Here is an example:

The sponsor's name is clickable and points to the sponsor's landing page.

All that our sponsors have to do is provide us with up to three "trigger phrases" that define their business. A phrase can be a single word or two linked words. For example:

• Hosting (single word)
• Dedicated server (two linked words)
• Web hosting (two linked words)

Think of these as search terms. It is search advertising within ReadWriteWeb. More importantly, it is in context, in posts that are relevant.

The idea is (a) to offer value to our readers by providing advertising links in the context of what they are reading and therefore more likely to find of interest, and (b) to offer a higher level of engagement to our advertisers, resulting in both more branding impressions and click-throughs.

Background on the Technology

We experimented with this manually to test whether the theory made sense and whether both readers and advertisers got some value from it. As you can imagine, doing this manually is difficult at any level of scale. So, we hunted for a technology partner who could build what we envisaged. This was not a simple technical challenge. What is easy for a human to do (read an article and quickly determine which phrases are most relevant) is quite hard for a search engine to do.

We needed an engine that would return ranked/scored results. We decided to limit the number of ads to three per post. Any more would detract from the reader's experience. We imagined that such an engine could come up with more than three matches for a sponsored trigger phrase in a single post, so we needed the engine to return the three most relevant sponsored trigger phrases.

That raised the bar considerably.

Our Partner: Hakia

We were delighted to find a partner that could jump this high bar. Even better, the partner is also a ReadWriteWeb sponsor (so it will have its own sponsored trigger phrases matched by the engine). Our partner is Hakia.

For those who don't know Hakia, check out its semantic search engine. It was a meeting of minds from the start. When we outlined our vision of what we wanted, it was clear that Hakia was headed in the same direction. Becoming partners to make it happen was a natural decision. Increasingly, we see our ability to partner effectively as being a core competency. We build our business with partners and couldn't imagine it any other way. Hakia clearly shares this partnering philosophy and competence.

Together with Hakia, we have big plans for what to do with this in future. We see it as something of a native revenue model for blogging. As always, we are keen to hear your feedback in the comments.

Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision-makers. Email our COO Bernard Lunn for all the details.

ReadWriteWeb is ranked the 10th most popular blog in the world, according to Technorati. Our site is read by tech and media professionals, early adopters, developers, designers, analysts, CIO's, VC's, media execs, leading thinkers.

Compete Search Analytics is a way to build and optimize search marketing campaigns.

SynthaSite enables you to make your own website in minutes, using Drag & Drop. It's free and no download is required.

Userplane is a provider of communication software for online communities. As well as instant messaging, Webmessenger 2 has a Presence system that allows sites to display and leverage online user presence anywhere.

Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.

Thumbplay is the fastest-growing and largest mobile content provider in the U.S., offering ringtones, videos, games and graphics to mobile phone users across all major U.S. carriers.

O'Reilly Media's Graphing Social Patterns is a conference for developers and marketers building and distributing apps for MySpace, Facebook, OpenSocial and other social networking platforms. It is on June 9-11, 2008 in the Washington, DC area.

Wild Apricot offers Membership Database Management Software for non-profits and associations.

Central Desktop offers a set of Wiki Tools for business teams (not the IT department). There's no download, it's delivered on-demand. There is a 30 day free trial.

Quintura is a visual-based search engine. Currently it is offering to display your brand (via graphical ad) in the search cloud on Quintura.com for free - click here for details.

MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW and SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

If you're a Web 2.0 company wanting to get some high quality exposure on a top weblog (and a privileged place in the Father of Web 2.0's RSS feed), then send me an email and let's talk!

In other news, tomorrow morning I'll be launching a new feature on Read/Write Web which I think you'll enjoy. I'm also running on a stricter publishing timetable now. I'm aiming to publish all my Web 2.0 news and views posts to coincide with breakfast time in the United States (where most of readers come from, I think). This generally means publishing at 10-11pm New Zealand time so as to catch the early bird on that same day in the States - in a sense I'm a day ahead of most of you ;-)

One last thing for now. I'm still looking for sponsors for the rest of Read/Write Web (including the new feature I'm about to launch). So feel free to email me if you'd like to know more.

