If you are struggling to understand the fundamentals of online video publishing, as well as how to use videos to do marketing, this video article with Lasse Rouhiainen gives you some good basic information on how to get started. Lasse Rouhiainen and Robin Good - Photo credit: Robin Good Lasse Rouhiainen is a passionate YouTube video publisher based in Alicante, Spain. Lasse who is a passionate video marketing evangelist, works a lot with the tourism sector, helping travel agencies and professionals get familiar and proficient in their use of online video to market and promote their offerings. Having Lasse been a long-time fan of MasterNewMedia by sharing and commenting back on much of my work, I have kindly invited him to join me for an online video interview focusing on the basics of online video publishing and marketing. What I wanted to get from him was some simple and immediately applicable suggestions on what is probably the most difficult part of a video publishing career: getting started. What do you need to do and which are the key problems you will need to face to start publishing your video clips on popular video sharing sites like YouTube? Which is the main mistake that people make when publishing videos online? What is the ideal length for a video? How to choose a good topic for your next video? How to get a video to be viral? Here my short video interview with Lasse along with a full text transcription:

Online Video Marketing - Video Interview With Lasse Rouhiainen - Part 1

Duration: 8\' 43"
Full English Text Transcription

Intro

Robin Good: Hi guys this is Robin Good from Rome, Italy, and today I am with Lasse Rouhiainen, who\'s not where you think he is, because yes, he\'s from up there in the Scandinavian countries (he will tell us more about it), but he\'s somebody who has moved as a pioneer away from his nice and sunny warm land down to the cold, icy south of Spain. Is that correct? Lasse Rouhiainen: That\'s right, thanks Robin for inviting me. I\'m here in Alicante, it\'s just another place in the Mediterranean like you. We\'re neighbors, kind of. Robin Good: Good! And why did you decide to go the way down to Spain? Lasse Rouhiainen: When I came I just had a job opportunity. I had faith because I really liked the weather, and nowadays thanks to Internet you can work wherever you like. I really like the weather here, and the atmosphere, and the Mediterranean lifestyle.

Meet Lasse Rouhiainen

Robin Good: Fantastic. I got Lasse here, because Lasse is an interesting guy who\'s working on how to market your videos on the Internet, how to make your message effective by using video. He\'s also part of a major public training evangelism program on how to better use new media, that is part of the Spanish government sponsorship for creating a better culture around the use of these communication tools. He acts like some kind of expert, tutor, advisor, to many people, especially in the filed of tourism, to help these agencies and these tourist operators understand how they can use YouTube and similar services to get their messages out. Did I get this correct? Lasse Rouhiainen: That\'s right, yes.

Main Mistake in Video Publishing

Robin Good: Good. My first question to you Lasse, because my readers like you are very much web publishers of all kinds, is: what have you discovered, while you\'ve specialized in this sector of video publishing, is the number one mistake that people make when they put their videos up on YouTube? Lasse Rouhiainen: I would say that the number one mistake is that they wait until the video is perfect. They want to be like Tom Cruise or Penélope Cruz. They like to be like actors and in online media today and Web 2.0 you just have to be yourself. The number one mistake I would say is that people want to act like somebody they are not, or they are waiting too long before they start to do a lot of videos. The most important thing it\'s the same as thinking that you would have some customers visiting your office, and you would have a chat with them. It\'s a simple step, and I think now in 2009 more and more video content will be in different formats on the Internet. We just have to be ourselves. Click the "play" button, and just record how we are and what we do and communicate better with our customers.

Ideal Video Length

Robin Good: That\'s cool, I fully agree with you. One thing that most people ask me nowadays, when it comes to video, tough, is: what is the ideal length of a proper clip? Is there an ideal answer for everybody? Lasse, what do you think, what\'s your take on this? Lasse Rouhiainen: First of all, you can use video in so many formats. You can do video which is like half an hour, or one hour video where you show a conference or something like that, and that kind of video is kind of like relationship building video or credibility video. Then you can do short commercials, which are only like 10 seconds or 20 seconds, or something. It really depends a lot. I would say that when you start, I would start by doing a series of short clips rather than one really long one, because when you are trying to do long one, when you start you just get nervous. Start with selecting like two or three topics that you like, and your customers like, and I would do a video series of those topics. And those videos would be something like two minutes or under 2 minutes. 1 minute, 2 minutes. That\'s a good way to start.

How to Choose a Good Topic

Robin Good: Next question people ask me then is about what topic... how should they go about it. You\'re serving a specific audience, which in theory is speaking about touristic destinations. Do you recommend to these people how to take their specific topic, how should they find something that they feel compelled to talk about and that they get a little emotional and interested while presenting, and not being boring when they present? What do you say to them? Lasse Rouhiainen: Yeah, that\'s a good point, and I would add that I also work with other sectors, but tourism is by far the biggest. I would think that it\'s the same question, as you have to think what your customers need to know right now about yourself, about your products and services. Try to think what kind of questions your customers are asking, and make a video based on those questions. You can use surveys or you can think what your customers have been asking before. Just try to focus and think about the video from the viewers\' point of view, and don\'t just talk about yourself and how great you are and all those things. Just focus on the viewer and the customer who is watching the video. That way the video would be really interesting, and that way it can also become a viral video where people start sharing it, if they find it that it\'s adding value and is something useful.

Viral Videos

Robin Good: You talk about viral video. Everybody says "I want to get a viral video", but while the definition is somewhat clear to everybody (that is somewhat of a video that gets spread by word of mouth and people telling other people more and more rapidly so that you get thousands and thousands of views), the strategies behind getting a viral video, is that something that you have a formula for? Lasse Rouhiainen: Let\'s say that is something that I have opinion about. I would say that most people like to do viral videos because those are the videos that they hear in the newspapers, on tv, or Internet. But rather I would think that I would like to do video marketing which is profitable, it means that it can move your products, or move your business ahead, or get you more customers or get better relationships. Rather than having one viral video that has millions of views, I would do several videos that don\'t have millions of views, but have let\'s say hundreds of viewers, and those viewers are in your target market. That way it would be much better for your business or whatever you\'re doing. I think viral videos... it\'s really cool to talk about it, but in my opinion there\'s a lot of viral videos that are totally... they\'re just viral, there\'s no business behind. They\'re just one million views and no call to action, and nothing. I think people get distracted there. They think that "the only way for using video in my business is that if I have one million views". That\'s my opinion. We have to think of it as a bigger picture, and not just focus on viral video.
Robin Good: Great answer indeed. I fully share what you say, and I\'m going to take up your advice immediately. For the many other interesting questions that you guys may have for Lasse, you got to come for the next part, because this is only part one of several ones, I guess. Giusto Lasse? Lasse Rouhiainen: Yes, that\'s right. Robin Good: Talk to you in the next one! Thank you Lasse, see you soon!

Originally shot and recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on January 8, 2009 as "Online Video Marketing: Basic Tips And Advice From A Video Marketing Evangelist - Lasse Rouhiainen - Part 1" ...

