Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

Mark Zuckerberg tried his darndest yesterday to shroud the mass commercialization of Facebook users’ private lives as empowering Facebookers so they “now have a way to connect with things they are passionate about,” i.e. products and businesses.

YAY? Have the world’s college students, and the tech blogosphere, really been clamoring to “friend” Coca-Cola and Blockbuster, and seeking ways to add dancing corporate mascots to their personal, supposedly private profiles.

NO! Nevertheless, a determined Zuckerberg plows on, reminding: We are an ad-supported service, guys, giving our prouduct away for free to users!

YES! And a $15 billion dollar valuation must be justified with a purported revolutionary advertising platform that puts a big, bad FOR SALE sign around the neck of every single Facebooker, down to the last 50 millionth one.

Facebook is, not surprisingly, disingenuous with its own users about how the new Zuckerberg dream marketer system will actually change the so-called “trusted” Facebook online social graph.

Zuckerberg and team routinely hail Facebook as mirroring how people interact in the real, offline world.  REALLY?

Are Facebookers walking around with signs hawking neighborhood restaurants and pitching the latest Coca-Cola product introduction to every last one of their friends? NO! But Facebookers are now required to do so for Mark Zuckerberg, as quid-pro-quo for the high-priced bandwidth he is shelling out for to keep the vaunted social graph in action.

Facebook nevertheless says point blank to users: “Facebook will never sell any of your information AND You will always have control over your information and your experience AND Advertisers never have access to what social actions accompany their ads.” Such is NOT the Facebooker case, however.

The Facebook demo below clearly shows how a Facebooker is unwittingly used, personal photo and all, as an unpaid product spokesperson, sold by Facebook to a high-bidding marketer for the good of the Facebook bottom-line.

Facebook’s pitch for markters belies its disclaimers to users, showing how Facebook WILL tell advertisers “exactly who is engaging with your business, and how”:

Facebook’s robust database of authentic demographic information provides you deep understandings. From the performance of your social ads to the viral distribution rate of stories about your business, Facebook Insights helps you learn more about your target audience.

That target Facebook audience will soon have a deep understnding of Mark Zuckerberg’s intentions: THE FREE RIDE IS OVER!

MORE: Facebook To Users: We Know How YOU Live, Work, Play, Vote… and IAB Blasts FTC: Cookie Police Threaten $20 billion Internet Ad Economy, Ad-Tech Report

PLUS: YES! Facebook IS Scarier Than Google!

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Mark Zuckerberg believes he is on to something, BIG: The next 100 years of advertising. Of course, the Facebook maven can think SO long-term, he is but a mere 23!

What will Zuckerberg’s 50 million Facebookers think, however, when they know he is giddily boasting to advertisers that Facebook knows “exactly” what they do, where they are, where they work, how they vote…

“Advertisers can connect with users by creating a presence on Facebook and targeting the exact people they want.” Once Facebook allows marketers to “target” its 50 million users, and converts the targeted Facebookers, Facebook renames the ad targets “trusted referrals” for brands.

Facebook Pages represents the “brand as friend”; Facebook has unleashed 100,000 such commercial profile pages for corporate products, businesses, organizations and bands. While Zuckerberg hails Facebook Pages as a ”social graph” production, MySpace has long hosted brands as friends pages.

Facebook’s “Beacon” social distribution unveiling is also not quite revolutionary, an application/widgets sharing system for third party Websites aiming to integrate off-Facebook transactions within Facebook.

The third leg of Facebook’s advertising push is “Social Ads,” which further commercializes users news feeds, again not a truly “completely new way of advertising online.”

While Zuckerberg gives an old college try to portray the increasing efforts of Facebook to monetize the private lives of 50 million users as a weighty moment in history, he doesn’t need to try so hard: Facebook’s impressive roster of launch advertising partners speaks to BIG marketer interest.

The real test for Facebook will be user interest, or not, however. After all, social ads, by definition, can not fucntion if they are not socialized with.

