Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

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 “Change: Get on Board or Get Run Over.”

#5: Cooks Source Copyright Infringement Becomes an Internet Meme

Speaking of getting run over…  This western New England publication became social media road kill for two reasons.  First, they were quite obviously and brazenly stealing others’ work.  But that alone did not do them in. What really spelled their demise was wanton and arrogant disregard for the power of social media. End result: splat!

Link: Wired Threat Level

#4: U.S. News & World Report All but Quits Print

Here’s a story about a company who decided to get on the bus a split second before getting run over. It remains to be seen whether or not they’ll be thrown back off but at least they’ve seen the writing on the (Facebook) wall.

Link: AdAge

#3: WordPress.com becomes a domain name registrar

The most popular post on this blog is “Create a Compelling Resume Online With WordPress,” which provides a detailed plan for configuring a WordPress blog to act as your personal online homing beacon. I’ve been giving more and more talks about Personal Inbound Marketing lately, and my very strong advice for people is to register their own personal domain and use it for a WordPress blog. Previously, this required two steps using two different companies. Now, you can do it all at WordPress.com. It’s still not the preferred route (I’ll explain why in a future blog post), but it’s great for people who are not very Internet literate.

Link: Domain Incite

#2: Old Media Beware: Blogs Rely on Cleverer Tech, Leverage Social Media, Making Bloggers More Money

Blogging isn’t the story here; it’s democratization. The Internet and its Web 2.0 applications are obliterating barriers to entry in lots of markets. Journalism is one of the first, but if you’ve been following Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson, you know that product development and manufacturing are one of the new frontiers.

Link: Fast Company

#1: Of SEO And Spaghetti Sauce

This isn’t just about SEO. The important message is that asking people what they want is a mistake more often than not. When you’re developing products, this is a huge challenge but when you’re developing web sites it’s a huge opportunity. For example, if you had conducted a massive consumer marketing survey in 2000 that asked Sony Walkman users what features and design elements were missing so that you could build a new, innovative device, the last product you would have come up with is an iPod. As the web site iPod History says, “At first, the reactions were confused and hostile, critics lambasted the $400 price tag, the unconventional scroll wheel and the lack of Windows compatibility. Despite all this, the iPod sold beyond everyone’s expectations, went on to revolutionize the entire music industry, and the rest is history.”

The point is that innovation is pretty risky when you’re talking about product development. It generally takes lots of money to get a new product to market. But with web sites, the risk is much lower and the tail is much longer. Be specific and make sure you offer plenty of flavors.

Link: search engine land

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

This week’s High Five is a grab bag of internet marketing topics.

#5: ACTA Draft: No Internet for Copyright Scofflaws

Regular readers of this blog will know that I often talk about net neutrality and copyright issues.  This article discusses efforts by the U.S. to convince other nations to develop protocols for copyright protection that would make it the responsibility of Internet Service Providers to police copyright infringements and immediately suspend internet connectivity  and terminate “in appropriate circumstances.”  In addition to raising costs for ISPs, this will almost certainly result in a “shoot first, ask questions later” policy in order to reduce their risk.

Link: Wired

#4: WSJ on iPad for $17.99 a month, magazines to be at or near newsstand prices?

It’s becoming clear that the print publishing industry is looking at the iPad as an opportunity to start with a clean slate <rimshot>.  The horse has already left the barn in terms of providing free content on the internet, and so it seems that they intend not to make that mistake again.  From the outset, several publications are intending to at least begin their subscriptions on the iPad at very near news stand pricing.  Given Apple’s strict control of the content application rules on their platforms, this should not encounter the technical hurdles publishers have faced on the internet.  This time, it’s personal.

Link: engadget

#3: 5 Quick Ways To Improve Your Facebook SEO

Lisa Barone writes one of the best internet marketing blogs on the internet, in my opinion.  She is a frequent guest writer on Small Business Trends and this article provides five simple, yet solid tips for improving the search engine optimization of your Facebook fan page.

Link: Small Business Trends

#2: Are Marketing Dollars Shifting? Exhibit Industry Down 12.5%

There’s not a whole lot to tell for this one.  While the decline of the exhibit industry isn’t shocking, I was a bit surprised at the steep drop from last year.  More evidence that marketing dollars continue to flow from traditional channels like trade shows to inbound marketing.

