Robert Scobble: “Ebay is about to announce a gadget that you can put on your blog and consumers can buy products - but not leave your site”

Robert Scobble - “I study how people outside of ‘us’ find people and things”

It’s a Google World:
Podcasters aren’t optimizing their content for Search Engine Optimization - and they are leaving traffic on the table.

Aggregate of the traffic is what gets you found. “Google is worth understanding” - How do people find you? When someone searches for “funny videos” - you’ll want to be found. “If you’re not thinking about how you rank on Google - you’re missing a ton of new business.”

It’s a People World and Word of Mouth World:
Robert thinks that we need to not ignore the word of mouth traffic - remember that, especially with Youtube, AskaNinja, Twitter, etc.
When he reads his feed reader - things that make him slow down are keywords, interesting photos, or “authoritative” people. These are the things that makes his eye stop and actually read the content.

It’s a Distribution World:
If you want to care about the apple tv - you need to care about the format, higher resolutions work better and will drive more traffic. It takes twice the time to code - and the bandwidth can be spendy, but you need to listen to what your readers or listeners care are the formats that they use.
Joost is starting a sister site that uses a “mashed P2P network that is far cheaper than today” - this will allow for the lower level Vbloggers to bring their content to the masses.

Getting bloggers to talk about you is exponential - it will bring in a ton of traffic!
“At Podtech we built a player that allows users to put content on their own site - which allows users to consume content without going outside of your site, and traffic trippled in 1 week.”

Nice little Tidbit of news:
“Ebay is about to announce a gadget that you can put on your blog and consumers can buy products - but not leave your site” — Look out AuctionAds!

Marshall Kirkpatrick - Getting access to information early in the conversation

Marshall Kirkpatrick Speaking at the PodCastHotel in San Francisco - Live Blog Post!

Getting access to information early in the conversation-
Timeliness - reporting on information as early in the news as possible. This is key to building the media properties that has built. SplashCast has been on digg several times, and that’s because of the timeliness of the content and news that is being broken.
Splashcast being dugg on the front page drive between 3,000 to 15,000 uniques to their site. Scribbed.com has had 9 front page diggs in the last month and this is due to timely PDFs that they have provided.

Twitter “is good for community rather than breaking news”. The earthquake story has been one of Marshall’s favorite stories related to Twitter.

Production time for podcasting or video is enormous - and that slows down the amount of speed that you have to break a story. The biggest changes in video blogging will be quickness to bring content online. Using Twitter or other live event notification tools can be used in conjunction with video blogging to let others know that a new story is being broken, needs digging, etc.

YouStream style live video - where it is an end-to-end model is the best that we have, and others will be moving towards this.
Free Speech Radio News uses several different podcasters to provide news - this is a great way to get a lot of content from many sources, quickly.

Reaching out to low-bandwidth and less tech-savy users is really the key for growth in podcasting and video blogging - bringing the un-tapped crowed into the “know” about these type of technologies.

Mini Cologne - has a program in San Francisco that teaches minorities to record and promote pod casts - this one of Marshall’s favorite examples of others reaching into the un-tapped crowed.

PodcastHotel Speakers on Saturday

Today’s events at the podcasthotel are some interesting ones that you won’t want to miss. This is probably the highlight of the day for anyone that wants to tune into the live feed!

1:30 p.m. – 2:15 p.m.
The State of Vlogging: What’s new?
How is the community evolving? How can artists get into vlogging as a way to promote themselves and their work? We will address how enabling technologies have changed the way we view and create video content online; are broader audiences ready? Will there be increased demand as with online video sites? How will this impact news distribution in the future?

Moderator:
Eddie Codel, PodTech and Geek Entertainment TV

Speakers:
Adriana Gascoigne, bub.blicio.us
Schlomo Rabinowitz, Vloggercon/CNET
Justin Kan, Justin.tv
Josh Wolf, The Revolution will Be Televised

I’m Heading to San Fran For the PodCastHotel Event

I’ll be heading down to San Francisco this weekend to attend the PodCastHotel event, and I’m really excited about this one!

The Podcast Hotel is a conference that is going to allow people to get together to hear people speak but also to create their own works, learn a ton, discuss issues and exchange ideas. The Keynote speaker is Andrew Baron, Founder, Rocketboom, which has become of of the most successful video podcasts in the world. I’m looking foward to hearing him speak!

A few of the speakers are:
Chris Pirillo, Founder, Lockergnome
Mary Hodder, chief executive officer, Dabble
Josh Wolf, The Revolution will Be Televised
Robert Scoble, Vice President, Media Development, Podtech

This should be an awesome event, and I’ll post some notes from the speakers over this weekend!

Why I Blog - Am I Crazy?

Thanks to Eric Hebert for tagging me in the latest Blog Meme game!

I’ll jump right into the 5 reasons of why I blog….

To Share Ideas
I’m a very strong believer in collaboration. Some of the best ideas or concepts can come from sharing similar situations or findings and then creating your own conclusions or solutions based on what other people have experienced. I like to share what I am thinking so that hopefully others will learn a little and share that with others.

To Learn From Others
It’s my blog, but you can comment too!!! - Some of the best ideas that I hear from other people come from blog comments that people leave for me after I make a post. Thanks everyone!

To Create Controversy
Do you every get bored surfing blogs with regurgitated content? - I sure do! I like to stirr things up a little bit when I can. It’s always nice to see SEO controversies in the blogging world!

