Media distributor Mochila has just signed another partner for the provision of content for its service to web publishers. American Media, Inc. is now making its content available for use through Mochila’s distribution stream, which is quickly reaching across websites by several means, including a recent deal with GoDaddy.

As the parent company for magazines such as Shape, Men’s Fitness, and Natural Health, AMI’s classic content is another example of a print media company looking for more ways to penetrate the publisher and reader market on the web. As with other content options through Mochila, AMI is making its content available for free to those publishers that are participating in Mochila’s ad support program. Users can pony up some cash if they want to lose the ads (AMI will license its content to sites for a one-time fee).

Several traditional media companies are looking to aggregated distribution methods for ways in which to extend their content in an effective manner. As Mochila continues to expand the ways in which publishers can access their service, it becomes more attractive to the content providers. Mochila spent a good amount of 2007 building up its relationships with content providers in order to become valuable to web publishers as well.

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Having worked in a huge corporation, I’ve learned to appreciate the sheer genius that is Dilbert. I read it religiously each day, and I even sometimes call some of my colleagues by their according Dilbert names. Needless to say, they do not understand this and think I’m insane. Which might in fact be correct.

In any case, you can now slap the official Dilbert widget anywhere you like, in three sizes: 400×300, 300×250, and 160×300. You can see it in action below, and the official Dilbert widget site is here.

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New Web 2.0 services await; all you need to do is grab your free invites over at Mashable Invites!

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The Web 2.0 Marketplace is a place to list Web 2.0 and “New Media” websites for sale, job offers, consulting services, Facebook development services and more.

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Google has just unveiled a new feature for AdWords, called demographic bidding. This lets you target your ads in a more specific manner, and see the results of the targeting. The available groups for targeted AdWords are gender and age group, on some sites within the Google content network. Google hasn’t released this feature just yet, but will begin testing it over the next few weeks with a select group of advertisers in the U.S. and the U.K.

For those that run contextually targeted or placement-targeted campaigns, the demographic bidding will work based on Google’s relationship with participating publishers. They’re the ones that give up the demographic data like gender and age, based on the users or visitors of their websites. The reason demographic bidding will only be available on certain sites within the Google network is because only participating publishers will be lending their sites’ demographic data for this purpose. These sites will also have to make it clear in their own Terms of Service that the users’ registration data may be used for these reasons.

What this new feature does is extend some of the targeted ad options that larger brands and advertisers use with other networks to be available to all of its AdWords clients. There will be two ways to use demographic bidding. Bids can be modified for a particular audience segment (i.e. increasing bids for the 25-34 year-old males), or you can narrow ads by elimination, meaning you can choose which groups you would not like to show ads to certain demographic groups that you see are already not meeting your ROI goals.

This is yet another way in which Google is giving feedback to its AdWords users so that they can better make informed and effective decisions. Does this make you feel better about using Google AdWords as an advertiser or web publisher, or is Google pushing its luck having just gotten over one big hump in regards to its privacy policies and accused attempts at a monopoly?

On another note, Google has reinstated the click-to-call feature for AdWords as well.

[Hat Tip to Mazy at Minds1anda.com]

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With Twitter down right now, I’m resisting the urge to join the fallback blogosphere backchannel chatroom of FriendFeed and actually get more productive this evening. Tamar Weinberg has provided an interesting set of posts for fodder along those lines, as she’s sent on to me what could best be described as a crapload of blog posts and discussion threads on the negative reactions to the new Digg algorithm change. The following from Kevin’s post at the official Digg Blog:

Digg’s promotional algorithm ensures that the most popular content dugg by a diverse, unique group of diggers reaches the home page. Our goal is to give each person a fair chance of getting their submission promoted to the home page.

As we point out in our FAQ, occasionally you will see stories in the upcoming section with 100+ Diggs - this is evidence of our promotion algorithm hard at work. One of the keys to getting a story promoted is diversity in Digging activity. When the algorithm gets the diversity it needs, it will promote a story from the Upcoming section to the home page. This way, the system knows a large variety of people will be into the story.

There seems to be a rebel forces uprising within the Diggosphere, though, as many long time patrons of the site feel betrayed, and that things are being engineered so that they can no longer effectively use the site as they’ve grown accustomed. There is also a loudly voiced concern that increasing the number of diggs required to reach upcoming and front page status will also greatly increase the lead time between a story’s breaking point and the story’s wide distribution through Digg, thus erasing one of the key value points of the system. Soshable has one of the better organized enumeration of reasons why the new algorithm changes aren’t that great:

This time yesteraday, 6 stories were promoted in 20 minutes. This seems to fall into the norm for a weekday around 4pm PST. The relative high traffic brings more stories to the front. As of the time of this post, 12 stories have been promoted in the last 4 hours — an average of 1 every 20 minutes.

Oboy has never had story go over 80 without hitting the homepage and DigiDave hasn’t had anything recently do the same. Today, both hit over 125, were not buried off of the upcoming list, but didn’t make the front page. One was from an established website, one was from a new one.

The “Hot in All Topics” section has some new names on it. Actually, almost all are new. Some are very new, having joined today, submitted something, and left. No Avatar. No comments. 1 other Digg. As of the time of this article, Pizzler is the only recognizeable name on the list. In fact, the other nine submitters who are on the “Hot in All” section have a combined 7 stories that have hit the front page before.

To further enumerate the inconsistency in play here, several folks have been watching the bury/digg ratio with Ajaxonomy’s Bury Recorder, and interestingly despite a clear concerted effort by veteran diggers to bury the story, it has remained on the scope of the upcoming popular news queues.

