Archive for content aggregation
Online Multimedia Presentations Get Interactive: Remix Your Photos And Videos With Vuvox
Posted by: | CommentsOnline multimedia presentation tools are a whole new exciting niche within the Web 2.0 landscape, letting you easily take your photos and videos and create great-looking visual mash-ups from them. It\’s one thing to sift through a page full of uninspiring, identical thumbnails, and quite another to navigate your media collection in a rich media environment. A new service lets you do just that, so that you can create multimedia presentations and interact with them in a hands-on way. If the first wave of Web 2.0 was comprised of services that made it easy for you to share your photos and publish your videos, this next wave of easy-to-use web applications is all about bringing your online media together, remixing …
Content Monetization: How To Make Money With Your Blog Content
Posted by: | CommentsNonetheless many discount blogs and small independent news sites as possible instruments for content monetization, most such critics are stuck into an old and intellectualized notion of what blogs and one-person web sites should be about.
Photo credit: Cristian Andrei Matei
There is no law or tacit agreement among online publishers whereby bloggers should limit themselves to short, shallow commentary, or where they utilize their blog only as an instrument to report about their personal lives and communicate with their friends. If they want to do so, that’s fine, but they should not moralize others for not following in a religious fashion their own traces.
If you want to become independent of your traditional work slavery, if you want to get out of the alienating 9-to-5 of your present job, if you want to devote the greatest part of your time to study, research and write about what interests you the most, while paying not just your coffee and hosting expenses with it, there are definitely more than one way to achieve this online.
They keys to them are your dedication to this, your ability to to focus and follow a specific field (and not everything that appeals to you), and the quality and depth of your writing.
While your blog friends may tell you differently, the fact that most of them make only a few dollars a month is only due to them choosing to be too self-referential, parochial in scope, purist and idealist in spirit (but rarely in the facts), too shallow in their content, too broad in the focus, and often very distant from understanding that a blog is not a religious format transmitted by God to some elects, but only a technology platform that allows just about anyone to publish online without needing to be a technical-savvy person.
What you can do with it and how you do it, it is all up to you. Judges should not be other would-be bloggers, but the actual visitors and readers, the advertisers and anyone else that without improperly crowning herself with judgmental powers nobody awarded them, that uses blog and independent news sites to learn and keep himself on top of things instead of being pontificated about moral and ethical issues of how blogging should be.
Taking such a stance, will always get you easily ostracized by old school blog purists and other (would-be)-intellectuals, but the fact of the matter is that you should not pay attention to these critics as they do not represent in any tangible way the public you will be addressing and the economic success you may be able to extract from your hard work.
In this light, I and the other editors in this virtual newsroom have decided to bring to an end our weekly Sharewood Picnic, which nonetheless its streak of new media scoops and growing popularity is now increasingly copied and fails to satisfy one of the key criteria I have indicated as being necessary for any kind of online success: focus.
What replaces them is a more focused and coherent weekly mini-guide devoted each week to a specific theme, and not just to all the new and interesting tools that have caught our eyes. At the pace new technology is moving today, we can’t follow all the new releases anymore, and the only way I can keep this daily magazine relevant to my readers is to give them more of what they come here for: focused information, news, resources and tools that empower them to become their own bosses.
Monetizing online content and learning what tools and services can lend you a helping hand when you will decide to go from blog fun to independent news publishing is the “focus theme” we present in this content monetization mini-guide.
While in this first release here, we offer you only ten new services to check out, this content monetization mini-guide will collect over the coming weeks and months additional resources and tools which we will keep adding as we discover and learn about them.
