So, I’ve been reading blog posts on digital signage for over a year now and I must admit, anything you want is on the internet, you just have search for it. Since I’ve been reading I’ve found some great content. I just thought I would post some of my favorite blogs I’m subscribed to in the digital signage industry (they are not listed in any particular order).

POPAI Digital Blog. This is a newly launched blog so I’m fairly new to it. However, it’s a conglomerate blog written by several industry leaders. This is the best type of blog because many heads are better than one. Already some great content posted.

Bill Gerba. The Wirespring guy. Anyone who’s anyone in the industry has read this guy’s content. He’s been writing articles on signage for the last couple of years. Most of his insights are super good.

Sixteen :: Nine. This blog is done by ScreenMedia. Regular updates here with very good content. I always check back to read the jems in this one.

Minicom Blog. Minicom Digital Signage keeps a very good blog that posts fairly regularly. There content is usually descent.

Nate Nead. Just a plug for my personal site. I think I’ve got some fairly decent material. I’ve also been doing a blog at Deploid.

Adrian Cotterill. Great content! This guy has been posting for sometime. It is “Daily” digital out-of-home, but sometimes I think fewer and more detailed posts win the day.

DS Insights Blog. The name says it all. Just updates and insights into digital signage.

DigitalSignageBlog.com. Self explanatory why someone would follow this one. Great content from a myriad of different subjects.

Rob Gorrie. Rob is the CEO of Adcentricity, a signage aggregation company based on the east coast. His insights are great and I love reading his blog

The Digital Signage Blog. At DigitalSignage.com we have about 6 part time and 2 full time bloggers, ensuring we get relevant content at least once a day. So, subscribe and return often.

Just as a post script, I’m sure there are those out there who’re wondering why I didn’t post something about the BroadSign blog, Planar Blog or the Scala blog. I’ll tell you why. It’s like those blogs are a machine is pumping out information. They’re impersonal to me. Sure, I check up on them from time to time, but I scan titles and keywords, I don’t read for enjoyment.

So, if it’s great, well thought out, interesting content you’re looking for, then check some of these guys out. Great stuff!

Well, InfoComm was great and I saw some pretty cool stuff. I forgot to blog about Alioscopy. Alioscopy is a company that does 3d digital signage displays that don’t require glasses whatsoever. In fact, it’s a bit trippy. From what I gained from talking with the rep, they’ve got a rendering machine that takes about 7 or 8 images and overlays them in the background. SlashGear did an article on them not too long ago which said the following:

In fact, the system sounds very similar to the WOWvx technology Philips recently demonstrated in their own glasses-free 3D display. Both rely on depth information recorded from a number of slightly different points-of-view - nine in WOWvx, eight for Alioscopy - that is refracted onto the different filter layers of the panel. Each system can display pre-mixed 3D video or create the 3D effect in real-time; alternatively, both can display normal 2D pictures. However the big difference would seem to be bandwidth: WOWvx supposedly needs only a little extra above plain 2D video, whereas Alioscopy’s system demands 9GB per minute.

Can you imagine that? Any digital signage system that requires 9GB per minute is really pumping out some info. These things are cool though. If you can afford their $10k price tag. The ad potential for such a system is pretty huge though. The picture of the screen I’ve pasted above really doesn’t do the system justice. It’s kind of one of those, “see it to believe it” systems. Some cool stuff nonetheless.

Well, another big player announced their entrance into the digital signage world today: AT&T. It makes sense somewhat because of the network they’ve already established.

AT&T has struck strategic agreements with ExtendMedia, Qumu and Stratacache, which are software companies that specialize in formatting and packaging content that is suitable for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer applications, such as streaming video, live and on-demand webcasting, e-learning and virtual trade shows, as well as the delivery of advertising over emerging media networks.

AT&T plans to complete deployment of nearly $70 million in network infrastructure and development investment by year-end to support its digital media capabilities across the United States and Europe (European Union countries) and Japan, Hong Kong, China and Taiwan within Asia. Over the next several months, the company will integrate the software expertise of ExtendMedia, Qumu, and Stratacache with its own capabilities to provide companies with one-stop shopping and simplified network-based solutions to encode, deliver, manage and support video and multimedia files. Businesses will also be able to combine these services with AT&T’s industry-leading security capabilities, hosting, applications and professional services to address their most pressing needs with complete and reliable solutions.

With today’s announcement, AT&T is responding to customers’ need to cope with exploding demand for rich and graphics-intensive multimedia content that has been fueled by the wide adoption of high speed Internet services, sophisticated computing technologies and the need to deliver to multiple play-out devices including digital signs, PCs and smart wireless devices. The content delivery network (CDN) services market totaled nearly $900 million in 2007, according to analyst firm IDC, and is expected to significantly grow in the future.

