Seth's Blog
- What should I do on your birthday? On July 4, birthday of the USA, we're supposed to blow off fireworks, eat hot dogs and buy a Chevrolet. On Columbus Day, birthday of an early imperialist, we're supposed to shop and march in a parade. On Martin Luther...
- What to do with special requests The bike shop is busy in June. If you bring your bike in for a tune up, it will cost $39 and take a week. A week! What if someone says, I have a bike trip coming up in three...
- The purpose of a book cover (and I think it works for lots of products) Is the purpose of the cover to sell books, to accurately describe what's in the book, or to tee up the reader so the book has maximum impact? The third. It's...
- The risk/reward confusion It's easy to to adopt the policy of avoiding risk at all costs, that whenever possible, the products you launch or the engagements you have should be flawless and without downside. Here's the problem: in most endeavors, a small increase...
- Malcolm is wrong I've never written those three words before, but he's never disagreed with Chris Anderson before, so there you go. Free is the name of Chris's new book, and it's going to be wildly misunderstood and widely argued about. The first...
- There's always room for Jello This is one of the great cultural touchstone slogans of our era. A culture where there's so much to eat we need to try to find a food that we can eat even if we're stuffed. Often, we'll decide that...
- How to be a packager For fifteen years, I was a book packager. It has nothing to do with packaging and a bit more to do with books, but it's a great gig and there are useful lessons, because there are dozens of industries just...
- The paradox of the middle of the market The middle of the market is the juicy part, where profit meets scale. The paradox is that it's almost impossible to make a product or service for this segment, because they want the tried, the true and the boring. A...
- Fast in, fast out Mark points us to this study of fads and trends. It turns out that a fast-growing trend is also likely to become a fast-fading trend. My analysis: the people who jump on a fast-moving trend are fickle early adopters. This...
- Can summer camp change your life? I think it can. It did for me. I went to the best summer camp in the world (the pictures to the right are by the now-famous but then teenaged Jill Greenberg). Most of what I know, I learned there....
ProBlogger Blog Tips
- MyAds: Promote Your Blog, Product or Service on MySpace At the bottom of this post is a coupon code to give you a $50 credit at MyAds - this is not an affiliate promotion, just a take it or leave it offer from MyAds. Over the last week or so I’ve had the opportunity to see inside the MyAds from MySpace. MyAds have been an advertiser [...]Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger. MyAds: Promote Your Blog, Product or Service on MySpace
- Feedburner Add Customizable Subject Lines to Email Subscr... One month ago I wrote an open letter to Google/Feedburner suggesting that it might be time to add some more features to Feedburner - particularly the ability to customize subject lines of those subscribing to a feed via RSS. It seems that they’ve been hard at work on that very feature. Today I logged into my Feedburner [...]Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger. Feedburner Add Customizable Subject Lines to Email Subscriptions
- Win an Omni Bean Bag Worth $149 in the Next 48 Hours at @... Update: Congratulations to @GemmaWent who has won this competition. Thanks to SumoLounge again for sponsoring this - check out their bean bag chairs here. Today’s ProBlogger Deal is simply - follow @ProBloggerDeals on Twitter and you’ll automatically go into the running to win the ultimate blogger’s chair - the Omni Bean Bag Chair from SumoLounge. You’ve [...]Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger. Win an Omni Bean Bag Worth $149 in the Next 48 Hours at @ProBloggerDeals
- 8 First Step SEO Tips for Bloggers “What are the first steps to optimizing my blog for searches?” - question submitted by @monedays using the #pbquestions hashtag on Twitter. Much has been written on the topic of search engine optimization for bloggers - but let me give you a few basic first steps: 1. Content is King The quality of the posts you write is [...]Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger. 8 First Step SEO Tips for Bloggers
- Should I Quit Blogging? Image by -nathan “Should I quit my blog and start Lifestreaming, Videocasting, Social Messaging/Networking etc?” There’s been another round of ‘blogging is dead’ posts doing the rounds of late and as a result I’ve had a number of emails hitting my inbox over the last week from bloggers asking if they should stop blogging. Here’s some of the [...]Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger. Should I Quit Blogging?
- How to Manage a School/Blog Balance This post was written by Aditya Mahesh, founder of AMBeat.com, a complete resource for entrepreneurs complete with advice articles, start-up profiles, interviews, news analysis, and more. Common wisdom suggests that academics are always chief in importance. Students, at least those here in the United States, are told time and time again that extra-curricular activities, whether it [...]Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger. How to Manage a School/Blog Balance
- Become a Blogger Reopens for 5 Days Only - Now Cheaper Th... One of the most popular resources for new bloggers - Become a Blogger - is reopening its doors to new participants - for 5 days only. Update: There’s only around 24 hours left to go on this offer - it ends Friday at Midnight EST (US time). It’s cheaper than ever before If you’re a new blogger [...]Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger. Become a Blogger Reopens for 5 Days Only - Now Cheaper Than Ever
- Better Questions Than “Do I Need a Mentor?” and “Ho... A Guest post by Josh Hanagarne – World’s Strongest Librarian In my Problogger post about how to land big interviews when your blog is small, I mentioned that I had a mentor. A lot of commenters asked me about that process and if I could write more about it. Send your thanks to Darren if you [...]Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger. Better Questions Than “Do I Need a Mentor?” and “How do I get one?”
- Get 30% off the Ninja Affiliate Plugin for WordPress - Li... The following is a ProBloggerDeal - exclusively for readers of this blog. For notification on Twitter of other deals, discounts and competitions for bloggers follow @ProBloggerDeals. A few mont Ninja Affiliate Plugin for WordPress. The promotion was so popular and I’ve had so much positive feedback from readers about the plugin that I asked MaxBlogPress [...]Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger. Get 30% off the Ninja Affiliate Plugin for WordPress - Limited Time Offer
- Perseverance Will Save Your Blog Robby G is a blogger from ShiteILike.com and explains the benefits of pushing your blog through good and through bad. I was doing some research recently, wondering if my blog would ever take off and what it really depended on. I was a little bit discouraged about writing lots of content for two months on my [...]Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger. Perseverance Will Save Your Blog
TechCrunch
- What’s Right and Wrong with Media Now Like most things on the Internet, there’s a good side and a dark side to where the media business is headed. The good side is very good: thousands of layers of mostly needless middlemen and processes are being eliminated as journalists get a direct channel to their readers. And, because it’s a two way medium, readers get that channel right back. And in the cases where the subject of an article has been wronged, the Web gives them powerful megaphones to fight back. In short, the more everyone has a voice, the more reporters are challenged to make sure they are right, because they will be called out. Look at what happened with the plagiarism scandal around Chris Anderson’s new book. Anderson says it was a mistake around a change in how they were going to use citations, and I take him at his word. But it’s safe to say any author who’d considered borrowing heavily from Wikipedia won’t now. We like to think that we act virtuously because of personal or professional pride, but nothing enforces those ethics like the real possibility of getting caught and hugely embarrassed. But the bad side is also very bad. The elimination of those layers – typically fact checkers, editors, lawyers and just time to make sure a work is fully baked—also allows mistakes, lazy reporting, a dependence on rumors, and hot-headed, unfair treatment to subjects. Worse: The metrics around the Web make it crystal clear which kinds of stories drive the most traffic. That leads to salacious reporting for the sake of clicks and comments. It’s easy to point the finger at blogs, especially by certain members of old media losing money quarter-after-quarter. (Cough, cough.) But this is not just a technology change as most corners of media are fighting for survival, it’s become a cultural change. And this week, I’ve been struck by two non-blog examples that reflect the tension. Right about now most people reading this probably have guessed the example of salacious reporting and unfair treatment I’m driving at is Ben Mezrich’s new book on Facebook. I’ll say upfront I haven’t read it. Galleys have been very closely guarded. Once I do read it, if everything everyone who has read it has told me is wrong, I’ll apologize for what I’m about to say. But, on a professional level, I find the ethics behind this project disgusting.
- Dotcom Crash-era Startup Reanimates By Trending On Twitter It's not often that Internet companies last 10 years, but Moonfruit in the UK has proved pretty resilient. It survived the dotcom boom the first time round, launching with VC-backing, growing to 65 staff and cutting back to two staff in the space of a couple of years. It's a wonder why they didn't exit in the most recent boom, but here they are still, plugging away. And their resilience is proving to be an asset as their 10-years old web site building business comes back into fashion, even as more recent competitors like Weebly, Yola, MyDragnDrop and Webnode, and many others, try to capture the market for people who want to build simple web sites. So what's the best way to re-invigorate an internet brand after 10 long years? Get trending on Twitter, that's how. So Moonfruit has been giving away 10 Macbooks for every year of their operation, beginning this week. The result is that it has become the top trending term on Twitter three days in a row, as all people need to do is add the hashtag #moonfruit to their tweet. An algorithm is randomly choosing a winner. There are five days left. By the second day this week it had reached 2.5% of all twitter traffic. But could the stunt backfire as fast as it worked?
- CallWave Delists From NASDAQ; Fuze Meeting Rises From The... It's not easy to launch a successful WebEx competitor. Most businesses have long since established their "system" for dealing with web meetings, using old standbys like WebEx or GoToMeeting. And those businesses that are willing to venture into the unknown have had plenty of cheaper alternatives to choose from, like DimDim, for quite a while. But that isn't keeping CallWave from launching one of its own, dubbed Fuze Meeting. And while it's not going to be an easy space to compete in, Fuze Meeting doesn't disappoint. As far as startups go, the history of the company is pretty unique. CallWave was founded in 1998 and went public in 2004, trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol CALL. After reaching a peak soon thereafter of over $15 per share, the stock dropped steadily, dipping as low as 50 cents early this year. Deciding to cut its losses, the company delisted itself from NASDAQ on Monday after buying back shares from public shareholders at a 44% premium over the current market value and paying out a total of $10 million. CMO Patrick Moran says that the company did this on its own accord, and that its hand wasn't pushed by any banks or VCs. CallWave will soon change its name to Fuze Box to reflect its new position as a startup.
- Outsource Your Beta Testing To Prefinery (Invites) The beta testing stage can be the cornerstone to the successful development of a new site. And many startups have to conduct and implement beta testing of sites, surveys and analytics internally, which can be an daunting task when you are launching a site. Prefinery lets startups outsource the whole beta invite process, from start to finish. Prefinery is offering 100 TechCrunch readers with beta invites to test the site. You can sign up here. Use the invitation code "TECHCRUNCH" when signing up for the service. Prefinery's ambition is to create a valuable first experience for beta testers and to help startups in collecting and organizing information that will result in a better product. Prefinery will do anything and everything when it comes to the beta testing process. The service will create a splash page for your product, generate an HTML sign-up form with fields and survey questions, create an automatic welcome e-mail/message, take signups into a queue, approve users, and trigger invite e-mail. The service will also generate invite codes and assign quantities.
- Microsoft And Linux Hold Peace Tweets Okay, it's not exactly the Camp David Summit that took place in 2000 between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but sometimes the littlest gestures can go a long way. A couple of days ago, upon hearing that Microsoft had officially joined Twitter, the official Linux account sent out a tweet welcoming them. "Welcome to Twitter, @Microsoft!," they said. The tweet sat unanswered for over a day, and it seemed like Microsoft may never answer. But about a few hours ago, they did. "@Linux thanks, nice to be here," they replied.
- Video: 50 Cent Confronts Sexman I don't recall how the YouTube user Pruane2Forever, aka "Sexman", came on my radar, but I definitely remember a few of his videos from a couple years ago. (Here's a old favorite — Not Safe For Work.) Basically, it's this kid who does movie and new media reviews that are (or at least used to be) unintentionally hilarious. These days, he apparently has quite the following on YouTube, as he has over 150 videos that range in popularity from tens of thousands of views to over a million. One of his most popular ones was a video from 4 months ago in which he calls out rapper 50 Cent. Sexman wonders how 50 still has "street cred" after doing endorsements for Vitamin Water, makeup and dildos (I'm not kidding). "What else is he gonna do? 50 Cent diapers for your little gangsta?," Sexman wonders at one point. He concludes that 50 Cent is "just a media whore!" Well, 50 Cent has responded. Yesterday, the rapper posted a video alongside Sexman, who apparently flew from Canada to New York to meet up at the rapper's request.
- TechCrunch50: You Want Advertising? We’ll Give You Adve... Despite our best intentions, it looks like the DEMO v. TechCrunch50 war will continue, even with DEMO under new management. In 2007 we launched the first TechCrunch50 event - a place where companies can launch to rabid fans and tech press. These launching companies are the stars of the show, and they don't pay a cent to attend. We thought DEMO's longstanding policy of forcing launching companies to pay a $20,000 fee was ridiculous, and led the conference organizers to make decisions based not on the merits of the startups but simply on who was willing and able to pay. Not only do we let startups launch for free, we give the top one a $50,000 prize. Our conference has grown rapidly - nearly 2,000 people attended TechCrunch50 last year while DEMO languished in San Diego with a paltry few hundred. To be fair, our events were on the exact same dates, so they were hit doubly hard. This year we moved our dates to give them some breathing room. We thought we were done battling DEMO. But today DEMO announced that they're giving away a "massive" prize - $2 million in advertising credits - to the top two startups at the event. The press is eating it up, saying that TechCrunch50 looks paltry in comparison. Of course, there's a catch. The "advertising" is remnant stuff on IDG properties (IDG owns DEMO) and will certainly be priced at rate card. They'll also charge for creative and other expenses. Meaning there is very little actual value. I'm guessing that the amount of advertising actually delivered would be in the tens of thousands of dollars of value, at best. And, of course, every startup launching still needs to pay to launch. But whatever. You want adverting? We'll give you advertising.
- The Inevitable Anti-U.S. Backlash Has Started On Kiva When we reported on Kiva.org's decision to open up its micro-lending platform to U.S. entrepreneurs, Kiva CEO Premal Shah told us he was concerned about backlash in the community. Shah acknowledged that the decision to open lending to U.S. recipients may draw criticism because it goes against the idea on which Kiva was founded—lending to help development in third world countries where credit options are limited. It looks like Shah's prediction was correct. There is now a lending team on Kiva's community platform titled "Unhappy Kiva Lenders." The members, which total 375 lenders from around the world, are angry that Kiva is extending loans to U.S. entrepreneurs. The team's page states that "including borrowers from the USA has undermined the very core of what made [Kiva] so unique and special; small, impactful contributions to entrepreneurs in impoverished situations in developing countries."
- Want The Obama “Hope” Artwork On Your iPhone? Nope, S... Start Mobile has managed to get 18 separate iPhone applications approved by Apple. So you'll imagine their surprise when one of them was recently rejected. But you may be even more surprised to find out why. Apparently, Apple doesn't like the way one piece of art in the app depicts President Obama. Is it out of line or tasteless? Well, you can determine for yourself, because you've undoubtedly seen the art in question before: It's Shepard Fairey's famous "HOPE" image of Obama that was everywhere during his Presidential campaign. So why on Earth would this be rejected? Well, here's the wording in the rejection: It contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states: "Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users." "Ridicules public figures"? This image is hanging in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian — yet, Apple apparently finds it inappropriate.
- Tweetmeme Wants To Be The King Of Retweets One of the most effective ways to amplify your message on Twitter is to get your followers to retweet it to their followers. Retweeting is also becoming a popular way to pass links around Twitter. They are becoming the new currency of the Web because of the power of passed links. One service in particular, Tweetmeme, is cornering the market on retweets by making it easy for blogs and other sites to add a retweet button to every page. You can see one at the bottom of this post. Just click on it, and it will take you to your Twitter account and populate a message with a "RT," the headline, and a short link. Go ahead, do it now. Do it again. Okay, thanks. Lots of sites use Tweetmeme's retweet button, and it drives a lot of its overall traffic. Nick Halstead, the CEO of Fav.or.it (Tweetmeme's parent company) says that the buttons are so widespread right now that they are generating 196 million impressions a week month. In other words, that is how many pages load with the buttons every month week, and some portion of those result in actual retweets. Halstead is making some improvements to the retweet buttons. Before each retweet generated by the button would include a promotional "via @tweetmeme." That has now removed to make more room for the actual headline and link. Next week he is going to introduce an image button which can be included in RSS feeds and emails to spread the retweet love even further. And sites will be able to embed a retweet counter to show how many overall retweets they get every week.
