Peter Norvig (director of research at Google) compares real-life traffic numbers of several sites with their reach as reported by Alexa. Norvig emphasizes the selection bias introduced by Alexa as a tool preferred by members of hte SEO-industry.
Super Affiliate Marketing Blog gives a 10-step introduction to PPC(pay-per-click)-marketing.
“First Life is a 3D analog world where server-lag doesn’t exist” - join 6 billion users and register at getafirstlife.com! 
…according to the comments on creator Darren Barefoot’s blog, Linden Labs takes the joke with a wink and grants Darren all rights to proceed the parody…big up!
The Ad Generator produces fake advertising by mashing up real-life corporate slogans with (tag-)related flickr-images.
10 things you should know about wordpress 2.1, which should be released later today. the feature I’m mostly looking forward to? AJAX-ified auto-saving of post-drafts (good bye lost posts due to browser-crashes).
Wikipedia - in an attempt to fight spam - adding the nofollow-attribute to all external links has been the major topic of today. Google Blogoscoped introduced (me to) an interesting strategy handling the attribute, which seems way more reasonable: as done before, external links within user-generated comment (comments, wiki-pages…) are initially set to nofollow. however, the attribute is automatically removed after a few days, assuming that the link, since it hasn’t been removed by the moderator (or, in case of Wikipedia, the editing community) is valid and therefor accountable for page-ranking. sounds smart to me…
Feedvertising offers bloggers - no matter how big their readership (actually the service turns down low-traffic sites) - a free & easy way to sell advertising-space in their RSS-feeds. Feedvertising works without changing the feed-URL, instead ads are inserted into the feed by a plugin extending the blogging-software (currently only Wordpress [self-hosted] is supported, with other systems soon to come). publishers can freely choose to sell adspace via Feedvertising or instead host in-house advertisments (like f.e. TechCrunch does). ads are HTML-text only, with prices calculated considering the feeds traffic, link popularity and overall topic. publishers share revenue with Feedvertising 50/50.
Linden Labs just published the august/september issue of their second opinion newsletter. while the newsletter is focused on internal issues and the upcoming closure of the user-forums (not really a great idea, imho), LL also unveils the new official - user-generated - movie-trailer promoting Second Life: “Second Life: Get One”, by Silver and Goldie - a really great piece of machinima.
gnomedex-mastermind Chris Pirillo started his very-own personalized web-advertisement-platform earlier this week. after loosing 30 pounds of body-weight , he is now selling ad-words on his chest, starting at 50,- USD. though the offers seriousness might be questioned, this could be your chance to spread your message among the blogosphere! 
I’m thinking about getting the keyword ‘vacation’ for the micro-site I did last night…
sure, the ads introduced by apple when launching the mac book pro were kind of original and - to some - funny. to others they appeared to be quite arrogent as well (especially the one regarding viruses, esp. since recent security-warnings regarding mac-os x made clear, that apple’s security-bonus mainly derives from not being in focus of most attackers). that’s why I love the spoof ads which turned up today on youtube.com :)…
PayPerPost is a service currently in beta trying to connect advertisers with bloggers seeking for revenue from their blogging-activities. advertisers offer ‘opportunities’ to bloggers, defining the requirements a blog-post has to meet in order to get paid for it (f.e. linking to a product-website, reviewing a product or writing about personal experiences with a product or service). while PayPerPost promises to review oppportunities and ban offers which would “require bloggers to be dishonest”, popular bloggers have already expressed their antipathy for the service (read Robert Scoble or TechCrunch).
PayPerPost is currenlty available to US-bloggers only.
Update: here is an interesting snippet out of PayPerPost’s terms-of-use for advertiser:
You acknowledge that PayPerPost bloggers are independent third-parties and not directly controlled by PayPerPost. As a consequence, any blog postings of your content or product(s) will inherently risk negative or unflattering comments about your content, product(s) or company. You specifically acknowledge and agree that PayPerPost has no control over any Posts that may be available or published on any blog (or otherwise), and that you are solely responsible (and assume all liability and risk) for determining whether or not such Posts are appropriate or acceptable to you.
Carson Systems (makers of DropSend) finally unveiled the core-purpose of their soon-to-be-going-beta web-application Amigo. Amigo basically is a matching-service, connecting newsletter-publishers offering ad-space in their email-newsletters and advertisers looking for a precisely targeted audience. the idea seems to make sense, especially for those publishing to smaller address-pools, who are currently having a hard time to market their ad-space. what remains unknown is the sice of the slice, Carson’s gonna keep for each deal. another concern that comes to mind: with the ongoing adaption of RSS, email-newsletters could become ultimately obsolete.
since february 06, Carson Systems is documenting the development of Amigo in great detail on their blog barenakedapp.com - an interesting read for everyone involved in the creation of web-apps!
…to the ongoing criticism on his advertisment-strategy in his latest post on zdnet. while I appreciate the reaction and generally positive tone, I don’t share his believe in the sole power of repetition. at least it’s not working that way, if the repeated ad-block is 6min long. and boring. imho you have to either change the length (repeating a short 30-60sec clip seems ok to me), or alternate the content. [idea from the top of my head: I'ld probably like listening to 5min long ad-"episodes" featuring case-studies of different customers - as long it's authentic and not overly scripted... how about that?]
the key to powerful advertisment is generating positive associations with the advertising entity. if the ad-”experience” is negative, repetion will only generate negative associations.
sidenote: some commenters are really way over the top, far from being constructive.
last week, during my vacation in new york city, I was walking uptown 7th avenue, when I noticed a huge landrover-billboard. having been working for austrias major outdoor-advertisment-company for a few years, I still have an eye for exceptional billboards like this, which had 3dimensional structure and the cars headlights were actually working (you can only guess that on this low-res cellphone-picture).
ok, the billboard alone wouldn’t have left me impressed ;), but after walking along, my cellphone suddenly started to rumble, indicating an incoming bluetooth-message, containing this advertorial video-clip from landrover:
besides the underlying idea of navigating a plane by a GPS-equipped-car in it’s trunk being utterly stupid funny, this is really a great example of mixing classical marketing-instruments like the billboard with modern, mobile marketing. I’m not about to buy a car in the near future, and I most probably wouldn’t by an SUV anyway. but this campaign left me with the impression of landrover being a company aware of the technological possibilities of this century. check the new york-campaign at http://www.landroverusa.com/nyc, where you can also see the hi-res video.
Maybe you could explain me sometime