This announcement is not surprising to me in the slightest, but becomes another reason to watch the digital signage industry. I posted earlier about Google’s entrance into digital signage. With some of the largest network players and internet advertisers entering, it would seem foolish to discount the signage industry based solely on lack of specific metric measurement.

InfoComm 2008 was a great show. My favorite part is seeing the newer technologies that are available out there. It’s partially the nerd in me as well as the generation I’ve grown up in. We’re used to bigger and better. This is easily witnessed in Apple’s newest release of the iPhone 3G. I always forget my camera to everything. It would have been great to have had the stupid thing at this event so I could showcase some of things I’m speaking about. There were plenty of other people taking pictures, so maybe we could connect with them somehow.

The Digial Signage portion of the show was larger than I thought it would be. I spoke with so many different vendors and picked up so many different business cards that my head is swimming. There were some interesting applications in that arena as well. This industry is certainly has some great hardware and software pieces being released shortly.

It took me 8 hours to finish 3/4 of the Digital Signage portion of the show. Just so you’re aware the digital signage portion of the show made up less than half of all the booths being presented at the show. Great technologies. Great people. I was able to run into some good contacts.

Much like paper beats rock, platforms beat applications hands down. Every time. It may be helpful to clarify the difference between the two and then talk about this truism.

According to Geoffrey Moore in “Crossing the Chasm”

Applications are what an end user sees. They can readily gauge the benefits of them .And if the application fixes a broken, mission-critical business process, they can insist on its deployment in spite of an IT department’s reluctance.

Platforms, by contrast, are multi-purpose by definition. They are infrastructure and as such are the domain of the IT community. Charged with maintaining the security, reliability, and performance of the current infrastructure, this group is not quick to adopt distruptive technologies which require widespread reengineering of systems.

Moore says that to accelerate the adoption of platforms companies must clothe platforms in applications clothing. “That is, they must tie them directly to an application in order to gain the end-user sponsorship necessary to secure a beachhead.”

Here’s the issue, however. To become a platform utilized by many in an industry a company usually has a huge barrier of incumbency to cross. This can be the most difficult issue for a company looking to get their platform out as the “norm.” This is why niche platforms are so critical. Not only do they allow for market penetration, but they also allow for chasm crossing in that area. So, the best way to get a platform to the market is develop one for a particular niche, milk the niche, and move on to other niches, until market dominance takes over.

When markets go mass, platforms have the advantage.

This is almost always true. So, when building a platform, do it for a niche that will benefit greatly. Then move forward to market dominance.

This post is for those of you trying to get higher on the Google charts for your specific keywords. I picked up the tip from my good friend Mark Jones who found it at GoogleGuide.com (a great resource by the way).

Essentially this is the key: don’t go to your own site via bookmarks or even directly by typing in the URL. You’ll improve your pagerank more if you go to your site through the search engine itself. So, type in your desired keyword(s) and find your site among the masses and click on it through Google. When you do this, Google’s algorithms recognize that the keyword you were searching for matched the site you clicked on. Thus, your pagerank goes up for that particular keyword.

Now, this does not just work in theory, but it works in actual principal. The case in point here is NateatNight.com, my sleep talking recordings site. What Mark did for the past week was search Google for “sleep talking.” Then he would go to page two where we were ranked somewhere in the top 15 or so. Then, he’d click on Nate at Night :: Sleep Talking Recordings. He did this several times over a couple of days and viola! The site is now on page one, position 6 for the keyword “sleep talking.” Not too shabby if you ask me.

So, if you want to be numero uno for a particular keyword, start searching out that keyword, find yourself in the haystack of sites that appear and click. It may take some time, but the more you go at it, the greater chance you have of getting to the top. So click for rank baby!

So, I found this on Rob Gorrie’s blog and I just had to post it here so all could enjoy. It’s quite interesting actually. This reminds me of an earlier post on Interactive Crowd Gaming. Certainly this would draw attention. Now utilizing it as something that will make more of just a “oh, that’s cool impact” may be another thing. Still has the “wow” factor though.

I just read an interesting article that appeared a couple of days ago in the New York times. It was talking about the tracking devices that are being installed by TruMedia on the Adspace Network. They are rolling with a bunch of them on the Adspace Network across the country.

The devices are very useful. Essentially what they do is measure traffic and are able to tell what the gender is to a high degree of accuracy for people walking by the digital screens. The great thing is that the information is not only stored, but reported back so the company real-time. It is able to get an accurate reading of how many, who, what, when etc. for each screen locale. This makes the measurement problems for ROI and traffic common among digital signage networks decrease substantially. There’s one problem: people are skeptical.

