Healthy Blog Reviews

Don’t think that just because Facebook has managed to not completely trample people’s privacy as of late that there is not more activity around the subject. In fact, forces in Washington, this time the FTC (Federal Trade Commission), are speaking at ‘hearings’ that are looking into this issue right now with talk of a “do not track” list. This is not the first time the subject has been raised (2007 it got some attention) but in light of recent online privacy ‘dust-ups’, this idea may have a real chance to develop. MediaPost reports The Federal Trade Commission is considering proposing a do-not-track mechanism that would allow consumers to easily opt out of all behavioral targeting, chairman Jon Leibowitz told lawmakers on Tuesday. Testifying at a hearing about online privacy, Leibowitz said the FTC is exploring the feasibility of a browser plug-in that would store users’ targeting preferences. He added that either the FTC or a private group could run the system. I have to admit that “do not call” list for telemarketers has made life better for me at least, although I am seeing more and more attempts to ‘get around’ that mechanism as of late. I am not sure what would happen as a result of a “do not track” list but many consumers may find it interesting just because of their experience with its offline cousin. This is not the kind of talk that the advertising industry wants to hear though, so expect a fight especially if the oversight of any kind of list is left up to the FTC. In fact, the advertising industry is starting to show plenty of signs of the need to ‘self-police’ to keep these kinds of talks and options out of the public forum. The FTC chairman also noted that he was in favor of an opt-in mentality rather than the existing opt-out and that idea has considerable support from others in power. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) both expressed concern that privacy policies weren’t giving Web users enough useful information about online ad practices. Rockefeller proposed that some companies were burying too much information in lengthy documents that consumers don’t read. “Some would say the fine print is there and it’s not our fault you didn’t read it,” he said, adding, “I say, that’s a 19th-century mentality.” Kerry added that he didn’t know that consumers understood how companies use data. “I’m not sure that there’s knowledge in the caveat emptor component of this,” he said. Wow, Sen. Rockefeller just tossed the advertising business so far into the past regarding their practices that the 20th century was ignored. I guess he made his point. So where do you stand on the possibility of a “do not track” list? Is this something that could hurt the online advertising industry or is it just a way for politicians to say that they are doing something about online privacy?

Tags: advertising, either-the-ftc, experience, facebook, feasibility, federal-trade, hurt-the-online, online, oversight, possibility, subject, the-advertising, the-possibility, time
Posted July 28, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

As the definition of a journalist gets stretched to the outer limits due to the proliferation of content farms and $10 per ‘article’ writers, it’s understandable that there is some concern in the ranks. It’s not there won’t be outlets for their work but it’s more about the state of the traditional outlets where most have made their living. Mashable reports on a recent survey which reveal these concerns In a survey conducted over May and June this year, PR network Oriella asked media moguls how the Internet was affecting their business, their publishing formats and even the quality of the content issuing forth from their newsrooms. In a survey of 770 journalists across 15 countries, the company determined that, while media creators are slightly more optimistic than they were last year about maintaining revenues vis-a-vis the rise of online ad budgets, many are still worried about whether traditional media formats can succeed in the long run. “Concerns about the viability of journalists’ traditional media channels (print, radio or television) have intensified,” the report reads. Of course, loss of advertising dollars leads the way for concern about viability of traditional media offerings. Since more and more people are moving online for their news, there will be fewer dollars available from advertisers who can support the kind of staffs that these outlets traditionally require. Since most people can see the chain reaction of these concerns the next obvious worry is if their traditional offline mediums will survive or just go away (if that hasn’t happened already). In the end, there may be no stopping these sweeping changes. Many act as if it’s the fault of the traditional media themselves but it’s really just people changing and moving to where they are more comfortable. Online is that place and not’s because the traditional media was bad. Where the trouble has come is the slow pace of adaption by traditional media of the online space. In essence, they have created their own troubles by waiting too long and having to react to this paradigm shift rather than help mold it. Traditional media, for the most part, missed a golden opportunity. Why did they miss it? I think it was because they were getting fat and happy by being unchallenged at the top of the media heap for too long. At that point you can lose your edge. They have simply lost their edge. With businesses being run by human beings this will happen. Most people want to go into cruise control when things are going well but they unfortunately lose focus at that point and are vulnerable to being replaced. Since I am part of the ‘new media’ side of the coin it’s easy to lob criticism at the traditional side of the media. The trouble with that is that I then become no better and could very well suffer the same consequences. For new media to really thrive we have to stay on top of the issues that face our industry as well. The primary one that I see is maintaining a high level of quality. With content farms churning out content that is more of a crapshoot with regards to quality this can end up being trouble. If enough readers and content consumers get burned they will look elsewhere for information. Delivery methods may change but quality never goes out of style. Right now, the online publishing world needs to be very vigilant regarding the state of the quality of content. There’s plenty of talk but little action and as the content farm mentality gains momentum the window of opportunity to take this problem by the horns is closing very rapidly. Could the online space suffer a similar fate to the offline space? Could the proliferation of lower quality content create enough discontent amongst content consumers that they will look elsewhere? Of course, where are they going to look, back to the offline space? Not necessarily but they may have less patience thus making it hard for even online entities to keep advertisers interested. So what’s your take?

