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 “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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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.

Amazingly, this week’s High Five largely ignores the iPad announcement.  This is a reflection of how important I believe it to be, since I’ll be blogging about that in the upcoming week.  Instead, this week’s links are focused on digital rights and net neutrality.

#5: Settlement Rejected in ‘Shocking’ RIAA File Sharing Verdict

I’ve been following this case for quite some time, and the defense team seems to feel like they have the courts on their side.  Having the judgement reduced from $1.92 million to $54,000 is still not enough for them, as evidenced by their decision to reject a settlement offer of $25,000 from the RIAA.  That the settlement was even offered seems to indicate that the RIAA is also concerned that the courts are on the side of the defendant.

Link: Wired

#4: iPad is iBad for freedom

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has organized an online petition named “Defective by Design,” asserting that Apple’s implementation of Digital Restriction Management (DRM) goes too far and will restrict the distribution of free software by disallowing applications to run on the iPad unless they are downloaded from the Application Store.

Link: Free Software Foundation

#3: Mozilla leader worries about Internet limits

Mitchell Baker, leader of the Mozilla Project, expressed concern over “the increase in laws that make it difficult to run an open network,” and especially over rules concerned with policing content.  She spoke at the opening of athree-day conference on digital innovation and creative ideas in Munich, Germany.

Link: Yahoo! Finance

#2: Netflix to FCC: scary loophole in net neutrality rules

While they generally support the proposed nondiscriminatory rules put forth by the FCC, Netflix‘s general counsel is expressing concern over a potential loophole. “In short, if left unchecked, the ‘managed services’ category could engulf the Commission’s open Internet policies altogether” and let ISPs end run any regulations.  This is no small matter given blurring between content providers and Internet service providers as exemplified with the sale of NBC Universal to Comcast.

Link: ReadWriteWeb

#1: Australia bans graphic games … sort of

The final story in this theme is a cautionary tale of unintended consequences.  Australia has passed a series of laws attempting to restrict adult content from children.  This story shows that the laws have, in fact, increased the amount of adult content reaching children age 15 and under in games like Call of Duty 2: Modern Warfare.

Link: Global Post

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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