Monday, December 18, 2006

The Top 10 Star Smiles 2006

The American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry (AACD) conducted a survey in 2006 of its
members to determine which Hollywood stars and professional athletes have the most glamorous grins:

1.

Halle Berry

Add to her list of wins ...

Oscar and Golden Globe winner, Bond girl and X-men
superhero Halle Berry is the female celebrity with the best smile.

2.

Julia Roberts.

If I could be like any pretty woman ...

She's smile is requested most often by patients of American cosmetic industry.

3.

Matthew McConaughey

A smile that makes us swoon ...

Hollywood hunk Matthew McConaughey was tops for best male celebrity smile.

4.

Hilary Duff

Queen of the teen scene ...
America's teen sweetheart Hilary Duff has the best smile of teen celebrities.

5.

Maria Sharapova

She aced it ...
Tennis phenom Maria Sharapova aced with her stunning smile, she have the best female athlete smile.

6.

Tiger Woods

Smile above par ...
Tiger Woods as the male athlete with the best smile.

...................................................................
This is the End of AACD rating, but it's impossible to make this list imperfect. So...
...................................................................

7.

Tom Cruise

That's impossible smile...

Tom Cruise, typical Hollywood beauty very with soft smile and hard bolls

8.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Hasta la vista smile...

Arnold Schwarzenegger quite the contrary have a hard smile, but hi is really hard guy.

9.

Angelina Jolie

Smile with two smoke guns...

In the Tomb Rider movies Angelina Jolie look like nature born with two smoke guns. But at the same time she have wery sensual smile.

10.

Clint Eastwood

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in one smile...

Clint Eastwood's smile is a smile of Wild West.

The Top 10 internet videos 2006

By the end of year many newsmakers make a lot of statistic collection. Now u can see The Top 10 internet videos 2006 in the Viral Video Chart's version:


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Sunday, December 17, 2006

The Top 10 Popular Blogs on Technorati 2006

1.

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things
1,230 members have made this a Favorite

Boing Boing is a weblog of cultural curiosities and interesting technologies. It's the most popular blog in the world, as ranked by Technorati.com, and won the Lifetime Achievement and Best Group Blog awards at the 2006 Bloggies ceremony.
By
Mark Frauenfelder
http://www.boingboing.net

2.


Techcrunch
857 members have made this a Favorite

By Michael Arrington
http://www.techcrunch.com/

3.


43 Folders
835 members have made this a Favorite

43 Folders is Merlin Mann’s site about personal productivity, life hacks, and simple ways to make your life a little better.

By Merlin Mann
http://www.43folders.com/

4.

Lifehacker, the Productivity and Software Guide
721 members have made this a Favorite

http://www.lifehacker.com/

5.

PostSecret
631 members have made this a Favorite

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

By frank warren
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

6.

Engadget
599 members have made this a Favorite

By WeblogsInc
http://www.engadget.com/

7.

Make Money Online with ProBlogger Blog Tips
501 members have made this a Favorite

Helping Bloggers Earn Money. Blog Tips and News for the Professional and Hobby Blogger.

By Darren Rowse
http://www.problogger.net/

8.

Micro Persuasion
442 members have made this a Favorite

Steve Rubel explores how social media is transforming marketing, media and public relations.

By Steve Rubel
http://www.micropersuasion.com/

9.

A List Apart: A List Apart
439 members have made this a Favorite

A List Apart, For People Who Make Websites, is one of the longest-running, most trusted, and most influential independent user experience and web design magazines.

By Jeffrey Zeldman
http://www.alistapart.com/

10.

Gizmodo, The Gadget Guide
404 members have made this a Favorite

http://www.gizmodo.com/

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

The 10 Gadgets That Changed the World

1.


RCA Model 630TS TV (1946)

When soldiers returned home from World War II, they could finally kick back and watch TV. More often than not, they flipped on this set, which sold for a cool $350 –- that’s $3,600 in today’s dollars. With a 10-inch black-and-white screen and enormous speakers packed into a fine wooden cabinet that weighed almost 100 pounds, the Model T of televisions was the first mass-produced postwar boob tube. The set could receive a dozen broadcast channels, including the ill-fated Channel 1, and was considered the standard until 1954, when RCA's 12-inch color set took center stage. It was the golden age of television: Dragnet, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and I Love Lucy were all on the air, and TV became the center of the family room.

2.

Western Electric 500 Desk Telephone (1949)

The clean, functional design of this rotary telephone quickly became iconic. Even the first touch-tone phone, introduced some 15 years later, was a curve-for-curve copy of the 500 –- except the dial was replaced with buttons. Nearly every phone that followed, from wall-mounted versions for kitchens to the bedroom-specific Princess model, took design cues from the 500. As the cheap, stylish objects made their way into every room of the house, they drove massive investment in the telecommunications infrastructure: Transcontinental calling became possible in 1951, and overseas calls began in 1956. Western Electric survived until the restructuring of AT&T in 1984; imitators still sell homages to the 500, dial and all.

3.

Kodak Brownie 127 camera (1953)


The Brownie dates back to 1900. The original -- named after a popular cartoon character -- was just a cardboard box fitted with a meniscus lens. That model helped launch photography as a hobby, shipping 150,000 units the first year. By the 1950s, cameras were staples of parties and family vacations. The Brownie 127, a British import molded from Bakelite, disassembled so you could load a spool of 127-size film. And, at about 5-by-3-by-3 inches, it could be wedged into a coat pocket. It also featured a 1/50-second shutter speed, fast enough to grab pics in most situations. More than a million 127s were sold over the next few years, paving the way for the snapshot camera and the point-and-shoot ethos of personal photography.


4.