What kind of approach to education and learning must we have, if the end result we want to provide to our kids is to enhance their ability to self-direct themselves into living a sustainable, meaningful and successful life? Photo credit: Dmitriy Shironosov If our goal is the one of truly having our children learn the ins and outs of life and the strategies and skills to challenge them, why are we segregating them out of our world and excluding them from the opportunity of learning from real-life experts the things that they are mostly interested in? If modern life is all about faster change, complexity, diversity and information / communication how can we expect to prepare our kids for the future when all we provide to them is a static and pre-defined curriculum of topics that is one and the same for everyone? Helping me out in this quest are again Howard Rheingold, Jay Cross, Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Nancy White, Gerd Leonhard and Teemu Arina who have kindly accepted to record a few short, one-minute-long video thoughts on these topics. Here, in Part 2 of this article (Part 1 here) their one-minute views on some these key questions:

What Education Can Prepare You For A Meaningful Life?

The Importance of School - Jay Cross

Duration: 0\':38\'\' You ask how important is school. School, because you\'re taught things and only part of that is learned, and then most of that is forgotten because there is a lack of application, before you have a chance to really use any of these things. What I learned in school is almost worthless. However, school is a great socialization device. I guess if you think if the learning is not the academics, but learning how to get along with people, I learned some very useful things in school.

Learning to Inquire - Howard Rheingold

Duration: 1\':20\'\' What I learned in high school was how to get into college. When I got into college it just didn\'t make sense to me to continue to pursue the collection of nuggets of knowledge that I could then regurgitate at tests. At the time I was really interested in learning, so I went to a place called Reed. I\'d say that the one thing that I\'ve received in my college education was a real dedication to inquiry. Instead of collecting knowledge, discovering it. Instead of receiving it, trying to seek it, to answer some kind of questions, something that\'s meaningful to me. Of course, the whole business of "How do you find the answer to questions", back in the old days it was libraries, today it\'s search engines. And how do you judge what you find, how do you analyze it, how do you know it\'s for real, how do you fit it together into a structure of meaning? Those were the things that I learned in college that didn\'t make a lot of sense, then, in regard to what I would do with my life, but actually had a lot to do with what I\'ve ended up doing.

How to Live a Meaningful Life? - Nancy White

Duration: 0\':21\'\' "How to prepare ourselves to live a meaningful life?" Be curious, know how to ask questions, know how to communicate, know how to read, know how to cook, know how to drive, know how to saw a button, know how to balance your checkbook, but I think it goes back to curiosity. You can never ever ever ever stop being curious.

How to Prepare Oneself for a Meaningful Life? Stephen Downes

Duration: 1\':03\'\' Probably the hardest question to answer is: "What can I do to best prepare myself to have an educated, meaningful life?" And there\'s no simple answer to that question, because it\'s going to depend a lot on what your own interests, and your own inclinations are. If I had to say anything, I\'d tell people: "Follow what interests you! Follow what gets you excited! And pursue that, and not be distracted by the many other things people would tell you that you absolutely have to do." In my own case, it was reading and writing. And while people were trying to get me to do other work, I would be reading. When people were trying to get me to do schoolwork, I would be writing. These are the things that I pursued in my life to make my life better. For you it may be very different, it may be technology, it may be science, may be auto mechanics, it may be industrial design, it may be any of the million things, but whatever it is, follow it.

What to Do to Prepare Your Kids for Life - Gerd Leonhard

Duration: 0\':28\'\' "What\'s the best way today if you have kids to prepare them for life?" I think to expose them to lots of different ideas, to have them travel, look at things, and experience things. To have them teach how to use the Web to reach people and to be reached by others, how to connect, and how to interchange. I think one thing that\'s crucial in today\'s world is how to learn how to juggle with this huge river, ocean of information. That learning to learn, to me, I think is one of the key things.

What Is Learning For Me? - George Siemens

Duration: 1\':12\'\' What is learning for me? I have to rely on a statement that E.M. Forster famously made, which is "Only connect". I think in a very real sense. For me to learn today is about being properly connected to other people, being able to find information when I want. Having tools at my disposal that allow me to access different sources of information, and also having a network of people that enables me to reach out, ask questions when I need it. These networks are obviously based on trust, these are people that I have followed for a while, who I\'ve been aware of over the last several years. In a real very practical sense, my ability to connect to other people, is learning for me. My ability to find information sources through easy-to-use tools is learning for me. And ultimately, anything whether it\'s policy, government initiatives, copyright, or any other system that puts up barriers between me and my ability to connect to others and information, it is ultimately a barrier to my learning.

Preparation For Life - How To Live Successfully - Jay Cross

Duration: 0\':22\'\' Preparation for life? Be relentlessly curious, ask questions all the time, join in your exploration with others, be aware that everything flows, nothing is for certain, it\'s all in flux. Life is beta, hop in and enjoy it.
End of Part 2 Part 1 - Education And Learning: A Paradigm Shift - Part 1 - Is Our Educational System Broken?

Special thanks go to the kindness and generous sharing attitude of:

• Jay Cross - Internet Time Blog
• Howard Rheingold - Smart Mobs
• Nancy White - Full Circle Associates
• Stephen Downes - Stephen\'s Web
• Gerd Leonhard - Media Futurist
• George Siemens - eLearnSpace

Originally prepared by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia and first published on January 7, 2009 as "Education And Learning: A Paradigm Shift - Part 2 - How To Prepare You For A Meaningful Life?" ...

It\'s all so good to talk about new media, 2.0, participation, collaboration, real-time web, mashing-up, agile development, remixing, or lifestreaming but what value do these discoveries have when as soon as we turn our heads home and to our kids we still force them to go through an education system that embraces none of such fantastic discoveries? Photo credit: Dmitriy Shironosov Why has it that advertising, marketing and new media have been able to rapidly deeply transform their own survival paradigms and have embraced principles exactly opposite to those that made them rich before but none of the discoveries and realizations we have made in this paradigm shift have contaminated our world wide educational system? Too early to ask? Why? Is it because we have often no direct business interest in education? Or is it because we have long stopped asking some good questions about what kind of value such school systems really provide? The tacit assumption here is that it is that we have been realizing for a while that true, useful, memorable learning takes place when there are conditions and a setting very different from the one offered by a classroom: Focus on the learning, not on the teaching, getting away from information stuffing and realizing the value of direct understanding and engagement, discovery work, exploration, opportunity to make lots of mistakes, interaction with elders / experts, passionate peers, are just some key elements we have realized make a true difference in creating a setting where true learning can take place. And the internet itself offers so many great opportunities to bring together those who really want to learn with those who know and want to share. Why then do we need to compromise for second-hand experts and hand over the greatest amount of official learning time our kids will spend with someone whose only credentials are mostly made up of certifications of tests sHe has taken? Given the times, wouldn\'t reputation and work produced be better "metrics"? I think it is about time that each kid wanting to learn something seriously should have the opportunity to do so by accessing the real world, he is supposedly being prepared for, and being granted a passport to access it as an explorer / assistant / lurker / collaborator depending on the situation. Newsrooms can open up to those who want to learn how to online media, just as much as a shoe shop or an auto mechanic can reserve days or time slots for having people who are there to watch, help, learn. For what are more theoretical matters students should be free to choose their teachers, and not be forced to be matched by sheer chance to instructors and peers who have nothing do with their interests and preferences. If the learner is the one who needs to come out with something of value from this long forced confined training, sHe should at least have the option to choose from whom to be instructed and be given the opportunity to do that learning path with other people cultivating the same interest and preference. Or not? Collaboration, conferencing and video technologies offer the opportunity to any student to potentially attend and make up a personalized curriculum of instructors and experts to learn from that doesn\'t require moving to Stanford, California, nor to wake up everything morning at 5 to take a train and two lousy buses. Or not? So, what\'s up everyone? Besides the few guys out there spending serious time researching and lecturing on today\'s educational challenges what are you doing to harmonize a little more what you have learned in the world of media and communication to the universe of learning and education your kids are immersed into? Feel free to shoot me back your criticism or ideas in the comments section of this post, and allow me to share with you a first short set of very brief video clips I have asked a few friends to record while I was preparing my LeWeb08 presentation: Howard Rheingold, Jay Cross, Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Nancy White, Gerd Leonhard and Teemu Arina have all accepted to record a few short videos for me while addressing some of the issues relating to our educational system and its future. In this first part (tomorrow Part 2) my questions are targeted at understanding what kind of education system we have, what do we really get out of it, and whether the infinite exams, tests and pieces of paper we get from them are really useful for living a successful / meaningful life. Well, here are some interesting views to start.

