New Makovision. Let’s start with what I’ve been reading this week:
- Droplings: It can turn any file on your computer into a branded download page hosted on Dropbox
It’s a menubar icon. If you drop a file on it, it’ll build a nice preview page around it, upload both to your Dropbox, then copy the public preview link to your clipboard. If you drop a folder on it, the folder will be zipped up before uploading. - The future of news ‘streams’
Much of the vision about streams is currently either experimental or hasn’t been built yet (like the App.net example I mentioned). But as it happens, there is a good early example of streams from a mainstream publisher: The Wall Street Journal. - Industry Survey: PPC Is Losing Ability To Generate Leads
Webmarketing123 surveyed more than 500 U.S. marketers, 65 percent of whom self-report as B2B marketers. Reps from companies including GE, Sony, Cisco, Olympus, Bose and FedEx took part. Survey respondents were fairly well divided in company size, with 32 percent coming from businesses with 1,000 or more employees and 23 percent from companies with 50 or fewer employees. - Twitter Says It’s Going To Start Aiming Ads At Users Based On Content Of Tweets
On the new Twitter, companies will be able to send paid ads as tweets to entire groups of users according to more than 350 interest categories handled by Twitter. The new ads will let companies get at a ”very narrow, very specific and incredibly focused audience,” Kevin Weil, a Twitter director of product management, said in an interview. - Advertising’s bumpy transition (and why it matters to you)
Until advertisers start to value the focused, memorable, impactful opportunity they have in buying the right ads in the right place for the right audience, web users are going to be stuck seeing irrelevant ads on sites that don’t respect their time and attention as much as they should. We have salespeople and investors and agencies and buyers that come from a world of mass and scarcity, and the opportunities of focus and connection and abundance are taking a while to sink in. - Why can’t we just admit that journalists are human?
One of the things that is so frustrating about the Chalian incident is that the former Yahoo bureau chief wasn’t even expressing his own opinion about what the Romney campaign thinks about Hurricane Isaac, or the fate of black people. As far as I can tell from the audio, he was simply making a humorous suggestion about something outrageous that a person might theoretically say about the Romneys — I would argue that there’s virtually zero chance he actually wanted his guest to make the comment he referred to.[...]If anything, journalists who are not afraid to show their human side can actually be more effective, and National Public Radio editor Andy Carvin was a great example of that during the uprisings in Egypt and Libya. It’s also why I think it’s better in many cases for fact-checking to be done in public. Are some journalists going to say offensive or even stupid things? Of course they are. Everyone does. So should a single remark that someone makes on Twitter, or over an open microphone, disqualify them from ever being able to practice journalism? Even a veteran newsman like Sam Donaldson doesn’t think so. Why does Yahoo?
Via: 
Don has worked at dot-coms and Fortune 1000 companies as a programmer and internet marketer since 1997. Clients and employers have included eBay, Morningstar, SONY, Findwhat.com, Allen Systems Group, BeFirst Internet, local network TV affiliates (NBC, ABC). His hands-on experience with SEO, Internet Marketing, Programming and Social Media tools has helped shape his Don currently works with a handful of companies managing Internet Marketing, Ad Buys, SEO, and Social Media strategies. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, USA.