ReadWriteWeb
- Ads Spotted on Twitter.com - Did You Notice? pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/twitter_logo_Jan_09.png"Three months ago we reported that a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ads_come_to_twitter.php"Ads Had Come to Twitter/a and it was a pretty big deal - until Twitter promptly said the word "sponsored" was only appearing on the site in error. Now the "sponsored definitions" of certain Twitter "concepts" have appeared on the site again - and they sure look legit this time./p pobject align="right"script type="text/javascript" br / tweetmeme_url = 'http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ads_spotted_on_twittercom_-_did_you_notice.php'; br / /script br / script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"/script /objectThese first ads probably aren't going to bring in enough cash to fuel a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ten_companies_twitter_should_consider_acquiring_ne.php"a micro-app acquisition spree by Twitter/a, but this is the first clear public indication of one way the company is bringing in revenue. It's funny - the ads have been live for about a week now and no one but a href="http://chrisabraham.com/2009/07/02/twitter-is-finally-monetizing-through-text-ads/"a few/a a href="http://collin1000.com/blog/?p=108"small, alert/a a href="http://collin1000.com/blog/?p=108"blogs/a has written about them. (a href="http://sethsimonds.com/twitter-finally-monetizes/"Seth Simonds/a in particular caught a really interesting international angle on the story.) It was big news three months ago and we believe it's still important./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d1.openx.org/ck.php?n=15598amp;cb=15598' target='_blank'img src='http://d1.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=11205amp;cb=15598amp;n=15598' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p pimg alt="twitteradslive.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/twitteradslive.jpg" width="179" height="167" align="right" hspace="5px" vspace="5px"So far the only two sponsored links we've seen cycle through our sidebars have been to the ad network Federated Media's Microsoft microsite ExecTweets.com (aggregating Twitter messages from corporate executives) and Universal Studios' CinemaTweets.com, promoting the a href="http://www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/article/gay-rights-group-ask-studio-bosses-to-add-positive-message-to-bruno-film_1107020"allegedly offensive/a forthcoming a href="http://www.lovesickbilly.com/LB/wordpress/2009/06/23/bruno-sascha-baron-cohens-gayface-minstrel-show/"gay-face/a movie emBruno/em. The ads only appear on the home page of Twitter when a user is logged in, not when looking at another user's profile page. Also included in the cycle is a link to a joint Twitter and Threadless.com microsite where visitors can buy Threadless t-shirts about Twitter. Apparently that doesn't constitute a sponsored link, but presumably money is changing hands somewhere. The whole world of Twitter is a green-field when it comes to rules of disclosure./p pPerhaps these sources of revenue will help Twitter remain a viable company long enough for all kinds of questions about this brand new medium to be explored./p pDave Winer a href="http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/04/03/whyPeopleCareHowTwitterMak.html"argued this Spring/a that people want to know how Twitter is going to make money because they might not like it. He told a story about learning while in college that Domino's Pizza used profits to fight Planned Parenthood. With all the time, energy and content people are investing in Twitter - many want to know how the company will monetize so they can decide whether it's an organization they want to continue investing in./p pAnd so it has begun. There are ads on Twitter. What do you think?/p pemDisclosure: Federated Media is also the ad network for ReadWriteWeb./em/p pemYou can find a href="http://twitter.com/rww"ReadWriteWeb/a on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: a href="http://twitter.com/marshallk"Marshall Kirkpatrick/a, a href="http://twitter.com/bernardlunn"Bernard Lunn/a, a href="http://twitter.com/alexiskold"Alex Iskold/a, a href="http://twitter.com/sarahintampa"Sarah Perez/a, a href="http://twitter.com/fredericl"Frederic Lardinois/a, a href="http://twitter.com/dougcoleman"Doug Coleman/a, a href="http://twitter.com/jolieodell"Jolie O'Dell/a, a href="http://twitter.com/susyperplexus"Dana Oshiro /a, a href="http://twitter.com/madlid"Lidija Davis/a and a href="http://twitter.com/stevenwalling"Steven Walling/a./em/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ads_spotted_on_twittercom_-_did_you_notice.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/FQWfqfmpMLrcofNYCu_HupX-_10/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/FQWfqfmpMLrcofNYCu_HupX-_10/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/FQWfqfmpMLrcofNYCu_HupX-_10/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/FQWfqfmpMLrcofNYCu_HupX-_10/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=jhBRIuDN1rY:Nwu8RhYgKnM:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=jhBRIuDN1rY:Nwu8RhYgKnM:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=jhBRIuDN1rY:Nwu8RhYgKnM:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=jhBRIuDN1rY:Nwu8RhYgKnM:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=jhBRIuDN1rY:Nwu8RhYgKnM:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=jhBRIuDN1rY:Nwu8RhYgKnM:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=jhBRIuDN1rY:Nwu8RhYgKnM:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=jhBRIuDN1rY:Nwu8RhYgKnM:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=jhBRIuDN1rY:Nwu8RhYgKnM:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=jhBRIuDN1rY:Nwu8RhYgKnM:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/jhBRIuDN1rY" height="1" width="1"/
- Risky Business: Enterprise GRC Platforms Essential, Says ... pimg alt="danger_workingonline.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/assets_c/2009/07/danger_workingonline-thumb-150x112-6361.jpg" /In a a href="http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/wave%26trade%3B_enterprise_governance%2C_risk%2C_and_compliance_platforms%2C/q/id/47911/t/2"new report/a issued on the first of the month, a href="http://www.forrester.com/"Forrester Research/a has asserted the importance of enterprise platforms for governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC). Pointing to big name corporate failures in the last decade, they argue that the value proposition for GRC software is clear, and they identified leaders in this growing market. /p pThe open question from the research is whether enterprises will really see the need as being so desperate. Fear may be a great motivator, but GRC platforms have yet to prove that they're a piece of IT that businesses require to succeed./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d1.openx.org/ck.php?n=15599amp;cb=15599' target='_blank'img src='http://d1.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=11205amp;cb=15599amp;n=15599' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p h2GR What?/h2 Governance, risk management and compliance platforms take a broad and complex series of business tasks and whittle them down to a central point of focus for the enterprise. pBasically, they're a technological solution for keeping track of programs of corporate governance, managing known and potential risks for a business, and staying in compliance with regulatory requirements. All these platforms incorporate varying degrees of workflow management, data visualization, content management, and reporting on related performance metrics. /p h2The Leaders/h2 Forrester examined 14 vendors of enterprise GRC platforms, and picked a href="http://www.axentis.com/"AXENTIS/a, a href="http://www.bwise.com/"BWise/a, a href="http://www.metricstream.com/"MetricStream/a, a href="http://www.bwise.com/"OpenPages/a, and a href="http://thomsonreuters.com/"Thomson Reuters/a as leaders in the space. pIt might surprise you that GRC platforms from enterprise software giants like SAP have been beaten out by much smaller vendors. But in an emerging market, it makes perfect sense that agile young companies can dominate big players who have come late to the game. /p centerimg alt="Forrester The Forrester Wave Enterprise Governance, Risk, And Compliance Platforms, Q3 2009.pdf (page 8 of 17).jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/assets_c/2009/07/Forrester The Forrester Wave Enterprise Governance, Risk, And Compliance Platforms, Q3 2009.pdf (page 8 of 17)-thumb-550x357-6363.jpg" //center h2Close, But No Cigar/h2 Integrated governance, risk management and compliance platforms present a new way to handle these business processes. Forrester itself published a a href="http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,46512,00.html?src=47911pdf"report/a that predicted GRC would first "hit the big time" just this year. All the leaders in the market thus far have sold a respectable amount of customers on the notion that they decrease risk, boost overall efficiency, and make strategy and decision making easier. pBut platforms for governance, risk and compliance still come off as a specialist product for large enterprises in volatile markets, rather than a core business tool. The ever-growing pack of GRC vendors have clearly defined the value they deliver, but not that they're something the enterprise cannot do without during a period of belt tightening. /p pemImage courtesy Forrester Research, Photo credit Gill Wildman/em/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/risky_business_enterprise_grc_platforms_essential.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/r0fbElraA6Lur7WFi1mnJX1z9us/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/r0fbElraA6Lur7WFi1mnJX1z9us/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/r0fbElraA6Lur7WFi1mnJX1z9us/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/r0fbElraA6Lur7WFi1mnJX1z9us/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tSId-ZV4wl8:mUU7aQqHNl0:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tSId-ZV4wl8:mUU7aQqHNl0:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tSId-ZV4wl8:mUU7aQqHNl0:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=tSId-ZV4wl8:mUU7aQqHNl0:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tSId-ZV4wl8:mUU7aQqHNl0:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=tSId-ZV4wl8:mUU7aQqHNl0:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tSId-ZV4wl8:mUU7aQqHNl0:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=tSId-ZV4wl8:mUU7aQqHNl0:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tSId-ZV4wl8:mUU7aQqHNl0:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tSId-ZV4wl8:mUU7aQqHNl0:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/tSId-ZV4wl8" height="1" width="1"/
- Digital Media MA: Mobile Analytics Deals Up, Social Medi... pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/moneybills.jpg" /a href="http://www.peachtreemediaadvisors.com/"Peachtree Media Advisors/a has just released their latest report on digital media mergers and acquisitions. We posted a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/2008_new_media_ma_investment_roundup.php"their 2008 report/a back in January, and this is a mid-year 2009 update to that. According to Peachtree, there were 342 digital media transactions in the first half of 2009, which was 12.3% below the number of transactions in the same period for 2008. More notably, the total value of transactions was emmuch less/em than a year ago. In the first six months of 2009, there were $4.2 billion in digital media transactions - a whopping 61% decrease from the same period in 2008. And that $4.2B figure includes $2.5B from the a href="http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/02/live-nation-and/"Live Nation - Ticketmaster merger/a this year./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d1.openx.org/ck.php?n=15597amp;cb=15597' target='_blank'img src='http://d1.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=11205amp;cb=15597amp;n=15597' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p pDespite the reduction in value of digital media deals, a couple of market sectors showed solid growth: strongMobile/strong and strongEnabling, Analytics and Ad Serving/strong. However, the strongSocial Media/strong sector had the biggest drop, with blog/user-generated and social networking deal values down./p pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/peachtree_july09a.jpg" /br /emImage by Peachtree Media Advisors/em/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/digital_media_mergers_and_acquisitions_2009.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/IE8g2vBK4iXavMJ3bWcALgtB2Mw/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/IE8g2vBK4iXavMJ3bWcALgtB2Mw/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/IE8g2vBK4iXavMJ3bWcALgtB2Mw/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/IE8g2vBK4iXavMJ3bWcALgtB2Mw/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=93LOHgdrFAg:ncJG0uRtwSM:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=93LOHgdrFAg:ncJG0uRtwSM:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=93LOHgdrFAg:ncJG0uRtwSM:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=93LOHgdrFAg:ncJG0uRtwSM:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=93LOHgdrFAg:ncJG0uRtwSM:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=93LOHgdrFAg:ncJG0uRtwSM:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=93LOHgdrFAg:ncJG0uRtwSM:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=93LOHgdrFAg:ncJG0uRtwSM:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=93LOHgdrFAg:ncJG0uRtwSM:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=93LOHgdrFAg:ncJG0uRtwSM:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/93LOHgdrFAg" height="1" width="1"/
- Expose Yourself on Launchly's Site Review Service pimg alt="launchly_review_jul09.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/launchly_review_jul09.jpg" width="150" height="44"You know that scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice is tumbling down the rabbit hole past all those miscellaneous chairs and birds? That same feeling of confused dread is often how users feel when they're attempting to navigate a site that has never been tested. We know that developers pour their souls into their projects. But that's also why it's sometimes difficult (and even personal) to point out the flaws. A developer has to ask, "Do I want it built my way without compromise or do I want users?" If you want to run a business, rather than spending months speculating on what you think users might want, it's sometimes best to simply ask them. /p pa href="http://www.launchly.com"Launchly/a is a web application review site where developers can upload screen shots and links and ask for user advice and feedback. Released this past week, Launchly appears to be a beefier version of a href="http://www.feedbackarmy.com/"Feedback Army/a with the additional abilities to track changes and request multiple rounds of recommendations. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d1.openx.org/ck.php?n=15590amp;cb=15590' target='_blank'img src='http://d1.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=11205amp;cb=15590amp;n=15590' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p pThe site allows developers to submit and resubmit their projects in iterations. Each iteration must be at least a week from the last one and new iterations are bumped to the top of the "New Launches" section. This placement in the "New Launches" section prompts user responses via a href="http://twitter.com/launchly"Twitter/a and a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/launchly?format=xml"RSS/a. From here, developers gain a new round of suggestions, traffic data and social buzz aggregation. Older iterations are then stored in the "Iteration Archives" for review. /p pSays Minnesota-based Launchly founder Brian McManus, "When my own launch day came, I did the typical submissions and SEO stuff but still found myself wondering what people thought of the idea and site in general. I turned to HackerNews and requested feedback there."/p pimg alt="launchly_review_jul09a.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/launchly_review_jul09a.jpg" width="400" height="349" align="right"/p pMcManus was thrilled with his feedback but unfortunately his post was shortly buried below a slew of other posts. He could resubmit for further discussion, but he'd lose the thread of suggestions he'd already received. In order to track his site changes and show the evolution of his own work, he created Launchly. McManus is currently charging $40 for the standard launch package and he plans to roll out two additional tiers to incorporate the added features of polls, custom sub-domains and usability testing. /p pA few companies are already appealing to the Launchly community for feedback, including a href="http://www.launchly.com/launches/54-twittermass"TwitterMass/a, a href="http://www.launchly.com/launches/37-tweet-promote"Tweet Promote/a and a href="http://www.launchly.com/launches/51-iconfinder"Iconfinder/a./p pThe truly interesting part about this service is that it allows reviewers to see sites evolve as per their suggestions. In essence, Launchly creates a sense of ownership and site-loyalty for those who've contributed feedback. While it's too soon to say if the site will take off, it's a great way for developers to gain new insight into the projects they're often too close to. It's also a non-violent and civil way to settle team disputes and make a case for changes to stubborn executives. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/2009/07/expose-yourself-on-launchlys-s.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2S-0933UrVhnwR8ZoDLtV2sFC_g/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2S-0933UrVhnwR8ZoDLtV2sFC_g/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2S-0933UrVhnwR8ZoDLtV2sFC_g/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2S-0933UrVhnwR8ZoDLtV2sFC_g/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=AFgcrNpu9gU:paOH2LAJ1iE:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=AFgcrNpu9gU:paOH2LAJ1iE:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=AFgcrNpu9gU:paOH2LAJ1iE:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=AFgcrNpu9gU:paOH2LAJ1iE:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=AFgcrNpu9gU:paOH2LAJ1iE:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=AFgcrNpu9gU:paOH2LAJ1iE:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=AFgcrNpu9gU:paOH2LAJ1iE:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=AFgcrNpu9gU:paOH2LAJ1iE:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=AFgcrNpu9gU:paOH2LAJ1iE:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=AFgcrNpu9gU:paOH2LAJ1iE:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/AFgcrNpu9gU" height="1" width="1"/
- Ten Companies Twitter Should Consider Acquiring Next pimg alt="twittercleanlogo.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/twittercleanlogo.jpg" width="156" height="41" If you were a little blue bird, with a good pile of money and a whole lot of hype, what would you buy to spice up your nest? There are so many little services being built on top of Twitter that we wouldn't be surprised to see some more of them acquired by the company soon. That would mean more features for everyday users and more usefulness for features loved by loyal early adopters./p pTwitter has acquired two other companies so far, that we know of. Search engine and sentiment analysis service Summize became Twitter's own search engine and Values of N sold its assets so engineer Rael Dornfest could be brought into the company. Here are ten other startups we think that Twitter should consider acquiring next. Which kind of company would you most like to see become part of Twitter itself? We've got a poll below./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d1.openx.org/ck.php?n=15594amp;cb=15594' target='_blank'img src='http://d1.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=11205amp;cb=15594amp;n=15594' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p pIs Twitter in a position to make more acquisitions? We suspect so. It has cash but more importantly it has stock. Think of it this way: Google is afraid of Facebook and Facebook is afraid of Twitter. Would startups bend over backwards to become a part of Twitter? We suspect most would./p pSome of these we think are likely acquisitions, some less so. In making this list we considered both functionality that would be helpful to have added to Twitter's own site and technology that would be worth buying instead of just building in-house. Whenever a platform company builds technology that a number of other startups offer, there is a risk of scaring other people away from investing in development that the platform could just reproduce. Acquisitions of startups on a platform probably increase the appeal of development though, as it's a chance to get in on the game./p h2Quite Likely, if It Hasn't Happened Already/h2 pimg alt="bitlypic.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/bitlypic.jpg" width="362" height="459" class="mt-image-center" align="right" hspace="5px" vspace="5px"stronga href="http://bit.ly"Bit.ly/a/strong is the most full-featured and popular URL shortener on the market right now and was a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_crowns_bitly_as_the_king_of_short_links_he.php"recently selected as Twitter's own shortener of choice/a, dethroning TinyURL. Bit.ly offers all kinds of smart analytics, from real-time click tracking to semantic analysis of topic keywords from the links that people tweet./p pOne trusted industry source speaking on the condition of anonymity a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/three_reasons_why_twitter_will_not_index_the_links.php"told us/a that Bit.ly servers "were moved into Twitter's racks months ago in preparation for this change" [of becoming the default shortener]. Bit.ly is becoming too important to Twitter to keep that functionality outside the company's own shop and the two companies share some investors. We will not be surprised at all if a Bit.ly acquisition by Twitter is announced sometime in the near future./p h2Could Happen.../h2 pstronga href="http://tweetmeme.com"Tweetmeme/a/strong is another fast growing Twitter analytics service that tracks sharing on the service. With a href="http://blog.tweetmeme.com/2009/07/03/more-buttons-more-retweet/"another chunk of new features just added today/a, the service is looking a whole lot like "Feedburner for Twitter" but with even more viral distribution possibilities. The Tweetmeme API is quite interesting and could complement Bit.ly quite well./p pstronga href="http://twitpic.com/"Twitpic/a/strong is a popular way to share images on Twitter. The site faces a strong challenge from ImageShack's a href="http://yfrog.com"YFrog/a, but independent Twitpic would be a cheaper acquisition and is already well known among Twitter users. (Twitter should probably look at a href="http://Enjoysthin.gs"Enjoysthin.gs/a; it's got the best user experience.) An increase in imagery on Twitter would probably offer the company a lot more advertising real-estate./p centerimg alt="Twitpicpic-1.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/Twitpicpic-1.jpg" width="587" height="527" /center pstronga href="http://tweepz.com"Tweepz/a/strong is a fascinating Twitter search engine that acts like a directory that lets you parse your results using various metrics gleaned from Twitter. Check out a href="http://www.tweepz.com/search?q=mobile+gameC="this search/a, for example. Twitter could benefit from making this kind of search available to users, advertisers and researchers - and Tweepz has already built it. See also a href="http://twazzup.com"Twazzup/a, another company doing interesting things with Twitter data./p centerimg alt="twazuptennis.