All over the world, millions of bloggers are thinking up new ways to bank on their content (or products, or services). To sell these offerings, some of them might want to consider turning their “free blog” into a “membership blog” where some things are free and some others are only made available to paying visitors (or customers).

Since WordPress doesn’t ship with the capability to bills members to access different levels or sections, the only option is to turn to a plug-in such as WishList.

This plug-in is sold for either US$97 for a “single site” license or US$297 for a “multi-site” license, which makes it an affordable solution for paid membership sites.

A free option for the WishList plug-in would be nice but that doesn’t seem to be in the works, for now.

So, what do you get, with WishList?

How about easy integration, detailed support guides, training videos, one (1) year of unlimited updates and support as well as four bonus goodies that just sweeten an already fair deal.

Also, with WishList for WordPress, you get the following:

• Unlimited membership levels;
• Simple installation with either new or existing blogs;
• Flexible membership options (i.e.: free, trial or paid);
• Sequential content delivery (from “level 1″ to “lever 2″);
• Control over the viewed content;
• PayPal shopping cart integration;
• Easy member management;
• Multi-level access memberships;
• Total content protection;
• Secure RSS feeds;
• Subscription length control;
• Login redirection to the page of your choice;
• Sneak peak content display;
• Custom error pages; and
• Partial content display.

If you’re a blogger looking to install the WishList plug-in into your WordPress site, you should be able to do it within an hour. Most of the work, on your part, will be to figure out how you want to structure your sales to optimize successful conversions.

Regarding the plug-in itself, it works well and doesn’t seem to slow down the pages loading time, which is a definite plus.

Money shouldn’t be an issue for getting your hands on the WishList plug-in because as soon as you start operating a paid membership site —if your offering is any good— you’ll make your “initial plug-in investment” back very quickly.

So if you’re seriously looking to build a membership web site, WishList delivers.

Tags: wishlist, wishlist plug-in, plug-in, plugin, wordpress, member, members, membership, online membership, paid memberships, money, revenue, publisher model, adsense, google adsense, blog, bloggers, wordpress

Pretty much every seasoned web user has an account with at least one of the popular social networks, like MySpace, Facebook, Hi5 and LinkedIn.

There are countless more such networks and the trend seems to be reaching every niche one can possibly imagine.

It’s a good thing because the more people work together, the faster we can achieve great things but then again, not all social networks vye to reinvent a better world as most of them are just endless streams of largely useless chatter where people interact without actually attempting to truly connect.

Not all communications have to be meaningful to be interesting for those engaging in it but it can seem like a lot of lost energy to fuel such large networks that basically amount to nothing. But that’s irrelevant, in a way, because millions of people still stampede towards these “rate me if you like me” type of social networks so in itself, there has to be a genuine need underneath all that digital noise.

So people, from the world over, are assisting to the rise of the social networks.

In and of itself, that’s big but is this a prelude to something even bigger or is social networking as we know it as good as it’s going to get?

That’s an excellent question and while nobody can say for sure, the featureset of a typical social network pretty much engulfs everything else with Twitter-like streams, blogs, forums, friend rings and chats, all packed into a single web destination which feels coherent to the user. So, featurewise, social networks pack quite a punch. Not all the features are as developed as “single application scripts” but to the user, that seems to matter very little as all they see is the feature itself and not the technology supporting it.

Social networking has everything to do with the cloud where the size and speed of hosting appears to be somewhat infinite, from a user’s standpoint. It’s probably the web 2.0 most compelling spinoff since a social network is often the place where people finally settle after looking at all sorts of other web services.

And since online social networking is generally free, millions of people just open up an account figuring it’s a good deal. Over time, some build up very rich offerings in their “social realm” and others never return after signing-up. The social networks nevertheless connect hundreds of millions of people daily for business and pleasure.

Among the niche-type social networks to watch out for, the following cities now have their own job-centric social networks: Miami, Daytona Beach, Tampa Bay, Detroit, Toronto and Montreal (with more cities to come). It’s an excellent idea as employers and workers are always looking for new ways to connect, locally.

As you can see, social networks will continue to evolve and amaze those who watch them thrive in all sorts of directions, with more power, more storage and more features than ever before.

For all these reasons and many more, it may seem like social networks have reached a plateau but in reality, they may just be warming up for a highly networked future.

