Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

Wine Library TV’s creator and host Gary Vaynerchuk is going to be on Conan O’Brien tonight which is outstanding news. Gary is both a personal friend and friend of TECH cocktail as he put up the majority of the sponsorship money to make TECH cocktail D.C. happen (he also announced the Cork’d acquisition – he did the acquiring – around TC DC as well).

Knowing Gary I am sure the show will be worth staying up for. He’s a very passionate and animated guy and, when you mix that with Conan, comic gold will undoubtedly emerge.

Now for a little history: Wine Library TV was actually created by Gary as a way to express his passion for wine and also to promote the online store he built a while back which you can find at WineLibrary.com. In turn, WineLibrary.com was actually a extension of a store in New Jersey that his parents had built up over the years.

The WineLibrary story is a great one in terms of what it can teach us about using the internet in an typically offline business and being on the forefront of technology. It is also a fantastic example of applying technology to an industry that wasn’t at the time, and still isn’t, incredibly tech savvy.

So, look out for Gary on Conan tonight and support one of our own. I am sure it’ll be worth your while. If you’re still not sold check out Gary’s latest show on WineLibrary TV to get a taste of what Conan’s interview will be like.

For more on the show tonight and Gary check out Frank’s post and the post on TECHcocktail.com.

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

Frank and I hosted the 5th TECH cocktail in Chicago last night (6th overall) which marked the one year anniversary of TECH cocktail. It’s really hard to believe that it has already been a year since TC1. That said, I thought I would start out with a little infographic I put together that sums up TECH cocktail’s first year (thanks to Jason Shellen for the inspiration). A picture says 1,000 words right? Plus, the graphic should keep my reminiscent rambling to a minimum.

Chicago has definitely come together as a technology community over the last year and I think we’ll be able to do even more in the year to come. In fact, TECH cocktail and Chicago have also become trend setters. Other people in other great cities that lack tech events are coming to us and asking us to bring TECH cocktail to them. I see this as a very positive thing since all the technology communities in the U.S. will start becoming closer.

TC5 was the best event we have done to date and it is all because of the great people we have here in Chicago. We drew between 500 and 600 people and a lot of those people have already sent in notes telling us about some of the great people they met and how TC5 will help them going forward with their businesses.

Of course it also takes lots o’ cash to put on an event like TC5 (trust me, I wrote the check) so I’d like to thank our sponsors since we literally couldn’t do it without them. A huge thanks to SingleHop, LinkedIn, Digital Bootcamp, Saper Law Office, Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center, MK Capital, Origin Ventures, Chicago Micro, Fave Media and LiquidTalk.

Please check these guys out and help make their sponsorship contributions worth it. I know these guys primarily sponsor to help the community and aren’t as worried about their ROI but they have some great products and services and they are local so we should all be supporting them.

Next up I want to thank all of the demoers at TC5. Thanks to myAOL, PollEverywhere, My Open Bar, Braintree Financial, Humanized and Fave Media. We set out to create a platform for start-ups and others to showcase what they do so we’re glad so many great companies are taking advantage of it.

Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank Laura, Paulette and the John Barleycorn’s staff for keeping things running smoothly throughout the night and of course a big thanks to all the TCers out there. You guy make the event what it is and we’re forever grateful for your support.

I’ll leave you with this link to the TC5 pictures and make sure to tag yours techcocktail5 when you put them on flickr. Looking forward to seeing you all at TC6 in a few months!

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes

I was scrolling through the old feed reader the other day (I was a way, way behind on that) and I caught Andrew Parker’s post on the death of the page view. Looks like Neilsen has decided to do away with pageviews in favor of a “time spent” metric. Andrew brings up an interesting point about both of these metrics and what they inherently value which I believe is worth quoting in full here:

But, why would Nielsen replace page views with the “time spent” metric? When everyone focused on page views, it rewarded companies like Myspace for requiring clicking through 10 pages just to update your profile. Now, if time spent becomes the new default metric, then sites like Myspace will be rewarded for their slow, cumbersome interfaces that needlessly waste your time. Whereas, a site like Google would be punished for having a speedy, easy interface that prioritizes getting you where you want to go, not keeping you on Google’s site.

He makes a good point. We need to start figuring out how to measure good traffic instead of just traffic. Advertisers are getting smarter and smarter each day and they are going to demand better from us in the metrics space. I am also sure that advertisers will quickly figure out the major inherent flaw in the “time spent” metric that Andrew points out. That is leaving pages open in general or leaving pages open across multiple tabs in a browser when you aren’t looking at them (which both he and I do each and every day).

Andrew then talks a bit about what we built at FeedBurner (by we I mean our awesome engineering team) and some of the flaws there. He’s spot on since we are really focusing on the feed and our current site analytics are not super useful for people who don’t use a blog platform to publish (but they are very useful for blog publishers). However, I do think the feed will begin to power more and more things for publishers and that is where things get interesting in the way of analytics (see my post “Publish Once” for more).

If feeds are powering widgets, e-mail delivery of content, feed readers, syndication, etc. then we are in a great position to fully measure the audience and its’ engagement and tie things back to the site analytics. We’re a ways out from this of course but it is coming and it should get us closer to the holy grail of audience engagement.

In the meantime, Andrew suggests looking into qualitative methods of measuring the web. That’s an interesting concept and it could add a lot of value to advertisers if qualitative metrics were developed and used in conjunction with quantitative metrics. I am not sure what the qualitative side of things would look like but I’ll keep thinking about that notion.