Is Our Educational System Broken?

The Paradox of 2.0 - Robin Good

Robin Good on the Paradox of 2.0 - Le Web 2008 from Erno Hannink on Vimeo. Duration: 2\':35"

What I Learned in the School System - George Siemens

Duration: 1\':16" Most of what I\'ve learned in the formal education system, especially at a K-12 level, doesn\'t necessarily have a huge impact to where I am and what I am doing today. If I was to say what\'s the one skill that\'s most critical, I\'d have to say typing. That\'s the one skill that I learned in K-12 system that, to this day, serves me on a daily ongoing basis. Otherwise, so much of what I need today, I encounter, whether it\'s a skill that I need to develop, which is driven by passion and interest, sometimes by work requirements, or whether it\'s knowledge that I need to complete a particular task, whether it\'s in work or just through my personal hobby or interest, almost everything that I use on a regular basis today has come as a result of me wanting to learn it, rather than being forced to or being put in a position where it was part of a curriculum. So if anything, our schools system today should foster the creation of a passion, it should encourage individuals to pursue what it is that they most love doing and eliminate barriers to achieving what people actually want to do.

Are Schools Useful Learning Environments? - Jay Cross

Duration: 0:44" ..... is what I\'ve learned in school. Schools are for socialization, not for learning. I was happy to have a good sendoff with school, but I have learned more in every six months on the Web that I\'ve learned for instance in Princeton and Harvard, I can tell you that. It\'s not what people teach anyway, It\'s what people learn, and learning is the responsibility of the learner not the teacher. I\'m a little down on universities, although I know it\'s good to have resource centers and things like that, but increasingly the knowledge of the past is not the wisdom of the future.

What Interests Do Universities Serve? - Gerd Leonhard

Duration: 0:52" "Whose interest do school and universities currently serve?" I think of course in many cases they kind of serve their own interest and... well, maybe not entirely serving their own interest, but it is something of course that has become a self-perpetuating thing. I think academia general needs to really open up and see what\'s out there in terms of knowledge and intelligence that\'s not part of this kind of world yet. To me learning is something that goes on everywhere between people, not between authorized professionals. Of course the question of quality comes up here. I think that is a real concern that we create peer pressure, so to speak, about quality and merit which we have on the Web in many cases. I do think that there\'s a huge trend towards the Web becoming the open learning platform. I hope it\'s not going all be about "Google.edu", but chances are that is going to be a substantial part of it.

What Kind of Education Do We Get in Schools? - Nancy White

Duration: 0:21" "What kind of education do we get in today\'s school?" I think I\'d have to turn the camera around at my son to answer that question, but I know that by watching as a parent, I\'m worried about what I see in school, I see people trying to get in the "test score mode" rather than really learning. And if learning is to become a life-long practice, which I believe it is, we need to change the way we\'re teaching in schools.

Whose Interests Are Universities Serving? - Teemu Arina

Duration: 1\':21" "Whose interest schools and universities serve?" I think that schools who have adapted something like learning management systems, are not really serving learning, but they\'re serving teaching and control. And from that point of view, these systems are none the best methods for learning. There are more like good methods for managing people, courses, information. But not learning. On the Web people have been talking about personal learning environments. That\'s the idea that you construct your own learning environment. And in that world I see the future of these institutions and universities to be more like learning resource centers. Where you go, it provides a meaningful environment networks, and the people who are working on these things, may be even coaches who can help you to find the right communities, sort of tap into the right information. This come up with your own way of understanding these things. It\'s about scaffolding. These institutions will be about scaffolding, and it\'s not a tight-up environment with walls, but rather part of a network itself and interacting with the networks at the same time.

Do We All Need a Degree to Be Successful? - Nancy White

Duration: 0:35" My son\'s going to take this video, so he\'s going to love this one. The question is: "Do my sons need a degree and why?". This is a really interesting question because both my sons stepped out of schools and one is going back. I think there\'s this push in the US that you need a degree in order to make a decent wage. But I look at what I do now, and a lot of what I do now has been formed by things I\'ve learned since I left school. So, I think it depends on how motivated you are and how much you\'re an ongoing learner. I think there\'s definitely a place for certain kinds of degrees but... everybody? I don\'t know!

Will We Need Degrees in the Future? - Teemu Arina

Duration: 1\':17" "Would someone need a degree in the future?" I think in the future we will learn from multiple sources, from multiple people, from multiple information systems, and also from the past as well as current future. In that world we will also provide degrees not based on one single source: the university. But we will gather these fragments which happen in interactions online. When I\'m going to one school, to one course, to one conference like LeWeb, or I\'m blogging, whatever these different events are, someone could go through that and provide me some kind of evaluation for my future boss: "This guy has been really thinking about these things many years." It\'s not just what he\'s done and written down, and what kind of numbers you got in tests, but also what other people are saying about him. It\'s also about what other people say about you, what is your impact on the network, and how you manage to do that impact, that is going to get you forward.

Will We Need Degrees and Certificates? - Stephen Downes

Duration: 1\':02" We can ask: "Do my sons or my daughters need a degree to get ahead in tomorrow\'s world?", and the question really depends on what they\'re trying to do. if they\'re going to be involved in academic employment where they\'ll be judged, lacking if they don\'t have a degree, then they\'re going to have to get that piece of paper. That\'s a matter of pragmatic practicality. But if they are involved in creative or artistic fields, in fields where your work is your calling card, where you can prove your worth with good code, good work, good writing, whatever, then NO, they are not going to get a degree. I think in the future we\'re going to see more and more scope for employment in the creative fields, and less for employments in more traditionally academic fields. So I think they\'ll be able to get by without a degree. But, again, it would depend on their choices.

Special thanks go to the kindness and generous sharing attitude of my friends:

• George Siemens - eLearnSpace
• Jay Cross - http://www.linkedin.com/in/jaycross">Internet Time Blog
• Gerd Leonhard - Media Futurist
• Nancy White - Full Circle Associates
• Teemu Arina - Dicole
• Stephen Downes - Stephen\'s Web

Originally prepared by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia and first published on January 6, 2009 as "Education And Learning: A Paradigm Shift? - Part 1 - Is Our Educational System Broken?" ...

