Blog Ryan

It has been quite a while since I’ve done a Ryan’s Radar. I was gone at Affiliate Summit for most of last week and have been trying to get caught up since I’ve been back. Affiliate Summit was excellent. You can read my recap at Super Affiliate Marketing. Like always there is a lot going on so I’ll try and captures a few highlights:

• How to measure ROI from Social Media: [Flashpoint] Ian Kennedy shows a graphic from a Forrester Research report that Steve Rubel discussed that shows how to measure Return on Investment from social media in general and blogging specifically…nothing groundbreaking here, but a good summary of how to measure the investment of blogging.
• Apple is ordered to pay $700,000 for bloggers legal fees. [Robert Scoble] Serves them right. Apple is ordered to pay for the legal fees of a blogger that they went after. The fact that the blogger racked up $700 grand in legal fees is the scary part to me. This underscores the importance of understanding the legal ramifications of blogging (which I don’t pretend to understand) and Scoble references the need to have some sort of legal group to help bloggers out. I’d pay a small fee to have access to that on the off hand chance some mega corporation came after me.
  Ask a Ninja signs big advertising deal with Federated Media. [Robert Scoble] Scoble points out that video blogging is starting to take off.
• Yahoo Adds Link Badge [Search Engine Land] Barry points out that Yahoo has added the ability to add a badge displaying the number of links that Yahoo show to a given page or site. Nice move by Yahoo. Makes them seem a little more friendly to the SEO world by offering an accurate count (**cough** Google?) of links and makes them feel more socially oriented, which I believe they are positioning themselves for anyway.
• SEMPO Institute is Live [Web Analytics World] SEMPO has officially opened the doors to training in SEO. There will initially be a high level course on SEO broken into 14 lessons. It will cost $499. Eventually there will be an advanced training offered. It will be interesting to monitor this to see the perceived value by those who have taken part.
• YouTube Offers Revenue Share from Ads [Tech Crunch] Many people are talking about the impact the YouTube announcement will have. Now that they will be sharing revenue with content producers the gap between them and their competition has widened significantly.
• Using YouTube to Drive Traffic [Web Log Hits] James Thomson and Muhammed Saleem seperately discuss using YouTube to Drive traffic to your website. Very interesting read regardless if you’ve used YouTube as a promotional tactic in the past.