Compared to a number of stories that have been completely buried after just a small number of diggs and buries, it is a bit suspect that Kevin’s story on improved algorithmic changes seems to defy the algorithm.As I’ve said before, I’ve got a soft spot for Kevin Rose and his many successful ventures due to a number of two-degrees-of-seperation connections I have to the fellow, but it seems those that are further removed from Rose do not have the same amount of mercy.To get the story behind the story on what the reaction by avid Diggers, Tamar referred me over to the live UStream broadcast The Drill Down. The show is a regular podcast by folks who spend more time on Digg than should be legally allowed, and really are in touch with the community. It didn’t take long for me to get the gist of the forces Kevin was trying to combat, and exactly why this might be a losing battle. Simply put, Digg is a victim of its own success.

It is my impression that Kevin has been trying to implement a formalized algorithmic system of democracy as applied to technology and geek news. The problem is that now that the community is roughly the size of a medium sized city, the concerns typically reserved for political science classes now come into play. The illusion is that Digg is a system typically referred to as ‘direct democracy.’ As such, denizens of that democratic environment want a system they can count on to put across their agenda, especially the long time users of Digg. They’ve formed the online equivalent of coalition governments with their sizable friends list, so when they post something to the site, they can reasonably expect it to make front page if it is of a certain quality.

This is one of the major components the new algorithm looks to combat, as well as another problem involved in direct democracy: self-interest. The voter or digger will tend to look after his or her own interest rather than considering the needs and values of a society as a whole. As such, it is very difficult in a true direct democracy to promote a story that appeals to the smaller niche group the site was originally designed for, as opposed to the wider audience that is interested in more mainstream things. In other words, LOLcats end up dominating more than nuances of the Open Source community.

I don’t have a pat answer in political scientific, computer scientific, or any other sort of scientific terms for Kevin or the community over at Digg. What I do think is important, and is a recurring theme of malcontent from the Digg community, is that Kevin and company open a much more visible and viable dialog with the community to clear up exactly what sort of philosophy of governance the system runs under, or risk losing the community altogether.

To see the conversation in action, see these posts:
200 Diggs 1 Voice: Diggers have had enough
Digg Is A Game. Let’s Play For Real This Time.
The Digg Algorithm Has Changed.
Two Diggs One Cup

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The Data Portability Workgroup has been receiving more press in the tech blogosphere than just about any other industry organization lately due to a large number of high profile new members such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook. There have been a number of questions regarding the concepts of portable attention data and the general viability of the DataPortability Workgroup in general raised amongst several bloggers. The numbers in terms of interest are becoming more clear - it isn’t just the bloggerati that are concerned with ownership of the data - the general wilds of the internet are becoming more concerned as well, as is evidenced by the results of today’s daily poll.

I took a minute to sit down with Chris Saad today and get the scoop from him on the big question regarding the workgroup: “Where’s the beef?” The answers will surprise you.

The embed is available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.

Subscribe to the podcast here.

You can check out Data Portability Workgroup here.

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A new feature from LinkedIn is a regular old recommendation tool, Amazon style. When you view another user’s profile, you’ll also see a box that says “Viewers of this profile also viewed…” This box shows the names and positions of those users that have also been viewed by the folks that have already looked at the profile you’re currently viewing. Got all that?

The new feature is an extension, of sorts, of that feature that lets you see the users that have viewed your profile, and the feature that suggests other people you may know.

Is it just me, or are things beginning to get a little redundant here? If you’re viewing profiles of those that have been viewed by the same people looking at the profile you’re currently viewing, then you’re even more likely to come across people you already know. It’s a handy reminder for checking up on users that you may not have talked to in a while. But as much as I complain, there is still a good chance you’ll see some names there that you don’t yet know. Hopefully these features will all be layered into a more robust recommendation tool that presents you with new users based on a set of variables that’s less likely to overlap as much.

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Zazzle has just announced the acquisition of Goodstorm, the company that helps companies and causes sell items with a selection of ecommerce tools. Goodstorm already had a T-shirt design and sales center, along with other services for custom creation tools that can be shared via widget and sold across the web.

It seems like a good acquisition for Zazzle, as the company grows and becomes further integrated with various social networking and media tools. Most recently, Zazzle’s partnered with Box.net, RockYou and MySpace to extend its custom product offering to users of these other web-based services. As part of the acquisition, Goodstorm will be a part of Zazzle’s larger efforts to help out social causes and non-profits, going right along with the company’s existing Zazzle Giving initiative. In taking on Goodstorm, Zazzle also gets access to Goodstorm’s existing partners, which include Amnesty International, the craigslist Foundation, and United for Peace.

Could this acquisition lead to more integration of Goodstorm’s offerings into social media as well? Given other efforts that have found social networks beneficial for spreading the word on their causes, and even raising money, this seems like a smart direction in which Zazzle and Goodstorm could go.

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Another company that’s looking towards global expansion; LinkedIn. Kevin Eyres has been appointed the company’s Managing Director in Europe, with LinkedIn’s first European operation opening up in London. Given the amount of growth LinkedIn has seen over the last year (reportedly doubling in size in all major regions in Europe), the move is inevitable for LinkedIn. Last year the social network for professionals reached 1 million members in the UK, where it has its largest reach outside the U.S.

Aside from the fact that most social networks eventually need to ramp up their global expansion efforts, this has been particularly important for professional social networking. To that end, Xing has probably been the most aggressive, extending its global reach through expansion and acquisitions. Facebook has taken a two-pronged approach by hooking up with the Samwar brothers and leveraging its existing community to help out on the translation end.

LinkedIn has a bit of catching up to do, but it’s well on its way. Eryres, who has worked for SideStep Europe and AltaVista International, has experience in the market, as well as extending a company on a worldwide scale. And while Eyres will focus on the company’s strategy and growth initiatives in Europe, LinkedIn is also looking for positions in marketing and sales for its new London office.

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