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 “The Changing Face of Facebook,” but I’ve also included a bonus link from Chris Brogan.

#5: Federal Board Says Employees Shouldn’t Get Fired Over Facebook Posts

The National Labor Relations Board has filed suit against a Connecticut company for firing a worker who complained about her supervisor on Facebook. This will be an important case study to watch and will have implications for how wide or narrow employer social media policies can be.

Link: AllFacebook

#4: Livestream For Facebook Lets You DIY Live Stream Video On Fan Pages

More and more small businesses and sole proprietorships are using Facebook fan pages as free surrogates for a website. Depending on the business, they may or may not be able to get away with this. Either way, Facebook is continuing to chip away at the reasons why you can’t do this (see #3 below).

Link: TechCrunch

#3: Microsoft’s Docs Now Supports Facebook Groups

One of my web pet peeves is the lack of decent group collaboration tools available. Google Wave had promise, but was too complex and “weird” to catch on. With Ning euthanizing its free product, there is a rather large opening that Facebook seems to be moving toward. In addition to providing a means for communication and discussion, Facebook groups has now made it easier to share documents. Now all they need to do is add audio and/or video chat and they’ll really have something.

Link: AllFacebook

#2: Facebook’s Gmail Killer, Project Titan, Is Coming On Monday

This entire week has been abuzz with rumors that Facebook will be announcing its Gmail Killer on Monday. There have been lots of clues, leaks, reading between the lines, and it’s obvious some sort of email solution is on its way. But not everybody is on the same page about what they’ll be announcing (see #1 below).

Link: TechCrunch

#1: Why Facebook Probably Isn’t Launching an Email Service

This is a pretty thought-provoking article. It’s predominately a semantics argument about what exactly constitutes an “email” solution. The important aspect of this article is the discussion about the future of electronic communications. Many of us are aware of the fact that only about 11 percent of teenagers use email and many colleges have halted the practice of providing freshmen with “edu” email addresses. From my own anecdotal experience, I’ve watched my two teenage daughters shift much of their communication away from text messaging and toward Facebook instant messaging. My guess is that Facebook is grabbing onto that trend with both hands and rather than trying to kill Gmail, it’s looking to serve the users who aren’t using email at all.

Link: Fast Company

Bonus: Don’t Do This – Speaking

I think most speakers are guilty of this until they learn otherwise. But it’s still far too common, so I’m doing my part to wipe out this scourge by sharing this brilliantly simple doodle from Chris Brogan:

Don't Do This, from ChrisBrogan on Flickr

Link: Chris Brogan

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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.

This week’s High Five is about crowd power; for better or worse.

#5: Microsoft’s Creative Destruction

Categorizing this article as “crowd power” is a little bit of a stretch, but it had to be included in the High Five nonetheless.  In the wake of the iPad product announcement, this fascinating article describes in great detail how the mob-like corporate culture of Microsoft didn’t simple stifle innovation; it barbarically tore it limb from limb and left the pieces scattered across lobbies and conference rooms as a warning to the next group of would-be world changers.

Link: New York Times (Op-Ed)

#4: NFL.com aggregates Super Bowl tweets and pics

The National Football League has jumped into the social media gauntlet with both feet for Superbowl XLIV.  They’ve announced an “official” (doesn’t everything need to be the official “x” of event “y”?) Twitter hash tag (#SB44) and Flickr photo stream, both of which will be aggregated to a dedicated page on their site.

Link: Pro Football Talk on NBC Sports

#3: We’re turning comments off for a bit

This unfortunate announcement was made on the Engadget web site early this week because the environment “has become mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations… and that’s just not acceptable.”  The situation illustrates one of the darker sides of social media and the tough decisions that must sometimes be made.  It’s a manageable task to moderate these forums unless and until they become a victim of their own success and simply grow too large.  I see this as the new job role for public relations professionals in the future – once they finally come to the realization that their current role of shaping messages is gone forever.

Link: Engadget

#2: Facebook COO: 175 Million People Log Into Facebook Every Day

While the total number of registered Facebook users (over 350 million) gets lots of press, this number is eye-popping for a couple of reasons.  First of all, the sheer size is obviously impressive.  That’s a lot of eyeballs.  Second, the adoption rate of 50% is astounding.  We heard just a few weeks ago that 70% of Twitter users are active more than once a week and 30% never post a single update.  This number is evidence that Facebook is not just growing at a break neck pace, it is retaining users and providing compelling reasons for them to log in every day.

Link: TechCrunch

#1: 20+ mind-blowing social media statistics revisited

Well, I’d certainly say “impressive” but can’t say that my mind was blown.  Notwithstanding the sensationalized and overstated title, this is a valuable page to bookmark for your next blog post or sales pitch for social media.

Link: Econsultancy

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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