As the leading video sites command more and more of our time, advertisers and major media companies will notice. The more time we spend on these services, the better chance they will have to compete on an equal footing with cable TV channels. It is still early days, but once we are nearing an inflection point, and once we reach it, the video industry (both online and off) will change very rapidly.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/08/how-people-watch-tv-online/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

Pay-per-view mechanisms, micropayments, and even subscription-based business models are all languishing. Consequently, the overall health of modern media marketplace and the digital economy—and the aggregate amount of information and speech that can be produced or supported by those sectors —is fundamentally tied up with the question of whether policymakers allow the advertising marketplace to evolve in an efficient, dynamic fashion. In this sense, it is not hyperbole to say that an attack on advertising is tantamount to an attack on media itself.

http://techliberation.com/2012/01/08/ezra-klein-on-the-importance-of-advertising-to-media/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+techliberation+%28Technology+Liberation+Front%29

Phonedog’s attempt to put a value on Twitter followers could well backfire. No one particularly cares to hear that they’re worth $2.50, even if that is well above the going rate. The site’s Facebook wall is already filling up with comments to that effect. “I just unfollowed you guys on Twitter,” writes one commenter. “You can put my $2.50 directly in my PayPal account.”

http://mashable.com/2011/12/30/twitter-follower-lawsuit-noah-kravitz/

The program will not allow students to earn an M.I.T. degree. Instead, those who are able to exhibit a mastery of the subjects taught on the platform will receive an official certificate of completion. The certificate will obviously not carry the weight of a traditional M.I.T. diploma, but it will provide an incentive to finish the online material. According to the New York Times,in order to prevent confusion, the certificate will be a credential bearing the distinct name of a new not-for-profit body that will be created within M.I.T.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2011/12/21/m-i-t-game-changer-free-online-education-for-all/

“We have encountered WHOIS information with facially false address and contact information, including websites registered to ‘God, ‘Bill Clinton’ and ‘Mickey Mouse,’” they added. “In Internet investigations, identifying domain name registrants immediately is especially important, as fraudsters often change sites frequently to evade detection.” Cybercrime cost Americans $139.6 billion in 2011, according to Internet security company Symantec.

FTC officials want ICANN to vet the consumer risks of each proposed name during the approval process, or at least scrutinize the hazards associated with regulated industries and names prone to abuse, such as dot-kids.

http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20111219_1641.php?oref=rss&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

A new Fascism, with its trail of intolerance, of abuse, and of servitude, can be born outside our country and be imported into it, walking on tiptoe and calling itself by other names, or it can loose itself from within with such violence that it routs all defenses. At that point, wise counsel no longer serves, and one must find the strength to resist. Even in this contingency, the memory of what happened in the heart of Europe, not very long ago, can serve as support and warning.

Primo Levi

http://www.cambridge.org/aus/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521603102&ss=exc

KenRadio Show, Ken & Andy talked about how Amazon will grab the new sub $100 tablet market, Why Samsung may want to buy webOS from HP and a whole lot more…..

http://kenradio.com/z/3838/world-tech-round-up-episode-47/

The price of “free” though is escalating, the social networks have moved on from just using our data for displaying advertisements to processing our private information and distributing it in ways we may have never expected.
Professional networking site LinkedIn caused an uproar last week when their social advertising feature started adding what appeared to be users’ personal endorsements to adverts for products, businesses and websites based on behaviour monitored by the site’s tracking software.

http://paulwallbank.com/2011/08/13/the-privacy-processors-how-social-media-is-manufacturing-our-identities/

Paragon Clinical LLC is a medical management company creating, supplementing and managing the development of medical infrastructure for Skilled Nursing Facilities and Assisted Living Residences. Its leadership and team have been providing skilled nursing home care for over 25 years. Paragon Clinical LLC, formerly NP Care of Illinois, LLC, has provided services to patients in over 54 nursing facilities in Illinois and has over 25 employees.

via » A medical management company: Paragon Clinical LLC.

Edward Conard, is a former executive with Bain Capital, which was cofounded by Romney, and said last night that he did not intend to circumvent election laws when he created a company, W Spann LLC, which paid the contribution without Conard’s name attached.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2011/08/06/1m_mystery_donor_to_pac_for_mitt_romney_ids_himself/

New York, July 31 (ANI): The White House is said to have “rickrolled” one of its Twitter followers who complained about a correspondence briefing being too boring.
“@wiggsd Sorry to hear that. Fiscal policy is important, but can be dry sometimes. Here’s something more fun: tinyurl.com/y8ufsnp #WHChat,” the New York Daily News quoted the White House tweet as saying.

http://www.newstrackindia.com/newsdetails/232991

That page goes on to list, in detail, the various ways that these groups can be harmed.   We know that women experience 25 TIMES the amount of harassment online that men do.  We know that 50% of LGBT teens are bullied online, and many of them consider–or commit–suicide.  We know that women are stalked and killed by ex-lovers. We know that LGBT folk are the victims of hate crimes.
Basically, we know that some people are assholes online, and like to target others and make their lives hell. They will do this using their real names; they do this with fake identities.   It’s about BEHAVIOR, not about names.  If your website is full of assholes, it’s your fault for not holding people–whatever name they go by–accountable for their behavior.  Online behavior doesn’t have to be polite or full of everyone agreeing with each other. Conversations just need to not be bigoted, hateful, or destructive.

http://membracid.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/why-google-hates-women/

Certainly the twitter townhall can act as a guise, but literally any given day we see segmented and patriotic discussion around any given issue. True, it is easier to get a true measure or reach during peak moments.

Now with Google plus adapting as fast as people use it, to their needs, and in a myriad of observable ways, we can apprehend the future enough to know that twitterfall is upon us, where as Facebook has become the premier yellow and white pages.

http://blogs.ajc.com/health-flock/2011/07/12/lowering-access-with-telehealth/

1 : an idea, belief or belief system, or pattern of behavior that spreads throughout a culture either vertically by cultural inheritance (as by parents to children) or horizontally by cultural acquisition (as by peers, information media, and entertainment media) 

2 : a pervasive thought or thought pattern that replicates itself via cultural means; a parasitic code, a virus of the mind especially contagious to children and the impressionable

3 : the fundamental unit of information, analogous to the gene in emerging evolutionary theory of culture 

  – meme pool (n.) : all memes of a culture or individual  

  – memetic (adj.) : relating to memes  

  – memetics (n.) : the study of memes  

4 : in blogspeak, an idea that is spread from blog to blog

5 : an internet information generator, especially of random or contentless information  

(Etymology : meme : derived from the Greek mimëma, ‘something imitated’, by Richard Dawkins in 1976)

Taken from Urban Dictionary
http://www.urbandictionary.com/iphone/#define?term=meme

Pance goes on to explain that the digital overlays, which add information to whatever picture the transparent screen captures, “may be transmitted onto a display screen that overlays a museum exhibit, such as a painting.”

