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
