FreeBirthdayTreats

FreeBirthdayTreats.com is a great example of a niche website that has maximal utility with minimal complication. I call sites like these Nichepedias — they have a very useful database for a very specific action or set of knowledge. The question is, how long do such sites exist before they are gobbled up by the larger compendiums of niche information? What meta-database of niche database sites is currently in greatest use? The birthday treat niche is not important enough for Mahalo and not a google-friendly search; you have to think up a question before you can search for it.

Much is made of social media and its collaborative and informational benefits. I love talking about the wisdom of the crowds and any form of collective intelligence online. But there are times where the objective is too niche for the crowd to care much about it, like where to go for a free birthday ice cream. Then again, what would this website look like if it were turbocharged by the community-at-large? Perhaps we just mash it up with Yelp and Google Maps and call it day?Thanks to Francisco Dao for turning me on to this website; it has renewed my interest in niche sites that compile useful or interesting information we didn’t know we needed and then love to share.

Attention marketing people: Are you starting to wonder what you’ll offer people on their birthday?

Schwaggin’ Wagon is back! We are donating completely to Operation Gratitude this time and we will be at both  Twiistup 4 and Mashable’s Summer Mash LA to collect unwanted schwag. It all gets sent to the troops overseas, rather than the back of your closet or a landfill.

We are dedicated to highlighting Green and Eco-Conscious products and services for the LA area and around the U.S., in addition to our usual goal of raising awareness of Schwag-wastefulness. Here’s an excerpt from my post on The Schwaggin’ Wagon blog (consider this a cross-posting of sorts):

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Did you ever think you’d hear us say we are The Schwaggin’ SUV? For this Tech-Event-Week in Los Angeles, we are proud to team up with Eco-Limo to create the Schwaggin’ Eco-Wagon! We will be ridin’ around Los Angeles in a Bio-Diesel Ford Excursion SUV, compliments of our sponsor, Eco-Limo.

Why are we so pleased at this sponsorship/partnership? It’s not because they were chosen to service the Academy Awards for the last four years. It’s that Eco-Limo is one of only 6 companies in California featured on Google’s Google Green site, and last year they received the Grand Prize in Sustainability by the City of Santa Monica, recognized as well by the California State Senate and Assembly! In short, they rock the eco-world. They are exactly what we were looking for in terms of transportation.

Here’s their story:

ECOLIMO was the first luxury chauffeured, ground transportation company in the world committed to providing the cleanest, most fuel-efficient car service available.
ECOLIMO provides reliable, traditional executive transportation services to corporate and individual clients in low emissions, environmentally friendly vehicles utilizing hybrids, bio-diesel fuel, and natural gas. ECOLIMO is a company that prides itself on combining environmental responsibility and efficiency with reliability and professional service.
It began with a simple idea: to change the image of the luxury livery business, offering limousine service with a positive environmental impact.
Ms. Y. Fray, a 20 year veteran of the industry and business owner, opened operations in Los Angeles in 2004 with one black hybrid electric/gas Toyota Prius and has since expanded the fleet to 15 vehicles in Los Angeles. We are a certified woman owned & operated business, as well as being Terra Pass certified and a member of the Green Air Congress.
We are looking to be fully operational in Las Vegas , New York & Washington DC by 2010.

Wow. You may even see some Eco-Limo staff at Summer Mash Los Angeles! Be sure to say hello.

Thank you to my panelists, attendees, and Ustream participants for a successful and informative panel!

[Here's the eMarketer chart we discussed showing advertising spending for online video and projections until 2011. I asked my panelists about these projections, and if they thought they'd remain accurate. Considering that advertisers still spend around $65 Billion a year for television ads, $4 Billion in 2011 is a comparatively small piece of the pie, however they thought this was a low estimate. Much of the sentiment from the panel puts these numbers in context--much needed after you've read Paul La Monica's pithy blog post on these numbers. We discussed what was possible for online video despite the comparatively low spending thus far.]

