry Scott, fixed.

[Scott Rafer]

Thanks! To join your community, people can just click here.

[Rob Leathern]

Is it just me, or is EVERY single one of the ads I see in Bloglines coming from FeedBurner for free text link ads www.Text-Link-Ads.com? I will say that this advertiser is one who advertised with us when I was formerly at LinkedIn -- so probably their product appeals to the same LinkedIn-Web20-blogosphere crowd... the only question is whether I have to keep seeing this same ad over and over again. It's not just your blog, Jeff - I also see it in some of the other feeds that use the FeedBurner stuff like Fred Wilson's. It's a very new advertising medium, so would love to see other readers/users and publishers share some of their thoughts on advertiser diversity and retention/repeat business over time...

[Serge Lescouarnec]

As far as advertising goes, I have not found any satisfying solution for 'Serge the Concierge'. I used Google for a while then Yahoo and went back to Google.
I have to say that Google Ads are more closely related to the contents of the posts.
On the question of the quality of the ads, I am not sure either is satisfying.
I guess better solutions will come as things evolve.

Serge
Biz:
http://www.njconcierges.com
Blog:
http://www.sergetheconcierge.com

[Seth Wagoner]

For original, interesting, and appropriately linked posts, 500 is an awesome number. Well done and many thanks for your contributions to our noosphere thus far.

I think sidebar gadgets and other blog services are the universe's way of using up all that spare bandwidth, CPU time, and screen real-estate. The void was there to be filled. I've been predicting this for a long time, even had a few ideas of my own on how to help fill it, but they're backburnered until the current project is finally underway.