Posted By Jason Dowdell at 10:13 AM
Permanent Link: More Time Than Money Marketing Experiment | Comments (0)

Thanks to an old friend working behind the scenes at Microsoft, we have word of a new Microsoft site that gives you the ability to sign up for an account on Microsoft's latest beta products. Windows Live Ideas is the site and it's part of the new MSFT branding strategy. Think big but work in small nimble teams and get stuff out the door faster than before. Oh yeah, and be a web platform company instead of a Microsoft OS company [yes, I'm being sarcastic]

The Windows Live site offers the ability to create a beta account for a wide array of new Microsoft service offerings including...

Live.com

“Have your way with this page. Sign in, get the content you want—news, sports, search results, whatever—add columns, and move stuff around at will. It’s all you.”

Windows Live Mail Beta

“It’s all new web mail, built from the ground up. Preview your e-mail without loading a new page each time (like Outlook®) drag and drop messages into folders, and generally power through your e-mail in a flash.”

Windows Live Search beta-mobile

“Coming soon - Picture this: You search for a restaurant with your phone, then click on the result to be connected immediately. Plus, you can see detailed maps, driving directions, and more—all formatted to fit the screen on your mobile device.”

And a bunch of other apps as well. They also provide links to the blogs of popular Microsoft products too. Oh my, msft is getting in the information sharing business again, this is starting to get exciting as Google is getting into the information hoarding business. My oh my how the tables have turned.

Okay, in all seriousness, Brightcove didn't actually hire the Gerber Baby but they did hire Adam Gerber away from MediaVest to be BrightCove's new VP of Advertising, Products & Strategy. What a mouthful, hope he got a good performance based bonus structure. Being VP of a single job is tough, I can't imagine being a VP of 3 areas. Hats off to Adam Gerber and the BrightCove team.

The hires signal a major push by companies developing new television advertising platforms. At MTV Networks, Flood will be responsible for all new platform sales for both the music and comedy networks. He reports to Hank Close, executive vice president-ad sales for the MTV Networks Music and Comedy Group. Close said the new platforms would range from on-demand to wireless.

I found some interesting commentary on the Fast Company blog about Adam Gerber and his past experience looking forward. Hah, he even mentions Orlando in his commentary.

I'm the traditional guy who's gone digital in the last five years. I just recently joined MediaVest in the TV buying unit, and I focus on innovation. What is TV going to be? I'm not going to be as well versed on some of these issues, but I'll focus specifically on how interactive television is affecting direct response.

I'd like to step back 10 years ago to Orlando. A lot of what we're dealing with in this space was addressed then. Unfortunately, those trials failed. Now we've got key companies focusing on the interactive space. We're moving from late night and overnight tonnage to primetime. The types of clients that are leveraging this today are Fortune 100 and 500 companies figuring out how to leverage two-way communication through the TV. It's not about the 800 number any more. It's not about the URL. Today, everything is all about the remote. Consumers understand the remote. They use it. It's easy.

We're also moving from sales-oriented messaging to information-oriented messaging. You can choose to interact with additional content and stop the rest of the world while you're doing that. It's about response. Long term, we're talking about an addressable world. We'll be able to serve distinct messaging into the home just as we can on the Web.

Consider this today's new vs old tip of the day. Most small business owners don't have the time to stay up to date on the latest internet marketing terminology permeating every nook and cranny of online media. So when it comes to knowing what words they should know versus the words that don´t really matter, they often rest on their own acumen. Depending on their level of technology advertising savvy, this could be fine but more often than not it's a kiss of death.

[queue the superman theme music here]

That's why I decided to explain the difference between good old web site search engine / directory submission versus pinging the blog search engines / directories. First we'll look at search engine submission since its what most are more familiar with.

site submit: Search engines need 1 of 2 things in order to know you web site exists.
1.) You submit your main url to them and they crawl your site and include it in their index.
2.) Another site already indexed in the search engine links to your site and the bots follow that link and crawl your site.

That´s it, nothing fancy, no rocket science, that's it. It's been around for a long time and people are comfortable with it, a little too comfortable seing as how they're still paying people for this service, but whatever.

Now if you have a blog, things are the same yet different and that is where a lot of the confusion around pinging comes in.

blog ping: Pinging the blog search engines & RSS aggregators is the same as submitting your site to the search engines except for the following.

1.) you ping the blog search engines every time you update your blog.
2.) because blogs are time-sensitive in nature, this happens much more often than standard web site submission.
3.) Depending on the user's knowledge level & understanding of the blogosphere, the word ping can take on several different meanings, all of which are accurate but simply end up confusing the novice all the more.

Clearing up the mystery
So one of the most fundamental pieces of information we must understand is why there are two different terms used when talking about submitting a web site to the search engines, be them blog based or not.

Not too long ago, bout 2 years I guess, there were a couple of blog search engines in the works. These engines were bootstrapped so saving money was of the utmost importance. They wanted to track blogs in real-time but knew that wasn't possible because they didn't have the number of servers required to do it, even back then. On top of that they didn't have the bandwidth to do it either because all of that requires loads of capital. So instead they decided to make it easy for those who owned blogs to notify them when their blog had been updated. This is what the blogosphere typically means when the word ping is used.

By only pinging the search engines when a site had been updated, it saved them bucu bucks on servers, bandwidth, electricity, repair bills, etc...

The only problem though, is that there was something out there that did the same thing but just on a slower lifecycle. And that was, everybody now, search engine submission :) So now the average SMB / SME has no idea which service they need, if either and how much they should pay for such a service. Well a few weeks ago I did a little piece on a free pinging utility called Pong. I highly recommend using it to notify the blog search engines when your site is updated. It's free and fast and you won't have to wait in line at sites like pingomatic.

Public Disclaimer: The folks at Pingomatic have been giving their service away for free for a long time [like 3 years or something] and I mean them no harm by saying they have slow load times. Pingomatic is a great example of a bootstrapped site [still is to my knowledge] and provides a free service to bloggers so they can have their voice heard. Problem is that the demand for their services has exceeded their server capacity.

Anyway, it's pretty darn early for me and I've been interrupted 3 times by children waking up before they normally should've and my coffee hasn't really kicked in and the dog spilled a coke in the family room. Why do dogs drink coke anyway? So I'm gonna wrap this one up for now but will revisit it at a later date with more detail and when my eyelids aren't still sealed shut.