Idea Day66: A Twist of Targeted-Ads
Is Google AdSense making sense? To tell the truth, I encounter more than 10 Google targeted-ads per day, but rarely do I click them or pay any attention to them.
Why?
Ads are relevant, but not catering to my specific interests.
Content-specific ads trigger only rational behaviors, while interest-specific ads evoke emotional behaviors. As a marketer, which kind of behavior do you think would be more likely to lead to an action?
When I search for something, it doesn’t mean I demand for that “thing”, or I am shopping for that “thing”. The motivation behind each search varies.
Sometimes, I just want to look up certain information for my proposal preparation, sometimes I ask search engines for information of gadgets I want to buy.
Targeted-ads appeared in the second scenario will be most welcome; on the other hand, in the first scenario, I would hate to see any ad that distracts me from my research, since I’m not in the mood of buying any service or product.
So how to improve relevancy?
1. An option to turn on or off poping-up of targeted-ads.
2. An option to input my specific interests, training an intelligent ads-server always returning limited topics of ads I assign.
For example, I’m a StarWars Toy collector, I feed the ads-delivery server on related keywords, ensuring that I “always” get StarWars related ads in return. No matter searching on youtube.com, google.com, or any ads-served blog, no matter what content I’m reading, seeing my favorite SW action figures showing up in the ad-column would absolutely makes me happy, and thus a happy buyer.
It’s a delivery model of “interests-customized ads”, which tailor to the “person” who makes the search, rather than the old-fashioned model that marries ads to content, but not you.
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Idea Day65: Tips Search
I’m a big fan of user-generated-tips. Whenever I see posts titled “10+ ways to…” or “How to do….”, I’ll get excited, and check them out immediately. Contributors on Mahalo have been aggregating a number of popular tips found on search engines, but will there be any technique to automatically crawl tips-posts on the Internet?
Sphere ItIdea Day64: Feeds Hunters v.s. Feeds Seekers
Always live in a world of information/RSS feeds overload? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a personal gate-keeper helping you find out the must-read feeds everyday? In particular, feeds that you are currently interested in?
Let’s temporarily forget about digg and techmeme. Articles that attract most people aren’t necessarily meaningful to you.
How about a web site where anyone can hire a web 2.0 savvy as their daily-reading consultant to sort out quality feeds catering to respective needs?
btw, check out this:
Idea Day63: Anti-Spammers, Let’s Have Some Fun!
Actually, I believe we all are anti-spammers. We hate spams. We want to delete spam at once. We want to declare email-bankruptcy….
Wait wait wait, wait a second, have you ever heard of the line: “If you can’t defeat you enemy, then make fun out of them?” (of course you never, because I coined it 1 minute ago. 
)
So, today’s idea - A website where you can dump spams which you think creative/funny/weird/sucked/etc.
Sounds strange? How does it work? Simply put, whenever you “accidentally ” stumble upon a spam, no matter in your mailbox or on web pages, simply “bookmark” it on the proposed site. If you are in a good mood, you can give it a little description, such as where you step on the mine, or how sucked it is. If you are angry at this annoying spam, just tag it with “filthy” key words! However these words should be acceptable in blogosphere de facto, to show how angry you are at it while avioding issues like personal attacks.
Next to the tag line are two columns, thumbs-up and thumbs-down. In thumbs-up section, you score the spam from zero 1 to 10, and tell everyone what appeared on the spam make you lol. The jingle? Or the falling-down-bikini-model image? Similarly, in the thumbs-down section, you assign it with a score from -1 to -10, and tell others specifically what on the content make you sick.
Ok, now, anyone visiting the front page will see a spam-version of hot-or-not, which means you will be shown a series of snapshots of spam-pages bookmarked on the site. Before you go to the next spam, you can score the present one from -10 to +10, and if you want more info about it, click the “sucks me more” button, which will lead you to the detailed-info page made by the original submitter. You can also add your opinion/review by following the format accordingly.
By the way, a bonus feature - you can even “share” the most sh*tish spam you discover on the site to your friend (or rival)! Play prank on those you don’t like (or like)! i.e. Bosses
Finally, when the score of a certain spam reaches a threshold, say +1000 or -1000, the site will (manually, if no info of source provided) mail the result to the original company (probably to their marketing department, or even VP of marketing.) to show them what a great/lousy job they have done! Not bad, right? An anti-spammers-community suddenly transforms into a practical marketing research group, offering valuable feedbacks! What’s more, during the process of filtering “good” spams from “bad” ones, users have lots of fun, work off their angers, and generate value.
Oh, don’t forget the original submitters, when their shared spams reach the threshold, the marketing companies should thank and reward him/her.
Sphere ItIdea Day62: Graphic Designers, Open Up Your Works!
I love and hate sites of stock photos. I love them because they provide me with tons of materials/inspirations when I start a new graphic design project. I hate them because most photos out there are of .jpg/.gif/.png formats, which take me lots of time to edit.
If you have some experience using apps like photoshop, you must know as long as you want to edit your current WIP(work-in-process) files in the future, you have to save them in the .psd format. .psd is the standard file format of photoshop. Pics of these “raw” formats can be edited easily and flexibly, since they consist of original layers of objects. After you convert them into .jpg/.png/.gif formats, they will be permanently compacted, and no longer editable.
Hey, if you are a professional artist, how about share your .pdf files and earn some money from them?