Bell & Howell Director Series model 414 Zoomatic 8-mm Movie Camera (c. 1962)

For the first 40 years of their existence, moving pictures were the exclusive purview of the film industry. The 35-mm format was the single standard, film stock was expensive (and prone to bursting into flames), and the equipment was enormous. When affordable 8-mm cameras arrived in 1932, America started shooting, and the cult of Junior’s first steps was born. By the mid-1950s, Bolex, Canon and others were producing cameras for 8-mm film, but none shot more famous footage than this Bell & Howell. Dallas clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder used his to film a presidential motorcade in 1963. Today, his camera is in the National Archives. His film showed that anyone could capture history, as in the Rodney King clip and 9/11.


5.

Amana Radarange microwave (1967)

Look around your kitchen. Since the invention of the modern household refrigerator in 1927, not much has changed in the way we store and prepare food, with one exception: the microwave. It works by using, uh, microwaves to excite the molecules in water, heating food much faster than conventional ovens. The first commercial model, in 1947, weighed hundreds of pounds, was almost 6 feet tall and cost as much as $3,000. But by 1967, the appliance had slimmed down, and the idea of cooking dinner in a matter of minutes instead of hours caught on in harried suburbia. Amana's countertop Radarange cost $495 and was sold Tupperware-style. A small army of genteel sales ladies would make roasts and burgers while touting the oven's "space-age wonder." Today, find that rare Luddite home without a microwave, and you have to wonder how they make popcorn.

6.

JVC HR-3300 videocassette recorder (1976)


Say you had to attend a birthday party the night that Battle of the Network Stars was on. What were you supposed to do, miss seeing Melissa Gilbert run the obstacle course? JVC had the solution. With the market's first home VHS recorder, you could tape a show and watch it when you wanted. You could also do the unthinkable: Pause the show to grab a snack, or fast-forward through the commercials. As they overtook the sleeker, smaller, better-quality Sony Betamax with lower prices and wider availability, VCRs highlighted the dangers of proprietary formats. They also marked the first assault on the big TV broadcasters' control over our viewing habits. Cable, video games and the internet weakened the networks' stronghold even more: Prime-time network viewership has plummeted 60 percent from 1952 levels.

7.

Atari 2600 video computer system (1977)

Home gaming started with Pong, but Pong got old fast. You'd blow your allowance at the arcade, come home and play your one-game console unit. But then what? How about unlimited games, for free, in the comfort of your very own rec room? The year it was launched, the $199 Atari 2600 VCS was a much-hyped Christmas gift, and by 1979 it had become a cultural sensation. When an arcade-faithful version of Japan's Space Invaders arrived in 1980, sales of the 2600 doubled. As the home-gaming industry grew, copycats like ColecoVision and Intellivision hit the scene, and Atari rolled out more-advanced consoles. But none endured as fully as the 2600: Atari didn't officially retire the box until 1992, a 15-year lifespan unheard of today. The thing we miss the most: its groovy wood-grain paneling.

8.

Sony Walkman TPS-L2 portable cassette player (1979)

Sony has a reputation for ramming formats down consumers' throats, yet the wild success of the Walkman was due in part to the company's embrace of the royalty-free cassette format from Philips Electronics. Never mind that the sound quality was crap or that the tapes had a maddening tendency to unravel, crease and break. What mattered was that a cassette was much smaller than a vinyl record or an 8-track. The original Walkman could pop into a jacket pocket or a bag, and that forever changed the way people listen to music. The Walkman might be the most popular gadget brand of all time: Almost 30 years and 350 million units later, more than 300 different Walkman-branded portables, including CD players, TVs and cell phones, have successfully isolated their owners from noisy commutes or co-workers.

9.

IBM 5150 personal computer (1981)

Apple often gets credit for starting the personal computer revolution, but the Macintosh, which debuted in 1984, was not the original mass-market PC. On Aug. 12, 1981, IBM launched the 5150 and changed home and office life forever. The system packed a 4.77-MHz Intel 8088 processor and up to 256 KB of memory, weighed 25 pounds with "diskette" drive, and sold for $3,000. It wasn't unreasonably bulky or expensive, and its boxy form factor remains the standard for PCs. Legions of schoolchildren and small-business employees began learning the already popular VisiCalc spreadsheet along with a new operating system called DOS. Starting in 1983, on-the-go professionals opted for a Compaq, the first fully compatible PC clone and the first portable clone. Windows, multi-gigabyte hard drives, the internet and the 3-pound laptop followed. It all started here.

10.

Motorola StarTac cell phone (1996)

Before the StarTac, cell phones were monstrous bricks that few people bothered to use outside the confines of a car. Motorola changed all that with the groundbreaking StarTac, a streamlined handset that turned the cell phone into a status symbol. As light as 3.1 ounces, it seemed impossibly small, and the flip-phone design made it simple to stow. It was also the first phone with a vibrate function, which Moto lifted from its pager division. The little StarTac did have a big flaw: a mere 90 minutes of talk time. That meant many users were forced to carry a second battery. But even if the phone did go dead, it was still a conversation piece, marking the advent of personal electronics as fashion.


By Christopher Null

Wednesday, December 6, 2006

The Top 10 Online Marketing Blunders to Avoid

Part of the fun of working in the online marketing industry is watching marketers try to navigate new territory. In the dozen years or so since the commercial explosion of the web, marketers have learned chiefly by experimentation. Along the way, experience has taught marketers not only what to do, but also what to avoid.

If we're lucky, we learn a valuable lesson without spending too much money.

If we're unlucky, sometimes that lesson is learned expensively. In full view of the public. With thousands of internet users pointing and laughing.

Some of the lessons learned here are personal experiences. Others are very public learning experiences like I described above. In any case, they're clear examples of marketing blunders you need to steer clear of.

1.

Failure to test

Never -- never! -- going to market without testing the user experience first.
One morning in September 1997, visitors to the home page of GeoCities were accosted by a little girl screaming, "Hey! Let me in!" at them. Not only was this seen as somewhat rude, but the problem was also compounded when many users couldn't figure out where the heck the voice was coming from.
The audio was supposed to be associated with an AT&T ad, which contained animation that would have made the whole thing make sense. But the audio produced a "WTF?" experience on GeoCities, owing to the fact that it started playing before people had a chance to scroll down below the fold and actually see the companion ad. Needless to say, Modem Media, AT&T's agency at the time, made some changes to the campaign to create a better user experience.

