Controling the Point System - Free Ipods for everyone

Joseph Turow - Media buying, privacy, transparency, and the data enomomy.

From “When the Audience Clicks: Buying Attention in the Digital Age” presented at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Check out 68:28 for a lively discussion on my favorite behavioral targeting topic - coffee cup capitalism.

Where does food come from?

Flash Cookies - Taste Better than Browser Cookies

Have you ever wondered why sites like Pandora.com seam to know who you are - even if you deleted your browser cookies recently?

Up to 100k, difficult to find, non transparent, non expiring, not cleared by any browser “Clear / Delete Cookie” functions - Flash Cookies are oh so very sweet for collecting data - so much better than plain old browser based Cookies.

I have heard the stories of ADNETS using Flash to re-spawn browser cookies when a user deletes their browser Cookies; but I had no idea just how many sites are using Flash Cookies for tracking.

Viewing my own Flash cookies (hundreds of entries) I identified no less than a dozen ADNET’s, ad servers, and online marketer cookies. My bank is even using them - they don’t even have flash on their site… Check Your Flash Cookies yourself…

Want more… check out this wired article on Flash Cookies.

Reptilian Words - Words that work

The Persuaders - invading the privacy of our minds

I started reading Shoptimism by Lee Eisenberg a few days ago. I have only gotten through 50 pages - but so far it’s an interesting read on consumer marketing. An early section on the work of Vance Packard and his exploration (in the 1950’s) of consumer motivational research by social scientist working for advertising agencies reminded me of an incredibly insightful (and somewhat frightening) PBS FrontLine documentary on the same topic. If you have not seen The Persuaders - it’s mandatory viewing for anyone interested in advertising and if your not living off the grid on some atoll in the South Pacific you should be interested in advertising right now.

With respect to Online Advertising check out the narrowcasting section and how marketers and political parties have been working with data vendors (Axiom in this case) to customize their packaging / messaging for every consumer segment - with all the recent talk in the ad industry about customization, personalization, the consumer in charge; makes you think.

How do I build an online shopping site

Because of my job (which really has little to do with building e-commerce sites) friends and family in the offline retail space commonly asked me “how do I build an online shopping site”.

Actually, I have built a few of these sites over the past 10 years (www.velopro.com, www.vintagecotton.com) so I guess I have some background; at least I know some stuff about what not to do. Here are some helpful links / ideas about the topic I have come across over the past few years that may help someone out there on the interwebs.

Although I am providing several options – IMHO the most important thing about an online store is the relationship created with your customers / users. Focusing on this relationship is key to success – no matter what technology you are using. I would suggest using the 3rd party shopping sites and a fully hosted store, this will enable the business to move forward quickly. You can always build your own system later as needed. Most online shopping sites (most online businesses for that matter) never get to market; they fail before they ever sell anything online. It makes sense to build up the actual business first.

3rd Party shopping sites:
Even if you have your website, you will want to sell on these sites to acquire leads and customers which you can redirect to your own site / put on a newsletter for future sales. The cheapest way to acquire a customer is to get an existing customer to buy again.

www.Ebay.com
www.etsy.com
www.craigslist.com

Fully hosted online stores:
Building a commerce website, dealing with prject managers, coders, renting webservers, working with security and credit card vendors to support credit card transactions is a whole lot of work. Why not let someone else do this for you behind the scenes and focus on your core business. These are great services that are subscription based.

www.shopify.com
www.bigcartel.com

Online Store Platforms:
If the hosted store does not offer you enough flexibility, you can get your own server and use an off the shelf platform to build up your store. You will still need to work with a coder, credit card vendors, etc. but this is much less work than building a system by yourself. There are coders that specialize in these systems and can build up a store for you in a week or so of work.

www.oscommerce.com
www.zen-cart.com

Online Store from Scratch:
Sometimes an off the shelf system will not do. If you have ideas / features that are not available with of pre-existing services / products you need to build it yourself. This is not going to be a trivial task, you will need to mock out all the functionality, lease webspace, hire a coder, and make sure the coder implements what you have asked for. Or you could take 3-5 years and learn to code in your spare time like I did (not recommended). Either way, there is a whole lot of work here, it costs a lot, and something is always going wrong. But in the end you have exactly what you dreamed up.

www.Elance.com
www.rentacoder.com
http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/categories/looking-to-hire
http://php.net/

***UPDATED***
SitePoint has a good post on this topic at: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/12/07/hosted-shopping-cart-solutions/

Health care town hall meeting

Craigslist is Punk Rock

Asymmetry and Serendipity

Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows us why we are so bad at prediction. If this is your cup of tea go read Black Swan.