Tags: content, definition, news, Offline, online, proliferation, quality, state, traditional, work
Posted July 24, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

I had to do a double take this morning when I read about the plight of reddit, one of the original social news websites. Apparently things aren’t so good over at the Internet property. It’sso bad that they have started to ask for donations to keep the site afloat. I bet you that their owner, Conde Nast, must be so proud. eConsultancy reports Making money online isn’t always easy, especially when you run an ad-supported business. And that’s not just true for the small fries; it can be even more true for popular, heavily-trafficked sites. That’s the case for reddit, the popular user-generated news site. It was purchased by Conde Nast Digital in 2006, but a blog post last Friday indicates that all is not well at reddit. That post reads We’ve been kinda bummed at reddit these days. It seems like every week something comes up that slows performance to a crawl or even leads to a total site outage. And we almost never get a chance to release new features anymore. Our four engineers — KeyserSosa, jedberg, ketralnis, and myself — are working full time (plus many evenings and weekends and sometimes even the middle of the night) just to keep things going. Perhaps we’re doing it wrong: there might be ways to optimize our code, or technologies that could allow us to work more efficiently, but we’re too busy to investigate these things, or to migrate to the ones that look promising. It becomes a vicious cycle. The bottom line is, we need more resources. Whenever this topic comes up on the site, someone always posts a comment about how reddit is owned by Conde Nast, a billion-dollar corporation like Time Warner or Cobra, and how if they wanted to they could hire a thousand engineers and purchase a million dollars worth of heavy iron. But here’s the thing: corporations aren’t run like charities. They keep separate budgets for each business line, and usually allocate resources proportionate to revenue. And reddit’s revenue isn’t great. Essentially the rest of the post is painting a grim picture of where reddit stands and it ain’t pretty. So how do they intend to solve this ‘revenue isn’t great’ problem? By asking their users to become reddit ‘subscribers’. That would make sense in a world where it is understood that in order to survive any company needs to generate revenue. Apparently the folks at reddit live in the ‘free Internet’ alternate universe thus this apologetic request for their visitors’ subscription help moving forward. We’ve been trying to get this out the door for some time, but it always got held up because we wanted to write some cool subscriber-only features first, like the ability to sort your profile page by score, or have more than 50 reddit communities on your front page, or a button you could press to smack someone in the face over the Internet. We now realize that we’re going to have to put the cart before the horse: in exchange for subscribing to reddit, we can right now only offer you our undying gratitude and an optional trophy on your userpage. It’s kind of a lame offer, we know, but if the program is a success, we’ll be able to give subscribers better incentives in the coming months. We invite you to post ideas in the comments section; in the meantime, I suppose it’s more or less a pledge drive. Unfortunately, it doesn’t wrap up any better. As long as we’re going to be taking suggestions and money from you guys, we might as well also take the name you came up with: this new program will be called “reddit gold”. How much would you pay for this wonderful opportunity? $10? $30? $∞? No, seriously, how much would you pay? We have no idea what we should be charging. So for now, we’re just going to let you pay whatever you want. Geesh, this is just, well, pathetic. I don’t wish any ill will on reddit but I do wish a few classes in business practice and common sense. Can you imagine how the folks at Conde Nast are looking at this plea from one of their business units? Business ain’t so great for Conde Nast overall but I don’t foresee a pledge drive anytime soon to help the bottom line. Am I being too hard on this or does this really appear to be one of the weirdest moves in recent history by a site that has some real power in the online space? What’s your take? Oh and by the way, if you are looking to help out reddit don’t forget ol’ Frank here …….. . (Hey, I had to ask.)

