In a season where teen vampires are all the rage, can a drama following a real-life band of teen burglars looting celebrities be far behind? (For Halloween, I’ll be dressed as them!)

The Net was their accomplice. The teens tracked the movements of stars such as Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and broke into their houses, making off with millions of dollars in stolen possessions in a spree that lasted almost a year.

Police said the teens scoured celebrity blogs and Web sites, looking for valuables, and then used the Internet to find where the stars lived. In fact, thanks to our tabloid world, it was easy to develop a list of designer clothes and jewelry, then raided the homes while celebrities were away.

“They thought it was fun, kind of an adrenaline rush,”
- Los Angeles police officer Brett Goodkin.

It’s like Sugar and Spice meets Ocean’s Eleven, with a dash of The Babysitters Club’s entrepreneurial spirit and a soupçon of Robin Hood. Except that it actually happened.

Considering the world’s appetite for semi-true teen tales of real events that sound too crazy to be legit, just hope the accused have good lawyers: both for any criminal charges, and to sell their life rights.

Of course, when they get out of prison they can write a tell-all books; someone will make a TV series out of it, they’ll get rich, and enterprising hooligans can steal their swag.  And so continues the circle of life….cue Elton John.

For more coverage, tune in to TMZ.

How can you determine the size of a blog or website’s traffic? Finding reliable website competitive intelligence benchmarks is hugely important, and a real challenge on the web. Too often people buy-in to bogus measures.

There is perhaps a false hope to find that big “standings board” similar to major league baseball.  After all, standings are fair and transparent; anyone can tally with wins and losses and see who is in first place. And there are performance stats (ERA’s and batting averages) which correlate strongly to wins.

So is there a big scoreboard for comparing your site;s traffic to competitors, and knowing who is in first place in your “division”? If your competitors are on the big paid tracking services, perhaps. But most blogs and sites are not, and most site owners don’t subscribe to Comscore.

There are lots of external competitive measures available, but do any of them really correlate to level of traffic? Some objective research suggests that free metrics are not strong predictors of traffic levels.

SEOmoz, Danny Sullivan (of SES fame) and Matt Cutts (Google) got behind research to compare external measures (such as Alexa and Google rank) with the actual traffic levels across dozens of competitive sites.  Their conclusion – there is only a low correlation between these external measures and actual site traffic.

Continued

The InformationWeek cover story had two elements. First was the illustration, which featured a compass with Windows 7 at true North, the headline “Winevitable,” and the question of how you will get there.

That’s the kind of positioning money just can’t buy. Imagine producing software whose inevitability is proclaimed on the editorial cover of magazines.

The second feature I noticed was the listing of the Government CIO 50. This made me think of Massachusetts’ then-CIO, Peter Quinn, who didn’t think Windows was inevitable.

Back in 2005, he set a course to take take the state off most licensed software.

• Step 1: Firefox, not IE.
• Step 2: Any software built for the state is made so it can be released as open source and traded or built on by other states.
• Step 3: Use standard open-source applications instead of the Miscrosoft Office suite.

Things were proceeding well.  Massachusetts was forward-looking, saving money, and leveraging the efforts of others.

Then two things happened.

1. His boss, Governor Mitt Romney decided to run for President. Imagine what funding Microsoft would put forward to prevent the first open-source-state elected President. After all, if government could stop paying for licensed software, what business or personal users would follow?
2. A story was planted in the Boston Globe. It reported concerns that Mr. Quinn had improperly accepted travel to open source conferences. The story was later proven to be untrue, but it was enough to show that the pressure to resign as CIO would be intense.

It was the shot heard ’round the e-government world. CIOs got the message loud and clear. Your boss doesn’t want Microsoft as an enemy, and neither do you. Microsoft will claim that open source reduces compatibility, and makes government more expensive. And they’ll fight fiercely to weed such initiatives out, by weeding you out.

And so Microsoft’s winevitability grew unchecked.

This week, Microsoft issued its largest patch ever for 34 new vulnerabilities. The inevitable apparently still needs some work.

I’ve written about “Brand Obama” previously; now, here’s a huge installment. RISD grad Aaron Perry-Zucker hoisted a website called Design for Obama, where artists up- and downloaded Obama poster designs during and after the election.

The hundreds of submissions (including “Did The Right Thing,” sent by Don Button days after the election) caught the attention of filmmaker Spike Lee. Lee got involved in publishing a book of 200 designs, selected and edited by Aaron and Spike.

Design for Obama: Posters for Change/A Grassroots Anthology is set for release November 4, 2009, on the year anniversary of President Obama’s historic victory.

“Give me your superhumans, your technological geniuses, your mutated masses yearning to fight crime.”

What geek can resist a blog dedicated to considering how US laws would be applied to superheros? After all, Superman is an non-documented immigrant. But wouldn’t his marriage to Lois Lane naturalize him?

What part of tort law would bad guys use to sue Batman for abridging their rights as a vigilante? And wouldn’t getting naked in a phone booth be a potential legal exposure too, even in Metropolis? Such are the considerations of Superhero Law.

