Markus, the owner of PlentyofFish.com who I interviewed in March, has been invited to be a guest on Shoemoney’s WebmasterRadio.fm show. I guess Shoemoney changed his mind. (update, for clarification this will be next Tuesday June 27th)

The big news today is AOL turning Netscape.com in to a Digg clone. Smart idea? One of the top stories is an audio file of a customer calling AOL and trying to cancel, the story below it points out that AOL just copied Digg. One thing I’ve learned in my years online, if you are shoveling BS to your customers and you have a public forum be prepared to do some intense moderation & banning. This really is nothing new, what is new is giving users control of the dominant content on your front page.

(update: You can currently see this in action on http://www.beta.netscape.com/.)

Almost completely unrelated to web site publishing.. but Amazon is now selling groceries on their site, deliverable anywhere. If you have an urge for Orville Redenbacher’s Natural popcorn or some Zesty Italian dressing but can’t be bothered to get out of your chair head over to Amazon.com.

Think Napster was a racket? It turns out when you buy their songs from iTunes you are also ripping them off… “For The Almans’, that works out to $24,000 when taking Nielsen SoundScan data of 538,000 Almans’ songs sold as downloads since mid-2002.” Where did the other $532,620 go? Apple and the record label.

I don’t like quoting big chunks of other people’s writing, but this is too good to pass up:

“Of 133 advertisers who control over $20 billion in advertising, 78 percent feel TV advertising’s potency has declined since 2004. When DVR penetration gets above 30 million households, 24 percent will cut their TV ad budgets at least 25 percent. They’ll reallocate that money to online and other channels. More than three-quarters will invest more in Web advertising; almost 70 percent will spend on SEM”

Yet another positive signal for publishers and domain investors..

In the article Bryan Eisenberg goes on to ask if your company could absorb an increase in ad spending by 4x. Where is that money going to go? Yes, to the search engines, but also to publishers. With Yahoo and now MSN jumping into the contextual ad network game that means there is going to be a big squeeze on how much money Google can get away with pocketing.

Lee Dodd, the guy behind Forumtrends and several large message boards will be on Shoemoney’s radio show at webmaster radio today at 6pm EST. If you own a message board Lee is one of the guys you should be listening very closely to. I have been reading his blog for several months now and it has given me some great insight in to the finer points of running a successful forum.

Shoemoney will also be announcing a special guest for his show on the 27th. He’s given me a heads up on who this is. Lets just say it is going to be very interesting.

MarketingSherpa is taking nominations for their marketing blog awards. I usually wouldn’t post something like this here but they publish some of the best articles on running commercial sites (more on the e-mail and conversion end of things.)

Unfortunately my favorite blogs don’t meet the requirement for being around since January 1st of this year; their loss.

I am going to be working on a big post about how to get visitors to regularly return to your site with an e-mail newsletter. Before I write it I would like to hear feedback from my readers. Specific things I am interested about:

- Do you have an e-mail newsletter right now?
- If not, what is stopping you?
- If yes, are you happy with the number of subscribers?
- If yes, what kind of percentages are you seeing with sign ups per unique (ie, 1%, 5%, etc.)
- How much time do you spend building your content?

This post might actually might be big enough to get a static page. If you have a question or issue, now is the time to ask.

Too paranoid to participate in social networking sites for privacy concerns? I’m well aware that colleges watch Facebook and school watch Myspace, but apparently the US government does too.

“New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.”

Recently I realised how someone could create a program that would allow someone to take a photo of a person on the street, perhaps with a mobile phone. Then using face recogonition software that image could be run through a database of information harvested from Myspace matching it up with a profile. Technical issue might require the database to be narrowed down to a specific geographic region but that would be one of the few limitations.

Forget the NSA for a moment, this data is public and can just as easily be harvested by someone else. Think about that for yourself, I don’t need to describe this in detail.

I suspect this comes as little suprise to most of my readers. All of the internet developers I have talked to either think Myspace is so silly they ignore it or like the marketing opportunities and use and about it. So, here is the good stuff that you need to exploit this situation for a much greater reward than politicians passing silly laws.

To profit off of this you need to build one of two things –
#1 a secure social networking site where minimal information is public. Number of friends could be public, but who they are isn’t. It will be difficult to go beyond this.

#2 a third party tool that allows users to encrypt data and display it only to select friends or people given a password. Right now many Myspace users input their age as “14″ because right now this is the only way to make their details private.

Once you have done #1 or #2 start building up the PR. Forget an affiliate program where you pay $1 a sign-up or something, you don’t need that. Right now the press is all over Myspace. They eat up any news story now matter how poorly it is written. Put something good out there and this should be easy.

I feel like I’m going on a post rampage today, but I couldn’t pass this story up. Cnet reports that a new study has found the Internet is the #1 most used media; that trumps TV, newspapers, magazines. Here is the real kicker: “studies have shown that only about 8 percent of advertising goes to the Internet.”

Despite what some “experts” have called a PPC advertising bubble, I see the potential for very strong growth in internet advertising. I’d say that see these numbers double would be a conservative estimate. For publishers and domain investors this is great news. For those that rely on buying traffic to turn a profit, not so great.

MarketingSherpa posted this article yesterday about a study which interviewed over 7,000 professionals in “corporations, government, healthcare, and academia” … “The average respondent was reading nine (9!) blogs on a regular basis. And these weren’t blogs for personal info — these were job-related.”

The article went on to point out that syndicated news sites like Google News are now a top information source. I can tell you that I’ve got some Google News RSS feeds I’m subscribed to and watch daily. While this means I get a lot of redundant and irrelevant info I am also able to build a very strong image of where a particular market is moving — at least in what the mainstream press is coverig.

How can you exploit these trends? Number one, get a blog going. You will probably be really dissapointed in the direct advertising revenue (at least initially) but it will give your site some powerful leverage. Next get your main site into Google News.

By doing these two things you will get your site in front of the eyes of influential people. If you are serious about long term success in the internet publishing industry this is a hell of a lot more important than spending all your energy making sure your site is ranking in the top 10 for your target keywords right now. Get the influence first, and rankings will be a lot easier.

If you still think blogs are a fad, Jon has some e-books you should buy.