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I love the idea of localized advertising / marketing. Obviously benefits exist in localized advertising for advertisers, distributors, and consumers. Advertisers know they are reaching are much more targeted market while consumers get messages that may actually mean something to them.

I have written about this several times before including a post in my series about Google’s Strategy. As I discussed in ‘Media Madness‘ the possibilities for Google in localized advertising is supreme if they become a heavy player in IPTV distribution, which they will. Google has a partnership with Earthlink to provide free WiFi hotspots, with advertising of course. They also bought Dodgeball, which happens to be a way for friends to track each other via mobile phone.

Today I stumbled upon another very intriguing advertising model via AdJab about a company in London using GPS to send localized advertisements on buses.

“U.K.-based search engine Yell.com has partnered with AKQA to provide GPS-based ads in Central London. The ads will display local businesses within walking distance on interactive displays.”

U.K. buses get GPS-based ads - AdJab

Essentially the bus drives around the city displaying advertising for stores on the street it is driving down, thus giving passerbys reason to at least window shop. It’s brilliant.

Last week I read an article by Sharon Baltes in the Des Moines Business Record about a local marketing company using the same methodoligies.

“Johnson and Adam Kuperman, both 22-year-old West Des Moines natives, have created a marketing business that uses non-traditional methods of getting advertisements in the hands of people their age. Their main approach involves text-message marketing to cellular phones.”

Mobile marketing

The idea that Innovative Mediums is persuing is on-demand advertising over the SMS (text messaging) medium. They say,

“The people who opt in to receive the text message promotions customize their account online to control not only which businesses they receive messages from, but also how many messages they want to receive per day or week and blackout times they do not want to receive any messages.”

This is, I think, an excellent business model. People can choose the advertising they recieve from a directory and businesses can send out messages at any time to their database of users. And in a college town (Iowa City - U of I) nonetheless, bar patrons can sign up to receive promotions from their favorite watering hole. The possibilities are indeed limitless.

The maturity of ‘extreme localized advertising’ will grow with the adoption of mobile and social technologies. It’s a very young industry and it is nice to see small companies targeting very marketable niches.

technorati tags:advertising, mobile, marketing, google, innovative mediums, yell.com

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I’ve been using Stock Xchng for a while now and still absolutley love it. There are many stock photo sites out there that offer royalty-free images for any use, but this one tops them all. All you need to do is make an account and your on your way to high quality pics for no charge. I absolutley recommend going over and signing up, you won’t be disappointed.

*On a side note, this post was posted using the built in blog utility in Flock’s new beta build. I had my doubts but what an awesome browser Flock really ended up being.

Blogged with Flock

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This is a classic argument that heats up about every year. It is also something I have participated in a few times defending and promoting the .NET framework as an agile alternative to J2EE or scripting languages like PHP.

So what happens when two extremely intelligent developers debate the subject? Well you get a thread of blog posts between Joel Spolsky and David Heinemeier Hansson.

Joel wrote a piece called ‘Language Wars‘ which discusses a predicament that software development shops often incur when beginning a new project - what platform? My solution is pick a standard for your company and stick to it, alleviating the need for heavy debate and weeding out the PHP nerds who won’t try a real language (just kidding!, but seriously try ASP.Net/C#) from your team.

Joel boldly states something I have been thinking about since the advent of Ruby On Rails (RoR), the very popular web framework created by David H.H. First he stated that there are 3 and a half languages to choose from when developing an Enterprise Level web application - C#, Java, PHP and a half of Python. To me, yes, his statements are correct because these are tried and true platforms with millions of developers to share knowledge with. He says that with “Serious Business Stuff” where your job is on the line there is no need to take the risk of using Ruby on Rails - it simply is not cut out for “mission critical” web application development.

I have not built an enterprise level web application in RoR, nor do I plan on it as I am perfectly happy swimming in the .NET framework. But I have built enterprise level apps in .NET and can safely say they are manageable, scalable, and fast (if you configure them right, which of course I do). I can also say, and have, that .NET can play in Web 2.0 and can be just as agile.

