I have this theory that almost every big brand- and product-manager who wants to do a clever viral marketing campaign is soon going to get it out of his or her system, so therefore we’ll probably see a peak of clever viral marketing campaigns in 2007 sometime. (Background: Gartner applied a similar logic to get to this prediction.)

Technorati Tags: marketing

Those who read this blog know that I typically blog about three general topics: magazine publishing, social media (a broad topic that covers a wide swath of online self-expression and community-building media developments) and Nashville. (However, at least one person has requested that I devote more posts to my dogs and kids.) For those of you who subscribe or visit this weblog for the social media stuff and skip all the Nashville or magazine posts, be sure to click over to a post on Nashville is Talking with the subject title, “Blogger Beta Can So Bite Me.”

Background: Brittney (and this will be a surprise to those who don’t think people who work for ‘traditional’ media companies can write such expressive subject titles) is an employee of Nashville’s ABC affiliate, WKRN. She is, without a doubt, the ubber-connector of several hundred weblogs and the people who maintain them in this region. The blogroll she maintains is the definitive directory of Middle Tennessee blogs. Nashville is Talking, the site she lives on, is an early and still pioneering role-model of how a local media company can develop a mutually beneficial relationship with a local blogosphere.

For example, check out the “Local Aggregator” section on the right column of the front page of Nashville is Talking. Even before the word “widget” was used for such things, Nashville is Talking was parsing the RSS feeds from local bloggers and displaying headlines on the front of Nashville is Talking, doing something akin to what I described earlier as the magic formula of MyBlogLog. I can say with a certain degree of confidence that the “Local Aggregator” feature on Nashville is Talking is one of the key reasons that an offline blogging community has flourished in Nashville.

Here is the part of the RSS/widget/Web 2.0-based would-be viral marketers should note. Don’t suck. If you are doing something that you want others to incorporate on their sites, then make sure it works — especially if you are Google and have billions.

If not, someone like Brittney will use her significant platform (at least to a sizable posse of engaged and active bloggers) to encourage them to turn a key component of their blog’s infrastructure over to your competitor.

Technorati Tags: nashville, socia media

(Quote from TechCrunch regarding Bill Gates’ advice on how to cope with DRM): “People should just buy a cd and rip it.”

I’m sure the Zune Store folks loved that advice. My frustration with the current approaches to DRM has led me to the same place, something I’ve blogged here often. Obviously, it’s a hack, not a solution. And if you only want to purchase one tune rather than the entire CD, you must still figure out how to strip out the DRM before the music is truly yours.

Fred Wilson explains the power of the tiny bit of code (he calls it “the reader-roll widget”) that enables the photos of those registered on MyBlogLog.com to appear over on the right hand column of my blog and a growing number of other blogs, and now, MySpace pages. (Here’s the neo-pop-culture-figure Eric’s post on the same topic.)

Quote from Fred:

“In the case of MyBlogLog, I don’t know how the service could work without the reader roll widget. It’s the front door and the reason the service is popular. So going from basically zero impressions in at the start of the fourth quarter to over 1 million this week is a great accomplishment.”

I’ll add another observation. The “reader-roll widget” has probably also increased the traffic on the blogs of those who are participating. I know that I click through to the blogs of new people I see showing up on this blog. I’ve discovered more new blogs in the past month that way than from any other way. Also, at the Nashville blog ‘meat’-up last Saturday, I met off-line the first person I’ve met online via MyBlogLog. In other words, I think the benefits of the service allows all who participate to win in some way. [Later: I feel the need to make clearer what I just said. If you are a blogger, your photo on another blog is like an ad for your blog. It will enable people who visit, say, this blog, to see a picture of you and, to perhaps click over and see your blog. It's like advertising where the only price you pay is dropping by other blogs. (Actually, on an esoteric front, we could explore the 'privacy capital' you are spending, but that's for another day.) Don't abuse it, however, as with one click, a blogger can easily ban you.]

Also, as someone who has used the service for six weeks or so — and who has observed it closely during that period — I have seen them address some concerns I raised publicly. First, they added a way to easily block someone who I don’t want to appear on my blog — a link-spammer, for example. And they seem to have addressed a performance issue that caused me to remove the reader-roll for a day.

Since they seemed to respond to those other suggestions, here are some more:

1. Update the “Help” page with explanations of how to use the service — or set up a user wiki so your fans can help build a “knowledge base.” If such a thing existed, for example, I would know how to add the reader roll to my MySpace page. I know I can do it, but I don’t know how — and I don’t know where to go to find out how.

2. I think I’ve seen it mentioned, but you need to explain more prominently how a registered user can do “private browsing” — there are some blogs a person may want to visit but not have their photo show up there.

3. You need to have a place on your site where I can post future suggestions as I doubt I’ll be using the rexblog again as a MyBlogLog suggestion box.

While I’m talking about it, don’t forget to join the rexblog community on MyBlogLog.

Technorati Tags: mybloglog, socia media

• How to get on the Netscape/digg homepage | Jason Calacanis Weblog
  Quote: “As we all know I’m no longer working on Netscape. So, these are my observations as someone who is no longer affiliated with the service.”
  (tags: digg netscape)
• ‘Page views’ metric is failing to compute | BetaNews
  More evidence that AJAX means a familiar metric, ‘page-views’ is beginning to lose its relevance. Yahoo says it’s why their numbers were topped by MySpace. (via PaidContent.org)
  (tags: ajax yahoo)