April 2008 Archives

Yes profit, that is the idea anyway.You may have noticed that external links have a preview box that shows you a SNAPshot of the link. It is even branded with a BG Views logo in the lower left. Snap.com offers this little utility, and they have been improving it over the years. You can do a lot more than just show a preview of a web page, however. And for that, I will show you the wonderful example that they put together.

Introducing Snap Shots from Snap.com

I just installed a nice little tool on this site called Snap Shots that enhances links with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, MySpace profiles, IMDb profiles and Amazon products, display inline videos, RSS, MP3s, photos, stock charts and more.

Sometimes Snap Shots bring you the information you need, without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you "look ahead," before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.

Should you decide this is not for you, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out.

So, you said profit?

One of the new features to Snap is Snap Shares, which "is a program for sharing ad impressions where a portion of the impressions generated on your site are yours to do what you want with, and the remaining impressions are Snap's."

I had Michael Metzger create some house ads for Snap Shares (Thanks Mike!) so now I just need to see how well the banner inventory sharing works. The more pages we have that use Snap, the better that ratio of course. The banner ads that Mike created:



There are two sizes because you can actually set the preview window to be really big, if you so desire. Now, this is not a feature meant to move ad impressions, Snap is just a nice thing to have, I think it is really useful. If we manage to make a few bucks from it, thats not bad either.

Special thanks to Natalie Miller-Moore for putting a bug in my ear, we now have a BG News Alumni Group on LinkedIn, too. What is LinkedIn? Well its like a grown up version of Facebook, or something. Why do we have a BG News Group on LinkedIn now? World domination of course!

LinkedIn seems to be behind the curve of Facebook and even MySpace groups, so please bear with me. You can see a list of people who are currently in (and approved) the BG News Alumni Group here. You can see my LinkedIn Profile here. So if you or another BG Newser are on LinkedIn, please join our group here.

Please note that while anyone can sign up for the group, I have to approve you. It seems that LinkedIn is a bit more careful about Groups. They even require a human to approve the creation of a group. What a novel concept.

But anyways, this is just another way to stay connected and network with others in our busy lives. Enjoy, and thanks for all the fish.

You can always contact me here: webmaster [at] bgviews [dot] com.

The BG News Facebook Network is for us, but the Facebook Groups are for our readers. These have been recently restructured so they make a little more sense.

BG News Alumni is for our alumni, easy enough. AmyJo Brown started that up and has a good amount of members, great initiative on her part.

BG News Staff was recently renamed, as it was called "Bg News" and was rather ambiguous with our other group. Patrick Maynard started this eons ago, and I have since taken it over (remember, BOFH). But when specific people sign back up, I will give them admin again. This is, obviously, for current staff.

Interesting/annoying side note about Facebook -- and they will not budge on this -- you cannot rename a group without first deleting everyone from it. Actually, in the email they told me I would have to completely delete it (remove everyone, then remove myself). Once I deleted everyone, however, I was able to rename the group, thus keeping the forum and wall posts. So semi kudos to Facebook on that.

The BG News is our "face" HA HA *cough* to the world. Brittany Crisp has done a great job with it. We currently are running our Get Smart campaign through this group. Seeing as she has worked very hard to get 233 members to date, I am not about to rename that one.

As you can see, having a group called "Bg News" and "The BG News" was a bit confusing. But it not any more, much.

I could create a "Fan" page too (like LittleBigPlanet) but I see little use in it over a Group. I think it would be overkill, which sadly is where I think Facebook has been headed since the explosion of half-assed apps that don't work and can be hacked. My opinion of course, but, well, I am writing this.

So there is your Facebook overview. Subject to change at a moments notice.