knofun

AMP! from Yahoo! is more than just a product with a lot of exclamation points. This looks really cool and I can’t wait until they let me give it a try.

geek stuff, web marketing advertising, amp!, yahoo

Big thanks to Laurel and the folks at eBay’s developer program. This morning they featured ZinText on their developer’s blog.

BTW, I am headed to eBay’s Developers Conference in Chicago June 17-19. Hit me up if you are going to be out there.

geek stuff, ventures devcon, ebay, zintext

Ok, this is not my site but everyone should go take a look at http://www.worldometers.info/. It has realtime numbers on all kinds of interesting worldwide statistics.

entertainment, geek stuff

I take my work pretty seriously (stop laughing!!!), so naturally there comes a time to measure up to your competition. For ZinText, that would be other in-text advertising networks like Kontera. So recently I found an average publisher that by chance was running both Zintext and Kontera on the same page. Aside from being a little shocked the code was all working properly with the two competing for space, I got a unique opportunity to see my lil baby in action against arguably the best among the competition (certainly the biggest).

On the homepage, we both linked the word “Nokia” in the first paragraph since it was mentioned twice. Here is what their ad looked like:

Uh, No Xplode? which links to: http://www.toseeka.com/search.php?q=No%2BXplode?? I don’t even know what No Xplode is or why it’s $39.99, but this didn’t seem too relevant to me.

Here’s our ad, same page, same paragraph:

Now I am not knocking Kontera, I know first-hand how hard it is to match relevant keywords to relevant advertising and I am not saying my product is perfect, but come on.

geek stuff, ventures, web marketing in-text advertising, kontera, marketing, zintext

Ok, so I admit that sometimes I get like in a grumpy old man phase and I will refuse to try new things. Most of the time I am right, new things are weird and scary. But twitter is something I wish I had gotten the second it came out. It’s like old school IRC but the conversation is all around you, like walking into a loud room you can turn up or down. You can also really see the power of this, Jason Calacanis has amassed an army he calls the “JasonNation” and he makes them do funny stuff like add people on twitter and digg his SEO spam. I mean, he got 150 diggs on a spammy review in like 20 minutes.. if he could figure out a way to meter that flow so it looked like legit traffic he could DOMINATE the front page of digg.

Speaking of digg, the other cool thing I have now because of twitter is near daily live videos from kevin rose’s phone on qik. Pretty funny, almost makes me want to work in a dot com office again – wait no it doesn’t.

geek stuff digg, jasoncalacanis, twitter

Big news today, well I guess not big but rewarding for a nerd like me, ZinText finally got the blessing from eBay, meaning we get to use this cool logo:

And take the scary “not approved by ebay” text out of the terms and conditions. Pretty cool, thanks eBay!!!

geek stuff, ventures ebay, zintext

Was just reading about MySpace’s revenue woes on gawker and I was just amazed. Apparently their plan is

an ad network which lets his salespeople sell ads all over the Web, not just on MySpace and other News Corp. sites.The idea is to take what MySpace has learned about its own users and share it with publishers and advertisers, to better target ads. What behavioral insights Bain expects to garner from “thanks for the add” isn’t clear. But at this point the Fox Interactive Media Audience Network remains little more than a thought bubble

So I thought to myself, what would I do if I owned MySpace? Well, look at their top users. Mostly mainstream music acts, Models, etc. All people out there pushing a brand and making money through their profiles. So why not create an AdBrite type system where advertisers can buy ads on specific profiles, and MySpace shares revenues with the users? More traffic, happy advertisers, and happy users. You guys can just send the check to my PO box.

geek stuff, rant, web marketing internet, marketing, myspace

But I am finally on twitter:

http://twitter.com/chrishedgecock

Hit me up or follow me. Now I have another method of spreading disinformation to me enemies yay!!! just kidding and dont make fun of me when I twitter that I am going to the gym.. sometimes I really do!

geek stuff, play twitter

So I have really had my head buried in the javascript books lately working on Zintext. Linking keywords to ebay searches sounds like an easy thing to do, but in practice its pretty difficult to do right.

First of all the javascript technique I was using had a pretty large bug in it that made it more or less useless. I had to come up with a better way of crawling the html of the page to be linked and then altering the html to create the links. In doing this the DOM and I have become very close, not that I wanted to be friends. Then I had problems with the spacing of links. Sometimes keywords would be all clustered towards the top, sometimes all in a group in the middle, not evenly spaced. I came up with a pretty elegant solution for this, but now the words I am linking are not always the best. For example president will be in the same paragraph as ipod video and zin will link president. Not exactly what we want, so thats my main focus right now.

At any rate, if you were holding off using it for any technical reason, it should now work without problems on any sites. As usual feedback is always welcome, thanks for using zintext.

geek stuff, ventures ebay, javascript, zintext

I hate the NFL network. Or rather, I hate my cable company. Or rather, whichever is responsible for there being NFL football on and me not being able to watch it. Last week it was the epic NFC matchup between the Cowboys and the Packers we were locked out of, now its the emotional conflict with Sean Taylor’s team.

I can see merits on both sides of the argument, but come on! The NFL is trying to get the most money for its network, and the cable company has a thin margin between what they payout for content and what they charge subscribers. I get it. But you both are spending more on ad campaigns (the nfl even with tv commercials on espn, both with extensive newspaper ads) than you stand to lose on making a comprimise that works for the CONSUMER. So in the meantime, fuck both of you.

If you want to watch the games you are locked out of on the NFL Network FOR FREE, use this guide on Zeropaid.

geek stuff, play, rant free, network, nfl