WebProNews

Could This Scandal Change us for the Better?

I wanted to add a non-personal comment about the impassioned scandal rocking our community, the best way I could think of to improve the silence.  This is a real test of the blogosphere.  Our culture and openness.  We don't know all the facts, but there is enough to be disgusted.  We do know that part of this involves real core and dedicated bloggers.  We do know that this involves trolls, there will always be trolls, and we all have them.  We do know that some speech is illegal for a reason, and sociopaths run against society, but there are slippery slopes in all directions from the hill we think we have climbed.

Flickr Filtering

Yesterday Flickr introduced a new feature on their service called "Filtering." Filtering is a tool whereby users can designate their desired level of browsing (i.e. show me everything on Flickr un-filtered, or screen out material that has been tagged inappropriate by the user community). It also allows users the ability to designate in advance if they feel that things that they are uploading might be considered objectionable and allowing them to mark their images accordingly.

Business Rules & the Rational Process

Periodically I get asked about bringing business rules into the Rational Unified Process or RUP. RUP and the Enterprise Unified Process are designed to apply UML and best practices in a formal way.

Google Homepage Skins - Change of Note for SEOs

I just had the official walk-through of Google's recent announcement for personalized home pages. In a nutshell, they are allowing users the opportunity to skin their home page with one of six different themes. The goal, and I quote, is to "delight users". And they don't just want to delight them in the short term. They want this to be a long-lasting love affair with the Google home page.

Topix Worries About Domain Change

After paying $1 million to purchase the rights to the Topix.com domain, Topix.net CEO Rich Skrenta now has to deal with a couple of daily realities in the search world: changing domains could cause a dropoff in search engine-driven traffic, and Google isn't exactly Nordstrom or L.L. Bean when it comes to customer service.

Wanting What I Can't have

I recently got feedback from an SEO Book buyer who stated that their site was not accepted by some directories I recommend. If someone does not accept your site realize that due to their editorial stringency a link from that location is probably worth more than a link from the sites that did accept your site.

Modern Marketing and Change

Three years ago Jeff Jarvis was kind enough to share one of his presentations with me about the changing trends in media.  It provided a wonderful insight into the US market in 2004. 

Debating Whether or Not Google Can Change Advertising

Ari Rosenberg, a media buying consultant, had an interesting column last week about Google's plans to enter the cable TV market, just the same as they've made inroads in the radio and print markets.

Wikipedia Should Change Its Name To Googlepedia

Wikipedia needs Google like plants need sunshine, according to the latest traffic analysis presented by Hitwise. Half of the online publicly-edited encyclopedia's traffic comes from Google alone, with another 20 percent arising from the other search engines combined.

The Analytics Opportunity

Final interesting article in DM Review this month - Dealing with Data: Data Analytics: A Huge Opportunity by Shari Rogalski. She does a nice job of summarizing the research and makes some good points. A couple of things I wanted to highlight: * You must move to a predictive mindset, not an analyze-the-past mindset. Check out my predictive analytics FAQ if you are not sure what this means