Online Content Monetization: Tools and Services To Make Money With Your Blog Content
- ClipSyndicate
ClipSyndicate enables broadcasters and other video content producers to insert advertisements in their videos. ClipSyndicate syndicates video clips to thousands of vertical web sites looking for specific content of interest for their end-users. As a result, broadcasters can further monetize their clips, web publishers have a new source for fresh, relevant content, and advertisers have access to a highly targeted audience.
http://www.clipsyndicate.com - Google AdSense for Feeds
Google AdSense for feeds is a program that enables publishers to place relevant ads in the feeds they syndicate. Google technology understands the nuances of language, and places ads that are closely matched (or “targeted”) to the content next to which they appear. If you are a current AdSense publisher and your feed has more than 100 active subscribers, you may qualify for participation in AdSense for feeds. Free sign up.
http://services.google.com/ads_inquiry/aff - TrendyFriendy
TrendyFriendy is an online web-community, which has been created for people who want to open a blog and find new friends. As an additional feature the community provides a possibility to earn money with Google AdSense. If you want to earn money, keep in mind that the rating depends on posts written exactly by you, which have been rated by other users. Your rating directly defines your participation in ad rotation on whole site. For participating in ad rotation an obligatory condition is having an own Google AdSense account. Free sign up.
http://www.trendyfriendy.com - HubPages
HubPages is a online space to share your advice, reviews, useful tips, opinions and insights with others. Set up an account and create your Hubs (your own web articles); you will then share the rewards when visitors click on your Hubs’ ads. That is because Hubpages lets you link affiliate IDs from eBay, Amazon and Google (with more partners in the works), so that your Hub can display ads and products like any professional web site or magazine. Free sign up.
http://hubpages.com - AdsBlackList
AdsBlackList is a service that enables you to maximize your AdSense revenue. It provides you with list of most commonly filtered websites whose webmasters use AdWords to attract visitors for low price click, so that they can convert it to high price click on their own MFA (Made for AdSense) or Low Cost per Click site. If you want to stop these type of actions going on through your sites, all you need to do is to paste a list generated by AdsBlackList to your AdSense Setup in the Competitive Ad Filter list. Your revenue should substantially increase. Free sign up.
http://www.adsblacklist.com - Bloglinkr
Bloglinkr is a service that allows publishers to display relevant ads on their sites and all of the advertisers on Bloglinkr are other blogs. You select the categories that you want your readers to see, and your readers will see links to blogs in the categories you’ve selected. You’ll get paid for each click. Additionally, you’ll get paid also when people click ads on blogs that you’ve referred to Bloglinkr. Sign up to receive a free invitation to join the program.
http://beta.bloglinkr.com - nbbc
nbbc is a marketplace connecting businesses that have video content to businesses that want video content, and enables all parties to profit from the exchange. Content owners place content on the nbbc platform and video is paired with advertisements. Web publishers access content and pick what they are interested in: whenever end users view content, the advertising revenue is shared between video producers and publishers. Free sign up.
http://www.nbbc.com - Grooveshark
Grooveshark is an online service that rewards you for sharing, reviewing, and discovering new music. Grooveshark is a web-based application for sharing music within a community of music lovers. We distribute DRM-free MP3s across a mostly p2p network. Grooveshark is currently in private beta and you need to apply for an invitation. Free sign up.
http://grooveshark.com - Coinlogic
Coinlogic provides bloggers, artists, musicians, authors, programmers, and anyone else with a web presence the ability to easily generate revenue from original content. Currently, this micro-commerce service is in private beta and you will need to leave your email address to receive an official invitation to join the program. Free sign up.
http://www.coinlogic.com - Quantcast
Quantcast is an open internet ratings service for advertisement. Advertisers can find reports on the audiences of millions of web sites. Publishers can ensure their sites are represented accurately by tagging them for direct measurement. Once you sign up, enter your domain name and paste your personalized JavaScript tag into each of your site’s pages. Quantcast will start measuring your traffic immediately, and you’ll see new traffic statistics in your profile. The service is free.
http://www.quantcast.com
This mini-guide has been originally written by Robin Good and Livia Iacolare and first published on MasterNewMedia as:
Content Monetization: How To Make Money With Your Blog Content
For corporate newsmasters OPML reading lists are an excellent way of gathering and custom-distributing thematic collections of RSS Feeds within the organization.
