Make Spoof Pages With A Line of Code

Web spoofs made easy! Open up any page, then copy the line of code below in the browser's address field. This makes the page "editable" locally so you can modify its content like you would in a text editor.

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

Besides its obvious entertainment value, this little experiment shows how easy web editing and publishing should really be.

-- around the web, but specifically from BlogStorm

Last-Frame Interaction in Online Video from Involver

I once wrote about how one possible way to make money off YouTube was to add some call-to-action interaction to the last frame of the clip; this space is currently occupied by the promos for related videos. A new start-up called Involver has brought this model to life:

"Involver’s unique vision is to provide more than just “video with a buy button”, creating a tool for marketers that does more than deliver millions of impressions with no way to capture the audience. The platform uses a rich set of video plug-ins to allow the campaign owner to capture email, offer quizes or surveys, even take orders or donations - all within the framework of the video, never forcing the viewer to browse to a new Web page." (-- StageTwo).

You can post Involver-powered videos to a whole bunch of social networking sites, although not to YouTube.
-- thanks, Jim

Can Social Networks Make Money?

The cover story in this month's MIT Tech Review: "It's a model that stirs memories of the first Internet bubble: build the user base and hope the money comes--from an IPO, a buyout, or ads. At this point, KickApps does not reveal revenue figures, or even what kind of a cut it is taking from the ads. That, too, brings back memories: staying mum about revenue was always a sign that there wasn't much to talk about."

"The problems with social-network advertising revolve around three main issues: attention, privacy, and content."

Ads in Google Docs?

There's this article (blog post?) in Time about how iPhone apps won't be free and it starts with:

"It's probably been a while since you bought new software. That's because so many tech firms — buoyed by ads placed in Web-based applications like the Google Docs word processor and the thousands of apps on Facebook — can now afford to give their programs away for free."

Are there really ads in Google Docs?

Earlier:
Contextual Advertising in PDF
Contextual Advertising in Word Documents
Advertising on CV
ATM Advertising

Create Email Newsletters with Mad Mimi

Cool tool alert: Mad Mimi, a rare example of the Web 2.0 techno-goodness put to productive use, is a recently launched tool for creating nicely looking email newsletters by dragging and dropping different design elements around the page. Subscription boxes for your site and usage stats are included. Sending to the first 100 subscribers is free. Not sure yet how well it handles multipart (HTML and text-only) messages, but I'll report back after giving it a more thorough test drive. For similarly easy-made custom landing pages, I recommend Marketo.

Bookmarkable Banners with Reminders from Spongecell

Bookmarkable advertising is a pet topic of mine and I'm glad to point to the most recent of the very few examples of banners ads whose shelf life is extended beyond a single impression.

Spongecell, a company that makes online calendars with social features, is launching Spongecell Ads. These are online display ads with widget-like functionality that allow users to share the contents of the ad with their friends and also, importantly, set a reminder for yourself.

The example above is an ad for what looks like a music event, but you can see how this format can work with any date-based information: promotions, coupons with expiration date, sales and so on. To quote from an email from Spongecell, "We’re adding our Add to Life technology to a standard IAB advertisement to make it easy for a consumer to easily move relevant content from an advertisement into the tools they use every day - Calendar, Social Network, Mobile device or home page - think of it as a bookmark for an online campaign."

Semantic Match Ties Ads To Page Meaning

Keyword matching is so last decade: "Through Peer39's proprietary SemanticMatch technology the most relevant ads are displayed in the most appropriate and productive content, assuring higher ROI. Based on natural language processing and machine learning, Peer39's patented algorithms understand page meaning and sentiment, and deliver the most relevant and effective brand safe online advertising." (site, press release)

Blogbite of the Week

"Anyone can solve a user-related problem with a few lines of code, but that doesn’t automatically make you the better company in this world of rent, bills, overheads and shareholders; especially when you’re not actually generating revenue."

A reader comment under Techcrunch post about Anyvite making a better product than eVite.

AP: The Price of Words

When you a preparing your PowerPoints a few years from now, you will be looking to illustrate the case of Associated Press charging for content excerpts, and here is where you will find a screenshot of the licensing webform. As with other commodities, bulk-buying words results in savings: from .5 to .2 cents apiece as you move from the first to the last bundle.

If you are wondering how AP monitors re-blogged content -- they work with Attributor (see last year's press release).

From "Through the Looking-Glass":

Alice thought to herself, "Then there's no use in speaking." The voices didn't join in this time, as she hadn't spoken, but to her great surprise, they all THOUGHT in chorus (I hope you understand what THINKING IN CHORUS means -- for I must confess that I don't), "Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!"

Websites Morph To Users' Cognitive Styles

And we are back.

As you might know, I've been busy for the past two weeks moving to a new place, hence no internet, hence the lack of updates. I'm all set now, and we are back to our usual schedule. I'd never have to deal with so much customer service before in such concentration, and I have to thank all these people for taking most of the pain out of the process.

Excellent Moving truly lives up to its name. They sent me a huge truck and two guys who were running up and down the stairs with the furniture that can be barely lifted by a normal human. They were perfectly on time and on budget even though I had severely underestimated the number of boxes my possessions would fit in. If you need to move around Boston, you can't go wrong with them.

I wonder if agents sitting on the front row of desks at a real estate office usually get more walk-in business, and I'm glad one of them did because he found just the place (if you know Cambridge, you know how old and run-down many apartments here are; I'd seen seven of those). Call Apartment Rental Experts on Porter and ask for Paul.

Moving utilities has been a breeze using NStar's website. Comcast continues to provide great service even though they had to send a second technician to fix something that had been overlooked by the first one. It took two business days from the initial call for the internets to resume their smooth flow.

And of course, many thanks to AdLab readers for sticking around and nudging me to get back online:

"The crowd demands entertainment!
Толпа требует развлечений!
Gloata cere distractie!
众人需要娱乐"

To kick off our summer season, here's an article from MIT Tech review about websites that recognize the cognitive style of visitors by the way they click around and adapt their interfaces accordingly:

"The researchers' initial studies show that morphing a website to suit different types of visitors could increase the site's sales by about 20 percent. While quite a few sites, such as Amazon.com, offer personalized features, many of those sites adapt by drawing information from user profiles, stored cookies, or long questionnaires. The Sloan system, however, adapts to unknown users within the first few clicks on the website by analyzing each user's pattern of clicks.

In addition to guessing at each user's cognitive style by analyzing that person's pattern of clicks, the system would track data over time to see which versions of the website work most effectively for which cognitive styles."