Back to the developer wars…

David quickly retaliated with a post entitled ‘Fear, Uncertain, and Doubt by Joel Spolsky‘ in which he happily defends his framework and calls out Joel on several levels, mostly the fact that Joel somewhat contradicts himself after stating that his company built its first product on a proprietary language created in-house, which we came to find out is called, “Wasabi”. He also pokes fun at the fact Joel finds VBScript to be a reasonable language for web development (it’s not, trust me).

There’s more to read, back and forth. You can follow along yourself here:

1. Language Wars - Joel

2. Fear, Uncertain, and Doubt by Joel Spolsky - David

3. Was Joel’s Wasabi a joke? - David

4. Wasabi - Joel

And if you want other commentary about the discussion read some of these:

1. In Defense of Joel’s Wasabi Indirection Layer - Daniel Read

2. When Did High Tech Become High School? - Mike

One thing Mike mentioned, which I think is worth re-mentioning is:

“Whenever we see such a debate coming through in blogs and forums, it is
worth investigating the real reasons why. It very rarely has anything
to do with language syntax or capabilities.”

I agree - it always winds up to be less about syntax, capabilities, agility and more about what camp you are in. I defend Microsoft because I am .NET developer so naturally I will be biased. That goes for PHP, RoR, and Java people too. You are naturally inclined to defend your platform because that is what you know.

Can’t we all just get along?

Read more…

technorati tags:.net, ruby on rails, RoR, asp, c#, development, Web development

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“The winners of Fast Company’s 2006 Customers First Awards transform ordinary transactions into entertaining experiences — delighting customers and showing everyone else the way.”

2006 Customers First Awards

Customer Champions:

• Mandarin Oriental
• NASCAR
• American Girl
• Burton Snowboards
• Life Time Fitness
• Mac Cosmetics

technorati tags:fast company, customer service, managing the edge, mte, edge

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Many people are confused on what Microformats (including me to an extent) so I thought I’d do a quick overview, share some resources, and show you my examples.

So, what are Microformats? Well, to start you should check out the ‘official’ introduction to microformats here. You should also read the ‘Microformats Primer‘ by Garret Dimon from Digital Web. From Dimon’s primer:

“Microformats are about using the standards we all know and love to convey as much semantic meaning as possible. Think of them as semantic best practices. They use current XHTML tags such as address, cite, and blockquote and attributes such as rel, rev, and title to create semantically appropriate blocks of code.

Microformats are great because they are both usable and elegant—and all you need to do to get started with them is familiarize yourself with the best ways to apply the tags and attributes you already use.”

Digital Web Magazine - Microformats Primer

Okay, what’s this mean to the average web user? Well, nothing yet. As John Allsopp writes in ‘The Big Picture on Microformats’:

Few really dispute the potential of microformats, but all technologies, no matter their promise, live and die by their adoption. So, how are microformats faring a year or so after their coming-out party? Since microformats are markup, their impact is less obvious than, say, AJAX—whose dynamic visual effects are usually a bit of a giveaway.

Digital Web Magazine - The Big Picture on Microformats

Granted it is being adopted by some developers and web services but the average user most likely will not know a developer / web site is using Microformats. But, if you are using the Flock browser (which I have been currently, look for a review soon) you can view pages with Microformats embedded.

Click to open up microformats on the flock shelf (topbar).

This opens, and you can navigate all of the Microformat information on the page.

Want to know more? Well, here are some resources:

1. About Microformats
2. Microformats Primer
3. The Big Picture on Microformats
4. Introduction to Microformats
5. Microformats Wiki

Want an example?

Well, my resume and contact form have both been semantically upgraded with Microformats. If you want to see the semantic goodness, do a view source.

technorati tags:microformats, web2.0, semantic markup, web design, development

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