Somebody needs to keep track of Santa Claus as he makes his way around the globe Christmas Eve, and, once again, NORAD has stepped up to the plate. This year they’re providing radar coverage and up-to-the-minute info on his every move.

Volunteer military personnel work into the wee hours of the night tracking St. Nick on special equipment that pinpoints his location on Google Maps and Google Earth. “Santa Cams” catch him in action as he criss-crosses the Earth in his sleigh and, if you watch closely, you’ll even get to see Santa do a flyby of the International Space Station.

Santa trackers issue regular reports on the web site as the Big Guy stops at various countries on his way to the United States; the trackers also remind kids about the importance of going to bed so he doesn’t have to skip the homes of boys and girls that are still wide awake. (How convenient!) The trackers also keep busy answering live phone calls and emails from kids around the country who call or write in with questions. You can also track Santa in Google Earth, visit m.noradsanta.org on your mobile device, or just search for “Santa” on Google Maps on your phone.

NORAD’s holiday web site is already up and running with games and activities, but the real fun begins at 12:00 a.m. MST on December 24th. That’s when the Santa Cams flip on and viewers can watch Santa and his elves get the sleigh and reindeer ready to go out for the night.

Be sure to check out the video compilation of scenes from last year’s cams to see some of the places NORAD caught Santa last year. If you’ve never visited the NORAD Santa Tracker on Christmas, you really must do so. It’s so cool that you’ll want to make it a holiday tradition.

Official NORAD Santa Tracker

Send an email to Lisa Hoover, the author of this post, at yvfn@yvsrunpxre.pbz

moc.rekcahefil@asil.

Here comes Santa Claus

Digital Inspiration is an oft-linked blog here at Lifehacker, and its author is a very savvy digital worker. That said, Amit Agarwal learned a lot about safety precautions when both his Gmail and Google Apps accounts were hacked into.

Agarwal’s not entirely sure about how his accounts were broken into, given that he had strong passwords on them. After a few moments’ panic and some back-and-forth with the Google team, he regained control over his accounts. If he had to go through it again, he’d wish he had a whole bunch of backup and verification procedures on hand. Here’s one item that jumped out at us, despite having gone through a similar experience, as something neither we nor most Google/Gmail users probably have ready:

#3. Take a paper and write down the following information about your Google Account. You will need this to verify your identify to Google in case someone else takes over your Google Account and the secondary email address associated with your account.

• The month and year when your created your Gmail / Google Account.
• If you created a Gmail account by invitation, write the email address of the person who first sent you that invite for Gmail.
• The email addresses of your most frequently emailed contacts (the top 5).
• The names of any custom labels that you may have created in your Gmail account.
• The day/month/year when you started using various other Google services (like AdSense, Orkut, Blogger, etc.) that are associated with the Google account that you are trying to recover. If you’re not certain about some of the dates, provide your closest estimate.

Be sure to read the full Digital Inspiration post for more tips and advice on preparing for, and recovering from, hacked Google accounts, and share your own hack/spam recovery experiences in the comments.

Gmail and Google Apps Account Got Hacked [Digital Inspiration]

Send an email to Kevin Purdy, the author of this post, at xriva@yvsrunpxre.pbz

moc.rekcahefil@nivek.

Good summary and links to full posts on preparing/recovering from a gmail hack.

« So you don’t think Twitter is for B2B? | Main | Why Twitter is like a bowl of soup »

December 14, 2009

My answers to 5 Twitter FAQs

Those of us who spend significant percentages of our public time talking about Twitter and social media, often hear the same question voiced over and over again. It my seem redundant to us, but it makes overwhelmingly clear what the barriers are: what reason people have to not use Twitter.

On the short list of these questions is: “How can a message constrained to 140 characters possibly have value?”

It takes more than 140 characters to answer it.

First off, the question often reveals a traditional marketer’s mindset: How do I get a message out? How do I get people to buy my goods and services in a measly 140 characters.

The answer is that you don’t. Twitter does not work well as a one-directional message-sending tool. It is more like a telephone. One person speaks and another listens. The parties go back and forth. The person who started the conversation often finds greater value in what she or he is told, than in the brief words that initiated the conversation.

