Weekend Project: Discover 3 great new marketing blogs on the Power 150

Power 150

One of the great joys of reading blogs is the discovery of new voices with a different perspective on issues I care about.

Here’s an easy way to find some great marketing blogs that have already earned a following, but may be new to you. I call it Power 150 Roulette.

Todd AndTodd Andrlik has compiled a Power 150 list of the “top” marketing blogs. Every weekend, I randomly pick three numbers between 1 and 150 and then I visit the blogs that are at these numbers on Todd’s Power 150 list.

For example, this weekend, I picked 30, 67 and 136. This led me to

The Viral Garden, where Mack Collier writes with insight and intelligence. He’s started a new corporate blog check up series. First up: Kodak.

adliterate, Richard Huntington’s perspective from the U.K. on “the future of advertising and the marketing communications industries, the impact of technology on communications and the nature of potent brands.” A mouthful. But worth visiting. A couple recent posts denounced brainstorms as the source of mediocre ideas and a reflection on the nature of advertising as a trade (spoiler: it’s not a profession and forget about training; learn on the job.) Provocative stuff.

Optimize & Prophecize, a take on Internet marketing from SEO veteran Jonathan Mendez. His post on Optimizing Social Media Landing Pages spoke directly to one of my current interests. I’m hooked.

If you haven’t taken a look at the Power 150, click over now. I discovered some great new blogs on Todd’s list. And I’ve subscribed to make many of them part of my daily reading.

Disclosure: I found the Power 150 and Todd’s blog when Pro PR showed up at number 111 on the current version of the list. Thanks Todd for creating this resource. I don’t know whether I’ll rank on future iterations of the list, but it was a pretty neat thing to find myself there at least for a little while.

Blogger and podcaster insurance

The news that Michael Geist is being sued for a link on his blog got me to wondering at my own exposure.

Shel Holtz conducted an interview for the FIR podcast with Karl Susman who provides blogger and podcaster insurance in the United States. Susman indicated that $2 million in liability coverage runs about $350 annually.

Do you know of any insurance providers who offer policies for bloggers and podcasters in Canada?

Katie Paine's Shankhassick Farm saved from foreclosure

Katie PaineLast week, word went round the blogosphere about Katie Paine’s efforts to save Shankhassick Farm from being auctioned off by the bank.

Well good news. Katie has just posted that Shankhassick has been saved:

As of 4:05pm today the taxes were paid and the bank was notified. I am SO grateful to everyone who helped. Thank you all. It’s been a humbling experience. Let no one ever think that Shankhassick Farm is just a piece of land and some houses. You all made it very clear that this farm is a very special place — a refuge, a source of inspiration and creativity and when that much good will and Karma comes at you, anything is possible — including raising over $125,000 in less than two weeks.

A real example of community and generosity.

Congratulations Katie.

Is Apple or EMI gouging Canadians on the cost of DRM free upgrades for iTunes Plus?

I just received an email from iTunes telling me that the new iTunes Plus DRM free version of music from EMI is available in Canada. The email concludes with the sentence that, “Even better yet, you can also upgrade existing EMI songs in your iTunes collection for just $.40 per song.”

$.40 per song? Where’d that come from? $.40 per song is a 33% premium over the the $.30 per song that upgrades cost U.S. iTunes subscribers. That’s a big, big difference.

How can this be justified? Not on the basis of the exchange rate. When I checked the Bank of Canada currency converter just now, it showed that $.30 U.S. is worth $.32 Canadian. So, that means that either Apple or EMI is pocketing a windfall $.08 for every iTunes track upgraded to the DRM free iTUnes Plus version.

I applauded Steve Jobs’ announcement that iTunes would take some initial steps forward into the world of DRM free music. That’s a good thing.

But charging one person an extra $.08 on exactly the same purchase another gets for $.08 less? That doesn’t make sense to me.

Seems like a marketing faux pas to me. I wonder if it will bounce back on either Apple or EMI.

What do you think?