To help get a better idea of who visits the sites, blogs, and podcasts that make up The Lounge I have launched a simple survey. To motivate people to take the survey we are going to select two random entries to win all 41 of the Manning In Action books, I know that is a prize I would love (except what to do with the Java books?).

Go take the survey now.

The survey includes some marketing questions as well as technology questions, when the survey is closed I will make the technology answers public.

-James

This was originally posted over on the Zerk Media blog but I wanted to cross-post it here since I think everyone should be subscribed to these blogs.

Over the last month or so a number of new publishers have joined the Small Publishers Room. With some of our members moving to The Silverlight Room there was room to take on additional publishers. Here are the new additions:

Corey Haines is currently a freelance developer and journeyman, traveling around to pair-program with other developers.

Dave Bost is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft and co-host of the Thirsty Developer Podcast.

Mark Harrison is a Solutions Architect at Microsoft UK – and a pre-sales Technical Product Specialist for Office Platform with a key focus on customer solutions for Content Management, Collaboration, Portal and Search.

John Sheehan is a .NET developer based in St. Paul, MN who specializes in building web applications with ASP.NET MVC, C#, jQuery and SubSonic.

I am thrilled to have these influential developers and bloggers join The Lounge.

-James

This was originally posted over on the Zerk Media blog but I wanted to cross-post it here as well since that blog is pretty new.

I am thrilled to announce the launch of the Silverlight Room in the Lounge. The room started serving ads in the middle of January with Telerik being the first advertiser to take advantage of this very targeted advertising opportunity. I am very proud of the group of publishers who helped to launch this room, it is made up of a couple of publishers who moved from the Small Publishers Room as well as publishers new to The Lounge. Here is our "starting lineup":

Tim Heuer is a Program Manager with the Silverlight team at Microsoft and writes a very popular blog filled with great information.

Shawn Wildermuth is a well-known blogger and Microsoft MVP who runs the Silverlight Tour which offers comprehensive Silverlight training.

Jeff Blankenburg is a developer evangelist with Microsoft who is personally very passionate about UX.

Josh Holmes is a RIA Architect Evangelist with Microsoft focused on building and educating the dev partners with a Rich Internet Application offering in Central Region.

Corey Schuman is a passionate Silverlight developer who enjoys contributing to the community via his blog, books, and speaking engagements.

Terence Tsang writes the Shine Draw blog which compares Silverlight and Flash by posting various samples and source code.

Laurent Bugnion is the author of "Silverlight 2 Unleashed" and frequently writes about Silverlight and web development on his blog.

I am very excited about this room and expect it to grow throughout this year to include all the top sites and bloggers who focus on Silverlight.

-James

I have decided that due to The Lounge and Ruby Row doing well and my goals around creating additional networks I am going to form a subsidiary of Infozerk called Zerk Media to focus on the advertising side of my business. I am still working on the official paperwork to get the accounting and business aspects done but I went ahead and put together a simple site and blog. In the past I have blogged about the status of the networks on this blog, but that is going to change and I will be blogging about The Lounge, Ruby Row, and other networks on the Zerk Media blog. I want to blog about each new publisher and advertiser without filling up this blog with that information.

I will continue to blog about the technical aspects of building these networks and the infrastructure behind them on this blog as well as any new major announcements. I will also continue to blog about business decisions and ideas on this blog.

So if you are interested in continuing to follow how the networks are doing please subscribe to the new blog.

-James

On December 16th 2007, a year ago today, I took over The Lounge Advertising Network from my buddy Kevin F. Here is a quick summary of the first year:

• Grew from 10 publishers to 40
• Launched the Small Publishers Room
• Launched the first .NET focused RSS advertising offering with the RSS Room
• Launched the Podcast and Screencast rooms
• Started the year with 2 advertisers, sold out all rooms for the first time in July.

I also have a couple of new things to announce today. The first is a couple of new publishers who actually joined last month but I never blogged about. Both have joined the Small Publishers Room and I think make great additions.

Kevin Pang writes a great blog and you will quickly notice he loves creating lists.

Ken Egozi is very active in open source. He is a committer to the Castle project and helps out on the NHibernate mailing list and wiki.

The second announcement is a new room called the Open Source .NET Room. This room will be a way for open source projects and developers to make money from advertising without resorting to large banner ads or google adsense. I was hesitant to start this room because I don’t want to be seen as profiting off of open source, so all the proceeds of this room are going to fund the servers that run ideavine.net. If you have an open source project and you would like to be a part of this room please email me (javery at this domain).

I also have another new room that will be launching in the new year, but I am not yet ready to make that public.