“The overlay may include information relating to the painting that may be useful or interesting to viewers of the exhibit,” he added. In other words, Apples new iPads may allow people to point them at physical objects and instantly receive onscreen information about those objects.

via Apple Files Patents for Augmented Reality, Transparent Screen – Mobiledia.

we like in crowds, all for the same reason, and this ties us together making manifest a narrow band of reoccurrence that longs for a differentiation
we dislike – we hate this, or that, for our own internal reasons – often tied to belief, bias, or disgust, but we dislike discretely, with purpose and – at times, with emotional intensity lacking in the more congenial ‘like’ or ‘+1′ or ‘plug’ – tagfoot’s upkick, stumbleupon’s stumbles, tumblr, digg – all of these tend toward a unilateral or scale, at times useful in a burrowing, termite culture sort of way – moving through the chaos which is daily data dumps, files, creations, media, and news

http://wesunruh.com/about/writing/hate-this/

Neil Strauss argues that we are, and that all of this implicit and explicit voting that takes place in social networks is encouraging a kind of vicious conformity. We no longer reveal our true selves online, he says, because so many of us are obsessed with judging our conduct based on whether it is approved by our friends, followers or social graph. But is that true? And if so, is it social networking’s fault?

Strauss argues that widespread use of social-networking features such as the “like” button, the retweet and the +1 button that is part of the new Google+ are effectively training us to only respond to things that have become popular — and to govern our own behavior so that it gets more likes and retweets, which he says effectively suppresses any unusual or controversial opinion in favor of the mainstream or predictable.

via Are we becoming slaves to the “like” button? — Tech News and Analysis.

I don’t know that this still holds true, but I do think it’s wise to have at least ten percent of what you’re requesting ready to seed into the campaign in the first few days. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been tracking the use of transmedia narrative as an element of crowdfunding for film development, something being undertaken by the theater troupe Foolish People for their production of ‘Strange Factories’.
Foolish People is using their Indiegogo drive to actually roll out their narrative,  with new media objects occurring every day to drive interest in donations. The actual site for the film is still in ARG game mode: http://strangefactories.com/ and doesn’t take in any contribution there at all – instead it deepens the visual aesthetic associated with the as yet unreleased film.

http://onlinesocialoptimization.com/course/tools/module-14-crowdfunding-and-crowdsourcing/

Currently I’m waiting for Google+ to open up again – I’ve likely got about five or six pending invites, and have been added to circles and posts already (I know this because I keep getting email notifications) but I’ve yet to actually engage with the new service.

That said, I still have an Orkut profile – proof that just because it’s Google, it doesn’t mean it’s useful. I also have a Google Wave account – remember those?

It is this constant process of assessing buzz, hype, and functionality that precedes the distilling of a module for the Online Social Optimization course – currently I’m at a point where I think I can offer a valuable insight into crowdfunding as an approach to online promotion for independent media developers, but as always my writing and work is perpetually subject to change (and occasionally entropy).

More to come..

 

Gawkers John Cook yesterday published an exclusive report on a trove of documents from the Nixon Presidential Library tracing the development of Fox News to a 1970 internal memo annotated by then-consultant Roger Ailes. Part of a 318-page cache of similar documents, the memo — “A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News” — called for the creation of a strongly pro-Nixon news outlet operated from the White House which would disseminate partisan news packages free of charge to local affiliates across the country. By coordinating release of these targeted reports with allied politicians and duping opponents into hostile interviews, Ailes hoped to bypass the “prejudices of network news” — a desire which led him to advocate for some unexpected political policies at the time, from campaign finance reform to anti-poverty efforts.

via “With television you just sit, watch, listen. The thinking is done for you.” | MetaFilter.

But that’s not all. This vocative form has an extra flexibility that enables you to transform a word in another case into a vocative as well. Let’s take the example above, but change “Paris Hilton” into the vocative form: “@AlexisPetridis, I enjoyed your hilarious review of the @ParisHilton album.” Here, the original meaning is preserved, but the vocative term “@ParisHilton” does an extra job: it tells the reader (and the Twitter system) that the remark is directed at Paris Hilton as well as mentioning her. Paris Hilton can then find it, read it and feel pleased that her album is still fondly remembered, albeit for providing good material for Petridis’s eloquent mockery.
And as if introducing a ground-breaking vocative into the English language wasn’t enough, Twitter features an additional case that I don’t think exists in any other language. I’m going to call this case the referrative case. This is the one that’s formed using a # symbol.

http://sharonandjames.co.uk/blog/

“We come up with two new mysteries for every one that we solve,” he [Schmidt] says. Still, he has already drawn some conclusions. “Twenty years ago everyone believed civilization was driven by ecological forces,” Schmidt says. “I think what we are learning is that civilization is a product of the human mind.” – Charles C. Mann writes about Göbekli Tepe for National Geographic.

http://www.metafilter.com/104760/Gbekli-Tepe

At the time this all seemed mysterious. AOL is a billion dollar corporation, and the foundation of its current business model is words. So you would think that AOL might care about the people who write these words. Or, at the very least, that they might care about the words themselves.
But now, I am not so mystified. With the recent release of a top-secret business document from AOL, things have been clarified.  “The AOL Way,” as the document is called, lays the whole plan bare — long flowcharts, an insane number of meaningless buzzwords… the works. One slide is titled “Decide What Topics to Cover.” It then lists “Considerations” from top to bottom. “Traffic Potential” is the top consideration, followed by “Revenue/Profit” and then “Turnaround Time.” “Editorial Integrity” is at the bottom.

http://thefastertimes.com/news/2011/06/16/aol-hell-an-aol-content-slave-speaks-out/

llaboration REQUIRES transparency (hence my push for a transparent news process) and that means taking the time to communicate to the public about where in the reporting process we are.
Collaboration requires communication – where physical proximity is lacking communication must excel.
Collaboration requires listening – an ability to absorb information sent back.

http://blog.digidave.org/2011/06/redundant-collaboration-the-irony-of-asking-for-help-and-creating-more-work

Castr is a free, open and anonymous platform for sharing video content that you find all over the web, a single space that gives you the ability to personally curate those things you think are amazing in the world. Because of the way in which corporations tend to mishandle your private information Castr will anonymize all of your activity, never keeping a record of your IP address, giving you a totally anonymous platform for sharing ideas and experiences with the world.

Castr is not a social network, its a sharing platform. Like “show and tell” day at school you can let people see the things you find interesting and yet do so without privacy concerns. We believe the time has come for a new model of shared content, one in which we never have to worry about being “tracked and targeted” and instead enjoy the things we love and share those with others.

via Castr — IndieGoGo.

The hackers probably used somethin they’re calling “spear phishing” which I isolated from the article at this link for further reading…

http://thereputationeconomy.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/pcworld-reports-on-imf-hacking-spear-phishing/

iCloud Communications attempts to boost its case by alleging that this isn’t the first time Apple has infringed upon others’ trademarks.
“Although Apple aggressively protects its trademark rights, Apple has a long and well known history of knowingly and willfully treading on the trademark rights of others — a history which began as early as the 1970s when Apple was first sued for trademark infringement by the Beatles record label, Apple Corp.”
The documents also mentions other trademark debacles Apple had in the past with McIntosh Labs, Management and Computer Services (MACS), the “Mighty Mouse” cartoon character, iPhone, iPad and iAd.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/230127/apple_sued_by_icloud.html

I find this fascinating, because it is very much about seo and buzz, more than any actual SaaS or patently unique service. It is all about ‘face’ and it is clear that adding ‘i’ to the beginning of any noun or verb is parasitic marketing to begin with…

Myths play out in the world, and Shiva, the Auspicious One, has taken the stage to mark an inauspicious time. As the mass media stripmines meaning from our culture, all areas under advertisings vacuous gaze become cremation grounds, and there Shiva lingers to redeem or reclaim .

Shiva, king of ghosts, awakens to a field of culturally dispossessed, economic dead, erupting in violence, abandon and force. Shiva, Tripurantakmurthi, destroyer of the cities of Gold, Silver and Iron, whose aspect is fire as both an end and a renewal.

