The Fearless Blogger

Microsoft’s been promoting “Bing”, their latest incarnation of “Live Search“, pretty heavily.   I’m not big on their claims that we’re all suffering a case of “search overload”, but the commercials are kind of clever in their patronizing way (< cue Sarah Palin impression> “Searching is hard!”).

But at the end of the day, Google still dominates.  By a show of hands – How many of you typed “bing.com” into your browser to find out more about it?  How many of you googled “bing” to find out what it was?

via 901am | Bing Parody Ad.

Matt Rosoff at CNET.com just posted a review of Muziic, a free music streaming service with an extensive catalog of songs.

Two things about Muziic struck me as especially cool:

First: The music catalog?  YouTube. That’s right – the video site. Muziic

makes extensive usage of the YouTube API to deliver rich audio-visual content, forming the web’s first ever “YouTube for Music”.

I think this is brilliant.

YouTube holds contracts with Universal Music Group, Sony BMG and EMI.  (A noted exception is Warner Music, who recently removed YouTube videos containing their music after negotiations around licensing fees failed.)  Through the usage of Google’s YouTube Content ID Recognition System, artists are paid royalties based on the number of plays their song receives. “Because of YouTube’s contracts with the record labels, satisfaction can be reached for our listeners and the artists themselves,” stated David Nelson, Muziic’s CTO and Co-Founder.

David, by the way, is the second cool thing about Muziic. read more

Earlier this year, I wrote about GiantCrayon’s newest iPhone game, ShiveringKittens.  The Tetris-like game challenges you to rescue cute little kittens by breaking them free from blocks of ice.

A couple of things have happened since writing the review, the first of which prompted this post:

GiantCrayon Games today announced it will partner with the ASPCA® (The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals®) to raise money for animals through a first-of-its-kind promotion during March and April 2009. This is the first time an iPhone game has been used as lynchpin of a fundraising campaign. read more

Today, Mashable implemented a new approach to social media advertising.

The social media site now features a Twitter Brand Sponsors module – a “widget” that syndicates the latest tweets from sponsoring brands (and one charity).

From Mashable’s announcement:

The Twitter Brand Sponsors module is our first trial of a new breed of engagement-based sponsorships. We like to call them sociable ads.

Social media is opening up a dialogue between brands and the web community. This is better for brands: it creates passionate, engaged customers who share their good experiences with the world. It’s better for the community, too: we get the opportunity to speak directly to the companies that create the products and services we use.

What about ads? Could they be more sociable as well?

My Two Cents

Personally I love this idea for non-obtrusively using Twitter as an advertising medium and revenue stream.

The most recent in a number of site improvements, the module is part of Mashable’s “Social Media Makeover” and speaks to the site’s goal to “reduce the number of ads on the site, but increase the relevance of those ads.”  Site founder Pete Cashmore shared in the comments: read more

After seeing a tweet about sitetweet.net, I headed over to the site to see what it was all about:

sitetweet allows webmasters to post immediate messages on Twitter about specific behaviors on their site. Usually installed on strategic pages, you can configure sitetweet to send a special message when a user performs a certain action on your site. You can use Twitter’s options for private posts in case you want to control who follows your login.

Some interesting uses:

• receive details on goal completions;
• register specific searches;
• receive notifications from vistors from specific sources. read more