Tags: social networks, social networking, online networks, people, connect, connections, online friends, myspace, facebook, hi5, linkedin, networked, jobs, business, niche networks, members, free

Wether it’s because we read the messages or didn’t need them anymore, it’s always been “standard” to be able to DELETE (and permanently DESTROY) them.

And it just makes sense. Plain, common sense.

It’s the most fundamental of functions — like when snail mail (or “regular mail”, whichever you prefer) isn’t useful for us anymore, we can throw it out. It’s just how things are done. But NOT at LinkedIn. Oh! No, these folks have developed some kind of unexplainable “allergy against deletion”.

Case in point, all inbox messages, in your LinkedIn account, wether they’re…

• Received;
• Sent; or
• Archived.

…can NEVER be deleted!

Isn’t that just completely wicked?

For instance, if ten other members send you “invitations” every week, you’ll likely have hundreds of theses “declined invitations” floating around your inbox after just a few months. It’s unacceptable.

LinkedIn blog’s authors, such as “christman” seems to be purposefully ignoring the repetitive requests to implement a delete button, in the inbox.

So, LinkedIn is forcing its members to deal with a littered inbox system which is supremely counterproductive — why would LinkedIn, which is a network of “professionals”, allow for such a thing to happen? Well, that’s a question nobody seems to be able to answer and LinkedIn, itself, provides no explanation on this.

Advertising isn’t shown in the inbox area so it can’t possibly be that the LinkedIn admins want members to sift through old messages in the hope that such activity will generate a handful of clicks. No, it has to be something else.

Could it be sheer “coder laziness”? Like when web site coders decide it’s too much of a hassle to implement a “delete button” for any inbox message? That makes no sense either because the implementation of such a feature is very easy. So it’s something else… but what?

LinkedIn looks like it’s trying to pull wool over their members’ eyes with lofty comments about privacy like when Steve Ganz says “[...] we’ve always believed that users should own and control their data [...]” but what they fail to say (or “prefer not to say”) is that they too have access to all of our data.

But, that’s not all…

Ganz also states, for LinkedIn, that “[...] we firmly believe in users’ rights to privacy [...]” but that doesn’t say, in any way, that they’ll respect those rights! For a company that wants to “be clear” about everything, they’re “playing with words” all the time.

Just to prove that last point, Ganz adds “[...] we promise to continue to keep privacy firmly in focus [...]” but again, “keeping something in focus” doesn’t mean they’ll safeguard our rights, even from themselves.

Perhaps LinkedIn thinks its members are gullible and unintelligent but their doublespeak is exposing a somewhat intriguing agenda of theirs where they carefully (and apparently, purposefully) prevent their users from deleting their messages. Even MySpace allows that!

And perhaps that’s where the real answer to the “no delete button, in the inbox” lies.

For several years, messages have been accumulating in LinkedIn members’ inboxes, without any possibility to delete them. That’s just plain wrong. But LinkedIn doesn’t seem interested in discussing the matter or better yet, resolve it.

Because of this sorry state of affairs, perhaps members should think twice before posting their private information in a network where all of those “interesting details”, ending up in your inbox or someone else’s, may never be deleted, ever.

If LinkedIn is acting in your best interest, it just doesn’t end up looking that way, at all…

Tags: linkedin, delete, delete button, inbox, feature, business messages, contacts, privacy, member privacy, user privacy, use of information, archive, receive, send, messages, social network, business social network, rights, user rights, can’t delete email messages in inbox, linkedin inbox problem, no way to delete messages in linkedin

That’s right, the Live Search service is gone!

How’s that for big news?

But there’s even bigger news. The old “live.com” service is officially set to be replaced tomorrow by a new search service called “bing.com“. Another 4-letter .com which is easy to remember and cool to bookmark. That’s pretty much as far as the similarities go, however.

The Bing.com search engine is built, from the gound up, so to speak, to be completely different than Live.com in the sense that it’s more mature and precise. A lot of testing went on using the Live dataset so expect to find in Bing what was available through its [now retired] predecesor.

Steve Ballmer said this about its new web destination: “Bing [will] enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.” at last week’s All Things Digital conference, in Carlsbad, CA.

And gosh, is Ballmer ever fired up about Bing!

According to Microsoft, in addition to offering search by category, Bing will offer…

• more relevant search results;
• snapshots of search results’ Web pages;
• color-coded search results; and
• search tools on the left side of the page.