When ad networks alone are not enough to sell all of your ad inventory, ad exchanges step in to help you maximize the money you make. Put simply, ad exchanges work on the same idea as stock markets. They allow buyers to bid on your inventory, and the demand for your inventory determines the price at which you can sell it. Photo credit: Travel Aficionado edited by Andre Deutmeyer Making a living as an independent web publisher means that you have to do one thing very well: monetizing your content. Google AdSense is where most publishers start because it is easy to set up. But how do you do ensure that you are getting top dollar for your ad inventory? Joining a vertical ad network to sell your inventory is a good idea. But the problem with ad networks is that even if they are good, you will have a hard time selling 100% of your ad inventory all the time, and there is no easy way to know if you are getting the most you can out of your available ad inventory. Ad networks play an important role in bringing you and similar web publishers together with online advertisers. But because ad networks are typically disconnected from the rest of the market (i.e. any given network only works with a small percentage of the available advertisers and publishers, rather than the whole market), they can limit profitability because they offer limited supply and demand. For publishers who link or daisy chain ad networks together, manually prioritizing ad inventory to networks can be a hassle. And there is no way to guarantee that your set up is making you the most money. This is where the ad exchange steps in. In the exchange, all market players - advertisers, publishers, and networks - are interconnected on a common platform. If your ad spot can\'t be sold at a premium price set by you, it is auctioned off in the exchange. You set the minimum bid price and then simple supply and demand economics take over. All advertisers have access to and compete for your ad spots in real-time. The advertiser with the highest bid purchases any given ad spot and the process begins anew as your ad inventory opens up. Currently, ad exchanges seem to be relegated to the remnant ad market (the leftover ad inventory spaces available on your site). But the real potential for online ad exchanges lies in not just maximizing the return on your remnant ad inventory, but in opening up your entire ad inventory to real-time bidding. If you have ever considered using an ad exchange... or even if you have never considered using an ad exchange and you have no idea where to start and what to look for, then there is no better place to start than here. In this article I have brought together some of the largest ad exchanges - AdBrite, ContextWeb\'s ADSDAQ, Yahoo\'s RightMedia Exchange, and Google\'s DoubleClick Advertising Exchange - with some of the newest entrants into the ad exchange space - TRAFFIQ and Turn - for a comparison of their unique traits and characteristics. If you are looking for ways to improve the monetization of your existing site and are caressing the idea of opening up your ad inventory placement opportunities to real-time bidding then you may find some useful information in this guide.. Here all the details:

Ad Exchanges Reviewed

The ad exchanges reviewed below were selected because they allow independent publishers to submit their ad inventory directly to the exchanges.

• AdBrite

  AdBrite ad exchange aggregates more than 45,000 publishers including big names like LinkedIn and the Drudge Report as well as thousands of long tail small niche publishers with over 7000 advertisers including big brands like Verizon and the US Navy. Additionally, AdBrite teams up with over 20 of the leading ad networks, thus helping to ensure a dynamic marketplace for ad trading. Every ad that is served is served on a eCPM (effective CPM) basis. So it doesn't matter whether or not the ad being served is a CPM, CPC, or CPA ad, each is converted to eCPM to determine which ad will be the most profitable for you. Each time there is a page view, AdBrite calculates the demographics and geo-location of the user, the contextual meaning of the page and other factors, and runs an auction for all interested advertisers. The AdBrite ad exchange service can be integrated with other ad management platforms. And AdBrite serves both your standard graphical display ads and rich media ads; text ads like Google AdSense; as well as interactive interstitial ads (full page ads). Publishers have complete control over the ads to be displayed. You can review and if necessary remove any ad before or after it appears on your site. Furthermore to maximize revenue you can set your own reserve price. For example, if you believe that you could make a minimum of $2 CPM for a specific ad spot, you would set your reserve price at $2. If AdBrite can't beat the reserve price, your backup network (Google AdSense or another of your choice) will fill the ad spot. Additionally you can control the look and feel of ads so that the ads best fit your site design. Unique Feature: With one snippet of AdBrite HTML code, each publisher has the choice of displaying banner ads, rich media ads, text ads, inline ads (double-underlined words that display a relevant ad when the mouse hovers over it) or full-page interstitial ads. Additionally, AdBrite InVideo enables ads in videos, and BritePic enables advertising on still images. All AdBrite features can be accessed by anyone, instantly, using a self-service interface at http://www.adbrite.com/.





• ADSDAQ

  Since its inception in early 2005, the ADSDAQ (think NASDAQ for ads) ad exchange was built by offering a CPM AskPrice to publishers. ADSDAQ offers a self-service desk for publishers, which allows smaller, long-tail publishers to take advantage of market dynamics to sell off their ad inventory. The ad exchange brings together more than 7,000 publishers, including 100 of the comScore 250 websites, including Fox News, Accuweather, and Belo Interactive Media and many smaller niche sites with interactive ad agencies, including Digitas and Modem Media (Publicis), Agency.com (Omnicom), and more than 350 advertisers run on the ADSDAQ exchange, including some of the biggest brands in automotive, pharmaceuticals, travel, consumer electronics, insurance and financial services. ADSDAQ only sells graphical display ads. ADSDAQ support standard IAB sizes and runs standard graphical and various rich media formats. If ADSDAQ is unable to clear inventory at the publisher AskPrice, ADSDAQ enables each one to specify backup networks such as BURST, Tribal Fusion, Google AdSense and many others to sell your remnant inventory. However, ADSDAQ touts itself as an ad exchange for premium ad inventory, not remnant. Since the publishers will set their CPM AskPrice, the ADSDAQ exchange is a first stop for inventory prior to a publisher\'s ad network remnant alternatives. Unique Feature: One of the things that make ADSDAQ unique is that it has focused on direct relationships with ad agencies, advertisers and publishers rather than working with existing ad networks like the other ad exchanges do. Contact one of the ADSDAQ representatives for more information at http://exchange.contextweb.com/sellingdesk/





• DoubleClick Advertising Exchange

  Bought by Google in 2007, the DoubleClick ad exchange brings together some of the largest publishers on the web with advertising from top firms representing a broad range of established Fortune 500 companies and newer, upstart brands. Additonally, DoubleClick works with ad networks to ensure a dynamic market driven trading environment for all. Although, the DoubleClick ad exchange tends to focus on large scale publishers, smaller niche publishers can also use the marketplace to sell their inventory. For publishers, DoubleClick Advertising Exchange attempts to generate maximum possible revenue for every single ad impression. The system enables sellers to dynamically allocate inventory to the highest-paying sales channel, rendering obsolete the arbitrary "premium" vs. "non-premium" (or "remnant") inventory distinctions. Publishers will always get the highest paying ad in the market. DoubleClick Advertising Exchange now supports the buying and selling of all standard types of online display advertising. However, the exchange was built to support a range of inventory, including graphical, video, and even in-game ads. The advertising exchange is tightly integrated with DoubleClick\'s existing DART ad management platform, enabling yield maximization across sales channels for sellers, as well as shared creatives, advertisers, Spotlight Tags and audience targeting for buyers. Dynamic allocation: For publishers, DoubleClick Advertising Exchange automatically determines how to generate the highest return for every impression by dynamically allocating to the highest paying sales channel. Publishers benefit from complete control over to whom impressions are sold, what ads are run and at what price. DoubleClick Advertising Exchange provides a single billing and payment point for all transactions, so you receive a single aggregate payment for all ads served, regardless of the number of buyers. DoubleClick ad exchange does not integrate with other ad management platforms easily, but if you use DoubleClick\'s ad management platforms and DART then the integration is seamless. In order to sign up for DoubleClick, you must contact a representative at http://doubleclick.com