By being able to effectively aggregate, organize, label, and provide selected access to thematic RSS feeds collections, corporate digital information librarians are now given true power to provide highly customized and tailored information feeds to their key stakeholders.
Not only.
Such capabilities provide also the means to create multiple definitive source of RSS feeds on a given topic, be it the latest communication software or just a hand picked selection on the best news sources out there. Such features support the use of a RSS feed library also and well beyond the walls of internal communications, research and intelligence to the ability to serve and distribute high-value content feeds collection on any designated theme to the public at large or to paying audiences.
What RSS does for websites, OPML does for RSS feeds. Which is to say that it gives end-users the capacity to subscribe, with a single click, to constantly updated information sources and access them from a single place, such as an RSS aggregator.
Increasingly, information professionals across a number of industries and sectors are making use of RSS feeds to pass along the latest information to their clients and end-users. These curators of information can make use of OPML to quickly and effectively import and export vast selections of feeds, organized into headings and subheadings, making the task of sharing a much less daunting one.
Blogbridge, whose powerful RSS reader / aggregator runs on Mac, Windows and Linux, has developed a solution for these information professionals: The Blogbridge Feed Library.
Here the details:
The Blogbridge Library is a powerful but surprisingly intuitive way to create vast, well organized libraries of feeds for a range of applications. This simple, easy-to-use platform could be of great use to librarians and PR professionals alike, not to mention those working in independent publishing and the blogosphere.
In this video review I walk you through the interface, along with the simple process of putting together your own library of RSS feeds using OPML reading lists.
BlogBridge Library – Video Review
In this video review I take a look at how you can:
- Find your way around Blogbridge Library’s main interface
BlogBridge Library – Purpose
As more and more organizations turn to RSS as a great way to gather up-to-the-minute, sometimes mission critical data from around the web there is an increasing need for a simple means to organize these feeds.
As it is possible to create a feed from any website, it has never been more important to find a way to aggregate, organize and recommend reliable sources of this information to clients and end-users.
BlogBridge Library’s main function is to provide and efficient way of going about this very task.
As BlogBridge’s own site describes it, BlogBridge Library creates a:
” flexible web based structure to showcase Feeds, Reading Lists and Podcasts to employees in your company, or members of your organization.
It will be the ‘store‘ where users can browse and search for recommendations of content to read with their Aggregators. And, here’s the important point: these are recommendations by people in your organization for people in your organization.
”
Effectively, BlogBridge Library brings Robin Good’s concept of the NewsMaster to within the walls of your own organization. While the role of the NewsMaster on the web is to hand-pick the best information for a specific target audience, using BlogBridge Library, librarians or information professionals can specifically target vast lists of recommended sources of data entirely geared to the people that they work with.
The Interface
The BlogBridge Library interface uses an intuitive, instantly recognizable folder-based format to display information. Anyone familiar with Windows, Mac OS or the various Linux GUIs will not find navigation an issue.
This familiar format, with folders nested within folders, is enhanced by the library paradigm, so that working through or putting together an OPML reading list is rather like taking a look at books on a shelf, which can be pulled out and explored in more depth at your leisure.
The home page arranges categorized reading lists in rows of four folders, with four tabs that allow you to easily explore a further four rows, meaning that a given category can contain sixteen lists. These lists can in turn contain further lists, so that the only limit of the amount of feeds contained in your library is that of the license you have subscribed to.
By being able to quickly scan through entire collections using thumbnails and a rich graphical interface makes the exploration of OPML lists seem a lot less technical, and will be sure to make end-users comfortable regardless of their previous experience of working with RSS news feeds.
It looks quite evident that a lot of time has gone into making the interface as accessible and instantly recognizable as possible, as to attempt to ground its potential success in its very simplicity and accessibility.
From the very top level BlogBridge Library folders, it is possible to explore the RSS feeds within them, right down to the ability to preview individual posts within those feeds.
There is no need to actually subscribe to a feed until you have given it thorough test within BlogBridge Library. In fact, it would be quite possible to use BlogBridge Library as your sole source of RSS content review, and this will appeal to those end-users that just want a quick way to get to the news you have gathered for them.
