Marketing

I was reading an article this morning regarding the use of ARM-based chips in a number of devices including "smartbooks". It appears the industry would like you to now call those smaller and less powerful laptop computers a smartbook instead of netbook.

To describe these devices as a smartbook is idiotic marketing for two reasons. First, "netbook" is a term that has been around for two years and most people today recognize the term being applied to smaller sized notebooks. When you hear the question, "What is a smartbook?" it seems very natural to just answer by replying, "a smartbook is a netbook". Secondly, I have to say it's very moronic (worse than ironic) to call a dumbed-down notebook a smartbook. At least when you say "smartphone" it is in reference to increased functionality over the traditional mobile phone and not less functionality.

I do not like the word "smart" being attached to devices and applications that are far from actually being intelligent on their own. Is marketing that insecure in the devices they're selling that they need to attach the word "smart" to cover up their own lack of intelligence? I have a theory that any time we attach the word "smart" to software or devices it is inviting doom into our lives.

Good news for sites that make a little money by allowing advertising on their pages.  Though, personally I've seen a drop in online ad revenue despite not doing too bad with the number of visitors I'm getting.

Despite an economic turndown, online advertising--and search in particular--is managing to keep its market intact, according to reports on Tuesday by an industry trade group and Wall Street analyst. 

Complete Story

Linux.com is featuring a story by Susan Linton titled "Drupal 6 keeps getting better". The author claims she has been using Drupal since version 3.1 and seems to know Drupal well enough to write a decent article. In short, she does a fairly nice job of summarizing the features introduced in Drupal 6. However, she ends the article with a rather strange conclusion.

My primary complaint with Drupal is still not addressed in this release. I believe having advertising capabilities is almost a necessity in any content management solution. Instead, Drupal leaves users to their own skills or to use a contributed module. The lack of native advertising support remains a major drawback.

I rarely have seen such request for an "advertisement feature" in the core of any CMS I've reviewed. Yes, some CMS do have an advertisement feature but in most cases the capabilities of such built-in features are usually limited. Either way, I just can't imagine with the latest drive to strip the less needed modules in Drupal 7 and beyond, that the Drupal developers would go for an ad module in the core.

I received an email from CPG Dragonfly CMS advocate, Dizfunkshunal. He observed that we do not cover Dragonfly here too much. Sadly, Dizfunkshunal is correct in his observation, in the past we have posted only a few articles regarding Dragonfly. How did this happen?

I really like the advice Global Moxie has given their users for how best to promote their content management system, Big Medium. In their blog post, Psst... Pass It On! Spreading the Word about Big Medium, they talk about various way users can "spread the word" about Big Medium. They show a good understanding for how online communities work, including what you shouldn't do when marketing a product via a blog or forum.

Don’t be a zealot

I have had this itch to change the theme I'm using for CMSReport.com.  I decided to scratch that itch.  I'm currently playing with some freely available themes out there for the CMS I'm currently using (Drupal).  The theme in use at CMS Report this week is LiteJazz by RoopleTheme.

So what do you think about the LiteJazz theme and is it an improvement over the theme we've been using the past year?  Feel free to use the comments section below to voice your opinion.

I'm especially interested in two things:

We Americans can be so stupid at times.  In the country of "land of the free", we spend too much of our efforts working to restrict the freedom of others.

Tomorrow's legal fight may be over Web browser add-ons that let people avoid advertisements. These add-ons are growing in functionality and popularity, which has led legal experts we surveyed this week to speculate about when the first lawsuit will be filed.

I must confess, I really don't fully understand how the Internet ranking systems actually work.  Ranking systems such as Google's PageRank and Alexa's Traffic Rankings seem to use a mystery of statistical analysis, algorithms, and a sprinkle of voodoo calculus to come up with the numbers they do.  Although most people lack the understanding to how these numbers are derived it is still fun to watch those rankings change from day to day.  For example, since the Fall of 2006 I've seen the rankings for CMSReport.com change from 830,790 to around a steady 90,000.

Did you hear the reports about all that money to be made from online advertisements?  In 2006 alone, Internet ad revenue was estimated at $16.8 billion USD.  You have also likely heard of bloggers making thousands of dollars in just a short amount of time through online ads. If you believe this is another post about making money from online ads or how to optimize your site for the search engines, you are going to be disappointed.  I'm not here to tell you how to make money online but when you shouldn't be making money from advertisement on your site.