This new search engine is also set up to organize query results in relevant groups rather than as a series of links. Google might want to pick up on this! So, for instance, a search for “travel to Seattle” may return Seattle destinations like hotels, restaurants and museums as almost a guidebook page. The same search on Live generated straight individual links that users had to go through one by one.

Microsoft has looked for ways to improve its search advertising revenue for years and maybe Bing will give them “more bang for their money”. It’s hard to imagine that advertisers will be leaving Google and Yahoo! for Bing anytime soon but overtime, maybe some people will get curious and want to see if Microsoft go its new search service right, this time around.

Everyone “in the know” regarding the search engine wars was aware that Microsoft’s search market share had been slipping for more than two years. It struggled to make its online advertising unit profitable but that wasn’t going too well. According to comScore, Microsoft maintains a meager 8.2% share of the market for core searches compared with 64.2% for Google and 20.4% for Yahoo!.

After trying a few searches in Bing’s “preview” search service for “new technology“, “local pizza“, “alternative cancer treatments“, “free education” and “open source scripts” yielded impressively relevant results which actually made sense. The pay-per-click results were generally related but not always useful. Maybe when Microsoft convinces more advertisers to sign-up, those results will become more interesting.

You may also appreciate the “quick information” that’s displayed at the right of the hyperlinks [and descriptions] to give you a sort of preview of what you’ll find, at any particular web site. Here again, Google and Yahoo! should send a few spies to check it out.

We’ll need at least a few months to see if Bing has what the users are looking for but until then, it’ll be interesting to see what the competition does to make sure they stay on top.

Tags: bing, about bing, bing.com, bing search, bing search engine, microsoft bing, steve ballmer, ballmer about bing, allthingsd, all things digital, live, live.com, search engine war, google, yahoo!, competition, users, visitors, internet, web, online

As Microsoft introduces Windows 7, that’ll be the default browser so if you don’t do it by yourself on your current XP or Vista setup now, it’ll be done for you, in the next OS release.

Microsoft’s new web browser is packed with features and one of them has been quite a cause for concern, for the online advertising industry which heavily relies on external JavaScript calls to display ads.

Publishers displaying Google AdSense ads have been quite vocal about the possibility for a new feature, among many others, called InPrivate [browsing] mode (also called the “porn mode“) where the browser doesn’t record anything, may it be history, cookies or cache that’ll be wiped out at the end of the session (so you don’t get slowed down during that session), because it was feared that the ads, originating from Google, would cease to be visible.

If that were to happen, as is the case with AdBlock Plus for Firefox, it would have the potential to destroy large parts of the online advertising industry because IE8 is promising to become the browser of choice, over time.

But although things might change, right now, it looks like the InPrivate mode won’t prevent Google AdSense ads from displaying.

Millions of AdSense publishers might let go a long sight of relief, when looking at the following proof that AdSense ads display normally, even when using the InPrivate mode…

By the way, it should be noted that we used IE8′s “express settings”…

…and we also had InPrivate filtering turned on in such a way that IE8 would block content for us (with its own “default” settings)…

…with these settings “enforced” (none that we determined, actually)…

So that was pretty much as far as the typical web user would go, when using such settings. Assuming a “typical user” would be using them, in the first place.

In all fairness, it might be a while before this type of “filtering” reaches mainstream.

The AdBlock Plus extension, however, has prevented publishers from collecting untold amounts of advertising revenue, since it’s been released to the Firefox user base so the idea of seeing IE8 come out with a similar feature, not activated by default but easily available to all, has made honest and hard working —ad supported— publishers very nervous.

Fortunately, it doesn’t look like Microsoft will wage war with Google on that front. Perhaps the Redmond giant has a slight idea of what kind of “blogger-storm” it would attract upon itself by doing so or maybe it’s just common sense (yes, that too can happen at Microsoft, according to certains rumors).

Whatever the reason, Microsoft’s IE8 InPrivate mode seems to play nice with Google AdSense ads on all publisher web sites that we checked (and we checked many of them, from all over the world, in several languages) so for now, it’s all good.

Let’s hope —and perhaps lobby— for things to stay this way.

And for AdBlock Plus to grow up and stop hurting honest web publishers.

