Death of Print (Vol. 79): Weekly High Five

Published on January 31, 2011 by in High Five

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Death of Print (Vol. 79): Weekly High Five
HighFive 300x275 Death of Print (Vol. 79): Weekly High Five

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme looks (tongue in cheek) at the “Death of Print.” I kid because I love. Print isn’t dead (or dying) but it is getting beaten to within an inch of its life and is going to need some serious cosmetic surgery after the beating is over.

#5: Changes to the Marketing Budget Landscape in 2011

I can hear the newspapers, magazines, telemarketers, and radio stations now – “Nothing to see here. Move along.” This chart from MarketingSherpa is about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning and shows that 2011 is going to be another year for the trees to rejoice.

chartofweek 01 25 11 lp Death of Print (Vol. 79): Weekly High Five

Link: MarketingSherpa

#4: Amazon’s e-book sales beat paperbacks

More good news for trees was revealed with Amazon’s earnings report last week, when they reported that they are selling more Kindle e-books than paperbacks.

Link: USA Today

#3: Ebooks Hit the Big Time With Amazon Singles and TEDBooks

This announcement from Amazon came out just days before they revealed the e-book vs. paperback sales figures. It’s a long-awaited move by Amazon to get their paws on the exploding popularity of self-published e-books. By lending credibility and “gravitas” to this category of books, the publishing world continues to transform itself.

Link: Hubspot

#2: How ready is the publishing industry for 2011?

This presentation by Forrester for Digital Book World (DBW) presents some figures that show how publishers are preparing themselves for the “printpocalypse.”



Link: Slideshare

#1: Digital Book World: Content>Consumer; Tweet Notes, Wrap-Up

Bob Mayer is a NY Times Best-Selling multi-published author. He is a West Point graduate, served in the Infantry and Special Forces (Green Beret) commanding an A-Team and as a Special Forces operations officer, and was an instructor at Fort Bragg. In this blog post, he takes exception to some assertions made at Digital Book World and offers some interesting insight and predictions about the future of books and book stores.

Link: Write It Forward

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Looking Ahead at Google and Social Media: Weekly High Five

Published on January 17, 2011 by in High Five

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Looking Ahead at Google and Social Media: Weekly High Five

HighFive 300x275 Looking Ahead at Google and Social Media: Weekly High Five

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “Looking Ahead at Google and Social Media.”

#5: Internet 2010 in numbers

Those who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it. Throughout 2011, many employees and consultants will be putting together presentations and plans for implementing social media strategies. This list of figures and statistics should provide some good raw material.

Link: Royal Pingdom

#4: Arm Yourself With Content, For Goliath Is Coming

One of the best things about inbound marketing is that is levels the playing field between small and large businesses. The bad news is that the word is getting out regarding how effective this strategy is and the big businesses will likely be jumping in in 2011. I predict that most of them will do it poorly at first, so you do have time but the clock is ticking.

Link: Hubspot

#3: So Google, You’ll Be Dropping Support For Flash Next, Right?

This is a little more technical than I typically get on this blog, but it could turn out to be an important maneuver in the burgeoning clash of the titans (Google and Apple). Google is making a move to replace one method of encoding Internet video (H.264) with its preferred version (WebM). The former is a proprietary technology whose future licensing costs are uncertain while the latter is an open source standard. One article suggests that it is more about infrastructure costs rather than throwing a punch at Apple. Either way, it’s the users and web developers who will be caught in the middle (as usual).

Link: TechCrunch

#2: How Media Will Relate to Facebook in the Future

I just met with a company that owns multiple newspapers and it was interesting to see the company politics from the inside out. This is a very old school industry that is not at all comfortable with the Web 2.0 technologies that are disrupting them. This article describes how the UK Independent is starting to realize one of the fundamental differences between its print and digital consumers is granularity.

Link: ReadWriteWeb

#1: Google already knows its search sucks (and is working to fix it)

Last week’s #1 article in this position was “Can Google Get Its Mojo Back?” There was lots of discussion all week about the increasingly successful “black hat” SEO techniques that are degrading the quality of Google’s search results pages. This article presents a very interesting perspective about why Google was successful in the first place (scalable design) and theorizes about why it will be able to “fix” its search. I’m not sure I buy the latter, but the former was an interesting perspective.

Link: VentureBeat

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Your 2011 Primer: Weekly High Five

Published on January 10, 2011 by in High Five

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Your 2011 Primer: Weekly High Five

HighFive 300x275 Your 2011 Primer: Weekly High Five

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “Your 2011 Primer.” This week’s links take a look at some tips and trends to help get strategically prepared for 2011.

#5: Maybe next year…

Let’s get started with a quick pep talk from Seth Godin. “It’s not too late, it’s just later than it was.”

Link: Seth’s Blog

#4: 10 Trends That Are Shaping Global Media Consumption

In reading this article, I am reminded of Clay Shirky’s theorem of technology’s impact on society: “These tools don’t get socially interesting until they become technologically boring.”