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/twazuptennis.jpg" width="610" height="325" /center h2Longer Shots/h2 pstrongAn iPhone app company/strong could be a good buy for Twitter; there's certainly plenty of options. M.Twitter.com is a good mobile service already but someone specializing in super high-quality Twitter apps for the iPhone, Android and Pre could be good to bring in house. It could be a href="http://www.atebits.com/"AteBits/a, makers of Tweetie. There may not be enough reason for Twitter to buy one of these companies, though./p pstrongA desktop Twitter app company/strong could help Twitter increase user engagement. Many of the most serious Twitter users (though not all) swear by desktop access. Twitter could acquire the most popular and arguably most innovative desktop app, a href="http://tweetdeck.com"Tweetdeck/a, or it could bring a href="http://seesmic.com"Seesmic/a in house. Tweetdeck would be cheap and shares investors with Twitter. Desktop apps may be too limited in appeal to be a compelling acquisition target./p pstrongGeo-location/strong could be a good feature to add to Twitter. Search by user location could be made much more meaningful and the list of things that could be done with it is very long. a href="http://brightkite.com/"Brightkite/a is popular and well developed, a href="http://Shizzow.com"Shizzow/a is pretty and wouldn't be expensive. On the other hand, browsers themselves will likely all become more location aware in the near future and Twitter may be satisfied with its current location data./p centerimg alt="brightkitejuly09.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/brightkitejuly09.jpg" width="610" height="382" /center pobject align="right" hspace="5px" vspace="5px"script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" charset="utf-8" src="http://static.polldaddy.com/p/1756638.js"/scriptnoscriptbr / a href="http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1756638/"Which of these kinds of companies would you like to see Twitter acquire next?/aspan style="font-size:9px;"(a href="http://www.polldaddy.com"polls/a)/spanbr / /noscript/objectstrongA semantics company/strong could bring structure to the Tweets, making them more useful and easier to advertise against. Right now links Tweeted are semantically analyzed by Reuters' Calais and sent to Bit.ly, but we wouldn't be surprised if Twitter was interested in scooping up a small semantics shop and helping it scale so that analysis was being done in house. Twitter may feel like semantics don't need to get that close to consumer users, though. (Disclosure, Calais is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.)/p pstronga href="http://topify.com"Topify/a/strong is a widely loved service that intercepts your new Twitter follower notification emails and sends you much more useful ones. It's great but probably too easy for Twitter to just reproduce itself./p pstronga href="http://friendfeed.com"FriendFeed/a/strong plus Twitter would be a match made in heaven. It would be an engineering powerhouse. It would be a step towards mainstream user adoption of FriendFeed, a service that can't make up its mind which end of the sophistication spectrum it's targeting. It's also quite unlikely to happen. If there's one related startup we can imagine turning down a Twitter acquisition offer, it's probably FriendFeed. (Though the investment-laden and highly ambitious a href="http://oneriot.com"OneRiot/a is a close second.) Nonetheless, it would be awesome if FriendFeed's cross-network aggregation, threaded conversations, groups, media support, search and more joined forces with Twitter./p pstrongemUltimately, it may be most likely that Twitter's next acquisition will be something vapid./em/strong A service that aggregates shopping Tweets, or celebrity Tweets, strikeor something else that will fall short of taking advantage of the Twitter platform's huge potential to change the world./strike Twitter staff a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitters_staff_may_not_use_twitter_like_you_do_tha.php"makes relatively simple use of its own service/a, so hoping that it will acquire companies that make it all the more powerfully sophisticated may be an early adopter's pipe dream. [strongUpdate:/strong After some discussion this afternoon, I am thinking it's time to reconsider this position I've held for some time. Twitter staff is not full of dummies, I'm sure, and it has probably been inappropriate of me to write as if that's the case.]/p pMaybe not, though. We wouldn't be shocked to see Twitter pick up at least a few of the companies above. What do you think? Are there other services you'd like to see become part of the Twitter team even more than the above? It's a wild and woolly micro-content ecosystem out there - anything could happen./p pemYou can find a href="http://twitter.com/rww"ReadWriteWeb/a on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: a href="http://twitter.com/marshallk"Marshall Kirkpatrick/a, a href="http://twitter.com/bernardlunn"Bernard Lunn/a, a href="http://twitter.com/alexiskold"Alex Iskold/a, a href="http://twitter.com/sarahintampa"Sarah Perez/a, a href="http://twitter.com/fredericl"Frederic Lardinois/a, a href="http://twitter.com/dougcoleman"Doug Coleman/a, a href="http://twitter.com/jolieodell"Jolie O'Dell/a, a href="http://twitter.com/susyperplexus"Dana Oshiro /a, a href="http://twitter.com/madlid"Lidija Davis/a and a href="http://twitter.com/stevenwalling"Steven Walling/a./em/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ten_companies_twitter_should_consider_acquiring_ne.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ey01R1EK7Kg7ZDDSbk-DRqYYp78/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ey01R1EK7Kg7ZDDSbk-DRqYYp78/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ey01R1EK7Kg7ZDDSbk-DRqYYp78/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ey01R1EK7Kg7ZDDSbk-DRqYYp78/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=zxiUVNobdjY:PkS05zm8s_s:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=zxiUVNobdjY:PkS05zm8s_s:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=zxiUVNobdjY:PkS05zm8s_s:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=zxiUVNobdjY:PkS05zm8s_s:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=zxiUVNobdjY:PkS05zm8s_s:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=zxiUVNobdjY:PkS05zm8s_s:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=zxiUVNobdjY:PkS05zm8s_s:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=zxiUVNobdjY:PkS05zm8s_s:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=zxiUVNobdjY:PkS05zm8s_s:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=zxiUVNobdjY:PkS05zm8s_s:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/zxiUVNobdjY" height="1" width="1"/
- How to Install Chrome and Chromium Side-by-Side (So You C... pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/chrome_and_chromium.jpg"We're sure by now you've heard about the upcoming extensions that will a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_first_google_chrome_extensions.php"soon arrive in Google's Chrome browser/a. Already we've seen a handful of these become available, including a href="http://www.adsweep.org/"AdSweep/a, a a href="http://www.vasanth.in/software/page-rank-for-chrome/"PageRank checker/a, a href="http://blog.cleeki.com/?p=70"Cleeki/a, and, as of yesterday, a href="http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-extensions/browse_thread/thread/75be6f91251f6e0b"a new bookmarking extension from Delicious/a. However, if you've been running the standard Chrome install (or even the public beta), new features like this are just out of reach. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d1.openx.org/ck.php?n=15593amp;cb=15593' target='_blank'img src='http://d1.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=11205amp;cb=15593amp;n=15593' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p pIf you're a developer, you're probably already running the version of Chrome released to the a href="http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel"Dev channel/a, but many "regular folks" are hesitant to make this switch because moving from the stable release to the beta or from the beta to the dev release is a one-way conversion. You can't go back to an earlier build without re-installing Chrome. So how's another ordinary techie supposed to play around with all the cool new stuff coming to Chrome? The easiest way is to install a build of the Chromium browser side by side with your (stable) version of Google Chrome. /p h2How to Install Chromium and Chrome on Your PC/h2 pFirst thing's first, if you haven't already installed a copy of Google Chrome on your PC, you should do so now. This new browser built on WebKit is winning converts right and left among the early adopter set these days, mainly for its blazing speed. From a href="http://www.google.com/chrome"google.com/chrome/a you can grab the latest release or, if you're a little more daring, you can click a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/chrome/beta/"the link/a to download the public beta version instead. /p pThat was the easy part - the trickier part is installing Chromium, the open-source project that powers Google Chrome. You may have already visited the a href="http://code.google.com/chromium/"Chromium site/a over on Google Code in search of the download only to be confused when no obvious download link jumped out at you. emHome, Docs, FAQ, Blog, Group, Terms/em - but no "Download." In fact, the only download link on the main page points you back to the stable version of Google Chrome. What gives?/p pThey're probably not trying to hide the download from you; it's just a matter of knowing where to look. Developers get this, but us "ordinary" tech enthusiasts may need a little assistance. You see, the Chromium builds are all stored online at a href="http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/"build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/a. If you're a Mac or Linux user, this is where you can grab your copy, by the way./p pWindows users need to head directly to the link at a href="http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-xp/"build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-xp/a. Once there, you'll notice a list of build numbers accompanied by a "last modified" date. /p pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/index_of_builds.png"/p pTo get the most recent one, scroll to the bottom of the page and click through to the files listed. The easiest way to install Chromium is to download the "mini_installer.exe" file. This is a simple executable that installs Chromium on your PC. /p h2Make Chromium Extension-Ready/h2 pOnce installed, there's one more step before you can begin playing around with extensions in Chromium - you need to enable them. To do so, you're either going to need to modify the Chromium shortcut or create your own new shortcut. /p pstronguWindows XP/u/strong/p pOn a Windows XP computer, you can just modify the "Target" field in the file properties. To do so:/p ol liGo to strongC:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Chromium\Application\/strong and locate the file called "chrome.exe." /li liRight-click on the file and choose "Properties." Click the "Shortcut" tab./li liIn the field labeled "Target" change the text to read (and yes, you need the quotes):strong quot;C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Chromium\Application\chrome.exequot; -enable-extensions/strong/li liClick "OK" when you're done. /li liMake sure this modified shortcut is the one you use to launch Chromium from now on. You may want to copy it to your desktop to be sure. /li /ol pstronguWindows Vista/Windows 7/u/strong/p pOn Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can't simply modify the "Target"; you have to create a new shortcut instead. To do so:/p ol liGo to strongC:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Local\Chromium\Application/strong /li liRight-click in the white space of that folder somewhere and click "New" on the menu that appears./li liChoose "Shortcut" from the menu to launch the Create Shortcut wizard./li liIn the window that appears, enter in the following where it asks you for the location of the item: strongC:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Local\Chromium\Application\chrome.exe -enable-extensions/strong/li liClick "Next" then "Finish"/li liA new shortcut will appear in the folder. Make sure this shortcut is the one you use to launch Chromium from now on. You may want to copy it to your desktop to be sure./li /ol pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/new_shortcut_wizard.png" /p h2Launch Chromium and Install Extensions/h2 pNow that you have Chromium installed and modified, you can play with extensions. To install an extension, you simply click on the hyperlink for the extension, which is usually labeled "extension_name.crx." A box will pop up asking you to confirm; just click "OK."/p pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/chromium_install_ext_msg.png"/p pustrongHere are some extensions you can try now:/strong/u/p ul lia href="http://www.adsweep.org/"AdSweep/a: an add-on that hides advertising on web pages you visit, similar to how AdBlock works. It uses JavaScript to adjust the CSS of a page and is also available as a user script./li lia href="http://www.vasanth.in/software/page-rank-for-chrome/"PageRank checker/a: a simple extension that shows the Google PageRank for the current web site./li lia href="http://blog.cleeki.com/?p=70"Cleeki/a: an extension that delivers the functionality of a href="http://www.ieaddons.com/en/accelerators/"IE8's Accelerators/a to other browsers./li lia href="http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensions/samples"Gmail Checker/a: One of the Chromium sample extensions that displays a toolstrip that shows how many messages are in your Gmail inbox./li lia href="http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensions/samples"Subscribe in Google Reader/a: Another sample extension which adds a button to the URL bar when a page has a feed that can be subscribed to. Clicking the button takes you to Google Reader./li lia href="http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensions/samples"BuildBot Monitor/a: A third sample extension which shows the current status of the Chromium Build Bot./li lia href="http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-extensions/browse_thread/thread/75a02aa146fcfabd"Chritter/a: a Chrome Twitter notifier that shows recent tweets in the tooltip/li lia href="http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-extensions/browse_thread/thread/75be6f91251f6e0b"Delicious/a: the official alpha version of the social bookmarking extension. (Note: you may have to save the file on disk and then drag on to the Chrome window to trigger the install instead of just clicking on the link). /li /ul pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/Chromium_extensions.png"/p h2Final Note/h2 pKeep in mind that Chromium isn't going to give you the same everyday experience of using the stable version of Chrome. While playing around with it, the browser actually crashed on me a couple of times - two times too many to make it worth switching over to permanently. This may just be an issue with the particular build I installed and will be corrected in a future version, but that's what you get when you play with cutting-edge tech. /p pAt least I was finally able to get my hands on the extensions and really see what they were all about. And for that, it was well worth the headaches. Extensions are incredible!/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_install_chrome_and_chromium_side-by-side.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/7TUkinmn6Z0JXmPhD9VUHcuGaPY/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/7TUkinmn6Z0JXmPhD9VUHcuGaPY/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/7TUkinmn6Z0JXmPhD9VUHcuGaPY/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/7TUkinmn6Z0JXmPhD9VUHcuGaPY/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=Nw6LDDytjP4:8OvzrtFSLXM:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=Nw6LDDytjP4:8OvzrtFSLXM:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=Nw6LDDytjP4:8OvzrtFSLXM:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=Nw6LDDytjP4:8OvzrtFSLXM:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=Nw6LDDytjP4:8OvzrtFSLXM:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=Nw6LDDytjP4:8OvzrtFSLXM:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=Nw6LDDytjP4:8OvzrtFSLXM:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=Nw6LDDytjP4:8OvzrtFSLXM:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=Nw6LDDytjP4:8OvzrtFSLXM:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=Nw6LDDytjP4:8OvzrtFSLXM:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/Nw6LDDytjP4" height="1" width="1"/
- Twitter Needs a Spam Filter? No, We Need a Marketer Filter pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/twitter_logo.png"Has Twitter spam gotten a little out of hand? According to today's top story on a href="http://www.techmeme.com/090703/p1#a090703p1"Techmeme/a, it has. Apparently, marketers are calling for Twitter to filter out spam and other adult content from the microblogging service. You know, so emtheir/em all-important tweets about the products and services they're pushing don't have to share the same web space as that emother/em nasty stuff. But fighting actual spammers is still relatively easy for an end-user: it's called the "unfollow" button. /p pIronically, if anyone's to blame for spamming our Twitter timelines, it's the marketers themselves. They've managed to trick our friends into spamming us with their messages instead./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d1.openx.org/ck.php?n=15591amp;cb=15591' target='_blank'img src='http://d1.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=11205amp;cb=15591amp;n=15591' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p h2If You're Getting Real Spam, Blame Yourself/h2 pWe're not sure where anyone, marketer or not, gets off telling Twitter that it's their responsibility to filter the content that flows through their service mainly because Twitter is emalready doing so/em. The company itself currently addresses the spam issue by providing an a href="http://twitter.com/spam"@spam/aem#160;/emaccount where you can report spammers and other abusers in the Twittersphere. If the account in question is indeed a spammer, Twitter boots them from the service. That sounds good to us. Simple and effective...at least for the end user. (It's probably a nightmare to deal with at Twitter HQ). /p pOf course, Twitter doesn't want their service overrun by spammers - no one would. However, they're probably more concerned with wasting their resources to support these fake accounts than they are with the annoyance it causes for their users. But do they have it under control? Perhaps not - fighting spam is sort of like fighting computer viruses. You block one and someone makes a new one. The same goes for spammers - kill one spammer and another appears to take his place. It's an ongoing fight, not a plague that can be wiped out overnight through some magic filter. /p pBesides, what you consider spam, I may consider "valuable information about a product." Probably not, but there is a gray area there that has to be taken into consideration. Some spam is out-and-out spam, but other stuff may just be "hot deals" from a legitimate company. However, if you didn't want to see said hot deals, you might consider them spam. Still, how emwould you/em see them unless you actually followed that account to begin with? Or maybe you turned on auto-follow using a service like a href="http://socialtoo.com"SocialToo/a? If that's the case, it's a little ridiculous for you to get annoyed when half your timeline turns into a slew of "buy this" messages - you only have yourself to blame for that. /p h2Where Actual Spam Hurts Us/h2 pThe only place that honest-to-goodness spam can really affect you on an everyday basis is not in your own personal timeline of friends' tweets, but when viewing a trending topic's stream or when doing a keyword search. In these cases, spammers hijacking a currently popular hashtag may show up in the timeline, potentially diluting the results with irrelevant information. For this reason alone, we support Twitter's spam-fighting efforts. /p pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/hashtag_spam.png"/p h2Even More Dangerous? "Tweet to Win"/h2 pWhat's actually more concerning than spam, however, is the new trend we'll call "tweet to win." Legitimate companies have begun using Twitter to promote a message - essentially an advertisement about their business' offerings. To cajole twitizens into "spamming" their followers in this way, they're offering prizes or the chance to win prizes in return.em (Full disclosure: this author did this once and still regrets it). /em/p pThis situation hasn't gotten out of hand just yet, but it seems like it's only a matter of time before it does. Because really, how many of you could resist yourselves if all of a sudden a company started giving away free Macbook Pros? Oh, apparently not too many of you because you've already spammed up trending topics today with a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23moonfruit"#moonfruit/a. What's Moonfruit? Why, it's a company a href="http://www.moonfruit.com/macbook-pro.html"that's giving away a free Macbook Pro every day for 10 days/a. Is this a brilliant social media promotion (as a href="http://mashable.com/2009/07/01/moonfruit-macbook/"Adam Ostrow of Mashable claims/a) or just a new, inventive way to junk up the twitterstream with advertisements? We think it's closer to the latter./p pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/tweet_spam.png"/p pThe only consolation in this particular case is that Moonfruit doesn't care what your tweet says, so it can just be appended to any ordinary tweet. That's not usually the case - most companies provide a message for you to re-tweet./p pWhat's frightening about this "it's not spam, it's a message from your friend" is that it's really not. My friend isn't emactually/em telling me that Moonfruit is this great new company they have just heard about and that I really have to check out. This isn't a word-of-mouth recommendation - my friend just wants to win a new laptop. They know this, I know this, and the company knows this. And that makes the message just as spammy to me as any other in-stream tweet from an actual spammer./p pSo, what can be done? Well sure, I could unfollow that so-called friend, but why would I? It's not like they do this regularly and 99% of the time, I like what they have to say. But while one day that friend is tweeting to win a Macbook, another may be tweeting to win something else. Even if only ema small percentage/em of an ever-shifting group of my friends tweeted a promotional message every day, it would be enough to junk up my timeline. /p pSadly, that's one kind of spam that Twitter can't really block. And neither can I. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_needs_a_spam_filter_no_we_need_a_marketer_filter.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qcPu1vGWCodVrb9geNd94_0alEc/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qcPu1vGWCodVrb9geNd94_0alEc/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qcPu1vGWCodVrb9geNd94_0alEc/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qcPu1vGWCodVrb9geNd94_0alEc/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=oyEcKupqoPs:l1aHb20tbSs:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=oyEcKupqoPs:l1aHb20tbSs:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=oyEcKupqoPs:l1aHb20tbSs:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=oyEcKupqoPs:l1aHb20tbSs:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=oyEcKupqoPs:l1aHb20tbSs:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=oyEcKupqoPs:l1aHb20tbSs:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=oyEcKupqoPs:l1aHb20tbSs:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=oyEcKupqoPs:l1aHb20tbSs:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=oyEcKupqoPs:l1aHb20tbSs:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=oyEcKupqoPs:l1aHb20tbSs:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/oyEcKupqoPs" height="1" width="1"/