Tags: ie8, internetexplorer 8, microsoft, adsense, google adsense, google, online advertising, online ads, web ads, ppc ads, pay-per-click, ad zones, display ads, hide ads, prevent ads from displaying, adblock plus, inprivate, filtering, web browser, internet users, advertising revenue, money, finance, common sense

Downloading the Adblock Plus extension for Firefox is easy. It takes under a minute. Activating it takes a few seconds and once the browser has relaunched, Google AdSense ads become a distant memory.

People who install Adblock Plus or similar extensions, in either Firefox or Internet Explorer, do it for a variety of reasons…

• some hate advertising, flat out;
• some want to protest against Google’s privacy policies, which may be viewed as intrusive;
• some never click on the ads, so they see no point in viewing them;
• some want a faster browsing experience; and finally
• some just follow a mass movement against online advertising.

But when people refuse to view the ads that pay for the free content they’re accessing, it endangers the entire online advertising ecosystem, especially the one involving Google AdSense and its publishers.

By using Adblock Plus when visiting ad supported web destinations, regular visitors become freeloaders. These people take all the free content and leave nothing behind, no even being courteous enough to even tolerate the generally non-intrusive ads accompanying that content.

Given the popularity of Adblock Plus, being the number one extension for Firefox, popularitywise, this means web publishers are going to have to find alternative ways to make money, such as…

• relying solely on Google Custom Search (beta) which isn’t currently blocked — and that’s a long shot, to say the least;
• switching to alternative advertising service but since they pay roughly 10 to 100 times less than Google, that’s a losing proposition that won’t pay the bills;
• ending the universal access to free content, limiting the free stuff to marketing purposes only and charging for memberships to access the previously free content;
• syndicating the locally produced and owned content to a larger network which still hasn’t been affected by Adblock Plus, yet.

That’s a lot of trouble to counter a handful of nasty ad blocking extensions but as the web publisher continues to reach new lows, there seems to be little other choice, in order to make ends meet.

Adblock Plus and similar extensions are probably the main reason why publishers see very high stats in their internal counters and much lower counts, according to Google. The difference is likely comprised of all the users that visited with such extensions on.

Keep in mind Adblock Plus —also— kills the Google Analytics code so trying to make sense of the numbers accumulated there isn’t even possible since a large portion of visitors aren’t accounted for. Yikes! So much for analytics…

So with all this in mind, it’s not hard to see that Adblock Plus and similar extensions are hurting web publishers, big time. So much so that an entire nascent online publishing industry is being strangled as it tries to emerge.

It’s like as if somebody sold a system to block all ads when reading newspapers, or watching TV or listening to the radio. It would have devastating consequences but online, it’s even worse since this media is still in its infancy.

People who value liberty, independent opinions and fair use should be enraged that ad blocking extensions even exist. If a web site has too much advertising for one’s taste, go elsewhere. When the web publisher sees his traffic count going down, he’ll get the message and change things to the visitors’ liking. There’s no need to block all the ads… for all sites, at once!

So, is Google also hurting, because of these ad blocking extensions?

Within its web publisher (affiliates) network, yes. Google hurt should follow the same curve as the downfall in revenue web publishers have been seeing for the last few months, especially since September 2008 and even worse, since February 2009.

However, the way Google displays its ads within its own search engine make it immune to ad blockers, there. As such, Google hasn’t been losing one penny from ad blockers, within its own search empire.

Also, everybody knows that the same link clicked in a publisher’s web page will usually bring between 6 and 18 times less money than the exact same link clicked within a Google Customer Search (beta) search results page. The logic behind this is probably that Google values its own web property above all others, even quality independent sites.

So while Google looks as strong as ever, every other AdSense publisher out there seems to be dying. Some slowly. Some, much faster. The smaller publishers being the first to call it quits.

Maybe that’s why Google hasn’t retaliated (legally or otherwise) against Adblock Plus.

They’re still making boatloads of money so why should they care if their web publishers are being driven into financial distress? Seriously, Google being the sole “safe” outlet to publish the pay-per-click ads, they may even be making MORE MONEY because of Adblock Plus.

So, the web publishers need to figure out a way out of this trap, by themselves…

• Adblock Plus and similar extensions will likely continue to thrive (until the free web dies); and
• Google isn’t moving to help out publishers… even as they’re being driven out of business.