MORE: Facebook Puts Freeloader Users On Sale To Highest Bidders!

PLUS: YES! Facebook IS Scarier Than Google!

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

As more readers are deemed to be trading newspapers for Websites, the Associated Press has sued VeriSign’s Moreover Technologies news aggregation unit, claiming it is making improper use of AP’s copyright-protected headlines, stories and photos.

Tom Curley, AP CEO: Our organization “spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually to provide original coverage of vital breaking news that cannot be obtained elsewhere.” Nevertheless, Moreover is wantonly “freeriding on our newsgathering and our reporting of news from around the world.”

Curley has recently made sure another online news aggregation freeloader paid up, Google News!

SEE: What Google News? AP: Google Plays Second Fiddle to Yahoo 

BUT, Did Curley end up negotiating a bum deal for AP with the world’s number one search engine. After all, he advised the Columbia School of Journalism last week that “The portals are runing off with our best stuff, and we’re afraid or unable to make or enforce deals that drive fair value.”

SEE: Associated Press: Smart, or NOT, with Google, Yahoo Deals

What about Curley’s exhortation to Columbia Journalism that if the founders of AP, many moons ago, had seen a Google, a Yahoo or a Facebook, “they would have figured out what to do about them.”

Curley assures HE knows what to do NOW: 

Lest you think we’re going off the deep end and giving it away for free, we have strong new efforts to protect news Web sites from unauthorized scraping through tighter site protocols and content tagging.

SO, will Curley be taking advantgage of the just launched Attributor “Content Monitoring and Analysis Platform” TO SUE GOOGLE FOR PROFITEERING OFF OF ADSENSE COPYRIGHT ABUSE OF AP OWNED PROPERTY? 

The Associated Press has been “tracking the use of AP content across the Internet” with Attributor since May. Now that Attributor has moved from beta to open for real business, will Curley follow-up on his call to monetization arms last week, and his lawsuit against VerisSign for copyright infringement.

In Attributor Launch Blasts AdSense Pirating: Google Beware yesterday, I present the Attibutor sales pitch for its service, it is an anti-Google AdSense one, big time, despite Attributor’s assertion that it does not wish to be a “copyright cop.”

Attributor proudly hails “to safeguard its intellectual property rights, the Associated Press is already implementing Attirbutor’s technology,” to combat the “plagiarist’s paradise” that is the Web.

The Wild, Wild, Web, according to Attributor:

Many sites will repost large chunks of content without any licensing agreement or even attribution. The ability to instantly monetize Web pages has spawned a nwe generation of plagiarists, with millions of splogs (spam blogs) using RSS feeds to automatically scrape content for financial gain.

Attributor underscores it “empowers publishers to send DMCA takedown notices” and seek the removal of copied content from search engines. The benefits to the AP are clear, Attibutor notes: “With greater visibility into where its content goes, the AP can more efficiently track and pursue unauthorized usage of its content.”

HOW WILL CURLEY PURSUE THE UNAUTHORIZED USAGE OF AP CONTENT AT GOOGLE ADSENSE SUPPORTED SPLOGS?

Google also profits from the AdSense-supported plagiarism plague via its sale of high-priced AdWords at  Google.com, as Attibutor’s evidence of top SERP ranking of splogs illustrates.

Curley laid down the copyright infringement gauntlet last week, will he soon fire the next AP lawsuit against AdSense-supported, unauthorized online resuers of AP content, thanks to Attributor?

After all, Attributor advises ”Google is unacceptable to publishers” and is suffering from a “prisoners dilemma.”

MORE: Attributor Launch Blasts AdSense Pirating: Google Beware

PLUS: Google To World: Give YouTube Your Videos, NOW! and NBC’s Defense Against YouTube IP Abuse? Carrot, NOT Stick: OMMA Report  and NBC Still Booming on YouTube: Google Lawsuit Next? 

ALSO AP Sues VeriSign: News Aggregation ‘Business Model’ at Risk and Ad-Tech: BuzzLogic Latest to Push Google AdSense 

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Attributor changes its status today, and its attitude.

