You can read the details here but they have appealed as of Jan 14th.  I would be suprised if Bill cant grease the wheels on this one.

I wanted to give be-a-magpie a whirl and see how quickly you could set it up. I decided to try and market a site most people on Twitter would never write about to see how the crowd would react (and to see if they would even notice). I went to the campaign creation page, input ‘lawsuit’ into the keyword field and then clicked a few of thier suggestions that automatically propogated the field. I then added the title ‘lawsuit funding’ and then filled in the ad text ‘http://www.lawsuitfunding.com for Plaxico”, hit save and the ad went pending. The site requested me to add funds to my newly created account through a provided paypal link (the paypal link goes to the german site and the text is in German). After adding funds to my account I waited and checked the time, 3:30pm it took about 2 minutes all told. Here are a few screen shots of the process. 

The site did take some time to load once I hit save but it eventually went through. 

I am curious to see if anyone picks up on the paid tweet ‘http://www.lawsuitfunding.com for Plaxico’ as it should be pretty easy to spot and at the same time keeps in line with some current news regarding the New York Giants wide reciever, for those outside of the US he is a sports athlete who recently shot himself in the leg. 

After 17 minutes the ‘waiting for approval’ section updated to approved and it looks as though the campaign is live. An email also was sent to update me on the approval.

Two Hours later the system still shows as 0 ads served. Anyone out there see the spot yet? If not I will need to adjust the budget to kick this off more.

3 hours and nothing yet…

I just received the first shipment from StartupSchwag. They send out promo items from startups to people who are interested in this normally free stuff for a small 14.95 fee. I was excited to get my hands on the package as I have been waiting for it since signing up for the service after reading the post about it on TechCrunch.

While I was aware that this would confirm all my thoughts that I have regressed into total dorkville I was eagerly waiting with much anticipation. I was hoping to find cool new companies, interesting items, and something that really kicked things off.

Boy was I disappointed. The package was sent in a typical USPS priority mail bag and looked like it had been through a long journey. I immediately opened the bag to see a glowing green shirt bearing the TechCrunch logo. I then realized there was no paperwork or any other information in the bag. I almost missed the 3 stickers and foam star that were accompanying the shirt.

I don’t have pics at this time but will add them shortly. While I may have had high expectations I would of though a little thank you note or welcome note would be appropriate. Also why not something that explains the companies on that same sheet, I am sure the companies would gladly provide a quick description of what they offer.

I was tempted to immediately cancel the subscription but I am going to give it one more chance. Hopefully they had some internal issues that have been worked out otherwise I cannot see Startup Schwag gaining much momentum.

Microsoft Demographics Prediction Tool.

It is always useful to know your audience so tools like this are always welcome. They are not 100% accurate like most tools but they offer an insight and a good ballpark range. Sometimes its fun just to mess around and see what it spits out.

Thanks to Marketing Lane for the tip.

A time has come and gone with Joost. No need to request invites!

They have been using the private beta as a way to get people interested in the site for about 2 years. They have finally pulled the plug on the exclusivity and are allowing anyone who wants to check out their system access. It was an amazing marketing feat that they were able to get so much attention to a closed and invite only platform. I doubt they would have had the same success and amount of users had they done this from the beginning.

This reminds me of the little kids on the playground that only want something that they cant have, once they obtain the object it doesnt provide them with much gratification. This was the case with Joost, a neat concept and a very real possible market mover but as of now it is still on the playground.

SubvertandProfit is known for allowing people to buy “diggs’ on the popular digg.com news site. Today they opened up the marketplace so advertisers can buy positive ‘thumb up’ from StumbleUpon for any url of their choice. The first thing you would think of is that the here comes the spam, while that may be a valid concern to some I do not think this will have much if any effect on Stumbleupon and the users. StumbleUpon would of been riddled with spam long ago if it allowed direct URL votes to count into its system.

Here is the screen shot of the basic field that advertisers will use when filling out a request and below are the guidelines direct from Subvert. Its pretty basic, they fund the account and buy stumbles for 1 dollar.

StumbleUpon Guidelines

User

• It is ok to thumbs up stories that you were not assigned with your account. In fact, we encourage you to do so.
• You may have stories to thumbs up even if we don’t email you.

Advertiser

• Please note that in order to avoid detection by StumbleUpon, we spread out votes on your content over the course of several days.
• Please limit the number of votes you buy for a particular URL to 30 per week.
• If you have a site with multiple pages, try to split up the votes between some of the pages. For example, if you run a blog, you could buy votes for both your homepage and individual posts.
• We reserve the right to reject any advertisement!

Most of us who have been doing actual advertising on Stumble (you can buy placement for 5 cents directly from Stumble) have noticed that a direct thumbs up does not drive traffic in the way that one does if it was sent by the Stumble toolbar. This means that if you go directly to a site and thumbs up it the vote doesnt count as much (or any) as it would if it happened naturally through someone stumbling.
What this means is that this attempt to game StumbleUpon does not work and will have almost no impact on the community. There is some talk that if you send a url to a friend then it shows up in their toolbar and if they then thumbs up the site it counts in full. This has not been confirmed yet.

This might work for Digg but StumbleUpon will probably not be affected by this. This battle may have been over before it began.

I think eBay is in the wrong here, and Google took the high road when they could of played this game and everyone would of lost, especially eBay.
You can read more over at TC.

Here is another image of the small ad, notice the lower right hand

button.

I just logged into an Adwords account that I manage and saw the above image. Click the image to see the larger legible version. I did not sign up for the beta access to this product and really don’t know much about it. It is very interesting though. I know Google was having a difficult time getting into traditional advertising outlets such as newspaper and radio but this look like a big step forward in that direction.

If I choose to ‘Learn More’ I am taken to this page.

I am not really interested in Radio spots as I have tried them in the past with zero results. I am interested to see Google’s approach on this so I may be looking into this in the future. Especially if they are willing to foot the initial bill, they are offering a 400 dollar credit to try out the system.

Here is a quick Overview:

• Google Launches Audio Ads (Radio Ads for now)
• Google will credit you 400 bucks if you create and run a spot by June 30, 2007
• the Audio Ads FAQ’s