Best Use of RSS Feeds by a News Collective

And the winner is: Associated Press! ...um, or Reuters. Because they both have RSS feeds. Hmm, seems the Oscars theme for this post has already broken down. Anyway, AP joined the RSS revolution this week and so now the two brandname news collectives have them. Susan Mernit broke the news and has the main details. Jeff Jarvis wonders how the RSS brand-building moves by AP and Reuters will affect their customers. Moonwatcher has an interesting take on that too: "Media brands are finding their content atomized, their brands diluted, and their content wholesalers going retail."

PaidContent.org has some quotes from an AP honcho, who says "it's really a strategy to drive traffic to member news sites as well as to AP news."

Ultimately, I think it's a strategy to raise the profile and impact of AP's brand. I'm following all this closely, because I'm intensely curious to see how Tom Curley's (President and CEO of AP) "content will be more important than its container" theories will be put into practice.

Best Enterprise RSS Development (of the past week)

Again the Oscars analogy breaks down, because there is more going on in the Enterprise space than the two companies I'm about to mention. But humour me... Firstly, Newsgator is an RSS Aggregator that I've not written enough about (compared to Bloglines especially). But they're doing some very interesting things in the Enterprise space. Greg Reinacker recently announced the NewsGator platform roadmap. He said: "Our general plan here is to expose nearly everything in NewsGator Online via API, and allow folks to build applications that leverage our platform in unique ways." Also Charlie Wood (aka Moonwatcher, one of my current fave blogs) has joined Newsgator as its VP, Enterprise Solutions. Charlie was hired due to his blog, something I'm still waiting (im)patiently to happen to me! :-)

Another company doing good things in the Enterprise is Nooked. They specifically target corporate comms people - their main bullet point is to "Use RSS to deliver real-time marketing information directly to journalist and clients". Nooked recently launched a directory of corporate RSS feeds, a manually-edited Yahoo-style directory. NB: Fergus Burns, the Nooked CEO, did email me with that news. But I've had my eye on Nooked for a while now, so I'm not mentioning them just because he emailed me. Although he did say he's a fan of my blog, so that always helps ;-)

Best Professional Blogger

This was a high-profile meme this week, thanks mainly to Jason Kottke announcing that he will be running kottke.org as a full-time job from now on. He's calling it a "micropatron" business model, because he's asking his many readers to chip in with micropayments. He's eschewing advertising entirely, which is a brave move but one which probably only he and a few others could pull off. Already he's gotten a lot of attention and loads of people have blogged that they've given him money. So it seems to be working.

Also a blogger from across the ditch from me, Darren Rowse from Australia, caused a lot of people to get green with envy when he revealed he's earning six figues (US money!) via his blogging activities. The small print? He has 17 blogs and posts around 25 posts per day 7 days per week. Also it's worth noting how he came up with the six figure figure: "the figure is calculated on a number of income sources including private advertising deals, affiliate programs, impression based ad programs, Adsense, BlogAds, text ads and blog consulting revenues etc."

So it includes "consulting". It also seems to be the result of a lot of daily sweat for Darren to make that kind of money - i.e. grind, work. It's not from blogging about The Dukes of Hazard, that's for sure.

Best Media Coverage Of A Podcasting Service

Hands down this award goes to Evan Williams' (of Blogger fame) Odeo, which got enviable coverage from The NY Times. It upset Dave Winer in particular, who thinks he's not being given enough credit for helping to invent podcasting. I think he's got a point, but I would be remiss if I didn't in turn point out Lucas Gonze's efforts in another 'credit where credit is due' campaign re podcasting.

btw, speaking of giving credit... it's great to see Dave Winer has resurrected the Two-Way Web blog. That sub-blog of Dave's was a key influence early in my blog career - ref my very first R/WW post.