I’m moderating I’ve moderated a panel on the future of online video content, from the perspective of those who are actually creating online content in a professional manner. I created this panel for the premier of a television show I co-created for Tru TV. Rather than go on about my experiences with network television, I thought it more appropriate to look to the future, especially because my primary profession is that of emerging media specialist, not a creator-producer in the entertainment industry.

Thank you to Robert Richman! Rob summed this up quite well in his guest post on Andrew Warner’s Mixergy.com blog. Here are Rob’s conclusions:

1. Content will take the lead
We’ve seen it before. When the technology becomes a commodity, it’s the aggregators and the content that win. But don’t get trapped in that word. Stretch your imagination for what that term (content) really means. It’s just what we use to fill a medium. What might that mean? What would the first crowdsourced movie look like? 

2. Brands will be the new VC’s.
As the technologies become more ubiquitous and free we’ll see another shakeout (and more outfits like Ycombinator). As traditional media becomes more and more irrelevant, brands will seek new channels to reach new customers, while strengthening brand loyalty with the existing ones. So if you have something that can get attention, think about what brand is in alignment with those interests and values. Prove you have something that people will use or watch, and you may just have an investor. 

3. People don’t like to pay money, but advertisers will.
Yes, it’s shockingly that simple. Go where the money is. People do not want to pay for content, and unless Paypal can streamline a one-click micropayment, we’re not going to see much change. So stop mining the miners and look at the big skyscrapers up-town. Nielsen is having a harder and harder time tracking ratings. You’ve got the razor’s edge. They want to bleed.

+++

My Panelists Included:

• Amanda Congdon, the host and executive producer of Sometimesdaily. http://sometimesdaily.com/ and blogger at http://amandacongdon.com
• Gilad Lotan - Technologist / Digital Media, Endemol USA -http://endemolusa.tv
• Ken LaZebnik from http://www.Strike.tv
• Hayden Black of Goodnight Burbank: http://goodnightburbank.com and http://www.abigailsxratedteendiary.com
• Michael Pilla of http://www.indieflix.com
• Tim Street of http://www.frenchmaidtv.com/
• Doug and Rosanne Welch, http://welchwrite.com  especially with regard to podcasting
• Espree Devora, owner of http://www.Zexsports.com
• Martine Beerman, writer and producer of “Guide to Getting a Life” athttp://www.thestream.tv

Several audience members and Ustream participants asked insightful questions. Thank you to BLANKSPACES for the amazing event space, thank you to Asahi for their sponsorship, thank you to TechZulu for recording the event and livestreaming it for all of us to enjoy.

Recently I started working at Blankspaces. This is a coworking office environment designed for freelancers and independent professionals who work solo, but who want to do so with others in an office environment. This can be a temporary, or somewhat more permanent solution to the isolation of working from one’s home. It’s a fantastic idea that embodies the best aspects of collaborative work and the potential for cross-pollination of ideas.  The proximity encourages conversations that might only arise seldomly at a cafe or cocktail party, thereby increasing chances of serendipity in one’s business and life.

Blankspaces is the paradigmatic example of the intersection between physical and online space–they have an online community that compliments and augments the offline community. Some of my graduate school work looked at examples of synchronous and asynchronous online/offline collaboration; I’ve been looking for more examples ever since.

Looks like I’ve found an important place, in that this office space provides the perfect research laboratory for the study of how offline and online interaction mutually affect one another, and how online tools in an intimate environment can facilitate friendships and business in physical space. It also uncovers what humans in this culture prefer to do online versus offline, when given the option to choose.

Kudos to Jerome Chang for creating a well-designed office space and in many respects a community center. Unlike Starbucks, Blankspaces has the potential to become a true “third place” that merits a mention to the sociologist Ray Oldenburg, who first discussed the necessity of such a place for the social vitality of a given community.

It is not often that I tell people they “must read” something. Bill McKibben eloquently tells us in this article why it is necessary for us to act now to make sure our governments collaborate on climate change agreements in the next 3 years.