• Right Media Exchange

  Right Media Exchange is considered to be the founding father of the ad exchanges. Launched in 2005 and bought by Yahoo in 2007, Right Media Exchange works with top-tier publishers like Tickle, Looksmart, Fox, Yahoo! (obviously), and thousands of smaller, niche publishers on their direct media exchange platform. On the advertising side of this equation, Right Media works with the top 10 ad agencies in the US, as well as a range of ad networks including Revenue Science and Adtegrity. Right Media facilitates transactions for all rich media, graphical, and text based IAB-approved ad units. Right Media provides an extensive set of classification and protection mechanisms for both buyers and sellers in the exchange. Ads and sites can be filtered using approximately 160 different attributes. Furthermore, before any ad is served it is scrutinized by an automated (creative tester) and human review process to stop potentially harmful creative from flowing through the exchange and ending up on your site. Like most of the ad exchanges featured here, Right Media makes its money by taking a cut of each transaction from ad networks and publishers. Unique Feature: Right Media offers APIs to outside developers. The APIs allow businesses to seamlessly plug into and develop technology for the exchange so that a tremendous amount of new services and value can be brought to the exchange community by third party developers. To sign up for the Right Media Exchange, go to https://direct.rightmedia.com/tour/index3.php





• TRAFFIQ

  TRAFFIQ is one of the newest entrants into the ad exchange space, but has already been selected for the Silicon Alley Insider 25 list honoring the world\'s most valuable digital startups. TRAFFIQ is a self-serve platform designed to help publishers of all sizes sell their inventory to advertisers. Since launching in August 2007, TRAFFIQ has brought together 1,500 brand name and quality niche publishers with more than 400 leading agencies and advertisers. TRAFFIQ partners include most of Fortune 1000 advertisers, mid-size advertisers, and premium and niche publishers, including: Federated Media, Healthcentral.com, Sky Sports, PerezHilton, and more. Using TRAFFIQ publishers can setup storefronts, segment, bundle, and list their inventory according to highly targeted premium and niche attributes. TRAFFIQ also offers full-path conversion tracking and reporting which allows publishers to completely capture of the full path of user engagement allowing publishers to gain a deeper understanding of the role of their inventory relative to other touch points, and price their inventory accordingly. Because TRAFFIQ allows publishers a lot of flexibility to describe their audience, advertisers can more easily match their preferences with your ad inventory. Advertisers are happy because they can easily launch highly targeted advertising campaigns ensuring that the ads are placed on a pre-approved list of sites and publishers. Publishers benefit because they get highly relevant ads. Like DoubleClick, TRAFFIQ handles all reconciliation and billing, so that publishers receive one check with all their ad revenue, rather than having to receive a separate check from each advertiser. And like the other ad exchanges reviewed here, there is no upfront cost to join TRAFFIQ, instead sellers pay a fixed percent commission on ads sold. Unique Feature: Using the publisher storefront, TRAFFIQ can serve as a rudimentary futures markets, letting publishers sell ad space several months in advance. To find out more about TRAFFIQ check out https://itx.traffiq.com/register/default.aspx





• Turn

  The Turn Smart Market is the other new entrant into the ad exchange space. Turn targets mid-size to larger publishers typically generating at least 100,000 ad impression per month. But any publisher can technically become a participant in the market, regardless of size, if the site is well built and serves a targetable niche. The Turn web-based publisher console gives you control over which advertisers, ad types, and ads are delivered to your website. Turn provides a single billing and payment point for all transactions, so you receive a single aggregate payment for all ads served within 30 days of the last day of the month in which ads were served. The Turn Smart Market is a "revenue ranked" auction, in which the ad with the highest predicted eCPM (effective CPM) wins the auction. As such the ad exchange can basically any type of ad, regardless of pricing structute (CPM, CPC, and CPA pricing). For every ad served, Turn automatically calculates the eCPM real-time, ranks every eligible ad, and the one with the highest eCPM wins the auction. To find out more information about Turn, visit http://www.turn.com/corp/publishers/publishers-overview.jsp

N.B.: One ad exchange that I would have liked to include in this guide is Microsoft\'s AdECN. Although Microsoft's AdECN is one of the largest ad exchanges, AdECN Exchange offers membership only to advertising networks, advertiser and publisher brokers, and agencies. According to their website, in order to remain "neutral and not compete with its members, AdECN does not work directly with advertisers or publishers". Because AdECN does not allow publishers to join the ad exchange directly, AdECN was not reviewed here.

Would you like to suggest other ad exchange solutions? Would you like to share your own experiences with any of the ad exchanges reviewed? Please leave a comment below.

Originally written by Andre Deutmeyer for MasterNewMedia and first published on January 5th 2009 as Advertising Exchange: Ad Exchanges Open Up Your Ad Inventory To Real-Time Bidding - Best Ad Exchanges Reviewed ...

Coordinating assignments and collaborating effectively on your projects can be a huge pain without the right tool. You need to have an efficient way to communicate, share notes, share documents, share files, and more in order to work together effectively and maximize productivity. Photo credit: Irochka edited by Andre Deutmeyer Here for you today I have selected a set of interesting new tools that bring all those features together into one easy to use interface as well as a new innovative independent platform for teaching and learning. In today\'s issue of the Sharewood Guide, I have brought together eight new hot online collaboration tools. From new Skype alternatives to file sharing services, the online collaboration tools showcased here today were selected with one thing in mind: to make your job easier by facilitating communication and information exchange between you and your team. This is my list of selected online collaboration tools for this week:

• WizIQ - independent online learning and teaching platform integrates audio and video
• Collanos - provides a free project management platform for you and your team
• Broadchoice - enterprise level project management platform that offers a free 30 day trial
• eLecture - allows you to broadcast your own interactive lectures on the net
• VoxOx - like Skype but with text messaging to mobile phones and social network integration
• Vyke - VOIP provider with a focus on free mobile VOIP
• Stinto - allows you to create private and temporary chat rooms
• Limewire - the newest release allows you to set up private p2p networks

Here all the details:

1. WizIQ

   WiZiQ is a web-based platform for anyone who wants to teach or learn live, independently of schools, universities, exams or certification degrees. Teachers and students use WiZiQ for its state-of-the-art virtual classroom, to create and share online educational content and tests, and to connect with persons having similar subject interests. In the Wiziq virtual classroom you can interact online using PowerPoint presentations and documents as well as text chat and full audio and video sharing. Not only. All sessions on WiZiQ are automatically recorded so that you can revisit and even search for a certain topic anytime at your convenience. Last but not least WiZiQ lets you easily share your teaching contents online so that it can be easily embedded on sites and blogs. http://www.wiziq.com



2. Collanos Collanos is a new online collaboration tool targeting non-enterprise organizations that provides users with and single, consolidated workspace that allows you to integrate and share any of your project related content with your team members. From simple documents to images, music, and even video, any type of media can be shared through the Collanos workspace. To facilitate collaboration between team members, Collanos allows you to send instant messages to others and create alerts so that you know when updates have been made to different parts of the project. Collanos does not yet have built in voice communication, but they are planning to add voice chat functionality in the future. Collanos is built on a a peer-to-peer solution that allows you to work on your computer both online and offline. If you have no choice but to work offline, there is no need to worry. Once you get online, your workspaces synchronize automatically with your team members. Best of all Collanos Workplace is completely free to download and use. http://www.collanos.com/