In this “open-anything” age, I would like to propose an open-graphic-design platform where designers can exchange/trade their editable graphic files.
A PsdTube? -> pricing(bidding)/uploading/sharing/online editing/downloading etc.
The same concept can apply to a marketplace of Flash’s .fla files.
Sphere ItIdea Day 61: Hire Beta-Testers For Your New Startup
Stop blaming why Techcrunch/Mashable/ReadWriteWeb never mention your startup. It’s life. Life is alway unfair. If you’re not a serial entrepreneur like Kevin Rose, or buzz-generating machine like Jason Calacanis/ Guy Kawasaki, you should find a practical way to attract early adopters besides creating buzz. So, don’t expect the first flock of users go to your website without incentives, instead, hire them!
A job occupation called “game-testers” has been introduced to the game industry for decades, and I don’t think there shouldn’t be a category of job description called “beta-testers” for the Internet industry. Let’s see:
Pay per signup?
Pay per contribution? (i. e. $1 USD for every 10 videos uploaded/ $0.5 for every 10 comments on your shared article)
Pay per bug-reporting?
Pay per reviewing? (every review help your site gain more publicity, no matter it’s positive or negative)
And lots of possibilities goes on and on.
In short, Beta-testers not only debug your product but also generate basic (crucial) content if your startup is SNS-oriented.
So, here comes today’s startup idea (finally): Simply building a website to serve as a marketplace of beta-testers <-> entrepreneurs.
Sphere ItIdea Day60: You Can Edit My Post, Now
Errr,
Actually, it’s just a concept, not that you can start to delete some of my boring ideas here…
I read a post from Fred Wilson’s blog, in which he disagreed that Marc Andreessen turns off the all the comments on his fast-growing blog. Fred insisted that the spirit of blogging is two way communication, etc, etc.
So, blogs = the best way of communication? To what extent? When I went through these lines, I ask myself, is this possible to have a wiki-blogging platform? Wow, I’m challenging the extreme level of free speach on blogs. Here is how it works:
If the blogger applies this function, every reader can edit posts (or maybe just part of a post) the author allowed to be edited. Of course there should be a version-control mechanism. For example, if you think my last idea sucks, you can modify it. If you find a mistake of my understanding of Spock.com, you can correct it. If you want to supplement a picture, a digram, or even a video at the end of the post, do it! The bottom line? The blog owner still retain the full administrative privileges, that means whenever he/she finds the edition ” unacceptable”, he/she can do any recovery, or even turn off the wiki-option on this specific post.
Did I cross the line? I’m not sure. At least if I can find a wordpress plug-in of “wikibloging (not co-authors)”, I will experiment this concept here!
For A-list bloggers? Sorry you probably can’t afford to revision the distorted posts every 2 minutes, but Mr. Fred Wilson, since you are a blog-conversation advocate, you should give it a try anyway!
Sphere ItIdea Day 59: Popular People, Popular Posts
Yesterday I did a review on Spock, that’s a really cool people-based search engine. Though it seems only celebrities’ profiles will be shown on the first page of results, I don’t think that will be a huge downside. Since when most of the time people use a search engine looking for someone, they are looking for useful info (bio/histry/contact) of “somebody”.(except those egoists :D)
And then I came up with an idea. Why don’t the team of spock add a feature, which shows the “most viewed” articles published by the one you’re searching for? For example, when I search “Tim O’Reilly”, Spock not only returns his profile, but also his most renowned “What Is Web 2.0” post, and so on.
I believe it would be useful because as the saying goes: You are what you write, right?
If the Spock team don’t want to do this, then you can give it a try. Build a vertical search engine of “popular posts” by crawling the authors’ names at the beginning or end of articles, counting the inbound/outbound links of them as well as the click-throughs, and finally ranking/aggregating these top posts to the indexed profiles respectively.
Sorry for being too simplified.
Idea Day58: Twitter-Like-Video-Nagging?
Hi all, it’s been a so loooooooong time since my last update on this site? Why? oh, last month, I just started a new blog, focusing on tech news around the world. To be more precise, I translate interesting tech news to Chinese (and with my own little opinion) for those who love to hear, but can’t understand Eng-version tech news happened in Silicon Valley and other places.
Ok let’s go back. I dropped by a site, Bubble Guru, this morning. There, you can record a video clip, and then copy the widget code to your blog. It’s nice to have a greeting video to my dear readers in a couple of minutes!
My excitement didn’t end here.
I found a description of the site said “Update (video)messages as often as you wish.”
Hey, are you talking about Twitter-like-video-nagging?
Can you imagine a page of Twitter-ers’ big heads, their odd facial expressions, and their exagerated gusture in motion, combined with their noisy naggings (now the real sound of twittering)?
Crazy, but I’m looking forward to this sort of service, as long as my bandwidth won’t explode…
Sphere ItMy Dreams Come True?
TechCrunch just covered a new startup - DreamCrowd which is similar to one of my ideas post here (Idea Day33: MyDreams). basically I believe share your dreams with others won’t hurt as long as you don’t reveal your true identity. Who knows one of your dream might inspire a novelist’s next masterpiece?!
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Content is King?! So what? The King can't have children without a queen! Join me, and together we will rule the empire of web x.0!
Special thanks to Steve Poland' brainstorming blog, Techquila Shots, which inspires me to write down my own ideas!
