Yesterday I received a survey from one of the services that provides paid content. I thought it would be interesting to share the questions and my responses. I would love to hear your thoughts as well. My general take has not changed - I am all in favor of advertorials but not in favor of paid reviews. Advertorials would be full "posts" that a company purchases similar to full page ads in newspapers. Labeled correctly, advertorials could be a huge winner for blogs. As I do with all advertising on any of my sites, the ads would need to meet my standards before accepting. The comments below only relate to advertorials not paid/sponsored reviews.

Intro from email sender: I am trying to best understand what is most important to bloggers like you. I would greatly appreciate it if you could take the time to answer a few questions.

1. At what price point is making a sponsored post interesting to you? $100/post? $500/post? $2000/post? More?

Allen: In general terms, the price for an advertorial should depend on the site’s real audience (not the fake rss numbers, etc.), the site’s reach and what media the advertorial includes (i.e. video/audio). The other consideration to look at is how long the advertorial will run. Pricing should also be in line with the monthly sponsorship pricing. Each advertorial should be priced accordingly.

2. If you have no interest in including sponsored content on your blog at any price why?

As I stated above, advertorials would be ok in moderation. For a large blog, running one or two a week would be acceptable. I wouldn’t run sponsored reviews for any price.

3. If you were to include sponsored content on your blog would you rather write a review yourself or simply place an advertorial?

Answered above. Sponsored reviews are not healthy for the overall market. There will always be the question lingering as to why the review was positive. We are starting to see some interesting business going on with video bloggers and decisions they are making around sponsorship and what amounts to paid reviews. This type of business needs to be corraled before it gets out of control and puts a hurt on the overall blossoming video industry.

4. In addition to full in-post disclosure what other conditions would you have for accepting a sponsored content?

To properly handle advertorials, naturally in-post disclosure is required. In addition, I’d like to see an "advertorial standard" created - similar to the IAB ad format standards. This will allow search engines and other aggregators to properly handle this type of sponsored content. Whether it’s some type of microformat or a specific "rel" tag or some other technical means to handle, it’s critical that this is setup correctly from the beginning. If it’s not handled correctly from the beginning, it will not work over the long-term.

With that said, there are a variety of other concepts and ideas I have for ways to monetize blogs. I will begin to share them over the next couple of weeks. It’s time for the CPM ad to rest in peace.

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Editor’s note: Dan Zarrella has put together a viral content sharing report and below is a small part of the report focusing on content types and online content sharing.

When most people think of viral content, one of the first things they think of is humor, silly Youtube videos, hilarious cartoons and toungue-in-cheek articles, but as I discovered with my viral content sharing report, the most savvy and prolific viral sharers prefer spreading news more than humor.

When I looked at the profile segments I constructed out of the survey data, I noticed a pattern among those respondents who frequently used new and geeky social web technologies, like Twitter and Digg: they prefer sharing funny content less than their less-social-media-savvy counterparts. The same pattern appears for frequent users of less bleeding-edge technologies (like blogs and Facebook), but it is far less accute.

Not only did I observe this preference when the respondents were sharing content individually with their friends, but also when they’re sharing in one-to-many ways (broadcast sharing, like submitting to Digg, Tweeting or blogging):

One possible reason for this may be that savvy social media users have become desensitized to all the "funny" attempts at viral content and have much higher funny-enough-to-share thresholds.

When I looked at those users who shared content more frequently or with more people than the average respondent I noticed the same trend:

Even if your ultimate target market is not early-adopter geeks, as a viral marketer it still pays off to focus on the types of content these highly prolific users prefer to share, as they’re the ones who are more likely to spread your content and when they do they can spread it much further. When you’re developing your next piece of hopefully-viral content, keep this in mind and instead of reaching for the trusty humor hook, try something timely or useful (like a how-to).

This is a small part of the large data presented in the full report I did on the results of my survey, if you want to know more, be sure to read the rest of my viral content sharing report.

Dan Zarrella is a social and viral marketing scientist, check out his blog or follow him on Twitter.

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Just two weeks after our interview with Pandora founder Tim Westergren, he sat down with the Washington Post today for a very serious discussion about the future of Pandora and of webcasting in general. In our interview, Tim spoke openly about the royalty and licensing issues around music and called the situation, "a real mess".