3. Broadchoice Broadchoice Workspace is an online collaboration tool that provides fast, easy messaging and file sharing between members of your team to help you stay in sync in real time. To collaborate with a group of people, you can create a space and publish content into that space. Spaces serve as your online communication and collaboration area, and a different space can be created for each of the projects you are working on. Through Spaces you can track your different projects, sales opportunities, or even create your own community. Spaces have access controls that allow content owners to publish securely to a private group or open it up to other users within the organization. If your organization uses Salesforce, Broadchoice Workspace integrates seamlessly with your Salesforce contacts so that you can quickly and easily open new channels of communication and collaboration with them. Additionally, Broadchoice Workspace is mobile, although at the moment it only works with the iPhone. If you want to try Broadchoice Workspace out, it is free for the first 30-days, after that you have to sign up for one of their subscription plans, unless you qualify as a non-profit, in which case it is free for you even after the initial 30 day trial. http://www.broadchoice.com/



4. eLecture eLecture provides a virtual classroom software product which allows you to conducte live interactive lectures over the internet, with students/participants attending the lectures virtually. eLecture allows broadcasting of near real time audio and video from the lecturer\'s camera as well as screen capture of the lecturer\'s desktop. Students/participants can submit feedback, post questions and receive answers via eLecture\'s built in text chat. Lecturers can limit the number of participants and number of questions each participant can ask. eLecture also has built in multi-lingual support for English, Spanish, Italian, French, Russian, German, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese. If you are looking for a solution for corporate training or distance education, then eLecture is worth checking out. Unfortunately eLecture is a Windows application for the time being. Before you go download eLecture, realize first that it comes in two parts. If you want to broadcast your lecture, you need to download the Electure Server and install the program onto your server. Once installed, you can begin broadcasting your lecture. But in order for participants to view your lecture, they must download Electure Console. http://www.umediaserver.net/electure/



5. VoxOx The best definition of VoxOx that I have seen is "Skype on steroids" because that is exactly what VoxOx is. Like Skpe, VoxOx offers free VOIP services to its members when you are calling computer to computer. When calling from computer to land / mobile phone then you will have to dish out some cash but not much. Also similar to Skype, VoxOx allows you to instant message and share files with people that you are talking to. Where VoxOx differentiates itself from Skype is its integration of social networks like Facebook and MySpace into its communication platform so that you can instant message friends on those networks without having to enter those networks directly. VoxOx also provides you with the ability to send and receive text messages from VoxOx to and from a mobile phone. VoxOx is free so check it out. http://www.voxox.com/



6. Vyke Vyke is not technically an online collaboration service as much as it is an online communication service. Like Skype, Vyke is in the business of providing VOIP services to its members. But what separates Vyke from Skype is their focus. Unlike Skype which focuses primarily on PC to PC VOIP, Vyke does not serve the PC to PC market. Rather they are focused on providing mobile to mobile, mobile to PC, and PC to mobile VOIP and text messaging services. Vyke is free to download, and you only pay if you use Vyke to call to fixed line phones from your mobile or PC device. http://www.vyke.com/



7. Stinto Stinto is a new collaboration service that allows you to create your own temporary chat room instantly. After you have created the chat room, your friends and colleagues can join and you can begin plotting and scheming to your heart\'s content. Once you have finished making your plans for world domination, your chat room is deleted automatically after a set period of inactivity, thus erasing all trace of your evil plans. If world domination doesn\'t float your boat, you can also participate in more innocuos activities like conferences with business partners, planning for the evening with friends, and gamer meetings. http://www.stinto.net/



8. Limewire 5 Limewire is a P2P file sharing service that has been around for a long time. Normally an established service like Limewire would not be covered here, but Limewire is alpha testing their newest version... Limewire 5. And one of the features that is being included in this newest update is the ability to set up private torrent networks. Which means that only your friends and others that you invite will beable to access this network and download the torrents that are being offered there. This feature allows you to very quickly share files - large and small - with team members, friends, and family without having to worry about strangers getting their grubby hands on your data, home movies, etc. http://limewire.com/

Would you like to suggest other online collaboration solutions? Would you like to share your own experiences with any of the solutions reviewed? Please leave a comment below.

Originally written by Andre Deutmeyer for MasterNewMedia and first published on January 4th 2009 as Online Collaboration Tools - New Technologies And Web Services - Sharewood Guide Jan 04 09 ...

In this first 2009 issue of Media Literacy digest George Siemens focuses on cloud computing, connections in social networks, changes in education, and on a cool resource for education technology-related conferences. Photo credit: Cyprien Lomas And to make 2009 an opportunity for personal change and innovation, George Siemens has decided to experiment a new way of dealing with his everyday tech life by embracing the cloud computing lifestyle. What does that mean? Cloud computing is a way of referring to using software and data that do not reside locally on your computer, but which reside on public commercial services accessible from anywhere you have an Internet connection. So, no need to be confined to your own machine to access your data, you just can use any computer connected to the Internet et voilà, you\'re set. The jump to cloud computing is often much smaller than one would think as many have already adopted web-based software and tools which are now integral part of their workflow. Take Gmail, Flickr or YouTube; both the software and the data in these cases are all in the cloud. And if you are not quite ready yet for the dive into the cloud, you can still go home with some cool new tools to try out immediately. Dr. Siemens features in fact to a brand new software list by Jane Hart with the likely-to-be top tools you may want to consider for adoption in 2009. To dive in, is the only wise step if you want to make you greater sense of the disruptive changes that our society is facing. Here all the details:

eLearning Resources and News

learning, networks, knowledge, technology, trends by George Siemens

Year of the Cloud

Cloud computing has been a common, but somewhat subdued, topic on technology sites. The cloud metaphor is appealing, though what it exactly means is still somewhat unsettled. In a technological sense, cloud computing refers to a service-view of computing, where technical details are largely hidden from end users. Which means, it is driven by financial considerations, as companies can extend their infrastructure without heavy investments in personnel or technology. I'm more interested in the impact of cloud computing. How will my communication and information processing habits change when I don't need to confine myself to a particular computer? What types of software do I need when I don't want to be tied to a particular laptop? So, I've decided to embrace the cloud. On my University of Manitoba blog, I'll be posting my experience to move to device neutral computing… where I have access to what I need as long as I have an internet connection. First post - Year of the Cloud: "My goal: to be device neutral by the end of 2009. Any data accessible in any device from anywhere."

What Will Change Everything?

Every year, The Edge asks prominent individuals a big question. This year, with the humble introduction of "New tools equal new perceptions. Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves" (sounds like McLuhan's "We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us"), The Edge asks: What will change everything? Responses cover enormous territory, including the mind, human nature, technology, biology, and more. A bit of skepticism is found as well - nothing will change everything. Edtech folks will find a bit of hope in At Last: Technology will change education It's not light reading, but well worth the time.

Top 10 Future Tools

Jane Hart has served the elearning field well this year, taking a Techcrunch role for learning technologies. In her recent post, she turns her attention from looking at the most popular tools today and focuses on what she feels will be the top tools of 2009. Most of the tools listed assume traditional desktop / laptop access to the internet. I think 2009 will be a year where mobile applications continue their enormous growth. In the last several months, I have shifted significantly from my laptop to my mobile (for maps, gmail, twitter, Facebook, news, tracking financial markets).

This Thing Called Depth

End of the year / start of the new year reflections always seem to centre on meaning and depth. We desire to eliminate meaningless and shallow pursuits in favor of more substantial ones. John Connell asks how to best move to greater depth:

"Do we need the bloggers' equivalent of the Slow Movement? Authentic blogging? Critical blogging? Reflective blogging? Blogging09?"

