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Will the iPad blend?

Blendtec's blenders cost a little fortune, but we're more than willing to spend an extra marketing dollar for all the great “Will it blend?” series videos those folks keep delivering. They blended hockey pucks, a laser pointers, Money clips – and above all plenty of Apple products. Following in the footsteps of the iPhone (both 1st edition and 3G) and the iPod, this time the newest geek-gadget aka the iPad undergoes the crush-test. Of course it won't withstand:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAl28d6tbko[/youtube] Read more

When Content Partnerships smell funny

Funny job descriptions turn up these day – have you ever heard of a “blog relations consultant”? I sure did today, and I can't say it was an enjoyable encounter. Just know this: unloading your backlink-ridden postings upon a popular blog is not called a “content partnership”. I would call it backlink scraping, but that sounds a lot more unfriendly, doesn't it?

Could it be there are altruist blog angels, interested in leveraging your popularity rank for utterly unselfish reasons? Unlikely, even though the first paragraph might sound tempting to some:

We're currently reaching out to bloggers like you to form a content partnership, or a guest blogging partnership, where our Professional writes can contribute guest blog posts on your blog once or twice a month.

Hang on, it's getting a lot funnier:

Our Writers would not be writing marketing material, but would like to provide Unique content for your blog. Please fill out this form if you are interested so that we can set up an editorial calendar.

Two note-worthy facts:

a) I had no idea that the difference between marketing and “great” content lies solely in the “uniqueness” of the latter.
b) This difference between the two mentioned content categories sounds even weirder considering that the person who sent me this e-mail works for a company which is “marketing” in its name.

So, sadly, I'm not going to start a “content partnership” with you. But I have a free consulting advice for you: set up your homepage before you start pestering innocent bloggers. Somebody might actually take a look at your URL, and read the following sentence:

We will use a unique combination that will allow you to fully utilize the Internet.

And then he might click around the bit and start to wonder, if a completely empty homepage is indeed “he latest trends of marketing that will literally put our customers first”…

Video-Interview: Guy Kawasaki on the state of social media

Last week, Guy Kawasaki visited Vienna to give a keynote lecture about innovation and the art of the start. I was the lucky blogger who got the chance to interview Guy – and I enjoyed the interview a lot. Guy has always been a major influence for me, his ideas have inspired me for years. We talked about his impressive biography, his Twitter strategy (Guy has more than 160k Followers) and his current project Alltop.com. The complete interview is 33 minutes long – I split it into five topical parts for your viewing pleasure. I also edited a full version, so if you prefer to watch one clip, navigate to the end of this posting.

Part 1: Guy Kawasaki's Bio and his e-mail inbox

His succesful career at Apple where he worked as a tech evangelist made Guy Kawasaki very famous. Few know though that he started his career in the jewelry business. In the first part of the interview, Guy talks about his biography and he explains how a web celebrity like him deals with tons of e-mails every day. Hint: purge everything that's older than 3 weeks!

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6538754[/vimeo]

Part 2: Guy's Twitter strategy

On Twitter, Guy has more than 160.000 followers. In the second part of the interview he explains his micro-blogging strategy in-depth. For Guy, Twitter is one of the best marketing channels, and he is putting a lot effort into offering lots of content to create a vivid environment for his marketing messages.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6540038[/vimeo]

Part 3: Guy Kawasaki about Facebook, Social Traffic and Online Reputation Management

Guy told me that he honestly doesn't understand Facebook – in his opinion, it's a place to “pull” people as opposed to Twitter which acts as a “Push” media. In this part we talk about the benefits of social traffic and the two-sided coin called online reputation management: Don't be afraid, use Facebook to create the image that helps your career!

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6540300[/vimeo]

Part 4: Guy Kawasaki about Alltop

Alltop.com currently is Guy's main project: the RSS site aggregates the most popular feeds on nearly 2000 topics. The site is not meant to serve geeks, but appeals to the mainstream user – Guy explains the concept and also has got a few tricks to offer for power-users.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6544551[/vimeo]

Part 5: Guy Kawasaki about blogging and entrepreneurship

In the last part of our talk Guy explains his thoughts about blogging and tells the true story of how he left apple and became an entrepreneur.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6544974[/vimeo]

Full interview: Guy Kawasaki on the state of social media

This is the full cut – same content, but edited into one video. If you prefer to watch our whole talk in one video, just go with this clip:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6545325[/vimeo]

What do you think?