- How to Be an Effective CEO pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/effective_ceo_jul09a.jpg" width="150" height="112" /emThis is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/2009/05/startup-101-our-serialized-how-to-build-startup-book.php"click here/a./em/p pFirst-time entrepreneurs are usually also first-time CEOs. When you look at your first business card that says CEO, don't forget that it is not necessarily telling the truth. You earn the title of CEO through your actions and your results. You still have your training wheels on./p pFortunately, there is probably more advice available on how to be an effective CEO than on almost any other subject. This chapter gives you a quick guide, but do invest the time to read the classics, particularly:/p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d1.openx.org/ck.php?n=15319amp;cb=15319' target='_blank'img src='http://d1.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=11205amp;cb=15319amp;n=15319' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p ul li"The Effective Executive," by Peter Drucker,/li li"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," by Stephen Covey./li /ul pThese are timeless classics. Their authors do not attempt to create any modern theory or expound on any particular business or market trend. The books work because they are based on observation. The authors observed effective people to find out what they did right./p h2The Effective Executive/h2 pPeter Drucker's "Effective Executive" was written in 1966. It is a slim tome and easy to read, even if the language is a bit dated. Drucker focuses on how to allocate time, because you can get more of almost any resource except time. His advice to find time for uninterrupted work is particularly relevant to today's multi-tasking world. He is also very clear about the need to allocate enough time for people. If you need an hour with someone, don't think you are being efficient by rushing through the meeting in 15 minutes./p pCEOs allocate resources. The first resource they need to allocate is their own time./p pOne popular book today is "Now, Discover Your Strengths," by Marcus Buckingham. Drucker was a big proponent of accentuating a person's strengths rather than managing their weaknesses./p h2The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People/h2 p"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," first published in 1989, is a self-help book written by Stephen R. Covey. It has sold over 15 million copies. Drucker observes the following habits in effective people:/p pHabit 1: strongBe proactive./strongbr / Change starts from within. Most people react to external forces. To lead effectively, you have to overcome that natural tendency./p pHabit 2: strongBegin with the end in mind./strongbr / You cannot lead unless you know where you want to get to./p pHabit 3: strongPut first things first./strongbr / This is similar to what Drucker recommends. You need to have a very clear view of what is important, so that you know what to spend time on. Note that this often means leaving your comfort zone by acting on tasks that you don't naturally like or feel competent in performing./p pHabit 4: strongThink win/win./strongbr / Seek agreement and relationships that are mutually beneficial. In cases in which a win/win deal cannot be achieved, accept that agreeing on "no deal" may be the best alternative. In developing an organizational culture, be sure to reward win/win behavior among employees, and avoid inadvertently rewarding win/lose behavior./p pHabit 5: strongSeek first to understand, then to be understood./strongbr / First seek to understand the other person, and only then try to be understood. Stephen Covey presents this habit as the most important principle of inter-personal relations. Effective listening is not simply echoing what the other person has said through the lens of your own experience. Rather, it is putting yourself in the mindset of the other person, listening empathetically for both feeling and meaning./p pHabit 6: strongSynergize./strongbr / Through trustful communication, find ways to leverage individual differences to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Through mutual trust and understanding, people can often solve conflicts and find better solutions than would have been obtained through either person's own solution./p pHabit 7: strongSharpen the saw./strongbr / Take time out from production to build production capacity through personal renewal of the physical, mental, social/emotional, and spiritual dimensions. Maintain a balance among these dimensions./p h2Three Things a CEO Has to Do Well/h2 pThis is emall/em you need to do as a CEO:/p ol liSet direction and milestones (resisting the tempting distraction of juicy diversification). The ability to clearly say, "No, we are not doing that," is very important./li liAllocate resources (both financial and human, starting with your time)./li liHire and fire the top team (we have devoted a separate chapter to hiring an A-Team because this is much harder to say than do)./li /ol h2Making the Transition from Entrepreneur to CEO/h2 pYour average entrepreneur would probably say, "Yeah, right!" if told that they have to do only three things. The reality of a startup is that you usually have to do a bit of everything. You have to be product manager, if not the actual coder and designer. You become the chief marketing officer, chief financial officer, chief of just about anything that needs to get done./p pThis, of course, is unsustainable. You have to work out a transition plan that allows you to hire people to take over all the jobs that you currently do except the three CEO jobs./p pHere are five tips for managing that transition:/p ol liRecord how much time you spend on these tasks. Understand the process. You cannot hire for, outsource, or automate a task unless you understand it yourself. Look at this "chief of everything" phase as your chance to learn./li liRecognize the reality that you are not an expert in these tasks. So K.I.S.S./li liUnderstand the difference between "core" and "context" in your business. Core is what you have to do really well and do in-house. Everything else you can and should outsource./li liHire, outsource, and automate in proportion to the growth of your business. If you can manage five clients with everything else you are doing, and your two-year plan calls for 20 clients, hire someone who knows how to win and manage 20 clients (not someone who managed 1,000 clients at their last job). When you finally get the resources, there is a huge temptation to over-engineer./li liPay particular attention to hiring someone to do the one job that you love and could continue doing very competently (whether that is coding, design, marketing, sales, or finance). Holding on to this one job, your comfort zone, is hugely tempting. But it is a huge mistake that will prevent you from becoming an effective CEO./li /ol stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/2009/07/how-to-be-an-effective-ceo.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/GcBP41lYVELpwNMFVO78yE07MrQ/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/GcBP41lYVELpwNMFVO78yE07MrQ/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/GcBP41lYVELpwNMFVO78yE07MrQ/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/GcBP41lYVELpwNMFVO78yE07MrQ/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=m3n3DVTjOTk:mT8wburK4wM:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=m3n3DVTjOTk:mT8wburK4wM:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=m3n3DVTjOTk:mT8wburK4wM:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=m3n3DVTjOTk:mT8wburK4wM:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=m3n3DVTjOTk:mT8wburK4wM:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=m3n3DVTjOTk:mT8wburK4wM:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=m3n3DVTjOTk:mT8wburK4wM:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=m3n3DVTjOTk:mT8wburK4wM:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=m3n3DVTjOTk:mT8wburK4wM:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=m3n3DVTjOTk:mT8wburK4wM:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/m3n3DVTjOTk" height="1" width="1"/
- Microsoft Wishes You Happy Porn Browsing in New Vomit-Fil... pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/microsoft-logo.jpg" /Under waves of ever-increasing competition from Mozilla, Safari, and Google, Microsoft has released a series of edgy, a href="http://www.browserforthebetter.com/psa-htm.htm"PSA-style online videos/a to promote a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/default.aspx"Internet Explorer 8/a./p pFeaturing one-time emLois and Clark/em actor a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001002/"Dean Cain/a, the ads are uncharacteristically hip and discuss such real-world Internet problems as the fear of missing something (a.k.a. insomnia by social media) and the fear of your S.O. finding your porn cache. However, at least one of the videos was just too cool for Microsoft. After becoming strangely popular and talked-about online, the video was renounced by the software mega-company and pulled from the a href="http://www.browserforthebetter.com"promotional website/a. Somewhere tonight, a creative director weeps./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d1.openx.org/ck.php?n=15588amp;cb=15588' target='_blank'img src='http://d1.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=11205amp;cb=15588amp;n=15588' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p pA Microsoft rep a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10278063-71.html\"wrote in an email/a to CNET, "We created the... video as a tongue-in-cheek look at the InPrivate Browsing feature of Internet Explorer 8, using the same irreverent humor that our customers told us they liked about other components of the Internet Explorer 8 marketing campaign. While much of the feedback to this particular piece of creative was positive, some of our customers found it offensive, so we have removed it."/p pThe spot itself features a young lady spewing copious amounts of what used to be breakfast on a young man. She'd borrowed his laptop and evidently stumbled upon some hideous new a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rule%2034"Rule 34/a form of online entertainment. The ad serves to highlight IE8's sneaky no-history InPrivate browsing feature./p pobject width="610" height="370"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/xB9fhjnJcB0hl=enfs=1color1=0x5d1719color2=0xcd311b"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/xB9fhjnJcB0hl=enfs=1color1=0x5d1719color2=0xcd311b" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="610" height="370"/embed/object/p pThe ads are, as a group, delightfully off-brand. They're too cool for Microsoft, which has generally dwelt somewhere between stodgy and cutesy in terms of marketing./p pBetter still, they show that Microsoft just might be listening to what users really need: Web Slices to get quick views of personally important sites without wasting unnecessary time browsing between full-on tabs; sharing accelerators for sending along lolcats or other media with a single right-click; and yes, a way to keep the missus from finding out about your love affair with Suicide Girls./p pThe features are nifty in themselves. We'd totally use them if we weren't already committed to Chrome and Firefox./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/msft_wishes_you_happy_porn_browsing_in_new_ad_then.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/4s4WXhQg4o464ruGioS13PxUNAE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/4s4WXhQg4o464ruGioS13PxUNAE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/4s4WXhQg4o464ruGioS13PxUNAE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/4s4WXhQg4o464ruGioS13PxUNAE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=sK0bW7n4toA:F8PLr1ahBOQ:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=sK0bW7n4toA:F8PLr1ahBOQ:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=sK0bW7n4toA:F8PLr1ahBOQ:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=sK0bW7n4toA:F8PLr1ahBOQ:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=sK0bW7n4toA:F8PLr1ahBOQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=sK0bW7n4toA:F8PLr1ahBOQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=sK0bW7n4toA:F8PLr1ahBOQ:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=sK0bW7n4toA:F8PLr1ahBOQ:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=sK0bW7n4toA:F8PLr1ahBOQ:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=sK0bW7n4toA:F8PLr1ahBOQ:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/sK0bW7n4toA" height="1" width="1"/
- Iran's Mobile SMS Up & Running; Will Twitter Start to Los... pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/iran-sms.jpg"According to a a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8131095.stm"report today from the BBC/a, Iranians are able to text message one another for the first time since the day before the presidential elections./p pSMS service, which political dissidents had used to spread messages and organize protests, has been restricted since June 11, causing many Iranians to use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social sites to broadcast and communicate./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d1.openx.org/ck.php?n=15587amp;cb=15587' target='_blank'img src='http://d1.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=11205amp;cb=15587amp;n=15587' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p pThe BBC report stated that, according to Iranian news outlets, SMS capabilities are now unblocked but that users are experiencing massive technical problems. Some messages as old as three weeks were just now being received, and some messages were delivered multiple times./p pIran's broken digital communication infrastructure caused many Iranians to turn to services such as Twitter, using proxies to work around government restrictions for web use. Twitter became so integral to Iranians' communication, particularly with the wider global community, that the U.S. State Department asked a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_postpones_maintenance_as_iran_furor_builds.php"Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance/a which would have occurred in the immediate aftermath of the election and resultant protests. Other services rushed to add a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_does_too_little_too_late_with_a_persian_version.php"Persian translation features/a./p pHopefully, the unblocking of text messaging in Iran is a sign that communication channels are returning to normal. So, does this mean that everyone's new favorite color, a href="http://helpiranelection.com/""Solidarity Green,"/a will begin to fade away from social web avatars sometime soon? Once the country and its government emerge from crisis mode, what news will come from Iran, and what will the Internet have to say about it?/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/irans_mobile_sms_up_running_will_twitter_start_to.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/XgkbQvDAQkVOXg2R2UXfDODsOIw/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/XgkbQvDAQkVOXg2R2UXfDODsOIw/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/XgkbQvDAQkVOXg2R2UXfDODsOIw/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/XgkbQvDAQkVOXg2R2UXfDODsOIw/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=B9lp7XIblMA:QYjKBschg1M:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=B9lp7XIblMA:QYjKBschg1M:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=B9lp7XIblMA:QYjKBschg1M:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=B9lp7XIblMA:QYjKBschg1M:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=B9lp7XIblMA:QYjKBschg1M:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=B9lp7XIblMA:QYjKBschg1M:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=B9lp7XIblMA:QYjKBschg1M:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=B9lp7XIblMA:QYjKBschg1M:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=B9lp7XIblMA:QYjKBschg1M:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=B9lp7XIblMA:QYjKBschg1M:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/B9lp7XIblMA" height="1" width="1"/
Dosh Dosh
- An Essential Marketing Principle: Give Before You Try to Get Experts have talked about this before. How many times have you read about the importance of ‘adding value’ for your audience? How many times have you read about ‘building trust’ with your readers/prospects? Many, many times. You know it well. Every marketing guru has spoken about this topic. I’m sick of hearing it. But it STILL bears repeating. Because some people still don’t get it. [...] An Essential Marketing Principle: Give Before You Try to Get
- Twitter Marketing: Why You Don’t Need to Mass Follow Users A few days ago Twitter announced on their status blog that all Twitter users are only allowed to follow a maximum of 1000 people a day. This rule was designed to cut down on ‘follow spam’, the act of following many Twitter users in order to get them to follow you back or click on your links. When combined with the already [...] Twitter Marketing: Why You Don’t Need to Mass Follow Users
- Ad Swaps: A Smart and Easy Way to Get Free Traffic After yesterday’s post on marketing without search engines, I decided to follow up with a strategy you can use to get quality free traffic. One of the easiest ways to get visitors to your web site is to spend money. Nothing is more effortless then paying for traffic. But if you can’t afford it or [...] Ad Swaps: A Smart and Easy Way to Get Free Traffic
- Marketing Your Website Without Search Engines I’m not old enough to remember what the internet was like without search engines. Apparently, there were lists of web-servers: they were manually updated and publicized in news updates like this. And then the search engines came crawling, indexing and sorting out pages. As the web expanded with more users and businesses putting up websites, search engines [...] Marketing Your Website Without Search Engines
- The Most Powerful Way to Presell Any Product or Service Preselling is the art of conditioning potential customers and making them more likely to buy products/services. It is usually performed at your website before you send the visitor over to the vendor’s store or landing page. The goal of all presell tactics is to get prospects into a frame of mind whereby they not [...] The Most Powerful Way to Presell Any Product or Service
- The Unhealthy Obsession With DoFollow Blog Links If you don’t know what ‘dofollow’ means, read this first before continuing. Many webmasters or bloggers are infatuated with dofollow blogs. Not everyone is obsessed with them, but there are many who spend time or money trying to leave keyword comments on dofollow blogs, in order to improve their website’s search engine rankings. They sell tools to [...] The Unhealthy Obsession With DoFollow Blog Links
- 6 Fool-Proof Steps to Make More Money With Your Website Every website has a bunch of web pages which get more search traffic than others. These pages are constantly visited daily by new visitors, people who have never seen the site in question before. I call these ‘money pages’ because they are a reliable source of immediate and future income. But they’re not just ‘money’ because they bring [...] 6 Fool-Proof Steps to Make More Money With Your Website
- Tell People What You Want Them to Do for You In marketing and advertising, a ‘call to action’ is a message or statement which encourages the prospect to perform a specific action. Most of the time this involves buying a product, making a donation, subscribing to a newsletter or requesting for more information. The specific action to take is defined by the marketer in accordance with his/her goals. If [...] Tell People What You Want Them to Do for You
- Building Complementary Services: A Powerful Long-Term Soc... A fundamental aspect of marketing is to gain the attention of a target audience and engage or redirect it in a way which fulfills specific objectives, such as a positive increase in reputation, legitimacy, mindshare, exposure (visitor traffic), sales and captured leads (subscribers, users, clients etc). In terms of online marketing, social media channels offer many opportunities. Some webmasters focus on setting up profiles with self-serving user generated content [...] Building Complementary Services: A Powerful Long-Term Social Media Marketing Strategy
- Everyone Uses the Internet for a Reason It’s the first month of a new year and at this time I’m itching to start new web ventures both for fun and profit. I usually do up a list of possible startup and site ideas and narrow them down into those with the highest potential. But success depends on execution and not just plans [...] Everyone Uses the Internet for a Reason
Influential Marketing
- Unexpected Marketing Ideas That Could Transform Your Cust... This weekend is the celebration of the American Independence Day on July 4th and if you have ever lived or travelled to America on this date, you know that the day is typically celebrated with BBQs and fireworks. Across the...
- 8 Interesting Facts About Sweden And Social Media As the US continues to struggle with how the healthcare system needs to be reformed, it was interesting to spend a week focused on Sweden in my Global Communications class this week as it presents an interesting opposite. The country...
- Signs Of Hope For The Transparent Future Of The FDA Several weeks ago, what some might consider the most unlikely government agency to embrace social media decided to launch a blog. The FDA Transparency Blog was aimed at bringing a level of transparency to an agency that its own leader...
- Why Google Virgin America's Online Scavenger Hunt Campai... Early this morning Google Apps partnered with Virgin America to launch a unique campaign where they invited people taking Virgin America flights all day, as well as those sitting on computers at home or work to participate in an online...
- How Social Media Could Have Saved FlyClear This is the sad story of a company that died. Actually, it's more of a question of how it could have been saved. I'm talking about the now defunct FlyClear service run by a company called Verified Identity Pass that...
- 8 Interesting Things About Marketing Social Media In Russia This week is the first of six straight weeks where a class I am teaching on Global Communications at Georgetown University will be focused on a particular region of the world. This week's region is Russia and they have just...
- Everything I Need To Know I Learned From ... Advertising? When I arrived last night in Myrtle Beach, I didn't really know very much about this place, aside from my destination hotel where I'm staying. A mere half hour later I knew many things, including the fact that they have...
- Trendspot: HoloCam Marketing Earlier this week, the USPS created an engaging tool on their site called the "Virtual Box Simulator." It is relatively simple to use - you print out an icon and when you visit their site and launch their tool, the...
- 4 Reasons Facebook Won Big Last Night In case you were under a rock last night or away from the computer (which is unfortunately the same thing for many people) - what you missed what an online event that is now being called the "Facebook Landgrab." On...
- The Course I Always Wanted To Teach Photo Credit: saikofish (Lou) Do you remember ever sitting in a class and thinking to yourself that if you were teaching, you'd do it completely differently? Most of us can probably relate to some version of this experience, though we...