Using scripts to force visitors to deactivate such extensions will likely become the norm because the financial drain is so bad that there’s just no other choice but that’s awful because web publishers are forced to confront their visitors because third party ad blocking extension makers have decided to attack them, head on.

Until such anti-ad blocking scripts are coded, web publishers will continue to feel the punishing crunch in their Google AdSense revenue. As bas as it is, the situation could get a lot worse.

Yes, web publishing was wonderful for a while but Adblock Plus and similar extensions are ruining the entire experience for everyone and accelerating the end of the free web, in the process.

Tags: adblock plus, google adsense, adsense, abblock, ad block, ad blockers, ad blocking, advertising, online ads, deleted ads, ads ripped out, ads not rendered, web publishers, ad revenue, sponsored links, free content, quality content, ad zones, visitors, adsense stats, ecpm, number of visitors, number of clicks, ad conversion, firefox, internet explorer, ie8, extensions, plugins, membership-based access, paid content

Quality online content is freely available, today.

Thanks to revenue generation services like Google’s AdSense, web publishers can concentrate on creating and managing that content while advertisers bid to be seen alongside it. In the process, countless web publishers get monthly checks, from Google, which help pay for it all.

Again, placing ads alongside quality content provides the following advantages…

• context-specific advertising space for millions of advertisers, from all over the world;
• a relatively stable monthly money stream, for participating web publishers; and
• tons of quality free content for all web visitors.

Furthermore, with Google’s AdSense service, visitors are presented with highly targeted ads which closely match their tracked preferences. In other words, a majority of ads presented are relevant.

So while that seems like a logical and straightforward online ecosystem, the people at Adblock Plus don’t see it as such.

In their view, such ads are a bad thing.

So bad, that they give away a plugin for the Firefox browser which basically eliminates all Google AdSense ads from web publisher pages, without Google’s consent or the web publisher even knowing about it.

Because Adblock Plus is a Firefox extension, the ads are basically stripped away from the rendered web pages.

If web publishers don’t read articles such as this one, they may never even know that their economic lifeblood (their ads) are secretly being trashed, by the Adblock Plus extension.

So Google AdSense publishers take thousands of blogs and forums by storm to discuss the recent freefall in the revenue they derive from their ads. And we’re talking about a more than 50% drop, roughly between September 2008 and March of 2009, according to many publishers who have been quite vocal about this spectacular drop in their earnings.

While it was historically possible to pay the rent by adding AdSense ads to content, it’s a lot more difficult now because Adblock Plus, among other things, is the single most downloaded extension for Firefox and on the Internet Explorer front, it’s no better because other similar extensions also attack the ads.

So where is this taking us?

If web publishers can’t make any more money with their Google AdSense ads, the quality and universal accessibility of content is probably going to be suffer, a lot.

Because of Adblock Plus and similar extensions to popular web browsers, expect…

• a lot less variety of content;
• a lot less free content;
• more membership-based content, available for a monthly fee or per-access fee;
• alternative ad methods that’ll need to be even more intrusive and less targeted, to make up for the lost revenue.

In other words, what sounded like a good deal for the typical web visitor tired of seeing clueless ads popping up everywhere might pave the way to a somewhat nightmarish web where a limited set of content is available for free and everything else has been forced to migrate to membership-based access rules, to keep up with the bills.

People who install Adblock Plus most likely don’t realize they’re being converted into digital freeloaders, of sorts.

You see, contextual ads —especially those from Google AdSense— add value to the original content by providing lots of links providing more information or commercial offerings, about any given theme. Visitors who prefer not to click on such ads don’t have to while those who find interesting leads can follow them through. It’s that simple.

By having Adblock Plus and similar extensions installed on so many browsers, at home, at school and at work, the entire revenue model falls apart and risks bringing the beautiful web we know down with it.

As such, any responsible web user should never install such extensions in their browsers.

Case in point, this is what the people behind Adblock Plus say about their creation:

“While nobody profits directly from it, widespread adoption of ad blocking software will make intrusive ads economically inefficient until they become as rare as pop-up windows already are today. And aside of making the internet a better place it is simply good to know that this work is used.”

If “nobody profits directly from it”, it should also be noted that that billions of dollars are likely lost each year by web publishers and that means Adblock Plus is an obstacle to the rightful redistribution of money, in society.