Second, Twitter is a business tool that is best used in conjunction with other social media tools. It’s advantages are that it is very fast for spreading ideas, information or just interesting thoughts. It is broad and shallow, while other tools such as blogs, podcasts or even wikis go much deeper.

Let’s compare Twitter to a hammer.  Both are diverse in the ways you can use them. You can use a hammer to build a house or perhaps bludgeon a spouse. In either case using a saw to help you with the job will usually prove useful and productive.

That gets me to the third frequently asked set of questions: “Exactly what do I use the thing for?”

The answer they hate to hear is precisely the one I have to give: Use it for whatever you want to do with it. Twitter is not an application. It is a communications tool or platform. You can use Twitter in as many ways as a telephone or email.

Then there is the dreaded ROI question, the one that makes Twitter and social media champions roll their eyes toward the sky with Pavlovian consistency. 

There are somethings that have clear value but are difficult to measure. For example, I have elected to wear pants at every face-to-face business meeting I’ve ever attended. I cannot think of any way to measure the value, but I know it’s there. I know in most cases the pants have greater value than say my wearing a skirt or no pants at all.

But I cannot give you the comparative ROI on the investment.

Nor can I quantify the value of a good telephone conversation; a customer whose problem got painlessly fixed by a support technician; a CEO spending five days of company tie and money to speak at an industry gathering; or a holiday donation to a homeless shelter.

Yes, there is a value to each of these things and somehow it translates to the bottom line. Yes, all things in business need to be measured to be understood and to scale. But more and more, measurement has become more complex.

When you understand what it is you want to do with Twitter, then you can find what it is you need to measure. Their are many tools and people who will help you.

And that brings me to the final and most difficult to answer of my frequently asked questions: “Why should I use Twitter.”

My blunt answer is: “Whatever you want.” Just like that hammer and phone.

Posted by shel on December 14, 2009 | Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c6ba253ef0120a74f8bfd970b

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference My answers to 5 Twitter FAQs :

Comments

My answers to 5 Twitter FAQs

Those of us who spend significant percentages of our public time talking about Twitter and social media, often hear the same question voiced over and over again. It my seem redundant to us, but it makes overwhelmingly clear what the barriers are: what reason people have to not use Twitter.

On the short list of these questions is: “How can a message constrained to 140 characters possibly have value?”

It takes more than 140 characters to answer it.

First off, the question often reveals a traditional marketer’s mindset: How do I get a message out? How do I get people to buy my goods and services in a measly 140 characters.

The answer is that you don’t. Twitter does not work well as a one-directional message-sending tool. It is more like a telephone. One person speaks and another listens. The parties go back and forth. The person who started the conversation often finds greater value in what she or he is told, than in the brief words that initiated the conversation.

Second, Twitter is a business tool that is best used in conjunction with other social media tools. It’s advantages are that it is very fast for spreading ideas, information or just interesting thoughts. It is broad and shallow, while other tools such as blogs, podcasts or even wikis go much deeper.

Let’s compare Twitter to a hammer.  Both are diverse in the ways you can use them. You can use a hammer to build a house or perhaps bludgeon a spouse. In either case using a saw to help you with the job will usually prove useful and productive.

That gets me to the third frequently asked set of questions: “Exactly what do I use the thing for?”

The answer they hate to hear is precisely the one I have to give: Use it for whatever you want to do with it. Twitter is not an application. It is a communications tool or platform. You can use Twitter in as many ways as a telephone or email.

Then there is the dreaded ROI question, the one that makes Twitter and social media champions roll their eyes toward the sky with Pavlovian consistency. 

There are somethings that have clear value but are difficult to measure. For example, I have elected to wear pants at every face-to-face business meeting I’ve ever attended. I cannot think of any way to measure the value, but I know it’s there. I know in most cases the pants have greater value than say my wearing a skirt or no pants at all.

But I cannot give you the comparative ROI on the investment.

Nor can I quantify the value of a good telephone conversation; a customer whose problem got painlessly fixed by a support technician; a CEO spending five days of company tie and money to speak at an industry gathering; or a holiday donation to a homeless shelter.

