ReadWriteWeb

At the Web 2.0 Summit today, Federated Media Publishing and Automattic, parent company of WordPress, announced an agreement to provide advertising rights for U.S. WordPress.com bloggers. Over 24 million sites are hosted on WordPress.com, and users will now be able to opt into a topically targeted advertising program.

Federated Media positions WordPress advertising as a more focused alternative to social media buys. The campaigns are content-driven, offering sponsored content curation, sponsored posts and semantic conversation targeting for ads.

It's called a spoiler tactic. You take your competitor's biggest cash cow and offer a free alternative. Everybody from Linux to Google has used the tactic against Microsoft. So who can fault Microsoft when it uses it against Google's advertising cash cow? The guys who benefit from this tactic today are the good folks at OpenX, the open-source alternative to ad servers from Google such as DoubleClick (for big publishers) and AdManager (for small publishers). (Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb uses OpenX to host our advertising inventory.)

Of course, ad-serving itself is not really the cash cow, but it is a key part of it. The real prize is a viable alternative to AdSense. This is the background of today's news about OpenX and Microsoft announcing an advertising technology partnership.

Microsoft, in cooperation with Federated Media and Twitter, launched its own full-blown Twitter search engine today. BingTweets mashes up real-time Twitter search with results from Bing, Microsoft's new and increasingly popular search engine. The result is an interesting hybrid product that puts Bing's search results at the center of the experience, while the real-time Twitter feed appears in a sidebar on the left. The top of the page features a list of trending topics, which are quite interesting, as BingTweets separates them out by popular terms, as well as by popular people, places, and products.

This past week saw the Conversational Marketing (CM) Summit in New York, an event organized by Federated Media (which sells advertising on ReadWriteWeb). It was a stimulating event because of the good mix of all of the participants in the advertising eco-system (publishers and media, advertisers and marketers, advertising agencies, and advertising technology startups). The sessions included many case studies of large brands that use social media to engage customers in different ways, as well as new technology from startups. My one overriding impression was that creativity, in all its forms, is back. There was a real sense of a return on creativity.

In the old days, somebody running a business had a cadre of middle managers who aggregated data about the performance of different parts of the business. They would typically write monthly reports highlighting trends, issues, and exceptions. In a modern, web-enabled, web-centric business, this role is served by the online dashboards provided by various services. The challenge today is aggregating and integrating those services. I see this challenge in the real world from running ReadWriteWeb's business operations. This gap seems like a good start-up opportunity. Perhaps somebody is already filling it?

ExecTweets is a new Twitter-powered site that provides an information-rich and curated view of just well-known executives grouped by fields of expertise. The site makes it easy to quickly vote up specific tweets as they appear as well as send a reply via Twitter if you want to engage in conversation. According to the official Twitter blog, Federated Media accepted the request to build the site in response to pressure for a more topic-based Twitter site. The site is sponsored by Microsoft.