Tags: Business, code, Conde, conde-nast, digital, folks, internet, night, online, Social
Posted July 12, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

The Tribune Company is struggling to pull itself out of bankruptcy proceedings but it continues to try to move its business forward by becoming the latest publishing company to turn agency. This type of move by larger publishers is becoming more commonplace these days as they scramble to re-invent themselves in light of the digital ‘revolution’ that has kicked many in the tail pretty hard. paidContent reports With ad dollars for magazines and newspapers continuing to shrink, publishers like Meredith and Gannett have expanded the purview of their digital ad sales teams to include digital marketing services offerings outside of the content they produce. Tribune Company is the latest entrant into the interactive marketing space. The publisher, still struggling through its interminable bankruptcy proceedings, has formed a new interactive marketing consultancy called 435 Digital Services. Named for Tribune’s Chicago street address, the project will shift a small number of current ad sales staffers into the new 10-person unit, as well as making a few new hires, according to a piece in Crain’s Chicago Business . Newspapers are under attack from all fronts which include the general move to online consumption of content, the rise of classified ad killer Craigslist and the challenge of smaller, more nimble hyperlocal blogs. Honestly, it’s hard to imagine how these companies including Meredith and Hearst (who purchased iCrossing recently) are going to pull this off. Even traditional advertising agencies were slow to truly pick up on digital offerings and are playing catch up. Add to the fact that everyone knows the troubles that the newspaper industry is having and it’s tough to see how even a small to medium business, or SMB, would trust their marketing to a newspaper entity. Of course, what companies think they can charge the SMB for such services will play a very large role in their level of success. No matter what the politicians say, the economy for the smaller players is still very bad and the fears of getting worse are getting more play these days. As a result, SMB’s won’t pay top dollar for services that many tell them they can do by themselves. Whether that is good advice to the SMB is irrelevant because many use it as a shield to keep service providers at bay. So this move to be all things to all businesses is interesting. Interesting in a way that it could very well be too little too late. It also looks like a move born more out of desperation rather than something that was part of a bigger business plan to succeed in the online space. Heck, if any of these companies had been actually planning for the new digital world order they wouldn’t be where they are now anyway. So would you trust your marketing services to a newspaper or magazine publisher who just put on another hat to attract your business?

Tags: Business, charge-the-smb, Chicago, craigslist, digital, include-digital, interactive, latest, marketing, online, politicians, project, these-companies, well-as-making
Posted July 7, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Assuming we are granted seeing the next 10 years unfold, how will the Internet impact your life and in particular your social interactions? According to ‘experts’ (overused and often undeserved title alert!) a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project , life is gonna be good because of the social web. Honestly, since most of these folks probably depend on the Internet to make a living are they going to say anything else? The study revealed The social benefits of internet use will far outweigh the negatives over the next decade, according to experts. They say this is because email, social networks, and other online tools offer “low friction” opportunities to create, enhance, and rediscover social ties that make a difference in people’s lives. The internet lowers traditional communications constraints of cost, geography, and time; and it supports the type of open information sharing that brings people together. While they acknowledge that use of the internet as a tool for communications can yield both positive and negative effects, a significant majority of technology experts and stakeholders participating in the fourth Future of the Internet survey say it improves social relations and will continue to do so through 2020. For me I can’t tell what’s going to happen because how this all looks in 10 years will likely be very different and we have yet to feel the actual impact of the social web on life as we know it. We are experiencing it as a group for the first time over the past 5 years on a much larger scale and really everyone is just getting their feet wet at this point. It’s too early in the game to tell if what has happened is actually good or bad. Right now it just ‘is’. One piece of terminology I found interesting is the idea of “low friction” opportunities. To me this implies a more ‘surfacey’ interaction and it rings a little hollow. I say that in a cautionary manner because it looks like we are quickly diluting what true interaction is as evidenced by “online activism” that simply requires someone to like something or join an online group to check off that they ‘did something’ about a matter of importance. Imagine if millions of people checked a box in support of a great cause and let it go at that. No matter what the issue people need to get their hands dirty to really enact change. “Low friction” interactions don’t seem to create that urgency. Just my opinion, of course. So let’s continue Pew’s work and chime in as to how you see the new world social interaction impacting your life over the next ten years. What might it look like? Will it be good or otherwise?

Tags: feel-the-actual, game, internet, life, online, opinion, project, really-everyone, simply-requires, Social
Posted July 5, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media