Concerned web publishers are absolutely right when they refer to Adblock Plus as a digital calamity which is causing enormous harm to the web, in general.

More people are coming to realize that the web can’t continue to be free is people keep using Adblock Plus and similar extensions because freeloading destroys most revenue-generating models, especially the one based on Google AdSense.

Adblock Plus is so efficient that it blocks regular Google AdSense ads but that’s not all, even the customized AdSense feeds, like those displayed in the Los Angeles Times, get deleted. In short, anything related to Google’s ads gets pulled from the web pages shown to users. It’s very sad, indeed.

Since the Adblock Plus developers and fans don’t seem too keen on the idea that web publishers need money to operate, a series of retaliation might be needed to save the web as we know it.

Among the measures that are obviously becoming more necessary, Google and web publishers should sue Adblock Plus for, directly or indirectly, stealing them of their revenue stream by empowering users with a tool that blocks all ads by default, instead of letting the user only block the ads he feels are too intrusive, on a case by case basis.

By banning all ads altogether, without any kind of prior notice to the web publishers or advertisers, Adblock Plus might be exposing itself —and those who code and distribute it— to costly civil and criminal suits. Similar extension coders expose themselves as well. By attacking the web’s revenue model and the web publishers, these “ad blockers” paint themselves as targets for the moment when the legal actions start flying around.

Do you think the Los Angeles Times, for instance, will tolerate that over half of their online viewers refuse to even view their ads? Of course not. It’s just a matter of time before another way to generate money is decided upon. Since it will likely be a sort of membership, all readers will pay dearly for those who were too foolish to support the current “all free” content access model.

And in all fairness, the Google AdSense ad zones are usually well located, alongside the content and pose no problem for the visitors. Only a minority of spam-like sites stuff the ads in such a way that it become intrusive. Should all web publishers have to pay for the lack of judgement of a minority of spam-spinners? Of course not. That’s why the very principle of “blocking everything, everywhere”, with Adblock Plus, is so twisted, unfair and unethical, if not downright illegal, in some circumstances.

For the time being, Google has been careful not to talk about extensions like Adblock Plus. However, it’s unlikely that they’ll stay silent much longer as they too must be suffering from the spread of this extension and others like it.

While the power to view ads or not now lies in the hands of visitors, web publishers could choose to show blank pages to them. The pages could also display short messages asking the visitors to turn off their “ad blocking extension” if they wish to view the content. Some visitors might find it supremely frustrating but by activating such an extension, they definitely had it coming.

When enough web publishers refuse access to freeloading visitors, the popularity of such extensions might start to go down. For the time being, the economic nightmare stemming from Adblock plus continues, for countless Google AdSense publishers who can’t make sense of their stats, anymore.

Adblock Plus might sell itself as a “plus” but in the end, it’s a huge “minus”, for everybody. The end of free content online would change our world, for the worse.

Tags: adblock plus, google adsense, adsense, abblock, ad block, ad blockers, ad blocking, advertising, online ads, deleted ads, ads ripped out, ads not rendered, web publishers, ad revenue, sponsored links, free content, quality content, ad zones, visitors, adsense stats, ecpm, number of visitors, number of clicks, ad conversion, firefox, internet explorer, ie8, extensions, plugins, membership-based access, paid content

Networking isn’t new.

Social networking is the online equivalent of a offline meeting where, among other things, geography and schedules wouldn’t matter. Now, that’s a weird concept for some C-level dinosaurs but for the tech-savvy managers moving up, it makes perfect sense.

At the very foundation of networking, there are two things: humans and communications.

In a business setting, a basic goal would be for ideas to be clearly communicated, among all “humans”, in the organization. A more advanced goal would be for those ideas to mature and turn into “value”, one way or another.

Blogs and wikis haven’t replaced email messages and chatting but they’ve definitely added shared spaces where project data (and ideas) can more easily pollinate, more often than not, in ways that were largely unpredictable. Putting the information “out there”, for an entire team (or company) to see is a powerful way to leverage teamwork.

Social networking for businesses see communities of interest spring up around subject matters rather than organizational hierarchies. If you’ve been in business for a while, you’re well aware that the best ideas don’t necessarily come from the “top brass”. Networking at all levels of a company smashes the invisible glass walls which have the bad habit of strangling innovation, big time.