A personal favorite of mine is superheroes as potential personal injury litigants:

So many superheroes start their crime fighting careers as accident prone individuals who fall victim to an industrial waste spill or a top-secret experiment gone awry. These accidents could lead to more than just superhuman abilities as toxic torts could mean big bucks for our heroes.

It’s official: Superhero Law is my favorite new website!

If you like it too, remember you heard about it on here on on good ol’ UsefulArts.US.

Okay, though he used a little more nuance, that’s the essence of what Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon’s CEO, said loud and clear in recent comments at Goldman Sachs.

The issue there is perhaps it is like the dog chasing the bus a little bit. So what I need to do is get ourselves focused around the following idea, that video is going to be the core product in the fixed line business. … I shed myself of the burden of chasing the inflection point in access lines and say I don’t care about that anymore.”

Translation: voice is dead to me. POTS (plain old telephone service) is no longer the bread and butter of Verizon.

A decade ago, this wasn’t the case. Verizon (and before them NYNEX) fought desperately to keep customers from migrating to DSL and optical services, by making sure that T1-lines (which are based on POTS service) were the only built-out infrastructure in their system.

From 1999 to 2002, I helped put several million dollars of investment into building out non-POTS services on the Verizon network. This was the Massachusetts Community Network, which Verizon resisted as if their business model depended on it. Their staff and VARs frequently said “the investment in POTS wasn’t fully capitalized, and that it couldn’t be abandoned for new products without returning on its investment.”

Perhaps competition, time and diversification of the wireless unit have brought Verizon to make this shift. Increasingly, they speak of themselves as a media company.  As Comcast pursues the purchase of NBC, can a Verizon broadcast play be far behind?

Continued

When the government tells someone to shut up, we call it censorship and the First Amendment requires the government to defend its regulation. But what if the government just says, “Shhhh… could you please turn that down?”

Rep. Anna Eshoo’s Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act (HR 1084) would do just that: require the FCC to issue rules that broadcast and cable TV ads:

(1) … shall not be excessively noisy or strident;

(2) … shall not be presented at modulation levels substantially higher than the program material that such advertisements accompany; and

(3) [that their] average maximum loudness…  shall not be substantially higher than the average maximum loudness of the program material that such advertisements accompany.

I understand Congresswoman’s Eshoo’s concern. Fortunately, nature has equipped me with a remote which allows me to a) mute loud ads; b) change the channel; c) turn off the television, unplug it, hide it in a cabinet and do better things for myself…..such as write on this blog.

For a great gift idea, see our post on the universal off remote, TV-B-Gone .

If the state can regulate the stridency of speech on broadcast television, what’s to stop them from regulating your speech more broadly? Representative Eshoo’s bill already proposes that the FCC should regulate volume on cable, which is a private medium financed by subscribers. There’s only a small step from regulating private content arriving for cable television to the Internet feed often arriving on the very same cable for one’s computer.

Continued

Online Marketers Who Collect Visitor Data Are Potential Targets of Regulation in 2010.

Law and health care practices are required to protect personally identifiable information (PII). However, in many cases they are encouraged to circulate so-called anonymous data. It turns out the distinction between the anonymous and the personally identifiable isn’t all that real.

Latanya Sweeney, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor, took anonymous data from medical records and used it to identify real patients.

She took what seemed like anonymous data from a health record: Mr. X lives in zip code 02138 and was born July 31, 1945. And by using publicly available databases, she found that only one one person in the US matched those attributes: former governor William Weld.

In a very real sense, “anonymized” or “merely demographic” information about people may be neither. Web sites that ask  “anonymous” users for seemingly trivial information (such a zip code or birth date) can use the same techniques to create a unique record and connect them back to extensive consumer databases.

If you are a marketer using “anonymous” web data, or matching web leads to demographic databases, then your data may be regulated in the next few years.

Over the next year, I believe we’ll see increasing regulatory interest from the FTC and other bodies.  When Sears paid users to download an application that tracked their site use, the FTC intervened. They are regulating what gifts bloggers can take, and what information ad networks can share for behavioral targeting.

Otis Maxwell is a copywriter who likes to mouth off on marketing, technology, and food. He’s also a great creative.

Last week he asked me what was on my short list of projects, and to my surprise I immediately said “Creative briefs.” After all, they really are what keeps chaos at bay, and more importantly, they prevent scope creep. In a fast moving marketing department, these are essential.

Otis smiled and told me I’d probably enjoy one of his recent blog posts on the  praises of creative briefs.

If you’re hungry for documents to build your creative process on, I’m a long time fan of Amy Goto’s books on website redesign. She provides templates for everything from an initial client interview to metatag planning.

If you need to ride the waves of change, rather than being buffeted by them, then make the process of creative briefing your surfboard.  Just as behind every great leader there is a killer wimp, behind every breakthrough campaign is a creative brief that just nails it.

Just a little clarity at the start can make your build processes faster, and improve their outcomes.