Blog Talk - WebProNews
- Twitter Applying To Have 'Tweet' Trademarked pTwitter is attempting to gain some kind of control of the use of quot;Twitterquot; and quot;Tweetquot; in a way that reminds me of Googlersquo;s a href="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006/10/if-you-google-you-must-be-spanked.html"attempt/a back in 2006.img align="right" src="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/2755v28-max-150x150.png" alt="" //p pa href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/01/twitter-grows-uncomfortable-with-the-use-of-the-word-tweet-in-applications/"TechCrunch/a got its hand on an email that was sent out to one Twitter app developer:/p blockquote pHi,/p pTwitter, Inc is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own. How can we go about having you change your UI to better differentiate your offering from our own?/p pThanks,/p /blockquote pThat prompted an a href="http://blog.twitter.com/2009/07/may-tweets-be-with-you.html"official response/a from Twitterrsquo;s chief of damage control Biz Stone. The use of quot;Twitterquot; appears to be pretty much off limits, but his comments about using quot;Tweetquot; have me puzzled:/p blockquote pWe have applied to trademark Tweet because it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective but we have no intention of quot;going afterquot; the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter. In fact, we encourage the use of the word Tweet. However, if we come across a confusing or damaging project, the recourse to act responsibly to protect both users and our brand is important./p /blockquote pIrsquo;m not a trademark attorneyndash;if you are, correct me if I am wrongndash;but if you register a trademark, arenrsquo;t you obliged to police it? I was under the impression that if you didnrsquo;t prevent others from using your trademark, you risked losing the protections granted by its registration./p pIf that is the case, maybe third-party application developers should be worried after all./p pIn addition, the above sentiment is how Twitter feels about the situation today, but what about in five years from now? What if itrsquo;s acquired by Google or News Corpndash;and they have a more stringent policy on the use of their trademarks?/p pOne blog post does not make a legal exemption. Irsquo;d be careful of your use of Twitter or Tweet if your product can in any way be confused as an official company offering./p pa href="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/07/twitter-twademarking-tweets.html"Comments/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=KSmGCL9TSKY:7xrOcIjs0oo:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=KSmGCL9TSKY:7xrOcIjs0oo:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=KSmGCL9TSKY:7xrOcIjs0oo:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?i=KSmGCL9TSKY:7xrOcIjs0oo:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=KSmGCL9TSKY:7xrOcIjs0oo:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed/~4/KSmGCL9TSKY" height="1" width="1"/
- Internet Marketing Trying To Police Itself On Privacy Issues pAn important element (read: selling point) of Internet marketing is the ability to know more about consumers and their behaviors. Everything can be tracked on the Internet, for the most part, and there is obvious value to marketers and their efforts. The flip side of this ability to track people is the privacy issue and lately the US government has been raising itrsquo;s regulatory eyebrows at the online world. In the past this may not have been such big news but with the current administrationrsquo;s bend toward a lsquo;name it and claim itrsquo; government style, web advertisers are looking to self police before they draw any more attention from the feds.img align="right" src="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Government.jpg" alt="" //p pa href="http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090702/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_online_advertising"Yahoo Tech reports/a on the efforts of a group of advertising associations that have come together to build a set of rules and regulations that the industry can use to give the consumer the privacy they expect and let marketers keep the freedoms that government intervention would likely hinder./p pThe centerpiece of these guidelines are the provision of transparency in tracking practices and easier opt-out for consumers. While it is certainly a big question as to how well these guidelines will actually work the hope is that the industry will be less of a focus of the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) and Congress./p blockquote pThese guidelines are coming from trade associations that represent 5,000 companies. The consortium comprises the American Association of Advertising Agencies, Association of National Advertisers, Direct Marketing Association, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Better Business Bureau. Their members are some of the nationrsquo;s largest companies, including Google Inc., General Electric Co., Microsoft Corp., Coca-Cola Co. and Procter amp; Gamble Co./p /blockquote pThese guidelines include recommendations that companies/p ol liTell consumers more clearly when theyrsquo;re being tracked/li liEducate consumers on how Web tracking works/li liGive consumers an easy way to opt out of being followed/li liProvide ldquo;reasonablerdquo; security for the data they collect/li liLimit how much data they retain/li liGet consumer approval before making material changes that would erode privacy protections with specific areas such as childrenrsquo;s personal information, financial data and medical records getting more protection./li /ol pAnyone caught by this new group will be reported to the federal government. This plan should go into effect in 2010. Sounds reasonable enough but of course there are those who feel that this will not be enough./p blockquote pJeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said the online ad industryrsquo;s promise to regulate itself through the new guidelines is designed to undercut the federal governmentrsquo;s increased interest in overseeing online behavioral advertising./p /blockquote pHe fears that the guidelines donrsquo;t go far enough and that there needs to be fair rules passed by Congress that lsquo;online marketing can thrive but consumers have greater control on how the information collected is being used.rsquo;/p pI am sure that the views of Pilgrim readers regarding government intervention in business are all over the map so wersquo;ll ask you the question: Should the industry police itself or should the federal government be involved? What are the pros and cons of both options? Herersquo;s your chance to form your own policy for people to see and show off your position on governmentrsquo;s role in business. Sounds like a fun and light topic to consider while enjoying the holiday weekend, right?/p pa href="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/07/web-advertisers-try-to-avert-the-government%E2%80%99s-eyes-somewhere-else.html"Comments/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=IrFVozltWGg:k0phO3J8Ji8:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=IrFVozltWGg:k0phO3J8Ji8:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=IrFVozltWGg:k0phO3J8Ji8:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?i=IrFVozltWGg:k0phO3J8Ji8:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=IrFVozltWGg:k0phO3J8Ji8:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed/~4/IrFVozltWGg" height="1" width="1"/
- Twitter Uncomfortable With 'Tweet' Being Used In Third Pa... pLooks like Twitter is not looking the other way as much these days. a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/01/twitter-grows-uncomfortable-with-the-use-of-the-word-tweet-in-applications/"TechCrunch reports/a that there is some concern at the social networking company that developers are using the term lsquo;Tweetrsquo; too much. Twitter, in fact, is claiming that the use of that trademark in the naming of any third party app is something they are lsquo;uncomfortablersquo; with. Here is an e-mail that was passed along to the TechCrunch folks relating to the subject.img align="right" src="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/twitter-bird.jpg" alt="" //p blockquote pHi,/p pTwitter, Inc is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own. How can we go about having you change your UI to better differentiate your offering from our own?/p pThanks,/p /blockquote pThe original reason for the e-mail was apparently around a developers attempt to have a UI so similar to Twitterrsquo;s that it may have been confused for the real deal. In the hashing out of that information the above e-mail was sent and the questions are starting to flow./p pApparently Twitter has applied for a trademark . Commentor Rich Hill stated/p blockquote pI just checked the US Patent Office and Trademark website and ldquo;TWEETrdquo; trademark has been applied for on April 14, 2009 but has not yet been finalized./p /blockquote pThe link that was given for the trademark application had expired so if you want to find the application visit the a href="http://www.uspto.gov/"US Patents and Trademarks Office/a and conduct the search./p pSo whatrsquo;s in a name? For the people at TweetDeck, Tweetmeme and many others apparently there is a lot. How will this eventually affect them? Too early to tell and only Twitter can determine just how far they may go to protect the trademark once it is finalized./p pI have to wonder that if they thought the term was so valuable why did they wait until April of 2009 to trademark it? Seems that the more we learn about Twitter and itrsquo;s business practices (or lack thereof) you wonder what other landmines are out there for them to step on?/p pWell, wersquo;ll just sit back and keep tweeting while we can still use the term tweet without having to tweet the Twitter legal folks to see if our use of tweet is OK by them. Holy tweet./p pa href="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/07/twitter-gets-tweet-itorial.html"Comments/a/pbr /a href="http://aj.600z.com/aj/63590/0/cc?z=1"img src="http://aj.600z.com/aj/63590/0/vc?z=1dim=9392" width="500" height="75" border="0"/adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=4fruKrtNsHA:n0pBASC_YdU:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=4fruKrtNsHA:n0pBASC_YdU:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=4fruKrtNsHA:n0pBASC_YdU:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?i=4fruKrtNsHA:n0pBASC_YdU:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=4fruKrtNsHA:n0pBASC_YdU:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed/~4/4fruKrtNsHA" height="1" width="1"/
- Flickr Just Now Allowing Connectivity With Twitter pa href="http://venturebeat.com/2009/06/30/flickr-adds-direct-to-twitter-publishing/"VentureBeat reports/a that Flickr is finally enabling its users to tweet their photos on the service./p blockquote pWhat took them so long? Flickr now has a built-in feature that lets members tweet their photos. ldquo;You can upload directly to Flickr and Twitter simultaneously, or tweet a photo already on Flickr, using a special short Flic.kr URL,rdquo; says the companyrsquo;s FAQ. It also explains how to post photos from your phone, and how to tweet from Flickr./p /blockquote pFlickr spelled out the ldquo;how torsquo;srdquo; in the following from their PR firm/p blockquote pTo use Flickr 2 Twitter, members need to first authorize Flickr to post to their Twitter accounts. Once authorized, members will be able to tweet photos from the ldquo;Blog Thisrdquo; button on their photo page or from their mobile devices./p pMobile uploading is possible once members enable their Upload by Email settings (unique Flickr email upload address + ldquo;2twitterrdquo;). After yoursquo;ve successfully tweeted your Flickr photo, it will look something like this./p /blockquote pimg height="239" width="300" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-11383" alt="Flickr image" src="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/Flickr-image-300x239.jpg" //p pIs there anything else out there that hasnrsquo;t joined the Twitter trend?/p pa href="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/06/flickr-connects-to-twitter-better-late-than-never.html"Comments/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=YEBuUstKMIU:TpNJVlcNTr8:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=YEBuUstKMIU:TpNJVlcNTr8:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=YEBuUstKMIU:TpNJVlcNTr8:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?i=YEBuUstKMIU:TpNJVlcNTr8:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=YEBuUstKMIU:TpNJVlcNTr8:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed/~4/YEBuUstKMIU" height="1" width="1"/
- Hulu Receives Good News Concerning Their Online Ad Format ppaidContent has two pieces of good news for Hulu in the past weekmdash;theyrsquo;re commanding not only a href="http://paidcontent.org/article/419-hulu-tv.com-getting-higher-ad-rates-than-their-network-counterparts/"similar ad prices to broadcast television/a, but also a href="http://paidcontent.org/article/419-report-hulu-owns-10-percent-of-the-online-video-ad-market"10% of the online video ad market/a.img align="right" src="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/hulu-logo.jpg" alt="" //p pFrom a a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601204amp;sid=atKGiQOMco.Y"Bloomberg/a report, paidContent shows that, for some shows, CPMs on Hulu are actually greater than they are for broadcast TV. And when I say broadcast TV, wersquo;re talking primetime, new episode, time-slot-leading network television. (None of that cable syndicated rerun stuff!) Bloombergrsquo;s example:/p blockquote pMarketers typically pay $20 to $40 per thousand viewers for a prime-time ad. On Hulu, which began offering shows to the public in March 2008, an ad on the animated series ldquo;The Simpsonsrdquo; costs $60 per thousand viewers, Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein amp; Co. wrote in a June 18 report./p /blockquote pHow can the Internet, with demonstrably fewer viewers (another example, the NCAA basketball championship game, drew 17.6M TV viewers and 7.52 Internet viewers), command such high CPMs?/p pA couple factors: first, that the Internet is so measurable. As CBSrsquo;s chief research officer put it:/p blockquote pldquo;The reason people are paying such a high premium for these ads on the Internet is they do have a captive audience,rdquo; Poltrack said. ldquo;You know you have eyes on the screen.rdquo;/p /blockquote pPlus, Bloomberg says, therersquo;s an extremely scarce inventory. A typical Simpsons episode on Hulu carries only 37 seconds of advertising, versus nine minutes on television. But that also means that their overall revenues per-episode are far lower, even with more dedicated viewers. Many analysts and networks worry about television companies ldquo;cannibalizing their core business.rdquo; But maybe their core business emshould/em be shifting online./p pJustifying those high CPMs, Hulu commands 10% of the online video advertising market place. a href="http://comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/6/Americans_Viewed_a_Record_16.8_Billion_Videos_Online_in_April"Hulu is a distant third/a in online video viewership, after Googlersquo;s properties and Foxrsquo;s properties (including MySpace and Fox News). They have only 2.4% of the overall video market and 2.3% of the Internetrsquo;s total unique video viewers. So 10% of the online video ad market is pretty impressive./p pimg height="313" width="500" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-11373" title="chart-ad-supported-online-video-sites-m" alt="chart-ad-supported-online-video-sites-m" src="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/chart-ad-supported-online-video-sites-m.jpg" //p pa href="http://www.screendigest.com/press/releases/pr_28_06_2009/view.html"Screen Digestrsquo;s report/a states that broadcasters direct control 44% of the ad market, while cable operators command 22%. ldquo;Otherrdquo; controls 15% of the market, Hulu 10%, and portals 9%./p pLetrsquo;s look at that againmdash;Hulu is the only website singled out there. It commands 10% of the market by itself, while the rest of the categories listed are just thatmdash;entire categories of sites./p pSo where does YouTube fall in there? Screen Digest says:/p blockquote pIn contrast, third party platforms such as YouTube, Joost and other portals, which have no direct vertical affiliation with major rights holders, nor direct access to premium content rights, will struggle to aggregate ad-supported movies and TV shows. The Hollywood Studios and major rights holders will continue to limit such deals, instead preferring to build their own syndicated ad-supported online video services ndash; such as Crackle, developed by Sony Pictures, and the CBS Audience Network./p /blockquote pWhat do you think? Is the Internet, specifically Hulu, the future of television and video advertising? Will YouTube ever be able to catch up to Hulu in terms of monetization?/p pa href="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/06/hulu-commands-10-of-online-video-ads.html"Comments/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=4KGiILJ_d5o:fsbGdZsYP8s:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=4KGiILJ_d5o:fsbGdZsYP8s:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=4KGiILJ_d5o:fsbGdZsYP8s:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?i=4KGiILJ_d5o:fsbGdZsYP8s:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=4KGiILJ_d5o:fsbGdZsYP8s:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed/~4/4KGiILJ_d5o" height="1" width="1"/
- Global Gaming Factory Buys Up Pirate Bay p style="text-align: justify;"nbsp;img align="right" src="http://www.hypebot.com/.a/6a00d83451b36c69e201157099a332970c-100wi" alt="" /(UPDATED) News began to trickle out in the wee hours this morning that The Pirate Bay has been sold to Global Gaming Factory X AB for $4 US million in cash plus an equal amount in stock. GGF develops gaming software and operates internet cafes and gaming centers in Scandinavia.nbsp; Details are vague, but the original team will still stay involved and promise to keep the site much the same./p p style="text-align: justify;"Ownership of the Pirate Bay had been transferred away from the individuals being sued in 2006 according to an a target="_blank" href="http://boombox.posterous.com/nya-tidens-intervjuer"interview/a (translation via a target="_blank" href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20090630/0104135410.shtml"Techdirt/a) with co-founder Peter Sunde conducted on Twitter. Neither Sunde or his fellow pirates are the beneficiaries of the sale according to a PirateBay a target="_blank" href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20090630/0104135410.shtml"blog post/a, but rathernbsp; quot;into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openness of the nets.quot;/p p style="text-align: justify;"a href="http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2009/06/pirate-bay-sold-to-global-gaming-factory.html"Comments/a/pbr /a href="http://aj.600z.com/aj/63590/0/cc?z=1"img src="http://aj.600z.com/aj/63590/0/vc?z=1dim=9392" width="500" height="75" border="0"/adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=PVK1UrwMXA8:6uex5lvY8oc:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=PVK1UrwMXA8:6uex5lvY8oc:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=PVK1UrwMXA8:6uex5lvY8oc:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?i=PVK1UrwMXA8:6uex5lvY8oc:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=PVK1UrwMXA8:6uex5lvY8oc:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed/~4/PVK1UrwMXA8" height="1" width="1"/
- Pirate Bay Launches The Video Bay div class="entry-body" p style="text-align: justify;"Those tiring of the growing restrictions put by rightsholders on video on You Tube and elsewhere may eventually find a home at The Video Bay.nbsp; Currently in quot;beta extremequot;, the site is the latest brainchild of the folks behind the Pirate Bay; and if their mounting problems in Swedish courts weren't already enough, this is sure to add to their legal bills./p div style="text-align: center;"a style="display: inline;" href="http://www.hypebot.com/.a/6a00d83451b36c69e20115718e8eb8970b-pi"img border="0" width="350" src="http://www.hypebot.com/.a/6a00d83451b36c69e20115718e8eb8970b-350wi" class="at-xid-6a00d83451b36c69e20115718e8eb8970b" alt="Videobay" //a/div p style="text-align: justify;"strongspan style="font-size: 15px;"quot;Both Live And Drunk Codingquot;/span/strong/p p style="text-align: justify;"quot;Don't expect anything to work at allquot;. reads the simple front page, and a test drive shows that almost nothing does. But the plans are ambitious./p /div p style="text-align: justify;"quot;To stay in the spirit on which TPB was founded and using the Latest Technologytrade;, TVB aims to use the new HTML5 features, more specificly the lt;videogt; and lt;audiogt; tags with the ogg/theora video and audio formats. This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don't bug us too much if the site ain't working properly.quot;/p p style="text-align: justify;"One audio and one video demo are up on the site, but to view any audio or video clips on the site you need a browser that can handle the HTML5 lt;videogt; and/or lt;audiogt; tag including:/p ul style="text-align: justify;" liFirefox 3.5 beta 4/li liOpera 9.52 preview/li liGoogle Chrome 3/li liSafari 3.4 amp; Safari 4/li /ul pa href="http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2009/06/pirate-bay-readies-launch-of-the-video-bay.html"Comments/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=0TnxGUpG2EY:eQ--hUEyrgg:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=0TnxGUpG2EY:eQ--hUEyrgg:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=0TnxGUpG2EY:eQ--hUEyrgg:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?i=0TnxGUpG2EY:eQ--hUEyrgg:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=0TnxGUpG2EY:eQ--hUEyrgg:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed/~4/0TnxGUpG2EY" height="1" width="1"/
