I’ve been reading so much about the Goo-Tube craze and direction of video advertising that I thought I would try my hand at a little piece. I think what turned the tipping point was Paul Allen’s online video marketing blog. I went to You Tube and thought of a little piece… I tried to develop it along the lines of the other pieces I saw that had the most views… (Certainly not the highest rating).

I’m a long ways from my own internet news beat… but it was a fun little exercise. It will be interesting to try a series of little videos and learn more about how to successfully use them for exposure and conversion.

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcaniconiosis is a disease one gets from inhaling microscopic pieces of silicate or quartz… Pretty interesting ‘eh?

Don’t ask me where I got the actor… Not bad for his first try though

Any ideas would be welcome.

We’ve all been to blog sites, forums or other community sites. More often than not, we havet to fish though mountains of unrelated issues to find what we’re really looking for.

Of course of lot large businesses have seen the benefit that could come from having a forum that actually helped to nuture the thought process to identitify and solve real queries.

I was introduced to Engage Thoughtware(tm) by Dan Mabey, Former Director Of International Economic Development for the State of Utah. This powerful business communication tool.

After a review of their patented program I’m extremely impressed by the benefits they offer. As best summarized by their own site, the benefits are as follows:

* Less costly than face-to-face meetings
* More secure than Blogs
* Produces better results than e-mail.

On another level, Engage:

* Drives the innovation/implementation cycle
* Removes political and geographical barriers
* Aligns team level efforts with the organization
* Reduces costs and streamlines processes
* Recognizes and provides for the reward of actual contributors.

Engage is already pretty well developed for corporate licensing. I believe the benefits and opportunities this technology would have in the free market would encourage incredible innovation and idea development. I also see huge economic benefit from IP development and advertising revenues. Kind of like the MySpace of organized and real information.

A focus group will be held in about a week to further explore its free market capabilities. I’m excited to see the development of this product.

We just posted our first article at Digg.com. Check us out and let us know what you think.

http://digg.com/offbeat_news/upcoming

This is our first experience in internet publicity at Worldwide Book Drive. We’ll see how it goes!

So I’m in Atlanta, Georgia right now with RigidFlex Plastics International at a trade conference regarding recycled plastics and the developments in the plastic trading industry.

Although completely off the topic of plastics, (I’ll write more about this conference later), it’s been fun lately to learn about the developments of Google and the other search engines in China.

It seems that Chinese Search Engines are showing some gain in their capture of the growing Chinese Market. It’s a tragedy to see that they sell out the top search results to the highest bidders rather than legitimate relevancy, but then, that’s very indicitave of Chinese media culture.

Google is having to adapt to Chinese media culture as well. Censoring their search results is pretty telling in that case. China’s market is growing quickly and google’s competitors (both foreign and native Chinese) are fighting for a piece of the fruit, it will be interesting to see what happens.

What ever happened with Alibaba anyways and their sellout and priorvow to take down google in China?

So after Google’s last big indexing round-up, a number of different sites that I manage in one of my small businesses lost its ranking. I understand that google has reset their algorhythms to try to clean out duplicate content and people who use scraper software, but a lot of legitimate sites seemed to have gotten slapped as well.

There’s a great article about it here for any one that might have suffered a similar fate.

If any one has any ideas of how to avoid showing duplicate content for site terms and policies, please let me know, I’m all ears. Online businesses, entrepreneurs or even basic bloggers will benefit from cleaning up how the bots read their pages.

We recently had a publicity strategy meeting for Somethinglocal.com. We sat down and tried to identify as many things as we could that would increase traffic, build brand equity, increase down loads and more, (what else do you usually talk about at an internet marketing meeting). We identified some great things we could do that would be news worthy, along with a number of different strategies to synergize our upcoming podcast with our upcoming quick-time commercials, Big Aland other promotional efforts we have coming up.

Of all of the things we talked about, the one that rang the most true was this: Prove your model, and it will do most of the promotion itself. Of course this is not the case with everything, but if it’s a model that really provides goods or services that people need, you can bet they’ll tell their friends about it. Myspace, Amazon, Google Adsense,Commission Junction, Ebay and more, provide a service that benefits their customers and brings them back for more. I might be wrong, but I bet the budget for the time and money to market these services is relatively small. I know I mentioned only big models, but I’m pretty sure the same applies to little things as well. Wasn’t Craig’s list just a small start-up?

Somethinglocal.com satisfies a need. Local bands need to connect with their fan base in such a way to be exposed, promoted and make profit for further development. It promotes bands and sells their music. Bands get 69% of all of the proceeds from their downloads. The rest of the money is used to promote the bands through the different modules of the website. It hasn’t been a smooth transition for somethinglocal.com, but we’ve finally got the backend working as of last week and we’ve already got over 10 bands with a balance in their accounts. As we really help bands sell their music, it will help lead and orchestrate the other marketing aspects of Somethinglocal. It’s still too early to tell just how successful our model is in practice, but it looks like we’re on the right track. Either way, it seems our marketing and promotional strategy has a clear top priority: First, prove the model.