Fizber.com is a "for sale by owner" site that is the craigslist of real estate but looks a whole lot nicer. The website claims to get 650,000 page views per day, and has recently added blogs as a feature for people to attract interest in their homes.

Per the company. "By blogging about their homes, our sellers generate more interest, thus increasing traffic to their online listings and increasing the chances of selling their property faster."

While a blog can offer a platform for providing unique insight into a property, you can't expect to get the whole story as obviously people want to sell quickly and won't point out any weaknesses. Blogging is good for narrating a story over time, but real estate sales are usually completed within a few months, and if a house is on the market for a longer time, you can't help but wonder. Perhaps blog entries will help in natural search rankings, but I'm not sure considering how competitive the real estate industry is.

Blogs are free with a listing (starting at $70),. but I couldn't find any examples of blogs on the site. Fizber.com is a well designed site with photos and maps from Microsoft Virtual Earth. I was surprised to find seven houses in my small city of 25,000 (versus none on Craigslist), but only 8 for all of San Francisco.

Between Fizber, Zillow.com for comparing prices, and the plethora of realtors who carry detailed MLS information, you don't have to be a the mercy of your realtor in buying or selling a home.

Do you remember the excitement when you found a copy of Sports Illustrated or Popular Mechanics in your mailbox and couldn't wait to scan the table of contents to see what articles were included so that you could figure out what to read first?

The web has all but killed that magic as the ubiquitous of availability of free content makes articles on your favorite subject only a few keystrokes away. This is a huge problem for magazines that have had to find a way of combining their unique depth with breadth and rapidity of the Internet.

Magazine publishers have been more active than ever during the past months in adding videos, blogs and interactive features to compliment their core content. According to the Magazine Publishers Association (per MediaPost), digital initiative increased 139 percent over last year in the second quarter of 2007.

TVGuide and Conde Nast were among the busiest publishers, with new advertising initiatives, daily features, and content partnerships. Newspapers have had a hard time retaining readers, but at least people understood that they would always have new content every day.

Magazine publishers have worked hard to change that perception about their websites in their quest to remain timely, which is not easy when your print content only comes out 1-4 times per month. So a "magazine" is now a cross-media venture that includes social networking, videos, personalization, and oh yeah, a few dozen pages of hard copy.

Microsoft is getting into the advertising auction biz with its purchase of AdECN. This puts them in competition with Google/DoubleClick, which is creating its own exchange, and Yahoo, which bought Right Media.

Ad exchanges directly connect advertisers with publishers who have available impressions to sell. Available impressions go to the highest bidder and can be instantly made live sans any lengthy agreements and insertion orders. Some big names (Washington Post) use exchanges and get much higher CPMs than some of the low-hanging fruit networks such as Blue Lithium.

Now that three of the big 4 have exchanges, you can bet that the ad networks and agencies are creating plans on how to compete since they can be cut out of the equation.

Source: Seattle P/I

Yahoo, AOL, eBay, and to a lesser extent Microsoft were the biggest winners of Web 1.0 (circa 1996-2000). While each of these companies has had its up and downs, they are all still standing with leading positions in revenue and traffic online.

Google didn't make a major impact until after the dot.com bust, but is now clearly in the lead. So when we look back at the Web 2.0 era of 2005-2010, who will be the most successful web companies?

Google/YouTube is the safe bet, but don't rule out eBay with Skype and PayPal. Could Fox or Disney leverage their video assets and combine social networking to have the most innovative and lucrative online division? Wikipedia anyone? Comcast or one of the IPTV vendors?

Or, how about Cisco, which is betting that Web 2.0 will be much bigger than the first Internet era and has purchased Webex and Scientific Atlanta? CEO Chambers is right when he says the shift is more about culture (being more open and direct in communications with consumers) than technology.

We can boil down web 1.0 to three applications -- web browsing, search, and instant messaging. For now targeted advertising, video and social networking seem like the best bests to have the greatest impact, but then again "push" technology was once all the buzz. What's your vote?

Video distribution companies are looking to mine the web's growing reserves of interactive content and create "Internet TV" that can compete with television for advertising dollars. They will only be successful if they can do a better job in tying viewing habits with buying habits.

Veoh TV, Joost, Blinkx, YouTube and Cozmo.tv are among the sites that are building channels of video content in hopes that millions of people will be tuning in each day. The challenge is building a large audience with a desirable demographic that can offset the cost of distributing video and the licensing fees.

Streaming is more costly than hosting web search because of the higher bandwidth requirements, and inserting interactive ads is more expensive today than display advertising because the technology is less mature. Therefore, the cost of content per minute of viewing time is higher.

Since "hit shows" online are going to be hard to achieve than in prime time TV, video companies have to use superior targeting and data mining (like TiVo has done)to extract higher dollars per viewer than being the pre-roll equivalent to display advertising networks. Also, while search marketing is based on keywords that now have established value, the value to advertisers of online entertainment is still in flux. Tagging video content and search the works spoken during a video (as Blinkx is doing) is also more costly than text-based search.

Veoh addressed the advertising challenge by hiring former Yahoo advertising exec Steve Mitgang as CEO. Video companies are learning quickly that they aren't in the technology business; they are in ad business and need to hire accordingly.

Scribes far and wide are touting the revolution that is Google Universal Search, but I think the integration of results from across news, video, images, blogs and the general web hasn't gone nearly far enough.

Searching Google on a famous person, for example presidential candidate Barack Obama generates 20 results that include almost exclusively websites about the man with a touch of news and some links to StumbleUpon, but there are no links to videos and just a single thumbnail image.

