Save for the obvious potential bandwidth issues, and the simple fact that I'm aPC user, this is a damn cool service. I'd love to have my home music collection available anywhere.

"TunesAtWork lets you listen to your personal iTunes music collection while
at your office or lab, even though your iTunes collection resides at home.
TunesAtWork is a specialized web server that runs on your home Macintosh
and serves web pages that present your music collection (including
playlists) organized visually much the same as in iTunes itself. This makes
it easy to find what you're looking for."

http://www.tunesatwork.com/

Every time I get an email from 'webmaster', or 'info', or 'newsletter', or blah-dity-blah-blah no name can't distinguish you from my cat, email sender, I reply to that company suggesting that they change their From name so that I know who the hell they are.

Out of all of the one's that I bitch about, there are still so many that have not changed this very simple element of their email campaigns. Seriously people, everyone sends emails this time of year stating "2004 e-Marketing Predictions". If you consider yourself worth reading, and your From name is 'newsletter', do you think I'm going to read yours, or the MarketingSherpa email I got yesterday?

Hopefully, all of the email marketers who are not yet enlightened will read the most recent article from ClickZ called "Sender Line More Important Than Subject Line."

Read it. Implement it

As the most effective form of branding-oriented advertising on the Internet, rich media spending will rise at a strong and steady pace. Rich media's effectiveness is supported by the continued strong uptake of broadband access, both in the home and at work. Those factors are behind eMarketer's spending projections, which show U.S. rich media ad spending passing the $1 billion mark in 2003 and approaching the $2 billion range by the end of 2005. The New York-based research company expects spending will grow by 31.9% this year, and by next year rich media ad spending will make up more than one in five of the total online ad dollars spent in the U.S. If you don't believe eMarketer about rich media's effectiveness, consider that rich media ads get a click-through rate more than five times higher than for nonrich media, as DoubleClick reported in October 2003.

I'm trying to compile a list of all of viable "Internet & Technology Industry" sites to which one could submit articles for publication, for the purpose of knowledge sharing, and, of course, business building & development. From what I've been able to gather, many consultants or people who run smaller 'agency type' firms could directly benefit from this type of publicity and credibility boosting. (please correct me if I'm wrong)

Also, does anyone's opinion differ greatly? Do you feel that this the 'publishing exercise' is a complete waste and provides no benefit? I'm very curious.

So far, I've put together the list you see below:

1. Marketing Profs
2. Line 56
3. CIO Insight
4. ClickZ

I'm always a fan of shameless self promotion for your business. I'm happy to have run across this little article by Judy Cullins on why you should be writing and publishing articles as one tactic to help promote and build your business.

Judy outlines the benefits of giving a little to gain a lot in return.

1. Writing articles brings free publicity.
2. Publishing articles is an effective means of positiong you as an expert.
3. You receive global attention when articles are web-based.
4. The more exposure your articles get, the more you are perceived as an expert.

There are a couple more...check out the article.

The only problem I have with this, is that I have yet to directly correlate my publishing with business. Granted, I was only doing a little freelance, but still, I see how they matter from a positioning perspective, but I'm not 100% convinced that publications actually drive business upward.

Oddly enough, Bonnie Jo Davis has a similar article titled Reaping The Amazing Benefits Of Writing E-Zine Articles, which has a few more reasons why you should be doing all of the above.

I recently attended a presentation where one of the speakers talked about how their weather-dependent products were being marketed very well on weather sites where the demographic targeting is almost done by default (for starteers, you have to enter your zip code or city to get your weather, not something advertisers get with most web properties). The results were almost unreal, and so was the ability to target.

For example, if you live in the Northeast, and your zipcode is one that just had a weather report of snow, a company could have demographic triggers set on their advertisements for shovels, snowblowers, fireplaces, snowmobiles or whatever winter gadget you're selling, and present the snow-struck weather seekers with precisely targetted ads. Brilliant.

Weatherbug, one of the leaders in getting online advertisers into this targeted space, just published four (4) of their targeting lessons in an interview with iMedia Connection.

Lesson #1: Online demographic targeting really does work.
Lesson #2: Use Internet applications to target large, loyal audiences.
Lesson #3: Target people in their world.
Lesson #4: Target outside the box.

Adverblog: Registration: the key to successful targeting

Media Post just reported on a soon-to-be-released Gartner report is predicting that "advergaming"- simply defined as games that incorporate marketing content-is set to surge in the months ahead.

Advergaming online seems to be gaining in popularity, and why shouldn't it! What really bugs me though, is that people are coming at it saying it's such a new thing. It's not. It's a basic human interest to be engaged and entertained, even more so in today's media driven economy. Games come in all forms, sweepstakes, lottery, chance, and those funky useless tricks you see going on in the middle of the mall where if you throw something into the window of a truck you win a prize.

More to the point, combine several of the elements listed above with your advergame, like we did with the KI NeoCon matching game. We already know that sweepstakes drive traffic and conversions, and there's now evidence that advergaming does as well. Put them together, and you're damn near unstopable!