Peter Whoriskey spoke with Westergren today and if you are into music streaming online, the interview is a must read. Westergren opens with the following, "We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision". And he closes with, "So if it doesn’t feel like its headed towards a solution, we’re done". The article also notes that Pandora’s royalty fees this year will amount to 70 percent of its projected revenue of $25 million.

Here’s the bottom line around the royalty issue from Whoriskey, "The Copyright Royalty Board last year decided that the fee to play a music recording on Web radio should step up from 8/100 of a cent per song per listener in 2006 to 19/100 of a cent per song per listener in 2010." That’s $17 million for Pandora this year based on usage. Smaller webcasters may already be out of the game due to the increased royalty rates. On the radio stations I listen to on iTunes, many of them have messages about the royalty rates throughout the day.

The question here is whether other music streaming companies (last.fm, imeem, etc.) will face the same struggle that Pandora is. And the answer so far is yes. Perhaps we will need some sort of pay model for these music streaming companies to foot the bill.

Steven Hodson also has some good insight into the issues facing Pandora and the industry at large.

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On the NY Tech mailing list this week there has been a good discussion about the launch of a mobile commerce site by clothing manufacturer Polo Ralph Lauren. Dianne from mocoNews commented on the launch yesterday. Normally a mobile commerce site launch is not that exciting but in this case, Polo Ralph Lauren is using print advertising to drive shoppers to the mobile site via QR codes.

"This is about someone who’s interested in our brand and interested in technology, and wherever the two meet, that’s what’s appropriate," David Lauren, son of CEO Ralph Lauren, said.

The image on the left is of a QR code. If you are new to QR codes, check out our coverage which includes a Japanese perspective where these codes are well received among consumers. You can think of QR codes as upc codes with more intelligence.

RL Magazine has an overview of the QR codes from their perspective which includes, “You’ll be able to walk past fruit at the supermarket, scan an apple, and see when it was picked and where it came from,” says Jonathan Bulkeley, ScanLife CEO. “While buying hair dye, you’ll be able to scan the code on the signage and see instructions. You can create your own code, put it on a T-shirt, and then let people scan your shirt and link directly to your MySpace page."

I still believe that the use of QR codes will change the mobile marketing and ecommerce landscape by allowing consumers to "pull" the marketing we want. That is, once the majority of mobile devices can handle processing the codes.

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Unfortunately Alexa didn’t make it. After stopping to count again yet again, Dr. Stern did all he could to bring the service back. Rest in peace Alexa, rest in peace.

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It seems the new buzzword these days is Cloud Computing. Years ago it was called "ASP" then moved to "SaaS" and now it’s "Cloud Computing". While some have talked about Web 3.0, it seems like cloud computing is this year’s hot topic. The most simple definition of cloud computing is that it’s a way to access files and services outside of your own space.

With that said, we received the following video today which I thought was worth sharing:

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Ashley Norris, former co-founder of UK blog network Shiny Media has a guest post on TechCrunch where he discusses the UK blogging scene. Ashley left the company last week to create another startup. The post is a good look into why Ashley believes blog media companies haven’t experienced major success in the UK as of now.

Ashley blames the following "external factors":

• Limited number of UK online eyeballs
• Lack of imagination in the ad industry
• Lack of UK media entrepreneurs
• Lack of VC support
• Too much competition
• The omnipotent BBC

When I initially read the post this morning, the reasons seemed legit but something didn’t sit right with me. After re-reading the post, it hit me. Nowhere in the post does Ashley (or Shiny Media) note that perhaps "not meeting customer needs" or any other internal issues could have also led to the undesired results. It’s very, very easy to blame external factors. I don’t know Ashley nor Shiny Media but what I took out of his post was a good bit of education on the UK blogging market but a heck of a lot of bitching and moaning about external factors.

For example, he notes that the BBC has a huge footy (soccer) site that basically forces Shiny’s footy blog, whoateallthepies.tv to be smaller than it could be. Way to rally the troops there Ashley. Let me clue you in on a little secret, every business has external forces working against it every day.

The last interesting bit from the story comes from some of the post comments. The first few comments discuss the look, usability and the type of ads that Shiny Media utilizes. Could the fact that some users didn’t come back because they were turned off by an internal factor outside of the content? One of the commenters noted that the content on Shiny Media blogs isn’t "compelling".  While I have no idea if it is or isn’t, I would be very interested in hearing how Ashley and the team reached out to their customers to find out what is working and what isn’t. Blogs need to listen to their customers just like any other product or service.

Maybe Mike will allow Ashley to write another guest post where he shares what internal factors could have led to some of the negative returns he/Shiny Media experiences. I would be very interested to read that post - and I am sure we (bloggers, entrepreneurs, etc.) would all learn more from that post.

From the alcoholics anonymous program: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.

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For those of you who have been following along, my mom was seduced by Steve Jobs’ iPhone. This was and is an astonishing thing, since my mom is very far away from being a techie.

On the day of the iPhone launch, she waited in line at an AT&T store (and I waited with her) to get her new phone.

My mom loves her phone, but one issue came up which triggered an interesting thought.  She had a hard time using the phone initially because of her fingernails.

My mom does not have big garish fingernails, but they were longer than any man’s fingernails, extending perhaps a quarter or a half inch beyond her fingertips. The problem is that the iPhone screen requires touch by skin. the tip of a fingernail will not work. This is a problem because it means that the angle that your finger touches the screen at is such that the you end up making contact with the screen with a very large imprecise area of your finger. In short, my mom kept missing the intended screen  buttons.

Now in reality, my mom clipped her nails and everything was fine. But I guess my question is whether that is a reasonable expectation in the product design. Were there any women on the product team? We’re there any *girly* women on the product team — women that like the idea of painted fingernails that extend a bit beyond the fingertip?

I am sure many of you will say that is the price of technology. But I myself wonder if there were some equivalent male focused impediment if it would have been considered acceptable.

I am not sure that this is the perfect example, but this whole episode just got me thinking about design issues for men vs women. How many other, perhaps more subtle issues like this are there that I and other product designers/developers don’t think about? It is indeed striking that such a basic issue for the iPhone, as far as I can tell, really has not been discussed at all. Will most of my male readers, or readers in general, argue that such issues are irrelevant?

Editor’s note: In addition to Hank’s findings, last winter we wrote about the inability to use the iPhone with gloves on.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who recently launched a new blog: Why Does Everything Suck? exploring the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet.

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I’ve written about the three leading comment replacement services (Disqus, JS-Kit and IntenseDebate) a good number of times. Today Disqus is launching the second version of their blog comment replacement service. Disqus launched last October and since then has won over 30,000 content creators who use the service on their blogs and Web sites.

I spoke with Disqus CEO Daniel Ha last weekend to learn more about the second release of the Disqus platform. We began by speaking about my last post about Disqus where I noted that they were taking some of the traffic that should have been directed to the content creator for themselves. On the post Daniel said that the issue would be fixed that day but it wasn’t. However Daniel does say that the v2 release today fixes the issue and traffic should no longer route to Disqus but directly to the content creator.

The major updates in Disqus v2 are a new Wordpress plugin and a new developer API. The Wordpress plugin makes comments SEO friendly - meaning that any comments will have associated Google juice. Similar to what JS-Kit launched last month, all comments will be syndicated back to the original source Wordpress comment system - this allows you to leave Disqus at any time and not lose the associated comment data. There’s a new import process which makes it easy to import and export comments into Disqus. Lastly you can moderate Disqus comments directly from the Wordpress admin - no need to go to the Disqus site. My hope is that a similar plugin will be available for other content platforms soon.

Daniel also walked me through the updated Disqus Web site which now features a page for each member that is public. What this means is that if I signup for a Disqus account, my friends can easily track all of my comments on any Disqus-enabled blog. Daniel calls this a "comment blog". Here’s a sample of my comment blog on Disqus:

One of the interesting bits Daniel noted during our discussion is that he believes that he is a heavier commenter than the CEOs of his competition. He believes they went into the comment replacement business because, "it’s what’s hot".

There’s no doubt that the comment space is hot. From the message board application FriendFeed to all of the new comment replacement and reputation services, this space is one to watch.

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