May 10th, 2012 § § permalink
This is serious issue. Not sure if people outside US are even aware of it.
The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010 (S. 3480) is a bill introduced in the United States Senate by Joe Lieberman (Independent Democrat, Connecticut), Susan Collins (Republican Party, Maine), and Tom Carper (Democratic Party, Delaware) on June 10, 2010.
via: votingamerican.wordpress.com
it’s the old security measure vs. power abuse debate, but this time it’s extreme and about the internet. I am always amazed how something so new and artificial as the internet feels like a proper human right. let’s hope it actually achieves that status before we break it.
May 3rd, 2012 § Comments Off on iTunes Match begins rolling out in Slovenia! § permalink
first: itunes match is awesome! not because it makes your music ‘legal’, but because it manages to reduce the storage space needed on the planet by several orders of magnitude. the fact that all the music is on all devices is just a bonus š
and secondly, wow to have it available in slovenia! we are not third digital world anymore!
Apple has slowly rolled out its iTunes Match service worldwide over the past few months, but today it looks like more countries were added, because the music matching service began rolling out in Italy, Portugal, Greece, Slovenia, and Austria.
via: 9to5mac.com
May 2nd, 2012 § Comments Off on not gonna fly: hyperink, ebooks from everyone § permalink
i like books, i like blogs, i like long tail models, but i don’t think this will work:
With the āBlog To Booksā program, Hyperink assigns a staff editor to curate a bloggerās posts, structure them into a narrative format, and then create a book in PDF, epub, and mobi formats.
from: Techcrunch
it’s not the amount of work really, but the available supply and demand – there is not much of either:
- i’d guess there is less than 20k blogs that will ever want to create a sellable ebook
- i’d guess that each of them will sell 50 ebooks, mainly as gifts for their friends
it saddens me when investors and media pump up the expectations of otherwise interesting startup teams. sure you can argue that if the team is right, they will pivot from this idea anyway. but in b3c marketplace businesses like this, it usually takes a lot of energy to get enough disproof that you can actually decide to pivot.
meh.
April 13th, 2012 § Comments Off on Encyclopaedia Britanica is Back! § permalink
well, at least for a little while longer – there’s 800 of them left. go get them while they’re cold!
Back in March, it was announced that after centuries of being a print staple, the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica was moving- for better or worse- to the digital realm. It was certainly the end of an era for people old enough to remember when encyclopedias like Encyclopaedia Britannica were the be all and end all of research,…
via: www.inquisitr.com
I’m sure they will reprint them though, at least once per century.
April 12th, 2012 § Comments Off on ComScore: Value And CPMs Are Out Of Whack § permalink
Onomatopia "Whack" hitting ball. Created in Adobe Illustrator by Jeremy Kemp, 2/24/05 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
the wild wild web is not a romantic place, it’s just senseless, and here’s another proof:
Not only are an average of 31% of display ads never even seen , but there’s little to no correlation between the CPMs sites are charging and the value they’re delivering to the advertisers – where value is defined as ads being viewed and delivered to the primary demographic target.
via: marketingland.com
as a geek i’m sad that in a world driven entirely by data andĀ algorithms, well on the way to the promised land of perfection and frictionless and justice, such stories are a normality, rather than anomaly.
meh.
April 11th, 2012 § § permalink
this story reminds me of MyBlogLog – acquired for $10M after 9 months in 2007, only 4 years later and 2 zero-s added:
On October 5th, 2010, Instagram launched My first instagram photo We’re really excited to launch our first version of Instagram today, free in the App Store. Instagram makes mobile photos fast, simple, & beautiful.
via: swizec.com
Instagram (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
when I saw this news on TV, and sitting trough the whole story, it felt like they were announcing a war or a new terrorist attack. it was not good news for anyone but those three founders.
these valuations have only market-sense, but no connection to the real world. Lot’s of friends have been talking about new bubble for over a year now, and I couldn’t agree with them. I believed that this time it’s different, that everyone is building real companies, with real value, and that exits happen only after they prove it or run out of resources.
not anymore apparently. instagrams valuation makes sense only in relation to facebook’s valuation, not in relation to the world or the users.
i am not saying that they are useless, like some bubble 1.0 ideas were – not at all. instagram figured out how to make pictures of urban reality, full of smog and with poor natural light, beautiful again. it gives a chance for new kids to live in a visually nice world again. like bauhaus did a century ago.
but that on it’s own is not worth 1/30th of world hunger.
