There is clear dissatisfaction with the current state of marketing among the social media mavens.

• Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures are looking for companies to invest in to take advantage of this.
• BuzzLogic releases their conversational ad service.
• The Inquisitr moves from AdSense to Technorati Media, indicating a potential shift at b5 Media.
• Lookery is providing demographic information that is relevant to social media providers and shaping ad presentation that way
• A completely off-the-radar person such as myself realizes that there is gold in what holds the attention, and that’s not always the latest and greatest

So what can be done? Jeff Jarvis points out that the problem lies with measurement. I agree, as there is only value in a system where all of the people involved agree on what the metric of record will be, and how it can be validly captured.

Currently CPM is the agreed upon metric. In a feed based online world, how does a CPM model work? And, most importantly, why would I continue to place your ads on my site if all your doing is advertising to people based on the words on the page, rather than who is looking at the page and how often that page is looked at.

In effect, advertisers should be the ones thrying to figure out how to get into the community, get into the conversation. As an advertiser, don’t you want to be where the action is? But how do you find an engaged audience in an online world that makes a sand castle on the beach in a hurricane look stable?

The challenge for advertisers is to be able to find the active communities and conversations effectively. The challenge for content creators and communities is to understand the value of their conversations, the interactions that people who visit the site have with the content.

In effect, a social media advertising model turns the current model on its head. Site owners and community creators gain the benefit of being attractive to advertisers because of the community, not because of the content. And site owners who understand who visits their site, what content most engages them, how they interact with the system will be able to reap the greatest rewards by selling their community as a marketable entity.

And Steven Hodson rounds out the week’s think on communities by throwing out the subversive idea that communities are not always free (as in ‘beer’, not as in ‘land of’). If a community has paid for the privilege of coming together to participate in communal events and discussions, then can’t that become an area for site owners to further control the cost of advertising on their site?

While the benefit of reduced or no marketing content is the benefit of many for-pay communities, this benefit can be used by site owners by saying that an advertiser can have access to the for-pay community at the cost of higher ad rates and smaller ads. The free community is a completely different set of rules, but there are also areas in the free community that are of higher value than others.

In summary, the current model is broken. But there is no way to measure the value of a Twitter stream, a FriendFeed conversation, a Disqus thread, or a Digg rampage. And until there is, we are stuck with an ad model that based on the words on the page, and not the community that created the words.

David Parmet pointed me to these Pledge Week extravaganzas.

My fave:

Surviving members of every 50s doo-wop band fight to the death with clubs — shirtless and totally coked-up — in massive Thunderdome-like arena

Merlin Mann is a god. One of the minor deities, but a deity nonetheless.

Some additions:

1. Celtic Women v. The Three Tenors in a massive glass-breaking, heavy metal tribute to Metallica!
2. Civil War outtakes — “Dear Ma,… General Grant has given the soldiers with one leg the afternoon off from ditch digging, god bless him…” (David Parmet)
3. Ken Burns vs the Celtic Woman in a nude mud wrestling match.. with fire!!! (David Parmet)
4. Cirque du Soleil performing with live wolverines
5. Ken Burns and Bill Moyers fighting for the right to interview what’s left of Nixon

STOP. THE. AWFUL. PLEDGE. DRIVES!

I have had to disable the Digg measurements in GrabPERF as a number of the monitoring locations have been blocked by the Digg firewall.

Technorati tags: GrabPERF, Digg, digg.com, firewall

Every day, the Digg search measurement times explode.

Maybe they need to look at that code again…

Technorati Tags: Digg, Digg.com, GrabPERF, Web+performance

So, how did you spend your Thanksgiving Day?

Keith is installing the run-off / septic tank for the Winery. Last week, in the heavy rains, the hole it was in filled with water and the tank was bobbing up and down in a pit of muck.

Now that the muck has been drained, he needed to make the tank level and fill around it. Keith did most of the work, but we had to jam rocks under it, and then lever it until it was level. Then Keith dumped fill in around the tank.

Hopefully it will be stable.

Now, it looks like we will get a blast of frozen rain.

Oh, the joys of farm life.

And not a Starbucks in sight.

The weekly GrabPERF Search Index Results are in.

NOTES:

• Level3/Cogent Peering Dispute affected all results this week

Week of October 04-10, 2005

TEST                                 RESULT  SUCCESS  ATTEMPTS
--------------------------------  ---------  -------  --------
PubSub - Search                   0.4032768    99.86      6644
Google - Search                   0.5196460   100.00      6735
Yahoo - Search                    0.6926705   100.00      6694
MSN - Search                      0.7543688   100.00      6722
Google Blogsearch (ATOM)- Search  0.8480318    99.82      6725
Google Blogsearch - Search        0.8880010    99.84      6731
eBay - Search                     0.9723281   100.00      6736
Newsgator - Search                0.9935382    99.61      6685
BestBuy.com - Search              1.2988528    99.94      6721
Findory - Search                  1.3819290    99.93      6693
Technorati - Search               1.4609834    99.88      6671
Amazon - Search                   1.6579611    98.94      1799
BENCHMARK RESULTS                 1.7649221    99.56    108774
Feedster - Search                 2.4226014    99.73      6671
IceRocket - Search                2.6644861    99.51      6698
Blogdigger - Search               2.7916678    99.14      6378
BlogLines - Search                3.5648172    96.84      6735
Blogpulse - Search                6.6344053    98.96      6736

These results are based on data gathered from two remote measurement locations in North America. Each location takes a measurement approximately once every five minutes.

The measurements are for the base HTML document only. No images or referenced files are included.