- A Twitter Rant Gone Bad pI am not an author. Irsquo;m a blogger. If I say something that someone disagrees with they can let me have it in the comments section of the blog. At that point, the decision needs to be made how, or even better if, I should fire back. In most cases, I make the decision to let bygones be bygones because comment crossfire usually ends badly (or at the very least awkwardly) and it doesnrsquo;t accomplish much in the end. As long as there are no off color comments regarding direct family members or my heritage, I can take it. Most online attacks come from people who are only exercising their Internet muscles anyway (meaning since they never actually have to face someone in person they can look like they have some nerve).img align="right" src="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/Twitter-icon.jpg" alt="" //p pa href="http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/author-apologizes-for-twitter-outburst-about-a-bad-review/"The New York Times covered an story/a that turns out to be a lsquo;how not to handle a situation onlinerdquo; mini case study. It appears that the author, Alice Hoffman, apparently got a bad review of her new book ldquo;The Story Sistersrdquo; from Roberta Silman of the Boston Globe. Silmanrsquo;s review included the comment ldquo;This new novel lacks the spark of the earlier work. Its vision, characters, and even the prose seem tired.rdquo; Apparently Ms. Silman gave away the plot as well. It appears safe to say that this was a less than stellar review and a dwindling number of Boston Globe readers may or may not have seen it. We do know, however, that Ms. Hoffman did./p pSo how did Ms.Hoffman respond? With a Twitter tirade, of course. (Note to self: If you feel slighted it may not be in your best interest to write something similar to the following)/p blockquote pldquo;Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron,rdquo; she wrote. ldquo;How do some people get to review books? And give the plot away.rdquo; Ms. Hoffman also lambasted The Globe and went so far as to post Ms. Silmanrsquo;s phone number and email, inviting fans to ldquo;Tell her what u think of snarky critics.rdquo;/p /blockquote pFast forward to the new media version of the stockade; the written mea culpa (a fancy word for eating your mistake whole and in public for everyone to snicker at). Hoffmanrsquo;s statement through her publisher, Shaye Areheart, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group division of Random House included:/p blockquote pldquo;I feel this whole situation has been completely blown out of proportion. Of course, I was dismayed by Roberta Silmanrsquo;s review which gave away the plot of the novel, and in the heat of the moment I responded strongly and I wish I hadnrsquo;t. Irsquo;m sorry if I offended anyone. Reviewers are entitled to their opinions and thatrsquo;s the name of the game in publishing. I hope my readers understand that I didnrsquo;t mean to hurt anyone and Irsquo;m truly sorry if I did.rdquo;/p /blockquote pOh, and she also took down her Twitter account. Hoffman is just another in a growing list of people who shouldnrsquo;t be allowed to use social media. Heck, you need a license to drive a car, what about social media? Until it is recognized that no good rant goes unpunished on the Internet, these online reputation suicides will continue to occur with startling regularity and intensity./p pWhat is your technique for keeping your emotions in check in online environments? Ever hit the send button and regretted it? I would venture to say that you arenrsquo;t truly involved in social media unless you have done that to some degree or another. What separates the online men from the boys is if you let it happen repeatedly and what level of intensity (or stupidity) you allow your emotions to take you to./p pIf you remember the TV show ldquo;Hill Street Bluesrdquo; the cops never left their morning briefing without the words of Sergeant Esterhaus saying ldquo;Letrsquo;s be careful out thererdquo;. While not as dangerous as mean streets of some urban center, the Internet carries itrsquo;s own set of risks so that people should heed the warning as well./p pa href="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/06/bad-review-made-worse-by-twitter-tirade.html"Comments/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=2AJK9gkzq08:btqdGRnLmv8:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=2AJK9gkzq08:btqdGRnLmv8:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=2AJK9gkzq08:btqdGRnLmv8:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?i=2AJK9gkzq08:btqdGRnLmv8:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=2AJK9gkzq08:btqdGRnLmv8:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed/~4/2AJK9gkzq08" height="1" width="1"/
- Reports Say Microsoft Could Be Selling Razorfish pWhen Microsoft a href="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/05/breaking-microsoft-to-acquire-aqauntive-for-6-billion.html"acquired/a aQuantive in 2007, it wanted to bolster its ad network. Unfortunately, it also ended-up with a conflict of interest, as aQuantive came with Avenue A | Razorfishndash;an ad agency.img align="right" src="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/ucm049032.jpg" alt="" //p pSince then, you could argue that about the only good thing to come out of that particular acquisition was the re-branding from the awkward quot;Avenue A | Razorfishquot; to the more practical a href="http://www.razorfish.com/"Razorfish/a. Really, what did Microsoft want with an ad agency anyway?/p pWell, the a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/11be3c0e-641f-11de-a818-00144feabdc0.html"FT/a has yet another rumorndash;in a a href="http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=130521"long line of rumors/andash;that Microsoft plans to sell off Razorfish./p blockquote pMicrosoft has appointed Morgan Stanley to find a potential buyer for Razorfish, its digital agencyhellip;In August, two years after the aQuantive deal, more favourable tax implications will provide an opportunity for Microsoft to sell an asset some view as a conflict of interest with Microsoft Advertising, which sells technology to rival agencies./p /blockquote pSo far French marketing firm Publicis appears to be the front runnerndash;with barely a mention that WPP may once again be interested./p pSo whatrsquo;s Razorfish worth? Back in 2008, AdAge slapped a $800 million valuation on the agency, but wersquo;re in a totally different economic climate right now, so FTrsquo;s $600m-$700m might be more realistic. But, really, thatrsquo;s just a very small drop in an insanely large Microsoft bucket. Why bother either selling?/p pWell, that brings us back to the conflict of interest issue again. Microsoft has a renewed focus on its own online advertising sales, and so the time might be right to get rid of any distractions./p pa href="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/06/is-microsoft-ready-to-shave-off-razorfishs-conflict-of-interest.html"Comments/a/pbr /a href="http://aj.600z.com/aj/63590/0/cc?z=1"img src="http://aj.600z.com/aj/63590/0/vc?z=1dim=9392" width="500" height="75" border="0"/adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=Y1IsCU3YGWU:ZG-kSl6ASzo:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=Y1IsCU3YGWU:ZG-kSl6ASzo:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=Y1IsCU3YGWU:ZG-kSl6ASzo:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?i=Y1IsCU3YGWU:ZG-kSl6ASzo:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=Y1IsCU3YGWU:ZG-kSl6ASzo:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed/~4/Y1IsCU3YGWU" height="1" width="1"/
- Important Bing Developer Leaves For eBay pIt seems that Microsoftrsquo;s taking a href="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/06/three-blind-mice-run-from-yahoo-to-microsoft.html"three steps forward/a and one step back, with its hiring of other companiesrsquo; employees. It a href="http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/172367.asp"just lost/a Hugh Williams to eBay.img align="right" src="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/2548f1a.jpg" alt="" //p pHe left Microsoft to become vice president of development for search for the auction site and, judging by Williamsrsquo; a href="http://www.linkedin.com/pub/hugh-williams/4/191/947"LinkedIn profile/a, eBay gains the guy that helped created Bing:/p blockquote pI was a Partner at Microsoft, and a development manager in the Bing team. Irsquo;m proud to say that many of the features of the first Bing release were created by my team./p pI managed the development of all user-facing web search relevance features, including the left-rail explore pane (with its quot;table of contentsquot;), navigational query treatments, query-biased summaries, quot;deeplinksquot;, related searches, and whole page results relevance. Additionally, I managed the Powerset team in San Francisco./p /blockquote pHe also played a key role in Microsoftrsquo;s development of Internet Explorer 8./p pSo, two questions. What damage does this do to Bing, if any? And, what the heck does eBay have up its sleeve?/p pa href="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/06/microsoft-loses-key-bing-developer-to-ebay.html"Comments/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=WUkIHr_vfQw:E-XLg9bUPQw:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=WUkIHr_vfQw:E-XLg9bUPQw:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=WUkIHr_vfQw:E-XLg9bUPQw:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?i=WUkIHr_vfQw:E-XLg9bUPQw:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?a=WUkIHr_vfQw:E-XLg9bUPQw:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsBlogTalkRssFeed/~4/WUkIHr_vfQw" height="1" width="1"/
Top News - WebProNews
- GoDaddy Makes Twitter Part Of Domain Registration Process pGoDaddy is sometimes hard to take seriously; its marketing department seems to be run by the same bunch of teenage boys in charge of Axe commercials.nbsp; But GoDaddy is still the world's largest domain registrar, and it's poised to help Twitter with a new step in its registration process./p pGoDaddy seems to have made the assumption that anyone wanting to create a website will also want to establish a presence on Twitter.nbsp; a href="http://mashable.com/2009/07/02/godaddy-twitter/" title="quot;GoDaddy Wants You to Go Twitterquot;"Adam Ostrow/a reports that it's actually quot;integrated Twitter registration into its domain manager, allowing you to see if the Twitter username that matches your URL is available, and if so, register it.quot;/p pThis says a great deal about how important Twitter has become to the people at GoDaddy (and indeed, you can find GoDaddyDeals, GoDaddyJobs, and GoDaddyGuy Twitter accounts, with that last one being rather popular and putting out about ten tweets per day).nbsp;/p centerimg align="middle" src="http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/article_pics/GoDaddyGuy.jpg" alt="" / /center pnbsp;/p p style="text-align: left;"It says something about what GoDaddy thinks its customers want, too./p pAnd since every single GoDaddy customer probably hasn't been switching back and forth between the domain registrar and Twitter while trying to name a company, this development may introduce Twitter to a lot of new people./pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=j518CNB7u-8:vn8Z50afi6A:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=j518CNB7u-8:vn8Z50afi6A:dnMXMwOfBR0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=dnMXMwOfBR0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=j518CNB7u-8:vn8Z50afi6A:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=j518CNB7u-8:vn8Z50afi6A:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?i=j518CNB7u-8:vn8Z50afi6A:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=j518CNB7u-8:vn8Z50afi6A:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed/~4/j518CNB7u-8" height="1" width="1"/
- Things You Need to Know About Twitter Security pThere has been more than one story in the news recently about Twitter accounts being hijacked. The most recent examples of note include the accounts of Britney Spears and famed blogger/entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki. These issues have highlighted some potential dangers of using the service, or really social networks in general. span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"strongHave you encountered security issues with Twitter or other social networks?/strong/spanstrong a href="http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/07/02/things-you-need-to-know-about-twitter-security#comments"Share with WebProNews readers/a./strongbr / br / Amit Klein, CTO of a href="http://www.trusteer.com"Trusteer/a, a security firm, who counts the nation's largest direct bank, a href="http://home.ingdirect.com/"ING Direct/a, among its customers, feels that Twitter account hijacking is an issue that more people need to be aware of. WebProNews asked Klein a few questions about it, and the following is the resulting Qamp;A session. br / br / strongWebProNews: Please talk a little bit about what is happening when Twitter (and other social network) accounts are hijacked. /strongbr / br / strongAmit Klein:/strong Typically, criminals hijack Twitter accounts in order to spread malware. That is, they abuse the hijacked accounts to post messages to all the quot;followersquot;, with a link to a site that serves malware. In the Guy Kawasaki incident, for example (not a classic account hijacking, but still a malware spreading campaign), of the 139,000 followers, it is estimated that hundreds got infected. Earlier this year, accounts of 33 celebrities (among them Barack Obama - 1.6 million followers, and Britney Spears - 2.1 million followers) were hijacked./p centera href="http://twitter.com/britneyspears/status/2381680740"img title="Britney Spears Twitter hijacked" alt="Britney Spears Twitter hijacked" src="http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/article_pics/britney-hacked.jpg" //a/center pstrongWPN: How big of a problem is hijacking of Twitter (or other social network) accounts? /strongbr / br / strongAK: /strongThis is quite bad, since a twitter account enables one to send malware links and plain spam to all followers. Of course - the more followers, the more widespread the attack is.br / br / strongWPN: How common is it? /strongbr / br / strongAK: /strongOver the last 10 days, we've seen two high profile incidents, in which an account was abused to serve spam and malware. One is a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=3669"the Guy Kawasaki incident/a, and a href="http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2009/06/britney-twitter.html"another is Britney Spears/a.br / strongbr / WPN: Has it been limited to quot;high profilequot; accounts, or is it becoming common for regular users as well? /strongbr / br / strongAK:/strong Obviously the media covers only the high profile attacks (celebrities, politicians, etc.). We believe that attacks against more average accounts are also taking place - quite possibly via mass production utilities. br / br / strongWPN: What are the dangers that come with it? /strongbr / br / img align="right" src="http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/article_pics/amit-klein.jpg" alt="Amit Klein" title="Amit Klein" style="margin: 10px;" / strongAK:/strong The most obvious danger is that a hijacked account can be used to serve malware and spam automatically to all a user's followers. An account can be hijacked a long time before it is abused. Attackers usually wait for the right opportunity to hit as many users as possible.br / br / While twitter is currently used to spread malware, it's a perfect platform to commit fraud as well. Followers trust the messages that come from the person they follow, while in reality the message could be spam trying to convince followers to fall to a scam. A very simple example would be a request to donate a small amount of money to charity (for example to support the situation in Iran). The link would go to a fraudulent website that records credit card numbers. A high profile account that sends such a message could result in hundreds of thousands of compromised credit cards.br / br / Another example is false rumors about companies and stock, which could result in pump and dump attacks. br / br / strongWPN: What can users do to protect their accounts? /strongbr / br / strongAK:/strong To secure their Twitter presence, users needs to take several actions: br / br / 1. Protect their twitter credentials - users need to be vigilant and keep on the look out for Twitter phishing attacks, and pharming (DNS poisoning) attacks. Users can install client side security tools that ensure they are only providing their Twitter credentials to the genuine twitter website. In doing so, they will protect their credentials against keyloggers or malicious browser plug-ins (quot;man in the browserquot; attacks).br / br / 2. Control and protect their twitter information. As tempting and convenient as it may be, using 3rd party applications and services that enhance Twitter may increase the exposure of users to abuse. Every website which is allowed to automatically post to a user's Twitter account adds attack surface that criminals may exploit. br / br / strongWPN: Please feel free to discuss anything else related to the subject that you feel people should know. /strongbr / br / strongAK:/strong Somewhat akin to phishing, is a practice called quot;twitter-squattingquot;, wherein names of people/organizations are registered by fraudsters (or sometimes pranksters). It makes a lot of sense to monitor for such registrations, or better yet, to register brand names and individual names as early as possible to thwart such attacks. br / br / img align="left" src="http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/article_pics/trending-topics2.jpg" alt="Trending Topics" style="margin: 10px;" / Another threat associated with Twitter is abusing quot;Trending Topicsquot; to serve malware. The attack involves sending many tweets (with malicious links) with some special keyword in them, so that this keyword will show up as a trend in the quot;Trending Topicsquot; list at twitter.com. A user that views a sample tweet for this keyword and clicks on the malicious link will be served malware. br / br / Both examples show how well established web attacks carry over into the twittersphere. Cyber squatting is a well-known practice on the web, which is now occurring in Twitter. Likewise, search engine poisoning is a common practice on the web, and now in Twitter also. br / br / Security-wise, Twitter should be treated both as an individual website with its own potential security issues, and as a microcosm into which many existing web attacks can be mapped. This makes securing Twitter harder than protecting typical websites. br / br / strongWrapping up/strongbr / br / WebProNews would like to thank Amit for sharing the above insight into Twitter security issues. emstrongHas your Twitter account ever been hijacked? Have you been a victim of Twitter abuse of any kind? a href="http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/07/02/things-you-need-to-know-about-twitter-security#comments"uTell us about it/u/a./strong/em/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=sJK13yXUBTA:4ksXDqi4lVE:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=sJK13yXUBTA:4ksXDqi4lVE:dnMXMwOfBR0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=dnMXMwOfBR0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=sJK13yXUBTA:4ksXDqi4lVE:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=sJK13yXUBTA:4ksXDqi4lVE:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?i=sJK13yXUBTA:4ksXDqi4lVE:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=sJK13yXUBTA:4ksXDqi4lVE:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed/~4/sJK13yXUBTA" height="1" width="1"/
- Hashtags Now Linking in Twitter pTwitter has started linking hashtags in tweets to Twitter searches. A few other Twitterers have started to notice as well:br / img src="http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/article_pics/hashtags-linking.jpg" alt="Hashtags linking" /br / br / The move makes sense, considering that the hashtag phenomenon has reach tremendous popularity. They often appear in the trending topics. br / br / The move also illustrates a greater emphasis being placed on Twitter Search, which only this year has become a focus of the company. It wasn't that long ago that it was a href="http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/03/06/search-comes-home-on-twitter"added to the Twitter home page/a, and it is already sparking big a href="http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/07/02/microsoft-takes-a-shot-at-real-time-search"interest in real-time search/a throughout the entire search industry./pbr /a href="http://aj.600z.com/aj/63590/0/cc?z=1"img src="http://aj.600z.com/aj/63590/0/vc?z=1dim=9392" width="500" height="75" border="0"/adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=Go2UfGJBlso:fDDg2T1j4M0:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=Go2UfGJBlso:fDDg2T1j4M0:dnMXMwOfBR0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=dnMXMwOfBR0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=Go2UfGJBlso:fDDg2T1j4M0:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=Go2UfGJBlso:fDDg2T1j4M0:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?i=Go2UfGJBlso:fDDg2T1j4M0:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=Go2UfGJBlso:fDDg2T1j4M0:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed/~4/Go2UfGJBlso" height="1" width="1"/
