He mentions a few concepts providing me with quite a bit food for thought:

• The huge potential which becomes available whenever people connect cloud computing and mobile devices
• The concept of crowd sourcing. You can get almost instantly a picture of events thousands of kilometers away by receiving information from a magnitude of eye witnesses. Raw information is distributed before spin doctors had a chance to get their hands on it.
• How this changes the balance of power between buyers and sellers
• How this changes the balance of power between government and citizen.

We had the chance to witness The Power of Mobile, which develops whenever millions of people have the ability to access this huge pool of information and the ability to publish instantly what they see, hear and think. Propaganda generated by governments and organizations like Hezbollah can now be dissected. Then suddenly becomes visible that one and the same person was shown as a dying bombing victim on 3 pictures taken in different places on different days, and the same toys scattered in the ruins of buildings on a host of photos taken in different towns on different days. (Examples taken from Hezbollah propaganda during the last Lebanon war)
Even the mere access to mobile phones, without the extra power of instant multimedia publishing has proven remarkably powerful. If people see something in the TV they may call a friend in the area affected and ask. “Are you o.k.? And what is going on.” As a result protests against Israel’s military offensive against Hamas in 2008 were much stronger in Morocco compared to Jordan, Lebanon or Egypt. People could already differentiate between the truth and TV coverage, as long as they were not too far away from the scene.
Such thinking is not new, but still valid and also economically powerful. I remember an article published about 20 years ago in the Harvard Business Review explaining that in rural India at the time the lack of phones was not a mere symptom of poverty, but an important source of poverty. The reasoning: Small farmers had to sell their product for a very low price to wholesalers, because they did not have a chance to know what people were paying in town for food. With a phone they could have called shopkeepers in town and ask what the pay for rice, wheat, potatoes or corn, make an informed decision what to plant and almost immediately increase revenue substantially.

Why to Use It
Why would you want to allow your readers to access your content as feed outside of the carefully crafted blog environment? The simple answer is: It is always a good idea to make it easy for your customer to access your message. And if a part of your message needs other formats like audio or video, which are not available via RSS feeds, there is still the link to the original blog post. In this case the text acts as a teaser to visit the blog and watch the video or to listen to the audio content.
And why would a reader of your blog add your content as feed to his RSS reader? Feeds are a very effective method to stay on top of a topic without browsing the web for hours to check favorite websites for changes and fresh information. This saves him a lot of time, and at places where he pays for bandwidth it saves him also a lot of money.

How to Use It
RSS feeds with WordPress provide easy access to your content. And the beauty is: It is already incorporated in your standard blogging software. WordPress automatically produces feeds with your posts, and then also a feed from the comments on every single post. Modern browsers show an icon listing the feeds in the address bar or on top of the webpage display window. But to make it easy for your readers you should add a link to your feeds to the sidebar of your blog.

Add More Features
I suggest you go one step further and use Google’s Feedburner service. This allows you to offer one single feed working with all feed readers. Feedburner gives you also statistics which allow you to gauge how many people read your feeds, and a feature to offer feeds via email to your audience.

In short:
RSS feeds with WordPress are a foolproof way to make your content easily accessible to your audience on a wide variety of platforms. It is already part of the standard WordPress blogging software. To make it easy to use, you should take care that your blog theme contains a link to the feeds. If you want to get stats about the use of your feeds and additional features, Feedburner is a good choice. It is free, makes your feed even more accessible and provides a simple set of stats about the use of your feed.

Manage All Ads from a Single Interface
OpenX structures ad serving by defining ad spaces on a web page, and connecting the spaces to advertisers and banners. An ad can be a picture, html code, java script, flash object, or plain text. Now the adserver manages, which banner appears on which ad space how often.

Manage Ads by Viewer Location and Language
I can also display banners according to the browser language of my viewer or according to his geographical location. I do not want to bother a German visitor with an offer for a vitamin supplement out of his reach because of his government’s customs regulations. And I do not offer that Spanish language ebook to visitor, whose language preference is Russian. The better I target the ads the more conversions I will get.

Manage Campaigns by Time
If needed, I define a time frame for the display of an advertisement. A time limited offer will not show up after the end of the sale. If no ad is available for a zone, e.g. because the maximum number of impressions is exhausted for each ad, nothing will be shown. But I like to use my ad space. So I define a Google Adwords banner as a default ad for the zone, and display Google ads if no other banner is available.

