ChasNote

Smart money is on the Ninja! Kent Nichols of Ask A Ninja and I will be on stage together at Influx Ideas in San Francisco on October 19, and I’m just hoping he leaves the weapons at home. Ed Cotton and the crew at Butler Shine put on an excellent event, which they describe as follows:

“The best stories in marketing right now are more than a series of PowerPoint slides. They’re distinctly more human….”

See you there!

HP is releasing a limited number of its new high-end gaming PCs, aka Blackbird, and inviting gamers to “tell us about the coolest mods you’ve seen. Brag about your ultimate gaming machine….” on a wiki site, Blackbird.wikia.com. The site includes videos from Jimmy Wales, Joi Ito, Morgan Webb and the Diggnation crew, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht — videos that were created to run in their respective video programs (as paid commercials) or websites (as paid banner ads). I especially like the clip from Diggnation, when Kevin calls the gaming box “Blackboard” instead of “Blackbird,” and Alex explains the difference between the two.

At OhGizmo, author David Ponce says it’s “sort of fun” participating in Toshiba’s Tech Battle Royale sponsorship:

“Each week, the question is read by the ninja from Ask A Ninja and readers get to vote on their favorite answer. I’ll tell you, it’s sort of fun to be battling it out with these guys, even if in the end it doesn’t make much difference who wins. See, whoever leads in the votes doesn’t really get anything special. Only bragging rights, I guess. But this is where I ask all y’all to help me out a little and send a couple votes my way. I’m currently 4th in the rankings, a whisper ahead of Mark Frauenfelder from BoingBoing.”

He also makes clear the terms of his relationship to Toshiba (brokered by us at FM):

“And for the record no one asked me to write this post, and I don’t get paid to write the answers. Toshiba (the sponsor) is running ads on this site (you might have seen them around) and that’s the only form of compensation in this campaign.”

It surprised me to see Fazal Magid in the comments write this:

“It looks like a reprise of the slimy Microsoft ad campaign (see link) that made waves some time ago. You would do well to disassociate yourself from FM, they have no clue what the limits of the acceptable are. That reminds me, I need to add “Federated Media” to the list of keywords to filter out in my aggregator…”

As I wrote in response to Fazal on the site: The sponsorship relationship with Toshiba is quite transparent from the start, and David’s post takes that transparency even further. The program doesn’t affect any editorial content on OhGizmo, and — as far as I can tell — doesn’t sway the editorial voice at OhGizmo. Is your objection just to the idea that authors can acknowledge advertisers on their editorial pages? Or that an author’s content can be licensed for us on a marketer’s site or advertorial project?

Nice to see that block in the upper right hand corner on Business Week’s business blog section is now featuring some of the FM sites!