I will say this at the outset– I believe him. I believe the scientist Rajendra Pachauri who McKibben quotes as giving humanity a hard deadline of 2012 — if we do not begin actions to lower emissions before that date, we will set off irrecoverable chain reactions in the environment.

The goal is to roll back our CO2 emissions from 385 to 350ppm (parts per million).

A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.

If ever there were a time for me to proclaim “this is the paradigmatic example of why social and collaborative media are crucial,” now would be it. If you’ve ever asked, “what’s the point of Web 2.0?”, here is the moment to jump on and get involved. Those of us who are using social and collaborative media on the web more than others owe it to humanity to pass this along in whatever form we think will make the most difference. If you blog, please consider writing about 350.org. If you use a social network, consider posting the URL; if you use Flickr then consider joining the Flickr group. McKibben is not an expert on Internet collaboration and new media, but he certainly gets its potential for results:

We do have one thing going for us: This new tool, the Web which, at least, allows you to imagine something like a grassroots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that “350″ stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.

And with that, I will reproduce the article in its entirety after the jump. It’s that important.

The World at 350
A Last Chance for Civilization
By Bill McKibben

Even for Americans, constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start — even for us, the world looks a little Terminal right now.

It’s not just the economy. We’ve gone through swoons before. It’s that gas at $4 a gallon means we’re running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It’s that when we try to turn corn into gas, it sends the price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and starts food riots on three continents. It’s that everything is so inextricably tied together. It’s that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the “limits to growth” suddenly seem… how best to put it, right.

All of a sudden it isn’t morning in America, it’s dusk on planet Earth.

There’s a number — a new number — that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA’s Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued — and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper — “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.” Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points — massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them — that we’ll pass if we don’t get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer’s insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.

So it’s a tough diagnosis. It’s like the doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high and, if you don’t bring it down right away, you’re going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear off the cheese, and, if you’re lucky, you get back into the safety zone before the coronary. It’s like watching the tachometer edge into the red zone and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas before you hear that clunk up front.

In this case, though, it’s worse than that because we’re not taking the pill and we are stomping on the gas — hard. Instead of slowing down, we’re pouring on the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per million last year — two decades ago, it was going up barely half that fast.

And suddenly, the news arrives that the amount of methane, another potent greenhouse gas, accumulating in the atmosphere, has unexpectedly begun to soar as well. Apparently, we’ve managed to warm the far north enough to start melting huge patches of permafrost and massive quantities of methane trapped beneath it have begun to bubble forth.

And don’t forget: China is building more power plants; India is pioneering the $2,500 car, and Americans are converting to TVs the size of windshields which suck juice ever faster.

Here’s the thing. Hansen didn’t just say that, if we didn’t act, there was trouble coming; or, if we didn’t yet know what was best for us, we’d certainly be better off below 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. His phrase was: “…if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed.” A planet with billions of people living near those oh-so-floodable coastlines. A planet with ever more vulnerable forests. (A beetle, encouraged by warmer temperatures, has already managed to kill 10 times more trees than in any previous infestation across the northern reaches of Canada this year. This means far more carbon heading for the atmosphere and apparently dooms Canada’s efforts to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, already in doubt because of its decision to start producing oil for the U.S. from Alberta’s tar sands.)

We’re the ones who kicked the warming off; now, the planet is starting to take over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and suddenly the nice white shield that reflected 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of the sun’s heat. Such feedbacks are beyond history, though not in the sense that Francis Fukuyama had in mind.

And we have, at best, a few years to short-circuit them — to reverse course. Here’s the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year (and, by the way, got his job when the Bush administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his predecessor): “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

In the next two or three years, the nations of the world are supposed to be negotiating a successor treaty to the Kyoto Accord. When December 2009 rolls around, heads of state are supposed to converge on Copenhagen to sign a treaty — a treaty that would go into effect at the last plausible moment to heed the most basic and crucial of limits on atmospheric CO2.

If we did everything right, says Hansen, we could see carbon emissions start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out we might even be on track back to 350. We might stop just short of some of those tipping points, like the Road Runner screeching to a halt at the very edge of the cliff.