Best New Web App Approach That Isn't Really New

Ajax is the trendy method of developing Web 2.0 apps right now. Ajax means "Asynchronous JavaScript + XML" and according to the write-up "it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web." I got a lot out of this article, however I was brought back down to earth with a thud when I emailed the article around to the programmers in my team at work. I was informed that those techniques (especially the xmlHttpRequest object) have been around for a while now and, although they're now supported by most browsers, they can be expensive for an organisation to deploy. Point humbly taken. I'll give the last word though to Jon Udell, who says: "The modern browser is an XML-aware client. Savvy Web developers have known about these features for a while, but now Google has legitimized them and pushed them squarely into the mainstream."

AutoLinks and Annotation

Ever since Google made it big, many people have been looking for a chance to pin the 'evil' label on them - especially as one of their company philosophies is to 'do no evil'. This week some folks pounced on Google for adding an AutoLink feature to its Google Toolbar. The issue? It has similarities to a controversial old Microsoft feature called SmartTags. According to Google, AutoLink is this:

What's getting folks riled up is that AutoLinks enables Google to create links to their own content, using your webpage as the context. According to CNet News:

There's a beauty of a conspiracy theory attached to this too. Slashdot explains:

The most interesting thing about this for me is the annotation angle. Annotation has long been a desired feature for web browsers - e.g. the W3C's browser/editor Amaya has extensive annotation features. Anil Dash is one person keen on annotation in this manner - he suggested on his blog (also quoted by CNet) that "once your HTML page gets to my machine, it's mine to rip, mix and burn.".

Is That IE7 In Your Pocket, Or Are You Just Pleased To See Me?

Speaking of browsers... the much anticipated Internet Explorer 7 was announced by Microsoft this week. Only trouble is, there's little evidence of innovation. The upgrade seems to be mostly about improved security. Also the beta IE7 won't be available until "this summer" (US summer that is). So, like, what's to get excited about? Or as I mentioned in Scoble's comments section: "What, no read/write browser? No RSS aggregation? Where's the innovation, c'mon..."

To be fair, maybe there will be some innovation in the backend - as Jeremy Wright suggests. But I'd like to see some real ground broken, for a change...

NY Times Buys About.com - Gains Web 2.0 Street Cred

The New York Times announced they will buy About.com for $410 million. There was a great meme going round the week leading up this: About.com represents blogging 1.0, whereas the likes of weblogsinc and Gawker are blogging 2.0. My take on that theory is here. Nevertheless lots of people think the NY Times deal was a good one for the venerable newspaper. My picks for in-depth analysis: Susan Mernit, paidcontent.org (plus audio interview), VC Fred Wilson, John Battelle (great headline too! "About The New York Times: Deep Into Web 2.0 Now"), Jay Rosen, NY Times article.

Key Quotes:

Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of New York Times Digital: "The model we've acquired is a web 2.0 model; it's not a centralized model, it's a decentralized model where the content is created by passionate individuals who have a competency and a desire to reach the public and that scales into many, many categories and it scales potentially geographically."
(emphasis mine)

Fred Wilson nails it: "If the content that is created on the edges starts to show up in the middle and the content that is created in the middle starts to show up on the edges, that will be a big deal."

John Battelle: "I think microcontent is key to winning in the Web 2.0 publishing world." [and] "As Martin told me when I pinged him after the deal: 'We're deep into Web 2.0 now.'"

Jay Rosen: "The second life of content, made possible by search, is of critical importance to journalists whose work is on the Web. (That's almost all journalists.)"

Big Media Blogging Coverage - Chicken Bloggers Outed

Ahhh, a warm fuzzies Associated Press article about SixApart: "The couple's odd chemistry cooked up Six Apart Ltd., a startup that has helped popularize the "blogging" craze, with millions of people worldwide maintaining online personal journals that dissect everything from politics to poultry." 

Poultry??

In other news Weblogs Inc was named as one of BusinessWeek's Five Net Names to Watch in '05, which founder Jason Calacanis was obviously chuffed about.