Do you agree with Guy? What is your opinion about the future of Facebook and Twitter? Have you tried Alltop? I'm curious about your comments!

Weekly Blogistan Round-Up no. 23/2009

This weekly round-up comes with a built-in 24 hours of delay, as the author was extremely busy during the last weekend launching the Austrian Internet Council [site in German]. This was an amazing proof of the power of social media: within the short time span of 5 days we our project was the cover story on ORF FutureZone, Austria's biggest Tech News site. Crowdsourcing is great, but it can be quite time-consuming, especially when there's a lot of interest and involvement. So, without any further ado, let's jump right into this week's hot social media topics!

Ignore everybody!

breas! Hugh Macleod of Gapingvoid published his first book titled Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity. Just ordered my copy – I'm looking forward to some inspiring quotes and cartoons:

The first rule of business, is never sell something you love. Otherwise you may as well be selling your children.

The Real Pip-Boy Deal

The Pip Boy saved me various time – while I was strolling through the post-nuclear wastelands of Fallout 3. But the nifty little arm-computer might soon enter real life: Engadget shows pictures of an impressive flexible OLED-Display:

The 4-inch organic electroluminescent display sports up to 1.67 million colors, QVGA (320 x 240) 100ppi resolution, and can be bent to a curvature radius of about 2 inches. Hopefully, this doesn't become a must-have fashion accessory any time soon: while it's perfectly appropriate attire for post-apocalyptic wastelands, we don't know how well it'll fly at the sorts of high society social events we normally frequent.

Seesmic Desktop: no Air required

TechCrunch interviewed Seismic founder Loic LeMeur – and the most charming Leena Rao managed to make the man talk:

According to Le Meur, Seesmic will soon be offering a browser based client. This offering is actually appealing, considering that Adobe?s AIR platform has some strange UI bugs and quirks and tends to use a good amount of resources on computers. And Seesmic will also launch an iPhone app, which is currently under wraps along with the web-based product.

Jeremy's own Affiliate-Network

Jeremy Shoemaker has been writing about affiliate marketing for quite some time; but recently he launched his own affiliate-network and published a post about his experiences. I'm really curious about his plans:

Sure I hear you? your thinking “Why the hell would you pay people to sign up for a free course?” It's a great question and I think when the dust settles around the shoemoneyx.com program I will write all about it, why I did what, and what exact effect it had. I do have a method to my madness but it's not as many have guessed. We will see if it works but that is for another post

Twitter is becoming infrastructure

Regular Geek posted an interview view on twitter – his main point: Twitter is shifting from an online service to a basic infrastructure upon which early adopters are constructing an eco-system:

So, why is marketing and economy so important to Twitter becoming infrastructure? Without an economy building on top of Twitter data and functionality, Twitter would just be a toy. With people researching the data that is generated from Twitter, it becomes much more important. In order to monetize the system, they can sell the data, but monetization becomes much easier when you become ubiquitous.

Can't argue with that – with all the various mash-ups and the growing interest in real-time search, it seems that Twitter is here to stay. At least for now.

Bing beats Yahoo

Microsoft's new search engine hat a great start: TechCrunch reports that Bing overtook Yahoo – now the question is: will this trend last or will the wearer of the ancient headband #2 leap for a comeback?

The company?s analysis for Thursday finds that in the U.S. Bing overtook Yahoo to take second place on 16.28%, with Yahoo Search currently at 10.22%. For the sake of comparison: Google?s U.S. market share is pegged at 71.47%, and its worldwide share at a whopping 87.62% (vs. 5.62% for Bing and 5.13% for Yahoo).