Will Richardson picks up on a similar theme:

"I did some counting yesterday. Totalled up all of the blog posts and comments on those posts for the last three years, and found a pretty interesting relationship. Seems the less I write, the more people comment."

A healthy sign of maturity for any field is the recognition, partly reflected in Perry's scheme of intellectual and ethical development, that a larger reality exists outside of the field where we personally spend most of our time. New literacies do not necessarily replace what was important previously. Previously important literacies are at least partly subsumed in new literacies. The maturation of blogging is partly found in main stream media adopting blogs. The other critical ingredient in maturing the field will be found in bloggers participating in previous publication forums (journals, books, etc.).

Twitter, Networks, and "Following" People

The popularity of Facebook, Twitter, and other social software has resulted in a popularization of network terminology. How networks work and how information flows is understood experientially by anyone who has used the software. As a result, the networking concepts long explored by sociologists and mathematicians are now being explored by Twitter users: How am I connected to others? Who do I need to connect to? What is the balance between having only a few vs. many connections? Valdis Krebs offers his position on finding the right mix between diversity and depth:

"Strategically I am building a small, yet efficient, group that reaches out into the many diverse information pools I am interested in. I know I am finding good people to follow on Twitter by the number of great exchanges that emerge on many topics. Think before you follow, use your time and ties wisely!"

NY Times and Visualizations

We have hit our scale limit in managing information. We need new processes to make sense of abundance. One approach is found in the use of social networks for filtering important ideas and concepts. A technical approach is found in data visualization. Bill Ives links to the NY Times Visualization Lab. The site is based on IBM's Many Eyes, and allows visitors to create and share visualizations. Visualization will become more prominent, as will our need for literacy with reading and creating different representations of data.

Educational Technology Conferences

Clayton R. Wright compiles the most comprehensive list of educational technology conferences. With his permission, I have posted his list for ed tech conferences from Jan-Aug 2009 (.doc). Great resource!

Originally written by George Siemens for elearnspace and first published on January 2nd 2009 in his newsletter eLearning Resources and News.

About the author To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book "Knowing Knowledge".

Photo credits: Year of the Cloud - piksel What Will Change Everything? - maria gritsai Top 10 Future Tools - Kirsty Pargeter This Thing Called Depth - Erik Reis Twitter, Networks, and "Following" People - ndnl NY Times and Visualizations - The New York Times Educational Technology Conferences - Clayton R. Wright ...

Here is Part 2 of my New Media Trends and Predictions for 2009. In this report I look at major trends while I try to anticipate key changes and the type of innovation taking place around the world of new media communication and professional web publishing. While yesterday I have covered web and video publishing, content creation, newsmastering, online advertising, internet marketing, in Part 2 my focus is on social media tools, technologies and trends, X-events, online collaboration, P2P and Open Source, learning and education. I have also reserved a little section to share some of my personal and editorial plans for 2009 as some of you have been asking me about them. I hope you will enjoy what I am seeing. Here all the details:

2009 Media Predictions - Part 2

(Part 1) by Robin Good

Social Media and Social Media Marketing

In 2009 social media will keep thriving. Innovation will come in the form of further opening up of the existing major social destinations to gather and aggregate any and every aspect of your digital presence. The Open Stack, OpenSocial, OpenID, and a few other tech acronyms characterize within social media a strong trend toward adopting and using open standards. For example, OpenID is a profile identifying web address that can be used to login to any site that supports it. OpenSocial instead solves the need to utilize any application on any site on the Web, while keeping the same people relationships and profile data you already own elsewhere. For some indication of where this is heading you may want to look into the Open Social session moderated that Marc Canter that took place at the recent LeWeb08 in Paris. My take on this front is that what you will see happening is the de-centralization of most social destinations. The new open social applications and features you will see in 2009 will allow you to make them local to your own site and community, while remaining internetworked with all social profiles on the many social networks out there.

"Even if Facebook is currently the shiny place, if developers can write and application once and put it loads of places, Facebook will be marginalised."

(Source: LeWeb08 The Social Stack - Computer Weekly) Instead of having to go to Facebook or Linkedin to talk to your network of contacts and communities of interest, you will be able to bring all of this on your own site and blog.

Ning

To those pointing to Ning as the already existing example of such an approach, I reply that while certainly a useful community building tool, Ning still lacks the features and traits that would make my ideal community platform. Despite all of the reasonable excitement around it for being the first distributed community building platform, I find its content organization, navigation and content accessibility very poor, as much as its search function, discussion capabilities and blog functionality. Ning insists on being a hosted solution and unlike WordPress, it doesn\'t get the support of a large community of developers in getting new features and extensions to its users. I need something much better than that. And in 2009 you will see exactly this. Google itself, with the recent launch of its FriendConnect social application may be the one introducing some very innovative services and features in the next few months. The MyBlogLog-like interface you can already activate on your site, may likely be the gateway to a new way to participate and join in with people of your similar interests through grassroots, web site-bound but also highly portable, distributed and de-centralized communities.

Twitter

Twitter is one of the powerhouses of such profound new changes in the way we will use social media, and if you are serious about leveraging the opportunities that the social network can open up for you, if you haven\'t yet, you will need to start using it and discover its huge potential. Make no mistake though, like many have done. Social media does NOT mean that all conversations now need to be in the open and that you need to tell everyone what you are up to drink at your next stop in your nightly wonderings. That is one way to use it, but not the only one. Twitter and other similar emerging social communication and conversational tools provide the opportunity to create trusted networks that can enable the fastest and most effective way to share interesting news and stories, light years ahead of any other traditional news service. I myself have a problem with the shallow conversations. I steer away from them as much in real life as in the virtual one. They consume me lots of time and often I find them inconsequential, preposterous and characteristic of the lazy man\'s approach to getting noticed in public. On the other hand I am thankful to these tools when they help me be in touch and virtually side-by-side with my real friends and contacts, the ones I really care about. I like to know what some of them are up to, I enjoy reading a bit of their private life and I run to check the references and article suggestions they put out. I am not there for the conversation per se or for having a conversation with anyone who jumps at me with a questions. I am there mostly to learn and pick up rare gems, tech gossip, insider buzz and tips from all of my networks. I am there to help out those asking questions I am passionate about and to reach out for ideas and suggestions from people who think differently than I do. Problem is people have taken this social media game as a competition for who has the most followers and in the rush many have not really made sense of what they are using this tool for. My take is that, depending on who you follow, going to 200-300 people you follow is the present limit, especially if you want to be able to really follow what these individuals have to say. If you look at my Twitter channel you will see that I have about ten times more people than follow me than the people I have chosen to follow. This is only because, differently than what I do on Facebook for example, where I like to be open and friendly with anyone who wants to do so, I select very carefully who I chose to follow. I frankly don\'t buy into this idea that if you follow me I have to follow you back, and therefore I make no difference whether you have got 6500 followers or 24. What I look at is what kind of things and information you are sharing with me and how valuable for me these are. The more useful and interesting stuff you have to share the more likely it is that I will follow you. And, given the above, if you are small and unknown with very few followers, it is even more likely that I will follow you as I don\'t like to get tips and breaking news from the same circle of insiders, who just pass around the same stories over and over again. So 2009 will be definitely be a year of maturation for both Twitter as a service as well as for its users who will grow a lot in understanding its best uses and applications. In this direction, in 2009 you will see some truly amazing services built on top of Twitter which will help you manage more effectively the stream of twits coming from your different networks and relationships.