Yes, there is a value to each of these things and somehow it translates to the bottom line. Yes, all things in business need to be measured to be understood and to scale. But more and more, measurement has become more complex.

When you understand what it is you want to do with Twitter, then you can find what it is you need to measure. Their are many tools and people who will help you.

And that brings me to the final and most difficult to answer of my frequently asked questions: “Why should I use Twitter.”

My blunt answer is: “Whatever you want.” Just like that hammer and phone.

View the entire comment thread.

Quick read for most asked questions on Twitter – the truth is there is no wrong way to use twitter just be yourself and help others.

Five video game buying tips for parents

Just as there are movies, TV shows and books that are inappropriate for young eyes, not all video games are ideal for players of all ages.

Granted, you already know this, thanks to widespread media coverage of many “Mature”-rated video games, such as the Grand Theft Auto series. I don’t think many parents want their 7 year-olds playing games where you can shoot police officers or pick up prostitutes — even if it is “just a game.” And imagine if you accidentally gave this kind of game as a gift to a child?

Considering the holiday season is upon us, the following are some helpful tips for parents (and/or gift-givers) buying video games, courtesy of the Entertainment Software Association of Canada (www.theesa.ca).

1. Check the recommended age ratings. An age rating is featured on the lower left of every game package, and it gives information as to age appropriateness. For example, “E” is for “Everyone,” “T” is for “Teen” and “M” is for “Mature.”

2. Read the back of the package. Called “content descriptors,” the back of the game box will tell parents why games are classified for certain ages. It might say something like “strong language,” “violence,” “blood” or “sexual references.”

3. Monitor your child’s game play. Sit down with your kids when they play these games so you can see what they do in them. Create a dialogue with your child about their game playing — their habits, feelings and with whom they play online.

4. Use the parental controls. All three video game consoles — Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii — all have built-in controls that allow parents to restrict content based on the age of the user. In most cases you can also set time limits for play.

5. Go beyond the box. There are many other resources for information about video games, including game reviews, trailers and demos, both online and in store. The Entertainment Software Rating Board website (www.esrb.com), for instance, will give you specific examples of what can be found in each new game.

By Marc Saltzman, MSN Tech & Gadgets

Posted at 11:55 AM in Games, Holiday Guide | Permalink

summary of the basics for parents as we near the last few days of christmas shopping.

Paris-based entrepreneur Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is covering the Le Web conference for us this year. Follow him on Twitter for more updates.

More cool startups from Le Web:

Stribe was the winner of the startup competition at Le Web. You may already know them from TechCrunch50, where they presented.

Stribe is a social network for your Web site. Instead of setting up a separate social network for your site or brand on a network like Ning, you can add a line of code to your site and it becomes full-fledged with social functions. People can log in through Facebook Connect (Twitter OAuth soon) and chat, share items, etc. The site is in private beta and will go public soon.

Their charismatic CEO Kamel Zeroual explained that the most popular feature is chat — if you’re logged in Stribe on one site you can chat with someone you know who’s on a different site that also has Stribe. They will operate under a freemium model; with premium accounts users can have deeper analytics about social usage and can push content, which would be very interesting to corporations that want to add social features to their sites.  

Hypios calls itself the first social marketplace for solutions.

Companies can post R&D problems that they have to the site, associated with a big cash reward (of which Hypios takes a cut), and get responses from tens of thousand of users, plenty of them graduate students in the hard sciences.

The company got its early users by building an academics-focused social network. Interestingly, they also got users by having their first challenge be a feature of their site that they were having a hard time solving and that was solved by their community in an unexpected way.

This, their CEO told me, is the main advantage of Hypios: companies get their problems solved in unexpected way; for instance, the solution to a bioengineering problem might be found by a computer engineer, or the solution to a computer problem by an economist. Hypios is young and has 8 projects online now.

Perhaps my favorite company of the whole conference is a startup called Yatedo, and I met them on the subway leaving the conference.

There were these two French geeky guys, carrying around huge signs and stuff from their booth in heavy luggage. When I asked them to give me a pitch, they leaped into it enthusiastically, stumbling through English for the benefit of the girl I was riding with, demoing the service on their unfinished iPhone app. Man, these guys were hustling.