Commenting on the above two stories, Slashdot notes: "Business Press Pays Attention To Blog Industry".

Techy Web 2.0 Highlights

Rather than a single techy post, it was two bits of Web 2.0 hackery that caught my attention this week. Firstly, Erik Benson managed to convert his entire weblog into a Bloglines API-powered site:

He explains how he did it in a later post (nb: I noted in the comments that it'd be cool to make this available to us non-programmers via an easy-to-use web service).

Speaking of Bloglines (which I nearly always do in these weekly wrap-ups), Joshua Tyler has created a neat app called Chameleon, built using the Bloglines Web Services. It's basically an alternative interface to Bloglines and has some nifty personalization features, such as keeping track of "which feeds you read, how often, and when". I've had a play round with it and it's a great example of value-add using a publicly available API.

Summary

That's it for another week. As always, I value your feedback. Please leave a comment or send me an email at readwriteweb AT gmail DOT com.

First allow me to give a shout-out to my sponsor, Marqui. Their CMS software now powers the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission website.

Bloglines Sale (my last comment on it, I promise)

The Bloglines sale to Ask Jeeves continued to generate chatter in the blogosphere, including from yours truly. To sum up: Bloglines got a big payout and the public discovered that Ask Jeeves still exists, which no doubt pleased Ask Jeeves. Bonus points go to Eric Lunt from Feedburner, who predicted the acquisition way back in September 2004!

Salon Sucks

In other news, the goal-setting app 43 Things got a nice positive write-up from Salon... and 24 hours later got kneecapped by a particularly nasty piece of gutter journalism from the same publication! Shame on you Salon. Luckily for us bloggers, we can read the real story from The Robot Co-op themselves and reputable people like Jason Kottke.

Blog Books

First I noticed Blogbinders, a company that seemed to sprout out of the LiveJournal community (my write-up of them). Then John Battelle started promoting a company called Qoop, which has a slick website and a product line with "Q" stuck on the front of each product name: Q-Print, Q-Publish, Q-Search... you get the picture, very Q-Cute. John Battelle got a free book of his blog by them (he has "a buddy who is involved in Qoop"), so looks like they're getting all the buzz. Nothing wrong with that, it's great marketing by Qoop. But Blogbinders seems like a cool little company, so worthy of some attention too. Don't forget Lulu.com, they're another print-on-demand company doing good things.

Podcasting Metrics and Specialist RSS Aggregators

Feedburner posted some cool stats about podcasting. They speculated that the market for specialized RSS clients looks promising: "There's a very interesting statistic that highlights how different the RSS world will be from the web 1.0 world. Specialized podcasting clients have quickly entered the ranks of the top RSS clients..."

On this theme, bit of news this week about branded RSS Aggregators - e.g. CNET's Newsburst and Guardian newspaper.

Steve Rubel suggested that "the RSS revolution will force online news sites to evolve into aggregators to retain their eyeball base" and Dave Winer was also enthusiastic: "Bottom-line: Aggregator software and the news business, looking forward, are very tightly bound."

Techy Web 2.0 Post of the Week

I thought I'd add another feature to my weekly Web 2.0 wrap-ups. Every week I read something new about the technical side of Web 2.0 which inspires me. This week's tech article to check out is from lixo.org, a new blog. He wrote an interesting post entitled Web Services APIs. A choice quote:

Summary

Well that's it for another week. No witty headers this week, I'm sorry. I'll bring them back next week. btw if you have any suggestions for Weekly Wrap-up, do leave a comment or drop me a line at my Gmail address (readwriteweb AT Gmail DOT com).

Anyway, Rafat says:

Apparently Reuter's branding "mumbo-jumbo" is coming from Niall FitzGerald, the chairman of Reuters. Rafat quotes him as saying: "The first thing we are currently doing is to define what the brand is because it hasn't been the subject of what I would call a disciplined brand exercise. What exactly does Reuters represent and who are the people to whom it has meaning?" he says. 