Its been an amazing year and I hope next year is even better.

-James

August was a great month for The Lounge, with Scott joining the network the web publishers room hit an all-time high of 1.7 Million impressions in the month. To start out this month I have moved Sam Allen who runs the excellent site DotNetPerls from the Small Publishers Room to the Web Publishers Room. Sam has been writing some excellent articles and has been rewarded with great traffic.

I am thrilled to announce that I will be handling sponsorship for the Herding Code Podcast. I am convinced that podcast sponsorships are a great opportunity for advertisers and I love supporting the great content and conversations that I hear on the podcasts I work with. Herding Code is also joining the Small Publishers Room to run display advertising on their site.

I have also added a number of other new publishers to the Small Publishers Room, we are now up to 26 publishers in that room!

Ben Hall has been on my radar for quite some time as he is a member of the team building my favorite unit testing tool (MbUnit) and also does a great job writing about unit testing, build tools, and much more.

I have known Scott Reynolds virtually for awhile and finally met him at CodeStock. Right after joining The Lounge he ended up joining the great folks over at LosTechies so not sure how long this blog will be in The Lounge, but thankfully LosTechies is a member as well so we aren’t really losing Scott.

Alvin Ashcraft has been writing an excellent daily link post and has also started to write some quality articles, he will make another great addition to the room.

September is going to be an exciting month for The Lounge, I hope to launch another new room in the next couple of weeks as well as launching a side-project that is related to The Lounge in some ways. Should be able to announce both very soon.

-James

The RSS Room of the The Lounge is now live. The Publishers are still working on getting their feeds setup, but I hope in a week or so to have everyone setup and the first real advertisements running. RSS Advertising represents a new way for publishers to get well compensated for the hard work they put in to their sites and blogs. It also is a great way for advertisers to get the word out about their products and services to people who rarely visit sites or blogs outside of their RSS reader.

Building the technology for RSS advertising was a fun challenge and I think it will be a good addition to The Lounge, I will blog about the technology as part of my Building The Lounge series.

-James

July was another great month for The Lounge, we picked up some new advertisers in Gurock Software (the makers of SmartInspect) and Lite Accounting. We also added some great new members to The Lounge.

I announced Scott joining The Lounge a couple weeks ago, I am thrilled to have in as a member and having him in the Web Publishers Room has vastly increased the advertiser value for that room.

Nikhil Kothari has to be one of the longest blogging members of the ASP.NET team and he continues to write insightful posts on a frequent basis. He makes another great addition to the room.

The Small Publishers Room also continues to grow with some great new additions.

Jeff Blankenburg is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft and increases my already high percentage of Great Lakes region (it’s not called that anymore is it?) bloggers.

I recently discovered Ryan Farley’s blog but I was very impressed with the writing and the history of great content (since 2003!).

Shawn Wildermuth is very well known in the .NET community, is an INETA speaker, and has been writing some great posts about NHibernate and Silverlight.

The month ahead will be very eventful for The Lounge, I plan on launching the RSS room in the next week, announce some new podcasts, and also plan on launching another all new room!

If you subscribe to me through an RSS reader you should now see a small ad at the bottom of each feed item. I am testing out the new RSS advertising that I have added to The Lounge. I have tested them in Google Reader, NetNewsWire, and Feed Burner. If you see an issue in your feed reader please let me know, I want to make sure above all that I am not causing any problems with a specific reader that I have not tested with. Over the next week I will have a couple other sites roll out the ads to test it on a larger scale, my goal is to launch the .NET RSS Room August 1st.

RSS advertising has become more and more prevalent over the last couple of years with plenty of big players in the market like Google, FeedBurner, and Pheedo. My goal is to deliver more relevant ads as most of the ads you see on the big players are more general technology ads, with The Lounge RSS ads I will be able to focus in on .NET publishers and .NET advertisers.

I will also only support people adding my advertisements to full feeds, ads in partial feeds is just wrong. Right now you will see an ad in every feed item, but that will be changing before August 1st as I add a metering option so publishers can decide how often the ads should show up.

-James

I am thrilled to announce that Scott Hanselman will be joining The Lounge in August. It says a great deal about someone that they literally need no introduction, if you work with .NET or any Microsoft technology, you know who Scott is. Since taking over The Lounge getting Scott onto the network has been one of my goals and I finally think The Lounge is at the point where it can be a mutually beneficial partnership. We have agreed to a six month trial to make sure that the partnership works out for both us, but I am confident that it will.

I have also picked up a couple of other excellent bloggers this month, but I will save that for my normal end of the month update.

-James