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A Letter To Facebook From The Rest Of The World

Written on August 31, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book

Dear Facebook,
A couple of weeks ago you launched your new location service, Places. We all think it’s great and are really excited that you’re opening up the world of location to a whole new audience. We can’t wait to start finding new and exciting ways of using Places to connect consumers and brands. But we [...]



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A Letter To Facebook From The Rest Of The World

Cup of Joe: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is or Shut Up!

Written on August 28, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

On Monday, we posted a piece about Philadelphia’s new Business Privilege Tax. In short the city now wants to tax bloggers whether they are making an income with their blog or not. It appears to be another case of a misguided municipality looking to bring in new revenue streams.

As expected, most bloggers are angered by this new tax. I don’t live in Philadelphia and I try my hardest to not complain about taxes. Therefore, I want to ask a much more important question:

Should blogging be free?

Nowadays, anyone with an Internet connection can sign up and get a free blog. That’s right anyone can have a free platform to share their thoughts and ideas with the world! It sounds pretty amazing doesn’t it? But what I want to know is, should it be free? Should users have to pay to blog? In short my answer is:

Blogs, and blogging shouldn’t be free. Period.

Before I begin telling you why I don’t think blogging should be free, let me add a little disclaimer. I make a living off of folks that choose to pay for blogging. The company that I own can and does create many different types of web applications. But, the vast majority of our work is focused on developing custom WordPress installations. So for me and many other professional blog developers it’s a slap in the face to see folks go around claiming that anyone can build a business with free tools. When businesses and entrepreneurs tout the “free model” they are effectively saying, “Don’t hire Joe Hall, because let’s face it, you can get it all for free.” In short free blogging can and does have real negative business implications for professional developers.

But, this issue isn’t about me, it’s about you! It’s about how much you value your ideas and what you are willing to do, to make sure they are heard. You see, before the Internet, individuals had to make huge sacrifices to get the same type of coverage that anyone with a free blog can get today.

For example during the civil rights movement, folks were willing to put their life on the line to get the media’s attention. Even to this day, there are billions of people that do not have access to the Internet or free blogging. I wonder what they would be willing to sacrifice for a free platform.

Those of us that can blog for free have become lazy and irresponsible. Mostly because we haven’t had to sacrifice anything to have our platform. The barrier for entry into blogging is nearly non existent for most of us in the first world. When you are forced to make an investment in an activity you are less likely to take it for granted.

If you aren’t willing to invest in your own ideas, then you have no right to share them. It’s your responsibility to pay for the cost and repercussions of your own ideas, it’s part of existing in a civil society. When you use free blogging services, someone else is paying to support your ideas. Someone else is letting you have a free platform at their expense. Datacenters and system administrators don’t work for free.

I have a friend who recently started a personal blog. She is paying for hosting, and a professional custom theme. She values her own ideas enough to pay to make sure that their delivery is flawless. Is she the best blogger in the world? Will her blog be popular? Who knows. But, the point is that she cares enough about what she has to say that shes putting her money where her mouth is.

So, how much should blogging cost? That’s a tough question. Honestly, I am not sure. How much do you think your ideas are worth? How much would you be willing to pay if free blogging didn’t exist? Should you pay for blogging with money? Or how about time? I wouldn’t mind seeing a blogging service that provides professional blogs for users that commit to 4 or 5 hours of volunteer work a month. Sure, it might not pay the hosting fees, but at least it would encourage a selfless sacrifice.

In the end how can you truly place value on your ideas if you don’t have to work or invest to spread them? Anyone can stand on their soapbox and yell, few can climb a mountain and sing.

PS: Feel free to leave comments below! However, I won’t be around to answer them til Monday.
[photo credit]

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Cup of Joe: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is or Shut Up!

SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 25, 2010

Written on August 25, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
From Search Engine Land:

Inside The Google Voice Phone Booths
Over the coming weeks, UK-style phone booths will pop-up around the US in airports and at universities, allowing anyone to make free calls to anywhere in the world. [...]



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SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 25, 2010

Inside The Google Voice Phone Booths

Written on August 25, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

Over the coming weeks, UK-style phone booths will pop-up around the US in airports and at universities, allowing anyone to make free calls to anywhere in the world. The promotion is designed to spread awareness of the Google Voice service. Below, a look inside the booth, including a video of it in action.
Google’s actually had [...]



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Inside The Google Voice Phone Booths

Inside The Google Voice Phone Booths

Written on August 25, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

Over the coming weeks, UK-style phone booths will pop-up around the US in airports and at universities, allowing anyone to make free calls to anywhere in the world. The promotion is designed to spread awareness of the Google Voice service. Below, a look inside the booth, including a video of it in action.
Google’s actually had [...]



