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.

Just found that Dwell magazine has a blog.

Ooops! A pseudo-blog. No feed.

Dwell: Get with the program.

UPDATE: Apparently it does! There is an RSS graphic at the bottom. But that’s not the feed link. Oh no!

You have to click the image to go to a page that has the page that has the RSS feed in it.

No. The feed is part of the blog. It MUST appear on the same page as the blog. Making it hard to find defeats the point of the process.

After a couple of days vacation, the FeedBurner feeds are back.

I bought the domain forwarding option from Wordpress.com (http://crazycanuck.org/), and then waited. I reactivated the feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/crazycanuck this morning, and you can start using that again.

Rick Klau from FeedBurner left a comment last night, which prompted me to try again.

Hopefully things will remain stable now.

Technorati Tags: FeedBurner, feeds

Well, for some reason that I can’t determine, FeedBurner and my Wordpress.com feed stopped playing nicely this afternoon. And they won’t reload, because Wordpress.com wants to send all 1400+ articles in the database back to FeedBurner.

Sorry to do this to you all, but the FeedBurner feed is removed. Deleted.

Hope y’all switch to the Wordpress.com feed.

UPDATE: The FeedBurner Feed is back.

Joe Kottke of FeedBurner sent me an e-mail to tell me that the measurement of my feed was throwing off their GrabPERF Stats.

Guess what? FeedBurner can’t find the Wordpress feeds at http://crazycanuck.wordpress.com/feed/, hence the disruption.

Likely you won’t read this until it’s fixed, if it’s fixed.

I love Fridays.

I finally tired of running my own blog server, and since most folks use the feeds, I figure I will abuse Matt Mullenweg’s bandwidth rather than my own.

Welcome back?

For those of you in the US who are not blessed with a way to tap into the Canadian feeds from the World Cup, you are missing a real treat. And you know what the treat is?

Silence.

It seems that the announcers that Rogers SportsNet and TSN have recruited to cover the games know how to keep their mouths shut and let the action unfold on the screen, with occasional salient comments on the action.

As well, the screen isn’t cluttered with useless graphics and streaming ticker notes. Just the score and a timeclock in the top left corner that disappears, and re-appears in about 2-minute intervals.

Sometimes, just letting the game unfold is the best way to enjoy the beauty and skill of the teams.

Technorati Tags: World Cup, Canada, USA, Rogers SportsNet, TSN

Reading anything using a feed reader allows prevents us from discriminating against the content.

Start with an inflammatory statement, then back it up, using the wisdom gleaned from Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Why do feeds prevent us from initial discrimination? Because we have no point of reference other than the text in front of us, and the occasional image. There is no way to make a quality judgement based on differences in appearance or layout.

In fact, the feeds we read are often filtered by the influence of others. We react positively to someone’s raving review of a feed, and we incorporate it into our subscriptions.

The decisions we make in those initial seconds may sour over time. Feeds grow old, stale, uninteresting. But the why did we subscribe in the first place? Was it a decision based on the layour of a site? The way the person looks?

No. It is based on the feedback of others, and the content we encounter.

Technorati Tags: Blink, feeds, blogging, Malcolm Gladwell

Can’t read your feeds?

You’re not alone.

UPDATE:

Even the plumber is confused.

Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Web Performance, Bloglines, aggregator

Yesterday I was on a call with a customer who flat out stated that 55% of their bandwidth was consumed by applications pulling RSS feeds.

Does your company have a grip on just how much continual background noise RSS feeds inflict on your Web servers?

Technorati Tags: RSS, Web performance, bandwidth