Welcome to Smuggle Me

Lior Haner from Yedda.com just sat down next to me and told me about an interesting twist on Questions and Answers. It actually allows you to embed questions and answers on your blog. I think it’s an interesting idea for my EMR and HIPAA blog since I am kind of an authority on EMR. I might have to take a look at it later. Could be interesting. I’ll have to see if it can drive more traffic to my website.

Today I decided to stop by BlogWorld Expo over my lunch. I figured I should at least stop by and say hi to a few people. It’s been pretty much as expected. Although, I must tell you that I was a bit surprised. Of course, the first thing that I wanted to do when I got here was to pull out my laptop and blog about it. In fact, as I walked I was just thinking about all the things that could be blogged about.

Well, I pulled out my laptop when I saw the bloggers lounge so I could blog and it turns out that the girl I’m sitting next to speaks Italian. Of course this is very excited for me since I love to speak Italian. To make it even more odd, the girl and guy that were sitting across the way were also speaking Italian (Update: on second hear, it might have been spanish). I’m not sure why, because the girl next to me is actually from france and pretty much speaks every language of the European Union. Was it just coincidence that everyone at this table speaks Italian (including me)? I think not. I should have put up a sign that said “Italian Table.”

I guess there is one other possibility of what was happening. The girl next to me is from a travel search website called Mobissimo. I guess it’s similar to Kayak or Sidestep, but she said that it searches something like 180 sites (the website says 176 sites) for the best deals which makes them larger than Kayak or Sidestep. Maybe later I’ll have to do a test to see if the extra sites find better deals or if maybe it is just better on an international level and the US sites are the same. I do think I’ll try it out for finding a rental car for my trip to Hawaii.

Turns out that it was the same price as what I would have found on travelocity, but I like it better since it’s much nicer for me to purchase it on Enterprise.com as opposed to travelocity.com. I just have more faith that I can change it if there are problems. I imagine Mobissimo is taking a cut from referrals. Either way, the process was seamless. Mobissimo could use a bit of work on the look of their site and I was sad they didn’t have the ajax city search so I only had to type Hon instead of Honolulu. However, it was pretty fast.

Interestingly, I really did need a rental car for our trip to Hawaii so I decided to book our rental using Mobissimo. Who would have thought that it would be beneficial for Beatrice, Co-founder and CEO of Mobissimo to go to a Blogger conference?

As a person working in technology I have tons of people at work that come up to me and ask me for some help in purchasing a computer. Generally I find this a painful experience because there are a zillion options and people don’t generally know what they want. However, if it is someone I like then I usually pull up my big girl panties and help them out, because I know that if I don’t then they are going to get ripped off and pay twice what I could find for them.

Even for people I don’t really care to help I always direct them to a site I’ve been using since I was in college called Tech Bargains. My favorite addition to their site was their easy link to Dell Deals. I love purchasing a dell computer and using various tricks that Tech Bargains has to get the best discount. My wife recently bought a digital camera on a whim. I wish she would have checked out the cheap digital camera list that Tech Bargains has. I think we could have saved some money, but oh well. At least she got a good discount where she got it and it looks like it should be a pretty nice camera.

I highly recommend watching tech bargains for good deals on computers. That’s what I’ve used for buying my computers and many of my friends. Sometimes you have to watch for the deals to come around, but I’ve been able to find some good ones.

I’ve started my big project to finish a facebook application for miaMessage and Spoil On. I must admit that it’s a little bit daunting to learn FBML and to crack open my PHP knowledge which hasn’t been thoroughly used for a while. However, we’re doing our best. So far the Facebook Developers wiki for FBML has been really helpful and I also found the Facebook Code Examples to be interesting too. If anyone else knows of some great documentation tutorials or code samples, please let me know.

Here’s a video that Ted posted with a few more details about the Argus release.

Honestly, I think for myself as a PPP/Izea follower, the release of Argus at PostieCon won’t be anything special. I think we’ve already heard all the good stuff that’s happening. There might be one or two things that I didn’t think about, but I’m afraid that it’s going to be somewhat of a disappointment after waiting so long for PPP to update. I guess they didn’t get the memo that people like regular updates all the time as opposed to major releases. Major releases never live up to the hype, but minor updates are often better than we expect.