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Inside The Google Voice Phone Booths

Google Finance Gets Mobile Makeover

Written on August 25, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Each time I find out about how Google is making strides in turning many of their popular services into a usable mobile form I am reminded of just how far mobile has to go. Honestly, I am naïve enough to think that a company like Google would already have done something long ago with an important feature like Google Finance to make it a mobile standard. Guess I was wrong. If Google is playing “catch-up” then just how far behind is the rest of the world?

From the Google Mobile blog (which was from a cross post from the Google Finance blog which brings up the point that it is a part time job trying to keep up with all the blogs Google has but anyway)

Here on the Google Finance team, we’re always looking for new ways to help you access the finance data, charts, and reports that you need in the blink of an eye. But all the data in the world won’t help if you can’t access it when you need it most. Since many of us are on the run throughout the day and don’t always have our computers in front of us, it came as no surprise that one of users’ most frequently requested features was a fast, easy-to-use mobile website for Google Finance.

We heard your feedback and are please to announce we’ve launched the new Android/iPhone edition of Google Finance for mobile! The markets don’t stop when you leave your desk, so we’re bringing the markets to you. Our new design gives you a unified experience across desktop and Android or iPhone phones, offering nearly all the same features and functionality on both. You can easily access the new site when you do a Google search for stock tickers or company names on your mobile device, or when you tap the “Finance” tab on the Google mobile homepage.

For full disclosure (since finance types are supposed to do that right?) I am not a high finance guy. However, if I was I would be surprised that Google is just now paying more attention to turning something as time sensitive as financial dealings into a more usable mobile form that helps people to effectively use the tool while on the go.

Here’s what it looks like

So what’s the marketing angle here? It’s pretty simple. You need to get your mobile strategy in order. If Google is seeing just how important this is do you think you might want to take the hint?

Now for some Google gamesmanship. If you would prefer to have this in an app it is only available for Android devices. Go figure, right?

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Google Finance Gets Mobile Makeover

Philly Is Not the “City of Blogger-ly Love”

Written on August 23, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Imagine you live in Philadelphia and you have a blog. You are like about 99.9 percent of the world’s bloggers so you make no money and the blog is a labor of love.

Now imagine that you are going to be charged $300 for the privilege of having your blog start from the City of Brotherly Love. Yup, that’s right, Philly is hitting bloggers with a this and other measures. If you haven’t had enough of the government on every level getting into everyone’s business this may put you over the top.

This comes from NBC Philadelphia’s web site:

Taking a step closer to an eerie Orwellian state where creativity is crushed in the name of “the greater good,” the city of Philadelphia is demanding that bloggers pay $300 for the privilege of writing on the Internet.

This $300 “business privilege license” is for all local bloggers – even the ones that make no money off their words.

The city doesn’t stop there. In addition to the $300 for the license to write on the World Wide Web, bloggers must pay city wage taxes, business privilege taxes and taxes on any net profits — on top of state and federal taxes — even if the blogger only made $11 over two years, reports the City Paper.

Blogger Marilyn Bess, whose Ms. Philly Organic Blog has made her a whopping $50 over the past few years, went to the city’s tax amnesty program to explain that she makes pennies on her hobby. They told her to hire an accountant, she told the City Paper.

I know of more than a few bloggers that call Philadelphia home and I wonder what they are thinking about this approach.

I just want to go on record as saying that this is completely ridiculous. I get that things are bad. I get that the government provides services (how well they provide them is a completely different matter for a different place). I get that it takes money to do things but taking this action?

My hope is that other regions are not as desperate or ignorant to do this as well. Although I live in North Carolina where our governor thought it was a great idea to tax all Amazon affiliate sales in the state and Amazon basically said “Screw you!”. That eseentially closed that door on people who were just trying to bring more money into the state that would be spent in the state.

What is your take on this action by the city of Philadelphia? I think you already know mine.

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Philly Is Not the “City of Blogger-ly Love”

Your Favorite Eric Schmidt Quotes?

Written on August 22, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

Do you want Google to tell you what you should be doing? Mr. Schmidt thinks so:

“More and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type. I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next. … serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically.”

Of course the problem with algorithms is they rely on prior experience to guide you. The won’t tell you to do something unique & original that can change the world, rather they will lead you down a well worn path.

What are some of the most bland and most well worn paths in the world? Established brands:

The internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.

“Brands are the solution, not the problem,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

“Brand affinity is clearly hard wired,” he said. “It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”

If Google is so smart then why the lazy reliance on brand? Why not show me something unique & original & world-changing?

Does brand affinity actually have a hard wired genetic component? Or is it that computers are stupid & brands have many obvious signals associated with them: one of which typically being a large ad budget. And why has Google’s leading search engineer complained about the problem of “brand recognition” recently?