Yatedo is a search engine for people, and I was impressed as much by the product as by the founders. It’s really well done, you get full profiles, and without the bunch of garbage and false positives that you find on other people search engines. It looked like a Mahalo or Wikipedia entry, but with more depth — and unlike those, it’s all done through an algorithm instead of human editors (unfortunately the product is in closed beta right now).

All the founders are computer science engineers (normal in Silicon Valley but unusual in Paris, where you almost always have a too-slick business person to give you the pitch), they’ve been doing this as a research project for several years but the startup itself is really young, they’re bootstrapping and they’re looking for funding. A great product with technical depth plus founders who are, as Y Combinator founder Paul Graham put it, “relentlessly resourceful” is a sure winner — or at least a startup after my own heart.

All these companies (except Yatedo) have something in common: they’ve raised angel money, often multimillion amounts. The main thing that was interesting that I got through my conversations with French entrepreneurs and investors was paradoxical: entrepreneurs can relatively easily raise money from angels, but find it really hard to get VC funding.

A few years ago, the complaint was the opposite: too few angels were willing to put money at risk, and there was a funding gap between seed/”friends, family and fools” funding and big, multimillion dollar VC rounds. Now, angels will put money to work, and plenty of startups raised the kind of money that would be a Series A VC round through only angels. But the VCs are fearful.

You would’ve thought that, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, it would be the other way around: angels damaged by the meltdown trying to conserve cash and VCs, with institutional money, filling the gap. This is what is happening in the US, with VCs taking part in smaller and earlier rounds. I don’t know why this phenomenon is, but I think it’s good for the long term because angels are the ferment that gets an entrepreneurial company going.

All in all, I have to say Le Web was a really great experience. As I said before, the conference was really well put together, the venue beautiful. As in all such conferences, the panels tend to be boring and rehash known themes and memes, but the attendees were a wonderful mix of American, European and French entrepreneurs, investors and other members of the tech scene, and that’s the reason why people attend these things — the people you meet.

More Le Web coverage here.

Photo: Robert Scoble

Good view of some of the top startups at Le Web this past week — including some mentions of bootstrapping through the start up phase.

Christine Mason McCaull is one of several entrepreneurs Portfolio.com is following as part of the series The Great Global Adventure. All of the entrepreneurs will be blogging about their experiences. This is the third in the series of blogs from entrepreneurs.

When we started our most recent business, ClickMarkets (in shared office space with a decent broadband connection and high-powered laptops), we did all the same things we did at our last big endeavor.

It was the usual drill: Develop a value proposition, craft a brand and market-entry strategy, put together a financial model, pull together a team, set up an infrastructure, and, eventually, actually sell services to our first customers.

But this time there was a big difference: It took a lot less of money and time to get to that first dollar in sales revenue, thanks to technologies that have vastly reduced selling, marketing, and administrative costs in setting up a new venture. This has freed us up to invest our money and time in the development of what is core to our business, run very lean, and bootstrap our company through sales revenue, not Other People’s Money.

I’ll even put numbers on it: What cost a minimum of $500,000 and took nine months and lots of engineering talent in 2004 can be done today, thanks to technology changes, by smart people with some Web awareness or the willingness to learn, for less than $20,000 in three months. It’s not that we’re doing this business on duct tape and baling wire, either. We’re working with very clean, professional services that can scale and which just a few years ago cost a hundred times as much to put in place.

As a former venture-backed CEO and 18-year industry vet, I’ve been an insider creating some of these technology shifts—but it’s only now, as we’re applying them in our own new startup, that we really understand their real impact from an operating perspective.

The following five major tech-enabled trends have saved us money and improved our business in the process.

• Trend 1: The Open-Source Movement
• Trend 2: Technology-Enabled Distributed Workforce
• Trend 3: Social Media
• Trend 4: Software as a Service
• Trend 5: Online Productivity and Communications Tools

We see that these trends don’t just impact new businesses, but are also applicable to established businesses of all sizes.

Trend 1: Open Source Everything

The open-source movement makes it easy to launch a functional, commercial, and robust Web presence at a fraction of the cost.

Usable open-source software and business applications cut down the cost of building really robust, functional websites.

