Sunday Chatter – 11/22
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Obama Never Used Twitter
Twitter users were bummed this week when President Obama spoke at a town hall meeting in China and admitted that he has never used Twitter. The president has one of the most popular Twitter accounts there is, and used it as a campaign tool during the election. I knew he didn’t post all of his updates, but recent posts such as “This is history” or “Humbled” wouldn’t be so out of the ordinary to believe he’d type them. The issue came about when the president spoke on Internet censorship in China about how information should be freely passed without any barriers. China regulates its Internet and popular sites like Facebook and Twitter are not accessible. TechCrunch.com has more.
Amazon Kindle Comes to Canada … Finally!
After many have been trying to convince Amazon to bring the Kindle north of the border, they finally made the announcement on Tuesday. This item will surely be very popular and atop the list of many folks this Christmas. The hand-held wireless device holds 1,500 book titles, including downloadable magazines, newspapers and blogs. The Kindle will retail for $259 U.S. on Amazon’s website. About 300,000 books will be made available to Canadian readers. Chances are MarketLeverage will be stocking up on these to send to their Canadian affiliates. 
Back from a Vacation? Here’s How You Get into Blogging Again
I haven’t taken a vacation in well over a year, because I’ve been too busy running multiple online businesses, but when I do, I’m sure I’ll need a kick in the pants once I get back. ProBlogger posted a list of 13 ways to get back into the blogging routine after some well-deserved time off. Without really being a surprise, one of the items on the list include turning off distractions so that you can get some work done. Everything from shutting off e-mail and Twitter to turning off your cell phone, can really help you hit the pavement. Most of these principles don’t just have to be contributed to blogging though, any job that requires your full attention and discipline can be maintained by reading these. The Internet marketing field in particularly needs your focus, especially when trying to come up with quirky, catchy ad copy for a sales page or PPC ad.
Ad.ly Launches Affiliate Program
Ad.ly is the newest advertising network for Twitter, in which normal users like you and me are making big bucks simply by tweeting out sponsored messages. Say what you will about spamming your followers’ timeline, you’re making money!
The network launched their affiliate program on Tuesday, which pays you 12% of what those you refer make. Pretty sweet, huh?
You set your own prices and categories for your tweets, which attract advertisers in your niche. You act as a publisher and can approve and write the tweet before sending it out.
Of course, those with more followers end up making more, right? Not so. Ad.ly has been filtering out the fake followers and going after the “real” followers on your list to promote to advertisers. That means if you have 100 followers who actually click on links you send out, as opposed to 10,000 followers who are bots and don’t click on anything, the user with 100 followers could end up making more.
The website is also holding a contest and giving away a 13″ Macbook Pro to the person who gets the most eligible twitterers to sign up for Ad.ly (2nd and 3rd place will get an iPod Touch). An eligible twitterer is someone you refer that has been a Twitter user for at least 120 days and has at least 50 followers. The contest started on Monday, November 16th at 12 a.m. PST and ends on Sunday, December 13th at 12 p.m. PST.
Sunday Chatter – 11/15
Google Now Offering Extra Storage Space
If you’re big into digital photography and movie editing, you know how much space those files can take up on your system. Speaking personally, I’m running out of space myself. Google has now began selling additional storage space starting at $0.25/GB. You can even get up to 16 TB if you really need it. Their pricing structure is as follows:
20 GB ($5.00 USD per year)
80 GB ($20.00 USD per year)
200 GB ($50.00 USD per year)
400 GB ($100.00 USD per year)
1 TB ($256.00 USD per year)
2 TB ($512.00 USD per year)
4 TB ($1,024.00 USD per year)
8 TB ($2,048.00 USD per year)
16 TB ($4,096.00 USD per year)
This may seem cheap, but considering that you can buy a 1 TB external USB hard drive for about $200 and have no yearly fees, I’d still prefer to buy my own drive.
When NOT to Tweet
People love tweeting while on the go from their mobile devices and sharing with their followers what they’re doing — whatever it is. But there are some social situations where using Twitter may not be acceptable, such as at a funeral, or while out on a date. There are several others, including some funny examples of inappropriate tweets in a post this week on TwiTip.com.
Swiss Privacy Watchdog Not Happy with Google Street View
The Swiss government is taking Google to court over its Street View application, which as you probably know, photographs anything and everything to go along with Google Maps. The country’s privacy watchdog cites problems with the height of Google’s camera, which can peer over fences and hedges. Several European countries have taken issue with Street View in the past, ever since its launch in 2007. Switzerland wants Google to remove all pictures taken in the country and to cease taking any more pictures until a ruling is made.
Facebook Ads Just Got Better for Internet Marketers
Facebook now lets you advertise to the friends of people who are already fans of you or your company. The social networking site rolled out “friends of connections” this week, which gives you an additional option when creating an ad on the Facebook Ads page.
This is great for marketers who target a specific niche and have a loyal following based around a certain subject area. This means that you can potentially gain more customers who want to buy your product or listen to what you have to say based on that their friends already being familiar with you. You could even set up a fan page based around an offer you come across on an affiliate network and then market directly to customers.
Right now you can only target friends of fans in Pages, Groups, Apps and Events where you act as administrator. Ideally, it would be great if you could target fans of any Page, but I’m sure this would get exploited and abused very easily. Ads would likely become irrelevant very quickly and the legitimate advertisers snuffed out.
In addition to harnessing the social graph by targeting your connections’ friends, every “Friends of connection” targeted ad promoting a Page or Event includes social content about a friend’s interaction with your business, amplifying the relevancy of your ad. Let’s take a look at an example. Annie is a fan of the Etsy Page. When Etsy wants to promote their Facebook Page, they can choose to target an ad to Annie’s friends by selecting the “Friends of connection” filter. Annie’s friends will receive the Etsy ad with the following sentence: “Annie Ta is a fan of this Page.” Annie’s friends are naturally more interested because Annie’s interaction with Etsy is showcased directly in the ad.
Now if only they could control how much people are paying these days for clicks, it would be virtually a flawless ad platform.
News Corp Wants to Block Google From Indexing News
One of the biggest news organizations around is facing off with Google in a war to remove its content from the search engine’s index.
Rupert Murdoch, who owns News Corp and is behind the Sun, the Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and several other outlets, is accusing Google of stealing their content by listing it in their search engines. By the way, Murdoch is 78-years-old.
The news executive says that once his company sets up a subscription-based service to sell their content to paying customers, he will block Google from indexing their sites and remove them completely from the Google News index. What the hell?
He should know that Google is probably the single biggest source of traffic to any of his sites and it will only hurt them in the future if they decide to put a block on that.
The general idea is that good news content should be paid for. Since when? Newspapers are going out of business because people are turning to the web, and now they want to block that? That won’t stop anybody from reading news online, as most people will just surf over to another site like The Huffington Post for example.
We all know what outcome News Corp has had by trying to manage web properties… case in point: MySpace.com. The company purchased MySpace a few years ago and turned it into one big corporate advertisement. The social media website has gone downhill as their traffic slides into a black hole and users move over to Twitter and Facebook.
But News Corp isn’t the only company going after Google for indexing their content. The Associated Press wants to start charging Google for carrying their news. Charging Google?
What’s wrong with these companies today? We’re deep into the social media era where news, content and information is shared freely among others in a fast-paced and instant environment. Embrace it!
What’s next, attempting to block out Twitter users from tweeting what they’re watching on CNN?
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