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

I am really excited to share a video of the new myAOL that my friend and TECH cocktail co-founder Frank Gruber put together. Frank is the Product Manager for myAOL (that’s why he moved to the D.C. area) and has been working day and night with his team on myAOL for a while now.

That said, I have read some of the criticisms of the product in the Tech Crunch comments (i.e. the product is not innovative, AOL is a year behind everyone, etc.) but I think the thing we all forget sometimes is that we are on the cutting edge of technology and not everyone is.

AOL is helping to bring the technology and ideas we’ve all proven out over the past few years to the masses. They help ideas and technology cross the chasm and that’s important.

For example, some people still don’t subscribe to feeds. I know… it’s crazy but it’s true. I think this product will definitely help more people understand feeds (among other things) and I think that is a very good thing.

myAOL should launch later this summer. Make sure to subscribe to the myAOL blog to stay up to date with Frank and team’s progress.

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

Publish once. That has been my mantra for a while now but I find myself saying it to publishers more and more lately. What does it mean? It means that publishers should publish their content once and then let feeds carry it to many different places.

From what I see publishers still seem to be spending a lot of time on things that feeds could take care of automatically. That’s a shame not to mention it’s inefficient and a waste of time and money.

E-mail is a good example of a place where feeds can do the heavy lifting but a lot of publishers have yet to take advantage of that fact. If a publisher already produces feeds of their content then there is no need to spend a lot of time on creating e-mails. The publisher can simply allow the feed to produce and send e-mails with FeedBurner E-mail Subscriptions or another feed-to-e-mail service. FeedBurner will then add the e-mail stats to the other stats so that the publisher can analyze their audience in a more complete manner.

Widgets are another great example of a place where feeds can be the content delivery mechanism. Take my resyndicate page for example – any of those widgets can be used to resyndicate my content and they are all powered by the feed. I publish once (to my blog) and my feed carries my content to subscribers both via newsreaders and via e-mail, to widgets that appear on different sites across the web and to a host of services that list my blog.

What’s also great about allowing the feed to do the work is that the statistics start to become a lot more complete. If the feed powers everything (but the site) then metrics can be provided that will encompass the feed consumption via feed reader, via e-mail, via widget, etc. Combine that with site analytics and the total content picture, a.k.a audience engagement, starts to become a lot clearer.

I am sure there will be many more places the feed can take content as time goes on so I hope publishers will continue to realize the power of feeds and use them as the content delivery mechanism more often. In the end of the day feeds will allow publishers to save time and money and they’ll also lead to more complete analytics that will get publishers closer to an overall view of audience engagement.

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

Yes, you read right. This is a post on social networking. Wait! Don’t move on to the next post yet. I’ll admit that I have become numb to the whole social networking scene too (with the exception of my recent obsession with Facebook). There is no doubt that noise permeates the space these days. However, I’ve recently met a few folks who have shown me that there is still a lot of interesting things to be done on the social networking front.

The thing that has sparked my interest is high value niche social networks.

I find those types of networks interesting because there are a lot of creative ways to monetize them beyond ads. I like ads as much as the next guy but I think that social networks shouldn’t rely on ad models alone.

I won’t go into any business models that I have heard of recently just in case they weren’t intended to be shared but suffice it to say there were some really interesting ones.

Most of the business models centered around high value people and information. Since the group of people participating in a high value niche social network are part of a specific niche (woah – master of the obvious there) and presumably have a lot of value to add within that niche to others who are on the outside (i.e. stock market analysts, industry analysts, etc.) one could charge the outsiders for access to that information. Combine that approach with advertising (that will fetch a high CPM due to its targeted nature) and you’ve possibly got a good business on your hands and one you can replicate across other niches.

Of course you’ll have to be careful with regards to the access you give outsiders. Not only that but you’ll really need to be very open and honest with the userbase. It’s the ethical thing to do and the users with appreciate the openness. Sure, some may not come on board but most probably will since they’ll see the benefits of being able to talk to other high value folks within their niche about issues theya re facing and how to solve them.

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

I attended the Future of Online Advertising conference in NYC this past Thursday and one of the topics was advertising pricing models on the web. We’ve all heard the debate before. Should CPM, CPC, CPA, CP whatever be the pricing model? What model is the most efficient? Luckily Kim Malone of Google tackled the subject in her presentation and I think what she said made a lot of sense (and no, it’s not because I work for Google now – thought I should throw in the disclaimer).

She looked at the three main online ad models of CPM, CPC and CPA and discussed how they all make sense depending on what it is the advertiser is looking to accomplish. Kim looked at the pricing models as a funnel where CPM was at the top of the funnel (reach a ton of people to build brand) and CPA was at the end of the funnel (reach the folks looking to buy the product/service now). The basic idea was this:

CPM should be used if the advertiser is simply trying to make people aware of their products and services (i.e. build their brand). CPC should be used if people are aware of the product/service and the advertiser is looking for people to take some sort of action (visit the website, fill out a survey, etc.). CPA should be used if the advertiser is only interested in creating conversions (sales) and is not very interested in extending awareness of their brand.

That is an over simplification of course but you get the idea. All of the pricing models work together to help advertisers achieve what they need to achieve so the arguments over whether or not CPM makes sense and if CPA is the new CPC are simply non-issues. The ad pricing model really all depends on what the advertiser is trying to accomplish at a given time (and on what the media type is – i.e. CPM tends to work best in feeds as feeds are a brand building media).