A Source Of Inspiration

Great news: finally Interactive Advertising Bureau Portugal kicks off, with an ambitious installing committee .

Ricardo from Elemento Digital did most of the hard work (along with Alain Heureux, from IAB Europe) and got great feedback from the major Portuguese online media players, that are finally agreeing on the urgent need of a reliable institution heading the interactive marketing industry.

In the next few months, IAB Portugal intends to discuss the main goals and business plan, inviting all the players to the table (remember my comment?).
So, if you’re in Portugal and concerned about the future of advertising, have your say at IABPortugal.com.

At least in Portugal. They better not be, since Craigslist has just opened their portuguese version and Google is starting to take local search and location based services more seriously in Portugal.

Anyway, PAI (Portuguese Internet Yellow Pages) released a new set of features that are so web 2.0 that they even have round corners and gradients. Here’s what we can do now:

Ratings and Comments

Now users can leave their ratings and comments, supposedly to improve the service quality. I wonder how long will it take until spammers and ruthless SEOs start flooding the system.

Maps

Nice one. Not Google maps, but at least they know the local market, so a tailored experience might be enough to convince portuguese users. The service is provided by Local Matters.

Search Widget

You can take the search service and embed it in your site as a widget. Unlike Google custom search, no revenue is distributed to publishers.

Things are eating up, and after web 1.5, it seems that some portuguese services are entering the 2.0 bandgwagon. Better late than never. Someday we might even ditch Microsoft government agreements and choose reliable OSS solutions (I wish …).

Meanwhile, all minor efforts are welcome. Nice work, PAI and Truvo.

Perhaps this has been around for longer, but it’s a first for me. Alexa, an Amazon company, now lists the top 100 Portuguese sites. A few patterns emerge:

• Hi5 ranks nr 1

  Besides user base, i simply don’t get it why it got so popular around here, specially when it’s way behind Facebook or MySpace in terms of features. Well, at least they announced their support for OpenSocial, by the end of this month. Curious how Orkut is ahead of MySpace (Brazilian emigration might not be the only reason).

• Google domains

  Google.pt + google.com + YouTube + Blogger = all your base belongs to us.

• Travian is #10?!?!

  I always made fun of Travian as being WoW for dummies. In several trips to my hometown in the countryside, it amazed me the dozens of teenagers gathering around in the local cofee shop to play this online strategy game. Now i fully respect it, though i still haven’t figured out the whole etnography. Another contender is Hattrick, a football manager that’s killing productivity in Portuguese offices. (Hey boss, if you’re reading this, keep in mind I play neither of them).

• The ISP / media conglomerate pack

  Sapo, IOL, AEIOU do their best to take advantage of being a default start page. With agressive content agreements and new service launches they try to hold on to a good slice of the market.

• Sports

  Football, mostly. With 3 daily sports newspaper (odd, isn’t it?), no wonder the online versions of Record, A Bola and O Jogo rank in the top 30.

• Leechers

  Oh boy, where should i start? Emule, private servers, Usenet … As if it wasn’t enough illegal downloads, Portuguese leechers are coming to the web to use services like MegaUpload, RapidShare, BtNext or Mininova. You think that’s funny? You should try to get a Cable connection to work decently on peak traffic hours.

• Portuguese do it better

  Keeping this blog Safe-For-Work, you probably can figure out what is the subject in matter. Although it seems we have to see a lot of “instructional materials” to keep in shape, as 8 in 100 sites seem to point out.

• The birth of social media

  Besides Hi5 and Blogger, several user publishing plataforms are getting big enough to believe we’ll see a sustainable growth in social media tools in the near future. Wordpress.com, Flickr, Fotolog and Imeem (where’s last.fm ???) have some impressive figures, a promising sign for User Generated Content.

• Web 1.5

  My biggest disappointment was not founding a single decent “Web 2.0″ (there, i said it) portuguese service. From the great list at Bloguite, none is featured on Alexa’s top 100.

Alexa’s ranking system, while extremely biased by those who have their toolbar, is the best free choice we have until compete.com becomes less US centric.

But i guess it’s our own market’s fault, that keeps feeding a monopoly like the one that Marktest has with their closed metrics solution Netpanel. Ah, if only comScore was here ….

Last year, on the balance of the e-Mkt 2007 conference, there was hope in bringing forward our national digital marketing industry, perhaps by becoming part of of EIAA or creating local IAB offices. Maybe that was not a feasible solution, but the reality of having poor industry metrics is a huge problem that needs to be addressed.
Better yet, let’s all have a true conversation about it. Your turn.

2008 is really shaping up with events in Portugal. After finding out that master designer Paula Scher from Pentagram, is scheduled to speak at ESAD the next 4th of May, today the gang from RIApt announced the first portuguese Flexcamp.

The conference about Adobe Flex and Adobe Air is heading to Portugal (at ISCTE) on the next February 19th, after a full year touring in the US.

Planned speakers:

• Serge Jespers, Adobe Systems
• Enrique Duvos, Adobe Systems
• Carlos Rovira, Flex and Flash integration
• João Fernandes, BlazeDS and LCDS
• João Saleiro, Connecting Flex to LAMP backend using AMFPHP

Register here.

I’ve highlighted the Fight For Kisses campaign before, but it really pisses me off that they did a major online media investment and didn’t had the budget to localize the website.

Once and for all Portugal IS NOT Spain !!!

In the end, it doesn’t matter how great your creative is, if you don’t care about your users/consumers. Let’s see if the media planner is listening … Oh, and if you’re a Portuguese blogger and also felt annoyed, go ahead and rant about it.

But wait, the Portuguese racer just got lost in the desert and really needs you to answer his call.

And if you support him, there’s a chance to win a Seat Altea.

Another mobile campaign by eStara Portugal.

The newest update on Google’s free analytics package has now support for Portuguese. As with English US-UK, we’re also used to this double localization, one for Brazillians and other for Portuguese, so it’s good news for us Europeans to have a dashboard in our mother language.
You can select it from the Language pulldown menu on the Analytics Settings–>My Account page.

While webmasters and data strategists are fine with the English interface, it will be useful to Portuguese clients that aren’t familiar with most of the terminology. For someone who spent 3 hours yesterday explaining the dashboard and main features, i surely welcome this addition.

Speaking of the other Google Analytics updates, you might want to update your code to the new ga.js javascript include and take advantage of the latest functionalities, like the one that allows the tracking of ecommerce transactions.

Shame on you Portuguese readers, for nominating this blog on the Internet category. I just can’t understand how 300 lazy posts managed to grab your attention. Is it the source ? Is it the inspiration ? Oh, i know, it’s those Shameless PromoTions and you feel like thanking me. No need, your projects are that good.

It’s been a hell of a ride since September 2006, talking to readers, deleting more than 30000 spam comments, digging some breaking news, becoming a screener, being listed at AdAge150, guest blogging, and the hardest part, writing regular content.

Thanks.