An example of what's got Rafat's dander up is on this Reuters page, which has two textual-like banners proclaiming:

1. "You are now on Reuters.com: the source of professional-grade information. Investing. Business. News."

and 

2. "Reuters.com - No Spin. No Agenda. Just the Facts. As they happen."

It occured to me that Reuters is trying to brand its data, a la Tom Curley's speech last year. Curley is from Associated Press, a competitor of Reuters. It's a new Web 2.0 world of free-flowing syndication and "atoms" (to paraphrase Curley) and both companies are trying to keep their brand to the fore in this world of hyper-syndication. Now granted, Reuters branding attempts as outlined above are rather clumsy. They're taking what Curley said - e.g. "The Associated Press, in this context, might end up "branding" facts such as sports polls or rankings, not just stories and photos" - a bit too literally. Reuters, to keep Rafat's blood pressure in check, please try and be a bit more subtle in your branding :-)

Jason does bring up one very compelling point in the chickens post: what is the line between writing and advertising? He believes Marqui bloggers cross that line and that is the crux of his argument. While I disagree with his conclusions, I agree that it's something we need to consider very closely.

On this point, one of my fellow Marqui bloggers Molly Holzschlag, calls her Marqui-sponsored posts "Clearly marked advertorials". I have to admit that I have never viewed my sponsorship arrangement with Marqui as one where I'm supposed to write advertorials. It's my understanding that we just need to link to Marqui once a week, but we can write anything we like about them. If we had to write advertorials, then I couldn't live by that model. One of Molly's readers summed up quite nicely my position:

On this point, Lucas Gonze commented on my link last week to Marqui:

The best part was that Lucas managed to slip in a "This is a sponsored post" at the end of that - heh. But seriously, I agree with Lucas. The future of Marqui-like blogging sponsorships is not in advertorials, but rather in patronage deals. When I googled to get some back-up on this, I came across a Ben Hammersley article for The Guardian back in 2003:

Ben of course has practised what he preached, having since acquired a sponsorship deal with a cigar company. And that's how I now think of my arrangement with Marqui. They're my patron - supporting my niche writing on Web Technology. And it works both ways, because the main benefit Marqui has gotten out of this (apart from all the free publicity from people arguing about the ethics of it all) is a big injection of PageRank. Any advertorials that people have written for them are of less value to Marqui, I believe, than the Google rank and sheer buzz they've gotten from this program.

Disclosure: this post is sponsored by Marqui... but then you knew that already ;-)

Tagalicious, baby, yeah!

Flickr and del.icio.us made tagging cool, now every social software app is doing it. Technorati, The Robot Co-op and Metafilter were among the companies braggin' about taggin' this week. There was also a fair amount of hand-wringing on the pros and cons of tagging - Many-to-Many covered a lot of it and Joshua Porter summarized why tagging is a good thing.

I shall call him… Mini-me

Bit of talk in the blog world this week about Big Internet companies buying little ones. The Internet Stock Blog asked: will Yahoo acquire Six Apart?

In another neck of the blogosphere, Andrew Chen of Monkey Methods (nb: a different Andrew Chen from the one in my blogroll) suggested that Feedster and Technorati "will die". Death in this context meaning that they end up as "a discount acquisition by one of the portals". Andrew gave 5 reasons and the gist of 1-4 was that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are too big and strong for Feedster and Technorati. OK, he may have a point there. The 5th reason is interesting:

I think Andrew is wrong on that score and Feedster CEO Scott Rafer hinted in the comments why:

With my Design for Data theory (see also my most recent post on it), I'm exploring a new type of design paradigm for Web 2.0. Feedster and Technorati are among the companies building this new paradigm. Here's a hint Andrew - it's not about "stickiness and pageviews" anymore.

Amazon's Groovy Developers Conference

Huge props to the Amazon Web Services Blog for real-time blogging of Amazon DevCon. I particularly enjoyed the notes of Rael Dornfest's talk, entitled Remix: beyond rip, mix, burn. It inspired me to remix some of the notes into my own post entitled Remixing and Speculation on The Future of RSS, with the theme of Information Remixing. 