It’s almost like the people who saw their house posted on Google “street view” and wanted to sue Google. People do not like to be invaded. And although the company claims that actual photographs are not taken and reported back, the digital screens seem like a type of “big brother.” So, if you’re ever walking by a digital signage screen and have an uneasy feeling like you’re being followed, don’t worry about it in the slightest. It’s probably just a crowd tracking device. I guess if you really want to mess with big brother you can just make faces. Who knows it might think you’re a woman if you scrunch your face together enough. Then maybe the screen will report back some lingerie images. Who knows. It may be worth a try.

In the realm of the internets (I like to use the plural, much like the southerners like to pluralize Wal-Mart to Wal-Marts), there are writers and readers. Naturally those who surf the web often usually do both. Those that are savvy enough, know that a equal dose of both is necessary to keep up in today’s fast paced world. Today, however, I’m going to focus on authoring relevant web content.

So, you’re using web content to drive traffic eh? Great! As you should. Here are some questions you need to ask yourself though.

1. Am I creating content for content’s sake or am I just looking at ways to increase my content so the spiders will think “hey, content this site is better than the others that talk about this particular widget because they have more content” ?

2. Does my content repeat itself exactly in my site…over and over? The spiders are smarter than you think and they even ban people whose site’s contain too much duplication.

3. Is the content relevant to my area of expertise? If so, great. If not, stop putting up garbage on your site just to hopefully drive traffic.

Now, having said all this, I’m going to go through a list of things I gleaned from an article Mark Jones sent me which was written by Gary Hess. He poses the question, How do I spot duplicate content? He gives several ways this can be done:

1. Make sure each page has only one URI that can be found by search engines. If your site must have a print version and a screen version, use your robots.txt file to exclude the pages or add the robots meta tag with noindex attached.
2. Do not copy and paste long paragraphs directly onto your pages. Quotes and paraphrases are fine, but anything longer than a few lines should be taken out. If the page must have the same content as another page, surround it with unique text so Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines can easily distinguish the page.
3. Try to get pages to at least 250 additional words / html tags that are not within the template.
4. Use 301s to redirect old versions of pages to the new version.
5. Keep internal linking consistent. Don’t link to /page/ /page and /page/index.html, choose one and only one. I have seen many websites link their ‘home’ button to /index.html. Don’t make this mistake. It will be seen as duplicate content, and even the 1% chance it isn’t, you will be splitting its Page Rank in two.
6. Use country specific TLDs when the content is country specific. This will not only help deter search engines away from labeling external-internal duplicate content, but will also help with your sites rankings in local searches.
7. Make sure your syndicated content has a link back to the original. This will help search engines decide which is the original.
8. Use the Google webmaster tools and select your preferred www or non-www version.
9. Don’t have empty pages. Many sites have stub pages for future articles that will be expanded. If you must, and I mean must, have these pages, at least block the pages using your robots.txt.
10. Blog/CMS software – understand how your blog or CMS software places its pages. If your site includes an date archive, directory archive, and an index page that shows the latest posts, your site will have duplicate content problems. Make sure to block the pages that will least likely to rank high and leave only one.
11. If a page is ranking better than your original, consider filing a DMCA request to claim ownership of your content within all search engines.

Final Thoughts

So, don’t get too caught up in the hum drum of always trying to place more and more content on your website. Especially if it’s just a repeat of what you placed there ten minutes ago. Everyone hates spam, including the webcrawlers and search engines, so forget it. However, keep on blogging because you never know when some customer is going to be looking for the very specific niche thing you blogged about 3 years ago. It can be an effective tool.

Remember, too much duplicate content can even mean being blocked completely from SERPs (search engine results pages). So, clean it up and get optimized! For more hints on SEO visit Enflate.

I’ve been waiting for some stats like this for a while. Today, I stumbled upon them at aka.tv.

Research results from Prime Digital Media and Sigma, owners of the Wellbeing digital signage network in Australian pharmacies, are reporting an effective 20% sales increase for products promoted through the channel.

The results are based on a month long research study carried out by Galaxy Research and Sigma audited point-of-sale data. The pharmacies selected to carry out the research were spread geographically across Australia - and no additional point-of-sale promotions or catalogues were placed in the pharmacies while the research was being undertaken.

Sigma and PDM are one of the first companies in Australia to release tangible research about the effects of digital media advertising in Australia.

This is great news that will help to increase the viability and credibility of the effectiveness of digital signage. Studies like these are invaluable in the promotion of out-of-home media.