Technorati: GrabPERF, Web Performance, Web Performance Measurement, Web Performance Monitoring, search index, SEO

IceRocket: GrabPERF, Web Performance, Web Performance Measurement, Web Performance Monitoring, search index, SEO

The weekly GrabPERF Search Index Results are in.

NOTES:

• Findory blog search added to index
• Google standard search takes top spot with 100% availability

Week of September 26 – October 03, 2005

TEST                                 RESULT  SUCCESS  ATTEMPTS
--------------------------------  ---------  -------  --------
Google - Search                   0.2477162   100.00      7062
PubSub - Search                   0.2538995    99.80      7043
Google Blogsearch (ATOM)- Search  0.5839898    99.90      7064
MSN - Search                      0.6146201    99.99      7063
Yahoo - Search                    0.6154676    99.99      7060
Google Blogsearch - Search        0.6547768    99.92      7064
eBay - Search                     0.6940026   100.00      7058
BestBuy.com - Search              1.0745931    99.91      7056
Technorati - Search               1.1970990    99.92      7062
Findory - Search                  1.2055845    99.91      6725
Amazon - Search                   1.2378869    99.33      1803
Feedster - Search                 1.2583286    99.92      7061
BENCHMARK RESULTS                 1.4132893    99.73    114382
Newsgator - Search                1.5429696    99.29      7062
Blogdigger - Search               1.7054253    99.99      7058
BlogLines - Search                1.7401694    98.99      7061
IceRocket - Search                3.7427026    98.57      7012
Blogpulse - Search                5.5294509    99.72      7062

These results are based on data gathered from two remote measurement locations in North America. Each location takes a measurement approximately once every five minutes.

The measurements are for the base HTML document only. No images or referenced files are included.

Technorati: GrabPERF, Web Performance, Web Performance Measurement, Web Performance Monitoring, search index, SEO

IceRocket: GrabPERF, Web Performance, Web Performance Measurement, Web Performance Monitoring, search index, SEO

The weekly GrabPERF Search Index Results are in.

Week of September 19-25, 2005

TEST                                 RESULT  SUCCESS  ATTEMPTS
--------------------------------  ---------  -------  --------
PubSub - Search                   0.1641161    99.82      7037
Google - Search                   0.2469639   100.00      7037
Google Blogsearch (ATOM)- Search  0.5754907    99.89      6201
Google Blogsearch - Search        0.5844869    99.67      7037
MSN - Search                      0.6129932    99.99      7036
Yahoo - Search                    0.6375895    99.94      7031
eBay - Search                     0.6750205   100.00      7036
Amazon - Search                   1.0858985    99.95      1832
Technorati - Search               1.1052304    99.89      7036
BestBuy.com - Search              1.3558370    99.52      7036
Newsgator - Search                1.5025822    99.97      7037
Feedster - Search                 1.5255779    99.52      7036
BENCHMARK RESULTS                 1.5572177    99.66    106498
Blogdigger - Search               1.7119017    99.94      7016
BlogLines - Search                2.6147261    97.24      7036
IceRocket - Search                3.4088173    99.86      7018
Blogpulse - Search                6.6481991    99.55      7036

These results are based on data gathered from two remote measurement locations in North America. Each location takes a measurement approximately once every five minutes.

The measurements are for the base HTML document only. No images or referenced files are included.

Technorati: GrabPERF, Web Performance, Web Performance Measurement, Web Performance Monitoring, search index, SEO

IceRocket: GrabPERF, Web Performance, Web Performance Measurement, Web Performance Monitoring, search index, SEO

The weekly GrabPERF Search Index Results are in.

This Week’s Notes

1. ERTW.com Agent location taken offline
2. Addition of Google Blogsearch to the Index
3. Numerous performance improvements to the GrabPERF interface

Week of September 12-18, 2005

TEST                           RESULT  SUCCESS  ATTEMPTS
--------------------------  ---------  -------  --------
PubSub - Search             0.2688096    99.82      6532
Google - Search             0.4013164    99.97      6532
Google Blogsearch - Search  0.5818507    98.60      4214
MSN - Search                0.6981630    99.83      6532
Yahoo - Search              0.7159974    99.95      6527
eBay - Search               0.8345692   100.00      6528
BlogLines - Search          1.0204595    99.95      6531
BestBuy.com - Search        1.1687228    99.97      6530
Feedster - Search           1.3112797    99.82      6531
Technorati - Search         1.3240335    99.95      6528
Amazon - Search             1.5195445    99.72      2481
Newsgator - Search          1.5823492    99.72      6529
Blogdigger - Search         1.7142475    99.97      6506
BENCHMARK RESULTS           2.0313721    99.50     76849
IceRocket - Search          4.2792600    98.79      6515
Blogpulse - Search          6.5226776    99.29      6522

These results are based on data gathered from two remote measurement locations in North America. Each location takes a measurement approximately once every five minutes.

The measurements are for the base HTML document only. No images or referenced files are included.

Technorati: GrabPERF, Web Performance, Web Performance Measurement, Web Performance Monitoring, search index, SEO

IceRocket: GrabPERF, Web Performance, Web Performance Measurement, Web Performance Monitoring, search index, SEO

Greg Gershman from BlogDigger found a bug in the Index charts just now. Seems that the chart legend was out of whack with the lines on the chart.

Easy fix. Turns out I was submitting the test ids in a random order. The graph generation component was fine with this, but when I went to build the legend, MySQL ordered the dynamic legend build result in a proper ascending fashion.

Simple fix: when I convert the test ids to an array, I sort the array before proceeding.

Thanks Greg!