- Google Voice: The New Coolest Thing Ever pWhat would you say if a company asked you if yoursquo;d like to have all of your home, work and cell phone calls, all your text messages, all your conference calls, all your voicemail -- pretty much anything you say or type into a phone -- ALL of it -- go thru their 3rd party service? You, like me, would probably say; Thanks but no thanks./p center div style="border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); margin: 0px; padding: 4px 0px 0px; background: rgb(217, 217, 217) url(http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/video/embed-bg.gif) repeat-x scroll left top; width: 326px; height: 208px; text-align: center; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Tahoma,Verdana,Times,serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;"embed width="316" height="188" flashvars="config=http%3A%2F%2Fvideos.webpronews.com%2Fvideo%2Fjwplayer%2Fconfig.xmlamp;file=http%3A%2F%2Fvideos.webpronews.com%2Fvideo%2Fplaylist.php%3Fmovie_name%3Dgooglevoice" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" src="http://videos.webpronews.com/video/jwplayer/player.swf"/embedbr / a class="right" onclick="window.open('http://videos.webpronews.com/video/getcode.php?movie_name=googlevoice', 'Code', 'scrollbars,height=450,width=500')" href="javascript:return false;"img border="0" align="right" style="margin: 2px 5px 0px -55px; position: relative; z-index: 2;" src="http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/video/video_embed.jpg" alt="" //aa style="color: rgb(0, 51, 102); text-decoration: none;" href="http://videos.webpronews.com/"bMore WebProNews Videos/b/a/div /center p style="text-align: left;"But wait. What if they were going to give you a bunch of really cool features and capabilities in the process?nbsp; For free? Oh, and what if the company were Google?nbsp; Now you might be saying; Oh yeah?nbsp; Well... what kind of cool features?nbsp; I would./p center span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"strongAre you Interested in Google Voice?/strong/spanstrongnbsp; /stronga href="http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/06/30/google-voice"span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"strongLet us know in the comments./strong/span/a /center pGoogle Voice is the new lsquo;Coolest Thing Everrsquo; coming out of Google.nbsp; Basically, what they are doing is allowing you to centralize your multiple phone numbers (work/home/cell etc).nbsp; In the process they have come up with all kinds of handy tools and features that give endusers more control over their telecom than they have ever had before.br / br / Essentially, herersquo;s how it goes down.nbsp; You get a new Google assigned phone number.nbsp; Then, you route all of your other phone numbers thru that number.nbsp; So, your office phone, your work phone, your home phone - whatever. Google voice will allow your calls to selectively ring thru to any of the destination handsets you choose.nbsp; It really is a handy idea in concept.br / br / Beyond that, Voice adds all kinds of cool little bonus features for example:br / br / - You can selectively ring calls thru to multiple destinations.br / - You can selectively block and screen callsbr / - You can send, receive forward and store SMS text messagesbr / - Check your voicemail online, read it via email or text (you can even forward it)br / - You can create personalized voicemail messages per contactbr / - You can group your contacts and manage their preferences on a group levelbr / - Conference calling, call recording, call switching, 411 info -- all that kind of thing is in there. br / br / img align="right" src="http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/article_pics/gvoice.jpg" alt="google voice" /Now, rephrase my original question and substitute Google for lsquo;a companyrsquo;. Do you still flatly refuse? Irsquo;m thinking a lot of people will just say ldquo;Oh, itrsquo;s emGoogle/emrdquo; and after that, ldquo;Well sure, that sounds fantastic! Wow. Man, Google is cool arenrsquo;t they?rdquo; So, my question is:nbsp; why is that?br / br / Yes, Google Voice is cool.nbsp; Yes, I have signed up. Yes, I realize using it means everything I use it for becomes more data for Google to lsquo;organizersquo;.nbsp; But I might do it anyway and I wonrsquo;t be alone.br / br / The way I see it, Google Voice users will be made up of three groups of people:br / strongGroup 1:/strong Realize how much data the service gives Google access to, but trusts Google enough that it isnrsquo;t a concern.nbsp; These folks also elected Obama and only eat tuna clearly labeled dolphin safe.nbsp; br / br / strongGroup 2:/strong Realize the data issue but donrsquo;t care, because they realize their lsquo;datarsquo; is all over the place anyway - Google might as well have some (more) too. These are also thenbsp; people who told their classmates about Santa in the 3rd grade. br / br / strongGroup 3:/strong No idea or thought paid to the matter of their data and who sees it. This the reality TV set.nbsp; As long as the Bachelorette is still on Monday night... theyrsquo;re good to go.br / br / Add those guys up and Google Voice will do just fine.nbsp; Even some of the people that refuse to use over privacy issues will trickle in after a while.nbsp; Peer pressure and the whole, lsquo;man I wish my phone did thatrsquo; factor is not to be lightly discounted (just ask Apple). br / br / Google Voice does lots of neat stuff...nbsp; Sure you give up a little in the way of data privacy, but hey... selective call block?nbsp; How cool is that? I can go to the lake and have my office line ring to my cell?nbsp; Well that certainly has itrsquo;s practical applications.nbsp; We are, most of us, used to trading a little bad for a little good. So whatrsquo;s it going to be for you? Are you Pro or Con on the Google Voice thing?nbsp; If you are, which of my groups do you fit into, or are you a group unto your own?nbsp;/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=Vb1AVZylmEA:35JfM2kaF3c:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=Vb1AVZylmEA:35JfM2kaF3c:dnMXMwOfBR0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=dnMXMwOfBR0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=Vb1AVZylmEA:35JfM2kaF3c:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=Vb1AVZylmEA:35JfM2kaF3c:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?i=Vb1AVZylmEA:35JfM2kaF3c:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=Vb1AVZylmEA:35JfM2kaF3c:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed/~4/Vb1AVZylmEA" height="1" width="1"/
- Realty Company Sues Craigslist Over User-Generated Ads pCraigslist is reportedly being sued for trademark infringement. A real estate company in Texas called First Call Properties is saying that it began posting ads on Craigslist in March, and that after that, a competitor called AAA Apartment Locating began posting ads using phrases like quot;first call,quot; quot;call first,quot; and quot;call us first.quot; br / br / img height="159" align="right" width="300" src="http://images1.ientrymail.com/webpronews/article_pics/craigslist-legal.jpg" alt="Craigslist - Copyright infringement" title="Craigslist - Copyright infringement" style="margin: 10px;" / a href="http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticleamp;art_aid=109003"According to MediaPost/a, First Call named Craigslist, AAA and two individuals as defendants. The case has been sent to Federal Court. br / br / Clearly, this is not the first time cases like this have made the news. It's just the first time that Craigslist has been on the receiving end of such a suit. Google has certainly been there. MediaPost's Wendy Davis points out that these cases don't usually get too far in court, but one between Google and Geico was settled. br / nbsp; br / quot;This is misguided in any number of ways: first, as long as the ad itself is not confusing such that the reader (or a moron in a hurry reader) would think that the ad is from the original company rather than the competitor, there's not likely to be a trademark violation,quot; a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090701/1113135423.shtml"says Mike Masnick/a at TechDirt. quot;More importantly, even if there is a trademark violation, it should not be Google's liability, since they're simply the service provider. The liability (if there is any) would be on whoever created the ad.quot;br / br / There is another interesting aspect to the Craigslist case. According to MediaPost, First Call also says the AAA ads are libelous, and say things like quot;First Call Properties is a Scam,quot; but Davis points to a section of the Communications Decency Act, which says sites can't be sued for libel based on user-generated content. br / br / It will be interesting to see the outcome of this case. Craigslist could settle, but based on past Google experience, it will probably just disappear./pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=mi5OT338XQE:CcX0hkFyC3U:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=mi5OT338XQE:CcX0hkFyC3U:dnMXMwOfBR0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=dnMXMwOfBR0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=mi5OT338XQE:CcX0hkFyC3U:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=mi5OT338XQE:CcX0hkFyC3U:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?i=mi5OT338XQE:CcX0hkFyC3U:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=mi5OT338XQE:CcX0hkFyC3U:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed/~4/mi5OT338XQE" height="1" width="1"/
- Google Maps Gets You Ready For The Fourth pWe'll admit it from the start; this development doesn't amount to Google's execs weeping while singing quot;My Country, 'Tis of Thee.quot;nbsp; Still, a sort of self-promotional Fourth of July blog post from the search giant may be of interest to you as we head into the weekend./p pIf you haven't figured out how you're going to celebrate the Fourth, you may be able to get some ideas by using Google Maps.nbsp; a title="quot;A festive Fourth with Google Mapsquot;" href="http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/07/festive-fourth-with-google-maps.html"Elaine Filadelfo/a of the Lat Long Blog Team writes, quot;If you'll be in DC . . . you can find a map of the various events going on throughout the holiday weekend and a map of fireworks shows throughout the entire region.quot;/p pOr if you're planning to spend time elsewhere in the country, there are plenty of other events maps available, including ones for Baltimore, the Milwaukee region, Myrtle Beach New Hampshire, Northern Alabama, the San Francisco Bay Area, South Central Indiana, and Western Michigan./p pFinally, if you intend to do your own thing, Filadelfo writes, quot;[Y]ou can make your own My Map to show friends how to get to your BBQ or where exactly in the park you plan to meet to catch the fireworks.quot;/p pAnybody who's going to be close to his or her computer might keep an eye out for a special Google Doodle, too; last year's is pictured below./p pnbsp;/p centerimg alt="" src="http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/article_pics/2008GoogleJuly4Doodle.jpg" //centerbr /a href="http://aj.600z.com/aj/63590/0/cc?z=1"img src="http://aj.600z.com/aj/63590/0/vc?z=1dim=9392" width="500" height="75" border="0"/adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=PXcWh9fhUj4:EMClyiJ5DvI:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=PXcWh9fhUj4:EMClyiJ5DvI:dnMXMwOfBR0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=dnMXMwOfBR0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=PXcWh9fhUj4:EMClyiJ5DvI:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=PXcWh9fhUj4:EMClyiJ5DvI:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?i=PXcWh9fhUj4:EMClyiJ5DvI:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=PXcWh9fhUj4:EMClyiJ5DvI:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed/~4/PXcWh9fhUj4" height="1" width="1"/
- FriendFeed Offers Real-Time Search pToday FriendFeed has launched a real-time search feature. Now when you perform a search on the service, you will be presented with real-time results as they roll in. That means you don't have to continuously refresh for the latest results. br / br / If you're searching a particularly hot topic, you might find it hard to even browse results because they're coming in so quickly. Luckily FriendFeed has acknowledged this.br / br / quot;While we were testing this internally, we could barely keep up with the non-stop activity regarding Michael Jackson (That's when we knew we needed a pause button),quot; a href="http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009/07/real-time-search-we-have-it-its-here.html"says Jim Norris/a on the FriendFeed Blog./p centerimg title="FriendFeed Real Time Search (pause)" alt="FriendFeed Real Time Search (pause)" src="http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/article_pics/mj-friendfeed-search.jpg" //center pYou can access real-time search on FriendFeed by using the regular search box, but you can also use advanced search options and saved searches and still get real-time results. You can also embed a real-time search on your site:/p centeriframe height="600" frameborder="0" width="400" src="http://friendfeed.com/search?q=michael+jacksonamp;embed=1" style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170);"/iframe/center pOn another FriendFeed-related note, the service ra href="http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009/06/friendfeed-now-6x-more-awesomer-with.html"eleased some new themes/a the other day. These allow users to customize their pages to suit their personal tastes with regards to aesthetics./pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=mFroVxQKmHc:8ymsMFtcwO4:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=mFroVxQKmHc:8ymsMFtcwO4:dnMXMwOfBR0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=dnMXMwOfBR0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=mFroVxQKmHc:8ymsMFtcwO4:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=mFroVxQKmHc:8ymsMFtcwO4:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?i=mFroVxQKmHc:8ymsMFtcwO4:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=mFroVxQKmHc:8ymsMFtcwO4:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed/~4/mFroVxQKmHc" height="1" width="1"/
- Google Blog Search Gets New Features and a Gadget pGoogle has launched several new features for Google Blog Search today. These are: RSS AND Atom feeds, an iGoogle gadget, a quot;hot queriesquot; features, and a quot;latest postsquot; feature. br / br / strongRSS and Atom Feeds/strongbr / br / Google says the addition of the feeds has been its most requested feature for Blog Search. Users can subscribe to specific topics or stories. There is a quot;subscribequot; heading in the left-hand column on the site, and underneath that are links for Atom and RSS./p centerimg title="Blog Search subscriptions" alt="Blog Search subscriptions" src="http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/article_pics/blog-search-sub.jpg" //center pbr / strongiGoogle Gadget/strongbr / br / The gadget lets users embed the Google Blog Search front page on their iGoogle homepage (or other pages that are compatible with iGoogle gadgets). Within the gadget, users can customize the topics they want to follow and quot;drill intoquot; stories as they wish./p centerimg title="Blog Search iGoogle Gadget" alt="Blog Search iGoogle Gadget" src="http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/article_pics/blog-search-gadget.jpg" //center pstrongHot Queries/strongbr / br / Hot queries is a feature that has actually been added to the Google Blog Search front page. It's pretty much what it sounds like. It listsl searches that are currently popular in Blog Search. Google says it's quot;an easy way to quickly dive into the trending points of conversation on the web.quot; If you're not a Twitter user, it's probably a good alternative to Twitter's trending topics./p centerimg title="Hot Queries" alt="Hot Queries" src="http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/article_pics/hot-queries.jpg" //center pstrongLatest Posts/strongbr / br / Latest posts is also an addition to the Google Blog Search homepage. It shows new posts from popular blogs. quot;While Hot Queries highlights what people are looking for, Latest Posts lets you find out about stories even before people start searching for them,quot; says Google on the company blog./p centerimg title="Hot Queries" alt="Hot Queries" src="http://images1.ientrymail.com/webpronews/article_pics/latest-post.jpg" //center pI'd say the new features are an upgrade for Google Blog Search. Would you agree?/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=pmHksd-QRak:enUscs9YL-4:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=pmHksd-QRak:enUscs9YL-4:dnMXMwOfBR0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=dnMXMwOfBR0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=pmHksd-QRak:enUscs9YL-4:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=pmHksd-QRak:enUscs9YL-4:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?i=pmHksd-QRak:enUscs9YL-4:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=pmHksd-QRak:enUscs9YL-4:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed/~4/pmHksd-QRak" height="1" width="1"/
- Google and Bing Tips for Site Architecture Issues pGoogle and Bing have both talked about site architecture issues lately on their blogs. Site architecture is an important part of search engine optimization, and crucial to ranking. br / br / quot;You can have great content and a plethora of high quality inbound links from authority sites, but if your sitersquo;s structure is flawed or broken, then it will still not achieve the optimal page rank you desire from search engines,quot; says Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center.br / br / If you have time, and site architecture is not your strong suit, I would suggest reading both a href="http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/webmaster/archive/2009/06/26/site-architecture-and-seo-file-page-issues-sem-101.aspx"Microsoft's/a post and a href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06/traffic-drops-and-site-architecture_29.html"Google's/a, but to sum them up, here a few tips from each of them. br / br / strongBing's Tips/strongbr / br / 1. Use descriptive file and directory namesbr / br / 2. Limit directory depthbr / br / 3. Limit physical page file sizebr / br / 4. Externalize on-page Javascript and CSS codebr / br / 5. Use 301 redirects for moved pagesbr / br / 6. Avoid JavaScript or meta refresh redirectsbr / br / 7. Implement custom 404 pagesbr / br / strongGoogle's Tips/strongbr / br / Google starts out by talking about some site architecture myths, and also shares a couple slideshows (they talked about the topic at a href="http://searchmarketingexpo.com/london/2009/full_agenda2"SMX London/a)./p centeriframe height="342" frameborder="0" width="410" src="http://docs.google.com/EmbedSlideshow?docid=dc75gmks_22ht5dh9hb"/iframebr / br / iframe height="342" frameborder="0" width="410" src="http://docs.google.com/EmbedSlideshow?docid=dc75gmks_73dvznqhd5"/iframe/center pstrongFinally, they offer these tips:/strong/p blockquote1.nbsp; Check that your robots.txt file has the correct status code and isn't returning an errorbr / br / 2. Keep in mind some best practices when moving to a new site and the new quot;Change of addressquot; feature recently added to Webmaster Tools. br / br / 3. Review the settings of the robots.txt file to make sure no pages -- particularly those rewritten and/or dynamic -- are blocked inappropriately.br / br / 4. Make good use of the rel=quot;canonicalquot; attribute to reduce the indexing of duplicate content on your domain./blockquote pAs I said, Google and Microsoft both have plenty more to say on the topic in their respective posts. The Bing post is actually the third installment in a series./pbr /a href="http://aj.600z.com/aj/63590/0/cc?z=1"img src="http://aj.600z.com/aj/63590/0/vc?z=1dim=9392" width="500" height="75" border="0"/adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=ajQ1L5J00jw:xc3I3rETWVM:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=ajQ1L5J00jw:xc3I3rETWVM:dnMXMwOfBR0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=dnMXMwOfBR0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=ajQ1L5J00jw:xc3I3rETWVM:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=ajQ1L5J00jw:xc3I3rETWVM:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?i=ajQ1L5J00jw:xc3I3rETWVM:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=ajQ1L5J00jw:xc3I3rETWVM:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed/~4/ajQ1L5J00jw" height="1" width="1"/
- The Top MJ Song, Album Lyric Searches pIf you're tired of hearing about Michael Jackson already, I'm sorry, but he's still dominating the news and the web. He's still responsible for two of the trending topics on Twitter at this time (Michael Jackson and MJ). br / br / You've probably read about the effect Michael's death has had on the web. It also had a huge impact on people downloading and buying his music. It had a big impact on searches as well. Hitwise has released some data about the top Michael Jackson songs, albums and lyrics that were searched for after his death./p center pimg height="108" width="402" src="http://weblogs.hitwise.com/heather-dougherty/mj%20searches.png" alt="mj searches.png" //p /center pquot;For retailers and publishers looking to prioritize merchandise and content, one measure to predict demand among consumers is through search data,quot; a href="http://weblogs.hitwise.com/heather-dougherty/2009/07/top_michael_jackson_song_searc.html"says Hitwise's/a Heather Dougherty. quot;When looking at the variations of searches that included the search term 'michael jackson', we classified the top 1000 terms from the week ending June 27, 2009, to find the most popular song amp; album and lyric searches. Many searches were very broad, looking for the 'best' and 'top' michael jackson songs, but the specific songs amp; albums that were searched most were Thriller and Off The Wall. Searches for lyrics were also common, with the most popular being 'Beat It' and 'Billie Jean'.quot;br / br / Here are the top five in both categories.br / br / strongTop 5 Songs amp; Albums/strongbr / br / 1. Thrillerbr / 2. Off The Wallbr / 3. You Are Not Alonebr / 4. Badbr / 5. Benbr / br / strongTop 5 Lyrics/strongbr / br / 1. Beat Itbr / 2. Billie Jeanbr / 3. You Are Not Alonebr / 4. Badbr / 5. Ben br / br / I guess the real question is how long will this Michael Jackson mania last? On the whole, it will probably last for an eternity, much like that of Elvis, but as far as dominating the web, it's bound to simmer down sooner or later. How long do you think it will be before Michael Jackson is no longer a trending topic on Twitter? a href="http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/07/02/the-top-mj-song-album-lyric-searches#comments"ustrongShare your thoughts/strong/u/a./pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=lHjp8q9xkZ0:nxEorrVSYX8:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=lHjp8q9xkZ0:nxEorrVSYX8:dnMXMwOfBR0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=dnMXMwOfBR0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=lHjp8q9xkZ0:nxEorrVSYX8:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=lHjp8q9xkZ0:nxEorrVSYX8:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?i=lHjp8q9xkZ0:nxEorrVSYX8:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?a=lHjp8q9xkZ0:nxEorrVSYX8:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WebpronewsTopNewsRssFeed/~4/lHjp8q9xkZ0" height="1" width="1"/
Smashing Magazine
- 10 Ways To Put Your Content In Front Of More People -->Which is more important,driving traffic to your website or encouraging as many people as possible to see your content? Believe it or not, they are not one and the same. Too often, we as website owners live and die by Web analytics applications. We fret about bounce rates, unique visitors and dwell time. However, when we focus so heavily on the performance of our website, we miss a fundamental point: we should aim to expose users to our content, not our website. The website is a tool to showcase our content, but it is not the only tool that does this. The content matters, not the website. That is why each company provides numerous ways to access its content beyond the website. From Amazon's affiliate scheme to YouTube's embed feature, these companies can reach audiences that may never visit their websites. While the points mentioned below will refine your strategy to deliver content to more people, they can not serve their purpose without an appropriate environment. In the age of social media and the rise of interactive web-applications such as Facebook, Twitter etc. building a community around your website is the most important way to drive traffic and keep the users coming back.