Example: We used the free open-source Joomla (www.joomla.org) content management system to build our Web presence, including user registration, email, and social-media management and e-commerce—and to avoid using developers to interpret our content and place it on the Web.

• Cost savings: $25,000.
• Extra benefit: Day-to-day control of our own site content without developer intervention.

Everyone seems to be getting sucked into social media. At the same time a large percentage of companies are using it wrong or using it without defining clear objectives.

Stephen Baker writes in Business Week: Beware Social Media Snake Oil

“As millions of people flock to these online services to chat, flirt, swap photos, and network, companies have the chance to tune in to billions of digital conversations.“

“But the same tools carry risks. Employees encouraged to tap social networking sites can fritter away hours, or worse. They can spill company secrets or harm corporate relationships by denigrating partners. What’s more, with one misstep, one clumsy entrée, companies can quickly find themselves victims of the forces they were trying to master. Thousands of bloggers attacked Motrin last year because of an advertisement from the Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) brand they found demeaning to mothers.

Over the past five years, an entire industry of consultants has arisen to help companies navigate the world of social networks, blogs, and wikis. The self-proclaimed experts range from legions of wannabes, many of them refugees from the real estate bust, to industry superstars such as Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk. They produce best-selling books and dole out advice or lead workshops at companies for thousands of dollars a day. The consultants evangelize the transformative power of social media and often cast themselves as triumphant case studies of successful networking and self-branding.

The problem, according to a growing chorus of critics, is that many would-be guides are leading clients astray. Consultants often use buzz as their dominant currency, and success is defined more often by numbers of Twitter followers, blog mentions, or YouTube (GOOG) hits than by traditional measures, such as return on investment. This approach could sour companies on social media and the rich opportunities it represents. “It’s a bit of a Wild West scenario,” blogs David Armano, a consultant with the Dachis Group of Austin, Tex. Without naming names, he compares some consultants to “snake oil salesmen.”

Can We Finally Change This Conversation?

It seems that online and off line conversations are consumed with measuring the ROI from social media. Much of the dialog is a waste of time and focused on the wrong thing. Yet organizations seem to be demanding a measure of ROI from this thing we all call social media. We’ve devoted a whole series to this discussion about ROI here

Using social media effectively demands mind-sets and capabilities that are unfamiliar and sometimes even counter intuitive to many business managers. It requires building trusting relations with your market, internal and external, rather than enforcing top-down out dated policies. Business managers should allow themselves and the entire organization time to unlearn and rethink everything before they “jumping into” social media. Most are following those who haven’t unlearned and rethought how, where, when,who, why and what they communicate which ultimately produces results, good bad and indifferent.

Results are the end result of how well and what people and processes communicate. You shouldn’t use social media until you know how well and what your people and processes communicate to all markets, internally and externally. Using it without knowing this is like jumping out of a plane with no parachute. Splat!

An ROI from social media doesn’t come from the tools rather the skills and knowledge on how to use them for a specific purpose, value creation. How much value do you create from use of your cell phone? Your email? and last but certainly not least your mouth!

Snake oil salesmen are known for avoiding questions during conversations, or flipping questions into other subjects. The reality is that any company wishing to measure the ROI from social media is asking the wrong question and avoiding the real issues. Just like a snake oil salesmen.

Tags: capital, commerce, conversational, currency, deragon, economy, innovation, integration, jay, media

Share 

• < Previous Post
• Next Post >

First paragraph says it all.

The case in brief:

For more than 30 years, Black controlled the publishing conglomerate Hollinger International, which owned among other newspapers the Chicago Sun-Times and the UK’s Daily Telegraph. At its peak in 1999, Hollinger’s revenues were $2.1 billion.

In the late 1990s, Black advised Hollinger to start selling its smaller newspapers before the Internet began to crush their profits. It was lucrative for Black and three other Hollinger execs who structured the newspaper deals so that they personally received millions of dollars in noncompete fees from the buyers. Hollinger’s board knew nothing of these noncompetition agreements.

In 2007 an Illinois jury convicted Black on three counts of fraud (amounting to more than $6 million) and one count of obstruction of justice.