While Google is collecting your data and selling it off to marketers, they have also thought of other ways to monetize that data and deliver serendipity:

“One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try and predict the stock market…” Eric Schmidt continues, “and then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.”

Any guess how that product might have added value to the world? On down days (or days when you search for “debt help”) would Google deliver more negatively biased ads & play off fears more, while on up days selling more euphoric ads? Might that serendipity put you on the wrong side of almost every trade you make? After all, that is how the big names in that space make money - telling you to take the losing side of a trade with bogus “research.”

Eric Schmidt asks who you would rather give access to this data:

“All this information that you have about us: where does it go? Who has access to that?” (Google servers and Google employees, under careful rules, Schmidt said.) “Does that scare everyone in this room?” The questioner asked, to applause. “Would you prefer someone else?” Schmidt shot back – to laughter and even greater applause. “Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?”

That exchange helped John Gruber give Eric Schmidt the label Creep Executive Officer, while asking: “Maybe the question isn’t who should hold this information, but rather should anyone hold this information.”

But Google has a moral conscience. They think quality score (AKA bid rigging) is illegal, except for when they are the ones doing it!

“I think judgement matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” - Eric Schmidt

Which is why the blog of a certain mistress disappeared from the web. And, of course, since this post is on a blog, it doesn’t matter:

If you’re ever confused as to the value of newspaper editors, look at the blog world. That’s all you need to see. - Eric Schmdit

Here is the thing I don’t get about Google’s rhetorical position on serendipity & moral authority: if they are to be trusted to recommend what you do, then why do they recommend illegal activities like pirating copyright works via warez, keygens, cracks & torrents?

Serendipity ho!

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Your Favorite Eric Schmidt Quotes?

Twitter Sees Triple-Digit Growth Outside North America

Written on August 11, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

Twitter usage is growing rapidly around the world, with most regions experiencing triple-digit growth between June 2009 and June 2010. That’s according to a new comScore report out today.
Nearly 93 million Internet users worldwide visited Twitter.com in June, comScore says — that’s up 109% over the previous June. The growth was even more dramatic in [...]



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Twitter Sees Triple-Digit Growth Outside North America

Twitter Building Dedicated Data Center

Written on July 22, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing

Twitter is preparing to move to a dedicated data center by the end of this year. If it allows for Twitter to be more stable then this can’t happen soon enough. Why should marketers concern themselves with this kind of information? It’s pretty simple. If the Twitter platform cannot be relied on to be consistently up and reliable then it is much harder to have valuable resources dedicated to efforts using Twitter. If you think companies are skittish now about whether Twitter is the “way to go” these recent technological missteps are not helping to ease that pain.

TechCrunch reports

As you may have noticed, Twitter has had some reliability issues over the past few months. Part of this was related to the World Cup, part of it is because they just continue to grow at a fast pace — 300,000 new accounts are created a day now. It has gotten to the point where Twitter needs their own warehouse for tweet storage. So they’re building one, in Salt Lake City.

While it undoubtedly won’t be as large as Apple’s forthcoming billion-dollar data center in North Carolina, Twitter says they have been working on a “custom-built” one that will be opening later this year.

These troubles have been difficult for the many third party developers and service providers who are dependent on the Twitter ecosystem for their own survival as well. Right now, no one is really very happy with Twitter’s performance and the excuses of event overload or anything else will likely have less credibility moving forward if Twitter truly wants to be counted amongst the Googles and Facebooks of the world. Of course, Google’s network of data centers is well known and Facebook announced earlier this year that they were going the private data center route as well. Having said that even now, I don’t ever experience issues with Facebook’s availability and rarely if ever with Google (unless you count their sometimes dog slow e-mail service).

The Twitter engineering blog tries to give a picture of how this will help Twitter and everyone associated with it moving forward.

First, Twitter’s user base has continued to grow steadily in 2010, with over 300,000 people a day signing up for new accounts on an average day. Keeping pace with these users and their Twitter activity presents some unique and complex engineering challenges (as John Adams, our lead engineer for application services, noted in a speech last month at the O’Reilly Velocity conference). Having dedicated data centers will give us more capacity to accommodate this growth in users and activity on Twitter.

Second, Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs. Twitter will be able to define and manage to a finer grained SLA on the service as we are managing and monitoring at all layers. The data center will house a mixed-vendor environment for servers running open source OS and applications.

So hang in there folks, Twitter is trying hard. Unfortunately, while I believe that they are doing the best they can it will not be enough for a our world of “What have you done for me lately?” Right now, people aren’t very happy with Twitter and as they say in baseball “You’re only as good as your last at bat”. If Twitter keeps striking out that will not help the cause one bit.

Here’s to less Fail Whale appearances and some semblance of stability for Twitter in the future.

Your thoughts?

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Twitter Building Dedicated Data Center