Ted Murphy of PayPerPost has unleashed the blog buzz machine to announce PayPerPost’s corporate name change to IZEA. A quick look around the blogosphere has Problogger.com announcing the name change. PPP’s poster girl and investor have both weighed in on the name change. Mashable and Read/Write Web both picked up the story offering little insight on the change except for rehashing old disclosure commentary. Jim Kukral picked up the story and lamented Ted not allowing him to test drive Argus. Scoble picked up the story and offered at least a reasonable suggestion that IZEA would change PayPerPost into an advertising agency for the social media starfish, but Scoble further suggests that it won’t matter after Google announces Open Social tomorrow.

Unfortunately, none of these announcements actually address how IZEA is going to change PayPerPost into an vastly different company (which is possibly why Techcrunch has remained silent). I believe that IZEA is PayPerPost’s attempt to take on Google directly. The announcement of IZEA isn’t about a name change or about bringing all of the PayPerPost properties under a unified name. Take a look at the list:

PayPerPost.com
Zookoda.com
BloggersChoiceAwards.com
RockStartup.com
RSSBrief.com
URLBrief.com
BlogInSpace.com

None of the services on the list except PayPerPost itself has significant potential to generate revenue for PayPerPost. Some enhance a blog’s value and some are needed services for advertisers but they are mostly general blogging services. PayPerPost’s IZEA’s core is generating and sharing advertising revenue.

The key announcement will be the release of the alpha version of IZEA’s new service. Unfortunately, it won’t be revealed until Nov. 10 at PostieCon. Access to the alpha version will be by invitation only through the end of 2007 and so you’ll have to learn about the changes from bloggers at the conference or other alpha users (yet to be specified).

However, I’ve been able to glean some interesting information about what I think we can expect from IZEA’s new service, codenamed Argus.

New Advertising Units
This is where I expect IZEA to branch out beyond paid posts and start confronting Google Ads head on. This is the type of service that IZEA can market to bloggers not interested in paid posts. I’m sure that many will mock IZEA’s attempt to do what I expect will be Google-like ads. However, let’s not forget Argus’s new stats program which can be used to target and track these new advertising units effectively. Not to mention PayPerPost’s current inventory of 11,000 advertisers. Of course, I don’t expect IZEA to make much of a dent in Google’s ad revenue, but I think there’s definitely room for IZEA to carve their niche. Yes, I say this even amidst all the Social Ads and Open Social news.

PPP Rank (or is it IZEA Rank)
It is certain that IZEA’s new service is going to have a ranking for bloggers. I expect this rank will expand beyond bloggers to any sort of website. I’ve had it confirmed that this rank will be more like an Alexa rank than Google PR rank. What makes this rank unique is that it will be based on visits, pageviews, ad clicks, CPC, CPM, user feedback, popularity by votes and influence by social network. Essentially, IZEA would be able to help an advertiser create a projected ROI before even doing a campaign. I’m personally a little weary on ranking websites based on user feedback and popularity by votes even with associated user comments. That type of feedback system has worked well for eBay, but been incredibly skewed on other websites like review sites. However, I do find this type of detailed ranking based on performance to be a great step forward for IZEA.

Open APIs
I don’t know much about what IZEA plans for their open APIs, but I’m scared that it’s just using the nice buzzword API. In any event, I’m guessing that these APIs will be for IZEA’s general blogging services (Blogger Choice Awards, Zookoda, RSSBrief, URLBrief and BloginSpace) and not their advertising network. I hope this isn’t the case and that IZEA will build a set of APIs that will allow a website to dynamically track and create advertisements using their open API. Can you say granular tracking of shared revenue with content creators?

Single Sign-on
IZEA has committed by the end of Q1 2008 to create single sign-on across all IZEA properties. I personally believe IZEA single sign-on is just a way to move IZEA’s general blogging service users (Blogger Choice Awards, Zookoda, RSSBrief, URLBrief and BloginSpace) into their advertising network.

Other Possibilities
A few other items that I see as major possibilities are payments based on conversions and bonuses based on performance. The real question remains whether it will be based on page views, click through rate, sales or some other measure of conversions.

I expect IZEA to try to become a monetization hub for bloggers and an social outreach platform for advertisers. I can’t wait to check out the alpha on November 10th even if I’m certain that it will be chalk full of bugs. Peter Wright thinks his days have been anything but typical lately. Just wait until we start pouring in the bug reports. Should be interesting to see what $10 million of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Village Ventures and Inflexion Partners’ money has done.