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Wadiwallah

A blog by iFaqeer
about life, technology and getting by in Silicon Valley

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Hufftington Post, Online Branding and Monetizing...and Muslim Voices  


Apologise for the stream of consciousness nature of this post. And for being MIA again. Been a little tied-up and distracted. (Moving to new digs this week! is the good news.)

I went to this month's Stanford/MIT VLAB's monthly event in the Bay Area (thanks McGuj, for hooking me up!), which was on "How to Monetize New Media Channels and Make Ad Revenue Real". That's Silicon Valley-speak for "making money out of your readers/users online". I'll try to do a detailed post on my notes from that event later, but a couple of the loudest messages from that event seemed to be that firstly, there's more money being pumped into online advertising than there is "compelling" (that word keeps coming up) content that advertisers can put it on and get good results. And secondly, the ad industry, or at least that panel, seemed to be focused on the need to better qualify and value (in the sense of setting the right price for) page views. Right now, it seems they are being sold and valued in bulk. These thoughts should be worth following up on with time.

But being in that state of mind, the column in the New York Times today titled "Building a Brand With a Blog" and about how Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post have done since that website started caught my eye even more. Of course, the trail of how it started seeming like it would be a celebrity blog site and morphed (we say "reinvented" here in Silicon Valley) into a place with lots of different voices is something we are familiar with here in Silicon Valley in the context of how ventures, particularly those related to the Internet, evolve and change to become successful.

iFaqeer has some more things to say about the number and quality of Muslims voices on the HuffPo. Check out the post on that blog. On balance, I have to say I am impressed by what the HuffPo is doing in this regard. One thing I think might be worth doing--maybe as part of the The Muslim Center's efforts is to do a "HP Blog, Muslim Edition". I wonder how they'd react if I approached them for a co-branding discussion...

Another rather interesting discussion I had with someone at the event was exciting. Will keep readers posted if anything develops.


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posted on The WadiWallah Blog at 11:06 AM