The web has long been rich in social and viral marketing elements.

Email this to a friend, social bookmarking, blogging, etc. So many services have popped up that now there is a Social Media Firefox Extension and Andy Hagans is planning his fake review optimization service.

Ultimately the communities that are focused on a niche and editorially biased will be successful while aggregator websites that are nothing more than a feature that Google can add to their suite of services will die.

Google quitely launched a Digg clone, and is aiming to create the underlying platform that powers most social networks. And they might bid on wireless spectrum in the US and UK.

As the leading portals collect more data they will be able to add value to more transactions and disintermediate middlemen by employing creative individuals to do jobs that were once done in offices.

If people get paid for results then the quality of work goes up. Think of portals as television stations vying for a bite of your attention for as long as they possibly can, and looking to pay you for your attention with relevancy, and cash if you are really motivated.
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Federal Trade Commission is conducting a Town Hall meeting to discuss several topics on Behavioral Targeting and Online Privacy. This is your chance to participate in the panel and have your voice heard.

This two-day Town Hall will bring together consumer advocates, industry representatives, technology experts, and academics to address the consumer protection issues raised by the practice of tracking consumers’ activities online to target advertising - or “behavioral advertising.” It will be held November 1-2, 2007 at the FTC Conference Center at 601 New Jersey Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC. It is free and open to the public.

The Commission invites interested parties to submit requests to be panelists and to recommend other topics for discussion. The requests should be submitted electronically to behavioraladvertising_requests@ftc.gov by September 14, 2007. The Commission will select panelists based on expertise and the need to represent a range of views about the issues. Panelists selected to participate will be notified by October 5, 2007.

Topics at the Town Hall will include:
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Consider your ad copy as it stands right now.

If you didn’t have any graphics at all in your ad copy, as it is written right now, without changing it at all, could you still sell your products and/or services? The answer: probably, but because the internet is such a highly visual place, the number of sales that you’d be able to generate without graphics would be staggeringly lower.
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The advertising methods that I am about to talk about are a reflection of what I have tried on my blog from time to time.

I would also like to point out that I don’t like to drown my website with ads because I believe it completely takes away from the user experience.
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The Internet has evolved quite a lot over the past few years. The Internet is no longer a mysterious place.

The Internet is now an established viable place to do business and with that all the problems of making your business stand out from the crowd online. Most companies choose Pay Per Click advertising to promote their business or service online due to its accountability and performance. However, the time has come that it is no longer as simple as bidding on keywords and watching the sales come in. Many companies are now outsourcing the complexities of their Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. Here I will outline the top reasons a company should outsource their PPC campaign. In no particular order:
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The issue of HTML email versus text email usually raises heated debate amongst those involved in email advertising.

For some people, feelings about HTML-formatted email have changed over time.

However there are a number of issues that one should take into consideration before making a decision either for or against sending HTML email in their advertising campaign. It may show to be a successful way of advertising, but then on the other hand it could be a pain to the ones on the receiving end.

To start with, not everybody has the ability to receive HTML Email, which is a very important factor for anybody involved in email advertising to take note of. It is estimated that over 30 per cent of email users are not able to receive HTML Email. HTML may show up unreadable or in non-standard fonts, clashing colours, badly formatted images and sometimes there is no quick or easy way to adjust appearance to be read. However it is also a fact that this figure is reducing by the day.
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