Keeping up with your competitors, your industry, and the media's coverage of your company is becoming an increasingly daunting task. Many of the same companies that provide the web publishing tools for creating feeds also provide businesses with tools for filtering through RSS feeds.

When you factor in podcasts and video content, the sheer volume of data online is growing at a faster rate than ever. Cutting through the thousands of blogs that are personal in nature to find the content that affects your marketing efforts requires smart RSS tools from companies such as KnowNow, PubSub and Attensa. It is hard to quantify how much of our daily browsing time is truly productive, but at least using the best tools can reduce that investment.

Attensa recently released a free RSS reader tool that plugs into Outlook. Attensa analyzes the feeds and items that you read and automatically ranks the items to bring the most relevant data to the top. For workgroups, this can eliminate countless browsing hours by making sure that the urgent information gets to the entire group instead of relying on "did you see this" emails or IMs between co-workers.

Another option will be corporate versions of tools such as Delicious and Digg where humans can aid in the ranking of content.

Good and bad news spreads like wildfire across the web, and being able to track it quickly requires using the latest filtering tools.

In marketing, the Internet can be a great equalizer. Getting the word out using technology can to a degree offset your competition's much larger budgets.

Mastering the art of search engine optimization along with blogs and RSS feeds can put you in the game by making the netizens and the blogosphere aware of the developments of your company.

We've all read about the importance of establishing corporate blogs for both internal and external consumption. The tools for publishing and tracking the success of multiple blogs are just coming into their own, with tools such as KnowNow, Movable Type Enterprise, and Attensa. RSS feeds can also be used to distribute press releases and product informaiton, such as Microsoft's extensive RSS feeds. However, the company could do a better job with press release feeds as they currently aren't broken down by category.

SEO is a complex science/art that is too broad to go into here, but marketers can use the Sitemaps protocol as the first step to make sure that the search engines know that you are alive. Last week Microsoft came on board in supporting Sitemaps. This requires setting up an XML file to tell the major engines about the structure of your website.

Nowadays the medium (of web publishing) makes the message.

One of the biggest decision facing television programmers (and other content providers) is determining whether to sell programming or pay for it through advertising.

The two factors two consider are the perceived value of the programming (aka quality and immediacy) and the potential size of the audience.

Programs such as the Super Bowl will remain ad supported because more revenue can be made from a mass audience then by charging a few dollars for each viewer. If the Super Bowl was on pay per view, a large percentage of the audience wouldn't watch because many currently watch partially for the ads, and frustration over lopsided games would scare away some potential viewers. If the NFL thought it could replace the billions in ad dollars with pay per view they would have done so year ago. People watch it BECAUSE it's semi-interesting and free, the same reasons they watch The Office or 24.

I disagree with Steve Rubel that the networks will start selling subscriptions or shows a la carte. Only a few shows with dedicated fans can charge for "bonus" coverage or old episodes. Remember the rush to sell reruns on iTunes and Google Video? The networks quickly reversed themselves and started broadcasting with commercials.

HBO and the other pay cable stations will continue mostly without ads. The a la carte sales of episodes will be reserved to a niche audience who like the convenience of watching on a mobile device. On demand services through IPTV or cable that incorporate ads will be in the majority.

I got a big laugh out of an email GoDaddy sent to all of it's affiliates this morning. Before I quote the email I'll give you a bit of seo history so you can fully appreciate the unintended humor of the Godaddy email.

There's something about seo that escapes most other forms of marketing. Automatic Penalties! Automatic penalties are the search engines way of fighting the good fight against search engine spammers (black hats). You see, the engines want to keep their indexes as clean as possible and void of the spam that all too often slips in. Many black hat seo techniques have been documented and are actually quite well known. One such technique is to create a blog on a .info domain and then begin creating thousands of pages of content (usually scraped from a bunch of other blogs) and load the domain up with gobs of content that's keyword rich. The problem of course is that these sites are just scraping other people's content and not adding any value to it whatsoever.

