Comic Relief taps social media campaign
The organisers behind this year's Red Nose Day have launched the charity's biggest ever assault designed to engage and communicate using social media tools.
Comic Relief is running promotions on Bebo for a "Big Bebo Takeover", encouraging users to design a red homepage for the social networking site this coming Friday.
Google embeds YouTube videos in AdSense
Google is testing a version of AdSense that includes YouTube video ads, hinting at the next step in the search giant's efforts to monetise the $1.65bn video network.
A new Flash-based 300x250 AdSense unit includes text links as well as a 250x200 embedded YouTube video. The test ad is "Gmail Theatre" - a low-budget video spot that is hosted on YouTube and trails Google's own email service, which dropped its invite-only barrier last month.
Podcast suite Odeo goes up for sale
Web-based podcasting application Odeo has been put up for sale, just months after founder Evan Williams led a management buy-out of the project from investors.
Williams wrote: "We've put too much into Odeo to want to see it fade away. And it still has tons of potential. But we're not improving it fast enough."
Pheedo launches 'FeedPowered' ads
Pheedo, an RSS ad network, has announced the launch of its FeedPowered ad platform, which enables marketers to use text and video RSS content within ad widgets.
FeedPowered ads are on-site advertisements which can present updated text, video or audio from any RSS feed.
Funding round puts poll marketing centre-stage
Web polling firm Vizu has received a $2.9m investment that aims to do for market researchers what AdSense does for advertising.
The investment, led by $1.5m from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, will go toward the just-launched Vizu Answers.The service allows marketers to create multiple-choice polls that appear on partner sites around the world.
Q&A: Snipperoo’s Ivan Pope on brand widgets
Ivan Pope is the CEO of Snipperoo, based in Brighton. Launched last year, it aggregates widgets for end-users to place in their blogs, social networking pages and other websites. It is also planning to launch an API which it hopes will ease the large-scale distribution of widgets for content producers.
With some expecting 2007 to be the 'Year of the Widget', we asked Ivan what online retailers and advertisers can do to get in on the act.
Startup silenced - Talkr up for sale
Talkr, a text-to-speech web service that lets readers listen to written blog posts, has put itself up for sale after failing to turn a profit in two years.Founder Chris Brooks revealed that 2,173 bloggers had bought into the service but that only 1,179 of them had agreed to accept audio advertising in the posts that Talkr converts.
MyBlogLog enhances Yahoo!'s social strategy
Yahoo! is buying web community service MyBlogLog for over $10m, Forbes reports .Launched in 2005 by Cloudspace, a group of five dispersed across the US, MyBlogLog allows users to carry a badge of themselves around the web that is added to sites for fellow browsers to see when they visit.
Bebo adds widgets
Social network Bebo is partnering with Photobucket, Rockyou and Slide to offer the site's users the ability to add simple, secure and viral widgets to their profiles.
For the first time, Bebo users can select photos from their personal profiles, create their widget of choice, and display it on their Bebo profile with a series of simple clicks.
Yahoo! links up with homepage provider
Former Google France boss Franck Poisson has hooked up with Yahoo!, which will provide advertising and search services on Webwag, his new customisable homepage venture.
The deal will see Webwag displaying sponsored links from Yahoo!, as well as launching what it claims is the sector’s first ‘personal wide web’ search feature – through which users can sift through their chosen content as well as the web as a whole.
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Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