Ibn Arabi wrote that one should not expect the angelic realm will show itself in a physical manifestation, instead look for the subtle emotional sense that presents itself as a form of communication. In the same way there will be no physical manifestation of Shiva, his body, manifested in its malefic sense, is a mental fire that ignites revolution and change, a broken urban facade awaiting destruction, an unsustainable infrastructure that fosters its own end.

via Modern Mythology: Lord Shiva, King of Ghosts.

While I know there are tarot card readers for the ipad and the iphone, tarotbot is only available for the android. However, the developer is making everything open source, and even working with artists to develop new tarot decks as well as creating new kinds of decks. This is more than just free tarot readings on your android device – this is the start of a digital community of tarot readers and artists.

via Free Tarot Readings on Android.

@ProgBot isn’t a bot – it’s tied into a few things, but by no means is it automated – I just use it to retweet all the bizarre left-wign reporting on right wing movements that I run across in my day, sifting the streams of information as they come in…  and it initiates a number of events downstream as a result – occasionally being retweeted in its own right.

@promemetician is everything I touch online plus things I want to track, combining alerts, my own activities, and the youtube account of the same name – as such it’s an easy way for me to sort back through the day and find a particular piece of something I noticed. Perfect for short-term references, and chock full of daily news and commentary.

@producerlymedia is a media highlights news feed I’ve set up long enough ago that I’ve forgotten how to access it – it is truly a servitor off on its own, likely at any moment to stop working, yet continuing to wake momentarily now and then to provide some automagical insight into contemporary machinations behind the scenes in quaint and traditional media.

via pop culture legos: @progbot @promemetician @producerlymedia and others | Wes Unruh.

They are daydreams and nightmares, both vital shards of archetypal change and reflection, the very vim and fiber of myth and culture – and they are not always brought into being by an author, artist, or singular musician – creativity is often a communal event, and many times it is even an anonymous event, especially when the art is political, speaking singing or screaming truth to power.

Other times it is as if the very environment itself is speaking through the artists who channel the essence of the street back up onto the walls unthinking, as if an afterthought. And our new walls are screens, black reflective scrying plastics you can touch, move, iconographic display replacing ritual, rote, bell and book. To mark up, to invade, and to sanctify our spaces as dreamers who seek to bring vision manifest to others, we must sync our very thoughts to the interplay of media and do so in ways that enable the artist, the author, and the visionary in spite of, in the face of, and because of the centralization of demographic data – what we once thought more generally of as ‘power; the man’ becomes now a side note. Remember, privacy for the mystic artist is often paramount to fully express the spiritual force with drives manifestation – the art may be and become public, but few visionary artists have the focus to create under too bright a spotlight.

Look into the work of Alex Ruiz and Max Pressman, or study the stylings of Rick Griffin to get a feel for this raw, primal stuff of creation. There’s a need for a folklore built between spaces – where art that embeds itself in the environment can be freed from it’s spatiality through mediation, and shared anonymously: something like the incredibly ambitious Castr project over on indiegogo. Castr seems like the perfect in-between space for those working in the shadows to perfect the vision and the voice they wish to project, and better yet it is a Tor for a new approach to distribution – a platform into higher things, like crowdsourcing an independent film.

Magic happens at the fringes, and weaves those fringes into a tapestry we continue to tell ourselves – the tapestry is made up of a great many voices and stories, many different threads. Start with the fringes, and weave your own work, publicly or not, into the reality you have been presented with – change your world, as my friends in Elete keep saying. And why not? It’s your world, after all.

Not, as the case currently is, an article published in July of 1998 by Robert C. DiGregorio, Jr. as the top result on Google’s search engine results page. (Seriously? No mention of micro-payments??)

So I’m posting this as a way to hopefully alter that, and redirect people to a case study in how to fund indie film over on Indiegogo so you can see how transmedia professionals with immersive environmental theatrical performance skills tackle transmedia and crowdsourcing.

anny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Land, an industry blog, said, “It has the taint of a smear campaign despite what Facebook is saying.”
Facebook insiders, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter, said the company hired the well-known public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to suggest stories about Social Circle to reporters because it did not want the issue to turn into a Facebook versus Google story. Social Circle is an optional feature of Google search that uses publicly available information from social networks to personalize search results.

This amuses me and has all the elements of a Bruce Sterling novel from the eighties.

Here’s the relevant detail:

I no longer think there is any plausible scenario under which Android fails to achieve over 50% smartphone market share in the U.S. and worldwide this year.  If Apple couldn’t spike the wheels on this juggernaut, there is no hope that RIM or any of the minor players is going to do it.  And to give you an idea how robust that prediction is, Android could still beat 50% in the U.S. if its growth rate dropped by a full third.

Personally I am in agreement.. chromebooks will hasten adoption.

“The information on the phone is useful in a forensics context,” Levinson told CNET today. Customers for Lantern 2, he said, include “small-town local police all the way up to state and federal police, different agencies in the government that have forensics units.”

Research by security analyst Samy Kamkar, a onetime hacker with a colorful past, indicates an HTC Android phone determined its location every few seconds and transmitted the data to Google at least a few times an hour, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. It said that the Android phone also transmitted the name, location and signal strength of nearby Wi-Fi networks, as well as a unique identifier for the phone.

http://m.cnet.com/Article.rbml?nid=20056344&cid=null&bcid=&bid=-281

http://findusonfacebook.tumblr.com/

Excellent tumblr blog above written by @ABlakeley which provides valuable clues on not being an asshat with your social media assets. Think carefully about relying on one social media third party network to be your primary replacement microsite though because when the site trends into a demographic you aren’t optimizing for, the results will only seem funny to others. (Thanks to the seemingly omnipresent @briansolis for pointing this out in a tweet earlier this morning.)

Attached is a rough beginning to the mind map I’m building, related in a parallel way to the link above.

You think?

We are an adaptable species, though, and this environment is Jo different than the complexities of wilderness, the challenging task a frontier presents. Claiming ‘overload’ showcases a desire for some implausible regression from the encroaching singularity… information is not knowledge until its been absorbed and nuanced, internally categorized, then technologically applied. Overload is what happens when you can’t fit information into your internal categorical models. That’s for you to fix. The world will not wait.

preconscious mind
egregoric
spivak iowa translation derrida
bbc greg hodgins
ikea meme
interconnected trust
interpersonal circumplex
personality seepage”"
exposition william gibson
cave jung
chicago tribune survey first amendment
chloe crowson
cymatics definition
dolphin cymatics
external vs internal cybernetic
flowscape, ideal
footnotes about stress
how to reach your preconscious mind
infictive countries
interpersonal
interpersonal theory
knowing oneself activities
memetics and comics
meta condition
narrative on cellphones
networked spaces
osotip
sigilization
toxic marketing memetics
sorcerer’s cave
tarotbot online
the sorcerer’s cave
transmedia
what is bricolage in art
whole science of memetics, represent

This is other than the actual title of the book – which made up the bulk of the searches.  I find the long-tail keywords more compelling, to be honest

What is the future of money? And not just money, but currencies in general – from virtual currencies to timebanks to social currencies based around trust, identity, reputation, expertise and relationships. And not just currencies, a.k.a. tools that are supposed to represent a unit of measurement in order to transact, but also value exchange in general and the social behaviors that precede them.

via 10 Projects Moving Us Towards a Superfluid Economy « emergent by design.