Content ain't king

“The idea that ‘content is king' in blogging is total bullshit” says Viral Garden:

Every day I read hundreds of blog posts. And every day, I see dozens of truly GREAT posts that get no comments. Every day I see dozens of pretty good posts that get dozens of comments and have vibrant conversations.
The difference? Most of the bloggers that write those pretty good posts are also pretty good about leaving their blog and interacting with people on OTHER sites. They comment on their reader's blogs. They tweet their links on Twitter. They are ACTIVELY social with social media.

Interesting thesis… I'd say that both factors come into play. Social media spamming will just piss people off unless you got some stories that are actually worth watching your moves.

Pic of the week

I admit: I just couldn't decide between these two beautiful shots. A direct path was taken by eyesplash Mikul, it's a free-handed shot. The seconded picture portrays a female lying wolf in the zoo of Z?rich and was taken by Tambako the Jaguar:

picweekbird

picweekwolf

Video of the week

Boats are only people – pretty unreliable ones, to be exact. These love boat passenger are in for a wet treat – feel the pain of these great sailors:

This is the end – of this week's round-up. Thanks for stopping by and offering me some of your Whuffies. Let's do it like this: I'll keep posting and you'll keep coming back and drop a dime from time to time :mrgreen:

Input for weekly round-upGot any news you'd like to read about in my weekly round-up of current blogosphere events?
Don't hesitate to contact me! Of course I'll include a backlink to your original story.

So don't hesitate – just click here for the contact form and give me an update on your issues: Give me input!.

Oh hi we fixed ur homezpage

Yesterday I talked about some twitter marketing ideas at digitalks. In my presentation I referred to the page howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com. All it shows is a big fat “Don't” and I highly doubted this thesis. Luckily my namesake Richard Pyrker aka @cycus has done a fantastic pundit-kitchen-digitalks-xsara-photoshop mash-up:

hi we fixed ur homezpage

Read more

Weekly Blogistan Round-Up no. 01/2009

bewerbungHow you're doing? I hope you had a great start into the new year, and believe me: 2k9 is gonna be a wicked year for web 2.0 folks, and I mean “wicked” in the good, old-school jungle way. I do have the impression that the European commercial community is just waking up, and I'm seriously looking forward to bigger budgets being spent on web 2.0 advertising as this will boost the whole scene. My personal 1st of January had a very nice surprise in stall for me: datadirt received a Pagerank update and is now proudly sporting a 5.

My German blog datenschmutz is now a member of the quite exclusive PR6 blogs club – this did not come totally unexpected though, yet I'm still really happy about it. Now I know that good ole PR neither reflects a real-time value nor is it the most relevant SEO factor: but I like to think like some kind of nice, expensive watch: no added value, but it looks nice and gives a great first impression :mrgreen:

So, what's a super-affiliate again?

Super Affiliate is a stupid buzzword used in the affiliate marketing blogging community by bloggers who want to make you think they make more money or are somehow better than you. When I had my first $1000 week at one of the very well known affiliate networks, they said I was now a “Super Affiliate,” which showed me that it means absolutely nothing. Anyone using the term “Super Affiliate” in a non-joking manner, especially when referring to themselves, has no credibility, and is an idiot.

Says NickyCakes of Reformed Blackhat on Jeremy's Blog That's a short yet very concise way to put it – I have nothing to add :mrgreen:

Look back (in no anger)

Jeremy took the time to do a proper all-year review which is also a very smart idea in terms of internal pagerank distribution by the way.

TechCrunch und Twitter

TechCrunch publishes an article on a mash-up that forwards tweets to e-mail adresses. Asks Babou:

I really enjoy your blog for your insights and the posts of your team of writers but there is one thing: you really speak a lot about twitter.
Now I understand Twitter has become an important medium of communication but does it really deserve so much attention?

Well… that depends: I guess that twitter deserves all the attention that fits into 140 characters – a couple of times per day.

Video of the week

You don't want to get that job? By all means, watch and learn from this brilliant job interview video by Ben Schwartz:

So much for the first weekly blogosphere review of the new year – as always, comments and feedback are highly appreciated. See you next week!