Though nearly a decade old, this classic blunder serves as a reminder that when we're breaking new ground with campaigns, we ought to test ads before going out to the general market to make sure the user experience is consistent with what was intended. Sometimes, both agency and client get so used to seeing an ad or campaign in a controlled test environment that they really need fresh eyes to take a look, to make sure people interpret the campaign the way they're supposed to. That fresh pair of eyes can be a formal focus group, a usability testing lab or even just a buddy looking over your shoulder. Any of these might have revealed AT&T's gaffe before it went live on some of the most trafficked sites on the internet.

2.

Forgetting bandwidth

Years ago, when I worked at another agency, we had a direct response client who used our agency for media planning and buying services only. A few days after launching a campaign, I sent the client some preliminary results that showed rather dismal conversion rates across the board. He called me back in a panic.
I explained that I had suspicions about his hosting provider and that he should consider upgrading his bandwidth now that his company was rolling out a campaign. The client replied that there was no way latency was responsible for the low conversion rates.

Later in the day, after I had pulled some data that showed a huge across-the-board dropoff from clicks to page landings, and supplemented that with some uptime graphs from Netcraft, his tune changed. We paused the campaign, changed providers and re-launched. Conversion rates blew away the results we had seen previously.

In retrospect, a bandwidth check should be standard operating procedure before launching a campaign of significant size. We know about the classic examples of how live events like Victoria's Secret lingerie shows and IBM's human versus computer chess matches can bring web servers to their knees, but sometimes we forget that a large ad campaign can have the same effect.

Before launching any sort of outbound campaign that's expected to bring in a significant amount of web traffic, check with your hosting provider or IT professional to make sure the incremental demand won't slow your site down to a crawl or cause a fatal web server crash.

3.

Overtargeting

Here's a sin of which many online marketers are currently guilty. The advanced targetability of online advertising is simultaneously a huge benefit and a major drag.
The benefit, of course, is that advertisers can use targeting to concentrate their media efforts on the sweet spot of their target audience.
The drag is that a lot of advertisers confuse "sweet spot" with "entire market," and they overtarget their ads, often with detrimental results.

A quick war story: in 1998, I worked on a telecom account where the client was advertising ISDN and DSL within a certain geographic footprint. We employed geotargeting in order to minimize waste and to cut back on the number of folks ringing up the call center from outside the service area. Along came a proposal from a well-known search engine to serve the client's advertising only to people looking for ISDN or DSL within the target geographies. Geotargeted keywords sound like a good idea, right?

Wrong. As it turned out, the search engine had location data on only a small fraction of its user base. Overlaying the audience of folks searching relevant keywords with the tiny pool of folks on which they had geographic data resulted in a microscopic potential audience, indeed. After slamming the same 11 people over the head a few hundred times with our ad, we canceled the order.

In retrospect, we shouldn't have overlaid the two targeting filters. ISDN and DSL had such low penetration compared to dial-up back then that we could have easily forgotten about the keyword filter entirely and had a successful campaign.

These days, advertisers make the same mistake very frequently. If the demographic sweet spot for red rubber balls is Men 18 to 24, online campaigns are often focused on that demo with laser-like precision. And that's a shame, because there's really nothing preventing a 35-year-old woman from buying a red rubber ball.
Don't assume a target audience is a market, or vice versa. One of the differences between television and interactive is TV's spill into demographic audiences other than the one targeted. While certain television campaigns might be guaranteed against Men 18 to 24, they also deliver some Women 25 to 49 in addition to the buying target. Some of those women buy the product. Why should it be different for online ads?
Experiment with loosening your targeting restrictions a bit. You might be pleasantly surprised by the result. Obviously, your mileage may vary.

4.

Failing to cap frequency

According to Atlas Solutions, advertisers can decrease their cost per acquisition on direct response campaigns, simply by setting an appropriate frequency cap. The trick is setting the cap at the appropriate level. Direct marketers have always had to play the trade-off game between efficiency and volume, and while a frequency cap of 3x might generate conversions at a lower Cost Per Acquisition, a frequency cap of 5x might result in a much higher volume of conversions at a CPA that still meets the advertiser’s goals.
Without naming names, we all know advertisers who have become infamous for saturating the Internet with ads that we end up seeing over and over.

Audience chafe factor might not be a good enough reason for some advertisers to consider capping frequency. After all, if given the choice between getting the order as the result of being in a prospect's face 24/7 and not getting the order because you weren't top of mind when the prospect went shopping, most direct marketers would choose the former. But most studies of both direct response and branding campaigns uncover a distinct point of diminishing returns. For DR campaigns, there's a sizeable falloff after the third impression, and optimal frequency (with respect to profitability) comes just a few impressions later. For branding campaigns, optimal frequency tends to vary, but most advertisers can quickly discern the point of diminishing returns by glancing quickly at their last Dynamic Logic brand study (or equivalent).

Once that point of diminishing returns is reached for an advertiser, doesn't it make sense that continuing to bash people over the head with an ad is a giant waste of money? Before you answer, consider that frequency-capping offers you the opportunity to stop advertising to the inundated and serve those impressions instead to people who haven't seen your ad yet or who are underexposed to it.

If you pay for your ads on a CPM basis, the only ads you're running that should be exempt from frequency-capping are sponsorships where people expect to see your ad every time in a given location. Everything else should be optimized, regardless of the goal, based on optimal frequency.

5.

Affiliate carte blanche

"Get me 10,000 new customers by the end of the quarter. No, I don't care how," is an oft-repeated mantra, especially for direct response advertisers. What many advertisers don't understand is that this is riskier than tap dancing on a land mine.

