Technically Speaking

Embargo Zone is a site (blog) clearinghouse that I set up due to the fun time we all had this week reading Mike’s go to hell and I mean you rant. I also read CenterNetworks follow up and the very groovy eco friendly RWW spin on the topic.

Now I know there are a ton of sites like PR Newswire, Business Wire, and your momma’s personal blog that all have the news. No big deal, but I also know that when you are pitched left and right by PR and startups - a lot of places get zero coverage. Maybe not zero, but so little that it never even blips the radar screen.

With that in mind, I went ahead and set up Embargo Zone. It’s not going to be like this blog, or any of the major blogs where you read the opinions of Stern, Arrington, Kirkpatrick, Perez, Marshall, Eldon, Om, etc. It’s going to be more like a second chance for those PR pitches that don’t quite cut it with the prime time bloggers.

Oh and with it being called Embargo Zone, there is no need for it to be “embargoed” PR. It can be release it when you can PR, or the “Hey, no one will write about this company, please post this so that it gets some online traction!” But to that point, if it is embargoed news, that embargo will be honored, please read the how to or about page to learn more.

What good does this really do for the overall news online? Well the biggest thing I kept reading the other day from the PR side of things was that coverage is the main thing. Why not put it all in one convenient place for everyone to read? Remember, not all blogs like your momma’s personal blog are privy to the press release. Why not get momma’s opinion on the subject?

I say the more coverage a company can get, as well as the more opinions on a topic or release is well justified. Our current situation as well stated the other day is that news has changed big time in 2008. The only way that it really will change is to level the playing field a bit by giving everyone with an opinion the chance to write about the company or service without the already prejudiced opinions of the top writers.

Only when the coverage is more even and everyone isn’t just linking back to what the big dogs wrote, will there be real news that matters. If your momma writes about a new service or site off of the press release vs what the big dogs post first, that will give a new point of view on the company or service. Right now, your momma writes based off of someone’s already jaded opinion. There is nothing new once the big dogs write about it; rarely do you see them link to a major blog and say, “Oh btw, Allen is full of sh*t but I thought I would provide him a link back to his blog!”

In the end, Embargo Zone is not here to compete with the great writers. That isn’t the point. Clearinghouse is all that the ‘zone is going to be. I even thought of doing some t-shirts - but damn Auto Zone to hell for taking the catch phrase - “Get in the ‘Zone!” Have no fear, if I do a t-shirt, it will rock no matter if the AZ already has that one locked up tight.

Technically Speaking, you can follow the feed for Embargo Zone - it might be worth your momma’s time if nothing else! If you’d like to learn more, check out the welcome post or the about page.

If you are a PR type that hasn’t heard of us (and you probably haven’t yet!) - you can start sending your PR, news, etc - right to tips [at] embargozone [dot] com - please read the about page or the first post!

As Jay announced earlier today about the latest release, below is my embeddable statistics for this blog. Get your own audience stats for your site(s) by simply signing up and using our free code.

Now the cool thing is that the longer you use Lookery, the more you can see - or the more trends you can analyze. Here are my charts from November 2008:

Technically Speaking, you gotta love audience data that is free. Suggestions needed on how to utilize this audience data are right here.

With YouTube taking it live according to the report that I just read here, what happens to USTREAM.TV as well as justin.tv?

Most of you have already seen Justin take a big hit earlier this week, and many comments regarding them is that they are toast, basically. But what about UStream? How long do you think it is before both services are bought by the bigger fish in the pond? What about the earlier rumors a couple of weeks ago that it’s all just a show that eventually will reveal the longer term partnership between UStream and YouTube?

Technically Speaking, looking for others to leave their thoughts.

Well I was checking some of my Gmail accounts, and it appears that themes have arrived. Three of my accounts have them, and it leaves me thinking on how they are picking who gets them first. It has to be something associated to where your account is and on what server. I thought at first it might be due to the way you signed up, and in what order.

But than I was thinking, while the above theme is now on my oldest Gmail account, this one here is on one that is newer than the one I use daily.

While the one above is very important since it’s connected to my PayPal account, the one below is hooked to a site that I haven’t updated much lately, yet has a little bit of traffic. I guess it would be more correct to say - I haven’t broadcasted lately! But the theme I used for this account reminds me totally of old school.

