iia: March 2007 Archives

As part of the Irish Internet Association's annual congress, we at Blacknight are sponsoring one of the afternoon sessions. The title of the session is "Can you make money out of Blogs and Podcasts", so it's pretty broad. If you make money via your site ie. through monetisation with Adsense, Amazon or any of the other affilliate / partner solutions let me know. It would be interesting to see what people are doing.

Realex have won a very tasty contract - the online payments for one of the largest online shops in Europe - CDWow! While I've known about this for several months I had promised their CEO, Colm Lyon, not to blog about it until they'd officially announced it, which I see they've now done. I'm delighted for Colm. He deserves every success.

I love reading marketing material. Sometimes you learn something new. Sometimes you giggle. Sometimes you giggle so much you fall off your chair. According Amas' latest report:

Almost two-thirds of businesses, or 64%, had websites in 2006, a rise of four percentage points on the previous year.

Wow! Are they talking about the same country I live and work in? Oh wait.. there's an explanatory footer:

Sources: Central Statistics Office: Information Society and Telecommunications 2006, survey of 12,219 companies employing 10 or more

(my emphasis) So what does that mean? Do companies with fewer than 10 staff not count? I doubt if their owners would be overly impressed to find out that they're not actually counted.. Or is it simply a "clever" ploy to make people feel that we're doing so much better online than other countries? A very large proportion of Irish businesses still do not have websites. They *may* have a domain, but all you have to do is take a walk through any Irish town to see how many are still using free hotmail.com (and similar) email addresses. A holding page does not a website make. I don't know, but it sounds like pointless headline grabbing if you ask me. Of course any report that suggests that meta content is as important as theirs does would make me worry.. Everyone else has been saying the opposite for ages ... Maybe they've rehashed a report from a few years ago when it did actually matter as much as they claim. Don't get me wrong, meta content is important, but whereas a few years ago the meta tags, such as "description" and "keywords" were essential that is no longer the case, as so many online marketers were gaming the search engines. In some respects what really bugs me about the report is the way they talk in absolutes, as if their "findings" were "gospel". Press releases can be amusing, but they can also backfire badly when someone examines them a little bit more closely. A recent example of that being Captivate's press release that was covered by ENN, then slated by RedCardinal and ENN's blog! The moral of the story, if there is one, be sure that you can actually lead by example of know what you are talking about before trying to grab a couple of column inches .... Then again, who actually pays any attention to any of these press releases? Are we all producing press releases to keep ourselves happy or simply to provide sales leads for publications' marketing departments? (I always get offered plenty of ad space when we run an ad in a national paper and get plenty of useless sales calls after a press release from people selling to me NOT buying - obviously!)