Pick the Winners, Drop the Flops
But there is more: The adserver generates a set of statistics. I know now in detail each banner’s impressions, clicks and conversions. Using these stats, I can easily determine, which banner is profitable, and which one is a waste of time and space.
The statistics allows me to set up a formal banner management. I ad and remove banners and affiliate programs based on real information, not guesswork. This improves my negotiation position with the advertiser. I know how many visitors I sent to him. And I have a clear idea, what I can get, if replace his offer.

Hide Affiliate Links
The adserver has an additional advantage: My visitor cannot see the affiliate link. If he wants to see the offer behind the ad, he has to click on it. This means I will be credited for the lead or sale.

Let me give a short recap:

An adserver allows me to

• rotate ads from different vendors
• limit the time frame of campaigns
• limit the number of impressions for an ad
• measure the performance of each ad
• if Ihave access to the sale page, measure conversions for each ad
• manage ad impressions by location of my visitor
• manage ad impressions by language of my visitor
• hide the url of the landing page of the ad.

Easy Instrallation
I need just a hosting account with php and mysql to run my OpenX server. Installation of OpenX is about as simple as installing WordPress. Basic installation without plug ins does not even take 30 minutes. You can get the server for free at http://www.openx.org

• Signup rate from people coming from my blog: 15%
• Signup rate from people coming from Google Adwords: 5%
• Signup rate from people coming from Twitter: 0%

I got lots of traffic from Twitter, and people seemed to be interested. But no conversion! Adwords remained at 5%. From my blog the traffic numbers went naturally down. I cannot write posts promoting the same offer day by day.

Putting Myself into Twitterers’ Shoes
I was scratching my head for several weeks, hoping to get at least one or two conversions from Twitter. After a while it seemed that even the click rates from Twitter went down. Naturally, because my followers knew the offer, as my blog readers did. Anyway, I was careful enough not to damage that Twitter account, it is still growing.
So, what does that mean? Is Twitter traffic useless? I do not think so, and I know that other people get conversions, signups etc. from Twitter.
I drew two conclusions: The page must be reasonable for people coming from search engines, and for people coming from my mailing list and blog, but not for Twitterers.
Thinking about the reason, I came up with the following conclusion: The signup page was, as thousands, driven by flash videos. But further investigation let me to conclude, that a Twitter link is rarely leading to a video.

Mobile Users Have Different Priorities
A little further brain wrenching reminded me, that even the emails with video links I get, do not work, as long as I open them on my mobile device, because the handset does not show flash.
In fact I use the email on my Palm to skim through the emails, to see if there is something I need to respond quickly. But all these video emails are left to my desktop, and I check them, if and when I have time and desire to do so.
Twitter is strongly geared towards mobile users. They may have difficulty to watch a flash video. And a Twitter user has often a very short span of attention. He may just to get a glimpse about what’s going on in his arena, between leaving the plane and picking the luggage. And unlike emails, tweets go away. They are not saved for later inspection.

Landing Page Must Correspondent to Traffic Source
This consideration seems to explain why my video page did not work with Twitter. And, while investigating, my brain reminded me that I should copy the ones, who get already results. Many of them seem to promote their blogs on Twitter, and then using their blogs to promote their money making stuff.

What do you think? Did you observe the same phenomena? How did you solve the problem? Please share your insight and leave a comment.

1. Define ad groups narrowly, with one or just a handful of closely related keywords (synonyms). If you put too many or too different keywords into one ad group, you will never know which keywords bring clicks and conversions from the content network.
2. Observe the statistics given by Google closely. It may take one or two days, but Google will show you, which websites produce clicks and conversions.
3. Move every websites which produces conversions at a profitable cost from “automatic placements” to managed placement. You do this by marking them and using the menu item “Manage placement and bid”
4. If you find websites which are producing lots of clicks but no conversions, block them by using the menu item “Exclude placement”
5. Watch the statistics of managed placements closely. If you feel you could get more conversions from a placement at a reasonable cost, you can increase your bid. If you find the cost per conversion is too high, reduce the bid or remove the placement.

By using this 5-step process you can often get more conversions from the content network at lower prices, than you could get from the Adwords search networks with the same keywords.