November 2009

Law Firm Ads Court Pedophiles, Rapists, and Child Beaters with Ugly Tactics

November 29th 2009

In the Court of Bad Advertising, Can You Plead Insanity? Likely the worst legal advertising ever, along with a taste of the web’s swift response.

Digital Marketing Regulation: Google Analyltics May Be Illegal in Germany

November 26th 2009

First They Came for the German Marketers… Continuing my theme that regulation should be a much higher concern to digital marketers and their professional associations, I submit that one core digital marketing tool may already be illegal in the world’s third largest economy. Zeit Online reported today that numerous German privacy officials are convinced that […]

Google Sidewiki Panics Brand Managers: Some Use Hacks to Jam The Service

November 24th 2009

Seth Godin may not want comments on his blog, but Google does.  Google’s Sidewiki service allows anyone with their tool installed to post and view comments in a frame right beside web content. I’ll provide a few examples of how this service is taking root, and some options for your Sidewiki strategy, including the choice […]

False Identity: A Federal Crime in the US, But Heroic in the UK?

November 23rd 2009

On The Internet Nobody Knows If You’re a 14-Year-Old Girl In Wales, a 61-year-old woman suspected that her husband had been sharing elicit emails with a 14-year-old girl, and feared he was a pedophile. She logged on from a computer elsewhere in their home, pretended to be such a girl, and found he was all […]

Drug Makers Beg for FDA Regulations to Allow Them to Twitter and Blog

November 21st 2009

In April, the FDA sent warning letters to 14 companies, including Eli Lilly and Co and Merck & Co Inc., about their drug marketing online, saying that ads for certain products were misleading and did not contain any risk information. But it’s hard to include risk information when your Twitter post is limited to 140 […]

Litl Computer: Meet the Next Apple Computer While It Still has 40 Staff

November 20th 2009

Litl Computer is to netbooks as iPods were to MP3 players. The beauty of the iPod was that it was designed to fit people’s worlds. It fit physically and it conceptually allowed  users to find and get music from the web without being transfixed by technology. Imagine a laptop built from its roots to be an easy, […]

The Truth Hurts: ATT Looses Ridiculous Lawsuit to Verizon

November 19th 2009

Verizon’s defense against ATT’s request for a temporary restraining order was blazing, and  a fantastic read. Its like they let their savage ad team help write the brief. ATT demanded that Verizon pull five disputed ads from the air as they were “misleading”. Verizon’s defense was, literally, “the truth hurts.” Defense’s introduction nails its theme […]

Online Tools Help Parents Pick Safe Toys This Holiday Season

November 17th 2009

This year, online tools are helping parents identify dangerous products, and better still, select healthy choices from the field of safe picks. In today’s complex world, everyone’s health safety is increasingly in their own informed hands. Healthy Stuff Bet you didn’t know that many toy cars contain materials known to cause birth defects or cancer. […]

Court Rules Domain Registration Privacy Services = ‘Material Falsification’

November 16th 2009

There are lots of legitimate reasons people don’t want their names on domain-ownership records. These range from exercising the privilege of anonymous speech, to avoiding spam, to simply preserving one’s own privacy. Of course this practice makes tracking down responsible parties for infringement or other offenses harder, as it requires a court order to learn […]

Do You Need Liability Insurance For Your Personal Blog? You May Already Have Some.

November 15th 2009

If you’re blogging, you’re a publisher.  Yesterday I posted about how Cyber Liability Insurance may help firms mitigate the risks of new online business activities. But what about your personal blog? Liability for Your Personal Blog? Oh, yes. Andrew Hamilton published a website, Forgotten Ohio, in which he retold a local ghost story about a […]