For Universal Search to be a useful resource, Google needs to do two things: incorporate more images and create icons to show which pool the results came from, and allow users to customize the mix of results.

It is difficult to find the results that are videos, news or blogs, and using icons is the easiest way to do so. Users could quickly do straight to the type of content that interests them most.

Google enables users to specify a language, but we should be able to say how much news, video, blogs, or images we want in the mix. A ratings scale that says "how important is this to you" could customize how many blogs you see based on a scale of 1-5, or photo freaks could emphasize images over all else.

I want my own algorithm darn it, and it shouldn't be hard to do.

AOL's purchase of Tacoda for $275 million has put behavioral marketing back into the headlines, but what the marketing tactic needs to become a seismic shift is to integrate e-mail into its tracking capabilities.

AOL should combine its strength in content and captive audience to develop a system that rewards users with free content for allowing their behaviors to be tracked and for opting into an e-mail list that learns from their travels.

Behavioral marketing is the best way to find out what people want, but users often don't want to derail their mission by stopping to read ads when they are doing a product search. People are much more likely to consider a relevant offer in their inbox later rather than interrupting their browsing. For example, an e-mail pitch could be tailored to people who put items into a shopping cart but didn't complete a purchase.

Using e-mail enables marketers to track behaviors from an entire web browsing session and determine the best products that can be e-mailed as special offers. AOL's broad network of sites is a great fit for behavioral marketing, and the company could give access to prime content via e-mail as a reward for being tracked. As long as it's opt-in, consumers won't get upset about their privacy.

"I'm not dead yet... I'm feeling better." It's a great line from "Monty's Python and the Holy Grail", but it could have been spoken by digital video recorder maker TiVo after the recent announcements of a new ad rating service and low-cost high definition (HD) recorder. TiVo is upsetting the folks at Nielsen's who have long had a stranglehold on TV ratings and advertisers' ears. TiVo is now compiling data about which shows are watched most after being "TiVoed," and which ads were the least skipped by viewers. It's the first time that ad-watching within a program has been quantified. The data is powerful for advertisers because they get a better idea of the value of their commercials and how relevant they are for a program's audience. The ad rating service details the shows that are best fit for an ad, as well as the overall effectiveness of a campaign. Advertisers are willing to pay for this information, so TiVo could finally have obtained it's holy grail -- a revenue stream that brings consistent profitability. TiVo today announced a new $299 HD DVR, less than half the price of the previous model. If you are willing to pay for an HD TV and receiver, than buying a TiVo is a no-brainer. Watching your favorite shows on your schedule in high def is worth the price, which is less than the cost of going to one movie each month when you spread it out over two years. So long live TiVo. While consumers have always loved the device (you can download an article by me that says why TiVo is still tops), now advertisers have a reason to love TiVo too.

There is no questioning the fact that dog fighting is gruesome and immoral lifestyle and those involved should face severe punishment. The question I pose to you is: Is it ethical to make money off the Michael Vick dog-fighting situation?

A simple Google search shows there are already a few people making money off of anti-Vick t-shirts but the one I find the most questionable is PETA.org. If you visit the PETA website you'll notice on the right hand side of the site they have created a cafepress store with anti-Vick shirts, hats, buttons, dog clothes and other products. This seems like very unPETA-like behavior and it rubs me the wrong way. I don't see UNICEF or the NAACP offering products for sale to make a quick buck. I'm sure that with a case that involves such a public figure the temptation is huge to monetize the opportunity but to me there are moral issues that would supersede the almighty dollar.

I think ethical companies that have ties to Vick have already made the correct moves in distancing themselves from Vick. Take Nike for example, they have already removed any Vick product from it's site as you can see by a search on Nike.com that returns "No Products Match Your Search". While I know this is PR damage control for Nike, there are other roads they could have taken, but they chose the high ground. PETA on the other hand is too busy chasing dollars rather than working on their image, which could use a little help to have people take them more seriously.

If you had the chance would you have a problem making money off of the Vick Dog-fighting situation?

First you had to have a website, then your website had to be interactive, then you had to have a blog, and now you almost have to be on YouTube.

Tonight's YouTube-centric presidential debate on CNN is the prime(time) example of how video is becoming the marketing communications medium. Sure, tonight's debate could have focused on questions submitted by e-mail (as countless news programs have done before), but seeing the faces of the average Americans who want to know about health care or taxes will be much more impactful than reading from a list of names.

First-person stories are more dramatic when you can see the expressions and hear the voices of the people telling them, which has led to the rise in popularity of sites such as Current TV and vlogs that are no more than someone talking into a camera.

Even a college student like James Kotecki can get the attention of presidential candidates by using video. Another example is Vator.tv, which is building a business around startups that record their video pitches to investors.

One of the biggest marketing shifts of the next few years will be companies large and small telling their stories through video, and YouTube and video ad networks as the most likely distribution mechanisms.

Online video company TurnHere has joined up withe RSS marketing company Pheedo to streamline the process of creating and distributing video content and ads for marketers.

Pheedo will distribute videos from TurnHere through its RSS service to websites to increase their visibility through the major search engines. This distribution platform will aid the videos in natural search rankings as well as increase the likelihood that they will go viral.

Search engine optimization and viral marketing strategies for video is in a relatively early stage of development. Google's universal search will increase the exposure of videos, but how to get a video to go viral remains a mystic art. While companies like SubmitExpress can help with website SEO, video has been somewhat overlooked until recently. RSS' ability to encapsulate video can automate the manual process of submitting videos to the major search engines.