Her list of 10 projects really highlight how globalism and networked spaces are radically redefining our sense of ownership, charity, and (for lack of a better term) winning. (also, check out how EmpireAvenue is playing with this notion of social currency.)

this is interesting. I’m not sure how I feel about this, the more I think about it the more nuanced my concerns. For now, I’ll say that I think it’s equivalent in implication to the Turner Channel’s penchant for colorization in the 80′s – and that was a painful time to live through if you were a film buff

Very few of the people that pay for SEO work have any idea what they’re paying for. And they don’t pay enough and the result is garbage. This is the same problem I’ve seen time and again in web design. I’m not going to turn this into a long bitter rant about this subject but trust me, half of that sour feeling you get in your stomach when you hear the word “SEO”? Don’t blame it on the writers or even SEO “Professionals.” The blame also falls on the shoulders of clients. I’ve taken SEO hack jobs and it feels dirty doing it, but doing this stuff right takes a lot of time and a lot of time means a lot of money. And people are often not willing to put a lot of money into something that they don’t even understand.

(amen, brother)

via Modern Mythology: How To Do SEO Write: And Not Be A Total Douchebag.

Unity of knowledge is a technological right, or it should be, and access to the public sphere of knowledge, the open community of global crowd-sourced information, provides the basis for this new world order – where pursuit of happiness can be a dream achieved by all through autodidact education – bootstrapping oneself and one’s community into a prosperous place – not just the American way or dream, it’s the dream of all, for all.

via We are the new world order and it’s a damn bright future » Wes Unruh.

Attending to the development of mobile money. Schmidt notes that Phones are used as banks in many poorer parts of the world. This is going to blow the minds of the people who are proponents of getting rid of the Federal Reserve here in the USA and making sure there’s a correct amount of actual gold sitting in a safe somewhere should everyone want to trade in their dollar bills. Can you imagine a world where we’re working with a single standard perhaps? Credits that are good past all borders and governments, and on this tip, all devices working on global networks, having what the DVD business calls Region Zero. Of course, this sort of situation can basically never go 100% global, as there will always be ultra-poor areas where “your Republic Credits are no good here, I need something more real.”

via The Coming Android “Mobile Revolution”.

1) Paid media is a good way to generate leads in most niches but many people are hesitant to try it. They are afraid to lose money. But for all they know for every $1 they spend on lead generation they may see $1.50 or $2.00 in return. Maybe you’ll lose money on the front end and recoup it on the back end. There is only one way to find out!

2) If you already have a list are you mailing it every day? You don’t have to send promotional emails all the time but you certainly should be talking to your subscribers on a daily basis. The funny thing is many list owners are afraid to mail their list daily. They think it’ll offend people and cause unsubscribes. There is no way to know for sure until you do it. For all you know it’ll increase conversions and sales. Try it and find out, it’s not like you are locked into a certain way of doing things. As my good friend and colleague Brian Terry says, “The answer is always no until you ask”

3) Don’t be afraid to try out new marketing methods. Right now sales videos are hot. They sell like gangbusters pure and simple. When the concept first became known some marketers jumped on board, tweaked their sales systems, ran some tests and found out that YES! sales videos were making them more money. But there are others who haven’t tried sales videos and never will. They are stuck in their old marketing habits and will never change. They are slowly stagnating while others rise to success around them.

via Can Riding a Snowmobile Supercharge Your Lead Generation Efforts? Heck Yeah!.

What’s the sweet nectar and bright colors that lures in the unwitting insects? That’s the question advertisers are bound to ask. The market is strictly concerned with selling the container, and like the insects, is blissfully unaware of the pollen. Countless dollars have been spent researching customer reaction to different colors, configurations of symbols and patterns. Certainly, much of this plays into the cutting edge of UX design. But, in contradiction of the common wisdom that says our biological similarities make us all susceptible to the same patterns, at least if we are looking for big-picture trends, it has been my experience that results vary depending on the “species of insect.” In other words, though the audience and the authors may all be consciously unaware of the genetic code of their work, we can readily sniff out what suits us and what does not, in the same way we have sized up potential mates through smell before a single word has been spoken. Even our immune systems are keyed to seek viable mates – this relates to our sense of smell as well – and further there is some evidence that even activities such as kissing have a matching and mating purpose, preparing our immune systems for one another.

via Memes, Myths, Birds, Bees, and Markets, by James Curcio | [ open myth source ].

In addition to all the public domain free ebooks, Google has partnered with booksellers to bring you paid ebooks too.

Google states that they have more than three million titles for you to choose from, including hundreds of thousands for sale. I installed the Android app on my EVO 4G and was pleased to see a pop-up asking if I wanted to sync the application across the Internet. With the sync function turned on you will be able to sync your reading position and library contents.

via Google brings ebooks to Android and iOS devices | ZDNet.

George Lois said, in the documentary Art & Copy, that marketing was poison gas. That jives much more closely with my understanding than the constant ROI concerns of corporate bobble-heads, as cutting edge as they may have polished their public face into being to talk to the narrowcast and expect the best.

What I find fascinating, and pretty much what I expected from online spaces, is that truth rises to the top, and new, spontaneous pools of information become immediately explored. We’re friggin ants, man… give us a big sticky spot and we’ll tell our friends, come swarming in until we’ve scoured it for all it’s worth. Here’s the thing though – we only tell the other ants we know are interested.

Recently I sent around to the mastermind group a series of links regarding specific third-party tools for twitter. I’ll be exploring those third-party tools that survived the recent shift in twitter’s OAuth mandate in the course module ‘Twitter as Lifestreaming‘ as I continue writing Online Social Optimization. Keep an eye on it, learning how to use some of the essential twitter tools out there will greatly improve your public appearance, and all that other professional bullshit, like metrics.

One application I do not think will be disappearing any time soon is ‘Layar‘ – a kind of augmented reality browser that overlays the video camera display in real time.  I downloaded it specifically to have access to the TweepsAround layar, which superimposes all nearby geographically tagged public tweets onto the video display of my phone.  Absolutely fascinating, although a pretty big battery suck – I feel very strongly that this kind of interface is only going to become more popular.

Speaking of twitter, I played with a number of twitter apps on android.  I actually continue to use all of them, to greater and lesser degrees, including TweepsAround, I also have Twitter’s official android application, Seesmic for Android, and Twidroyd, which I purchased.  Of these, I use twidroyd for multiple accounts and seesmic for my main account on twitter, and I’ve been fairly happy with that arrangement.

I mentioned Zenonia above, I’ve also purchased Radiant, and both of those two games were worth the couple of bucks I spent on them, in terms of time I’ve spent actually playing them.  I won’t bother listing any of the games I haven’t played more than once.  Somewhat connected to that, I’ve also become quite fond of the tarot for android application Tarotbot I’ve been able to be part of the beta test on, and which is now in full release.  (Here is an interesting interview with the developer of Tarotbot and his call for additional tarot deck artwork.)

I also incorporate both wordpress’s app and tumblr’s app into my daily blogging, and – being the political geek I am – I also use the Congress application every couple of days out of a kind of need for over-saturation.  I do take in a lot of news through the phone, both through google news (usually just through the aforementioned Dolphin browser) or through the NPR app.  And of course, twitter itself..  and I’m also linked in to YouTube directly with another app.