To Be Credible
Everyone gets their five minutes of fame, but once that’s up, what do you do then? Well….how about blogging to get another 15 minutes of fame! Some 4 letter domain name comes to mind here, it starts with a “DI” and ends with a “GG”. All kidding aside, when you do SEO for several years, I have learned quite a bit and it’s great to share with others and build a small following of readers that look upto you and actually care about what you say. Rock on!

To Have a Little Fun
Blogging sometimes can be too serious, I like to chat about things that you wouldn’t normally see from an SEO/M Blog.

Alright, Time for a little Tagging!

Steve Alledia - Good Domaining Friend and Joomla Master
Tim Germer - PPC Pro and founder of NorthWest Noise
Frank Schilling - Blending Domainer & SEO worlds puts him on my list of marketing pros!
Earl Grey - Long Time BH Friend
Paul Madden - The SEOidiot

Get Caught up on Search Marketing & VC

Kontrib Offers a Digg Alternative for Non-English Speakers

One thing that Digg lacks is foreign involvement due to the interface being in purely English. Kontribb offers the solution!

To submit and vote on articles at Kontrib, you first register. After you submit an article, Kontrib’s linguistic machines immediately translate articles into supported languages. These are Arabic, English, French, and Spanish, with more to come later. Kontrib is slick because it translates both the article summary hosted at Kontrib’s site, and the original article linked to. Comments are also translated.

Until now, language translation has remained clumsy. There are text translation sites such as BabelFish, or Google’s language tool. The coming Worldwide Lexicon Project promises to help bloggers translate their sites by mobilizing interested readers. Human volunteers will translate sites with higher quality, argues Brian McConnell, the project’s leader, and they’ll translate into any language. Though, we’d argue that human efforts will vary in quality.

What is FaceBook up to?

Recent traffic statistics at social networking site Facebook are impressive and we’re wondering if there’s a wider story here.

Facebook tells us the site is seeing about 1.5 billion page views a day, up from about 1 billion daily views last month — statistics that haven’t been released until now. That’s a huge jump.
Read more over at VentureBeat

So How Did you Learn SEO?
Here’s part of Rand Fishkin’s Story about SEOmoz:

“In 2001, the company that would become SEOmoz (at the time just Gillian, Matt & myself) began taking on some e-commerce development projects. Previously, we had designed static websites in Flash & HTML and done some consulting in usability, but with the addition of Matt to the team, we were ready to take on some beefier projects. We designed and developed several sites for clients and”

Rand over at SEOmoz would like to know how you got your start!

ZoomInfo - The HeadHunter’s Best Friend Expands

ZoomInfo today launched its Business Information Search Engine, a service that offers information on more than 3.5 million companies. Although the company profiles are similar to those offered by Hoovers.com and other subscription-based providers, ZoomInfo business profiles are free. More about Zoominfo at Search Engine Land

Matt Cutts Blog Hacked on April Fools Day

Ok, I was a bit surprised to see this nice little piece of hacking work done on Matt Cutt’s site by the DarkSEOTeam.

Click for the full size screen capture of Matts Blog:

Once you take a look at Matt’s Site, you’ll want to cruise over to the www.darkseoteam.com site where you’ll see the following:

Of course I’m lying when I make everyone believe that content is King.
Of course black hat SEO and spamdexing are the only Kings.
Google is just a stupid algorithm relying on spammy backlinks.
But you guys had no right to let everyone know. That’s why I defaced your bloody DST site. To show the entire world how evil a white hat can be.

In fact, I’m as evil as my employer
All your backlinks are belong to us !

Elaborate April Fools Joke? Or really good hack job?
You be the judge!

I am Watching Justin.TV Right Now

Ok, so I’ll admit it, Im addicted now. I spent probably 1.5 hours of my life today watching what Justin is watching on Justin.TV

Justin.tv is the creation of, well… Justin. Justin wears the camera 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even in the bathroom. Even on a date. Today I had the pleasure of Watching Justin Watch a seminar at the Kresge Auditorium in Stanford University by Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus.

Among other things that you can watch Justin do, include…

Justin Cleaning up after a party
Justin Meeting a Raper
Justin’s House getting raided by police (yes, seriously!)

You can also text message justin and watch him read your text here: 415-948-3219

Is this web 3.0 at the early stages or am I “just crazy”, as my Fiance would say!?

UPDATE: I’m up late tonight doing some work for a client and just decided to log on to see this Justin.TV kid bar-hopping. Then the craziest thing happend, I think he fell over and broke some of his camera equipment. So I guess Justin.TV is “To be continued”.

A Trip Around the Blogosphere

Fasten your seatbelts - we’re going for a trip around the blogosphere!
Jeremy Shoemaker is interviewing Melissa Harrington next week, whom is going to be on the Howard Stern show next week. Melissa Harrington apparently is a Top Web Porn Star.
Some of the questions that Jeremy will be asking are:

-How do you acquire subscriptions?
-How do you get new customers?

Crave shows us a $1 million laptop by a company called Luxury Launches that supposedly is “believed to integrate real diamonds and other precious jewelry into the chassis of the system.”

Google has launched their latest version of Google Spreadsheets while one of Google’s First investors and board member, Michael Moritz is stepping down.

SES New York is coming up and if you’re on the fence about whether or not to attend, Lee Odden has 5 reasons to attend SES NY.

And lastly but most important!
Sir Paul McCartney has broken a 43-year relationship with EMI to sign with a new music label set up by Starbucks, the coffeehouse chain. Starbucks is launching their own label to coincide with their HearMusic offerings. This is a pretty smart brand extension for Starbucks if you ask me!