Black’s appeal asks the court to consider a fundamental question: If an executive’s dishonest actions cause no discernible economic harm to a company or its shareholders, is it still considered criminal fraud?

Why it matters:

Black’s will be a test case to rule whether the “honest services” clause is so broad that it should be invalidated.

Critics of the statute say it is so vague that it has become a relatively easy way for prosecutors to go after those in government and business who participate in activities that are, as one court put it “something close to bribery,” but not actual bribery.

“First, its unintelligible language fails to give ordinary citizens fair notice of what is prohibited,” argues the Chamber of Commerce in a friend-of-the-court brief. “Second, the statute’s capacious language invites arbitrary and unpredictable enforcement. As real-life examples show, the statute is a catch-all that can be used to target almost any imaginable form of dishonesty in government or business.”

If the court decides the language is too vague, it could invalidate parts of the convictions of Black, Skilling, Madoff, and any number of other corporate fraud cases, says Thomas Goldstein, a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. “Congress would surely move to amend the law to make it more detailed and clear,” he adds.

A more likely outcome, legal scholars say, is that the court will attempt to define what it means to deprive someone of “honest services,” which could send Black back to a lower court for a new trial in light of the new definition. It could also result in further confusion as judges attempt to interpret the clarified law.

The court is also hearing two other cases this term, including one brought by Skilling, that challenge different applications of the honest services clause — an indication that it is considering narrowing the definition of what exactly qualifies as criminal fraud.

The infamous Conrad Black office (where he walked out a slew of banker boxes of documents) was across the street from a party I was at this weekend. The exact topic of this article came through my mind while walking down the sidewalk – who really defines fraud? (I am not suggesting that what he did was above board, but just a thought that past through my mind at the time)

Is Apple’s iPhone-without-a-phone the McDonald’s Happy Meal of mobile communications?

Click to enlarge. Source: Flurry Analytics

Peter Farago of the mobile analytics firm Flurry uses data from its November report to make the case that Apple (AAPL) is quietly — and successfully — using the iPod touch to lock in a loyal base of under-age users who will eventually become the next generation of iPhone buyers.

“While it is clear that the iPhone has significant short-term revenue value for Apple,” he writes in a report issued Sunday, “Flurry believes that the iPod Touch holds more long-term strategic value for Steve Jobs and team.”

“In terms of Life Stage Marketing,” Farago writes, “the practice of appealing to different age-based segments, Apple is using the iPod Touch to build loyalty with pre-teens and teens, even before they have their own phones (think: McDonalds’ Happy Meal marketing strategy). When today’s young iPod Touch users age by five years, they will already have iTunes accounts, saved personal contacts to their iPod Touch devices, purchased hundreds of apps and songs, and mastered the iPhone OS user interface.” (link)

The evidence that Apple’s strategy is working, Farago says, can be seen in a graph of end-user sessions recorded over the past six months.

Flurry, according to Farago, tracks 15 million end-user sessions every day from its “analytics solution” code embedded in 3,000 applications on 4 platforms: Apple’s iPhone OS ( both iPhone and iPod Touch), Research in Motion’s (RIMM) Blackberry, JavaME and Google (GOOG) Android.

The graph above shows that the iPod touch’s share of those user sessions has grown 4 points over the past six months — the same as Android despite starting from a much larger user base. While the iPhone continues to grow in user sessions, its share in Flurry’s data has dropped from 57% to 50%.

Even more significant, according to Farago, is that kind of things the kids are doing with their iPod touches.

“Anecdotally,” he writes, “we know the ‘iPod Touch Generation’ is made up of heavy MySpace, Facebook and SMS users, who voraciously share their lives with, and influence their ever-expanding social graph. Importantly, this also includes promoting products they like. Empirically, Flurry compared how iPod Touch session usage has changed over the last six months across key application categories important to this demographic; namely, Social Networking and Games.”

Farago’s empirical evidence is displayed in the two charts below, which show the iPod Touch growing faster than both the iPhone and the Android devices in Flurry’s Social Networking and Games categories.

Via GigaOm.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Age-based Marketing broken down with Apple’s iPod as the case study

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong

Tim Armstrong, the ex-Google advertising sales chief now in charge of Time Warner’s AOL division, got a laugh when he spoke in September at an interactive media conference in New York. If only that was what he intended.