What is missing from my phone, by choice, is Facebook.  I’m sure there’s great facebook apps, I just don’t care to use them.  I do, however, have ACV, DieDroid, and a Star Trek Sounds and Ringtones app plus a Combadge app.  I purchased an Hours application and Delux Moon, both to get a feel for how useful this phone might be as a “magickal” tool.  I even found a app called Magick, but, beyond the magical compass, I haven’t found it to be of much use.

What I do find myself playing with thought is Retro Camera, FXCamera, and Sketcher, often just uploading the results directly to Flickr accounts.  I can also upload to my server, thanks to AndFTP, easily one of the most valuable of the apps I am using, and ASTRO, which gives me a much better look at the files on my htc incredible.  Finally, I love Gmote - an app that turns my phone into a way to browse media on my computer and run a presentation or just turn my phone into a touchpad – pure genius.  Again, my phone isn’t perfect, but these apps are very much worth exploring if you’ve got an android phone of your own.

“if your twitter name isn’t your real name, why did you choose it?”

I was curious what kind of answers I would get. One was a single word, or should I say hashtag, @Brainwise’s ‘#Anagram’…

Another response led me to an entry where someone else had asked this same question regarding screen names.

Other great responses:

“..first name is what my dad wanted to call me, second name is a nickname I acquired about 20 years ago..”

“..My last name is Moon, and the obverse of a coin is the front, or “heads”, side. So Lunar Obverse is my public face…”

“cuz I didn’t want the whole world to know who I am…”

“it was mike_mccoy79. i thought notgroundlevel sounded cooler. also, it make me “feel” smarter then others…”

“I chose my twittername because it sounded “cute” to me at the time. Regret it now, sounds stupid & slightly sexual.”

I have to say, of the responses, the one I most identify with personally is Nysidra’s: “Nysidra is my Internet name. That’s almost the same as a “real” name, ja?”

Rocketjam takes it to another level, having spent a lot of time developing a kind of personal brand around his online presence slash “..twitter name…online identity thing” provided a link to his FAQ detailing where his name arose and what he does online.

So I titled this post, why bother constructing identity online? I think the answer is first, that it is fun – identity tourism is a kind of theatrical performance, and speaking through a mask provides a kind of empowerment. However, quickly that mask becomes an extension of the ego, a kind of armament of the id even. That is possibly the most important secondary reason – it provides a kind of personal narrative for internal dialogue – and a way to accrue presence in a social space without the physical restrictions that govern meatspace. I don’t dare attempt to tie any sort of trends to this kind of anecdotal sampling, but I do think the way that identity is deliberately constructed an endlessly fascinating area of research.

Today I focused on content strategy, something I will be developing in more detail very soon.

Now I’m back to the text, and revamping layout to be even more mobile – social focused.

via Users of Facebook’s Social Network Are Mostly Anti-Social: Poll | Fast Company.

This Following Policy is specifically for Twitter and was established so that my Followers can clearly understand why I may or may not follow them back, and how quickly they can expect me to start following. To be sure, this is not my entire process. When I learn that someone is following me I usually do things like look at their Profile page, review some of their comments and Favorites, and look at who they follow and who is following them, etc.

I highly recommend that all Twitter users adopt policies of their own. I believe it will help reduce churn and make Twittering a better experience for all.

via My Following Policy « Neal Wiser’s HyperTense Blog.

I’ll be presenting a series of videos designed to explore what I and the others who initiated the Public Individual Mastermind Group have developed since the publication of The Art of Memetics in 2008. Suffice it to say, these videos go beyond what I initially released at the start of Public Individual, and reflect two years of study. The core of this mastermind group was the use of the Public Individual Identity Tracker, available at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pilPmRnL3UZr8_o0bvCimcA&output=html

On this spreadsheet we’ve listed a number of URL’s you’ll find useful. Bear in mind that the internet presence you are constructing is a confluence of multiple third-party sites working in tandem, and that these individual sites all have their own developmental arc. Redundancy across social networks will help you maintain a coherent presence even in the face of sites falling apart (like Ma.Gnol.Ia’s massive server fail), or being purchased and subsumed into other sites (Delicious being integrated into Yahoo, Feedburner’s integration into Google.) It is because of this very process that I rely on the public spreadsheet function Google provides through Google Documents, so that as new services arise or old services fail I can update the spreadsheet once and keep this core document up-to-date.

via Online Social Optimization.

# Has mediated culture changed to fit new regimes of attention?

# With an infinite number of channels, is it still possible to get citizens to talk about the same topic?

# How do marketers get attention when technologies, from TiVo to pop-up blockers, allow for filtering?

# Does the ability to work anywhere, thanks to mobile devices, break down the idea of attending to home or family within particular temporal and spatial blocks?

# How does a new disciplining of attention (or a lack of such disciplining?) affect learning inside and outside of schools and universities?

# Are “Lifehacker” and “Four Hour Work Week” just continuations of a long interest in efficiency, or do they mark a move beyond the workplace for such efforts?

# Is there a consensus regarding “multi-tasking” and “continuous partial attention” vs. task focus in terms of effectiveness?

# How do individuals create their own “situational awareness”? To what degree is our attention locationally based?

# How have technologies of social networking affected who we attend to and how we attend to them?

via TL;DR: The Future of Attention – a thaumaturgical compendium.

In short, the concept of creating a series of 45 interviews with smart online/social people leading up to South by Southwest was one of the better ideas. Not only was it great blog fodder but it had crazy SEO implications.

via Citizen Marketer 2.1: Ten Most Poplular Citizen Marketer 2.1 Posts of 2009.

From a user perspective Foursquare appears, on the surface, to be nothing more than a game. Check-in more times than your friends and claim the title of “Mayor” of a location. So what? In much the same way that new Twitter users are stumped by the question “What are you doing?”, new Foursquare users find the act of checking in at a location somewhat pointless. As a friend of mine says, other than enabling stalkers what exactly are you getting out of it?

It’s true that the current actual value of Foursquare to the average user is minimal, if you stay mostly in your home town, you might find you are checking in at the same location as friends, possibly you might get a recommendation for an alternative to the location you are at, but that’s it. If you travel then you are likely to get more from it in terms of recommendations for places to visit, things to do and the potential of meeting other users – the core of Social Media.

via Why You Should Care About Foursquare – Part One | IncSlingers|Integrated Marketing Communications Agency|Traditional & Social Media Marketing Commmunications.

A consequence of the digital divide, disparity in media literacy has become more evident as online advertising grows and social media networks expand. Due to a variety of factors, including age, economics, education and geographic location, a significant portion of America’s population now has access to the Internet, but lacks the knowledge to ensure that their information remains private. This group is more susceptible to identity theft, fraud and the embarassment of information overshare on social networks.

via Facebook at a crossroads with media literacy | alyssagardina.com.

It is the act of assembling the footage prior to the movie-going experience which seems to reveal a specific sequence of events, and only by attending the film would the entire narration reveal the other underlying pattern.

via Digital Narrative in Attention Ecology .;. Trans-Media Narration via Modular Exposure.

The idea behind this sentence is to construct hooks which unravel in the mind to an intuitive apprehension of a specific enthymeme prior to the actual reading of the narrative flow – be that in whatever medium – to set the staging and cauterize catharsis – engendering a desiring loop.

Of course, this is obviously weaponizable – inserting desiring machines into docile bodies by way of memetic triggers seems a bit like Dollhouse without wires.

-Wes

..who still counts “hits” to a site…

via Twitter / Joe Buhler: @Douglas_Quinby As if soci ….

Increase registrations 30%+: Socialize enables login via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and OpenID identities

via Gigya – Connecting content and consumers with the social web.