Social Media Marketing

The big discovery in 2009 for many companies will be that you cannot really engineer social media use inside an organization. You can facilitate it, support it, make it emerge, but you fundamentally need to let your own most passionate people find their own best ways to make use of this new conversational tools. Private social networks, vertical communities, decentralized and portal social media solutions are the keywords for 2009. You will see a lot of new names in this space. Better metrics. Everyone is talking about them, and there is indeed a wealth of valuable information to extract from the metadata available around your social activity. It is not so much how many followers, friends or contacts you have, but what these people do with the news and stories you share with them. Do they follow your tips and click on them? Do they pass those items on to their trusted friends? or... what kind of people are those following your friends? Who do they influence? What types of information topics characterizes your listeners? And your sources? How good are you at breaking news early for your network of followers? Finding the best questions and creating tools that enable you to see the big picture under this social media universe could prove extremely valuable in understanding influencers and opinion leaders beyond mere popularity numbers.

Social Shopping

2009 marks the first large scale entry of the social shopping metaphor into the mainstream online eCommerce. Beyond what Amazon and eBay have long shown to be the value of recommendations and customer feedback, we are now moving into a year in which you will start benefiting more directly from the advice and recommendations of your own very network. If until today you have relied on the opinions of some unknown guy posting in a forum or commenting under a blog post, in 2009, you will start to see that your own network of contacts can actually help you find a trusted solution to your plumbing needs as well as recommending you the next camcorder you may want to buy, with much greater effectiveness and reliability than any other traditional approach. Two are the key things happening here:

1. New services and eCommerce features will further facilitate your ability to rate, provide feedback, review and recommend any product or service you purchase online.
2. The integration of your social network and presence with many of the online eCommerce destinations will allow you to get advice and recommendations from the people you know and trust rather than from just another user.

"Although customer reviews are nothing new on popular eCommerce sites like eBay and Amazon, in most cases, consumers use the critiques from people they don\'t know. Now with connective technologies like Facebook Connect, Google FriendConnect, and OpenID, consumers will now be able to see reviews, experiences, and critiques from people they actually know and trust. As a result, expect to see eCommerce widgets and applications appear in popular social networks, as well as when visiting existing eCommerce sites the ability to login with your Facebook or Google identity. As an example, next time I\'m shopping for a laptop, not only will I see reviews from editors and consumers, I will now know which one of my friends uses an Apple computer, and what they think of it." (Source: Jeremyah Oywang)

Social Reputation

Of all things social, social reputation is going to be the one having the most impact on your personal life and on your opportunities to access new project and work offers. In very simple words, what it is going to happen, is a strong shift from personal credentials based on certifications and tests to the emergence of personal reputation profiles built around the spontaneous comments, evaluations and reference comments of your previous team-mates, co-workers, customers and employers. I see individual persons going around unchecked and deeply lying about their experiences, references and career, to get where they would like to be. How can you still trust a CV or resume and not find out directly by those who met and worked with that person who that person really is. How can you trust that someone mischivious, lazy or outright dishonest will list such personal traits in his CV presentation and why would you trust unchecked credentials when you have the opportunity to spend a little time to find out the truth? Habit... and misunderstanding that the world is rapidly becoming a different place when it comes to evaluating people. Just like for technology products and services, you don\'t go to check the official marketing leaflet of a new camcorder to find out whether it is the one you are looking for. You research, compare models and you ask lots of questions to your friends and competent contacts. You search on Google for your camcorder model and see what others have been saying about it. You go to your friend at the corner electronics store and you ask him what his experience and advice is based on his customers feedback and store sales. That\'s how you chose and select people. Why shouldn\'t it be the same for such critical choices as selecting your partner or new executive marketing manager? This is why getting your hands dirty now with social media, living the idiosyncracies of this new universe, and exposing yourself to the many conversations that the Web provides is a good path to prepare yourself for the future. As your certificates and diplomas will lose more and more of their value what will count most is what people out there think of you and what they are willing to say about you when asked to. This is why is increasingly less important to have a degree or master in a discipline, and it is much more important WHO you have been working, interacting and exposing yourself to and WHAT kinds of things you have produced that others can see. If you say you have been here and there, have done this and that, but then the digital tracks say something different, you suddenly become a self-referential puppet that can survive and get work only within protected circles of friends and allies. Until today, if you lied, misrepresented or concealed something about your past experiences and credentials, it would be only you and someone else to be sharing that information. Now if you do this in public, by replying to public questions in videos and interviews by hiding or misrepresenting facts to your advantage, not only you run a much bigger risk of losing your credibility but this possible discovery, will not remain a private matter that you can easily forget about. To gain solid social reputation you need to transparent and accessible. The more you hide or cover up who you really are, to defend or protect your ideal projected persona (who you think you would like to be) the more this will show true, and while your friends and close mates may keep smiling at you, the opportunities to become a respected reference and a trusted source to those beyond it will likely dwindle. For companies, 2009 will mean the year in which they can start to have a meaningful social media presence. For the most part, companies who have embraced social media so far have done so in a very conservative and somewhat incorrect way. They have landed into social media land bringing in their traditional approaches and behaviours to communications, PR and marketing, which is exactly the opposite of what you want to do to be effective inside social media. The wrong strategy approach to use in such situations is the one of placing your best PR and marketing people on these tasks, while who should really ride this opportunity are your best and most passionate workers in the operating lines. These are the people that your customers and suppliers want to see and become friends to.

Online Identity and Your Distributed Social Profile

The emergence of a centralized Personal Social Identity Profile. 2009 should also rescue us from the bad situation we have fallen in when it comes to our profiles on social networks and the need to maintain and create separate ones for each new place you sign-up to, with the same frustrating issue affecting also our network of contacts which we have to slowly rebuild across each and every new social community we enter. What you are likely going to see happen this year is the advent of a new tools and features which will allow you to create a centralized and very comprehensive social profile of yourself and of your network contacts and which will then allow you to share and submit selected parts of it to each of the new web communities and social services you will later join. This will save you a ton of time and frustration, while reducing friction in adopting or testing out new services and tools.

X-Events

In 2009 you will see some of my original ideas BOUT X-Events become reality. In 2008 already a handful of companies has started to challenge the X-event puzzle by developing tools and projects around the fundamental idea of creating resources to facilitate the creation and realization of events that went beyond their physical occurrence. X-events are strongly tied to social media development and the ability of individuals to meet and exchange openly across multiple and diverse communities and social networks. X-events (extended events) can provide an ideal platform to extend the relationship building process that live events are built for as well as to fuel a much larger and lasting conversations. Bantora, is one such company, which working and extending the original X-events paradigm is trying to build the first true X-Event platform. The trend toward extended type of events will give way also to a new approach to virtual conferences: the distributed event. Who said that to have a powerful and memorable event we all need to go to one site or location and do everything there? Can\'t it be that the event organizers launch a theme, or a set of topics, and then aggregate and list distributed events taking place at this or that site or blog as components of the actual event? Say for example that an organization has organized an event that you are very interested in, but it is on the other side of the world and you have not been invited to speak. Organizers could set up an extended event section where they list and aggregate distributed events and presentations complementing the event, that either take place on a platform provided to all those uninvited presents who want to contribute their ideas, or which take place directly on the site a