But content sites have no way to track their role in generating purchasing intent.  Often intent generation doesn’t involve a single trackable click.  Even if there were some direct way to measure intent generation, doing so would be seen by many today as a blurring of the the advertising/editorial line.  So content sites are left only with impression-based display ads, haggling over CPMs without a meaningful measurement of their impact on generating purchasing intent.

All of this has caused a massive shift in revenues from the top to the bottom of the purchasing funnel – from intent generators to intent harvesters.  Somehow this needs to get fixed.

(Disclaimer: My last startup (now sold) has been mentioned multiple times on all of the blogs you mentioned. I even turned down a full profile on TC because I thought we couldn't scale.. I'm still kicking myself over this ;-))

You need to focus. The e-mail you posted here is well written, but too generic to make an impact nowadays. You need to tailor your story to fit the sources you're most interested in. You will not get coverage on even three of the sites you mention, since they're all keen to get exclusives, so don't bother with the mass mails. Foster some relationships.

Look at the blogs you're targeting. Really look. Your e-mail provides no story - it asks me to come up with one and try to fit you in to it. This distinction is important, especially for Mashable, RWW, and LifeHacker. Go through their stories and look for patterns. On RWW you'll see a mix of "news" about well established companies and "how to" type stuff often featuring smaller companies (like yours). Mashable is very list and "soft" news oriented (note posts about Justin Bieber, dating, and "happiness." LifeHacker is very "how to" based.

Your story is basically "news" but it's not a "story." You need to seed the bloggers who are looking for stories (like the above three) with stories, not release news.

(I could write a lot about this but I've been up ages and need to get a few hours sleep before going to the in-laws.. I hope you can sympathize.. :-) Any questions, ask away and I'll be back later.)

This power to turn the most resistant foe into a QVC shopper has made the network one of the most effective retailing machines ever invented. Founded by the same man who started the Franklin Mint, the company began broadcasting on November 24, 1986, when it sold $7,400 worth of merchandise. Since then, QVC—it stands for “Quality, Value, Convenience”—has become one of America’s largest jewelry retailers and a leading importer of Irish goods, and has earned other superlatives too numerous to elaborate.

If there is one common current that runs throughout all of humanity, it is that everyone Googles themselves all day, every day. Humans are vain creatures! Copywriter Alec Brownstein used this fact to get a job via Google AdWords.

Languishing at a huge ad agency, Brownstein bought the names of his favorite creative directors on Google AdWords for 15 cents per click. Which meant whenever they Googled themselves, Brownstein's ad popped up:

Hey, [creative director's name]: Goooogling [sic] yourself is a lot of fun. Hiring me is fun, too" with a link to Brownstein's website, alecbrownstein.com.

It worked: Everyone but one of his targets called him, and today Brownstein works for Young & Rubicam, a fancy New York ad agency.

A warning, from personal experience: This doesn't work as well for asking a girl you like out on a date.

One of the services I offer people is cleaning their Wordpress installations of hacks and infections, mostly for those who might not have the time or technical expertise to follow my hacked Wordpress cleaning guide. Therefore when something happens that increases the number of people getting hacked, such as when a new exploit is discovered, or a security hole in a large host starts getting exploited (like what happened with Network Solutions last month), I get an increase in the number of people requesting help cleaning things up. This month it started happening with a large number of GoDaddy customers.

Whenever a service rises to popularity, an “open” alternative is usually close behind. The problem is that most of these alternatives never go anywhere, let along get close to the service they’re trying to supplant. But the rate at which Diaspora*, the open project hoping to be the new Facebook, is gaining funding is getting too big to ignore.

The New York Times profiled the NY-based project yesterday, noting that the team of four NYU students gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000 through the online fundrasing site, Kickstarter. As NYT notes, they shot past that goal in a mere 12 days. As of yesterday afternoon, they were at $23,676 in funding. Today, just one day later, that total stands at an amazing $58,315. And they still have 20 days of fundraising to go.

A tipster draws our attention to the writing on the left side of the chalkboard behind the students: “TOUCH GREP UNZIP MOUNT FSCK FSCK FSCK UMOUNT.” Wait a second: That’s not intelligible code! It’s almost as if it has another meaning.

Pretty much every command on the blackboard is missing the argument(s) that makes it useful (e.g. filenames for ‘unzip’ and ‘touch’). So: Dirty joke. fsck, which is short for “file system check,” has a long and storied history as programmer profanity.

The canonical dirty UNIX joke, as immortalized by countless message boards, is even more graphic(al user interface?): “unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes, fsck, fsck, fsck, umount, sleep.”

Here is how Pereti explains his business: “We built a viral analytics platform that tracks how consumers interact with media in realtime and a viral advertising platform that sends more traffic to the content that is actually working. So we optimize content for viral distribution using realtime data and we make money through viral advertising on our site and network.

From early April to the first week of May, the number of unread emails in my inbox grew from a manageable hundred to an unmanageable thousand. There wasn't one event that precipitated this situation, it was a number of situations. This happens to me fairly regularly.

Here's how I declare email bankruptcy: I have a list of about thirty people who I email with regularly and who are my most important email relationships. I use two web services, Gist and Etacts, to tell me who these people are. Both are useful. I then do gmail searches on their names and make sure that I have no unread and unarchived emails from them. It would be great if one or both of these services could auto-generate a gmail search on all thirty addresses for me. It would be even better if gmail had this feature built into the service.