The web presents us with the largest accumulation of knowledge and information within recorded history. The mass and complexity of this information makes it very difficult to accurately model what is happening in a way that allows us to anticipate the results of publishing new content. Early attempts at managing this complexity rely on “authority” measures such as page rank to filter out information leaving a more reasonably sized subset to analyze. While efficient and useful for displaying relevant results to users this authority measure does nothing to help us understand features of a publication’s content that enhance its effectiveness in capturing the attention of web users. We are still faced with a large degree of uncertainty when trying to define what content will be successful.

Technology solutions for richer and more meaningful analysis of text content exist, unfortunately the solutions themselves are nearly as complex and overwhelming as the web itself. This has led to an environment where tools for things like analysis of sentiment, semantics or simply word usage on large scales are unavailable to anyone without expertise in machine learning or the means to hire it. Fortunately advances in human computer interaction have provided techniques for making complex expert systems accessible and understandable for those with less than a graduate level computer science education.

via Social Mining – learning the web with AI « PersonEngine.

The theory of the group developed over time and was re-christened ‘systematic ideology’ by Walford in 1976. Its basic premise was that people’s assumptions and identifications the factors making up their ‘ideology’ are not explicable in terms of material conditions in general and their relationship to the means of production in particular—and are never likely to be. Instead, there are persistent and distinct ideological groups in society, cutting across social classes and forming a series, with the largest groups being most typically guided in their thoughts and actions by a preference for family, authority, familiarity and tradition. Politically, these preferences find predominant expression in the ideas of the large number of so-called ‘non-politicals’ in society, and in Conservatism and then Liberalism the strength of these preferences gradually weakening through the series.

As the series progresses further, the next, progressively smaller, ideological groups seek to repress these identifications and preferences in favor of dynamism, social change, logical thought and the pursuit of theory as a guide to decision-making, these being expressed politically in Labourism, more overtly still in Communism and then, in an ultimate and extreme form, in Anarchism or ‘Anarchosocialism’, the purist variety of it allegedly expounded by the Socialist Party of Great Britain. The more an ideology represses the preferences for family, tradition, etc. in favour of social change, dynamism and the pursuit of theory as a guide to action, the fewer in number its adherents are likely to be, with anarchists or ‘anarcho-socialists’ being the smallest of all. Those seeking radical social change, so the theory contends, will always be hampered and restrained by the enduring preferences of the largest ideological groups.

via Systematic ideology – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The site is actually run by Moddr, a New Media Lab in Rotterdam, which execute the underlying scripts which erase your accounts. The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is a digital Dr. Kevorkian. On Facebook, for instance, it removes all your friends one by one, removes your groups and joins you to its own “Social Network Suiciders,” and lets you leave some last words. So far 321 people have used the site to commit Facebook suicide. On Twitter, it deletes all of your Tweets, and removes all the people you follow and your followers. It doesn’t actually delete these accounts, it just puts them to rest.

via Wipe The Slate Clean For 2010, Commit Web 2.0 Suicide.

Over the past few months, we’ve talked about whether you should have a social media policy and what should be included in that policy. It only seems logical to discuss the next step in the process, which is what to consider when implementing a social media strategy in your workplace.

Just having a policy isn’t good enough — you need a plan to put it in place. Here are five areas to discuss when implementing a social media strategy.

via HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy.

Mashable has been there through it all, stepping in to provide journalists with touchstones and compass directions to help them do everything from tell more compelling tales through alternative storytelling to make the most of their Twitter accounts.

It’s not enough today to have a good rolodex of sources (seriously, who even has a rolodex nowadays?) and a solid recorder, journalists need to be able to make use of every tool in their arsenal in order to stay afloat in today’s almost real-time media landscape.

It’s time to add another factor to the boot leather equation.

via Mashable’s Social Media Guide for Journalists.

To make Twitter an effective tool, you need to be a Brand, Maven, or Mensch. To go even further, you need to be able to adopt the roles of Brand, Maven, Mensch, and a touch of the Smore, and that is truly an art.

via Guy Kawasaki :: American Express OPEN Forum.

Ray Carney talks to Richard Metzger (born October 25, 1965 in Wheeling, West Virginia) who is a television host and author. He was the host of the TV show Disinformation, The Disinformation Company and its website, Disinfo.com. He is currently the host of the online talk show Dangerous Minds.

DOWNLOAD via Ripple: Ray Carney talks to Richard Metzger | Alterati: The GSpot- The Inside Scoop on the Outside Culture.

Rather than fall into the hands of their enemies, ancient japanese samurai preferred to die with honor, voluntarily plunging a sword into the abdomen and moving the sword left to right in a slicing motion. The name of this form of ritual suicide is Seppuku 切腹, “stomach-cutting”. Among the important people who committed seppuku there are Azai Nagamasa, forty-six of the Forty-seven Ronin 1703, Takijirō Ōnishi , and, of course, Luther Blissett.

As the Seppuku restores samurai’s honor as a warrior, in the same way, Seppukoo.com deals with the liberation of the digital body from any identity constriction in order to help people discover what happens after their virtual life and to rediscover the importance of being anyone, instead of pretending to be someone.

Hacking and parasiting one of the most popular social networking website, Seppukoo.com deactivates one’s user facebook account, driving people into one of the most radical chic user-experience: the virtual suicide.

via Seppukoo » About.

via Be Merry for Tomorrow: The Axe Game | Brenico Media.

Many companies that handle SEO in-house these days are also so focused on the old school practices that they are completely missing the boat changing course. If their senior management knew how much this would cost them, I am sure they would motivate this type of change if they are open minded enough to have an in house department in the first place.

via How will social optimization change the SEO industry? | SEO Buzz Box.

Retailers, technology companies looking to avoid ‘creepy factor’ in figuring …
Chicago Tribune
People may be sharing more personal information than ever via online social
networks, but there remain many subtleties to consumer behavior that …
<http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-mon-smarter-web-1130-nov30,0,5285561.story

1. Compile a list of your brand keywords – including common misspellings and abbreviations. It’s worth bearing in mind that people do often shorten brand names when communicating via the social web, especially as sites like Twitter only allow a specific number of characters in each update.

2. Set-up a Google alert for your keywords – this service doesn’t capture everything but it’s a good start. Basically, whenever your chosen term is mentioned on a webpage, Google will send you a quick email to let you know.

3. Search Boardreader.com every day for your keywords – this website will search every forum out there for mentions of you and will provide a direct link to the thread where you are mentioned.

4. Use Google Blog Search – this is similar to the above but searches across blogs as opposed to forums.

5. Make the most of Twitter Search – as well as using Twitter to update your followers, there is a powerful live search engine there too, so search via the website at http://www.twitter.com/ or download Tweetdeck for free and add a search for each keyword – as long as you have the Tweetdeck application open you’ll receive an on-screen notification and a beep every time there is a new mention of one of your search terms.Remember, this search feature is in real-time – so you can resolve any issues almost instantaneously. How’s that for quick customer service?!

6. Get involved! When something is said about your brand, don’t be shy – leave a reply! If it’s a compliment, a simple ‘thanks for your comments!’ will suffice – if it’s something that needs looking into then it’s best to post a quick reply to confirm that you’re looking into, to make it clear to anybody who visits the page in the meantime that you’re aware of the situation.You don’t need to reply to every single positive or neutral remark though – after all, you don’t want to seem too big-brotherish to your customers!