April 10th, 2012 § Comments Off on Linked Data – the best of two worlds § permalink
noSQL is dual to SQL - Exploring NoSQL - YOW 2010 Melbourne (Photo credit: avlxyz)
warning: ignorant CEO rant
when oh when will the geeks realize that it’s not about the formats, but about products and customers?Ā the tech decisions are made simpler if you have a real problem to solve. and tech standards are 90% of the time emergent from hundreds of best practices.
On the one hand you have structured data sources such as relational DB, NoSQL datastores or OODBs and the like that allow you to query and manipulate data in a structured way. This typically involves schemata (either upfront with RDB or sort of dynamically with NoSQL that defines the data layout and the types of the fields),…
via: webofdata.wordpress.com
April 9th, 2012 § § permalink
Theme of Carmen's influence over Jose from Bizet's Carmen. Created in Lilypond using the G. Schirmer vocal score from 1895. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
interesting article, with one key point: “your klout score might not be accurate measure of pure influence, but it does show if you are socializing your influence” – and by focusing on it, klout is training us all to be more social online.
of course the real reason why ‘socializing influence’ is being popularized, is because it helps the brands and merchants sell more trough their evangelists.
but at the same time, as a collateral damage, i believe making us more social is a significant and positive contribution of several web services these days – they are making us into different, hopefully better, humans of the future.
It’s fashionable to feign indifference to your Klout score, which measures online influence. Some professionals think it’s uncool to seem too interested in their rankings; others believe all you need to worry about is creating good content.
via: www.forbes.com
April 7th, 2012 § Comments Off on time for “Push PR” § permalink
An Empire of Silly Statisticsā¦A Fake War for Public Relations (Photo credit: Marquette University)
Ernest is entirely right – PR companies just don’t get the fact, that we don’t care what they think should interest us – that’s what it means being ‘independent’:
www.ernestbarbaric.com
At some point in the last year or so, someone pegged me as an influential blogger… and then it started. A constant and never-ceasing stream of daily e-mails from various PR companies mindlessly clogging up my inbox.
It does not, however, mean that PR is dead – there clearly is a need for ‘public relations’. the need is actually much larger than it ever was, on both sides –
corporate communications as much as on the receiving end – bloggers have to be current and informed, just like journalists had to be.
I believe the solution is in making PR more pushy.
As a writer, I expect the right content to come to me, I don’t want to seek it out. In that sense, I expect it to be pushy, but also highly targeted and personalized. Just like it used to be, back in the days when there was roughly as much PRĀ professionalsĀ as there were journalists, and the two crowds well managed eachother.
as the new media grew, keeping up with targeting became impossible, and now they rely on ‘curated’ lists of thousands of bloggers, they never really looked at. I believe that’s where we at
Zemanta make a huge difference – I often link PR messages from my posts, because they are recommended to me exactly when I’m writing about the topics they adress, so they actually provide value to me – I would never go look for them otherwise.
Pushy is not spammy, if done right. But there is no way you can do PR right without help fromĀ algorithmsĀ these days.
April 6th, 2012 § Comments Off on multi-channel marketing and bad infographics § permalink
we all like infographics, because they make data and information value central, and then use visual storytelling rather than fancy words.Ā in this act of replacing word compositions, with incredibly stronger visual compositions, we perform two actions:
- reduce the message to it’s core. this is always a combination of ‘extended puncline’ and ‘the context’.
- amplify the core
as infographics are becoming massively popular, theĀ consequencesĀ of performing the first action badly are becoming a problem. it usually happens when the creator of the infographic is biased. here’s a very simple and benign case:
I find that a lot of people involved with social media tend to get into discussions about which platform is better with the ultimate goal of eliminating of one platforms they are discussing. This happens often with the Facebook and Google+ debate, with the goal of eliminating Facebook and totally defecting to Google+ or vice versa.
via: anisesmithmarketing.com
good marketing is always multi-channel, with the message adapted to specifics of each channel. yes, you should always do Facebook and Blogging, and probably a few others as well.
the original author of the infographic has noble goal though – to her the blog is the hub of your online life, a point I very much agree with, and a great argument to invest in it. but saying no to all other channels is just madness.