With carte blanche to do whatever it takes to generate customers, an affiliate can and often will use all sorts of unsavory tactics, including creating its own affiliate program comprising all sorts of sketchy folks who will also use any and all means at their disposal. Those means are often along the lines of spam, phishing scams, bogus co-registration, spyware and all sorts of other nasty (and likely fraudulent) things.

Ever see a piece of spam come into your inbox from an otherwise respectable brand and wonder why the marketer would resort to spam? This is precisely how that happens. Someone on the marketing team needs to reel in an affiliate.

In the recent past, an affiliate of one of our clients was tasked with generating a certain number of registrants for the client. When they found they couldn't live up to their commitment, they moved from respectable marketing tactics toward shady ones. When the registrants they referred immediately opted out from my client's offering upon receiving email confirmation, it was a huge red flag that something had gone awry. In this case, the affiliate had simply -- and shadily -- force-subscribed people in its own database to the client's offer. Thankfully, we had guidelines in place such that the client could immediately sever all ties with the affiliate without penalty.

Such guidelines are a necessity if advertisers are going to do business in the affiliate marketplace or in the realm of CPA advertising. Otherwise, the brand is at risk of both legal exposure and being associated with shady marketing tactics.

6.

Managing paid search by hand

It's one thing to plunk down $50 a day for a few keywords if you have a small business or simply want to test out paid search. It's another thing entirely to manage your bids on a sizeable paid search campaign manually over a period of time.

A competitor of one of our clients once confessed that we were driving his team of on-site search specialists positively bonkers. The team would update its bids, hoping to "jam" my client by underbidding us by a penny, thus increasing our click costs. Mere minutes later, we would counter-jam his team, forcing them to go back and re-bid everything. What the competitor didn't realize at the time was that he was bidding against a system, not human beings, and that our bidding strategy was based on a collection of logic rules-- some simple, some complex.

A good bid management system (Atlas Search, 24/7 Search, DART Search, et cetera) pays for itself almost immediately by increasing your bang for the buck and keeping your paid search costs down. You'll also become a lot more efficient through cutting back on the manpower that you've allocated to managing your search campaign.

Given all this, I'm flabbergasted when I continue to run into advertisers who insist on managing bids manually. All it takes is a single competitor's employment of a decent bid management and search tracking solution and any manual management you might be doing will be rendered completely ineffective for terms you compete on. Much like a martial artist uses jiu jitsu techniques to apply your own energies against you, a competitor will use a bid management system to increase your click costs, take all the good inventory for themselves, and blow you out of the water from an efficiency standpoint.

Investing more than $1,000 a month in paid search? Don't do it manually.

7.

Ignoring mindset

I've already mentioned testing the user experience before launching a campaign to make sure the experience is consistent with the expectations of the advertiser. Another user experience sanity check that needs to be conducted before launching an online campaign is the mindset check.

A client of ours once tried to run an ad that took nearly 30 seconds to run through its animation sequence on a site where the typical user was in and out in half that time. Obviously, folks didn't stick around long enough to see that ad play out. But that's just one symptom of an overarching disease.

The sanity check has to do with the mindset your prospects will tend to be in when they encounter your ad. Are they browsing? Are they "mission critical?"-- that is, are they preoccupied with hurriedly completing a specific task? Are they on a page that typically serves as a quick gateway to another?

Ignore mindset at your peril. Many advertisers filter inventory from their buys based on mindset. They might not buy ads on Instant Messenger applications, knowing that people are less likely to respond if they're actively engaged in a chat with a buddy. They also might ignore proposals to buy ads on stock quote pages, knowing that even the desirable individual investor target can be less attentive if they're quickly typing in one stock quote after another as they check on prospective investments.

Creative can be optimized according to mindset. One might use a short-form animated banner on a gateway page and a longer form creative on a page where people are likely to spend more time. But mindset shouldn't be ignored. Doing so can reduce the effectiveness of your campaigns and cause perfectly good inventory to fail to produce brand impact and increased response.

8.

Not customizing sponsorships

So you bought a terrific sponsorship that involves three ad units on a page. The leaderboard on the top, a nice skyscraper down the right-hand side and the leaderboard on the bottom.

Now is not the time to run the same ads you run in ROS rotations.

You can see these sponsorships all over the web, where the advertiser owns the page and every ad unit on it. Such multi-unit sponsorships have a terrific chance of making a big impression on a potential customer, but all too often advertisers fail to take advantage of the space they've purchased.

Some of the best sponsorships use multiple ad units in concert. Think Budweiser and its multi-unit ad that poured beer from the top leaderboard into a frosty glass waiting in the side skyscraper. The worst sponsorships simply fill the space with three random ads rotating elsewhere on the buy, and the user ends up inundated with different messages for the same product that compete for attention.

When you buy interesting space, you need to fill it with interesting advertising that takes advantage of what you bought.

9.

Forcing subscriptions

So you've got a giant database full of people who have purchased red rubber balls from your company, and you want to start a rubber ball newsletter. It would be so easy to simply export that customer database into the seed list for your new newsletter, wouldn't it?

As Yoda once said, "Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny."
As easy as it would be to give your newsletter a running start, force-subscribing customers to anything is a great way to get them to run away from your company, screaming.

I'm not kidding about the screaming part. People love to talk in online forums about how Company X spammed them and how they'll never do business with them again.

Don't forget, when someone spouts off about being spammed on a blog, message board, social networking site or other online community, those comments tend to stick around. And we all know how well blogs and community sites tend to be treated by Google and other search engines. A negative comment about spam out in the blogosphere, especially if other bloggers link to it, can be devastating to a brand's online reputation, not to mention natural search engine results.

Like it or not, a newsletter needs to be built organically. Perform an audit of customer touchpoints, from your website to your advertising to even your email signatures. You'll find plenty of opportunities to get customers and prospects signed up through an opt-in process.

10.