- 15 Fresh High-Quality Free Fonts -->Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you don’t have to. In this selection we’re glad to present you Junction, Nadia Serif, Nilland, CartoGothic Std, Bergamo Std, Comic Serif, Birra Stout, Vegur and a couple of other high-quality free fonts. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the fonts — the license can change from time to time. 15 Beautiful High-Quality Free Fonts 40 Excellent Free Fonts For Professional Design You can find over 80 more free fonts in our section Fonts.
- Fantastic Wallpapers That Will Blow Your Desktop Away -->We love desktop wallpapers. And we love beautiful ones most. And although we monthly publish desktop wallpapers of our readers (desktop wallpaper calendar feature), we thought that it would be nice to provide our contributors with some fresh inspiration and our readers with some nice wallpaper update for a lousy Monday. The wallpapers for this post were selected over a long period of time; they cover mainly nature, abstract and digital art (further collections will be coming if you are interested). We've tried to pick only the most beautiful ones and hopefully you won't be disappointed. Below we present a showcase of over 50 fantastic wallpapers that will blow your desktop away. Most of them are in HD and will make your desktop look as nifty as it is possible. Because the resolutions are so high, if one doesn't fit your screen, use your favorite image editor to refine its dimensions. You may also be interested in the following related posts: Really Stunning Desktop Wallpapers 100 Beautiful iPhone Wallpapers 70 Beautiful Dual-Screen Desktop Wallpapers
- Retro Toys: A Free Icon Set -->Today we are glad to release "Toys", a retro icon set that was designed by Helen Gkizi and released with Smashing Magazine for its readers. The set contains 9 "toys" icons (png, 128×128px) that may come in handy in a variety of settings – e.g. in projects related to children and family. The files are transparent PNGs, and the source file (.eps) is included as well. As always, the set is completely free and may be used for any private or commercial project without any restrictions whatsoever.
- Drawing Inspiration From Music -->Instead of getting into the heads of successful designers, we should be getting into the head of the audience we're designing for. There are many ways this can be done, one of which is music. Relying on senses other than your vision can evoke a greater comprehension for what feeling must be conveyed through a design. In my early years as a student, I had a difficult time adjusting to the thought process of a designer. I'm a hands-on learner, and developing design ideas is more of an abstract art. Being able to recognize a good design versus a bad design was never the problem, but creating unique designs was for me much like an artist trying to draw purely from memory that doesn't have that capacity. For a couple of years I treated design as purely an art, simply because I lacked guidance in this area and didn't know any better, hitting the ground running with a project without methodically seeking out inspiration appropriate for the task at hand.
- Flash vs. Silverlight: What Suits Your Needs Best? -->With the release of Silverlight 1.0 and its subsequent versions, a debate started among designers and developers regarding choosing between Flash and Silverlight. Silverlight faces difficulties in capturing the market because of the maturity of Flash. However, Silverlight has managed to keep up by including certain features that designers and developers have always wanted to see in Flash, such as search engine optimization. In this article, we will discuss some of the technical differences between Flash and Silverlight to help you choose the technology that best suits your needs. Flash uses the frame-based animation model. In frame-by-frame animation, we create an object for each frame to produce an animation sequence. For example, if you want to move something across the screen in 3 seconds, calculate how many frames 3 seconds will take, then calculate the matrices required for each frame along the way. Keep in mind that the player won’t actually maintain a frame rate unless you embed a blank audio track; otherwise, 3 seconds might turn out to be 2 or 6 or 5.
TwiTip
- How to Get Noticed on Twitter By Nathan Hangen, follow him @nhangen. Once upon a time, Twitter was an innocent and casual place to hang out. Everyone was positive and was nearly over-interested in what everyone had to say. However, now that the initial “buzz has worn off and people are realizing how difficult it can be to manage thousands [...]© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips. How to Get Noticed on Twitter Related posts:Streamlining Your Twitter Feed - Groups to the RescueHow to Follow Everyone Back on Twitter Without Ruining Your Experience
- Twitter: Remaking the Persona of the Physically Challenged By Carmen R. Gonzalez of Healthcare Communications Group. Follow her @crgonzalez. American novelist James Baldwin once said, “An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.” The same can be said of those with physical disabilities who are using Twitter as their stage to create [...]© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips. Twitter: Remaking the Persona of the Physically Challenged Related posts:TwitterHawk - Targeted Marketing on Twitter
- 3 Ways to Recognize Bots and Spammers on Twitter By Nathan Hangen, follow him @nhangen. I remember the good old days back before Twitter had gone mainstream where it was a small and exclusive hangout for tech geeks and social networking addicts. There wasn’t a lot going on, and we didn’t have a lot of “celebrities” in the neighborhood, but we [...]© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips. 3 Ways to Recognize Bots and Spammers on Twitter Related posts:7 ‘Secret’ Ways To Use Twitter Search8 Sure-Fire Ways To Tick Off the Twitterverse5 Ways I Benefit from Twitter
- 5 Uncommon Ways Your #Business Can Use Twitter by Jason Drohn - Follow him @jasondrohn Every marketing agency in the world is trying to figure out social media right now. The funny thing is bloggers and content creators have been embracing social media for years, building their own brands around social services. If you were to walk into the top marketing agency in your area [...]© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips. 5 Uncommon Ways Your #Business Can Use Twitter Related posts:8 Ways that Twitter Can Grow Your Freelance BusinessBuilding an Effective Business Profile on TwitterUse Twitter for your Business the Right Way
- The Benefits of Using Twitter for Fundraising By Jasmin Tragas of wonderwebby, follow her @wonderwebby. Raising funds on Twitter isn’t just about getting money for your charity. It’s about connecting with people, creating awareness and it’s about giving. Over the last several months people around the world have tweeted, re-tweeted and donated for an Opportunity International Australia microfinance program in the Philippines. As I [...]© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips. The Benefits of Using Twitter for Fundraising Related posts:Answer A Reader Question: Twitter For Fundraising?Using Twestival To Increase Your Audience While Helping Raise Money for CharityAn Illustration of the Power of Twitter to Spread a Story
- Sunday Roundup: Replies, Breaking Twitter, and Profile Ex... It’s the almost-weekly roundup list of links, tools, and Twitter culture once again! Check these out and let us know what you think in the comments. Twitter used for DoS Attacks in Iran (nytimes.com) Profiles.im - Tool to create a more detailed Twitter profile. Create your account, edit the information, and use your custom URL in your [...]© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips. Sunday Roundup: Replies, Breaking Twitter, and Profile Expansion Related posts:Sunday Roundup: Twooting, Graffiti, Celebrity Tweets and MoreSunday Roundup - Music, Games, and Clinical TrialsSunday Twitter Tool Roundup
- TwiTip Reader Review: HootSuite by Jeff Russell- Follow him @iapam Like many of you, I’m a member of so many social media networks, the last thing I wanted to do is join another one. But this Twitter thing just kept coming up over and over again. I kept thinking what am I going to do with a microblogging service that [...]© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips. TwiTip Reader Review: HootSuite Related posts:Creating Your Own Twitter Groups with Twittbot [Review]TwitterGroups - A New Twitter Tool Will Help Expand Your Network [REVIEW]Destroy Twitter [TOOL REVIEW]
- What’s Your Biggest Twitter User Peeve? Please share or elaborate in the comments, and if you’re interested in writing a guest post for TwiTip (or ever even thought you might be interested), please check out the Write For TwiTip page! © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips. What’s Your Biggest Twitter User Peeve? Related posts:Do you Use Twitter More or Less on the Weekend? [POLL]Twitter User [...]© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips. What’s Your Biggest Twitter User Peeve? Related posts:Do you Use Twitter More or Less on the Weekend? [POLL]Twitter User Names: How did you Come Up With Yours?How to Get More Followers on Twitter
- Answer A Reader Question: Twitter Bullies Here’s another reader question that I’m going to post for the masses to help answer: I’m having a hard time with some of the drama that happens on Twitter. Sometimes I find people being harsh to people I follow, and watching them go through the emotions in 140 characters over and over again can really get [...]© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips. Answer A Reader Question: Twitter Bullies Related posts:Answer A Reader Question: Twitter Etiquette?Answer A Reader Question: Twitter For Fundraising?Twitter: The Real-Time Answer Engine
- 7 ‘Secret’ Ways To Use Twitter Search By Thomas Baekdal. Follow him @baekdal. Twitter Search is just amazing because it can give you real-time feedback about pretty much everything. That is, if you know how to look for it. Here is how: Before we start I need to point out that both TweetDeck and Seesmic (my two favorite Twitter apps - with Seesmic being [...]© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips. 7 ‘Secret’ Ways To Use Twitter Search Related posts:Leverage Twitter for Your Job SearchThe Secret Art of The DMWelcome to the Hive Mind; Learn How to Search Twitter
PolicyBeta
- Online Activism Isn’t Dead The social and political impact of the Internet is growing at a rapid pace. After all of the successes credited to President Obama’s social media campaign network in last fall’s election, we still find ourselves at the earliest stages of development of the social layer of the Net. Still, some are quick to dismiss the [...]
- Lori Drew Conviction Thrown Out News stories are reporting that the federal judge in the Lori Drew “MySpace suicide” case has thrown out Ms. Drew’s conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Although what Ms. Drew did was horrible, we have long thought that her federal indictment was a gross distortion of the law. The judge will issue a written [...]
- LocationFox A couple of weeks ago I wrote about one of the upgrades in the iPhone 3.0 software update that allows the Safari browser on iPhone to be location-enabled. Firefox had previously implented something similar in a beta version of the browser, and now that functionality has been released to the world. Firefox 3.5, released on [...]
- Broadband Grants Will Require Nondiscrimination The federal agencies responsible for administering the broadband stimulus program have announced their initial grant criteria, and the news on the openness front is good. In comments filed in April, CDT urged that broadband services supported by stimulus money should connect users to the full Internet and the full range of Internet-based content and applications, as [...]
- Enter the Advertisers Given how much advertising we all see, especially online, you know it means something when the entire advertising industry gets together to make an announcement. Today, the advertising industry, as represented by a cohort of trade associations, joined together to publish their own self-regulatory principles, with an aim toward increasing privacy protection for online behavioral [...]
- China Backs Off Green Dam filtering mandate Chinese authorities today delayed implementation of the much-disparaged Green Dam-Youth Escort filtering mandate, just one day before the July 1 implementation deadline. Since the Green Dam directive was made public, we have learned that the filtering software does not work as proposed or publicized, may create serious security vulnerabilities, may contain stolen code, and likely [...]
- Happy Conclusion to Remote DVR Case Happy Conclusion to Remote DVR Case I noted at the beginning of the month that the Solicitor General had advised the Supreme Court not to reconsider the important Second Circuit case giving the green light to Cablevision’s “remote storage digital video recorder” (RS-DVR). I’m very happy to report that the Supreme Court has followed that [...]
- CRS Weekly Report: Comprehensive National Cybersecurity I... The Congressional Research Service is a $100 million a year think tank that researches and writes informative and non-partisan reports on topics suggested by members of Congress. The catch–and the reason you might not have read their work–is that CRS reports are only made easily available to members of Congress. Citizens can request [...]
- Another Side of Section 230 Yesterday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued an excellent decision in a focused-but-important appeal dealing with “Section 230,” which provides vital protections to service providers who facilitate online speech and users’ ability to control their Internet experiences. The case involved a less familiar aspect of Section 230, which is commonly applied in [...]
- Leveraging Trade as a Tool Against Censorship An article in the Washington Post today outlines how some senior U.S. officials are leaning on trade issues to pressure China on its recent mandate that all computers sold in that country must come pre-installed with Web-filtering software. Computer experts that have examined the Chinese developed Web-filtering software have found a laundry list of [...]
Web Transplant
- Newsday’s Decision to Charge for Content is Desperate a... I began my career at Newsday in 1986 when I was hired at the age of 23 to work on some of their very first online services. I spent seven years working on online services there and got to know some fantastic people. My final presentation, before leaving in 1995, was an introduction to this new thing called HTML and linking. I haven’t been at Newsday for a while now, and its changed owners and management a few times, but somehow I still care about the place. My company, SubHub, enables people to build subscription websites quickly and easily. So...
- Why Facebook Will Eventually Go Premium There's more bad news for Facebook as it seeks to justify its huge valuation -- the world's largest advertiser is not finding Facebook to be fertile ground, according to Randall Stross in The New York Times. The most successful effort that Procter Gamble was willing to point to on Facebook was a 2006 page for Crest Whitestrips, which attracted 14,000 fans at its peak -- many apparently lured by free giveaways such as concert tickets. Out of Facebook's 130 million users that's not a rousing success. That the Crest Whitestrips experiment left a funny taste in PG's mouth was...
- Worlds Have Collided My old industry friend Len Muscarella has a bit of a grumble in his latest Interactive Media Associates newsletter about the increasing use of Facebook for networking by business colleagues. Len was one of the pioneers of online media, having been one of the early executives at Prodigy, which in the early 1990s was one of the first and most cutting edge consumer online services. I worked with Len at Newsday when we brought him in to help us launch our own service on the Prodigy network. Len has seen more trends in his career then most of us ever...
- Oodle Gets Facebook Classifieds Oodle announced today that it will take over the running of Facebook Classifieds, adding to its roster of deals which includes MySpace as well. This is a great move for Oodle, founded by some of my ex-Excite colleagues including CEO Craig Donato. It's also an acknowledgement by Facebook that it cannot do everything and expect to do it well. Rather than run its own classifieds service, it outsources to a specialist. What they give up in revenue sharing they should make up in increased activity. This is especially true for classifieds which depends for success on having a critical mass...
- Who Decides What You View? In today's New York Times Magazine, Jeffrey Rosen asks who decides what content we can view over the Internet. Increasingly it's Google, with its vast and global search engine reach as well as its dominance of online video via YouTube. Somewhat disconcertingly, we learn that the first line of arbitration at YouTube is a corps of twenty-somethings who rule on individual requests to find certain videos unacceptable. If it gets too tricky for them, they bump it upstairs to Google headquarters where a cadre of lapsed journalists-cum-attorneys try to strike a thoughtful balance between local law and free speech. Not...
- Wake-Up Call Picking up this morning's Metro on the train platform, I couldn't help but be struck by the front-page headline above the article on the £1.9 trillion bank bailout. Metro puts it in stark terms. That's: £288 for every man, woman and child on the planet 10,000 times the total raised by the Band Aid and Live Aid concerts 36 times the aid sent by the richest nations to the poorest each year 190 times the GDP of Ethiopia The front page photo is not of bankers in suits or overwrought Wall Street traders watching their positions erode, but rather of...
- Opening Night at Jamie's Italian Jamie's Italian opened tonight here in Bath. It's the new Italian concept from celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and Bath is meant to be the flagship of the new chain. We decided to head on over and see how it measured up. Various photos are on my Flickr page. Probably this chain will give Carluccio's a run for its money -- they are the closest competitor in terms of concept -- quality Italian food, rustic setting, affordably priced. For now, however, Jamie's Italian needs a bit of work. There are long waits (they take no reservations) and the bar area is...
- Pricing Politicians Today I received an email from the Obama campaign inviting me to attend a lunch with Al Gore in London on 25th September. Price: $10,000. And for $28,500, I can also attend a half-hour reception beforehand. Wow! I haven't spent that much on lunch since the internet bubble. Last year I was invited to attend an entrepreneurs breakfast at 11 Downing Street with then-Chancellor Gordon Brown. Price for breakfast: 45 quid -- about $90. Say what you will about Gordon Brown, but compared to Al Gore he sure is value for money.
- From King to Candidate It's symbolic, if coincidental, that tonight Barack Obama will accept the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States, on the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. The New York Times has a moving article today focusing on the handful of Democratic delegates who will be there tonight and who were also there for King's famous speech on the National Mall on August 28th, 1963. From a practical standpoint, when it is so urgent to get the Republicans out of power before they further wreck the country, I am sorry it's not Hillary...
- Farewell Dave Freeman I was sad to learn today about the death at age 47 of Dave Freeman, co-author, with Neil Teplica, of "100 Things To Do Before You Die," the quirky and popular travel guide. One of the things I got to do before I die was to work with Dave and Neil way back in the internet 1.0 era, around 1997, when I was director of City.net, owned by Excite.com. City.net at the time was the most popular travel site on the web according to PC Meter (later Media Metrix). We had tons of traffic and were looking to bulk up...
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