7. Never Astroturf! This means that you should never respond to a forum thread, blog post or webpage with a comment that suggests that you’re not connected with the business that you’re talking about. When you do respond to something, always be open about who you are and which company you are from.

8. Be professional! It’s easy to slip into being more casual if you’re commenting on something on a social networking site for example, you’re probably not used to being in ‘work-mode’ on Facebook however you must remember that anything that you post will usually be visible to everybody – and furthermore will probably remain on the site for a long time.

9. Listen and learn – by engaging with your customers online you may be able to get feedback on things that otherwise would be unknown to you. That way, as well as resolving problems through social media channels you can also use them as a method of collecting free, live market research.It’s also worth keeping a track of who you to talk to and what you say – for example, perhaps you have a customer database that allows you to enter notes against a customer’s record.

10. And finally, please remember that you’ve got to do these things at regular intervals! Depending on the volume of conversations surrounding your brand, you may only need to set aside fifteen minutes each day to perform the above tasks – a small price to pay for digital peace of mind.

via Greater Manchester Chamber Blog: Top 10 Tips: For Online Reputation Management.

Build relationships with community members by contributing and supporting the community. When you conduct outreach don&apos;t just spend time on your own stuff. This outreach portion is where organizations have a tough time understanding the value. Really it’s about building relationships with people.Content creation is not just about good writing, but really when it involves engagement, good content is focused on being a great conversationalist.

via PR Communications: Balancing Content With Engagement To Create Harmony.

The marketplace for educational tips and tricks is too new to have generated policies or guidelines in most places. In Fairfax County, Va., officials had been studying the issue when they discovered this fall that a former football coach was selling his playbook and instructional DVDs online for $197; they investigated but let him keep selling.

A high school English teacher in upstate New York said her bosses barred her from selling plans used in her classroom; she spoke on the condition that she not be named.

Beyond the unresolved legal questions, there are philosophical ones. Joseph McDonald, a professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University, said the online selling cheapens what teachers do and undermines efforts to build sites where educators freely exchange ideas and lesson plans.

“Teachers swapping ideas with one another, that’s a great thing,” he said. “But somebody asking 75 cents for a word puzzle reduces the power of the learning community and is ultimately destructive to the profession.”

via Selling Lesson Plans Online, Teachers Raise Cash and Questions – NYTimes.com.

Or more importantly, how will people be getting online in 2011?

If you’re planning to get an online business kickstarted, be sure it doesn’t burn out at the starting line. Think long-term strategic brand management, and remember you are growing your presence over time. To remain viable, a site must grow, and the inbound links must grow, each leveraging the other to create a kind of lattice across the net.

Long term online presence. That’s kind of the point!

via What Will 2011 Look Like Online? / Domozych Media.

Conventional wisdom says that you cannot write a book by committee. Charlene Li of Altimeter Group is trying to dispel that idea, to some degree.

As she’s researched and written her forthcoming book Open, Charlene has relied on her blog and Twitter account to collect ideas such as the title of her book. It looks like her approach is to ask very targeted questions (”international examples of ‘open’ organizations and leaders needed”) to meet a need, which I suspect sparks better input than open-ended queries.

Crowdsourcing is nothing new, but I believe thought leaders like Charlene are taking the right approach in reaching out to readers and followers for ideas.

via Superhype » Blog Archive » Crowdsourcing Charlene Li’s new book.

When employees use social media they need to include a disclaimer that makes it clear that their comments don’t necessarily reflect the opinion. By doing so they avoid misrepresenting the company. This can be hard however, given that the company likely lays claim to the intellectual property of the employee. If that’s the case, then actually the employee does represent the company regardless of the disclaimer in place, since all intellectual developments of that employee are owned by the company. How a company resolves that particular paradox is a challenge, as ultimately if they own the intellectual property of the employee then his/her views are representative of the company.

As businesses continue to accept that social media is here to stay they will also need to develop policies that monitor it’s use and represent them actively.

via Imagine Your Reality , Archive » Some commentary on social media policy.

For the past year or so, every new member is screened before they are permitted to join. Every day, myself and a few other Admins, enter every username, IP and email address into a database that tracks forums spammers. If they get past that stage and are welcomed into the Community, and then spam us, their right to post is removed and their information is reported to the database, so that other forums will know in advance a spam predator is in the bushes outside their house.I hate doing it. But, the practice has been a welcome relief to the moderators who are not paid to be there every day and wish only to mingle and make sure the place is meeting the needs of our guests. The Community is at peace and enjoying a spam-free environment. Throwing people out for ignoring House Rules is not a fun duty but it’s vital to the health of the forums.

via Spam Forums at Your Own Risk — Cre8pc Cre8pc Usability & Holistic SEO.

Remember, every search engine is designed to provide the most relevant data to its user, and every search engine is rapidly changing to cope with the overall surge of information being added to the internet every day.Because of this, the algorithms which are kept secret also change. Signals that once influenced search decisions heavily have become less relevant, and over the last few years a couple of trends have emerged. To my mind, the most important rule of thumb is to present unique, relevant content consistently while crediting those other sites which provide interesting insights or commentary on your topic.A corollary to this rule of thumb is that any activity which seems overly manipulative to a search engine, even if it works, will eventually become irrelevant. Before I explain specifically why social media has become such an important factor in future-compatibility for search engine optimization, I want to highlight an example of this irrelevancy which I’ve anticipated for the last year or so, the ‘NoFollow’ tag.

via Social Media Strategy for Your Website and Presence / Domozych Media.

I do understand how people could think of social media as a fad. Something that was going to fade away just like 8tracks, audio cassettes, laser discs, and car phones. I think that people think that way because they are scared of it or really just don’t understand it. They fail to see the power that social media can wield. When it comes down to it, how they can make money with it. For me, it all comes down to straight shootin’. Honest advertising… and how it can help the little guy. How it effects small, local businesses that have always had to go out of their way and spend a bunch of money to get widespread exposure. They have had to take out ad space in a local newspaper or mailer to get it out to their neighbors that they have a really great new pumpkin spice yogurt flavor. (which is awesome by the way. @myofrozenyogurt) They can now use Twitter and Facebook as real weapons for their business. The other side of the coin is that for people like myself who are fiercely loyal to businesses that I love… we can spread their messages with a simple retweet.. or by sharing their link to our friends. It helps everybody in the long run because local business is the key to everything in my mind. When local businesses are doing good then I am feeling good.

So yes, maybe Twitter and Facebook may come and go, but this way of interacting with the world is here to stay.

via …From the Treehouse with the Ocean View: A Fad? What Fad? Social Media is Now …and the Future.

It’s nearly impossible to learn how to use social media tools and techniques in an environment that forgives all missteps, can be wholly reset and leaves no incriminating traces of your mistakes or potentially embarrassing, compromising communication skills after you’re done. The best way to learn how to post to Flickr, to learn the nuances of Twitter and engage in the myriad of online dialogue environments is to actually do it “in production”, as they say, which comes along with a lot of actual or perceived personal and organizational risk. That’s the reason most social media programs and users representing significant companies or governments are usually associated with the “Public Relations” or “Internet Marketing and Social Media” department – these folks are trained and expected to know how to engage in public dialogue, within the bounds of legal, regulatory and policy controls (when available).