Generally speaking, social applications provide business value by letting people add context to information stores which, in turn, helps others identify what’s useful to them — it also makes search results that much more relevant.

Social bookmarks are a nice example of this since team members can share the web resources they like and learn from others about web destinations that have been overlooked. After a while, the bookmark list becomes a real time saver.

Naturally, enterprise social networking helps people find and connect with co-workers through user profiles, expert search and social graphs that map out any employee’s connections throughout the organization. This, in and of itself, makes for a strong argument for social networking, in the modern workplace.

Finding co-workers with domain-specific knowledge, in just a few clicks, can really propel any organization to a whole new level of communications, productivity, teamwork and of course, profitability.

Some organizations are obsessed with the “dangers of wasting time” wrongly associated with social networking. But that’s very bad management since social networking is a communications enabler and as such, it’s built to help channel information to the right people, wherever the people may be in the organizational chart.

If you’re just starting out in the social networking for business “adventure”, make sure to take a look at the quality open source scripts that are available to structure your data into blogs, forums, wikis or just about any other way you wish.

Tags: social networking, enterprise, business, work, workplace, colleagues, co-workers, employees, team members, managers, c-level, executives, decisions, ideas, communications, information, organization, open source, blogs, wikis

For online advertisers, AdSense is a huge network through which they can sell themlselves, their products and their services. For web publishers, it’s a revenue stream but what about Google, what’s their take on the service?

Over the years, a large number of AdSense publishers have wondered what words Google would use to properly define the “publisher side” of its all important pay-per-click advertising system (comprising other elements, namely AdWords where advertisers purchase the ads [that are later shown through AdSense]).

If you’ve been wondering about that too, here’s how Google defines AdSense, in its 2008 annual report, on page 56:

AdSense for content is our online service for distributing ads from our advertisers that are relevant to content on our Google Network members’ web sites. Under this program, we use automated technology to analyze the meaning of the content on the web page and serve relevant ads based on the meaning of such content. For example, a web page on an automotive blog that contains an entry about vintage cars might display ads for vintage car parts or vintage car shows. These ads are displayed in spaces that our AdSense for content partners have set aside on their web sites. AdSense for content allows a variety of ad types to be shown, including text ads, image ads, Google Video Ads, link units (which are sets of clickable links to topic pages related to page content), themed units (which are regular text ads with graphic treatments that change seasonally and by geography) and gadget ads (which are customized —mini-sites— that run as ads on AdSense publisher web sites).

For our online AdSense program, our advertisers pay us a fee each time a user clicks on one of our advertisers’ ads displayed on our Google Network members’ web sites or, for those advertisers who choose our cost-per-impression pricing, as their ads are displayed. To date, we have paid most of these advertiser fees to our Google Network members, and we expect to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. We recognize these advertiser fees as revenue and the portion of the advertiser fee we pay to our Google Network members as traffic acquisition costs under cost of revenues. In some cases, we guarantee our Google Network members minimum revenue share payments based on their achieving defined performance terms, such as number of search queries or advertisements displayed. Google Network members do not pay any fees associated with the use of our AdSense program on their web sites.

Our agreements with Google Network members consist largely of uniform online —click-wrap— agreements that members enter into by interacting with our registration web sites. The standard agreements have no stated term and are terminable at will. Agreements with our larger members are individually negotiated. Both the standard agreements and the negotiated agreements contain provisions requiring us to share with the Google Network member most of the advertiser fees generated by users clicking on ads on the Google Network member’s web site or, for advertisers who choose our cost-per-impression pricing, as the ads are displayed on the Google Network member’s web site.

Whoever wrote this, at Google, did a very good job at explaining AdSense… in just three paragraphs!

If similarly-sized businesses, like IBM, Cisco or Microsoft had attempted to define such an important business operation as this one is such a short linespan, chances are they would’ve failed, filling page after page to eventually “get to the point”.

This AdSense definition, published in the annual report and reprinted here, follows the exact same logic as Google’s search home page. “Easy does it” seems to be the general rule of thumb behind what AdSense is and seeks to be. In itself, this is wonderful news for all the smaller web publishers out there because it means Google doesn’t intend to overly formalize its ad network, like some competitors have.

Take APT, Yahoo!’s unified digital advertising platform.