Technically Speaking, when themes arrive to you, I think you’ll agree that there are some cool choices and it helps to break up the boring and stale look of your Gmail.

I just read that GnR is debuting it’s Chinese Democracy album exclusively on MySpace this evening at 9pm.

My thoughts are: When Axl can get on some real meds and put aside all their differences to reunite the original band, than we’ll have an event. The tracks I have heard so far, are less than impressive for an album that should have came out 17 years ago!

Technically Speaking, 17 years and this is all we have waited for?!? btw, you should check out this site for more GnR info.

Fog City Games is an interesting study in analytic data. For one thing, you’d think in the primarily male dominated gaming industry there are few sites that have a dominant female audience. Fog City Games statistics prove that females do play games online. A whopping 84% plus play games at this site.

Even more interesting are the search terms that people used to find this site. It’s great to see this list, since none of them refer to “fog city” or “fog” reside in the top 10.

What is even more interesting is that even though a major blogger has had his say or rather his suggestions about Ask.com, people do use the site. Maybe this is something Ask.com needs to think about in their future marketing or advertising initiatives since at least for Fog City Games, the audience is well over 2/3’s female. Even more interesting - Google doesn’t even come in at #2 here! It’s AOL search!

The next thing I found out about this site is #5 on the below list. These are the search terms that are called Cross-Site Audience Keywords. Number 5 should raise a few eyebrows, as while the gaming on this site isn’t war game oriented, it’s clear that the users that come here to play games also do searches for “play free online war games now” and with being 84% female, that tells me that if marketed successfully, you can market a war game to females.

These cross-site audience keywords are really nice to learn about. Not many analytic companies like to share that data with the site owner. With the statistics above that are all free for Lookery site owners, a good data analyst can really help to increase the ROI for a site.

Technically Speaking, what Lookery offers for free is just a sign up away.

Full Disclosure: The site owner is in fact a member of the team at Lookery. I picked this site purely on the cool data that his site generates. If my site generated cool data, I could write a post about it also, but unfortunately with a 92% male audience, and as small as this site is, why bother?

tipjoy - I just came across this site today. I’m sure there has been plenty of posts about this site already, but it’s an interesting concept, so I added a tipjoy button to the right (and it appears below the post which is done via the plugin).

The concept is rather simple, and with the way the online advertising world is being written about currently, who knows - this could be the way to earn a bit online. I think bloggers would be the first to benefit, and low volume sites that run Google Ads and never earn enough to get to that $100 minimum payment.

Technically Speaking, eventually the world will get it’s collective heads on straight as there are too many interesting start ups out there that deserve a shot at success. btw, Since you are here reading this post and if you just learned about this site here - toss me 25 cents!

I’m thinking it is pretty clear that Lookery sold the ad network about 2 weeks ago. Now many people are wondering where the money is, or rather how they can make money by using Lookery. First of all, you might want to go straight away to this post that David did the other day. I thought that was a great explanation of what we are doing currently.

Even with that being said, if that isn’t clear enough for you, Jay posted this the other day also. Yes, to answer the question that is roaming in your head after reading that post by Jay - I did jokingly say “Dude, that has to be the longest sentence I ever saw!” - Yet, it does make sense if you take a second to digest what he was saying.

One thing we are going to be doing on the Lookery blog is start doing a write up of the featured site of the week. This past Friday I posted our first in what we hope will be an enlightening series of sites that are on the front page of Lookery dot com.

By now you are saying, “Ok, Rex, where the f**k is the “Money” going to be coming from now that there is no ad network?!?” Well if you know me, and some of you do, I like to build a story before just saying, “Here ya go, here are some links, enjoy.” Story building is key to selling anything. It’s called psychology, and the more we draw you in with the story and use good psychology, the better you are going to understand the money side. Without a good storyline, you tend to lose the interest of your audience.

Some of you are only interested in knowing your audience, and that is completely fine. It’s free to use and easy to sign up. I think one of the biggest uses of this free service is the regular every day blogger. I see bloggers who use twitter daily to promote things about their blog, but yet, it appears they are shouting to an audience - but really - do they know their audience? That is where knowing your audience comes in.

Finally we arrive at the money part of this equation. It’s based on something we all learned in kindergarten actually, and that is called sharing. Specifically all we are asking is for you to share your data and you make money from that. It’s passive income. And the cool thing for the geeks reading this, is that we are sharing our API for you to do this. It’s very simple to deploy on your site.

