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The advertising industry is on the verge of being shattered into a thousand fragments due to the knowledge explosion and the proliferation of new technologies. There are no more grand theories that hold sway over the entire industry. Michael Strangelove
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The notion that you can generate traffic to your site by offering incentives to surfers is by no means new.
Perhaps the best known name in this game is CyberGold, whereby surfers earn actual money in tiny increments for visiting specified sites and performing a variety of functions, like filling out surveys and so forth.
Now there's the MyPoints Millionaire Sweepstakes from MotivationNet, who
run the MyPoints Surfer Incentive Program. Essentially this is the Web equivalent of earning airmiles.
Participants in the MyPoints Program can earn "free" points which are redeemable for merchandise for the many things they do on the World Wide
Web - from visiting Web sites to clicking on incentivized
ad banners, responding to e-mail offers, downloading
software, enrolling in online programs, making purchases
and completing surveys. The points they
earn are combined into one
secure and private account.
Current MyPoints Program partners include Barnes and
Noble, Carnival Cruise Lines, Computer Discount Warehouse,
Edmund Scientific, Investor's Business Daily, Marriott
Hotels, Marshall's, Olive Garden, One Hanes Place,
Overton's, Red Lobster, Runtzheimer International,
Salons/Spas USA, Sara Lee Direct, Spiegel and T.J. Maxx.
Well, "earning" a million of pretty much anything sounds pretty good to us. It's less tempting, however, when one learns that a "HelloSet Office Rover" headset runs to 35,000 "ponts".
Will this type of incentive program work? We suppose that if you're an avid supermarket coupon clipper, you may well find this program appealing.
We, on the other hand, prefer solid, easy-to-locate content and information.
Perhaps we're just old fashioned...
"Technorealism" sounded like a course in how to program your VCR, so we took an afternoon off to learn how to stop that annoying ..
In fact, it turned out to be a half-day conference sponsored by Harvard University Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
The conference comprised two panels, each led by a moderator, debating different aspects of the emerging Technorealist "philosophy", which acts as a kind of counterweight to both the lunacy of the "cyber-libertarians" and the stuffy, European "statists".
So what is it? Well, the Technorealists have come up with a kind of "manifesto" (more like position statements):
Nothing to argue with there (although we did point out the semantic illogicality of "information" wanting "to be protected"..).
Nonetheless, the panels went through the motions of debate, aided by an audience of some 175, which included - amongst other notables - Mitch Kapor and that other bloke who used to write songs for the Grateful Dead...
So what? Well, whilst we find the group's "guiding principles" sensible to the point of blandness, we do believe that the emergence of the Technorealist camp signals a coming-of-age of the New Medium.
This is A Good Thing.
For if the movement can gain sufficient momentum and garner political and economic clout, a coherent approach to the New Medium - one which acknowledges the role of government and a pragmatic view of eCommerce - may emerge to the benefit of all who participate in the New Medium.
Jobcorner is a new entrant into what is becoming a somewhat crowded field, that of resume dop-off/job matching database sites.
The site itself is clean and easy to use, although it's quite apparent that the folks at Compact Computing Limited (no URL provided), who designed the site, use 21" monitors, thus necessitating sideways scrolling for lesser mortals like us.
The front page sports the standard search engine interface (although we
could live without the animated buttons...). There are links to:
We scooted over to Candidates' Corner, whereat it became apparent that this site is not what it appears. The first clue came in the request to submit one's CV (Curriculum Vitae) by email, fax or snail mail. This was followed by a request to fill out a long form, containing fields for all the information contained in a resume...
The form also made it apparent that this site was aimed at recruiting computer and IS professionals to work in Europe, specifically the United Kingdom.
Jobcorner is based in Morden, Surrey, which is a suburb of London. Whilst this information is available at the site, it needs digging out.
The organization could profit from making its intentions clear on page one. As it was, we spent about 15 minutes in Candidates' Corner before realizing that there was no way for Jobcorner to find us a contract copywrting position in the USA.
As a general rule, we recommend stating what you can do for your site
visitors in clear, unambiguous terms right from the get-go. Otherwise, it's
unlikely that first-time visitors will become repeat visitors.
A.I. Laboratories, a Ridgewood, New Jersey "intellectual property and product
development company" is the first to list Internet domain
names for sale or lease in the "sellers" section of the
Intellectual Property Exchange.
These domain names offer opportunities to represent financial
and legal services, such as Web-Trust.com and
Web-Escrow.com; fun and game sites, such as LottaBulla.com
and GameUniverse.com; and culinary sites such as Culinart.com
and Culinarium.com.
A.I. Labs has chosen the Intellectual Property Exchange, Price
Waterhouse LLP's new intellectual property trading web site for
its ability to provide equal access and a commercial venue for
individual intellectual property owners and small firms like itself.
Besides the Board of Trade, where one can buy, sell, trade and
license intellectual property assets, the Intellectual Property
Exchange has a number of other free services, such as News,
Q&A, Royalty Rates and a selection of Attorneys.
If you are interested in purchasing or leasing the enormous brains which inhabit our organization, you can avoid the middleman by contacting us direct...
Our jihad against fat online graphics continues by our alerting you to GIFWizard.
GIFWizard is an online service that
reduces the file sizes of your Web site images so that your Web
pages will load faster. Which is A Good Thing...
They will even scan your entire site for bloated GIFs, animated GIFs and JPGs, create reduced file size version of those graphics and check for broken links. You can also check graphics one at a time by entering a URL or uploading a file from your machine.
The Site Scan service comes at a price, as follows:
Which seem pretty reasonable in the context of acquiring the knowledge and application to do it yourself...
There's also a library of 400,000+ image thumbnails, which you can scavenge for images when inspiration deserts you.
Well worth checking out.
Take a look at the Archives. We've indexed all the past issues with topic pointers.
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