November 9th 2009
In Monrovia, Liberia, there’s a guy taking the matter of a lopsided, state-run media and reshaping it into a free-of-charge, independent news-aggregator—all accomplished with a whiteboard and couple of markers. (No Internet required!) Each morning, at 10:45 a.m., Alfred Sirleaf heads to his bulletin board to post the day’s news, culling together a slate of […]
November 7th 2009
Discussions of regulating digital marketing were just below the surface at New York Ad:Tech. My last post gave an overview of efforts to regulate digital marketing. Now, here’s an interview at Ad:Tech by reporter David Spark with Ted Murphy, CEO of Izea, the company that makes the paid blogging service Social Spark. Ted’s been in […]
November 5th 2009
Nobody Has Noticed, But Regulation is Nearer Than You Might Imagine Earlier this year, the FCC signaled its intent to regulate the Internet. States such as Massachusetts have considered a prohibition against tracking users between sites. And the FTC has strongly suggested that ad networks require users to opt-in, rather than opt out. Interactive marketers […]
November 4th 2009
My colleague Dan Slagen and I arrived to find sprawling lines of digital marketers waiting to get into the Javitz. I think that’s a good sign for the industry, if not a sign of increased business spending. It’s incredible that people will pay $1,400 and stand in lines three hundred deep to enter this in-person […]
November 2nd 2009
Brad Templeton, chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has produced his own “Downfall” parody video, making fun of the fact that Constantin Films has issued DMCA notices to remove all of the “Downfall” parody videos from YouTube. This little-known film has become an Internet sensation and, as I note below, Constantin Film’s […]
October 23rd 2009
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 […]
October 20th 2009
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. […]
October 17th 2009
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 […]
October 15th 2009
“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 […]
October 13th 2009
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 […]
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