The 'future of RSS' bit was this: in the not too distant future, more people will subscribe to topic/tag/remix feeds than feeds of actual people. I wrote a follow-up post fleshing that idea out a bit.

Google's Juice

Narry a week goes by without Google making some news. This week they hacked around with one of the Web's fundamental principles - the link. Google created a "no-follow" attribute for the hyperlink, to try and thwart comment spammers. News.com reported:

Here's Google's statement in the Google Blog. John Batelle has some good analysis on it. 

John also reported on the Google AdWords API, a new advertising platform perhaps? John said:

Schwimmer tries to take away Bloglines' mojo

Lawyer Martin Schwimmer opened up a can of worms this week, with his request (granted) to have his RSS feed removed from Bloglines. I followed the action in this post. As yet Bloglines has not publicly responded to the controversy, but I'm sure we'll be hearing more about this issue in the coming months. For a more light-hearted take on it (or is it?!), check out Dennis Kennedy's post.

Now I'm taking Peg's words out of the context he placed them in, which was about advertising in Web-based journalism. What's worse, I'm blatently using Peg's words as part of my weekly sponsor's plug! But I'm being transparent about it :-)

It's a new media world of free-flowing atoms and content set loose from its containers. Marqui are hitching a ride on my atoms - and don't worry, they're paying me a decent fare for the privilege. But everybody has to remember: they're still my words and so I have to be 100% credible and transparent about what I publish. Because who knows where my words may end up.

Disclosure: I mentioned and linked to Marqui as part of my sponsorship arrangement with them. See here for details.

Anyway for this week's paid Marqui post, I thought it'd be timely to review Marqui's new blog - called Marqui's world. My new company is all about business blogs, so what better topic to write about in my sponsored post. Let's take a look then at Marqui's effort at setting up a blog and compare it to another recent company blog on the scene - General Motor's GM Fastlane Blog (which I wrote about on the Weblog Solutions blog this weekend). 

Content

They both started about the same time - the first post for Marqui's world was on 30 December and GM Fastlane Blog's first post was January 5. In terms of content, GM's blog got off to a voluminous start. They've already posted 9 items and some of them are lengthy. It looks like they had a bunch of posts pre-prepared (a couple of speeches converted into posts, links to interviews, biographies, plus some actual conversational posts). Pre-preparing content is a practice I'd recommend if you're launching (any) new blog, so top marks to GM for that. And what's more, the content is compelling - evidenced by the 68 comments (and still growing) that have been made to a post about GM's new Saturn brand. 

Marqui's world has only 3 posts so far - and none in the New Year. So they're off to a slow start. The one piece of advice I'd give to them straight off the bat is to post regularly - momentum is vital in keeping blogs afloat. I should note though that GM probably has more resources to throw at their blog, being a huge multinational company and all.

Target Audience

GM are obviously targeting car enthusiasts and, judging by all the comments they're receiving, they seem to be striking a chord with that audience. 

As for Marqui, they are targeting marketers. The 3 items so far have been an introductory post, a post entitled Firing up the imagination, and a post about an SEO paper. Nothing yet that will bring marketers scurrying out of their business lunches and commenting on Marqui's blog. And remember that one of the main goals of an external business blog is to get conversations going with your customers. 

However I do think the tone of Marqui's blog is encouraging. It's conversational and informal - that's good. But the subject matter isn't compelling enough yet. Nothing against SEO papers, but it's hardly the sort of thing that your customers are going to get all excited about. Actually, the best piece of content I've seen from Marqui isn't even on the blog - it was a write-up by Janet Johnson about "a fascinating breakfast meeting in Portland about innovation and risk taking in marketing [which] yielded surprising insights". OK, that's the kind of thing you should be blogging! Talk about your marketing theories, about innovation in your field, about "surprising insights". That is much more likely to get marketers conversing with you, than a dry paper about search engine optimization.