Acquisition vs. retention

The ability to separate your existing customers from your prospects is one of the things that make traditional database marketing very effective. After all, it's a lot easier to upsell or cross-sell an existing customer than it is to pluck an entirely new customer from the universe of folks who have never bought anything from your company.

There's no lack of opportunity to personalize messaging to brand loyalists, switchers and new prospects online. Behavioral targeting, remessaging, profile targeting and email personalization are all tactics we can use to segment and personalize.

Why, then, do I see a good number of campaigns that treat existing customers like they've never interacted with the advertiser before? In many cases, this can be downright insulting.

By way of example, a few weeks after making a big-ticket purchase with an online retailer, I received the same acquisition message in an email that any prospect might get. The email contained a pitch for one of the things I had just bought from the company.

The fact that this happens in a dynamic marketplace where personalization is easy says something to me. It says the retailer doesn't care enough about my business even to acknowledge that I've been a loyal customer.
How difficult would it have been for the retailer to look up my purchase history, insert a line in the email that says, "We appreciate your business," and recommend a product for me that wasn't the one I just purchased?
Not very difficult at all.
Fact is, CRM solutions make it easy for marketers to mirror online what they're doing in traditional database marketing. Ad servers can easily help to differentiate between folks you've already reached with your ad campaign and folks who are seeing your ads for the first time. They can differentiate between different types of customers, too. So why deliver the same ad you run to attract new customers to the folks who already buy from you?

Conclusion: You live, you learn

No one expects marketing to be perfect 100 percent of the time. That's why we test a lot in this business. But the expectation is that once we've learned from our testing, we should be applying that knowledge wherever we can to improve our marketing efforts continually.

Each of the 10 marketing blunders I've described here is a lesson someone learned, sometimes the hard way.
The good news is that their mistakes are your learning opportunities. Don't doom yourself to repeating history.

Last suggestion: print this piece out and see if your company is currently committing any of these blunders.
If so, fix them.

MEDIA PLANNING & BUYING: IN FOCUS

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Top 10 Tips to Better Business Blogging

Hendry Lee wrote about top 10 tips to use and promote your blog:

1.

Write like you talk. Don’t talk at your readers, but in a personal tone like you talk to a friend. A good trick to do this is by defining a clear target market and then takes it down further to an individual. Every time you blog, write to the person as if you are talking to him/her.

2.

Choose the right person to blog. A blogger should know your company or the topics you want to blog about inside out. No one knows your business and market like you, but if for some reason you can’t do it, delegate to one - or a group of bloggers - who know your business. The right person may not even be somebody in marketing, but possibly could be in customer support or a technical person.

3.

Post regularly. Frequency matters, after some time as you establish an audience, readers expect you to post content often. That’s the reason they come back to your blog or subscribe to your RSS feed. Consistency creates stickiness.

4.

Bloggers are generous linkers. Do link to other posts, news resources, authority sites and give credit where credit is due. Doing this appropriately can help you in building relationships with other bloggers in your industry. Bloggers appreciate the links and will often link back.

5.

Encourage feedback and conversation. Commenting is one of the most unique features of a blog. If you keep people for writing comments on your blog, they will do that on their own blog. Use trackback when necessary to continue the conversation.

6.

Know your keywords. Having the right keywords can help your ranking and is one of the important on-page factors for search engine optimization. A keyword or key phrase is basically what people enter into search engines like Google and Yahoo! to find you. Common places search engine robot look for keywords are in the title, various heading tags, body copy, text formats, and link texts.

7.

Add supporting pictures. Visual content improves a blog, but should enhance what you write in the post. Using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) blog editor, you can do this without having to know any HTML code, and are very easy once you begin.

8.

Promote your blog consistently. Renew your signature file to point to your blog, tell your newsletter readers about it, promote it in your presentations, talk about it on the next networking event, and so on.

9.

Encourage RSS/Atom feed subscription. There are always people who like your blog on the first visit, but forget about it tomorrow. If you hook them with your blog’s RSS/Atom feed, your content will be syndicated automatically the next time you update your blog and chances are better they will remember you.

10.

Socialize. Blogging is essentially a social tool. While you can involve in discussion across multiple blogs, networking propels your efforts to the next level. Bloggers tend to link to other blogs they know.

No one can build a successful blog overnight, unless he/she is a very influential or a famous person. Don’t blog just because your colleague says that it is going to be the trend.
Blogging requires a lot of resources, but if done properly, can be a great marketing medium from which you can reap later. A blog extends your marketing reach to the next level, but remember, it should be used in addition to other marketing strategies.

About Henry Lee:
Hendry Lee helps business owners integrate technologies into their marketing. He actively blogs about Small Business Blogging. Subscribe to Blog Tips for Business to receive short and practical tips to start and get the most out of your blog.

Monday, December 4, 2006

Yahoo! Top 10 Movie Searches 2006

1.

Spider-Man 3

2.

X-Men 3

3.

Pirates of the Caribbean 2

4.

Star Wars

5.

Superman Returns

6.

Transformers

7.

Saw III

8.

The Da Vinci Code

9.

Talladega Nights

10.

Borat


Read more about it rating on the Spirit Of The INTERNET, or on official Yahoo! prewss release.

Yahoo! Top 10 Song Lyric Searches 2006

1.

Hips Don't Lie

2.

My Humps

3.

Grillz

4.

Unfaithful

5.

Bad Day

6.

Beep

7.

Laffy Taffy

8.

Buttons

9.

What Hurts the Most

10.

Unwritten


Read more about it rating on the Spirit Of The INTERNET, or on official Yahoo! prewss release.

Yahoo! Top 10 Politician Searches 2006

1.

George W. Bush

2.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

3.

Bill Clinton

4.

Hillary Clinton

5.

Dick Cheney

6.

Mark Foley

7.

John Kerry

8.

Barack Obama

9.

Nancy Pelosi

10.

Tom Delay


Read more about it rating on the Spirit Of The INTERNET, or on official Yahoo! prewss release.

Yahoo! Top 10 Sports Team Searches 2006

1.