Input for weekly round-upGot any news you'd like to read about in my weekly round-up of current blogosphere events?
Don't hesitate to contact me! Of course I'll include a backlink to your original story.

So don't hesitate – just click here for the contact form and give me an update on your issues: Give me input!.

My German blog ranks #44 in Twingly’s charts

Twingly ChartsThis week, Swedish Start-up Company Twingly launched its very own top-blog lists in twelve different languages. Their blog search is delivering really good results, so it seems that the near future might look rather bleak for Technorati – and the best part is that my main blog datenschmutz ranks #44 in the German-language list!

The overall winner of the new rating is – what a surprise – Technorati. And this is what Michael, or in this case Robin, thinks about the new charts:

Twingly, the social blog search engine that prides itself in being completely spam-free, has launched BlogRank as a way to identify the 100 most important blogs in 12 different languages based on a proprietary ranking system. It

Weekly Blogistan Round-Up no. 47/2008

Blogistan-PanoptikumThe last election parties have ended by now, the USA are looking forward to a new era of fairness and social improvement. Will the new president be able to live up to his promises in times of an economic crisis? Looks like Barrack Obama has got to deal with a difficult situation, as the crisis is now spreading from the finance sector to old economy and car manufacturers start facing serious troubles. Of course advertising budgets will be cut, which will eventually lead to more and more online-money being spent for performance based marketing. A rather bleak scenario for traditional advertiser, but definitely not the worst news for affiliates.

Going against Wikipedia: In Germany, left-wing politician Lutz Heilmann started a massive discussion among bloggers: the genius sued Wikipedia and had them remove the German article which contained among other biographical data on his history with the infamous Stasi. This is the perfect example of new media misunderstood: while Heilmann obviously tried to obfuscate facts, he provoked a flood of articles that give him a worse name than any Wikipedia page ever could have. The net is changing politics faster than anybody expected ten years ago…

Movement vs. Change: I love Seth Godins simple yet very illustrative examples of “the power of the net”. And I'm not a fan of Starbucks:

Simple example: the Starbucks in Larchmont, NY keeps their thermostat at 64 degrees. And the stores in Breckenridge, Colorado keep their doors wide open all winter. If you're raging mad about energy waste, you could say something. And nothing would happen. But if customers organized and ten people said something or a hundred people said something… boom, new rules. The system doesn't know what to do with a movement.

The ugliest thing of the week: it's a mixture between a car and motorcycle, and it combines the disadvantages of both concepts in perfection. I have no clue why Time Magazine has voted the Peravces Monotracer one of the best inventions of 2008. C'mon guys, you can't be serious – even the description sounds like a joke, but it's not:

You really need the mind of a Swiss engineer to come up with a vehicle that combines the lithe maneuverability of a motorcycle with the not-getting-rained-on-ability of a conventional automobile.

This week in Online Marketing: Google started rolling out a Digg-like feature where users can “like” or “dislike” search results. It seems they are currently running a few tests – I'm wondering if this social component will be used for the general index or for tailoring SERPs to the logged-in user's needs. And Twitter still is the new hot sh*t – even though the fail-whale returned today and SMS functionality is not avaible in most European countries, users still love their microblogging service #1. One of the reasons is the large number of mash-ups: the latest one even allows you to tweet from beyond: using twuffer.com, it's possbible to schedule tweets – so if you already know what you're going to do next week or next year, twuffer might be just for you. And if not you might still be able to use the service for marketing purposes :mrgreen:

Video of the week

How do you visualize a car that doesn't even exist yet? Infinity has invested a great deal of time and money to build a flexible and impressive 3D surroundig – this video explains the whole idea:

So much for this week – I wish you great Sunday, see you soon.

Sys-adminning vs. Marketing: Clash of cultures ftw!

Dan posted an amazing video (and redesigned his blog): it brilliantly illustrates the little differences between marketing (the guys who talk crap all the day) and sys-admins (the guys who play computer games during their work hours all day). It's a clash of civilizations: and we all know which one is gonna make it, right?

[youtube]BcQ7RkyBoBc[/youtube]