Google’s Departed Godfather of AdSense Joins the Tumri Project

After Gokul Rajaram, the “Godfather of AdSense,” left Google at a seemingly inopportune time for the search company, no plans were indicated on Rajaram’s part as to what direction his new solo career would head. Today, however, we’ve learned that Rajaram is indeed sticking with his expertise in consumer and business ads, and has joined the board of directors at Tumri, a one-to-one online display marketing solution. Tumri works as a consolidated, one-stop-shop for brands to create their online campaigns to be delivered across platforms, media types, etc. It is one of several companies looking to provide a centralized service that does some of the heavy lifting for the brands that bcome their clients, extending certain projections and other data to form a targeted display ad campaign that will reach end users and consumers. Tumri has in fact spend quite some time building up its staff of notable veterans in the field, including Calvin Lui. From the looks of it, Rajaram is attracted to Tumri because of its technology, which is central to its service as a differentiating factor. Dubbed the AdPod, Tumri constructs a brand’s online ad campaign as a platform, combining existing creatives and marketing messages with offers and listings, turning it into a dynamic ad widget. Rajaram’s presence on Tumri’s board of directors helps solidify not only Tumri as a company, but dynamic ad widgets as an effective and scalable form of targeting advertisements. The way I see it, widgets incorporate reporting and an ability to change, which are primary reasons for why they are being experimented with so heavily at this time.

Digg Joins DataPortability, Will Support OpenID

Digg has just announced that they have also joined the DataPortability Workgroup, adding to a laundry list of companies in the Web industry who have signed on to work together towards allowing you to own your data and take it with you to other sites.

In a blog post this morning, the company writes:

“Want to sync your Digg friends network with another service? We want to help you do that. Want to use your Digg activity to get recommendations from another web site? We’re working on that, too.”

Additionally, the post indicates that the company will soon support OpenID, though it’s unclear if that means you’ll be able to login to Digg using OpenID, or if they’ll simply join a long list of companies including Yahoo and AOL that are allowing you to use your credentials from their respective services to login on other sites.

All of this sounds good to me. As we now know, most of the main players are already in on DataPortability, including Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. Mashable readers were fairly split in a recent poll where we asked whether DataPortability was all hype or the next big thing:

Welcome, Digg. Now let’s see what happens.

The killer Twitter-tracker just arrived and its name is Tweetmeme

It had to happen sooner or later. We’ve had Technorati. We’ve had TechMeme. Now we have Tweetmeme, which will track what’s hot on micro-blogging platform Twitter. The business of tracking the online conversation just a got shot in the arm a big hit with the tech equivalent of crack cocaine.

Built by the makers Fav.or.it, a yet-to-launch blog commenting system, and based on an idea by Marjolein Hoekstra, Tweetmeme looks for new content and tracks who else is talking about it. It ranks the content based upon who and how much a particular item is being discussed. As anyone knows, the number of URLs which spread virally through Twitter each day must run into the millions, so tracking where that viral trail starts and gains momentum is going to be fascinating. It also categorizes the content into blogs / videos / images and audio. Sure there are other Twitter aggregators like Politweets (politics), TweeterBoard (conversation analytics) and many others.

But Tweetmeme has a few other features including a ‘river’ of new content and RSS feeds for the river (or categorized feeds for blogs / videos / images / audio). In addition Fav.or.it will integrate Tweetmeme into its API so you’ll be able to comment on blog posts through Tweetmeme. [For an explanation of how Fav.or.it will work see here and here].

The knockout punch is that Tweetmeme will Twitter the original person who first mentioned the item if it makes it onto Tweetmeme. This is going to be fun…