Links

If you look at the GM blog, you'll notice they've started to compile a list of links to other car enthusiast websites and "blogs we like". In the blogging world, this is known as a 'blogroll' (they may be going out of fashion on the homepage, but generally most bloggers keep a blogroll somewhere). It's particularly important to maintain a blogroll on your homepage if you're a new business blog looking to connect to a community of readers. My suggestion to Marqui is to find out which are the marketing blogs that interest you, then link to them on the side of your blog. What's more, regularly read what they're blogging about and comment on that on your own blog (and leave comments on theirs). Two-way communication is important not just with your target audience, but your community of like minds.

Design

I mentioned above that GM probably has many more resources to throw at their blog - and it shows in their slick design. It's a bit unfair to ask Marqui to match that, but one thing I suggest to Marqui is to differentiate your blog more from your main website. Currently it looks too same-y. For the blog to capture the imagination of your customers, and compel them to converse with you, it needs to have its own identity and (most importantly) personality.

Summary

GM's new blog is off to a great start and the conversations with their customers (and potential customers) seem to be flowing like wine already. Marqui is by comparison off to a slow start, but I think the tone of writing they've adopted is promising. They just need to come up with some more compelling content that their target audience (marketers) will be excited by. I also suggest they find out who their blogging community is (other marketing blogs, primarily), and regularly read and link to them. Also a distinct design for their blog, to give it its own personality, would not go amiss.

That's just a start... OK here's where I add a plug for my new company, Weblog Solutions Ltd :-) Marqui, we're available to help you improve your blog! That invitation extends to any other company or organization wanting to get started in the blogosphere, or wanting to put some pep into their current blog. Feel free to contact us to talk.

Disclosure: I mentioned and linked to Marqui as part of my sponsorship arrangement with them. See here for details.

I appreciate Marqui's openness and their generous sponsorship arrangement, but so far I have no firm feelings either way about the Marqui product. I said at the start that I'd analyze the product, but for a number of reasons I haven't fully test-drived it yet. One is that there are too many technical details missing - particularly regarding how to implement it and how things connect together. Sure I could take the demo for a spin, but what I really want to do is have a nosy under the hood. Maybe one of their techies will open up that hood in their new blog. Another reason is that I don't want to just list features and regurgitate case studies - I want to have an 'angle' that will interest my readers. 

OK those are all just excuses for my laziness... Marqui does seem like a decent enough product and its target audience of marketing people is looking for an easy-to-use and multi-channel communications product, which Marqui advertises itself as. But as my previous post indicates, I get emotionally attached to (and therefore write about) innovative Web 2.0 products and services like Flickr, del.icio.us, Bloglines, Feedburner, PubSub, etc. Marqui isn't one of those kinds of products - deliberately so, because it's not aimed at geeks like me. It's aimed at marketing people, who just want an easy way to issue press releases on the Web. 

Now then - coming up there is potentially a topic for me to get my teeth into. There's a Web 2.0 angle on the agenda in the Marqui program. So when that gets injected into the mix by the Marqui story-feeders, maybe I will finally get my A into G. I know Marc Canter is probably waiting for me to write up something about Web 2.0 (because I didn't rate a mention in Marc's review so far of the paid bloggers). So Marc, I promise you that I will write a kick-ass post soon :-)

Disclosure: I mentioned and linked to Marqui as part of my sponsorship arrangement with them. See here for details.

I'll be kicking up my heels for the next two weeks, ruminating over my goals for 2005 and re-charging my batteries. I'll also be preparing my new business venture's weblog for go-live in January - very exciting!

btw there's some excellent 2005 predictions going around the weblog world. I recommend you check out John Batelle's post and also Andy Lark's (Sun executive and fellow kiwi).

If I don't blog again before 2005 (yeah right), have a happy holiday! :-)

Disclosure: I mentioned and linked to Marqui as part of my sponsorship arrangement with them. See here for details.