A tall, dark-haired 38-year-old, Armstrong looks a bit like the actor Jon Hamm who portrays Mad Men’s Don Draper, and despite his new media credentials, he is an old-school pitchman. The CEO of AOL talked passionately about how his company is reinventing itself as a content creator with an ever expanding universe of niche sites catering to everybody from political junkies to fantasy sports buffs to weather geeks to World of Warcraft addicts.

The only problem was that Armstrong overstayed his welcome, surprising the audience at the end of his presentation by proudly rattling off the names of his company’s 75 Web destinations. “He went through all the brands,” says Karsten Weide, an analyst at IDC who covers AOL. “It just wouldn’t end. Everybody started to snicker.”

A lot of people are bemused by AOL’s attempts to reinvent itself. The company has re-jiggered itself almost entirely to prepare for its December 10 spinoff from Time Warner. It’s as if AOL, whose name was once synonymous with the Internet itself, is now trying to become the world’s largest publisher of tiny Web sites.

The strategy isn’t as laughable as it sounds. After all, this is a company faced with an existential dilemma. AOL still relies heavily on income from 5.4 million subscribers, many of whom login using antiquated dial-up connections. (Yes, there are still folks who do that.) Douglas Anmuth, an analyst at Barclays Capital, estimates that dial-up users will generate 43 percent of AOL’s $3.2 billion in revenues this year and 60 percent of its $1.1 billion in earnings. But these customers continue to flee, and next year Anmuth expects the number of subscribers to drop by 27 percent. Even worse, he doesn’t forecast any revenue growth through 2014.

Betting on Incremental Steps

AOL execs have been dealing with this dial-up decline for a long time, of course. And they have made some big bets to try to kick-start the company, including AOL’s $850 million purchase last year of Bebo, an English social network. It was meant to take on Facebook. Have you heard much about Bebo since? Neither have we.

Now under Armstrong, the company is taking smaller steps—albeit quite a few of them. It’s building the future on an Internet publishing model that has actually been in place for several years at AOL. While the company is letting go a third of its 7,000 employees, AOL execs say they’re on a hiring binge when it comes to snagging more editors and writers to spawn more sites.

“We’re still hiring journalists,” says Bill Wilson, president of AOL Media who is in charge of the content and overseas 500 full-time journalists and 3,000 freelancers who are already shoveling material into AOL’s ravenous niche realm. He describes it as “the rebirth of AOL.”

AOL’s Lost Decade

Shortly after Armstrong arrived at AOL in March, he made a curious statement to The New York Times. He said the company was plagued by “an incremental culture. By moving in very small ways, we miss the big opportunities.”

The new CEO was clearly trying to galvanize his new employees. However, Armstrong didn’t quite nail AOL’s affliction. The company has repeatedly swung for the fences—only to strike out. This is, after all, the creature from the dial-up era that bought Time Warner, home of Batman, CNN and Time magazine, for $163 billion in 2000. The deal will go down as among the worst in corporate history. But nobody ever accused its architect, former AOL CEO Steve Case, of thinking small.

Case argued that he could turn his dial-up service into an Internet media colossus by funneling Time Warner’s movies, music and magazines exclusively to AOL subscribers. Unfortunately, this was just when consumers began migrating to faster broadband services provided by their cable providers.

The old Time Warner contingent rebelled. Soon, Case was gone. His old company became a division of Time Warner, one that was dragging down the parent company’s stock. Perhaps not surprisingly, AOL floundered. “They’ve had a lost decade,” says Brad Adgate, senior vice president of Horizon Media, a New York ad agency. ‘It’s like Winston Churchill’s wilderness years in the 1930s.”

In 2004, AOL started switched strategies, offering its articles, videos and games for free. But Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN—its key competitors—had already been doing that for years. And Yahoo, the pioneer of the group, had amassed an enormous audience.

Obviously, AOL made a big mistake by not tearing down the walls around its garden of digital content sooner. Today, according to comScore, Yahoo dominates sports and finance on the Web. Time Warner’s CNN, AOL’s corporate sibling, rules the news category.