Link: RIA Journal

#3: 10 Business Models That Rocked 2010

What struck me in reading this article was how many of these models had been attempted before. It’s probably equally worthwhile to examine how these implementations succeeded when predecessors failed.

Link: TechCrunch

#2: Blogging Forefather Seeks to Re-Invent Blogging, Again

Dave Winer, inventor of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), is very concerned about silos. So he’s doing something about. “The important thing is that you and your ideas live outside the silo and are ported into it at your pleasure… You never have to worry about getting your stuff out of the silo because it never lived in there in the first place.”

Link: ReadWriteWeb

#1: Can Google Get Its Mojo Back?

At this time last year, Google seemed unstoppable: so much so, that many of the news stories and blog posts were questioning whether or not they were too powerful and even advocating a Google-free existence. Just a year later, many experts are questioning whether or not they are in real trouble.

Link: TechCrunch

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The Tangled Web: Weekly High Five

Published on December 5, 2010 by in High Five

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The Tangled Web: Weekly High Five

HighFive 300x275 The Tangled Web: Weekly High Five

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “The Tangled Web.” An effective web presence used to mean a well-optimized (for search) web site. But today, the ever-expanding world of social networks is both complicating and simplifying the process at the same time. This week’s links reflect on how social media sites are impacting search and connecting with one another.

#5: Your Income, Home Ownership & Parenthood Status Now Available as an API

RapLeaf has taken some heat over the past couple of months. Privacy concerns for consumers are going to have to be balanced with the openness of the Internet. The U.S. Congress is even making noise about a “Do Not Track” registry for Internet browsers that is similar to the “Do Not Call” registry for telemarketers.

Link: ReadWriteWeb

#4: Facebook Testing New Registration Social Plugin

Facebook is looking to extend its fingers further across the web by providing web developers with more tools to simplify their tasks. By offering a free registration system for web sites, they are strengthening their position as a standard identity provider on the web.

Link: All Facebook

#3: LinkedIn Launches Share Button

I have no idea what took LinkedIn so long, but they have finally created a share button for web site owners to allow users to easily share their content with LinkedIn. Sharing is fundamentally changing the world of search marketing and is eating away at the monopoly search engines have had since the inception of the Internet.

Link: Mashable

#2: Twitter Proven to Impact Search Engine Rankings

In my Personal Inbound Marketing talks, I frequently encourage people to use Twitter as much for the inbound links as for the engagement. In other words, even if you don’t have a lot of followers there is value in posting your content there in the form of search engine juice. This article provides more supporting evidence for that strategy.

Link: Hubspot

#1: Why WordPress rules the Web

Blogs are the engines that drive Inbound Marketing. There simply isn’t a better system for delivering your remarkable content in a search engine optimized format. Here’s another person’s opinion on the subject.

Link: SEO Theory

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Of Eggs and Baskets: Weekly High Five

Published on November 21, 2010 by in High Five

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Of Eggs and Baskets: Weekly High Five

HighFive 300x275 Of Eggs and Baskets: Weekly High Five

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “Choosing a basket for your Internet eggs.”

#5: WordPress Wins Open Source CMS Hall of Fame Award

Since the most important aspect of an effective inbound marketing strategy is remarkable, shareable, readable content, it therefore stands to reason that choosing the right basket (content management system) for your eggs (content)  is also going to be critical to success. I’m a huge fan of WordPress and the Open Source Awards agree.

Link: PacketPub

#4: iPad ‘newspaper’ created by Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch

Publishers are spreading their eggs in all kinds of baskets (print, open web, walled web, mobile, social media) in an attempt to figure out the best business model in a Web 2.0 economy. We now see the Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar of media by planning an iPad-only publication.

Link: The Guardian

#3: Ask the Wise Guy: Facebook Fan Page or Website?

Guy Kawasaki is nothing if not a “bottom line” kind of guy (rimshot). In this article, he does a great job of explaining why he put all of his eggs in the Facebook basket for his latest book, Enchantment. The bottom line is that if you’re trying to establish a web presence for something more ephemeral and less permanent, then skipping the website and going for a Fan page may very well be your best option.

Link: American Express Open Forum

#2: Facebook Introduces Anti-Email: Social Inbox, Seamless Messaging, Conversation History

Where are you going to put your e-communication eggs? Facebook is betting on the current trend of teens and twenty-somethings shunning email in favor of texting and instant messaging. But the central issue here may turn out not to be the technology, but the trust. Facebook hasn’t engendered a very high degree of trust lately, but we’ll see whether convenience and expediency win out over trust.

Link: Fast Company

#1: Long Live the Web

Tim Berners-Lee authored a sort of “State of Internet” article this week. Much of it discusses eggs and baskets, and the threats to both. He argues that net neutrality (lack thereof) threatens to crush certain eggs while failure to adhere to open standards threatens to diminish the quantity and diversity of baskets we have to choose from. It’s big thinking from a big brain about big issues.

Link: Scientific American

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