Link: Hubspot

#1: Facebook Foreshadows New Features With Privacy Policy Tweaks

It’s time for our monthly Facebook privacy policy fire drill!  They are proposing a couple of new (and potentially disturbing to some) tweaks that will be made to their privacy policy.  The first is the integration of automatic geolocation features.  Applications like foursquare provide a fun way to localize social media and meet new friends, but they also broadcast your activities to the world and provide criminals with a possible blueprint for tracking your whereabouts.  The second change is the implementation of the new Facebook Connect policy, which may automatically sign you into sites and share your public information simply based on the presence of a cookie on your computer.  Given the fact that many Facebook users still don’t fully understand the implications of the “Everyone” default sharing mode on their wall, this has the potential to get a little nasty.

Link: TechCrunch

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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

This week’s High Five is about protecting and promoting content.

#5: DMCA Muscle Kills DVD Copying, for Real

I’ve been covering several different lawsuits in which the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is prosecuting a scorched earth assault against its own customers guilty of piracy.  While those arguments are about the punishment fitting the crime, this story is much more disturbing because it deals a serious body blow to the “fair use” aspect of copyright protection.  This is the principal that makes it legal to make a copy of a CD (music, program, or otherwise) for your own personal backup purposes.  However, in this case a judge has ruled that the crime exists in the breaking or bypassing of any encryption.

Link: Wired

#4: Bogus Copyright Claim Silences Yet Another Larry Lessig YouTube Presentation

This story is a preview of things to come.  In previous “High Five” posts, I’ve linked to articles about legislation that could threaten net neutrality by compelling Internet Service Providers to police their user base for copyright violations.  If forced to do so, it will lead to several undesirable side effects.  First, and most obvious, it will increase prices as these service providers will have to invest in additional resources to police their own customers (not to mention insurance policies for increased risk).  Second, it will lead to far more restrictive policies as their terms of use will no doubt give them final say in what is or is not acceptable – legal standards will not be applicable because they will be more concerned with avoiding litigation than their own users’ rights.  Finally, this story is obviously an example of an automated software application that is simply looking for digital footprints and stomping them out with extreme prejudice and no room for fair use.

Link: TechDirt

#3: Apple Stacks The Deck Against Amazon’s Kindle App

It’s no great secret that the true source of success for many devices is the “killer app.”  The most famous example is VisiCalc for the Apple II.  The real secret to Apple’s domination of the personal MP3 player market was the iTunes store.  This article discusses the potential impact of the iPad’s e-reader application being directly linked to the iStore, and how a couple of mouse clips could be a serious impediment to Amazon’s Kindle Reader application.

Link: Business Insider

#2: How The Newspaper Business Killed Itself

John Dvorak is no shrinking violet, and has been making bold assertions and predictions for many years.  In this article, he makes the case that the New York Times’ decision to begin charging for online access is another example of the industry shooting itself in the foot.  Like most brash pundits’ predictions, the vast majority of his predictions prove not to be true and I actually disagree with his opinion on this latest move by the times.  So why am I including it?  Because in describing the newspaper business’ past sins, he uses the simplest and single best metaphor I’ve read on the subject.  After describing how publishers reacted to declining revenues as a result of underestimating the effects of online classifieds by laying off beat writers, he concludes that “It was like attempting to fix a flat by letting the air out of the rest of the tires.”  Perfect.

Link: PC Magazine

#1: What The Heck Is Inbound Marketing (and how you can maximize it) With Brian Halligan

“Inbound Marketing” is the single most important concept that will determine the degree to which businesses, associations and individuals will be able to spread their ideas and gain visibility.  In this interview, David Garland speaks with Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan, who literally wrote the book on Inbound Marketing.  If you take the time to watch this video (and I hope you do), I encourage you to think about the concept of inbound marketing for your own personal online identity as well as that of your organization’s.

Link: The Rise to the Top

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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

The theme for this week’s High Five is, “Content Wars.”  Wrangling continues over copyright protection, and content creators continue to struggle with delivery channels and monetization.

#5: Apple Courts Publishers, While Kindle Adds Apps

The e-reader market is heating up nicely.  Apple’s expected announcement of a new tablet computer is igniting a battle “for the hearts and minds of book publishers, authors, and readers.”