Now I need to be clear that this technique has been around for ages (circa 96) and isn't always limited to .info domains. But the appeal of the .info domain extention to spammers it the cost... usually you can get them for free when domain name registrars run a sale or when you purchase a hosting plan. And what did GoDaddy just do?

Special Offer!
IT'S BACK! Free .INFO* Domain Name with Hosting Purchase

One of our most popular offers is back for a limited time, so don't miss out! Give your visitors a FREE .INFO domain name ($5.99 value) with the purchase of any new 12- or 24-month shared hosting plan! World-class hosting plans from Go Daddy® include all the storage, transfer and email accounts your visitors could want, plus live 24/7 support and much, much more. But hurry, this offer expires December 31, 2006, so add it to your site today!

So when this email arrived in my inbox I thought it was pretty funny. Not only does GoDaddy have a dirty reputation because of it's controversial commercials during the SuperBowl, but now it's getting a bad rap for it's encouragement of seo spammers.

Adware distributor Zango is not complying with an agreement that it just signed with the FTC, according to the Center for Democracy and Technology and software expert Ben Edelman.

Edelman points out eight violations to the agreement, including not disclosing the terms with consumers, deceptive installation tactics, and a failure to remove old software that was not in compliance.

Zango's software, which consumers download in order to receive free online content such as music or videos, tracks consumer movements online and can disrupt e-commerce by launching pop-up windows.

The Center for Democracy and Technology also said Zango is violating the FTC deal and is asking for closer scrutiny.

Anyone who distributes Zango's software or advertises with the company will likely not be increasing their standing with marketers.

Video ads are acceptable as long as they are kept short, according to PodZinger. The multimedia search site says the majority of consumers it surveyed don't mind video ads that are 15 seconds or less as long as they are not repeated often.

It may take some time but agencies who are using to paying the lower CPM of online will adjust to the higher prices of video ads. While more bandwidth is required to deliver video ads, tracking performance will be easier because publishers need to run fewer ads to make the same revenue.

The ultra-competitive travel industry should be an early adopter of video advertising. Showing off the views in and around a hotel or travel destination is much more alluring than a banner ad. The same can be said for media companies, which could tease albums by briefly excerpting from a music video or movie trailer. Video ads can also reinforce ads initially seen on TV with the added benefit of interactivity.

Search marketing is a good fit for video since advertisers will be more likely to pay the higher cost for keyword-based responses than for video as a display competitor. However, industries such as financial services will receive less of a return from video advertising, and will likely focus on traditional search marketing.

Found via Adotas.

A Tip of the Hat to Stephen Colbert and the producers of The Colbert Report, who are using the Internet to create a powerful online community and marketing phenomenon.
Colbert's Nation of fans have already disrupted Wikipedia and the naming contest of a bridge in Hungary, showing how powerful TV can be used to promote online participation.

Now Colbert wants to build a gift shop in Colbert County, Alabama (we believe him) to further the self promotion.

The audience of primarily teen to twenty-somethings viewers is a perfect match for online participation, and Comedy Central is doing its best to keep the community involved. Colbert interacts with fans through a MySpace page.

Comedy Central is cooperating an external fan site and provides unique content and RSS feeds to keep online fans coming back. Fans can purchase Colbert paperweight and books by authors who have hawked their books on the show. By taking it to the people, the Nation is growing stronger every day.

SpikeTheVote, the site designed to rigg digg, is up for sale on ebay. Currently, there is only 1 bidder and the price is $1,000 but one little known fact is that SpikeTheVote will get you banned from Digg.com. After testing out the SpikeTheVote system, I went to Digg.com to check out the stories on the home page. I found a story I wanted to Digg so I logged in and was presented with "Sorry, Bad IP Address." (See screen shot) And to this day I can no longer log in from any computer as you can see here by my user profile link, I have been removed from the system. Emails to Digg's support address have gone unanswered and I suspect that will not change nor should it. I tried to exploit the digg system and got caught. Now I am doing my civic duty and letting perspective buyers of SpikeTheVote.com be aware of the negative effects of the system, while at some point it may work, it has failed to produce any of the stories I dugg to the homepage (the most being 15 diggs).