Coming full circle now, it’s about what you know (your audience) and now you know where is the money (sharing your data). It’s a simple concept to grasp, and hopefully in the coming months we will tell the story well enough so that everyone out there understands this data stuff is not only interesting, but yes, it can make you money.

Technically Speaking, I hope I told a more concise story about where Lookery is at today. Sign up and start learning more about your audience. If you have the data, and are inclined to grow that data into something worthwhile, you should share it with our growing community or network of sites that power our team to move forward and create more for products for you!

The news now is very old since the first major blog to break the news. This of course was first put out to the world right here as well as here. This let out the fact early about the Adknowledge buy of the Lookery ad network, but it’s time to move forward with what we are doing best.

That specifically is helping site owners to amplify their audience data. It’s what we have been doing actually for months now, and with the sale of the ad network, we can now focus all our resources on that fully. Adknowledge was the right choice when the opportunity presented itself to us to give our publishers a well known ad network home.

Coverage was pretty good today after the actual press release went live. One thing I’d like to clear up is that in no way are we based out of “Palo Alto” as stated in this post. It should have said “the San Francisco - Boston with side shows in Seattle and St. Louis based Lookery” - well at least it would have been more truthful!

While many posts simply regurgitated the press release, no big deal as I have done that myself, other outlets dug a little deeper and wanted to know more. Since we started last July on the Facebook application network, there was the coverage on the sites dedicated to that space. Coverage went pretty much everywhere, even overseas.

To be quite clear, the last two post comments that I left - one word - babelfish! I am not fluent in any language outside of English which I happen to get by in. I did however want to acknowledge them for the coverage of the sale of the ad network, but also so that I didn’t appear as the ignorant American - as they say, “When in Rome… ” - I gave it my best effort to use their language in responding.

Technically Speaking, it’s time to come over to Lookery now that the ad network part of Lookery is gone and check out how you can amplify your site(s) audience data today by signing up and becoming part of the growing Lookery network - we gang up on the ASL (Age, Sex, Location) and KW (Keyword) / cross-site audience KW data for you!

123People officially launched this morning. Now many of you are saying, “Great, another competitor to Google, Yahoo, etc… another fail whale in the making.” That was my original thought, but I had to give it a try. I figured I’d put it through it’s paces, see how good this site was. What they are doing is not competing with any search engine, but rather enhancing the search experience when you are looking for people you know or knew. Cool concept so far, but I had to test this out for myself.

I went to the site and was greeted by the below usual stripped down search look that we are all use to seeing these days on a search site. Nothing new here.

Well I said I was going to put it through it’s paces, right? I went and searched for someone that I haven’t been able to find for over 14 years now. Yes, I’ve tried countless searches on different sites in the past few months, but since the person’s name (real last name) also is a Hip Hop term, it was becoming pointless in trying to find him. A lot of hip hop artists were actually using his real last name which is “Samples” and calling them self DJ Mike Samples, DJ Fred Samples, etc… You get the picture.

Well with 123People, not only do you get a string of endless links, but you get social network connections, YouTube connections, as well as e-mail addresses, article links, etc… The complete person search results you want. The most important thing here, is that you also get pictures. You are not just receiving back a spit result list of articles and links where it “might be” where the person you are searching for is located at online.

Well I found test case #1. I was quite shocked to find that he also found the old band page like 4 days ago. So since he found the old band page first, I said, “One more missing member to find.” I figured the test wasn’t really fair since he had actually found the band page first about 4 days ago on a Saturday night around 1:30am.

This next person was going to be harder to find, since up to now I couldn’t find him on the normal social network searches, Google searches, etc.. 123People found him in one simple search! The picture find really helps as he has one of those people with non-gender specific first names - “Shannon“. I found him by his picture which linked to his MySpace page. Now I’m putting it out there for anyone that knows him, since he hasn’t been online since 6/1/08 according to his MySpace page - if you know him, or know of him - ping him for me please.

Technically Speaking, isn’t it about time you actually found those people from your past lives vs searching endlessly on Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, etc.. and finding endless links to what you are not searching for? It’s quite refreshing to write about a new company that actually does what it says it is doing. btw, didn’t you like that I didn’t use one word from the usual press release?