A few vocal members in these online marketing communities argue that these customers just don’t get it, posting customer email threads, bemoaning how unskilled these customers are, etc.

Well – if you look at these sites, you see that many of the images that they use to reference these ebooks look just like a physical book – actually, a book with a customized cover. Its no wonder the customer expected a book when the site shows a book – even if the site copy states electronic book.

And if you are targeting a niche market, it is wrong to expect that since they are online they understand how to download, save and possibily install something.

Yes – it is more profitable to sell bits – an electronic book costs next to nothing to distribute. But digital doesn’t work for everyone, so the solution isn’t bits or atoms – its both. Offering a digital and physical version of the product meets the needs of all users, increases customer satisfaction and reduces chargebacks.

The intro made a compelling argument how atoms would ultimately give way to bits, forever changing the way we acquire, access and utilize products and information. Being a member of PC Magazine, this was extremely important to me – it foretold the death of the publishing industry, no?

Given this backdrop, it seems that the death of atoms [at least for publishers] may be a little premature – even today. Looking at the most recent PC magazine and Maximum PC issues, it seems that Adsense has gone atomic.

Google took out full page ads in both of these publications and resold the space to adsense customers, allowing these companies to gain a foothold into publications at a fraction of the cost. Publish.com did a writeup on it, complete with interviews with the adsense participants. The ads can be viewed online as well.

I remember talking about this very strategy many years ago at a PC Magazine editors day dinner with some industry ad execs in Boston. Bridging the gap – I mentioned – between online banner ads and magazine ad space from an online perspective seemed an exciting proposition and a unique position unmet by existing ad networks. I got polite nods and a few ahhs from it, but nothing materialized.

That is, until now. Chalk another one up for Google.

While that change caused many sites to be dropped from search results, many came back in a few months – prompting a never ending stream of conspiracy theories and chicken little warnings about an impending change – my site is falling!

But – I digress. According to Google PageRank is more than alive and kicking – in their own words “PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools”. Techies may want to read some whitepapers on the topic – Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brins stanford paper is a good place to start.

So understanding Pagerank and monitoring your sites PR ranking is a good idea. How do you find your rank? Best way is from the google toolbar – install it in your browser and accept the advanced functions version (different terms for firefox and internet explorer users – but you get the picture). Once pagerank is installed, surf to a popular page (anonymous surfing online perhaps?) and look at the bar. As I write this, netcloak.com has a PageRank of 5 – which could change as time progresses. Yahoo.com has a PageRank of 9 and a lot more traffic than netcloak – so it ranks higher.

There are other browser toolbars that report pagerank – Quirk has a firefox extension that reports PageRank and Alexa rank – another site popularity ranking system. Alexa has come under fire of privacy / spyware advocates – but it does provide another useful view of the surfing cosmos. Quirk has a anonymous mode that uses anonymizer.net – but there is a slight delay in retrieving the ranks and if anonymizer is overtaxed / offline no ranking is reported. Another nit – the pagerank results in quirk are sometimes different than the pagerank results from the google bar – in one situation, quirk incorrectly reported a site as unranked (meaning that the site was removed from google) while google reported otherwise. So if you’re trading pagerank stories, make sure that your using the same source – otherwise, you may be in for a shock [no more chicken little links ] . Quirk is at version 1.11 right now, so one can’t be too critical of the tool just yet – besides, it provides a lot of other good info in a small amount of screen space.

Does Pagerank matter? It seems to matter to Google – perhaps less than before flordia, but important nevertheless. PageRank may not be the end all metric, but it is one to watch – and its better to have some information that nothing at all.

Of interest to me is the folding of MSN into the platforms group. It’s no secret that MS and Google are not the best of friends, and for all the api / standardization efforts that Microsoft has issued over the years, very few internet centric MS APIs have gained any traction. (passport, anyone?)

While I welcome the release of APIs on the net, I can’t help but wonder if it is a case of “too little, too late”. If a more advanced MSN search API was available, it would be nice – but all the traffic is elsewhere. I believe that sea change would be necessary for people to choose MSN over google, but playing the platform card and providing advanced APIs to leverage that platform is Microsofts strong suit.

All I can say is – let the games begin.

Jim Galley

I’ve read in many online marketing areas that blogs are important for SEO (search engine optimization), google rankings, etc. Mind you, I’m not that interested in exposing the world to yet another meaningless list of blog postings, but i’ll try to make the content somewhat interesting.

With what, you may ask? Well, I’m certian that you’ve read everywhere that making money online is the thing to do. The question is… how?

See, I’ve been involved with technology for a few rounds now – spanning back to pdp-11′s. You graying geeks out there will undoubtedly know what that is. I’ve been executive director of PC Magazine Labs though the heydays of the personal computer revolution – seen alot, met some pretty famous people (yes I met him too) and learned alot in the process.

Was in the mix with the dotcom boom (& bust) and deployed a lot of technology. I’ve got some patents under my belt, and have dealt with quite a few venture capitalists in my day.

Nice history lession, but why is this applicable?

Online marketing is a mix (some say unholy mix) of technology, marketing basics, and – dare I say – some old fashion hucksterism. Lots of money (or the promise of) is to be made from feeding people information – either by (re)selling digital goods (read: ebooks) , creating nanoportals with targeted niche information (via rss or content), or creating communities with backend commerce opportunities. If this sounds so 90′s think again: the technology, affiliate models and ad networks used this time around is many times better.

I’ll be hitting all the approaches and (hopefully) finding the pitfalls before they arise. I’ll document what I can as time progresses. So – can a technologist survive in this land of opportunity? We’ll see.