Link: New York Times

#4: $675,000 RIAA File Sharing Verdict Is ‘Unreasonable’

A defendant has asked the U.S. Disctrict Court in Massachusetts to either retry the case or reduce the fine of $22,500 per song.  This comes on the heels of a $1.92 million judgement last year against a woman who downloaded 24 songs.  These shocking verdicts are raising the volume of calls for Congress to change the laws, but a Justice Department dominated by RIAA lawyers and lobbyists it seems that the entertainment industry’s stormtroopers will continue to patrol the Internet for the foreseeable future.

Link: Wired

#3: Open Letter From OK Go, regarding non-embeddable YouTube videos

OK Go is a rock band that just wants to make music and share it with their fans.  In a thoughtful post on their web site, they explain the intricacies of publishing music videos in the current Internet climate.  Shockingly, they declare that “crazy as it may seem, it’s now far harder for bands to make videos accessible online than it was four years ago.”  Like the aging Hippie reluctantly pulling the lever for a Republican, YouTube is finding itself answering to new constituents in its quest for monetization.  The soundtrack to this drama would surely include Roger Daltry’s voice; “I hope I die before I get old.”

Link: OK Go’s User Forum

#2: YouTube Will Start Charging for Some Videos

On the heels of the OK Go story, we learn that YouTube will begin experimenting with paid content.  They plan to charge users around $5 to view independent films from the 2009 and 2010 Sundance Film Festivals.

Link: ReadWriteWeb

#1: New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers

In the latest chess game between newspapers, readers, and search engines, the New York Times announced this week that it is planning to charge readers.  Their approach will differ from the Wall Street Journal, which charges based on premium content.  Instead, the Times plans to charge by volume, which will ostensibly allow the casual visitor to find an article on Google, for example, and have full access to read the article.  It’s a novel idea and not without some technical hurdles to be overcome.  It seems to me that it strikes a fair balance between the free exchange of ideas and making a living.  I will be rooting for it to succeed.

Link: New York Magazine

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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

This week’s High Five is about all things Internet.  It includes some interesting uses, abuses and threats that are not only worthy of mention but long term monitoring.

#5: The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model

I don’t generally use this space just to list “cool stuff.”  However, in addition to having pizazz, it seems to me that this model has some serious potential to become a game-changer.

Link: Wired

#4: Optimize LinkedIn Profile for SEO

Mike Volpe from Hubspot provides some very simple yet important tips for optimizing your LinkedIn profile (it led me to immediately make a couple of quick tweaks).  I am constantly evangelizing how important your online presence is, and this short tutorial is great for maximizing its effectiveness.

#3: China Blocks Wired.com With ‘Great Firewall’ – Updated

The conclusion from this article is that China’s algorithms for censoring the Internet were messing around with Wired magazine’s availability, which seems to be intermittently available.  The interesting nuggets from this article are the notations that China tends to block any sites with RSS feeds and blogs.  Why RSS feeds?  Because they are a push mechanism instead of pull.  In other words, it’s easier to track people when they have to visit a site to read what’s on it.  I know none of this is particularly shocking, but it’s important to understand what governments can do to encumber the Internet.  And before you start feeling too comfortable in the U.S. or E.U., read on…

Link: Wired

#2: Court to FCC: You Don’t Have Power to Enforce Net Neutrality

Net neutrality is the principle that your ISP (Internet Service Provider) should not be able to deliberately throttle back bandwidth for particular sites or protocols or otherwise interfere with them.  This ruling is about Comcast’s efforts to hamper use of the file sharing site BitTorrent.  Since these “torrents” are frequently used to illegally share files, there may not be much sympathy.  However, consider that Comcast has also been accused of interfering with Vonage as well, who is a competitor to their voice over IP service.  The courts and government seem to be setting the stage for an Internet that is going to be patrolled, regulated, fettered, and not at all like the one we are used to right now.

Link: Wired

#1: Senator Demands IP Treaty Details

This is a follow from last week’s story about the possible efforts by U.S. and E.U. authorities to deputize ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to be the Copyright Gestapo.  This week, we see that a U.S. Senator is having to file a Freedom of Information Act request to see the details of this treaty.  That the government is trying to hide information is nothing new, but the fact that this Senator is from the same political party as the current administration makes you wonder what’s in this bill that they don’t want people to know.

Link: Wired

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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