New York Yankees

2.

Dallas Cowboys

3.

Pittsburgh Steelers

4.

Boston Red Sox

5.

Manchester United

6.

Arsenal FC

7.

Detroit Tigers

8.

Chicago Bears

9.

Real Madrid

10.

St. Louis Cardinals


Read more about it rating on the Spirit Of The INTERNET, or on official Yahoo! prewss release.

Yahoo! Top 10 Blog/Blogger Searches 2006

1.

Perez Hilton

2.

The Superficial

3.

Pink Is the New Blog

4.

Huffington Post

5.

TMZ.com

6.

Daily Kos

7.

Jossip

8.

A Socialite's Life

9.

Little Green Footballs

10.

Gawker


Read more about it rating on the Spirit Of The INTERNET, or on official Yahoo! prewss release.

Yahoo! Top 10 TV Show Searches 2006

1.

American Idol

2.

Lost

3.

Days of Our Lives

4.

Family Guy

5.

Deal or No Deal

6.

Grey's Anatomy

7.

The Simpsons

8.

Dancing With the Stars

9.

Smallville

10.

South Park


Read more about it rating on the Spirit Of The INTERNET, or on official Yahoo! prewss release.

Yahoo! Top 10 Celebrity Baby Searches 2006

1.

Suri Cruise

2.

Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt

3.

Sean Preston Federline

4.

Jayden James Federline

5.

Kingston Rossdale

6.

David Banda

7.

Moses Martin

8.

Grier Hammond Henchy

9.

Barron William Trump

10.

Dannielynn Hope Marshall Stern


Read more about it rating on the Spirit Of The INTERNET, or on official Yahoo! prewss release.

Yahoo! Top 10 Celebrity Searches 2006

1.

Britney Spears

2.

Shakira

3.

Jessica Simpson

4.

Paris Hilton

5.

Beyonce Knowles

6.

Chris Brown

7.

Pamela Anderson

8.

Lindsay Lohan

9.

Jessica Alba

10.

Mariah Carey


Read more about it rating on the Spirit Of The INTERNET, or on official Yahoo! prewss release.

Yahoo! Top 10 News Story Searches 2006

1.

Steve Irwin death

2.

Anna Nicole's son dies

3.

Iraq

4.

Israel and Lebanon

5.

U.S. elections

6.

Fidel Castro stroke

7.

North Korea nuke

8.

JonBenet confession

9.

Saddam Hussein trial

10.

Danish cartoon

Read more about it rating on the Spirit Of The INTERNET, or on official Yahoo! prewss release.

Yahoo! Top 10 Overall Searches 2006

1.

Britney Spears

2.

WWE

3.

Shakira

4.

Jessica Simpson

5.

Paris Hilton

6.

American Idol

7.

Beyonce Knowles

8.

Chris Brown

9.

Pamela Anderson

10.

Lindsay Lohan

Read more about it rating on the Spirit Of The INTERNET, or on official Yahoo! prewss release.

The Top 10 viewed youtube videos to november 2006

1.

Evolution of Dance
Views: 36,326,477

2.

Pokemon Theme Music Video
Views: 17,587,465


3.

Quick Change Artists on America’s Got Talent
Views: 13,227,001



4.

guitar
Views: 11,322,284

5.

Hey clip
Views: 11,258,123

6.

Real Life Simpsons Intro
Views: 10,324,703

7.

Urban Ninja
Views: 8,995,901

8.

OK Go - Here It Goes Again
Views: 8,752,958

9.

Ronaldinho: Touch of Gold
Views: 8,210,285

10.

lion sleep tonight
Views: 8,086,338

U can see this statistic on YouTube.

Saturday, December 2, 2006

The top 10 alternative ways to make money online

1.
EARN BY PHONE

Ether is an innovative service, where you can earn by phone. How is that possible? Well we all have something valuable to say. Whether you’re an accountant, a computer expert, a blogger , or a good gossiper, you can earn money selling what you say to others over the phone or through email. Sure, only if there is a demand for what you are saying. If you are an entrepreneur with multimillion business I am sure people would like to pay you to talk about your path to success. If everything you know is local gossip things can get harder, but with proper marketing everything is possible:) There are no monthly fees, no setup fees and no connection fees. Ether only earns money when you earn money – their commission is 15%. You earn money based on the rate you’ve set. Once you’ve placed your Ether Phone Number where you want people to see it, your phone only rings when someone is ready to pay for what you say. This service can be very useful addition to your normal business. One way of testing Ether is by setting high rate per hour, so you can still work on your projects and take the cash from those who value your past work to pay high rates. You can market yourself by putting your Ether Phone Number on your business card, website,blog or wherever people can find you.

2.

DO WHAT HUMANS DO BETTER THAN COMPUTERS

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web service, where you can earn cash by doing simple things, that people do better than computers. We build complex software applications based on the things computers do well, such as storing and retrieving large amounts of information or rapidly performing calculations. However, humans still significantly outperform the most powerful computers at completing such simple tasks as identifying objects in photographs—something children can do even before they learn to speak. Don’t expect to earn enough to retire, but by for example transcripting podcasts you can earn few bucks.

3.

ENGAGE IN EXPORT IMPORT BUSINESS

Closo is an e-commerce tool that brings you local and international market closer by allowing face-to-face trades and using tools, and verification systems that eliminate many types of fraud that both buyers and sellers are subject to on similar websites. There are merchants and customers all over the world who are afraid to trade at a distance, yet they have quality goods to buy and sell.Closo is dedicated to attracting these customers by providing local pickups as an option by using their web-based messaging system as communication. This option is also an excellent tool for international buyers and sellers to communicate and make sure that each party is completely satisfied with the transaction.


4.

SELL YOUR DIGITAL CONTENT


Blish is a digital marketplace that allows anyone with digital content a place to sell products. Whether you’re a company with thousands of digital products, or you’ve written one book or a piece of software code, Blish offers you a place to sell that content. Each product that you hope to sell via Blish.com is limited to a 300 MB file size.