Much is being written and discussed online currently regarding the state of Government 2.0, and how we’re quickly reaching an impasse where the ability to become a social media practitioner is simply neither supported nor available to employees working behind government firewalls and Internet usage policies. Social media simply isn’t very social or usable at all, to those for whom it would most benefit. As well, the public forum is missing out on a lot of really good insight and dialogue, because so many employers and employees simply can’t afford the risk, or don’t have the capability to learn, understand and test the risks, that come with posting material online.

via Information Management & Social Media Consulting: Social Media Simulation and Training Environments, by an Internet Media Coach.

The rest of 2009 and 2010 will separate the pack – those organizations that see the changing information environment and realize that it links directly with how they engage customers, partners, and employees will start seeing results after months or years of investment. Others will leave social initiatives on the side and ignore the changing dynamic at their financial peril. The power has shifted. The organization needs to be shaken up. We are just at the beginning of where this shift gets really interesting.

via The Social Organization: It’s the Trough of Disillusionment and So Much More.

All of the major Internet service providers are moving swiftly toward subscriber-level deliverability based on individual engagement. This means that whether or not you have opened or clicked on an email from a company in the past will directly impact whether you will receive that email in your inbox or spam folder in the future.

The argument for personalization, testing, and other relevancy-boosting email considerations has always been that the post-delivery metrics like click-through and conversion rate would improve (and they do). But now, if your emails aren’t interesting and engaging to members of your audience, the subscribers you worked so hard to get will just stop receiving your messages. Poof! You’re off the radar and forgotten faster than the freak voted off Project Runway in week one.

This should scare you. And it should free up some budget and willpower for rigorous testing (especially subject line and time of day), and hard core dynamic content. Maybe even the use of analytics to create emails derived from your subscribers’ Web site behavior.

via What Facebook and Email Stole from Google’s Playbook | Email Marketing Advice | Social Media Consulting – Convince & Convert.

We’re living at a time when attention is the new currency: With hundreds of TV channels, billions of Web sites, podcasts, radio shows, music downloads and social networking, our attention is more fragmented than ever before.Those who insert themselves into as many channels as possible look set to capture the most value. They’ll be the richest, the most successful, the most connected, capable and influential among us. We’re all publishers now, and the more we publish, the more valuable connections we’ll make.

via Privacy is dead, and social media hold smoking gun – CNN.com.

But it’s interesting to see Google offering tips about how to “get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don’t want them to see.” Reputation management can sometimes be a hot-button issue — some people believe it’s unethical to create and optimize content for the express purpose of pushing negative content out of sight. Google’s endorsing it in today’s blog post, and offering suggestions for how to make it happen.I also suspect, from reading the blog post, that Google is trying to do some pre-emptive customer service here. You can imagine the amount of emails and perhaps phone calls Google gets from people who are upset about what they see when they Google themselves. The blog post basically says, Would you stop asking us to clean up the search results mess you don’t like?

via Google Endorses Reputation Management, Says Stop Asking Them To Remove Content.

Jonathan did not start the group, but joined it a day after it was started because he dislikes the changes. Poking around on the page, he noticed that the group had no administrator, the person who configures the page, allows posts, and makes rules for the group.Believing in the cause – and perhaps sensing an opportunity – “I clicked a button to make myself the admin, and that was it,” he says.Since then he has been inundated with messages and friend requests from around the world.

via Eighth-grader leading Facebook revolt – Entertainment Wire – The Olympian – Olympia, Washington.

To date the KnowEm team has helped to reserve over 100,000 profiles and reported back to some of our clients over 20,000 issues of squatting and misrepresentation of a brand, username or trademarked term. This is all done with local employees in New Jersey; we are proud to be a company fully staffed in the United States with absolutely no dependance on outsourcing.

Since April of 2009 KnowEm has been tracking and monitoring hundreds of social media networks populated mostly with user-generated content. Our database of these sites is updated daily as new sites are released and our staff reviews them for quality. We track multiple metrics on these sites to determine which networks are gaining (or losing) traction in the social media landscape. By using and storing these metrics we watch for patterns and spikes in traffic and popularity.

KnowEm also constantly updates and adds new sites to our vast database of social sites. The next Facebook, Twitter or MySpace is already out there or could be coming soon – do you know which one it will be? KnowEm offers a subscription service (Brand Protection Program) to ensure that you and your brand will not have to worry about it. As new sites emerge we will make sure that your flag is already planted and you will not have to worry about dealing with a squatter or someone who is misrepresenting your social media identity.

via About Knowem, LLC.

The assumption at all of these events is the same: real-time is where we’re heading; real time is good. Newspapers were good, cable news was great, blogs were better, instant attention bursts are best.

Hmmmm.

This week, the Christian Science Monitor reported that American judges are having to remind jurors that they’re not allowed to tweet from the jury room. I shit you not. In February, a juror in the trial of an Arkansas lumber supplier tweeted – during deliberations – his opinion that the defendant’s company will “probably cease to exist, now that their wallet is 12m lighter.” Meanwhile in Philadelphia, a juror posted daily updates from the courtroom including – and this is awesome – on the eve of their verdict: “stay in touch for a big announcement on Monday everyone.”

via NSFW: Weezer, plane crashes and everything else that’s worrying about the real-time web.

The prevailing paradigm in Internet privacy literature, treating privacy within a context merely of rights and violations, is inadequate for studying the Internet as a social realm. Following Goffman on self-presentation and Altman’s theorizing of privacy as an optimization between competing pressures for disclosure and withdrawal, the author investigates the mechanisms used by a sample (n = 704) of college students, the vast majority users of Facebook and Myspace, to negotiate boundaries between public and private. Findings show little to no relationship between online privacy concerns and information disclosure on online social network sites. Students manage unwanted audience concerns by adjusting profile visibility and using nicknames but not by restricting the information within the profile. Mechanisms analogous to boundary regulation in physical space, such as walls, locks, and doors, are favored; little adaptation is made to the Internet’s key features of persistence, searchability, and cross-indexability. The author also finds significant racial and gender differences.

via Can You See Me Now? Audience and Disclosure Regulation in Online Social Network Sites — Tufekci 28 (1): 20 — Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society.

Tac Anderson calls this ‘Being a Social Media Ninja’ and his blog post explains how he set up this very same approach for Microsoft Store, although he relies on Posterous as the primary lifestream hub for Microsoft rather than a private wordpress install. What’s most important, though, is that you find a way to approach a lifestream that is best for you and that incorporates the keyword phrases, the social media, and the organic reputation structure you want to associate yourself, your company, and your brand with over time.

Online social optimization is something I’ve been studying for years, beginning with a grounding in early social issues that arose from email and chat rooms and progressing into a life-long study of memetics and belief patterns in social bodies that form both online and off. Socially optimized behaviors manifest in many, many different ways. Today’s digitally enhanced social body can perform intricate social action with a remarkably low-level entry point into the group’s organizing network.

via Online Social Optimization and Lifestream Toolsets / Domozych Media.

New Media students are on the verge of an exciting and evolving field of study. With topics ranging from social networking to innovative art forms to gaming to Internet policy and politics falling under this umbrella, there is plenty for students to learn about and stay connected with. Adding these blogs to your favorite reader will help you keep current on all that is happening in the world of New Media.

Technorati Tags: new media, social media, optimization

2. You should have a couple hundred followers before toying with http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/

3. You should have an installed wordpress blog on your own server before using http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fresh-from-friendfeed-and-twitter/

4. You should utilize and donate time and money to http://twitter.pbworks.com/ on a regular and frequent basis… and lastly, perhaps most important of all:

5. You should tie all your twitter account rss feeds through http://feedburner.google.com and rely on Twitter to become a part of your larger web presence cloud.