It’s probably good but you likely need millions of visitors per day to get any level of attention from them to be —considered— for their ad program. Which is basically out of reach for over 99% of the web publishers out there. So all these fine web enthusiasts flock to Google’s AdSense where such insane “barriers to entry” simply don’t exist.

Talking about Yahoo!’s ad network, one has to wonder why they insist on being so elitist about who gets to show their ads. Is it because Yahoo! hate smaller publishers? Are they convinced only “they” know how to deliver content, and value? It’s anybody’s guess why Yahoo!’s “external publisher base” is so severely skimmed to keep only astronomically huge publishers while slamming the door in the face of all others.

Oh! Well, it’s their problem, not Google’s.

For those who like to read annual reports (even if the very idea of it might seem odd, at first), Google’s 2008 review of its activities, amidst the economic downturn that has started to be felt at the end of that year, proves that Larry and Sergei still steer this search giant with agility and grace.

Tens of thousands of people stand behind Google’s success but even though the valuation of the company has skyrocketed in the last decade, the people at the top have kept cool about it.

And it’s probably why any web publisher with sound content (i.e.: unique, useful and valuable) and a legitimate desire to generate revenue can apply to Google’s AdSense and reasonably expect to be accepted.

If you’re looking for a true sense of entrepreneurial spirit, online, look no further that Google AdSense… even in these hopefully episodic times of economic crisis.

Tags: google, adsense, adwords, definition of adsense, what is adsense, why adsense, how does adsense work, adsense publishers, ppc, pay-per-click, online ads, ad network, advertising, contextual ads, yahoo, apt, online publishers, money, revenue, online revenu, content monetization

This financial crisis isn’t good for Google, its AdWords advertisers and its AdSense publishers.

While Google’s 2008 annual report shows a dip in the pay-per-clic advertising revenue model, the situation hasn’t improved since the beginning of 2009. In fact, the eCPM levels many publishers are seeing are hitting what appear to be record lows.

What probably hurts the most is the roller-coaster effect, of sort, between the “banner year-like” revenues of 2008 and the abysmal counterpart, in 2009.

AdSense is still the most lucrative PPC ad program online but countless publishers can’t make ends meet anymore. One publisher saw eCPM metrics shrink threefold. In real life, it’s the difference between making some $75 a day (in 2008) and some $25 a day (in 2009).

While many publishers had quit their day job to build high-quality web destinations, financed through AdSense, in 2007 and 2008, this year’s revenue slide has convinced most to get back on the job market and basically forget (for a while, at least) about their newfound lifestyle, as work-at-home web publishers.

But the more creative web publishers continue to derive enough money from AdSense to hold on tight during these generally harsh financial times.

Here’s what’s being done by some web publishers to “stay in the AdSense game”…

1. Cater to niche markets (namely to the debt consolidation and troubled assets niches);
2. Bank on the social networking trend (including “spin marketing” in Facebook groups);
3. Reduce the number of AdSense “ad zones” to show only the most lucrative ads;
4. Redesign the looks and add new features to existing web destinations;
5. Find a way to get more visitors in order to make up for the lost revenues (with the “original” visitor count).

Let’s hope that you’ll get creative too and basically endure the current market downturn. This will likely put you in an enviable position when the market goes back up, again. Assuming that it will. Of course.

So, is it possible to survive even though AdSense’s eCPM levels appear to be lower than ever? Probably, yes. But it’s not going to be a joyride. This time around, AdSense publishers won’t be laughing all the way to bank, like so many were, in 2008, the year AdSense really shined — for Google, the advertisers and the publishers alike.

Mathematically speaking, known and [publicly] unkown factors affect AdSense’s eCPM.

Rather weird situations seem to have wildly unpredictable effects on this particular metric but suffice it to say that for a large group of AdSense publishers, it hasn’t been as good in 2009 as it’s been before.

Given Google’s inherent creativity and leadership, one can safely assume that this particular “revenue decline” issue is being dealt with quite seriously at the search king’s headquartiers, in Mountain View, CA.

In the meantime, web publishers are welcome to get creative in order to beat this financial crisis and prove, once again, that AdSense’s online advertising continues to be a huge bargain, even for cash-strapped advertisers.

Tags: google, adsense, adwords, ecpm, ppc, pay-per-click, ads, advertising, online ads, publicity, web ad zones, adsense publishers, adwords advertisers, revenue down, overall revenue, revenue generation, work-at-home, web publishers, web publishing