5.

SELL YOUR STOCK IMAGES AND ILLUSTRATIONS


Fotolia is the first worldwide social marketplace for royalty free stock images, allowing individuals and professionals to legally buy and share stock images and illustrations.Fotolia offers image bank of free and affordable royalty free photos and illustrations perfect for any medium, web or print. Photographers and designers constantly update Fotolia with thousands of new photos and illustrations each day, while photographers and designers receive commission from each photo sold and revenue from advertising on the free section.Fotolia challenges the traditional closed agency model by offering to everyone hobbyist or professional the opportunity to monetize their talents, whatever their fame, status, or size of portfolio.

6.

START YOUR OWN SHOP


CafePress is an online marketplace that offers sellers complete e-commerce services to independently create and sell a wide variety of products, and offers buyers unique merchandise across virtually every topic. CafePress.com has empowered individuals, organizations and businesses to create, buy and sell customized merchandiseonline using the company’s unique print-on-demand and e-commerce services. Today, CafePress.com is a growing network of over 2.5 million members, which have created over 35 million unique products on customizable merchandise ranging from apparel, home and office accessories to music and data CDs and books to prints, posters and cards. Powering independently-run shops as well as syndicated and corporate stores,cafepress manage every aspect of doing business online , including storefront development, site hosting, order management, fulfillment, secure payment processing, and quality customer service - enabling anyone to open a free shop with no upfront costs and no inventory to manage.

7.

EARN FROM GOOGLE ANSWERS


Become a google answers qualified researcher. Because of an overwhelming response by qualified candidates, they are temporarily not accepting additional applications, but they stated in their FAQ that they will likely begin accepting applications again in the near future. More than 500 carefully screened researchers are currently answering questions from 2.50$ per answer to more than 10$ per answer.

8.

SUBMIT YOUR CONTENT TO THE ACCOCIATED PRESS


Submit your content to the Associated content . If you’re over 18 and a legal US resident, you can submit content for payment consideration. An Associated content manager will review the submission and email you an offer within five business days. The amount of the offer is based on topic, quality, competition and the Content Producer’s track record of promoting their content and generating traffic for Associated Content. Payments range from $3-$20. The highest offers are placed on exclusive submissions that are specific, discoverable and consumer driven. If you are not satisfied, you can always decline an offer and remove your content from their system.

9.

DESIGN LOGOS AND TEMPLATES


Can you design a logo ? Well there are many contests per day for a minimum of 100$ reward on Sitepoint forums. If you win one contest per day, … well you can calculate that. You can do much more here ranging from trading your services, selling your ad space, templates or website, to landing a new job.

10.

BE INNOVATIVE


Last but not least: Be innovative! This is probably the best you can do if you want to earn serious $ online. Coverpop or Milliondollarhomepage are perfect examples, that you don’t need more than an innovative idea.

by Anna Benson

Friday, December 1, 2006

The Top 10 Passages From longlist The Bad Sex award 2006

1.

I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe (Jonathan Cape)

Hoyt began moving his lips as if he were trying to suck the ice cream off the top of a cone without using his teeth. She tried to make her lips move in sync with his. The next thing she knew, Hoyt had put his hand sort of under her thigh and hoisted her leg up over his thigh. What was she to do? Was this the point she should say, "Stop!"? No, she shouldn't put it that way. It would be much cooler to say, "No, Hoyt," in an even voice, the way you would talk to a dog that insists on begging at the table.

Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns - oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest - no, the hand was cupping her entire right - Now! She must say "No, Hoyt" and talk to him like a dog. . .

. . . the fingers went under the elastic of the panties moan moan moan moan moan went Hoyt as he slithered slithered slithered slithered and caress caress caress caress went the fingers until they must be only eighths of inches from the border of her public hair - what's that! - Her panties were so wet down. . . there - the fingers had definitely reached the outer stand of the field of pubic hair and would soon plunge into the wet mess that was waiting right. . . there-there- (p368-9)

2.

Before I Forget by André Brink (Secker & Warburg)

. . . the most tousled, tangled pubic patch through which I have ever had to find my way. A near impenetrable little forest, a small private Amazon to get lost in. But when one finally got down to the river, slipping and sliding through reeds and weeds and rushes and undergrowth, one could slither through the mud and dive in, wholly immerse oneself, stay down for an impossibly long time, nearly drowning, before coming up again, panting and heaving. . . (p140)

. . . the mound of her sex . . . was disproportionately - but beautifully - high and rounded, overgrown with a luxuriant mop of long black pubic hair, not crinkly at all, but soft and feathery; and the vulva itself ... was of unusual plumpness, almost spherical, like a large exotic mushroom in the fork of a tree, a little pleasure dome if ever I've seen one, where Alph the sacred river ran down to a tideless sea. No, not tideless. Her tides were convulsive, an ebb and flow that could take you very far, far back, before hurling you out, wildly and triumphantly, on a ribbed and windswept beach without end (pp202-3)

". . . I would plunge into her from above like a diver in search of abalone." (p171-2)

3.

Snobs by Julian Fellowes (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Still without a word he turned back to her, the same furious intensity in his face, and, avoiding direct eye contact, he started to kiss her while he planted his right hand against her vagina. Once it was in place, he began to massage her with a kind of dry pumping action, which reminded her of someone blowing up a lilo. She groaned a bit by way of encouragement. He didn't seem to need more as suddenly he heaved himself over between her legs, fumbled himself into her, thrust away a few times - no more than six at the outside - and then, with a terrific gasp to tell her that it was now (which she countered with some cries and pants of her own), he collapsed on top of her. The whole business, from the moment he folded the paper, had taken perhaps eight minutes. Ah, thought Edith.

"Thank you, darling." One of Charles's more irritating habits was always to thank Edith after sex, as if she had just brought him a cup of tea. Of course, at this point, she did not know it was habitual.

