MortarBlog

We launched our much-anticipated Mortar 360 brand quiz today.

Click through to test your brand management prowess against the Web’s most advanced (and we might say pithy) brand analysis tool.

(more…)

Our team went up and chatted with the lovely ladies at Made In Napa Valley last week. After the meeting, Catherine and pals generously sent us off with some of their beautifully packaged artisan food products. I tried the Napa Valley Meritage Herb Rub on some salmon on Sunday night. Just a hint of olive oil on the fish, then rubbed in the rub, let it marinate for about 1 hour, then grilled it. It was so good! So tasty, in fact, that I ate it for dinner Sunday, Monday’s lunch and dinner (3 meals in a row!). Check out their site for their super tasty products, including vinegars, tapenades, marinades, dipping oils, and lots more.

(more…)

This is a very easy, cool tool.

What’s a Clusty Cloud?
From: http://cloud.clusty.com/

A Clusty Cloud is a tool that webmasters or bloggers can use to instantly visualize a topic using the familiar tag cloud display. What makes the Clusty Cloud unique is that you can create a cloud based on any topic or query - you don’t need tags or months of content on a subject to create an interesting cloud.

Clusty
Clouds are generated using our search results for the topic you enter.
Since the tags you see come from Clusty, you can click on any of them
to go to Clusty’s search results. Using Clusty to generate the cloud
also ensures that it is always up-to-date because the clusters are
generated in real-time.

 What do you do with a Clusty Cloud?

Use
the Clusty Cloud for individual blog posts, blog sidebars, your
personal site or any other web page. You can also customize the look of your Clusty Cloud to match your site or topic.

Like this:

(more…)

Wanted to share a newly found webtool that seems pretty cool: Sphere.com. From their website:

"Sphere’s advanced search algorithm helps you discover high-quality, relevant, and
timely blog posts that match what you’re looking for.
The Sphere It! Bookmarklet is a free bookmarklet that makes it easy to
find blog posts that relate to what you’re reading on the Web.  It may change your life."

We’ll see over the next few days if that holds true.

(more…)

Fans of Internet radio rejoice. Pandora, from the Music Genome Project, has arrived.

File under “how did I ever live without this”. Pandora is the online music station for your inner DJ. Simply enter the bands or artists you like and it’ll stream similar songs to you all day long. Unlike iTunes and other web radio services, Pandora provides a more interactive experience — its kind of like Amazon’s “if you liked this book, you’ll love these” service.

Like that? You’ll love this.

Squeezebox is a $250 gizmo that streams web radio (like its partner Pandora and the now positively venerable iTunes) wirelessly through your stereo.

But perhaps most interesting is the business partnership between these two.

Pandora is subscription based. You get to listen for so long, or to so many songs before paying a small fee. Seems like a fair deal to me. I get to test out the service first. Establish whether it fills a gap in my life (it does) and pay accordingly.

And to help me with my listening enjoyment, Pandora offers me Squeezebox so I can rock out away from my Mac.

Pandora no doubt gets a spiv from Pandora in the form of a revenue share on Squeezebox sales.

Another perfect example of an web symbiosis. Just like Orbitz crossing selling hotels and vacation packages to complement travel plans, and eBay offering bonds to guarantee online purchases.

Note from the Viral Monitor: Pandora made its debut here at Mortar about five weeks ago in an email from an account services colleague. And the first Squeezebox was delivered to one of the CDs two weeks ago.

I’m going to be putting in my order soon.

(more…)