AOL sought salvation in mergers and acquisitions. There was the Bebo fiasco. Time Warner also tried and failed to sell AOL to Yahoo last year.

Stumbling on a Business Model

The irony of all this is that AOL’s current strategy was born out of a much smaller deal, which it did almost on a whim. In 2005, just when blogs were emerging and changing Internet publishing, the company paid $25 million for Weblogs, a startup run by online maverick Jason Calcanis that created such blogs as Engadget, a technology site, and Joystiq, a magnet for video gamers.

AOL didn’t just get these rapidly growing sites; it snagged an intriguing publishing model. “What AOL wanted when it bought Weblogs was a more efficient, blog-centric publishing model that it could extend across the rest of the business,” says Peter Rojas, the former chief strategy officer of Weblogs who has since created blogs like RCRD LBL and gdgt.

That’s exactly that happened. AOL used the Weblogs approach to create new sites that were even more successful. The most notable was TMZ, a gritty celebrity gossip site launched in 2005 by AOL and Warner Brothers’ Telepictures Productions. TMZ distinguished itself—some would say disgraced itself—early on by breaking the story of Mel Gibson’s scandalous DWI arrest and offering up unflattering pictures of Britney Spears. It was a runaway success.

Today, TMZ is the third most visited entertainment news site, according to comScore. AOL had similar good luck with FanHouse, a sports site. It’s the Web’s ninth most popular sports destination with a team of refugees from the New York Daily News, the Dallas Morning News and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Giving Each Site its Own Brand

In some cases, these sites carry the AOL name. But in the case of Politics Daily, a new site edited by a former New York Times writer Melinda Henneberger, readers must scroll down to the bottom of the home page to find any reference to the mother ship.

The reason is fairly obvious. It’s been more than a decade since Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan exchanged love notes via AOL in “You’ve Got Mail.” These days, people aren’t as smitten with the company and what it represents. In the age of Twitter, AOL isn’t exactly bleeding edge.

And while Wilson says the sites are gaining momentum, AOL still has a long way to go. ComScore says its monthly unique visitors declined by 11 percent in October to 98 million. Meanwhile, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft’s sites saw their eyeballs rise.

So you can see why AOL is creating Web sites at such a furious pace—three in April of this year, four in May, two in June and four more in July. The company is also trying to ramp up and better target content production with a soon-to-be-launched site called Seed.com that will let editors see which stories are resonating with readers. AOL just signed up former New York Times tech writer Saul Hansell to run it.

Then editors can assign more pieces on these topics to the company’s army of freelancers. More content, more eyeballs, more ad sales. AOL hopes it’s as simple as that.

Big Sites Lure Big Advertisers

The test will be whether AOL’s sites can attract more of the lucrative display ads that flow to Yahoo, in particular. According to IDC, Yahoo had a 17 percent share of the U.S. display market in the third quarter of 2009 while AOL only had 9 percent.

The problem for AOL is that many ad agency executives don’t think these niche sites are hefty enough yet. “None of their properties seem to be must-haves from a media-planning perspective,” says Greg Stern, CEO of Butler, Shine Stern and Partners, a Sausalito, Calif., based agency whose clients include Mini Cooper, Adobe and Priceline.com.

AOL’s response? It says it can deliver mass audiences by selling ads across its niche constellation. For instance, Wilson says AOL is particularly good at targeting hard-to-reach 18 to 24-year-old males who travel back and forth between Asylum, its Maxim-like destination, FanHouse and Engadget.

“We actually get a large network effect,” Wilson says. “We have all these people traveling though out all these sites—sometimes without them even knowing there is a connective tissue to AOL.”

This is AOL’s path to salvation. If it doesn’t work, it’s hard to imagine AOL surviving. If it does, there will be no more laughter when Armstrong goes into granular detail about niche publishing.

More on BNET:

• Perspective: Yahoo’s Turnaround Efforts Are Straight from Steve Jobs’ Playbook
• Chip Conley: Should I Take My Burning Man Pics off Facebook?
• Four Principles of Apple’s Successes (and Failures)
• Taming a Type-A Culture Gone Wild
• The First Step to Landing Your Dream Job? Leave the Country.