4.

The Last Song of Dusk by Siddharth Dhanvant Shangvi (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Was it on the bed that she sat on him, her weasel-like loins clutching and unclutching his lovely, long, louche manhood, as though squeezing an orange for its juice? Or was it on the balcony swing, much later, that he buried his thirsty tongue in those thick pink lips between her legs? She loved most the lusciousness of his buttocks, their dimpled circumference, as though God had created them only so she might pull him farther into herself and then muffle her rapturous pleasure as she had, only a few hours back, muffled her anguish. ... they had exhausted all the wild beasts lurking in the forests of their flesh. . . (p35)

5.

Cherry by Matt Thorne (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

I still had the brush. I gripped it tightly, even as Cherry embraced me. She was on all fours, with me lying beneath her. I let her hold me, then moved the brush to my crotch, pointing it upwards. I wasn't sure what I was doing. The kiss had changed the temperature of the moment, altering our interaction from erotic fantasy to sexual intimacy. . . . It was true that in my years without a woman my fantasies had frequently been shaped by material created out of empty anger and pain, and it was an attempt to legitimise (in the sense of seeking a female response to) this form of frustrated lust that I acted now, bringing my hips up so the tip of the brush handle pressed against Cherry's labia. (p88)

6.

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (Little, Brown)

I held Karla as if holding her could heal me, and we didn't make love until night lit the last star in our wide window of sky. Her hands were kisses on my skin. My lips unrolled the curled leaf of her heart. She breathed in murmurs, guiding me, and I spoke rhythm to her, echoing my needs. Heat joined us, and we enclosed ourselves with touch and taste and perfumed sounds. Reflected on the glass, we were silhouettes, transparent images - mine full of fire from the beach, and hers full of stars. And at last, at the end, those clear reflections of our selves melted, merged, and fused together. (p658)

I pressed my lips against the sky, and licked the stars into my mouth. She took my body into hers, and every movement was an incantation. Our breathing was like the whole world chanting prayers. Sweat ran in rivulets to ravines of pleasure. Every moment was a satin skin cascade. Within the velvet cloaks of tenderness, our backs convulsed in quivering heat, pushing heat, pushing muscles to complete what minds begin and bodies always win. I was hers. She was mine. My body was her chariot, and she drove it into the sun. Her body was my river, and I became the sea. And the wailing moan that drove our lips together, at the end, was the world of hope and sorrow that ecstasy wrings from lovers as it floods their souls with bliss. (p400)

7.

Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam (Faber & Faber)

At the tip of his penis, the dot of starlit ache - which had to be kept in place and referred to periodically to maintain the erection, but was never to be dwelt on because then it would spread and lead to climax - was growing larger.

His mouth looked for the oiled berry. Her taste came and went tidally salt and sour in his mouth, as eloquent as weather.

When he fell through the sensation and opened his eyes he was surprised to find her there.
And he could not hold her close enough.

The smell of his armpits was on her shoulders - a flower depositing pollen on a hummingbird's forehead.

They detonated the remains of each other's orgasms with fingers and tongues, areas of their bodies sticking together with sweat that was like the weak glue that holds segments of an orange together. (p127)

8.

The Food of Love by Anthony Capella (Timewarner)

She felt strange and wild. Her body was just a collection of organs. She was blood and plumbing, like any other creature, and there was nothing that was forbidden about any of it. She gnawed on Tomasso ravenously, like an animal plundering a carcass, and when she had had enough of that she swung her leg over him, like a rider swinging into a saddle, and galloped.
She was riding naked on a big horse, among a pack of hunting wolves, at night. The flanks of the horse were slippery with foam. She could sense something in the distance, some small animal which was desperately trying to escape the pack, but they were getting closer to it every second. The wolves could sense it, too, and increased their pace. She galloped faster, urging her mount on with little cries and squeezes of her thighs. Closer and closer they got to their quarry. Now there was a jump ahead, a vast wall rushing towards her, but it was too late to stop. She dug her nails in hard and held on for dear life. As she finally took off into the air, she arched her back and shouted. The animal was screaming, too, as the wolves finally caught it and tore it apart, ripping its soft pajate open with their sharp teeth, devouring the coratella and the bloody bright red heart. (p99)

9.

Virgin in the Gym and other stories: Room Service by Wendy Perriam (Robert Hale)

The startled bed was rocking as he made her come with just his mouth: bristly chin, velvet lips. "Yes, more!" she cried as his tongue probed and thrust. "It's wonderful! It's wonderful!" He had peeled her like a kiwi fruit and she was all glistening-moist and sensitive as his unstinting tongue went deeper. Nothing existed in her universe save the long slow stroke of that tongue, opening her wider and wider until the whole of him seemed to slip inside her and explore her body from the inside out. He was licking a lazy pathway from her womb to her lungs to her heart, and their bloodstreams were converging into one reckless scarlet pulse. There were no boundaries between them now: he was seeing through her eyes, swallowing with her throat, digesting with her juices. And all the Pierres that had ever been - the child Pierre, the boy Pierre, the student, poet, painter Pierre, the tender, violent, wild Pierre - were fused with her and part of her, part of her seethe and squall. "Yes, Pierre, I'm coming!" she shouted, winding her fingers tighter into his hair. (p56)

10.

Dr Mukti and other tales of woe: 'Dr Mukti' by Will Self (Bloomsbury)

Whimpering and grinding his teeth, Shiva swung open the gate and entered another of the fields on his funny farm. He herded the cow into the hoof-cratered corner by the water trough, then slipped his trousers off so he could mount her. His first wife Sandra bucked and mooed beneath him. Despite the tumult of upheaving flesh Shiva still noticed - with lofty, Brahminical pity - the sprinkling of livid spots on the inside of her anal cleft. Sandra's conical fingers, which resembled jeweller's ring trees, dug into an earthen bolster, and her high-pitched bellows rent the rapidly compressing atmosphere. (p100)

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