A stealth-mode startup in May, co-founder and CEO Jim Brock told me the $10 million VC backed “online content originality” play was determined to provide “visibility” on the Web’s copyright content DNA. As Attributor unveils its Web-wide content monitoring and analysis platform to the public today, Rich Pearson, of the Attributor Biz Dev team, described to me how publishers of copyright material may soon be fighting for their rights, for links.

In pitching its services to Web content creators, Attributor rallies around the Web’s economy, the link-based one, reiterating the Web’s question du jour: “How can I get links that drive traffic and help my rank in seach engines?”

Attributor promises, “with just a dew clicks, you can answer questions like”:

Who is putting ads on my content, and can I share in the profit?
How can I get more links to my site when my content shows up on other sites and social networks?
Which of my articles or images are being used most?
And which of them create the most links and clicks to my site?

Attributor monitors the Internet for copies of orignal publisher content, scanning billions of Web sites, blogs and social networks so publishers can “learn how and where their content moves across the Internet.”

The Attributor value proposition: “At any time, view your dashboard to see who is copying your content.” Once the offending copied content is identified, Attributor is ready to launch automated, remedial link policing campaigns:

INCREASE TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE BY ADDING LINKS TO YOUR SITE
Links are part of the attribution you are entitled to from sites that copy your content. Here’s how we help build links to your site: First, we identify all pages copying your content but don’t link back to your original. Next, we automate the request process so you can send Link Requests to all sites that fail to link to you. The end result? More traffic to your site through the links that you secure plus improved rankings with the top search engines.

If Attributor’s link carrot approach doesn’t work, escalation to a DMCA stick is but one click away: Web sites, AND Google, beware:

Occasionally, a site copying your content refuses to add a link back to your site. Or you may not want your orignal content to appear anywhere other than on your site. You can use Attributor to send DMCA takedown notices to unauthorized sites, the companies hosting their content as well as the search engines and ad networks.

Attributor CEO Brock is firm:

Search engines should not link to pirated content.
Advertising networks should not profit from infringing content.

In fact, Attrinbutor has fighting words for Google, the proud owner/operator of both the number one search engine AND the number one online ad network: GOOGLE IS UNACCEPTABLE TO PUBLISHERS!

BUT is Google really in a “prisoners dilemma”? Quarter by quarter, does GOOG not reach for the clouds, along with CEO Eric Schmidt. Google is NOT fretting about whether it should “monetize or monitor,” but plotting about how to monetize MORE and monitor LESS!

Is there really any reason for Google to change its DMCA umbrella ways now? After all, how strong is a “Google is unaceptable to publishers” argument, if the very same publishers nevertheless worship the all mighty Google SEO/SERP/LINK Gods?

UPDATE: Tom Curley AP Crusade: Google AdSense Lawsuit Near? Thanks to Attributor

READ MORE: Associated Press: Smart, or NOT, with Google, Yahoo Deals and Google’s Gadget Ploy: The Web, Owned by GOOG

PLUS: Google To World: Give YouTube Your Videos, NOW! and NBC’s Defense Against YouTube IP Abuse? Carrot, NOT Stick: OMMA Report  and NBC Still Booming on YouTube: Google Lawsuit Next?

AND Ad-Tech: BuzzLogic Latest to Push Google AdSense

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Google’s claim to AdSense fame is that its two line text ads are “so well-matched, that your readers will actually find them useful.”

How useful will Anil Dash’s readers really find his blog’s plug for the “New Mac OS X Leopard” available now with free shipping direct from the Apple Store though? After all, the “Ads by Google” Apple OS ad may be color-coordinated to match Dash’s purple blog theme, but the product pitch certainly does not reflect the message his blog is sending today, i.e., “THE WORST THING ABOUT APPLE”

Dash on Apple:

Although I’ve been accused sometimes of reflexive contrariness, the truth is I’m just pretty consistent in my assessments of technology, with little regard for the perceptions of the companies or people who provide those technologies.