More likely, though, we’re the Coyote — because “doing everything right” means that political systems around the world would have to take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they’re supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way we made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.

It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely with the poorest ones, so that they can develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.

That’s possible — we launched a Marshall Plan once, and we could do it again, this time in relation to carbon. But in a month when the President has, once more, urged us to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that seems unlikely. In a month when the alluring phrase “gas tax holiday” has danced into our vocabulary, it’s hard to see (though it was encouraging to see that Clinton’s gambit didn’t sway many voters). And if it’s hard to imagine sacrifice here, imagine China, where people produce a quarter as much carbon apiece as we do.

Still, as long as it’s not impossible, we’ve got a duty to try. In fact, it’s about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.

A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.

After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can’t do this one light bulb at a time. And if this 350.org campaign is a Hail Mary pass, well, sometimes those passes get caught.

We do have one thing going for us: This new tool, the Web which, at least, allows you to imagine something like a grassroots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that “350″ stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.

Hansen’s words were well-chosen: “a planet similar to that on which civilization developed.” People will doubtless survive on a non-350 planet, but those who do will be so preoccupied, coping with the endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet that civilization may not.

Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security provided by a workable relationship with the natural world. That margin won’t exist, at least not for long, this side of 350. That’s the limit we face.

Bill McKibben is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org. His most recent book is The Bill McKibben Reader.

Yet there are times when I miss working with others on a team, toward a shared long-term goal. Of all the possible organizations, where does someone with expertise in social and collaborative media choose to lend a hand? In what kinds of business organizations can such a professional make the greatest difference and have the greatest impact on the bottom line?

Is it in:

1) Digital advisory groups within forward-thinking PR and interactive marketing firms?

2) Online Community Management within media and technology organizations?

3) Training and Development divisions within large, established organizations whose employees desperately need an understanding of how social and collaborative technologies are altering their job descriptions? This could include collaboration management, internally.

4) Online outreach–formerly PR or Marketing depts– within small to mid-sized organizations?

5) Newly-created Internet strategy positions within those firms who stand to gain the most from the Web 2.0 revolution?

There are quite a few roles that I can take on to affect positive change in the business world–choosing will depend on the specifics of the opportunity. Is your company embracing change and creating such roles or burying its proverbial head-in-sand and hoping social media will go away?

This thread is begging to be updated as things progress…

When we first created this show, we had visions of promoting it by tapping into the natural fanbase of hackers, geeks, and enthusiasts found all over the Internet. The uber-talented cast–Chris Nickerson, Luke McOmie (Pyr0), and Ryan Jones–have friends far and wide both within the hacker community and beyond. That alone, with almost no effort, was enough to gain fan interest and much press when the show premiered last year. Within a few days we had a wikipedia entry, we were rising up on Digg, and other kinds of social and collaborative media were used to embrace the show, primarily because it struck a nerve with actual security professionals. They are so used to inauthentic portrayals of hacking, that when they find something real, they love it.

Ori Neidich (one of my partners) and I had talked about what we could do for TruTV (then CourtTV) in terms of promotion on the net. We knew that we could get a huge following for the show that would translate into big ratings for Turner Broadcasting, on a very small budget. All we needed was cooperation from them. After all, it’s a Faustian bargin when you sell a show–they own the rights!

TruTv/CourtTV had little interest in promoting the show at all, let alone allowing an Internet campaign to be associated officially with them. This, for a show that they told us was the highest-scoring of all of their test-piloted shows in the history of the network. What gives?

This may be indicative of television networks’ lack of understanding in general as to what online media can do for the marketing of a show, for very little investment. Grassroots campaigns are nothing new to Hollywood, but for this level of budgeting, they may not have realized just how much they could have gotten for free. Ori and I would not have charged extra for our time. Certainly Chris, Luke, and Ryan did an amazing job promoting the show on their own with no extra bucks–my hat goes off to them. Even when Chris sent the network a dossier on all that had been accomplished for free, the network barely responded and probably did not give it more than 2 minutes of thought. Really, Turner Broadcasting? Can you afford to turn away from social media and internet marketing in general? You’re ok with a little website that does next-to-nothing? Is that how you want to promote your tv shows, especially the ones that appeal to Internet-types?

Before you read any further, you might as well find out what The Schwaggin’ Wagon is all about.

It is gratifying to have an idea come to fruition in just a few short days. Were it not for Marjorie Kase of Blogger Reps, David Preciado of Social Rocket, Andy Sternberg of Netzoo, Kyra Reed Author of Blog 101 Book, and Daniel Hartman Esq. and others, there is no way the event that is this wagon would be in existence.

At bottom, this is about preventing quality t-shirts and hats from sitting in conference attendees’ dressers, never to be worn, when they could be warn by those who would use them. Also: Kids. Love. Schwag. They do. Many of those trinkets, hats and other items will go to Innerkids.org. In addition, many of the t-shirts and adult-appropriate items will go to Operation Gratitude, an organization that packs care packages and sends them to U.S. troops overseas.

This journey is also about fun. There will ambiance in this 15-person van. Do you have old Schwag? Yes. Are you an exhibitor who needs to unload last year’s Schwag to make room for this year’s Schwaggoriffic goodness? Please contact us.

This journey could, perhaps, be an experiment in social media/public events/new PR as well…but don’t tell anyone. I’ve been known to conduct such experiments, but I cannot confirm or deny a thing.

If you are around Moscone Center in San Francisco this coming week, for the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Conference then please come by the Schwaggin Wagon to say hello.

SEO should stand for Simply Effective Outstanding content. So it should really be: SEOCON

Let’s look at each of these top SEO techniques by David Leonhardt (one of the SEO gurus) and see which ones actually require rolling up of sleeves and creating great content:

1. Be bold. Use the <b> </b> tags around some of your keywords on each page. Do NOT use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is plenty.

Okay, that’s a trick. Fine. Will do.

2. Deep linking. Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site.

This requires creation of great content.

3. Become a foreigner. Canada and the UK have many directories for websites of companies based in those countries. Can you get a business address in one of those countries?

Does anyone really go to this kind of trouble for SEO? Perhaps. But it’s still not worth your time unless you can easily do it.

4. Newsletters. Offer articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines. The links stay live often for many years in their archives.

This requires great content. And, btw, what would we consider to be in the category of “ezine”?

5. First come, first served. If you must have image links in your navigation bar, include also text links. However, make sure the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won’t follow additional links to the same page.

Okay, neat trick. Thanks David.

6. Multiple domains. If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might warrant two. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way. Why not a site dedicated to gumbo pudding pops?

This is a great suggestion. And guess what? It requires great content.

7.  Article exchanges. You’ve heard of link exchanges, useless as they generally are. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish someone else’s article on the history of pudding pops with a link back to their site. They publish your article on the top ten pudding pop flavors in Viet Nam, with a link back to your site. You both have content. You both get high quality links. (More on high quality links in other tips.)

I agreee - to an extent. And guess what? This requires the creation of great content.

8. Titles for links. Links can get titles, too. Not only does this help visually impaired surfers know where you are sending them, but some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page.

Okay David. Neat trick.

9. Not anchor text. Don’t overdo the anchor text. You don’t want all your inbound links looking the same, because that looks like automation - something Google frowns upon. Use your URL sometimes, your company name other times, “Gumbo Pudding Pop” occasionally, “Get gumbo pudding pops” as well, “Gumbo-flavored pudding pops” some other times, etc.

Yes, but this is contingent on…you guessed it… great content in the first place.

10. Site map. A big site needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks. A small site needs a site map, too. It’s called the navigation bar.

Fine. Agreed. Though this will not help you if it points to bad content.

How about we discuss methods to prod yourself–and make your life easier–toward the pursuit of creating compelling content for your site? (for another post) Yes, traditional SEO has its place. But that place is not as expansive as it once was, given the many changes in the search environment, not to mention the precipitous rise of social media.