We will be upgrading the ad server this weekend with hopefully little if any downtime. So if you notice any problems give it a couple of hours before getting in touch.
The upgrade appears to have taken without any problems. We have also enabled geo-targeting.
We’ve put together some RSS subscriber icons so that you aren’t stuck with the orange one that ships with the plugin. Just pick the one you want, upload it to wp-content/plugins/fedafi/ and rename it background.png
Download the zip file with them all in here.
Having been involved in the ad industry one of the things I brought with me to Fedafi was the industries love of simplicity when it comes to media buying and tracking. Today Clickz report how brand advertisers are bashing Google’s efforts to get into the brand sector.
But many big brands and their agencies are resisting these efforts, and for a simple reason: Google insists on trafficking and reporting all the ads itself.
In new media firms there’s only two names they want to know to do this Doubleclick and Atlas. People in new media understand these two, they use them every day and don’t want to add a third, especially for a small portion of their budget.
Brand marketing using RSS will be big in the future, I wrote about this a few days ago and it’s because of the different objectives of brand vs direct marketing.
Even so we all need to provide services in a way they can easily consume them. It’s why we went to great lengths to make sure our adserver would work hand in hand with both DoubleClick and Atlas. I’m sure Google will catch up because the lure of big bucks for them will be too great to insist their platform is what should be used.
If you are wondering if the Fedafi Wordpress Plugin is compatible with the new 2.1 version of Wordpress, well - it is!
We’ve tested and can’t see any problems, if you find any let us know.
As reported by Read/Write Web Syndicate IQ has closed its doors. Syndicate provided services similar to Feedburner. I agree with Richard that this isn’t a problem with the ’space’ - I’m guessing that’s the new word for industry (the business you are in) - publisher services, more a problem of business models and expectations.
Post bubble 2000 the web became real, small businesses could succeed with good business skills, great ideas and a good business model. Today it is much more difficult, many ’spaces’ have people who don’t necessarily have those three qualities - but they do have the ability to raise VC - just like the pre-bubble firms of 1999.
This means the firms with good business skills, ideas and models have to sit around and wait for the VC funded firms to burn through their cash or find new ways to compete. Unfortunately Syndicate IQ wasn’t able to wait any longer and I feel for them.
Syndicate won’t be the last in this space, looking at some of our competitors blogs that haven’t been updated for months you begin to wonder and that is bad for the space, we need good ideas and they won’t be coming from the behemoths of this industry.
The action in publisher services will come from around the edges rather than a frontal attack. The problem is that we are not hitting enough of the edges.
What it does mean is that the smaller, non-VC funded firms have to really work hard, innovate and move quickly.
Yesterday Google released an updated policy for Adsense users. Some changes and you can read the source here and the real deal here.
Most important change is competitive ads, you can still have them on your blog as long as they can’t be confused with Google ads
In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.
We have just released v1.0.2 of the Fedafi RSS Wordpress Plugin, download it here.
The new release has some feature changes, code optimization and bug fixes.
New Features
Bug Fixes
We recommend everyone updates to the latest version. Please report any bugs here.
If you use the default Wordpress permalink structure for your blog then many people may subscribe to your current feed using an URL something like this
domain.com/?feed=rss2
If you install the Fedafi Wordpress Plugin you need to redirect this to the new feed so that your subscribers don’t get lost.
To do this you need to add code similar to this in your sites .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^feed=(rss2)$
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://yourdomain.com/rss.php? [R,L]
Guy Kawasaki posted about the amount he gets through advertising from his blog, more of a ‘here’s the numbers make of it what you will’ than a ‘look at me’ type of post and very useful it was. This has lead to quite a conversation, including one about us here at Vecosys.
What is interesting is that some, like Vecosys have risen above the mire of ‘you don’t know what you are talking about’ and considered the whole ‘blog advertising’ arena.
Alan Patrick at Broadstuff has just written on the subject with an interesting take on banners vs search, likening blogs to the old magazine media. Much is being made of metrics and for those who have them they are a powerful tool. But, my thoughts are that blog advertsing in particular is more like product placement. Especially for the long tail.
I think savvy marketers won’t be looking for ‘goal conversions’ they will have a much more subtle approach to blogs. Like product placement in movies the long tail can achieve the same with their engaged readership. Pay per post on the other hand will become the product plug.
Now of course I would say that, having just started an ad network for feeds, but I would have said it anyway and my goal for our network is to get people using the exchange system. This way many will build their subscriber list telling others about blogs worth reading.
Back to the point, if the most powerful endorsement is a personal one then it follows that placement within a conversation also carries some of that power. The RSS feed is the channel conversations use to travel, they are different to the blog itself. In fact for many it’s the only point of contact with the blogger. It follows that impersonal Google ads are a flat plug, like interrupting a pub conversation with your mates and making a sales pitch.
A banner ad from a company you’ve chosen is more like a placement. Imagine how Pepsi would like it if every time guests came around you got Pepsi out? Okay not every time, but sometimes 
If you like Pepsi and your friends like you it then becomes more difficult for them to dislike Pepsi, in consumer behavior this creates a triangle of love, because disliking Pepsi means they may have to dislike you. Hence celebrity endorsements and product placement, you like Tom Cruise so if he drinks Pepsi you have to like Pepsi - way too simplistic but you get the idea.
That’s the niche for banners in the long tail.
If a blogger ‘endorses’ a company/product and I like the blogger then maybe that will go some way to win the battle for my mind for that product type. Wash, rinse and repeat and over time brand positioning can be achieved.
We hope that our network grows, last year over 1.5 million copies of Wordpress were downloaded and we want every last one of them using our plugin and using it to build up their own personal subscriber list. Then, when they are ready we will have a network that is unique, a way for the likes of Pepsi to reach into thousands of households by personal endorsement.
Disclaimer, I hate Pepsi.
We are just finishing off working on the next release of the Wordpress plugin that will add to the statistics engine to give more accuracy and detail, allowing you to drill down by day. One thing that has made all of the work much tougher is the lack of standardization regarding information supplied by user agents.
Some, such as Netvibes, Pageflakes, Bloglines and more have used a standard format, like this:
Service_Name/release (http://www.domain.com; 1 subscriber)
This is great, it says who and how many. However others seem to use their own standard, such as:
FeedLounge (http://dl0.feedlounge.com/), 1 subscribers, next refresh in approx. 3600 seconds
Others don’t supply any subscriber information, such as
Excite Europe Feed Agent (http://mix.excite.co.uk/)
Come on Excite, let us know how many people are reading, we want to know.
I know some ‘user agent purists’ will say that subscriber details shouldn’t be there, but they are and will continue to be added, let’s just hope they add in a standard way.
Anyway, here’s a sneak preview at the new stats engine;