The best case in point I can use to illustrate this is an example of the worst thing about Apple. There is simply nothing less attractive than a person who is both flawed and smug, and apparently one of the few plausible justifications for treating corporations as legal persons is the fact that this holds true for companies as well. And Apple is a smug company.

The new version 10.5 of Mac OS X rather famously features a display when you’re browsing machines that appear to be running Microsoft Windows. The image deliberately uses an aged-looking monitor and a crashed computer as the illustration of your other computers. The disdain here isn’t for the unfortunate unwashed who have to suffer through Windows because they’re so clueless — it’s a snide shot at the other computers you own, or of your family’s other machines around the house, or of the computers of the peers you work with. In short, the derision is likely aimed at people who care a hell of a lot more about you and your boundless Mac-enhanced creativity than, say, the OS X team does.

Unfortunate Google AdSense advertising adjancencies are not only the Web’s bloopers, they underscore that contextual advertiisng is NOT a “solved problem,” not even for number one Google.

AdTech takes New York City by storm next week, perhaps there are some ad network disruptors in store  ready to deliver that ever elusive Google “killer.”

MORE ADSENSE BLOOPERS: Nick Carr Comes To His Senses: Goodbye Google AdSense!

PLUS: Business Plans Help the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid Go Down and YAY! Facebook Junk Now Open Social Web Free For All

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Facebook continues to be credited for changing the world, without having to do anything world changing!

The latest greatest Mark Zuckerberg creation? Facebook Flyers, the little ad platform that could!

Recently given the $5 personal stamp of approval by Forrester Research’s Charlene Li at the unofficial Facebook conference, Valleywag’s Owen Thomas now “strips” Facebook’s Flyers to uncover their true nature: A Google Killer App!

The “scoop”?

Like Google’s AdWords, Facebook Flyers Pro charges per click,,,and lets advertisers target by…are you listening, Google—keywords!!!!

YAY! Clicks & Keywords, an unstoppable Google killer then? NO!

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Yes William, BUT: “I know keywords, keywords are a friend of mine, Facebook Flyers keywords ARE NO Google AdWords keywords”? (credit, Lloyd Bensten)

WHY is Facebook NO Google?

GOOG lesson 101: Google ads are part and parcel of Google SERPs! Google ads are only provided to searchers actively looking for the products and services hawked by its “targeted, measurable” AdWords text ads! In other words, Google ads are a service that Google searchers rely on to fulfill their information needs. In the mighty words of all mighty Google, Google advertisiing “enhances the experience” of users.

Mark Zuckerberg lesson 101: Facebook Flyers are part and parcel of Facebook “social graph,”; i.e., they intrude upon Facebookers when they are trying to have their serious fun–Super Poke, What’s Your Stripper Name, Food Fight.

In the simplest terms, Facebook Flyers “target people” in their hghly personal space while Google AdWords fulfill people’s needs in their anonymous information space. In the world of Facebookers, Flyers are undoubtedly to be avoided AND the more “personal” they get, the more “creepy” they are likley to be deemed, i.e., how dare you “target” Suzie’s love for pet mice!

In the age of Google and for the legions of happy Googlers, however, Larry & Sergey are helpfully helping “organize the world” to make it a better place for all the world’s searchers, at Google.

What is Mark Zuckerberg promising for marketers’ $5? “Localized awareness” Hey, you get what you pay for!

PS: AdSense is also NO AdWords, AND Facebook Flyers are NO AdSense. Facebook can take solace, though, in the old number two Avis adage: WE TRY HARDER!
SEE :Facebook, the Web’s State Fair vs. LinkedIn, the Chamber of Commerce and Facebook Cold Shower: Zuckerberg NOT Killing Anything, 2% Internet Share

PLUS: Click Forensics CEO: Click Fraud Hits 28% for Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network and Google Nielsen TV Ads STILL Blurry: NOT AdWords for Television

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN