Intermediads is a new service just launched in closed beta. It was developed by…, us.
When we started this blog and sold the first few 125×125 buttons we immediately started wondering how to provide more value to our advertisers. We noticed how difficult it was for advertisers to tell their stories and pitch their companies in such a small area.
As you can imagine that small rectangle gives both readers and advertisers very little information. Right now the ‘click or don’t click’ decision is a very black and white situation. As a visitor you either click or you don’t and if you do you take a gamble with your time. What we wanted to do is provide more information to visitors before they click without making the ads bigger.
What we came up with is largely inspired by Flickr. As you can see in this screenshot, when you hover over a user favicon at Flickr a small gray border appears. If you then click on the border a small layer comes up with a few options.
This is exactly what we built with Intermediads. If you hover over the 125×125 ads in the sidebar here you will see a gray border with a small triangle appear. If you click the triangle you will see a screenshot, description and some other interesting data about the advertiser.
Our guess is that this service will both increase clickthroughs and provide higher quality traffic for advertisers. Users will be better educated about what the advertisers have to offer. What it comes down to is that we offer advertisers something between a view and a clickthrough. You could call it a ‘Half A Click’. We now monitor every normal ‘Clickthrough’, ‘Hover’, ‘Half A Click’ and every click to every link in the information layer. This educates both the advertiser and the visitor.
The service is currently in closed beta and running on a few selected high traffic blogs. We want to test our assumptions and see how the Intermediads layer improves clickthroughs. In about a month or so we will open the service up for other blogs. If you are interested in using the service (it works WITH your current Ad service) fill out the form at the Intermediads site.
I hope you like that post!
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Dania & Gregory Gerhardt from Amazee.com at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco
In 12 days Switzerland-based Amazee will launch in open beta. We met the founders, Dania and Gregory Gerhardt, at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco where they are very actively promoting their start-up. The service they aim to deliver is a simple site which allows people to work on projects that need more than one person to achieve their goals. They can set goals, invite people to join them and share their projects.
This isn’t a standard project management software but more of a platform for people who want to reach certain goals and need a tool to make that possible. The goals can be as simple as ‘Clean my house’ or as difficult as ‘Change our school system’. Unlike many other project management services Amazee is being built to do serious as well us fun projects and not really aimed at the corporate project manager.
Have you ever had a goal which required the attention and engagement of more people than just yourself? Then you are on the right platform. Amazee is a free platform that allows you to state your goals and gives you the tools to connect with like-minded people to run and promote projects. Whatever your goal is, publicize and pursue it on Amazee!
Think about your life’s goals the small and the big ones. They are an expression of your personality and they indicate to the world where you are heading for. Show them. Achieve them.
They visited Robert Scoble who made this video of Dania explaining the project:
Dania was kind enough to share 50 invites with us to give to our readers. Digg this post, leave a comment and I will personally email you an invite.
About 27 minutes ago Pownce went live and out of closed beta. If you know all about Pownce but didn’t get in before head over there now and get an account.
If you haven’t heard about Pownce before read on. Pownce was founded by Leah Culver (a speaker at The Next Web Conference 2008), Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka and went into closed beta about 6 months ago. Pownce is “a way to send stuff to your friends. What kind of stuff? You can send just about anything: music, photos, messages, links, events, and more. You can do it all on our web site, or install our lightweight desktop software that lets you get out of the browser.”
Although the founders have denied being a Twitter clone from day one you can’t help but seeing some similarities. Where Twitter keeps things extremely simple and depends on outsiders to build extra services on top of their API Pownce is much more versatile and offers a lot of extra functionality right from the start. Pownce is all about sharing stuff (Events, urls, photos, contacts) and Twitter is more about talking about what you are, or are not, doing.
People unimpressed with Twitters interface and options but interested in interacting with a community might want to check out Pownce. For a detailed report of the new features check this post on Techcrunch and Mashable.
Written on May 14, 2008 – 8:45 am
Intermediads is a new service just launched in closed beta. It was developed by…, us.
What we came up with is largely inspired by Flickr. As you can see in this screenshot, when you hover over a user favicon at Flickr a small gray border appears. If you then click on the border a small layer comes up with a few options.
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