Powerful Search
End-users will also welcome the powerful array of search options available to them, facilitating content discovery even within such a large array of content sources and supporting information professionals in their quest for finding the best sources on a specific topic /theme. In the BlogBridge Feed Library it is possible to search by the titles of RSS feeds, by folder or user names, which helps you narrow down and pinpoint search results considerably.
Furthermore, search results can be limited to title, description, tags, URLs or a combination of the above, so that users can expect to bring back only the information relevant to them at any given time. While this is a simple function, it is an essential one to users attempting to navigate any sizable collection of reading lists, and serves as an excellent complement to the already strong visual navigation methods available.
The BlogBridge Feed Library provides an effective tag cloud to allow those wanting to wade through information in a more visual fashion. As all of your RSS feeds can be tagged at the point of creation, this makes it very easy to create targeted and well-organized information quickly and efficiently, aiding the easy location of key data at later times.
Organizing Users and Administrative Functions
The administrator access facilities in the BlogBridge Feed Library, allow you to easily organize other users acces rights to the library. The library administrator can in fact add new users, assign them to different “organizations“, implement access restrictions, security, integrate images, biographical data and more.
The ability to create “organizations” within the BlogBridge Feed Library is a powerful aid when in need to create a series of interconnected RSS feed libraries for a number of clients or departments within your workplace.
Each “organization” can be customized as to which RSS feeds it will be given access to, and this makes the BlogBridge Feed Library very flexible for those looking to work with a large group of end-users.
Furthermore, individuals can be assigned to manage specific areas of the feed library, so that the expertise spread throughout your organization can be fed right back into the reading lists gathered in your collection.
In this fashion, you can also have your video production and new research department set itself up to automatically collect the best RSS feeds available from online news video sources, your PR department do the same for the most relevant important PR sources in their sector, R&D collect its unique mix of research and development feeds and the organization can start to manage the incoming information flow with some true organization and intelligence.
By allowing customization of data at a user and group level, the BlogBridge Feed Library avoids a one-size-fits-all approach to information architecture and allows for a number of flexible functions to be achieved from a single account or installation.
Conclusion
The BlogBridge Feed Library is an easy to use, powerful tool for anyone looking to quickly and easily gather and share a vast amount of OPML reading lists.
Primarily, I can see it being of interest to information professionals such as librarians, but also to organizations that rely heavily upon the monitoring of closely targeted, constantly updated information on specific themes and topics from across the web.
This second group is a vast one, and might range from pro-bloggers right up to PR, R6D, competitive intelligence, business analysis and marketing departments with a need to keep abreast of the latest changes in their field.
The BlogBridge Library does a very effective job of demystifying and simplifying the process of browsing and organizing feeds through the use of its clear, familiar and primarily visual means of navigation. It manages to make accessible what might otherwise be considered the territory of geeks and IT administrators, and that is in and of itself a major achievement.
Leveraging in full the potential of OPML and RSS, the Blogbridge Library provides excellent interoperability allowing the ability to import and export data in both of these standards-based formats.
I personally found Blogbridge Library to be a pleasure to use, and didn’t encounter any noticeable bugs or issues in setting up a simple library, or in exploring the RSS feeds arranged in Blogbridge’s own Expert Guides. As such, I highly recommend this easy-to-use, thoughtfully designed RSS content aggregation and delivery platform.
Specifications and Pricing
The Blogbridge Library is entirely browser-based and platform independent, which is to say that you can use it regardless of which computer or operating system you are accessing it from.
There are two versions of the Blogbridge Library – one that is free to use, and installed on the end-users own server, and another that is hosted at Blogbridge’s own servers, and which comes in a number of different account sizes all offered at what I would consider very reasonable prices.
As you can see, the main differences are in:
- The number of librarian, administrative accounts made available to the user, ranging from 5 to unlimited.
Additional resources
- Visit Blogbridge’s showcase feed library