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Freewebs rebrands site-building service

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Webs.com have officially rebranded their site-building service to embrace a rollout of social publishing features enabling site owners to grow a community around their websites. The platform makes it simple to seamlessly add photo and video galleries, blogs, calendars, web stores, wikis, and members that can comment and contribute to bring a website to life.

The rebrand is a small part of a much larger milestone– the launch of a new platform ten months in development.

Originally posted on November 18, 2008 @ 7:35 pm

Filed Under: Web

Metacafe introduces new music channel

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Metacafe has launched the Metacafe Music Channel. The channel features established artists and up-and-coming acts in the genres of Pop, Rock, R&B, Hip Hop, Country and Latin.

Metacafe has signed on to the affiliate program for Sony BMG’s MyPlay Video Network, which enables it to run a wide range of frontline Sony BMG music videos right on its own site. Additional content partners will be added to the Metacafe Music Channel in the coming months.

Originally posted on November 19, 2008 @ 12:09 pm

Trulia.com and Placecast partner to increase relevance of ads

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As advertisers and publishers seek ways to improve performance to compensate for shrinking budgets, new technologies like location-based advertising provide a means of improving relevance and response rates. Real estate site Trulia.com, and media company 1020 Placecast, have announced their partnership, using location information to target specific audiences for advertisers and deliver more relevant messages to them on Trulia.com.

Placecast adds a new dimension to audience targeting by using location information as the key to relevance. In Trulia’s case, the starting points are the real estate locations in which users express interest. Placecast’s proprietary targeting algorithms correlate these with dozens of other demographic, psychographic and geographic data points.

For publishers in categories such as travel, events, tickets, real estate, weather, classifieds and career search, Placecast uses the location information already present on these sites to target audiences and customize messaging. Improved performance results in a dramatic increase in the value of ad inventory for advertisers, transforming remnant ad space into premium CPM real estate for publishers.

One of the first advertisers to take advantage of this approach with Placecast and Trulia is Avis-Budget. Approximately halfway through a three-month campaign, Avis has seen its ads on Trulia perform strongly relative to other publishers. The Avis-Budget campaign is just the first of many in the expanded partnership between Trulia and Placecast.

Originally posted on November 19, 2008 @ 4:40 pm

NHL and The Salvation Army to launch Online Red Kettles

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The National Hockey League (NHL) is collaborating with the Salvation Army to support the Salvation Army’s 2008 National Christmas Campaign in the US and Canada.

The Salvation Army’s first collaboration in both the US and Canada will allow NHL fans in both countries to donate in an exciting way through Online Red Kettles. Online Red Kettles are the Internet counterpart to The Salvation Army’s traditional physical red kettles, which are stationed at retail outlets and street corners throughout the Christmas season.

During The Salvation Army’s 2008 Red Kettle Campaign, fans can use a pull-down menu at NHL.com to select and join their favorite team with their own personal kettle. The individual whose NHL.com Online Red Kettle provides the most financial support to the Campaign will receive an NHL All-Star Game prize package for the 2009 NHL All-Star Game Weekend, January 23-25, in Montreal. The package includes two tickets each to the NHL SuperSkills® Competition, the 57th NHL All-Star Game and NHL VIP pre- and post-game receptions.

Originally posted on November 20, 2008 @ 12:58 pm